Okay, looks like we're all here. Thank you everyone for joining us. This is John with CASA, the safest way to store your Bitcoin and we really appreciate you taking the time to sit in on this topic. What to do if your nation bans Bitcoin? It means different things all around the world and of course many nations are at varying stages of this debate right now and this will be a great conversation and a wonderful time for it. We're pleased to welcome our speakers Ron Stoner and Jameson Lopp both with CASA and our special guests NVK or Rodolfo as some of you may know him from CoinKite as well as Dave Bradley from the Bitcoin Well and so thank you so much for joining us and before we begin I would like to remind everyone that this is going to be a theoretical discussion. We obviously don't know where you live around the world and so we are not offering legal advice, tax advice or financial advice. This is all theory and we hope you enjoy this discussion. But speakers if you could take turns and kind of tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure, I'll start. My name is Ron Stoner. I'm a hacker that has been in this space for over a decade now and I transitioned into more of the professional side of security. I'm currently the head of security at CASA helping to provide our customers the peace of mind they need when it comes to their security in Bitcoin and one of the fun parts of my job is thinking about these types of attacks and the response and what to do and how to help people secure their holdings. So this is a really fun topic. I'm happy to be here and elated to be on this panel with the rest of our guests. I think I'll turn that over to Jameson. Hi, I've been building multi SIG self custody Bitcoin wallets for about seven years now and originally my thesis many years ago for why I first got interested in Bitcoin was actually as a hedge against nation states and central banks and basically the idea of having a completely alternative parallel financial system. So I think this is one of the fundamental aspects of the system that a lot of us are here for in the first place and the ability for Bitcoin to be able to not only survive but thrive despite what the traditional authorities would like us to do is it's important for us to keep in mind and continue discussing as the whole world keeps evolving and responding to the fact that Bitcoin continues to exist. Hey, NVK founded CoinKite over 10 years ago. We've been defending people's bags since then in multiple iterations. Right now we make a cold card which is a very hardened hardware wallet and we make a few other Bitcoin products and yeah we just make sure that people don't lose money. Hey, I'm Dave Bradley. I've been in Bitcoin since late 2010 and I founded my first Bitcoin company in 2013 and I've been buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada ever since. Most currently I'm with a company called Bitcoin Well. We do primarily Bitcoin ATMs and we're publicly traded on the Toronto Venture Stock Exchange and I'm also widely known as the strongest and best looking Bitcoin entrepreneur in Canada. Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us. So I'd like to open up by acknowledging a little bit of the elephant in the room. Obviously this topic is timely for a very important reason. In Canada we're seeing some events where the government is getting to interact with Bitcoin in a way that a lot of us aren't used to. So Dave and NVK, if you could, what's the read from where you're standing from people that live there? So you know like these things are not exactly how the media portrays and also they're much worse and much better in certain ways. I mean first of all there is no like order or law or anything that I know of against Bitcoin itself. The concern was with this specific crowdfunding platform that was crowdfunding after the order to stop was made. Essentially the government made donating to this cause illegal. It's unlikely the outstanding court after all this martial law is done and whatever but that's beside the point. Point is they made it illegal to donate to this cause and they weren't able to distribute those funds to the truckers as far as I know and then what the government has is a list of addresses really and they're sort of like trying to tell through the usual sort of ways of telling all the governed say KYC exchanges and things like listen these addresses are addresses of interest. We would like you to stop if you have any transactions related to this. I don't believe they were successful in any of those cases and I don't think there was any success regarding lightning at all. So that's sort of like the just objective state of things. Yeah so like Rodolfo said like all of the regulated companies got the same notice. We got that notice from the RCMP and there's I think there's like 34 addresses on there. What they notice notably is not is any requirement to do any kind of blockchain analysis to go back and see you know did this person just move these coins from one of those addresses so it's not necessarily the most effective way to ban those addresses but it's definitely the first time I think that we've seen like an organized effort to actively try to freeze Bitcoin in Canada. They have sent those or if it comes from this address you're sort of like required to stop it but I don't think they're sophisticated enough to understand you know the millions of ways in which people circumvent those orders. Yeah I think the big differentiator is like every other time that we've been asked to freeze addresses that I know of or that anyone's been asked to freeze addresses it's always been tied to like a police investigation or a court order or something like that rather than just like a blanket government edict and so it's a little different in terms of how they got to this place I think. Thank you. So something that's on my mind about this topic is the situation in Canada we're seeing something involving in Russia with a bill that could be prohibiting self custody. I'm not a lawyer in Russia so I don't know for sure but has Bitcoin always been on a collision course with this type of this type of outright ban or really stringent regulation? I think in my mind the risk of some of the bans and regulation were greater in the beginning of Bitcoin's history. What I mean by that is the hydro hadn't grown large yet and I think we're at a point now where if you end up cutting off one of the heads three or more are definitely going to grow in its place. So when we talk about regulation and bans a lot of people immediately go to the worst case scenario and what we've seen over history is the running joke on Reddit is that China has banned Bitcoin 18 times now. Some of them were a little bit more effective than others some of them were just PR for PR reasons and when we're talking about bans there's really a couple levels of bans where they could declare a ban from a country level without really any enforcement where they're just declaring that and hoping people comply. You could also see a ban where they're doing things that were referenced here where there's white address lists and things that they need to block or there may be transactions that are being flagged and stopped to and from exchanges and service providers and then you can go a little bit further where it can reach out to your bank accounts now is what we're seeing if you transacted with Bitcoin and we saw this in the past where people would use bank accounts and a certain service provider or company would ban them because they were associated with Bitcoin and activity and then we can even go further where we can talk about the miners and hashing power and a lot of the censorship capabilities there that people have theorized about. So I think it's interesting to me today because it is an issue but I think that the hydro like I said has grown so large that we're going to be able to pivot and react if we start to see these things depending on the level of man. I guess one thing that we've been seeing here is and I think it's a great example because it is a G7 country and G7 countries you'd think would be the last to sort of do something so stupid and one fascinating thing to watch is it is very similar to like a chavian sort of way of handling it where you essentially put a massive blanketing order out or new law and then what you do is you do selective enforcement which is traditionally how it's been done in governments forever where the government in place normally goes after people who they don't like with that selective enforcement because ultimately they know it is impossible to ban it so it's down to nonsense or for you to know that you are a person who's not on their happy list so you may find yourself in a position where you may need to either fight them in court or leave. Yeah I think specifying exactly what type of ban we're talking about is important because there are many types of bans that can't really be enforced like I don't think we're going to see for example an attempt to completely ban bitcoin as a protocol at the network level that would be kind of ridiculous to do because once again bitcoin as a communications protocol can be facilitated over any number of different media as actually Rodolfo is well aware you know having done some experiments on censorship resistance and alternative communications channels and ultimately you know one of the reasons why there is this narrative that bitcoin can't be banned is because it comes down to these sort of boots on the ground like number of doors that need to be kicked down in order to really enforce this and so that's why especially if we are successful in continuing to increase the level of self-custody getting the funds into the hands of the individuals rather than a few centralized choke points that's what makes bitcoin more and more robust because it becomes less and less likely that a nation state is going to care so much about this financial network that is you know flagrantly continuing to operate despite their proclamations that they're going to you know send law enforcement and military to the home of every suspected bitcoin user yeah I mean remember right like people can just pack up and leave right they'll remember their 12 words and they'll leave literally naked you know if we're still talking about say g20 kind of country it's unlikely they will hold hostage you know like thousands of people just because they are suspected to have you know bitcoin yeah I think we're talking about like what kind of ban is likely in the short term I think what they're going to end up trying to do here in Canada and I can see this happening in other western nations soon is imposing further censorship requirements onto the centralized exchanges so I think we're probably going to be in a space where as regulated companies we have to block certain addresses we have to block an ever increasing list of people and just like any government attempt to ban anything anywhere else in the world what's that that's going to do is drive the formation of a black market and I don't really see there being a lot of success at stopping people who really want to get bitcoin to getting bitcoin that's I don't see going any better than their attempts to ban drugs differentiator that we have currently that we didn't have prior is that we're seeing nations and micro nations and sovereign states start to adopt it so if we do see bands from a nation's type of level from these different countries does that mean El Salvador for example is going to follow suit or are they going to continue to do their own thing we didn't necessarily have that before so as bitcoin grows and the community matures we're seeing more of this foundation be built where you know I think eventually you may get to a point where we can say it doesn't matter if this country bans it because you know this is our tool it's a global tool it wasn't designed for government's censorship or seizure and I think we can continue to work to fulfill that prophecy you know it's you can look at financial markets as molt right so you know when a country makes a you know a ban or something against an asset right there is a financial consequence to that if a lot of people hold that asset especially if the financial markets hold that asset right so as bitcoin gets more adopted by say fortune 500 companies right a government banning bitcoin say for example american government so big banning bitcoin would you know crash a lot of this stocks that have a lot of bitcoin their balance sheets say in the near future so you know nobody gets reelected if they crash the market so you know that's why it's so good that you have these entities adopting bitcoin yeah I think we're a long way from them trying to aggressively fully ban bitcoin I think that we might get that to that point someday where all these attacks at the pool and at the minor level start becoming a realistic possibility but I don't think they're going to ban those things I don't think they're going to go that far over censorship I think that the only thing that's going to get the nation states of the world to eventually go that far is once they realize that they've permanently lost the ability to tax us through inflation then that's what I would expect to be a last ditch effort to regain some measure of control we should also as bitcoin evolves and matures they need to be specific about what is actually being banned right so are we talking about mainnet are we talking about something like the lightning network that was mentioned earlier because if I'm running my own full node I have the capability to open peer-to-peer payment channels and still transact in some some cases so I may not be able to settle on a mainnet if there's issues or bands or things going on but if I have liquidity and I have access I can still use some of these tools so my challenge would be when these bands come up what specifically is being banned is it everything under one umbrella or specific pieces of the protocol and they think that complexity is going to grow over time as we see more bits implemented more features and more tools built on top of bitcoin yeah just like anything else I expect the government will not be very good at this and they will probably be a number of years behind on whatever they're whatever layer or new technology they're trying to ban and just like we saw with the men's check response there I can see them trying to ban things that they can't physically ban yeah I think we have finally the first type of technology that you truly shoot yourself in the foot if you go after it right you know even the internet nowadays you know as a g20 interconnected financially country you can shut off the internet right that's something reserved for for say developing world or poor countries because they're simply not that interconnected now when you have an asset that on top of the internet you know you can still transact even without the internet just with more you know nonsenses but you now have something that you're economically linked right that the actual value that your citizens your companies have is fully linked with the rest of the world in market so you can't just debase say your currency like you did before you cannot just debase the bitcoin you have to you know maybe have a new trade agreement or something so you know you just since anymore or even what you know a lot of these countries did with gold you can't create paper bitcoin the same way you did a paper gold that you know the supply is just too small and it will be sort of fairly clear that somebody's trying to play that so I think the days of blanket bans are pretty much done thank you so um a good question to think about is is if you kind of put yourself in the shoes of your average bitcoin or maybe even a new bit corner and if you're somebody that's a little bit worried about this type of outright ban or something really strict coming down on you what types of things should be should you be looking for in your current regime I mean I think the the easiest way to go about your life adopting bitcoin and doing it in a way that is not susceptible to authoritarian overreach is to to try to be you know native within the ecosystem and by native I mean like try to avoid these choke points which are the you know the regulated on and off ramps because like we've already said we know that that is where the government pressure is going to end up because the government or really any any authority is going to try to exert the maximum amount of control that they can with the least amount of effort so that's why choke points and bottlenecks centralized areas of any ecosystem that's that's where the pressure gets put so if if you are you know acting as a sort of full native bitcoin or trying to you know help create a more circular economy or you're accepting bitcoin for stuff you're you're paying for things with bitcoin then I think that's going to automatically put you in the best possible position now it's you know it's a bit more challenging to do because we're still very early I think in the process of mainstreaming the bitcoin economy but I think that really is the end goal if we we want people to be able to utilize the technology and the protocol without having all of these weak points which are essentially the the bridges between the traditional financial system and this new one you know it's kind of fascinating because you know stable coins essentially deprecated the proverbial Swiss bank accounts to for for your USD stable needs right so now you know you find people you know lawfully engaging in you know like full-on banking services outside of the the legacy financial system right they're able to travel the world have USD have Bitcoin and and you know they can interchange between the two they can find some more complex riskier contracts out there to resolve some of the other volatility issues but no but we are moving to a point now where in just a few more years you know you're going to find credit card solutions you're going to find still things that you may need to interface with the old world that you know will be sort of whack-a-mole but but you you will be sufficiently serviced with the new financial solutions that may be or may not be regulated and there is almost nothing governments can do about that because these people can also just move I think we're going to see a point where they force stablecoin operators or the protocols that they're on to regulate the users or transactions yeah but but that wouldn't matter right that that only matters if people are trying to go back to the legacy system right if they find like you knew him for the you know if they find a landlord that sucks that's willing to accept you know the direct asset like Bitcoin or some stablecoin as payment for the the rent you know that exchange they had the capabilities or the requirements of blocking that payment is no longer relevant but there's still an operator of the stablecoin right somebody issued that sure sure you know and that's today but at the same time I mean how many tether transactions have been censored like nearly none and and you know what's going to happen is as some of this this more riskier assets on riskier chains evolve and grow you're going to have you know USD based on Chinese treasuries right and and people are just going to keep on hopping between all these if their intent is to escape volatility with higher risk but at the same time they can just hold you know BTC or they can just pay BTC to the landlord so you know I think there's going to be a weird space in the next few years on how lawful people behave and how lawful people resolve some of the issues because the advantage is going to be on the people who just move on from the state actor sort of lawful mentality not advocating for that but but that's really where the market is going because state actors just can't move or can let go of that control I think there are some things people can do until we get to that point where there are enough decentralized financial services to be able to live and survive and I asked myself the same question or similar questions before this space you know what actions would I take or what would I do to prepare if they came back and said the United States has banned all Bitcoin right and you have to cease using it immediately and one that I think are viable methods that you can do if you are one of these people that's facing a ban or you're in one of these nations that decides to enact this is one of the more viable methods is you can sit tight I think I would immediately make sure I have GPG encrypted copies of my private keys or my seeds and I would keep that somewhere hidden and I probably would just lay low until the legislation or everything worked out but then the other thing I think people should be aware of I'm a paranoid security guy so I always try to think about this stuff right in the worst case scenario and then hope for the best but from a preparation standpoint there's six or seven things people can do to prepare for this if you are worried about it and I think the first one we saw up in Canada is if your bank account is being linked to Bitcoin activity or transactions that could be suspect to being frozen. So this was one of the steps that people used to do in the early days is that they had multiple bank accounts if you have that luxury where if one of your bank accounts goes down you're not totally dead in the water you're spreading that risk out a little bit and that's something people could do today before the banks happen. The other thing you can do is keep your non KYC coins in cold storage and some good examples of non KYC coins would be ways that you've mined yourself or if you're lucky enough to hold physical Bitcoin casacious coins or some of those tokens and representations those physical totems those coins haven't moved in years and haven't gone through KYC systems and aren't associated with any transaction activity so adding those types of things I think are going to demand a premium when we do see these types of regulations and bans and they do today currently just due to some of the checks exchanges do. I also recommend people keep some liquidity in some lightning wallets maybe not a ton because it's still a new technology and we're working out a lot of the issues but if you have money in the lightning wallet and we do see a ban on main net there may be code there may be things we can do with being able to still transact or settle those on a new chain. Number four is kind of touchy where you do want to make sure you have enough funds in your local fiat currency for an emergency and what I mean by that is enough to eat and potentially move and get to somewhere where you can reload your seeds on a hardware wallet or transact with your Bitcoin in another country and then the other thing people should do is just practice safe operational security OPSEC if your government's banning Bitcoin and they're serious about it they're going to be grabbing logs and keywords off your Facebook your LinkedIn your Twitter and trying to identify those people as we said selective enforcement right there were the whales who are the known vocal personalities in this space who are the people that are throwing the middle finger to the government because they're going to make an example out of them to try to get everybody else in line. So these are the types of things I think people need to think about and lastly you are a type of person that has enough money and availability for dual citizenship right there you're decentralizing your risks to a one nation that's Bitcoin. You can go to your other nation and transact and do what you need to do without having to worry about running amok of that ban or the government. So I've got an interesting exercise and we'll see what the response is to this. So imagine you wake up tomorrow and some and through some weird twist of fate you're a central banker and your premier president has told you to crack down on Bitcoin. How would you attack it? I think from a central bank perspective the best way to go after Bitcoin would be going back to the gold standard. It's totally true I mean there really isn't much because the financial incentives are really on side of Bitcoin right. This is one of those moments that you can choose to embrace it and take advantage of it and be a first comer and really benefit from being that first comer or you're just going to essentially try to fight and perish. It sounds a little too optimistic or too strong but that's really what this is. I think I would provoke in fighting within the community because that's the typical spy playbook is cause dissension from within distract people keep their eyes off the mission and the prize and these examples in the community are ones that we should all look at and rally behind because this is our chance to stand united and say no we won't stand for these bans no we won't stand for these types of regulations. This is our tool right. This is how we're going to use it. So these are eye opening examples but if I was to do that I would try to do some some spy ops from inside. I mean we saw that right. I mean they feel miserably trying to change variables and you know sure they caused a little bit of strife but people eventually move on and I think the size of the space now and the amount of of of economical capacity sort of you know negates all this sort of like usual approach they have always done against open source right which is you know try to create drama. I don't know I would I would probably investigate market manipulation. I mean if you think about it with the central banks essentially having the money printer it seems like if you really wanted to you could probably you know take on the position of being the most malicious huge Bitcoin whale market maker in existence. I mean it would be pretty funny if they printed a lot bought a lot and then dumped. Yeah the problem with that idea is that you just give more power to the Bitcoiners while you're doing that right because you increase all of our purchasing power as they drive the person. That's an interesting segue to my next question. So for those that aren't familiar with it what is the Streisand effect and how would that interact with Bitcoin? Why is the Streisand effect take place? You can't cheat the market right. I mean there's only so far you can do and that is true for the market of ideas of or you know financial assets. It's just that we have a thing that everybody wants and governments are now at odds with the markets right. They're trying to go the other way with censorship and manipulation of markets but we now have this thing that forces their hand. So essentially every time they try to do something with it it just strikes an effect and something else bigger happens right. Like it's not perfect akin but you know they just can't delete Bitcoin off the internet anymore. Yeah I mean once it gets big enough that they can't ignore it they have to start issuing these proclamations right and so the proclamations inevitably result in the Streisand effect because now the media picks up on it and of course they're gonna start spinning it and put their narrative on it. I think one of the most annoying things that I've seen from the past few weeks is I saw quite a few mainstream media articles that said that the Canadian government had frozen a bunch of Bitcoin wallets and of course we all know that's not the case. They only proclaimed that they wished that they could freeze a bunch of Bitcoin wallets. A good historical example of the Streisand effect is when China did their most recent ban in October and it came out in the news and everyone thought it was going to be doom and gloom and the price actually rose. So we saw some of the highest price activity whether it was correlated or not. Something tells me the news stories and people's awareness of all of that got them moving a little bit quicker. So I think that's a good example of the inverse effect happening. Yeah I'm probably in you know several hundred or maybe thousands of people's phones as Bitcoin Dave and I'm the guy that they text I'm sure the rest of you guys all have this as well where every person you've ever met texts you anytime something happens to do with Bitcoin and usually what ends up happening is those people text when the price is going way up but this week I've been getting a lot of those texts because I think people are starting to see you know what is actually useful about Bitcoin and what kind of like real world scenario you can like a normal person can end up in where they might want money that the government can't freeze. Yeah I mean you know look at what Trudeau did with the bank freezes right they had to try to walk that back because the net effect of this kind of stuff is that you know any person with a brain goes hey if they can arbitrarily you know pick on some old lady because she donated 20 bucks to some cause that she doesn't even fully understand right you know they're going to come after my actual wealth and so these people all started to wiring out. I mean you know you ask around like anybody with money was starting to get the money out of the country right and what's fascinating about that is that you can't really save face after something like that it's going to take years for people to have any sort of security or respect for the Canadian banking system. How would the risk of a ban how does it differ from those that have KYC coins and those who don't have KYC coins what is the practical impact of that? Say another layer in my mind of privacy and security where I have my holdings and I secure them how I want and I take custody of those and nobody needs to know whereas if I've interacted with an exchange that has my KYC information any government or legal entity can compel them to share that information without my knowledge and that does happen as we referenced earlier in the call with different law enforcement requests and seizures and things that happen. So I would advise people that if you're the type of person that is privacy or security conscious to not interact with these KYC sites and services we've been preaching that for a while and even Kraken just came out and said recently that is happening and it's going to continue to happen as time goes on. So it's another layer in the security and privacy onion of how far do you want to go and what level of control do you want to retain over your assets? Coming after the exchanges is the only knob governments have. So they're going to turn that one all the way to a hundred and people can still legally buy it. I doubt they will be legalized to buy it. They're just going to have like further reporting sort of requirements and as people take custody of them it's so important to take custody of your bitcoins because not your keys not your coins. You can weather it out as Ron mentioned you know just sit and wait because if you don't do anything more often than not you will likely be in a legal position where you're not breaking any laws or doing anything of course check with your lawyer but like so you know Bitcoin is playing the weight game right. We can cockroach we can stay we can hold longer that they can stay solvent. I think that that was also still true even after all of the Chinese bans you know even after I think they basically forced most of the exchanges to shut down. If I recall correctly it was still legal to own Bitcoin and transact in it. It's just that they basically shut off all of the regulated financial institution on ramps and off ramps. I think a good question to ask yourself too we always like to ask like what if your nation bans Bitcoin what if your nation bans your local currency like what if the United States comes out and says the dollar is no longer a currency where the world decides that we're not going to transact in the dollar anymore and when you think about it what steps would you take immediately or what systems would collapse or what would end up happening I think that's how I got it with Bitcoin like what steps would I take to make sure I can ensure my survivability for the short term and the long term if the inverse was to happen. You know when I was a kid in Brazil the government went and did the bailings right did a haircut and that was right after I think two or three failed currencies that we had only 24 hours to exchange back to the new currency you know this is the game that you know these are these are the tools in the game that they know how to play right the difference now is that we have an asset that's fully fungible and fully soluble right and I think they you know to a certain extent they do understand that I don't think they are in a position yet or do not see the bright side of essentially acknowledging that Bitcoin is not banable and that there is very little much that they can do nowadays against capital controls right so you know just being able to secure your asset goes a long way yeah I think they're already kind of on the road to that right now with all the money printing going on in the world it just hasn't really registered yet that these currencies are dying and the difference is this time we can switch to the new money well in advance so we don't only have 24 hours for some reference right even in Canada you know like I would I would sort of go out on a limb and say that like at least probably half of the of the wealthy who have liquidity liquid money in the bank are actually holding USD right I don't think non-businesses hold CAD as much as people think they do so even if we saw the capital flight out you would see it as USD and you wouldn't see it reflected in the CAD being sort of demolished in the forex right so that's not different than all these people holding the BTC like you would not be clear to them what's happening I think a lot of the stuff is not as visible anymore to government as they think that it is something else that that we're seeing making headlines right now is the prospect of banning self-custody and the only analog I can think of that is is when when you travel across the country with hordes of cash and and you get stopped and the police takes it from you when we think about banning self-custody we're looking at civil forfeiture are we like are they messing with the supply chain on hardware wallets what would you anticipate is is their goal that's my challenge so that is how do you enforce it at that level where you know do we have to send Gestapo to people's houses to do searches one of the things that I remember vividly from my childhood was the cable television de-scramblers right you would go over your friend's house or your uncle's house and they'd have that little black box it would give you all the pay-per-view channels on cable and the whole channel guide and everything he scrambled and it was just a chip and they thought that for years the cable company did because they said they were losing revenue and in reality you know they were making profits hand over fist but every once in a while they'd send out a stinger signal or send out a cable technician to do some surveillance and check to see if anybody was using those but I remember for years for decades at least people got away with that right because you can't enforce that on that low level and I doubt that they're going to be training police to be able to identify hardware wallets and USB drives and things like that as we mentioned earlier the government's slow they're inefficient they may eventually get their way but they're not very good at doing things you know it's kind of funny because you know we actually make hardware wallets in Canada and and it's I'm still fully unconcerned because you know it's still a lawful country I'm entitled to make a product they've tried a banning encryption before back in the day how did that work didn't work so you know they can't really replace the chips that we have in quantity good luck to them the source code is is totally viewable and verifiable so they can't really do anything against that I can make this product in any other country the world is a simple board to make so like you know if they came after us it would actually be quite amazing because you know again they're just revealing their hand and we would know exactly the extent they could go about it all this this physical attacks are often very targeted because they're extremely costly and they have high failure rate right so it's very hard to do something that is against like everybody right I mean the them banning people from downloading free movies on torrent failed miserably the way that that diminished was by by the market meeting the demand which was to lower the cost and find different business models right so I think essentially what we're gonna see is gonna be very similar to the movie or music industry where governments are gonna have to accept that they no longer have the monopoly on on money and and and they're gonna have to compete and it should be added that it's very easy to hide an open down because of those rounded corners but I think I think we're gonna see this crackdown happen if they try it is going to be again at those centralized choke points with companies like us with the regulated exchanges and they might try to make it so that we're not allowed as a regulated entity to send bitcoins to a wallet that is not verifiably linked to a regulated custodian or another regulated exchange so that's something that we're definitely gonna fight pretty hard if they try to put that in here in Canada but I think that's like that's the only even remotely realistic way that they can go about banning self-custody well look at the Swiss solution right so in Switzerland they have this thing where if you wanna if you wanna withdraw your funds from an exchange a regulated exchange you need to sign you either have to go to an to a custodial wallet or you have to prove that you own the key but but that's idiotic because you can prove that you own the key and then move the friends right after like 10 over times and and then you had a both accident like these things are so ineffective and the cost of them to society like in actual dollars are you know they're absurd. The question is what does it actually mean to ban self-custody at the very lowest level what that would be saying is you are not allowed to have a large random number in your possession and we we know just due to the the nature of information and information wanting to be free and the the internet and all these other communications channels that make it impossible to truly stop the flow of information is that it's just a fool's errand and and I think basically to go back to what Dave said earlier is that sure they can implement those mandates and they can go to the the choke points of the regulated institutions and say you know you have to abide by that but what is that really gonna do it's just gonna cause a split it's gonna result in those regulated institutions being their own walled gardens and meanwhile the rest of the world goes on as a quote-unquote black market which is of course just more government propaganda for free market Jameson touched on the point exactly you can ban Bitcoin but I don't have physical possession of bitcoins right my bitcoins live on chain and as he said I I have some random numbers that I control that allows me to sign a message to move the ownership of those coins right so like when you talk about bans and we got a little bit into this earlier with semantics and you were saying banning Bitcoin are you actually banning the holding of private keys where the ownership of Bitcoin and this gets into a really tricky area because to my knowledge if you ever have a search and seizure or warrant you know served against you it needs to explicitly define the physical items that that team is there to look for so are they coming to seize numbers is that what we're talking about here when we're talking about these types of local enforcement you know personally I think they would just use similar like common law that we have for beneficiary right that's how corporations work so you know they'll just say you're the beneficiary of that of that Bitcoin on on the chain right so you have signing authority over that on the chain and then we have already like plenty of case law on that but but that's still like you know are you gonna ban you know people from having Sony authority on something like it becomes very complicated because you know it's still your property it's you know and now it's free speech because it's money so it's gonna they they're on an uphill battle they can't win and yeah it gets into the realm of banning thoughts good point um so I have one more question before I open up to Q&A I'll give people some time to request but um so something that we talked about in the Bitcoin community is the prospect of the boating accident theoretically if fed or investigator knocks on your door and you say I lost my Bitcoin in a boating accident um how does that actually play out yeah I think that depends if they know if you have it prior or not um when someone's knocking on your door you know it's already kind of worst case situation where you don't know what they know what information you put out there whether or not they're asking you leading questions or false questions to get you to either admit or deny something based on their goal so that's a tricky one because if they're coming for you they probably already know information or have justification to do it and if you're lying or trying to deceive people I think then you're putting yourself in in deeper trouble depending on how you react to that so I would think that preventing that situation to begin with and not making yourself a target is probably better advice than how do I how do I actually deal with that situation when it transpires because I don't actually have good advice it's going to be very much situational dependent you know they do have a lot of law and orders to produce right and and in a way if they suspect or the judge agrees that they suspect that you have something that they want to know or have and and the court is in agreement with the the law they they would they would just hold in contempt right so your their electric rock for quite a while before the electric goes so you know I you know as funny as you know this is a good meme it's not it's probably not a very good uh strategy yeah I mean first of all remember it's it's not possible to prove a negative right it's you can't prove that you lost your coins though here's an interesting possibility I haven't really heard people think of of this situation but I wonder like if you really wanted to make sure that your coins can't be seized the only way like 100 full proof way I'm aware of doing that is to either burn the funds you know send them to a burn address so then literally no one in the world can ever access them or to do a a time lock on them you know you could put a 10 20 30 year time lock on it and then you could even you know cryptographically prove to the government that your your your funds are quote unquote frozen and there's nothing that that any government authority can do about that but otherwise it's very tricky I would say at least in the United States the the best legal advice when it comes to you're talking to law enforcement is don't any anything that is said to law enforcement should happen through an attorney because they have a much better idea of what they're doing and what you potentially expose yourself to whenever you say anything otherwise if you do say something like I lost all my bitcoin then you're putting yourself in a very tenuous situation especially if at any point those coins touched any KYC services or could otherwise be traced to you because if you ever want to spend them again in the future there's a high likelihood that that activity is going to raise some red flags yeah I think it's going to come down to the same thing again where they'll probably end up regulating that at the exchange level and if somebody is you know deemed to have had a bullying accident and they they don't feel like going with a wrench attack then they will probably put surveillance on you at the exchange level and say these exchanges must freeze whatever friends come in up to a certain level just like we saw with the truckers thank you so um at that point we'll move to Q&A and I'll just quickly reset the room for those that joined after we started this is a theoretical discussion we're not advocating that anybody go break any laws we're just talking theory here Justin I added you to the to the stage do you have a question for the panel yeah yeah thanks for having me um I'm a bit of a bitcoin pleb so um my understanding I'm still learning about bitcoin and everything but um I'm actually going to be speaking to uh my parliament in just over half an hour and I have five minutes to really you know give a bitcoin uh pitch and but really the main point was to protest this um the central bank digital currencies that we're going to be testing soon in the country so yeah I was just wondering if um yeah what would your five minute pitch be to kind of deter a country from using central bank digital currencies and adopting bitcoin I would try to enlighten them that this is a technology that is sound insecure and has been going strong well over for 13 years now whereas CBDCs are very much new and untested and theoretical and there's a lot of back and forth and pros and cons to them um I would let them know that you know a lot of uh governmental programs while you do you know you need to be a respectful position when you're talking to them obviously with this but while they uh they do implement these things they're not always implemented correctly and if you look at the private sector and industry a lot of times they do things better right so why would we want to create a new technology when we already got one out there that is working is in the people's hands and is decentralized and secure give them the example of compost serve versus the internet there's very little incentive to create a network of just one node right the query exists is a network they'll capture a lot more value because they'll be early and you know if they try to make their own thing it's just going to be another version of their current uh state money that will likely go down the drain anyways yeah and I think the the first point I would make would be that as a payment network bitcoin is inevitable it's very difficult as we've been discussing the sensor and all but impossible to stop when it comes to payments and that by embracing it at that very surface level for payments um there's actually a possibility for the country to bring in investment and innovation like we're seeing in El Salvador right now so that's like the toes in the water but I think the real um our like eventual outcome for any nation state is to start moving away from this unlimited money printing term and start separating financial policy from monetary policy and whichever country starts doing that starts like meaningfully accumulating bitcoin to use as their national currency eventually is probably going to be the richest country in the world yeah I think uh approaching it from a first mover advantage standpoint is important because the any given country that has its own central bank and its own currency it's going to be to be highly incentivized to keep doing that and you know continue to have as much control over as many different levers as possible and so it's it may seem stupid to give up a lot of those points of control in order to adopt this new technology but I would think it's new technology but I would think of it as instead um you're being one of the the first early adopters of what will eventually become the digital gold standard and will be greater than any one country it will be the global standard that works because no single nation state can manipulate it it also has been one of the technical benefits right so what we're looking at is very similar to when we were all walking around with nokia phones in our pockets and we had the t9 sms text everybody and within the span of a decade due to the uh entrepreneurship and ingenuity of some of the silicon valley uh texts that were out there we're all walking around with smartphones now which kind of blew our world apart and it's hard to think about the pre-smartphone world when we were all walking around how we communicated how we got access to our work email how we did the things that we needed to do on a daily basis so what you should do is you should explain to them that we are at that precipice right now where we can make a choice you know do we want to keep nokias in our pocket or do we want to advance and get into the smartphone world and i think if you look at that bitcoin is the smartphone of money right why would you why would you shy away from that thank you for your question and good luck with your talk with parliament um thanks for that everyone that was great um so this next person i add to the stage i love this handle noodle nakamoto do you have a question for the panel yeah um cheers thank you um ron said that if possible um don't use centralized exchanges to acquire bitcoin etc um but for those of us that did and i'd imagine there's you know a fair few is mixing the only option to get privacy back and it's kind of a two-part that's kind of part one part two is sort of you know reflecting on what just happened with um wasabi in that kind of floor that was discovered with people mixing i think you know previous utxos with new utxos etc um after that happened how much confidence you guys have with you know things like whirlpool from samurai um and the mixing facility that's in sparrow wallet for instance um may i just be quick um it's a bit controversial maybe um so i think people need to be careful with uh privacy larping um you know a lot of these tools are actually very good if you if you do it well uh i think many if not most of the average users will likely screw themselves if you know trying to use these tools and you also have to be careful with your local laws regarding mixing and things like that because you could essentially be saying that you're doing something wrong right i think they're fantastic like joint market is fantastic there's a lot of good tools out there but i think people need to be need to understand more before they sort of jump in and put their life savings into something that could cause them harm yeah 100 um and you know straight up i'll be honest i wouldn't know how to use some of those services i've read up on them it's just that from a privacy standpoint um if you've got coins that you've already got from an exchange and you just want you know you're not a criminal you you just want privacy um you know what's the best way to go about it if you know if you just want to kind of give yourself a a clean record almost as if you'd mined the coins yourself i think the separation is probably the best thing in your case because you've already acquired the coins they've already gone through an exchange there's already probably kyc information tied to them that's not the worst thing in the world if you're not a criminal and you're not trying to scam people and you're not doing money laundering right if you're just transacting with it or buying it to hold or speculate or you love the technology and just want to contribute to it that's great when you start to introduce mixing with that though it gets to be a problem because mixing is not just the one and done type of function or software that you run once and then you're in the clear you have to do a lot of upkeep continually where you're making sure that you're keeping your mixed outputs and inputs and things like that separate from other ones and that you're continuing to not uh to mix and match any of those things and it's a lot of work so what i would say is if you're the type of person where you're not a criminal you're not worried about that you probably don't have too much to worry but you do have the privacy aspect still and i think with more protocol improvements and signature aggregations and all cool new technology enhancements you will get more of that privacy over time but the problem you're going to encounter if you go to mix it and you don't do it correctly is they're going to be able to remix it and find your identity anyway in the case that you're being targeted and then the second thing is if you do mix them and then you try to transact with those coins they may get flagged right even if you're using them for legal purposes because it's a few hops away from the mixer or it's been identified as part of different coin drawing processes that are out there things like that you could be unintentionally making your life harder right so i think again uh sitting tight and just waiting if you have the coins there's things you may be able to do in the future to help kind of add some more of the privacy benefits back to it that that that's a really interesting point and i suppose taking the other side of the kind of coin if you will um that means any bitcoin user if i've understood you correctly could also could also be exposed to that kind of overreach if they've interacted with a mixed coin you know that that they've never know they just didn't know about is that correct go ahead bradley yeah like i think it's possible um that would be a bit of a stretch based on the current technical and knowledge base that we're seeing from governments right now um but there might be some requirements at some point um i i would take the position that your uh your kyz coins that you have are probably going to be fine and uh that said it's not a bad idea to get some non-kyz coins to get some non-kyz coins as a hedge to that idea and uh it's also one of those things where like in the worst case scenario if like it's what we're describing here in the very unlikely scenario where you've got people kicking down doors looking for uh those are supposed to have bitcoins um you know you probably want to have something to give them in that case uh and so having those non-kyz coins would be kind of like a hedge on top of your kyz coins um and you know another interesting aspect of this is uh you know mixing is just one sort of like thing there is also a million non-kyz sort of like you know digital contracts out there that people will sort of make legitimate investments in and then you know withdraw legitimately and you know like it's no longer the original coins right it's the same as sending to an exchange and taking it out so you know it's one of those things that like they can write it into law but like good luck enforcing it other people are going to tell you do like throw it on the lightning network or send it into manero into a manero black hole privacy coin black hole and then bring it back out but even some of those types of things the tooling and when you do that stuff it goes on chain right so even if the tooling doesn't necessarily exist today or isn't as optimized as it is today you know that doesn't mean in two years they're not going to be able to trace things more efficiently than they can today with some of the chain analysis um software that's out there um sergio do you have a question for the panel uh yeah thanks for bringing me up uh i was just going to go back to what dave said earlier about just kind of i know diversifying is kind of a stupid word to use i mean it's a little bit old for investors but it probably is a good idea to split up uh your coins to consider different you know different avenues to put them in with kyc and no kyc so i'm you know i've been mining since the summer and that's kind of a no kyc way to do it of course you got to have some capital to get maybe get started with that um compass offers a service i don't know if anybody would like to do that or if they have capital to do it but it's a good way to get kind of quasi uh no kyc coins um so i'm doing that but i'm also a casa customer and i don't know if i don't know if this is a question i think someone brought it up the other day in either as a twitter space maybe as a podcast but what do you guys do um with your node what do you guys do with the coins when i send it into my my casa wallet i have a two or three multi sig so i don't know if you guys mix the coins when you put it in there or what do you guys actually do well uh we do get asked fairly regularly you know if if casa is going to implement any sort of coin join or mixing or whatever and uh short version is it's actually kind of antithetical to the security model that we offer like if you want to be doing coin mixing that's a very interactive process so you have to have those coins on a hot wallet that can be regularly signing these large coin joint transactions so it's not something that we've even really looked into implementing because you know it's automatically putting your coins into a lower security model than we uh try to offer by default okay of course it's technically possible for us to do lower security model than we uh try to offer by default okay of course it's technically possible for us to do um and then even even past that there would be further questions of like exactly which mixing protocol would we use and what would the coins be mixed with and what are the you know potential legal ramifications around all of that so yeah it's it's fairly i would say fairly low on the priority list for for us to implement ourselves what i normally recommend people do is that i i don't think it really makes a ton of sense to be constantly mixing your coins um it may make sense to to mix them you know before you deposit them into casa i don't really think so either really the only time that i think it makes the most sense to to mix your coins is when you are about to make a payment on shane if if you want to be able to make a payment and do it in such a way that the person can't just plug that transaction into a block explorer all the way back a few hops and basically see your entire wallet i think when doing coin join makes the most sense for the average person yeah that makes a lot of sense okay and then i guess one other thing i is just like a comment you know i've been been a cost customer for a little over a year now um but like i said i wanted to diversify so i started doing the mining but there there are times when you know i'm looking at price and if i see a you know a trigger where it's like a 20 dip or even 15 or 10 dip i'll go buy coins and i'll i'll send it straight over to my sparrow wallet and i don't know if anybody has played around with the sparrow wallet but they now have a mixing tool in there for coin join and it's kind of nice because you can you can coin join but then you can have it mix coin join and then directly put into another wallet that you create on a sparrow so there is there's a way to kind of diversify the way that you're mixing it there so you're not you know you're not mixing and then it's stuck there and then you got to send it again and then well you just mix them and now you're sending it so now they can backtrace that so there's kind of a cool way for you to mix it and then automatically send it to like a cold card or a treasure or something like that thanks for the suggestion um salamante i asked added you to the stage do you have a question for the panel yeah thanks for the opportunity so i guess my question in the event of there's a ban um i'm trying to assess kind of the risk to the collaborative custody model right so i'm also a customer of kasa so i can see a situation kind of like what's happening and kind of like let's say things get so bad here in the us wouldn't it be possible for them to just say the kasa hey we're gonna kill your mobile apps no one all kasa customers all of a sudden they're not going to be able to use their kasa app and then they will basically prevent kasa from signing any transaction so all of all of this collaborative custody customers will will be forced to kind of use the kind of recovery method right we're using electrum and doing it on their own um so do you see that as a risk where the government can say that kasa for example you cannot sign any transactions for your customers and then shut down your app would that be a possibility i mean it's it's always technically a possibility and it's something that you should consider as an edge case and this is why we've designed it so that the app and our servers are not a single point of failure i think it's a pretty big edge case uh like if canada came to us and told us to shut everything down uh we would definitely discuss that with legal counsel before deciding how to respond like i'm not even sure if they would have the legal authority to put that sort of pressure on us um but yeah so could an authority compel just assume it's united state's government since that's where we're based could we be compelled you know not to sign transactions uh i mean i would just assume that kasa as a company gets completely nuked you know that is the worst case scenario whether it happens due to a government action or due to some other weird environmental edge case doesn't really matter and that's when it's important for you to be able to follow that sovereign recovery process and i really encourage all of our customers to do it now do it ahead of time make sure that you're comfortable with with being able to do it even though you will probably never have to it's it's just like practicing any other sort of emergency drill um you want to make sure that you are comfortable with the fact that you have the ability to follow those instructions so yeah i mean it's a worst case scenario and but it's still one that we want to not end up causing catastrophic loss to our customers if it does happen yeah that makes sense and i obviously that's not going to happen through like law passed through congress right it's going to be something where you know declared emergency and then you know abusing the laws right that's kind of the situation that i'm potentially anticipating because it happened in canada right i never thought it would happen in canada and it did so that's why i'm so the last question i have um for i know we talk a lot about kyc versus non kyc coins um wouldn't we want to be uh you know increasing like because the more we use as bitcoiners right use these tools to whirlpool or coin join wouldn't that kind of force the government to say yes that's dirty money versus us bitcoiners cooperating doing it the right way in kyc paying our taxes and then incorporating that as part of the ecosystem um just when i get your thoughts i you know like i see it being promoted a lot which is a good thing but i think we still you know as responsible bitcoiners we should be still paying taxes um that way you know because if the majority is not paying taxes and using these tools to um not pay taxes then then then we're asking basically uh the government in congress to kind of attack us right so why don't you get your thoughts on that i think there's a couple different issues at play here uh one of them is the just fungibility of bitcoin in general and the unfortunate aspect of the fact that very few people actually use mixers means that if you are using these privacy enhancing tools as of now it actually makes you a bigger suspect even if you're not doing anything illegal uh it will you know if if anything comes up um with a a chain analysis company or or any sort of regulated exchange that's looking at the the history of your funds within several hops then the fact that your funds have gone through privacy enhancing tools actually increases your risk score and makes it more likely that the regulated institutions will decide not to do business with you um you know a in in an optimal world we would all be using coin join and in various privacy enhancing tools and it would be so pervasive that it would just not be tenable for any of these institutions to refuse to do business with us because they would be basically cutting off their own foot um unfortunately i don't see us getting to that point anytime soon on the other hand from a sort of taxation perspective i think that's less of an issue of um of using privacy enhancing tools i think that probably comes down more to money laundering than taxation and i suspect that the money launderers who you know they're basically trying to clean the proceeds from other criminal activities just so that they can spend them i doubt that they're going to be paying taxes on them either way but regardless like when it comes to taxes and you're paying your your capital gains and whatnot i i don't really think that on chain or or really any technical privacy considerations or any like aml or non-kyc stuff even really matters of when it comes to the taxation stuff because what's ultimately going to happen is if you want to realize uh a non-negligible amount of gains that you've gotten from investing in these systems you're going to be buying property you know you're going to be increasing your lifestyle and it's those things that end up um getting attention from the tax authorities you know if they see you acquiring property and there's a mismatch between what you have uh reported and your your basically level of of lifestyle um there's really nothing that any on chain or technical privacy is going to do to help you when it comes down to that no thank you very much that was quite helpful thanks for the opportunity you guys thank you and um infinity long i added you to the stage if you have a question for the panel and this will be our last question for the day thank you so much for joining us up infinitely long take it away hey guys thanks for having me so um i'm kind of new to the space and you guys keep mentioning kyc um what do you guys think are like the best non-kyc methods to acquire bitcoin this question comes up a lot i think in a lot of the spaces we've done because it's more topical now some of the ones we've mentioned here like if you run your own miner and you're mining your own bitcoin you don't need to report that to anybody right you didn't need to put an id on file to accrue that so that's one way you can do that there's some interesting games that are actually being built on the lighting network and i don't suggest that for like trying to get any significant amount of value it's more it came to like viewing ads on can do that there's some interesting games that are actually being built on the lighting network and i don't suggest that for like trying to get any significant amount of value it's more it came came to like viewing ads on the internet to get a couple cents here and there. But you can pull a couple hundred satoshis for free with various games and mobile apps. And even some of the the savings apps, the full guard and some of the other various ones that are out there, lolly, you can spin for sats or you can get bonus sats per day. So if you're the type of person where you do that for five minutes every morning as part of your routine, you can start to build up a little tiny stack and it's not going to be anything significant, but you are getting KYC free Bitcoin that could be worth a little bit more in the next decade or so. So you want to consider those types of things. The other thing I saw people as labor, right? If you have a skill set, and you want to do a job for somebody, if you're a security professional, you do a penetration test. I've done those for Bitcoin before as a payment, right? And while I was doing it through my business and legally and declared it on taxes, depending on where your jurisdiction is, or who you are, there may be different laws or reporting reporting requirements for exchange for payment for skills and labor. So I would look into those types of things to see what those limits are, because there are ways that you can act within the system and do it. The last one people are going to recommend is local bitcoins. And I think that that has changed over the past couple of years and is not as a viable method. But if you start attending Bitcoin groups, meetups, things like that, you will start to hear of or discover opportunities to make purchases that may not have to go through a KYC process. Any business in most developed world can charge Bitcoin for their services and products, like that's what we do. So, you know, just earn Bitcoin by selling what you have, like, it doesn't take much to add the plugin to your shopping carts to start accepting Bitcoin for your services. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us, everyone. And thank you to our special guests, NPK, and Dave Bradley. And, yeah, so we host these monthly spaces on here. And if you follow us at Casa Hodel, you can be a part of them. And, and at Casa, we we publish all kinds of Bitcoin content. And we have a lot of content that you can find on our website. So if you want to follow us, and at Casa, we we publish all kinds of Bitcoin content about Bitcoin security, even if you just like the color purple, give us a follow. And in the meantime, don't trust, everyone.