BTC Sessions

JULIAN ASSANGE FREED! ep422

Welcome to Simply Sessions for June 27th, 2024. Today, we discuss the European Central Bank's move towards a digital currency, reactions from Christine Lagarde, Joe Biden, and Elon Musk, Julian Assange's release and its impact on Bitcoin, and the US and Germany selling large amounts of Bitcoin. Stay tuned!

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Duration:: 57m
Broadcast on:: 27 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: aac

[MUSIC] >> Yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. We've got Nico waiting here. In the wings, bring us the latest and greatest in everything Bitcoin. I will be following up with, of course, your tech updates. How are you guys? I hope you've been having a good week here. I'm jacked and you know why? Because my brother from another mother, my other tip, my distant tip will be in town, flying into Calgary this Sunday. We're going to have a week chilling out here at the SAP market, the Bitcoin Rodeo, and maybe even the Calgary Stampede and the Rocky Mountains. It's going to be an absolute blast. We're also going to be chilling with Adam O'Brien from Bitcoin Well and plenty more, bitcoinwell.com/ptc sessions. Don't use this simply like, anyways, I see Nico laughing in the background here. Anyways, of course, this is live. We're going to get things rolling, but because it's live, anything can happen. I defer to my friend Bill here. Okay, we'll do it live, do it live, I can go out and write it and we'll do it live. F***ing thing sucks. And if you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC Sessions. This is your simply session. Before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. I am pulling up timechaincaler.com and simultaneously, I'm going to get that live chat on the side of the screen there. Everything you save into the chat from here on end will be live for the world to see for better or worse. Back to timechaincalendar. We're sitting at $61,495 per coin. A single US dollar will snag you 1,626 SATs. Side note, nice little redesign on timechaincalendar is looking slick. Thanks, TC. Good work. In terms of fees, looks like, now I don't know where anything is, priority, nine SATs per byte. Wow, single SATs per byte, priority transactions. Not bad. Anytime fee, eight SATs per byte. In terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.71 million of them, that's 93.89% of the total supply. We'll do a quick shout out to our sponsors here and then we'll dive right into the news. We'll be back in a sec. On a mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the US, the best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self custody. They never hold your coins. You can add a Bitcoin address as part of onboarding. There's a transparent 1% spread, no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees, plus they have KYC free cells and bill payments on their website. They're also a publicly traded company under the ticker BTCW on the TSX-V. Check them out over at bitcoinwell.com, check out my full tutorial on how to use them and you can check out the links in the show notes down below and sign up today. And kite.com has some of the best hardware on the market today to secure your Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse and is my daily driver. On top of this, they have plenty of other goodies including the Mark 4, the tap signer open dimes, the block clock, and much more. If you head over to their website, make sure you use code BTCSessions at checkout to get a nice discount. Links are in the show notes down below. Alright, we are back, we're going to bring them in here, buddy, how you doing, good to see you. Yo, I'm so excited, man, Canada 2.0 Canada, second time Calgary, I'm incredibly excited. I keep saying, I was like, I absolutely love this city and the response from every single Canadian is because you haven't seen the winner yet, bro. Which I find absolutely hilarious, but yeah, I'm incredibly excited and it's going to be a great trip and to be my daughter's first international trip and really looking forward to it. Again, the rodeo, the stampede, the traveling, so I'm really excited for it and Ben gave me some tips, some fathering tips too, so I appreciate that. Oh yeah, just have the baby, shove that kid on a plane every opportunity they get, they're going to be a nice little world traveler, our daughter hills it regularly, she knows exactly what's up. Her son is three in a boy, so he's a terror, but you know, such is life, such is life, but yeah, man, cool, well, okay, I'm going to pull up the screen here, but we did this last week. This is a thing, we're going to stick with this. It was a lot of fun and on top of it, I'm going to, after you're done your news segment, I've got mine pulled up here too and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to do a second one of these. Can I queue it up and let people know what's going on here? I hate it brother. Alright, sweet, so this is Bitcoin well and they've got like a point system where you can effectively redeem your points to get rewards and the rewards can be anywhere from 500 sats up to potentially a million sats. And so basically the way that it works is we're going to drop a coin in the well and it's going to bring up a prize, you know, 500 sats, 1000 sats, whatever it may be. And what's going to come up on the screen is a QR code. This is an LN URL withdrawal code. So what you need to do is you need to get your lightning wallets ready because the second it's on the screen, you're going to scan that and try and redeem those sats first before anybody else in the show. So we're going to do it now. I'm going to do it again when I start my tech update. So Nico, are you ready to throw that thing in the well? Let's do it. Let's throw some coins. By the way, also the way that you earn Bitcoin, Bitcoin, well, points is by buying Bitcoin on Bitcoin. Well, anyways, all right, let's do it, whopping like the coin in the wishing well and 500 sats. All right, get scanning, get scanning everybody. Should I, should I make a big, I'm going to make a big here, I'll just kind of we'll see. And if you win, honestly in the chat, let us know who snags these sats. By the way, I think I used the term, let's see who snipes these sats last time. And the person who actually got them was Bitcoin sniper. I got to look, I got to look and I'm like, I'm wondering, I'm like, it must be, must be, there must be this, this one guy that's just really fast, prepared. Oh, man. Exactly. Awesome. All right. I guess I will, I'm going to, I'm going to bring that one down. I wonder, I hope somebody got it by now. I hope those lightning, those lightning wallets were ready, because I'm going to collapse it down now and, and, and we're going to move on. But if you got those sats, let us know in the chat. And you can always scrub back through the video to pull up that QR code and claim it. But yeah, man, let's dive in. What's been going on this week? What is top of my, I mean, I know what's top of mind. But let's, let's go. Also, also, if you use either promo code BTC sessions, or simply BTC, you get three coin tosses for free. Obviously, I recommend simply BTC and back then recommends BTC sessions. Oh, that's not, that's not fair. But yes, if you use either of our promo codes, of course, Bitcoin, Wells, sponsors us both. You get three free coin tosses into the Bitcoin wishing well. All right, everybody. So big news, this is absolutely insane. Next billionaire, I think, to join the Bitcoin train. Of course, you have Michael Dell. Michael Dell is the founder, CEO and chairman of Dell Technologies. It's one of the largest companies in the world, I think his net worth is like 15 billion. It's absolutely huge. And he was dropping some cryptic things and then he just dropped the meme and just came all out. Of course, like every Fortune 500 company, Dell holds a considerable amount of cash or cash equivalents. And I'm talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, and they are holding on to melting ice cubes, essentially. So they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars in purchasing power every year for holding those cash equivalents. And they don't even have to hold Bitcoin in totality. They can even just hold, you know, 5% or 10% instead of in cash equivalents just in Bitcoin, it will actually compensate for the loss of purchasing power due to holding fiat and cash. So this is why it's such a big deal. This isn't just a billionaire, this is a billionaire that has a massive corporation behind it. And let's see, let's see the news. Is this like personal stuff? Is he saying that he's personally buying Bitcoin? Is he saying that Dell, you know, Dell computers or Dell Technologies is gonna, you know, is gonna follow, you know, a Bitcoin, a Michael Saylor's Bitcoin strategy? Who knows? But let's take a look at some of the hints because they're incredibly exciting. Is this the next domino to fall? I don't know. We shall see. So here's obviously Michael Dell, Michael Dell CEO of a hundred billion plus market cap Dell Technologies showed at least some big interest in Bitcoin, recirculating a BTC-friendly post on X from Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor. It started Thursday when Dell posted scarcity creates value. That prompted a reply from Saylor, the executive chairman of MicroStrategy, saying Bitcoin is digital scarcity, which Dell then reposted. That is, you hear that? That's pretty effing crazy, right? The hint. Who says scarcity creates value, Bitcoiners? Obviously the reply from Saylor, Bitcoin is digital scarcity. And then the confirmation is that Dell retweeted that or reposted that. Here's the image of it, here's Michael Dell reposting it. And it didn't end here. Michael Saylor, sorry, both Michaels, Michael Saylor, Michael Dell, I guess like the billionaire Bitcoin club. Like you know how like it's like the team of Benz, I guess the the billionaire Bitcoiners are the team of Michaels, I guess. Can I? Can I be a Michael? Yeah, right. Like what's the standard name to Michael? No, I can't, I can't abandon my fellow Benz. Right. I think that I think they might be upset anyways, anyways, so let's check this out. Of course, we got Michael Dell and he says, this is a great account to follow and he's tacking the cookie monster, very entertaining and check this out. Yes, that is a meme of the cookie monster, not even cookies, but eating Bitcoin cookies. And of course, this came shortly after Michael Dell reposted Michael Saylor. So I mean, it's not a direct confirmation, bro, but at the same time, like how like, you know, like is something Bitcoin related for sure, like absolute guarantee. And this would be huge. If this domino were to fall, it would be massive. It would be a game changer because it's the it's like Michael Saylor has already secured it. Now, which other tech company, which other fortune 500 company is going to follow in his footsteps? And of course, like when that happens, when that happens, and I think it's going to inevitably happen. Yeah, man, like the sky is the absolute limit, right? I think all other companies that haven't adopted a Bitcoin standard or have put Bitcoin on their treasury, they're going to be at a disadvantage to the companies that have, right? So whether that's MicroStrategy or Dell, it becomes a game of survival. The peer pressure starts to mount, right? So anyways, this is incredibly exciting. And maybe Michael Dell and Dell Technologies, Dell Computers are the next domino to fall in terms of the billionaires, in terms of the fortune 500 companies. Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting to see again, I've always thought that Bitcoin, other than us weirdos somewhere in the middle of the pack that just kind of discovered it, you know, for our own weird preferences, I think that people at polar ends of the spectrum of, I guess, wealth disparity, those are the ones that will recognize at first ones that have the least to lose and have been somehow cut off from the legacy system, either by censorship or because their political distance or whatever it may be, but they need to use money that can't be censored or their money is so broken that they require an escape from inflation. But there's also the super high net worth people that are beginning to understand it because their entire livelihood is preserving purchasing power and protecting their capital. So they're also uniquely positioned to get it. So it's no surprise to me that we're seeing a little bit of both ends of the spectrum and it's working its way in. The other thing I want to do is share a last week I had Scott Deedles from Block Rewards podcast on and he was referring to Michael Saylor and Michael Dell and, you know, the, you know, how much more wealthy Michael Dell is. And he was referring to, he says, we're going up by orders of Michaels. So yes, I think that was the quote of the week. And yeah, you know, every cycle will go up another order of Michaels in price. 100% I'm bullish on the Michaels, bro. I'm bullish on the Michaels. I'm bullish on the bends, but I got to say that Niko is absolutely scarce because I don't think I don't I don't know if I heard of another Niko in the space. It's scary. Oh, man, Ben, do you mind pulling up that, that latest comment from G.N. the T.H. Or this is really interesting. I think he made a really good point, right? If Dell starts to add BTC to their balance sheet, they will deny thousands of millionaires in the world to become whole corners. I would say not even millionaires, just thousands of people, you know, Bitcoin is absolutely scarce, right? The math that I always like to do is eco can't do math, but this is simple math is that there's 50 or 60 million millionaires around the world. And there's only 21 million Bitcoin. So if every millionaire around the world wanted to buy just one, they physically could not, which is incredibly gunther appreciated, bro. They physically couldn't smiley face, gunther smiley face. So I think that's incredibly bullish now. If you do the math for the Bitcoin for billionaires, it's kind of like, you know, there's only so much to go around, right? And nation states haven't even gotten in, central banks haven't even gotten in. So you know, the party hasn't even gotten started. Yeah. Again, like some of the scarcity metrics in and around this stuff is crazy. Like if you were to take the entire supply of Bitcoin completely for going all the lost Bitcoin and everything, but like if you had the full 21 million and you divided up evenly amongst every single person on the planet, each person would only get like 200 and something thousand odd sats. And then when Luke was on the show, when we were in, when we were in El Salvador together, he brought up an even more interesting method or mechanism to me where he mentioned on the show that if you were to look at the issuance of Bitcoin right now per day at the current mining reward and then you divided that per capita across the globe, each person per day, if they got an even split of the newly mined Bitcoin, each person on the globe would get five sats per day. Like that's how scarce it is. So if you go and you buy it, you go buy like 100 bucks worth of Bitcoin, you're basically claiming like a huge portion of the world's daily allowance of sats. It's crazy, man. It's so not like the numbers are are so nuts. And I think when people understand it, I think what we truly get to like a runaway type of moment like this inflection point and it's going to be insane. I'm just so happy that I have Bitcoin and its in cold storage, very safe. All right, so next piece of news, governments doing what governments do best, which is being stupid. Why are they so stupid? It's because they have a money printer. It's like like giving an AMEX with unlimited, you know, like literally no, no limits whatsoever to a 16, seven year old kid and say, go ham, that's essentially what, you know, the government is when it comes to printing money. And what's really moronic, in my opinion, is here you have the US government, which literally has the ability to print money, right? Selling Bitcoin, which they do not have the ability to print more of out of thin air without investing in miners and getting in line like everybody else. They're literally selling Bitcoin, which every single time they've sold Bitcoin, it's been an absolute terrible trade. You want to talk about the separation of money in state? They are literally separating money in state when they do this, right, literally, right? So the headline from Bitcoin magazine is US government moves millions in Bitcoin to Coinbase. It goes on to say on June 26, the US government sent 3,940 Bitcoin to Coinbase Prime and it goes on to say the transfer Bitcoin was originally confiscated from convicted drug trafficker but meet sing earlier in 2024, sing was arrested in London in 2019 on distribution charges and extradited to the United States in 2023. As part of his conviction, sing forfeited over 8,100 Bitcoin worth around 150 million at the time. While the recent transfer of nearly 4,000 Bitcoin is substantial, it represents just a fraction of the government's total Bitcoin holdings. This shows the US government currently possesses around 214,000 Bitcoin worth over $13 billion, making it the largest national holder of Bitcoin globally. Much of the government's Bitcoin comes from seizures related to the shuttered dark web marketplace Silk Road, the infamous Bitfinex hack of 2016, also contributed to the stash. Now what's really interesting about this latest statement, Ben, is why didn't they give that back to Bitfinex? You know, like what's going on there? Well, it's a crime scene, Niko, you can't be just really nearly given back stats to people they were stolen from. Right? Like, oh, we're the government. We're going to, we're going to confit, we're going to seize this back and have it back. Guys, they stole it from me. Nah. Nah. Okay. Moving on to the next one, here you have the German government also doing something stupid. They also decided to offload 900 Bitcoin and 400 Bitcoin in, you know, different trenches, I guess, and they sent it to Coinbase and Kraken. Now what's really ironic about all of this, and I find absolutely hilarious, is that the US government is also currently suing Coinbase, right? So, you know, they're suing the platform of which they're using to sell Bitcoin. They're literally separating money from state, and the whole thing is just absolutely hilarious because they could just print money, you know, as their heart desires, and they're selling Bitcoin for something they could print more of, more of, and I think it's very symbolic. I think it represents the inefficiencies of government, like, how could it not? Like, it's the perfect representation of what happens in government when they can just print money out of thin air. They start to make really, really dumb decisions. Like, it's almost as if it's an ideological thing. It's like, we don't want Bitcoin, we want dollars, like, you know, which I find really, really interesting. Yeah. I mean, at some point, and I mean, people going back in the back and forth in the chat about this, but like, at some point, you know, governments through, you know, through whatever smokin' mirrors that roundabout way that they try to obfuscate the fact that the Fed is basically the government. I would pause to say that the Fed is actually separate from government, like it's, yeah, but nonetheless, if the government wants more money than they have, it is then created. Like, they're basically they're able to create deficits, which create inflation. And yes, they're going to have to pay interest rates and everything like that. But at the end of the day, money creation is through, yes, creation of new currency, but also through creation of debt. And at some point, governments will not even be able to print enough to purchase back the amount of Bitcoin they once held, because the inflation of the currency through printing will happen quicker than they can buy up the Sats. And so I think that whatever that inflection point is when governments actually realize that, oh, this is actually scarce, and maybe we shouldn't, maybe you should hold the scarce asset and get rid of the thing that we can print out of nothing. And maybe we should buy stuff with this thing we can print out of nothing and hold those hard assets. And this is the playbook from, we were talking about this last week on "Where Are We Bush?" This is exactly the playbook from confessions of an economic hitman where wealthy countries will go in and they'll be like, oh, those are some pretty nice resources there. But it looks like you don't have the infrastructure to extract them. Allow us to create this predatory loan for you, so that you can create the necessary infrastructure to extract the resources, oh, you can't repay the loan, that's okay, we'll restructure it and you can give us all your resources. And the play there is obviously they're able to take something they have for free, which is issuing debt, and they're able to extract something that is actually scarce, which is the resources. I don't know why the governments haven't yet figured out that they're playing themselves the exact opposite of the playbook that they've done on all these other countries, but they're doing it on a global level with currency. It's hilarious. Dude, it's hilarious, and it's just an example, like the people in charge, you're so-called bettors, are they really being charged? You know, there's this really famous quote, Ben, that really stuck by me, which is like, if you just took 50 random people across the country, they would do a better job than the 50 politicians in charge, because there's such ideologues and they've been thinking about random things. And the 50 random people are just normal people trying to get by. And I think the role of government is just, it's like a referee, and I think Fiat has just fueled this experiment where the expansion of the role of government in people's lives and this is whatever. I don't think a lot of people want those things, right? And they come up with all these fancy shenanigans and all that stuff like you were saying, separate money from state or this fucking insanity is going to go on. That's what I've got to say. And yeah, bro, you're absolutely right. No matter how much money they print, they were never going to be able to buy the amount of Bitcoin they sold, dude. Yeah. It actually sends a quote on people get Bitcoin. When people understand that it's actually scarce, they're not going to be super keen on accepting dollars for the Bitcoin. Maybe at a premium, eventually, it would just depend when the government's actually get it, right? Like, they could get away with it right now, but down the line, there's an inflection point where people value Bitcoin way above where everybody values Bitcoin above printed fiat cash and they just have no use for it. You're absolutely right. Yeah, man. So I'm excited for those days. It reminds me of the meme with Neo and Morpheus, right? It's like, are you telling me Morpheus? I won't have to sell my Bitcoin for dollars one day or whatever. And it's like, Morpheus looks and was like, no, yeah, I'm telling you, we'll never have to do that. Anyways, in other news, Opti's ex-girlfriend continues to be vindictive against the breakup. Of course, I'm talking about Christine Lagarde. She is the head of the European Central Bank. And nobody wants this. Nobody wants this. This is just, she's admitted it herself. She's like, if we don't, quote unquote, innovate and establish a central bank digital currency, you know, the role of the central bank will diminish. And my response to that is exactly. What's really interesting about this, Ben, is the wording in this is fascinating, right? So she says, we've made significant progress towards ensuring we're ready to issue a digital euro in the future if needed. What's really interesting about that is the bait and switch. What is the bait and switch? She didn't say central bank digital currency. She said digital euro, right? And it continues. It says, we look forward to contribute the democratic debate with European legislators on bringing public money, right? Very interesting wording. What do you think is more public? Bitcoin's an open ledger. Anyone could create more Bitcoin if they invest in the mining infrastructure. You we can't audit the Fed or we can't audit the European Central Bank. If you create more of it, you go to jail, right? What is more public, in my opinion, right? So it's interesting that they're playing word games here and she goes on to say to the digital landscape to complement physical cash. Also, letting you know that we're not going to get rid of cash, you know, we're going to keep it around. And here's the official reports. As we publish a report summarizing our progress on the digital euro project since the preparation phase started on November 2023. A digital euro would provide an all-in-one digital payment solution that is accessible to all. Should it be issued, it would make our payment market more innovative, resilient and less department, less dependent on non-European schemes? Okay. Now, if I just showed you this picture and I took away the digital euro, wouldn't you think that this is shit coin marketing? Like, what is the difference, right? It looks like an ad for like a discount sale at like bargain bin or something. Like it's like really, really poorly designed. It literally looks like some trashy store is having a sale and you should come and pick up all of their stuff that they're trying to get off the shelves. Absolutely. Yeah. Total disaster, shame on Christine Lagarde. And another thing also kind of dropped balls by government. Here's Joe Biden, President of the United States, absolutely gaslighting the populace on inflation, right? So they find hilarious, right? Like you have the European, the head of the European Central Bank lying through her teeth, right? President of the United States saying inflation was zero on a monthly basis in May. This is welcome progress, but prices are still too high. That's why I'm fighting to lower costs by increasing rental assistance, taking on big pharma and investing affordable clean energy. Now what's hilarious about this is at the end, he's literally saying, we're going to print more money so we can get clean energy. And at the top, he's, this is kind of insidious. This is kind of malicious. And the reason I'm saying that is like inflation is cumulative. So just because it was quote unquote zero, it just means that it hasn't increased that fast. And then here, again, this is the important of, this is the importance of Twitter is that you just see people responding by, and it's interesting about this post too. It's not showing all of it, but someone is saying like, Paul, I can't pronounce your last name. Because Joe Biden is gaslighting again. Inflation is cumulative. It's 3.3% higher from last year has averaged over 5% under Biden. Now it gets political at the end, but the point I'm trying to make is even if they get it back to 2%, even when they say, oh, we lowered inflation, that doesn't mean that prices are going to go back to where they were before. It just means the rate at which the currency debasing is slowing down, right? But that, of course, is not explained whatsoever. This is just pure political inflation is zero inflation is down like that is gaslighting to its finest. And at the very end, he's actually saying, we're actually going to print more money, which is the cause of inflation. This was actually fuels everything. Yeah. Like if if if somebody was intellectually honest with simplistic wording in and around this, you know, when they say that inflation has come down, the the correct way of saying it in layman's terms would be things are getting more expensive, but less fast than they got expensive over the past month. Like that's that's more or less or things didn't get more expensive this month. And then patting yourself on the back for that shit. Yeah. Well, the things are up like 40% like in the past two years or more and and side note, did you see that video of the dude who had the Walmart cart from two years ago saved? And it was basically like a rundown of like 40 something items that he had done for a grocery cart and he had paid it before and it was a hundred and twenty something dollars. And then there was a button that says reorder all and this was his order was from 2022 and he hit the reorder all button to see what it would cost. And it was four hundred and fourteen dollars for the same items. My God insane, but here's Biden patting himself on the back. Yo guys, don't worry in May shit didn't get more expensive for one month. Also, we've got some projects on the go that are going to require a lot more cash. Dude, that's so in its create. I'm glad that you brought that up because that means that the inflation rates that they've been giving us are bullshit, right? It's almost as if the books are cooked. Like that's so crazy, man, but we still got a lot of work to do because people are still not awake to this reality, like people are still not awakened to the reality of the scam of fiat currency. Anyways, headline news of today, of course, Julian Assange. Now, talk a little bit about this, right? There's a separation of money in state. The way that I see it, there's many more other martyrs, but I would say there's three big martyrs in Bitcoin, Julian Assange, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, their history with Bitcoin goes almost back to the inception, and I'll get more into detail of what I mean about that. But Julian Assange represents the beginning of independent journalism, and this is what you've seen rise over really since the inception of the internet, but it really started to take off, and we're really seeing it seep into mainstream now where independent journalism is actually getting more traction than legacy media. And that becomes a big issue for governments because before there was only a handful of institutions that governments would have to knock on the door and say, actually, you can't run that story. So what Julian Assange did was he obviously founded this website called WikiLeaks, which obviously leaks stuff. Now, supposedly, when you leak something, if it came from a legacy media outlet, it would be protected. It would be protected under the First Amendment, but because it came from an independent journalist, they did the same thing that they did to Ross Ulberg, and they tried to make an example out of it. I believe something is coming to a head. We're reaching a culmination point. We're reaching an inflection point because two out of the three martyrs of Bitcoin, right? And there's been many more, but I would say the three most popular ones, Julian has already been freed, so one out of three, and Ross Ulberg could potentially be free if Donald Trump gets elected. Of course, the third one is Edward Snowden. I think we're going to free him too, as our freedom movement and the Bitcoin movement gets more and more influential and more powerful. Now what did Julian Assange do? He leaked a video of an Apache gunship mowing down journalists in Iraq. Now, it's a tragic situation overall because, of course, the US military didn't want that to happen. There was a terrible situation overall, they mistaken that the journalists were holding AK-47s, or in reality, they were holding cameras. It was a horrible scene, and Julian Assange released this, and that's what journalists do. They do that so that the government is held accountable for their actions. And remember, the war in Iraq was caused by this journalist from the New York Times getting information from the intelligence agencies and actually telling the American public, selling the American public, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. So here you actually have a journalist who's actually journaling, I don't know if that's the correct word, versus the propaganda media, AKA the legacy media, and they put them into the put them in a box for it. Now I did say that Julian Assange and Bitcoin's history is intertwined, and it's super intertwined, because actually Satoshi's last post on Bitcoin talk, December 11, 2010, was it would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest and the swarm is headed towards us. He disappeared after that post. Now WikiLeaks was actually using Bitcoin to stay alive, because all the traditional financial system, they cut WikiLeaks off. Does that sound familiar? Five, ten years later, Canadian Drucker's protest, political dissidents getting their accounts hacked. So this was like the beginning of all this stuff. But back then, the mainstream wasn't awakened as it is now, right? Now people are not no longer consuming and handful of legacy media outlets. Now people are seeking their own information and consuming the content that they wish, like what we're doing right now, independent media. So Julian Assange is a martyr. Now the big news is that he got freed and checked this out. The person who paid for his private jet travel, you know, after his release, was an anonymous Bitcoin donor. I don't think it was so anonymous. Actually, this is a big coincidence. Check this out by Bitcoin Magazine. This is Jack Dorsey tweeting literally safe passage through at 4.03 PM and check this out at 4.03 PM was the anonymous $500,000 Bitcoin donation, right? So absolutely crazy. And now the last thing that I'll say is this thing was bullshit. Why do I mean that? Because he had to admit that he committed a crime. So essentially it was a struggle session. Struggle session is where like they make you admit it's very common in like a highly collectivist countries, right, where they put you in a room and they tell you you did this. You were wrong kind of like 1984 style thing. So essentially he had to admit that he committed a crime for him to be let free. I also don't think it's a coincidence that this happened because this would have never happened without the approval of the US government. If it wasn't for Donald Trump promising at the Libertarian Convention that he would free Ross Albrecht if he was elected. So I believe that the motivation behind this was also political as well. So the Biden administration could say, hey, you know what, we did something to drop Mike, right? So yeah, I'm really glad that Julian Assange was freed. This is incredible news. This is a guy who has supported, you know, not only Bitcoin, but freedom of speech transparency. So governments could be held accountable for their actions, cough, cough, the Joe Biden tweet, complete gaslighting. And this is incredibly important. I think the fight for free speech is the front line for the battle for Bitcoin. I think that if we lose a fight for free speech, if they're not okay with you speaking freely, what makes you think they're going to be okay with you transacting freely is incredibly bullish news. And of course, you see Bitcoin's fingerprints all over this story. And I think that's a representative. It's a symbolism. It's symbolism of what Bitcoin is. It's freedom money to its core. This was my heart. I really love this. It makes me so happy, you know, watching the clips of him being reunited with his family and his family have been present at, you know, the Bitcoin conferences and all of this. I was just in Prague and his sister Stella was speaking on stage about what was going on. And again, to see her, you know, documenting the entire ordeal as he left and, you know, finally got to fly out of there and fly home was incredible. You know, I was lucky enough last year, the Human Rights Foundation did a summit in Nashville in the fall. And I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with Gabriel Shipton, who is his brother as well. And yeah, just kind of just had a general conversation with him and everything and they must be so relieved, again, to like have him back home, you know, they never knew if they were ever going to actually get to see him again in person and, you know, he's got kids too. Yeah, he hasn't seen and how long. And so he's being reunited with them, you know, right now. And so it just makes me happy, the glimmers of hope that we're seeing, the possibility of Ross being freed and I hope that comes to fruition, I truly do. And if that's the trajectory that we're on and we see that happen, then I've got to believe that that Snowden could be potentially on that list too. And so I think that it's a breath of fresh air given what we've seen over the past number of years. And yeah, let's let's keep this train rolling because it's going in the right direction. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And speaking of Ross too, I mining disrupt, so Ted Cruz was doing a thing right before and I actually got to spend time with his mother and we spoke for about 35 minutes backstage and I asked her, I said, you know, like, how do you feel, right? Because the Donald Trump stuff and like I could just see the look on her face. Like it was like, you know, she was so she's like, this is like, we're almost there, right? And it was it was insane. It was surreal, right? So you know, this means that freedom is winning. This means that the Bitcoin movement continues to grow and influence. This means that the that the freedom movement continues to grow and influence. And hopefully we continue winning, man, because I think the world would be much better place with more freedom in it. Anyways, this was your simply sessions, Ben. I will literally see you in the flesh next week. And I'm excited to do this in person. I'm ready. I'm ready. Cheers. I'll talk to you soon. And, yeah. Thanks, man. All right, everybody stick around. We are going to keep going. We've, of course, got your tech updates and we're going to do another drop into the well so that you can claim more says, get those lightning wallets ready. Get ready to scan because we're going to do another drop into the Bitcoin well. But before we do, we're going to do a quick shout out to our sponsors. So we will be right back. I'm allows you to borrow against your Bitcoin in a non-custodial way. Collateral is held in a three of four distributed multi-sig with trusted parties. It provides institutional liquidity providers, loan periods of up to five years with flexible conditions and the best rates and best of all, no re-hypovocation of your funds. If you want to check them out today, head over to debified.com or hit the link in the show notes down below. All right. Let's dive into it. First side note, I'm going to bring up my screen here, by the way. We found the winner of the Sats for the first round and that went to Chris Constable, who snagged them over on X there. So good job on the quick scan, but we're going to jump over and Bitcoin well here. We're going to we're going to go ahead. We're going to redeem 500 points. I hope you have those lightning wallets ready and we'll drop a coin in the well and hopefully somebody snags those Sats. I'm going to enlarge it here. Again, if you're unfamiliar, all you need is a lightning wallet. You hit receive, you scan the QR code and you'll be able to redeem 500 Sats this time around. So get scanning. If you claim those Sats and you're in the chat, please do let us know. And if you add it, you can always shoot a thank you off to @Bitcoinwell if you're on, if you're on X and tweeting it too. But there you go, 500 Sats. If you don't, if you're not able to scan it in time, you can scrub back through the video afterwards and claim or you probably going to want to do it sooner rather than later. But nonetheless, let's dive into the tech updates. Number one, OpenSats announces long-term support for Kale and William Casarin. And this is for Keshu and for Domus and a Noster app for iPhone. And so Kale is recognized for his ongoing work with Keshu, a free and open source chamois in e-cash protocol that greatly improves user transaction privacy and efficiency. He has also been instrumental in development and maintenance of popular mint implementation, nutshell and cashew.me wallet, which supports offline e-cash transactions. The grant will support Kale in improving the Keshu protocol's robustness and performance, including introducing a fee structure to prevent denial of service tax, implementing a proof of liability scheme for auditing mints and enhancing the multi-nut payment concept. Will's prolific contributions to the Noster ecosystem highlighted by his development of Domus have advanced Bitcoin integration into social network through pioneering zaps, peer-to-peer micropayments between users or the Lightning Network added OpenSats. JB will focus on further developing NosterDB, upgrading Domus IOS, note deck and note crumbs. So congratulations to both gentlemen for the grants. Okay, so let's chat about what has been going on with Fedaments here. So there was a DNS attack on a couple different Fedaments servers. So the way this works is, effectively, it's a big, and sorry for that scrolling, Mark, he forgot to drop that there. Anyways, Fedaments is basically a big multi-sick, and you can set them up however you please. Anybody can set up a mint, and once funds are in the mint, people can transact using an e-cash system on top of it. You can also link it through Lightning and have Lightning Gateway so you can send into an out of the mint via Lightning. However, some of the key holders and some of these multi-sigs were using domains that end in rather than .com or .whatever, ai or .io or .xyz was a commonly used DNS or domain name server for Fedaments, and some of those .xyz servers were being randomly shut down or attacked or censored in some form, which caused a couple of mints to have some issues in being able to properly relay transactions. This caused mutiny wallets, so if you were using mutiny wallet and you were part of either of, I believe it was, Freedom 1 or Bitcoin principles, those two mints experienced some major outages because of this attack. Now, this tweet from the Fedament handle says, "We are implementing API endpoint rotation for the next Fedament release, which will allow bringing back guardians whose domains have been lost," so they say, go on to say, we've seen two federations recently affected by having the domains placed on server hold by the registrar, while this showcased Fedaments resilience and users did not experience downtime due to a single guardian offline, the federation's resilience was reduced. In the meantime, we advise you to avoid using .xyz domains for the Fedament guardians, their domain suspension policies are quite aggressive and random. So nonetheless, basically mutiny and those mints are functioning as expected now, there's a mitigation tool that will be in the next release, and more or less, these are early stages of a new protocol and discovering where the attack vectors are. And luckily with this one, it seems that it's been mitigated. I will say that, so mutiny got a little worried, they thought that this was going to be worse than it was, and so then they took the onboarding process, which included adding a mint if you so chose, and they buried it in the settings instead. I kind of wish they hadn't jumped the gun there and done that so quickly, and I'd love to see it back. So hopefully they changed that around and they re-add it to the onboarding process because I still do think it's very valuable to have an easy onboarding process to be able to send and receive your first couple dollars without obfuscating that option away. The whole point of having it is that ease of onboarding to test your first transactions and then move to self custody down the line. I just think that it'll be a harder flow for the average person to test their first pathway to self custody by changing that. But nonetheless, we'll see what happens either way, figured I'd fill you guys in. Now, in the same realm as that, and what I mean by that is federations and multi-sig setups as an abstraction of Bitcoin to be able to enable cheaper transactions in the in-term for smaller amounts, liquid is another thing that uses that model, that federated model in the background. However, liquid's been running for like seven years, so it's a lot more battle tested. It's not widely used, but I use it for day-to-day stuff all the time. Bull Bitcoin has integrated it. I know Bitcoin well has it as they're dropped down as soon to be added integration. And wallets like Aqua have been just super useful. Bull Bitcoin has a wallet that does the same where they do lightning and liquid swaps in the background. So you have a spending section and you can spend to either lightning or liquid independently. And it's just a singular balance. And now Blitz Wallet is another one doing the same idea. So we're beginning to see the creation of these wallets, which are using liquid as an onboarding mechanism for lightning, which is kind of cool to see. I quite enjoy it. So now you've got three options for lightning/liquid wallets that are all singular balances. Moving on. I did do a tutorial on speed wallet at the beginning of the week, so feel free to check that out. It's another lightning option for you if you're so inclined. And I'm working on Keeper. So Keeper is a multi-sig vault. It's more of a key management system. So you can create hot wallets, multiple accounts, all backed up with a single seed phrase. You can also use things like tap signer and cold card and plenty of other hardware options with it to create multi-sig vaults. They also have baked in inheritance planning, they have baked in assisted multi-sig, they have a whole bunch of different stuff. But I'm going to be doing a tutorial on that one. And I believe that will be dropping Monday, but I've been working on it throughout the week. And it's pretty cool in particular, the way that backups are done is very unique from what I've seen. Anyways, look forward to that in the coming week. And one last thing I wanted to mention here, I've been living on Bitcoin for quite some time. Chee Bear was one of the pioneers in the early days of Bitcoin for accepting Bitcoin when it came to flights and hotels. They're very early to the game. And what I'll, in terms of a tip of the hat to them, is they didn't just capitulate after a while. A lot of merchants came on and said, "Oh, yeah, we'll accept Bitcoin." And then just changed their mind later when it wasn't the cash count they thought it would be. Chee Bear, they held it down for years and years accepting Bitcoin for flights and hotels. And sadly, they put up today with a little sadness, a lot of memories and more gratitude, then we can possibly express. We've decided to stop selling tickets on Chee Bear.com so we can fully focus on our core business building travel solutions for businesses. So sadly, that option is off the market. I did ask online to see if people had other suggestions. And within a minute, I was put on to travala.com and then, of course, accept Bitcoin. So hey, if you're booking travel and you need to pay in Bitcoin, I found my option now. There's a couple others out there too. I did a search and I found a few, which is pretty cool. So thanks, travala. I'll be trying you out in the near future. Anyways, rounding out here, as Niko was saying, he's going to be in Calgary very shortly for the Bitcoin rodeo. I'm so excited you guys. You have no idea. It's going to be so fun to have people coming to my home down here in Calgary. We have JPCers. He was on Why Are We Bullish last week. And we are very excited to have him as well as all of the other guests. So we've got all kinds of great people coming out pressed and of course, Niko will be here. This is Poulia, Dave Bradley, Madex, JP, as I mentioned, Graham Wardle, Harry Suttick, Adam O'Brien, Scott Diedles, Steve Barber, Colin Sullivan, Brad Mills, Flo from Love Is Bitcoin, Ben Harper, Dale from QuickBit, C-funk, Derek Fildebrandt, Simon Raven, Noah Kramer. Yellow is going to be partaking in the roast of me, which should be good. BJ Dictor, Seb Bunny, Brett Oland, Dave Harvin, Sebastian Elani. It's going to be a lot of fun. So if you're in the Calgary area, if you have not grabbed tickets yet, head over to bitcoinrodeo.com. The code BDC sessions will get you a nice discount there. And of course, if you're in town a day early, come to the sat market. It's going to be a blast. By the way, on the Bitcoin rodeo website, we scroll down a little bit, the sat market, the meetup info is right there. You can click. It'll take you to the meetup page and you can say that you are coming. We've got a ton of vendors partaking. It's going to be at the Deerfoot Inn and Casino on July 1st from 9am to 3pm. Make sure you follow the handle, by the way, at BTC sat market. And we'll add a nostra handle and then pub pretty soon as well. But yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. I just really can't wait. It's super exciting for me. And in terms of other events, the next Bitcoin event I'm going to be hitting is Baltic Honey Badger. And five years, I was there in 2019, heading back. Very excited for it. It's going to be a lot of fun. August 24th and 5th, they also have Nostriga heading it up just two days before that, which should also be a blast. I'm going to try and be present at that as well. But yeah, this conference, I have fond, fond memories of Baltic Honey Badger in 2019. So I really can't wait to be back. There's going to be a lot of great people there. But if you're in the area, if you're in Europe and you want to hit it up, head over to baldaconeybadger.com and you can again use code BTC Sessions for a discount on your tickets as well. And I hope I'll see you there. And with that, I'm going to start rounding this out. Of course, if you're checking out the channel, you've been sorting through the tutorials, need a little bit of extra hand holding. Be sure to head up my team over at bitcoinmentor.io, they can help you through with anything you need, whether it just be key management, learning hardware, multi-sig, running a node. Whatever it may be, you can reach out to them and they'll help you. And if you're a Bitcoin, you've been around for a while and you've just kind of become a Bitcoin Luddite, maybe you're set in your ways and you're too afraid to ask, I've encountered a few people where they kind of just get stuck in their ways and they're afraid to level up and move on and try new things. I mean, this can be a good way to do it. Of course, I have tons of free material on the channel. I encourage you to play and learn, but if you need a little bit of extra hand holding, these guys at bitcoinmentor will absolutely nail it and they will help you through with all your questions, anything that you need. So please do reach out. Anyways, guys, with that, I'm going to round it out. Thank you guys so much for being here. Don't forget to hit us up tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. Why are we bullish? A little bit of an announcement on that one as well, so that one should be fun. So make sure you join in for the show tomorrow. It's going to be a lot of fun and like, subscribe, share, all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. Have a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for your simply session. the next video. Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]