TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap #190: Sanctions and the fall of the dollar

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - biden executive order is a nothing burger - 600K azteco locations in Nigeria, azteco locations in Canada - ukraine buys military gear with cryptocurrencies directly - warren crafts bill targeting cryptocurrency in russia sanctions - coinbase on their compliance and surveillance protocol - ftx on their compliance and surveillance protocol - senators look to lock down russias gold reserves - credit suisse "bretton woods II" - new initiative to roll out mesh nets in ukraine - bisq v1.8.4 - twitter adds native Tor support - foundation devices teases new hardware and app - bitmex cofounder sam reed pleads guilty to bank secrecy violation - Bitcoin and U.S. National Security: An Assessment of Bitcoin as a Strategic Opportunity for the [United States](https://global-uploads.webflow.com/61d2416d1d63f07ecbfd010c/6227990b73b93e046dc55e2e_Bitcoin and U.S. National Security.pdf) - bitcoin and cuban embargo - secret surveillance program collects americans money transfer data - ministry of nodes: starting your bitcoin journey - Cathedra shareholder letter - odell coindesk interview on privacy Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off

we're going to win I didn't get to say that in the podcast but we're going to win tough times ahead but we're going to win don't you ever forget that freak this show was brought to you by good friends at Unchained Capital right down the hall from us here

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by our good friends at Brains. Unfortunate news. Breaking. Breaking. Hours ago. A little late to this one, but they had to cancel

the BMC 2022 conference. the EU apparently despite the fact that all this data is coming out that the vaccine is not as effective as previously thought and maybe detrimental to some people the EU has put in

travel policies that don't allow you to get to certain places if you don't have the jab so brains understanding that Bitcoin is about freedom to choose private property rights

bodies, your property you should have rights over that they don't want to force anybody attending the conference to have to make tough decisions in regards to the EU vaccine policies so they're just going to scrap the conference

altogether not force hard decisions or awkward conversations or people to do things. They simply do not want to do props to the Brains team. I think this is an admirable move by them. I know they were very excited to have all these Bitcoiners meeting in Prague in June,

but they're going to put principal over profit here. They're scrapping the BMC 2022. Hopefully this madness ends and sanity comes back to the world and those mandates are abolished at some point in the future, at which point I'm confident the BMC conference will happen.

I think that was redundant. BMC will happen. And you know what? Selfishly, I wasn't gonna be able to make it in June due to the arrival of my second child being imminent around that time. Selfishly, I'm sort of happy because now I'll be able to go.

silver lining I know the Brains team is really bummed about this so go download their auto-tuning firmware if you haven't already, Brains OS Plus it helps you stack more sats with your hash if you have an ASIC that is compatible with Brains OS Plus

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Go check it out. Brains for all your mining needs. They got slush pools. If you run Brains and put your hash in slush pool, you're going to get 0% pool fees.

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the interest associated with the loan if the Bitcoiner can't pay you back You're going to get the stats in that multi-sig escrow account at the end. Lend.HodlHodl.com. L-E-N-D dot H-O-D-L, H-O-D-L dot com. Last but not least, this rip was brought to you by our good friends at the Bitcoin 2022 conference. They had not had made the same hard decisions that the Brains team did.

And Bitcoiners will be gathering. The largest Bitcoin gathering in all the world. Not only the largest Bitcoin gathering, just the largest gathering ever, ever in Miami, South Beach, April 6th to the 9th. Six is industry day. If you're looking to climb up the industry, you're going to want to go to industry day. Seventh and eighth are general conference days. There's going to be a bunch of talks, a bunch of stages, a bunch of things going on.

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that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be but i think i'm going to start saying the number of the rabbit hole recap what number are we on 190 getting close to 200 we're 10 away 10 away unfortunately we won't be at 200 by conference day but never gonna live that down

I don't think hey you called 200k by conference day I called peak clown world we all make mistakes you see you got the mask mandate thing wrong too so they extended it on the airplane

I was like i was i was pissed off when i saw it but i also just like laughed because because of your prediction yeah if you haven't i was actually talking about talking about 200k by conference day i was just thinking about this the other day uh because rabbit hole recap was formally announced at bitcoin 2022 and i was thinking about my top call at bitcoin 2019 when we and i had everyone's stack and it was the it was at 13 000 and we didn't retake $13,000 for two years and everyone just gave me shit for it.

And meanwhile, that was three years ago and $13,000 just seems so fucking cheap. Right. Buy all the tops. That's what we'll say. That was a great... You posted the picture from that live

group. You look like a baby in that. No beard. Dude, fucking Bitcoin ages you, man. i'm like 60 years old now i mean the stash and the hat or it's you you're you're aging incredibly this is what i like to see you look like a seasoned boathouse casino dealer what was that that's what justin moon said who's the the riverboat casino dealer on the right

yes we've uh you can see i'm in a different spot in the room right now the studio is coming together on this end like we've mentioned in episodes past the supply chain issues have affected the the build out of of the studio here at the bitcoin commons in austin texas it's coming together though we're gonna have it ready for south by southwest next week i saw parker last night um super fucking excited for uh bit devs plus uh bitcoin takeover at Bitcoin Commons on the 17th and the 18th. Yeah, we're going to be in person next week doing this. Yeah, so what are we

doing for that? Let's start business on air. Like 1pm, we'll do it at the Commons on Thursday. Yeah, we have to figure it out because we have that other event that we have to do. At 3, right? So I guess like 12.30, we'll do it. Yeah, I would even give

us some cushion. So we'll do it at 12 CT? Yeah, give us three hours. We're going to be in person. Or do you want more cushion? What? I like 12. I like 12 Central, I think.

I think that'll be enough cushion. 12 Central next week, freaks. That is 1800 UTC. We will be together in person. Rip and Rabbit will recap. I still... But you should all, especially if you're in the Austin area,

you should come join us for BitDevs on the 17th and Bitcoin Takeover at Bitcoin Commons on the 18th. The agenda for Bitcoin Commons is fucking insane. Yes. The space for the Bitcoin Commons stuff is limited. And I will say, we love all you freaks, but Parker is trying to get non-Bitcoiners in to get educated about Bitcoin.

So buy your tickets now if you want to come. Yes. He has the open ticket on this Twitter thread. If you go to Parker Lewis's Twitter thread right now and go buy it, then you can come. And Parker was a little dismayed at the engagement this tweet got. He texted me and thought it was Shadowban because this tweet didn't blow up. I love that.

Everyone just assumes Shadowban as soon as they don't get engagement. Go blow it up, freaks. What a week. What a week. A lot has changed since last week. Blocks have been produced. Bitcoin has been sent. Sanctions have been levied.

war is waged on is the war still going did they come to like peace talks what's what happened yesterday the war is still going marty i figured marty's a gold bug now i'm not a gold bug we'll get to that we'll get to that i'm not a boomer marty gold bug i sold all my bitcoin on marty's recommendation just loaded into gold no don't don't lie to the freaks i never made a recommendation to buy gold meanwhile we uh we've just been focused on the wrong thing this whole time instead of being focused on bitcoin we should just been focused on nickel i've been joking around that at this pace uh we're going to change bitcoin 2022 to nickel 2022 yes i don't think you understand why we have we have the gold and the comics and nickel and silver on the list

that it's not like i'm trying to like be like gold's gonna pump it's very interesting i don't No, it was a FOMO tweet. No, it wasn't a FOMO tweet. I'm more interested in the plumbing behind the scenes and what's going on there. I'm hearing from a birdie in the gold world that what happened to Nick Lay on the LME is currently taking place with gold and silver on Comex.

I don't know. That could easily be a Peter Schiff tweet. We'll get into it. There's a lot to talk about there, but we have to get to Clark's dashboard first. The price of Bitcoin is currently $39,225. I'm never going to live that one down. One Cuck Buck is going to get you 2,549 sats.

We are currently sitting at a $744.5 billion market cap. We are at block height $726,741. Approaching $19 million Bitcoin. I mean, we're officially 20,467 Bitcoin being mined away from hitting 19 million. What's the significance of that? Nothing. It's just a nice round number.

We had a difficulty adjustment right before last week's show. Many blocks have been added to the ledger since then. We're currently 1,035 blocks away from the next adjustment. which is estimated to be on March 17th, 2022, and it's estimated to be a downward adjustment of 4.2% as of right now, and that's because blocks are coming in at 10 minutes and 27 seconds on average, which is 27 seconds above the 10-minute block target, block production target. We are seeing 1,441 transactions in Clark's mempool.

samurai unspent whirlpool capacity is over 4,400 Bitcoin sitting at 4,402.7 Bitcoin or 172.8 million cuck bucks worth of unspent value. Maybe we'll start on mining. It'll be interesting to see how increasing energy prices

and fuel prices affect the mining industry. I wonder if a lot of operations that are on-grid specifically are going to be feeling the pain and have their electricity provider increase their rates on them. Can't hear him. Can you hear him?

I muted myself. How the fuck did we go from negative $20 a barrel to $130 a barrel in like a year and a half. Central planning. Isn't that fucking insane? Isn't that fucking insane?

Like it needs to be said that how insane that fucking is. Talk about efficient markets. Super efficient. Central planning does things. It fucks up the pricing mechanism of the world. I could see miners being affected by this increased electricity price.

Maybe that's what we're seeing. Of course. That makes sense, right? Yeah. why wouldn't they energy goes up that's like their main input well that's like that and the actual cost of the machines right yeah

it'll be see I mean there's some people if things continue down the path that they've been going on the last two weeks people calling for $200 barrel and oil $300 oil things can get fucking intense I mean it's gonna fuck I gotta sell all

my gold and now I gotta buy oil do you want to start with that should we start with that what my little birdie tweet yeah your little birdie tweet so if you freaks remember

back around when when the price of oil went negative March April of 2020 around that time too there is actually if you want to go back and listen to the episode I recorded at Royce Bog

we talked about the bullion markets particularly the delivery of bullion between London and New York where two of the biggest bullion vaults exist and where a lot of the bullion trades

happen and they affect paper markets if things get out of whack back then in 2020. This is the craziness in March 2020 right? Yes, yes. back in April 2020. Yeah, back then

they changed. I don't know if you remember, but things were getting so insane behind the scenes that they changed some of the wording and some of the structure of one of the contracts in Comex, which I believe allowed them to just piggyback on the London

bullion market. Their vault, which basically, essentially Comex got bailed out. And it seems like there is similar problems arising at comex specifically this week there's apparently a large player many people on the internet are speculating speculating that jp morgan and i think there's data to confirm that it probably is them is trying to cover short positions so they're trying to buy bullion

whether it be silver or gold uh as desperately as possible so that they can um they can cover the margin on their short trades that they have out there and they're willing to pay there's rumors that they've been paying 10% over spot for bullion if you look at the March contract car I sent that

put that in the TFTC group as well or it's in this thread somewhere the Wall Street Silver tweet the March 2022 contract which which is supposed to come to an end. You've got to click the second tweet.

I did bad Twitter threading, so go down a little bit more. No, no, don't click that one. Click the one above it. I responded to the one above it twice by accident. Go down. Go down. That tweet.

Yeah, so if you look at this chart here, the March 2022 Silver Futures contract contract has gone absolutely a wall off the chart uh and see there's something going on oh fuck i gotta sell my oil for silver i'm not saying go buy gold or silver i'm just saying there there could be or nickel or nickel well so that's the thing like there there is certainly something happening in the metals markets where so nickel earlier this week was skyrocketing there was a massive short squeeze and I believe it was Comax, one of the exchanges

the physical the exchanges. Wasn't the London Merchantile Exchange? Yeah, it was London. So London stepped in and they basically bailed out and rug pulled nickel traders that day. They retroactively I believe in the middle of the day, so we're

not recognizing any trades that happened past 12 midnight the night before. So they were allowing people to trade throughout the day. people are making a shit ton of money and then like at some point in the afternoon they're like you know what actually we're not going to recognize any of those trades and so the pricing mechanism is completely fucked obviously these these the powers that be are stepping in and not

allowing free markets to have true price discovery in the metals markets right now who knows if they can keep plugging the dam obviously there's there was rumors that the bank of international settlements and even like the plunge protection team that that we have here in the united states have been stepping in trying to bandage over these precious metal markets and then even precious metals just metal markets in general and so i think again like i said in the tweet i'm not like saying go buy gold buy silver there's something structurally happening obviously you can see here the price isn't running or anything like that um but you're like top ticket right well that's the thing like i think that's the the aggressiveness with which uh there was a reaction to the zoom

car um i don't know i trust my source my birdie in the industry and was your source just on your podcast i'm not gonna not gonna um not going to uh i haven't listened to that episode yet i'm looking forward to it not going to give any indications one way or the other but again like i said in the second tweet in that thread just something look at comex this week there could be something going on my bet is if there is something going on somebody's just gonna push a old buy on the week somebody's gonna somebody's gonna print a bunch of money and paper over it but uh it does seem like there's some forces behind the scenes um how do you even buy nickel i've never done it you go to the store you buy something you get some change

they're still giving change out these days aren't they trying to say what aren't they trying to like abandon coins here well the actual like actual nickels only have 25 nickel in them yeah i went down the nickel rabbit hole a little bit what did you find what else did you find i told you i dumped all my bitcoin for nickel and then i dumped it for gold and then i dumped it for silver and now i'm in oil well would you can you at least concede that it's an interesting story if there is something structurally like i'm not like saying go buy any of these things just no yeah i mean it should be it should be interesting to see play out i think uh

we're obviously in interesting times that no one really knows what the fuck is going on so there's like craziness happening as was witnessed in the nickel market which is like traded like a complete shit coin but I will say that gold

bugs have been saying similar shit for the last like three decades so yeah I mean and if you listen to Larry Lepargo and this has been their theory come to defense of our brethren in the gold world who truly want sound money.

They may not agree with Bitcoin, and we definitely don't agree with gold, but we do have the common guiding star of sound money in the digital age. And I mean, this is their theory that the paper markets have been suppressing true price discovery

in these precious metals markets. And it would be interesting to see if that becomes laid bare at some point in the near future like matt said they've been saying this for decades my bet is again they'll be able to paper over it literally and figuratively uh and i don't know if they can't allow this type of shit to happen but who knows with what's going on the international stage there's rumors that they're not rumors the the sanctions that were just enacted on russia this week part of that was like people are calling for central banks that are

holding their physical gold outside of russia not to actually give it to them we're gonna rug pull them like we did afghanistan earlier this year uh and in venezuela in years past as well so and uh very interesting times did we lose him no I'm here I just my fucking internet is out here I was going to say you're green

so I've been on mobile I've been on mobile the whole time when my internet comes back I'll switch how's your internet I thought you got that hot fiber I do have that hot fiber but it's out they said it'll be up soon

we'll see I'm looking for my phone so I can get to the list. What do we have on the list? Do you have the list up? Ooh, executive order. Yeah. I mean, we prepared you freaks for this. If you came and listened to the show.

Absolutely nothing. Complete bullshit. That's what we said. That's what we've been saying for weeks now. There's been a looming specter of this executive order from the Biden administration for probably well over a month now. There was rumors when it first came out that yeah it was just going to be the biden administration calling for studies and that's

exactly what happened uh there were i think rep tom emmer actually he had an interesting thread if there was like any sort of subliminal not subliminal but if you're going to read between the lines and try to draw some conclusions it is interesting as there's no mention of decentralized crypto assets or ensuring that these are free and open source. I don't think they say Bitcoin once. No, they don't say Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies.

And then there's no other supported through a distributed ledger technology, but there's no sort of reinforcement of, hey, we're going to ensure that these systems remain free. But you've been saying, I mean, is this the

front run where they just set the stage here and then down the line when these studies come out that's when the real battle begins yeah i mean they gotta start somewhere right but uh to me this just reads like a bunch of buzzwords put on a piece of paper just to tell their constituents hey look we're paying attention to it we're doing tech things we're doing it we're doing it yeah and i actually i forget who said this earlier this week, but I think the pace at which the federal government is going to be able to move on this stuff is in our favor as Bitcoiners. I don't think they're going to be able to move fast enough to legislate outside of executive orders to actually perturb

the development of the open source project itself. With that being said, we'll certainly come after miners. And I do believe at some point in the future, they will try to make it impossible for you to get coins off an exchange and into a wallet you control. So that's one thing I've been beating the drum on this week. Do not be complacent about getting your Bitcoin into wallets that you control.

If you're out there, you're one of those people. Go download a wallet on your phone. Start testing. Get comfortable. Seek out other options. Seek out help. Do not be complacent. it's easier than you would expect yes

much easier literally download an app it creates private public key key pair for you very easy what do you think about the executive order anything else to add to that no I think it's not really even worth discussing further

just a bunch of bullshit we've got a lot of buzzwords a lot of buzzwords visa mastercard suspending operations in russia over the ukraine invasion evasion of ukraine and paypal and paypal and in all a lot of corporations it's not just these payment rails you've had we mentioned steam last week there's a number of others that have entered the fray throughout the last week including zoom we had duck duck goes founder come out and completely ruined the reputation of his company today by saying that they're gonna i still yeah that was so fucking sad man right so if any of you are unaware the ceo of duck duck go at yegg y-e-g-g on twitter

basically came out i mean duck duck go for anybody's unaware is supposed to be a a search engine that competes with google but is better than google because it actually gives you it doesn't try to censor results or or tune their algorithm to more privacy focused is the key it's more privacy focused and then also the algorithm is not fucking around with you yes until today uh like so many others i'm sickened by russia's invasion of ukraine i'm sickened by it as well in the gigantic humanitarian crisis it contribute continues to create hashtag i stand with Ukraine. At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates

to down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. Which is like, okay, now you're manipulating your algo. You're playing the great fact checker. The censorship game.

Let people get the information and discern for themselves. DuckDuckGo has been politicized. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I don't know of any other really good options. So we'll see. Hopefully some people recommend some good options. You know, I pretty much switched fully over to DuckDuckGo. I've liked it a lot lately. So this is definitely disappointing. Maybe they'll roll it back. i still think uh you know this is more than just sanctions right this is this idea it's like cancel culture mixed in it's modern cancel culture mixed into sanctions uh where

these companies are going above and beyond to essentially get like virtue signal points by cutting out the russian market and i think also like a secondary uh reason for it is that the russian market probably just isn't that large so they they think they can like if you like if you at like mastercard's revenue i bet you it's like single digit percentages is in russia like you wouldn't see them do this to china uh or like you see apple stores wouldn't close in china uh even though they do tons of human rights abuses because the market is so massive there but i still think the best example of just how insane all this is is that the fifa video game removed the russian team from it so you can't play with the russian team like that's just really i

i feel like encompasses like how absolutely fucking crazy it is well it's and i tweeted out earlier this morning it's like it's incredibly astonishing to watch a bunch of the corporations who were virtue signaling about the blm movement in the summer of 2020 when all those riots were going on and now maybe racism isn't the correct term but you have this woke capital corporatocracy coming out and being like overtly prejudiced is probably a better word against Russian citizens

not allowing them apparently it's okay to be prejudiced against a person if they have a certain nationality in the corporate world now obviously they're posturing like it's to hurt Putin and what he's

trying to do but it's just going to embolden him like this is what he's telling the russian people right now it's like look at these these evil westerners like you need to trust me like it's just pushing people closer to a dictator and then on top of that you're cutting off russian citizens with visa mastercard paypal specifically from their money and maybe some of them are trying to get out of the country maybe some of them are out of the country already and trying to do things and they can't do those things because um these corporations have decided to to be prejudiced against anybody who happens to be russia russian murky waters

yeah i mean obviously uh cutting people off uh from the internet is not um cutting people off from the global financial system cutting people off from access to the internet uh where we saw like namecheap pulling uh their domains um cloudflare actually which is a company i despise because they have a large amount of of uh they middleman by design a large amount of traffic on the internet um had a really good post on it about why they weren't canceling russian um accounts and then the reason was they were like now more than ever uh russian citizens need to have access to information that's outside of Kremlin control and outside of Russian control. So it's extremely short-sighted. Maybe some people will be angry at Putin for it within Russia,

but you got to imagine that there is a, now there's going to be like, if you're like 16 to 25 in Russia and you've just lost everything, like you're never going to forgive Western companies, right? Like they've just been fully radicalized. Yeah. Yeah. It's completely short-sighted. I I mean, everything that's going on with this whole situation from the federal government's reaction to the woke capital reaction is just completely short-sighted. There's literally no long-term thinking with these strategies. Unless it is, I mean, that's another theory that's going around

and everybody in the West and Russia are playing together to funnel us into this separate CBDC world. and this is just a conflict ignition to start that trend or accelerate that trend but yeah

because it's one thought that would lead me to believe that that may be true is like just how incompetent the reaction is across the board where it's like almost astonishingly idiotic it's like what the fuck is going on here

it's almost too good to be true yeah i mean i just wouldn't uh it should be interesting to see how everything plays out yeah uh being you said it last week larry lapard echoed it in the episode that we recorded on monday very very good rep but yeah i mean the u.s dollar is currently suffering a massive head wound. It got shot in the head via this whole situation. And we're going to see a mass bifurcation in the world. Ray Dalio is saying China is going to come up and they're going to be a reserve currency. But I don't think he's factoring Bitcoin into that equation at all in his thinking. And it's been weird. It seems before this whole Russian thing even broke out,

He was already trying to suck up to the Chinese government and the CCP with comments he was making publicly about not caring. I saw Larry recommended mandibles too. Yeah. What's our Matt O'Dell mandibles correlation update this week? There was a freak that says he stacks a thousand sats every time I say mandibles on the pod, so I wanted to make sure that he just stacked twice.

are the mandibles correlations getting eerier and eerier as time goes on yeah I mean I had a conversation with Parker yesterday at the Nashville Bitcoin meetup where I

asked him you know he has his gradually then suddenly series and I was like are we in the suddenly phase yet are we still in the gradually phase when does what does the suddenly phase look like and how scared should we be i think we may be in the suddenly phase bro uh i think that might be a peak clown world call

i don't know dude see the cpi print today yeah i mean let's talk about that what was it 7.9 percent 7.9 40 years highest in 40 years and underreported i believe the shelter numbers was something like 3.2 percent year on year and if you've looked at the housing market anywhere that's just an insultingly low number they're trying to put out

here I thought Kaylee was going to come in Kaylee hardest working woman at

Unchained she's crushing it here at the commons helping to set it up she can't hear this

maybe she'll listen later and hear it but back to don't sure what was

that said don't sure I won't I won't I would never shoot Kaylee

CPI 7.9% highest in four years uh last month was the highest in 40 years. So we're just getting,

last year, last month, excuse me, was 7%, I believe, this month, 7.9%. And it's only going to get worse from here with the sanctions going on. Russia's come out in the last week. They say, all right, anybody on our shit list, we're not going to export grains to you. We're not going to export natural gas.

We're not going to export fertilizer. We're not going to export palladium. you're cut off until 2023. Russia, at least right now, is posturing like they're not going to export any of their commodities

to people on their shit list. Europe, US, NATO countries, definitely on that shit list. And people are like, oh, they're only 2% of the global economy. Their global GDP, it doesn't matter. US doesn't have much direct trade. Their GDP is less than Texas, Marty.

Well, again, GDP doesn't matter. GDP in a financialized world is bullshit. Assets matter. I'm just saying that's pretty crazy. That's how financial... Their GDP is equivalent to Greece. Less than Texas. That was pre-war.

But they have all the assets and that's really what matters during all this. We're going to see. You said I wouldn't be surprised if my suddenly call does not turn out to be like my cloud world call. We're going to change the name the show to gold bug recap what i didn't mention gold at all why are you bringing gold bug but it's

i mean dude you're literally shutting that and so going back to that like yes russia two percent of gdp but they have at least ten percent of many of the main commodities in the world palladium wheat natural gas oil a number of things and yes even if we don't do direct trade with russia nickel too right nickel for any of those things what they're they're cutting off people who do direct trade with them for those things that's going to make the competition for those assets with the producers that we currently do buy them more fierce so it's going to drive up prices and then you have rising energy we're talking we've already talked about oil the cost of oil natural gas going up is going to make the cost for people producing things to go up and then

You're going to see a breakdown in the manufacturing sector because input prices are just going to get so high that it's not going to be profitable to actually build shit. And then you just have a cascading fucking shit show, which is maybe at the very beginning of the suddenly phase, which is heavy to think about and it's scary to think about. But be aware, freaks. This is what happens when you have incompetent people

trying to centrally plan economies across the world. And they are engaged in a proxy war where they're just dick-measuring against each other, not really caring about the citizens that are affected by their dick-measuring contest. Farger didn't think we were in the suddenly phase yet. He thought we were at the end of the gradual phase. And I tend to, I think that's,

I like tend to agree with that. I mean, I know that's like a little bit semantics. Isn't that the beginning of the suddenly, Isn't the end of the gradually phase the beginning of this? No, I think when the suddenly phase hits, it's going to fucking smack us in the fucking face. You know, it's going to be like, I don't think we've seen anything yet.

No. Also, now that I'm a precious metals expert, I've been told that palladium is a byproduct of nickel production. They're heavily correlated, supposedly. Yeah. If that helps the freaks at all. I don't know if that helps, but that's my random fact of the day and apparently that's russia has 11 of the global

oil supply 17 of the global nat gas supply 11 of the global pm production which is precious metals 11 of global wheat production and 10 of global uh lnd minerals industrial minerals production shout out to jeffy for throwing that stat in in the comments that's a material amount of assets It's like in a financialized world, 2% in GDP. How much does Texas have? I think we have. Jebby, look how much Texas has.

He's pulling that from a tweet that was posted. I think I retweeted it. So I don't know if he has that information at his fingertips, but it would be impressive if you do, Jebby. Shit's getting real. We're going to find out. What do you want as a society?

an economy with a hollowed out manufacturing base but sick fintech apps and social media apps or do you actually want an economy that is secure with raw materials and commodities and assets that actually

make this modern world that we live in possible I think we're going to have a lot of confrontation with these thoughts and ideas So how do the freaks prepare if this is the end of the gradual phase. Shake your local

rancher's hand. Go shake your neighbor's hand. If you don't know your neighbors, get to know your neighbors. Obviously stack sats. Get them off the exchange. And start building.

Guns land in Bitcoin. Yeah. And beef. secure your beef now yeah I don't want to turn into like a doomer podcast we kind of are

we're like how would we feel if we didn't say this stuff and it did happen would we be doing a disservice to the freaks what's something positive

100% what's the next what's the next positive list on the item item on the list wow the coin is up Oh, yeah, I like that. I have one. Twitter added Tor support finally, which is something that Facebook had done like in 2014. And what this means is that they have a native onion address now that you can use Twitter natively through Tor, which is diametrically different than their existing policy, which was that they were constantly flagging accounts that were accessing via the Tor clear net exit nodes.

so but what what their claim for this and it does make sense logically is that it allows russians to continue to have access to twitter even if the russian government on isps block it so um this is the kind of thing that we should be seeing western companies do rather than try and cut off russia they should be giving russian citizens more global access rather than less yes props where props are due shout out to twitter for doing this and jeffy fucking man with the fast fingertips texas had six and a half percent of global crude oil production in 2020 it's material amount for our national state that i live in uh happy to be in texas like i can say so that's that's about half of russia's production yes but you also have biden coming out this week

and these fucking incompetent assholes in the White House. Again, I don't want to get political, red versus blue, whatever, but it is objective. These people are fucking either stupid or malicious in terms of energy policy. They're coming out.

You have Pete Buttigieg, the CIA spook that is our transportation director. Mostly stupid. Come out and say people need to buy. This is why people, gas prices are going up. Go buy a Tesla. spend 60 grand on a Tesla and like that

electricity it's cheaper to charge your Tesla than it will be to fill your car but these idiots don't realize that natural gas prices are going up most of the things that power these Tesla power stations are natural gas I'm pretty sure the batteries

have nickel in them yeah they have nickel they have silver lithium do you know how much nickel is in a bitcoin asic no i can't tell you off the top of my head we're probably gonna look it up the uh yeah it's they're saying and then they're like they're trying to blame the oil and gas industry you have elizabeth warren coming out and saying that oil and gas producers are gouging uh gouging consumers by raising prices like these people don't understand

fundamental economic concepts, supply and demand, adjusting prices as the market changes, as supply dwindles and conditions change. I don't think the oil and gas industry is trying to, I know the oil and gas industry isn't trying to gouge consumers. They're reacting to market signals that they have to

if they actually want to be able to deliver shit to market and run businesses profitably. And Elizabeth Warren's saying she's going to have a profit clawback from oil and gas companies that are profiting from the rise in oil and gas prices, which is communistic. It doesn't make any sense.

And it's hypocritical. Are you going to take profit takebacks from Pfizer and Moderna based on the vaccination campaign that just went on? Why don't we do it like the whole COVID vaccination campaign was supposed to be a critical necessity for individuals should Pfizer and Moderna have been able to profit as much as they did off of that,

are you going to claw back those profits too? Where is the logical consistency? These people don't even know how to think. They have no critical thinking skills. They don't understand economics. They don't understand markets. They are destroying this country and putting the whole world

in a very precarious situation because they are fucking stupid and incompetent. They don't understand anything. They are sociopathic kleptocrats. They don't care about you. They don't give a fuck about you freaks. they're actively working to make your life worse off to make you more insecure

to make you more dependent on their incompetence it is time to walk away from these people I think we need to have a serious discussion about abolishing the federal government and just having states run things from here on out please, leave us alone federal government you're ruining everything can we get back to a positive topic

next topic I turned off my I only have this on so I can't see the list because I think it's hurting my internet connection coming in very clear now so this is Azteco news car if you could zoom in on that Azteco

has launched been on the move the last couple weeks they have 600,000 cash in locations in Nigeria they're in every every post office in canada brad mills uh did a nice demo he had a tweet thread he went to canada bought a thousand dollars worth of sats using as canada it's the post offices it's just six

thousand post offices yes i said it i said it are you listening no not really i'm exhausted i apologize come on man come on once a week we just need your attention for a couple hours once a week i'm exhausted you're just gonna take i'm gonna have you take the lead on this episode Okay. I'll take the lead. I'll step up. Yeah. So Azteco, I mean, shout out to Beauty on the team there and Mike and everybody who's been working too. I think Azteco has been around for a while. A lot of people have doubted that they'll ever go big. And the last few weeks specifically, they've come out swinging. They've been working behind the scenes, obviously, to set up an infrastructure for a massive launch and they've executed on that. and it's beautiful to see i mean brad mills was able to buy a thousand cuck bucks worth of or canadian cuck bucks worth of sats uh connect bucks connect bucks via vs techo no kyc no aml he just walked into government known post office like yeah i'm gonna get my bitcoin here so the way azteca works in these situations is you go to the azteca website um you print out a voucher

uh and then you take that printed out voucher to the pay point uh the merchant scans it you pay the merchant cash and then you receive an email with the voucher for you to uh sweep your bitcoin onto a withdraw your bitcoin into a self-custody wallet so the actual merchant doesn't really know you're buying bitcoin they just know that they're scanning this qr code it's like similar to like mobile phone vouchers um so i guess a lot of these merchants already support the mobile phone vouchers already support the gift card vouchers and um as techo just kind of uh latches on to that existing infrastructure so they don't have to actually roll out their own infrastructure yeah i do think the no kyc aspect is probably not going to last that long so i mean take advantage

of it while you can like as tech goes basically liability strategy is at least from my perspective seems to be they offload the liability onto the individual merchants um so it should be interesting to see how that plays out but you know hopefully i'd love to see more you know no kyc options so um i i wish them the best and hope it works out but regardless don't uh don't think you can necessarily count on this long term you should be FOMOing it well maybe in the western world I mean 600,000 like I'm more excited

about this in the developing world like Nigeria yeah the Nigerian one is big news yeah we're fucked here in the west Nigerian brothers and sisters I can run with it but Nigerian government doesn't like Bitcoin

yeah but they don't seem like the most organized over there either yeah definitely not But you did just have a long rant about the US government not being fully incompetent as well Yeah, that's true But Nigerians have proven to be

Nigerian citizens have proven to be very savvy Yeah, very resourceful So I think they'll find a way Didn't Nigerian government do like a full ban at one point or like close to a full ban on Bitcoin? It tried to I mean, I know it wasn't effective during the

The SARS protest, yeah. Which was a woman's protest, not SARS. Unrelated to the virus. Yes. Wasn't it police? It was anti-police? I think so, yeah. It was like a women's rights march, I think. From what I recall.

Good news, Bitcoin helping the Ukraine military, or Ukrainians buy military equipment. So the only reason I put this here was because i thought it was interesting that the army uh says that 40 of the military gear they bought they just bought with uh they said crypto not bitcoin but they bought with crypto directly rather than converting it which is just like i don't it's an interesting circular economy yeah thing yeah the arms dealers like yeah we'll take your we'll take your bitcoin yeah i wonder like how much of it like i would love to know what the breakdown is because they've

raised they raised eth they raised tether they raised bitcoin and then like the shit corners really came out i think justin's son gave them a bunch of tron and uh uh gavin uh gavin wood the one that had that yeah gavin wood gave him polka dot um so i wonder which ones they spent if it was like the usdt they spent or if it was bitcoin it doesn't really say i did see a breakdown of i I think Ether was the most donated Bitcoin. Second, Tether third, and the rest of the shit coins after that. I mean, Gavin Wood gave, I think,

$5 million worth of Polkadot to the Ukrainian army. But anyway, isn't that number way higher than you expected? That they spent 40% directly rather than converting it? Yeah, it was surprising. and like you said, it highlights the growing circular economy. More people, more merchants

are accepting Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. More people are willing to take it and hold it. I mean, is that surprising given what's going on? Maybe they had to because of all the sanctions

that were being levied at some point. you know they're buying it in the ukraine ukrainians are buying it so they're not sanctioned but uh there's probably there's millions of people around the world i had a conversation yesterday like there's just these compounding events you have the canadian trucker convoy trudeau freezing bank accounts there you roll that right into this where central banks across the world are like russia your accounts with us we're seizing all that money or freezing it and it's just you have example after example after example of the value prop of bitcoin and a distributed cash system it's like oh this is why it exists there's millions of

people around the world potentially billions waking up to and understanding more innately the value prop and utility that bitcoin provides and why we've been talking about it for years and why we think it's so important moving forward this is like bitcoin doesn't need a marketing team there's many people out there thinking that we need to be better marketers but there are no better bitcoin marketers than the tyrants and sociopathic elite of the world who are unable to keep themselves away from the button that controls other people's money yeah i mean water doesn't need marketing when people realize the need for bitcoin they'll they'll figure it out and they are all over the world

we mentioned it earlier elizabeth warren crafting a bill targeting cryptocurrency in uh in russian sanctions she's the worst man she's literally like on the wrong side of every fucking topic. Whenever she says something, you can just pretty much assume the opposite. It's a better course of action. How can the people of Massachusetts keep voting for this woman? She literally lied and told us all

she was Native American. I don't know, Marty. We have a lot of horrible politicians. That's true. She has no character. She's like the worst character. She's a bad person. Do we even live in a free country anymore? No.

US, UK, and EU govs are just better at cosplaying competence yeah it's true let's go to shout outs we've got good shout outs I missed a shout out two weeks ago I'm sorry for this the freak reached out to me I remember reading it

I thought I read it on there but we've got a revised shout out to make it more contemporary the other one was a bit stale Midwest Bitcoin meetup scene is crazy strong shout out to over 12 Bitcoin only meetups between five states michigan has detroit jackson and benton harbor ohio toledo columbus cincinnati

dayton and cleveland indiana has the indianapolis meetup kentucky has lexington and louisville and pennsylvania my home state has pittsburgh and philadelphia my home city i'm adding that color there if you or know friends and family in the midwest join us by finding these groups on meetup.com twitter matrix and bitcoin tv big love to everyone who joins and organizes these events and bless all the bbq we share stake in love truly grateful we could do it we couldn't do it without you shout out to everybody getting these meetups more meetups popping up this is bullish like to see more meetups let me pull i can love meetups i i love seeing how how everything is growing meetup wise all over the country all over the world like i said earlier we had

nashville bitcoiners yesterday uh it was fucking massive tons of people there vibes were high people came from all over different different states from all over the country we had people from texas there we had people from new york wyoming kentucky alabama shadow rocket city Bitcoiners in Huntsville. Just like an awesome island meetups. Off the record, no pictures, no recordings, as it should be.

Keep going to meetups, freaks. They're a great experience. Great experience all around. Austin BitDevs, next Thursday night going south by southwest. Be there or be square if you're in the city. Next shout out, you are a fucking moron. You often espouse

ideas that seem to be based on your somewhat newfound wealth, making you feel far more important and relevant than you could ever possibly be. You don't read as coming from a background of significance or worth mentioning. Where was that education from, Marty? Glad you have a little bit of money. I'm sure it's a lot to you. Maybe just shut the fuck up though. I'll be unsubscribing, cunt. Just kidding. I fucking love y'all. Never change. You keep doing what you do. Really appreciate the alternative perspectives from london paul and matt mazingtious important reminder that as much as we distrust our own leaders that does not mean we shouldn't recognize propaganda from it comes at us from all angles

stay vigilant freaks david agree there that's what you're just bullshitting on twitter what do you mean that's the clip you posted on twitter right where's this someone someone aped that one someone that first part that you read that first part you read that was an email I got in response to an event someone rewrote it in the shout out got it

I posted that because I just thought I truly thought it was hilarious I get hate mail all the time I thought this one particularly was fun I think the added the added unsubscribing cunt was hilarious this guy just mirrored that it was the exact same wording

yeah yeah a joke well shout out dave thank you thank you david also uh before i forget uh 6102 bitcoin our boy 6102 he's still out there he's just not on twitter um he has a bitcoin meetups page to bitcoin-only.com slash meetups so if you want to look for a good solid bitcoin meetup in your area go to that website bitcoin-only.com slash meetups and if you don't see one, consider starting one. Got to start somewhere. Start. Start them.

We want Bitcoin meetups everywhere. Teach people how to download wallets and send Bitcoin off the exchange. Or to buy Bitcoin off without an exchange. Matt, I'm going to let you take this one. This is one of your favorite subjects. How come you don't set up an Urbit group for the freaks? Because

Urbit's a shitcoin. I knew. I knew he was going to say it. I have an an Urbit account. An Urbit planet. I like the Urbit team. They're building Bitcoin stuff there.

I think it's an interesting project. The planets are basically NFTs and they're pre-mined NFTs, right? I think so, yeah. Namespaces is what they describe them as. I think

many in the Urbit project regret the way they did the namespace. Umbral just added Urbit. Yeah. Yeah, I saw that. I have a lot of respect for the Urbit team. Do you ever use Urbit?

I haven't in a while, honestly, if I'm being honest. But I have before in the past. I mean, it is a cool concept. And they're trying to do something similar like Start9 Labs with their Embassy Suite, just taking a completely different approach. I think it's completely different than Start9 or Umbral. I mean the it is

but I think the goal the end goal is similar where they want people owning their data and their compute on their own machines their own hardware gotta read the shout outs I didn't expect to talk about but we've got you've had you've had urban shows on the pod

we did bitcoin sign guys a big big urban guys coming he showed it as well but didn't you have like someone else from the Urbit team on I don't think so I did something for them last summer when they announced their Bitcoin wallet

integration they built their own Bitcoin wallet integrated into Urbit and I participated in that like interviewed them for their own showcase I'm going to get hate mail over that you gotta read the shoutouts the Erbit stuff

I mean I just witnessed you defending a shitcoin so I think it's an interesting god damn it how many shitcoins is Marty gonna shill this episode he's already shilled oil and gold nickel

I didn't shill Erbit somebody paid for a shoutout wheat they're all hey they're all outperforming bitcoin right now dude uh i it's true i mean look if you're not pricing your bitcoin to nickel your short nickel it is weird the bitcoin's been in this weird consolidation phase for quite some time and it's great stocking stacking opportunity so take advantage of it while it's still last who knows

it could be better stacking opportunities in the future I have no idea which way the price is

going and when but it's an observation retrospective on the price consolidation

we seem to be in for months now interesting FTX on their compliance and surveillance protocol

this is what do you think about this you took a screenshot you shared it in a tweet

this was crazy so both FTX and coinbase are scared about uh being labeled by like elizabeth warren and others as enabling sanctions sanctions evasion so for the first time like these companies when they do their like kyc aml compliance and surveillance measures they almost never talk about their protocols publicly right so the fact that they came out and just like these are things that we've we we know that they do already that is often speculated that is often talked about but to actually hear it

directly from their mouths um their their policies and how they do it i think is a very unique situation they almost never talk about this stuff publicly but they feel like their backs are against the wall so they want they want everyone to know like how great they are on at spying on their users and controlling their users um you know my internet is as i said is is not great because i'm on mobile right now uh car you want to pull up the ftx one marty what i'd like you to do is can you just read this thread to the freaks on the podcast feed can you uh can you zoom in please car all right so it starts out how crypto exchanges enforce u.s sanctions one we collect identifying information of every user including name date date of birth phone number social

security number and photo ID. We cross-check the info against government databases to ensure veracity. For example, name matches social security number. If we can't verify an identity, the user is rejected and prohibited from trading. Again, this is Brett Harrison from FTX. If a user's identity is fully verified, we then check the name against all sanctions list and watch lists, including Treasury's OFAC list, the Department of Justice's FBI wanted list, and the UN's consolidated sanctions list if found users rejected and prohibited from trading. We monitor the user's fiat transactions. If we detect a deposit is coming from or a withdrawal is going to a sanctioned bank or other blacklisted source, we block the user's activity. We monitor the

users' crypto deposits, withdrawals. I can't say that word. Using on-chain risk analysis and transaction monitoring tools such as at TRM Labs. First time I'm hearing that one. We use the same transaction monitoring tools the government agencies use. Continued, these tools have databases of known sanctioned addresses, heuristics that determine geographic locations, and machine learning algos that identify suspicious patterns and transfer histories. If we detect suspicious activity, we block the user from moving assets. Along with the above methods, we are in continuous productive dialogue with government regulators and law enforcement and update our procedures based on their instruction.

Crypto exchanges have extremely advanced technology and effective procedures for enforcing AML and sanctions. recent public assertions that crypto is an effective means of evading sanctions due to the lack of industry regulation are without factual support and thread wow thanks for reading it they have us all pretty pretty owned here i have nothing to say except brett nailed it yeah car we pull up at ronin dojo i think it's important after reading that thread from these cucked exchanges that we read and the clean base presser like i think if you press ctrl f and type and share share with government they said they

said like so many times how much information they share with the government over and over again not really lying yes that right there car that that photo i just have a cypherpunk manifesto yeah so uh everyone is talking about joe biden's executive order on crypto and it's the 29th anniversary of eric hughes's famous work a cypherpunks manifesto a timeless piece that is more relevant than ever and considering we just read that thread from brett harrison the compliance officer at ftx i think it's important to counteract it with this cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography for encryption is fundamentally a private act the act of encryption in fact removes information from the public realm even laws against

cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border in the arm of its violence these are cypherpunk technologies everyone should go read the cypherpunk manifesto if they have and it's a short read it's like a page um but it's more prescient and important than ever um and i would just say like based on these comments i'm seeing coming from the freaks i just want to be absolutely clear here like yes ftx and coinbase laid out their policies and how they enforce them and their surveillance measures and coinbase specifically talks about their own in-house surveillance tool and how it's so advanced and it's best on the market and they sell that directly to the government and coinbase talked about how they use that tool to basically

determine other people's identities that are not coinbase users um it's important to keep in mind here that pretty much every single regulated bitcoin company is doing these same things or similar things um so this is not unique to ftx and coinbase no this gets into an interesting discussion too like why like we need to abolish the bank secrecy act again these companies are tell it to sam reed sam reed yeah yeah right so sam real founder good mechs just put pled guilty to uh bank secrecy violation yes thank you the bank like so let's get into any bitmex did do you think bitmex materially harmed any of their customers again so obviously some customers has lost a lot of money.

Well, maybe they did, but not for the reasons the government said. Yeah. So this is actually... Like they had... There was some like questionable liquidation scenarios

and trading against their users. And with the BitMEX insurance fund just going higher and higher and higher as they were doing it. But definitely not for these reasons. No. But I tweeted out yesterday, we're going to destroy ESG

and then we're going to abolish the Bank Secrecy Act. The Bank Secrecy... This is like we need to get a movement behind this The Bank Secrecy Act enacted by Richard Nixon in the 70s has just thrust a dragnet surveillance system over the financial system. You can't operate as a regulated entity on the global stage anymore.

This Bank Secrecy Act has forced countries and regulators all around the world to adjust their regulations and data collection policies. And it all stems from this act that, again, does not really do anything to perturb criminals from actually enacting the crimes that they want to commit. It's tied very closely to the drug war, which has been an abject failure for a century now, over a century. And the Bank Secrecy Act needs to be abolished. That's where a lot of these KYC AML regulations stem from, is this act specifically. It's time to begin creating a fervor around this particular subject and being more vocal about it. This act is harming more individuals than it is helping prevent crimes.

It has erected supranational entities like the Financial Action Task Force and OFAC, which again are forcing these data collection policies on industry players that is putting people in harm's way. And it's, it's, it's perturbing the free market. It's increasing compliance costs and adding a bunch of OPEX to, to companies that could be better allocated towards more productive endeavors. It's, it's time to begin forcing the conversation of abolishing the Bank Secrecy Act in the public eye. like people talk about people being one issue voters on bitcoin like i would like i think i would take a i think a one issue vote stance on abolishing the bank secrecy act it is definitely a tall order and not going to be easy but you have to start somewhere we should start highlighting that the bank secrecy act is detrimental to human flourishing yeah i mean i missed a little bit of that because i was closing the door over there uh that my dog opened um but uh i the general premise is the bank secrecy act uh basically

criminal criminalizes it operates under the assumption that financial privacy is inherently criminal and i think that's an anti-american assumption and obviously it creates a massive regulatory burden and cost uh for businesses that do have to comply with it yes that's a good segment so i my internet just came back so i might pause for a second i'm just going to switch it back all right well um well while he's switching back if you're watching the live stream you can see uh on my block clock right here we're at block 726 746 and if you look up above me uh i can't see it anymore it was block height 719 300 that is when the bitcoin commons was established shout out to tyler um from unchained for for getting the sign in the commons he's also the gentleman

responsible for the the lead into the show here if you're not paying attention you probably should be internet good yes sir I was going to say that that Bank Secrecy Act topic is a good segue into the Coindesk piece that about you and

your fight for privacy in the digital age it's a very good piece thank you I did that interview late January before all this other shit went down just for what it's worth but yeah everyone should go read it it was a good interview

I appreciate Daniel who did the interview what is the one message you hope people take away from this interview privacy is important and we should prioritize it and financial privacy is not a crime and I do not support money laundering you want to explain the last comment

no I just don't support money laundering neither do I we do not support money laundering here at TFTC at RHR anywhere like this idea that like if if like people use cash all the time financial privacy cash has extremely good privacy guarantees we should have the same privacy guarantees if you're using digital money digital cash and that should not be considered criminal behavior by itself

uh criminals will also use similar tools um you can police them with good old-fashioned police work just like you've always done in the past uh in a cash-based economy and that's just like completely hypocritical too i think the people at the top who are enacting these laws i mean we've seen the insider trading on capitol hill we know that hunter biden has a financial stake in gazprom which is a big player in the the situation unfolding in russia and ukraine we We know that Joe Biden has financial ties to some of these companies. The big guy, you know, politicians throughout time. These people don't follow their own laws that they write and force onto the rest of us.

They are abject hypocrites. And again, they are detrimental to human flourishing and a quality of life on this planet. They do not care about you. They do not give a fuck about you. These laws do not protect you. They make you worse off and they make you a slave in the digital age. This is all the Bank Secrecy Act and everything that has stemmed from it has done. It has erected a digital panopticon that you're being continually herded into and you're told

it's to protect you. It's to protect you. We're here for your protection, but it's really to enslave you. And unless you begin fighting back, speaking up about it and adopting Bitcoin and holding it yourself, you're going to become a slave in the digital age. It's happening. right before your eyes are you going to fight back are you going to sit there and let them do it to you you have autonomy do you have freedom not right now you can get it and it's

important it's important to realize that's not just governments it's governments working hand in hand with corporations that are monetizing us um like we're essentially like data data cattle literal fascism and the convergence of the state and the technocracy corporations is how mussolini defined fascism we live in a fascist world let's talk about fascist state individual feeling people like putin's a dictator medora's bad we didn't like saddam hussein it's everywhere fascism is here in the united states as well it's just takes a different wears a different mask and it looks a bit more polished and uh less abrasive but there are nuances there yes there are but like we could not have this podcast under saddam hussein's rule

no but we'd already be in the gulag this podcast is they're trying to cancel it so i mean i would not i think there's a false equivalency just be well we're on the path towards that would you would you deny that like i don't even think we could have this podcast uh in russia no but we definitely couldn't have this podcast in venezuela they want to get there you met they're they're pushing us towards that and you either talk about it now or we are not allowed to talk about it when it finally gets to that point and we're we're playing checkers in the gulag wonder when we're gonna get our next we'll be playing chess checkers is they no they don't know they don't want you they want you dumb you got to play checkers they're not

I'm going to allow you to play chess. You get to play checkers once a day between your bug patties. We already talked about a senator who's looking to lock down Russia's gold. Again, just forcing them away from dollar hegemony. The dollar is dead. Again, we'll look back in history

and we'll pinpoint the last two weeks as the official death of the dollar as the world reserve currency. Zoltan who's a much vaunted is the word I'm looking for analyst from Credit Suisse who talks about global currency

markets and bond markets he came out with a piece essentially saying that the dollar is dead there's no turning back from the events of the last two weeks we're going to have Bretton Woods 2 essentially where the world is going to

Bretton Woods 3 excuse me where the world is going to begin deciding what is the next world reserve currency what is the the landscape of the currency markets the international currency markets look like now that the us dollar is not the reserve currency he mentioned bitcoin at the end of this letter if this is straight up the mandible scenario on this this piece yeah i mean we you cannot you cannot operate moving forward under the assumptions uh that that we were just weeks ago in terms of global currency, bond, commodities, markets. Everything has changed.

I thought it was interesting. A couple of takeaways from this piece. First of all, he talks about commodity-backed currencies, whether that's gold or another commodity or a basket of commodities. At the end, he mentions Bitcoin. And he says the exact words were... My car is scrolling really slowly.

Up, up, up. The exact words were... Bitcoin. if it still exists then we'll probably benefit from all of this which so the the thing i wanted to say here is first of all it's crazy that bitcoin is even part of this conversation um just shows how far we've come and how mature it is that it's actually like on the macro uh it's as part of the macro conversation the second part is if it still exists then and like that is that's our alpha right there like most people that are paying attention to this shit

do not think Bitcoin has what it takes to still exist. And I expect Bitcoin to completely outlive us. So if we are correct here, that is our alpha. Our alpha is that the overwhelming majority of money managers and people that have money to deploy have not deployed into Bitcoin yet. And that is to our advantage. That is to our advantage, I agree.

But we could also increase our alpha and increase the probability that Bitcoin still exists when this is all said and done, get your coins off the exchanges, learn how to run a node. If you're a miner, try to granularly distribute your hash rate more, geographically distribute it.

We can bolster the network to increase the probability of Bitcoin's success. And the first thing you can do is get your coins off an exchange, not let the supply of Bitcoin get somewhat centralized in the hands of these exchanges that are easily co-optable by the government.

Avoid KYC. Learn privacy best practices. Hold your own keys. Use your own node. What do we got next? Oh, I like this. New initiative to roll out mesh nets in Ukraine. So they're

Lola Lola Leitz. who's a privacy cypherpunk enthusiast and she covers a lot of what's going on she's a lightning developer and the lightning developer has a thread about building a meshnet

in Ukraine Starlink's involved there's an explanation before we dive into the particulars of the meshnet why are we using Knitter now? what is the Knitter? Knitter's a non-tracking Twitter like if you just take

any twitter twitter link and you put knitter.net in it uh where twitter.com is the link will show up without tracking without signing now like twitter is doing like if you don't have a twitter account and you click a twitter link um on desktop it'll like ask you to sign in they won't show you the actual tweet so not only they're tracking it but they're like locking it down um so knitter gets around that um lola is awesome um i love her content i appreciate her work and uh so the the guys at lnp bp standards association are basically running a fundraiser in bitcoin um so that they can deploy uh mesh nets across ukraine because a lot of the internet's cut out in ukraine right now yes as you can see if you scroll down just a little bit car there's

There's the NetBlocks chart that shows that internet capacity fell by 50%, what looks to be like 50% at some point. Over the last week, props where props are due to Elon Musk. I know we shit on him for Tesla and subsidies and the LARPing, but Starlink is very interesting. SpaceX is very interesting. And he sent a bunch of Starlink receivers to Ukraine, and they're deploying those.

and it is good to see you can route around the state with these new ways of accessing the internet and so props for props are due with that being said too, now props for props are due

and the ESG thing, you had Mark Andreessen who's the general partner at A16Z which is a crypto they have crypto funds but they're VC and a lot they've been posturing against proof of work and to cater to esg narratives in the past

mark andreason's become like a very anti-esg over the last couple weeks due to the obvious shortcomings of our energy infrastructure caused by by that movement elon musk even came out against ESG and its craziness. I think he was referencing specifically the fact that arms dealers are going to be positive from an ESG perspective because they're supporting Ukraine.

And it's just funny to see all these LARPers come out of the woodwork and try to save face when it becomes obvious that this stuff is insane. ESG is completely communistic. It is completely nonsensical. It doesn't make sense.

it is not profitable it will not usher in a a utopia which it hopes to do is nothing more than a marketing scheme for middlemen to scam more fees via funds that that are able to trade at a premium because they get this certification which is completely stupid if you're in the bitcoin industry specifically bitcoin miners stop catering to esg you look like an idiot you look like a cuck stop it your dog's always like barking during the show

I know and the door is closed too I think she knows when I'm recording does she want to come on and talk she is right now cameo do we only have one software update this week uh yeah

BISC version 1.8.4 I downloaded the Zeus wallet too on iOS it's so sexy the new fucking UI is so fucking nice shout out to Evan and team you guys have made a bang up app

there's pretty much no other mobile wallet that is that comes close to Zeus in terms of using it with your own note at home. I use Zeus all the time. It's fucking fire. Yeah.

Yeah. What were you using before that, Zap? Yeah, which I shouldn't have been doing. But BISC v1.8.4 automatically deletes sensitive trade data after a trade is completed.

It's a big change. Pretty big upgrade there. It's good to see. delete that data what do we got next there's a big list big list this week

Foundation Devices teases their new hardware and app unveiling Passport Batch 2 and Envoy mobile app with Batch 2 and Envoy we will build an intuitive and highly secure Bitcoin self-custody experience you're beyond excited to share all the details with you today

I'm going to link to that I'm in contact with Zach. Zach, I hear your response. We will schedule a call to talk about what you guys are building. Have you tested this out? It's not shipped yet.

Have you tested out the first version? Yeah, I have one. What are your thoughts on it? It feels nice in the hand. i don't use it to store any bitcoin i uh this this the new model looks it looks sexy at least the renders or pictures or whatever those are the app is looks interesting supposedly it's going to be open source gpl hasn't been

code hasn't been released yet um it's more of like uh i guess i guess the mobile app is like a single sig um it's a single sig wallet plus you can use it to set up your foundation device your passport um tour it's tour by default if you use their node and servers or you can connect to your own servers um what else uh they made it cheaper than the last one the last one was pretty expensive and uh cheaper thinner lighter the um supposedly they're still using the same secure element and i've heard some some shit about that secure element being compromised but we'll see i i have no details and uh i look forward to getting my hands on this one I'm sorry I got a message

but yeah this isn't shipped yet it's pre-order and Envoy app isn't shipped yet either beware I guess it's going to be $1.99 pre-order and then it goes up to $2.29 that hardware Bitcoin and US national security and assessment of Bitcoin

as a strategic opportunity for the United States. Actually had the pleasure of meeting Matthew Pines last night at a Galaxy Digital event here in Austin. We had a great conversation. Really good dude. Yeah, Pines is great. Really smart. Yeah.

He knows his shit. It's interesting how they're framing. How he described how they're trying to frame this stuff on Capitol Hill. Last week I said we talked about and we mentioned earlier with the exchanges is posturing like it doesn't help evade sanctions but again like it does if you do it correctly

it just takes one transaction to prove that wrong however i do agree like it is bitcoin is a matter of national security it is becoming glaringly obvious that the u.s status as global reserve currency is completely evaporating in front of our eyes we're going to need to as a country transition to something else and do you want to transition to a cbdc do you want to transition to a digital one a digital ruble gold back ruble go back gold back you want no uh how could you counter punch the the countries that are political sphere or war machine sphere views as adversaries how do you how if you actually want to throw a wrench in their plans, but adopting Bitcoin is actually the smartest move you can make to throw a wrench in

the plans of China and Russia trying to create their own gold-backed digital currency or whatever they're trying to usher the world into as the US dollar loses its reserve currency status of the world. If you really wanted to make a bold move, you would encourage Bitcoin adoption by American citizens and encourage industry to to grow around the bitcoin protocol here in the united states yeah i mean that reminds me uh just because cbdc's are topic of conversation um and it was a topic on the executive order as well from biden that like this idea that like what makes bitcoin special is the fact that it's digital is it's just completely misguided like these cbdc's don't change anything from a fiat point of view it's the same trust issues it's the same fiat issues

that we have with the current systems um if if anything in a lot of ways it makes it worse because it adds easier easier seizures easier surveillance um easier uh easier uh debasement the currency so yeah so this whole idea that cbdc's can ever compete with bitcoin they can't by design because the whole point of a cbdc is that they're controlled by a centralized party the central bank hence the cb part of dc yes digital enslavement tools that's what a cbdc is i mean they've come out actually majid who was on the rogan podcast he actually quote tweeted one of my cbdc tweets from like the summer of 2021 which was a video of augustin carson's the head of the bank of international settlements coming out and saying exactly what they want

to do with the cb like these people are telling you what they want to do with these cbdcs which is granularly control you make you a digital slave they don't like that they don't have control how people spend a hundred dollar bill they want to you realize everyone's already a digital slave right yes i mentioned that earlier there's ways out now like a sleigh is we have a way to get off uh this digital facebook's digital enslavement twitter's digital enslavement iphones are digital enslavement google's digital enslavement amazon's digital enslavement we have ways out there's degrees of that enslavement and we have ways out bitcoin is one of them that's why we're sitting here talking about it we have ways out now if we don't act they may not be there in the future

they're going to be very hard to access in the future um yeah uh what else do we have here how to buy earn and spend kyc free bitcoin fuck you Ty postage is our digital enslavement Ty was here last week Ty was here love you Ty

this is an article by Anarchio Crypto how to buy, earn, spend KYC, Bitcoin, and Monero without ID or a bank account so I just this is a really good write up people should check it out sometimes I just put like good write ups

on the bottom that we don't even really need to talk about um like i put one also ministry of nodes starting your bitcoin journey our boy our boys katan and stefan over at ministry of nodes put out a really good piece anarcho crypto put out a really good piece so go check those out the cathedral bitcoin team put out a really good shareholder letter this week just yeah but i figured we'd talk about that okay i thought you're just throwing that out to you i didn't intentionally uh jump i intentionally jumped over it because i figured we'd have a conversation about it they it was a really great piece and you're on the cathedral team well done i mean i can't take any credit for it other than finding aj and drew um yeah so aj and drew

have been working on the shareholder letter for some time and it's i think it's biased obviously But I also think it's incredibly well done. They paint the picture of what they want to build cathedra into. They believe that sound money and energy abundance in the digital age is an imperative. They have very critical commentary on the history of monetary and energy policy in the United States over the last five decades specifically. They believe that the Fed has destroyed our money and that ill informed energy policy is making us less secure as a nation bitcoin is a tool and a vehicle which could help us in both areas make it make monetary policy better by ushering in a in a political sound distributed monetary system that via proof of

mining incentivizes the production and proliferation of abundant and cheap energy sources. And I really like what they did in this piece, particularly by framing it. We have two mindsets that we can decide to go down. We can be Malthusian, which believes that humans are bad and there should be less of us and we should use less and not harness our ingenuity and innovation to make the world a better place. We should just kill ourselves and limit the amount of people that live on the planet. This dude literally believed this. Thomas Malthus was an economist in the 1700s who literally thought you should raise food prices on poor people so they couldn't eat and they would die. And then we had the Promethean view of the future, which doesn't see human

flourishing as a zero to negative sum game, but a positive sum game where we're able to actually We use our resources that we have at our fingertips to become more productive and to increase the quality of life for everyone. And we can support more people. We can figure out a way to flourish on this planet as the population grows. That's what future do you want?

Do you want to be a Malthusian who believes that humans are bad, that we should die off? Or do you want to be a Promethean believing that we're incredible we can do really cool things and we can make the world a better place and that we have the intellect the capacity and the ability to make the world an awesome place that's what cathedra wants to do we're going to go try to make that happen and bitcoin and energy are very important on on making that that view of the future materialize so i'm very pumped to be a

part of the cathedral team on the board there AJ and Drew are really fucking smart as you may be able to

tell by reading this letter they're very passionate they're young they're hungry and they love those

guys yeah shout out to shout out to them and great great shareholder letter I don't I

don't usually read shareholder letters but that was a good one hey yeah go I was gonna

say we're just trying to communicate with our shareholders here Yeah, I know, but I'm not a shareholder and I read the letter, which I was glad I read it. It was very good.

I have two pieces here. One on Bitcoin and the Cuban embargo written by this Bitcoin founder in Cuba who's going to be speaking at Bitcoin 2022, I thought it was a really interesting piece. We talk a lot about Russia and Canada and Ukraine, but the Cuban people have been suffering under embargo for many, many years, decades, and similar situation for them where they can't use traditional financial rails in terms of American companies and Bitcoin gives them an option gives them a an option where there is no

other option so love to see it I suggest everyone go read that and then there's another one on Afghans right yeah this one's interesting did you see this one I'm not ready yet no it doesn't actually talk about Bitcoin

but like there's it's behind a paywall imagine if you pay 10 cents worth of satch just to read this right away you can also just go to archive.org and see it the the crux of it

is that there's basically like these withdrawal limits at their banks so they have all this cash in their bank accounts that they can't get which is a tragedy and bitcoin can help mitigate that if you hold your own keys and use bitcoin in a circular economy

yeah let's get the circular economy going freaks you wanted to do an early rep today do you have obligations this afternoon yeah but I'm not going to talk about them on air you don't need to but yeah I do thank you for doing an early rep

there's one other piece here secret surveillance program collects Americans money transfer data yeah this came they had to admit to this right didn't they like subpoena yeah it was like a freedom of information act i think yeah there's we're digital slaves they're taking our data we know all this we talk about a week in a week out um but it was i think it was like any payment over 500

between the u.s and mexico um was being tracked and tagged and surveilled without due process any uh authorization they don't care about you freaks you don't have the right to privacy you don't have the right to freedom in the digital age you are a cattle better be a good cattle isn't a cow cattle cow is it cattle plural can you be a cattle cows a cattle yeah you can i don't think it could be a cattle i think we might egg we're gonna have to go i would say duck duck go is jeffy still here jeffy go look it up car you could just type in cattle and see what Google let's see what Google

use DuckDuckGo even with the DuckDuckGo's new policy it's still better than Google Google tracks you and does even more censorship no just type in cattle that's such a good DuckDuckGoose

cattles or cows is what he just searched cow or cows I can't read it I can't read it. Go back. Go back to the dictionary. Go to the dictionary.com. Second one.

You see Dreamin's comment? If we're going to fact check Marty's grammar, RHR will be five hours minimum. I can't say anything in defense to that. Domesticated quadrupeds held as property

or raised for use. Bovine animals on a farm or ranch. Yeah, it's a plural noun. Full-time Bitcoin. how is in general use as a singular for the collective cattle the word cow is easy to use when a singular is needed and the sex is unknown or irrelevant when there is a cow in the road for example interesting but i think i use cattle correctly in the plural saying you're you are

you all are digital cattle speaking you said a cattle you said you are a cattle oh yeah you are a cow i don't know i'm just fucking you all are cattle yeah that's that's what you meant to say I don't know. It's been a long day. The government. Completely inconsequential, but I'm glad we looked it up. And now us and the freaks know. You come here,

you learn something new week in and week out. This is our 190th rip. Times are getting heavy. US dollar reserve currency status is dead. Commodities prices are going crazy. Energy prices

are going to continue to go up. CPI print today was 7.9%, and that was severely underreported. Go shake your rancher's hand. Go say what's up to your neighbors. If you guys are in a fight, squash the beef. Figure out how you're going to work together, how you're going to support each other.

Stack sats. Get them into wallets you control. Lock down some water. and begin speaking out against the insanity that's being thrust upon us by our incompetent government, our fascist overlords

that are ruining the world and forcing you further into the panopticon. You cow, you all are cattle. Love your freaks. Stay on one stack, Nickel. Peace and love.