 One of the biggest news pieces to come out of Bitcoin Miami was Jack Mollers, as he took the stage, and said that strike is branching off into 65 more countries. And the question has to be, is Bitcoin lightning in transactions? Is it easier, cheaper, and faster? So we'll take a look at what was said, and also take a look at a little bit of problems with Ethereum in the core layer. Now, before we get going, you may notice that my voice is still a little bit under the weather as I'm battling strep throats. But we just push through, push some information out, and here we go. So the piece I'm talking about is Jack took the stage, and he talked about Bitcoin lightning and how they are improving everything about it, how they're branching off, and they're really making strides. And now it's available to 3 billion people. So the first thing I have to go over is this. What's lightning, and why do we need it? I think that's a big question. I mean, we hear about it, right? We talk about it like, oh, that sounds good for payments, Bitcoin lightning. What is it? Why do we need it? First of all, transactions per second. Visa is crushing us. It's just crushing us across the board, and it does 24,000 transactions per second. Ripple is the closest thing we've got at 1,500. PayPal 193, Bitcoin cash, a whopping 60 TPS, Litecoin 50 dash, crazy, 48. Ethereum is a whopping 20, and Bitcoin does seven transactions per second. So why was everybody talking about in the old days of how it is a great transactional layer now? Bigger mysteries have not been solved. But the question you have to ask then, of course, is what is lightning? How is it different from just like the main core layer? To make it very simple. Layer one for Bitcoin transactions. If you do any kind of transaction on the layer one of Bitcoin, you're going to pay between 5 and 20 bucks. Sometimes 30 bucks, depending on how much congestion is on the blockchain. Now, if you take that off and you do a layer two, which is just above that, and you just, let's just say to make it very simple, it's you and some other people. And you're just going to keep like a little ledger between yourselves and it's off chain. And you and these people, they are transacting 10 times, 15 times, 100 times, whatever else it is. That would really add up, wouldn't it? But at the very end of the day, if you're paying Jack $10, he's paying you $8, and you pay him $13, and he pays you $6. When you actually sum up and just say, okay, time to pay the bill, you can just do with lightning and pay pennies on the dollar, or pennies, exactly. You know, to pay all this craziness, that is the transactional layer of Bitcoin. That's what lightning is supposed to do. It's supposed to be for microtransaction. We can finally get that magical coffee buying with Bitcoin, everybody keeps talking about. And to prove my point here, as far as Bitcoin average transaction fees, this is taking a look over the last three years. Bitcoin is crazy expensive when we get congested. In April 2021, you were looking at a nice big chunk of change at almost $62.77 per transaction. That's just an average. And then, of course, it came down to only $23, and everybody was happy about that. And, of course, we just jumped up again, not too long ago. And we're looking at May 7th or May 8th, $31 per transaction. And now it's at a reasonable $4. I hate to tell you this, but Visa and Stripe are still kicking our teeth in with that. So there's not a lot of room to celebrate on the main layer. And then Ethereum is no better. I will just tell you that. Ethereum transaction fees are skyrocketing, or did before when there's a big, huge congestion. Look at that. Ethereum average transaction fee, $196 on May 1st, 2022. I think there was a merge going on and some problems, some upgrades, $43 in April 5th, 2022. And now we're looking at a reasonable $26, $9 for a transaction fee. So that just gives a little bit of background about what's going on. Now, Bitcoin lightning and the nodes, we're making strides. It's looking pretty good. This is from looking at Bitcoin. Link's in the description. I highly recommend. It's a free website. And it tells us that Bitcoin lightning nodes that are out there right now, we had an all-time high around February or so, March 31, 2022. 20,000 nodes dropped off a little bit, but it's still doing pretty good. And over time, since 2019, we only had 2,000. Now we're looking at almost 19,000 or 18,000. And then, of course, the Bitcoin lightning capacity, or how much you can actually process. Here's the price of Bitcoin, or excuse me, the amount of Bitcoin you can process, 5,297. And the dollar amount that would be is $143,872,277. So again, the more nodes that we can do, the more that we can actually have the capacity, that is lightning in a nutshell. This is what Jack said. This was a 30-minute video. The only thing you need to know, roughly, is the next two minutes. I will link this video so you can watch the whole thing. I did that for you. But just take a listen. This is what's going on with Strike and Lightning Network. And for us as a company, and I know a lot of you guys in this room have been very frustrated because this is where we're operative right now, Strike, and this has never been enough. And I used to talk to them two and a half years ago about how we can deliver financial products to the global south in a very honest, equitable, Bitcoin-only way. And so it was never enough. And I've been working with Salvadoran regulators, with the Bitcoin office there, and they've been building a framework and a licensing structure for Bitcoin companies that want to serve billions of people and want to take it further than just a country and legal tender and actually give people more hope despite the San Bank and Frieze, despite the Federal Reserve, spread the Lightning Network and Bitcoin further and farther than ever. And the country's been to their word and it was awesome to work with them. And that's our headquarters for what is now officially, as of this morning, Strike Going Global and Global Expansion. So Strike is available at 302k. It's awesome. It's really amazing. And if you look at this map, it's a lot of the global south. Central America, South America, lots of Africa, India's in there. We're so proud of it. And it's been two and a half years in the making. And the global south has a lot to do with Bitcoin. They have a lot to say for where the world is going. And we're living in a country right now where the SEC is fighting with Brian Armstrong and we're going global headquarters out of El Salvador. It's really fucking awesome. It's really a beautiful thing. So this is live. It was live this morning, not too many people noticed, but it's live now. These are the ones that I could fit into this slide. There's many, many more. So three billion people can now download Strike Today. And it's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah, pretty interesting. So a couple of things that go over. First of all, when Jack was talking about how this is able to happen, he made a very important point, which he said I had to work with regulators. And I had to do this to get this into 65 different countries so we could have three billion people. Now look, on this channel, we talked a lot about regulation and it's not a very popular opinion. I am one of the belief that if we want to really go through mass adoption, we need to bring this out. And unfortunately, we have to work with the regulators to bring this to the next four or five billion people. So Jack's done his job pretty well. I think that as time moves forward, we're going to start working with regulators. Now the regulators here are not the greatest. Gary Gensler, hopefully he gets out. But if we don't do this, I don't think we can bring the mass adoption that we really want. So kudos to Jack for working with regulators to get this to this point. I think that's the next evolution. Also, I don't think you talked about this, but in that particular piece of the video, but also Strike is going to integrate Tether. So now you're going to be able to use Bitcoin, cash, and a stable coin that is Tether. Not USDZ, nothing something like that. It's going to be Tether. And I think that's a really good way to get things moving into, for payments. But there is this thing here that, where it says Strike Global Money App. And it talks about all these different countries. I was like, is that, I wonder if that's true. So when I was looking at the information, they just updated the website today. It says, where is Strike available? Well, in the U.S., Strike is available to all residents, excluding Hawaii, New York, South Dakota, and U.S. territories and possessions. So sorry, Puerto Rico, you're not going to be able to get it. Please note that it isn't possible to create an account if you live in an unsupported region. And that was it. But they just added this part here, that globally, the Strike app is available in over 65 countries worldwide. What does this mean? It means that, and we're going to go through the app in a second, it means that I can send, you can send people in the United States, people throughout the world can send payments, can send Bitcoin for fractions or pennies. And they can make it quick and easy. And the transactions per second, I should go up way high. So that is a step definitely in the right direction. But there is something that you have to know, and that is that I know when we talk about crypto and the gel assets, we think it's anonymous. And no one's going to know, even though it's not a public ledger, but no one knows our wallet. Well, just so you are crystal clear aware, when you sign up for these types of apps, to do that, they're going to ask you for your email address, confirmation code, you're going to use your name, select your country, get to agree to some terms and conditions. You may also write additional information. These details may include date of birth, address, social security number, ID card scan, or a selfie. So don't think you're going to walk in there and be like, just download it and start moving money around. It doesn't work like that, unfortunately. And then lastly, to actually use this, you're going to need a bank account. And this is where it all comes down to. So we're going to just jump in there real quick and take a look at the strike app. Now, this is the strike app light network. If you don't like that, there's a lot of different lighting addresses you can create. There's a website called lighting address.com. I'll link in the description. And you can use Zebedee, BTC Pay. I'm the host of the ones for a lightning network. But this is the one that I'm going to show you. And they actually work out pretty easy. So let's just jump into my phone real quick. First of all, they did make this pretty darn easy. I must admit. Because when I first did this with my buddy Steve over in Puerto Rico at Taste of Smoke, he was like, just do this and this. It was a little bit cumbersome, but now it's super simple. So I'll link it in the description so you can download it if you want to check it out. But just so you know, it's got USD right here. I got it whopping almost $50. But the little icon on the bottom there, that little icon itself for strike, you click on that and you can switch between cash and Bitcoin. And with Bitcoin, like you can buy Bitcoin on this, you can sell Bitcoin and you can put it in for like you can dollar cost average. There's a thing here called withdrawal. And this is where you can pay people. If you want to withdraw, and it says right here, you can scan or paste a Bitcoin address. Now I've already copied one Bitcoin address and I'm just going to click on paste. Now on this one, I'll just use a QR code. You can be sipping away Bitcoin all around the world. So I'm going to paste, sorry to let you paste your message. Yeah, sure. And then I can send as much Bitcoin. I don't have that much, but I can send it anywhere I want to. So that's just Bitcoin itself. But remember, this is a payment app in all honesty. So let's just go back real quick. Here on the cash, I can request, I can request it via QR code, the same thing, or a strike user. Let's just click on strike user. So my strike username is DNews. For enter a strike name, like I got a buddy Showtime, but unfortunately hasn't been registered yet. So I put SHO, SHOTO, SHOTO. Let's just try this guy. Add additional message. Lucky day. And then of course I can request money from him. I'm sure he's not going to like that. But if you request, you can click there and they can pay you or you want to send. Same thing. For me, like to send globally, it can do it in cash or it can do it in the different currency throughout different parts of the world, like in Benin, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya. So using the Bitcoin rails, it won't receive like the bot or it won't receive whatever currency throughout these different areas. It will see it in their native fiat currency and not cash if you want to do it. And there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 or so different countries that can do that. Very interesting. But for me, we're going to click on send. I'm just going to go again, QR code or a strike user. Let's just click on strike user. Let's just look up. I'll again show my buddy Showtime out there, but Chojo's there. I don't know this guy at all, actually. This is a man. Lucky you. And then I'm going to click on up right on corner. I'm going to send him $2. Good for him. Congratulations. And Showtru gets $1.07. So it only costs me $0.03 to send him $2, which if I had to do that like with PayPal or Striper, I mean, it's not going to be a ton of money, but over time, if you keep sending these things, it actually adds up and I'm going to confirm. So congratulations, Chojo. He's got two bucks. But anyhow, I see how this could actually be a really good thing as far as what you want to do with it. I mean, I personally, I have a couple of businesses. And if I could just pay a sense in the dollar and just have people just scan a QR code and just say pay me as long as your bank is near in the right region and you can pay me like that, just for pennies. For me, that's a great deal. The problem is, and I think this is the bigger issue, is getting people to understand like how this works and they'll actually do it. Oh, I got a dollar. Nice. Hey, loaded. And to actually make this thing actually work. So we need to do this ourselves. So what I want you to do is when you download this app, what I want you to do is look in whatever your, so like my username is strike.me forward slash D news. I want you to put your username, your strike username below in the description. And I'll just send people random Bitcoin or cash or whatnot and we'll get this thing rolling. Also, you can also do this on Twitter. I don't know if you, if people were aware of that, but you can just see right here, not so much this piece here, for tips and tipping. You can actually use this for Twitter. I'm going to link this in the description below, but when you turn this on, it only uses on mobile devices, Android and iOS. You can't use it on your desktop, but you can tip people using the Lightning Network, using strike. I think that's pretty cool. So again, I think this is a step in the right direction. It's just, we've got to start using it to actually, make this for the old option. Hey, I want you to think about that in the comment section and let's finish up with a couple of pieces. We just talked about Bitcoin and layer two solutions and how things can work out, but it doesn't just stop there. There's also a little problem with Ethereum. Now, again, it was astonishing to me how people would talk about how Bitcoin can be used for payments. I remember this back in 2017, when people were paying 50, 30, 50 bucks for a transaction fee. I'm like, really? Is that what we're going to do here? It's not going to make much sense. Ethereum's the same way. And now Vitalik finally came on and goes, stop using the consensus layer for this stuff. Vitalik, we're going to warns against overloading Ethereum. This is what it breaks down to. There's been some ideas of how to actually use consensus layer. People suggested using it for price and data oracles, restake initiatives, using layer one soft forks to recover layer two projects should they have issues. And Vitalik's like, no, this isn't going to work. There's a natural urge to try to extend the blockchain's core with more and more functionality because the blockchain's core has the largest economic weight and largest community watching it, Ethereum. But each such extension makes the core itself more fragile. So look, I know there's a lot of people who love Ethereum. I like Ethereum. When all honesty, it's not going to work like this. We're going to have to do what Bitcoin's doing, switch over to the layer two solutions, ordinals and using them for the NFTs and stuff. If you want to do those things, that's what Ethereum has to do. I think Ethereum should be the base layer, layer twos and sidechangers do their job. And that's where I think we're headed. And then lastly, ledger. There's been some uproar about the problems with ledger. There was a great interview with Mark McCormick at what Bitcoin did. And he had Pascal Gauthier, he's the CEO of ledger. And he just talked about how it was a mistake, what they did, but they want to move forward with recover, but they're going to make some concessions. There's going to be a Twitter Spaces. It's going to be tomorrow. It's going to be at 1230 Eastern Standard Time. I will link this video or this Twitter Spaces in the description so you can check it out. I will be there because I'm very keenly interested in what they are about to say, but that is it for today. So look, like today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing. I don't care who you subscribe to, but this isn't a set it and forget it type of industry. You need to really be informed what's going on, especially the next year or so as we head ourselves up to the next Bitcoin halving and beyond. That's it for today. Thanks so much for watching. I do appreciate it. I'll see you on the next one.