The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP #189 (Bitcoin News Stories) - New ATH and F U

Episode Date: November 12, 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.com⁠⁠ Discord:  ⁠ ⁠⁠https://discord.gg/ESRCZWpb⁠ ⁠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. 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.

Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Mighty CBP on the CBP Media Network. I'm Len the Legend, and today Joey is not going to be joining us, but we have a competent replacement. In fact, he's way better than I am. I'm lucky to have him with me, Mr. Arno, but he's going to be joining me in just a moment. Price all-time high. We are vibing. Hopefully everybody has cracked open a beer or a cold one, whatever the heck you have. Make it worth your while. But before we go any further, I just want to go right into the sponsors. We have to talk about them.

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If you haven't done so, $21 is going to be added to your account. No questions asked. And the last thing we have is Decentral Tech. Decentral Technologies, what can I say about them? We have the CBP Media BidX coming in the very near future, should be shipped this month. Home mining solutions, got you covered. So if you want to have a quiet home miner, they can hook you up. Or if you want to have a loud one, they can hook you up. You want to have a BidX? You want to have an S19? You have the whole range, the whole gamut,

they are going to provide it to you. They a lot of different options they provide great service if you have any questions to do with mining repairs just anything check them out decentral technologies based in canada so if you are canadian you're looking to mine and you want to do some home mining these are the folks you want to talk to so check them out and without further ado let's bring in the real host of the show i'm just here as a prop today mr r gnome how are you buddy i'm doing really well and thanks for having me i appreciate you stepping in for pitch hitting for joey for those who aren't aware joey's wife obviously you know she's pregnant and the whole nine yards so we need somebody to do the the job And you are no better than it like you were to say you're the best person

I think that could do it. In fact, I'm gonna walk away let you do the show all by yourself if that's a wonderful news. Wonderful news. Well, in that case, happy all time high Canada. This is the gnome show. We're going to be talking about all the reasons why before you go head first in the all-time high, remortgaging your home and following all the ludicrous things that Saylor says, you want to learn about securing your keys, setting up backups, learn about coin recovery and how to do that for yourself, learn about air gaps, learn about setting up your own entropy.

We got a whole bunch of stuff and a whole lot of new users to learn about things with. So welcome to everybody. And congratulations to everybody that held through the bear market. You saw 17K and now you get to see 89. Good for you. It's been a wild ride. And that 2021 and 2022 year was incredible because we hit 2021. I think it was 69K was the all-time high give or take and

then within a year later we were down to 17 18k or even 15 i think within the end of 2022 that was quite a drop in a short period of time it was just a lot of events that happened in a very short period of time between some shit playing and even regardless of the events i mean like this is just what bitcoin does right it's what it's going to do this time most likely too obviously nobody knows for sure anything and past performances and future performance but i really want to stress to those that are buying at this point please be ready for the drop i don't know if it's going to happen tomorrow i don't know if it's going to happen five years from now at 100 times this price. But I do know that Bitcoin frequently sees 80% plus drops in its price.

They're temporary. And it's the people that panic that hurt themselves. So if you're not ready to hold, there's a reason that we say don't invest more than you're willing to lose. And it's because those are the people that panic and they hurt themselves. So don't be one of those. 100%. So anybody that's new to this game, like they just saw the price,

they decided, heck, I'm going to buy some Bitcoin or anything that's related to it. We will discuss that later. But if you think that this thing will continually go up, it's not. If that's the case, everybody would have done this a long time ago.

The drawdowns, they're real. They hurt and you got to be ready for it. So if you don't think that you could stomach a 50 or greater drop in a short period of time i suggest get out right now and just look at it from the side because that's the reality that this thing will go down as you mentioned when we don't know but it will as for how much to we don't know i will make one guarantee though no i will make one guarantee the price will never go to zero because i have

a bid at one cent for 21 million bitcoin so that's right well i will be out bidding you for two cents so there we go we have a guarantee he will not there's a floor on this thing for sure and i actually know that uh this actually has happened before i remember um maybe 2016 ish adam back gotten an argument with somebody about Bitcoin hitting zero. At least I'm pretty sure it was Adam Back. And he and some other Bitcoin Twitter users started literally putting orders for 100% of the supply at the bottom of the order books. Like at one cent, at two cents, at three cents cents like for just every coin existence that's incredible just to prove that this demand exists because it does like we you may be listening to this

thinking like that's ridiculous like if bitcoin actually crashed to a couple cents like you wouldn't want to buy it but the reality is is like we are bitcoin an investment in bitcoin is an investment in ourselves we are the node runners we are the backbone of the protocol we decide what bitcoin is and i've decided it's valuable to me and my life of course i'm going to buy it i have i've functional use for it do you live on a bitcoin standard without going too much into too many details or are you still yeah so i'm i've been all in for about 10 years um i've been in that time obviously there hasn't been a whole tonnage of bitcoin merchants that take it directly there's a lot of merchants and services that will take it through intermediaries um and custodians and i i end up using a fair amount of those i use bull bitcoin Bitcoin, one of your sponsors. I use their bills payment service, BYLLS, quite a bit. So to buy a lot of my meat directly in Bitcoin from

my local farmer's market. In fact, I find my local farmer's market, especially in the more rural locations, people are very accommodating when I want to pay in Bitcoin directly. So I can get my beef, really good beef with my Bitcoin. I can get local shawarma with my Bitcoin directly. I can get stuff like rent. I pay through bills, groceries as well. I use a middleman and gift cards and stuff for most often, but there are instances where I get to use it directly.

And those are really the best. Now for people that are listening to this or watching this and say, I want to do the very same thing. Keep in mind that you've been in this game for a long time. So you've been stacking for a long time. So you were buying when the prices were high and also when it was very low. So for people thinking that you're just going to buy in today and do the exact same thing,

I wouldn't recommend it. I suggest. Like I, buy in today and do the exact same thing i wouldn't recommend it i suggest so you can't like i so i bought initially somewhat near the top of a bull market um i was in for a long time and for a year or two in about like 2012 2011 uh instead of buying in i was really focused on making sure that I understood Bitcoin, that it was worth buying into, that my funds would be secure. And one of the first things that you really realize when you're learning about Bitcoin is that it's an economic security model.

It's got all this hash power and it's consuming electricity. And that hash power and electricity form a cost to mutate the state of the Bitcoin ledger, the blockchain. And so it's only really as secure as that cost to attack. Frankly, everything is. Everything's economic security from your doorknob to your email account. And Bitcoin is no different. It's just a little bit more direct about it. It says, you know, you have to spend this money on power and resources if you want to earn Bitcoin through the block subsidy and fees and append to the chain and so like to attack bitcoin we talk about things like 51 attacks we talk about uh

things where miners have to basically like spam put in economic resources into bitcoin and i was very focused on the idea that there had to be a minimum cost where i was comfortable putting in money until that minimum cost to attack Bitcoin was reached, I wasn't comfortable going all in. And by my back of a napkin math, I decided sometime in 2013 that it was worth going all in on because I felt like it would cost me, somebody would cost them a sustained input of millions of dollars over the course of months to attack it. And that's really all that you can do when you attack Bitcoin is you can maybe like deny service for a little bit by mining nothing but empty blocks or filling the transaction network with spam. But it costs money to attack it. And that's how we secure it.

So for me, I've been on this journey for a long time. I got in originally, like I said, dabbling around 2011, 2012, but wasn't comfortable putting money in until about 2013 when I realized the cost to tackle significant. And then to your point, you know, I bought largely at the top of the 2013 market. There was the pump to 300 in April of that year. And then there was the Mt. Gox pump to 1,100 in of that year and then there was the mount gox pump to 1100 uh in december that year and those are the times that i bought because at those points is when the the security of the network was actually higher because of the cost um so that was great for me except for you might recall that we then entered a four-year bear market and so i was i was in the

red for four years, the first four years that I was heavily and all in Bitcoin. And people going in right now, people that follow Saylor's, frankly, disastrous debt advice need to be aware you're going to have to survive potentially four more years. Plan for a scenario where Bitcoin gets banned

in your lifetime. You might see a decade of bear market simply because of forces outside of Bitcoin's control or scope. So if you can't handle to service your debt for as long as you might be underwater, don't go into debt to buy Bitcoin ever. It's dangerous. Don't be very careful when you're listening to these these Saylor folks that are saying, you know, remortgage your house. He told people to do that at 69 at the top of last cycle. Those people that remortgage their houses and followed Saylor's advice, if they couldn't service that debt for four years, they don't have any Bitcoin anymore. They lost their money. It's gone.

And the ones that did manage to service their debt for that long, I mean, the amount of money they paid servicing the debt probably has them only ballpark even around now. So it's a very dangerous game. You are not Michael Saylor. You cannot get debt for free the way that Michael Saylor can. Be careful and be ready to be underwater for a little while if you're buying at the top save some gunpowder so that you can still buy when and if we should dip that's my advice to users that are joining right now and when you do buy keep in mind the way i was talking

to somebody this morning is you're putting that money and it's just buying bitcoin and you're not going to touch that for a long period of time. So essentially wave goodbye to that money so that you better not have that money earmarked for rent or food or whatever. It's extra, it's play money, it's whatever, because you're not going to be selling Bitcoin in the not too distant future. It's going to be probably a long time away before you start selling it or exchanging it for a good or service or whatever. So that money, you better not need it for something. So that's the right mentality. Don't go into debt, use extra money.

And if you want, scroll it away for the time when there is a massive drop and execute a buy then or just buy on every month or every few weeks, whatever it is works for you. There's lots of different options, but certainly going to debt is not one of them. That's the wrong thing to do. It's Taylor's idea. It works for him, like you say, but he could get debt really cheap. And also when you mentioned that, interest rates were very, very low. And obviously it's gone up quite a bit since then.

And so we're at the mercy of some external factors about the cost of that debt. You don't want to have that hanging over your head. It just could create a lot of sleepless nights. There's a reason we say don't invest more than you're willing to lose. That really is important. 100%. Now, just one thing, Noam. If by chance my screen goes black,

I have been having a little bit of connectivity issues. I come back within 30 seconds or so, so just bear with me. Oh, I will just carry on and the Noam show will continue. The propaganda will flow. The education will be heard. All shall rejoice. seconds or so so just bear oh i will just carry on and the gnome show will continue the propaganda will flow the education will be heard all shall rejoice and you mentioned the four-year bear market from 2013 to 2017 there was one additional thing that was done during that time there was a war block size war that was fought and that's something i don't think we'll ever have to deal with again at least not in that scope so that that's something that that is one of the larger existential

crises is Bitcoin faces, faces, I see the next block size war is coming. I see all the things that led us to the past block size war recurring. And it spans from like, look at who led the block size wars, it was It was Coinbase. It was Barry Seabird or whatever the hell his name is. It was Woo and Bitmain. It was these miners that were biased by the profit that they can make scamming people. It was companies who are biased by the profit that they can save by not optimizing their transaction usage and by simply shoving all of their costs onto node runners. And I think that the next block

size war, four cores type event is actually going to be including a lot more government interference as well. I think that governments are going to say, hey, ETFs, hey, Coinbase and businesses in my jurisdiction, this is the fork that you're going to adopt because the other one has a new anonymity feature that we don't want you to use or whatever the hell else. And all of these businesses will happily go along with it, as will all their custodians, because that's the financial incentive. They want to stay in business and these people have all of their money so i i see a huge potential room for future attacks on the bitcoin protocol um the culture has become very apathetic to things like running a node if you don't run a node i want you to be asking yourself who are you trusting when you look

at your bitcoin balance how do you know those yourself, who are you trusting when you look at your Bitcoin balance? How do you know those Bitcoin are there? When you transact and you get a confirmation, what makes you so confident that that confirmation actually occurred? If you're not running a node, you can't answer any of these questions positively because you don't know what the state of the Bitcoin network is. You aren't defining Bitcoin actively. You're not watching the forks and competing blocks. You're coming from a state of trust or ignorance when you don't run a node. So I want to encourage all the new users. I want to encourage all the

old users, please run a node. I do think that it's possible we end up in another block size war type event. And if we do, you will be very grateful for running a node when that happens and i'm grateful for the people that have fought the previous or the only block size works to date because i'm able to run a node with relatively modest hardware and if it wasn't for that fight and winning that fight i would not be able to do that um my note is right here you know three feet for me and it is a 14-year-old laptop. And it runs it fine. It's running Bitcoin Core just fine.

It doesn't complain, doesn't do anything. I wouldn't be able to do that if the blockchain was massive. I wouldn't be able to do it with a one-terabyte hard drive or two-terabyte hard drive. It would just be extremely large. And it would cost me so much more to do. So that's one thing I have to be thankful for is the people that fought the war they did it and i'm the beneficiary of it we're all the beneficiary bitcoin maintaining its decentralized properties which is nodes are where the decentralized properties of bitcoin come from um being able to everybody run it and everybody verify all of the

transactions from the dawn of time and not have to trust anyone else is what gives bitcoin its unique properties and why it has value at all there's so many people out there that are so eager for things like etfs or uh you know not holding their own coins because they think it's dangerous but they don't seem to realize how every single cycle and i guarantee you we're going to see it again in two years we see countless businesses fail as soon as there's the dip uh last last season it was FTX and a bunch of other exchanges there will be more next time this is what our future is coming so like be aware that these events are likely to happen protect yourself don't keep your coins on exchanges this is another thing that i'm seeing a lot of traders come up in you know this

price action a lot of traders eager for fiat and dollars and there's they're keeping their money on exchanges and what they don't know and what i want to tell your listeners is that when your coins are on an exchange in the bull market or the bear market, and you think I'm going to scalp or I'm going to leverage and it's fine because I've got a stop loss or it's fine because I'm watching it and I'm there. These exchanges get very frequently DDoS either by natural use and a lack of investment in their servers or malice. And those stop losses don't execute. The exchange will go down for 12 hours to maybe even a couple of days. And when it comes back up, the price will be dramatically different. The dust will have settled. You will be locked into trades that you couldn't have been pulling yourself out of for whoever knows how long. And a lot of these traders end up losing their ass to counterparty risk because they don't understand

what trusting these exchanges means. It is not a risk-free thing being a trader. You can't just hedge everything on a stop loss. You guys need to be very careful out there. It's funny you mentioned the exchange is going down for a period of time because the previous times we got close to an all-time high this year and even achieved it coinbase for whatever reason just like clockwork went down but now at this time around this past week it's i haven't heard of it going down it seems like it's an anomaly it's this it's remained

up and we haven't peaked yet see this these are you're looking for peak indicators traders it's when these suckers go down that's that is when so and another thing and first of all i just want to just go into the weeds really quick for anybody list liking what mr arnome is saying. You can find him on the Bitcoin Discord. He is a moderator there. The signal is off the charts. Check that out. Look at the website that he's posted here. BitcoinTech.help

Check out that if you want assistance. He and the people over there are absolute gems. So I would suggest anybody out there that wants to get more information to dive deep into Bitcoin, to ask questions that's not shitcoinery, that the place to go so go to the discord bitcoin channel on discord you're in good hands over there just wanted to pump your channel there oh yeah so to pump pump my own you know toot my own horn um i'm really impressed with how this bull market is playing

out now uh some of the people that have been around the community for a couple of these cycles know, as I'm sure you do, Len, that the community tends to degrade pretty significantly in terms of high signal content when price action occurs. Basically, everything becomes about price. You get these huge floods of new users. You experience this, you know, we call it the eternal September problem where all the new users dilute all the old users

and change the culture and give a lot of really bad advice. And it becomes just really difficult to educate yourself or anybody else. But in the bitcointech.help chat, this specific bull market I've been finding, it's the best I've ever seen it. Like there's basically no shit coining going on. I haven't had to ban or mute really anybody.

There's a ton of new users. They're all talking about Bitcoin. Yeah, there's a lot of price discussion. Yeah, the signal's a little degraded, but compared to the last couple of cycles or other platforms, oh my goodness, it's night and day. I'm in love with the chat that we've built over here that's and so that website points directly to the discord so if you don't don't know how to open up the discord and get to it that's the way to just easily get there and that's awesome to hear that this cycle is much

better than previous cycles i just want to touch on one thing quickly too. And I mentioned this, I asked the question in the discord on Bitcoin discord is that now with the price being at an all time high interest seems to be also at an all time high. In fact, if you look at Google, you could see that the trend showing that Bitcoin searches are it's spiked and you know, people are wanting to know a little bit more about it, want to learn about it, et cetera. So with that being said, I would have expected that the transaction fee would have jumped immensely high because people want to transact with Bitcoin,

buy into it and move it to their wallet. But it's not the case. It's still relatively low. It's somebody, I wish I could give that person credit, but mentioned on the discord channel that it's because people are buying and just leaving out an exchange. Yeah. That's what I was going to say well as um i think that that's a sign that

people are buying and leaving them on exchange people are getting ready to flip these are people that are interested in dollars not bitcoin and that i mean just goes back to when you leave on the exchange historically there have been some very bad events for people that have trusted exchanges. Not everybody has gone rug pulled, but a large enough portion of people have been and were never able to recoup what was on there. So what I'm trying to get at is one of the fundamentals, one of the characteristics of Bitcoin is you could hold on to your Bitcoin. Don't let somebody else do that for you. If back in the day, we used to remember telephone numbers easily. I still remember telephone numbers from my childhood and I could rhyme them off.

If you could remember telephone numbers, remembering words is just one step further. It's not a great leap further. It's just a small step further. And that would be one way to easily secure your wealth. It's not that hard to do. I mean, I just look at it. It should be said it's very dangerous relying solely on your memory. No, it's just one way.

One of the reasons that I really like Bitcoin is it's programmable money, right? So something that I'm a big advocate that people do is if you have a large amount have more than one way to spend it like maybe have it so that you've got a multi-sig key and you can spend it when you get all your multi-sig keys together or a majority of them but then also have another spending path on like a time lock that you can give to your relatives or your friends the people that will inherit your will and it's like, if something ever happens to me, after X amount of time, these coins will become spendable by my friends and family.

Or if something happens and I lose access to my coins, there's some kind of disaster and I lose my keys, I still have this other way to recover my coins in like a year or whatever. So Bitcoin is about not relying on these, you know, central service providers. There's no chat you can call up for help. I mean, other than ours and the ones that we make as a community that are free. But we don't have any authority. We can't log into your account and fix it for you. We can teach you how to fix it yourself. But really, it's all

about you and what you prepare for and how your diligence plays out. And part of that should be what is the worst case scenario? What happens if I lose my keys? Yeah. What happens if my memory fails? What happens if I get hit in the head and I'm in a coma and, you know, I don't even remember ever owning Bitcoin? I still would like to have my financial security in that case past me needs to take care of future me and liana wallet is one that you recommended

for doing time lock right i have yeah so very newbie friendly um there's no like programming involved there's just kind of drag and drop and drop and button pressing and you can set up exactly the kind of spending conditions that i'm talking about so it's liana wallet l-i-a-n-a for those who are looking to do some research into this now i just wanted to change topics really you know to what really the big thing is now it's the price of bitcoin right and people that that's what's driving a lot of the interest that's what most of the people that are newcomers to this that's their metric of success the price it's not anything else it's the price going up versus what i bought it at that's and unfortunately or fortunately that's really what's going to drive a lot of interest it just recently surpassed the market cap of silver i'm not sure if you're aware of that but just today so silver if you think about how much

history it's had behind it all the silver that has been mined to date bitcoin has surpassed that market cap so that's interesting though a lot of people are attributing this to this pump to the election in the states that wrapped up and donald trump was is now the president-elect i'm not sure that i'm entirely on board with that narrative i'm sure that many people have bought because they're excited about president trump and what they think he's going to do he's proposed a bitcoin strategic reserve which i think is an actually very good policy that i've been lobbying for canada for for quite some time um but let's take a look at the broader situation here.

Bitcoin has value, whether Trump is elected or not. And in every past US election that has been happening around the same time, you know, them being on a four-year schedule as well as us, we've gone up. So I mean, I expected that unless the four-year price cycle has been broken, which frankly, there's every reason it should be broken. Having supply doesn't naturally impact price the way that it used to. It's just too small of an amount of supply change. But still, this four-year price cycle seems to carry on. We are basically right where you would expect us to be, you know, seven months after halving.

We are past the old all-time high and rapidly pumping to new horizons. So it's entirely possible that we continue following this four-year kind of price cycle and we go through a year of bull market and then another horrible 80% drop along bear market. And I think that it's entirely plausible that would have happened with or without Donald Trump. If he does put together a Bitcoin strategic

reserve, it will be one of the most important things that has ever happened to geopolitical Bitcoin adoption. Are you familiar with the details which are i mean it's kind of scant at this point but what level what little has been shared are you familiar with what so i heard trump's speech at the nashville bitcoin conference oh my god that was a rough listen he is it's tough to listen to that man uh it seemed very ill-informed it seemed it seemed like he was repeating talking points that had been given to him that he didn't really understand or think about, especially in the context of RFK's speech, which happened shortly before his. informed very cogent a lot of discussion about things like how good Bitcoin is for the power grid and you know hard money and backring Treasury bonds and a little bit of Insanity in terms of buying all the freaking Bitcoin forever but generally very well informed speech by rfk

Trump's very ill-informed but you know obviously there are people that are backing Trump that have his ear that are trying to push for this strategic reserve. So I'm hoping that that happens. That'd be a very good thing for Americans. And I think that as a Canadian, we also have to be kind of wary of what's happened in the United States. Trump obviously represents the populist right and the last time trump got elected we kind of saw a global wave wave of right-wing populism uh we saw brexit um and i think that we're going to see that here in canada too a little bit of right-wing populism rearing its head and to both the right and the left i say to you this if you're on the right congratulations like you're doing it you're getting your bitcoin buy it hold it secure it fantastic if you're on the right congratulations like you're doing it you're getting your bitcoin buy it hold it secure it fantastic if you're on the left congratulations you're right about

everything the world's on fire everything's gone to shit escape to bitcoin it's it's the way out protect yourself i don't care where you are on the political spectrum buying bitcoin right now is a good thing for you to do do you think that there's any credence that the bitcoin etfs being in existence might have something to do with the bitcoin pump happening because if you look at the inflows like for example just today in fact they were saying absolutely and this is why it's dangerous though is if people are buying the etfs instead of bitcoin they're not buying bitcoin So the price is going up. Yeah. Is this ecosystem getting healthier? No, it's getting that something will happen i'm saying that there's a potential that something could happen and it's as the value of bitcoin goes up and as the number of bitcoin that's held in these etfs increases as well i i wonder if something does happen is if there's any mechanisms

to make investors whole it's going to be a heck of a lot of insurance. The insurance doesn't cover any of this stuff. So you have whatever coins the ETF says you have. They define what Bitcoin is for you. And this is kind of what I was talking about earlier in terms of, I'm afraid for the next fork wars. What happens when the interests of these ETF managers don't align with the interests of node runners yeah so boom dust was saying earlier he's hoping for a block war 2.0 because he's talking about Blackrock trying to do a fork and so boom dust is on point with this the real best thing

about being attacked as a bitcoiner is that they pay you. They pay you. Like when the block size wars happened, I made bank. Everybody in Bitcoin that was defending the protocol, dumping the scam coins, made money just for being there and protecting the protocol. If BlackRock attacks, like that guy's absolutely right. We are going to get huge payouts. it doesn't even matter if their attack has the majority of users in it because like look at all these custodial users and people that really aren't interested in bitcoin they're interested in dollars any government fork or blackrock fork is going to appeal to those people enormously they may even have a majority but it's not going to matter because they have to pay us we get their coins and then we get to dump that into bitcoin

again it's it's an absolute bonus it's like christmas here's some freebie eager to be attacked again i that last attack bought me a house like please buy me another one did you see anything about there's this new bitcoin act that's being proposed it's very far away from even becoming a lot it still has to be voted by the house the senate and so forth so um the idea behind it is the united states is going to accumulate a million bitcoin in a five-year period of time have you heard about this uh the only thing i've heard that had anything similar said was the crazy speech by rfk at bitcoin natchville

which he basically said that he wanted to buy all of the bitcoin and print all the money to buy all the bitcoin that's an interesting idea i i i'm not sure if like if you followed what's going on with the federal reserve we could talk about that later but it looks like there's going to be some fighting that's going to be going on between the federal chair, Jerome Powell. Yeah, there's possibly some political misunderstanding in the federal government of the United States about whether they can or cannot fire people. Yeah. You see, and we actually have this same problem in Canada too. I don't know if you recall, but Pierre has frequently in the last four years been very critical of Canadian monetary policy, often for fair enough reason. But his response to that unfairness has been to suggest that the government fire people at the Bank of Canada.

And he doesn't seem to realize that that's not how this works. They're an independent organization. They aren't just arbitrarily fired by political whim and things like that. And the same is true in the United States. They can't just fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve. It's done by appointment, but then the appointment is for an X amount of time. So like Jerome Powell, for instance, I think goes till the beginning, first half of 2027. I think it would take an act of Congress, which I suppose technically they have now. Yes. If they want to do it, there's a way to do it, and it's not by executive order.

Now, switching gears, we touched upon this earlier but michael saylor the guy that's associated with micro strategy he announced today that they bought another 27 000 bitcoin to the tune around 2.03 billion dollars remember they were supposed to raise 41 billion 42 billion dollars that was announced a week or two ago and so they said with that 42 billion they're going to be buying primarily bitcoin with that money and here they are they're starting the process and they are a big holder of bitcoin they have almost 280 000 bitcoin on your are they a big holder of bitcoin comparatively they hold any bitcoin ah so they they have claims don't hold any bitcoin at all let's just be very very clear about that

people who are buying micro strategy are buying something that themselves does not hold any bitcoin um yes and i gotta be honest like i don't understand how all these people simping for micro strategy like can tolerate this constant stock dilution and let alone like all the fud that sailor talks about you know bitcoin isn't a currency bitcoin's bad for the environment el salv Salvador should pound sand. It's just ridiculous. So the theory behind it is they're looking at what the metric they're using is sats per share. And even with dilution, if the sats per share goes up, then shareholders, for the most part, seem to be satisfied with the direction they're going. It's funny. part seem to be satisfied with the direction you're going he is funny we were joking earlier that uh blockbuster could do exactly what micro strategy has done and they could you know buy a

whole bunch of bitcoin and that really has nothing to do with their core business their core business is you know a failure and doing whatever it's doing but so long as they pandered to enough bitcoiners and you know convinced them that it would be this wildly successful company just by merit of of investing in and owning bitcoin and that that's how i view microstrategy is like they're not they're not even a company anymore they're they're a pandering play that exists solely to enrich michael saylor at the expense of bitcoiners so mad man monroe writes not everyone needs or wants self-custody i mean bitcoin kind of mandates that whoever owns the keys owns the coins so to the extent that if you want to participate in bitcoin at all you kind of do need to self-custody.

There's really no way around self-custodying if you want to participate in Bitcoin, at least at the minimum. You can participate in Bitcoin without a node if you self-custody because you're signing your transactions. That's part of the Bitcoin protocol. But if you have no keys, if you never interact with the protocol in any way, shape or form, you have no claim to Bitcoin. As far as the Bitcoin network is concerned, you just have nothing. Agreed. All right. There's an interesting story, and I want to hear your thoughts about this, is that the guy by the name of Dean Skurka, I hope I pronounced his name correctly.

If I didn't, my apologies, Dean. He's the ceo of an exchange called wonderfi it's a publicly traded exchange oh boy yeah they have you know bitcoin and a whole bunch of other things that they sell this guy was previously the ceo of bitbuy and bitbuy was gobbled up by wonderfi not too long ago anyways dean was kidnapped and held for ransomware. And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to laugh, but it's actually an interesting story. This guy was nabbed.

For people who are aware of downtown Toronto, he was in the University and Richmond area, so right in the core of downtown Toronto. And last week, Wednesday at 6 p.m., he was nabbed and he was forced to give up $1 million. And later he was released at Centennial Park. And Jameson Lopp was mentioning that this is the 171st instance of suspects using physical violence to steal Bitcoin that he's aware of. There could have been more than 171 instances. It's a pretty good database. Meetspace attacks, Google Lopp, Bitcoin Meetspace attacks. There's a pretty good database. Meetspace attacks,

Google lop Bitcoin Meetspace attacks. There's a GitHub where he's tracking all this. So this is the 171st version of this. Now, this is going to be more problematic moving forward as price of Bitcoin goes up.

People are where people own Bitcoin. That's why I think, like you mentioned, having stuff like time lock Bitcoin or just something that provides a level of protection against this i think in this case dean had to give up some of the assets that were held by the exchange uh wonderfire i'm guessing that would be my assumption but i do not know for sure so like first of all if you're a customer at this exchange like you messed up you messed up being a customer at this exchange and letting them hold your money.

The shit coiners guys got a long history of being just kind of a scummy Bitcoin business owner. Not that that's a reason for anybody to deserve what happened to him. Like that's horrible what's happened to him. But this is why you wouldn't want to hold your coins on one of his platforms uh and two yeah this is a lesson for the entire community in how how to protect yourself from some of these things you obviously can't stop a person from putting a gun to your head that that is something that is always possible and as has been demonstrated can happen on a busy street in a downtown major Canadian city.

So there's really no preventing this. We know statistically, if you introduce your own weapon into these situations, you increase the likelihood of your own harm dramatically. So Bitcoin, I think, provides a very good game theoretical approach to reducing the severity or impact of this kind of danger. You want to do things like use Liana wallet and have multiple spending paths. You want to limit access to your own coins and tier your wallets. So like maybe you've got a wallet that is a hot wallet or is a lightning wallet and you have full access to all the time anywhere in the world and it carries a very small amount. And then maybe you have a colder wallet that is generally offline and has

some emergency funds. But then your actual stack, your life savings, if you're going to go all in on Bitcoin like me, you've got life savings and you want those to be totally inaccessible, even to yourself. You want to put yourself in a situation where you cannot spend them. So you use time locks and you use geographically distributed multi-sig so that you can't meet the spending conditions easily. Accessibility and security are opposite ends of the spectrum. The more accessible your money is, the less secure it is.

The hope is that if somebody puts a gun to your head, you can give them the hot wallet. You can even maybe give them the cold wallet if they have enough time and they're you know because the truth is if somebody's robbing you they probably got things on their mind and they're looking to get out of there as soon as they can so you can maybe give them those two sets of walls but you can't actually give them the other wallet the cold coins because you don't have access to them and you know that anything happens to you, your family or whomever will be able to recover those coins. So you've got like this built in will that is part of your Bitcoin, this insurance policy.

The hope is, is that the incentive to take the hot wallets is large enough that they will simply take those and go there is too much trouble too much risk and not enough guaranteed payout trying to chase someone for coins they cannot spend when you could have to like what are they going to do kidnap you and everyone in your family for the next three years like they're gonna be jumping all over the country trying to find every one of these keys that you tell them where's like even if you fully cooperate with them they're still going to be stuck waiting for the time lock and yeah what are they going to do just keep you hostage so that you can't outspend them on those coins like it just creates this horrible horrible game theory problem so the hope is that game theoretically they're incentivized to just take what money you can access and leave you alone.

And this applies to businesses too. If Mr. Wonderfy would have kept his consumers funds not in a hot wallet if he had done something like BitMEX does, for example. BitMEX has a nightly board meeting and they only withdraw once a day you have to be part of the one batch transaction that they do because they bring all of their their keys together that they need to spend and they spend it in person once a day it's not a hot wallet you can't just so like if their servers get compromised their their money doesn't go anywhere. And this is what businesses should do. Businesses should be practicing the same kind of capital controls and accessibility controls as individuals are in these situations.

If I could even throw a wrench into this whole thing, and you talked about earlier, if there's another block size war and we ended up with a competing shit coin, maybe that's what we should hold on to so in case there is an attack against a five dollar wrench attack we just end up giving the shit coin that was airdropped to us and we keep our bitcoin so i'll take the payout for defending the protocol every day give me that i mean what did we make on on b cash we made like between 10 and 15 if you sold within the first week like that's a nice little bonus to your stack who doesn't want 15 percent more bitcoin i missed that by just a few

months it sucks whereas if you wait if you wait then you get nothing because it becomes worthless right yeah you really have to evaluate these for if you if you want to just sit on the fence, you can, but then you don't get any of the reward for defending the protocol. Give them test net coins. Test net coins actually is not, I've actually thought about how I would best scam somebody trying to attack me, like double spend them, like really low fee them and then rbf as it goes or child pays for parent the change and just start like a bidding war over the coins

they're trying to steal um i think that those are all viable things to do in a lot of circumstances that are unfortunately time sensitive and a lot of people don't think about. That would work awesome, especially because there are periods of time when the next block isn't built for 30, 40, 50 minutes. An hour even, yeah. If you can get it on the front of that, it's very much possible

you could execute that strategy. They're robbing you. You sneak in the fee at 0.1 satabyte. Fuck them. sneak in like they're robbing you you sneak in the fee at like 0.1 satabyte like fuck them see it's in your wallet i see it right there it says so a sentence i promise don't shoot me let's uh talk about this guy called roman sterlingov again the other one i hope i pronounced correctly i'm not sure if you heard about this story this guy was associated with something called Bitcoin Fog.

Bitcoin Fog I've never heard of before. But apparently it's some wallet that has mixing services, mixing features. And there was claims that this guy had been running it for a period of 10 years, from 2011 to 2021. And it just so happened he was tried and sentenced and found guilty of money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transmission business and money transmission without a license.

Now, this dude says that he has used Bitcoin Fog Wallet, but he claims he's not the dude behind the project and as per his defense it said that most of the evidence at trial was circumstantial and neither the bitcoin fog server server logs private keys or ledger were ever entered into evidence so it looks like this guy based on this might have been made an example of. But have you heard of this Bitcoin Fog wallet before? I haven't. This sounds like one of those centralized mixing services. So to contrast this with something like what happened to the Samurai devs, Samurai devs ran a centralized non-custodial service and they were accused of conspire conspiracy to commit

money laundering because they made a couple tweets suggesting that people should avoid sanctions through uh coin joins right um but this is different this sounds like a custodial mixing service traditional money laundering. Maybe they don't have them dead to rights, because as you're aware, when you're looking at Bitcoin forensics, a lot of it is circumstantial evidence. You don't know exactly who owns what address. You're working with a lot of things like probabilities and relying on the people you're targeting as a prosecutor or a law enforcement to basically make mistakes.

It's like the Internet. You're as private as you want to be. If you keep your UTXOs separate, you never are combining them for anything nefarious or sketchy. And you're using layers like lightning and lightning swaps. And you're using coin joins to feed your lightning channels. Like, you're going to be quite private. There's not really ever going to be anything but circumstantial evidence possibly against you is that what this guy was doing i don't know i i

highly doubt it considering uh he wasn't running a non-custodial service as far as i understand it but even if you do do a lot of these things right we've seen what happened to samurai devs the reality is that they will they will make up charges to put you away uh and we don't actually live in a law-based or fact-based society and we see this over and over with bitcoin like for example with uh csw with craig craig wright pretending that he's satoshi how many years a decade almost of his lawsuits and false claims when everyone who has ever been willing to verify his initial fraud his initial proof can show that he's a fraud that he was using timestamp manipulation to create a hash collision um that should be provable like and it is but unfortunately our legal system lacks the

technology literacy and isn't set up to verify things our legal system is based on social argument it's not based on on facts or proving anything so it has allowed all these abusers to do horrible things in the ecosystem um like csw and it also allows the prosecution of, I don't know about innocent, but certainly on false charges, people like the Samurai devs. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for people running custodial mixing services, though.

If you're running a traditional money laundering service, you get what you got coming. And to tie a bow in the story, this guy Sterlinglo off was given 12.5 years in prison that was his sentence so in canada in the united states i was about to say because that's a hefty sentence for canada for financial crimes so i mean now a story that kind of ties into this and i never heard you talk about it is ross we heard about him the guy that was behind silk road and apparently trump may pardon his sentence and he's promised that he

will whether he will fulfill these promises we're not sure right that's also um like i think i think ross is guilty of a lot of stuff do I think that that guilt should translate into two life sentences plus 40 years with no possibility for parole? No, I don't. That is incompatible with my idea of what justice is for pretty much any crime. If he was tried in Canada, he would be out right now. Even though he, for example, he would be out right now, even though he, for example, put out a hit on people.

Um, it wasn't part of the trial other than the sentencing. Cause we just, you know, took it as fact because we basically have it. Um, but he, he put out a hit on people, uh,

and he was running this dark net marketplace and in selling illegal weapons and drugs and all this other stuff um he committed crimes he should do some time that said should the time be literally multiple lifetimes plus 40 years no i figure if trump were to pardon him now he's basically done what eight years nine years something like that i think 10 that that's that's fair enough i wouldn't cry if he served another four and he got pardoned at the end of the term um do i think he should be pardoned yeah yeah i think that that sentence is absurd for pretty much any crime there are so few crimes you could commit where i would say yeah you know what two life sentences plus 40 years no parole for this 20 year old kid bitcoin is saying 11 years so that he corrected us both so thank you yeah i lose track of time

in these cycles and i mean just another story because we're kind of getting up to the hour mark where we could transition to the rest of stories have you looked at this collider script bullshit yeah this allows for covenants without a hard fork type deal well yeah so it allows for covenants without a hard fork but with their own you know asic network to to power through these covenant locks. Like, it seems totally impractical. Like, I would think that a fork should be dramatically more practical than a whole new ASIC industry built around these hash-based time locks. In terms of, from what I understand,

to make stuff like OpC opcat reality under this system would require millions of dollars of processing power yeah they want to build basically a parallel mining industry where what you're mining is these uh covenants and so this is really just a proof of concept more than anything else this is uh i somebody described it to me as uh nerds masturbating and that's basically how i see it as well um i don't see any of these proposals as remotely possible or plausible i suppose they are possible but why no no let's not build a new entire asic driven mining network just for no let's not do this if we want covenants let's pass something like ctb let's end this ridiculousness now doesn't this shine a light on the fact that there has to be some scaling solution that we adopt moving forward? Because this is just, as you call it, nerds masturbating.

But still, it kind of achieves something where it improves scalability of Bitcoin. So something's going to have to be done with this, right, eventually? I really like that when you allow the protocol to mature on its own and people continue to have use of these tools and they don't change, there's no forks, you see new features being created through the protocol. People innovate with the tools that they have, and that's certainly what this is. It's an innovation using the tools that they have doesn't require a fork and that in itself is a worthwhile line of thinking we should be thinking like that and we should be very cautious about adopting new forks instead of allowing this natural evolution to occur that said i think this is just a stepping stone on the path of that natural evolution this is not a destination we have

somebody from the uh discord joining in here not just a new asic network one significantly larger than bitcoin's current hash rate for any actual throughput yeah it's frankly i think that the proposal is absurd it's it's fun and interesting in the way that masturbating is, but it's absurd. Okay. I think we'll end the Bitcoin segment. So no, don't do anything because we're just going to seamlessly transition on the audience, on the video side,

but it will be seamless because the people on the audio side, this is going to be the end of this segment and there'll be another one coming the very next day. So with that, I would suggest everybody take care, enjoy this pump day and we'll be submitting the rest of the episode tomorrow but for people tuning in already just stick around we'll be happy all-time high day everybody yeah man take care