The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP #161 (Bitcoin News) - Privacy Issues, Block Mining, Square BTC Converts

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. We also welcome special guest host @BitcoinScribe to the show this evening! This week: Samourai Turfed, Wasabi Blocking US Users Phoenix Wallet Goes Offline Custody Questions Capital Controls? and so much more 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: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://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. With their new kyc-free options, there's never been a quicker, simpler, more private and (most importantly) cheaper way to acquire private Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer. Check out the other podcasts on the network: The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast (https://www.youtube.com/c/CanadianBit...) The NHL 94 Podcast (https://www.youtube.com/@NHL94Podcast) Two Whites and a Blue (https://www.youtube.com/@twowhitesand...) Bitcoin and Barbells (https://www.youtube.com/@JoeyBBandBTC)

The Canadian Bitcoiners podcast is just two guys and maybe a guest or two discussing Bitcoin, Bitcoin equities, and the related macroeconomic space. It's not meant to be financial advice, so please, if you're doing any investing, after listening to our program, do your own research, do your own due diligence, and understand that any money you invest can be lost. The show is meant for entertainment purposes only, and we hope you enjoy the program. show tomorrow. So he's done me a solid and brought in our good buddy Scribe, Bitcoin Scribe, to help co-host the show. So welcome, Bitcoin Scribe. Good to see you. How are you doing? I'm good, Joey. Thanks for having me. My pleasure, buddy. My pleasure. We were just talking about the struggles and the ups and downs of doing home renos and backyard renos and all these things.

What's expensive? Let me tell you guys. We had a busy week in bitcoin scribe uh we got a lot to talk about tonight we got some privacy stuff we got some block mining stuff we got some block uh bitcoin convert stuff we got some capital gain stuff maybe we'll see we'll see if we talk about biden's capital gains it's not in the rundown but we might do it in the uh in it's in the show notes so why don't we start like we usually do with the sponsors, EasyDNS, Mark and team, best place for you to host your content. If you've got a website or you're thinking about getting a website, you want to build something like we have, like Scribe has, how do you do it? You need a website first.

You've got to go to EasyDNS. Mark will help you buy a domain, which even though Saylor says there is no second best, he hoards domain names. And so I would argue that he actually believes domains are second best. Get your domain name, start putting your content there. What else do you need? You need someone you can rely on and not have your stuff taken down. Mark's for sure not going to have that problem.

He wrote Unassailable. The book is behind me here somewhere. On top of that, you can have all the virtual private server needs you have met by Mark. So for our, you know, sort of a friend group here, Bitcoin node, Nostra Relay, Nodus implementation, BTC pay server, whatever. Okay. You'd be transmitting data, not money. Do it all with EasyDNS GPS.

Plus you got like, you know, PGP and GPG email, a bunch of other bells and whistles. Go there. CBP Media is the code to tell Mark we sent you. We know you guys are stacking up. Mark told us that he's very pleased about the traffic that the promo code is getting, which is sick. We love that. So go there, keep it up. Another company that's thrilled with the traffic, we're sending them Bull Bitcoin. We love Bull, okay? You can go to the post office by KYC Freecoin with cash on your account with Bull Bitcoin. Bring your QR code that the website gives you. Tell the post office to scan it.

They'll look at you confused. You look at them with a confident smirk and trade your fiat bucks for the hardest money around. On top of that, if you want to do e-transfers in, you're not too worried about the privacy stuff. You want to do e-transfers, you can do that too. Piece of cake. Everything's easy. It's all non-custodial. They never hold your Bitcoin. You give them a wallet address, lightning address, LBTC, whatever. They send it to you. Everything is coin joined on the way out,

which may not be the case forever. We're going to find out. Talk about that tonight. And on top of that, you pay your bills there. Not just like a one-off kind of cell phone and stuff, but if you really want to live on the Bitcoin standard, your mortgage, your property tax, energy bills, whatever, they got all the vendors there, big dropdown list on the bills platform. I want bitcoin.ca's website, or you can go there, use our promo code. It's in the show notes. I don't have it memorized. You for sure don't have it memorized.

And we look forward to seeing you guys continue to run your money through Bold Bitcoin because they're crushing it. Now, before we get into housekeeping here, I'm going to do the boost. Len sent me the boosts. I should have sent these to you, Scribe. I don't want to read them, but Len does a good job with them. We got a handful of boosts here. Bitcoin plus food, 200 sats.

Unlistenable audio. Sorry. Bitcoin plus food. Listen to me. This is about the Tom and Aiden episode from last week. I made a mistake in the setup. So StreamYard wants a camera and a mic. It wants you to pick your inputs when you fire up the thing.

It's easy when you're streaming, but when you're at home, you actually have to use the OBS camera, but not the OBS mic. So my fault there, but it gets better after about seven or eight minutes. I did end up fixing it. Thanks to somebody in the chat and Tom paying attention to the live feed. So Bitcoin plus food. Hope you come back for another episode, Mike. So my fault there, but it gets better after about seven or eight minutes. I did end up fixing it. Thanks to somebody in the chat and Tom paying attention to the live feed. So Bitcoin plus food. Hope you come back for another episode, buddy. Owen 21, 333 sats. Appreciate as always. We appreciate you, buddy. Moe BTC Dick, 500 sats. This is good alpha. Something we talked about offline scribe. Tagging onto the trades debate. We're about to have an insane squeeze in trade

work. I've been a Sparky, that's an electrician, for eight years now, and I've never seen so few new hires ever, not even close. We're getting maybe one or two new hires a month, and 90% of the time, they have no idea what they're getting into and will most likely not continue in this career, despite us trying to accommodate them. Tradee wages are going to rival very high- high paying careers in the next decade, I think. Moby to C. Dick, I agree with you. Now, the real question is that show that Ricky is doing on

Crave now, where he's a trades guy. Is that going to improve the flow? I don't know. We're going to find out. D5E5, 500 sats. Will voting for the other party stop this Canadian recording of assets policy? If so, Pierre Paglia is my guy. Voting will not help. It is a fool's game, in my opinion. Doug and Rube525, 525 stats. Similar capital gains antics in the UK, but not quite the middle class asset strip mining that Trudeau has gone for. Will be very interesting to see what

this does to Canada's economy. Good luck with that. Scribe, any comments on that? You guys ever boost the show? How come I never read anything from you? Yeah, I never boost boosted my laggy uh maybe just a touch but not much okay good my camera's lagging on my own yeah i've never boosted the show it was the first i'm confused by the first guy why'd he boost if he he just listened for six minutes decided it wasn't for him but we have a very little fan base we'll take his sats and report on the problem.

I was keeping for this week. Busy week for me. Latin is, like I said, in parts unknown, staging a hunger strike or something. I don't know. Today, obviously, the flagship, me and Scribe are going to hold down. Tomorrow, David Bailey and Mark Goodwin. A dinner party like no other. Let me tell you here on the CBP, that's from seven to eight o'clock.

We'll be talking about Bitcoin Magazine, among other things. I should mention Mark and Dave, like diametrically opposed to, like in many of their viewpoints. And so I'm interested in hearing what they have to say about stuff like the ETF, about stable coins,

about Bitcoin broadly, ordinals, all that stuff. And we'll talk about some not so controversial stuff too, because I do think those guys have a lot of valuable stuff to say uh which is not the popular opinion these days but i don't care wednesday i'll be on high hash rate that's late at 11 o'clock i don't think it's live i don't know when it'll be released so i don't make any promises there thursday i'll be on why are we bullish and uh friday i'll be doing money talks with mike campbell probably my fourth or fifth or something appearance there.

Looking forward to speaking with him. Scribe, you got any housekeeping? What do you want to talk about? What are you doing this week? Not much, buddy. This is basically it. And then just showing you, you know, I almost brought a glass of milk on because I knew you were going to have one. I love it, man.

Everyone should be drinking more milk. Like we talk all the time about the importance of milk in the fitness regime here. So I'm a little surprised and disappointed, but you can do that in your next appearance. We should start, Tribe, with this news about Samurai. So for whatever reason, I shared with myself a list of stories. Samurai was the first one. Samurai Wallet, what's the best way to describe the story? Taken down last week by US regulators.

One guy arrested in Pennsylvania, the other in Portugal. The claims are not very friendly. Let me tell you, among them, the accusation, the allegation, the charge that Samurai laundered more than $2 billion to organizations or entities that were either sanctioned or represent terrorist interests or things of this nature. I think the exact wording was combined several unique features to launder money through their network. Now, you're a little more tech inclined than me. And so I want to sort of hear your insights on this, but tell me something. Am I wrong thinking that the real problem with Samurai and Whirlpool wasn't necessarily that it was doing

these transactions or whatever, because there's a lot of ways you can kind of obfuscate your transactions on Bitcoin. But wasn't the problem that they were taking fees? They took something like $4.5 million over the course of the life of the tool set in fees. And so I would argue that even though you may say that you don't hold the Bitcoin at all, which they didn't, it was like just kind of a signing and swapping tool. Taking fees, isn't that enough to get you tagged by the government? What do you think? Yeah, I think they laid it out pretty clearly in the indictment.

That's basically why these charges are brought. The government knows that Samurai didn't directly touch the money. But in FinC's uh guidance or whatever they compare it to like uh like a frying pan transferring heat from your from your stove to food it's like that's all it takes really uh to be you're aiding and abetting basically in money and laundering um look my take on this is that I didn't use Samurai. I wasn't a particular fan of their antics on Twitter, but I view FinCEN as a direct violation of your fourth amendment rights in the US. They've basically created a system where you need to over-report

on all of your transactions in order to not get caught up in any of this. And I just think that's a violation of your rights. It's your money. You've got a right to do with it what you want. But yeah, that's my quick take on it. Where do you come down on stuff like the idea that code is speech and free speech is part of the US constitution? I think there's a lot of people who are talking about this idea that you can swap whatever ones and zeros you want on whatever network you want and not face consequences. It sounds like you're in the same boat,

but is that really the case here? Like, is that what we're, is that what we're seeing in stuff like wasabi? And I'm with you, by the way, I should mention, uh,

T dev. And I don't know the other guy's Twitter handle, but man, in that indictment and in that, um, department of justice release, they, I think, pretty clearly put a target on themselves with Twitter antics. So I don't know. Anyway, is this code of speech thing something that I should keep an eye on, that they're going to lean on? I have no idea. I see here, by the way, that the one fellow was released on $1 million bond after pleading not guilty. So I would imagine that was

the guy who was arrested in Pennsylvania. So a decent start, I guess. But yeah, the code of speech thing, where do you come down on that? I assume that you're with me on that front. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a case to be made that there's a First Amendment defense here. But again, I'd say it's a Fourth Amendment defense. You've got the right to not be... The government can't perform illegal search and seizure on you. And I would say that if the government is basically mandating all of these companies to report all of their transactions to them, no matter what, the companies are basically being coerced to do this because if they happen to fail to miss a transaction that in hindsight was used for something the government deemed illegal,

then the company is going to get fined out of their minds or the people that run the company are going to get arrested. I think it's a Fourth Amendment issue as well. So it could be First Amendment issue, code of speech, sure. I think you're better defenses from a Fourth Amendment perspective. I happen to know people. I'll say I'm very biased. I know people very well and people, in fact, that are related to me that have been basically hounded by FinCEN and have had to pay enormous amounts of fines because they just, you know, they underreported it. They were, it's a small company under report. You don't have data analysts. You don't have the legal team required to constantly report these things to keep an eye out for these things. And so they ended up getting slapped with a huge fine from FinCEN.

And so I'm, I'm completely biased against them. Yeah. When you start coming up with people that I know personally, it's a little different. Yeah, of course, man. It'll color your view. One of the things I kind of want to talk about is, and this is on the show notes too, but we'll kind of lump it in here. Wasabi also now not accepting US IP addresses for part of its suite of services, suite of tools. And a lot of hubbub on Twitter about, look, you're seeing now, I think in a lot of ways, the clamps coming down. And in some respects, there's something to be said for like, are we being lulled to sleep by the big price moves?

And if we think about some of the stuff that's happened over the last two years, let's say, you go through FTX, some of these other huge dips, Terra Luna, whether it's a company like this going tits up or a stable coin, Algo stable coin, or just derivatives people getting wiped out, like leverage getting wiped out. You've gone through all these ups and downs and not really had a ton of direct state attacks on Bitcoin. I think that's safe to say. Now, as the price is rising, you're seeing state attacks more and more. That's one piece of it. But I think the thing that's under-discussed, maybe not under-discussed, but there's no deep dives on this. If we look and see

what is going on in terms of like the basement, especially where you guys are in the U S here, it's, you know, it's already a done deal. We're spending like crazy over here. This, the ship has sailed, but you know, you guys are really the sort of a flagship democracy. Let's say there's clearly something coming down the pipe where there's going to be a move to remove privacy from people, to make sure that all financial transactions and financial assets have perfect transparency, so everyone can see what you have at all times. There's no hiding, no evading of taxes, no fleeing the jurisdiction for another without paying your quote-unquote fair share, as Biden and Corrine would say.

And also, I think there's going to be the criminalization of discussion and attempts to demonize the dollar direct or indirect. And that's how I view this. If I think about what's going on with Samurai, I really think that it's like a scared animal, right? Two or three years ago, if you told me that this was going on, the price was 10,000, 15,000, I would go, yeah, they're maybe laundering money. And they could have been laundering money for terrorism. I have no idea at the moment, but I view this now as a scared animal backed into a corner, starting to act out. Do you share that view? Is this a soft whimper of a dying regime? Or is this just another example of how,

no matter how decentralized you think you are, someone somewhere can be putting cuffs over it? And you mean a scared whimper from the US government? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I mean, you had a great tweet the other day when all of this was first starting to come out. It's like, this is an admission from, from a government that's told us over and over again, that this thing that we're doing is a beanie baby. It's a tulip.

This is an admission from them that what we have here has legs. It is, it is money. Um, and I, I think you're exactly right. I think you're spot on. I think,

uh, the U S government is holding onto this last little bit of power that it, that it, uh, wields, which is the U Ss dollar and as soon as that thing starts to collapse man god help us because uh it's not going to be pretty i don't think well what's the like what's the next step here like if you were if you were a mixing service because let's be honest we we don't have any other big mixing services besides wasabi and coin joint people talk about joint market You could use Lightning to obfuscate if you wanted to. I'm not recommending that, but you could. It's difficult to track transactions through Lightning Network and back to layer one. If you're a small dev or even like a Bitcoin dev scribe, working on tools that are privacy adjacent even, this has to send a shiver down your spine,

does it not? Yeah. I mean, look, even outside of Bitcoin, you're starting to see them clamp down on, hey, any transaction over $600 has to be reported to the IRS. I think you're just going to continue to see this in companies that don't even have anything to do with Bitcoin. Like you look at Cash App, obviously they've got Bitcoin on the app. They've got Lightning enabled, but you just look at Cash App's peer-to-peer cash payments, just pure USD. I'm sure they're reporting a huge amount of these transactions. Just because like we opened up the show with, you've got all these regulations in place. you're not sure if you failed to report something. And then in hindsight, the government gets to come back and say, hey, we actually tracked this $3 payment to a donation to people that we don't like. You're just incentivized to over-report, which I go back to it being a direct violation of your Fourth Amendment, right?

If you happen to live in the US. But if you're a dev, man, I'd be terrified of working on these things. I know you mentioned Wasabi's blocking users. Phoenix announced that they're taking their product off of the app store in the US and I don't blame them. And I know this is a bold Bitcoin show. I like Francis's take, which is the US is an absolute nightmare for anybody that wants to run anything related to privacy. And so I don't blame these people. And I know Francis has said that he can't get bull Bitcoin into the US because the regulatory landscape is too strict. And I really don't blame them. I think the US is making a massive mistake. And I think that really all they're doing is

they're just chasing away innovation. Yeah. the innovation thing is a hard pill to swallow for me because it's obviously it's happening here too like we're demonizing we're demonizing bitcoin all the time and uh maybe we'll talk about that now so in canada word in the most recent budget we talked about it a bit last week i think we kind of missed the mark though so i want to bring it up again uh word in the budget the canadian budget from two weeks ago at this point, but last week really was where all the commentary showed up. Our government is looking at the worthiness, let's say, of crypto and Bitcoin related investment vehicles in the tax advantaged accounts. So things like the ETFs, potentially MicroStrategy, Coinbase, companies that are on the S&P 500, on the NASDAQ, no longer potentially going to be tax advantaged for you as a Canadian. So I'd be curious to get your thoughts on this, but I'll maybe give you a pitch across the middle here.

Is the tax advantaged account the most important thing to get new people into Bitcoin? I think a lot has been made about to get more number go up. You really need new money. You can't just be selling to each other, people who had Bitcoin and getting back in, people who want out and want to get back in later. You need new money. And is the ETF the new money vehicle that we need? And Canada is a small market, but be curious your thoughts on whether or not this kind of thing could show up in the United States, given the way that your justice department's villainizing Bitcoin on other fronts. Yeah. It's interesting. Are they going to attack true self custody of Bitcoin or are they going to start attacking like your ability to do things with, uh, non, non, uh, like non custody, like things like the ETF. Uh, that's a good question. My,

I mean, my immediate thought really is with the tax advantage. Most of these are, um, yeah, I agree. They're self custody or bust. I a hundred percent agree. Um, I don't trust the ETF. I don't own any of them. I don't know, but I also have access to Bitcoin. Like what happens when all the on-ramps get shut off? It's going to start getting tougher to buy Bitcoin, you know? So I don't know. It's a good question. My immediate thought is how many people in Canada even take advantage of the tax advantage

accounts anyways. Like here, I think it's pretty similar to our our retirement accounts we've got like a roth traditional we got 401k um and i know a bunch of people that don't contribute at all to any of those that is actually a good point though scribe like that we talked on the show before and you and i have discussed offline with uh with our other buddy who will remain unnamed tonight um the idea that there's a clear attempt here to kind of like protect the incumbent class from having to deal with a new subsection of up and comers vis-a-vis retirement accounts,

Bitcoin, stuff like that. This is why in my tweet, I said, there's, it's clear. If you don't view these things as the, through the lens of they're attacking our freedom or they're scared of the

US dollar collapsing. Fine. If you don't think that, fine. But if you look at all these things through this other lens of there is a debasement event coming that's going to be unrivaled in its size, in its destruction, and in the fallout that comes after it. If you think about all these things together through that lens, Wasabi and other CoinJoin, stuff like Samurai obviously being taken down. We had Tornado Cash taken down two years ago at this point. We said it could never happen here. It's happening here now. You have reporting requirements clamping down on Bitcoin and crypto transactions here in Canada, as well in the budget, a proposal that you have to report not only when you sell your Bitcoin,

but when you buy every year in your taxes. That's a lot. And that's telling to me. Stuff like capital gains taxes going up on the sale of businesses and on the exit of one jurisdiction for another. Discussion of unrealized capital gains on stuff like Bitcoin. You guys are also proposing a fairly large capital gains tax, talking about taking away tax advantages from Bitcoin and related products in otherwise tax advantaged accounts, discussion around here in Canada, retirement plans being forced to buy Canadian equities as opposed to international equities, like really going down with the ship in a lot of ways. Think about all these things through the lens of there's about to be debasement. We don't want anyone having any assets except the people we know. It's like this devil you know argument against the devil you don't. The last thing they want is me and you rising up in our

citadel and having a hundred kids each and deciding that I don't really feel like doing this anymore. I don't really feel like living here, paying taxes here, building a business here, all that stuff. Am I on the right track there? What do you think? Yeah. The only thing you're wrong on is you're saying it's going to happen and it's already happening. This is exactly, it's already, it's already all happening. I mean, and they do it. What pisses me off the most is they do it all under the guise of like, we're just looking out for your best interests. If you were looking at my best interests, I wouldn't be taxing my income when I make

it and then taxing it whenever I buy anything. And now you're talking about taxing it before I even sell the thing that I bought tax money. Yeah, man, these people don't care about us. If you still think that they do, I think you're just like, I don't know, your head's up your ass really. Yeah. You know, you're, you're exactly right. This is exactly what they're doing. The question now comes to us, right? It comes to people like me and you, do we, do we, do we stay where we are and fight for the things that, you know, the general, generally speaking, Western civilization was built on, or do we

pack it up and move to somewhere like El Salvador? Um, I happen to live in, you know, I happen to live in a relatively, uh, a relatively, uh, it's a low population place in the U S there aren't many people. I know all my neighbors very well. Uh, so I think the things that a lot of people in larger cities in the U S deal with are things that aren't much of a concern to me and I'm much more inclined to stay where I am. Uh, and I feel quite good where I am. So yeah, all that state protections too, right? Like your state puts up a barrier to entry as far as like oppressive new laws and regs here we don't have that same barrier they try to it's getting harder and harder to see where the difference between state and federal

regulation is in the u.s um it's getting harder and harder but fortunately there are still like for example the state that i live in doesn't have a state income tax so i still pay a federal income tax but no state income tax uh which is great. However, that typically means the sales tax is higher. So I'm still getting a federal tax on my income and then everything I buy has a sales tax on it. Yeah. I mean, these taxes, it's frustrating. One of the most frustrating things for me as a Canadian is watching the tax rate go up and up and up. My wife and I pay more and more and more and the services we need are less and less available, less and less quality in each service. Everything from schools to roads to healthcare to you name it, really. If you need help or support from almost any government agency, you're going

to have a hard time getting it. I don't necessarily think that's a knock on the people working in those agencies, but they're just stretched so thin and there's clear, I think, mismanagement at some level of some of the money going in. But anyway, story for another time. Let's move on. How about you just let people do what they want to do? You and I are both homeowners. I know we've got something here in the rundown about owning your own home, but you and I are homeowners and we were talking right before we started.

It's like, so I'm rebuilding a deck that I have out back. And here's what I have to do. I've got to go to the city. I've got to pay for a permit. It's like 30 bucks. So you pay for a permit to do work on your own house. I buy all of the material that I need with money that was taxed when I got it. And then I pay a sales tax on that. I do all the labor myself.

And then what happens? The city drives by because they know that I had a permit because that's a public record. So they drive by, they're like, oh, wow, the value of your house just went up 10,000 bucks. Guess what that means? You're paying more in property tax. So it's like, I pay for the permit to improve my own house so that it can be worth more. So I pay more in taxes to people that had no part in, in, in doing anything with my house. So I know you said, Oh, well they're, you know, government employees, these agencies are stretched thin. Well, how about you just, how about we just start cutting some of these people out and see if things get better or worse. My guess is things are going to get a lot better. I personally love having to talk to

a bunch of people who don't know me or my house or my neighbors about building stuff. You and me have talked before about my neighbor who's got these huge fence posts in and she wants to build a fence that's like 10 feet, but someone in the vicinity will not let her build it. Calls the city every time. And I just think, just don't ask. It's your property. You want to build a palisade wall? Go for it. Who cares? If you know, run a chicken farm in your backyard, as long as it doesn't smell like shit, you know, I don't care. You know, Bob's your uncle, enjoy the eggs. Maybe throw me a couple here and there, but you're right. It's like a, this is, it's like a broader theme, right? Like whether it's Bitcoin or tradfied transactions or anything, everyone wants to know what you're

doing, why you're doing it. They want to cut, they want to tax, they want to levy, they want to take and take and take. And what did, I can't remember who it was. I want to say it was Margaret Thatcher, right? The problem with spending other people's money is eventually you run out or something like that. And these guys are not adding, there's no value being added here. And we're in really dire straits here. Our GDP per capita is below, I think, almost every United States state, including probably the one you're in and the ones that are generally regarded as flyover and frowned upon by the average Canadian. We're way worse, guys. We produce way less. We have less rights. We are taxed at the greatest rate in the world.

They're close. And I don't know if you saw this one scribe the other day but maybe not the other day it was like two weeks ago now canada has the second highest paid politicians on the planet not a bad gig if you can get it when you say oh man that's yeah i mean i'm not surprised and i that's probably just based on salary too it's probably not based on all the insider trading that they're getting into. There's something to be said for that, but I don't want to get canceled. So, okay, let's go to your pet topic here. We added this for you and I expect you to carry this part. So we're going to talk about first, I have actually two of them here.

I have the block enabling the square sellers to convert sales to Bitcoin with Cash App. And I have the block miner update. So where do you want to start? Which one do you want to do first? Can I just say one more thing? I know we started with privacy and then went down this- For sure. For sure. This tax rabbit hole, but I've seen a lot of takes on Twitter over the last few days about the arrests. Almost everybody condemns the arrests. Hey, we don't like these guys. They kind of made a target out of themselves, but they shouldn't be arrested. I've seen some takes from pretty reputable people saying there needs to be a discussion about where regulation does fit in. I would just say this, if I had any hope whatsoever

that government agencies would enter that conversation in good faith. I would say, let's hear them out. There's never been an instance where any of these agencies have said, hey, we're going to do this. And then that's it. That's our, that's the line in the sand. We're never going to exceed that. They always go one step further, one step further, one step further.

So they've, our own agencies have gotten themselves into a position where we don't trust them to do absolutely anything so we would just rather not have them in the conversation at all um yeah i would that's where i would end on the privacy thing it's like well i wish i could have a good conversation let's keep let's let's keep going right like look at you guys haveenter over there. We have this thing that just started last year, the Bitcoin Coalition of Canada or whatever. In both cases, they claim to be, quote unquote, engaging with regulators, engaging with politicians. And I would just say, I like the CoinCenter guys. Van Valkenburg and Neeraj are popular on Twitter. I think they're

smart guys. But you have to ask yourself, the Coin Center group does a big dinner every year. They raise a lot of money. They have a prominent profile. But what the fuck have you been doing for a decade? What the fuck have you been doing? This is still happening today. Guys are getting nabbed. Show me where the money went. Show me your wins. And here in Canada, it's even worse. We have this coalition that, as far as I can tell, has zero wins, zero traction. And judging by the commentary in the budget, and by the way, people close to the budget and close to the coalition that messaged me privately, these guys are not even in the fucking room. They're not even in the fucking room.

They're talking like they're doing stuff in both cases, Coin Center and the coalition. And the results are fucking zero. And the obvious argument you could make, oh, well, it'd be worse if we weren't there. Well, we'll never know. And I got that news for you. If the best argument you could make is that it'd be worse if you weren't around or weren't there, you're not going to make it. That's not a good argument. And so I don't know where do you... Even Porter, Satoshi Action Fund, he's trying to go state by state. It's a bit of a different operation, but fuck man, if people are still getting arrested for running open source stuff, where have you been? What have you been doing? What have you been focusing on, if not this? Do you not understand the value prop of Bitcoin? Do you not understand the importance of privacy in a democratic system?

Do you not understand the importance of financial freedom for people who are in weird situations and don't want other people to know how much Bitcoin they have, which by the way, these mixing tools do. They help obfuscate that kind of stuff. If you don't want any of that, or you don't understand it, get the fuck out of the way and stop pretending you're helping if you do understand it and you're not helping what the fuck have you been doing coin center should have to release like i should go on the website before the show because i'm really slandering them here but coin center should have released a statement like what have we been doing that we missed this and you know there's just nothing here new stance on crypto wallets brought in big us or delegated

bank secrecy there's not even anything on the front page about samurai so like what what have you guys been doing there's a banner on the top get your tickets to the 2024 coin center annual dinner what do you think it costs what do you think it costs individual entry for for one man to get in what do you think it costs scribe uh two thousand 750 us you can sponsor a table for 25k 30k or 40k thanks for your generous donation get ocked what have you been doing what joey doing you not getting the tables i mean they need them they need more money they would be my 40k would have stopped this? Oh man, if I find that out, fuck, I'll be pissed. I'll be so pissed. Yeah. I mean, that's my big thing. That's what's been eating me up all week is it's all these people that are like, oh, we need to have a real conversation about where there can be some

compliance regulation. And in my mind, it's like, well, you have to know that these agencies are not coming into those conversations in good faith, which makes me think all these companies that are leaving the US are on the right because what are you going to do? You're going to overspend on a legal team that you're a small company. Maybe you've got 10 developers and you're going to spend what? 30, 40, 50% of your entire company's budget on a legal team that's going to go state by state. Like in the U S to get money transmitter license, that's a state by state thing. You've got to go to each state regulator and figure out what their rules and regulations are and abide by them.

And you know, that's, that's a, that's a lot of money and lawyers ain't cheap. So I don't know, in my opinion. And at the end of the day, none of that should matter anyways, because it's a lot of money and lawyers ain't cheap. So I don't know, in my opinion. And at the end of the day, none of that should matter anyways, because it's a direct violation of your fourth amendment. Like you do not need to have every one of your transactions monitored by a US government agency. You just don't. Do you think that they'll come down on your side after some like long drawn out legal battle or they just don't?

This is the other problem I have. I don't see a lot of it in Canada because we don't have the same kind of strict set of guiding documents that you guys have. My biggest fear is that they just draw this out for five years or ten years and demoralize and destroy

and degrade and discourage people from running similar services and from building on Bitcoin and all these things. Then they lose the end anyway, but by that time, it's too late. The traction's gone. The excitement's gone. The CBDC's rolled out, whatever. I don't know. Do you think that you're going to end up being a sort of fourth amendment victor here? Or is it just they're going to steamroll that too? I don't know what the history is. Do they steamroll the constitution like that often? I can't imagine they do.

Oh, yeah. What do you mean? Who knew? Who knew? Who knew? The thing's basically, maybe read this. I'd be shocked. I'd be shocked. I bet you could ask a bunch of our congressmen and senators to recite every amendment.

I mean, look, can we go back to a few weeks ago when Tucker was interviewing Putin. Whatever you think about Putin, the guy has a pretty good understanding of Russian history, if nothing else. He's a spurt for history. I would challenge, he's got no notes. He's just rattling off thousands of years of Russian history. I would challenge anybody in the in the u.s government to tell you tell you anything about like i don't know the first 10 presidents of this country they wouldn't be able to no there's no doubt um no i i wouldn't say that that our current officials have a uh high respect for the founding documents of this country

oh fuck all right well let's go to uh this always happens i always pick a or land always documents of this country. Oh, fuck. All right. Well, let's go to, uh, this always happens. I always pick a, or Len always picks a good first topic and we have gone for 40 minutes and we, we,

uh, only, we only do the stories we actually like instead of all the ones we put in the notes. Okay. So what do you, what do you want to do here? You want to do,

uh, the block minor. This is interesting, right? This is, I think like state of the art stuff, the size of the chip or something is like crazy. And the efficiency is

crazy tell me about this well yeah right now i'll be i'm first of all i'll start i'm biased also towards block i'm a big block guy like really like block really like really like what they're doing when it comes to mining they uh i just pulled up kind of like a timeline of what's going on with their money so in october 2021 when block was still square uh dorsey tweeted that they were considering developing a mining system and he was basically he just tweeted out like what would you guys like to see from that this was october 2021 by january, they came out and basically said, we're going to move forward with this based on the feedback that we got. These are the things we're going to focus on. And the biggest thing that they needed to focus on, they said, was

vertical integration. They wanted to do everything in-house, including building out their own chip system. Not long after that, Intel announced that they were going to roll out a Bitcoin mining ASIC. And one of their first customers was Block. They went from, hey, we're going to do everything vertically integrated to we're kind of outsourcing our chip development to Intel. Well, it didn't take Intel long to abandon that product. And in April, 2023, they basically announced that they're going to stop production of this. This was a five nanometer chip. And Block actually went ahead and bought out a ton of those chips. So they stopped, Intel stops taking orders. They stopped producing it and Block bought a ton of them and basically said, this is going to hold us over until we can design our own three nanometer chip.

And last week they announced that their design on the three nanometer chip, which is supposedly much more efficient, is now done and they're sending it to the foundry to be made um so that's that's the news on their chip dorsey also announced that they're going to develop an entire mining system so they'll sell the chips and then they'll also sell their own system and then with the chips they're going to release a mining development kit well which is pretty cool spiral anotheriral, another Block company entity, has already released a lightning development kit. So this mining development kit could be bought or used in tandem.

I think it's going to be open. I think it's going to be an open source development kit. But you could buy a mining chip, the ASIC itself, from Block outside of its own mining system and then use the MDK to maybe even design your own rig. So pretty cool stuff. I like this a lot. I got to be honest with you. I've wavered on Dorsey over the years because it seems to me like he sometimes gets distracted by stuff and was in on this blue sky thing when I think he should have been focused on Bitcoin. I have to admit, Scribe, that I am curious after seeing him pay for quite a big chunk

or help pay for quite a big chunk of the CSW litigates defense. I wonder if he's going to do the same for Samurai and these guys. I'd be curious about that. But on the mining front, I like this a lot. I think that mining, and I said this on the show before, I think that mining is becoming dangerously centralized. And it seems like a lot of people now are starting to go on podcasts agreeing with that sentiment and explaining it in ways that maybe I can't because of my sort of technical shortcomings.

But the thing that I like about this is I can, I think, count on Dorsey to do things that maybe hurt his bottom line as far as the quality of the minor, ocean, stuff like that. And trying to get minors into as many new hands as possible, whether those hands be industrial, individual, or otherwise. I don't know what the ETA is on this. I don't think it's in the article here, at least not the one that I'm reading. But inside of two or three years, it's not bad. I think the big question is,

how are you going to handle what's clearly a supply chain crunch and all this stuff? Miners are infamously hard to get a hold of. Industrial miners have been securing, quote unquote, securing hardware, putting out announcements about securing hardware, watching their stock price rip, and then never getting the hardware while it's actually efficient based on the hash rate. And I'd be curious how he's going to avoid doing something or having the same problems. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, the hardware bit is particularly important. The one thing I would say about Block is that they also own a number of companies. Well, I wouldn't say a number. Like Square, their point of sale terminal, they build their hardware. So they have some existing infrastructure for hardware production. Now it's not a Bitcoin mining rig and it's not producing your own silicon chips, which is particularly difficult. And there's only a few companies in the world that produce them at scale. The nice thing about Bitcoin mining is that I don't think you really need to be able to scale really big because I don't think there's a ton of people that are going to jump on the opportunity to mine Bitcoin. So the margins have to be right for them for sure

on this product. But I don't think they've got to produce anything in huge quantities, at least at the start. So I don't think it'll be a big issue for them. I think it's easy. Like they have their venture arm backed gridless, which is in Kenya. So they have a place to kind of roll this out on like a pilot at a pilot scale, like a pilot scale launch size. I don't know. Like the other thing too, that kind of worries me here.

If I look at like the market for ASICs, whether it's new or used, it's hard to displace the current, you know, champion of the space, right? Whether it's Antminer or whatever else is out there. These guys,

they have a stranglehold on the market, not only because of their production capacity and whatnot, but also because they have the sort of embeddedness of being in every industrial miner do you get to be 10 times better in an ecosystem that's as competitive as Bitcoin mining? And by the way, only getting more competitive. Anyone who looks at the hash rate chart, talk about a chart that's due for a pullback that's never coming. That's the one. So in an ecosystem this competitive, how is he going to displace any of these guys? This is the other thing I have a problem with. I get that he's like kind of a big dreamer and has, you know, very, very significant aspirations to do great things. But I worry this is a bit more than he can chew. And also, you know, from a hardware perspective, how was their Bitcoin wallet received? That's a

much simpler piece of hardware. I realize these things are not quite so easily compared, but I don't think it was received that well. I haven't heard a lot of people talking about it, speaking highly of it. And so I wonder if you couldn't get that right for a lot of consumers in what's arguably a much less competitive market at a lower entry point and a lower price point what makes something you can do this yeah yeah i i agree i thought i did not get a bit key um big key kind of prides itself on having a cloud-based backup for your seed phrase which is a huge red flag here's what you have to here's what you have to consider with Block. Block is a publicly traded company in the US. And I think what Dorsey's trying to do is he's trying to create this middle lane for Bitcoin, where you've got your Bitcoin maxis, you've got no coiners, and then you've got a bunch of people in the US, particularly, that maybe you want to get into Bitcoin, but they don't know how. Now we've got these ETS. We talked about that a little bit at the front of the show, but how can you actually get Bitcoin into the hands of people that want direct access to Bitcoin in a way that's pretty easy to use? And I think that's where Block is trying to create products. I think that's what

BitKey is. So it's certainly got its flaws, but I understand at least where they are. And I would imagine that that's also what they're going to do with mining. So you're saying, how are you going to create this 10X event that gets people out of the sticky situation? Maybe he doesn't want to take people away from Antminers. Maybe he wants to get brand new miners in. And I'll tell you, if you want to get home miners, because one of his big things is he wants to decentralize mining. If you want to get home miners, one of the best things you can do is just make sure that you send a system when someone orders it. Because at the moment, if you're trying to buy a used miner, you basically just send somebody that you meet online Bitcoin and that's one thing you get. Of course you can make them more efficient. Um, that's, what's going to pull in larger industrial miners. Although I don't think that's what Dorsey's plan is for this. So I think that the issue they're going to run into is really a marketing

issue. Like how are they going to bring in new home miners? Cause I believe that's what, that's the niche they're going for. Yeah. That's a good point. Actually. I kind of do like this idea that you don't have to go to Kaboom Racks. I love the Kaboom Racks guys. Don't get me wrong. They're doing the Lord's work. But the idea that you have to go on Kaboom Racks, pay for a used ASIC, you don't know really how long the thing is going to last. You don't know sort of the condition of it.

Or you can go on these other Telegram channels where, like you said, you send a guy Bitcoin. He sends you a skid of loose loose boards and loose you know frames and loose whatever loose power supplies and says like well you know hopefully there's 10 units here but there might be like six or zero and uh also i sent them in a bubble mailer so good luck you know the fucking ups guy stomped all over him there's a dead mouse in it. I could have seen this coming. I can't believe these don't work. Okay. So we're high on this. We like this here on CBP. Now this other story from Block. I like this a lot more. This Block enables millions of square sellers to convert

sales to Bitcoin with Cash App. Seems like a pretty easy interface. Convert some of your daily sales into Bitcoin. You choose the percentage. It does a pretty easy interface. Convert some of your daily sales into Bitcoin. You choose the percentage. It does the convert for you. It seems like at the end of the day, or per sale, and sends it to a wallet of your choice, likely your Cash App wallet. I really like this. This is something they should have done a long time ago. The only question I have is, if I think about all the people using square terminals here in Canada, it's like restaurants, Apple stores. It's not the kind of stores you would expect to use a Bitcoin convert. Here in Canada, we have Lightspeed POS as well,

which is another big provider. I don't know if you guys have it in the States. You may actually. But I think a lot of people use Lightspeed. They're Canadian. They're a little bit cheaper and a little bit less advanced, but it's a high quality product. Let's get your thoughts. I mean, I really think this is a good idea. I would love to see small businesses start at 1%. I should note that there's a quote unquote transparent flat 1% fee that applies to each conversion made from daily sales to Bitcoin. So they're taking a 1% cut. Not great, not bad, but I've always liked this idea of converting some of your sales to Bitcoin. We do that here at CBP. We convert some of the sponsor contract money to Bitcoin every month. And I just think there's no better way to get people on board than to do so in an ecosystem

they already know, already understand, and maybe most importantly, already trust. There's no way that they're worried about Cash App losing their money or Square losing their money or whatever. And so use these two things to get people into Bitcoin, have them start being savers. And that sort of marginal new Bitcoin user that you get through a 1% convert, you wouldn't have gotten any other way. They're not going to Coinbase,

they're not buying Bitcoin on their app. I really like this. Where do you come down? Yeah, this is a great move from Block to use Bitcoin to create what I call shared value wins across their products. So you've got Square merchants that use Square terminals, and then you've got Cash App users that use Cash App. What a great way to get your Square merchants to just auto to put this money

into Cash App and then convert it into Bitcoin. So on the Cash App side, you get the win. Block gets the win from selling Bitcoin. They've got that 1% fee. And from a merchant perspective, it's a no brainer. I put up a thread a few days ago. Whenever this news came out, I basically just went back and said, for the last 365 days, if you were a merchant doing 500,000 in annual sales, and you just put 10% of that, basically assuming that sales are distributed equally across all your days, if you just put 10% of that, or you put any percentage of that into Bitcoin, over the last 365 days, you would have been up 85%. Now imagine you held it in cash. Now imagine you're in Argentina and you're a merchant and you held it in the Argentina peso, right? So I think Square has a massive opportunity here to provide a lot of really, really great

store value. They get to lean on Bitcoin for its store value properties. Yeah, that's a great... What did you call that? Shared what? Victory? Shared what wins? Shared app wins?

Shared business wins? Yeah, so if you're a company, you've got multiple products, right? Like, you know, Block, people know Block owns Square and Cash App. They also own Tidal. They own Spiral. They own Afterpay. So anytime you can create a product or some feature within a product that hits, you know, more than one of the things in your ecosystem.

In this case, it's cash app and square. I just call it a shared value win. Like, you know, the, the merchant wins because they get to basically have a safer store value in Bitcoin and cash app wins because they get to make basically 1% on the,

the Bitcoin that you buy. So I call this a shared value. I think this is great. This is a good thread. I retweeted this the other day, but people who haven't seen it should go back and look. It's on your feed, Bitcoin Scribe from April 24th. Lots of good data. You might be the biggest Square bull that I know.

You definitely are a bigger bull than me on Square. And probably also than our mutual friend SB, who's another Square bull. What is the value prop? I'm trying to understand why anyone would use another POS terminal besides one that gives you optionality. And I don't see it anywhere. Afterpay is another great example. You do an after pay thing after pay is the kind of uh is the kind of thing that a lot of people use now because the economic conditions we find ourselves in square uh terminals are things a lot of people

use cash app a lot of people use i don't understand why you'd go somewhere else for any of these services now you're a big title guy as well do you want to you should give uh give me a uh breakdown here a quick breakdown like 30 000 foot view on your title slash bitcoin tie-in take that i've heard you mention a few times i think it's pretty good even though i don't use title it's a good idea yeah so title is a music streaming platform that block acquired um this is why you always see dorsey hanging out with jay-z all the time by the way which look based on Diddy stuff, he may need to separate himself a little bit. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

There goes your chance of ever having Dorsey on the episode. No. So titles and music streaming service, primary competitor, obviously, is Spotify. And look, one of the reasons that Jack and Jay-Z have title and own title is that they want to change the way musicians get paid. That's basically their goal of title. Well, what better way than just letting me pay artists directly for their music on title? And the beauty of it being a block product is that you don't even need Bitcoin to do this. Although I think it's like lightning would be an excellent way to create these payment rails between the products. You're an artist, you've got music

on title and you've got a cash app account. Why not just have your business cash tag attached to your profile and let me send money from my cash app account over to yours? Better yet, do it over Lightning and let me attach any Lightning wallet that I want to it. I send sats. Basically, Tidal sends the sats to the artists, to their cash app account. Incoming payments come in as either Bitcoin or USD. And I paid the artists directly for their music. It's like, again, it's an easy cross-product shared value.

Like your music's on title and you have a Cash App thing, and then Cash App or Block as a business just takes a 1% fee or whatever it is, and the artist gets paid directly. I have to take a chance here to uh bash um the other jack for i think again falling short coming up short being more talk than product delivery on the strike side man look at the stuff dorsey's accomplished just in the last year right you say see what you want about big he say what you want about this mining thing but both of them coming to fruition pretty quickly i realize that he's got quite a bit more capital behind him

than Mallors does, but I've talked to you about this a little bit offline, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not Mallors has really delivered anything in the last two years or three years since the Miami Bukali address

about bringing strike overseas and strike to the US and Bitcoin payments and all this stuff. Nothing really ever found traction, got a foothold. And I'm frustrated by that because I think a lot of people felt like he was a guy who was really tip of the spear, but I don't know. I feel like he's really under-delivered. Where do you come down on all that? Is he as disappointing as I think he is or does he deserve a little more credit? I don't know. I feel like he's really under-delivered. Where do you come down on all that? Is he as disappointing as I think he is or does he deserve a little more credit? I don't know. No, I think Strike has built a lot of cool products in the last two years. I think maybe there's been some under-delivering on the merchant side and I think Mahler's has

owned up to that. And that's also kudos to him why he stopped putting timelines on a lot of the things that he says are coming. I know they just launched, I think it's just Strike UK or maybe it's just Strike. It's UK. It's UK, I think. Is it UK? I know there's a difference now between like, whether you can have it in London, whether you can have it UK. And I think they launched Strike UK, but not Strike London or whatever. I don't know exactly what they did, but I know they're still rolling that stuff out. In my opinion, Strike's best product ever was their cross-border remittance product where you could send US dollars. They would convert it to Bitcoin, send it over Lightning to the recipient's country, and then reconvert it into the local currency and put it straight into

their bank account. So for example, I could send $10 US to somebody in Kenya and they would receive it directly to their bank account in their local currency. And they wouldn't even need, like they don't even need a strike account to do it. In my opinion, that was their strongest product. I'd love to see more of that. I think the use case of Lightning as a remittance, like a payment rails for remittances is beautiful. I thought it was an amazing product. So I'm not sure quite where that is now, but I think they're more switching towards the traditional kind of FinTech where it's, we'd rather just have everybody on strike that we can. So I think they've switched their focus to that. But from a payments perspective, you have to think too, like one of the things I'd love to see out of Square is every Square terminal being able to issue a Lightning invoice so that I could pay at a Square terminal with Cash App, Strike, whatever Bitcoin wallet I want, whatever Lightning wallet I want. But you have to think about what's the demand for that? How many

people really want to buy things with Bitcoin? Square, in my opinion, already has a hard enough time convincing people to pay with Cash App instead of a Visa card, even though it's a 1% fee for Cash App transaction and a 4.5% fee for Visa transaction. So they're having a hard time even getting customers to use Cash App at Square Terminals instead of Visa. So I know Malheur's had this talk at, what was it? Bitcoin 2022, maybe? Yeah. Where he said NCR is going to adopt it well you have to look at ncr like they're on a time crunch they're struggling economically just like everybody else uh in a

high high uh high fed rate environment and so like where's where bitcoin payment's gonna fall on their priority list probably not very high yeah i guess i guess not okay no those are fair points i mean uh it's it's uh good to have you on because because you do have your ear to the ground when it comes to a lot of stuff. Len and I, I think sometimes are guilty of really dunking on guys like Mallers, even though you're right. You know, you did give a couple of good examples of stuff that they've delivered and are trying to deliver.

So that's good. Okay. So that's it for the Bitcoin stories. We're going to go to the notable stories next. So if you're on audio just you know do nothing check your podcast app tomorrow and it'll it'll be there for you the second half if you're on video stay here if you're on spaces stay here i see a bunch of you guys on a bunch of different platforms just stay here don't do anything and uh take care of yourselves okay now you have to say

don't be a cuck don't be a cuck. Don't be a cuck. Are you a fan of the old school NHL 94 game on the Genesis or SNES? Why not check out my show, the NHL 94 podcast, from tournaments and tactics to the people who make up this community. Check it out wherever you listen to podcasts or find it on YouTube.