WBD592 Audio Transcription
Bitcoin - Enemy of the State with BTC Sessions
Release date: Monday 12th December
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with BTC Sessions. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
BTC Sessions (Ben Perrin), is a Canadian Bitcoin educator with a well-known YouTube channel. In this interview, we discuss his experiences as part of a group of Bitcoiners organising Bitcoin funds for Canadian truckers being targeted by the Canadian government.
“He messaged me, and he said: ‘Hey, man, I’m on a backup phone, just so you know, police just raided my house and they literally took everything. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.’ And I’m thinking: is that about to happen to me?”
— BTC Sessions
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Mr Sessions, welcome to What Bitcoin Did. We've made nearly 600 episodes and this is the first time we've had you on the show, which is embarrassing really.
BTC Sessions: Well, we're fixing it! No, I do appreciate you having me, I really do.
Peter McCormack: Dude, you do an amazing service for Bitcoin. I think you're probably one of the most important people in Bitcoin.
BTC Sessions: You're making me blush, man.
Peter McCormack: Well, look, your education videos are very popular and you do some amazing work. I remember talking to you about it in, we were in LA, weren't we; no, Miami?
BTC Sessions: Miami, maybe, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and long overdue. And also, it's been long overdue us doing a basics of Bitcoin, being a bitcoiner and talking about this stuff. We've done a lot of shows recently on macroeconomics and philosophy and those things, but sometimes it's good to get back to basics, and you're probably the best guy to talk to about this.
We will talk about FTX at some point, because we want to talk about being a good bitcoiner, I'm not always the best bitcoiner, so we will get into that. But I'd be interested to know from you, somebody now who's spent so much time teaching people about Bitcoin, you probably have a lot of people come to you saying they don't know anything about Bitcoin, they might be new. How do you frame it now for people?
BTC Sessions: So, I think that there is no one answer. It's not a question of how do you frame it, it's a question of who is the person; why are they asking you about it in the first place? I've kind of gotten to the point where people are aware that I use and actually live on Bitcoin now, but I don't feel I need to push on people, because people then come, they'll get curious, they will get curious. I tend to look at, what does the person do for a living; what's their political ideology; what is their economic background in terms of their understanding of economics? So, it's really different for every person.
If somebody who's a little bit older, who was alive when we went off the gold standard and remembers it, when Nixon nixed everything, they'll be familiar with rampant inflation and they'll recall, "Oh, it's happening again, interesting" and that can be a starting point. But then other people come at it from a censorship-resistant aspect, which has been particular at home as of late; that was a major item of contention. So, there's a lot of different ways that people come to it.
Peter McCormack: How much can you talk about what happened recently at home?
BTC Sessions: I can probably talk about it as extensively as you like, if you really want.
Peter McCormack: Well, it would be good to know because -- well, you give the back story. Trucker protests…
BTC Sessions: Yeah, I want to add a caveat to this, because I know obviously you've had a wide mix of different bitcoiners on here lately, you've made an effort to have people from across the spectrum, you've had a lot of progressives on lately, so there's going to be some progressives that are listening to this and right away they're going to hear "Canadian trucker protest", and they're probably going to think, "Fuck those guys".
Peter McCormack: Well, so for some context, there was a long period of time when we didn't really have much representation from the left on the show, and some of the comments on YouTube or the reviews on Chartable or emails I got in was, "All your stuff is right-wing libertarian, you're not giving a voice to progressives", and we listened to that and we got some people on. But specifically, the trucker show we made, we got a lot of emails in, I'm going to say maybe 20 emails in, from people who were upset and angry and felt like it wasn't a fair representation of what happened.
BTC Sessions: Yeah. So, I guess before I get into this, I want to say two things. Number one is, regardless of what side of the political spectrum you're on, in the context of everything that's said here, zoom out and recognise that the actions that were taken apply equally to both sides of the political spectrum. So, if a government can take those kinds of actions, which was effectively a flavour of martial law in Canada, the same can be true if the next administration is on the opposite side of the spectrum from you and you're processing whatever, the precedent has been set. So, I think it's important that once those tools are A-okay to use, they can be used across the board.
The other thing I'll say is, in 2015, I voted Trudeau in.
Peter McCormack: So, it's your fault!
BTC Sessions: Yeah, it's my fault!
Peter McCormack: You brought communism to Canada!
BTC Sessions: I mean, egg on my face that I vote in a guy and then seven years later, I'm effectively labelled some sort of right-wing extremist, when I feel nothing of the sort.
Peter McCormack: Well, I don't know if you saw the tweet I put out about how Americans see me versus how Brits see me?
BTC Sessions: I did see that!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, because I'm considered a progressive, crazy sham progressive in the US and in the UK, they think I'm Alex Jones; I get that. By the way, educate me a little bit here, Trudeau's father was also a politician?
BTC Sessions: Yes, Trudeau's father was our Prime Minister back in the 1970s.
Peter McCormack: Was he respected?
BTC Sessions: It depends who you talk to but fun fact, he was the only other Prime Minister to enact the same measures, but it was under a totally different context. There was a group called the FLQ and they were trying to protect French language in Quebec, and they viewed every inroad of English into Quebec, like shops that would have English words and all that, they basically felt they were losing their culture. But they went to the extreme of, they would literally bomb a shop if it had an English name on it. They kidnapped and murdered an MP.
So, Trudeau at the time did what was now known as the Emergencies Act, was previously known as the War Measures Act. It probably wouldn't have flown over as well if Trudeau now had used the War Measures Act in the context of a pretty peaceful protest, but I digress. Yeah, basically the military was in Quebec and it was searching for the -- it was martial law within Canada.
Peter McCormack: What do we think about that?
BTC Sessions: I mean, I'm not a fan. It's funny because growing up, when I was young, I thought, "Strong, powerful leader doing what he has to do". Now I don't quite think that way. I mean, I think that obviously law enforcement has to deal with that, it was horrible what was happening, but I'm torn in that instance. I think that's a dangerous step to take and, yes, the context, it was a scary one, but I don't know.
Peter McCormack: Could it have been solved by law enforcement investigations plus negotiation?
BTC Sessions: I don't know. Again, it was before I was born, so I don't know. But maybe in that context, more bombings, more murders would have happened. I have no idea, but I just find it ironic, not ironic at all, that Trudeau's father was the last time that Act was enabled.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I would say they're not like-for-like situations and Trudeau's use was egregious.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, pretty heavy-handed, I would argue.
Peter McCormack: So, the kinds of emails I got in were more -- there was one specific one where a guy referred to his mother having an operation that did not happen because I think something to do with the doctor couldn't get to the hospital, I can't remember the detail. Maybe she couldn't get to the hospital, but that was the one that was particularly challenging to have an answer for. There were others where it was like, "This is noisy, it's a disturbance, we can't get on with life", and I was like, "Well, that's the idea of protests. It's civil disobedience, it's meant to raise an issue", but there was that specific case.
I support peaceful protests but at the same time, if someone needs an operation, there should be a way for someone to have that operation.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, again I don't think there's any easy answer here. I guess before we get into what happened, what I will say is that my general view is that people should be able to choose what happens to their own bodies in really any context. Also, my wife is a nurse and she's taken infectious diseases courses. So, there's Twitter discourse, but she was always my reality check as well. So, I'd go on Twitter and I'd see all these things and I'd go back to her and say, "Okay, what makes sense, what doesn't. Help me parse through this".
One of the things that struck me with her was she said, "The thing that irks me is that one of the first things that we learn in medical school is that no matter what, you advocate for your patient. So, you give them the best information that they have, make sure that they have it all, they can parse through it, and that whatever their decision is at the end of the day, that is their decision because it's their own body". She said, "This is kind of the first time that I'm not seeing that. Everybody seems to be ignoring what we've learnt".
Peter McCormack: And there were specific protests related to truckers wanting to travel into the US, they had to be vaccinated to return or to leave?
BTC Sessions: Yeah, so that was kind of the initial spark. So, the truckers had been making their trips throughout the entire pandemic as is, there was no requirement whatsoever. They were alone in their cabs the entire team, but they would do their trips back and forth. And again, most of the truckers actually were vaccinated, many of the protesters were vaccinated, but they basically said, "Now you need to have this if you want to be driving your truck any more".
In the context of what the restrictions were for all Canadians, basically more or less if you decided that you opted not to be vaccinated, if you had a government job, you were just done; in many cases, if you had many other jobs, you were pretty much done. You could not travel domestically within the country on a plane, boat, train, any form of public transit whatsoever.
Peter McCormack: Sorry, just to interrupt, how did they prove that? I mean, I can understand on a plane it's easy to have proof of vaccination, but were they doing that on trains?
BTC Sessions: Yes.
Peter McCormack: Wow!
BTC Sessions: Any form of public transit, you had QR codes. So, there was a passport system to go into any stores, basically to go really anywhere. Beyond that, let's say you're in Canada and you've made the decision, "Listen, I've got my reservations, I would prefer not to do this right now, and I'm not getting vaccinated", let's say you decided, "Listen, I kind of don't like the law of the land, I would prefer to go somewhere else", our only land border is the US and the US required vaccination to cross the border. You could not leave, you were effectively stuck in Canada with no job and no way to travel within Canada, assuming you couldn't afford a car, and there was basically no way to live your life otherwise, which is a pretty massive amount of coercion into doing this.
I should also say that Canada is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world and these restrictions were still there.
Peter McCormack: COVID vaccinated?
BTC Sessions: Yes.
Peter McCormack: Aren't there certain jobs that require certain -- to be a nurse in the UK, are there certain vaccines you have to have? Can you look that up?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I'll have a look.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, I mean there definitely are. As a nurse, you have to be up to date with -- I'm not sure what my wife needs.
Peter McCormack: Is there a hepatitis one, or…?
BTC Sessions: Yeah, there's going to be certain requirements. Actually, funnily enough, in the US, there's more requirements on kids being vaccinated in school than in Canada, there's no requirements. There's suggestions, schools will sometimes ask, but it's not a legal requirement for kids within Canada to be vaccinated in school.
Peter McCormack: And there are certain places you have to travel in the world, you have to have certain vaccines to go to; it's not just recommended, you can't go without.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, like I've been to Southeast Asia, and there's yellow fever and things like that they require in certain parts, like Northern Thailand. But again, my general perspective is, I think people should be able to decide what they do with their own bodies, and I feel like that's not a crazy thing to think, but I had a lot of people in my circle of friends that basically thought it was a crazy thing to think. That was upsetting, but I can agree to disagree with people.
So, let's start with, they said the truckers had to do this. On top of this, you have an entire population of people, a large portion of the population of Canada, that was very upset about their situation. They've lost their jobs and other contacts, they can't leave if they don't like it, and so on and so forth. This resulted in what started as the trucker protest, they started driving across the country, in the dead of winter, might I add, like -35° weather through most of the country. And it was the largest protest in Canadian history.
You had people lining overpasses, cross-country, standing on the side of the highway, waving flags. And for me, the thing that struck me is, Canadians are a pretty compliant bunch. I just said, we're one of the most vaccinated populations on the globe. For Canada to be the nation where it finally broke, where people said, "Listen, this is pushing me too far", was pretty wild to see for me. I thought that we were the country that just kind of rolls over and says, "Whatever".
So for me, that was a positive thing. I think anytime it goes too far in one end of the spectrum or the other, there needs to be that pushback, so I was happy to see that. But I was also a little disheartened to see, as things progressed, a large portion of the population basically dismissed any of the grievances of the protesters and categorised them with broad strokes. They were labelled as racists, as science deniers, as just insane people that want to overthrow the government.
Don't get me wrong, if you have the largest protest in a country's history, there's going to be all kinds of people involved in that; it's massive. But I think it's unfair, just as it would be unfair to categorise other protests that recently happened over the past couple of years, by what the worst of the worst did.
I'll just say it; if you're a progressive and you're going to say that the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, should not be painted exclusively by the looting and the destruction of public property that happened, then I'm going to go ahead and say that a group of people that simply wanted bodily autonomy shouldn't be categorised by the one guy that showed up in a crowd with a Nazi flag.
Don't get me wrong, that guy's a piece of shit. But when you see the coverage on the news, especially in Canada, it was maddening, because I knew Caribou on the ground. He's sending me videos of what's happening and I'm literally seeing bouncy castles, families singing in a circle.
Peter McCormack: Sorry, the guy with the flag though, was he holding the flag claiming himself to be a Nazi, or was he using that to accuse the Trudeau Government of being Nazis?
BTC Sessions: That's how I saw it.
Peter McCormack: That's how I saw it.
BTC Sessions: It's not how it was played on the news.
Peter McCormack: Oh no, I know that on the news, but you said, "He's a piece of shit". But my understanding was that he was using that to say, "You're Nazis".
BTC Sessions: He's either a piece of shit or he's an idiot, because that's obviously not how it's going to be perceived. So another example, there was some dude that had a Confederate flag down there, and he was walking through the crowd, so they showed that all over the news. What they don't show, which I saw the video of, is as soon as he starts walking through, all of the protesters go up to him and they're like, "Hey, man, what the fuck are you doing here? Get out of here". None of that was on the news. But those were the clips that were just played in perpetuity afterwards.
There was another instance where there was some guy that went into an apartment complex and lit a bag on fire and just left it and walked out, and that was tied to the protest. It was totally unrelated, it was never rescinded or anything. There were all these instances.
Peter McCormack: Canadian news, how independent of the government is it?
BTC Sessions: CBC is fully bankrolled by the government.
Peter McCormack: Is it basically like the BBC?
BTC Sessions: Yes, pretty much.
Danny Knowles: I just always like to pull this up. BBC's not banked by the government, it's banked by the public.
Peter McCormack: Yes and no. Yes, it is.
Danny Knowles: It's different though, I think you have to delineate the difference.
Peter McCormack: But it's legislated by the government that we have to pay for it.
Danny Knowles: Yes, but it's not funded directly by the government.
Peter McCormack: Yes, I understand your point. But when there's no opt out, apart from not having TV, and the government legislate that we have it -- I'm not anti-BBC, I'm just wondering what is the connection. Thanks though, Danny.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, so CBC gets direct, if I'm not mistaken, they get to the tune of $1 billion a year, or something like that.
Peter McCormack: Direct from the government?
BTC Sessions: Either through taxes or whatever the mechanism is. If the government wasn't there, they would not receive that money.
Peter McCormack: Do they not have an advertising model because of that?
BTC Sessions: No, they still take ads and everything.
Peter McCormack: Because the BBC only takes ads on international dissemination of content; there's no advertising in the UK on the BBC, it's just straight-up TV.
BTC Sessions: Oh yeah, they're still on CBC, there's still ads.
Peter McCormack: Were they the ones mainly reporting say on this flag, or was everyone doing the same?
BTC Sessions: I mean, it went everywhere. We get CTV, Global, those are some of the major other news networks, but it's more or less you get similar flavours of the same coverage. But yeah, I just feel that it wasn't -- I was a little upset when we had our Prime Minister come out and basically say, again fringe minority, again largest protest in Canadian history, "Unacceptable views". I mean, yeah, there's that asshole with the flag over there, there's definitely obviously going to be people that you disagree with and maybe do have some distasteful things to say, but you can't dismiss the largest protest in Canadian history as simply that. There's something more there that a large portion of the population actually are concerned about and want to see a change around.
Peter McCormack: With regards to the funding and what happened with Caribou, and then litigation afterwards, can we talk about that at all; can we talk about the state of that? Let people know what happened.
BTC Sessions: Okay, so I'll kind of walk through the sequence of events as I understand them. It's been a way now, this was back February/March, so --
Peter McCormack: I mean, I remember a little, so if I kind of fill in any gaps.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, there will be some things that are fuzzy, the sequence of events may be a little out of order, but I'll do my best.
Peter McCormack: Start with the GoFundMe.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, so GoFundMe goes up, they raise a ton of money.
Peter McCormack: Millions.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, millions. If I'm not mistake, like $10 million, something like that. And simultaneously, I think it was BJ Dichter had a QR code out. There was a couple of people that had just put up a static QR code to raise a bit of Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: And that money was to fund the truckers so they could eat and not work.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, just whatever help was needed. So, a ton of money is being raised, and then a lot of bitcoiners again lean towards, or at least there were a number of bitcoiners that leaned towards again the idea of body autonomy, being able to make your own choices, not being coerced and that kind of stuff. So, people started saying, "We should raise some Bitcoin for this. Maybe we can accept Lightning donations".
Peter McCormack: Sorry, was that after GoFundMe closed down?
BTC Sessions: No, not yet.
Peter McCormack: Oh, okay.
BTC Sessions: So, this was part of the, I guess what informed the initial setup here. So, the thought was, "Okay, well they've raised a ton of money through this method, but we can probably raise a little bit of Bitcoin here too, sure". So, I was asked, "Is there any way that we can set up a page today to accept Lightning payments?" and this was very early on. I can't recall exactly what point, but I think pre them even getting to Ottawa, the truckers I mean.
So, my thought was, at the time, people weren't a fan of what was going on, but it was large and people were paying attention, but there was no thought of where it was going to go at this point. So I thought, we're probably going to raise a few thousand bucks and that this is probably going to remain legal, because protesting is a legal thing in Canada. Silly me!
Peter McCormack: And the fundamental pillar of democracy.
BTC Sessions: Yes. So, with those now wrong assumptions, I unfortunately, and I'm going to own this right now, I made major, major mistakes in setting up that page, which still haunt me now. I still look at that and go, "Why the fuck would I have…?" I assumed it was going to be small and legal, but I would say it's always best to start with best practices. So, what were the mistakes I made?
Well, I set up this page that would be able to accept both on-chain and Lightning payments. I set it up this way using something called Tallycoin, which is an easy way to connect your Lightning node to just an online page and set up a little fundraiser.
Peter McCormack: Is that like almost a Bitcoin Patreon?
BTC Sessions: Yeah, something like that. You can set up a cause, accept donations, and it's all non-custodial. It goes directly into a Bitcoin wallet if it's on-chain, or directly to a Lightning node that you yourself manage. So, I set up this page and one of the problems with the way Tallycoin functioned at the time was it actually does generate a new address for each fundraiser that you create, but it does not generate a new address for each donor. So, it's a single, static address that everyone was donating to. Problem number one.
What happened at that point, as time went on, we started getting some decent donations. And then the government, through threats and whatever, basically shut down the GoFundMe and were trying to confiscate the funds. Nonetheless, everything that went to GoFundMe was frozen. There was a time where they were saying, "We're just going to take the money and donate it to other causes", then there were threats of lawsuits and that didn't happen, and then they eventually had to actually, if I'm not mistaken, return the money, or part of the money to the original donors. I'm not sure of the exact state, but nonetheless the money did not get where it was intended to go.
Then, GiveSendGo steps up and says, "We're not going to freeze your money, we're not going to do any of that, we will let you accept it". So already, yes, this is coming in to fill the void, but people are starting to go, "Bitcoin seems like a better idea because you can't stop those transactions from happening". So, things start to snowball, they start going quicker and I'm getting a little panicked.
Now, at the same time, we've done a multisig setup; so, anybody listening that's unfamiliar, picture a digital vault that requires multiple keys to unlock. The thought behind that was, we just don't want the coins in a single location where a mistake could be made, or somebody could get the single private key and take the money, we wanted to spread that out. We also had publicly identifiable bitcoiners basically as keyholders, because --
Peter McCormack: Reputation.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, reputation. There's the "don't trust, verify" ethos of bitcoiners, "Well, who the hell am I giving money to?" If it's people that are actually putting their reputation on the line that are publicly seen, at least there's someone to point to. So, yeah, we had a multisig going and I don't need to list everybody here. Everybody that's watching will be familiar with who the multisig holders were. But we had that set up.
We then see the GiveSendGo. They didn't freeze the funds, but as soon as the organisers went to withdraw funds, the second it hit a Canadian bank, it got frozen.
Peter McCormack: The transaction or the account?
BTC Sessions: The money landed in the account and then it was frozen. So, millions of dollars again. So fiat, effectively the legacy banking system, was entirely compromised at that point, it just was not going to get to people. There were lots of people on the ground that were giving gas and food and everything. Actually, there were so many food donations that it was overflowing, and then they overflowed the foodbanks in the area. So, all of the food banks in Ottawa were just full of food and donations, which was fantastic.
Peter McCormack: Nice, yeah.
BTC Sessions: So at this point, it was very clear to everyone that Bitcoin was really the only thing where the money was successfully going through.
Peter McCormack: But still a target and now a test.
BTC Sessions: But still a target. So we ended up raising -- the initial goal on the page, it's laughable now, was 10 million sats, like $4,000 at the time, one-tenth of a Bitcoin. We ended up raising something like 22 Bitcoin. It was over one one-millionth of all Bitcoin that will ever be created were donated to a single cause.
Peter McCormack: Unbelievable.
BTC Sessions: It was crazy. I was not okay, I was so stressed. And part of it was I was thinking, "I'm going to lose friends", and then the Emergencies Act hit, which effectively we all didn't know what was happening, what the implications of this were. I still don't fully understand what the rules of the game were, because it just seemed like they were just doing whatever. The Canadians were getting bank accounts frozen, mine never did, but BJ and Caribou did.
Peter McCormack: Still to this day?
BTC Sessions: No, not any more, because the Act was beat down after.
Peter McCormack: What the fuck are you meant to do though?
BTC Sessions: I don't know.
Peter McCormack: What do they expect people to do?
BTC Sessions: I don't know.
Peter McCormack: You might not know the answer to this question. When they freeze your account, you obviously can't use your debit card, you can't get money out; do your mortgage payments still go through?
BTC Sessions: I don't know, but I don't imagine so. If your bank account is frozen, no funds would be going in and out, is my understanding. So, I don't know what you do in that situation.
Peter McCormack: For embarrassing the government.
BTC Sessions: Yeah. And so at this point, and again this is where the order of the sequence of events is going to get a little messy. So, this is the part that I start getting -- this is the part where I'm somewhat uncomfortable, because again I fully own that I made massive mistakes from the get-go.
Peter McCormack: But hold on, if you thought you were going to get 22 Bitcoin, you would have done things differently. Don't beat yourself up about this.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, but as a good bitcoiner, you should observe best practices.
Peter McCormack: Of course, but then there's a rush, you're doing it quickly. I've raised money before and just had a single address.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, it was a shitty situation is what I'm getting at and I hope that everybody watched and will do better moving forward. And I'll give my thoughts on the ideal raising of money in an adversarial situation, what the flow would be now. But outside of that, there was, and again this is the part where I'm going to be weird about talking about it, but JW is somebody on Twitter --
Peter McCormack: Chewie?
BTC Sessions: Yeah. So, in the midst of the panic of what was happening with how quickly things were growing and the legal uncertainty around everything, somewhere in there, and this is where the sequence is totally a blur to me because I was not doing all right, but we started getting legal threats from JW on Twitter, because I had done a podcast with Nick and I think Greg and BJ and we were talking about this amount of money came in, and there had been discussion of what's actually needed, "Well, there's lots of food there, there's lots of gas there, so on and so forth", but the topic came up, "Hey, a lot of these guys are getting fines. They may have been charged with various things. Perhaps one idea is having a legal war chest to help them out with that kind of stuff". I guess that idea that was floated, JW was not a fan of that.
Peter McCormack: What's it got to do with him?
BTC Sessions: He donated.
Peter McCormack: And? Under what conditions?
BTC Sessions: I don't know, the thing was called Bitcoin For Truckers.
Peter McCormack: Well, that's for truckers.
BTC Sessions: Well, what I will say is he effectively said, "If this money is not handed directly to individual truckers by the conclusion of the protest, I will sue BTC Sessions" and listed a few names.
Peter McCormack: Whenever his name comes up, it's always for something where he's being a piece of shit. I mean, I've had him blocked for years because he's a fucking moron. But every single time, he's being a piece of shit.
BTC Sessions: I don't want to sit here and disparage him.
Peter McCormack: I do, fuck him!
BTC Sessions: All I'm going to say is, given the stress, I really didn't appreciate having that extra shit dumped in my lap.
Peter McCormack: Okay, very quickly, you don't have to tell me the answer to this, but do you know how much he donated?
BTC Sessions: I've no idea. What happened was, as soon as he tweeted that I said, "Hey, man, would you like your money back? We will happily send it back". He refused to reply to that.
Peter McCormack: It was probably like, I don't know, $500 of Bitcoin.
BTC Sessions: Yeah. So nonetheless, what I will say, and here is where I'm going to basically concede that that action did contribute to a quicker movement of funds that then got into the hands of the truckers. Again, I'm totally fuzzy on the order of when things happened.
Peter McCormack: That's fine. So anyway, some of the Bitcoin starts reaching the truckers?
BTC Sessions: Yes. So effectively what happened is, there was an effort -- and at this point, I'm no longer a custodian, we had begun to move funds out of one multisig into another. And so at that point, I believe JW and a number of others had begun to basically figure out, "How can we actually put together packages?" I actually think the packages that were put together worked great. And again, I will concede that the prodding to move forward quicker in the end actually was a positive thing, and I'll tell you why in a second.
So, there were packages that went out to individual truckers, effectively like, "This is a preloaded seed phrase, here's how to load it up into BlueWallet and send it into another wallet that you yourself own". I think there was $8,000 of Bitcoin on it for each trucker.
Peter McCormack: Holy shit!
BTC Sessions: Yeah. It was a sizeable amount because there was a lot of money there. So, it was going out and being handed and some girl cried and it was like --
Peter McCormack: Sorry, how would you know who to give it to and someone's not received twice and someone's not been missed out?
BTC Sessions: I believe that on the ground, they were trying to make a list, they were talking to people in advance like, "Hey, if we get donations, can we bring some to you?" so basically, it went something along those lines. But I wasn't there, so I'm not super-privy to that part of it.
Nonetheless, the part where it got stuck and the part where the early mistakes of me doing the Tallycoin with the static address and it not having been obfuscated in some way, this is where it started to catch up with us, because as we went to move it out of the initial multisig so that it could then be in a place where they could easily create those packages, there was a bug in the multisig software we were using. And I'll say that the software is fantastic, they worked it out, but nobody was prepared to be -- even the software that we were using was ill-prepared for this kind of a test. It's since been hardened, I would say.
But we were using Nunchuk wallet and the guys at Nunchuk are fucking legends. Their responses during this were incredible.
Peter McCormack: Big up, Nunchuk.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, indeed. But nonetheless, the way that Nunchuk works is you have a bunch of people that have keys and you need X number of keys to approve a transaction. There's an encrypted chat where if you want to start a transaction, you basically propose it into that encrypted chat, people see it as a message, you can click on it and then sign with the key that you have. So, it makes remote coordination super-easy.
However, at the time, we encountered a bug where you would propose a transaction and it would show for you in the chat, but it wouldn't be relayed to the other members, so there was no opportunity to attach a signature. So, a handful of Bitcoin, around 30% of it, kind of got stuck as these packages were being made. So what ended up happening, again this is where it's kind of fuzzy, but 70% of all the Bitcoin was handed to individual truckers, and I will note that it was the only online donations out of all of it, GiveSendGo, GoFundMe and Bitcoin, the only donations that actually made it to the intended recipients.
Peter McCormack: Before we get onto the other 30%, how did the truckers know what to do with the Bitcoin? Did they get it to exchange; could they sell it; were the exchanges then put under pressure?
BTC Sessions: So, there were basically instructions of a variety of different ways you can utilise Bitcoin to purchase things, to exchange for dollars, and so on and so forth. But it basically walked it through and I read through it, and it was pretty good instructions, I'd say.
Peter McCormack: Was there any pressure put on the exchanges like on GoFundMe?
BTC Sessions: Yes.
Peter McCormack: There was, okay.
BTC Sessions: Yes, so this is where I would say the failings of the initial setup really came to light. So, because it was all donated through a single, static address, trivial to see exactly what was coming in, where it was coming from and where it went afterwards. You have a starting point to say, "Just start here and then we see where it goes". So, the exchanges were effectively just sent a list of individual addresses that said, "Don't accept Bitcoin from these addresses, or freeze it when it gets there if it comes from this address".
So, at this point, and I don't know, my understanding is there was no instruction on, "Look back in the chain to see if it, at some point, when to these addresses", and so on and so forth. So, my understanding is that the exchanges were effectively saying, "Okay, we'll look for this individual address if it came from that one". So, you get what I'm saying?
Yeah, so at that point, there's this 30% that is kind of finicky, the Nunchuk guys were helping in trying to extract that from the multisig. Unfortunately, I think it resulted in a situation where the credentials to move that Bitcoin were in too centralised a place, and at that point it was removed from the custody of the keyholder.
Peter McCormack: Fine. Can I say what is, because I know what happened?
BTC Sessions: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, that was when the police basically raided his house?
BTC Sessions: Yeah, if I'm not mistaken.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, raided Caribou's house, threatened him and he did what probably most people had to do. I felt so sorry for him at that time.
BTC Sessions: He messaged me the second they left and not only did I feel horrible, but I was mortified. I was so scared. He messaged me and he said, "Hey, man, I'm on a backup phone. Just so you know, the police just raided my house and they literally took everything. I just wanted to give you a heads-up". And I'm thinking, "Is that about to happen to me? Is somebody about to come kick in my door? My daughter's here, I'm sitting here with my family?"
We were about to actually leave. We were going on --
Peter McCormack: A big old trip!
BTC Sessions: Yeah, we were going to Costa Rica actually. It had been planned well before any of this stuff had started. But I'm thinking, I don't --
Peter McCormack: Don't want to get stopped at the airport.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, and I'm thinking, "Are they going to come to my house?" All of this stuff that we've been talking about has happened in two weeks, and I'm sitting there going, "If it's gone this far in two weeks, what's another week? How different could it be from then? How much worse could it get?" So, I'm running through scenarios in my head where I'm just not ready for this to happen to me. So, I go out to my wife and I say, "This is the situation".
Peter McCormack: "Let's get the fuck out of here".
BTC Sessions: That's what I said. I said, "Maybe we should go and stay in a hotel somewhere for a couple of nights before we fly out and we'll see what happens". So, I'm sitting in this hotel and I'm thinking --
Peter McCormack: You're a fugitive!
BTC Sessions: I mean, I technically wasn't.
Peter McCormack: No, I know what you mean.
BTC Sessions: But that's what I felt. Then I'm thinking, "Are they going to let me on this plane?" Then I'm thinking, "If I get on this plane, there's a possibility I might not be able to come back". All of this is going through my head and it was stressful as fuck.
Peter McCormack: But listen, you did a good thing, you should not beat yourself up about anything. It was a fast-moving situation. We all tend to see our social media world differently. I don't know what people said to you. I didn't see anything from anyone I respect say anything negative.
BTC Sessions: I think I just take it to heart because I know I could have done better. And what I'd love to tell you right now, and maybe this will be used by others, but what I would have done differently.
Peter McCormack: Well, we will get to that. What about the subsequent litigation; can that be talked about; is that over?
BTC Sessions: No, but I'm not super-well-versed in exactly what's going on.
Peter McCormack: But you're not being litigated against?
BTC Sessions: There's a footnote where they list potential custodians, and my understanding is that's just a kind of throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. By the time that litigation happened, I was not a custodian, so I don't know exactly. Nonetheless, there was a lawsuit that was launched on behalf of I think two individuals and a company in Ottawa that were suing the convoy organisers for disrupting their businesses and their lives during the protest, which I found a little bit rich, given that all the protesters were there --
Peter McCormack: They probably got loads of business, didn't they?
BTC Sessions: No, I think they did have to shut down a ton of shit. But some stayed open.
Peter McCormack: Some probably did very well.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, probably. But nonetheless, a lot of people's lives were disrupted for a few weeks. But the thing that I found rich that kind of pissed me off was, the people that were there protesting were there because their lives were fully disrupted to the point where they had no jobs, no way to pay their mortgages, and they could not leave the country if they didn't like it.
Peter McCormack: On reflection, did the protesters get anything wrong where maybe they could have had more support from the public, or was it purely the work of the government and the mainstream media that turned them against them, and they couldn't have done it anyway?
BTC Sessions: I mean, there's probably instances of individuals that did shitty things. I think some of the border blockade stuff was definitely front and centre. However, that was resolved with regular law enforcement well before the Emergencies Act. So, yeah, I don't know. Nonetheless, that 30% of the Bitcoin is now sitting in a legal limbo because of something called the Mareva Injunction which basically says that this class action lawsuit, it encapsulates every bit of -- all the assets that have to do with something effectively must be locked in place until the resolution of the lawsuit. So, I think that's where it stands, I don't know.
Peter McCormack: It's good for the lawyers.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, exactly.
Peter McCormack: Okay. So, if you were going to do it again, best practice, what do you think?
BTC Sessions: So, what I'll say, and again I don't want to frame it in the context of, "If I were to try and subvert my government after they --" that's not the frame.
Peter McCormack: Dude, if activists wanted to raise funds to support some kind of project, or activism or protest, what are the best practices?
BTC Sessions: Yeah, so I'll go through it and I'll say that I hope it gets easier. Out the gate, the page to receive donations, I had not used it at that point, but I've since learned, it should have been a BTCPay Server, the donation page. The reason being, it generates a new address every time somebody sends to it, plus you can accept Lightning donations. All of that is all there, very easy to manage once you get it up and running.
Immediately after all funds are received, CoinJoin; very simple. Had they even been CoinJoined after they came in from the single address, at least then it would have been forward-facing privacy, which was kind of what was needed. Unfortunately, the state of where it was in the multisig just didn't happen. But nonetheless, BTCPay Server, then CoinJoin.
The multisig was okay, but I would have had a smaller quorum. We had 3-of-5, so 5 keyholders, 3 people necessary to sign. I think it's just too difficult to organise and wrangle and try to get signatures and stuff, especially in a situation like that where you have to be nimble. A 2-of-3 multisig would be just fine; you don't have a single point of failure, but you can be quick to move things.
The publicly identifiable bitcoiners as keyholders; all of ours were within Canada. That's fine and dandy when you're just trying to hedge against somebody accidentally losing keys. But all of a sudden, when the government says, "What you're doing is no longer allowed", it becomes a real problem, because it's trivial to say, "We know where you are and you are and we're just going to go and find you". I think the way around that is having publicly identifiable people vet the reputation and vet the keyholder and say, "I know who's holding the key. I vet them, I put my reputation on the line". Somebody comes to your house, kicks in your door, says, "Give us the keys". "Well, I don't have the key. I can tell you who the person is, but they are not in the country". I think that's how you get around that.
The method of delivery to the individual people on the ground I thought worked fine. I thought packages like that worked just fine. The other alternative is, in a situation where something is actually needed, just go out and make the purchase for them. The money's already moved, it's already there, and just buy what's needed. But yeah, I think the care packages worked just fine. That's kind of where I'm at in terms of what I would do: BTCPay Server; CoinJoin; multisig with 2-of-3; vet the keyholders, rather than be the keyholders; and then hand out care packages.
Peter McCormack: So, one observation from me is I think you've focused far too much on the downside and not enough on the upside. Your head is all in that 30% that went wrong and not in the 70% that went right. And so, you managed to achieve more good than bad in this situation. And, look, I don't know you well but I know you, we've hung out a few times. I know you're a good dude so I know why this weighs on you, but you should not. Take that forward in future situations, you know it, but I'm proud of you as a fellow bitcoiner for what you did, because I think it's fucking great.
BTC Sessions: Thanks, man. And one of the things that really struck me in, I think May of this year, Gladstein had me out to Oslo for the Oslo Freedom Forum.
Peter McCormack: Amazing. I was meant to be there. I was in court with Mr Craig Wright.
BTC Sessions: Oh, yeah. Congratulations, by the way.
Peter McCormack: It's not over yet, dude. 20 December.
BTC Sessions: Still, yeah. So, I'm in Oslo and I had somebody come up to me, her name is Luda, and if I'm not mistaken she's based in Poland. And this is going back to what I said at the beginning: zoom out and look at how these actions and how these tools, the actions themselves can impact either side of the political spectrum, and how the tools can be used by either side of the political spectrum. Luda does work in helping people raise money in post-Soviet states in which there is infringement on people's rights.
At the outset of the Ukraine conflict, she wanted to get basic protective equipment to individuals in that zone, and she looked at every possible route, and it was going to take weeks with legacy banking. Then she said she looked at the Canadian protest and she said she used that as inspiration in which this could work, and she was able to get all of this equipment into Ukraine on day two of the conflict instead of weeks later. That had a huge impact on me seeing that and it proved exactly what I thought. This is not a right or a left tool, this is just a tool for human freedom. And she was able to do something that probably saved a lot of lives, and she used Bitcoin to do it, and she used the example of Canada to do that, and that hit me.
Peter McCormack: That's amazing. Trudeau is under some pressure now from, I'm going to try and pronounce his name, I'll get it wrong; Poilievre?
BTC Sessions: Just do it a few more times! Pierre Poilievre.
Peter McCormack: That's it. He's putting some good pressure on him.
BTC Sessions: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: He's coming from the Conservative side, but he doesn't sound deranged. Let me just put some context there. I don't think all people who are Conservatives are deranged, but sometimes they can be; but equally from the left, they can sound deranged. It's just us in the centre who are okay! Trigger everyone!
BTC Sessions: Yeah, right, how many people can you piss off in a single sentence?!
Peter McCormack: I'm pretty good at this!
BTC Sessions: Yeah, so Pierre is kind of putting on the pressure. Through the entire ramp-up of money printing and all this, he's been screaming that inflation was going to happen and that it was going to be bad and that it was not sustainable, the entire time. Now he gets to do a little victory lap. He's going around, "Look at the state of things. This is what I said would happen in the face of everybody calling me a quack", and he was right, he was very right about all of that stuff. Now, he's beginning to appeal to a lot of people that feel like they're somehow getting screwed, and he's hitting on the right points as to why they feel screwed.
Peter McCormack: I like him.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, I quite like him as well. I think I don't put too much trust in politicians in general, but I do see positives in that pendulum kind of swinging back in the other direction, because I feel like it went really far in one direction, and we'll get back to a happy medium for all of two seconds before it goes far in the other direction. But yeah, a lot of his points I agree with, and he's a bitcoiner, isn't he?
Peter McCormack: He's a bitcoiner.
BTC Sessions: He is. I think he's strategically shutting up about that right now, which I don't entirely disagree with, because we all know the average person has no idea if there's even a difference between Bitcoin and crypto and everything else, and they just want to look at, "Where's the price gone in the past ten months or a year?" They don't want to look at where the price has gone, for instance, since Trudeau has been in office, which by the way, at one point it was around 70X, or something like!
So, when you cherry-pick your timeframe, as I just did, you can make any narrative work. But yeah, he won the top spot for the leader of the Conservative Party in an absolute landslide, almost 70% of the vote immediately out of the gate. If I had to guess right now, if there was an election, it's probably a coin-toss right now, so there's a 50/50 shot that a bitcoiner would be the Prime Minister of Canada, which, take those odds. There won't be an election for a little while here, probably, I'd say at least a year or two.
Peter McCormack: Gives Trudeau a little more time to fuck it up some more.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, actually that's what I'm kind of hoping. I think sitting through a little bit more of Trudeau might be a good thing, because it will probably tip the favour more in the opposite direction.
Peter McCormack: Go on, Pierre, we want you. Well, I didn't know we were going to get into all of that! You said before you started that you're living on Bitcoin.
BTC Sessions: I am, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I remember you telling me that in Miami. Has that been economically the right decision?
BTC Sessions: Yeah. I mean, it wouldn't economically be the right decision for everybody. What I mean is, you have to have your shit in order, you have to know what you earn and you have to spend less than you earn. If that's the case, you're fine, because effectively when you get paid, whatever you get, you immediately pay your bills.
Peter McCormack: So, do you budget in sats?
BTC Sessions: No, my invoices go out in dollars, they get paid in the Bitcoin equivalent of dollars. So, I get paid at the beginning of the month, I get that money, I know what my bills are, I pay my bills out the gate. Anything that's left over is savings and it remains in Bitcoin. Now, this does something interesting, because every purchase thereafter that was unanticipated becomes a conscious decision of, "Do I want to give up my Bitcoin for this item?" instead of, "I have dollars, I'm going to buy this, it's not Bitcoin right now". So, the incentives switch and they can help you be a better saver, in my opinion.
Peter McCormack: I think somebody else, was it Max…?
Danny Knowles: Hillebrand.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. He said --
BTC Sessions: He's been doing it for a while, I think.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and he's like, "Every bull run, do you regret not buying more Bitcoin?" and I was like, "Yeah". He's like, "Well then, that's why you do it".
BTC Sessions: You've got dollars, you're short Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Just living on Bitcoin, are there any specific challenges that you weren't aware of that you've just had to become aware of?
BTC Sessions: I mean, you're jumping through hoops, you're trying to find mechanisms in which to pay for different things. And I should clarify, it's not like I don't have a bank account.
Peter McCormack: No, of course, but you're on a Bitcoin standard.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, but I'm on a Bitcoin standard, so there might be things like I use my credit card to pay for something and then I pay it off with Bitcoin the second the charge goes on; or, I use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards for gas or groceries, or something like that; or, and this is my favourite thing, I've found a rancher in Alberta --
Peter McCormack: You buy your steak!
BTC Sessions: -- that is a cattle rancher, and I bought a quarter of a cow with Bitcoin!
Peter McCormack: Love it!
BTC Sessions: Hats off to Texas Slim and the Beef Initiative, because while this guy wasn't in the Beef Initiative at the time, it's how I linked up with him. So, I don't know, things like that. I'm very keen on trying to get local peer-to-peer commerce, but I recognise that there's a ton of tools out there to be able to live on Bitcoin: Bitrefill, you can pay your bills in the US; Canada, Bull Bitcoin does the same thing; and Bitcoin Well. There's a whole bunch of different options to bridge that gap, until you can just do it regularly.
Peter McCormack: How does your wife deal with the -- or, is she not, is she like, "Fuck you, I'm having my dollars"?
BTC Sessions: Yeah, she earns dollars, but she's fine with it.
Peter McCormack: Is she on a Bitcoin standard though?
BTC Sessions: She's not on a Bitcoin standard, but she is earning Bitcoin from me, because she helps me with the show now.
Peter McCormack: Nice! All right.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, so she actually went to her first Bitcoin meetup, not meetup, but event. We went to Charlotte for HODLween.
Peter McCormack: HODLween; there's a HODLween?
BTC Sessions: There's a HODLween.
Peter McCormack: Oh my God, because you know Halloween's my birthday?
BTC Sessions: Oh, really? I did not know. You were born on whitepaper day.
Peter McCormack: Born on whitepaper day.
BTC Sessions: Meant to be. Yeah, it was good.
Peter McCormack: I'm a coincidence, dude!
BTC Sessions: Yeah, she went to her first event and she was hesitant at first when she got there. She was like, "I love these people", so she wants to come to more.
Peter McCormack: Awesome. I'm going to skip a couple of things I was going to talk to you about, because we've not made the show we were going to make. But what I will ask is, this has been a particularly tough week, and I know some bitcoiners have been, "It's not affected me. I buy my Bitcoin and keep it in cold storage". This FTX thing does affect us all, even if it's just a haircut on our wealth, maybe even a temporary one. It affects the reputation of the industry. It makes your job maybe easier sometimes in some ways, but it affects us all.
In terms of Bitcoin, what are the key principles for you as a bitcoiner that have been hardened over this last week?
BTC Sessions: Self-custody. I mean, it's the obvious answer. I'm leaning towards regularly saying now, self-custody is not harder than legacy banking. I actually do believe that now.
Peter McCormack: Hold on, you've got to meet my dad!
BTC Sessions: But the only reason it's perceived that way is because people learned how to do legacy banking.
Peter McCormack: It's just different.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, it's just different. Think of all of the steps involved with going in and getting a bank account, just getting auto deposit to your bank from your work and the forms that you have to fill out to make that possible, or doing any sort of a transfer to another bank. Those are all learning curves and there are apps that make it simpler, but the apps that make it simpler are as simple as using a Bitcoin wallet.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think the bit that is harder, self-custody itself isn't hard; what is hard is the reality of accepting if you fuck up, you can lose everything. That's the hard bit. We know with our bank accounts, like in the UK, you're protected up to £80,000. You know that if there's a transaction that goes out on your card, you phone up the bank, they instantly refund you and then they do their investigation. We know all this.
Get to that point whereby you basically need to write down these keys somewhere, hide them, split them, and if you fuck up you lose all this, that is the hard bit. But that to me is the only hard bit.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, and really that risk and those mistakes that are made, you're going to incur the loss regardless. And what I mean is, in the world where you get the insurance, you pay for that because the only way that it's possible to insure all that and everybody always be made whole is because there's this backstop where, when the mistakes get so egregious, they just print the money to make everybody whole again. So, you're losing it in purchasing power over the course of the entirety of your life.
I would venture to say that the losses from the erosion of your wealth in a fiat standard far, far outweigh the losses that you would incur from the one time that you would go, "I fucked up my keys", and you would learn from that. So, people don't like those slaps in the face, they don't like those, "Shit, I fucked up, I got to correct"; they don't want that. But what that does is it snaps you to attention and it makes you actually improve. With the other world, you're just asleep at the wheel and they're able to just scrape away your wealth.
Peter McCormack: All right, man. Well listen, one final question, why are you bullish?
BTC Sessions: Love it! I'm bullish because we've just had so many examples of why you should self-custody and why it's important, and I'm going to say it again, it is not harder than legacy banking, you just need to make the effort. So, if I can do one thing with this opportunity, I'm going to say, anybody listening to this, watching this, I want you to take the initiative and level up your Bitcoin learning journey. If you're sitting on an exchange or any sort of custodian, get the fuck off, download a simple wallet on your phone and just try your first transaction.
You can download BlueWallet or Muun wallet in a second and learn how to use it. I've got tons of tutorials for that. Explore hardware; that's your vaults to keep your money in. And then don't be afraid to dive into other things down the line, I don't know, nodes, Lightning, all that kind of stuff, it's a lot of fun, there's ton of stuff to learn. So, don't be afraid to learn something new.
Peter McCormack: Well, that was what we were going to make a show about.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, it was!
Peter McCormack: You mentioned the truckers, I was like, "Give me the background", and then I have to hear it all. So, listen, we'll make that one another time; we'll come back on, we'll do that again. We're probably going to have to edit that intro! No, fuck it, whatever. If they don't know who they are, which pretty much everyone will, but how do they go and follow your YouTube tutorials?
BTC Sessions: Yeah, you can just go to YouTube, search BTC Sessions; there's a ton of stuff there on pretty much anything you can do.
Peter McCormack: Literally anything.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, pretty much. And then the other place you can find me is Twitter @BTCSessions, or I do have a website, BTCSessions.ca, and if you go through the video tutorials and you're like, "I need extra handholding", I do one-on-ones with people.
Peter McCormack: All right. What's your favourite mobile wallet at the moment?
BTC Sessions: My default, just for day-to-day, for pocket change, is Muun.
Peter McCormack: Okay. I've been on BlueWallet for a long time.
BTC Sessions: Yeah, Blue is good, but it segregates the Lightning and the on-chain, and Muun is just --
Peter McCormack: I don't know how Muun does that.
BTC Sessions: I won't get into that, but there's stuff going on!
Peter McCormack: It's voodoo! Ben, you're an amazing bitcoiner. Everything you did for the truckers is amazing, and listen, keep doing this. Let's do this again next time we're -- well, I keep saying this, we're going to be doing a Canada trip soon.
BTC Sessions: Oh, you're going to come up? I'll take you to the mountains.
Peter McCormack: These fucking Canadians are coming out of the woodwork.
BTC Sessions: I know, a lot of Canadians.
Danny Knowles: A lot of Canadians, yeah. Steve Barbour, Greg Foss.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we will come up, we'll come and visit, we'll do a show, we'll eat part of your cow!
BTC Sessions: Perfect!
Peter McCormack: All right, man, good luck, keep doing this.
BTC Sessions: Thanks, man.
