TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap #178: We got a strike

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - SEC delays Bitwise and Grayscale spot ETF proposals - Underground bitcoin mining is thriving in China - HRF, Strike, Opensats announce three lightning focused - Opensats receives approval to operate as tax deductible 501c3 - BTCPay Server v1.3.7 - Rust Lightning v0.0.104 - lnbits v0.4.0 - Specter DIY v1.6.2 - Mercury Wallet v0.5.1 - Simple Bitcoin Wallet v2.4.24 - Hexa Wallet v2.0.65 - Blockstream sponsors mempool project Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital Braiins - Daniel's thread Compass Mining HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this Festivus rip of Rabbit Hole Recap. It was a great time. Matt and I had a great conversation. Some good adversarial thinking in this one if I do say so myself. Started out a little

heavy note, but we ended on good notes. I promise you that. Enjoy it, freaks. This was brought to you by friends of the motherfucking Cash App. Cash App is where you stack sets, send sets, receive sets, and sell sets if you so please. Sats are the standard on the app.

Cash App makes it very easy to DCA into Sats. You can send it and forget it. Cash App can be your bank account, the offer account numbers, the rally numbers. They have their boost product, which allows you to get cash back and Sats back every once in a while via the app. It's a beautiful thing.

You can send the taproot scripts from the Cash App now. They're pushing the way. Use the code SackingSats if you haven't downloaded the Cash App yet. You're going to get $10. $10 is going to go to our good friends at Owls Lacrosse. That's Owls Lacrosse. this rep is also brought to you by our good friends at unchained capital unchained capital

is here to do many things for you well one of my favorite things that they do is they help you with custody collaborative custodies are here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model if you have all your bitcoin on an exchange you're that's a single point of failure that exchange can get rug pulled therefore you can get rug pulled if you have all your bitcoin behind a single SIG wallet, that is a risk as well. If you lose that wallet, if you're using a hardware wallet

or a paper wallet and the backup to that wallet, you are shit out of luck. So what Unchained does and what they want you to do is to engage in a collaborative multi-SIG, a two or three multi-SIG, which you hold two keys,

Unchained holds one. As long as you have your keys, you can move your Bitcoin in and out of your vault as you so please. They're offering a white glove concierge service that's going to take you from zero to having a collaborative custody vault set up. on their platform. You're going to have multiple video conference calls. They're going to get you

hardware wallets. They're going to get you comfortable with multi-sig. They're going to get you set up and then they're going to dump a thousand cuck bucks worth of sats into your vault once you're all set up. Again, eliminate single points of failure in your custody model. Try out the Unchained Vault. They've got IRA products. They've got lending products. They've got incredible content as well. Tell them the TFTC sent you for this collaborative custody vault package and you're going to get $50 off. Go check out everything they have going on at unchained.com. This report was also brought to you by our friends at Compass Mining. Compass Mining is here to get more individuals into the home mining game.

All right, what you do, you go to compassmining.io and you buy an ASIC. They're going to send that ASIC to your house and then they have an at-home mining support team as well. It's going to communicate with you to tell you everything you need to do to get your house, wherever you're plugging your mire in, ready to get it plugged in and have it hashing and getting that hash pointed at a mining pool that is then going to send you excuse me,

I just burped a little bit, your sets. So you can check this out, compassmining.io, buy an ASIC, I send it to you. They have a support team that's going to tell you

everything you need to do to set it up. And then on top of that, they have the ability if you want to take the risk of going with a hosting facility as well, you can buy the ASIC.

They'll plug it at the hosting facility. They have an incredible content team. I know Zach and Will are hopping on the mic tomorrow with drew and aj from cathedral bitcoin so check that out and it is currently december 16th so on the 17th they will be doing that uh this trip is also brought to you by good friends

at brains brains is here to help you stack more sats with your hash their brains os plus firmware is auto tuning firmware that allows you to uh you download this firmware on compatible uh mining models and it basically makes your machine more efficient and allows you to stack more sats with your hash. It takes your hash a bit longer. If you have a mining model that is compatible with BrainsOS Plus and you're not using it, you're leaving sats on the table. And if you want to, you are using BrainsOS Plus, you want to track what's going on and look at the data and compare yourself to potential scenarios, go to insights.brains.com. I-N-S-I-G-H-T-S dot B-R-A-I-I-N-S dot com. It's an incredible mining dashboard. It's going to teach you about profitability,

difficulty, hash rate, mining pool stats, per model miner stats. It's a beautiful thing. Go check out everything they have going on. If you have a miner that's compatible with Brains OS Plus firmware and you're not using it, you're leaving stats on the table, make sure you download it and go check out everything at Brains.com. B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com. This web is also brought to you by good friends at Hodl. Hodl. Hodl. Hodl is here to bring you a peer-to-peer lending platform. Lend.Hodl.Hodl.com allows you to engage in peer-to-peer lending. Again, they're leveraging multi-sig it's a two or three setup you hold one key your counterparty in the trade trade holds another key and huddle huddle holds the third key you put your bitcoin up in that multi-sig

two or three escrow as collateral and then you get stable coin liquidity as a result from your counterparty um and then huddle huddle acts as an arbiter there so as long as you put your sats up you get that stable coin you go spend on what you want as long as you're paying that um that interest back plus your principal you're going to get your sats back at the end of the day Alternatively, if you're a stable coin user and you want to get yield on that, you can enter the other side of this marketplace, but your stable coins up for yield in the form of Bitcoiners looking for liquidity, paying you back what you put up plus interest. Go check all this out at lend.hodlhodl.com. Last but not least, this report was brought to you by your good friends at Bitcoin 2022. Bitcoin 2022 is happening in Miami, April 6th to the 9th, 6-9. Nice. It's going to be an incredible event. I'm going to be there speaking. We're doing a live RHR. It's going to be a massive party in Miami. Again, April 6th to 9th.

You can go to b.tc slash conference to buy tickets and register for the event. Use the code TFTC. You're going to get 10% off. That helps out the podcast too. If you haven't gotten your tickets yet, get on it. The ticket prices are only going to go up

as more and more sell. So enjoy this, Rip Freaks. you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when 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.

What is up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, back in my father-in-law's bedroom, home for the holidays. Matthew, how are you? The classic. The classic room. Coming to you live from my 2014 MacBook Pro, my shitty camera. I hope the audio is okay, but I am on the shitty internet in my father-in-law's bedroom. So if I crap out, the internet problems this week

will probably be due to your Uncle Marty. I really hope it freezes on your end. Me and Marty were on a call yesterday or the day before and he was doing it from his father-in-law's bedroom. And he tried to call me out for my internet being shitty before he realized that it was his fault that he was the one dropping out of the call. And it was just really, it was pure happiness on my end.

Yeah, the same thing just happened right then. You had a robot voice that I was about to say, it's you, but it was probably me. I think it was you. We never told the freaks last time, but before last rabbit hole recap, I sent you and Carr a screenshot of my internet gear. And it is straight fire.

Very fast. It's very fast. What was it? 850 megabits a second? Yeah. We can just round up to a gig. Okay. What's a gig?

it's a gig we're going to keep it tight here obviously we're getting close to Christmas it's Festivus here in the United States on the East Coast I'm back on the East Coast time zone light week light week but I'm just

happy to be here we come week in and week out to talk about Bitcoin tangential topics to Bitcoin we've been doing this for well over three years now and it's one of my favorite things to do week in and week out us meet here with the great Matthew O'Dell to talk about the state of Bitcoin

in the world revolving around freedom in the digital age. Merry Christmas to Marty and to the freaks and to Carr. Do you see, Carr got me this. My very own Bucky sweater. My very own Bucky's Christmas sweater.

Have you ever been to a Bucky's? Yes, once. Yeah, for you freaks who don't know what Buc-ee's is I'm becoming very well acquainted with it after moving to Austin Texas Buc-ee's is an all-in-one it's similar to like a Wawa

here in the northeast but I'm sorry to all my Philly and northeast brethren Buc-ee's is I would say a little bit higher caliber what are we not getting live comments or there's just no freaks

in the comments I don't know i don't know you haven't seen anything yet wow i mean yeah it's the holidays dude you know this is going to be a rip for for the pure audiophiles i bet uh who i find it hard to believe there's not a single person in the comments i'll see well i mean matt stay humble okay maybe we're gonna have weeks but there's not anybody in the comments okay now i i blame technical difficulties um we also what was uh in that same vein we don't have any shout outs this week too as of right now so if you're listening you want to get a shout out in i'll have our btc pay server up um scouring

that but uh yeah we're we're shout out less today um but let's jump into it start a clark's dashboard as we always do and yeah we're not on youtube we're not on youtube yeah interesting yeah we're on we're on twitter though right yeah

I retweeted the tweet did you set it up on restream already it should have been I didn't do anything different this week outside of what we did should we just cut it

and just up we got someone there it is was there a delay it says sending data to youtube right now oh yeah probably

a YouTube delay. Yeah, it's probably a delay. Back to Clark's dashboard, Matthew. Don't worry. We're going to get out to all the platforms. The price of Bitcoin right now has popped above 50K

right before we hit record. TFTC, RHR pump. We're at $50,490. The current sats per dollar exchange rate is 1,981 sats is what you're going to get if you're buying a cuckbook worth of Bitcoin.

Market cap of Bitcoin right now is $954.7 billion. That's the sort of thing you like. We're currently at block height, 715,430. And did Clark add this because of us or was he highlighting that it was always here and I just could have found it? I thought he added it because of us. Clark, if you did, you're a gentleman and a scholar.

If you didn't, I'm sorry for missing it. UTXO set size, which we discussed last week. We went into the nuances around UTXOs and the fact that not every individual on the planet will be able to own them. There are 78,271,383 UTXOs right now. The chain size is 433.5 gigabytes. Why is that important, Bitcoin,

if it is to be a distributed system, sufficiently distributed? You want to make it so the chain size is in a range where you can have as many individuals as possible download the ledger and syndicate it to others. You don't have to syndicate it to others, but you can. And so keeping it as small as possible, 433.5 gigs, is pretty reasonable. You are on YouTube. Thank you, Sovereign. We are not on YouTube, is what he's saying.

And I'm checking myself. We're not on YouTube right now. we got it we got a youtube strike this week maybe we should talk about that clock car has been putting out clips um business on air car and they can hear us i know you're on mute but uh sorry cars and pleb lab right now we're in three different locations he's got ben the carman singing christmas carols behind him it's very annoying um so he's had he has to mute himself while we're on air um people are loving the clips they want them uh we need we're probably going to have to create a new page for clips

specifically, but one of the clips with laser huddle just to separate everything. That's how Rogan did it too. He had his main page and the Rogan clips. They're not liking our clips, right? Is that what's going on, YouTube? No, they're loving the clips. Well, YouTube didn't like

the laser huddle depopulation clip. We got a strike for that one. I think we just need business on air. Let's try to hide things in the video content and not especially the touchy subjects in the title of the clip

or the episode. Oh, you put depopulation in the clip title, Carr? Yes. Yeah, you probably shouldn't do that. I was being honest. Hey, we live and we learn. We iterate. Grow. Speaking of growing,

as of right now, we're 249 blocks away from the next difficulty retarget. and difficulty will not be growing if we keep it this pace. It's actually going to fall by 0.6%. And that is because blocks are coming in at 10 minutes and 4 seconds on average, which is 4 seconds above the 10-minute production target.

Clark currently has 15,007 transactions in his mempool. Da-da-da-da-da-da. You can get one sat per byte fees in and Samurai is still hovering where it has been for the last few weeks, around $4,341.17 Bitcoin or $219.1 million. Excuse me for my burp.

Matthew. Still not on YouTube. Still not on YouTube. Don't worry about it. Just enjoy the time. Let's enjoy each other's presence here on this beautiful festivus day. Fine.

Fine? I'm just going to get a fine? I just miss I miss a ride or dies in the comments that's all I've gotten spoiled I know

you have gotten spoiled remember when we used to like try not to pay attention to them I'm getting sending data sending data that's what I'm seeing

it's been a pretty pretty big shit show here back home I come home and many people my family have either gotten the flu or COVID

so that is why I'm back in my father-in-law's bedroom in South Jersey to isolate. Luckily, my wife, son, and I have been pretty inoculated from that. We're feeling great, but it's a pretty big bummer. Your family should all have COVID?

My parents got the flu. My wife's sister and our brother-in-law may have COVID. It's a shit show. Damn. It's like COVID and the flu are blowing through Philly right now. Happy to report my parents are feeling much better. They were knocked out for the last, the previous two days, but they're feeling good now.

So if you're in the Northeast, either the flu or COVID seems like it's going to get you at some point over the next few weeks. So just be aware. Glad I'm not there. Yeah. It seems like all the lockdowns are happening too. yeah lockdowns are happening

Fauci's saying that you're not allowed to be with your family if you're unvaccinated even though everybody is double vaccinated double boosted is susceptible to Omicron too there's just no logical consistency Matt the clown world is

I mean it's at an all time high I don't want to say it's peaked but I'll start with this controversial topic because I wrote about it in the bet last night it's just really again having to move away from my family for a few days while I'm home on vacation. I'm supposed to be spending time with them. It's just really getting frustrating. How long are we going to perpetuate this cycle of fearmongering, another jab, lockdowns, masks, vaccine passports?

At what point do people just realize that this is a virus? Viruses mutate. They're going to be around with us for our existence as human beings. And we just need to move on and stop participating in the fear mongering that's coming from the people on the boot tube that really don't care about your health and safety. I think they just like being authority figures on things and they want to. They get dirty pleasure out of having control over this many people or perceived control that's because that's what it is it is perceived control that you've handed over to these uh insane authoritarians um it's time to stand up be adults not be afraid and go back to normal life or try to at least because this stuff is not going away this virus

is going to keep mutating they're going to try and keep up with the vaccines specifically the The way viruses evolve is they become more spreadable but less dangerous. Yes, which seems to be the case with Omicron. Correct. So this is my call to the world. And again, dude, that's another thing I wanted to talk about. The second-order effects are beginning to get scary.

I don't know if it's directly a second-order effect or just something that's going on coincidentally with all this is the fentanyl overdoses. I didn't realize that for the 18 to 45 age range in the United States, fentanyl overdoses are the number one cause of deaths in that age group. That's fucking insane, dude. Yeah, it's been pretty bad for a while. I had a couple of friends who lost that way.

Time to end the war on drugs. Legalize drugs. Yeah, legalize drugs. Bring it out of the shadows. but seriously if you're like if you're a cocaine doer like at the very least like try to figure out how you can test that cocaine before you're going to do it because that seems to be the number one way in which people are are dying of fentanyl overdoses it's getting i thought it's mostly heroin and heroin too um i'm known usually you get hooked on oxys and then you move to heroin

because it's cheaper and easier to get. And then the heroin is laced with fentanyl and then you overdose. Yeah, I think they're lacing it with everything. Heroin. Don't do heroin. I don't think that's a drug you really want to get into. But I know a lot of...

Or cocaine either. They're very high time preference activities. But if you are going to engage in them, try to figure out a way in which you can test them to make sure there's no fentanyl in it because it is pretty lethal. I personally do know a few people who have passed from it as well.

But right behind that is suicide, which is another crazy thing. I think that is more tightly connected to the lockdowns. Death of desperation is what people call it. Sorry, holiday season. We're getting right into these fucking heavy topics, but it's on the top of mind.

And I think it's important. These are a couple of the things that are going underrepresented and not underscored, but they're being pushed to the side in favor of this COVID fear-mongering. And these seem to be much larger problems. How the hell is suicide

the second largest cause of death for 18 to 45-year-olds in the United States? Nobody wants to talk about that. Why are these people seeing an early exit of this planet as desirable? it's it's a pretty big problem that we probably should be talking about how many how many people just feel completely destitute and have no optimistic vision of the future that they just decide to to take their own life like why is this happening how is there this many people with

no hope for their futures what does that say about us as a society at large and and what we're performance tuning for it's fucked up dude I've been in a bad headspace the last 48 hours being forced away from my family and then reflecting on this type of stuff yeah

definitely fucked up you know be there for your friends and your family guys what does it say about the state of the world Matt? come on give me a little bit more than this You know, I'm not a mental health specialist or anything, but at the end of the day, we got to be there for each other and be someone that people are willing to, you know, be comfortable enough to talk to you about hard things. a lot of us just like no i mean a lot of us just you know you scroll twitter you like you know you stay on your social media you're constantly just staring at your phone you know you're not looking

up and around you and and being there for the people that are that what matter right your rider dies so like you gotta even if even if you know uh i i i think it's it's important to be that type of person that hopefully someone who's going through a lot of shit that is thinking about undoing their life is willing to

be comfortable enough to come to you with that feeling and that information and hopefully you can help them through it. And if you're out there, if you're listening to this, if you're one of those people,

I mean, never hesitate to reach out if you're going through a rough time. It's fucked up. And a lot of people are. And that's the thing I want to hone in on. It's like, how are these many people so pessimistic on the state of the world?

What does it say about our society? It's just another indicator that we are a bit off kilter. I don't even want to say humanity. We'll just talk U.S. specifics here as Americans, in America specifically. We may be the richest, toughest country in the world, But there's a lot of underlying problems where we're focusing a lot of our attention outwardly, trying to point fingers abroad, people meddling with our elections and throwing culture war stuff at us. but we have very, very big problems internally. Maybe we should be a bit more introspective as a society

and really reflect on what we're fine-tuning for as growth at all costs. What we should be fine-tuning for. Should we be cloud chasing in society like we are? Should we have this hedonistic sort of mentality? I don't know. I'm rambling now. I'm sorry.

I just had a freak send me a Telegram message because we are still not on YouTube, so we don't have a live chat. And the freak made a very good point that if you are another freak and you're thinking about suicide, please consider calling the Suicide Hotline. That as well. Thank you to the freak who Telegram messaged you. On to Rose, your topics. I'm sorry. This is me. Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas. But we are approaching the day which the Lord was born. So that's something to be joyful for. But here's something we can both agree on. It's always fun to shit on ETFs that get denied by the SEC. VanEck, man. Grayscale and Bitwise. Not even VanEck.

Bitwise and Grayscale spot ETF proposals were delayed by the SEC. not surprising check the tapes Marty said a spot ETF was imminent when did I say that like 5 weeks ago 6 weeks ago whenever the futures ETF was named alright check the tapes

10 weeks ago I don't believe I said that well it's in the tapes alright somebody car somebody we're not going to have a spot ETF any fucking time soon they would like the futures ETF

because the futures ETF is cash settled and isn't actually based on underlying Bitcoin. Yeah, it's a derivative. So there's probably some rehypothecation. I mean, the CME contract, apparently those paper contracts do have to buy physical Bitcoin below them. But I don't believe the other futures contract out there does.

So it's a bit of rehypothecation. Does the CME contract buys? I believe there is at least some margin necessary for those contracts. They do need to buy and touch quote-unquote physical Bitcoin at some point to facilitate that specific contract. Like we say all the time, IP is the ETF, just stacks that. this has been a meme since literally 2013 I believe it was the first time

people have been excited about an ETF yeah forever man and everyone always thinks it's imminent yeah it's just more proof that regulators do not really care about people like they have so many ridiculous fucking ETFs they just don't

want a Bitcoin ETF because they're threatened why would they be threatened though as regulators you can have why would they be threatened by bitcoin the financial establishment yeah so

I guess that's what I'm trying to get at there is why do the regulators care they're just supposed to regulate be somewhat agnostic to the underlying instruments I know I know. It's a very corrupt system. When ETF? When spot ETF?

They have garbage ETFs that are 3x short, 3x long, super leveraged products that if you hold them overnight, you lose your money. They have all this garbage out there, and they don't want Bitcoin ETFs because it will increase the valuation of Bitcoin. And a lot of Bitcoin trading, the majority of real Bitcoin trading is done outside of their purview. They don't like that. Well, wouldn't they want to approve an ETF so that it does come within their purview? I mean, the argument they always make is there's no way for them to efficiently spy on the large exchanges that are abroad. Which is like a half-assed excuse. It's like kind of the truth, but also kind of bullshit. Yeah, so the justification there would be that they wouldn't feel comfortable because there's exchanges abroad, they would argue, can manipulate the price, which would be negative for the holders of the ETF.

Because when you have a spot, when you have a futures ETF, the price of the ETF is based off of what futures are trading at at the CME. If you have a Bitcoin spot ETF, you have to figure out what price is that tracking, right? And first, they said they didn't like these exchanges abroad. And that's one of the reasons why the Winklevoss, they failed at getting the ETF in because of that reason. And so they launched a regulated U.S. exchange, you know, based in New York, Gemini, and it still wasn't enough. Right. It's it's mostly bullshit. But, yeah, I think I think it's a it's a tactic to try and delay Bitcoin's growth. But it's as simple as that.

which is an interesting tactic because it will allow the the freaks out there listening who many of which i know there are some institutional investors listen to this podcast on a daily basis weekly basis excuse me but most are humble sat stackers so the the sec pushing out this etf approval is just allowing us to stack more sats on the download so stay humble yeah i mean i think you kind of nailed it earlier right because you like they're they're they're using high time preference short-term thinking uh really they would like they they should be trying to have an etf as soon as possible and have it gobble up as much bitcoin as possible and much trade volume as possible but instead they're basically forcing

people to go out and learn how to actually obtain real bitcoin hold it themselves you know and use it with their hopefully with their own node right like actually go out and obtain bitcoin when a lot of people might not do that if they could just click you know buy on td ameritrade um so they're shooting themselves in the foot long term so as the longer we wait for an etf you know i think is better for us um yeah yeah the state wanted to successfully attack bitcoin they should have approved the etf in 2013. imagine imagine how much bitcoin the etf would have at this point it'd be like gbtc but so much larger yeah it's uh hey or maybe maybe we got some fifth is a fifth pillar fifth column what if we what if we one or the other or one or the other column we have like

six people in the twitch comments right now that's the only freaks we have with us and you still you're still using your personal twitch account right what twitch are we even streaming at the real marty bent at the real marty bent we'll get that all figured out we need a tfdc twitch we'll get that figured out

shout out to our twitch shout out to our twitch diehards the birdman 321 yeah the five people over there uh we love you twitch crew still not never never go on Twitch

just just accept the fact we're probably not going to be on YouTube this week I don't know what's going on AvocadoKid85 Matt and I decided pre-show that we're not

going to talk about that so sorry oh yeah we did not talk about that card do not pull that up on the screen they can go fuck themselves ETF

ETF, not approved. And so we either have a fifth column Bitcoiner in the SEC who understands the game theory around this. If the government really wanted to control Bitcoin, they would approve the CTF ASAP. So it could accumulate, even then if it did accumulate a mass amount of Bitcoin, they really wouldn't be able to control the network,

but it would tie up supply and probably create lazy tendencies, which would drive people to be complacent instead of learning how to control their own keys? I mean, a key value problem with Bitcoin is it's not a proof-of-stake network. If you have more Bitcoin, it doesn't give you more controller power over the network.

Now, that being said, there is a hard-to-quantify robustness that Bitcoin gains when we have more sovereign holders, people that are actually holding their own keys, using their own node, getting comfortable with it, learning, you know, privacy, best practices and stuff. We, that like remnant class that like group of sovereign Bitcoiners is it gives Bitcoin a defensible position, right? We want as many of those people as possible. So if you have an easier regulated, fully custodial, trusted third party

way of getting Bitcoin, you're inevitably going to reduce that amount of like sovereign base, right? And if you had done that starting in 2013, um, there's a shit ton of people that are holding their own keys and using their own node right now that never would have done it just because they could have just pressed buy on their TD Ameritrade account. Yeah. So congratulations.

You played yourself, SEC. And US government regulators. Hopefully they don't watch this. But we know they do. This was a cool story this week from a journalist at

CNBC who I have had the pleasure of meeting quite a few times in the Bitcoin mining scene, Mackenzie Sigalos. She's actually doing some really good work. It seems like she's putting good effort in to actually understand what is happening in the mining space, particularly. And she wrote a story for CNBC

talking about the Chinese underground mining scene. It is becoming very apparent that even though the CCP banned mining within the borders of China, that there are some renegade miners that have stayed behind and are risking it for the biscuit. And I believe in the article,

the miner who was using an alias estimated that he believes there's probably still around 20% of network hash rate within China's borders. who knows how accurate that estimate is but I think it's certainly above 0% like we've been saying for the last

many months which is encouraging because it proves that Bitcoin is extremely anti-fragile and Bitcoiners on top of that are pretty pure based individuals no matter where they live

at least some of us are yeah I mean uh all you have to all you have to know is like if if the u.s government said that bitcoin mining wasn't uh legal in america anymore you would fucking laugh people out of the room if they said no one was mining in america anymore right like we have the war on drugs just because weed has been illegal now it's legal in some states but it's still illegal federally and and in some states it's not like people don't smoke weed um so of course some miners went underground they distributed their setups they went off grid they did a bunch of different tactics to bribe

officials stuff like that to to continue mining and continue earning cash flow sats flow and then a bunch also relocated it makes logical sense it does it's a beautiful thing to see though it's very resilient shout out to any of the chinese miners that stayed behind and have their asics plugged in i wish you the best of luck i hope you have the highest of uptime and and the the greatest of pool luck out there as well i would say uh two things first of all um first of all these types of tactics like what the chinese did actually make bitcoin a lot stronger because those warehouse miners that were very common in China and now are very common in America, these massive warehouses that are on grid that are very obvious,

those are the easiest to target, obviously. And as soon as they made this ban, those warehouses stopped, right? People moved to smaller operations, more distributed operations. It's much harder to crack down now going forward. The second thing is there was a really interesting story in here about one guy who uh they called this power provider i think it was a hydro facility or something they called his power provider and was like uh there seems to be a lot of usage here like we think there's a bitcoin miner and like he hit up his buddy and was like they're like they're on to you like you need to um and he like took some precautions and then they continued on and and why did that happen

that happened because for the power provider it's a very lucrative relationship for him to have this bitcoin miner uh constantly pulling excess energy from him um as a buyer of last resort and a buyer of first resort so that is uh that's it's an interesting dynamic right because you can't ban energy providers and those energy providers are naturally incentivized to um to work with bitcoin miners yeah again i've said this many times i don't know if satoshi even realized it But just the incentives, the loose incentives of the network, whether it be node operators running consensus code, that's going to respect the assurances that were embedded into the protocol early on. or the miners and their loose incentives with the energy providers

like you just explained, I think it might be the most perfect incentive system that we've ever come into contact with as humanity. It's just at the end of the day, individual human greed is going to be leveraged

to bring something good into the world. And we're seeing that play out in China. The freak asked if we believe that 20% network cash rate being in China is realistic. i believe so i wouldn't be surprised yeah i mean that sounds about right to me yeah china's a pretty massive country um and for what i from what i understand there's there's ways to um have pretty sizable mining operations that are

under the radar uh having had discussions with with some chinese miners in the past and they started out like right before the ban they were probably in like the 50 to 60 percent range yeah i think it was probably closer to the 60 percent range so like so 20 percent is is you know a 60 percent drawdown something like that that that sounds like reasonable in this kind of situation i mean obviously it's just me like thinking about those numbers in my head but like that that like kind of makes sense to me that 60 would relocate and 40 would seek shelter within the borders yeah yeah uh that seems in line with realistic possibilities in my mind as well but again like you mentioned matt i mean this is why i'm an off-grid maximalist even here in the

united states i love everything that's going on in west texas i'm very happy for all these miners that are building massive farms but it does scare the shit out of me i think not only off-grid small operations if you're on like people having them in their homes like these are all

the things that add robustness to the network the warehouse miners not so much I mean the warehouse miners you have and again

I'm not trying to disclaimer I sit on the board of a publicly traded miner that does distributed mining so I'll put that out there

but does Cathedral do warehouse mining too? we have we have some yeah we have some operations that are

on grid but most most is off grid the I mean just like just again adversarial thinking like what if

if this does get big if Bitcoin does succeed and you have like maybe you just have miners start fighting each other I don't know what that will look like

but imagine just like EMP EMP attacks on these large on these large operations. You get hundreds of megawatts of machines burn out overnight. The hash wars

are going to be magnificent. Well, that or the incentives. The incentive is to lower difficulty, so you can mine more. The incentive is to blow up your opponent. Yeah. People think I'm joking. I always get

laughed at, but if you're building this shit, your whole building should be a Faraday cage. Seriously. It should be protected from potential EMP attacks. Yeah. Maybe more expensive, but it's... Well, no, what I think is

I'm super excited is the wrong word. Autonomous drone swarms are going to change everything. And for better or for worse? Probably for worse. Autonomous...

So right now, right now if if you have a drone usually it's you know a military drone it's like controlled by in arizona from like a storage container it goes connects to a satellite and then it hits the drone so one way to stop drones is you just jam that signal the command and control signal right now the autonomous aspect of that takes away the jamming ability because the drone's just thinking on its own you just send the drone you're like these are the coordinates there's a bitcoin in mind there or there's a person you you know you you want to take out you go to those coordinates and you take out that person with take out that operation or person without any kind of command

and control situation it's just autonomous then you add in a swarm so there's like a hundred of them uh so like you have to like start trying to shoot them out of the air or whatever autonomous drones there's autonomous drone swarms and then um on top on top of all that if you're able to do on off-the-shelf parts then you can have autonomous drone swarm attacks where it's impossible or very difficult to figure out who actually sent the attack and you can't jam the drones and it's really expensive to stop against so like all of a sudden like warfare like asymmetrical warfare is going to be completely different and like i don't think people realize like how close that is like that is like we're already seeing people use off-the-shelf drones for like rudimentary

assassinations rudimentary attacks where they like put c4 on like a dji drone and just like fly it into a presidential office or something but like it's gonna get so much worse than that that happened to latin america or southeast asia it's happened a couple times in latin america i believe uh they all failed uh but yeah it's gonna get worse i mean my drones from day well this i mean but pulling on that thread too like this long term does this drive all mining operations underground which is an interesting thing it shows another dis-economy of scale right where we're miners that have smaller operations that are more distributed are going to have a better benefit right you have if you're the dis-economy scales

of Bitcoin mining are less regulatory target, less regulatory pressure, less malicious actor pressure. And then a big one for me is just waste heat harvesting, right? Because you're never going to be able to harvest waste heat from a warehouse. But if you have 10 miners and it heats the hot water in a building or a home or something, you can capture that and you get a lower cost as a salt lower costs or even potentially a higher revenue as well if you're doing something protective with that magic or like mushrooms or pots and it's it's pretty lucrative and that's like i've yeah i've practically said that was like boiling the ocean to produce salt yeah it's still going on in canada yeah uh there's i mean and that i've said this on twitter

a couple times and it's been cryptic when i tweeted out i'll just be pretty transparent with it here like a lot of people especially talking about the long-term viability of mining particularly around the profitability due to the reduction of the subsidy over the long term number one i think the block reward being the subsidy plus the fees will be sufficient to stay mining into perpetuity just because there's gonna be a large amount of demand for utxos because UTXOs provide a lot of utility and people are going to be willing to pay for that utility, which will provide more than enough

revenue for miners to keep securing the network. But another thing I think we're mentioning here is that people really discount the fact that there is potential revenue outside of the block reward via doing something with the waste heat,

which rarely gets talked about as part of the economic business model of mining operations and i think that's a diseconomy of scale right regardless yeah yeah so we just have to get past this warehouse miner thing i think is a they'll always be warehouse miners but i think the amount of hash they have on the network as a percentage is a momentary aspect of asic adoption so asic adoption has a couple hurdles that you have to get through the first one is manufacturing in the beginning um you're going to have very few asic manufacturers um

the second one to me is this this warehouse uh like kind of corporate massive mining operation kind of situation and you get past that because the life cycles increase like you're not gonna do a waste heat reclamation operation if the miners fucking stop go obsolete in four years three years two years uh when you start hitting five to eight years ten years then all of a sudden you can put you know um a lot of effort into that into that reclamation right yeah yeah and and this is the advantage we have on the shit corners because they're not even going through that process they're stifling their asic there's there's really no other chain that has a developed asic ecosystem where like a lot of r&d a lot of money is going into actually securing the network

um and it's it's going to be hard to jump start one after the fact uh it's one of the the main advantages bitcoin has i i just think it's poetically beautiful that for the first 13 years of bitcoin's existence more specifically probably the last 10 years as people sort of looked at the hash rate growth back then and said oh if this continues it's going to take a lot of energy and they immediately just went to energy

bad we need to change this and a lot of shit coiners have been running with it for the last decade like we're moving away from energy intensive mining where again not realizing something Satoshi probably didn't even realize at the time either is that this perfect incentive system

due to the economic incentives to be as profitable as possible actually helps us create energy efficiency external to the Bitcoin network, which is actually a beautiful thing for humanity. And a very underscored, excuse me, I keep saying

underscored. Underscored means you highlight it. I mean to say underappreciated. Underrated, underappreciated aspect of the network is that it's helping create efficiencies external to itself, which is and I just think it's so beautiful

like we talked about last week obviously with SBF shitting on proof of work in favor of proof of stake and actually on that note go read the article that Lucas Nuzzi and Nick Carter wrote in a rebuttal to

FTX's comments on proof of stake energy usage and transaction cost they did a pretty good undressing of that terrible argument I mean, the story of ETH is a perfect example because Bitcoin obviously had a massive head start against ETH in terms of ASIC maturity. But ETH actually had like a fairly strong and growing mining sector where miners were putting a lot of money into securing ETH. um they were putting a lot of money into researching and making better machines that

were more efficient that can make them more money and through a course a couple courses of action starting kind of like in 20 early 2018 they started saying we're moving to proof of stake we're going to make sure proof of stake happens and they basically scared the shit out of anybody who who was putting money into ETH, putting money into ETH research for their mining and mining operations. And who would do that? Who would build on quicksand in that way? And a lot of those people ended up moving into the Bitcoin mining sector and basically just wrote it off. And that's why you don't see like a developed, strong ASIC ecosystem in ETH. I mean, And they went as far as...

They did some kind of fork at one point that fucked up a couple ASICs too, I believe. Yeah, they were threatening that Prague POW fork that would have bricked a lot of... I'm not sure if that went through, but... It doesn't even have to go through. Just the threat of it stops investment. Well, I would even take it further.

I mean, the threat of it has always been there. I mean, for those of you who don't know the history of Ethereum, before they even launched the protocol, i believe in like 2014 late 2014 early 2015 the intention was to launch the protocol and then quickly transition to proof of stake uh within 18 months the pre-sale they said they were going to do it yeah well and in the protocol like at launch they had the what the what they determined as a difficulty bomb but they had it in the protocol when it launched and the difficulty bomb for uh

Those of you who are unaware of that aspect of the network, they said at this block height, we're going to force the difficulty up so high that it's essentially going to be impossible for proof-of-work miners to produce new blocks. Therefore, the network will be literally forced by the physics of the difficulty going up so high to transition to proof-of-stake.

They've since nagged on... They just keep pushing back that difficulty bomb. They just keep forking and pushing it off. yeah i believe the next one they're pushing it back i believe in february or something like that but i mean that's obviously the case they've always said they wanted to do proof of stake but my point was they almost stumbled into a robust proof of work ecosystem uh because miners rightfully so realized like oh this proof of stake thing keeps getting delayed keeps getting delayed and started pouring massive amounts of money into their mining operations

into research and development. We saw a couple large-scale ETH mining operations spring up. We saw people trying to make ASICs. Bitmain was trying their best to make hardware that was as efficient as possible on ETH. Then instead of embracing this kind of backdoor that they just walked into having a robust proof-of-work ecosystem, instead they did everything possible to squash that research and development that was being done. They're doubling down on the environmental virtue signaling, which is hilarious.

Do you want to... Yeah, so that's like the thread that I started in August of 2017. I believe I started that thread right around, I believe, the second delay. And I was like, all right, they keep delaying this proof of stake transition. And for those of you who are unaware, I've been tracking the transition, the so-called transition to proof of stake on Ethereum for well over four years now. And I don't think it's ever going to happen. But like Matt said, the actions that they've expressed or have executed over the last three years particularly have really scared a lot of miners away from actually investing in critical security infrastructure. And if you speak to any ETH miners today, they fully expect to transition to Zcash mining or something after this.

No, no, but Zcash also is signaling that they want to move to proof of stake. Yes. Yeah. So they're, they're going to do that until that delay, uh, until that inevitably happens. They're going to like ride the S curve of, of the shit. Um, That's what all these shit corners don't realize. Like you really should be, like if you want your chain to be, have any, uh, any chance of success, uh, you know, at actually having any kind of censorship resistance and,

and being successful, You should be embracing ASICs from the very beginning. You should be using algorithms that are not designed to be so-called ASIC resistant, which they inevitably never maintain because someone will figure out a way to do a purpose-built computer that will be more efficient. You should do the exact opposite. You should be using mining algorithms that are as easy to make ASICs as possible so you can kind of jumpstart that process and get to a more mature ASIC ecosystem as quick as

possible. But at this point, I mean, in a shot to 256, Bitcoin is like so far ahead. It's just like not even... These are conversations that should have been happening in 2016, 2017. And even then, it probably was too late.

Well, these conversations weren't happening with ETH specifically, but Namecoin. I mean, I think Bitcoin won the hashing wars very early on with Namecoin. So for those of you who don't know, Actually, funnily enough, a lot of the people who were the founders of Stacks originally worked on an altcoin called Namecoin that used the SHA-256, HashCash SHA-256 hashing algorithm as well.

And so it therefore competed with hashrate dedicated to the Bitcoin network and eventually just started getting reorged into Oblivion because it had such a minority share of HashCash SHA-256 hashrate that it essentially rendered the project obsolete. I think you can make a strong argument that the Bitcoin won the hash war back then. I mean, it was never even really close, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't even a war.

It was just like, all right. It was a matter. Yeah, it really was. I was very, I liked that mining talk, that adversarial thinking. Like, think about miners now. And I should say, there are miners thinking about this down in Houston. And not this month, but last month, Chad from, who's the CEO of the Winstone facility that Ride owns, described their security on site. I mean, they have men with guns on site who will shoot you on site if you try to open the door and do anything with their ASICs.

That is one layer. But I think we've got to be thinking about autonomous drones, as Matt mentioned earlier. It's going to get crazy. People aren't ready for it. It really is. this is big for you. I'll let you take this one. HRF Strike OpenStats announced

three lightning-focused bounties. Really like this, dude. So Strike and Jack Mallers over at Strike raised a bunch of money for the Bitcoin race car, the Indy 500. If you remember,

there was QR codes on the race car. People could donate. They raised a bunch of money for development. this is the first step in deploying that so i i believe they have more money besides this uh that is available uh for development but this is the first step um they teamed up with hrf to develop three bounties all lightning focused um all with a specific focus on basically making lightning easier and more accessible for activists around the world but uh i think they could be very helpful for everybody. All three bounties come with a one Bitcoin prize. So each bounty can, if you

successfully complete the bounty, you will receive a Bitcoin. They all expire at the end of the year. If they are not awarded to anybody, they will go into HRF's general fund, which HRF and Gladys have been doing a remarkable job with deploying that to developers in need of funding. So it will not go to waste. This is not an open-ended bounty. OpenSats, the organization I co-founded to support open source development, our nine-person board of ride-or-die Bitcoiners are basically judging bounty submissions and whether or not the bounties are going to get paid out. We need a unanimous decision among our nine-person board. The first bounty is uh the first the first bounty is a lightning tip jar uh the idea is bolt 12 specifically

being implemented which is this idea of a reusable invoice without running like a btc pay server or something like that so you can imagine someone running a mobile app running a mobile lightning wallet taking that reusable qr code or reusable text string posting it wherever they want and be able to accept lightning donations from around the world without exposing their node public key or their ip address uh it will make it way easier to accept donations in a relatively private manner um without running an additional server additional web server like right now you can do it with btc pay server but uh especially if you're in like an authoritarian country it's it's very difficult to obtain and run a 24-7 server without doxing yourself, without putting yourself at risk.

So what you see with a lot of activists, like I was talking to Navalny's team, one of the leading activists in Russia when I was at the HRF event in Miami, they just put a fixed address because they're like, privacy is secondary. We're not going to run a server. We put it up. Putin knows exactly how much Bitcoin we have, how much we raised, when we spend it and that's fine with us uh because it's just easy it's easy for us to do and this is this is hopefully would make it much easier for them to do it in a relatively private way while also being able to accept smaller donations because of lightning um the second one is a stabilized lightning product a lot of activists around the world do not want to be

exposed to bitcoin's volatility obviously for us like sats are my stable coin um i don't really see a need to peg to USD. But for a lot of people, they would love to accept Bitcoin as a donation, but ultimately, they want to hold it in US dollars while they wait to spend it. And this proposal is something that has been very close to Gladstein's heart. He wants some kind of contract for difference type of situation on Lightning where there's a market where people can be going short or long. So there's no token involved, no tether or anything like that. But it evens out so if there's a bunch of people that want to go long bitcoin and a bunch of people that want to go short this lightning market will basically allow you uh to either peg to usd

or do the opposite yeah but point of clarification on the contract for difference in that contract somebody's one party's going long or short and the other party's looking for stability and then right yes but so i guess there's actually three right it's like one is long one is short and one is stability there's three potential uh positions you could take uh but you would have two you'd have two different contracts for somebody going short and one going long and both those contracts yeah would have somebody looking for stability it's like what some people do on like bitmex right where they create like the artificial stable contracts by doing your short and long position of equal size right and then it like levels out or it's not of

equal size there's some trick to it but anyway the idea is like a non-token based lightning enabled market where you're you're able to basically and what what gladstein envisions in his head is he wants to see like you open your lightning wallet on your phone and you like have a slider like 25 of it is in dollars or 100 of it's in dollars and you can just just do a slider and to the to the user they don't really know what's going on um like in the background they just know like, this $25 is in my wallet, and it's going to stay $25. So he wants the UX like kind of obfuscated, hidden from the user. Obviously, a lot of these people are using Tether currently. But Tether could blow up at any time. It's centralized. It's a massive

regulatory target. So it'd be nice if we had, you know, at least in the short term, while Bitcoin adoption increases and hopefully as adoption increases, volatility should reduce and it should really become one of the most stable assets in the world in terms of purchasing power stable and up.

The need for it will be less but in the short term, it could be a massive boon for people. Yeah. I mean, just go to UsefulToolips.org and read all the research that Matt Alborg has done in regards to having conversations with people

in emerging economies that leverage Bitcoin, they all really like the stability that stablecoins provide them in terms of exchange rate volatilities. Like it or love it, this is how people are

using this technology. And if they need it, who are we to say that they shouldn't be using this stuff? We should try to accommodate them via Bitcoin if we can. 100%. And then the The third and final one is a Charmian eCash Lightning implementation, a wallet that incorporates Charmian eCash's privacy properties, either federated to reduce custodial risk or not

federated, but still pass the bounty. This is already being worked on by Bitcoin developer Eric Sirion, who I've had on dispatch. Very promising. This is probably the most difficult bounty to complete of the three. Eric is already getting funding from Blockstream, which is also very good. But the idea is just a very simple mobile lightning wallet that gives you good privacy from the custodian of the wallet. So right now, it would look something like Wallet of Satoshi. but with wallet of satoshi you have to completely trust the privacy your privacy with the operator

wallet of satoshi in a charming e-cash setup you wouldn't have to trust them with your privacy you still have to trust them with your funds but if you added a federated model on top of that then you you would have basically like a multi-sig kind of situation where you have 15 custodians and and like seven of the 15 would have to collude to to take your money yes and you gladstein and bitcoin q a i believe had a really good discussion about that on twitter earlier this week correct yeah um the really beauty of it is like a lot of the ux issues of lightning are solved on mobile no channel management low fees uh easy ux uh if it's custodial but the main negative of custodial is they can take your money and they you have no

privacy. So if you add the Xiaomi and eCash aspect, then you get privacy. And if you add the federated aspect, you reduce the risk of custodianship. So you end up in like a wallet Satoshi plus plus plus situation, which is kind of a really great trade off balance, especially if it's smaller amounts of money. All of a sudden, using Bitcoin privately could be the cheapest and easiest way uh if you're willing to do that one trade-off which is custodial risk and that is mitigated to a degree because of the federation i would say significantly mitigated i mean the federation could be a massive amount right so right now marty you can't uh you can't do multi-sig Lightning. So what happens is the federation in the mint is holding the majority of the Bitcoin,

but the Lightning portion that actually allows you to pay any Lightning invoice and receive from any Lightning invoice is still a single SIG with custodial risk. But the idea is that portion, that Lightning portion is a very small amount. So if there's an exit scam there or some other issue uh the majority of funds are still safe in the federation um so that's the biggest thing but you could upgrade that presumably in the future if if it becomes easy to federate a lightning wallet through multisig uh which is the hope that's what a lot of people are obviously working towards patience freaks patience if you build it remember we're building it and if you build it they will come but all this stuff will come in time as i say a lot on this podcast

and in the newsletter we're not going to get all this out of the box at once it's going to take time to get there and it is happening all this has improved significantly over my time observing bitcoin and i think actually the pace of improvement specifically since the lightning network has has matured over the last three years is is increasing uh to a very impressive level one thing i have question uh just a question uh around the distribution of the bounties unanimous vote i thought that was interesting yeah unanimous vote of all nine board members yeah that's that's gonna be hard to get isn't it well so first of all a huge shout out to Jack Mauler's rock star on the rest of the strike team Gladstein for putting it all together anyone

who donated to the IndyCar for even making this possible in the first place um so so the way Open Sats is is designed um we actually first of all uh we got our 501c3 tax deductible uh yesterday or the day before yesterday so you can you'll be able to donate to Open Sats and receive a tax deduction if you're american i did not expect this to happen ben price did not expect this that we thought we were going to have to go back and forth with uh the u.s government to make this happen because hrf got their tax deductible status because uh they're a human rights organization so they just backdoored into bitcoin they were like we'll add a bitcoin fund and brink got their tax deductible thing because they're an education thing they're helping developers or whatever

everyone we talked to said there's no way that a bitcoin focused development fund on its own is going to get tax deductible status like you're going to have to really work for it you're going to have to constantly change the documents resend them back and like work with them but we got it i was amazed we got it hopefully we'll have public donations open soon but the whole idea of open satch was twofold right there's going to be direct projects listed so you can say like oh i want my project, my donation to go to mempool.space. And if you do that, instead of donating directly to mempool.space, you donate through us, you get a tax deduction, and we send 100% to mempool.space. The second method is a general fund, which I expect to be more popular. And so you can donate

Bitcoin or credit card to the general fund. So you can set up like a $50 reoccurring, like I want to weaponize the plebs. You set up a $50 reoccurring donation with credit card. We automatically stack it into Bitcoin, then put it into the general fund every month. And then that general fund gets deployed to different projects based on a majority of the nine-person board, not a unanimous. This is the long-winded reason I'm bringing it up. The reason we have a nine-person board of many different types of ride or die Bitcoiners is so we can have all these discussions. And then at the end of the day, if five decide to deploy it to a project, then it goes to that project. Unanimous was Gladstein's idea. I think in this case, it was really important for us that

we made sure the bounties were as specific as possible. So I think it won't really make that much of a difference whether or not it's unanimous or not. I think it'll be pretty obvious if someone completes the bounty um and then worse comes to worse i mean the all those funds are moving into the the hrf general fund regardless right so they're not going to go to waste it's not like oh we'll never reach a unanimous decision the year is 2030 and the funds are stuck um so we we want to that that's how that decision was raised on unanimous i like it i love it shout out to you human rights foundation strike team uh you and the team at open Sats. I know there's many people working

on that with you. Congrats on getting your 5013C certification or 5013C3 designation is probably the better word there. Big moves. Pump for you guys. Pump for Bitcoin. Pump for the

Lightning Network. I'm really excited if those three products come to market again that'd be massive. If any of the individual ones by themselves happen. Part of it too was like uh and i like kind of i echo gladstein's sentiments um he wanted it to be big things you know he it was it's supposed to be an uh an inspiring thing you know accomplish great tasks

and uh if even if they if the bounties don't get reached um hopefully it inspires a lot of builders out there to to think bigger love it fucking love it while we're on uh donations in the space disclaimer i'm on the board of this company cathedra announced a fifty thousand dollar donation to summer of bitcoin which was a program that i wasn't aware of until aj and drew hit me up asking my thoughts about it looked into it seems really cool it's a university it's a program that gets university students into Bitcoin and open source development generally summerofbitcoin.org is the website

it seems like a great way to get more individuals into Bitcoin development it's a spiral Bitcoin initiative I believe formerly Square Crypto or they worked with them maybe it's a separate initiative but Spiral worked with them because I talked to Steve Lee about it when he was on Dispatch.

Yeah, and I think, I thought the name of the general, I think it's Ed Veit, who started it. I thought he spun out of out of Chaincode Labs, but Maybe, but Spiral helped with it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think you're right. He spun out of Chaincode or Brink. I think it was Chaincode. Brink spun out of Chaincode as well. The summer Bitcoin, this is the second year it's happening. It happened last year as well. I know both SharedBits and mempool.space were very happy with their placement. So it's a really cool initiative.

It helps open source projects, open source Bitcoin companies, open source focused Bitcoin companies get developer talent. and it helps these young people from around the world get their foot in the door in new projects. So it's a really cool project. Yes, and that's run by Adi Shankara. So shout out Adi, Summer of Bitcoin, doing some great work. And while we're on the topic,

while we're discussing him, I don't know if you got to catch it yet, but Gladstein went on Glenn Greenwald's podcast and did an incredible job of putting forth... It came out? yeah it came out earlier this afternoon I actually finished listening to it right before we hopped on here

it was a really good episode I think he opened Glenn's eyes and hopefully Glenn's audience does he actually have audio feeds or is it on Rumble only I watched it on Rumble so that's how I watched it was it video or was it audio

it was video yeah I would imagine he syndicates it I think he has a partnership with Rumble or something like that though I'm not sure um i mean like i looked up rumble stats after he meant well first of all marty uh i'm very excited for glenn to come on tftc hopefully uh i i saw that so when i saw that

tweet of you asking him and him saying he was going to come on tftc um he said gladstein he interviewed gladstein and it was going to be on rumble so i started looking into rumble because I keep hearing about it, but it wasn't really on my radar. Rumble is a Canadian video host that's been around for a bunch of years now. I believe the number was this year, they went from 1.5 million to 30 million users. It's all based on YouTube censorship. so there's like a ton of there's a ton of uh online personalities and hosts and whatnot that use rumble as their main host now because they have better public censorship policies than youtube which i mean is a low bar but it's you know it's like a centralized company i don't think there's

any shit coin attached to it or anything um but yeah we we need to get on rumble we need to get on everything that we can uh we've got one strike on youtube we get three and we're gone um so car if you're i know you're listening got the strike on youtube we did we got it my bad dude that was no i mean it was it was content that that i was a part of so i'm just as culpable just whenever you have laser hotline yeah Because it was fire. It was fire. It was fire.

It was fire. Hey, yeah, we're not on YouTube right now. So maybe we can speak more freely than we otherwise would. We're going to speak freely anyway. We're not going to let YouTube dictate how we speak here. Yeah.

We'll just get banned. Talk shit about it. Yeah. Thank you. I'm excited that Glenn responded to this. I'm excited. I mean, he's

I mean he's inarguably inarguably like probably like the goat like him

Ty B and a couple others maybe are like the best journalists of our generation easily I mean he

Snowden Snowden leaks alone yeah so very very excited to talk with him very excited that he's

he himself is learning about Bitcoin trying to pique his interest there or Bitcoin's piquing his interest and he's trying to scratch that itch and I love to see

that he had Alex on to give the Bitcoin pitch and like I said I listened to it right before I hopped on here he did an incredible job yeah I mean I haven't even seen it I'm sure it's a fucking fire conversation

there's like there's no doubt in my mind that you put the two of those guys in a fucking conversation together and it's fantastic yeah so go check that out

gladstein's really like the perfect guy like we should just every single like would i like to be on rogan sure but like every single person that every single personality out there i would rather them interview gladstein like he's like the perfect front man for us like well let's put him on rogan he's with greenwald like everywhere i want gladstein to be everywhere yeah but why why can't all of us be on rogan jay we all can't but like gladstein should be there first like i is the priority we must protect gladstein at all costs let's get him let's get him in front of every camera possible i completely agree i completely agree i mean he is i mean how can you deny the human rights argument for bitcoin especially the way he speaks so eloquently like

i'm i'll just be dropping f-bombs left and right like he just nails it yeah and i'd be like like like, um, um, Joe, pass the joint, please. Go check it out. Shout out to Alex. Alex, thank you for all the incredible work you do on the content side, on the human rights side, and just advocacy outside of the Bitcoin bubble. And that's something I said at the beginning of the year

that I think we need to do. We should continue that in 2022 is, yes, the Bitcoin podcast circuit's incredible. There's incredible minds. There's incredible content. There's incredible discussions. But I do like seeing Bitcoiners get out and get on the Glenn Greenwald's, the shows of Glenn Greenwald and others to give the pitch to people outside of what can be an echo chamber. I love the echo chamber.

I don't think there's anything wrong with echo chambers, but I do think getting outside and trying to reach other audiences is important and effective. Guess what? Guess what? are we do we even live in a free country anymore no but

Bitcoin's gonna fix that guess what what we got a shout out a freak a freak herd thank you if they had time to buy

a shout out we got one Merry Christmas all to all the freaks in concentration camps this year stay strong we'll see you on the other side

with love Serpent Dove cheers Serpent Dove if any of you are listening from Um, if any of you are listening from a, uh, a modern day, uh, I'm not going to go as far as calm concentration camps, but a quarantine camp will go there. Uh, I hope you enjoyed the company. I mean, they're certainly camps in Australia.

Yeah. So those are private camps too. They're like run by private companies. Yeah. Oh. And I tweeted out earlier this week about the bill in New York. that was supposed to be voted on January 5th that would have allowed something like those Australian quarantine camps to come to New York State. Apparently, that bill got pulled from the floor. Thank God. So New Yorkers, we made a stink about that.

I'm not taking credit for it, but a bunch of people are making a stink about it. It was all Martin. Yeah, I think the powers that be at the state heard and pulled the bill from the floor. It will not be voted on. So as of right now, you don't have to worry about

quarantine camps in New York State, which is a win. We'll take wins where we can get them. Carl, we're on the rosier subjects. We can't pull that one up. That's a depressing name. Meanwhile, COVID doesn't exist in the South. No restrictions whatsoever.

None. Doesn't exist in South Jersey, dude. It's crazy being down here. The change in way of life 80 miles east of Philadelphia. Between Philly and South Jersey? Yeah. Specifically at the shore. At the shore, you haven't seen a mask yet.

But it's also like it's a summertime in the winter, right? Yeah, but there's like... My wife and I, we went to dinner last night closer to Atlantic City. and it was a packed restaurant. That's what I love to see, walking into a restaurant. This doesn't happen too often in Austin either. Walking in, none of the waitstaffs wearing masks.

The waitstaff thing is a big thing. Yeah, it pisses me off. There's so many classes. Yeah. If the waiter wants to wear the mask, then by all means, they should not get fired for wearing the mask. They should be able to do whatever the fuck

they want to do, but they all look fucking miserable because they've been wearing it for eight hours while working a service job um it's fucking ridiculous yeah so i was very happy to walk into our favorite restaurant down here last night and packed restaurant everybody was enjoying the holiday season the the wait staff looked happy and unencumbered by by onerous masks so um getting some joy down here and again like even in austin like that's not the case in every place um so So there are pockets throughout the country where rules are stricter and less strict than others.

Software updates. We got to wrap up soon here. My son's about to wake up from his nap and we've got to go to Cape May. BTC Pay Server version 1.3.7 has been released. On that note too, I saw Pavel next tweet out earlier today. There's going to be open source opportunities

outside of coding at BTC Pay. beginning in 2022. So they're looking for community managers, customer support, social media managers, and stuff like that. So if those are some of your core competencies and you've been looking to contribute

to Bitcoin open source, but you can't code, BTC Pay Server may have some opportunities in that regard in 2022. So that's a good thing to see. And from what I understand, Nicholas Dorier, does this update come with the big UI overhaul?

Or is that not coming for next year? they've been teasing a big UI overhaul that's supposed to significantly improve the UX I don't believe it's this update I think it is going to be an update I think we know if it was this update it'd be like in bold

yeah Rust Lightning version 0.0.104 has been released LNBits version 0.4.0 has been released Spectre DIY version 1.6.2 has been released Mercury Wallet version 0.5.1

has been released Simple Bitcoin Wallet, Matt's favorite wallet version 2.4.24 has been released and Hexa Wallet version 2.0.65 has been released Cheers As always, I don't think there's any

critical vulnerabilities or bugs that these new updates are The Mercury Wallet one is probably the most important one just because it's like so early that they are making relatively you know they're making changes often so like it's

still very much a beta product the updates for Mercury Wilder password verification bug fix, tor, control, error handling, and more efficient state chain info API support that sounds like something you should update yeah

you don't have to rush to update these maybe rush to update Mercury if you're running it. Basically, if you're using something like Mercury, you should be using it with small amount of funds and you should be constantly checking updates and GitHub issues and stuff like that because

when these early projects, these new projects, especially when they're trying something really novel like state change, you've got to be on top of that. Yes, yes you do. That's the thought process. Shout out to the Mercury Wall team and everybody working on state

change. It's a very... under a period second layer solution and scalability solution and privacy solution too. Is it a privacy solution? It's a massive privacy solution. It's basically like akin to coin swaps but off-chain.

Yeah. So you don't have to pay fees. We have one other topic. Right? Yeah, it's Blockstream funding Mempool, sponsoring Mempool. Yeah, this is great. Blockstream is sponsoring Mempool project. Mempool is going to have a separate liquid.network website where they're going to do all this liquid stuff and show liquid tokens and stuff like that. And they intentionally made it a separate website to keep Mempool pure. But it's good to see the support. This is how, if you want an open source project to integrate something, this is one of the ways to do it.

um but just to go back uh to mercury wallet while i remember um so one of the things that we're so mercury some guys from the mercury team will be speaking at bitcoin 2022 on the open source stage uh the general admission days originally we were going to just do the open source stage for the two ga days um two thousand person conference hall dedicated to open source development we've decided that we're going to open it for the industry day as well the first day and on the first day is going to be almost like a bit dev style uh a bit dev style day so like presumably if you do it correct but it's going to be harder to do a socratic seminar style we're going to try and find a balance because if there's like 500 people in this fucking room

It's going to be really difficult to do it Socratic style. But the point is, is the conversations, if we're successful in our creation of the conversations and are facilitating the conversations, like I should only be able to understand 10% of everything that's discussed. It's going to be like heavy, heavy technical conversation on that first day. And then the next two days will be more accessible conversation to a wider audience. um and one of the key aspects here is all those open source contributors who are eligible whether that's bitcoin core btc pay server the five lightning implementations they have free access

to that day as well so we're going to try and facilitate like a really heavy technical conversation day which i'm pretty excited about hell yeah shout out to uh bitcoin 2022 that is going to be on april 6th to the 9th in miami was this stuff happening before the 6th that you're just mentioning uh no 6th is industry day so that'll be the day the technical thing happened the technical conversations happen and then 7th and 8th are the ga days those are going to be having great conversations about open source projects on that stage and then the 9th is sound money fest which is going to be the first uh bitcoin powered music festival boss and if you're thinking about going we have a code tftc 10 off disclaimer we'll be getting like ref link

rev share on that so or use the code which cannot be mentioned yes if you know it um all right uh that's all we got you want to riff on anything quickly here before we wrap up no i know we want to keep it tight i love you marty i love you car i love you freaks merry christmas to everybody stay humble stack sets peace and love merry christmas to you if you're if you're celebrating christmas if you're not still enjoy your weekend enjoy your life enjoy your time on this earth it's precious it's a beautiful thing it's a miracle that we're here love all y'all peace and love okay