The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP #178 (Bitcoin News Stories) - Rail Strike, Kennedy and Trump, Cuts Coming

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES 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.com⁠Discord: 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/cbp⁠⁠The 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. D-Central Technologies - https://d-central.tech/Your home for all things mining! Whether you need a new unit, a unit repaired, some support with software, or you want to start your own wife-friendly home mining operation, the guys at D-Central Tech are ready to help. With industry leading knowledge and expertise, let the D-Central team help you get started mining the hardest money on Earth.

uh friends and enemies i forgot to put the branding up on the video hold on okay you can put it up you see it there it is absolutely man better late than never okay the first three seconds it'll be a matter it's that's where all the hijinks come around and everything is just you know you gotta cut that shit out that's right that's right i got buddies telling me here they want to change the date of our fantasy draft football next week no the answer is no my name is joey that's len is it next week our our draft for the show is thursday yeah because doesn't the season start like before labor day or starts starts next thursday Oh, I've been so far out of the loop. All right.

It's going to be fun. Thursday night game, Friday night game. I think there's a Saturday game, maybe Sunday and Monday in the no fun league. Monetize it all the way, brother. Remember, it used to be like, you know, just Saturday. Sorry, just Sundays. And then Monday night was the special day. Now, every day is a special day.

And none of them are special. That's a result. Let's do it, boys. Let's monetize it. How's that for you? Living the dream, brother. Living the dream. You know what?

It's a good day. Actually, it's a good weekend. We're looking at potentially the rates are going to be cut. We'll talk about that, I think. Because Powell's saying, maybe time to cut rates. And Bitcoin responded to that that which is really nice giving it all back now

giving it all back now again I had a long chat this weekend with Normies and good times what Normies are you talking to? I talk to Normies out there I'm communicating I'm trying to spread the word of Bitcoin

sometimes I'm up against a brick wall which is good so as long as the price is suppressed it's advantageous for us because we're buying it on the cheap we know it's going to go up we know there's going to be value in this it's going to just absolutely skyrocket so we're able still to change our local currency into more bitcoin as a result yep can't beat that i'm looking at the prices whatever it's you know it goes up it goes down it's uh in and out no problem for me we haven't been yet banned that's the one thing right no thankfully yeah that's so good telegram uh on the out here maybe we'll talk about that tonight too i'm not sure but

we may as well start with the sponsors easy dns best place for you to procure a domain port a domain anything to do with domain name services uh name servers mark is your guy what can you say about mark latin that hasn't been said already we've been doing uh ads for mark for a long time he's he's uh he's been a great supporter of this program he actually did a space i think last week or the week before with uh joe barbuto another friend of the show and gave us a shout out at the end of his two hours before he went yet another hour talking about the collapse of the fiat system and CBDC rollout and all these other things people care a lot about. As far as a website, Mark is your guy. Virtual private server stuff available with EasyDNS as well for Bitcoiners, whether you want to do a Nostra relay, Bitcoin node, BTC pay server, node list, you name it.

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easydns.com, CBP Media is the code. Just tell them we sent you 50% off your first bucket of buys with Mark and the team. Who's next? Yeah, Bull Bitcoin, right? Like we just talked about the price of Bitcoin

a few minutes ago. Price went up. Looks like price is going back down. So maybe a good time to buy, maybe a good time to sell. Either way, you have those options with Bull Bitcoin. Fees are still kind of low, so you can still take advantage of the on-chain.

But there are Lightning you could take advantage of. So if fees go up, and it did go up briefly this week, you could take advantage and use Lightning. Because Lightning gives you the opportunity to move Bitcoin on the cheap. And Bull gives you the option to buy and sell using Lightning as well. But not only that, you could also spend your Bitcoin through Bull Bitcoin and start using that to pay your bills. So you have a credit card bill, you have mortgage payment, whatever. You can start using your Bitcoin in order to pay those bills.

So maybe you have a large stack of Bitcoins and you've been stacking it for a long number of years. You ought to. I hope so. If you're listening to us, I hope people have been doing that. So the price, you know, you bought at a much lower point, and so now it's much more valuable today. What could

you do with it? Pay some bills with your Bitcoin, and Bull Bitcoin will enable you to do that. But you can also buy gift cards with Bull Bitcoin, and you can spend your Bitcoin indirectly in the real world, and you can live on a Bitcoin standard. That's pretty damn cool. And if you haven't yet opened an account, use our promo code below if you do. $21 is going to be added to your account next time when you open it and provide the necessary

information so check them out they are an awesome company joey you did a video for them not too long ago right i'm i did no i did i did a uh just a brief video on why i like bull why i use bull why other people should use bull has nothing to do with the sponsorship either, by the way. It's that if you want to support a company that is Bitcoin only, Bitcoin focused, there's no better way to do it. And Mr. Arnome, who was our guest last week, as much as he doesn't like that we have monetized our opinions, thinks they're the best company in the world for Bitcoin, best exchange in the world. I think that's probably true. They're not available everywhere in the world, but I think they're the best company in the world for bitcoin best exchange in the world i think that's probably true they're not available everywhere in the world but i think they're the top bitcoin exchange on the planet in terms of uh product and mission so yeah you can't wait for my

video i gotta go in location for this one i got i'm still scouting out the best spot where are you going i i have any idea in my mind i don't know exactly where but it's gonna be i got i got the props i got everything i need to do is serena gonna be in it no but it's going to be, I got, I got the props. I got everything I need to do. Is Sabrina going to be in it? No. Okay. It's just going to be me and whatever else I bring with me. A couple of gimmicks to hold nine yards. We got one more sponsor though, Joey, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Decentral tech, the best in the business. I was outside with my dog before this, trying to think of a clever tag like we have for the other two sponsors. I got to come up with one for these guys at some point. But this is the kind of place you go to if you want to do a little mining. You want to help decentralize, as the name goes, the hash rate into your basement. Do some mining that your wife will not be too upset with, will not bankrupt you.

You support the network. Point your hash rate to a pool that makes sense for you, one that you support, one that's not really uh you know what what would you say len one that's one that's on the up and up maybe not one of these ones who does uh some suspect activities and supports certain uh elements of the bitcoin uh network and you know you know what you're getting into yeah yeah yeah right they're up front They're Bitcoin focused. Yeah.

And right, like, look, if you want to- I was talking about the pool. The hardware there is second to none. And you actually see today a lot of people in my, I don't know, I guess in my timeline, maybe it's the algorithm feeding me this because I've been talking with Decentral on Twitter now, but there's a lot of people who want the BidAxe. A lot of people- Yeah, I got it. There's a reason for that.

People are getting like CBP branded BidAxes that tbp branded bid axes yes i love that i love that's coming up there it's gonna be a limited run i don't i don't think it's gonna be 75 of them 75 so yeah so if you want to get one of these suckers get a couple i'm gonna buy some for my friends and family for like christmas gifts i think i think that'd be pretty cool i have a limit order of buying 75 of them go there buy a bid axe get your hash board repaired all that good stuff jonathan and the crew over there best in class like all our sponsors there's no there is no second best with our sponsors so head over and uh make sure you give those guys a couple of bucks what do you want to uh what do you want to do next maybe do some housekeeping here first uh last week mr arnolm another big thanks to him i i enjoyed that conversation he seems like a very down-to-earth guy as much as i maybe disagree with some of his

takes and it sounds like you do too i i do like how we are are we on the road to influencer is that what i'm no interview i would think sorry i would i would think not i would think we're not there because i don't think we're doing the stuff that influencers should be doing look are you out there touting trash are you out there saying one thing but doing it like that's right like and to be honest i'm very really on twitter yeah right so like if anything i'm the anti-influencer i just come out here talk shit about bitcoin i think i think we're like just yeah We're just talking to each other the same way we were So many years ago at my kitchen table I don't think we're

Influencers but I did I did appreciate his Feedback and viewpoints it's always good to talk to an OG like that he's been around a long time And he's seen a lot and so the white Blood cell response from The OG crowd is something that is Valuable in bitcoin and will become I think More valuable as time goes on even if I

Don't agree with everything, losing it is also not an option. So that was a great show. That was a dynamite show. And we got a lot of feedback from that. In terms of the boost, we got a ton. And some of them didn't even make the cut in terms of comments about the show.

We'll definitely go through them. We'll definitely go through them. And then the other note is, well, there's two other notes. I did the Karadza, your life, your terms show last Friday. Absolutely. No,

two Fridays ago, I guess it was released on Friday. The truth. It was the two Fridays ago. I did it. I forget now. I was so high on caffeine. Yeah.

Because the last one I invited you to come up to mystic and you said, you're going to do it. So yeah, it was probably two Fridays ago. So it was really good show. Uh, young Aiden has been dropping clips here and there. The one that just came out before the show was about me saying that if you can't squat to 25, if you don't own a home and if you don't have a kid, maybe voting shouldn't be

something that you're entitled to do. So I'll be ready for the tomatoes on that. And I really appreciate Tom and Nick having me as always. It was a pleasure talking to them this week in the show no interview being replaced by the first second second year we're doing it but the first time ever we're going to stream the cbp fantasy football draft so i'm going to cram as many of the 12 people into the one of these stream yard rooms as i can and we're just going to shoot the shit have a couple of beers and throw away 50,000 stats, watching the no fun league all year.

12 hour session, 12 hours stream. Yeah. I do it. Yeah. Just try to monetize this as much as, because you got to make YouTube love us somehow, because it looks like we're in the outs for these guys.

Yeah, maybe. So we'll see it, man. Give them what they want. That'll be good. That's going to be really good in that league. There's a couple of people you guys might know uh last year's winner i can't remember

the name of his team fish bomb or something like that so he got an automatic bid we're welcoming boomer to the league alex from bull bitcoin will be in there aiden carads is in the league this year uh and then i think i just gave it to whatever eight or nine other people who wanted to join it was basically first come first serve so can't beat it man fans football is uh a uh love of mine and actually on that note i just had delivered to my house something called a buzz box buzz tv box recommendation from uh marizio of lead and fame uh to watch red zone and college football during the season so So apparently you can get like basically everything on this. I just sent him a picture of it before we went live. I'll have to check my DMS after and,

uh, and see how to set this thing up. But I'm hyped. I've never been a cable cutter and I am, I'm fully transitioning to the, uh, the, the way of the cable cutter starting.

Oh my God. Imagine how much money you could. We canceled our, we canceled our cable here probably two months ago because I was just sick of paying it every month. And so now my wife watches her she she barely watched tv she's more of a reader but she does like a good housewives series and so amazon had that but then the sports like i don't i i need the sports man i'm a big sports guy so this is gonna be good look if an esteemed uh politician gets gets rid of her Disney plus subscription,

then you can do the same for your cable bill, right? Like, let's just follow the lead of these individuals and maybe we'll, we'll get to the right path and we can turn the ship. That's good for you. Good for you. That's because I was trying to get you to do that a long time.

I'll post the review video of a buzz TV. Anyway, it was pretty cheap too. It was only like 140 bucks, I think. And it's, as far as I can tell, it's like the best best one i thought it was going to be like at least a couple hundred dollars but i grabbed it yesterday afternoon off amazon and it showed up here about 20 minutes ago so there you go yeah plug it in that while i talk about the boost joey and let's do it let's do it right after so a lot of we're getting a ton of boosts for some reason and so

anonymous 2100 sacks and i wish you put a name associated with this because anonymous i don't know what that wrote this but talks about mr arnome and he writes man this guess what a soap box prick if it wasn't for these influencers then i wouldn't have gone on down the rabbit hole as much as I have just because I can't run a node yet and use liquid when the fees are high. Bitcoin is for everyone, not just high tech nerds like 2011. He is what kept Bitcoin from having mass adoption. Amazing.

He doesn't chastise me for having a hot wallet for 2% of my stack. And no wonder my peers still think us bitcoiners are weird haha so yeah he didn't really enjoy that and well take what he says with a grain of salt but there is a lot of truth to it uh i would say especially with the ability to run a node verify your transactions don't expose your bitcoin to hot wallets much of it i like his idea about having a time um you time lock your Bitcoin. Did you mess around with that wallet then, by the way? Leanna wallet after the show?

No, I haven't. I kind of started. I'm going to continue this week maybe and throw a little bit on there and see if I like it. It looks kind of cool. I did appreciate that tip from him. I also appreciate that boost. That boost is very nice. And I got a lot of similar feedback

from people both i whom i know very well and people who i barely know at all so i i appreciate that i know len does as well anonymous again 2100 sats again i want to thank you for the sats i don't know who you are though going to promote fountain over youtube for following you guys as i'm sure it's a matter of time before the cbp uh they come out for you for the cbp and get you banned because on youtube we'll talk about it later on but it looks like there's some action going on over there and um yeah thanks for the sats because it's definitely going to help us out and yeah listen to us on fountain it's not live unfortunately but still you can listen to us the very next day and give us a booster gram like you did thank you i I see Boomer speaking of which messaging in from many different platforms

where no one can see his comment. I see them Boomer, but the one else can see the rumble, the bird, the blank, interesting name, 5,000 sats. Mr.

Arnolm. While I don't agree with a lot of his political views, he is an exemplary example of principles over preference would love to hear him on a show again someday it's always good and refreshing to hear people like that send him some splits for the show so yeah i'll send him the half of this and yeah yeah absolutely he's welcome by the way whether we disagree with him or agree with him he's welcome anytime i've how many times we Len, the guests we want are the guys who dig in, have opinions, they're well thought out, they can defend them.

And that's the kind of guests you want to talk to, right? We talk to guys in the traditional finance space who don't agree with Bitcoin, but have good thoughts on a lot of other stuff that we may agree with or can have dialogue on. This is no different. It's a good show. I'd love to do it again. But I agree with a lot of what he says, to honest oh same same quite quite a bit there was a lot more agreement uh last week than disagreement for sure between the three of us rod palmer 10,000 sats hey maple syrup guzzlers come join the intellectual silk road i hope we're already

there i think i might be on the road. Yeah, I don't know. I'll find out. Last but not least, we have North Star Welding. Sorry, North Star Welds. Yeah. 1,200, 345 sats. 12,000.

1,200, 345. That's like Freeland trying to read the debt number. Remember that? So this guy, North Star Welds Service, he's been writing in to us the last few weeks, giving us a ton of sats. God bless him bless him that um here's my contribution to the cbp jet we're not buying one by the way please give me a box don't rule it out no no if it's going to be a toy one please give me a p.o box for a generous donation to feces for mental health never say bitcoiners are selfish with their resources.

By the way, school will be starting soon. So please return the Tupperware container. We'll send prepaid shipping labels. Who the heck stole the Tupperware? That's a good note. I like that. But yeah, like CBP Jet is not happening. It's just a...

We'll mean that, but we won't mean it into existence. There's no way I'm going to be on the same level as people like, what was that clown Mark Cuban? So yeah, no, yeah. He's got a couple. Yeah.

He's not worried about the climate when he's flying private. I'll tell you that. Anyways, let's, let's get rolling. What do you want to talk about? 17 minutes. That's long enough.

Let's get, let's get started. Well, the same thing like last week, you talked about that. That's that eso thing because it's hot off the heels of that poor corborne eso story that's a gas station that was accepting bitcoin we now have it revealed on twitter that canada's first liquor store is now accepting bitcoin as payment and this is jack Lonsdale's liquor store located at 1433 Lonsdale Avenue, North Vancouver, B.C. Nice.

Nowhere anywhere close to us. And we I guess. Oh, some thanks to the people at CoinOS for this because they were able to help make this a reality. Once again, for this one, I don't know what is going to be their MO moving forward, if they're going to be hodling the Bitcoin like the people at the ESO were doing or have mentioned they're doing. But I do hope that they understand the requirements on their end

if they do start selling their Bitcoin that they've collected from these purchases. Because in Canada, there is a capital tax that's applicable to Bitcoin when you sell it. So I hope that they understand it, but not just them, but also the people that go there to spend their Bitcoin. So if you are going to be spending it there, just be very careful. Make sure you document everything, because if it's on-chain and it's tied to the KYC and you don't report this to CRA, there's going to be some recourse down the road. And we don't know if you're going to fly under the radar, but if you don't, it's going to be some recourse down the road. And we don't know if you're going to fly under the radar, but if you don't, it's going to be tough moving forward.

So again, I suggest for this, this is not financial advice, of course, but seek out an accountant or reach out to CRA, get some information. But either way, with respect to the story, this is more of a slowly than suddenly moment. Now we're having another business that's offering to sell their

goods in bitcoin and this i suspect it's going to happen more frequently moving forward is it going to be widely available we're going to get a bunch of things in the next well probably uh are people going to start spending their bitcoin probably not people i think want to hold on to their bitcoin more than anything but at least the options available and it shows that it is a medium of exchange that you could use it as a as money like we talked about with mr arnone or sailor saying it's not money well it is money look at this another example it is fucking money so i'm not sure if you want to add anything more to this thing what's there to say cole like i said last week crushing it i was actually just cutting up the shorts from last week's show today and so there's a few of them

scheduled over the next you know week or so and one of them is about cold doing this great work in the, in the sort of broader community to get people on board with Bitcoin via coin us. Now we just got to make these guys, you know, happy that they spent the time, right. Go, go patronize these businesses with Bitcoin, spend and replace all that good stuff. Like Len mentioned, you know, do some bookkeeping along the way, but you know, Len, it's going to be a lot more of these guys as things roll forward here. We got, I think, some pretty solid price action coming our way over the next 12 months, 24 months, something like that. I expect that this will continue. More people will want to do this. I think tradespeople are great candidates for this, small business owners like this liquor store guy. And by the way, Len, it's going to be a lot of

independent retailers able to sell liquor here in ontario pretty soon uh as well or beer here in ontario pretty soon why not get them too maybe i'll start cruising around dundas with uh i'll get cole to come by we'll do a dundas tour try and get some some uh vendors oh did we lose you joey no i'm good i'm here okay stutter for a second there maybe it's my link or yours either way so not sure if you noticed but other people did notice this past week that on the bitcoin network the fees jumped substantially for a very brief period of time and we've been in this single sats per v by territory for quite some time so for people that don't understand

moving around bitcoin, at least for the past little while has been cheap, you could do it for less than a buck, for the most part. And the fees unexpectedly jumped on August 22. And mempools all over the world were showing transactions that were coming in around a four figure number of the sats per V byte. And that's basically a lot more money to move your Bitcoin during that particular period of time. But that jump in fees was temporary. It was just a very short period of time. And apparently this could be attributed

to something called the Babylon Bitcoin staking. That's what I saw, yeah. Yeah, and I've never heard of that before. And I really have not heard of it since. I'm pretty sure this might be it what's caused it but still it it's just a blip on the radar but what this is i can't believe we'll talk about it just very very briefly because i guess people are wondering why the fuck this caused the price of bitcoin to jump at least the transaction fees to jump temporarily people were

able to lock up their bitcoin using this staking thing so babylon put in a limit of 1 000 bitcoin that could be staked so coiners all over were jumping over each other trying to get in and have their bitcoin stakes so they were competing against each other to try to make sure that within the thousand bitcoin that you could stake that they're part of that so they were raising the your transaction fees to make sure that they were included so the the staking doesn't give more Bitcoin. Let's be honest that this is not anything to do with Bitcoin. It's simply you're giving somebody your Bitcoin, they keep the keys and they enable you to gain more shit coins. And what could go wrong through all this joy? We've never seen this before. This has never happened. This is innovative. When you say absolutely, this is one of a kind and certainly to take advantage. Fuck that. This whole exercise does prove that fees can easily jump. And right now we're still very lucky that fees are cheap. Very, very cheap. So transacting Bitcoin, moving it from place to place is really, really cheap. So it's a good opportunity. If you haven't yet done so, consolidate your UTXOs while they still are cheap.

There will be a point in time, maybe not next month, maybe not next year or next decade, but it will eventually happen that fees will be high. And you will be kicking yourself if you have not consolidated your UTXOs right now. Do it. Do yourself a favor. Fucking do it. If you need help, I'll show you the fucking way. It's very, very simple, but simply do it while the fees are cheap.

Yeah. Sparrow lets you do it very, very easily. There's probably other wallets that you do it pretty easily too, but Sparrow is one I'm most familiar with. I don't understand why people are sending Bitcoin to staking services and things like this. What am I missing here? I thought we were maturing as an ecosystem. look at the eth btc ratio it's like all-time lows every day uh i see the bankless guys tweeting out that they don't think the economics of ethereum are going to work long term all of a sudden like what the bank yeah i know hoffman hoffman tweeted out the other day that he's like where's the interest going to come from in this like how are we we can't just have people gambling on shit coins like okay man like we've

been saying this to you for fucking five years at this point you didn't want to listen instead you started a podcast about it and now your whole personality rides on this i i don't understand why people are are looking into staking and whatnot still there is no in my opinion anyway there's no demand for defy in these like secondary networks or or non-bitcoin tokens or whatever instead where the demand is like we talked about before it'd be like bitcoin collateralized loans is that ideal in terms of parking your bitcoin with someone else no but at least you can use it for something you know irl meatspace type stuff right this other this other you know network staking thing why who's asking for that who's asking for that there was demand for it because fees spiked not going to say that there's a lot of is it manufactured demand like oh we can only take a thousand bitcoin i actually

read it was a hundred transactions not even a thousand bitcoin maybe i misread that but that's crazy manufactured because we're talking about generating um yield from something that's generated that's simply that's an individual coding something and figuring out a way to move money around so um people buying in are liquidity for people coming out it is funny in the chat narwhal rug pulling coming muslim bitcoin or staking is the most fiat garbage I've ever heard. Everyone knows it. So who, like, this is why when people say to the guy who sent us the first boost, the anonymous guy, well, I do agree that the delivery from Mr. Arnome, you know, could use a little bit more honey instead of, you know, vinegar. Fine. The reason he has that delivery is because of stuff like this.

He's seen this a million times over and over again. People are getting ripped off, scammed, conned by people bizarro world Len and Joey who are doing a show or a space or whatever talking about yield and returns on your Bitcoin. It's damn near the Elon Musk send me one get

two back YouTube scam. We'll see what happens with this stuff, Len. I don't know much about the company who did this. I think it was ARK, maybe. Was it ARK? I forget. Not ARK, the investment house. ARK is like another sort of Bitcoin company.

But I don't know. I got to look into that because I don't want to be smirched the good name of ARK if they are not doing this. But there is something going on with these guys. And I mean, Len, how many times have we told people on this show dating back to God knows how long ago there there's risk there's yield has risk. And I we've even like, we were sponsored by Lennon for a long time. And even then, okay. Although those guys stayed afloat, although those guys did all the right things.

And although arguably they, you know, their risk management practices were a lot better, very sound, in fact, there's even risk there. If you really wanted to do this, there are ways to do it that are not quick. Hurry up and pay $1,000 per transaction to get your thing in the next block because we have a limit on how much we're taking. There are reputable places that will do this for you, that will help you take that risk if you want it. In my opinion, it's still too much of a risk. But this is not the place I would be taking it if I was a Bitcoiner.

That's the thing I don't understand. That's probably maybe the most puzzling part about the entire thing. People think they're going to get their Bitcoin back. Why? I don't understand. You think everything's just a golden ticket? It's insane to me this is still happening. I 100% agree.

When you give up your keys, you've set it there. There's insane to me this is still happening i 100 agree when you give up your keys you've said it there there's risk to that you don't have custody of your keys somebody else dies regardless if it's in some sort of smart contract or what the fuck it is still there's inherent risk that you may not get it back yeah you're willing to do with that all the more power to you but let's be honest what are you gonna get to get in the end? It's just fucking garbage. Narwhal, great tweet in the comments here too. More money has been lost chasing yield than at the point of a gun. Yeah, it's hard for me to dispute that.

I don't know. Either way. A couple of Bitcoin mining stories I want to bring up. Number one, Bitfarms this week, this past week, they announced that they are buying 100% of the equity securities for Stronghold Digital Mining that's traded under the NASDAQ SDIG. And according to Bitfarms, this is going to add an additional 4x a hash per second to their network, which is not too shabby the transaction value is approximately approximately 125 million u.s in equity plus the assumption of debt valued at approximately 50 million u.s cool 200 million said yes so we talked a lot in the past while about consolidation in this space and here we go this is another one that is now being gobbled up by another company so stronghold is interesting in its own right because it does own and operate two power plants in

pennsylvania yes one with 25 megawatts sorry one of one of 85 megawatts of generation capacity and another with 80 so 85 and 80 megawatts for each of the two plants. So that's not too bad. So this is the play for, I guess, the pure Bitcoin miners. I think somehow they got to pick up some other way to create and generate their own electricity and use that to mine Bitcoin. Simply relying on electricity from the grid

and using that to mine Bitcoin, there is an element of risk with that. And I think Bitfarms is trying to do what they can to get around that. And at the very least, they're going to be having two places to generate electricity. But still, in the end, let's be honest, it's $125 million US in equity, but there's debt here of $50 million. So this company is Stronghold digital just like all bitcoin miners it seems they're just laden with debt and they just attack on more debt that's

just the way things go with these companies so there you go um bit farms it may not be truly just a you know relying on the grid you're doing their own thing and generating their own energy moving forward at least for this particular thing so go back and listen to the interview i did with jeff lucas from june i think maybe late may early june whatever he hinted at this transaction and i didn't like you know whatever we were just talking about m&a in the space and he was saying that this stuff was yeah and he hinted at it and just said we you know we can't talk about much right now but there is some you know some stuff going on the m&a space for sure in bitcoin mining and we want to be a part of it. They had this on the burner, which is great.

Is this a Ben Gagnon front-to-back transaction, or did he finish this one off for the last CEO? Any idea? I don't even have it. I don't know how long it takes. I don't know. I haven't seen Ben talking about it either, so I'm not sure. Yeah.

Either way, they've done it, so consolidation is taking place and expect more moving forward. So this is not going to be the last one we're going to see like this. Do you think that BitFarms is a long-term acquirer or target? I mean, they have the Riot stuff going on. Where does that put them in the ecosystem you know better than me i think yeah so sorry last year for a sec did you say rhodium enterprises rhodium no okay so yeah it's a company that they've been mining bitcoin they've these

folks have been trying to go public back in 2022 so they've been around the block but they pulled the rug on that one uh at the very last minute so they didn't go they were trying to do a reverse back or was it there's a spack or reverse whatever the fuck it is either way it's a reverse reverse back would just be giving money back no so it'd be a spack sorry yeah uh so that's what they tried to try to do but it never worked out either way so in in 2021, to give some context here with Rhodium Enterprise, they mined more than 2,800 Bitcoin in that year. And if you look at the other Bitcoin miners, the publicly ranked ones, they ranked fifth in comparison to them

in terms of how many Bitcoin they mined in that year. And in 2022, they increased their Bitcoin mining production to 3,600 Bitcoin for the year. So clearly they're a decent sized company trying to go public this isn't just some mom and pop small pick that just sprung up overnight these guys were mining bitcoin a lot of it and aspire to go public at one particular moment of time but a couple of weeks ago it was leaked that they were having issues with paying back their loans and this was as the loans that were due in July of

this year. And if you look at the debts that they have, they raised almost 80 million of the debt, and that was to expand their operations. And I believe this is the debt that's causing them problems. So to make matters worse, they were also relying on hosting services for mining. So in fact, they were using Riot's infrastructure to mine Bitcoin. So they didn't generate their own electricity. They used somebody else to host. So you can just see the red flags here. But things really went bad at this particular moment because this past week, Rhodium filed for Chapter 11.

For a company that wanted to go public just two years ago that mined a heck of a lot of Bitcoin, 2011, in terms of how much Bitcoin they mined, they were fifth compared to publicly traded miners well another one bites the dust and how they will emerge after chapter 11 is anybody's guess but if i were to bet on a particular outcome it's probably going to be consolidation they

might be gobbled up by another company in the next little while but just another example if you don't generate your own electricity in in the long run, you're going to be screwed. Rhodium is a weird name for a Bitcoin mining company. You know what Rhodium is? It's an element? Yeah, but do you know what it's famous for? No. It's how gold is made white.

Okay. So diluting the purity. I don't know. There's a story in there somewhere, but I don't have it handy here. I mean, the question I asked you before we got, we're getting disconnected there for a second. Like this M&A,

where is BitFarms? I know we're talking about Rhodium, but like they're whatever, they're done. MIA, they're DOA, I should say now. When you think about BitFarms, are they an acquirer or are they a target long-term? They have the ride stuff going on new ceo in place uh where do you where do you put them

in the hierarchy you know better than me on that front where would i were to guess a lot of these are just going to be targeted for purchase by who somebody that's much bigger than them that wants to get into space and also has the ability to not, not a Bitcoin miner though. Right. Probably not. Okay. That's what I,

that's really the, that's where I wanted to go with this. I agree with you on that. I think. Yeah. I think that a company that has the ability, like has energy, that's just not being used.

So rather than buy up equipment from Bitmain, a wholesale cost, a retail cost for brand new equipment they can get something cheaper that's used that's what you're just simply moving from ada to be and continue mining i'm guessing that's what would happen but i could be wrong i i think you're right i think you're right it's gonna be interesting to see and like these companies like you mentioned they're like they're it's such a cutthroat business in terms of the economics. And I think it's going to be cutthroat in terms of the financing and availability of public support and all these different things too over the next, you know, as the epoch kind of unfolds here a little bit. We're still really

early. You know, the halving was only what, six months ago? It was in March, right? So five months ago, you know, like we're really not that far along and i think you're gonna see a lot more companies kind of you know there'll be some soft almost four months on the beach yeah it's we're close i know we're close like it's actually uh by the way like the sort of last uh i don't know what you call this last stretch of sort of flat price action you would expect following a having you're gonna get uh you're gonna start seeing activity most of the time here um off a cycle low and after having those those times are going to be pretty close to each other

this time around so i think like sort of separate from mining i think people who are not stacking during these like choppy times i just don't know why the hell not honestly i it blows me away there's a lot more to it this time around because you have these mechanisms that you could buy bitcoin using um traditional markets like you could get the etfs oh sure should still drive price though should still drive price one way or another i mean as the market you know then you have also gptc um when they start selling which they did i think they're down like in terms of the total they got almost nothing left yeah they're like still a couple hundred thousand in the grand scheme of things but it was like six seven hundred thousand they had so that's a there's a lot of a lot of different factors to consider this time around and because of that

it's impacting the price so to speak yeah but then also on top of that i think i don't think retail is buying up before retail was driving a price before i think i don't think retail is doing it as much this time around well may say that well now with the etfs you see pension plans buying in you see um jp morgan so you think it's people holding ibit and the other etfs really moving price now as opposed to the the pleb uh stackers there the dc airs i think they have more capital at their disposal and they can move stuff and i think that the retail investors don't have the same amount of capital they did before, given the inflation that's impacting us. So five years ago, you could spend more on stuff like Bitcoin.

Now it's harder to do that when the price of everything's gone up. I agree. And it's not to say that businesses don't have the same type of challenges to deal with, but I just think that they're able to allocate capital much easier than we can,

especially a lot of capital. I'm with you. I think that's a, I think that's a good point. I'm waiting to see what happens when the first cut comes in September and whatever the outcome of the election is, it'll be huge too. I think those two things are going to drive price more than anything else,

more than any other fundamental, any other inflow, any other, anything that's going to be the thing that dictates where the next year goes. Mount Gox. I forgot about that. Boomer mentioned that it's another one. That's true. Yeah. They're dictates where the next year goes. Mount Gox. I forgot about that. Boomer mentioned that. It's another one that's.

Yeah, they're still they're still selling. Yeah. So El Salvador, they're 80,000 public servants. I didn't realize they had that many, but they do. They'll be able to take part in a Bitcoin certification program. And this public certification has seven different modules. Take us takes about 160 hours to complete and each of these modules detail several concepts like laws skills management related to the use of bitcoin

as legal tender love it and gives these 80 000 individuals potentially a broader understanding of bitcoin so again another slowly than suddenly moment here. So given what's going on in economics, stuff like this and general finance, this should be taught in school. I know this is going off a little bit of a tangent here, but I think this is, I'm not sure if it is being taught

right now in Ontario, but certainly this should be considered, especially giving people a better understanding what's going on with finances and economics, but also sprinkling some Bitcoin if they can. But either way, it's one sense it's with respect to El Salvador is kind of strange in that the certification is coming out many, many years after they adopted Bitcoin as a currency. But El Salvador is paving a path that has never been walked before. So they are trailblazers, so to speak.

So every step they take here, nobody has walked there. So maybe that's why everything is taking a little bit longer. But once it's done and it's here, it's a lot of just a copypasta type thing. Some other country or even a company wants to do something similar. They could just use a lot of what's been done over there and take advantage of that. So I like this. This is pretty cool stuff. And I want to hear some feedback of it once they take these certification

programs. Jaime Garcia, I'll probably have an in on this. Won't he, will he be able to get some of that, that material? I hope he can. I hope so.

Well, we have other contacts over there, so yeah, we'll be able to get some feedback, but I, I want to hear about it. Like it sounds really fucking cool. Same.

President Bukele, come on the show. Okay. Yeah, very exciting. If only every public service was doing this, but a story for another time. Podcasting 2.0 for people out there that use that, like it. I would recommend Fountain as one way to listen in.

Fountain themselves, they had released an update this past week to version 1.1. And in this version, it enables you to connect to your Nostra profile. Very nice. That is pretty damn cool. So before this update,

the boostograms that we've been getting were only available to see on the Fountain platform. So with this change now, with Nostra now included into the mix, messages that, or these boosts that are being sent, now they will also end up in your Nostra feed. So say, you know, if Joey were to boost our show, for example, like your comment would be included in your Nostra feed. So that way is a way to increase engagement.

I like this move. Nostra integration in general is rather cool. It's still on. There's not much integration, not on integration. There's not much adoption yet. If you compare Nostra to X, it's like a night and day in terms of the amount of users using it. But still, I like this. This is another move that's showing off that there's a lot of possibilities that you could

do with Nostra. So if you are a Podcasting 2.0 user, I suggest check out Fountain. And if you are doing that, another thing I suggest is link that up with your Nostra profile. You might get a lot more engagement with any boost you send out, not just to our show, but to any of them. So check it out. This was a pretty solid update in terms of adoption, sort of separate from Nostra.

There's a lot of people on fountain too, that I just didn't realize like people who used to, I used to see in live chat a lot. Dan wedge, great example. He's predominantly on there. He's only on Nostra. Actually, he emailed me not long ago and told me he's only on nostre but i when i logged into fountain the other

day i was like holy shit like i haven't talked to this guy in so long i miss uh you know him and a few others who are still very active on uh fountain but i hardly ever see in the live chat which really you know put a smile on my face nost Nostra's time is coming. The Telegram news, significant. Governments around the world basically don't want you... I mean, what basically amounts to whispering to each other, right? No one's allowed to tell secrets anymore. Everyone's

got to have a backdoor into every bit of communication that you do. Nostra's time is coming because there's no CEO to pick up in France for Nostra. The Nostra CEO is coming because there's no CEO to pick up in France for Noster. The Noster CEO is not sacrificing his OPSEC for some Instagram thought pussy like the Telegram guy decided to do over the weekend and had that girl posting literally every move they were making. And he got nabbed by the French authorities and now faces 20 years in jail. I hope that was worth it, buddy, because that's going to cost you big time uh talk about breaking frame a story for another uh another podcast but anyway

uh good to see that uh founds adding nostre if if they integrate it some other places integrate it len you know we'll be better off i gotta spend more time on nostre i have damas on my phone or damas whoever the uh pronunciation is primal is a good one too is it yeah how's that how's that one better than damas i hear that it i don't want to say it's it's another one i just want to say just try that out and then you can make your own decision which is better than two is on desktop primal is the only one that i've seen and it works really well on android so um amethyst it works really well i don't know i've not heard of that one i've not heard of that one primal i kind of remember from before so there's a primal desktop so you can even just dip your toes in that yeah check it out some support for that in the chat too so telegram have you you've

recently got within the past year a new phone right, right? Yeah. And when you did that, did you not notice when you put in your Telegram app, you know, all the chat and everything just recovered? Yeah. So where does that, where does that store it? Of course it's stored. Yeah. So like, that's, that's going to be like, and if anybody say like, wow, like this is a mind blowing,

I can't believe this happened. Come on. It just do that. The mind-blowing thing isn't that they're storing the data, though. The mind-blowing thing is that they picked the guy up who coded an app and then basically held him on 12 charges that amount to you're not moderating everything everyone says on your app at all times. So we talk about this a lot on Axis of Easy

and that Europe is putting this in play and this type of scenario i don't think i'm going to see elon musk fly anywhere near europe and this is going to apply for it applies for anybody that's running a platform like friend of the show preston burnland who we had on a year or two ago a lawyer uh basically saying today he has a great blog post on this. I recommend people read, but basically saying the long and short is if you are a software engineer

and any of your stuff is showing up in any of these apps, you can't travel Europe. You have to get your people out of Europe and all into the United States yesterday. And don't wait any longer because these guys are just, they're relentless.

They don't care about anything except power. There's no doubt about it. It's all there is to it 100 and so when you look at alternatives to telegram anybody out there that uses signal if you ever reinstall signal you'll notice that none of your chat history is there which is interesting what is there though is your it does store your contacts yeah so something is stored it's not storing it it's sending it from the device you've used to verify your account ah okay there we go yeah there is i'm on the github right now so i'm on the um the linux version of it the signal this desktop so you can analyze the code if you want to see how everything is operating and this type

of model i prefer is there's less that's being hidden it's more transparent and you could verify that they're not sending anything to the mothership at least stuff that shouldn't be sent to the mothership telegram does that so definitely look at other alternatives um it's simply not signal there's other ones as well keats being one um and uh session is another one yes yes that's another there's other there's other ones too but like i don't know man then there's other people who think that this guy getting picked up is actually like a false flag to make people think the telegram is secure you should be only using telegram because it's so secure we had to pick this guy up and blah blah blah the other apps we're not arresting anybody because they're not secure we don't care so they want be only using telegram because it's so secure we had to pick this guy up and blah blah

blah the other apps we're not arresting anybody because they're not secure we don't care so they want you only using telegram i don't know it's like it's just it's just so frustrating that everyone needs to see what you're talking about at all times you know and it's never just to you know congratulate you on winning a beer league trophy you know it's it's to make sure that they can use it against you when the time comes which is extremely frustrating cz i'm not sure if you saw this one but he's uh looks like he's coming out of prison very soon this thing he is already he's being moved to a different it looks like september is the time he's coming around how much money people lost as a result of what he's done and the the the hiding of stuff and he hasn't wasn't uh he's a great canadian legend

canadian legend cz he went to school with elon musk right they were i went to waterloo together i thought is he that old i don't know how old he is he looks young he's chinese i guess so it's hard to really pin a birthday down for that cultural group they look so great as they get old the chinese well a lot of people say the bull mark starts when he comes out of jail officially i guess i don't buy this fucking thing but i guess you do i don't know i guess you don't either so what do you think of course i may as well buy on the basis of like moon phases when this guy gets out the shit queen market's gonna go bonkers once he fucking um i guess the last one that i we should touch upon it is uh simply bitcoin yeah i got some

controversial thoughts on this go ahead give the uh give the full breakdown well they simply bitcoin their channel on youtube got banned but not just that one but also simply bitcoin clips for which they've, from what I understand, have never posted a single video. They just were just hoarding that. And that's basically it. And that was also banned as well.

They are concerned about why they treat, tried reaching out to YouTube help for assistance. And they never seem to get any information as to why, or at least it never provided us the information as to why it was banned. But, you know, it seemed like a benign channel for the most part. They weren't giving any editorial about,

you know, governments like bashing them and sort of speak. It was pretty like, you know, benign if you ask me, but either way they got banned from YouTube. And I know you might. Yeah, I'll pass it over to you

you got some i got some more popular i'm not sure if you want to talk about them i'll say i'm not going to name names i'm not going to say anything but i will say that i don't think whatever fuck it i know you would think about it again you really want at least there's at least if you look at the notifications they're posting from YouTube, right, the letters they get, it says you're violating our community guidelines. Community guidelines is not limited to posting content that is harmful or hateful or whatever else YouTube says. It's also related to the way you manage your channel. And I'm not suggesting that necessarily they're out there buying views or buying followers or whatever. I don't know. But it doesn't have to be content related to get banned on the basis of the community guidelines as the fulcrum. It takes more than that.

And so I want to see what YouTube says here. And I want simply to be transparent about what the response is as well. Because in my opinion, this is a significant move against Bitcoin. But there's a lot of other Bitcoin channels that are not being banned and seem to never be affected by these kinds of things, right? You know, I think we're a lot more abrasive than those guys are. And we have never even received a strike. I think the only strike we got was when I played some Trailer Park like we, we, I think we're a lot more abrasive than those guys are and we have never even received a strike. I think the only strike we got was when I played some trailer park boys audio

maybe like a year and a half ago. Yeah. But there have been others that, that have been banned and reinstated. And I can't remember any of the top of my head, but we've seen it. We're going to see, we're going to see. So my, my, the point I want to make though is that there are for sure channels out there that are buying views and the comment sections are full of spam comments and you can see the subscriber counts not really going up. It's, it's hard. It's hard to make these accusations, but like running a YouTube channel is hard. YouTube is a hard game.

It's a slow grind and you know, we don't spend a lot of time on YouTube or anything like that. So maybe, you know, maybe we're just not the right people to ask, but there's like, you know, patterns to look for in view counts and stuff like that. And I just think that there's more to this than maybe anyone realizes right now. And it doesn't necessarily even mean that those guys are responsible for it, right? Like maybe they got someone to help. For example, like a guy like BTC Sessions, who is a huge YouTuber, has been a huge for a long time. He hired someone just recently to do like some back office stuff for him, right? Like help me out with some of the stuff, help me out with shorts or whatever. I don't know exactly what he did. You got to keep an eye on people like that if you hire them. And so maybe that's going on. There's a number of things that could

happen. My hope is that the channel is reinstated and we just forget about this and those guys get back on the air. Nico and Opti, they seem like nice guys. I was on Why Are We Bullish with Opti once upon a time. Met Nico a little bit in... No, did I meet him? I think I was at the same bar, but I don't think we actually ended up speaking. But anyway, these guys are, at the end of the day, Len, they're putting out a message that's very similar to ours, very similar to a lot of other people, that there's something going on in the world, economically, culturally, all these things, and you should be paying attention to it. Bitcoin might give you a fix for that. Consider it. There's nothing harmful about that. And I think one of the things we talked about on Axis of Easy and this show, the more you go down the rabbit hole, the more likely you are to upset somebody, especially as that sort don't have to cite uh for fear of having our channel ripped down and demonetized or whatever but you know you can see that the ground

is a little shakier underneath these monoliths than it was two years ago or three years ago and it's only going to continue to get shakier and shakier as time goes on and so the things that you were able to say freely and without reprise a year ago you may find that uh these things are not so freely said as time goes on. Maybe they're the victim of that. I don't know. I guess we'll find out. If one week we don't stream, you'll know what happened.

Yeah, you'll know what happened. Exactly. Well, MuslimBitcoiner, I just want to assalamu alaikum, brother. He says that Matthew Kramer goes unhinged on his channel, but he's yet to gotten the rug pull. According to Nico on Twitter, and I can't verify this so i'm just can't verify anything that's yeah that's the other problem with all this is that it's i'm getting screenshots of emails but it's not well this is a this is a tweet he sent out he said bitcoin only

channels that have been banned in the past he lists five of them bitcoin magazine swan bitcoin bitcoin university which is matthew's channel btc sessions and simply bitcoin i think we talked about did we talk about in the past when bitcoin magazine got banned was that a topic of discussion or i can't remember i don't even remember when did we talk about that we did talk about swan yeah that was like the bitcoin university i don't think we talked about btc sessions no bitcoin university bitcoin university got banned because that guy runs a trading service that he sells people. He never talks about it in his channels, but he runs a service. So I'm not saying it's a scam or isn't a scam, and I'm not saying YouTube doesn't allow it.

Of course they do. Every ad before I watch a video on our channel is like a scam trading service pretty much. So there's other stuff going on. That's not immediately visible to people who are just kind of paying attention on the peripheral, but you know, I expect that we'll hear more details about this and my recommendation broadly speaking. Okay. Well, I appreciate that there are times when bringing public pressure and bringing public views to an issue you're having with a large company like Google vis-a-vis YouTube when your channel gets banned from someone like Nico is a move that might help you get your issue resolved more quickly. But it also is a step toward perfect

transparency that you may not want when YouTube tells you what the problem is, because you may not be aware of what the problem is, like I said earlier. And if you're, like I said, you're paying someone to do like, I don't know, thumbnails or whatever, right? Like you don't know what else is going on behind the scenes. The guy who makes the thumbnails or the company that makes the thumbnails wants you to get views. You don't know what they're spending the money on. You have no idea, but you might find out the hard way and you might find out very publicly if you go this route. And so I it was up to me i would say like maybe not uh you know it's it's hard this is all difficult i hope these guys bounce back and i hope they get it sorted out but i think there's a lot and like don't forget too right like you you're you and me are lucky we have really great sponsors who are not like

addicted to play counts addicted to youtube algorithmic plays and all this other shit. We move volume through the sponsors. That's all they care about, right? Is it money in their pocket? I don't report views and plays to the sponsors unless they really want to see it. But some sponsors are not like that. And that's another problem, right? If you're relying on this stuff, to our gnomes point, maybe you find yourself trying to get some help and you just don't know what kind of help you're getting until something like this happens. So I just think that there's more going on here. YouTube is extremely cutthroat. You're competing against a bunch of 20-year-old girls showing their ass and tits for eyes in the 20 to 35 male range, you got to play hardball.

And sometimes hardball means there's a little bit of stuff going on in the fringes. And like I said, I'm not necessarily saying that these guys know about it, but it could still be happening, especially if they're paying for outside help. And so I want to see how this ends up. That's it for the Bitcoin related stuff. Send it. God bless everyone. Come back for the second related stuff send it god bless everyone come back for the uh second half the audio tomorrow if you're on video stay right here we're not going anywhere and i'm not paying anyone to make the thumbnail unless it's my wife so don't worry about any fake views or comments on our videos and don't be a cock