On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/02/21 (Our Dice Crisis, Paypal opens Bitcoin to Merchants, USA Retail CBDC?) (EP.201)

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

Nic and Matt return for news and deals of the week. In this episode:  A crisis with our dice manufacturers Visa will enable USDC settlements on their payment network Paypal turns on Bitcoin payments for 29m merchants Are Paypal transactions actual Bitcoin expenditures? Sillvergate working with Fidelity to provide Bitcoin-backed loans SEC charges LBRY with securities law violations Are founders taking the wrong lessons from SEC inaction? Jay Clayton is now advising OneRiver on their digital asset strategy Tether publishes a new attestation The merit of real time attestations for stablecoins The CME launches a Bitcoin microfutures The Boston Fed will be open sourcing some of their CBDC code Will we ever get a retail CBDC in the USA? NFTs make it to SNL A new pasta shape just dropped Nic syncs his Umbel node Content mentioned in this episode: Nic on Medium, Noahbjectivity on Bitcoin Mining Nic on the Lex Fridman podcast NFT skit on SNL This episode is brought to you by Sovryn, DeFi on Bitcoin.

This episode is brought to you by Sovereign. That's Sovereign with a Y as in Yankee. Sovereign is D5 built on Bitcoin and secured by the Bitcoin network. Sovereign.com lets you earn borrow and trade without giving up control of your coins. Connect your wallet and start earning interest on your Bitcoin today with Sovereign's lending facility. Pledge funds to the liquidity pool to earn a portion of the trading fees or trade with up to 5x leverage on the decentralized exchange. Visit sovereign. and put your coins to work. Stay sovereign.

That's sovereign with the Y. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis.

The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of constituted easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And we're recording this one early. So I'm sure there's a full day of stories that will happen that we'll miss on this podcast.

But we're recording this on Thursday morning. Yeah, we're making the critical mistake of recording it too soon. And important stuff always happens in the following 24 hours. happened last time. This was the biggest deal week in the history of us doing this podcast, I think. More deals happened this week than any other time I can ever remember. We're going to have to start pruning these deals because they'll just take over the entire show. They will.

They will. Your podcast appearances might take over the entire show, too. Three hours with Lex Friedman. That was a good one. I'm only halfway through, I'll admit. It was a marathon. But yes. I went to Lex's place in the suburbs of Boston.

Turns out he lives here. I didn't know that. He's one of my favorite podcasts. Well, a lot of Bitcoiners were hating on him a little bit, which I thought was pretty unfair. I mean, the show I did with him, he was very fair and balanced, honestly. And I gave him an open dime and some fud dice. He was pretty fired up about that.

He did seem pretty happy about that. Well, we had some other good podcasts this week. You had James Devalos from Horizon Kinetics on the show on Monday, talking about a little bit of inflation, talking about the Horizon Kinetics inflation beneficiaries ETF, which does not have Bitcoin in it. It does not have Bitcoin. Yeah, I liked it.

I mean, I thought he had a really interesting case for inflation. And their approach to actually playing inflation in terms of the instruments in the portfolio was very clever, I thought. And I actually bought more of that ETF after doing the episode with him. Not investment advice. No, but I was convinced. And then I also did an episode with, this was our 200th episode. Can you believe that?

Already 200. Wow. 200 episodes with Rafael Cosman, the CEO of Trust token. They basically introduced a uncollateralized on chain lending protocol, which I didn't think was really possible. but they made it happen. Yeah, and that was cool that they have the real-time attestations from Arminino. Yeah, I love me some proof of reserve chatter.

Congratulations to them for doing that. Thank you. There is some big proof of reserve news dropping soon. Oh, tease it. Yeah. So stay tuned. Next couple weeks, there will be big developments in proof reserve world. I said 2021 is going to be the year of proof reserve, and I stand by that.

We're going to get there. The other news item in the Castle Island world was your post, a response to Noah Smith of Bloomberg, who wrote some thoughts on Bitcoin that just turns out to be inaccurate. And so you took a 19-minute read to dispel his inaccuracies. Yeah, that was the problem, because his blog post was like 800. words and it took me four to five thousand words to tackle his blog post. It was just so much effort. But the byproduct of all that is that I finally got to put down really good grid level data on China. And I think if you, once you look at the Chinese energy map, you will begin to

understand why Bitcoin is mined in China. And it's not just a coincidence. It's not just a random thing. It's because China had this unbelievable overabundance of energy. I haven't, I don't have the time to do this, but I think what we need to do is someone needs to build a website, which is basically the fud dice, all the reasons why Bitcoin is going to fail or Bitcoin's horrible. And when you click on one of the reasons, it also generates you four or five rebuttal pieces where it just tells you the facts. So this one would go under a couple of them, I suppose.

Honestly, I think Dan McArdle did that with Case Bitcoin. Case Bitcoin is a good site. Yeah, Case Bitcoin has rebuttles. So I recommend that. Well, shall we go into some deals? Let's kick it off with a Castle Island deal. So evaluate market, which is an analytics and trading platform for NFTs. They're initially building for NBA Topshots.

They're based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They raised $1.6 million from us, notation capital, drive-by draft kings, and others. So congrats to the Evaluate team. Yeah, hopefully we have a Castle Island deal every week from now on. Well, that's like 52 deals a year. That's a lot. Yeah, no, that would be a good cadence. That's like Alameda CMS level deal making.

Yeah, I hope CMS is in here. I mean, that's the free space on the bingo card. We'll see. We'll see. Dapper Labs, huge deal. That's speaking of Topshots. That's the company behind the flow blockchain that Topshots is built on. There is $305 million at a $2.6 billion dollar valuation round led by KOTU

with some really high profile athlete participation in that round. So they had participation from Michael Jordan, but I have to say, that's like the second best Michael Jordan you could have on your cap table. I think you choose Michael Jordan at Galaxy 10 out of 10 times. Yeah, when you hear about a crypto deal with Michael Jordan, you actually think Galaxy. But yeah, this would be the athlete. They got the runner up Michael Jordan. That's fine.

Then we have chain analysis. Everyone knows chain analysis. There is $100 million from Paradigm, Ribbet, Edition, and Time Ventures. Next one up is Avante Bank. This is the Wyoming Bank, started by Caitlin Long. They raised $37 million from Coinbase Ventures. Finance USA, Morgan Creek, Slow, and the University of Wyoming Foundation. Huge, huge congrats to Caitlin and the team over there.

Very excited to see what they put together. Next up, we have Ngin, public blockchain network. They raised $19 million for a token sale. Next one up is Element Finance. This is a decentralized finance platform. They raised $4.4 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Placeholder. And then Tendermint, which is, I guess, the parent company behind Cosmos.

Am I getting that right? Yes. They launched a $20 million venture fund to boost development in the Cosmos ecosystem. A lot of deals here. Next one up is Hextrust. This is a crypto asset custodian. They raised $6 million in a round that was led by QBN Capital. I'm starting to get nervous that we're not going to see a CMS deal this week.

We haven't had any yet. Yeah, we haven't had one yet. I don't know what's going on. Do they take the week off or something? Super rare. NFT marketplace. There is $9 million, round led by Velvet C and one

confirmation. Next one up is a Boston-based deal. Purestake. This is the company behind the Moonbeam parochane, which is building on Pocod. They raised $6 million from coin fund, finance, Parify, and others. This is Derek Yu, the co-founder of Fuse.

So congrats to the Purestake. stake team. Then we've got M token or I.M token, a crypto wallet company. There is a $30 million series B led by Quiming Ventures with participation from Cigdom, Hashke, and IDG. Next one up's hard to say. It's liquidity. It's not liquidity. It's liquidity. This is a decentralized borrowing protocol. They raised $6 million in a round led by Pantera with participation from Alameda on the board with Alameda. Greenfield. Juan, IOSG, and a few others. Delta Crypto Derivatives Exchange raised $5 million from Sino Capital.

Ave Ventures, Khyber, Spartan Group, gum and cryptos. Next one up is another fund. So borders list capital, which is the fund that's associated with Algaran, they raised $10 million for an NFT fund. Unclear, like what type of stuff they're investing in. Can you add a fund with just NFTs would be pretty cool? Can they like rewind back 10 years? imagine saying, you know, a fund launched by a public blockchain is going to be investing exclusively in non-fundable tokens. Imagine trying to make sense of that a decade ago.

The only way to think about that is like a fund buying baseball cards or something. It would be very hard to explain that. So almost there. Ovex, a crypto prime brokerage company, raised 4 million from Alameda, two Alameda deals this week. And then the last one is Ember Fund. This is a trading platform. They raised 5.3 million from BAMVC, anthos Capital, uncorrelated ventures, column ventures, and others.

So I did not see CMS on this deal, but CMS was on Real Vision. Very good appearance. Well, yeah, I don't know what's going on CMS, but Dan did buy all of our mugs, all of them, not just one. So Dan wins the MVP as far as, being a fan of our merch. Yeah, shout out. Shout out,

I'm kidded out. You can't see. I'm wearing our Brink Nation t-shirt drinking from our brink mug. The point of the merch is really just so you can dress up while you record the episode. I have a couple good ideas for some merch for the summer. But someone told me that, so we have On thebrink. Dot shop. I guess there's an On thebrinkshop.com that very much does not sell.

crypto merchandise. Well, here's an update on the merch. So I have contracted with our Polish dice manufacturers to make some more dice. This is actually a live breaking update. You don't even know this yet. Okay. So they had errors in manufacturing. There was some sort of dice crisis. And the first batch of dice that they made failed. It was a failed batch. How do you fail? Honestly, I don't know. I'm looking into it. So we have to pivot the color of the dice. We can't do the orange. It doesn't work. Orange just doesn't work in the molds or something? Something terrible happened. That color of orange is out. We have to move to a new slightly darker shade of orange. So it's not going to be the Bitcoin orange color due to the manufacturing defects, we had to throw out our first batch.

I know. It's very unfortunate. I mean, do we have any people in the audience that maybe run dice molding facilities that can help us out? Yeah, if you do, please get in touch. Look, we've got real issues with our supply chain here. We've extreme centralization, you know, kind of like TSM and, you know, the glugable chip shortage. which we have a dice shortage. And, you know, our manufacturers are really not pulling through right now. That's not good. It's not good.

Well, let's get into some news of the week. So Visa announced on Monday that they will enable USDC. This is the stable coin, of course, launched by Circle and Coinbase. And this will be available to settle transactions on their payment network. So pretty big deal. Yeah. You know, it's so funny, everyone always would compare blockchins to Visa and say, how are you going to reach Visa scale at the base layer?

Turns out Visa is just going to become an L2 on public blockchains. This is just for stable coins initially to start. USDC in particular, but they could move to a whole variety of blockchain assets, I'm sure. Yeah, this just makes a ton of sense. Visa has probably the most valuable network out there, and stable coins are happening in a very real way. So why not be the conduit to this type of activity? certainly seems like a better approach than the kind of private blockchain mastercard route yeah i mean

visa and PayPal in the same week both building on top of public open blockchains that's how these things scale at the end of the day you have public networks tapping in to the blockchain network itself becoming a note on the network building an overlayed network maybe using the blockchain itself for final settlement. That's how they scale. This is, we're getting there, you know. Agreed. And along those lines, you referenced it, but PayPal has enabled the part of their service that allows merchants to accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, B-cash, and white coin at the point of sale, and then convert that into dollars. And so PayPal, PayPal gets it for sure. Yeah. And man, this was so frustrating because a whole bunch of critics, a lot of economists,

I'm not going to name names, said you're not actually spending Bitcoin. You're merely selling Bitcoin for Fiat. And then the merchant is receiving Fiat. Thus, you are not spending Bitcoin. It only looks exactly like you're spending Bitcoin. It only looks and feels exactly like you're spending Bitcoin to buy a good or a service. But actually, you're not. Don't overthink it.

I mean, it's like, come on. like we were getting we got this critique for the first 10 years nobody accepts bitcoin so then when PayPal turns on their merchant services and now we've 29 million merchants that accept bitcoin in this really frictionless way then they want to you know minimize that by saying oh they're not they're not accepting true bitcoin like come on let us let us take a dub every now and again pretty weak um next one up is Silvergate. So they have announced a partnership with Fidelity Digital Assets to enable dollar-based loans with Bitcoin as collateral. So the workflow here seems to be immobilize your Bitcoin with Fidelity,

and then Silvergate will give you a U.S. dollar loan, which is kind of a no-brainer. Sounds like a great product. And I believe they're already doing this with Block 5, I'm not mistaken. Fidelity, I believe, is doing it with Block 5. I believe Silvergate's also doing this with Coinbase. So the SEC has charged library, the decentralized video streaming platform with securities law violations. They sold $11 million of tokens back in the day. And library is actually fighting the charges. Yeah. So library is fighting the charges in the sense that they have a website, like help library save crypto or something.

This was interesting because in the. letter that libraries sent out to their users, they said this has been a case that's been ongoing for three years, which is really wild that the SEC has been after this for three years and we're just now hearing about it. So it makes you wonder if there's other, you know, long-dated prosecutions going on here. That token sales in 2016. I don't know that this was like a token sale per se. It seemed like there was a series of one-off sales that the SEC was targeting. So they didn't do a broad retail sale, which I don't know. I'm not going to opine on if they're in the wrong here or not.

We'll see. But they didn't do like an ICO. Right. The challenge is if a sequence of issuances or sales beginning in 2016 and where here we are in 2021, there's just this long, long lag between the SEC and these issuers. that means that if you are judging the merit of some activity, which is potentially marginal from a securities perspective, on a two or three year time frame,

because you don't see any enforcement within that two to three year time frame, you're not using a long enough sort of sample period, basically, because the cycles are so long. Yeah. And so this is especially dangerous, I think, for entrepreneurs that are not seeing action taken by the SEC and kind of reading into that and thinking that certain activities are okay and it will see but it doesn't look like they are. I see a lot of complacency judging based on a trailing 18 month two-year window,

taking SEC inaction as gospel effectively. And yeah, be wary of that. So speaking of this, ex-chairman of the SEC, Jay Clayton, is now advising one river asset management on their digital asset strategy. So he's an advisor for crypto. So I had the biggest eye role here. I mean, this is a guy that did nothing for crypto community, no outreach, nothing but punitive enforcement actions, nothing positive, didn't promote the Bitcoin ETF, even though the facts and circumstances have radically changed. And now he's taking high paid advisors. gigs talking about crypto.

This is a little surprising actually because I mean he clearly didn't want anything to do with crypto and yet now he's working for crypto firms. So I don't really understand that. Yeah, it seems pretty perverse. In other SEC related news, Coinbase has hired the ex-director of trading in markets at the SEC Brett Redfern to run their capital markets group. This looks like a pretty strong hire here. Yeah, big time higher.

So here's something interesting. Tether, the embattled stable coin, if you will, has published an attestation by the accounting firm More Cayman, claiming that the liabilities match the assets. And this is actually outside of Tether's obligations to the NIAG. So this is a discretionary. attestation to bring tether into line with what the other stable coin platforms do. Except, as we said earlier in the episode, there's some stablecoins out there that do real-time attestations. So the bar has been raised. So this is a big deal to get this attestation. Now,

I've never heard of this accounting firm. More Cayman. Where do you think they're based? Probably in the Cayman's is my guess. Now, people will knock this and say, like, who the hell is this accounting firm providing this attestation. And I think you just have to understand that no like top 10 accounting firm is going to want to be anywhere close to this project just based on there's only downside here for them. You know, you can you can cash this check and bring on this client, but they've just been under such public scrutiny that it's a big risk decision. So not surprising that they don't have like a KPMG doing this attestation. But I think it's, It should be applauded, certainly, doing this at a station is very long overdue.

Totally. And that was always, if you listen back to our tethered discourse, back from when the tether discourse was really firing, and then ultimately, thankfully, they settled with it. And YG, we got a lot of answers to this stuff. That was our number one ask. Just hold yourself to a standard matching that of the other stable coin issuers. they're getting closer to that. If they did a periodic attestation, that would be even better, because a one-time attestation tells you very, very little, right?

And it's like a proof reserve. A one-time proof reserve tells you little because you can borrow coins. So you have to combine it with a cash flow analysis and a periodic attestation. I think Tether should look at what Trust Token did, with their real-time attestations. That, to me, is the gold standard. That is literally, you can go and create their report as a third party and get a programmatic attestation corresponding to the state of affairs at that moment,

not just on a monthly frequency. Yeah, that real-time attestation counts on API connectivity to the bank, which, you know, if you have a bank that doesn't have that, or if you have a bank that is deplatforming you, that becomes a little bit challenging. But yeah, I agree. That's what you should be striving for. Yeah, I wonder how technologically enabled DELTEC bank is.

Do you think they have that capacity? Wouldn't surprise me if they don't have the latest and greatest API suite. Either way, they deserve pilots for this. And again, that is a distinct attestation from their obligations to the NYU. So those are two different things. Hopefully we'll see the beginning of those soon. And then that should do a huge amount to sort of put these rumors to rust, frankly. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. Do you see the CME is now launching a Bitcoin microfeutures contract in May? So this is a smaller version of the CME Bitcoin contract. It will be denominated in one-tenth of a Bitcoin. I think this just has the result of more participation. Since these are smaller denominated, I think you'll see more activity in some parts of the market here. So I think we're going to see futures volumes impacted by this. I personally look forward to the Satoshi denominated futures contract. So coming in 2030. Yeah, the nano futures contract

as the unit price becomes too large for us to express it with numbers and digits. I'm looking forward to that too. That would be a good day. The block clock, we both have block clocks. Those are going to be obsoleted at some point. Why do you just you can't you don't have enough. I think there's seven I think there's seven figures. Yeah there's seven entries on the block clock but one of them has to be the dollar sign right and one of them has to be BTCUSD. I mean you can't but not you have to know what the number stands for. So we're going to start using scientific notation at some point. Well, I mean, we might have a ways to go. Bitcoin's a little bit of a stable coin this week.

It has been. So, Steve Ehrlich interviewed Hester Pierce in Forbes. I always say it's Purs, right? It is. It is purse. Yeah. Hester Purr's. So I think this is a great interview. Hester First continues to be really like the All-Star regulator here. I'll read you a portion of my kind of favorite. sections here. So she says, I think we've dug ourselves into a little bit of a difficult hole by setting standards for approval that are difficult to figure out how to satisfy. This is in regards to the Bitcoin ETF. And then she later goes on to say in the same kind of stream here, but again, the standard we've applied is different from what we've applied to other types of products. So it's hard for me to predict, talking about kind of predictions for

when this gets approved. And I think those really stand out to me is that The standard that the SEC was under for analyzing the Bitcoin ETF under the Clayton administration was just really not the right standard, it looks like. And we'll see what happens under Gensler. But Hester has been kind of the dissenting voice here all along on the ETF. So we very clearly know where she stands. Yeah, I think history will not look kindly on the denials of the ETF between 2016 in 2021. in hindsight that was clearly a mistake and holding it closed for that long allowed a huge amount of

pressure to build up in the system and when an ETF is finally approved it's just going to be you know a mad stampede now you have products like GBDC trading at a discount it's kind of a messy situation. And when you think about the standards that they apply to other asset classes, it's just not the same standard. It's not even remotely similar. Bitcoin is going to be the most liquid commodity they've ever held out this long for an ETF for. Well, the other thing that's going to be interesting here is that so there's six ETFs that have been filed, at least at the S1 level. And we're going to have like four or five more, I think. There's just, there's a few others that are going to be in the hopper. So I think the pressure here is going to

mount in a pretty serious way on the administration to, you know, at least get in a room and start to hash out some of these things. And these are very strong applications. Yep. So I think at this point there's no justification for stonewalling it any longer. There's an interesting article on the WSJ this morning just dropped. Boston Federal Reserve Bank is going to be open sourcing some of their CBDC code. That's interesting. So they will be making it available for public scrutiny. Imagine finding a bug in a CBDC.

They probably have a bug bounty program, huh? Well, this is Anders and James Lovejoy, right? They're really good. I'm sure they have bug-free code. I think so, too. It is interesting. I kind of love the parallels here. here. The Boston Fed is doing a lot of work with the MIT DCI. And ultimately, a lot of the code is

being written by Bitcoin developers. Right. So I mean, Neha is very heavily involved in this project. So the best expertise in the world for writing CVDCs appears to come from crypto enthusiasts. Well, yeah. And Anders Brownworth was at Circle and was like one of the pioneers here of USDC. It was, you know, him, Sean and Jeremy in a room just coming up with the concept. So there's a ton of a ton of Boston talent on this project.

Yeah. You want to build a CBDC? Like go ask a Bitcoin developer. How to do it? How do you build a secure cryptographic money system? What's your prediction here with this? You know, is this going anywhere? I'm not

sure. I think it's really a political question. I don't believe. that a retail CBDC will ever exist in the USA. I know that's that's a bold prediction to make, but that disintermediates commercial banks. The Federal Reserve, as Larry White has pointed out many times, Federal Reserve is not a public-facing organization. They don't have the capacity to engage in the kind of activity that retail commercial banks do. and also they, you know, why would they disintermediate commercial banks?

That would be effectively almost nationalizing an entire industry. So my guess is if we get anything, we're going to get a hybrid model where maybe there's a broader set of entities that get access to master accounts of the Fed. that get access to base money, basically. Maybe fintechs, maybe stablecoin issuers. I think it would make all the sense in the world for a stable coin issuer to back their reserves with central bank dollars instead of commercial bank dollars, because that just strips out one layer of risk. And there actually are stable coin issuers in certain countries that have access to base money.

Cignam Bank in Switzerland would be one example. those are backed by Franks with the Swiss National Bank. So that's the model that makes the most sense to me. I don't see why exactly we would need regular Americans to hold and use a CBDC issued by the Fed. Yeah. I don't see any urgency for that. I think the CBDC in an institutional context, I've said this time and time again, just makes a ton of sense, though.

And so you can imagine using this for repo transaction. and just institutional settlements and just making things a lot more efficient. This can be kind of a financial plumbing first step potentially. I'll be the one to pedantically point out that currency is already mostly digital. Like if you add it up, you know, you've got like a couple trillion dollars worth of notes outstanding

and what's M2, 15 trillion, which is all digital claims. The thing is, though, the financial plumbing for moving the U.S. dollars even digitally is just so broken and old. So I forget what the increment is for moving funds on Fedwire, but you can't just like one shot move, you know, a trillion dollars overnight on Fedwire. It's so there's some serious, you know, plumbing issues there that I think could just be easily replicated, you know, replicated on a Fed coin type of a thing for a dealer to dealer settle. and things like that. So did you see the CNBC is reporting that Goldman is going to begin offering Bitcoin and other digital asset related investments to their private wealth management clients

in the second quarter? And we had some similar Morgan Stanley news. Was it last week as well? Well, so Morgan Stanley put the NIDIG in the Galaxy funds on their platform. Unclear what this Goldman thing is. I mean, it could be something like that where they just start to offer them funds. Who knows? maybe they're offering them direct spot exposure to.

Unclear, but pretty soon every wirehouse bank will be doing this. Yeah. This is Goldman's third bite at the apple by my account. But it makes sense. Bitcoin is in demand. It's an asset class. It has interesting correlation characteristics. Why not offer it to your clients?

You don't have to have a directional view to offer it through to your clients. So did you see that? NFTs were on Saturday Night Live. It looks like going mainstream. It's like jumping the shark. Yeah, SNL has been painfully unfunny for a good, I want to say five years now. They just haven't had it.

But this I thought was pretty good. I thought it was a pretty good explanation. And pretty, yeah, I wouldn't say it was like laugh out loud, funny, but it was pretty good. Yeah, I mean, NFT was last good. when like Andy Sandberg and Bill Hader were on. NFT or SNL? S&L. S&L.

S&L. Yeah, it was a good little skit. It was clever. Yeah. But not that funny. Classic SNL for me was Will Ferrell, get off the shed.

That's one of my all-time favorites. Well, yeah, I mean, Will Ferrell, S&L was the golden age. Chris Farley, S&L, was great, too. It just hasn't really come anywhere near that recently. Comedy is difficult when the scope of things you can joke about gets narrower and narrower. Have you noticed that there's more and more crypto people going on big podcasts? So Ballagy was on Tim Ferriss, you and Pomp are on Lex Friedman, and it feels like this is going mainstream in a pretty big way.

SBF went on odd lots my favorite podcast oh yeah odd lots has been really good lately they should sell some merch they should take a leaf from our book and sell some merch i would buy that merch the um they had the vertu um CEO on odd lots that was quite a good episode this week so the best podcast merch ever um i've discovered it um is this new pasta shape have you heard about this? No. So there's this podcast called The Sporkful, which is a food podcast. I don't listen to food. I don't know who listens to a podcast about food.

I don't know. No idea. But so the host, this guy, Dan, Pashman, invented a brand new pasta shape. It's a novel shape. It's never existed before. What's it look like? It's like a curve. like a squiggle and then it has ruffles on it.

So it's meant to really absorb a lot of sauce and it's something you can really dig your fork into and it's also meant to be pretty meaty, right? So anyway, that's podcast merch because if you listen to this series about him inventing this new pasta shape, it was like this whole ordeal, then of course you're going to want to try,

try the new pasta. Wow. That's great. So, I mean, we can only aspire to that level of greatness from a merch perspective. We'll get there. We'll put out some new things on the brinkdot shop in the next week or two here. So things are heating up. Yeah, I mean, once we get our dice supply chain in order,

we're going to be selling some slightly off-color orange dice, not the right orange, but the next best orange. Well, if I keep on having great ideas And getting them vetoed by you I might have to start my own merch store on the side Yeah, to be clear I think I came up with all the ideas on our current merch store I've got some great ones that are back of the back of the store

Yeah, we're gonna those are going at the bottom I mean, you know as far as the the lead the readers the listeners know There's you know Matt is like the business of the merch empire and I am the ideas guy. So it's good that you're also very modest about it. That's how we break out the responsibilities. I'm happy with our merch though. I mean,

people have been buying this stupid mug with my face on it and then posting it on Twitter. I think we're going to have to make that mug a limited edition because it's pretty embarrassing for there to be a mug with my really goofy headshot on it that says a libertarian nerd. Have you sent one to what's his name? Oh, to the climate journalist that kicked it all off.

Yeah, Eric Holt House. I offered him a freebie and he didn't take me up on the offer. I don't know what his deal is. Huh. Yeah. So maybe we'll let that one run for another week and then take it off because we can't just sell this awful mug in perpetuity. Yeah. Yeah, we'll make it a limited edition of NFT.

Physical NFT. But anyway, you can use lightning on our store now, by the way. So we fix that. Oh, nice. Yeah. And you got your Umbrell node fully synced up? Well, we're 80% of the way there. But yeah, my, oh, 93%.

I built a Raspberry Pi Bitcoin node. And that is, it was very intimidating to me, but I followed the guide on the Umbrol website and it's actually completely 100% doable, not that hard. So I highly recommend it. It's a fun project, fun little DIY project. Nice. All right. Well, I think that's it for the week. I'm sure there'll be a lot of news happening on Thursday that we'll end up missing. But so it goes. We'll hit it next week if there's some big stories. Thanks for joining and we will see you on Monday.