TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #702: The State of Bitcoin Protocol Development in 2026 with Coinjoined Chris
Episode Date: January 10, 2026Marty sits down with Chris (@coinjoined), founder of Bitcoin insurance company Biturance, to discuss the state of Bitcoin protocol development, quantum FUD, self-custody solutions, European Bitcoin ad...option, and the cultural divide between institutional holders and the cypherpunk ethos. Chris on Twitter: https://x.com/coinjoined STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/4pOv2L4 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/
Transcript
Discussion (0)
you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free
if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting
like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to
devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean
that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be
chris i've been i've been enjoying your game sir online i had to reach out and say
i need to get you on the podcast to talk about bitcoin how are you doing well i'm very slatted
thank you you're the tallest troll on uh on bitcoin twitter how's it feel that is actually
something i've never heard like i've heard like tallest shit poster but tallest troll like that
that makes a lot of sense i i take it um yeah i was thinking guess what we're three days past
the 17th anniversary of the genesis block and i think uh you've been in bitcoin for quite a while
we had the pleasure of meeting in person in riga latvia at the baltic honey badger conference in
2024 haven't caught up since and like i said i've been observing your game on x and i think 2025
particularly was a crab year in bitcoin price we sort of ranged and people get very crabby
when they range we had narratives popping up whether it was uh the op return limits getting
lifted uh bit 444 bitcoin knots and we we tied the year up with quantum fud uh what are your
thoughts on just the the state of discourse around bitcoin protocol development specifically
so protocol development i think is doing like it's just chugging along just fine um besides
like this like critical bug that they just found in bitcoin version 30 that deletes legacy wallets
but other than that like uh yeah i mean i tried to uh make light of the filter situation uh the
entire last year i think and i'm very happy that we moved on now to like the quantum thought like
i think february 1st is like before for signaling day or something i have not seen a single note
signal that or like a single minor um yeah that's not gonna happen but yeah why do you think why do
you think these narratives manifest within bitcoin quantum specifically for me was like come on guys
we've been talking about this for years now all of a sudden yes some people suffer from like main
character syndrome and then it's a good angle to uh remind people hey i'm still around um uh i mean
the the irony like i have nothing against nick carter uh even though he blocked me um but like
he he like came up with these very nice dice uh the fud bitcoin dice um where like quantum was
one side and now he's uh like investing with his vc funnel he led an invest in like a company that
makes blockchains quantum secure and like that company uh like i stalked it on linkedin now
proudly says we're making solana quantum secure which you know sure scams mbc is fine with that
but like preaching or like he he ended with like um everybody's gonna dump on bitcoin now because
i said so and i wrote this blog post and i think that's too much uh i mean it's worthwhile having
these conversations and i like to see that like our smartest um cryptographers are working on
something and that we're like not unprepared and we actually have contingency plans but uh yeah i
mean it's just boredom i think because not that much happens and everything has been going too
well price has been quite high you know need a new narrative yeah and now the price is drifting
higher to start the year people i haven't heard any quantum fun since uh since around christmas
time so yeah i mean it's it's gonna happen soon that they're factoring like larger numbers like
i mean there was this paper um i think reid and um brand black like he he went through it and like
um who was the physicist from fidelity um but what's his name his name yes miguel ross um
there was a paper claiming oh we have a broken a six bits ecc key like an elliptic curve key
and then he went through this paper and like he saw okay you guys guessed 100 times
and a six bit key to the power of six is like 64 like two two there's 64 possibilities and
you guessed 100 times so i'm not that flustered that like any sort of key is being broken in the
future let alone like 128 bits so yeah yeah what um again like what do you think of just like the
broad state of bitcoin itself not the protocol well the protocol and the industry you've been
working as we're discussing before this on satskeeper you're working on a bitcoin insurance
i mean i have like a few companies that that deal with self-custody with inheritance and insurance
of bitcoin mainly i'm focusing my energy on um the store value aspect of bitcoin like uh i wish
more people would use it as a medium of exchange but that simply is not the reality um like i use
my bitbox and they have like a bit refill integration and from time to time i use bit
refill to to purchase goods and stuff but i know that i'm in the absolute minority and i would have
thought like 10 years ago like in 10 years from now like we would see a lot more adoption that
way and again i'm a euro poor uh i was not uh blessed with uh like four million square terminals
where you can now pay with bitcoin everywhere i think this is like the most enormous news that
has happened last year um but yeah i think so more companies are coming in more um like retail
investors the interest is not really there or isn't back like it was in 2021 um but we have a
lot of interest from uh yeah institutional holders to to have bitcoin on the balance and
have it properly in self-custody so that's what i observe you mentioned that you're a euro poor
uh what is the uh the state of the bitcoin industry and the posturing towards bitcoin as an
asset from uh european officials and what are the boots on the ground reports of individuals
so i reside here in the uh small uh grand ducy of luxembourg i'm sure you can point it on a map
as an american high school educated person um and our finance minister he just spoke in bitcoin
at bitcoin amsterdam um the sovereign wealth fund of luxembourg purchased one percent of their like
holdings into like ibit which is like a ginormous step i would would say like luxembourg is like a
small country 600 000 inhabitants but like ton and ton of people from belgium and france and
germany come here to work and there is this thing where if you work for 10 years even if it's
minimum wage um you are entitled to like a fat pension um once you reach retirement age and that
was paid out from this uh wealth fund that this uh it's not a kingdom like it's like we have grand
duke um and that was set to expire like in 2045 or something like because markets whatever and
spending too much money as all governments do um so i think it's like the right choice to pivot
a little bit into bitcoin exposure um so i'm bullish on that uh i'm natively german i'm not
that bullish on that country um we have a really strong bitcoin community and i would say of all
the european countries um we have the most toxic bitcoin only maximal crowd like if i go to a
french bitcoin meetup it will be a bitcoin meetup but people will yeah just show you iota and
ethereum and solan and all those good things um iota is still around yeah iota is german by the
way and and it is quantum secure because i know that i invested like in 2015 2016 when it didn't
come out like i i bought that whole bullshit um david sonstibble was his name like oh it's not
binary it's uh ternary like you have minus one plus one and zero and like i bought this whole
quantum bullshit like 10 years ago and my my iota bags during my my shitcoin period um yeah
those would have been some some cool cool bitcoin but um yeah it's still around like just yesterday
i saw like a paid ad for for iota which is like insane to me but they were funded in bitcoin i
guess i remember uh i remember the iota day my shit corner day around days around that time too
it seems like we've been in bitcoin around the same amount of time what what drew you to it
originally um so i had a friend in in university who was really into this like he was really
paranoid um and he gave me bitcoin um like for free like a ton of bitcoin and i was thinking hey
uh i don't need this i have paypal i have all the means to to pay for stuff and goods and services
and once it reached like uh not euro parity like was that 50 cents or so like i i sold
my my bag for like a graphics card um and uh neglected for like two years and then it came
back like fuck should i have kept this but i was not a cypherpunk i was an engineer i was
at university with like technical minded people and there was a lot of conversation about like
bitcoin but um i didn't rock it until let's say 2017 when i realized hey hang on uh all my my
stock gains like i came in and i always i'm gladly emitters like i came in for a number go up like
i always say like there's two two kinds of bitcoiners people that come for a number go up
and fucking liars and i admit that people come into it and then they change and then they stay
for the sovereignty and they stay for the freedom money and like the fuck you money and those great
great aspects but maybe today with all the education that we have like a lot more people
come into it from that side without this number go up but like back then i would wager everybody
went into bitcoin because wow this this is an asset that goes up and you know that's why
my genesis number go up is the uh the best technology that humans have ever come into
contact with it is uh there's somebody because we were discussing this uh earlier like i use
bitcoin as a medium of exchange and pay logan he's on here now he gets paid in bitcoin every
two weeks uh other other members of our staff get paid in bitcoin by my vpn service with bitcoin
uh and the the payments aspect is uh very useful incredibly important but i think people try to
over index on that um even though i use it every day literally um as a payments means people over
index on that and try to fade number go up because it's like uh we're we just sound greedy here but
i think it's they get down to bitcoin's sort of path towards success you need number to go up
massively over time yeah i mean it's uh inevitably like people will have more eyeballs on it and more
people will accept bitcoin and want to be paid in bitcoin um if it's like crab walking for like
five years i'd be fine but i would assume that adoption would like not grow as steadily um i i
use bitcoin daily again in my company like i pay people in canada and in australia and i'd rather
put a bullet in my brain to do like a wire transfer and wait like three or five days and
pay like 50 bucks in fees like from a german bank to a luxembourg bank to like a singaporean and
like it takes ages and with bitcoin like just like and it doesn't get old like every time i
get like a separate invoice and i just pay it in like a couple seconds and then the guy texts me
man are you ever like asleep or what no it's like sending like this bearer asset like this digital
cash at the end of the globe in like a second and like there's nothing i can do to to take or claw
it back and that guy is paid and no intermediary has been paid maybe like i don't know lightning
or like an on-chain fee of like a couple cents right now that's amazing but i get that i'm like
an enthusiast like i run my own nodes i have like enough liquidity management to like pay any
invoice like i pay several million sets easily when other people struggle with that uh like the
technology is not or the ux is not there yet like i'm really bullish on arcade and all these things
and i'm happy that people like smarter people work on that um but yeah i want to see more people use
it are we a dying breed people have our own nodes and self-custody and i think like if you did last
here taught us anything is that like running a node makes you a bitcoin so there's a lot of
around that um every customer that i get they're really like privacy conscious these days like it
used to be like only uh like the tinfoil wearing uh weirdos uh like we're like into this like us
like we are like oh i i'm using a vpn like that is like weird nowadays it's absolutely normal and
now when i onboard people like i'm a big fan of liana wallet um i always explain the the privacy
implications of connecting your your wallet descriptor to an external node because then
of course you leak your holdings like there's no loss of your keys but you lose some privacy
and especially with like a wallet like liana you can like it's a single single click and have a
pruned node installed fully like there's no porting magic like everything happens in the
background and it's like 35 gigabytes of blockchain data downloaded over the next two three days or
so and i show this to people and they're excited wow now i have my own like full node like i can
onboard people now 100 the right way they get like a hardware signer they get like a multi-sig
they get a node um and i think that interest has grown so no we're not at the dying breed
not on my watch that's good to know what um what do you think about uh obviously jameson lopp
has been following the the wrench attacks on bitcoiners and i think that is uh
and then as somebody who's really focused on self-custody multi-sig self-custody specifically
um what do you think about the conversation around self-custody and the fears that are
beginning to increase because of these wrench attacks which if you look at it you take eight
billion people into accounts um and all right maybe we'll shrink the the total addressable
market to the amount of people that hold bitcoin or wider crypto to maybe hundreds of millions
i think there was 35 five dollar wrench attacks last year um how do you think it was even more
like i think jameson lob actually like he used to manage this github all by himself and now he has
like somebody who puts uh all those data entries in there because it was like one one a week like
52 or something at least um yeah i mean that that drove me to to launch bit insurance um like i know
how to perfectly protect my bitcoin uh against any form of cyber threats like that that is solved
like we have hardware signers we have geographically distributed multisigs i would say
it is because the magic of bitcoin script as opposed to any other shit coin like you have
all the primitives all the security built in natively on bitcoin to be protected against
hacking like you can be socially engineered um but like most of these hackings again like they
they are like down to user error like in the end like the person being hacked uh signed the
transaction because he was duped like that is solved like you can like i i would major actually
like there has not been a hardware signing device that has been hacked like we all wear these tinfoil
hats like i don't know cold card with like a ton of secure elements etc like everything like that
is solved but like i for my life of me could not figure out what i would do in the event somebody
kicks in my door like if somebody comes in and threatens me and my family or like anybody i love
um i can of course start drawing like a chart and tell them hey i have a five of six whatever
multi-sig i have like this time decaying thing like you can't uh physically like uh you have
to like abduct me to different places for me to sign the transaction um wouldn't it be great uh
if i could give them like an old ledger or something with some bitcoin even like a larger
sum and they would be happy and left me alone maybe like why can't they ensure something like
this we're looking around like in 2022 2021 when we launched the idea like the company was formed
in 2022 um and like nobody would want to touch bitcoin as a insurable medium whereas you can
insure your gold bars against like a robbery you can insure your your fine art against robbery like
that's that's no problem um but bitcoin back then was like uninsurable and that's why we like
launched insurance with the hope to like give you a bargaining chip um in the event of a five
dollar wrench attack and since then like anchor watch has also come along and i think that is
the last missing mosaic like the puzzle piece and like your perfect security setup if you have like
cyber protection plus five dollar range protection and what what do you think changed the minds of
lloyds of london and other insurers out there that are getting them comfortable too
I mean Becca is very persistent I think
so like we when we launched we talked to virtually every single insurance company in Europe
and they laughed in our face and like closed the door and some people re-invited us and kept like
stringing us along and sooner or later you realize oh there's like two people three people five people
these calls um suddenly you realize oh you're being abused for like uh educating their staff
on bitcoin but they're never gonna sign or underwrite your product um and that abruptly
changed uh in 2024 when was it like the the bitcoin etf launched i think as soon as like
larry fink uh blessed this asset as like okay this is here to stay um you get a call back from
alliance you get a call back from all these other insurance companies because they realize okay this
is not just some crazy assets um there is some money to be made uh insurance companies they need
to like invest in products uh that that are of interest to be insured and uh yeah that was a
blessing this guy's like we launched in 2022 we had a white label insurer which was like kind of
unknown um and yeah they they went under uh sadly not because of us because they had like a financing
around for like 50 million euros and then uh like by the end of 2024 um they they had to file chapter
11. no no customers of ours was like hurt by that we could migrate and now we have liberty mutual
like one of the largest uh specie uh insurers in the world as an underwriter um and they are
not messing around like it's it's good to to have these uh financialization developments like i'm
I'm not a big fan of BlackRock, but it helped bring the conversation forward.
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it really does it's weird how social uh the social aspect of a social signaling from
those we perceive to be successful comes into play here it is weird like uh i think that's
another thing i've been grappling with but just uh sitting back and observing over the last few
years since the etfs launched and here in the states as we've had these uh treasury companies
launch and michael saylor really uh skyrocketed himself to uh the top of bitcoin fame if you will
for lack of a better term is this uh sort of confrontation with the cypherpunk freaks that
bitcoin was founded in and grew up with and the suits coming and saying all right we like this
asset too and people reacting to it i think i mean i've always been uh in mbk's camp where
bitcoin is successful everybody's going to want to adopt it and you just have to exactly like you
just have to accept a great thing like uh what do you expect like everybody wants a piece of pie
of the pie if like we build something this good like of course nation states will come of course
like the financial players will come like bitcoin is for for anybody who wants it and
it strengthens your network like the more greedy somebody is the better it is for everybody else
um but there's like yeah entirely new dynamics now like i don't know with venezuela i don't
know if that is fake news or something like really it's really weird uh that's like okay
there's a state with 600 000 bitcoin and uh donald has just abducted we were uh we were talking we
were talking before we hit record about how odell likes to troll in the chat he's actually trolling
me in the chat right now because i did a short video on uh the venezuelan story and then our
team here at tftc clickbaited it and then the tweet says what if i told you a def dea informant
might control access to 600 000 bitcoin that's a wild theory but uh i don't know do they have
600 000 bitcoin maybe i mean it's just like some some assumption uh and i'm pretty sure that uh
maduro didn't i mean he had like five different output changes maybe at like a lot of hardware
signers stuck in and like what is the european perspective on what the us just did over the last
five days so like demonstrably like it's not constitutional what you did um pretending like
otherwise it's like a little bit like muddying the the waters there but like uh these constitutional
rules like they they work in like stable systems like it's like currently the world is not that
and uh i think the general um reaction in europe would be like orange man bad and like you can't
do that um but like if you talk to anybody who has actually lived under venezuelan communism like
they understand viscerally uh like they're very relieved like they're very happy that he has been
removed and it's like one of the cleanest military operations to to have ever occurred like so clean
that some people might say okay this was like he he cut a deal and voluntarily like uh came to the
drop-off spot um but like my take is again uh like this was necessary uh it's i'm happy he's gone
and um yeah even though like i i believe more so than trump i believe in soft power and he does
not believe in that like at all like he like soft power only works on people that listen to reason
and there are some international players right now who would not listen to reason
and yeah occasionally reminding everyone uh where the larger stick resides um that recalibrates like
some incentives uh much faster than like some un statements or like some european finger wagging so
yeah i'm on board with this move but i i would not want to be on the receiving end like i think
there was definitely a pre-range deal like if you look at how happy maduro is when he's like
sitting with the dea agents it's like you knew uh you knew something was happening um but like
going back to i mean again who knows whether or not they have 600 000 bitcoin but i mean people
have been speculating and these stories been out there it's been actually funny to watch um
the venezuela bitcoin story hit mainstream because i'm sure as you know if you've been
in the industry for a decade you know the venezuelans i think on a per capita basis
were some of the largest adopters of Bitcoin
simply because they needed to
because they had hyperinflation
and a dictatorship that they were trying to evade.
And Bitcoin mining was big in Venezuela.
I think they were top three country at one point
about 10 years ago.
Then Maduro came in and ruined that
by seizing all the mining operations.
Obviously, the diaspora that has resulted
from the socialist dictatorship over the last 25 years,
So you have people sending money back to Venezuela using Bitcoin and stable coins.
And so Bitcoin's been a big theme in Venezuela for well over a decade now at this point.
But I think the theories about how the Maduro regime may have acquired 600,000 Bitcoin again, whether or not they did is yet to be determined.
But the theory is that they were doing two things, one of which was swapping gold for Bitcoin with other countries.
gold rich country and they wanted a to diversify that those gold holdings into bitcoin because it
allows them to do uh things that you can't do with gold mainly send large amounts of money
over the internet and then the other was they were selling oil um routing around sanctions
selling oil for tether and then converting that tether to bitcoin because they don't want tether
to blacklist them and if you think about um them doing that many like you said i do not like the
madora i did not like the madora regime i'm happy that he's out of power but if let's run with the
assumption that they did acquire 600 000 bitcoin and did it in that way it's pretty cool because
it highlights bitcoin's value prop which is this yes neutral reserve asset outside the purview of
five eyes the g8 un whatever you want to call it yeah i always say like to me as a businessman like
the uh number one use case it's like international trade with bitcoin because it's it saves so much
time and you can find enough crazy people on every continent that accept bitcoin and it makes
things like much much quicker like i i like i don't know i have it's not around me like i have
this in germany we're not trusted or like in europe in general we're not trusted with a shopping
card you have to put like a coin like yeah to release it and i thought to get rid of the last
fiat i will create like a bitcoin commemorative thing that you put in but you can remove it
immediately like you can crack essentially like shopping carts and i wanted to have this made out
of like brass and i was looking like where to manufacture this and like in china with alibaba
i found like a a brass molding company and uh they had like commemorative coins with like ethereum
and monero etc already in their in their like product lineup and i asked them like hey you
manufacture this do you also accept bitcoin and they said yeah sure we do and instead of like
sending a wire transfer like to to alibaba like it goes again like luxembourg singapore china
that takes like at least three days and it costs me 50 euros um i like just sent bitcoin with like
22 minutes like on chain they confirmed like the balance payment was not out yet but like the
initial payment and like in less time than it took for them to like uh would have received the money
via wire transfer they already like seen seem of the tool they showed me pictures of like here
this is the tool like wow this was fucking fast and of course they could at any point could have
like racked me because there's no you know chargeback but they wanted to have the other
50 of the money and uh then they like delivered uh two thousand of these like stamped uh yeah
brass uh coins to me uh and i was like wow this is like international trade like this was like
five years ago um like why would i ever like use a wire transfer like people tell me oh i use
transfer wise like even there like you pay a ton of fees and then like the currency conversion and
slippage and it takes time and yeah bitcoin just just works globally but now we have stable coins
stable coins are here why do we need bitcoin at all yeah that's uh like when people say like
michael saylor has done the most for bitcoin adoption um i always like challenge that idea
like he has done like more than you and i probably definitely i mean he he has uh again also a very
big stick um but paolo arduino to me like he is the one guy in the space who discovered and
understands product market shit like i'm not i don't care about tether like i i have no use for
it myself but i 100 understand well like everybody in argentina uh like prefers the the brand of
dollar attached to something then like oh it is a volatile asset of bitcoin like he has probably
driven crypto adoption and with that also bitcoin adoption more than any other other person i would
say globally i would i would co-sign that and it's it's funny listening to him tell the origin story
of tether and the stablecoin specifically because he's like ah we had some customers asking for it
and we thought it would be like 100 million dollar market cap coin so we did it and lo and behold now
we're one of the largest buyer of u.s treasuries in the world uh can you imagine like he he wrote
that entirely without claude like he didn't vibe code it imagine that like he had to create this
like before llms it is uh and it's it's been funny watching uh over the years the tether
obviously at bitfinexed um yeah who emerged after the 2016 bitfinex hack
again i fell for the quantum i fell for the bitfinex i fell oh you fell for bitfinex
of course i i fully i thought oh yeah like why why is there no big four audit why not
and then like you see okay they had like liquidation events where they paid out like 20
without like flinching and i like no bank would have survived that like they they are fully funded
like nowadays i believe that um but like back then i mean again i'm a gullible person i guess
i i believe that for for some time well what was it uh i think it was i think around the fta yeah
i think the summer before the ftx blow up in summer 22 i think they had like a three-day
redemption of like 20 billion tether and handled it yeah handled it seamlessly
they they are very very liquid i'm asking like pound for pound like with 200 employees or so
like they are the most profitable company on this face of the planet i mean but who's beating tether
as a company like in profitability i don't think there's some vibe coder out there who's uh he's
gonna fire under his ass right now that's saying i'm gonna be a company of one that uh is more
profitable i think it's gonna be very hard to be more profitable than tether like they're buying
8888.88888 bitcoin per quarter it's insane like i mean i used to work in china and there they are
really like big into the number eight because it brings luck and you had to pay like more if your
phone number that you were assigned to had more aids like yeah is there an association with that
like what is the reason why i mean i know the report is like 88883 like but i'm i'm assuming
there's some they're paying an homage to the chinese uh the chinese tradition of of admiring
the number eight that's just my assumption but uh yeah some some superstition like i i i would
also buy eight thousand eight of bitcoin if i could but you know different side pockets
the um i mean you mentioned earlier excited about arcade and that's something
whether it's arcade or just arc uh generally as i mean you have competing arc protocols but arc as
a as a sort of high level protocol um bringing new extensibility to bitcoin via second layer and
being interoperable lightning another second layer protocols that's uh that's something that i've
been really excited about and i think it's happening relatively under the radar behind
the scenes not many people are paying attention but i think the foundations for sci-fi banking
stack of the future are being built right in front of our eyes like if you combine lightning
e-cash mints arc liquid liquids having its day it's been around for a decade now people are
finally starting to use it um and then what else is there you have spark as well uh it feels like
we're getting to the point where you can really begin to build out the sovereign banking stack
on top of the protocol yeah i mean bitcoin uh is like we have the scarcity with the limitedness
through that and we can verify it and then yeah i've been using arcade os like the the arc
implementation from um not second btc what's their name i think they're called arc arc labs
arc labs yeah the wonderful like ux like with lightning always say i have this bitcoin why
can't i receive i need inbound liquidity like this this conversation alone like you would not
pick up a normie onto anything non-custodial like they they were fine with one of satoshi
speaking of europe world of satoshi closed their custodial wallets in europe uh like
one week ago or so like european union asked for some uh data on the users and they said yeah
fuck it we only like you get to withdraw your funds and you can move on to the semi-self-custodial
uh world of satoshi version and they're using spark right because they i mean they shut down
the us years ago but they just came back with their non-custodial spark implementation so i
think it's like some form of like super not private multi-sig thing i have not looked
all too much into it like i i onboard people if it's custodial i onboard them with blink um but
yeah i mean it's uh again the tangent i was on was like lightning is too non-user friendly and
arcade is amazing like for that i mean it's again like a better but you can use arcade os and
just deposit bitcoin and then you can pay lightning invoices and it just works it's like amazing
um the only downside you have to be like come online like every month or so which for some
people is too much of a hassle i guess but um it's amazing that this works without any soft
fork which is like a nice thing you know yeah and i think they're working on that liveliness
ux problem um but it's a protocols where you can just automatically push things into the next round
um what uh what doesn't exist yet that you that you want to exist within bitcoin
i mean so i'm facing like we work with a traditional bank here in germany one of the
first traditional banks to adopt uh like a bitcoin only education program and uh there we had like a
very like 3 000 people german bitcoin conference like just in october of last year um and there
i had a ton like i had a couple workshops and i did my quiz show and then like in the workshops
i was like flabbergasted and taking it back how many older people attended there was like 80 people
and they were like 50 60 70 years old into bitcoin i was like wow and the number one question that
came up was always how do i make sure that my kids get to my bitcoin and i was like yeah i'm
we are kind of young you know like we're not really thinking about inheritance planning we're
not thinking about like writing a will or something but bitcoin is a special asset where like
if you want to inherit it properly like it's in self-custody like it's not on coinbase and
coinbase it's like trivial to like have your death certificate and your family gets your bitcoin
maybe uh but like with self-custody bitcoin there are so many foot guns and like in the audience
there are like so many really smart people um like asking these questions i think like there
needs to be much more user-friendly experience for for this kind of customer because like you
can do it with a cold card with a bitbox like the honor wallet i think is the best go-to way
to do bitcoin inheritance where you can just have like a multi-sig that degrades essentially if
you're inactive for 15 months um and there i would wish but this is only possible with soft fork
that this 15 month relative time lock window would be increased to like five years or 10 years or
something like that um so in the event that i kick the bucket that my air just has to wait
can have a pre-registered like hardware signing device and just have to plug it in like the ux
there needs to improve like a little bit and yeah i mean jack dorsey's working on something cool
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what uh what software could you need like some sort of covenant so your covenants would be great
um i mean covenants essentially solve everything uh they would make lightning better they would
make uh self-custody better like we would have reactors instead of proactive security
um again yeah i'm like just fucking ship ctv now please uh or from me like ctv just in french like
template hash like i'm fine with all of these uh but like the development and that's like
very slow it's good that it's slow i would say um but uh yeah i'm i'm afraid that too many people
say like being one of them are like uh preaching the ossification of bitcoin which in my opinion
this way too early like we're not there yet the uh we have the 20 what is it the uh 2064 bug
we need a hard fork at least once yeah i mean eventually we need to have those like and again
like we wasted the entire year of 2025 talking about a fucking nothing burger about like a data
carrier size limit increase which is like there's so many strong economic incentives that this will
not be used or abused and like all these whatever i'm not gonna repeat matt crutter's favorite word
now but like all these things were like such a distraction we could have spent so much more time
on actually improving bitcoin and we know there are bugs like bib uh 54 right now like it reached
also some maturity like two years ago three years ago matt carello had like the um uh great consensus
cleanup proposal and i think antoine also worked on this now where like we have the inflation not
inflation but the um time warp bug um like the time warp attack that a miner can do um that has
been fixed fixed on testnet now this needs to be like merged into into bitcoin like in bit 54s
there's like a bunch of known bugs known critical bugs that can be exploited now um and we should
focus on actually like discussing those instead of like oh not versus core or whatever in my opinion
no you said ctv development slow but ctv has been sort of in an end state for years now
it's been tested i mean they did everybody like i made this meme uh like the saw guy uh welcome to
my saw trap um you're a bitcoin developer there's a perfectly fine covenant proposal in front of you
your challenge is it to leave the room and leave it untouched it's perfectly fine
and like everybody comes along oh let's have tx hash it doesn't do enough let's do
check stick from stack two and this and like let's put a template hash like there's so many
like it's the engineering disease like ctv is good enough it has been around i think like 10
years now 2015 or so um there's a big bounty nobody has come up with any way to exploit it
it is safe it will improve bitcoin dramatically um yeah i i don't know how you could be opposed
to to this kind of thing well make the sell you mentioned reactive versus proactive
sort of defense and security what how would you describe those and why would you argue that
reactive is preferable so right now the way bitcoin works we have coins utxos so if you have
a big UTXO and you spend it you risk all of your wealth and hope that 99% comes back at the change
output which is a crazy design if you think about it like it's not like uh ethereum is account based
you have like a number and it goes up and down but bitcoin is UTXO based and like every time you
spend something you risk your entire like you dump out your entire bucket of gold and hope that the
UTXO comes back and we make sure like hardware signers check that the change output has not been
tampered with that there's no like um yeah there's some kind of attack that replaces the change
output um and with all the security premise that we right now have like i make my living selling
steel wallets like you emboss your 1224 words into steel and that is your backup that you need
if your hardware center fails you go back to this and you can recover everything but what if somebody
else finds it he has access to all of your bitcoin like that is like a single point of failure
and with a covenant you can define this is my vault i put my bitcoin in here i can define
something like velocity meaning i can only spend this much of my bitcoin per day even if there is
a breach like the the thief cannot steal all of the funds or i can define this is my my vault and
from here i can only spend to this known address where like a hot wallet with like kraken or like
another address that is also like secure there's an intermediate step and if i spend to any other
address um i have this big red button that i can push and that will claw back the transaction
and will send it to like another like 24 words hammered on steel like hidden underneath a tree
or somewhere like you have these options where you see okay somebody's happening and i have an
undo option now or i can limit the amount of bitcoin that i can spend and all of these things
if i like point them out everybody yeah i want that like everybody tells me yeah this sounds
great i want that how do we achieve this and we jump through a lot of hoops right now with like
these decaying multi-segs with miniscript um just having a covenant would make this much easier
much smaller and yeah the ux much better yeah i've always been partial to james o'burn's framing of
it obviously he had op vault which looked at ctv it was like okay if people are afraid of
check template verify because they think it's going to bring too much let's just focus on the
vaulting aspect and bring it to bitcoin and make it so that his framing was make it so exchanges
can never get hacked again and i think that's if that's exactly what it does or that's one of the
products of implementing something like op vault is you have the potential to create these
transaction structures that make it very hard to get hacked or not to get hacked but to
lose bitcoin after getting hacked um that seems like something that is uh very obvious like we
should all want that but we have this social aspect of bitcoin development that um throws
a wrench in that which is good it's a it's a double-edged sword you want that sort of rough
consensus um gridlock what is that that exists what is it what is rough consensus that's a great
question i think we're still trying to figure it out i think it depends on what you're trying
to get into bitcoin right rough consensus is if all the greybeards are agreed and
then the uh plebslop podcasters are also on board then that is rough
well let's dive into that like how do you view it
um as a plebs flop podcaster that has uh deferred to the graybeards in the past
what what else am i supposed to do that's that's the million dollar question like i would so i see
it as my um directive to like educate as many people and have this like uh not astroturf like
what is the grassroots like people want this and people institutions want this and if there's
enough yeah incentive from a monetary perspective um people again you vote by having bitcoin like
if you are an economic player in this you can you can vote and be vocal about it um and then
we can achieve like another soft fork i think um but for that we need proper codes proper
tests benchmarks fuzzing and a lot of check boxes need to be ticked uh and the problem with bitcoin
is that every four years we have this big halving event a lot of new people come in and if we talk
for four years more new people come in and they say bitcoin is perfect and then we just start from
a new so i think um yeah to to achieve another soft fork we need to figure out a way to get
everybody on board and like one to two years to signal for something um but yeah i'm kind of
bearish on that i am too it is i mean i'm also an advocate for covenants i know some people may
find that blasphemous but i think having been around for a while and understanding that reactive
versus proactive um sort of security posture that you just described i mean i think that's
objectively preferable in my mind and i think there's a lot of people who look at the magnitude
of the changes that came with segwit and taproot and they have shell shock or post-traumatic
stress syndrome from the unintended consequences of those upgrades and they assume that um something
similar may happen with any other future software whether it be ctv cat whatever it may be which
it's not to say there isn't any unintended consequences that may arise but i think
people do not appreciate how relatively small of a change something like ctv is to segwit or
taproot yeah then again like block size increases like three lines of code and like one parameter
so that is never a good uh indicator oh it's just a teeny tiny bit of code um but yeah like
the the unintended consequences i hear this a lot and to quote my my favorite shit coiner james
um like the unintended consequences are not quantifiable um if you do it and also they are
not quantifiable if you don't do it like we don't know if you don't do this upgrade maybe bitcoin
like apathy will kill it or like uh people uh will move on to other things um and therefore
because you can't quantify both of them like they even out so unintended consequences always exist
um and that's why we move slowly and have a lot of eyes on there so that like they are not uh yeah
large large mistakes being forked into bitcoin that's why i'm also like not uh all too keen on
having a a quantum uh fork that is now with some yeah non-hardened uh yeah quantum post-quantum
algorithms or whatever uh like we we need to take time and we need to improve it because
there will be a lot of tech that if you know introduce like a new post-quantum scheme that is
way too heavy and way too difficult to verify um so yeah i just had journalist uh nick and
mikhail kudinov on to talk about their hash based um signatures their research paper it shrinks
yeah and i don't think people understand or appreciate like how much you need like you're
going to need to overhaul every wallet software that exists like because yeah like that's my
like psbt you're gonna have to change it's it's not like uh it's not like you just get quantum
resistant addresses you can use everything that's existed before and that was the most
disheartening thing about the narrative and the the uh main character syndrome sort of forcing
itself into the conversation it's just like nobody's talking about this it's like we've
been talking about it for years yes like steve lee had an entire conference and invited you and
didn't come um because i mean if the rush to upgrade is i would argue riskier than um being
slow uh because who know like you mentioned earlier like who knows when quantum is actually
going to manifest and you can really there are so many there's so many canaries that will drop
before like ecdsa is threatened like again we know with the snowden leaks the nsa is working
on quantum computers for quite some time and you can't assume that not everything will be
out in the public not every achievement but with all these other companies these these private
companies like google and psy quantum and like microsoft and like this small ionq like as soon
as they factored like a larger number and they need like a bridge loan from a vc they would come
back like look look what we did like they will they will telegraph like their advances so i'm
just taking my lab here um and like we have more than a decade at least and in that time again
journalists like uh and then tim ruffing they they improved on the post-quantum algorithms that the
national institute of standardization technology suggested and said like here we have these i think
they call sphinx algorithms and then they said hey we take this out and we can shrink them make
them smaller they're still way too large to to have like proper throughput in a block but you
see there is steady progress and then there's like lara scheichelman like a lot of other like
really smart people that are not vcs are working on it give them some time and do not distract them
with like bullshit discussions yeah so i mean that was the uh the illuminating thing from my
conversation with jonas and mikhail just like the wallet like particularly if you have low power
relatively low power hardware wallets like the amount of time it's going to take to sign
those signatures is going to be um significantly longer than it takes today and if you've ever done
something like a dlc um even on a mobile wallet you know the signature sort of rounds for that
take a minute up to two minutes sometimes yeah i mean like a multi-sig with like 50 cosigners or
something like you can test it like you realize uh i mean mdk is not cheap it's like a security
this is the design decision to not have like a fully functioning computer in there you could
add more oomph into this of course but like you want to have its purpose built and now
it's purpose built for that but for post-quantum like we have to change like mining qr codes
wallets like nodes like there's a ton and ton of things and we need upgrade hooks so like
everybody's on board and like nothing breaks um it's these things where you realize yeah
decentralized system has a lot of advantages but also a lot of disadvantages if you want to like
move into one direction quickly like a bank can do key rotation a bank can easily become post-quantum
and like not a weekend maybe but like it's possible with the centralized exchange with
bitcoin there will be like uh yeah a two-year process software has been built up over some
projects more than a decade and they're literally gonna have to just throw out all the uh throw out
the engine essentially and rebuild from scratch yeah i mean jonas and like they're working on on
the sccp256k1 library like libsecp yeah uh that is uh the the yeah central part of like every like
node and wallet uh and that's i think is an amazing work and like a lot of a lot of people
don't know this and they don't know about like who jonas nick is i think i'm always like amazed
that like these are the people that keep like a low profile and these are the actual builders
and not the people that are the loudest on twitter i was very uh very impressed with him i think it
was the first time we've definitely the first time we recorded i'm pretty sure it's the first time
we ever met too but he's like he can explain things very easily he is very personable um
you can tell he cares deeply about this and understands the uh the third or second third
order effects of these changes that people are flippantly trying to uh rush uh bitcoiners into
yeah i mean so in germany we have a bitcoin community and they recently made uh how do you
say it because i've had i've had people um on rhr rabbit hole recap i've had people zap us and
the uh pump the uh the german speaking bitcoin podcast how do you say it
i don't swan sick i i am swan sick i don't swan sick means 21 like i is one and swan sick is 20
i don't swan sick i don't swan sick okay i don't swan sick you can just say 21 people will know
but yeah like we have this community and an artist made like a trading card game and made
like 21 like bitcoin personalities and for some reason i'm one of those which is like undeserved
but like jonas nick has one christian decker has one a lot of people like gg has one and i think
it's like these are the the actual people doing stuff um again not vcs not mechanics on twitter
yeah mechanics on twitter um what uh what else should we cover here what do you what are you
looking forward to in 2026 what do you think the priority should be so i haven't made my prediction
list yet but i really really want uh i don't have my hat in reaching distance right now i want to
see like a pardon or clemency for kian and bill um like yeah uh like again kian like celebrated
christmas and then i saw like i mean he must be happy to go into prison because the last two days
before he had to be arraigned like he was arguing with mechanic on twitter and say like i mean this
can't be it like the last days in freedom like he has to like argue with people on twitter and
like justify things and oh nazis on your side like shut the fuck up like i i want donald trump to
be cool um and you know send a message that like writing code even if it is uh abused uh by
criminals um is not a crime like you're not responsible if you write privacy software
you're not responsible um if people abuse uh like technology um that's my my only wish for
2026 the rest you know i don't know bitcoin can go down to 30 000 and shake on all the treasury
companies i'm fine with that um but i really want to see um yeah trump doing another solid similar
to ross do you think the onus is on the industry in the united states to preserve
from a legal perspective i guess preserve the ability to use bitcoin i think it doesn't seem
good in europe right now i mean so i have to say the the laws around bitcoin in germany are better
than in the united states uh but there's i think purely purely by accident so uh whereas uh you
will always be tax liable in the event of you like selling or using bitcoin in germany if i
hold it for one year i'm free there's no capital gains i can just spend it and that is like really
really nice and you have a right to to your privacy um so i'm fine with that but that is
born not on purpose i think it was done on accident like they're talking about you know
let's get rid of this um people are speculating and making money on that and we need a cut and
they want to remove this one you're holding limits uh and maybe even backdated but um
yeah so i agree it is uh good to have people in the white house um i mean i wish they were more
pure i wish they wouldn't do so many crypto scams on the side um but uh as long as united states
um allows for bitcoin to thrive game theories at play other nations will not you know forbid it
and that is again yeah america can be a shining light and yeah that is this weird uh weird
transitionary period at least from my perspective that we're in we're getting the suits the big guys
the nation states are coming and it's like ah what are you going to do with bitcoin and going
back to the conversation like softworks covenants specifically if nation states do step in in size
in the next few years like will softworks be impossible i think yeah i mean i have this
article and i think shinobi has never published it um why nation states uh need covenants or
rather people living in nation states that have adopted bitcoin need covenants because
one of the key advantages of gold is that you cannot take a pallet of gold onto a helicopter
when you flee the south american country whereas if you amass your bitcoin uh off the money that
you take out of your your population um that is very easy to take with you if you if you flee
to i don't know i mean it has happened that some kind of dictator has rugged a population and
stolen money um by like transferring it in a swiss bank account um bitcoin makes it so much more easy
and there you could have a proper like covenant where like okay as long as you're in power you
get to sign uh if you um yeah get voted out uh your your key will be rotated out uh and yeah
i've written an article about like we need covenants for nation-state adopting too like
the next article needs to be like we need covenants to prevent quantum like we need to
attach it somehow uh to to fork in covenants i think well i think you're uh you're touching
on something that i think is very important and something that bitcoiners really need to get
better at is framing these things i think of one thing that i'm passionate about and would love to
see is pay join get implemented widely particularly with large exchanges and um i know a lot of the
exchanges outside of bull bitcoin um shy away from it because they're like oh well like the
privacy thing is too much it's like no you just frame it as transaction batching we need to save
shareholder capital by being more efficient when we spend bitcoin on chain when we're
to our users um yeah not only that framing is very important yeah yeah like like tip 77 like
i mean the bull bitcoin integration is great um who was it um there was an article with the
bitcoin policy institute gerald gerald glickman wrote something and it was really like an
interesting spin on that where he's saying exchanges should be um mandatory um coin
joining and obfuscating funds because you have a from a banking law perspective you will have to
have a a certain level of privacy um you are mandated as a bank to have private uh customer
funds and with bitcoin currently they like grossly reusing addresses and like they not doing these
things and he had like a very interesting article a couple years ago like four years ago so i need
to find it i'll send it to you um where he's like arguing exchanges need to coin join by law
yeah it's just this aversion to private i mean i know why the large governments of the world
don't like privacy because they are losing control of many aspects of uh their ability to rule as
they print more money go into more debt and begin to lose the narrative in the um in the realm of
social um but i think that's the most disheartening thing is like we have the potential like i said
earlier especially with these second layer protocols maturing to build like a completely
new banking stack on top of the bitcoin protocol and it's desperately needed in this day and age
i think the banking infrastructure is completely antiquated and not suit for purpose in the digital
age and for some reason or another i think mainly because they worry about losing control or being
hindered from actually building out this sci-fi banking stack i just dropped off i'm back sorry
yeah just you cut you cut out a little earlier when you're giving your whole coin join spiel
i only caught the tail end but uh luckily all this is being recorded uh recorded locally so
it'll look good in post
yeah so um yeah coin joining the ux is great another thing that would improve it is
sisa like a signature aggregation um has been discussed for quite some time uh um if we
implemented that i think greg raw said it would be cheaper than a regular transaction to do coin
joins with uh visor or cso that was funny like going back to the quantum thing too it's like
how much of this stuff are we going to focus on and then it's like oh we have to do quantum
resistant addresses that completely i don't know if you could do cso cisa with
quantum resistant addresses but if you could that would make more sense too
yeah we need a bitcoin pr department to to spin these things
that is yeah
who should do that i mean i don't know if you're being facetious there but i think
these things do need to be uh articulated to the broader market in better ways
yeah it's it's oftentimes you see uh very smart bright developers we need
translation services for for bitcoin yeah we need uh autism to adiq translation services um
yeah more and better communications also like learning from 2025
if communication can be improved lots of trauma can be avoided yeah there's a lot of drama in
2025 here's the hoping that uh there's a bear market in drama in 2026 but i won't be holding
my breath for that i guarantee you there will be more i'm really really bullish on trauma
um drama and trauma but um yeah well what are your hopes for 2026 um selfishly i hope that uh
that Bitcoin collateralized residential mortgages become a thing here in the
United States? I think that would be massive, but, uh, okay.
I think, uh, no, I mean,
it was a big theme in 2025. I wrote about it, talked about it a lot, but again,
as you may be able to tell,
I think this emergence of these interoperable second layer protocols is really
powerful and fascinating to me and i guess my hope for 2026 is instead of quabbling about
different protocol changes uh getting distracted by uh op return or quantum resistance let's begin
people begin focusing on like okay how can we leverage these second layers to create more
extendable bitcoin user experiences and build cooler and products at the end of the day that
make bitcoin more useful for individuals are you bullish on citria uh
no i i could i mean it am i going to use citria probably not uh
i mean as soon as there will be a poly market calci prediction market type on bitcoin and i
think like with citra you can build something like this i think that will be a very big inflow
into bitcoin um and there will be a lot of you know prediction markets not only funded by rob
hamilton but like actual prediction markets like you too yeah well like what's wrong with something
like predicts right do you need to do all that predicts is like custodial yeah and with like
in evm type of layer 2 which i'm always very impressed like robin linus is a close friend
of mine um and i really like appreciate what what they are building there um like alpham and citria
and like all these things that i didn't think were possible to build on bitcoin without any
changes to to the code um i think it's very cypherpunk i again i i'm not interested in any
str and whatever virtual machine um but yeah prediction markets uh i'm very surprised how
big they have become uh and these things yeah i think that they will come this year are you
surprised why are you surprised it was predicted that prediction markets would become a thing
this is uh it's a long-awaited there's this great quote by michael say like i think in 2018 where
he's like denigrating bitcoin says like oh bitcoin is a fad it will have the same future as um online
gambling and online gambling is bigger than ever as is bitcoin like he's right on the money
he took the wrong under on that bet um uh i'm i'm not a like you know i played the
tone-based poker tournament uh poorly um and i'm not really into gambling but uh i see what's like
it's a very nice way of um finding truth because if people put their money where their mouth is
like i trust those polls more than like a general twitter poll let's say agreed and that's what it
was actually i'm not sure if you saw it but brian armstrong came out i believe it was yesterday or
the day before and people were saying like hey you guys just recreated gambling and obviously
yes to an extent some of these prediction markets are gambling but he acknowledged like hey this is
actually a way to discover truth faster because you have insiders who are financially motivated
to leak information playing on these prediction markets and we've seen that come true and you
have a bunch of people saying oh my god this is uh this is uh this is terrible we don't like
insider trading in traditional markets and it's like it's true like i don't like when politicians
insider trade off of information um that they they glean from subcommittee meetings that are
not public um but i think this is different i think the dynamics is it more that you don't
want them to have it or is it more that you would be fine if everybody could do it exactly
because i feel like yeah in a free market like again there is no such thing as like insider
trading like and it truly truly like doesn't exist anywhere in the world but like in a truly
free market i think uh yeah instead of trading it's just called trading yeah i think you
articulate it very well my thoughts on it it's like as long as everybody can do it um it should
be beneficial and like you saw it with uh over the weekend when madora there was an insider
who hopped on the polymarket fat trade and made a bunch of money and i was looking in my in my
signal chat whether or not i was invited to the pete hexaf maduro signal
what would you say if you if you hopped in that group chat i mean i would like would be a fly on
the wall and then i would put a outsized bet and then i would do the dennis porter style huge
breaking as soon as we have like internal confirmation like uh that the ego has landed
or something i don't know i would i would monetize it i i think i agree with you i think prediction
market's going to be continue to grow whether or not they manifest on bitcoin i think i would
not i mean i think they should manifest on bitcoin i think ultimately they will but i i think more
broadly people don't understand still don't grasp the profundity of what's happening right now and
don't grasp how this is going to change the world like right now we're seeing it
in dinks and dunks like one-off events but once that hits scale and the people are conditioned
to go to prediction markets to make bets um about certain events uh with particularly insiders with
knowledge of these events it's going to really change the dynamics of how information flows and
how the world actually operates yeah i mean this is one of my favorite stories um i'm not sure if
i'm supposed to share this but i'm gonna do it anyways uh i can remember the uh electric uh
money um documentary about who's satoshi like hbr this documentary like two or three years ago
peter todd um and everybody says oh it's adam back it's health finney it's uh
uh lens as a man uh and there was a poly markets and there was one very outsized bet on peter todd
and with like documentaries that have been recorded months in advance people that have
been part of this documentary had some insight and knowledge uh and yeah some people you know
do bet on themselves which you know it was a big fan when i learned that like don't hate the player
i hate the game uh like why would you bet on something like i mean i get betting on like an
election where you like everybody knows the outcome at a certain point in the future but
why would you bet on something that has been decided in the past like movies are generally
not like uh live streamed like there's like an entire production team that knows what happened
there but yeah yeah it's a brave new world it's a brave new world chris where um or anybody's so
curious find out more about you what you're working on seed or bit assurance yeah uh follow
me on on twitter at coin joint um i i post about my work i do uh weird acquired taste memes um
you can write me an email chris at c door.io or at bit assurance.io um always happy to talk
about bitcoin always uh yeah up for a conversation there we'll keep it up like i said i've uh i've
been appreciating your game from across the pond here it's uh it's very good my star rising
i don't know if you're you're very tall i don't know how how high it can rise from here but
um yeah thank you for doing this this is fun thank you yeah thank you for having me marty
all right all right peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc
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