Educational videos are a great resource for learning about Bitcoin tools and how to use them. BTC Sessions has made it his mission to make helpful videos.
This is a transcribed version of the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast, hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by BTC Sessions to talk about his process of making educational Bitcoin content.
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Transcript
[00:00:06] Q: I’m very, very excited to introduce none other than BTC Sessions, who has his own YouTube channel. Many of you who are familiar with him, myself included, consider him probably my favorite teacher in the Bitcoin space. And I’m truly honored that you are taking the time to grace us with your presence, man. How are you doing, dude? [00:00:24] BTC Sessions: I’m great. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me always love chatting with you and P and and shouted out to CK who is just on that dude is a legend. Love him. And yeah, man having, having a good time having a good summer [00:00:39] Q: love. Yeah, bet. So we wanted to really talk to you.I mean, you are best known for running, you know, the BTC sessions, YouTube channel, which I had a, a moment of the weekend where it kind of clicked in my head. It’s like, oh, sessions, like, you know, class for BTC classes. Okay. Got it. Got it. Yes. I only just had this realization like three days ago, so, but like, let’s talk a little bit about first.
Like what inspired you to really go down this path? I know you very famously talk about how, like you were offered a few Bitcoin to live off of in 2013, I believe. Kind of regretted actually spending that Bitcoin now, but like what really sets you on this path to be the resident teacher in the Bitcoin space?
[00:01:24] BTC Sessions: So I think it kind of came from a place of necessity for myself in terms of. When I started learning about Bitcoin, I I’m a pretty visual learner. So I was looking, I was actively searching for visual guides of how to do stuff and I could not find any, just really there, you know, in and around 2014, there just wasn’t a whole lot that could help me through some of the stuff that I needed to do.It would often be like, yo, go to this message board. And there’s some comments halfway down that kind of explain, or, or here’s like go to the GitHub. And there’s, there’s an explanation there. And just stuff that I, I, I found more difficult to parse through. If I was lucky enough to find something that had screenshots and examples it was better, but more or less, I, I, I ended up spending two years.
Kind of trying to parse through everything, myself in, in a variety of different aspects. And once I got comfortable with it, I figured I just make the thing that I had been looking for so that I could at least help a few people avoid having to dig as deeply as I did for all of that type of stuff.
And so I, I started in 2016, I started the channel actually just hit the six year birthday of the channel this past month. So yeah, so it’s heck guess congrats brother. Thanks man. Yeah. So it’s been going for six years, but uh, yeah, I started doing, you know, I figured I’d just do a video once a week on whatever I felt like covering.
And then I didn’t stop and I increased the frequency of videos. So here we are six years later. what was the first video? The first video, the very first one, other than like an initial intro of what the channel was gonna. I believe was either like a basic Bitcoin mobile wallet. And I can’t recall which it might have been copay, which was like a, a BitPay multisig mobile wallet that could also be single SIG or it might have been a Bitcoin ATM how to use one.
Those were two of the first videos that I ever did I’ve since, you know, migrated to plenty of other options. But yeah, those, those would’ve been the first couple.
[00:03:48] Q: So let’s, let’s talk a little bit because I think what you have. Afforded people, the opportunity to have, if they go out and seek it is, you know, we talk a lot about self custody. This is self education. You talk about how you went down this rabbit hole, it was painful and you didn’t want other people to kind of go through that.I feel like, you know, there are a lot of channels that have now since practically replicated what you try to do. Mm-hmm how, how important is self education on this path of self sovereignty?
[00:04:22] BTC Sessions: I think it’s so important because, I mean, you don’t know what you don’t know. Right? And, and so many people, they, they put off the personal responsibility of gaining that knowledge and they just defer to somebody else there.So much of, of what Bitcoin was built for people completely ignored by, by sinking some money into an exchange and leaving. Which is like the worst thing you could do. It’s the antithesis of what Bitcoin was built for. And the only way to get around that is to start learning and, and take that first step.
I know it’s it can be scary, but you, you can, you can start learning and taking those first steps yourself now, or potentially learn a very expensive lesson later on down the line, as we’ve seen in droves, not just this year, but over the past decade, it’s littered with examples and stories of people who thought their money was safe with other people.
And just to realize that no, it’s gonna be frozen. No, they’re in solvent. No, it was a rug. Pull it, you know, name it. You got it. It’s all happened before and that’s why self custody. It’s, it’s kind of a, it it’s. Completely inverse to what we’ve learned through our entire lives of, oh, put your money in the bank.
It’s the safest place for it. And in Fiat world that, that’s just what we learned, but and it seems counterintuitive, but the way that Bitcoin is designed, it’s, it’s as difficult to try and get the keys of an, an individual across the world, as it is to try and get the keys or, or hack an exchange, the amount of effort put forth is similar.
And so, when you’ve got a honey pot of everyone’s money, that’s much more of a target on your back than self sovereignty and holding your own keys. So, yeah,
[00:06:25] Q: but you do a lot more than just, you know, self sovereignty. What are, what are sort of the themes that you like to explore and what are. Across the spectrum.Like what are other than just custody other than setting up your wallets? Yeah.
[00:06:40] BTC Sessions: I mean, I think other than the, the nitty gritty of just, how do I get a wallet? How do I secure my coins? I like diving into, and I mean, this is still kind of down the vein of tutorials, but the idea of running a Bitcoin node of don’t trust, verify of being able to host an entire copy of the Bitcoin blockchain, all of the history of transactions that have ever existed and the rules that govern the network and making yourself.Resistant to someone trying to co-op the network. I think that’s an important one. And that’s one that became particularly important to me in 2017, watching the block size wars and watching a large number of you know, 80% of the hash rate. And, you know, some of the top companies like 50 of the top companies in the space, I’ll say, we’re gonna change the Bitcoin, change the Bitcoin protocol and install our own devs.
And to see that fail in particular because people said, nah, we’re gonna run our own notes. I think that’s a, that’s a huge win for Bitcoin. And I think it’s important that people learn that and learn how to partake in that. If they see fit, not everybody has to run a node, but I think it’s very important that they can if they choose to.
So trying to put forth stuff like that. Trying to show different privacy tools that people can use and, and not have people be frightened of them. You know, that’s, that’s been part of my journey, especially this year, kind of learning more in the privacy realm. And then again, kind of a separation of money and state I think is very important.
And having censorship resistant money is incredibly important, which obviously you guys have been touching on at Bitcoin magazine with this last issue drop. So yeah, those are kind of the key tenants that I, I, I gravitate towards. I love it. Hmm.
[00:08:39] P: The, I, I wanna ask you about just the, the specific process you go through.I’m so curious because your videos are so comprehensive and they’re, you know, you go through and you edit them. How long does it take you from. You know, idea to shooting, to releasing a video in terms of all the steps that that are required.
[00:08:56] BTC Sessions: Yeah. So it, it depends on what I’m doing. So the, the tutorials can vary.I’ve, I’ve kind of fallen into a schedule where, you know, I do a couple live videos every week. So I do a, a, a Thursday news show, just kind of recapping what happened over the past week. I do a Friday panel show called why are we bullish? Where people come on with different topics that they’re excited about in Bitcoin currently.
And those ones, you know, it’s just kind of prepped through the day, do the live show and that’s it. So they they’re just encapsulated in a single day, but the tutorials really can. Really can vary depending on what I’m covering. So, if it’s a simple wallet tutorial or something like that, my, my flow will typically be, you know, I’ll tinker with it a little bit.
Kind of learn my way around the app. Then I’ll, I’ll write a flow of, okay, what am I gonna cover first, all the way through. So set up and so on and so forth. Give myself jot notes, and then I’ll just start recording bit by bit, you know, intro prerequisite, prerequisites. You may need set up all that kind of stuff.
I’ll go through it, all, edit it all together. You gotta do thumbnails. You gotta do descriptions. You gotta upload it and share it and do all of that stuff. If it’s a simple topic, I can get one of those out in a single day. If it’s a more complicated topic. So one of the more recent ones that I did is I wanted to do the most in depth tutorial on the cold card wallet that I possibly could do that anybody has put on the internet so far.
So NK, MK four, right? Yes. On the MK four. Yeah. So that one, it took me a day of experimenting with all of the features. I was already familiar with how a cold card works, obviously, cuz I use it a lot, but a lot of the advanced features I just hadn’t tinkered with yet. So it was like a day of messing around with that followed by a day of just shooting all of the different pieces and that flowed into another day of finishing that up, editing it all together and getting it online.
So that was a full three days and like long days. Eight hours by like, you know, it was getting into the evening and my wife was like, it’s dinner and I have children that I need help with. And , I was like, I’m so sorry. I just, this one you’re not too bad. Yeah. This, this one’s a tough one. so, yeah, so I mean, she’s very forgiving when, when I get into something that’s a little bit more in depth and it takes a little bit more time, but yeah, that was, you know, there were like 10, 12 hour days in there for three days straight to get that one out.
So, yeah, it, it varies, but that’s why I kind of have that flex room in there Monday through Wednesday is like somewhere in there, tutorials getting done. It’s just a question of how long that takes. I love it.
[00:11:45] P: What is your your favorite feature of the new cold card? I have not had the privilege of playing around with [00:11:49] BTC Sessions: one.Ooh. Okay. So, there’s a number of things. So the virtual disc thing is pretty cool. So I didn’t understand what that even did. So virtual disc mode, typically when you are using your cold card you’re air gaping it. So meaning you don’t plug it into your computer or phone or anything, it’s all, you just power it separately.
And then you have your whatever third party interface you’re using. So in my case, spar wallet on your desktop, you set up the transaction there, you save it to an SD card, put in the cold card to approve it, and then bring it back, signed to broadcast it with the virtual disc mode. You basically have a mini disk on.
The cold card itself. So it, it loads up as if it was, was a thumb drive. So you can plug it into your computer, not as secure as fully air gaping it. However you use the virtual disc to bring over the data from the transactions. And this is different from having Sparrow or whatever wallet you are using, actually interface with the cold card.
Cause when you do that, when you just plug it in and you say that you wanna send it with Sparrow and then you approve it on the cold card and it just it’s communicating with the wallet. What you’re technically doing is you’re giving that wallet control over the device, which you don’t know exactly how it’s going to do that.
Yeah. Whereas with this, you’re actually, you’re still doing the same flow that I described with air gaping and you’re pulling it onto that virtual disc, approving it, pulling the sign, transaction off and uploading it. So I think that’s a really cool thing. NFC is in the process of being added to blue wallet.
So that’s gonna be huge. I’m gonna be very excited to play with that, but it’s not out yet. So video incoming, whenever that drops, but then other stuff like the, the, the trick pins on it. So anybody’s played with a cold card before you could have like a duress pin or a brick me pin. So you’d put in a pin and it would kill the whole device kind of thing.
As a security mechanism, the way they’ve done it with the mark four is. You get the versatility of saying, if this pin is entered, then this behavior will happen and you can customize that. However you want. If this pin is put in, I’ll go to my duress wallet with a decoy amount of money. If this pin is put in, I will wipe the seed.
If this pin is put in, the device gets bricked. If this pin is put in the device will freeze for one hour so you can really customize it to do whatever the hell you want it to do, which is amazing versatility. That’s awesome,
[00:14:38] P: man. I, yeah, I can’t wait to get one. still stuck with my MK three. [00:14:42] BTC Sessions: It still works fine though.The MK three for sure has all of, you know, the, like they’re adding in a lot of those pin features to the MK three and, and it’s, they’re more or less there. Flow is a little bit different, but I just did a workshop in Vancouver on the cold card and some had the four and some had of the three. And more or less they could do all the same things.
The main differences were the virtual disc and NFC of which we, I mentioned, but we didn’t fully cover. We mostly got the basics of how to use it. And it’s still MK three holds up big time. I do love the
[00:15:17] P: virtual disc functionality. I didn’t even realize that was a feature. That sounds extremely [00:15:21] BTC Sessions: handy. Yeah.Yeah. Yeah. I love it.
[00:15:25] P: Q it looked like you were about to say something at some point during the no. Okay. [00:15:28] BTC Sessions: So [00:15:30] P: one thing that I’m curious about as well is how has the progression of your, your tutorials gone over time? Like, what are things, what are sort of the biggest step improvements that you feel like you made over the course of your, your show?Because frankly I haven’t watched your earliest ones, but I feel like it was just like you came outta the gate and it was like high quality, high
[00:15:49] BTC Sessions: value stuff. well, I appreciate that, but that definitely wasn’t the case. [00:15:54] P: so you’re [00:15:54] BTC Sessions: calling me a liar. I see how, yes, I’m saying you’re a dog faced PO what’s what’s the what’s the quote, pony faced or faced liar or something like that.I don’t even know whatever, whatever it was. Anyways okay. So I’d say it took me a lot longer to get my tutorials out back then. I also wasn’t as clear in a lot of my messaging. I think one issue that I’ve had over time is you do so many of these things that you get a little bit into the habit of glossing over things that I used to clarify every single time.
So like, oh, this, you know, write down your backup and somebody would be like, what’s backup. Why do I need to write it down? Why is that important? What are these words? Like all of those little things where if it’s a, a basic wallet tutorial, then you gotta go back and be like, Who’s likely watching this and still throw it in just in case.
Regardless. I think the way in which I film, you know, like being able to have like screen shares and multiple screens and everything, the editing process is a lot easier. It’s, it’s mostly efficiency on the back end of what I’m actually doing and how quickly I can put things together. But the other main benefit is with six years of tutorials sitting there, I can be like, Hey, if you’re dealing with this, if you are using this particular tutorial, here’s some prerequisites that you’re gonna wanna know and I’ve got videos for all of those.
And so if you, rather than starting here, if you’re confused about the following concepts, go to these other videos linked down below first and then come back here. And that’s just something that you can’t do. When you start a channel very difficult. Whereas now I can be like, Hey, I have all of the other steps that you need to get to where this video is starting from.
So go there first.
[00:17:49] Q: I [00:17:49] P: was saying, I mean, you, you could, you could just like make stuff up. You could just be like, oh yeah, go check out this awesome video I did. And then just, there’s no link to it ever didn’t exist. [00:17:56] BTC Sessions: yeah. Yeah. I’ll try not to do that. Some sometimes though, I’ve I’ve said, oh link to this is down below. Go, go check out that other video.And then the comments are like, where, where is it? So yeah, people have to do some manual searching, but it’s always there somewhere. Very cool.
[00:18:14] P: I had another, another great question. I was gonna ask you it’s gone like tears in the rain.Oh, I know what it was. What, so what are some of, this is the question I like asking, but what are some of the technologies that you were most excited about or yeah, things that are being developed in Bitcoin
[00:18:26] BTC Sessions: right now?I think so I’ve been interested in a lot of the privacy stuff lately, I think. And I’ve said this to a few people, but I’m kind of viewing privacy the way that we viewed scaling back in early 2017. But I think we’re better off than we were for privacy now versus for scaling in 2017. And what I mean by that is beginning of 2017 scaling and transactions per second were like top of mind for everyone.
You know, how are we gonna scale this thing? How are people gonna use it without fees getting insane? So, and so forth. We had nothing yet by. Now five years later, we scaled on chain. So we got S there’s a, a whole bunch of other efficiencies that are on chain as well, when it comes to things like tap route and soon, eventually snore signatures, all that kind of stuff that basically, and not to mention people just using Bitcoin more efficiently, all of the exchanges are batching transactions now, so on and so forth.
So we’ve scaled massively on the base layer. But beyond that, we have the lightning network, which literally did not exist at that point in time. And now I, I use lightning daily on top of that. It’s very easy for anybody to onboard to lightning now, like literally download moon wallet, send a regular Bitcoin transaction to it.
Congratulations. You can now use all those funds on the lightning network. And so moon is M U U N by the way. If you’re looking for it now, gotta say it every time. Yeah. Gotta say it. But I think that the amount of innovation that we saw on scaling when it was top of mind, as of 2017 to now is going to be happening in and around privacy because it’s top of mind for so many people now is privacy.
And I think that we’re in a much better place because we already have so many privacy tools available. Now, is it the easiest thing to utilize those privacy tools? Not necessarily, but there’s a plethora of them out there. and they’re only gonna improve from here. So, you know, you’ve got, you can do coin joints, right?
Spar wallet, has it all built in, you can coin join X number of rounds and then mix directly into your hardware wallet for safekeeping. That’s amazing. You’ve got you know, much better default privacy guarantees on lightning, not perfect, but definitely way better. And so you can enjoy a reasonable amount of privacy just using lightning transactions.
So I definitely know that from experience beyond that and beyond that. Yeah. Cryptic you know, and then, and then, and it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but you have side chains, things like liquid network where they have confidential transactions, which shields, not only the amount being sent, but the asset being dealt with.
So all you see is that a transaction to place and that’s it. There’s plenty of cool things. There’s also oh, now I’m forgetting the name of it. There’s something called mercury wallet and it uses, oh, why am I forgetting it now? I’m literally gonna look it up right now. It uses what is known as state chains.
There we go. Oh yeah. And that’s basically trading UT XOs with people basically trading the keys to UT XOs without the ability of somebody to spend using your key once they get it. There’s, there’s some stuff going on in the background there, but basically there’s no indication that any transaction has taken place in the blockchain, but you now own different.
And you can do this right now, so you can download mercury wallet and, and start using state chains right now. And it’s for specific denominated amounts. So you’d have like a million SATs or something and you effectively trade the keys to those SATs with somebody else. And and then you go off on your Merry way, withdraw it to a, another wallet.
And now you have an entirely different UT XO, and nobody even knew that that transaction took place. So amazing things being done. And I can only imagine five years from now how much cool stuff there’s gonna be. Yeah.
[00:22:32] P: Yeah. State change are very cool. Mercury wall is, is awesome. I’m also excited about ment and you know, we’ve been talking about that a lot lately with the the news that just came out, but super excited to see where that goes.And I think it’s gonna be a game changer in terms of helping people in In less affluent areas. Mm-hmm who are not exposed to Bitcoin or don’t, don’t have the time to really sink their teeth into it, to be able to offload some of that onto, you know, a trusted group of guardians that already exist.
People, you already trust whether it’s your community leaders or, you know, members of your church or, or your, whatever it is. I think that’s
[00:23:03] BTC Sessions: a really cool innovation and, and I have to dive deeper into ments. I’ve just, I I’ve just kind of had a cursory like, Hey, this is more or less how they function, but I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta go read the documentation and, and get deeper down.But this is what I mean, like th this is kind of information it’s kind of been chow. Ch Miz has been a thing that’s been around for a while, but has been front of mine for a lot of people. And so now I see lots of information about this dropping and. Again, just a, another, another tool in the Bitcoin tool belt and, and people will have different risk profiles for different things and, and different preferences.
But the fact that we have options out there is incredible. Yeah.
[00:23:46] P: And just for the audience, what we’re talking about is ment, which is the same thing as, and an abbreviation for federated Chey and Mintz OBSU and Eric Syrian, and Justin Moon also just launched a company called fedi, which is building out a wallet that focuses on this.So there’s, there’s some great coverage out. There’s written a couple articles for Bitcoin magazine. I think there’s two that came out or there’s one that just came out yesterday. So, I’ll put that link in the chat again, and you guys can check it out.
Ben, I, I. I I saw you at Bitcoin 2021. And you had like something covering your hair because I feel like, and I think we talked about it at one point you were like, yeah, brother’s hair. I mean, it looks fly as fuck, but it is a liability because I can’t go anywhere without people being like, yo it’s Ben.
And I can only imagine, like, what happens like, cuz you could never change your hairstyle at this point, right? Like
[00:24:39] BTC Sessions: yeah. It’s, it’s locked in. It’s locked in. This is yeah. You know, it’s, there’s a time lock on it. And it expires when I disappear from Bitcoin [00:24:47] Q: bro. I feel you on that though. Like I, yeah.You, on that,
[00:24:52] BTC Sessions: you, you would be very easily identifiable in a crowd as well. I, I, I think there’s a, a handful of people that experience that, that, so [00:25:01] Q: only on the topic of hair and we’ll keep this super brief, but this hair is like new thing for me. This is like a year old top. So like when I go to people from my past lives, They do not recognize me.And honestly, I fucking
[00:25:14] BTC Sessions: love it. it is great. It’s it’s funny. Yeah. Pete, you, you’re saying that you saw me like cover my typically I, I don’t, I don’t care cuz it’s, it’s amazing when somebody comes up and they’re like, yo, I use that tutorial and I’m running a node now that’s some of the most flattering stuff I’ve ever encountered and that’s, it’s incredible.The, me ever, the only time I’ve ever like put something on my head is when I had to get from one place to another very, very quickly for something important. that’s exactly
[00:25:48] P: what it was by the way you, you came, you be lined like straight for the bar to get like a bottle of water or something. And then you like went straight back.I think it was to like the, you know, like the the Swan do at that point to like, I think you were recording a podcast or something, but it was, I saw you and I was like, oh, and I was like, nah, nah, he’s, he’s a man of the mission. Yeah. I also feel like it’s like a, you know, like an. In movies where somebody like they’re a superhero, they like put the the little mask on and nobody recognizes them, you know, or they take, you know, Superman takes the glasses off.
I feel like it’s the same thing. You could take your hair off and you just be like, immediately completely
[00:26:17] BTC Sessions: anonymous. Dude. It worked, it worked even at Bitcoin 2022, there was a couple buddies of mine down and we’re like, okay, well, at one point we’re gonna have lunch. And then I met up with them in the Concourse there and we’re like, okay, let’s go to, let’s go to the, the, I can’t remember what’s called, but yeah, we’re gonna go up to the place.We’re gonna grab some food. And it’s a long, you know, it’s a big venue. So it was a long walk and we’re stopping like every minute minute and a half. And my friend was like, dude, just put that shit on your head and we’ll walk. So I literally just put I took, like, I went to a, one of the booths and asked for a free shirt.
Of whatever vendor it was. And I just wrapped it over my head and then we made it there in record time. It was great. That man yeah. Yeah. I was surprised cuz I was like, no way. This is actually gonna end. Yeah, no it’s without, without the beacon going it appears that I can move freely. So again, when, when I eventually fade into the background, when when Bitcoin education is no longer needed I can just buzz, buzz my head and nobody will ever recognize me again.
It’s a gift. It’s a
[00:27:27] P: curse. Q it’s a question. I know you love to ask everyone, [00:27:33] Q: go for it. Thank you. So Ben or BTC, you do an incredible credible job of, you know, teaching people how to really understand and use Bitcoin. I, however. I’m curious what your opinion is on the idea of the 80 20 principle, as it relates to Bitcoin and its understandings today.Most people couldn’t tell you how, when they start their car or flip a light switch, how that actually is what the process behind that is doing. Is there a point when we reach a hyperized world where not everyone is going to both know and understand Bitcoin, nor will it be necessary? Is that a realistic outcome in your opinion?
Or is that actually a dangerous outcome?
[00:28:19] BTC Sessions: I think that’s an eventuality, right? Like you’re gonna get to the point where people obviously do not understand the underlying infrastructure. That’s already largely the case. Somebody can, somebody can go to an exchange, buy some Bitcoin. And if they’re, if they’re actually self custodying, they can download a wallet back it up and.No problem. They don’t need to understand what’s actually happening there. They they’ve taken self custody. They’re, they’re totally fine. I think it’s important that you know, a critical mass of people have an understanding of the infrastructure. And I like this kind of hard line, you know, maximally self sovereign group of people that keep on pushing for everyone to step outside their comfort zone towards that end.
I think that’s gonna continue to be needed. And the most important part again, is that it’s always accessible to all. If someone chooses to do it, I love the development in and around easy plug and play nodes. I think that’s super important now. Can that be if everybody runs the exact same implementation, can that be a liability?
Absolutely, but it beats nobody running nodes in the first place. So I, I think that what you’re getting at is as, as more and more of the world uses Bitcoin, there’s a number of things and a, a number of services that by design become obsolete in their very nature exchanges is one of them, right? In, in a world where Bitcoin is the currency.
Why do you need an exchange to get out of dollars? I mean, I, I already don’t technically need an exchange to get Bitcoin. I earn Bitcoin that as, as a living. And so that for me, that on ramp. OnRamp companies are already obsolete in a sense. Now I still need the offramp in, in companies that bridge the gap so that I can pay bills where I can’t pay Bitcoin directly, so on and so forth, but more and more of those things are going to go away.
And people won’t necessarily understand what’s going on in the background much. Like they didn’t understand what was going on in the background when we changed from phones via phone lines and switchboards to VoIP, right? Like nobody really understood what happened in the background. All of a sudden their phone calls just got a lot better quality and a lot cheaper.
And so I think that’s kind of the direction we’ll head with Bitcoin less and less people will understand exactly what’s going on, but my hope is that they will understand why it’s better money and hopefully they’ll understand why it succeeded. Historically versus gold or at least like a, a core group of people educating people on money will be able to explain like, Hey, we, we had a pretty good sound money before, but it failed because of its physicality, which led to centralization of ownership and easy confiscation.
I hope that that becomes a mainstay of financial education in the future. And I, I think it’s starting to be so, but we will see as long as long as that message get gets through, I think will be okay.
[00:31:40] Q: I, I won’t lie. I was looking at other tabs. Sorry. All good. I, I like this idea though. While, no, they won’t understand Bitcoin and the technology behind it because there’ll be so many offerings to make the user experience easier. There is maybe with a little bit of hope you have injected this necessity to understand why at least Bitcoin is better than the Fiat we have or the gold we have.What would be your just obviously we’ve, we’ve all we all have sort of our go to, I like to call my six Pokemon to pull out of my little satchel. Anytime I talk about Bitcoin to a non Bitcoin or what are some of the, your go to quick hit arguments to why Bitcoin versus anything else?
[00:32:27] BTC Sessions: Are you, are you talking about Fiat or are you talking about okay, [00:32:32] Q: sorry.I’ll I’ll, I’ll make it. I’ll actually separate it out. What is your go-to for Bitcoin versus Fiat Bitcoin versus gold Bitcoin versus any Bitcoin?
[00:32:41] BTC Sessions: Yeah. Okay. All right. So I mean, verse Fiat, simple question. Well, how many, how many dollars exist? How many dollars will exist next year? How many dollars will exist in tens?Do you have a say in that. Do you actually hold your money? Probably not. It’s probably in a bank account. What happens if the bank account tells you, you can’t have it anymore? What kind of recourse do you have? All those types of arguments are pretty simple. And I mean, again, Canada leading example, this year of people that were doing something legal until it was deemed not at the drop of a hat and all of a sudden found that legacy finance had failed them because they didn’t have access to their money.
And you can see this in, you know, name, your political dissident situation, anywhere in the globe. And, and you’ll see parts of that. You can also point to hyper inflation. You can point to the fact that humans are notoriously bad. When, when showing. The opportunity to print more money, they’re going to do it.
They’re going to debate the currency, even if they don’t do it with malice and mind, it ends up not helping people. So there’s that Bitcoin versus gold kind of what I alluded to earlier, the physicality of it was its Achilles heel, right? It, it resulted in deferring to custodians. It was difficult to transport over long distances yet held its value over long periods of time.
But the distance thing resulted in needing to create needing to create kind of derivative money paper that you would move around that represented bits of gold, so on and so forth. So the visibility thing was a little bit more difficult. And in the end, when you create a, a, a money on gold that is linked to gold, that link can be broken because it’s not, it’s, it’s not an imutable link.
So when you know, somebody like Peter Schiff says, well, if we had a, a crypto that was linked to gold, it’s, it’s a terrible idea because dude, you just watch that play out in 1971. And that’s exactly how it would play out again. So, yeah. When it comes to Bitcoin versus all other coins, Bitcoin had such a unique early stage because nobody really understood that value could even be had there.
And because of that, it was given free reign to grow that first few years, uncorrupted And that’s something that hasn’t really been afforded to others. And at this point, the, the ability to change the base protocol of Bitcoin in a non backwards compatible way is more or less out the window, unless it was like a zero day.
Everybody get on board and change this now, or the whole project is dead. If you wanna put in arbitrary changes to Bitcoin , it’s very difficult to get consensus on that. And that’s the feature that we want because we want to be sure that our money is sound that it’s imutable, that it’s censorship resistant.
And when you can willy-nilly change things, then it, those promises of a sound censorship resistant, global mutable money are called into question. And so, yeah, I mean, that’s my, that’s my quick run through. All, all of all shit coins everywhere. I kind of view it as you know, gold was, would’ve been good if it wasn’t for the transferability and the visibility thing over large large spaces.
But I mean, Fiat is one entity can print money. Crypto is everyone can print money. Bitcoin is no one can print money.
[00:36:28] Q: I like that. I like that. And then, sowhat happens when someone says to you something to the vein of, well, it just doesn’t matter. I don’t, I don’t care to learn it is it are these, the lost souls that will be forgotten in. Bitcoin standard future or are these the people we actually have to spend a little extra time helping to drag out?
[00:36:56] BTC Sessions: I don’t, I don’t think they’ll be forever lost souls. They’ll be, they’ll be the last holdouts will be the ones that are hurt most immeasurably by it because they’ll be the ones clinging to alternatives that don’t protect their wealth and their, their self sovereignty. But eventually out of necessity, they’ll, they’ll have to use something like Bitcoin in a hyper Bitcoin eyes world.And as soon as they start doing that, they will benefit. They’ll just benefit less than people who are earlier benefited before them, but as soon as they get on that standard and they start earning Bitcoin for a living and saving, it changes their habits. It changes the way they look at the world. And every set that they earn and save will always represent the same percentage of the monetary base.
Moving forward in perpetuity. There’s no de basing it. If you save a hundred sets, then that will be the same percentage of all Bitcoin forever. So I think, I think that’s incredible. And whereas nowadays, if your bank account showed your percentage of total dollars, that number will continue to go down in perpetuity unless you’re, you know, a, a Cantillon there and you’re able to be closest to the money spigot.
That’s, that’s pretty much how it goes nowadays.
[00:38:18] Q: Oh, I really hope they’re not lost souls. [00:38:24] BTC Sessions: they’ll be alright. Like again, in the end, once, once they’re on that Bitcoin standard, they’ll begin to benefit. I think. Yeah, there can be a lot of pain in between there though. [00:38:35] Q: So how much do you, like when people say it’s impossible for everyone to run a note in their home?Do you just send them one of your videos with, with a little note saying at one point, someone also said it was gonna be impossible for everyone to have a phone in their own home.
[00:38:52] BTC Sessions: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s definitely not impossible. Right? It’s it’s there’s parts of the world. Yes. Where it’s, it would be incredibly difficult to run a node when it comes to connectivity and all that kind of stuff.Or just cost of hardware. If you wanna run a dedicated machine or based on where you are But it’s not everybody has to run a node. It’s just important that they have the option. So you may see instances where there’s a node being run for a community and people can point their wallets toward that particular node if they want to.
And, and beyond that, like the, the cost of hardware is coming down, the bandwidth issues are becoming a thing of the past. It’s getting to the point now where I’m not sure how many hun hundreds of gigabytes, the Bitcoin blockchain is, but like you’re getting thumb drives, not thumb drives, but like micro SD cards that are like four terabytes.
Right? So, so it’s, it’s going to become less expensive to run a node if you choose to over time. And eventually it’ll probably be pretty feasible to have one on a phone, like my phone right now. Is 128 gigabytes, and there’s definitely phones that have more space than that. And you can add in SD cards to them that are whatever size you please.
So, yeah, like it’s, it’s becoming more and more feasible that you’ll be able to run a Bitcoin node on the fly. And I mean, that’s inherent to Bitcoin’s design. That’s why there’s been this kind of guarding of the block size limit of trying to limit the amount of data that’s being parsed every 10 minutes.
Because if you kind of leave that door wide open, then it can be come prohibitively expensive, either technologically or actually. Monetarily to run and maintain a node. And we’ve, we’ve seen the perfect example is Bitcoin SV, cuz even exchanges that hosted and like bought and sold Bitcoin SV are like, we can’t do this anymore.
We can’t even run the node dude. Like it’s like terabytes and terabytes of data of just like spam transactions to be like, look how many transactions we can do. So it’s, it’s a losing battle and they’ve kind of proven that just in trying to show how much they can scale, they’ve shown how impossible it is to scale in that manner.
So yeah,
[00:41:20] Q: this will be fun. This will be a really fun battle to hyper colonization. What does that mean to you though? Like what does a hyperized world look like? What does hyper colonization mean? [00:41:34] BTC Sessions: I think it’s just when we get to a place where. N mass people are deciding to use Bitcoin over their local currency. I think there will be some pain in the interim when that happens, right.An entire world running for the exit. That’s not a clean transition. I don’t, I’m not sure exactly how in, in a world where that plays out, how it plays out, because I’d like to hope there’s some semblance of an orderly transition where not too many people get hurt. And perhaps that could be mildly achieved.
By countries beginning to use it as a reserve assets backing their currencies. So and so forth. Maybe that could be a, an instance where that happens. But I think it’s gonna be a little bit more of a quick, like, oh my God, you know, big, more and more countries are, are using as a reserve asset. More and more people don’t want to hold dollars and Lira and whatever other currencies.
And so they’re dumping them. I think there’d be some, some degree of chaos in four X markets and things like that. But once that transition transition is complete, while things become infinitely better, in my opinion you know, people can simply learn a skill and capitalize on it and earn from it and they don’t have to become a professional investor.
They can simply earn and save. Like magic, their money will still work and continue to work and preserve its value into retirement and likely appreciate in value depending on population and, and human ingenuity. It’s very likely that your savings will just have a gradual deflation to them. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.
In terms of what infrastructure and stuff like that looks like, I think there’ll be there’ll still be services in and around Bitcoin and, and like quote unquote, traditional finance, those types of things, like in terms of loans and people are gonna wanna start businesses and take loans. But I think what ends up happening there as we’ve seen there, you, you can’t, you can’t print away the risk with Bitcoin.
And so that makes people look at risk very differently. You know, am I gonna lend my Bitcoin to somebody for a few percent? With, with risk of a, a total loss? No. More likely it’ll be people that have direct relationships with people that are creating businesses that say like, Hey, you know, I, I think you have a good business there.
Maybe I wanna have a part of it. And you know, I’ll, I’ll extend a loan that way, but I think risk is gonna be completely repriced in a Bitcoin only world. And people will still invest in things, but it will just be a much more calculated decision. That’s not gonna be people saying, well, gee, I get my paycheck.
And I know for a fact, I can’t just save that. So I guess I’ll toss it into. Whatever fund my banker tells me to, I have no idea what I own, not a clue, what companies or funds or whatever are in this shit mix that I have in my portfolio. I’m just told that I should expect to be able to retire on it and that’s good enough for me.
We won’t have that. We will have people who save their money and then people that want to take some risk and invest some of their money. And I think that’s a much better and more sustainable world
[00:45:23] Q: will. I’m not trying to be an household to say like this, but like what role will people like you who are educating have in a hyperized [00:45:34] BTC Sessions: world? I hope to be obsolete, to be honest. Like I th I, I, I think that the channel begins to disappear when most people get how to create a wallet when people know how to secure their Bitcoin themselves.Yeah. I, I don’t know. I, I think that I become less and less necessary and I think that’s a great thing. That’s kind of the goal, right? Like I don’t, I don’t want to constantly have to reeducate people on things. I, I, my hope is that they’ll get educated and they’ll start to learn about how Bitcoin works.
And then a lot of this stuff will become more and more intuitive over time. So, and I am still here. Sorry, my camera just crapped out there, but regardless I want people to be able to learn this stuff and be able to Be able to continue on their own education. I don’t think I’ll be super necessary in maybe a decade, but perhaps, perhaps I might be a little necessary if there’s a ton of other innovation and apps and different things that you can do in and around Bitcoin.
So I could be wrong. We’ll see if it’s necessary. And there’s a ton of other tools that people don’t intuitively know how to use in a decade’s time that maybe I’ll be here with a gray streak in my hair instead, still teach plebs how to use the next thing for Bitcoin. We’ll see.
[00:47:00] Q: So [00:47:01] P: I wanna shift topic slightly.You had some pretty interesting experiences to say the least around the protests that happened in Canada. Can you take us through at a high level sort of your involvement, what happened? And really the question that I wanna ask you is how did that change your perception of Bitcoin and where we are sort of in this process of Bitcoin, a Bitcoin becoming a much larger thing for
[00:47:29] BTC Sessions: more people?Yeah. So. Yeah. The, the beginning of this year was a, a tough one and it, it kind of came at me pretty fast, but so the long and the short of it is the, the truer protests basically began to materialize. When a number of people basically’re told, like you don’t have body autonomy, and if you choose not to get vaccinated, then as, as truckers, you’re no longer allowed to cross the American border back and forth.
And so they, they basically lost their livelihoods. But that also extended to even people traveling domestically. So any Canadian that wasn’t vaccinated, couldn’t get on a plane, a train, a boat, any sort of domestic travel and And more or less that that has remained it have remained for extended periods of time.
Like up to recently, I don’t even know what the current what our, what our current regulations are now. I believe they’ve lessened a little bit. But like, even up until last month as a Canadian, you still couldn’t even get on a local flight, but you could go to a hockey game with 20,000 people side by side without a mask.
And it was totally fine. So anyways, that’s kind of the context around the craziness of some of these, these restrictions where people lost their livelihoods couldn. Leave the country, if they didn’t like it either. Right? So they, you know, people will say, oh, if you don’t like it leave, well, there was no option because our only land border was the us and you needed to be vaccinated to cross it.
And you, so you could then couldn’t get on a plane to fly to any country that didn’t have restrictions. So that’s kind of where, where things were at. So there was the, this ended up being the largest protest in Canadian history and all these truckers converged on on Ottawa, our nation’s capital on and effectively what happened was there were a couple guys in and around Ottawa.
One was BJ Dicker, one of the organizers of the, of the convoy itself. And then there was Nick AKA, nobody caribou, a Bitcoin that was in Ottawa supporting the truckers and doing some Bitcoin things there. Both of them, I believe both of them had previously posted just Bitcoin addresses on Twitter or just raising a little bit of money.
Things kind of got some traction. Greg FOSS had spoken with Nick and I believe BJ previously. And then on Twitter reached out to me and said, Hey, is there any way we could accept lightning donations on this? I said, sure. I could probably figure that out. And I ended up creating a couple things.
One was a donation page on tally coin that would accept on chain donations and lightning donations to my Bitcoin note. The second was I created a Twitter handle called Hong Kong huddle and kind of started posting there that, Hey, this is a donation page. And then I began coordinating with Nick BJ.
Greg FOS. And Jeff Booth was another person that was involved here and we created a multisig wallet between all of us started migrating funds that went through the donations to that multisig wallet, just to prevent loss of funds through user error. And so my initial thought was just to give an idea of scale.
I thought, given the previous donation addresses that we would, you know, maybe get a few thousand bucks. So my initial goal for the, the, the donations was 10 million sat on the page. We got that like almost immediately. The first day we, we raised like a whole Bitcoin and then in the span of.
Around two weeks, we raised one, 1000000th of all Bitcoin that will ever exist. So there’s something like 22 Bitcoin or something there. Somewhere in that realm at the same time as this was happening and forgive me for kind of parsing the timeline and not perfectly here, but the government effectively declared it illegal.
So the, the, the, the protest was seen as an illegal occupation of the nation’s capital. They basically painted all of the protesters as, you know, racists or bigots or whatever it was. And don’t get me wrong. There’s a couple assholes down there flying like Nazi flags. But those people were promptly told to pound sand and get the hell outta there.
So obviously not reflective of the entire group. But the emergencies act was enacted, which basically gave the government more or less power to do whatever they pleased. And so they chose a few specific things to do. One of ’em was to freeze bank accounts of people in and around Ottawa that were donating and helping the costs.
another thing was they gave sweeping powers to police and stuff like that. They were basically trying to tackle, there was a couple border closures, which were separate from the main protest, and then they wanted to clear out the city. But in doing so, yeah, they, they effectively made it illegal to be at the protest and they gave themselves the ability to shut down people’s bank accounts and cut them off from the financial system.
So, GoFundMe had raised millions of dollars. They. Effectively prevented that from ever reaching its destination gifts send go same deal while they didn’t bend the need to the Canadian government. They tried to send money over to a bank account that was belonging to one of the organizers and TD bank.
Subsequent, subsequently froze that money so that didn’t get through either. The Bitcoin, however, ended up being given out to individual truckers around 14 and a half or 15 Bitcoin were put on paper, wallets care packages that were able to be swept by individuals at the time, it was about $8,000 each trucker received and there’s videos of it being given out and everything.
Unfortunately there was a bug in the wallet software temporarily that prevented us from moving the last few Bitcoin out of the multisig. The way that it works in nunchuck wallet is there’s an encrypted chat. And whenever you wanna send Bitcoin, you can propose a transaction. And that encrypted chat message gets relayed to everybody else.
And anybody with a key can then sign it. The encrypted chat message was not being sent through, so somebody would try to send it and nobody else would see the message so they weren’t able to sign. So we were effectively trying to get all of those funds moved. 15 Bitcoin went out or in and around there went out to individual truckers, which they still have.
But in the process of that migration, unfortunately, Nick had more keys as we were trying to get it out. And his home was rated by police. They took his laptops and all that kind of stuff long in the short of it is that Bitcoin is now sitting in. An escrow awaiting the outcome of a lawsuit, which was launched by a couple individuals in a business in Ottawa that said they suffered losses because of the protests.
And so there’s something called a Marva injunction, which says that any funds and association with this particular lawsuit need to stay put until the resolution of the lawsuit. So the legal, I guess, is it’s in legal limbo, so it’s just sitting there, but 70% of all the Bitcoin got to individual truckers and the last 30% is sitting in that legal limbo.
I don’t know, I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what the result of that lawsuit is gonna be. It’s probably gonna take some time. So yeah, more or less. When looking back at this situ and sorry, this is super long ran guys. no, this is amazing. I, I, so lessons learned, number one, I, I made two major mistakes from the get go and that kind of pooched, the whole thing moving forward.
So that even any of the funds were able to be taken. So maybe three, three things that I would change. Number one tally coin is a platform that allows you to accept Bitcoin donations at the time. And I’m not sure if this has changed since, but it would create a new donation address, not for each Don donator, but for each new.
Fundraiser. So unfortunately when I uploaded the X pub, it created the fundraiser and then it had a single static on chain address, which gave a very localized central point, which all the funds could be tracked therein. And so law enforcement was able to say, okay, like this went here, this went here, we see all the funds.
These are all, these are bad Bitcoin, so and so forth. So a better alternative to that would be BTC pay server. Unfortunately, when I started the fundraiser, I’d never used it. I didn’t know how to use it. I fixed that now. And I’ve now created a tutorial on how to use BTC pay server. Two the funds were not coin joint and.
Again was a mistake in and around how quickly we wanted to get it to multisig because how quickly the funds were building up, having one person with control of that would not have been ideal. So they’re in multisig, but then afterwards it’s like, oh crap, a lot of money is here. This should be coin joined in my opinion anyways.
So it would’ve been better if the. BTC pay server went into Sparrow wallet, did around a coin joint. And then the coin joint went into the multisig from there that would’ve been ideal. And then third is in and around the leg legality of things something that was previously legal became illegal.
And so when we had the multisig, it was all publicly identifiable Bitcoiners that are Canadians and in Canada. And so when it’s a legal protest and you assume it’s not gonna be a lot of money, it’s not that big of a deal to have identifiable Bitcoiners. In fact, it’s preferable because everybody is thinking don’t trust, verify who has this money.
And so we identified ourselves so that people wouldn’t be freaking out about where this money was and who had it, unfortunately in that instance when the government doesn’t like you, that becomes a major issue, especially since we’re all in the country. So I would change, I would go back and I would.
Rather than having the actual key holders be publicly identifiable, I would have individuals vet the key holders. So as an example of myself, I would be like, Hey, I’m putting my reputation on the line. And I know who holds this key. I don’t personally, but I vet the person. So if they do something shady, it’s gonna fall back on me.
Then there’s at least a little bit of don’t trust, verify there. And so, you know, then somebody kicks in my door and demands the key. Well, I don’t have it. I can tell you who has it, but maybe they’re not even in the country. So those are kind of the main things that I would change new receiving address.
Every time you receive a donation, which would be BTC pay server coin, join all funds after they come in. Multisig was still good. I’d probably do a two of three instead of three of five, because three of five was very difficult to coordinate. And then have the key holders. Vetted, but not identified. That would be my takeaway.
So there you go. If you’re, if you’re in a, an adversarial environment trying to fundraise there’s, there’s your roadmap, I suppose.
Oh, you muted P
[00:58:53] P: and I was muted. I just said that was incredible. Thank you so much for going through that with us. [00:58:58] BTC Sessions: no worries. No worries. one day I’ll figure it out, but today is not that day. All good. You’re [00:59:05] Q: honestly, I’ve given up hope. I, I wanna create a button that Chris can press every single time. P is just muted.Just like that. Won’t won’t you did just like that won, won wall.
[00:59:15] BTC Sessions: I have it. Strong bone. Yeah. Yeah, [00:59:19] P: man. What [00:59:20] BTC Sessions: a journey? Yeah, I can’t even [00:59:23] P: imagine. [00:59:23] Q: I want to ask, because like, we talked a little bit about this at the beginning of the show, how, you know, if you had asked me a year ago, would the Canadian government take such draconian measures against its own citizens?I would’ve, I would’ve said no. Candidly, like I would’ve, what, what do people who are not in Canada need to learn from this experience so that they themselves do not have to go through this nightmare that yourself truckers and countless others had to experience.
[01:00:01] BTC Sessions: I think, see this is a difficult one because people become very complacent and willing to put up with a lot of crap, right.Myself included. And so I think the, the main takeaway is to always, you know, be willing to push back even on the politicians that you think you agree with, hold them to task. But also be, be self sovereign. Right? The, the only really the only thing that worked here was, was the censorship resistant money.
And not even perfectly because the tools weren’t used to their full extent, but I, I would say be as self sovereign as possible while still holding anybody that does have influence in government to a high standard and hold them to task as best you can. And I think always, maybe just hedge for the worst possible outcome.
So like, as I was saying in, in my instance, I made a couple of assumptions that one, we wouldn’t raise much money and two that it would remain legal to have a peaceful protest. And neither of those things remains true. Had I gone in with the assumption that maybe we’re gonna raise a lot of money and maybe this is going to become illegal.
I would’ve gone through all of those. All of those steps to ensure that it would remain resistant through all of that. And I see in, in the chat here, Alexander using Panim absolutely pan S are awesome. And again, I started to learn, go down that rabbit hole after all of this went through. So I’ve now made a couple tutorials on how to use Panim both on samurai and on Sparrow wallet.
And they’re awesome. So anybody watching that doesn’t know what a Panim is. It’s basically an, a public identifier that you can share without sharing a Bitcoin address. And then that means there’s no easy centralized point of saying, oh, this address belongs to this person. Now I can begin to track their funds and begin to piece together what they have.
So at P M somebody can link to you and then they’ll be able to generate addresses for you to be able to send you money without you having a public post in a public forum an address that somebody that anybody could audit. So I, I love it.
[01:02:30] Q: P I have a fun, so off topic question. So unless you have something more to contribute, I wanna sidetrack us completely go for it, dude. BT, the last time you and I got a chance to really talk, I was on your show and you. And I, I’m not trying to admit it. Like we’re MCU, nerds, love and thunder. Did you see it?Did you like it?
[01:02:52] BTC Sessions: This is the first one that I haven’t seen, like right out the gate, sadly. It’s because I was on a road trip, so I was doing my workshop in Vancouver. So I left two days prior to it coming out. But me and my wife are in the midst of setting up date nights so we can go to it because that’s that’s her Hollywood crush.So , I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll take that L right there. I’m I’m no Chris Hemsworth, but I’ll, I’ll try.
[01:03:18] Q: All right. So who’s your Hollywood crush. We heard who your wife is. [01:03:21] BTC Sessions: Oh Anna Daar MOS. Oh, yes. [01:03:24] Q: Yes, [01:03:25] BTC Sessions: she is great. Super hot, but I mean, my wife finds her super hot too, so that’s, , we’re we’re together on that one. [01:03:33] Q: I love that. I love that for you guys. Ben, I wanted to give you the opportunity to also answer. Have you ever been to Amsterdam and what do you, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the city? [01:03:45] BTC Sessions: I have been to Amsterdam. I was there actually with my wife for we were like, we weren’t married yet, but in 2012 we went backpacking through Europe for three and a half months.And so Amsterdam was the first place that we got to together. And it was a great city. I really enjoyed it. The canals are amazing. We, so I don’t , I don’t really smoke a lot of weed but we decided to partake while we were there. And I we were staying in this little hostile hotel. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but we were basically in an attic and to set the.
To set the stage of where we were, the stairs were so steep in this place that I could stand in front of the staircase and reach my arm out, straight in front of me. And I would be touching a stair that’s how steep they were. So we had to traverse this in our giant backpacks. But down at the, the main check-in area, tiny little cafe, the whole place reeked of weed.
And then they had an assortment of edibles there. And so we grabbed, we picked up a space muffin and the dude at the front desk asked if we smoke very often. And I was like, last time I had any, maybe was six months ago. And he was like, Ooh, you guys better split this . And so we did. And so we each had half a space muffin and we walked around for about an hour.
We both couldn’t really feel anything. And right, as we were saying how much we couldn’t feel it, it was like somebody punched me directly in the brain. just, just, and, and my wife heard me say, oh my God. And she was like, what? I don’t, no, I still don’t feel anything. And then she went silent for about 30 seconds as she went through the exact same process.
And then we just wandered aimlessly and were super paranoid. And somehow, eventually made our way back to our host where we then like, Sat and, and kept on a are, are you okay? Yeah. I’m okay. Are you okay? so there’s a lot of that. But there’s a really, maybe I’ll find it, but there’s a really great picture of us that we managed to snap.
We’re like, we, we’ve never been this high before, so we’ll just get a good, like selfie style and our eyes are just pasted together. and like just mid. Yeah. So I will tweet that I will find it and I will tweet that photo out after this show. I do it
[01:06:16] Q: do it. That is hilarious. I’m so sorry that you have that experience.I’m definitely gonna bully you into taking some sort of a space cake or smoking a joint with me in Amsterdam while we’re there. Dude,
[01:06:27] BTC Sessions: I, well, first I gotta make sure that I’m going I, I, I gotta, I do want to go. I don’t know if I’m, if I, I don’t know in what capacity, but I would love to maybe partake and speak or something, whatever whatever’s needed.So, yeah. Amazing. You heard it here
[01:06:44] Q: first, Alex? [01:06:47] BTC Sessions: Yeah. Alex, get me there. Yeah. [01:06:49] P: I want to ask, but just as we’re kind of wrapping up, I know you’ve been doing some workshops, some in person workshops, specifically around using the cold card. Can you like what’s going on there? Can you tell people about it?How can they learn more about
[01:07:01] BTC Sessions: these? Yeah, so, so I just did my first in person workshop. I’ve done plenty of like one-on-ones with people. People are always asking, like, despite the fact, and I should caveat this by saying, I always have free stuff. So anybody who wants to learn, there’s always gonna be free videos on what you wanna learn.However, some people. They just want that extra hand holding and the ability to like on the fly be like, what is this, what, you know, how there’s something I encountered that wasn’t in the tutorial. And like, they just want an hour of me sitting there with them. And so I do a lot of one-on-ones like that, where people go and they’ll book me for an hour on my website.
However, I thought it would be kind of cool to be able to have a classroom setting and like have an in depth, like deep dive workshop. So I did my first set of those in Vancouver on the 16th of July. So just this past, you know, five days ago, six days ago, whatever it was And they were great.
So I did a learning self custody workshop and it was like a three hour kind of marathon. So everything from like getting your funds off the exchange, setting up a, a basic wallet, using it, doing transactions, understanding transaction fees deleting and restoring your wallet. We got into using lightning and showing how moon works versus how blue works and different backups.
And then we discussed different types of hardware. So I gave a rundown of kind of all the top hardware options out there to kind of set them on their next steps towards self custody and security. So that was kind of the morning session. And then in the afternoon session, we did a four hour deep dive on cold card.
And so again, that ran the gamut of kind of the zero to hero basics of setting the thing up, backing it up, using it. Air gaping transactions restoring a device, so and so forth. So we did all of that. And then we dove in, in the later parts into some of the more advanced features and how they work and what they do and how to use them.
So it was it was pretty, pretty great in my opinion, I learned a lot and I’ll be able to tweak and, and make them even better. I think moving forward, what I will probably do next time. I do one of these, which I’m not entirely sure when, but I’d like to do more traveling workshops. I think I’ll always do a short one hour beginner session for free at the beginning of the day.
And then I’ll probably have two deep dives. For the rest of the day cold card will probably remain because that one, I feel like went really well. But I’d also like to do maybe something on nodes or maybe something on different privacy tools or maybe something on multisig, lots of options there.
But yeah, I, I basically want people to be able to come along and come and like really get into the nitty gritty and start using some of this stuff and experimenting. I think it’s incredibly useful. I love
[01:10:08] P: it. That sounds fucking awesome, man. Where can people find you on Twitter, YouTube? How can they get access to your amazing content? [01:10:17] BTC Sessions: yeah, man. So you can follow me on Twitter at BTC sessions. You can also find me on YouTube, just search BTC sessions. There’s tons of stuff there, but yeah, you can subscribe to that channel. And then I also have a website, BTC sessions.ca cuz I’m in Canada, of course. But that’s where people would find me if they want to actually book like a one-on-one, you know, on online kind of individual session, try to, to help you through whatever you want.So, yeah, those are kind of the mean main places that you could find me. Love it. Love it. Well
[01:10:49] P: on that note I want to thank you for joining us today also for going 15 minutes over. This has been a fantastic conversation. Also thank you for contributing so much to Bitcoin. Your content is fucking incredible in case that wasn’t clear to the people listening, check it out.BTC sessions has amazing stuff out there. Some of the most cogent well organized, thoughtful tutorials on Bitcoin.
This is a transcribed version of the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast, hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by BTC Sessions to talk about his process of making educational Bitcoin content.
Watch This Episode On YouTube or Rumble
Listen To The Episode Here:
[00:00:06] Q: I’m very, very excited to introduce none other than BTC Sessions, who has his own YouTube channel. Many of you who are familiar with him, myself included, consider him probably my favorite teacher in the Bitcoin space. And I’m truly honored that you are taking the time to grace us with your presence, man. How are you doing, dude? [00:00:24] BTC Sessions: I’m great. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me always love chatting with you and P and and shouted out to CK who is just on that dude is a legend. Love him. And yeah, man having, having a good time having a good summer [00:00:39] Q: love. Yeah, bet. So we wanted to really talk to you.I mean, you are best known for running, you know, the BTC sessions, YouTube channel, which I had a, a moment of the weekend where it kind of clicked in my head. It’s like, oh, sessions, like, you know, class for BTC classes. Okay. Got it. Got it. Yes. I only just had this realization like three days ago, so, but like, let’s talk a little bit about first.
Like what inspired you to really go down this path? I know you very famously talk about how, like you were offered a few Bitcoin to live off of in 2013, I believe. Kind of regretted actually spending that Bitcoin now, but like what really sets you on this path to be the resident teacher in the Bitcoin space?
[00:01:24] BTC Sessions: So I think it kind of came from a place of necessity for myself in terms of. When I started learning about Bitcoin, I I’m a pretty visual learner. So I was looking, I was actively searching for visual guides of how to do stuff and I could not find any, just really there, you know, in and around 2014, there just wasn’t a whole lot that could help me through some of the stuff that I needed to do.It would often be like, yo, go to this message board. And there’s some comments halfway down that kind of explain, or, or here’s like go to the GitHub. And there’s, there’s an explanation there. And just stuff that I, I, I found more difficult to parse through. If I was lucky enough to find something that had screenshots and examples it was better, but more or less, I, I, I ended up spending two years.
Kind of trying to parse through everything, myself in, in a variety of different aspects. And once I got comfortable with it, I figured I just make the thing that I had been looking for so that I could at least help a few people avoid having to dig as deeply as I did for all of that type of stuff.
And so I, I started in 2016, I started the channel actually just hit the six year birthday of the channel this past month. So yeah, so it’s heck guess congrats brother. Thanks man. Yeah. So it’s been going for six years, but uh, yeah, I started doing, you know, I figured I’d just do a video once a week on whatever I felt like covering.
And then I didn’t stop and I increased the frequency of videos. So here we are six years later. what was the first video? The first video, the very first one, other than like an initial intro of what the channel was gonna. I believe was either like a basic Bitcoin mobile wallet. And I can’t recall which it might have been copay, which was like a, a BitPay multisig mobile wallet that could also be single SIG or it might have been a Bitcoin ATM how to use one.
Those were two of the first videos that I ever did I’ve since, you know, migrated to plenty of other options. But yeah, those, those would’ve been the first couple.
[00:03:48] Q: So let’s, let’s talk a little bit because I think what you have. Afforded people, the opportunity to have, if they go out and seek it is, you know, we talk a lot about self custody. This is self education. You talk about how you went down this rabbit hole, it was painful and you didn’t want other people to kind of go through that.I feel like, you know, there are a lot of channels that have now since practically replicated what you try to do. Mm-hmm how, how important is self education on this path of self sovereignty?
[00:04:22] BTC Sessions: I think it’s so important because, I mean, you don’t know what you don’t know. Right? And, and so many people, they, they put off the personal responsibility of gaining that knowledge and they just defer to somebody else there.So much of, of what Bitcoin was built for people completely ignored by, by sinking some money into an exchange and leaving. Which is like the worst thing you could do. It’s the antithesis of what Bitcoin was built for. And the only way to get around that is to start learning and, and take that first step.
I know it’s it can be scary, but you, you can, you can start learning and taking those first steps yourself now, or potentially learn a very expensive lesson later on down the line, as we’ve seen in droves, not just this year, but over the past decade, it’s littered with examples and stories of people who thought their money was safe with other people.
And just to realize that no, it’s gonna be frozen. No, they’re in solvent. No, it was a rug. Pull it, you know, name it. You got it. It’s all happened before and that’s why self custody. It’s, it’s kind of a, it it’s. Completely inverse to what we’ve learned through our entire lives of, oh, put your money in the bank.
It’s the safest place for it. And in Fiat world that, that’s just what we learned, but and it seems counterintuitive, but the way that Bitcoin is designed, it’s, it’s as difficult to try and get the keys of an, an individual across the world, as it is to try and get the keys or, or hack an exchange, the amount of effort put forth is similar.
And so, when you’ve got a honey pot of everyone’s money, that’s much more of a target on your back than self sovereignty and holding your own keys. So, yeah,
[00:06:25] Q: but you do a lot more than just, you know, self sovereignty. What are, what are sort of the themes that you like to explore and what are. Across the spectrum.Like what are other than just custody other than setting up your wallets? Yeah.
[00:06:40] BTC Sessions: I mean, I think other than the, the nitty gritty of just, how do I get a wallet? How do I secure my coins? I like diving into, and I mean, this is still kind of down the vein of tutorials, but the idea of running a Bitcoin node of don’t trust, verify of being able to host an entire copy of the Bitcoin blockchain, all of the history of transactions that have ever existed and the rules that govern the network and making yourself.Resistant to someone trying to co-op the network. I think that’s an important one. And that’s one that became particularly important to me in 2017, watching the block size wars and watching a large number of you know, 80% of the hash rate. And, you know, some of the top companies like 50 of the top companies in the space, I’ll say, we’re gonna change the Bitcoin, change the Bitcoin protocol and install our own devs.
And to see that fail in particular because people said, nah, we’re gonna run our own notes. I think that’s a, that’s a huge win for Bitcoin. And I think it’s important that people learn that and learn how to partake in that. If they see fit, not everybody has to run a node, but I think it’s very important that they can if they choose to.
So trying to put forth stuff like that. Trying to show different privacy tools that people can use and, and not have people be frightened of them. You know, that’s, that’s been part of my journey, especially this year, kind of learning more in the privacy realm. And then again, kind of a separation of money and state I think is very important.
And having censorship resistant money is incredibly important, which obviously you guys have been touching on at Bitcoin magazine with this last issue drop. So yeah, those are kind of the key tenants that I, I, I gravitate towards. I love it. Hmm.
[00:08:39] P: The, I, I wanna ask you about just the, the specific process you go through.I’m so curious because your videos are so comprehensive and they’re, you know, you go through and you edit them. How long does it take you from. You know, idea to shooting, to releasing a video in terms of all the steps that that are required.
[00:08:56] BTC Sessions: Yeah. So it, it depends on what I’m doing. So the, the tutorials can vary.I’ve, I’ve kind of fallen into a schedule where, you know, I do a couple live videos every week. So I do a, a, a Thursday news show, just kind of recapping what happened over the past week. I do a Friday panel show called why are we bullish? Where people come on with different topics that they’re excited about in Bitcoin currently.
And those ones, you know, it’s just kind of prepped through the day, do the live show and that’s it. So they they’re just encapsulated in a single day, but the tutorials really can. Really can vary depending on what I’m covering. So, if it’s a simple wallet tutorial or something like that, my, my flow will typically be, you know, I’ll tinker with it a little bit.
Kind of learn my way around the app. Then I’ll, I’ll write a flow of, okay, what am I gonna cover first, all the way through. So set up and so on and so forth. Give myself jot notes, and then I’ll just start recording bit by bit, you know, intro prerequisite, prerequisites. You may need set up all that kind of stuff.
I’ll go through it, all, edit it all together. You gotta do thumbnails. You gotta do descriptions. You gotta upload it and share it and do all of that stuff. If it’s a simple topic, I can get one of those out in a single day. If it’s a more complicated topic. So one of the more recent ones that I did is I wanted to do the most in depth tutorial on the cold card wallet that I possibly could do that anybody has put on the internet so far.
So NK, MK four, right? Yes. On the MK four. Yeah. So that one, it took me a day of experimenting with all of the features. I was already familiar with how a cold card works, obviously, cuz I use it a lot, but a lot of the advanced features I just hadn’t tinkered with yet. So it was like a day of messing around with that followed by a day of just shooting all of the different pieces and that flowed into another day of finishing that up, editing it all together and getting it online.
So that was a full three days and like long days. Eight hours by like, you know, it was getting into the evening and my wife was like, it’s dinner and I have children that I need help with. And , I was like, I’m so sorry. I just, this one you’re not too bad. Yeah. This, this one’s a tough one. so, yeah, so I mean, she’s very forgiving when, when I get into something that’s a little bit more in depth and it takes a little bit more time, but yeah, that was, you know, there were like 10, 12 hour days in there for three days straight to get that one out.
So, yeah, it, it varies, but that’s why I kind of have that flex room in there Monday through Wednesday is like somewhere in there, tutorials getting done. It’s just a question of how long that takes. I love it.
[00:11:45] P: What is your your favorite feature of the new cold card? I have not had the privilege of playing around with [00:11:49] BTC Sessions: one.Ooh. Okay. So, there’s a number of things. So the virtual disc thing is pretty cool. So I didn’t understand what that even did. So virtual disc mode, typically when you are using your cold card you’re air gaping it. So meaning you don’t plug it into your computer or phone or anything, it’s all, you just power it separately.
And then you have your whatever third party interface you’re using. So in my case, spar wallet on your desktop, you set up the transaction there, you save it to an SD card, put in the cold card to approve it, and then bring it back, signed to broadcast it with the virtual disc mode. You basically have a mini disk on.
The cold card itself. So it, it loads up as if it was, was a thumb drive. So you can plug it into your computer, not as secure as fully air gaping it. However you use the virtual disc to bring over the data from the transactions. And this is different from having Sparrow or whatever wallet you are using, actually interface with the cold card.
Cause when you do that, when you just plug it in and you say that you wanna send it with Sparrow and then you approve it on the cold card and it just it’s communicating with the wallet. What you’re technically doing is you’re giving that wallet control over the device, which you don’t know exactly how it’s going to do that.
Yeah. Whereas with this, you’re actually, you’re still doing the same flow that I described with air gaping and you’re pulling it onto that virtual disc, approving it, pulling the sign, transaction off and uploading it. So I think that’s a really cool thing. NFC is in the process of being added to blue wallet.
So that’s gonna be huge. I’m gonna be very excited to play with that, but it’s not out yet. So video incoming, whenever that drops, but then other stuff like the, the, the trick pins on it. So anybody’s played with a cold card before you could have like a duress pin or a brick me pin. So you’d put in a pin and it would kill the whole device kind of thing.
As a security mechanism, the way they’ve done it with the mark four is. You get the versatility of saying, if this pin is entered, then this behavior will happen and you can customize that. However you want. If this pin is put in, I’ll go to my duress wallet with a decoy amount of money. If this pin is put in, I will wipe the seed.
If this pin is put in, the device gets bricked. If this pin is put in the device will freeze for one hour so you can really customize it to do whatever the hell you want it to do, which is amazing versatility. That’s awesome,
[00:14:38] P: man. I, yeah, I can’t wait to get one. still stuck with my MK three. [00:14:42] BTC Sessions: It still works fine though.The MK three for sure has all of, you know, the, like they’re adding in a lot of those pin features to the MK three and, and it’s, they’re more or less there. Flow is a little bit different, but I just did a workshop in Vancouver on the cold card and some had the four and some had of the three. And more or less they could do all the same things.
The main differences were the virtual disc and NFC of which we, I mentioned, but we didn’t fully cover. We mostly got the basics of how to use it. And it’s still MK three holds up big time. I do love the
[00:15:17] P: virtual disc functionality. I didn’t even realize that was a feature. That sounds extremely [00:15:21] BTC Sessions: handy. Yeah.Yeah. Yeah. I love it.
[00:15:25] P: Q it looked like you were about to say something at some point during the no. Okay. [00:15:28] BTC Sessions: So [00:15:30] P: one thing that I’m curious about as well is how has the progression of your, your tutorials gone over time? Like, what are things, what are sort of the biggest step improvements that you feel like you made over the course of your, your show?Because frankly I haven’t watched your earliest ones, but I feel like it was just like you came outta the gate and it was like high quality, high
[00:15:49] BTC Sessions: value stuff. well, I appreciate that, but that definitely wasn’t the case. [00:15:54] P: so you’re [00:15:54] BTC Sessions: calling me a liar. I see how, yes, I’m saying you’re a dog faced PO what’s what’s the what’s the quote, pony faced or faced liar or something like that.I don’t even know whatever, whatever it was. Anyways okay. So I’d say it took me a lot longer to get my tutorials out back then. I also wasn’t as clear in a lot of my messaging. I think one issue that I’ve had over time is you do so many of these things that you get a little bit into the habit of glossing over things that I used to clarify every single time.
So like, oh, this, you know, write down your backup and somebody would be like, what’s backup. Why do I need to write it down? Why is that important? What are these words? Like all of those little things where if it’s a, a basic wallet tutorial, then you gotta go back and be like, Who’s likely watching this and still throw it in just in case.
Regardless. I think the way in which I film, you know, like being able to have like screen shares and multiple screens and everything, the editing process is a lot easier. It’s, it’s mostly efficiency on the back end of what I’m actually doing and how quickly I can put things together. But the other main benefit is with six years of tutorials sitting there, I can be like, Hey, if you’re dealing with this, if you are using this particular tutorial, here’s some prerequisites that you’re gonna wanna know and I’ve got videos for all of those.
And so if you, rather than starting here, if you’re confused about the following concepts, go to these other videos linked down below first and then come back here. And that’s just something that you can’t do. When you start a channel very difficult. Whereas now I can be like, Hey, I have all of the other steps that you need to get to where this video is starting from.
So go there first.
[00:17:49] Q: I [00:17:49] P: was saying, I mean, you, you could, you could just like make stuff up. You could just be like, oh yeah, go check out this awesome video I did. And then just, there’s no link to it ever didn’t exist. [00:17:56] BTC Sessions: yeah. Yeah. I’ll try not to do that. Some sometimes though, I’ve I’ve said, oh link to this is down below. Go, go check out that other video.And then the comments are like, where, where is it? So yeah, people have to do some manual searching, but it’s always there somewhere. Very cool.
[00:18:14] P: I had another, another great question. I was gonna ask you it’s gone like tears in the rain.Oh, I know what it was. What, so what are some of, this is the question I like asking, but what are some of the technologies that you were most excited about or yeah, things that are being developed in Bitcoin
[00:18:26] BTC Sessions: right now?I think so I’ve been interested in a lot of the privacy stuff lately, I think. And I’ve said this to a few people, but I’m kind of viewing privacy the way that we viewed scaling back in early 2017. But I think we’re better off than we were for privacy now versus for scaling in 2017. And what I mean by that is beginning of 2017 scaling and transactions per second were like top of mind for everyone.
You know, how are we gonna scale this thing? How are people gonna use it without fees getting insane? So, and so forth. We had nothing yet by. Now five years later, we scaled on chain. So we got S there’s a, a whole bunch of other efficiencies that are on chain as well, when it comes to things like tap route and soon, eventually snore signatures, all that kind of stuff that basically, and not to mention people just using Bitcoin more efficiently, all of the exchanges are batching transactions now, so on and so forth.
So we’ve scaled massively on the base layer. But beyond that, we have the lightning network, which literally did not exist at that point in time. And now I, I use lightning daily on top of that. It’s very easy for anybody to onboard to lightning now, like literally download moon wallet, send a regular Bitcoin transaction to it.
Congratulations. You can now use all those funds on the lightning network. And so moon is M U U N by the way. If you’re looking for it now, gotta say it every time. Yeah. Gotta say it. But I think that the amount of innovation that we saw on scaling when it was top of mind, as of 2017 to now is going to be happening in and around privacy because it’s top of mind for so many people now is privacy.
And I think that we’re in a much better place because we already have so many privacy tools available. Now, is it the easiest thing to utilize those privacy tools? Not necessarily, but there’s a plethora of them out there. and they’re only gonna improve from here. So, you know, you’ve got, you can do coin joints, right?
Spar wallet, has it all built in, you can coin join X number of rounds and then mix directly into your hardware wallet for safekeeping. That’s amazing. You’ve got you know, much better default privacy guarantees on lightning, not perfect, but definitely way better. And so you can enjoy a reasonable amount of privacy just using lightning transactions.
So I definitely know that from experience beyond that and beyond that. Yeah. Cryptic you know, and then, and then, and it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but you have side chains, things like liquid network where they have confidential transactions, which shields, not only the amount being sent, but the asset being dealt with.
So all you see is that a transaction to place and that’s it. There’s plenty of cool things. There’s also oh, now I’m forgetting the name of it. There’s something called mercury wallet and it uses, oh, why am I forgetting it now? I’m literally gonna look it up right now. It uses what is known as state chains.
There we go. Oh yeah. And that’s basically trading UT XOs with people basically trading the keys to UT XOs without the ability of somebody to spend using your key once they get it. There’s, there’s some stuff going on in the background there, but basically there’s no indication that any transaction has taken place in the blockchain, but you now own different.
And you can do this right now, so you can download mercury wallet and, and start using state chains right now. And it’s for specific denominated amounts. So you’d have like a million SATs or something and you effectively trade the keys to those SATs with somebody else. And and then you go off on your Merry way, withdraw it to a, another wallet.
And now you have an entirely different UT XO, and nobody even knew that that transaction took place. So amazing things being done. And I can only imagine five years from now how much cool stuff there’s gonna be. Yeah.
[00:22:32] P: Yeah. State change are very cool. Mercury wall is, is awesome. I’m also excited about ment and you know, we’ve been talking about that a lot lately with the the news that just came out, but super excited to see where that goes.And I think it’s gonna be a game changer in terms of helping people in In less affluent areas. Mm-hmm who are not exposed to Bitcoin or don’t, don’t have the time to really sink their teeth into it, to be able to offload some of that onto, you know, a trusted group of guardians that already exist.
People, you already trust whether it’s your community leaders or, you know, members of your church or, or your, whatever it is. I think that’s
[00:23:03] BTC Sessions: a really cool innovation and, and I have to dive deeper into ments. I’ve just, I I’ve just kind of had a cursory like, Hey, this is more or less how they function, but I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta go read the documentation and, and get deeper down.But this is what I mean, like th this is kind of information it’s kind of been chow. Ch Miz has been a thing that’s been around for a while, but has been front of mine for a lot of people. And so now I see lots of information about this dropping and. Again, just a, another, another tool in the Bitcoin tool belt and, and people will have different risk profiles for different things and, and different preferences.
But the fact that we have options out there is incredible. Yeah.
[00:23:46] P: And just for the audience, what we’re talking about is ment, which is the same thing as, and an abbreviation for federated Chey and Mintz OBSU and Eric Syrian, and Justin Moon also just launched a company called fedi, which is building out a wallet that focuses on this.So there’s, there’s some great coverage out. There’s written a couple articles for Bitcoin magazine. I think there’s two that came out or there’s one that just came out yesterday. So, I’ll put that link in the chat again, and you guys can check it out.
Ben, I, I. I I saw you at Bitcoin 2021. And you had like something covering your hair because I feel like, and I think we talked about it at one point you were like, yeah, brother’s hair. I mean, it looks fly as fuck, but it is a liability because I can’t go anywhere without people being like, yo it’s Ben.
And I can only imagine, like, what happens like, cuz you could never change your hairstyle at this point, right? Like
[00:24:39] BTC Sessions: yeah. It’s, it’s locked in. It’s locked in. This is yeah. You know, it’s, there’s a time lock on it. And it expires when I disappear from Bitcoin [00:24:47] Q: bro. I feel you on that though. Like I, yeah.You, on that,
[00:24:52] BTC Sessions: you, you would be very easily identifiable in a crowd as well. I, I, I think there’s a, a handful of people that experience that, that, so [00:25:01] Q: only on the topic of hair and we’ll keep this super brief, but this hair is like new thing for me. This is like a year old top. So like when I go to people from my past lives, They do not recognize me.And honestly, I fucking
[00:25:14] BTC Sessions: love it. it is great. It’s it’s funny. Yeah. Pete, you, you’re saying that you saw me like cover my typically I, I don’t, I don’t care cuz it’s, it’s amazing when somebody comes up and they’re like, yo, I use that tutorial and I’m running a node now that’s some of the most flattering stuff I’ve ever encountered and that’s, it’s incredible.The, me ever, the only time I’ve ever like put something on my head is when I had to get from one place to another very, very quickly for something important. that’s exactly
[00:25:48] P: what it was by the way you, you came, you be lined like straight for the bar to get like a bottle of water or something. And then you like went straight back.I think it was to like the, you know, like the the Swan do at that point to like, I think you were recording a podcast or something, but it was, I saw you and I was like, oh, and I was like, nah, nah, he’s, he’s a man of the mission. Yeah. I also feel like it’s like a, you know, like an. In movies where somebody like they’re a superhero, they like put the the little mask on and nobody recognizes them, you know, or they take, you know, Superman takes the glasses off.
I feel like it’s the same thing. You could take your hair off and you just be like, immediately completely
[00:26:17] BTC Sessions: anonymous. Dude. It worked, it worked even at Bitcoin 2022, there was a couple buddies of mine down and we’re like, okay, well, at one point we’re gonna have lunch. And then I met up with them in the Concourse there and we’re like, okay, let’s go to, let’s go to the, the, I can’t remember what’s called, but yeah, we’re gonna go up to the place.We’re gonna grab some food. And it’s a long, you know, it’s a big venue. So it was a long walk and we’re stopping like every minute minute and a half. And my friend was like, dude, just put that shit on your head and we’ll walk. So I literally just put I took, like, I went to a, one of the booths and asked for a free shirt.
Of whatever vendor it was. And I just wrapped it over my head and then we made it there in record time. It was great. That man yeah. Yeah. I was surprised cuz I was like, no way. This is actually gonna end. Yeah, no it’s without, without the beacon going it appears that I can move freely. So again, when, when I eventually fade into the background, when when Bitcoin education is no longer needed I can just buzz, buzz my head and nobody will ever recognize me again.
It’s a gift. It’s a
[00:27:27] P: curse. Q it’s a question. I know you love to ask everyone, [00:27:33] Q: go for it. Thank you. So Ben or BTC, you do an incredible credible job of, you know, teaching people how to really understand and use Bitcoin. I, however. I’m curious what your opinion is on the idea of the 80 20 principle, as it relates to Bitcoin and its understandings today.Most people couldn’t tell you how, when they start their car or flip a light switch, how that actually is what the process behind that is doing. Is there a point when we reach a hyperized world where not everyone is going to both know and understand Bitcoin, nor will it be necessary? Is that a realistic outcome in your opinion?
Or is that actually a dangerous outcome?
[00:28:19] BTC Sessions: I think that’s an eventuality, right? Like you’re gonna get to the point where people obviously do not understand the underlying infrastructure. That’s already largely the case. Somebody can, somebody can go to an exchange, buy some Bitcoin. And if they’re, if they’re actually self custodying, they can download a wallet back it up and.No problem. They don’t need to understand what’s actually happening there. They they’ve taken self custody. They’re, they’re totally fine. I think it’s important that you know, a critical mass of people have an understanding of the infrastructure. And I like this kind of hard line, you know, maximally self sovereign group of people that keep on pushing for everyone to step outside their comfort zone towards that end.
I think that’s gonna continue to be needed. And the most important part again, is that it’s always accessible to all. If someone chooses to do it, I love the development in and around easy plug and play nodes. I think that’s super important now. Can that be if everybody runs the exact same implementation, can that be a liability?
Absolutely, but it beats nobody running nodes in the first place. So I, I think that what you’re getting at is as, as more and more of the world uses Bitcoin, there’s a number of things and a, a number of services that by design become obsolete in their very nature exchanges is one of them, right? In, in a world where Bitcoin is the currency.
Why do you need an exchange to get out of dollars? I mean, I, I already don’t technically need an exchange to get Bitcoin. I earn Bitcoin that as, as a living. And so that for me, that on ramp. OnRamp companies are already obsolete in a sense. Now I still need the offramp in, in companies that bridge the gap so that I can pay bills where I can’t pay Bitcoin directly, so on and so forth, but more and more of those things are going to go away.
And people won’t necessarily understand what’s going on in the background much. Like they didn’t understand what was going on in the background when we changed from phones via phone lines and switchboards to VoIP, right? Like nobody really understood what happened in the background. All of a sudden their phone calls just got a lot better quality and a lot cheaper.
And so I think that’s kind of the direction we’ll head with Bitcoin less and less people will understand exactly what’s going on, but my hope is that they will understand why it’s better money and hopefully they’ll understand why it succeeded. Historically versus gold or at least like a, a core group of people educating people on money will be able to explain like, Hey, we, we had a pretty good sound money before, but it failed because of its physicality, which led to centralization of ownership and easy confiscation.
I hope that that becomes a mainstay of financial education in the future. And I, I think it’s starting to be so, but we will see as long as long as that message get gets through, I think will be okay.
[00:31:40] Q: I, I won’t lie. I was looking at other tabs. Sorry. All good. I, I like this idea though. While, no, they won’t understand Bitcoin and the technology behind it because there’ll be so many offerings to make the user experience easier. There is maybe with a little bit of hope you have injected this necessity to understand why at least Bitcoin is better than the Fiat we have or the gold we have.What would be your just obviously we’ve, we’ve all we all have sort of our go to, I like to call my six Pokemon to pull out of my little satchel. Anytime I talk about Bitcoin to a non Bitcoin or what are some of the, your go to quick hit arguments to why Bitcoin versus anything else?
[00:32:27] BTC Sessions: Are you, are you talking about Fiat or are you talking about okay, [00:32:32] Q: sorry.I’ll I’ll, I’ll make it. I’ll actually separate it out. What is your go-to for Bitcoin versus Fiat Bitcoin versus gold Bitcoin versus any Bitcoin?
[00:32:41] BTC Sessions: Yeah. Okay. All right. So I mean, verse Fiat, simple question. Well, how many, how many dollars exist? How many dollars will exist next year? How many dollars will exist in tens?Do you have a say in that. Do you actually hold your money? Probably not. It’s probably in a bank account. What happens if the bank account tells you, you can’t have it anymore? What kind of recourse do you have? All those types of arguments are pretty simple. And I mean, again, Canada leading example, this year of people that were doing something legal until it was deemed not at the drop of a hat and all of a sudden found that legacy finance had failed them because they didn’t have access to their money.
And you can see this in, you know, name, your political dissident situation, anywhere in the globe. And, and you’ll see parts of that. You can also point to hyper inflation. You can point to the fact that humans are notoriously bad. When, when showing. The opportunity to print more money, they’re going to do it.
They’re going to debate the currency, even if they don’t do it with malice and mind, it ends up not helping people. So there’s that Bitcoin versus gold kind of what I alluded to earlier, the physicality of it was its Achilles heel, right? It, it resulted in deferring to custodians. It was difficult to transport over long distances yet held its value over long periods of time.
But the distance thing resulted in needing to create needing to create kind of derivative money paper that you would move around that represented bits of gold, so on and so forth. So the visibility thing was a little bit more difficult. And in the end, when you create a, a, a money on gold that is linked to gold, that link can be broken because it’s not, it’s, it’s not an imutable link.
So when you know, somebody like Peter Schiff says, well, if we had a, a crypto that was linked to gold, it’s, it’s a terrible idea because dude, you just watch that play out in 1971. And that’s exactly how it would play out again. So, yeah. When it comes to Bitcoin versus all other coins, Bitcoin had such a unique early stage because nobody really understood that value could even be had there.
And because of that, it was given free reign to grow that first few years, uncorrupted And that’s something that hasn’t really been afforded to others. And at this point, the, the ability to change the base protocol of Bitcoin in a non backwards compatible way is more or less out the window, unless it was like a zero day.
Everybody get on board and change this now, or the whole project is dead. If you wanna put in arbitrary changes to Bitcoin , it’s very difficult to get consensus on that. And that’s the feature that we want because we want to be sure that our money is sound that it’s imutable, that it’s censorship resistant.
And when you can willy-nilly change things, then it, those promises of a sound censorship resistant, global mutable money are called into question. And so, yeah, I mean, that’s my, that’s my quick run through. All, all of all shit coins everywhere. I kind of view it as you know, gold was, would’ve been good if it wasn’t for the transferability and the visibility thing over large large spaces.
But I mean, Fiat is one entity can print money. Crypto is everyone can print money. Bitcoin is no one can print money.
[00:36:28] Q: I like that. I like that. And then, sowhat happens when someone says to you something to the vein of, well, it just doesn’t matter. I don’t, I don’t care to learn it is it are these, the lost souls that will be forgotten in. Bitcoin standard future or are these the people we actually have to spend a little extra time helping to drag out?
[00:36:56] BTC Sessions: I don’t, I don’t think they’ll be forever lost souls. They’ll be, they’ll be the last holdouts will be the ones that are hurt most immeasurably by it because they’ll be the ones clinging to alternatives that don’t protect their wealth and their, their self sovereignty. But eventually out of necessity, they’ll, they’ll have to use something like Bitcoin in a hyper Bitcoin eyes world.And as soon as they start doing that, they will benefit. They’ll just benefit less than people who are earlier benefited before them, but as soon as they get on that standard and they start earning Bitcoin for a living and saving, it changes their habits. It changes the way they look at the world. And every set that they earn and save will always represent the same percentage of the monetary base.
Moving forward in perpetuity. There’s no de basing it. If you save a hundred sets, then that will be the same percentage of all Bitcoin forever. So I think, I think that’s incredible. And whereas nowadays, if your bank account showed your percentage of total dollars, that number will continue to go down in perpetuity unless you’re, you know, a, a Cantillon there and you’re able to be closest to the money spigot.
That’s, that’s pretty much how it goes nowadays.
[00:38:18] Q: Oh, I really hope they’re not lost souls. [00:38:24] BTC Sessions: they’ll be alright. Like again, in the end, once, once they’re on that Bitcoin standard, they’ll begin to benefit. I think. Yeah, there can be a lot of pain in between there though. [00:38:35] Q: So how much do you, like when people say it’s impossible for everyone to run a note in their home?Do you just send them one of your videos with, with a little note saying at one point, someone also said it was gonna be impossible for everyone to have a phone in their own home.
[00:38:52] BTC Sessions: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s definitely not impossible. Right? It’s it’s there’s parts of the world. Yes. Where it’s, it would be incredibly difficult to run a node when it comes to connectivity and all that kind of stuff.Or just cost of hardware. If you wanna run a dedicated machine or based on where you are But it’s not everybody has to run a node. It’s just important that they have the option. So you may see instances where there’s a node being run for a community and people can point their wallets toward that particular node if they want to.
And, and beyond that, like the, the cost of hardware is coming down, the bandwidth issues are becoming a thing of the past. It’s getting to the point now where I’m not sure how many hun hundreds of gigabytes, the Bitcoin blockchain is, but like you’re getting thumb drives, not thumb drives, but like micro SD cards that are like four terabytes.
Right? So, so it’s, it’s going to become less expensive to run a node if you choose to over time. And eventually it’ll probably be pretty feasible to have one on a phone, like my phone right now. Is 128 gigabytes, and there’s definitely phones that have more space than that. And you can add in SD cards to them that are whatever size you please.
So, yeah, like it’s, it’s becoming more and more feasible that you’ll be able to run a Bitcoin node on the fly. And I mean, that’s inherent to Bitcoin’s design. That’s why there’s been this kind of guarding of the block size limit of trying to limit the amount of data that’s being parsed every 10 minutes.
Because if you kind of leave that door wide open, then it can be come prohibitively expensive, either technologically or actually. Monetarily to run and maintain a node. And we’ve, we’ve seen the perfect example is Bitcoin SV, cuz even exchanges that hosted and like bought and sold Bitcoin SV are like, we can’t do this anymore.
We can’t even run the node dude. Like it’s like terabytes and terabytes of data of just like spam transactions to be like, look how many transactions we can do. So it’s, it’s a losing battle and they’ve kind of proven that just in trying to show how much they can scale, they’ve shown how impossible it is to scale in that manner.
So yeah,
[00:41:20] Q: this will be fun. This will be a really fun battle to hyper colonization. What does that mean to you though? Like what does a hyperized world look like? What does hyper colonization mean? [00:41:34] BTC Sessions: I think it’s just when we get to a place where. N mass people are deciding to use Bitcoin over their local currency. I think there will be some pain in the interim when that happens, right.An entire world running for the exit. That’s not a clean transition. I don’t, I’m not sure exactly how in, in a world where that plays out, how it plays out, because I’d like to hope there’s some semblance of an orderly transition where not too many people get hurt. And perhaps that could be mildly achieved.
By countries beginning to use it as a reserve assets backing their currencies. So and so forth. Maybe that could be a, an instance where that happens. But I think it’s gonna be a little bit more of a quick, like, oh my God, you know, big, more and more countries are, are using as a reserve asset. More and more people don’t want to hold dollars and Lira and whatever other currencies.
And so they’re dumping them. I think there’d be some, some degree of chaos in four X markets and things like that. But once that transition transition is complete, while things become infinitely better, in my opinion you know, people can simply learn a skill and capitalize on it and earn from it and they don’t have to become a professional investor.
They can simply earn and save. Like magic, their money will still work and continue to work and preserve its value into retirement and likely appreciate in value depending on population and, and human ingenuity. It’s very likely that your savings will just have a gradual deflation to them. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.
In terms of what infrastructure and stuff like that looks like, I think there’ll be there’ll still be services in and around Bitcoin and, and like quote unquote, traditional finance, those types of things, like in terms of loans and people are gonna wanna start businesses and take loans. But I think what ends up happening there as we’ve seen there, you, you can’t, you can’t print away the risk with Bitcoin.
And so that makes people look at risk very differently. You know, am I gonna lend my Bitcoin to somebody for a few percent? With, with risk of a, a total loss? No. More likely it’ll be people that have direct relationships with people that are creating businesses that say like, Hey, you know, I, I think you have a good business there.
Maybe I wanna have a part of it. And you know, I’ll, I’ll extend a loan that way, but I think risk is gonna be completely repriced in a Bitcoin only world. And people will still invest in things, but it will just be a much more calculated decision. That’s not gonna be people saying, well, gee, I get my paycheck.
And I know for a fact, I can’t just save that. So I guess I’ll toss it into. Whatever fund my banker tells me to, I have no idea what I own, not a clue, what companies or funds or whatever are in this shit mix that I have in my portfolio. I’m just told that I should expect to be able to retire on it and that’s good enough for me.
We won’t have that. We will have people who save their money and then people that want to take some risk and invest some of their money. And I think that’s a much better and more sustainable world
[00:45:23] Q: will. I’m not trying to be an household to say like this, but like what role will people like you who are educating have in a hyperized [00:45:34] BTC Sessions: world? I hope to be obsolete, to be honest. Like I th I, I, I think that the channel begins to disappear when most people get how to create a wallet when people know how to secure their Bitcoin themselves.Yeah. I, I don’t know. I, I think that I become less and less necessary and I think that’s a great thing. That’s kind of the goal, right? Like I don’t, I don’t want to constantly have to reeducate people on things. I, I, my hope is that they’ll get educated and they’ll start to learn about how Bitcoin works.
And then a lot of this stuff will become more and more intuitive over time. So, and I am still here. Sorry, my camera just crapped out there, but regardless I want people to be able to learn this stuff and be able to Be able to continue on their own education. I don’t think I’ll be super necessary in maybe a decade, but perhaps, perhaps I might be a little necessary if there’s a ton of other innovation and apps and different things that you can do in and around Bitcoin.
So I could be wrong. We’ll see if it’s necessary. And there’s a ton of other tools that people don’t intuitively know how to use in a decade’s time that maybe I’ll be here with a gray streak in my hair instead, still teach plebs how to use the next thing for Bitcoin. We’ll see.
[00:47:00] Q: So [00:47:01] P: I wanna shift topic slightly.You had some pretty interesting experiences to say the least around the protests that happened in Canada. Can you take us through at a high level sort of your involvement, what happened? And really the question that I wanna ask you is how did that change your perception of Bitcoin and where we are sort of in this process of Bitcoin, a Bitcoin becoming a much larger thing for
[00:47:29] BTC Sessions: more people?Yeah. So. Yeah. The, the beginning of this year was a, a tough one and it, it kind of came at me pretty fast, but so the long and the short of it is the, the truer protests basically began to materialize. When a number of people basically’re told, like you don’t have body autonomy, and if you choose not to get vaccinated, then as, as truckers, you’re no longer allowed to cross the American border back and forth.
And so they, they basically lost their livelihoods. But that also extended to even people traveling domestically. So any Canadian that wasn’t vaccinated, couldn’t get on a plane, a train, a boat, any sort of domestic travel and And more or less that that has remained it have remained for extended periods of time.
Like up to recently, I don’t even know what the current what our, what our current regulations are now. I believe they’ve lessened a little bit. But like, even up until last month as a Canadian, you still couldn’t even get on a local flight, but you could go to a hockey game with 20,000 people side by side without a mask.
And it was totally fine. So anyways, that’s kind of the context around the craziness of some of these, these restrictions where people lost their livelihoods couldn. Leave the country, if they didn’t like it either. Right? So they, you know, people will say, oh, if you don’t like it leave, well, there was no option because our only land border was the us and you needed to be vaccinated to cross it.
And you, so you could then couldn’t get on a plane to fly to any country that didn’t have restrictions. So that’s kind of where, where things were at. So there was the, this ended up being the largest protest in Canadian history and all these truckers converged on on Ottawa, our nation’s capital on and effectively what happened was there were a couple guys in and around Ottawa.
One was BJ Dicker, one of the organizers of the, of the convoy itself. And then there was Nick AKA, nobody caribou, a Bitcoin that was in Ottawa supporting the truckers and doing some Bitcoin things there. Both of them, I believe both of them had previously posted just Bitcoin addresses on Twitter or just raising a little bit of money.
Things kind of got some traction. Greg FOSS had spoken with Nick and I believe BJ previously. And then on Twitter reached out to me and said, Hey, is there any way we could accept lightning donations on this? I said, sure. I could probably figure that out. And I ended up creating a couple things.
One was a donation page on tally coin that would accept on chain donations and lightning donations to my Bitcoin note. The second was I created a Twitter handle called Hong Kong huddle and kind of started posting there that, Hey, this is a donation page. And then I began coordinating with Nick BJ.
Greg FOS. And Jeff Booth was another person that was involved here and we created a multisig wallet between all of us started migrating funds that went through the donations to that multisig wallet, just to prevent loss of funds through user error. And so my initial thought was just to give an idea of scale.
I thought, given the previous donation addresses that we would, you know, maybe get a few thousand bucks. So my initial goal for the, the, the donations was 10 million sat on the page. We got that like almost immediately. The first day we, we raised like a whole Bitcoin and then in the span of.
Around two weeks, we raised one, 1000000th of all Bitcoin that will ever exist. So there’s something like 22 Bitcoin or something there. Somewhere in that realm at the same time as this was happening and forgive me for kind of parsing the timeline and not perfectly here, but the government effectively declared it illegal.
So the, the, the, the protest was seen as an illegal occupation of the nation’s capital. They basically painted all of the protesters as, you know, racists or bigots or whatever it was. And don’t get me wrong. There’s a couple assholes down there flying like Nazi flags. But those people were promptly told to pound sand and get the hell outta there.
So obviously not reflective of the entire group. But the emergencies act was enacted, which basically gave the government more or less power to do whatever they pleased. And so they chose a few specific things to do. One of ’em was to freeze bank accounts of people in and around Ottawa that were donating and helping the costs.
another thing was they gave sweeping powers to police and stuff like that. They were basically trying to tackle, there was a couple border closures, which were separate from the main protest, and then they wanted to clear out the city. But in doing so, yeah, they, they effectively made it illegal to be at the protest and they gave themselves the ability to shut down people’s bank accounts and cut them off from the financial system.
So, GoFundMe had raised millions of dollars. They. Effectively prevented that from ever reaching its destination gifts send go same deal while they didn’t bend the need to the Canadian government. They tried to send money over to a bank account that was belonging to one of the organizers and TD bank.
Subsequent, subsequently froze that money so that didn’t get through either. The Bitcoin, however, ended up being given out to individual truckers around 14 and a half or 15 Bitcoin were put on paper, wallets care packages that were able to be swept by individuals at the time, it was about $8,000 each trucker received and there’s videos of it being given out and everything.
Unfortunately there was a bug in the wallet software temporarily that prevented us from moving the last few Bitcoin out of the multisig. The way that it works in nunchuck wallet is there’s an encrypted chat. And whenever you wanna send Bitcoin, you can propose a transaction. And that encrypted chat message gets relayed to everybody else.
And anybody with a key can then sign it. The encrypted chat message was not being sent through, so somebody would try to send it and nobody else would see the message so they weren’t able to sign. So we were effectively trying to get all of those funds moved. 15 Bitcoin went out or in and around there went out to individual truckers, which they still have.
But in the process of that migration, unfortunately, Nick had more keys as we were trying to get it out. And his home was rated by police. They took his laptops and all that kind of stuff long in the short of it is that Bitcoin is now sitting in. An escrow awaiting the outcome of a lawsuit, which was launched by a couple individuals in a business in Ottawa that said they suffered losses because of the protests.
And so there’s something called a Marva injunction, which says that any funds and association with this particular lawsuit need to stay put until the resolution of the lawsuit. So the legal, I guess, is it’s in legal limbo, so it’s just sitting there, but 70% of all the Bitcoin got to individual truckers and the last 30% is sitting in that legal limbo.
I don’t know, I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what the result of that lawsuit is gonna be. It’s probably gonna take some time. So yeah, more or less. When looking back at this situ and sorry, this is super long ran guys. no, this is amazing. I, I, so lessons learned, number one, I, I made two major mistakes from the get go and that kind of pooched, the whole thing moving forward.
So that even any of the funds were able to be taken. So maybe three, three things that I would change. Number one tally coin is a platform that allows you to accept Bitcoin donations at the time. And I’m not sure if this has changed since, but it would create a new donation address, not for each Don donator, but for each new.
Fundraiser. So unfortunately when I uploaded the X pub, it created the fundraiser and then it had a single static on chain address, which gave a very localized central point, which all the funds could be tracked therein. And so law enforcement was able to say, okay, like this went here, this went here, we see all the funds.
These are all, these are bad Bitcoin, so and so forth. So a better alternative to that would be BTC pay server. Unfortunately, when I started the fundraiser, I’d never used it. I didn’t know how to use it. I fixed that now. And I’ve now created a tutorial on how to use BTC pay server. Two the funds were not coin joint and.
Again was a mistake in and around how quickly we wanted to get it to multisig because how quickly the funds were building up, having one person with control of that would not have been ideal. So they’re in multisig, but then afterwards it’s like, oh crap, a lot of money is here. This should be coin joined in my opinion anyways.
So it would’ve been better if the. BTC pay server went into Sparrow wallet, did around a coin joint. And then the coin joint went into the multisig from there that would’ve been ideal. And then third is in and around the leg legality of things something that was previously legal became illegal.
And so when we had the multisig, it was all publicly identifiable Bitcoiners that are Canadians and in Canada. And so when it’s a legal protest and you assume it’s not gonna be a lot of money, it’s not that big of a deal to have identifiable Bitcoiners. In fact, it’s preferable because everybody is thinking don’t trust, verify who has this money.
And so we identified ourselves so that people wouldn’t be freaking out about where this money was and who had it, unfortunately in that instance when the government doesn’t like you, that becomes a major issue, especially since we’re all in the country. So I would change, I would go back and I would.
Rather than having the actual key holders be publicly identifiable, I would have individuals vet the key holders. So as an example of myself, I would be like, Hey, I’m putting my reputation on the line. And I know who holds this key. I don’t personally, but I vet the person. So if they do something shady, it’s gonna fall back on me.
Then there’s at least a little bit of don’t trust, verify there. And so, you know, then somebody kicks in my door and demands the key. Well, I don’t have it. I can tell you who has it, but maybe they’re not even in the country. So those are kind of the main things that I would change new receiving address.
Every time you receive a donation, which would be BTC pay server coin, join all funds after they come in. Multisig was still good. I’d probably do a two of three instead of three of five, because three of five was very difficult to coordinate. And then have the key holders. Vetted, but not identified. That would be my takeaway.
So there you go. If you’re, if you’re in a, an adversarial environment trying to fundraise there’s, there’s your roadmap, I suppose.
Oh, you muted P
[00:58:53] P: and I was muted. I just said that was incredible. Thank you so much for going through that with us. [00:58:58] BTC Sessions: no worries. No worries. one day I’ll figure it out, but today is not that day. All good. You’re [00:59:05] Q: honestly, I’ve given up hope. I, I wanna create a button that Chris can press every single time. P is just muted.Just like that. Won’t won’t you did just like that won, won wall.
[00:59:15] BTC Sessions: I have it. Strong bone. Yeah. Yeah, [00:59:19] P: man. What [00:59:20] BTC Sessions: a journey? Yeah, I can’t even [00:59:23] P: imagine. [00:59:23] Q: I want to ask, because like, we talked a little bit about this at the beginning of the show, how, you know, if you had asked me a year ago, would the Canadian government take such draconian measures against its own citizens?I would’ve, I would’ve said no. Candidly, like I would’ve, what, what do people who are not in Canada need to learn from this experience so that they themselves do not have to go through this nightmare that yourself truckers and countless others had to experience.
[01:00:01] BTC Sessions: I think, see this is a difficult one because people become very complacent and willing to put up with a lot of crap, right.Myself included. And so I think the, the main takeaway is to always, you know, be willing to push back even on the politicians that you think you agree with, hold them to task. But also be, be self sovereign. Right? The, the only really the only thing that worked here was, was the censorship resistant money.
And not even perfectly because the tools weren’t used to their full extent, but I, I would say be as self sovereign as possible while still holding anybody that does have influence in government to a high standard and hold them to task as best you can. And I think always, maybe just hedge for the worst possible outcome.
So like, as I was saying in, in my instance, I made a couple of assumptions that one, we wouldn’t raise much money and two that it would remain legal to have a peaceful protest. And neither of those things remains true. Had I gone in with the assumption that maybe we’re gonna raise a lot of money and maybe this is going to become illegal.
I would’ve gone through all of those. All of those steps to ensure that it would remain resistant through all of that. And I see in, in the chat here, Alexander using Panim absolutely pan S are awesome. And again, I started to learn, go down that rabbit hole after all of this went through. So I’ve now made a couple tutorials on how to use Panim both on samurai and on Sparrow wallet.
And they’re awesome. So anybody watching that doesn’t know what a Panim is. It’s basically an, a public identifier that you can share without sharing a Bitcoin address. And then that means there’s no easy centralized point of saying, oh, this address belongs to this person. Now I can begin to track their funds and begin to piece together what they have.
So at P M somebody can link to you and then they’ll be able to generate addresses for you to be able to send you money without you having a public post in a public forum an address that somebody that anybody could audit. So I, I love it.
[01:02:30] Q: P I have a fun, so off topic question. So unless you have something more to contribute, I wanna sidetrack us completely go for it, dude. BT, the last time you and I got a chance to really talk, I was on your show and you. And I, I’m not trying to admit it. Like we’re MCU, nerds, love and thunder. Did you see it?Did you like it?
[01:02:52] BTC Sessions: This is the first one that I haven’t seen, like right out the gate, sadly. It’s because I was on a road trip, so I was doing my workshop in Vancouver. So I left two days prior to it coming out. But me and my wife are in the midst of setting up date nights so we can go to it because that’s that’s her Hollywood crush.So , I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll take that L right there. I’m I’m no Chris Hemsworth, but I’ll, I’ll try.
[01:03:18] Q: All right. So who’s your Hollywood crush. We heard who your wife is. [01:03:21] BTC Sessions: Oh Anna Daar MOS. Oh, yes. [01:03:24] Q: Yes, [01:03:25] BTC Sessions: she is great. Super hot, but I mean, my wife finds her super hot too, so that’s, , we’re we’re together on that one. [01:03:33] Q: I love that. I love that for you guys. Ben, I wanted to give you the opportunity to also answer. Have you ever been to Amsterdam and what do you, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the city? [01:03:45] BTC Sessions: I have been to Amsterdam. I was there actually with my wife for we were like, we weren’t married yet, but in 2012 we went backpacking through Europe for three and a half months.And so Amsterdam was the first place that we got to together. And it was a great city. I really enjoyed it. The canals are amazing. We, so I don’t , I don’t really smoke a lot of weed but we decided to partake while we were there. And I we were staying in this little hostile hotel. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but we were basically in an attic and to set the.
To set the stage of where we were, the stairs were so steep in this place that I could stand in front of the staircase and reach my arm out, straight in front of me. And I would be touching a stair that’s how steep they were. So we had to traverse this in our giant backpacks. But down at the, the main check-in area, tiny little cafe, the whole place reeked of weed.
And then they had an assortment of edibles there. And so we grabbed, we picked up a space muffin and the dude at the front desk asked if we smoke very often. And I was like, last time I had any, maybe was six months ago. And he was like, Ooh, you guys better split this . And so we did. And so we each had half a space muffin and we walked around for about an hour.
We both couldn’t really feel anything. And right, as we were saying how much we couldn’t feel it, it was like somebody punched me directly in the brain. just, just, and, and my wife heard me say, oh my God. And she was like, what? I don’t, no, I still don’t feel anything. And then she went silent for about 30 seconds as she went through the exact same process.
And then we just wandered aimlessly and were super paranoid. And somehow, eventually made our way back to our host where we then like, Sat and, and kept on a are, are you okay? Yeah. I’m okay. Are you okay? so there’s a lot of that. But there’s a really, maybe I’ll find it, but there’s a really great picture of us that we managed to snap.
We’re like, we, we’ve never been this high before, so we’ll just get a good, like selfie style and our eyes are just pasted together. and like just mid. Yeah. So I will tweet that I will find it and I will tweet that photo out after this show. I do it
[01:06:16] Q: do it. That is hilarious. I’m so sorry that you have that experience.I’m definitely gonna bully you into taking some sort of a space cake or smoking a joint with me in Amsterdam while we’re there. Dude,
[01:06:27] BTC Sessions: I, well, first I gotta make sure that I’m going I, I, I gotta, I do want to go. I don’t know if I’m, if I, I don’t know in what capacity, but I would love to maybe partake and speak or something, whatever whatever’s needed.So, yeah. Amazing. You heard it here
[01:06:44] Q: first, Alex? [01:06:47] BTC Sessions: Yeah. Alex, get me there. Yeah. [01:06:49] P: I want to ask, but just as we’re kind of wrapping up, I know you’ve been doing some workshops, some in person workshops, specifically around using the cold card. Can you like what’s going on there? Can you tell people about it?How can they learn more about
[01:07:01] BTC Sessions: these? Yeah, so, so I just did my first in person workshop. I’ve done plenty of like one-on-ones with people. People are always asking, like, despite the fact, and I should caveat this by saying, I always have free stuff. So anybody who wants to learn, there’s always gonna be free videos on what you wanna learn.However, some people. They just want that extra hand holding and the ability to like on the fly be like, what is this, what, you know, how there’s something I encountered that wasn’t in the tutorial. And like, they just want an hour of me sitting there with them. And so I do a lot of one-on-ones like that, where people go and they’ll book me for an hour on my website.
However, I thought it would be kind of cool to be able to have a classroom setting and like have an in depth, like deep dive workshop. So I did my first set of those in Vancouver on the 16th of July. So just this past, you know, five days ago, six days ago, whatever it was And they were great.
So I did a learning self custody workshop and it was like a three hour kind of marathon. So everything from like getting your funds off the exchange, setting up a, a basic wallet, using it, doing transactions, understanding transaction fees deleting and restoring your wallet. We got into using lightning and showing how moon works versus how blue works and different backups.
And then we discussed different types of hardware. So I gave a rundown of kind of all the top hardware options out there to kind of set them on their next steps towards self custody and security. So that was kind of the morning session. And then in the afternoon session, we did a four hour deep dive on cold card.
And so again, that ran the gamut of kind of the zero to hero basics of setting the thing up, backing it up, using it. Air gaping transactions restoring a device, so and so forth. So we did all of that. And then we dove in, in the later parts into some of the more advanced features and how they work and what they do and how to use them.
So it was it was pretty, pretty great in my opinion, I learned a lot and I’ll be able to tweak and, and make them even better. I think moving forward, what I will probably do next time. I do one of these, which I’m not entirely sure when, but I’d like to do more traveling workshops. I think I’ll always do a short one hour beginner session for free at the beginning of the day.
And then I’ll probably have two deep dives. For the rest of the day cold card will probably remain because that one, I feel like went really well. But I’d also like to do maybe something on nodes or maybe something on different privacy tools or maybe something on multisig, lots of options there.
But yeah, I, I basically want people to be able to come along and come and like really get into the nitty gritty and start using some of this stuff and experimenting. I think it’s incredibly useful. I love
[01:10:08] P: it. That sounds fucking awesome, man. Where can people find you on Twitter, YouTube? How can they get access to your amazing content? [01:10:17] BTC Sessions: yeah, man. So you can follow me on Twitter at BTC sessions. You can also find me on YouTube, just search BTC sessions. There’s tons of stuff there, but yeah, you can subscribe to that channel. And then I also have a website, BTC sessions.ca cuz I’m in Canada, of course. But that’s where people would find me if they want to actually book like a one-on-one, you know, on online kind of individual session, try to, to help you through whatever you want.So, yeah, those are kind of the mean main places that you could find me. Love it. Love it. Well
[01:10:49] P: on that note I want to thank you for joining us today also for going 15 minutes over. This has been a fantastic conversation. Also thank you for contributing so much to Bitcoin. Your content is fucking incredible in case that wasn’t clear to the people listening, check it out.BTC sessions has amazing stuff out there. Some of the most cogent well organized, thoughtful tutorials on Bitcoin.
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