The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Tariffs Hit Canada, EU Hates Bitcoin, Czechs Love It, Clear Mempools | The CBP 201 Pt. 1 (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES The TARIFFS HAVE ARRIVED, what do they mean for Canadians? What does Trump want from Arctic Mexico? Plus, mempools clear, Czech Central Bank Looks to Bitcoin, Chicago's Mayor has a GIFT ROOM, and much more. Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com ⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.easydns.com⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

friends and enemies welcome back canadian bitcoiners podcast len um any news today anything worth talking about over the last few days gonna be a slow show what do you think thanks for tuning in it's been a great show i'll catch you next week maybe there'll be something worthy of discussion within the next seven days but last seven days absolutely nothing it's been pretty slow and dry crazy world eh like it's just absolutely not i can't believe the few days we've had here both in terms of like bitcoin price whiplash uh czars on czars uh billions of dollars spent on borders what can you say i was um you know i've been around a number of different people over the last few days different scenarios some professional some

social yeah somebody's doing this the six feet and all we are not we are not obviously but uh i you know i've been sort of listening to the things people say in these circles. And Len, broadly still in normie circles, and these are like bright normies, not just like pure normies. They're like somewhere in between the Reddit crowd and the people still wearing masks for sure. Whoa, wait, wait, wait.

The Reddit crowd's pretty bad, right? Yeah, yeah. The mask, what? bad, right? Yeah. Oh, sorry. So they're a little further away. They're somewhere between that crowd and you and me, right? I'll put you and me. Somebody at Annex talking about Bitcoin, understanding Bitcoin. Yeah, exactly.

And a lot of people still don't seem to think Canada has just any role to play in any of this. Things are just happening to us. We are just an impartial you know part of this whole transaction i don't think it's actually that way but really just a big dick swinging contest right here to see who's got the bigger one to take it yeah around it well whatever it's delayed for 30 days for us and for the people down uh in mexico as as well so interesting times that's right that's right warm weather canada and arctic mexico both uh both the length let's talk about the sponsors the peso the arctic peso and uh yeah whatever they call the actual peso i don't know but listen let's um

let's talk about the sponsors he's dns you know mark uh i was with mark on the weekend actually he's on the wayside board with me. We had a nice meeting yesterday. Lots of good work. That's a good group of people. I wouldn't say anything bad about them. That's a really good group. Mark is your friendly neighborhood registrar.

I don't know if you guys need a website, but if you do, Mark can help you with that. If you own a website already, you can port it over to EasyDNS. It's easy. We've done both, Len and I. It's been great both times. Not only that, if you're a Bitcoin enthusiast, probably you're listening to this show, although you could also be a czar enthusiast given today's news. You can do a lot of stuff over there with the virtual private server suite of options. BTC pay servers, NOS2 relays, Bitcoin nodes, node disimplementations. There's stuff in there I'm definitely not mentioning. And on top of that, Len, what do we talk about every week on Accessive Easy? The number of people who are becoming victims of data breaching and overreaching,

not on EasyDNS, DomainShare, there to protect you, your website, your clients, your mailing list, from all sorts of nefarious activity. And if you use our promo code CBP media, you get 50% off first round of buys. Not that you'd ever use this, but if you are unsatisfied with the service, Mark will just give you your money back. No questions asked. He may not even email you.

He may just send you the money. I don't know. I've never done it, but you're not going to need to worry about that. So go over, start your website. EasyNS is the place to do it. It's a very good reaction there guillaume is in the chat all the time asking me if i can see the chat like i can see it i don't always type back in the chat but i can see it and so yes i don't you don't have to tell me to scratch

my nose just know that i can see the chat and len can see it too probably i don't know what len's screen looks like that's why i was laughing the reaction yeah well joey let's talk about bull bitcoin right i think it's look everybody we got we got okay we get hilarious emails from people all the time always of indian descent and uh this guy on discord here talking we i love your streams we can get we have some killer ideas that can help your channel add me harprey no i'm not gonna add you the channel's fine get fucked go ahead bull bitcoin everybody's trying to get rid of their dirty fiat in one way shape or another they're either going to try and buy gold like a lot of central banks need to be doing maybe buying houses equities securities but bitcoin is where you really want to park your

money and bull bitcoin will be happily to sell you some bitcoin in exchange for your canadian dollars or if in europe they'll take your euros as well so one good thing about bull bitcoin they are non-custodial there's so many fucking exchanges out there and big ones like looking at binance looking at fucking Coinbase. They are like a bank in terms. They will take your money and they will hold your fucking Bitcoin for you. That's fucking bullshit. This is what you do not want to do.

Well, Bitcoin doesn't give you that option in order to buy from Bitcoin. You have to provide them an address to send your fucking Bitcoin. This is what you want. So not only could you buy your Bitcoin from them on chain, you could do it in lightning. Fees are fucking really cheap right now. So you don't have to use lightning. You do on chain. I'd recommend that right now. But they have a few other options as well, because you just simply buy or sell your Bitcoin from them. You could also buy gift cards. You could just start spending your Bitcoin in the real world, or you could use a bill service and start paying your bills with your Bitcoin. So a lot of different options over there if you have not yet opened up a bull bitcoin account recommend you do so we have

a referral link below check it out open it once you do and fund your account 21 will be added to your account and i ask you once you do that compare it to another exchange there's nothing out there that compares to bull bitcoin they are number one for a reason i love in the world number one in the world yeah yeah best best in uh best in slot so can we get boosts this week yeah so i got three boosts mickles 300 sorry 500 sats he says cheers keep it up cbp looking forward to the loony hour boys coming up when are they they coming up? Next week, Rich. Rich, for sure. Keith, maybe. Sretzky, no. In fairness, I didn't ask Steve.

I like Steve, but it's not the speed of the show, really. I want to talk more about financial markets, not necessarily the real estate slant. Important if you're a Canadian thinking about investing, but not really if you're a Bitcoiner. So I didn't ask Steve.

But we like Steve all the same. He's been on the show, front of the show. No problem with Steve at all. And MoeBTCDick500Sats, so i didn't ask steve but we like steve all the same he's been on the show front of the show no problem with steve at all and mo btc dick 500 sats the sentiment on medium of exchange seems so bleak to most plebs even bitcoin communities will tell me it's irrelevant asinine to me and it's so true because what makes bitcoin so well what it is right now is not just a store of value of medium exchange and without of exchange, you're only just solving half of the equation. We should be using Bitcoin more as a medium of exchange.

But keep in mind, in Canada, you are subjected to the taxation laws. And I'm not sure whatever jurisdiction you will reside in, but check it out. So if you are going to spend your Bitcoin, just make sure you follow the letter of the law. If not, be careful. careful that's always there's nothing len loves more than raining on a parade yes we should use bitcoin more as medium of exchange i'm just not gonna tell people spending it without giving i have no other comments i have no other comments on that yeah nothing else zordon unless you're on power rangers zordon nice nice callback oh fuck it my sister watched power rangers that was that's a? Nice. Nice callback. Oh, fuck. My sister watched Power Rangers.

That is a good callback. I like that. Okay. I think it's a thousand sats. And he says, another great interview by CBP. And this is for the Phil Bach. Phil Bach? Bach. Bach, that interview.

Seems to like it. Yeah, super nice guy, man. He was the managing director of the new york stock exchange for six years in the 2010s so you can imagine the stories that guy has and uh i was doing dry january until phil tweeted about half an hour before the show that he was going to have a whiskey on the podcast so i thought man you know it's not every day you get to have an hour with a guy like that i may as well pour myself a glass of red wine. I did. I'm glad I did. It was a great conversation. And he's the guy that, by the way, didn't want to talk markets, wanted to talk life and all the culture and stuff. And he's got an interesting story. He had a brain tumor years ago removed,

is fine now. And it just gave him this just snapped him out of whatever corpo life he was in. He started doing his own thing and not caring as much about what other people think. He'll tell you he's a lot better for it. I really enjoyed talking to Phil. I asked him after the show if we could add him to the stable of co-hosts from one of us his way and he agreed. He graciously agreed.

Another high quality cbp uh friend of the podcast for sure it it goes to show you in reality what's what's most important to us in life really isn't most important to us until you go no way like that he's a change to your perspective on things and i hope that nobody has to go through something like that but if one does you've got you change your life you're for sure you look at things yeah for sure but yeah it's who are who's coming up this week in terms of tomorrow night i have john rubino dollar collapse uh who's actually a friend of mark's so i've been subscribed to john substack for a long time it's a free subscription if you

guys are looking uh for content that at the very least I'd say is Bitcoin adjacent but is also very good in terms of writing style and broader content. It's a strong sub-stack letter. Not too long and doesn't get released every single day, which sometimes I find annoying. It's pretty good. And then next week I said Diaz and Dicker.

And then the week after that, Scott Wolf is going to come here to the studio to talk about the Canadian Bitcoin Coalition. That'll be a daytime interview because Scott has some scheduling stuff. And Len, this year, I think if guests come to the studio, I will take them out on the show account for a hamburger and a beer at the Collins Brewhouse here in Dundas. A Dundas favorite. Happy to take you. It'll probably cost me, I don't know, I think a beer and a beer at the Collins brew house here in Dundas, a Dundas favorite. Happy to take you. It'll probably cost me.

I don't know. I think a beer and a burger is probably like 35 bucks. It's not bad. It's worth the drive. Come hang out, come shoot the shit, see the studio, meet my,

my kid, my wife, my dog, and enjoy an hour together. Forget the zoom and all that. Let's, let's get together. Joy to one last thing before we dive into it.

The currency wars, what's going on? We have to thank somebody? Are we about to thank somebody? Yeah, because there's one currency in particular that seems to have weathered a storm, and that is the Singapore dollar. I want to thank the loyal listener. Wedge, I'm going to fucking call you out, Wedge. Wedge, I'm not calling you out. the Singapore dollar. I want to thank the loyal listener wedge.

I'm going to fucking call you out wedge wedge. I'm not calling you out. Just big. Thank you for providing. And I'm holding my hand for the people that are listening. So $1 Singapore dollar. And I love it because we, in the past we have had a discussions about this.

We've, I don't know how it came up, but we were pegging this to bitcoin and we're pricing it in for whatever reason it's kind of a meme currency for us even though it's a very powerful currency in the world comparative to a lot of other ones that's a callback to when we were doing this like two three years ago right so the singapore dollar update it was like and i want to yeah so he wrote a very nice note i i would show it to the screen but it does show something at the top so i don't want to dock him and yeah i love it thank you wedge so much and i know you reached out to us a little while ago it finally came into our hands

and something he got you too so you got he sent me he sent me the tank engine dvd with all the old thomas perfect i didn't want to say it. So yeah. Listen, we have a ton of love for our listeners and a lot of you guys, like I've met in real life, I shouldn't say a lot of you, but a bunch of you I've met in real life and gotten to know you a little bit and Wedge is one of them. That's a true G, you know,

as the kids would say, sending me something like that. Those DVDs, Len, as you know, I'm sure, probably getting harder and harder to find. So you have to watch the Disney plus, um, you know, bleached version these days of everything you watched when you were a kid instead, you know, guys like wedge, keep, keep the, uh, keep the stories flowing. So if he doesn't want it back, I'll hang onto it and I'll pass it along to someone when the time is right and keep the, you know, pay it forward. Right. That's the whole, that's the whole story story that's it for me

for all the things i gotta check off my list of things to do if you have anything else this is nothing i'm joey let's uh let's no let's bang let's bang around here where do you want to start what a week okay we'll do we'll do the tear shit at the end i think okay because let's start with the bitcoin stuff i mean we always start with the bitcoin stuff exactly this is okay right so and we'll talk about something we mentioned a couple of weeks ago which was a czech republic their central bank about bitcoin right so there's some development on that front in the past few days and so they were talking about the idea of buying bitcoin and adding it to the reserves well the central bank's board they approved the process to analyze this option now okay that's a small step but it's

a step in the right direction does this mean they're going to buy bitcoin right away no it's just at least one hurdle that's been jumped um it also doesn't mean they have to buy bitcoin as well it could also mean they want to buy gold because they're just looking to see what else they could add to their balance sheet because who the fuck knows what's going to happen in the future. They may buy Bitcoin, but at least it's a topic of discussion.

One thing that is noticed, that is notable, that the Czech Republic, although part of the EU, they have not adopted the euro. They still use their own native currency. It's CZK is the name for it. So if you look at their reserves, the CZK,

I took a look at what they've hold, their treasury, in fact, and from the Central Bank of the Czech Republic. And they hold a fair number of bonds. They own a lot of equities and securities and investments and shares of units for a few other things. But what I don't see in the thing, they don't own any gold, at least from what I can see right here. So they lack gold and certainly they lack Bitcoin. I think they're going to see what's going on in the world.

And they're going to see other central banks out there. They're stockpiling gold. And they're probably going to go in that bandwagon as well. But I don't think they're going to just simply overlook the Bitcoin thing. I have a feeling they might stockpile a little bit, just a small, small bit, and add it to their balance sheet. And because this is all public information, if it's going to be be added it's going to eventually be known and to see a european country a country that is in the eu and we'll talk about lagarde in just a moment if they put if they buy bitcoin this is going to be monumental moment we none of us have ever talked about a g7 country buying bitcoin at the onset it's probably not gonna happen and czech republic is not a g7 country but it's closer to a g7 country than el salvador is and certainly closer

to a g7 country than the central african republic who gave us the bait and switch some time ago with your bitcoin yeah yeah well at least your bitcoin adoption so i i just wanted to bring it out there interesting story doesn't mean they're going to buy but they have approved the analysis of moving forward with buying shit like bitcoin very interesting it is interesting do you uh so we talked a bit about the reserves i think two weeks ago a week ago you're right it's a good callback by you to bring that up again the standard sort of central bank set of reserves is always SDRs, foreign currency, specifically USD, some of your own currency, debt instruments.

And of course, yeah, you got to have your one Singapore dollar framed in every central bank vault. There's something there. Plus probably precious metals, plus probably some other stuff that we're not thinking about, including real estate and other things. For example, here, the government owns a bunch of land. US is the same thing. I'm sure European countries are going down that same road, including the Czech Republic. Do you think that... We could talk about this in the same context or through the same lens that we talk about

the US doing their strategic crypto reserve. Do you think that these guys are all thinking about this now because Trump got in? Do you think he was the catalyst for this? Or do you think that this would have happened regardless of Trump's win in November? I think it has to do with probably other central banks that are probably- Okay, talk to me. Tell me why. Because I would take the opposite view. I would say that trump talking about it was the maybe maybe even the summer was the last thing some of these countries needed uh to really go over and they're not over the edge yet but to head toward the edge in terms of buying and holding well what's driving up the price of gold what do you think it is it's retail no i think it's no i think it's uh nation states yeah i think

it's okay then if somebody like sitting in a basement could figure this out why couldn't the central bank and so if they're going to do they'll probably do tit for tat if somebody's doing it they're going to just do the same as well well the reason the reason bitcoin you know but bitcoin you see it's not that easy right bitcoin if you buy, you are attacking the treasury market, attacking your own sovereign debt and attacking your own gold holdings. So you're demonetizing other stuff. You're changing. You're not just betting on a second horse.

You're killing the other horses you have money on. And that's dead money, right? And as soon as you start to sell those assets for Bitcoin, or as soon as the market thinks you're going to do that, it starts the price move. And so there's going to be a significant reward for the first actor if the price hangs on and moves. But if it doesn't, then that reward is not going to be what you thought it was. There is no Valhalla for that first actor. As the saying goes, it's not oftentimes the person who holds the knife who ends up taking the throne. And so this first country to add is not, I don't think, going to be the one to benefit unless that country is the United States, then all bets are off. But if it's another country, I just don't see it becoming a huge deal. We've already seen it in El Salvador. What happened? They are back in bed with the

IMF three years later. So how did that go for them? I would argue not so well. And these guys might wind up going the same direction. So my personal view is that it's not really going to move the market. And it's unwise for a country that size to do that considering they probably rely barely heavily on stuff like gold bonds us dollars all of which would would take a hit under a bitcoin reserve standard for central banks it's an admission that the currency is failing but it's also when you're stock playing everything else it's i think the same type of admission just maybe not to the same degree i don't think you're right len i think you're right but for whatever there's like voodoo magic in the air that people just

don't care about that but but they all care about the bitcoin adoption i i think that if the checks uh central bank does buy bitcoin even a modest amount i think it's an earth-shaking move with respect to bitcoin how big is that digital bank in terms of the others? Do you know? No. I'll look it up. Keep talking. No, I think it's big enough that it's going to move markets.

And then if you have one buying in and publicly announcing it, there could be some out there that have done it without publicly announcing it. But to do it, by Bitcoin and announce it, it's also going to be who's next at that point. And it's just going to be a race for every one of them to add some Bitcoin to their balance sheet. Look, I'm not trying to advocate for this.

I'm not trying to say this is a good thing. No, I know. It just, it just is a thing. Anybody could buy Bitcoin. Anybody could sell Bitcoin. You know,

whatever the fuck you want with Bitcoin, but in terms of the prosperity and wealth of the nation and the citizens that live there, it only makes sense for them to buy something like Bitcoin, to trade in a currency which is devaluing against everything else that's a hard asset. The CZK. What the fuck?

Yeah, CZK. I didn't look at how well it's doing in the past few years but i could just guarantee it's not doing very well against gold against houses against fucking bitcoin as well so it makes sense to trade it today rather than tomorrow yeah they looks like they're ranked somewhere between 100 and 150 depending on what set of assets you look at but if they start selling like yarmour yager jerseys yeah i guess they're out they have a

strategic yager rookie card reserve over there probably yager and hasha two years old and he's still fucking potting he scored a goal just i was talking to uh mike my brother-in-law yesterday during the avalanche game about solani as as like the sort of the premier goal scorer of all time i think anyone who says it's not solani is just out of their mind

premier like top tier like the best goal scorer of all time he's really not the best who do you put about who do you put in front of him doesn't solani have like an 80 goal season his rookie year was 70 something and i think that was his peak in terms of output for goals which for it's phenomenal for a rookie season but gretzky scored 92 he scored 92 in one season he scored 39 in 50 games um he had 50 games didn't he sorry i thought gretzky had 50 and 30 not games right yeah esposito is another one rocket richard fucking ovechkin who's gonna break i would i like ovechkin too i think ovechkin's like the most well-rounded offensive goal scoring talent we've ever seen gretzky is up there of

course gretzky but gretzky is like away okay they think gretzky could play this is a dumb argument i hate making this argument play today it's hard to say but when he played with his peers he was the best yeah or you could make an argument for lemieux but that's that's basically it and they were just light years he's the only player to have gotten 200 points he did twice in his career a lot of support in the in the chat here there may be a lot of you can take away all the goals mike bossy oh my god these are all great oh all is good too yeah you can take away all the goals that gretzky scored and he's still the points later most points yeah ever if you just count just his assist there's some stupid ones right like the past 50 gate like you sees like some uh he gets like over 100 points

and 50 like it's so stupid some of the stats that he came up with but in terms of pure goal score matt gretzky was fucking really good 92 goals good good luck fucking topping that pretty good pretty good yeah let's talk about uh another european thing because we also talked about the czech central bank the team the esteemed uh president of the ecb convicted criminal esteemed president christine lagarde madame lagarde she's gonna be around for a little while i took a look her tenure ends november 2027 so we have her for another two and a half years if they don't extend her and she lasts a full term. And she came out this week because there was talk about the Central Bank

of Czech Republic doing this. She gave us a soundbite for us Bitcoiners saying that she's confident that Bitcoin won't enter the reserves in the EU. So the European Central Bank probably won't put it on their balance sheet. The topic of have funds staying poor comes to mind right away.

I think she gave a lashing to the people of the Czech Republic Bank after this news came up. Behind closed doors, she must have been absolutely irate and told them this is not the right way to do things. But either way, she said she had, quote unquote, a good conversation with them. And she says that central bank reserves should be liquid secure and safe now i don't know about you but bitcoin certainly

covers all three liquid secure and safe right like you control your keys it's not going anywhere you could easily fucking transact with it it's fungible i don't i just don't get it treasuries secure and safe now after the russia thing like no do these guys think that any treasury is safe after trump just threatened columbia with asset seizure a week ago if you believe those headlines like that's what these guys are in so and also the euro is dying like It's not going to make it to 2030. So the idea that these guys think they're going to be able to hang on to whatever currency sovereignty they have is laughable. But this is par for the course. They don't know what they don't know, which makes them almost impossibly bad at their jobs. And you see it over and over again. It's

the same bullshit. Every economic crisis, oh, we're just going to print and print and print. The rates went negative real over there for a time. They're going to go negative real again. These guys jump on the necks of any member states that show a little bit of weakness and basically make them slaves, Greece,

when their economy is weak. And then they just pretend that they saved the day. how are things going over there these days anyone know how are things going in any of these european nations it's a it's a gong show man and lagarde is just like you know this the scarved bandit uh skeletor on the mic all the time we talked on this show like a year ago or a year and a half ago about that soundbite about Bitcoin that the European Union and other governments have to be aligned and make sure that there's no escape from the tax regime.

And the tax regime vis-a-vis the basement, I would argue, but she didn't say that. And say, look, if there's an open door, people are going to use it. We have to make sure there's no open doors. These are the people that are running the monetary policy for the world's second largest central bank, I guess. I don't know what the Bank of China looks like, but it's top five. And they have, what, 500 million people over there? I have no idea. A bunch though. It's the most important landmass in the world probably because there's just so much potential for hot water. there's basically no water anywhere over there

i can't it's hard for me to imagine a place i'd rather be in a currency i'd rather hold less than the euro and the eurozone in europe and and like it shows every time you look over there it's another dumpster fire and by the way by the way it's on germany that's what what drives that yeah exactly but as i would say by the way germ if germany ever elects a trump light type government the european union dies overnight you know that's really all it takes never mind uh waiting for uh the euro to collapse on its own against other currencies or for bitcoin to proliferate to the point where people in europe are using it it'll die on its own if they elect uh what is it the afd alternative for germany right i'm pretty sure or alternative for deutschland i suppose there's like a growing talk about having canada join the eu sphere somehow by who that's retarded

like i don't know how that would even this is the kind of shit that just i look at it and i just laugh like we are so deluded and stupid in this country in so many ways. And by the way, I tweeted today too. I'm a proud Canadian. It may not seem like it all the time, but I really do love the country. I grew up here. And I don't think I would have had the same opportunities that have been afforded to me if I'd grown up anywhere else.

I mean that. But that's not the country we're in now. And to see people online who drink more 7% triple IPAs than they do glasses of water or milk, talk about how tough the country is, referencing World War II, the War of 1812. When their BMI is higher than their IQ, their fingernails are too fucking long, they got Dorito bags all over the bedroom and a collection of Funko Pops, never been to a gym, to hear them talk about how they're tough. We're going to stand up. No,

you're not. No, you're not. They're just pissed off with Trump. These are the type of being pissed off is okay. I'm fine with that. These are the type of folks that were angry with Trump to begin with. And now for sure,

he's had a fuel to their anger. And so what are they going to say? Just bend over and take it again? By politicians, they get ramped up by Trudeau. And I'll talk about that right now. Watching that Trudeau speech was infuriating on Saturday night. And I said this to Mark yesterday too. You know, for the last 10 years,

we've been told over and over and over again how strong our economy is, how resilient our economy is, how resilient our population is, how diversity is making us the best economy in the G7. How many fucking times did you hear that over the last 10 years? same government led by the same man demonized the history of this country, encouraged the teardown of statues, encouraged the destruction of national identity, encouraged the division of the population. Now this guy stands in front of the press on a Saturday night and says, we have to be proud of our history, all the things we've achieved together. We have to visit our glorious, unbelievably nice and full of rich heritage, national parks and national monuments instead of going to the United States. That is

shameful. And then to dodge questions about the prorogued parliament, hey man, LeBlanc, LeBlanc talking to Vashi today or yesterday, dodging the same question. His peers trying to put the knife in his back every time they get in front of a camera, and the admission by the PM that Donald Trump hadn't returned a call since inauguration while all this was going on. This is anything but a strong country. And if you had to pick, I know you say this all the time, but I really don't think you could make a case for this being a top five country in the world to live in, top 10 country in the world to live in. And yesterday and Saturday really spelled it out for me. And today spelled it out for me.

After all that talk by Canadian, everyone putting out lists and boycotting and this and that, and all's talk about we're going to stand up to the bully it didn't look like you were standing up at 4 p.m when you bent to every single demand that the president made after riling up the population for 48 hours did that look like anyone this is paul we're going to talk about it now because we kind of just diverted right into this and it's i'm not sure like which direction of the show we go and then we kind of just diverted right into this and it's i'm not sure like which direction of the show we go and then we kind of whatever we get we'll talk about we'll come back to it we'll get the full rundown we'll talk about the terrorist after but let's just keep going bitcoin shit all right so we can stay on the central bank stuff because that's where we left off before we went on a tangent the central bank of norway their investment arm the nbim it was revealed this past week that

they own 500 million dollars of mstr shares yep you must be very happy to hear that show i don't it doesn't really matter to me like i like i said i wish i still i wish i still had all my mstr but i peeled some off the the thing i would note is that everyone is going to have MSTR because they're in the queues now. So I don't have, not everybody. You can't say that shit because I hang on. Hang on. Do you have a pension?

I don't directly own it. So your pension is in it for you. So whether you think you're in it, you don't think you're in it. You're in it. Everyone, everybody is in it. Okay. You didn't do the, you didn't do the clicking. I get it. I get it. I in it. I didn't actively do it. Everybody is in it. Where I actively start my money. Okay.

When I get my Singapore dollar. You didn't do the clicking. I get it. I get it. I go to Bull Bitcoin and I say, I want fucking Bitcoin, buddy. I don't want to put this in the market. Okay. You didn't buy the stock.

I get it. You are going to benefit from MSTR down the road too. Just like everyone else. Fuck the MSTR. I want Bitcoin. Whatever you want. Fuck the MSTR. When they're're paying it send

me your money send me the mstr share like 30 cents every every week or whatever i will share it well anyways so they now they have indirect exposure to bitcoin as a result of this but it's not just this joy doing a little bit of digging they've had indirect exposure to bitcoin for five years give or take since 2020 they own shares in block this has been reduced lately because they've had more shares in the past and they've been slowly dwindling this down but they had shares in block they also have some shares in tesla now tesla let's be honest they have some bitcoin that's not driving up the price of this stuff yeah but but there's one other thing they own. It's shares of Riot, the Bitcoin mining company.

Wow. They also own shares of MetaPlanet, the Bitcoin buying company. I have no idea what the fuck MetaPlanet is. See, that's got to be recent, right? That's got to be recent. Yeah. So this is interesting that they are actively trying to gain exposure. But the one thing they're not doing is fucking buying Bitcoin. Right?

Like, what the fuck are you buying these equities for when you can get wrong doing it just fucking buy the bitcoin and add it and fuck the rest you take away all the fucking the garbage that could happen with mstr the guy could say something terrible about anything and then it's going to take the stock riot you know there could be terrible weather going on in texas and it could impact rights ability to my bitcoin tank the stock uh meta planet again i have no idea what the fuck to do except for buying bitcoin these days but right like just take all these fucking risks out of the of the equation buy bitcoin and add it so like interesting that you're doing this they're adding to their bitcoin exposure so to speak but fucking buy bitcoin man and now the bull bitcoin is in

europe there's no fucking reason why they shouldn't do it just fucking open a user referral code if you can and could you imagine they did that'd be fucking myth but anyways you're nothing if not consistent in your views so i do appreciate that though i will say that um there's probably a lot of rules like we always say this. I'm repeating myself for frequent listeners. But there's a lot of rules around what you can and can't buy, can and can't hold, and how you can or cannot hold it in any type of shared asset portfolio. So naturally, this is probably the only way they can get exposure. And by the way, it's also possible then that they like that volatility for some reason

in MSTR as opposed to spot. Who knows, right? The strategies that these guys are employing, I have no idea what they could be. But the MSTR moves differently than spot Bitcoin. And that could be to the benefit of the pension. Or not the pension, but to the holders and stakeholders of that stock portfolio. So I don't know. To me, it's like you could do either one.

Like there's obviously a case we made to holding Bitcoin, especially if you hold MSTR, Semler, Block, all this other stuff. Semler, yeah, another one. Yeah. Semler's a big one. Semler's a big one for them to hold that. What the hell did they do against Semler? Is it a hell of a deal?

I don't know. But they're just using Bitcoin. It's a Bitcoin treasury asset, right? So they're doing issues. I shouldn't say issues doing issuances as well, like MSTR is. But it's like a science and tech company, I'm pretty sure. Probably makes medical materials or something. I don't know. Let me look it up.

Something like that, yeah. The ones that I know for sure, like tahinis, you could buy your shawarmas over there, and they fucking hold corn, right? Seller makes hardware that treat and diagnose chronic diseases there you go brains you know brains a lot of people sure do brains show the former brains employee gandalf yet yeah and they've decided this past week to open source their bitcoin mining control board and this board is used to hook up to the bitmain s19 series a6 and also the mini miner that brains has released not too long ago this is the b

cb 100 board and so they have decided to open source the hardware design which means anybody out there could look at the schematics build build it yourself and do whatever you want, improving it, your choice. So it's a bold step for them because open sourcing, it means that they no longer have total control over it. But again, this is the way

the community likes to do things. They like to have control over stuff. They like to see things. They make sure there's nothing going on behind the scenes. And also it gives the ability, as I mentioned, to improve on things. When things are open source,

somebody could come in and make an improvement. So I like this. Good move on brains. I don't plan to buy any of these devices. I have a Bidax, not two, it's right here, in fact. So yeah, it's not going to impact me whatsoever, but I think it's a cool move on their part. Does it mean that they have something else coming down the pipe

when they open source a significant piece on their part. Does it mean that they have something else coming down the pipe that when they open source a significant piece of their product line like this, that's the first thing I think. A significant piece of the product line. Well, I mean, it's mining is. Yeah.

Yeah. But like for them to open source it, maybe that maybe they're coming up with something new that they're not going to be open sourcing. Maybe. I don't know. It's good. Listen,

I'm fine with it either way. I'm not a mining enthusiast or anything like that. So I don't have much to say about this, except to me if i was doing open sourcing it would be because it was about to be completely unimportant to me the stuff that i was uh putting out there because now it's out of your hands like you said you know everyone can do whatever they want with it strong move though they could have just you know whatever what is the name for it uh mothballed it and and uh not open sourced it right no this got a little bit of press not too long ago when they released it so the mothball and just

i don't know um it seems like a good move it got them some free publicity from all this so who knows maybe it's going to be a benefit to them in the end you've heard of endax before of course yeah so for people who aren't aware they're an exchange in canada medium-sized exchange i'm not yeah i would say so yeah they're not shake pay but they're also a little bigger than uh i don't know newton probably actually newton might be about the same size newton's pretty big i'm par anyways endax exchange may have been subjected to a data breach so if you have an account with endax be careful because users on bitcoin ca subreddit and also the endax subreddit it's a couple places yeah they're saying that people

have been receiving emails and it's like quote your ledger device needs attention security update required end quote and this isn't coming from ledger it was a phishing attempt now people might say oh this is coming from maybe ledger phishing and all no because the thing is people were getting these emails from accounts that they only use to sign up to endax so they have a specific endax email that they only use to sign up with endax and they're getting these emails so clearly if there's a breach somewhere it would have come from endax. Endax claims there was no data leak. But I'm just looking at this. It just screams to me that something was done

that was wrong. So what I'm trying to say is, when you do pick an exchange, pick an exchange wisely, because you're giving up your information, you're going to scan, at least here in Canada, you have to scan some identification and provide them to the product, provide this them imagine this ends up in the wrong people's hands what they could do with that information so endax seems to me that there's a breach here and some people had their information leaked what was leaked at least the email address maybe more who the fuck knows endax isn't talking about it i'll i'll note here as well. I didn't, I didn't look, I did look at the stories,

but I didn't look to see if you had the coin base, uh, data breach story in here. Do you, I don't have that. I didn't hear about this coin base. Was this today? So it's relatively recent.

I think I saw it today from Zach XBT and I'm, I'll bring it up in the same context because, because coin base is not saying anything about this either. They had a data breach sometime ago in the same context because Coinbase is not saying anything about this either. They had a data breach some time ago, the same way Endax did. And Coinbase is losing something in the neighborhood of $10 to $15 million of user funds every month. Users are getting socially engineered and scammed out of Coinbase money. And they're doing this with spoofed emails, spoofed addresses, spoofed everything.

Phone calls, the phone numbers are out there for people who are using Coinbase. Endax is probably in a similar boat. Wouldn't be surprising if they lost that data, right? You mentioned emails, probably phone numbers in there too. And there's a couple of things you can do to make sure that you don't get got by these things. The first thing is obvious, use Bull Bitcoin. There's no bullshit at bull. It's not custodial. They can call, you know, Guillaume can get a phone call from someone trying to scam him over at the bull Bitcoin help desk. And even if he's like asleep at the wheel or high on mushrooms or something, it's still not going to happen because he doesn't have your Bitcoin. It's never going to happen. Number one. Number two, these exchanges never call you.

They make this clear everywhere in all the help documents, all the FAQs, all the support emails, all the support DMs, all the support Twitter accounts. It's all the same message. We'll never call you. We're never going to ask you for your addresses. We're never going to ask you for your keys. And so when I hear this, what it tells me is that we are getting new adoption in Bitcoin for sure. A lot of people are coming into Bitcoin for the first time and they're not paying attention, Len. They don't know what they're looking at. They don't know what they're doing. They're making mistakes that a rookie would make and it's costing them money, which sucks. What sucks even more is that Endax is not

saying anything about it. And I think that that's, again, not to draw on the axis of easy podcast, but what do we say all the time? If you get suckered into this, you have no one to blame but yourself. There's only so much these services can do to protect you. There's only so much that your email can filter to spam or your phone can block. You, at some point, have to have some common sense. And if you don't, then ultimately it's on you to protect yourself. Too bad.

So sad. Welcome to Bitcoin. This is the way things go sometimes. They'll give the one-year credit monitoring services if they do admit. Oh, God, I know. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. So the mempool, and everybody knows, people are checking them out. You'll notice something interesting has happened this past week. It's been depleted. There's transactions. Yeah.

It's very odd that this is happening. Because if I look at the level of interest that's happening in Bitcoin, like I would say it's an all time high. The amount of people that are interested in Bitcoin are more interested in Bitcoin or interested in the price of Bitcoin, right? One of those things is going to add to the mempools. The other one is not. I think that if you're interested in the price, eventually you'll be interested in buying it, and then that could add to the mempool. But the fact that we've had all this transpire, we've had in the past 12 hours, 24 hours,

the price went from like 105 to 91 now to 101 according to your block clock. People are buying and selling Bitcoin. But still, the mempool is still relatively empty if I look at it right now. It just seems very odd that it's like that. Now, I don't think this is going to last forever. You know, layer one does not have the ability to capture all 8 billion people in Transact, and it just doesn't have, it's not possible. So what I'm trying to get at is

when it comes to UTXO management, now is the right time to execute a plan to make sure you don't have haphazard UTXOs. One million minimum is general consensus, what you want to have, or higher. You can't go wrong with going higher. But lower certainly could be problematic in the future, especially when fees get higher. So I just find it curious that with all this price action, all these people looking at Bitcoin, all these people presumably at bitcoin all these people

presumably buying bitcoin and some selling it looks like yeah still the mempool is still empty and i'm wondering why that's the case joey it's got to be some people instead of buying bitcoin they're buying something else that's not bitcoin that has that is tied to their price like mstr like assembler like the etf yeah all this shit okay and they could consolidate their stuff on they could batch do one transaction so that a bunch of individual ones just do one and then it just you know it makes it more efficient when you're trying to do it but still it ain't big right right it's not fucking bitcoin so let me tell you very interesting that it's fucking empty this mempool i why why is it this is the thing i think people don't realize

okay you actually would expect to see this as more people understand what bitcoin is and what it's worth because you just are not gonna have people people selling, moving, or touching Bitcoin once they've been around for a cycle and seen this thing go from 20,000 to 100,000. They're not going to move it. They're not going to touch it. How many times do you and me talk about securing Bitcoin is really just making sure you can deposit easily and that it's almost impossible to send the transaction out once it's there? That's the whole thing about securing Bitcoin.

And so when people realize this, they take the same action. Naturally, that's going to cut demand for block space. That's number one. Number two, in the future, this is only going to intensify and accelerate, I think, because people will not use their Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. They will use it as a medium of collateral. And so that's going to be something that's going to affect block space demand as well. And it's one of the reasons why I think we were lucky we won the block size war and kept the block size low. But at some point, I think there's going to be another conversation to be had about security budget, fees, miners, all this stuff. If in fact, you don't have to move your Bitcoin at the same level

that you did a year or two ago. And if it doesn't become the high velocity medium of exchange that maybe we thought it might be five years ago, 10 years ago. But to be honest with you, that use case, it hasn't really materialized in a lot of places. And by the way, it's also being, like we're working actively on making sure it doesn't ever become a use case on layer one,

which is a whole other problem. So I don't know why we would expect this not to be the case as things advance. As people realize what it's worth, they don't want to move it. They'd rather use this collateral. They're using layer twos. Like we asked for this. And there's going to be an issue with with this in the future and the people who

want stuff like tail emissions or seizing lost coins to pay miners or keep the keep the block subsidy going whatever like all those people are fucking out to lunch fuck them all okay but what okay so what's the plan then if if the if the block if demand keeps going down for block space where are the fees coming from you know this it will have to be decided in the future and maybe you just have too many miners out there maybe you just have to scale back the amount of miners eventually the what you're going to get per block is going to be very very low and you'd hope that the price of bitcoin would compensate that yeah so it's still it just would work out in the end but then you have the problem of like you know how much hardware how much hash is on the network that's another issue then right like the problems you're playing whack-a-mole i think a little bit at least i i could tell you i'm not and i could suspect

you're not in it to make money with our little bit access now they're not they're not putting it up but if you have enough of these people, I think, you know, I just want to plug it in and help the network. We're not publicly traded. We have no shareholders to, to deal with.

We have no investors to deal with. We're just plugging. Maybe that is where binding should be moving towards the future. Rather than having these large farms that are owned by companies, it's decentralized. I agree. Everybody's doing it with no fucking incentive aside from i just want to help the network and if you get rewarded great if not no fucking skin off my back but one

thing you overlook though there is a lot of bitcoin that's being transacted as a medium exchange zaps are being done at a phenomenal rate yeah lightning does work lightning for sure yeah yeah it doesn't scale out in its current form to all eight billion people too just like uh layer one lightning has its limitations but what we're doing right now if you go on nostril you start sending stuff then some uh nice post or you get zapped and these apps are happening all the fucking time. So rather than them taking place on layer one, it's taking place in Lightning. And Lightning is working in that sense. So people are transacting with Bitcoin,

maybe not buying shit, but at least they're sending zaps. And to me, that is a medium of exchange. You're buying or paying somebody for their ideas and their post. And that's being done. You're not wrong about that, but how does it contribute to block demand? Like block space demand demand doesn't have to always be there again like i mentioned it

could move over to layer two to to lightning as more people adopt bitcoin the amount of space it's going to be chewed up like there's just it's right now it's i don't know what the number is like what it could could accommodate in terms of how many people. We haven't yet crossed that threshold. When you say accommodate, think about what you mean by that. Because when I hear it, I know what I think. I think accommodate means cheap transactions available for everybody. And to me, that means no demand for block space.

Certainly not expensive demand. So where does the fee discussion come back? If you want to buy Bitcoin and add it to your quote-unquote wallet yeah that's a transaction yeah so if you do that i do that and all eight billion people do that is there enough block space to do that within no if not with the current not with the current set of tech no but i mean assuming that we continue to improve the tech under the like this is what they're talking about so far has only moved in one direction and it's been get layer two more open make layer two cheaper neither of those is good for the security budget so are we going to

send the tech the other way we got to make it more expensive you're still gonna have to buy on layer one right now i don't know of a way just simply buying to Lightning. I don't know where to send my Singapore dollar, aside from like bull Bitcoin, but for the most part, people are buying layer one shit and putting it in a wall and leaving it like that. So when people start doing that and start leaving it as, in that case,

a store of value, there's not enough block space available to accommodate everybody to do that one buy every two years and put in a block space. There's not enough out there. All I know is Lightning is working in terms of taking the pressure off

layer one, but I think even ETFs and fucking MSTR and stuff like that, people are, I want to buy Bitcoin. Oh, here's an easy way to do it. I can go to my brokerage. For sure. Once that disappears, once people people fucking realize once the rugging happens and people like what else could they do then you're gonna see block space get chewed up quite a bit it's not the day that we have real pictures on or whatever fucking else these ordinals that was a fucking joke it

sucked for that brief period of time but we discussed it it was never going to be infinite because you had to pay hard money in order to maintain that so you couldn't do it so yeah um yeah okay fair enough that's the the only thing like i would just continue to ask people who think that we need cheaper layer one space or whatever, like more accessible, accommodating layer one space. Is accessible and accommodating going to allow for the security budget to maintain network security? That's the big question. It continues to be, to me anyway, the only question that actually matters. It is the only thing that Bitcoiners need to worry about now.

Everything else is taken care of. If Mempool fills up, that takes care of the security budget, right? Yeah, for sure. Over time, I'm of the opinion that the block space is scarce. It won't be like this now. You won't have 100% access to it, a one sat per V-byte for transactions. This is something that's going to disappear sometime in the future when I

don't know, but it's, this is not going to last forever. Just like the ordinal is fucking plugging things up. It's not going to last forever. Just different rationales for one. You had to pay for plugging up the network ordinals. This one,

I think there's just not enough people that want to buy in yet, but once people start wanting to buy in yet but once people start wanting to buy in well then it becomes more costly to do so he's in here to compete for somebody else to that that wants to buy in plus you're going to be competing with i we suspect people that have okay let me ask you how do you square that more people wanting to buy in will mean less block space when at 20 000 it was 50 cent transaction and today it's zero how do you square that that's it that's interesting so what's causing it to be so cheap right now like i think the theory is that etfs are taking away some of that shit like mstr shit like samler and to a lesser degree even lightning so it's taking away some of the pressure that layer one

should normally have if those things didn't exist without an etf i don't think there would be it would be this empty i don't i don't know like the thing is i think we're talking about the same things as demand increases the the likelihood that there won't be some innovation regardless of how you view the etf in its current form it is an innovation that stifles block space demand. And so there's going to be more of those innovations that stifle block space demand, either from TradFi or from banks or from nation states or whatever. Nation states are not going to be interested in paying $50,000, $100,000 more to do final settlement. There's's going to be innovations it's open source it's friends and enemies you know like they're going to do this and that's like opcat and shit like that whatever whatever i mean that's today but fucking a week a month a year who

knows and so like when people say that absolutely yeah and so like i i think like i said the technology and the the slant of all these improvements is always unfriendly to the security budget thesis, I think. And that's my concern. That's my big worry. I have nothing to add to that. Okay. Let's just see how things play out. I'm not concerned for the least bit. And I think that there's going to be enough people transacting in the

future. That's going to pay for people to want to mine. That's my opinion, but we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. Coin us. Let's do one last story.

Coin. Yeah. Terrible man. Poor guys. All right. Well, they might've been exploited for people who are not aware. People who have used the

service might realize that there's a disruption during this past week and they say it's due to a vulnerability in a system that was exploited it allowed an attacker to get access to reset codes for account accounts on there that didn't belong for them so somebody could go on there and ask for a password reset even though it was not their account and this has since been patched but unfortunately not before 80 accounts had their passwords reset and attackers were able to drain their accounts no note how much was taken from them but this all goes back to it not your keys not your coin and if you're using custodial lightning coin os is custodial lightning it's custodial on chain and yeah so what can i say like not it's not saying it's a bad service by the way i don't think you're saying that either

yeah i just for me if i want to have control of something i want to control my keys i don't think anybody's using this service for their main source of their corn. Maybe they're putting a little bit on there so they can transact easily. I'm assuming that's the case. Maybe a couple hundred sacks. Remember how easy it was. Cole and, God, I forget the lead dev's name, came on the show. We were sending transactions to Dave Bradley in the chat.

It was unbelievably seamless, outstanding product. So I hope to get this sorted out because it is a good product. If we want to onboard merchants and stuff like that, this is about as good a merchant-facing product I think I've ever seen. And we've been around for seven, eight years now. We went from no merchant-facing products to now stuff like CoinOS. So I hope these guys figure it out. I'm sure they will. I'm not worried about it.

You said they patched it already. I'm positive that they got that yeah but you lose trust right a little bit yeah you're in the move fast and break things industry here right like short of cold storage where you secure your own keys what else is a sure thing like you said nothing that's why this is the one thing and i preach this all the time is people please look learn how to use cold storage generate your keys offline do it in a manner that your keys are never exposed to internet never share it with anybody like just take precautions where that your wealth can never

be stored sorry stolen it's stored for you to keep forever so to do the right thing like don't fuck around yeah don't take the easy way out do it the right way yeah just do it yeah totally agree totally agree it's so and by the way the easy way and the hard way are now just the easy way that might not work in the easy way that does work things are not that hard anymore cold card not that hard you know if you can start a dishwasher you can figure out a cold card yeah it really isn't that difficult it seems daunting when you first try it because it's something new you got all these buttons and a new interface and all that shit but once you start

diving into it it really isn't that bad and the beautiful thing is until you start sending your bitcoin you could fuck around with it and lose nothing like you could just fuck around the worst that happens is you break the fucking thing and there's nothing on it. There's no Bitcoin that you move to any key. So just fuck around with it. Have fun with it. And that's the way to do it. If you need help, let me know. I'll show you the ins and outs of it.

Yeah, man. Totally. Totally. That's it, Joey. Let's go on to notable stories. Let's do it. Let's do it. If you're on video.

We'll continue with notably. If you're on video, hang out. On Twitter, hang out. And if you're on audio, wait for tomorrow for the back half of the episode until then take care of yourselves yeah see like he says don't be a cock