The Samourai Wallet founders were arrested, what we know at this point, as well as El Salvador's Chivo Wallet hack. Plus, some good news for Bitcoin's improvement proposal process, my thoughts on the Epic halving sat bidding, and why Runes won't go away anytime soon.
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LINKS:
Sponsor: http://podhome.fm
Promo Code: TWIB
LINKS:
- Epic halving sat Bidding
- Samourai Wallet Founders Arrested and Charged With Money Laundering
- Southern District of New York | Founders And CEO Of Cryptocurrency Mixing Service Arrested And Charged With Money Laundering And Unlicensed Money Transmitting Offenses | United States Department of Justice
- [bitcoindev] Adding New BIP Editors
- El Salvador’s Chivo Wallet Source Code & VPN Access Leaked
- WalletScrutiny - Know your wallet like you built it.
- Zeus v0.9.0-alpha1
- Jack Mallers on X: "Announcing Strike Europe 🇪🇺
- Buy Sats on River
- AQUA Wallet
- Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet - Sparrow Wallet
- Green: Bitcoin Wallet on the App Store
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Music. Welcome in to Episode 8 of This Week in Bitcoin. My name is Chris. Did you enjoy the crazy feast bikes post-having? Things seem to be settling down as I record. But even in that small window of time, we saw more adoption of Layer 2 solutions by different application creators. So that was interesting. I just really jumped on that. I guess we probably all expected humans were going to human. But as I was looking at the bidding just before I hit record, the Epic halving set, which is the first Satoshi from block 840,000, that one set is currently going for about 5.5 Bitcoin. Yeah, you heard me right. One set is going for just over 5.5 Bitcoin right now.
I guess i'm not so so surprised right that i think it's like the first sat in block 840 000 which was the having block according to the ordinal's numbering system that's a that's a rare satoshi i feel silly even talking about it but like i said humans are going to human it's going to be interesting to watch how this develops because i'm going to keep an eye on this because the news to me here is that we're valuing one sat more than another sat that somehow a sat is all all of a sudden very special and i think this kind of concerns me a little bit i'm not quite sure why but i can't help but feel like this is going to be human behavior and i i want you to boost in with your thoughts i have a question for you because i bet you it's easy to say this is silly and this is ridiculous but frame it like this would you pay a little extra to own one of satoshi's original sats maybe from the genesis block you know i mean this is a theory just totally theoretical like somehow these came up for sale satoshi satoshi shows back up on the scenes like hey everybody i need a little money the price has gone up a little bit.
I'm going to sell one of these I'm going to sell a few of these sats and each one of these you know they're going to go for like, one sat one of Satoshi's sats is going to go for 10,000 sats not a whole bitcoin just 10,000 sats for one Satoshi's sat would you be willing to do that. That's the mind game I've been playing with myself. I think I might. I'd like to know what you would do. Let me know. I am off to LinuxFest Northwest this weekend, so come say hi if you're in the Pacific Northwest. I just got back from Austin, Texas, and now I'm going to the Bellingham Technical College, April 26th and the 28th, 2024.
If you're around on Saturday, I'll be doing some barbecuing, and on Sunday, I'll be doing Linux Unplugged Live. You know, it could be a lot of fun. It's probably not going to be, you know, oh, Oh, you guys will understand and appreciate this, actually. None of the other shows, anybody appreciates this. It drives me crazy when I'm at Linux Fest because their campus is the Bellingham Technical College. Well, guess what they shortened that to? BTC. So I see BTC everywhere, all over the place. BTC, BTC, BTC. And it's never about Bitcoin. It's rough. It could be a lot worse, though. Samurai Wallet founders have been arrested and charged with money laundering in the Southern District of New York.
But our prosecutors charged the Samurai Wallet founders Rodriguez and Hill today. The pair are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. Side note here, I think we're going to be hearing a lot more unlicensed money transmitted business accusations getting thrown around in the future. These charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years and five years, respectively. Rodriguez, 35, and Hill, 65, collected approximately $4.5 million in fees for their, quote, mixing service, according to prosecutors.
Rodriguez was arrested on Wednesday morning, and it will be arranged in Pennsylvania either later today, as I record, or tomorrow, as you're probably listening to this. According to the press release, Hill was Samurai Walt's CTO. He's been arrested in portugal and will be extradited to the u.s so rodriguez is in pennsylvania hill is in portugal right now and extradited to the u.s i have some of the highlights here so yeah a conspiracy to commit money laundering conspiracy to operate unlicensed money transmitter business those are not too surprising anybody that follows this kind of stuff we've seen this before here's where it kind of gets a little um specific they the uh prosecutors claimed that they facilitated over 2 billion in unlawful transactions.
That's a huge number enabled 100 million in money laundering from dark web markets. Uh, they also claim that they went on Twitter and encouraged money laundering, um, encouraged people like, uh, avoiding exchange, uh, sanctions. And I have screenshots in, in the announcement that they have over on the U S government website. I'll, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. They got screenshots of like their Twitter feeds. I mean, it, It's pretty rough, guys. They say, quote, they encourage money laundering via Twitter. They marketed specifically to criminals for privacy evasion.
And they acknowledged that they receive revenue from dark slash gray market participants and that they even sort of boasted about that to potential investors. And they've got some quotes. They've got like, somehow they've got messages. I'm going to keep following this, but they seem to have some messages where they were boasting in multiple cases about taking money from dark gray markets and about how their niche is dark gray markets. They're never going to be mainstream, but their niche will be dark gray markets, and that's good money. Quote, at Samurai, we're entirely focused on the censorship resistance and black slash gray circular economy.
Economy one private message attributed to hill this is all we have at this point quote this implies no foreseeable mass adoption although the black slash gray markets have already started to expand during covid and will continue to do so post covid and the prosecutors have that in a screenshot at this time i don't know where they got it from but it appears to be attributed to hill one of the co-founders of samurai wallet and um the other kind of wider context here is that the doj is preparing for an upcoming trial against roman storm who's a developer and co-founder of the tornado cash mixing service on ethereum.
And that case is being pursued by the doj southern district of new york division, and recently the doj's washington dc unit successfully won a conviction against roman Roman Sterling of Sterling of that's I know my bad. But as you might recall, he was the operator of the crypto mixer Bitcoin fog. And they got him on money laundering charges. So this is, they're building momentum here. They're knocking them down and they're building momentum. And now they're operating with more and more international partners on these. And they're expanding. And the only real solution here for end users to avoid any third-party risk is full custodial services.
In reality, it means, you know, if you have to use a custodial lightning wallet for a bit, you know, quote-unquote have to. To um that means don't leave a lot of money on there and have a full custody solution for the money you really care about i'll keep an eye on this and if you see any interesting stories please send them in maybe via boost or from the contact page i'd like to keep an eye on the story but i'll be on the go but it's definitely going to be an important one that again just sets more precedence now on monday we had some good news bitcoin got five new bip editors so what's a bip Yep.
Well, it's a Bitcoin improvement proposal. It's a way for the community in a wider context to suggest improvements or propose improvements to Bitcoin. And this has also also been adopted in other projects, too, like the podcasting 2.0 project. And so you get a bit editors help make it into the best possible bit possible, just something that is not only a good historical document, but gives people context when they come to analyze the issue. Because if something major does happen and get accepted, it could become sort of a historical improvement proposal.
And so you want these things to really kind of stand the test of time. And there's only so much one editor can do. And Luke Dasher says he was just backlogged. He's the primary editor for Bips right now. And he reached out for help on the mailing list. And some well-known existing expert contributors were suggested. They seem to mostly have support. This process is kind of funny the way it works. There is a voting, and then if there's really no fighting and no massive reasons not to go for somebody or like a strong vote that goes the wrong way, it's sort of like when there's a lack of activity, that's when they've reached consensus.
It's a funny way they do this. And so after Luke asked for some help, there was some formality discussions. And then the day after the halving, 420, Ava Chow wrote, quote, there's not really been any actual objections to the nominees, nor have there been any suggestions on choosing a subset of them since my last email. As such, there is rough consensus. Now, to the outsider, that seems like odd. But Ava actually addresses why rough consensus is exactly what they're looking for. Quote, I don't want this process to become a popularity contest and require some kind of formal voting.
Rather, I'd prefer that this process be something more like how Bitcoin core maintainers are added by achieving rough consensus. And thus, we have five new editors. That should be really interesting. I think other open source projects should also look at the BIP process. It is, you know, I mean, getting things into Bitcoin is not easy and it's not a quick process, but it starts with the BIP. And then it's quite the journey from there. Some bad news for El Salvador users, though. Some Chiva Walt source code and keys related to VPN access seem to have been leaked.
The cyber hacker group, the attackers, go by Cyber Intelligentsia SV. They put the SV on the end of their hacker name so that way you really know they're from El Salvador. There can be no doubt about where they're from. And they have leaked snippets of the Chivo wallet source code. Now, the Chivo wallet has been a constant source of controversy because it's a custodial wallet essentially run by the El Salvadorian government. And they incentivized users by giving them some free money if they downloaded this wallet. And I think, you know, with hindsight, it's pretty easy to say it wasn't a great idea, but the El Salvadorian government was looking for something that they could roll out and have some level of support and control over.
You know, it's a big transition to go from banks to a wallet. You could kind of see it from their perspective, but as Bitcoiners, we know, boy, that's never going to go well. And it doesn't require that you use Chivo down there. You can use any Bitcoin wallet, any Lightning wallet. The Chivo was the one that was sort of encouraged by everybody and had all the branding behind it. So it's got a fair amount of users. Now it doesn't sound like. This has resulted in access to their Bitcoin. It's more like just wallet source code, which maybe then could be sifted through for bugs and then at some point lead to some sort of problem.
According to the blog, the hackers released the stolen information to the public to, quote, punish the Salvadorian government for, quote, refusing to engage with them. Although we don't really have specifics on what they want to be engaged over, I have some speculation. The group did recently leak a bunch of other databases about 5.1 million salvadorians were impacted by that i could see there just being something around all of that but apparently they're not getting any response from the el salvadorian government around this i haven't seen anything official from chivo this isn't getting a lot of attention but it's sort of been bubbling up over uh the week so i wanted to give a shout out to no bs bitcoin because they're the ones that i think really brought the most attention to this and they've been doing a killer job this week, so I've decided to throw them in the splits.
So if you do boost in this week, I'm going to give a split over to NoBSBitcoin for really doing just fantastic work. Okay, coming up, your boosts, project updates, and my bulletproof stacker self-custody guide. You asked for it. It's coming up. But first, a big shout out to Podhome.fm, my podcasting 2.0 platform with unlimited episodes and Podhome AI that can auto-suggest chapters, titles. It's really, really powerful. It also has the easiest live stream support with full podcasting 2.0 lit integration. You can do value for value music streaming, unlimited shows and episodes.
Just use my promo code TWIB. That's TWIB and you get the first three months for free and see why I'm loving Podhome for all my podcasting 2.0 posting. It's quick, too. The downloads are wicked fast. So many nice features, and it's like having a whole team in your back pocket when you go to post. Now, we do have some boosts to get into this week, so let's do it. Jeremy Ross is our baller booster this week, who comes in with 23,500 sats. Send in from Castomatic with no message, though. I do appreciate that support, Jeremy. If you meant to send a message, just let me know. But I really appreciate it.
The Podfather's not far behind, though, with 15,000 sats. Mr. Adam Curry comes in via Podcast Guru. i hoard that which your kind covered friday night drinking wine and texas boost whoo you know i was just in texas uh possibly when you sent that boost when it's um yeah i was probably on my way home that day thank you podfather appreciate that and uh jc denton comes in with 2100 sats happy having here is a post having sat oh are those very special jcd are those uh uh are Are those like special sats? Are they epic? Appreciate that, JC Denton. Oppie 1984 comes in with 4,000 sats.
When it comes to cold storage of my Bitcoin, I went old school and printed off a paper wallet with an air gap machine and just store the paper wallet in my fireproof safe. I just keep the public address in a text editor. And in a sync thing folder occasionally that gets backed up. I also keep the soundboard. It's like your piece of flair. He says also keep the soundboard It's like your pieces of flair There is always a minimum of flair, Paper wallet I'd like to hear opinions on the paper wallet I have heard people shouldn't be using paper wallets anymore But it seems like that's a workflow That's working for you So I can't really say no.
Oh, there he is. Adversary 17 comes in with 8,000 sats. Boost! No message, though. Just sending in a big old boost over Fountain. Appreciate it. You know, all these boosts help us get up on the Discovery page, too, so people can find the new show. And I also really appreciate that. Chad F. Comes in with 3,222 sats and says, Thanks for covering Runes. I hadn't heard of it until today. And then he also sent 1,000 sats to our artist for the end track, June and the Jets. Thank you for doing that, Chad. Chad, you are, Chad F, man, you know what? You deserve like a hot boost and a pew pew.
You're always out there repping podcasting 2.0 and the value for value music, man. Really appreciate that. You're doing the people's work. The Muso comes in with 4,500 sats. I am programmed in multiple techniques. The What Bitcoin Did podcast covered the runes and ordinal stuff a few months back. Zach, I particularly enjoyed an episode with the Bitcoin mechanic and his argument against anything that is not a monetary transaction on the blockchain. I'd already agreed with him prior to listening to this episode, but afterwards I agree even more.
In my opinion, anything on the Bitcoin blockchain that is not a monetary transaction devalues Bitcoin as a whole. Let the shitcoin blockchains keep their shitcoin tokens, I say. Oh, I love that hot take. You know, so Musa, that's what I'm oscillating to as well. It's like it should only be monetary uses on Bitcoin because we got all these other crap currencies that people can go out there and play around with. However, I think it is also the actual valuable scarce nature of Bitcoin that makes it kind of attractive to people to play around like this. You see what I'm saying? Yeah.
And if we're going to go around and say rocks have value and digital tokens have value, I just, where are you going to draw the line, Musa? Where are you going to draw the line? Now, I like that you have a line. And that is anything that's not a monetary transaction. But ordinals are technically monetary transactions. I don't know, man. Crashmaster comes in with a row of ducks. 2,222 sats on Podverse. Keep up the good work, Chris. If you tweak the show at all, perhaps consider incorporating more Bitcoin mining and cold old wallet software stack reviews as updates on even occasional how-tos.
Maybe these could be subscriber special episodes. Kind of dig the idea of checking in on software stacks. We're going to do that in this episode a little bit. I'll talk more about that in a moment. But I like the idea of my stack is always kind of not actively changing. In fact, the rate of change has slowed the software stack that I use to manage, buy, and sell, very rarely sell Bitcoin. In fact i don't generally sell bitcoin so much as i'll use something like the bitcoin company, and that's really just for business purposes sometimes it's kind of tricky right because for me i really want my primary thing is is i want to privately store for a long term, selling is mostly going to happen over lightning or something like that it's going to be small little things or a boost it's not going to be like um you know a house or a car or something So that stack is generally relatively static, but it does change and evolve as the Bitcoin network fees change and things like that and layer two solutions and things like FedEmit come along.
It does sort of require that you kind of not necessarily change the tooling, but just kind of keep current with it. And that's something I should probably give thought to how I could keep that up to date in the show. I will give that more thought, Crashmaster. And I definitely am down for incorporating more Bitcoin mining news. I just need to get some good, solid sources. The Bitcoin mining industry is very quiet, very hush-hush. They talk amongst each other a lot, but they don't talk with outsiders of the mining industry much. I think because of just persecution in the past and all kinds of things like.
That. So last thing they really want to do is draw attention to themselves at all. You can see why they're not super excited to like come run into a guy like me. But I am definitely down for just sharing more about what's going on at that layer. Mega Strike 3 comes in with 5,100 sets. Keep the change, you filthy animal. I was sad to see the Bitcoin dad pod go, but I'm loving this show and I'm glad the void was filled. As far as the wallet setup and Bitcoin purchasing process, I would absolutely love to hear a full episode dedicated to these topics. As a newbie, this would be super useful. Keep up the good work.
Well, Megastrike, I am going to, in the resources section of the show this week, go into more extensive detail on the stack with a full list of links. And then I'll kind of be looking for your feedback on what I'm missing, what overview bits you're missing, and then I'll develop content around that. But I'm going to give you the fundamentals today, and then you can tell me what bits of the picture you still need filled in. ABC comes in with 5,000 sats. Yes, please do an episode outlining your current picks for software and services and your stack in 2024. Well, I have got good news.
It's coming up in just a minute. LazyLox also comes in with 5,000 sats. B-O-O-S-T. Says thanks for another great episode. Thank you, LazyLox. Every boost really matters. Thank you very much. Jin from Matik comes in with 2,000 sats. Great episode. I like the intro music. It gives me goosebumps every time. Thank you. that is the classic wonderful ronald jenkins he says it's great that you're continuing your own bitcoin podcast after the bitcoin dad pod stop please give a shout out to wallet scrutiny.com, so plebs can choose verify and compare how their bitcoin wallet is built that's wallet scrutiny.com i will try to put a link to that in the show notes i'll go grab that right now for you guys to know your wallet like you built it not everyone is a developer and not everyone has to be as their slogan that's pretty good jim that's pretty good thank you for sending that in i really appreciate that thank you everybody who boosted in i got 900 sats from pothome who said happy havening dive value for episode seven from ace crackerman thank you everybody who boosted and we have a 2000 sat cut off just for time right there but i do like to give people like nicole gave a boost to the uh to our song last week sent the artist 500 sats thank you nicole for doing that we had 19 boosters this week 85 237 sats not incredible but gets us a sega.
And i do appreciate that and some really great quality boosts too so not like blow away amounts of boosts saving that link for you right now but really great quality i'd love to hear your your feedback would you buy some of satoshi's sats also your thoughts on anything that i'm about to when i cover my my self-stacking bulletproof guide any gaps you need filled in please boost those in and let me know so i can start working on that for you and with that that is all of our boosts for this week if you'd like to send a boost into the show just get a new podcast app there's a whole new world of podcast apps that have all kinds of services and they're getting better and better you just go to podcastapps.com fountain has been crushing it with new releases fixing and polishing speed and enhancing the UI.
And of course, Podverse is cross-platform, GPL available for Android, iOS, and the web. And then last but not least, you hear people boosting from Castomatic and PodcastGroove. There's so many great apps. Try them out, see which one you like, and then boost into the show. Music. I got project updates for you. I got project updates. I am so excited about the next major release of Zeus. It's currently an alpha alpha one stage right now. So I'm not necessarily encouraging that you use it, but I want to keep this on your radar because there are a lot of mobile options, but very few hold up to the feature, the power and security of Zeus on iOS and Android and version 0.9.0 is out alpha one.
First feature in here that i think is just so great it has a watch only account import from xpub, in other words you could have your cold wallet offline somewhere we're even receiving like your dca dumps into it just like you're never actually plugging the cold wallet in you're never even booting up the computer that has the software on it you're just from from like a from another wallet from whatever you're wherever you're getting your stats you're sending to there over time and you You just want to check on it. Or this could be great for family members where you're stacking for them and they want to be able to check on their balance, but they can't really do anything else but just check on it. A watch-only account import.
Oh, gosh, I've wanted this feature for so long. It's so great to see Zeus bringing this. Also, another fantastic feature, hardware wallet support, you guys. Signing device support, like cold card, seed signer, et cetera. And then on the Lightning side, they got batch channel opens. Yes, that's right. Batch channel opens. The batch channel opens, which will, well, it'll open up channels and batches and keep things cheaper and batch on-chain transactions as well. Man, Zeus is really looking good. And I'll let you know when I see that version actually ship stable because that is some great hardware wallet support, you guys.
Strike has a really big update this week. They now are rolling out in Europe. Yo, we just launched Strike Europe. Ladies and gentlemen, it is live today, right now. Now check your app stores for all eligible European customers. Strike is available. Let's go. I am pumped. It actually looks really great. And it's going to make it even easier now for people to stack sats on a really decent platform. I think Strike is a solid platform and it's got lightning support. It's got a good set of people behind it. It's great to see it expand. Band okay here is my bulletproof stacker self-custody guide you do this i don't think you can go wrong nobody's gonna get fired for following this process i recommend you buy sats on river i will put links in the show notes that river link will be an affiliate link, um strike is also good like i just mentioned you basically you want something with solid lightning support there's various levels of good here and not so good you know and robo sats is on the spectrum links to all of that but for the bulletproof newbie i say you buy your sats on river you just need to make sure you have something that has lightning but we'll go with river for this and then on a regular routine at you stack your sats you make your you make your routine purchase on river that will build up a balance you send that balance over lightning to the aqua wallet.
The AquaWallet will swap your inbound Lightning into Liquid and store it in Liquid. When that peg into Liquid happens, which it will do on the backend for you automatically using the bolts.exchange API, when that pegs into Liquid, you essentially break the on-chain tracking. So most looky-loos will not be able to follow where those sats went. It doesn't mean that River doesn't have a record of how many sats you bought at what price, but it means somebody doing some chain analysis is going to have a much harder time tracking your sats how much they are where they went the liquid network is run by blockstream there's about 15 liquid functionalities that hold a key so it kind of acts like a giant multi-sig so in my view this is my opinion liquid is safer than any one exchange or company but it is not safer than private cold storage there's 15 keys that would all have to get rugged but But it's better than just one exchange, but it's, you know, it's long term, you know, 10, 15 year horizon.
Private cold storage is better. So you accumulate in Aqua, that'll be on device. It's a mobile app with liquid, lightning and Bitcoin on-chain support. The goal you're doing, the reason why we're going from wherever you bought your Bitcoin, River, Strike, the reason why we're going from River or Strike to Aqua and not right into your cold storage is because we're trying to avoid small DCA-sized UTXOs in your final wall. Unlike, say, the Visa network or, like, I don't know, Wire Earning Money or Western Union, where they'll charge you a fee based on the amount of money you're transmitting. A percentage of the fee is like a hundred dollars we'll take a five percent fee i don't know i'm making numbers bitcoin charges on the size of the data of the transaction so lots of little utxos lots of little transactions actually take up more data in a block so you're going to get charged more in the future you know when the bitcoin fees the transaction fees are much higher you could outprice yourself you could have small UTXOs that you can't send because they're worth less than the fees required to send them you know I'll see people on Twitter talking about how they're DCAing on strike one dollar an hour well let me tell you something you're never going to be able to spend those sats even something that's less than a million sats could one day be hard to transfer on the Bitcoin network.
There's always going to be lots of solutions, but ultimately you will at some point need to likely do an on-chain transaction. So what we do is we accumulate in Aqua, the Aqua wallet. But you could put anything in here, but I like the Aqua wallet because it's doing all of the pegging and lightning support for you in one place. And so you don't have to use multiple apps and services. You collect in there for a while. Personally, I'd say you want to get north of 2 million sats, but it's a comfort thing. You should go higher if you're comfortable with it but don't go too crazy high then you sweep once you're at that threshold from aqua into the sparrow wallet now sparrow you first need to get yourself a cold card you create a wallet using the cold card set up sparrow with all of that then you sweep into sparrow backed by your cold card that's your permanent savings then you need to save those seed phrases you need to save your pin you need to save vital information some way that works for you there's lots of cool ways to do that some really fun ones some products you can even buy if you want put it on metal.
And you don't really touch it, And you're only sweeping to that when the amount in your temporary middle wallet reaches an amount that you're not comfortable losing. But you want it to be high enough that you could spend it in the future. There's not a real perfect answer here because we don't know what future fees are going to be like. But the idea is that you utilize something like the liquid network or maybe a Fedemit in one day. Like this is an area where maybe I'll update this once we have some really solid proved workflows there.
But the idea is you kind of break the tracking you accumulate in liquid where it's really cheap to move things and hold things this is also if it's once you have it in the aqua wall or you have it in liquid maybe a fatimate in the future this is a great time to start divvying it up amongst family friends and kids if you want to don't do that crap on chain you could do it in layer two and save yourself a ton of money something like the aqua wallet or block stream green so for an individual this process works really smooth for families skip the aqua wallet and use something like Blockstream Green because it supports multiple sub-wallets.
You can use bolts.exchange to go from lightning to liquid, so like from river to liquid, or whatever you're using, and then proceed later on to sweep to Sparrow backed by a cold card. This method lets you stack and build value in something like an Aqua Wallet or a Blockstream Green or whatever you like, maybe one day something like the Mutiny Wallet using a Fetament. You can get like an actual head start before you go blow $300 on a cold card. And cold cards go on sale. So while you're accumulating that temporary stack, cold card might go on sale. And you can grab a couple.
Keep an eye on the Mutiny Wallet, too, because you could do this likely without having to use Liquid in the future. I don't know if we're there yet, especially we're looking at something where you could maybe keep it temporarily for a while if it takes you a bit to get to a few million sats. So, you know, Aqua and Liquid are really well tested. They've been around for a long time at this point. Mutiny Wallet and the Fetament support is still fairly new. So for me, I like to let this stuff cook a bit. The Blockstream green wallet is also really tried and true, and you can also use that with hardware wallets.
So the workflow is buy on an exchange that has Lightning support or use something like RoboSats and go KYC free, which also has Lightning support. Go from Lightning to Liquid or in the future, Affediment. Accumulate in that Liquid wallet. And then once you've reached a high amount, peg out into your Bitcoin wallet in Sparrow using ColdCard or whatever your final cold storage wallet solution is. You peg out from liquid to your final solution. So then, you know, it's much, much harder to track you as well. So not only are you avoiding high transfer fees in the future, transaction fees, but you're also able to now move your temporary stash around in a really cheap environment.
You're able to accumulate in this way that is private. There's a lot of benefits to it. It's an additional step, but there's just so many benefits to it. Is run by the Blockstream Corporation, so it's not like it's some, you know, community project or something. But they have their own commercial reasons for running it, and it seems like it's been pretty solid. So I will have links to the Aqua Wallet, to the RoboSats Guide, to the Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet, and to the Green Bitcoin Wallet. These mostly all have had updates this week, too. Sparrow, Green, Zeus, like I mentioned. They're just getting updated aqua wallet they're just getting updated like crazy right now, they're getting so good aqua is one that could work for the normie so i like to mention that one but also because it's doing all of the moving from lightning to liquid back to on chain when you need it for you on the back end using bolts with their api and it's been really solid that's quite i know now that now that i say it all out i feel like you're probably just glazing over. So let me know what I missed.
Let me know what doesn't work for you. What bits don't make sense. And I will try to put. Music. I get no pleasure in playing this for you, but I think we need to get on the same page. This shenanigans going on with the Bitcoin stuff that not just to ordinals, but more than that, it's not going away anytime soon. And the reason I say that is I think nobody has properly communicated the actual value of Bitcoin and the utility of Bitcoin. And so the financial press and the rest of the normies and the people that have large, large amounts of money to move around are still trying to wrap their head around what makes Bitcoin valuable.
And instead of taking them all to school constantly on what actually gives things intrinsic value, we're just going for the easy answer. This here is the Bitcoin Foundation chair, Brock Pierce. He spins a story about how all of this degen behavior is going to be just great for the value of Bitcoin and NGU is just around the corner. Brock, okay, so the halving event has concluded. Everybody was waiting years for that. What is the next catalyst you see? What's the next narrative, right? What's the next thing we're going to use to pump Bitcoin? That's what she's saying.
Because they don't understand the utility, even of just a store of value, let alone digital gold or anything of those narratives that they want to try to use. Like they just they don't quite get it. They just know it's it's basically hype after hype cycle. So what's the next one, Brock? Well, I mean, it's what we've seen. Bitcoin had record fees during this halving because a lot of what we call layer two technologies, the idea of building on Bitcoin. If you've heard of Ethereum, it's all the other applications that had moved away from Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is back and delivering smart functionality, NFT functionality, meme technologies.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, Brock. So first of all, Bitcoin's back. I didn't know Bitcoin was gone, but it's back, guys. And the reason it's back is because it has NFT functionality and memes. Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is back and delivering smart functionality, NFT functionality, meme technologies. Meme technologies. I mean, man, Bitcoin sounds awesome now. Let's invest more money. Functionality, NFT functionality, meme technologies. All of these things are now being built on top of Bitcoin for the first time since almost a decade ago. go.
And so in anticipation of that record fees, as people are trying to get in to be the first. And that I think is why it's not going to go away anytime soon. Because the collective of people that go on these shows and pump NGU, they want this kind of activity. They need this kind of activity because at least it's something to do with Bitcoin. It's some kind of like they look at it as, look, there's something you can do with it. Now there's a reason to spend money on it because it's scarce and there's something you can do with it. As if store of value just right now isn't clearly enough.
And I think it's just simply they're exhausted at trying to explain it, so they're just leaning in. All right, well, if you made it this far, go check out thisweekinbitcoin.show. I have links over there for what I talked about today. Also, please consider boosting it as a value for value podcast. And I'd also love to see you share it with a friend. I think one day this This could be the number one Bitcoin news podcast, at least for the JB community and the podcasting 2.0 community. There's a lot of podcasters and listeners that are trying to wrap their heads around this Sats thing now, and I'd love to be a resource for them.
So please do consider sharing it. That's another great way to send a little value to the show. And in the spirit of podcasting 2.0 and value for value, I would love to play a song for you. Now, the Dorfell family is well known for being extremely talented, and there's Dorfell family bluegrass. So our song this week is Play Guitar by the Dorfell family. Thanks for joining me. See you right back here. Bye. Music.
Music. Welcome in to Episode 8 of This Week in Bitcoin. My name is Chris. Did you enjoy the crazy feast bikes post-having? Things seem to be settling down as I record. But even in that small window of time, we saw more adoption of Layer 2 solutions by different application creators. So that was interesting. I just really jumped on that. I guess we probably all expected humans were going to human. But as I was looking at the bidding just before I hit record, the Epic halving set, which is the first Satoshi from block 840,000, that one set is currently going for about 5.5 Bitcoin. Yeah, you heard me right. One set is going for just over 5.5 Bitcoin right now.
I guess i'm not so so surprised right that i think it's like the first sat in block 840 000 which was the having block according to the ordinal's numbering system that's a that's a rare satoshi i feel silly even talking about it but like i said humans are going to human it's going to be interesting to watch how this develops because i'm going to keep an eye on this because the news to me here is that we're valuing one sat more than another sat that somehow a sat is all all of a sudden very special and i think this kind of concerns me a little bit i'm not quite sure why but i can't help but feel like this is going to be human behavior and i i want you to boost in with your thoughts i have a question for you because i bet you it's easy to say this is silly and this is ridiculous but frame it like this would you pay a little extra to own one of satoshi's original sats maybe from the genesis block you know i mean this is a theory just totally theoretical like somehow these came up for sale satoshi satoshi shows back up on the scenes like hey everybody i need a little money the price has gone up a little bit.
I'm going to sell one of these I'm going to sell a few of these sats and each one of these you know they're going to go for like, one sat one of Satoshi's sats is going to go for 10,000 sats not a whole bitcoin just 10,000 sats for one Satoshi's sat would you be willing to do that. That's the mind game I've been playing with myself. I think I might. I'd like to know what you would do. Let me know. I am off to LinuxFest Northwest this weekend, so come say hi if you're in the Pacific Northwest. I just got back from Austin, Texas, and now I'm going to the Bellingham Technical College, April 26th and the 28th, 2024.
If you're around on Saturday, I'll be doing some barbecuing, and on Sunday, I'll be doing Linux Unplugged Live. You know, it could be a lot of fun. It's probably not going to be, you know, oh, Oh, you guys will understand and appreciate this, actually. None of the other shows, anybody appreciates this. It drives me crazy when I'm at Linux Fest because their campus is the Bellingham Technical College. Well, guess what they shortened that to? BTC. So I see BTC everywhere, all over the place. BTC, BTC, BTC. And it's never about Bitcoin. It's rough. It could be a lot worse, though. Samurai Wallet founders have been arrested and charged with money laundering in the Southern District of New York.
But our prosecutors charged the Samurai Wallet founders Rodriguez and Hill today. The pair are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. Side note here, I think we're going to be hearing a lot more unlicensed money transmitted business accusations getting thrown around in the future. These charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years and five years, respectively. Rodriguez, 35, and Hill, 65, collected approximately $4.5 million in fees for their, quote, mixing service, according to prosecutors.
Rodriguez was arrested on Wednesday morning, and it will be arranged in Pennsylvania either later today, as I record, or tomorrow, as you're probably listening to this. According to the press release, Hill was Samurai Walt's CTO. He's been arrested in portugal and will be extradited to the u.s so rodriguez is in pennsylvania hill is in portugal right now and extradited to the u.s i have some of the highlights here so yeah a conspiracy to commit money laundering conspiracy to operate unlicensed money transmitter business those are not too surprising anybody that follows this kind of stuff we've seen this before here's where it kind of gets a little um specific they the uh prosecutors claimed that they facilitated over 2 billion in unlawful transactions.
That's a huge number enabled 100 million in money laundering from dark web markets. Uh, they also claim that they went on Twitter and encouraged money laundering, um, encouraged people like, uh, avoiding exchange, uh, sanctions. And I have screenshots in, in the announcement that they have over on the U S government website. I'll, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. They got screenshots of like their Twitter feeds. I mean, it, It's pretty rough, guys. They say, quote, they encourage money laundering via Twitter. They marketed specifically to criminals for privacy evasion.
And they acknowledged that they receive revenue from dark slash gray market participants and that they even sort of boasted about that to potential investors. And they've got some quotes. They've got like, somehow they've got messages. I'm going to keep following this, but they seem to have some messages where they were boasting in multiple cases about taking money from dark gray markets and about how their niche is dark gray markets. They're never going to be mainstream, but their niche will be dark gray markets, and that's good money. Quote, at Samurai, we're entirely focused on the censorship resistance and black slash gray circular economy.
Economy one private message attributed to hill this is all we have at this point quote this implies no foreseeable mass adoption although the black slash gray markets have already started to expand during covid and will continue to do so post covid and the prosecutors have that in a screenshot at this time i don't know where they got it from but it appears to be attributed to hill one of the co-founders of samurai wallet and um the other kind of wider context here is that the doj is preparing for an upcoming trial against roman storm who's a developer and co-founder of the tornado cash mixing service on ethereum.
And that case is being pursued by the doj southern district of new york division, and recently the doj's washington dc unit successfully won a conviction against roman Roman Sterling of Sterling of that's I know my bad. But as you might recall, he was the operator of the crypto mixer Bitcoin fog. And they got him on money laundering charges. So this is, they're building momentum here. They're knocking them down and they're building momentum. And now they're operating with more and more international partners on these. And they're expanding. And the only real solution here for end users to avoid any third-party risk is full custodial services.
In reality, it means, you know, if you have to use a custodial lightning wallet for a bit, you know, quote-unquote have to. To um that means don't leave a lot of money on there and have a full custody solution for the money you really care about i'll keep an eye on this and if you see any interesting stories please send them in maybe via boost or from the contact page i'd like to keep an eye on the story but i'll be on the go but it's definitely going to be an important one that again just sets more precedence now on monday we had some good news bitcoin got five new bip editors so what's a bip Yep.
Well, it's a Bitcoin improvement proposal. It's a way for the community in a wider context to suggest improvements or propose improvements to Bitcoin. And this has also also been adopted in other projects, too, like the podcasting 2.0 project. And so you get a bit editors help make it into the best possible bit possible, just something that is not only a good historical document, but gives people context when they come to analyze the issue. Because if something major does happen and get accepted, it could become sort of a historical improvement proposal.
And so you want these things to really kind of stand the test of time. And there's only so much one editor can do. And Luke Dasher says he was just backlogged. He's the primary editor for Bips right now. And he reached out for help on the mailing list. And some well-known existing expert contributors were suggested. They seem to mostly have support. This process is kind of funny the way it works. There is a voting, and then if there's really no fighting and no massive reasons not to go for somebody or like a strong vote that goes the wrong way, it's sort of like when there's a lack of activity, that's when they've reached consensus.
It's a funny way they do this. And so after Luke asked for some help, there was some formality discussions. And then the day after the halving, 420, Ava Chow wrote, quote, there's not really been any actual objections to the nominees, nor have there been any suggestions on choosing a subset of them since my last email. As such, there is rough consensus. Now, to the outsider, that seems like odd. But Ava actually addresses why rough consensus is exactly what they're looking for. Quote, I don't want this process to become a popularity contest and require some kind of formal voting.
Rather, I'd prefer that this process be something more like how Bitcoin core maintainers are added by achieving rough consensus. And thus, we have five new editors. That should be really interesting. I think other open source projects should also look at the BIP process. It is, you know, I mean, getting things into Bitcoin is not easy and it's not a quick process, but it starts with the BIP. And then it's quite the journey from there. Some bad news for El Salvador users, though. Some Chiva Walt source code and keys related to VPN access seem to have been leaked.
The cyber hacker group, the attackers, go by Cyber Intelligentsia SV. They put the SV on the end of their hacker name so that way you really know they're from El Salvador. There can be no doubt about where they're from. And they have leaked snippets of the Chivo wallet source code. Now, the Chivo wallet has been a constant source of controversy because it's a custodial wallet essentially run by the El Salvadorian government. And they incentivized users by giving them some free money if they downloaded this wallet. And I think, you know, with hindsight, it's pretty easy to say it wasn't a great idea, but the El Salvadorian government was looking for something that they could roll out and have some level of support and control over.
You know, it's a big transition to go from banks to a wallet. You could kind of see it from their perspective, but as Bitcoiners, we know, boy, that's never going to go well. And it doesn't require that you use Chivo down there. You can use any Bitcoin wallet, any Lightning wallet. The Chivo was the one that was sort of encouraged by everybody and had all the branding behind it. So it's got a fair amount of users. Now it doesn't sound like. This has resulted in access to their Bitcoin. It's more like just wallet source code, which maybe then could be sifted through for bugs and then at some point lead to some sort of problem.
According to the blog, the hackers released the stolen information to the public to, quote, punish the Salvadorian government for, quote, refusing to engage with them. Although we don't really have specifics on what they want to be engaged over, I have some speculation. The group did recently leak a bunch of other databases about 5.1 million salvadorians were impacted by that i could see there just being something around all of that but apparently they're not getting any response from the el salvadorian government around this i haven't seen anything official from chivo this isn't getting a lot of attention but it's sort of been bubbling up over uh the week so i wanted to give a shout out to no bs bitcoin because they're the ones that i think really brought the most attention to this and they've been doing a killer job this week, so I've decided to throw them in the splits.
So if you do boost in this week, I'm going to give a split over to NoBSBitcoin for really doing just fantastic work. Okay, coming up, your boosts, project updates, and my bulletproof stacker self-custody guide. You asked for it. It's coming up. But first, a big shout out to Podhome.fm, my podcasting 2.0 platform with unlimited episodes and Podhome AI that can auto-suggest chapters, titles. It's really, really powerful. It also has the easiest live stream support with full podcasting 2.0 lit integration. You can do value for value music streaming, unlimited shows and episodes.
Just use my promo code TWIB. That's TWIB and you get the first three months for free and see why I'm loving Podhome for all my podcasting 2.0 posting. It's quick, too. The downloads are wicked fast. So many nice features, and it's like having a whole team in your back pocket when you go to post. Now, we do have some boosts to get into this week, so let's do it. Jeremy Ross is our baller booster this week, who comes in with 23,500 sats. Send in from Castomatic with no message, though. I do appreciate that support, Jeremy. If you meant to send a message, just let me know. But I really appreciate it.
The Podfather's not far behind, though, with 15,000 sats. Mr. Adam Curry comes in via Podcast Guru. i hoard that which your kind covered friday night drinking wine and texas boost whoo you know i was just in texas uh possibly when you sent that boost when it's um yeah i was probably on my way home that day thank you podfather appreciate that and uh jc denton comes in with 2100 sats happy having here is a post having sat oh are those very special jcd are those uh uh are Are those like special sats? Are they epic? Appreciate that, JC Denton. Oppie 1984 comes in with 4,000 sats.
When it comes to cold storage of my Bitcoin, I went old school and printed off a paper wallet with an air gap machine and just store the paper wallet in my fireproof safe. I just keep the public address in a text editor. And in a sync thing folder occasionally that gets backed up. I also keep the soundboard. It's like your piece of flair. He says also keep the soundboard It's like your pieces of flair There is always a minimum of flair, Paper wallet I'd like to hear opinions on the paper wallet I have heard people shouldn't be using paper wallets anymore But it seems like that's a workflow That's working for you So I can't really say no.
Oh, there he is. Adversary 17 comes in with 8,000 sats. Boost! No message, though. Just sending in a big old boost over Fountain. Appreciate it. You know, all these boosts help us get up on the Discovery page, too, so people can find the new show. And I also really appreciate that. Chad F. Comes in with 3,222 sats and says, Thanks for covering Runes. I hadn't heard of it until today. And then he also sent 1,000 sats to our artist for the end track, June and the Jets. Thank you for doing that, Chad. Chad, you are, Chad F, man, you know what? You deserve like a hot boost and a pew pew.
You're always out there repping podcasting 2.0 and the value for value music, man. Really appreciate that. You're doing the people's work. The Muso comes in with 4,500 sats. I am programmed in multiple techniques. The What Bitcoin Did podcast covered the runes and ordinal stuff a few months back. Zach, I particularly enjoyed an episode with the Bitcoin mechanic and his argument against anything that is not a monetary transaction on the blockchain. I'd already agreed with him prior to listening to this episode, but afterwards I agree even more.
In my opinion, anything on the Bitcoin blockchain that is not a monetary transaction devalues Bitcoin as a whole. Let the shitcoin blockchains keep their shitcoin tokens, I say. Oh, I love that hot take. You know, so Musa, that's what I'm oscillating to as well. It's like it should only be monetary uses on Bitcoin because we got all these other crap currencies that people can go out there and play around with. However, I think it is also the actual valuable scarce nature of Bitcoin that makes it kind of attractive to people to play around like this. You see what I'm saying? Yeah.
And if we're going to go around and say rocks have value and digital tokens have value, I just, where are you going to draw the line, Musa? Where are you going to draw the line? Now, I like that you have a line. And that is anything that's not a monetary transaction. But ordinals are technically monetary transactions. I don't know, man. Crashmaster comes in with a row of ducks. 2,222 sats on Podverse. Keep up the good work, Chris. If you tweak the show at all, perhaps consider incorporating more Bitcoin mining and cold old wallet software stack reviews as updates on even occasional how-tos.
Maybe these could be subscriber special episodes. Kind of dig the idea of checking in on software stacks. We're going to do that in this episode a little bit. I'll talk more about that in a moment. But I like the idea of my stack is always kind of not actively changing. In fact, the rate of change has slowed the software stack that I use to manage, buy, and sell, very rarely sell Bitcoin. In fact i don't generally sell bitcoin so much as i'll use something like the bitcoin company, and that's really just for business purposes sometimes it's kind of tricky right because for me i really want my primary thing is is i want to privately store for a long term, selling is mostly going to happen over lightning or something like that it's going to be small little things or a boost it's not going to be like um you know a house or a car or something So that stack is generally relatively static, but it does change and evolve as the Bitcoin network fees change and things like that and layer two solutions and things like FedEmit come along.
It does sort of require that you kind of not necessarily change the tooling, but just kind of keep current with it. And that's something I should probably give thought to how I could keep that up to date in the show. I will give that more thought, Crashmaster. And I definitely am down for incorporating more Bitcoin mining news. I just need to get some good, solid sources. The Bitcoin mining industry is very quiet, very hush-hush. They talk amongst each other a lot, but they don't talk with outsiders of the mining industry much. I think because of just persecution in the past and all kinds of things like.
That. So last thing they really want to do is draw attention to themselves at all. You can see why they're not super excited to like come run into a guy like me. But I am definitely down for just sharing more about what's going on at that layer. Mega Strike 3 comes in with 5,100 sets. Keep the change, you filthy animal. I was sad to see the Bitcoin dad pod go, but I'm loving this show and I'm glad the void was filled. As far as the wallet setup and Bitcoin purchasing process, I would absolutely love to hear a full episode dedicated to these topics. As a newbie, this would be super useful. Keep up the good work.
Well, Megastrike, I am going to, in the resources section of the show this week, go into more extensive detail on the stack with a full list of links. And then I'll kind of be looking for your feedback on what I'm missing, what overview bits you're missing, and then I'll develop content around that. But I'm going to give you the fundamentals today, and then you can tell me what bits of the picture you still need filled in. ABC comes in with 5,000 sats. Yes, please do an episode outlining your current picks for software and services and your stack in 2024. Well, I have got good news.
It's coming up in just a minute. LazyLox also comes in with 5,000 sats. B-O-O-S-T. Says thanks for another great episode. Thank you, LazyLox. Every boost really matters. Thank you very much. Jin from Matik comes in with 2,000 sats. Great episode. I like the intro music. It gives me goosebumps every time. Thank you. that is the classic wonderful ronald jenkins he says it's great that you're continuing your own bitcoin podcast after the bitcoin dad pod stop please give a shout out to wallet scrutiny.com, so plebs can choose verify and compare how their bitcoin wallet is built that's wallet scrutiny.com i will try to put a link to that in the show notes i'll go grab that right now for you guys to know your wallet like you built it not everyone is a developer and not everyone has to be as their slogan that's pretty good jim that's pretty good thank you for sending that in i really appreciate that thank you everybody who boosted in i got 900 sats from pothome who said happy havening dive value for episode seven from ace crackerman thank you everybody who boosted and we have a 2000 sat cut off just for time right there but i do like to give people like nicole gave a boost to the uh to our song last week sent the artist 500 sats thank you nicole for doing that we had 19 boosters this week 85 237 sats not incredible but gets us a sega.
And i do appreciate that and some really great quality boosts too so not like blow away amounts of boosts saving that link for you right now but really great quality i'd love to hear your your feedback would you buy some of satoshi's sats also your thoughts on anything that i'm about to when i cover my my self-stacking bulletproof guide any gaps you need filled in please boost those in and let me know so i can start working on that for you and with that that is all of our boosts for this week if you'd like to send a boost into the show just get a new podcast app there's a whole new world of podcast apps that have all kinds of services and they're getting better and better you just go to podcastapps.com fountain has been crushing it with new releases fixing and polishing speed and enhancing the UI.
And of course, Podverse is cross-platform, GPL available for Android, iOS, and the web. And then last but not least, you hear people boosting from Castomatic and PodcastGroove. There's so many great apps. Try them out, see which one you like, and then boost into the show. Music. I got project updates for you. I got project updates. I am so excited about the next major release of Zeus. It's currently an alpha alpha one stage right now. So I'm not necessarily encouraging that you use it, but I want to keep this on your radar because there are a lot of mobile options, but very few hold up to the feature, the power and security of Zeus on iOS and Android and version 0.9.0 is out alpha one.
First feature in here that i think is just so great it has a watch only account import from xpub, in other words you could have your cold wallet offline somewhere we're even receiving like your dca dumps into it just like you're never actually plugging the cold wallet in you're never even booting up the computer that has the software on it you're just from from like a from another wallet from whatever you're wherever you're getting your stats you're sending to there over time and you You just want to check on it. Or this could be great for family members where you're stacking for them and they want to be able to check on their balance, but they can't really do anything else but just check on it. A watch-only account import.
Oh, gosh, I've wanted this feature for so long. It's so great to see Zeus bringing this. Also, another fantastic feature, hardware wallet support, you guys. Signing device support, like cold card, seed signer, et cetera. And then on the Lightning side, they got batch channel opens. Yes, that's right. Batch channel opens. The batch channel opens, which will, well, it'll open up channels and batches and keep things cheaper and batch on-chain transactions as well. Man, Zeus is really looking good. And I'll let you know when I see that version actually ship stable because that is some great hardware wallet support, you guys.
Strike has a really big update this week. They now are rolling out in Europe. Yo, we just launched Strike Europe. Ladies and gentlemen, it is live today, right now. Now check your app stores for all eligible European customers. Strike is available. Let's go. I am pumped. It actually looks really great. And it's going to make it even easier now for people to stack sats on a really decent platform. I think Strike is a solid platform and it's got lightning support. It's got a good set of people behind it. It's great to see it expand. Band okay here is my bulletproof stacker self-custody guide you do this i don't think you can go wrong nobody's gonna get fired for following this process i recommend you buy sats on river i will put links in the show notes that river link will be an affiliate link, um strike is also good like i just mentioned you basically you want something with solid lightning support there's various levels of good here and not so good you know and robo sats is on the spectrum links to all of that but for the bulletproof newbie i say you buy your sats on river you just need to make sure you have something that has lightning but we'll go with river for this and then on a regular routine at you stack your sats you make your you make your routine purchase on river that will build up a balance you send that balance over lightning to the aqua wallet.
The AquaWallet will swap your inbound Lightning into Liquid and store it in Liquid. When that peg into Liquid happens, which it will do on the backend for you automatically using the bolts.exchange API, when that pegs into Liquid, you essentially break the on-chain tracking. So most looky-loos will not be able to follow where those sats went. It doesn't mean that River doesn't have a record of how many sats you bought at what price, but it means somebody doing some chain analysis is going to have a much harder time tracking your sats how much they are where they went the liquid network is run by blockstream there's about 15 liquid functionalities that hold a key so it kind of acts like a giant multi-sig so in my view this is my opinion liquid is safer than any one exchange or company but it is not safer than private cold storage there's 15 keys that would all have to get rugged but But it's better than just one exchange, but it's, you know, it's long term, you know, 10, 15 year horizon.
Private cold storage is better. So you accumulate in Aqua, that'll be on device. It's a mobile app with liquid, lightning and Bitcoin on-chain support. The goal you're doing, the reason why we're going from wherever you bought your Bitcoin, River, Strike, the reason why we're going from River or Strike to Aqua and not right into your cold storage is because we're trying to avoid small DCA-sized UTXOs in your final wall. Unlike, say, the Visa network or, like, I don't know, Wire Earning Money or Western Union, where they'll charge you a fee based on the amount of money you're transmitting. A percentage of the fee is like a hundred dollars we'll take a five percent fee i don't know i'm making numbers bitcoin charges on the size of the data of the transaction so lots of little utxos lots of little transactions actually take up more data in a block so you're going to get charged more in the future you know when the bitcoin fees the transaction fees are much higher you could outprice yourself you could have small UTXOs that you can't send because they're worth less than the fees required to send them you know I'll see people on Twitter talking about how they're DCAing on strike one dollar an hour well let me tell you something you're never going to be able to spend those sats even something that's less than a million sats could one day be hard to transfer on the Bitcoin network.
There's always going to be lots of solutions, but ultimately you will at some point need to likely do an on-chain transaction. So what we do is we accumulate in Aqua, the Aqua wallet. But you could put anything in here, but I like the Aqua wallet because it's doing all of the pegging and lightning support for you in one place. And so you don't have to use multiple apps and services. You collect in there for a while. Personally, I'd say you want to get north of 2 million sats, but it's a comfort thing. You should go higher if you're comfortable with it but don't go too crazy high then you sweep once you're at that threshold from aqua into the sparrow wallet now sparrow you first need to get yourself a cold card you create a wallet using the cold card set up sparrow with all of that then you sweep into sparrow backed by your cold card that's your permanent savings then you need to save those seed phrases you need to save your pin you need to save vital information some way that works for you there's lots of cool ways to do that some really fun ones some products you can even buy if you want put it on metal.
And you don't really touch it, And you're only sweeping to that when the amount in your temporary middle wallet reaches an amount that you're not comfortable losing. But you want it to be high enough that you could spend it in the future. There's not a real perfect answer here because we don't know what future fees are going to be like. But the idea is that you utilize something like the liquid network or maybe a Fedemit in one day. Like this is an area where maybe I'll update this once we have some really solid proved workflows there.
But the idea is you kind of break the tracking you accumulate in liquid where it's really cheap to move things and hold things this is also if it's once you have it in the aqua wall or you have it in liquid maybe a fatimate in the future this is a great time to start divvying it up amongst family friends and kids if you want to don't do that crap on chain you could do it in layer two and save yourself a ton of money something like the aqua wallet or block stream green so for an individual this process works really smooth for families skip the aqua wallet and use something like Blockstream Green because it supports multiple sub-wallets.
You can use bolts.exchange to go from lightning to liquid, so like from river to liquid, or whatever you're using, and then proceed later on to sweep to Sparrow backed by a cold card. This method lets you stack and build value in something like an Aqua Wallet or a Blockstream Green or whatever you like, maybe one day something like the Mutiny Wallet using a Fetament. You can get like an actual head start before you go blow $300 on a cold card. And cold cards go on sale. So while you're accumulating that temporary stack, cold card might go on sale. And you can grab a couple.
Keep an eye on the Mutiny Wallet, too, because you could do this likely without having to use Liquid in the future. I don't know if we're there yet, especially we're looking at something where you could maybe keep it temporarily for a while if it takes you a bit to get to a few million sats. So, you know, Aqua and Liquid are really well tested. They've been around for a long time at this point. Mutiny Wallet and the Fetament support is still fairly new. So for me, I like to let this stuff cook a bit. The Blockstream green wallet is also really tried and true, and you can also use that with hardware wallets.
So the workflow is buy on an exchange that has Lightning support or use something like RoboSats and go KYC free, which also has Lightning support. Go from Lightning to Liquid or in the future, Affediment. Accumulate in that Liquid wallet. And then once you've reached a high amount, peg out into your Bitcoin wallet in Sparrow using ColdCard or whatever your final cold storage wallet solution is. You peg out from liquid to your final solution. So then, you know, it's much, much harder to track you as well. So not only are you avoiding high transfer fees in the future, transaction fees, but you're also able to now move your temporary stash around in a really cheap environment.
You're able to accumulate in this way that is private. There's a lot of benefits to it. It's an additional step, but there's just so many benefits to it. Is run by the Blockstream Corporation, so it's not like it's some, you know, community project or something. But they have their own commercial reasons for running it, and it seems like it's been pretty solid. So I will have links to the Aqua Wallet, to the RoboSats Guide, to the Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet, and to the Green Bitcoin Wallet. These mostly all have had updates this week, too. Sparrow, Green, Zeus, like I mentioned. They're just getting updated aqua wallet they're just getting updated like crazy right now, they're getting so good aqua is one that could work for the normie so i like to mention that one but also because it's doing all of the moving from lightning to liquid back to on chain when you need it for you on the back end using bolts with their api and it's been really solid that's quite i know now that now that i say it all out i feel like you're probably just glazing over. So let me know what I missed.
Let me know what doesn't work for you. What bits don't make sense. And I will try to put. Music. I get no pleasure in playing this for you, but I think we need to get on the same page. This shenanigans going on with the Bitcoin stuff that not just to ordinals, but more than that, it's not going away anytime soon. And the reason I say that is I think nobody has properly communicated the actual value of Bitcoin and the utility of Bitcoin. And so the financial press and the rest of the normies and the people that have large, large amounts of money to move around are still trying to wrap their head around what makes Bitcoin valuable.
And instead of taking them all to school constantly on what actually gives things intrinsic value, we're just going for the easy answer. This here is the Bitcoin Foundation chair, Brock Pierce. He spins a story about how all of this degen behavior is going to be just great for the value of Bitcoin and NGU is just around the corner. Brock, okay, so the halving event has concluded. Everybody was waiting years for that. What is the next catalyst you see? What's the next narrative, right? What's the next thing we're going to use to pump Bitcoin? That's what she's saying.
Because they don't understand the utility, even of just a store of value, let alone digital gold or anything of those narratives that they want to try to use. Like they just they don't quite get it. They just know it's it's basically hype after hype cycle. So what's the next one, Brock? Well, I mean, it's what we've seen. Bitcoin had record fees during this halving because a lot of what we call layer two technologies, the idea of building on Bitcoin. If you've heard of Ethereum, it's all the other applications that had moved away from Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is back and delivering smart functionality, NFT functionality, meme technologies.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, Brock. So first of all, Bitcoin's back. I didn't know Bitcoin was gone, but it's back, guys. And the reason it's back is because it has NFT functionality and memes. Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is back and delivering smart functionality, NFT functionality, meme technologies. Meme technologies. I mean, man, Bitcoin sounds awesome now. Let's invest more money. Functionality, NFT functionality, meme technologies. All of these things are now being built on top of Bitcoin for the first time since almost a decade ago. go.
And so in anticipation of that record fees, as people are trying to get in to be the first. And that I think is why it's not going to go away anytime soon. Because the collective of people that go on these shows and pump NGU, they want this kind of activity. They need this kind of activity because at least it's something to do with Bitcoin. It's some kind of like they look at it as, look, there's something you can do with it. Now there's a reason to spend money on it because it's scarce and there's something you can do with it. As if store of value just right now isn't clearly enough.
And I think it's just simply they're exhausted at trying to explain it, so they're just leaning in. All right, well, if you made it this far, go check out thisweekinbitcoin.show. I have links over there for what I talked about today. Also, please consider boosting it as a value for value podcast. And I'd also love to see you share it with a friend. I think one day this This could be the number one Bitcoin news podcast, at least for the JB community and the podcasting 2.0 community. There's a lot of podcasters and listeners that are trying to wrap their heads around this Sats thing now, and I'd love to be a resource for them.
So please do consider sharing it. That's another great way to send a little value to the show. And in the spirit of podcasting 2.0 and value for value, I would love to play a song for you. Now, the Dorfell family is well known for being extremely talented, and there's Dorfell family bluegrass. So our song this week is Play Guitar by the Dorfell family. Thanks for joining me. See you right back here. Bye. Music.
Welcome to Episode 8
QUESTION: Would You Pay Extra for an OG Satoshi?
LinuxFest Northwest and Bellingham Technical College
Arrest of Samurai Wallet Founders
Legal Actions Expanding
BIP Editors Update
Boosts, Project Updates, and Self-Custody Guide
Zeus Alpha Release and Strike Launch in Europe
Bullet Proof Stacker Self-Cus Guide
Why Runes are Sticking Around
Closing Remarks
