TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap 191: The Gang is back in person

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

This week Marty and Matt are discussing: - Unchained Data Leak - Arthur Hayes. Energy Cancelled - Stratum V2 - Wasabi doing chain surveillance - Kazakhstan Mining Equipment / Did not ban proof of work... - Block releases hardware wallet info - UK Bitcoin ATMs forcing shutdown Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off Download Fountain Podcasts

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 There's no video for this. We're recording. Keep that. Keep that. Is there no video for this in here? We've got to go to our 1031 Tribe event. We just recorded our first in-person rip since Nashville.
Starting point is 00:00:11 This is the first one-on-one in-person rip we've probably had since Let's fucking go. a live episode. Bip-Bop Boom. That wasn't one-on-one either. It was a group. Oh yeah, we had a group.
Starting point is 00:00:22 So it's been a while. Maybe it was pre-pandemic. No, I don't think so. I think we're wrong on that one. We might be. But anyway, this was a great rip. I hope you love it freaks I'm happy you like this studio
Starting point is 00:00:31 I was very nervous this studio is really fucking awesome that's sweet alright I really like this one I fucking love what we got going on
Starting point is 00:00:39 here at the Bitcoin Commons the vibe is very high elevated getting the studio finally put together and sitting down the set that
Starting point is 00:00:49 that we have here I think it's gonna produce some good content shout out to Carr he's behind the computer right now He's putting everything together, making us look good.
Starting point is 00:01:01 We're stepping it up here at TFTC, freaks. Trying to make something legitimate. Doing our best. This rip was brought to you by good friends at Unchained Capital. Unchained Capital is here to bring you financial services, net leverage, Bitcoins, and native properties. They have their vault product, which is a two or three multi-sig forum,
Starting point is 00:01:26 quorum which you hold two keys unchained holds one key you always have access to your bitcoin as long as you have your two keys if you're ever in a pinch need that unchained to be the second in the two or three multi-sig quorum they are there for you
Starting point is 00:01:41 they have a lending platform as well you use your bitcoin as collateral it's same day US dollar liquidity you have an IRA product roll over your IRA into bitcoin you can control the keys too Jeff Anders running that team be on the lookout too they had a data breach
Starting point is 00:02:00 last week they just announced earlier today in terms of data breaches severity relatively low compared to data breaches that happen in other areas of the industry but yeah
Starting point is 00:02:15 there was a data breach some identifying information emails, IP addresses that were stored on a trusted third party did get socially engineered. The third party got socially engineered.
Starting point is 00:02:36 So go check out the announcement there. We'll try to link to that in the show notes as well. But if you want to go, check out everything they got going on. Incredible products, incredible team, incredible content, unchained.com.
Starting point is 00:02:52 This report was also brought to you by our good friends at Brains. Car's pulling off his headphones because that was a high. I hit that high note. Brains with two I's. B-R-A-I-I-N-S. Incredible team.
Starting point is 00:03:12 Been in Bitcoin for quite a while. They're a team behind Slushpool, which is the oldest mining pool in Bitcoin's history. Started in 2010. They're a team behind BrainsOS Plus Firmware, which allows you to stack
Starting point is 00:03:22 more sats with your hash if you download it on nasix that's compatible if you have a nasix that's compatible with any of brains os plus firmware versions and you're not using it you are leaving sats on the table it's as simple as that they've insights.brains.com i n s i g h t s dot brains b r a i i n s dot com that is your one-stop shop for all the pertinent mining data that you may need as an individual or a business in the mining industry. They were going to throw a conference, but they had to cancel it. They'll probably
Starting point is 00:03:57 reschedule it at some point later. You'll look out for that. What else do they have? Incredible content as well. If you want to learn about the mining industry, history, how it works, what they're working on. They work on open source projects as well, like Stratum V2. Go check it out.
Starting point is 00:04:13 Brains.com. B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com. This report was also brought to you by good friends at hodl hodl hodl hodl is here to bring you a peer-to-peer lending platform no kyc no aml it also leverages bitcoin's native multi-sig properties what you do is you put your bitcoin up in a collateral escrow multi-sig accounts where you hold one key it's a two and three multi-sig you hold one key or counterparty counterparty holds one key and then hodl hodl is there with the third key in this setup. You do not, you cannot move the funds in the escrow account for obvious reasons. However, you do have visibility into that multisig wallet to ensure that your
Starting point is 00:04:54 sats aren't being rehypothecated and that if you're paying your stable coin loan back plus the interest at the end of the day, you are going to get your sats back. Alternatively, if you are a stable coin guy or gal and you're looking to get yield on your stable coins, you can go to Lend.HodlHodl.com and enter the other side of that marketplace and put up your stablecoins to be lent out with an interest rate attached to them to Bitcoiners looking for stablecoin liquidity. Go to Lend.HodlHodl.com to check out this lending platform. Again, it's no KYC, no AML. You put the Bitcoin up, you get stablecoins, you pay back the stablecoin loan, and you get your sats back.
Starting point is 00:05:34 No KYC, no AML. You put your stable coins up. They get lent out to Bitcoiners and you get your stable coins back plus a bit of interest on top of it. It's a great, beautiful thing. Lend.HodlHodl.com. This was last but not least
Starting point is 00:05:51 brought to you by our good friends at the Bitcoin 2022 conference, which is coming up real quick. we had ck pete rizzo and dylan eclair on the show yesterday great little four-person powwow here at the bitcoin commons talking about everything they're doing at bitcoin magazine what they have planned at bitcoin 2022 it is happening in a few weeks april 6th to 9th in south beach miami it's a four day event and they've got
Starting point is 00:06:24 industry day which is the first day you want to brush elbows with industry hot players hot players day one, six days two and three, seventh and eighth are general conference days
Starting point is 00:06:38 we're going to go in and it's going to be a massive event with many stages having very focused talks, panels presentations, there's going to be many CEOs throughout the industry that are participating. President Bukele is going to be making a big announcement. I think we've got senators, congressmen coming in to talk as well. It's going to be a hell of an event. Day four is a music and comedy festival. They've added comedy to the list as well. They've got comedians coming. They've got Steve Aoki coming, Logic,
Starting point is 00:07:11 Deadmau5, Run the Jewels, and a bunch of funny comics as well. Hannibal Buress will be there. They announced that yesterday. Mark Maron's going to be there. So it's going to be a cool event. The Bitcoin Magazine team, BTC Media team is creating a very, very cool cultural event in South Beach, Miami. Go to b.tc slash conference to get your tickets
Starting point is 00:07:34 if you haven't already. They're going to be going up as we approach conference day. Use the code TFTC. That's T-F-T-C. You're going to get 10% off your tickets. b.tc slash conference. Uh, code TFTC. Last but not least, uh, I know I just said that for Bitcoin 2022 conference. However, we got to make you aware that if you download the fountain app and you listen to TFTC, any TFTC episode between now and the end of the month, March 31st, uh, you're going to get 1000 sats sent to your fountain wallet. and at the end of the month
Starting point is 00:08:10 on the 31st, we're going to randomly choose a freak who downloads the app and listens to a TFTC episode 50,000 sats. That's like 2,500 sats a dollar right now times that by two. That's $2 times that by 10.
Starting point is 00:08:26 It's $20 worth of Bitcoin. 20 cuck bucks worth of sats, okay? Download the Fountain app. Fountain.fm, I believe, is the website. If you want to go check out where you can download that. Enjoy this rip.
Starting point is 00:08:39 Incredible rip. Okay. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. 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.
Starting point is 00:09:10 I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. We're back in person. Let's fucking go. You don't like your legs being shown on camera? When FDR was president, they didn't show legs. Yeah. Who said he had polio?
Starting point is 00:09:26 He did have polio, yeah. Rest in peace, FDR. R.I.P. Yeah. Wasn't his wife running the show for a while? Was that him? I don't think so. well what is that freaks
Starting point is 00:09:37 dude this fucking studio is fucking awesome thank you you like it bitcoin commons is fucking awesome you regretting your decision what decision I live in Austin oh yeah yeah I mean like
Starting point is 00:09:50 you don't work out of the bitcoin commons just live too far out of Austin it's a long drive the stash is too much when are you going to do the stash I'm building one now we've got uh the empower conference at the end of the month here in texas in houston and uh drew armstrong and
Starting point is 00:10:12 i are on a panel together for cathedra was that ong ong and and bitcoin joining forces in houston texas gonna be a great event but yeah i think i'm gonna grow the mustache out for that i have not told my wife yet though she just thinks i'm bringing the beard back i hope she just found Find out live. She may have. Honey. I'm going to be out of town. I'm going to have a stash.
Starting point is 00:10:34 You're not going to have to look at it directly. Maybe you'll see pictures of it. This is Rabbit Hole Recap Rip 191. We're live at the Bitcoin Commons. We've got Matt back in person. I miss these in-person rips. They're the best. I will crack.
Starting point is 00:10:47 We need a cheers. Good to see you. It's good to see Carr. The vibes have been high. I've already cracked. The vibes have been high. We've got to look at each other when we cheers. Cheers.
Starting point is 00:10:54 That's a good call. Otherwise, seven years of bad sex. Not between us. it's just gonna extend my extend my bad sex run another seven years damn it what a week
Starting point is 00:11:08 I'm not gonna lie dude I'm exhausted it's been you got here last night car and I have been running this week we got the studios finally set up this week
Starting point is 00:11:19 it's been it was hard to find furniture the supply chain issues are real my landlord has just been using that as an excuse I'm pretty sure I don't know man
Starting point is 00:11:28 Finally got a new dishwasher. Finally? That was quick. You started complaining about that, what? Like a week ago? Two weeks ago? No, no, no. It's been months.
Starting point is 00:11:37 Yeah. Two more days. We got a lot going on in the comments here. We got a 1031 Tribe event after this. We've got BitDevs tonight. We got the Bitcoin takeover tomorrow at South by Southwest. Very high signal event. I'm really excited for it.
Starting point is 00:11:54 Yeah. The energy is very high right now in Austin, Texas, but it's also draining. Again, I'm exhausted. I'm going to be switching between this Topo Chico. I've just been perpetually exhausted this year. Yeah. We got Bitcoin 2022 right around the corner.
Starting point is 00:12:12 I had Rockstar on Dispatch this week, and it was just basically a public Odell therapy session. It's like two hours of him working through the Odell exhaustion. where did we I have not had time to listen to it yet where did we settle the therapy session
Starting point is 00:12:28 I mean like a good therapy session I felt much better at the end that's good feel rejuvenated that's good I need you rejuvenated
Starting point is 00:12:34 you forced me to lead last week and step up we might need to meet each other in the middle well that was also
Starting point is 00:12:42 because I was drinking with Bitcoiners the night before and you were last night as well yeah it's a trend did you see any
Starting point is 00:12:50 live music last night no i haven't seen any live music yet it's hot by um yeah it's fucking bitcoin capital of the world so i have a good place for us to start before we get to clark moody's um you know we're we're exactly two years from the largest single day drop in equities markets when everything went completely chaotic. March 17th. We are two years and a couple days from that March 12th
Starting point is 00:13:24 event where Bitcoin plunged first before equities did. Pretty crazy two years. Very crazy two years. Doesn't feel like two years. No, it doesn't. We were still...
Starting point is 00:13:40 March 12th, I'd left Brooklyn. Our last Brooklyn in person rip was probably I escaped Brooklyn March 12th I remember because we thought the pandemic was going to be really bad and I had to return an Amazon package
Starting point is 00:13:55 so I Whole Foods is owned by Amazon so you could drop it off there and I walk in with my N95 mask there's a line out the door because people were panicking trying to get food I was the only one wearing an N95 mask I like drop off the package I was like none of these people are going to make it
Starting point is 00:14:12 they're all going to die. And I got into my car and just drove out of Brooklyn. That was two years ago. Two years ago. We're here. We're still alive. Many of the people in Brooklyn
Starting point is 00:14:20 are still alive. Many have left us. Yeah, March 12th. We were talking about that earlier. We had breakfast. That was a beautiful breakfast this morning outdoors. Yeah, thanks for having us
Starting point is 00:14:30 over for breakfast. Yeah. Marty made us breakfast filled with seed oils. No, I didn't. There was no seed. Not one seed oil. Everything was made in butter.
Starting point is 00:14:39 We had eggs, bacon, pineapple. hash browns onions and peppers it was delicious it was a good it was a good breakfast some coffee i should have probably started cooking breakfast a little bit earlier though yeah i noticed that yeah that's what that's on me that's on me it's uh yeah march 12th it's pretty crazy that it's been two years it it feels it feels longer right it feels much longer like we were talking at breakfast today about BitMEX's trading engine during that.
Starting point is 00:15:11 Apparently it actually performed well. Until they saved the market and shut it down. Until they shut down their site. But like, yeah, BitMEX was, I don't think they were in the legal battle that seems to be coming to an end now
Starting point is 00:15:27 at that point even. I mean, it's over because they all pleaded guilty to bank secrecy violations. Yes. 10 mil slap on the wrist, though. in prison potential prison time yes but for the guys already served a bunch of time right so we'll get time served yeah we've got we've got arthur hayes's recent blog post on the list i was thinking about the two year that post is great we're going to definitely talk about that but uh i was like to me that march to like august was like kind of a blur and the turning point was BitBlockBoom 2020
Starting point is 00:16:01 BitBlockBoom 2020 I felt like my feet were beneath me I wasn't like acting in a panic mode or reactionary mode and like I had a plan
Starting point is 00:16:10 in place for like how to be successful in this kind of environment and just I mean looking back like we fucking did it like I I think
Starting point is 00:16:20 I think we navigated that chaos pretty fucking well and I like to think a lot of the freaks did as well alongside us look at us now
Starting point is 00:16:30 we've gone from the we've gone from the shared room in my apartment building in Williamsburg studio apartment
Starting point is 00:16:37 studio apartment we have a bookshelf with a bunch of Bitcoin related stuff I've got this butt box here it cost me a Bitcoin worst investment
Starting point is 00:16:48 Marty's ever made thank you Balaji that's a 21 computer supposed to revolutionize the world and Marty
Starting point is 00:16:58 Marty got wrecked on it it was it was a lesson learned lesson learned Bitcoin price is probably like what
Starting point is 00:17:07 $600 it was the first time Marty ever mined Bitcoin yeah it was didn't the the 21 computer didn't produce
Starting point is 00:17:14 a lot of Satoshis but it produced a lot of lessons okay that's that's an expensive lesson as Matt
Starting point is 00:17:22 just described but it's kind of weird like should I I should be looking at the camera instead of you well we can see
Starting point is 00:17:28 each other in the camera in the camera yeah okay we can look at each other though too i do i'm looking at you right now i do miss looking into your eyes right i feel like i should turn yeah i'm still trying we're trying to figure it out it's an iterative process here at the tftc studios in the bitcoin comments or parker lewis is the the uh the monitor feng shui he's been very hands-on and where we place everything in this um came in here earlier and tried to put bitcoin sign guy picture here i told him to get the hell out it's he's forcing it we're gonna build out the bookshelf though let's go to clark's dashboard and jump into it current price of bitcoin is 40 820 cuck bucks one cuck bucks gonna get you 2450 sats currently sitting at a 775 billion dollar market
Starting point is 00:18:16 cap. We were at block height 727,778. We're like 50... No, that wouldn't have been a palindrome. Yeah, no, it would have been like 51 blocks past a palindrome. Did the difficulty adjustment just happen? It just happened literally
Starting point is 00:18:34 as we were sitting down, getting ready to hit record two blocks ago, and we had a difficulty adjustment of negative 0.4%. that was difficulty epoch 362 blocks were coming in at 10 minutes and 3
Starting point is 00:18:52 seconds on average over that 2016 block period we're currently 2014 blocks away from the next retarget which as of right now is estimated to be March 31st and it's even two blocks in there's no estimate
Starting point is 00:19:08 up or down yeah I mean that's way early there's no estimate yeah it's way early samurai feeling vindicated this week those guys are but we'll uh we'll talk to the we'll talk about that later as well they have a promo code for discount called wasabi refugees well it seems like there are some refugees uh transferring over to that uh whirlpool what a fucking shame unspent capacities at 4510.01 bitcoin i believe that's 100
Starting point is 00:19:38 Bitcoin more than it was last week. It was at like $4,400. Cock bucks, that's $184.1 million in unspent value. Not nothing. Not nothing. I mean, 100 Bitcoin influx in a seven-day period is not anything to scoff at.
Starting point is 00:19:54 What's 100 divided by 4,400? It's like 2% almost. A little bit more than 2%. I didn't know what kind of math you were trying to do. I was trying to do percentage growth week on week. That's a pretty good... yeah it is yeah um yeah should we start there or should we two and a half percent right yeah somewhere around there two two point six percent yeah um car just did it on his fingers and sent
Starting point is 00:20:22 it to us do we front load with data leaks or do we front load with we front load with data leaks that's brutal and we're broadcasting from their offices oh this is the bitcoin commons this is bitcoin commons this is separate from unchains offices they do they do sponsor the the commons unchained had a data leak uh last week that they announced yesterday no unchained systems were compromised and no data was pulled from their systems directly however they were using a trusted third-party vendor active campaign and they actually uh so they the situation is they closed down their active campaign account uh a month ago as they transitioned to what they believe is more secure uh crm and apparently some attacker uh basically socially engineered
Starting point is 00:21:16 active campaign to reopen the canceled account the attacker went into the active campaign chat function on their website and talked with a rep at that company and somehow socially We engineered them to create a new admin on the canceled Unchained account that that person was then able to access and then pull data from the active campaign. So it gathered email addresses, IPs, and whether or not the people in that database had vaults or not. And usernames. And usernames, yes. um well my understanding was that unchained asked them to delete their data they didn't delete the
Starting point is 00:22:05 data yes and then they restored full access and the account to the attacker without any verification like but still obviously uh unchained has to take the blame and they they have taken the blame for trusting this third party and my understanding from parker is that they tend to move everything in-house now yes not that it really helps the people that are already um compromised me being one of them and like the majority i think the majority of unchained team also has vaults uh so they all got compromised this is a marketing uh this was the marketing database um it's pretty fucking bad i trust the third parties are security holes um this is you know one of the main trade you take with something that's collaborative custody uh you have ease of use you have them
Starting point is 00:22:58 holding your hand but you have to trust them um and i know they're feeling a lot of shame and embarrassment and uh shitty week and and they feel very responsible obviously because they are um for this happening um it's important to realize for people that are affected that yes mailing addresses haven't been exposed home addresses haven't been exposed but you can use this data with other leaks to cross-reference so like if your email address is in here and let's say like ticket master was hacked and your home address isn't ticket master a malicious entity can combine the two um can combine the two to have your data to figure out other data, external data that wasn't in this leak.
Starting point is 00:23:50 IP addresses obviously give rough location to an amateur attacker, but a sophisticated attacker can get very precise location from IP addresses. I don't know why a marketing company was logging IP addresses in the first place. My understanding is IP addresses were a reduced subset of it, so not everyone's IP addresses were exposed, but a decent amount were people who bought concierge service through the marketing company or something like that. Yes.
Starting point is 00:24:24 And another variable in this, this social engineering attack was waged on another company a few weeks before Unchained 2, an active campaign, didn't, number one, warn anybody, or two, obviously change any of their internal processes, which pretty stunning how incompetent
Starting point is 00:24:47 just the third parties man I know the data leaks will keep happening till more and more people get burned and people learn their lesson but it doesn't lessen the hurt every fucking time it happens no and so
Starting point is 00:25:02 if you're an unchained customer who was affected by this leak be on the lookout offer phishing scams on you personally people so like fake emails that say they're from unchained or probably from a bunch of different bitcoin companies they'll they'll just assume that you have accounts on like coinbase or cash app or all the all the bitcoin companies yes never like click a link in an email always type it in manually yeah so sucks trusted third parties man
Starting point is 00:25:39 this was like trusted third party squared because like Unchained is a trusted third party and then they trusted a third party. I would say to like all the Bitcoin founders out there, like take this as a fucking lesson. You know, do everything on a foundational level to protect data. Hold as little data as possible.
Starting point is 00:25:57 And then with that data, like make sure you're doing everything in-house as much as practically possible. Because it matters. It really does matter. exposing your users to this kind of risk when it's not necessary. Agreed. Agreed.
Starting point is 00:26:15 My wife just texted me, side note, are you drinking already? Honey, it's a cold brew. It's a cold brew. But he's also drinking already. No. I had a sip of a Topo Chico. He's drinking. Yeah. What'd she say about the mustache? I don't know if she's heard that yet.
Starting point is 00:26:31 I think she might have just hopped in. Honey. I mean, if she hopped in, she heard you. You don't have to text her back. yeah yeah it sucks I know I mean
Starting point is 00:26:44 I spent a lot of time talking to Parker about it yesterday he's really broken yeah he's taking it personally and like Matt said they're thinking about
Starting point is 00:26:54 taking everything in internally I think they're going to take everything in house yeah reduce reduce trusted third parties beware
Starting point is 00:27:03 beware if you're going to have a data leak I believe they are suing the company yes but I'm not sure if we were supposed to talk about that but I just did because the
Starting point is 00:27:21 question car put up a car put up a question saying our statement saying that they should be sued from a freak yeah the way they did get I mean the fact that you allowed somebody to
Starting point is 00:27:32 enter a customer representative chat room on your website and have them make you an admin without any verification is pretty ridiculously incompetent. It was a fake email too. It was like an un-chained email. It wasn't even a real one. They tried to guess a real
Starting point is 00:27:49 un-chained email and it wasn't even a real un-chained email. But once again, this is not trying to reduce the blame on un-chained. They are ultimately responsible for it and I think they accept that too. Their post was very it was not filled with excuses.
Starting point is 00:28:05 It was very transparent. extreme ownership. I think they're exemplifying that. Disclaimer, Unchained is a sponsor of this podcast and the Bitcoin Commons.
Starting point is 00:28:16 We're literally broadcasting from our offices. This is Bitcoin Commons. Okay, we pay for this. This is our office. This is our office. Okay. Okay.
Starting point is 00:28:24 Okay. So walk outside, turn left, Unchained's office. They're down the hall. Okay. Okay. All right,
Starting point is 00:28:34 should we get a wasabi? What the hell's going on? what the hell is going on with Wasabi oh my god sad fucking state of affairs man for any of you freaks who are unaware WasabiWall has preemptively
Starting point is 00:28:49 decided to surveil their users entering CoinJoin entering through their coordinator they're going to use chain surveillance tools to make sure that UTXOs aren't quote unquote tainted what is this link you're showing
Starting point is 00:29:05 car it's like he's just got like a random wasabi website about surveillance video that's not the right website wasabi wallet the coin join software implementation um the company that runs like maintains it wasabi is a free and open source project but the company that maintains it zk snacks uh and runs the main coordinator the centralized coordinator that coordinates all the rounds um has always been compliance friendly for a privacy company they have very restrictive terms of service from the very beginning yep um and now it appears they're preemptively complying with potential regulation that hasn't actually passed um to blacklist utxos and they're actually going to fund they're they're going to pay chain surveillance companies to so the way these
Starting point is 00:30:03 centralized coordinators are set up whether that's the main wasabi default coordinator or chain case which is an alternative uh wasabi coordinator run by the chain case team that has like an ios version of wasabi um or samurai whirlpool is that they're blinded from knowing which input connects to which output in a CoinJoin. But what they do know is they obviously know the inputs that are coming in, like which UTXOs are flowing into the CoinJoin rounds. And Wasabi has decided that they're going to block certain UTXOs from going into their CoinJoin rounds that they deem illegal or sketchy.
Starting point is 00:30:45 And to do that, they will be paying a chain surveillance firm to actively spy on users and determine which UTXOs are good or bad, which is fucking horrible. And they're going to be blocking those UTXOs from entering. And presumably, obviously, they will be, those chain surveillance companies are constantly sharing info
Starting point is 00:31:13 with other KYC exchanges. They're collecting all this data. So literally, if you're using Wasabi going forward, your CoinJoin fees will be going to pay the enemy of privacy and freedom that is chain surveillance companies, these mercenary companies that work with authoritarians, corporations, dictatorships.
Starting point is 00:31:35 And there's an argument to be made too, and this has been a topic of conversation on Twitter and around the subject. Are the chain surveillance companies even that accurate? Like, could they be mislabeling a UTXO as something that should be blacklisted? Yeah. I mean, look, so the way chain surveillance works is it's all a probability game. So like Marty can keep sending Bitcoin to himself because that's how Bitcoin works,
Starting point is 00:31:58 right? You can keep generating new addresses and sending to yourself. What chain surveillance attempts to do is assign a probability to each transaction of whether or not Marty actually sent it to someone else rather than himself. So it's a probability of ownership changing hands and then trying to determine who that new owner is mostly through external data stuff like kyc data purchase history heuristics in terms of like time of day the transactions are being sent out maybe ip addresses that are linked to broadcasting heuristics like which wallet is sending the transactions so it's all a probability
Starting point is 00:32:33 game and they do tend to side on the more bitcoin or bad bitcoin right like those error on the side of caution is what they'd say with the opposite really it's the error on the side of of non-freedom yes um and this legitimizes them and i just like so there was a big case um so so zk snacks makes all their money i guess the majority of their money i don't know if they have another revenue stream through these coin join fees right so if you use wasabi you're paying them coin join fees I don't understand even if even if they had
Starting point is 00:33:13 even if there was a regulation which we don't know of a regulation first of all Wasabi has released vague tweets we have you know
Starting point is 00:33:22 telegram chat messages no proper statement has been released we have no idea of a regulation one of the lead devs leave discussed
Starting point is 00:33:29 the guy who built Wasabi 2.0 from the ground up this guy's fucking extremely intelligent nothing much left wasabi said he was very upset with the company and he said he wrote a resignation letter that no para the founder of wasabi didn't even read um so they're like going back and forth but besides that point shut down the fucking coordinator like wasabi is a free and open
Starting point is 00:33:57 source project anyone can run a coordinator if you're gonna comply and invalidate chain surveillance existence and pay a change surveillance company shut down the fucking company instead wasabi can still exist as the free and open source project that anyone can take over the lead on that isn't fully cucked and if you actually care about your users if you actually care about privacy that's the way forward and there's there's precedent here because there was that there was that email provider lava bit um that got pressured by the government it was encrypted email and they got pressured by the government to put in the back door. And the founder was like, no, fuck that. I'm just shutting down the company because I actually care about users and I care
Starting point is 00:34:38 about privacy. And it comes down to principles. It really does come down to principles. What do you stand for? And it's just an absolute fucking shame to see this fucking go down. It's disgraceful. It is absolutely disgraceful. And as someone who I have, yes, I've been very critical of Wasabi for the last few years. But before that, I was a heavy Wasabi user. I paid them a lot in CoinJoin fees, I gave them a lot of feedback I shilled it very often on the podcast. We had Wasabi Wednesday at one point. Yeah, I'm personally
Starting point is 00:35:08 hurt by this you know, I, it is it is fucking horrible and if you are a Wasabi user, don't necessarily freak out, first of all, this is specifically the CoinJoin portion
Starting point is 00:35:24 so if you're using Wasabi with your cold card or hardware wallet or something that is unrelated um if you're using coin join coin joins are are still are effective use samurai use sparrow use join market just avoid wasabi coin join going forward that is the actionable advice uh in terms of that yes i mean i would just like to echo your sentiment around integrity is like especially considering what we're trying to do here with bitcoin i think being integral and having integrity is extremely important in this space.
Starting point is 00:36:02 And that move was extremely disappointing to see. And again, similar to the conversation we had around the Trucker Convoy fundraise, this highlights yet another reason. Like Matt said, the coordinator's open source, the project's open source, and Samurai probably has done this much better than other CoinJoin implementations.
Starting point is 00:36:25 They have a bunch of NIMs that have basically launched their coordinator and makes it harder to attack them. And maybe that's what Wasabi should have done is, all right, we're shutting down the coordinator and quietly come back as NIMS months later. Yeah, I mean, let's be clear here. The centralized coordinator makes the UX easier.
Starting point is 00:36:45 It makes everything more efficient. It makes on-demand CoinJoin much more effective, especially for mobile. These are the advantages you get from a centralized coordinator. It also funds development because the coordinator is getting paid a portion of the CoinJoin fees. It makes Sybil resistance very easy, which is this idea of an attacker flooding rounds with their Bitcoin to figure out process of elimination. Pretending to be multiple people, but they're one person. Right.
Starting point is 00:37:21 It allows structured liquidity. This idea that a coordinator can basically make sure that there's no address reuse happening, can make sure that there's incentives set up. So you have, if one person comes in, they pay their UTXOs. If all the UTXOs they bring in at the same time get spread out across rounds
Starting point is 00:37:41 rather than being in the same round. But the trade-off is it's a central point of attack. So Samurai can still be attacked in this way, like a regulatory way. They are a company, you know, they can be attacked in the same way. It's important to realize that it appears that Wasabi has not been attacked through regulations. They were over-complying ahead of time. That's my understanding right now.
Starting point is 00:38:08 But ultimately, you have something like JoinMarket, which is on the opposite side of that trade-off balance. It doesn't have a centralized coordinator. You know, the UX isn't as easy. yeah uh you you know you can't use it for a mobile to basically the coordinator in those you have the maker taker model right so you have uh makers who post offers that you can coin join with them and the taker is the coordinator in that so it's a p2p process much more censorship resistant um so it's it's all about options different trade-off balances uh but it's just a real real fucking shame to see
Starting point is 00:38:43 what Wasabi's doing it just does not make sense it doesn't which leaves me again makes the mind wander why were they preemptively doing this what do they know was it you can't be that incompetent
Starting point is 00:38:59 like it's such an obvious terrible move from an optics perspective I think they want to be like the compliant coin join which is bullshit you can't be like a it's an oxymoron privacy tool isn't that an oxymoron like where do they draw the line like what kind of utxos get banned from from using it yeah exactly like do they ban whirlpool utxos they ban join market utxos like what is uh it's just i don't
Starting point is 00:39:24 know it is um an absolute shame i mean there's not not much more i can say besides being a fucking well a lot of people were calling it a legitimate attack on bitcoin's fungibility no no para said that after he fucking irresponsibly multiple times said like privacy on bitcoin has been fixed because of wasabi and then he like shoots himself in the foot he's like oh bitcoin failed you know like no wasabi failed fucker zk zk snacks failed uh their users um i really didn't appreciate that he he was like this is attack on coin join this is uh and like the other thing is so like join market is p2p samurai also has p2p coin joins in stonewall and stowaway so you could actually not use their centralized coordinated whirlpool rounds we could do one you can just do it it's all it all
Starting point is 00:40:18 goes p2p through tor um with your with your pain him and you can do a two-person coin join you can do a two-person pay join um where one of us pays the other person but we both give inputs instead of one person only being inputs you can do a fake two-person coin join that looks like a two-person coin join you can't tell the difference just with yourself you can use that by itself or you can actually do whirlpool and then use the two-person coin joins when you actually spend um and these are just all different options that you have available to you and it's good that bitcoiners have options but uh i don't know if there's really a market for a compliant coin join implementation but you know maybe there's a bunch of well people out there that will pay for it
Starting point is 00:41:05 i think it's like we need to normalize like p2ep i think more not normalize but just what page join yeah page join like pen like when you go to a merchant i mean the big hurdle is obviously to do p2ep for merchant perspective you have a hot wallet so i i mean i like i like the the the p2p samurai attempt rather than doing the merchant attempt The one thing about the merchant attempt is, so the receiver needs to be online. So let's describe the mechanics of a payday to endpoint. So the merchant has to be on,
Starting point is 00:41:47 the receiver has to be online, unlike a normal Bitcoin transaction where the receiver doesn't have to be online. And what happens is the receiver's online. Instead of Marty sending a UTXO to me and getting change back, if Marty's sending me a transaction, I give him an input.
Starting point is 00:42:02 he has an input and then we both get change back so on on on chain it doesn't you can't tell how much the payment was for um and you can't tell like who was the sender in all things equal like there's obviously some heuristics you can fuck certain things up if kyc data is mixed in there um you can figure it out but it looks like you can't you in a lot of situations you can't tell it's a two-person transaction either. It looks like maybe Marty's just putting in two inputs because that happens sometimes. Like if Marty's trying to pay me a million sats
Starting point is 00:42:37 and he has a 500,000 sat UTXO and he has an 800,000 sat UTXO, he needs to put two inputs in that transaction to pay me if that's a normal transaction. So when you use pay joint, it could look like that. And the assumption, all of a sudden, those probability analysis that chain surveillance companies are doing,
Starting point is 00:42:56 the assumption, their probabilities go down. They never really know. If enough people use it at scale, they never know. Right now, they just assume all inputs belong to the sender. But if enough people use pay join, they can't make that assumption anymore. Now, the reason I say I don't know if it could ever really work at scale, if there's actually momentum for it to happen in that merchant pay situation is because it just really split a lot of people are paying with lightning yeah um and i mean lightning gives you some gives you gives you pretty good privacy as a sender so like people that care about privacy while paying will probably tend to use lightning and then and then the people that are paying on chain will probably just be using the most
Starting point is 00:43:51 naive method possible and we've already seen that because BTC pay launched this support what like a year ago or something very few people are using it yeah like we have it available on on our BTC pay yeah very it's very rarely used yes
Starting point is 00:44:07 but I just feel like that's like a I don't know if that's yeah true yeah it doesn't really seem practical yeah this is a Probably one of the biggest problems that Bitcoiners need to solve.
Starting point is 00:44:27 How do we get better privacy? Has it gotten better? Is this a step back? And I will say that I have a lot of respect for people that run centralized coordinators and privacy companies publicly because there must be a shit ton of pressure on them. I know like I just talk about privacy and I feel the pressure like I would never fucking publicly run a centralized coordinator. But if you're going to fucking do it, like have some principles and care about your users. I don't think I think this is a step back for Wasabi.
Starting point is 00:45:07 I don't think this changes anything in terms of the Bitcoin privacy situation. I still think the Bitcoin privacy situation can be improved tremendously. um i think we're a long way from where we were two years ago if we want to go back to that two year time scale um a joint market is is uh has since added fidelity bonds to reduce uh civil risk um samurai stack has gotten significantly better now you can get a ronin dojo you can get a plug and play if you don't if you don't want if you don't want to run it yourself if you don't want to set it up yourself or you can build one yourself so you have a full node stack then you connect it to to your phone sparrow is fucking awesome which just works with straight electrum
Starting point is 00:45:51 on your desktop um matt needs to make a cold card video for sparrow says buff dog yes i have to i will do double g um and yeah i i mean i think i think oh and the other thing with joy market is you know we have this bounty out for an easy web ui for joint market for these full node boxes whether that's like an umbral or a raspi blitz or um a noddle and it's completely open source uh dirgigi and dennis reinman and a bunch of other guys are working on there right now the bounty is pretty high uh that's with hrf uh it is an alpha right now it uses clear net like no one should really use it with any kind of real money or any kind of adversarial environment like test it very very carefully if you're going to test it um but progress is being made and i and one
Starting point is 00:46:48 more thing is something that we've we've harped on a lot on this show because i i knew it was going to happen is this is this uh conflation with mixing and coin joined and all the news articles that were released like the block crypto released like this horrible article where it's like bitcoin privacy service coin join mixing like gets hit with like regular it was like a horrible fucking article what's the difference what's the difference the difference is mixing to me is these custodial mixers you send a service bitcoin and they send you back someone else's bitcoin now custodial mixers have precedent that they're illegal to run them uh now i've never seen any users of custodial mixers get hit but we've seen operators of custodial mixers get hit
Starting point is 00:47:37 Famously, the most recent one was the operator of Helix, which was also the founder of Dropbit, who got arrested by the feds. Now, CoinJoin is a collaborative Bitcoin send transaction. No one is taking custody of your coins. You are simply sending a Bitcoin transaction in a self-custody way with other Bitcoiners at the same time to break probability analysis. You're not getting someone else's Bitcoin. New UTXOs are getting generated on the other side with shared history that breaks the probability analysis. It's a Bitcoin send transaction.
Starting point is 00:48:10 These coordinator services are essentially sending messages back and forth. They're just sending, they're just sending texts back and forth. We have room. They're not taking custody of Bitcoin. We have input room in this transaction.
Starting point is 00:48:21 Do you want to join? Yeah. It's an important distinction. It is. Because with the centralized mixers, you send, you just send it. Well, these are still centralized, but custodial,
Starting point is 00:48:32 with custodial mixing, you're just sending, I'm sending them Bitcoin. They're sending me like Marty's Bitcoin to someone else's Bitcoin. Yes. Where you're initiating a transaction. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:48:44 And there's custodial risks there where they can actually steal your Bitcoin too. Yes. And you have full trust in them because they're not blinded to what is happening. So if the custodial mixer wants to, they know exactly where your Bitcoin went next, like which Bitcoin you got,
Starting point is 00:49:01 and they can actually, you know, track you through that mix. Yes. And then one last thing that I forgot to mention as a trade-off of these centralized coordinators is you don't get, it's important to realize
Starting point is 00:49:17 you do not get Sybil resistance. That idea that flooding the round to find out, to process of elimination, track your Bitcoin, you don't get Sybil resistance from the coordinator because the main Sybil resistance in a low fee environment,
Starting point is 00:49:30 which is what we have where the transaction fees are really low, is the coin join fee. And that coin join fee gets paid to the coordinator. So a coordinator can flood their own rounds. They can flood their own rounds, and as a result, it only costs them the transaction fee. In Wasabi's incentive model,
Starting point is 00:49:51 Wasabi actually gets paid more if they do that because Wasabi users pay per perceived and onset. so the more UTXOs in a transaction the more you pay for that coin join Samurai has a fixed fee
Starting point is 00:50:09 so they can still Sybil at low cost but they don't get paid more if they Sybil so the incentive is not as strong we got that all out the coin join flame wars it's not even part flame war
Starting point is 00:50:26 Samurai is it's demeaning I'm sorry it is demeaning Samurai proves to be a better product in this particular realm
Starting point is 00:50:40 I mean it should be interesting to see if someone else launches I know there's some rumblings that other people are going to launch Wasabi coordinators I don't know what this means
Starting point is 00:50:49 for Wasabi 2.0 which is being tested right now did they even launch that? it's not great that nothing much dropped it's in testing testnet right now it's not it's not great that uh the lead architect nothing much as
Starting point is 00:51:02 you know seems to leaving on bad terms is not good uh because you know it's really hard to understand how they're doing wasabi 2.0 and like he was like one of maybe like four people in the world that kind of understood how it was working um so it's yet to be seen how that what's going to happen there it makes me feel way uh more cautious about trusting it in any kind of reasonable way definitely not with their coordinator but even with someone else's coordinator um and one more thing before we change the subject here um fuck i just forgot it yeah you distracted me a little bit sorry sorry i was trying what were you talking about wasabi 2.0 you don't trust it um oh yeah so there's been this case where there's asymmetric address reuse
Starting point is 00:52:00 or symmetric address reuse where the same address is on the input side as in the output side on wasabi and obviously that doesn't help anyone's an onset if you're using the same address on the input and address on the output side and for the actual user it can completely fuck you We saw that when the Wasabi demixing was that an address on the output side was the same as an address on the input side. One of the benefits of a centralized coordinator is they can actually prevent that from happening. They can see that the address has been reused and been like, no, you can't do this coin join. Now, Samurai's coordinator prevents that. Wasabi has said for the longest time, they're like, you know, they can't do that.
Starting point is 00:52:41 but they can put chain surveillance in the front and block UTXOs. They can clearly stop address reuse and it's still supposedly happening from my understanding, it's still supposedly happening in Wasabi 2.0. So it's like, I don't know. It's just frustrating.
Starting point is 00:52:57 The whole thing's very frustrating. It's just one of the fallen soldiers. One of the companies that fails in the early days of Bitcoin. People try it. Thrust chain surveillance on your users. it's probably not going to work out in the long run so if you're interested in the wasabi specifics more i had no power on the show in march 2021 a year ago on seal dispatch if you go to seal
Starting point is 00:53:23 dispatch.com cd15 go check that out i mean in that 10 minute clip that you posted how bad is that so bad he doesn't even it seems like he doesn't even understand i think he was just playing dumb on that you think so he's got to understand it it's key well maybe he doesn't i don't know which one's worse i think hey maybe that was a very i had open arms on with me maybe it just truly doesn't understand it maybe well if you're still considering using wasabi go listen to that if you're not you don't have to waste your time yeah i mean the 10 minute clip alone is probably all you need to hear um all right on to another more interesting top or not more interesting but a very interesting topic,
Starting point is 00:54:06 which is Arthur Hayes' blog essay. He calls it an essay that he dropped last night. Energy canceled. Similar to my belief that we will look back at the last week of February 2022
Starting point is 00:54:24 as the end of the dollar, the petrodollar system as the reserve currency of the world. Arthur. the date the sanctions went into place yes everywhere he pinpoint i said that we keep arthur pinpoints a day february 26 2022 and he basically has a long essay 25 minute read about uh what he believes is going to happen talking a lot about energy which has been a very uh recur it's been a recurring topic on this podcast for the last few weeks
Starting point is 00:55:00 We even talked about it. We talked about it on Rabbit Hole Recap the week before it even happened. Yeah. Like the week before that week, we were saying if the U.S. does this, it'll be the end of the U.S. dollar. Yes, and they did it.
Starting point is 00:55:13 And it's the end of the U.S. dollar. Interestingly enough, in this article, Arthur believes that both Bitcoin and gold are going to massively benefit from this. He's calling for $10,000 gold and a million dollar Bitcoin. And what I found interesting.
Starting point is 00:55:29 There's only a 5X on gold. Yeah, and a lot of X on Bitcoin. 20X on Bitcoin. A lot of X. Yeah, a little bit more than 20X. Live rabbit hole recap math. But he thinks gold's going to be the next reserve currency. We're going to revert to a gold standard.
Starting point is 00:55:49 I was talking to Marty earlier that my worst case scenario is that we're right about everything, but gold becomes the world reserve currency, bitcoin fails and uh i just don't have i don't have much gold i have like no gold got this wedding ring uh for many is yeah all my gold is just uh my wife's many jewelry yeah jewelry that's the only that's the only gold i have but this is uh i mean shout out to arthur hayes he whenever he puts out a post it's never a boring read it's always very insightful and very original I mean, we have been talking about a lot of these topics.
Starting point is 00:56:29 Energy is a very important part of the world. It is what people fight over. And the fact that, I mean, we didn't even have this on the list, but you had since the last episode, last week, 190, we've had Saudi Arabia engage in discussions publicly with China to begin pricing their oil deals in yuan. They'll accept yuan for oil, which, again, is not what you want to see.
Starting point is 00:57:02 You have President Xi flying over to Saudi Arabia to meet with the royal prince. I don't care what chick when they price it in. Neither do I. And that's what's going to be very interesting over the next decade. So I said this with, it might have been Rodolfo, I forget who,
Starting point is 00:57:20 earlier this week, But I think what we're going to see is you're going to have just like a complete shattering of this petrodollar system. And I think we're going to see like a crate, like you're going to have yuan oil contracts, you're going to have ruble oil contracts, you're going to have rupee oil contracts. And I don't think... A lot of chaos. A lot of chaos. I don't think... Financial markets in turmoil, macro headwinds, everything going crazy.
Starting point is 00:57:46 And Arthur made an interesting point. I think he said inside money and outside money. And inside money is all that bullshit, derivatives, fiat currencies. And then outside money is stuff that is external and has inherent value that is not connected to those things. And that, he says, is gold and Bitcoin. I would say, I mean, the transition will probably start with gold. But ultimately, gold is a shitcoin compared to Bitcoin. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:58:12 Gold, I mean, we'll just relearn the lessons that we learned a century ago with gold. It's just annoying to use. Yeah. it's annoying to use it's already extremely centralized you can't like easily custody it you can't send it around the world you can't easily sell it
Starting point is 00:58:29 it's a pain in the ass to fucking sell physical gold it's a pain in the ass to fucking move it around, store it securely verify that it is actually gold I will say that Marty's Marty's gold bug birdie tweet
Starting point is 00:58:44 remains a top tick gold is only dumped since you tweeted that out marty and maybe maybe i scared maybe i scared the government to print so much money that they were just like this is not going to happen marty bent moving markets down the uh no yeah but i think we both agree that gold is far inferior in terms of a what we would believe to be a suitable reserve currency when compared to bitcoin i mean And that's the beauty of Bitcoin. People call it digital gold. I think Bitcoin is much more than digital gold.
Starting point is 00:59:18 But if you want to compare it to gold specifically, it's scarcer, more divisible, easier to transfer, transfer, extremely easy to verify. If you're running a full node, it's superior in every regard. Obviously, there's a lot of people who can't get over the fact. It's way more than digital gold. Yes. But people can't, for some reason,
Starting point is 00:59:39 people can't get over the fact that Bitcoin isn't physical and they have this crux that they can't get over. I'm like, no, I like the physical gold more than the digital Bitcoin. That's probably because they don't understand the proof of work consensus mechanism with the difficulty adjustment, which when you do, it's like,
Starting point is 00:59:58 oh, I don't really need this to be physical at all. However, I do believe that misunderstanding or complete lack of understanding that exists will push a lot of these large actors toward gold in the coming decade. A lot of them also already have a lot of gold. So like their bags will dictate their decision
Starting point is 01:00:19 short term. Yes. So that's the other thing too. I've been saying this this week is the U.S. actually has a golden opportunity here. Pun intended. So you have like Russia, China, the Saudis,
Starting point is 01:00:35 Indians, the Indians getting together and being like, alright, we're going to transition away from the dollar and i bet they're going to try and do their own gold-backed currencies of gold-backed yuan gold-backed rubles gold rupees all that's what they did in mandibles yes and so like that's that's still the same system even though it may be better in their eyes than the dollar system that has been completely murdered over the course of the last month it's still those are still centralized it's a trusted centralized system yeah that is gonna when you have centralized
Starting point is 01:01:12 systems they inherently get corrupted they are not fair systems uh yeah and they will be corrupted over time and they require trust agreed and again that presents the the opportunity for the united states is because i don't think anybody's going to be able to trust the u.s you know like all right we'll go to a gold standard we'll be fair everybody's like no you just had your chance you fucked it up so you front run all the people are inevitably going to fail their centralized gold back currencies you say all right you know what we're actually going to adopt the the distributed peer-to-peer digital cash system known as bitcoin because we actually think it's fair that's uh it's funny because you've had this unfair monetary system and the game theoretical
Starting point is 01:01:56 trump card move that the u.s should make right now is we're gonna go bitcoin we're gonna go like free monetary system free money uh we don't we don't really like centralized monetary systems now that ours has died so that is what the u.s should do will the government do it no but i've been thinking through this more this week and i'm and again obviously big in the mining big in the mining and energy and i'm i'm becoming more and more convinced by the day that we don't even need the government's permission to do this we just got to get the energy companies so people yell to me like why do you have orange man it's like i looked for trump card like it was a funny like like trying to make a political statement with this uh cars pulling up the bent from earlier
Starting point is 01:02:42 this week uh energy producers can lead to the transition to a bitcoin standard i don't think we need the government to make the decision if we don't need them and they're not going to do it anyway no they're not and so i think recognizing that they're not going to do it that's why as Bitcoiners. And that's why I'm very excited for this conference in Houston at the end of the month with the oil and gas and energy industry at large. We've got Andrew Myers from Satoshi Energy here today. I think what we should really be doing is just focusing on getting energy producers across all the different fuel sources aligned with Bitcoin and integrating Bitcoin into their operations. And luckily for us, it is actually a no brainer. Bitcoin bolsters their operations,
Starting point is 01:03:26 bolsters or balance sheets. It actually makes a lot of sense to integrate. And so while many people in the Bitcoin world are focused on getting politicians to like Bitcoin and talk good about it and make laws about it, I think we can ignore them, go to the energy companies. Energy is the basis of our society. Without that, we don't have the ability to run our economy. You get them so aligned with Bitcoin and get them to have so much skin in the game that the government will be unable to tell them you can't do this. They're going to be like, no, this is essential to our businesses and our businesses are essential to your economy.
Starting point is 01:04:07 So what do you want to do here? So another thing that Arthur mentioned, which I agree with, first of all, everyone should go read this post. It's one of probably the most important posts of the year. He mentions this idea of chaos. It is going to be very chaotic. financial markets are going to be chaotic. The world is going to be chaotic. The state will be in a failed state type of situation. He specifically says, protect your family,
Starting point is 01:04:34 be able to wait out these times. Bitcoin will not necessarily stop this chaos. What it will hopefully do will minimize the chaos. If you survive the chaos, you can come out the other side more stable and secure. So I think it very much lines up with my thesis right now of planning through this, which is guns, land, and Bitcoin. I will say that a failed state type of situation or a failing state type of situation where other countries are demanding debt paid in hard money and goods paid for with hard money rather than USD is a situation where we enter a hyperinflation type of period, is a situation where our own government will start trying to seize gold, will start trying to seize Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:05:21 So this is something that people should be aware of. You will see stuff like the executive order 6102, which was FDR, I believe, passed it to seize gold. Paper gold, ETF paper gold, Bitcoin ETFs, all can just be seized with a button press. Paper Bitcoin, paper gold, custodial Bitcoin. Be careful out there, freaks. It's going to be a wild fucking ride.
Starting point is 01:05:52 State is failing you, and they're going to try and take your shit. You turn around, you give them the finger and tell them, you've only made things very bad. We don't need you anymore. It's going to happen. And it's not just the state taking your shit, which is, let's be honest, impractical. If our own government wants to fuck us,
Starting point is 01:06:16 they have the means to fuck us in a lot of ways it's impractical to protect against that it's also protecting yourself in a chaotic situation where the state is failing and being prepared for that because that's when you know your fellow citizens the fellow people
Starting point is 01:06:33 your neighbors and stuff start coming for your shit that can be protected against in a more accessible way more realistic way and that's the kind of situation that people should be
Starting point is 01:06:47 preparing for and if we're wrong then great then you're prepared and you know you took a little bit more time you took a little bit more effort to be prepared
Starting point is 01:06:55 for that situation you know hope for the best prepare for the worst that's what I'm trying to say I guess yeah but you're beginning to see signs
Starting point is 01:07:02 of this shit particularly with gas prices there's two gas related things that I saw earlier this week that really fucking creeped me out
Starting point is 01:07:12 first was I believe like Sunday of this week i saw a video of a man in los angeles who was crying his eyes out and he's just screaming at joe biden saying i didn't eat today joe i didn't eat today joe you want to know i didn't eat because i couldn't afford gas to fill my car up to get to my job so you have where i get paid and then i could buy money because you have the situation where people are literally being pushed to a point where they can't they literally cannot afford to work to put food on
Starting point is 01:07:46 their plates and that's when people start to get desperate and i mean yes one anecdote one video but i imagine there's there's more individuals like this gentleman out there in the u.s and across the world second one same vein truck driver who had a refrigerated uh load carrying milk he went to fill up his tank it cost him like eleven hundred dollars and he said a video like i don't think you guys understand like this is not economical what happens when prices go up three more dollars maybe they double again and this becomes like a 2200 tank fill like the shit is not going to make it to market is what he said so we were very very precarious situation i would argue our government has led us here direct this is a direct result of ill-informed and
Starting point is 01:08:45 terrible policy from from the federal government over the course of many decades whether it be monetary policy energy policy or trade policy on an international level we truly need to ignore the federal government you need to get the message out there the federal government is not your friend they're making your life materially worse off and like the more people
Starting point is 01:09:11 who understand this and the quicker they understand this the faster we'll be able to rip the bandaid off and ride through the chaos phase and actually begin to rebuild society in a more stable fashion we were having
Starting point is 01:09:26 this discussion this morning too at breakfast It's hilarious how all these policies that are portrayed as progressive wind up being regressive in terms of the effect of poor people the most. Energy policy being the most obvious example of this. You don't allow people to drill for oil and gas. You shut down nuclear power plants saying that you're saving the environment and helping people's long-term health. But what that really does is raise energy prices, which affects the poor the most and puts them in a position where they can't get to work and then start feeding each other, feeding themselves, excuse me. We had another example of it as well. The other interesting thing that I thought happened this week, so our supply chains have already been strained because of the lockdown policies that we had over the last two years. um then they were additionally strained because of the actions we've taken against russia in terms of trying to cut them off from the whole financial system uh and cut them off out of the global trade network and now to me my take here is that china has noticed an opportunity
Starting point is 01:10:39 and they're pretending covid spreading yeah shut down shenzhen shut down right now literally the manufacturing epicenter of the world is currently shut down because they said COVID which is just a very convenient I think that's a very convenient excuse to basically like try and shock the system a little bit more they like see
Starting point is 01:10:59 that we're in a weak position just fucking like poke it a little bit fucking more yeah the US is in a very weak and wounded position right now I mean you had that happen this hasn't been talked about that much but did you
Starting point is 01:11:15 Like, Iran bombed the U.S. consulate in Iraq earlier this week? Yeah, I believe so. Like, what the fuck? Like, so they see that we're wounded, distracted. It was Erbil. Sprit. Erbil. Erbil.
Starting point is 01:11:27 How do you pronounce it? Erbil. Or Erbil, I think. I'm not sure. It's E-R-B-I-L in Iraq. I thought it was I-R-B-I-L. No, it might be Erbil. I think it's E.
Starting point is 01:11:38 However, yeah, Iran felt that we were distracted, spread thin enough to bomb the U.S. consulate in Iraq. Well, I think they said it was like not their government who did it. But yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, people, people are noticing. It was insurgent forces in Iran. And on top of this, top of all this, you have like Joe Biden losing his mind in front of the whole world.
Starting point is 01:11:58 He literally can't speak. Doesn't make any sense. Nancy Pelosi, the same exact thing. Like, do you see that speech he gave earlier this week? Like talking about. You see the picture of her and JFK when she was younger? Yeah. JFK's inauguration.
Starting point is 01:12:13 It's been around for a while. I mean, again, these are our leaders in the federal government and they are making us look terrible. They put us in a very weak position and they are not the individuals who are going to lead us out of this mess. Broken incentives. Very broken incentives. Most of this can go back to broken incentives.
Starting point is 01:12:31 Yes. Which is why the beautiful incentives of Bitcoin, the rough incentives of Bitcoin cannot be understated in their importance. It's really fucking cool. Yeah. And powerful. maybe maybe the only incentive system baked into the american political structure is states rights again we've been saying this for quite some time over the last year on this show like states
Starting point is 01:12:54 asserting their autonomy and beginning to ignore the federal government is a very encouraging trend to see again i think that's only going to accelerate i think it should accelerate i think these states need to be more bold like them or love them or love them or hate them excuse me I think Ron DeSantis is, is, may not agree with, you may, you don't have to agree with all of his policies. You don't have to agree with everything he says, but I think we can all agree that he is leading the way in terms of having the courage to ignore the federal government and basically say, all right, we're a state, we're autonomous. We're going to do what we want. Please leave us alone. I think we need more of that. Again, you don't have to agree with his policies, but the fact
Starting point is 01:13:37 that he is doing this and is showing that you can do it because it technically is allowed in the republic that we've set up here in the United States. Hopefully it emboldens other governors to begin doing the same and making bold moves
Starting point is 01:13:51 based off of what they and their constituents believe is right for them. Democracy fail. Thanks for, yeah, democracy equals fail. Hi, hi, Calamone. Moving to Austin, May 1st.
Starting point is 01:14:05 It's such a funny thing when a car just like puts like a comment on the screen and then like me or Marty just like reads it without reading the name of the person. Like it's, we can't help ourselves. Like you just like, you were just like talking and then you're just like democracy equals fail. You're just like,
Starting point is 01:14:19 it's a, what is a anchorman or whatever? Yeah. Put anything on the teleprompter. I'm Ron Burgundy. Yo, fuck yourself. Um,
Starting point is 01:14:32 yeah. Shake your neighbor's hand. shake your rancher's hand hit the gun range but again yeah i do think we can expedite the chaos and get to a more stable situation yeah expedite shorten the chaos yes expedite the chaos means like yeah i don't know oh the chaos is here expedite the journey through the chaos shorten it lessen the extent of it yes make it you know less painful for everybody yes that should be the plan like the chaos has to happen unfortunately the chaos is upon us there's too much yeah the chaos is but i would say it's going to get significantly more chaotic yes
Starting point is 01:15:13 god damn it i mean in a lot of ways we might look back and be like wow that was not much chaos at that point no you know no we were sitting those are the normal calm times or whatever yes we were stable times remember when we were able to go into the bitcoin commons in austin texas god damn it bye bitcoin yeah i mean if i'm if if what i expect is happening like i do not you know i i we'll see yeah well the fed came out and raised rates by 25 bits so you said it wasn't gonna happen i didn't think it was gonna happen i i mean this is exactly a small low bullshit, negligible increase is exactly
Starting point is 01:16:01 what I expected. Can you go to my account and pull up the not going to make it tweet I sent out last night, which highlights the Fed funds rate comparing the rate hikes that Volcker did in
Starting point is 01:16:16 the late 70s to yeah, right there. I think Zender posted this and zoom in on that. It very much highlights just how ineffectual this 25 BIP is going to be. It's nothing. It's fucking...
Starting point is 01:16:34 Die inflation. In the 80s, they were able to raise it up to 19%. Today, we're at 80 BIPs, if that. Which is 0.8%. Yes. And there's no way... BIPs are what the cool kids say. There's no way they're going to curb this inflation.
Starting point is 01:16:52 when you combine the money printing that has happened with the supply chain shocks that have happened and continue to happen it's inevitable and then you throw in russia i mean again you alluded to it earlier arthur describing in his letter what you're going to find is when push comes to shove the u.s has had a lot of leverage due to the fact that it has run this hyper-financialized economy and the dollar is a reserve reserve currency of the world but again it's a gradually and suddenly moment we're hitting the suddenly moment where it's like the dollars don't matter it's the stuff that matters you want the the precious metals the industrial metals the commodities your wheat your corn your natural gas your oil that's what people
Starting point is 01:17:43 want now they don't give a fuck about the dollar or the financial financial financialized world that is built up around it at the end of the day people need to eat they need to put fuel in their cars they need to put fuel in their homes to heat their homes they don't they don't give a shit about treasuries or any of that and we've pissed off much of the world and now they're everybody's turning insular and beginning to embark on isolationist policies russia particularly is not going to be exporting any of their commodities to countries that have made it onto their shit list and i don't think people realize they they ridolfo has been saying this all week in here they produce 60 of the world's ammonium nitrate which is one of the key ingredients
Starting point is 01:18:30 to fertilizer which is pretty important for food production around the world we'll just switch to seed oils that's it yeah i mean that's that's part of the chaos is you're going to be eating beyond meat you're gonna be eating lab meat because you're not gonna be able to grow shit so hopefully there's ways to to mitigate that supply crunch particularly ammonium nitrate i mean there's a bunch of talk of cow manure prices rising pretty significantly because obviously that's the alternative to industrialized fertilizers is cow shit so you need to figure out a way to they literally poop money it's
Starting point is 01:19:10 crazy times crazy times let's focus on something good that happened this week which is there was a Stratum V2 demo testnet demo that was released yesterday and
Starting point is 01:19:26 it's just very encouraging to see we've been talking about Stratum V2 since 2019 for any of you freaks who are unaware of what Stratum V2 is It is a mining pool protocol that allows individual miners to communicate with pools so that they can share their shares and get distributed satoshis based off the commensurate rate that they dedicate to a pool. Stratum is the popular, Stratum B1 is the protocol, the standard protocol that miners are using, mining pools are using right now. It has been around for quite a while, and it's becoming very apparent that it's probably time to upgrade this mining pool protocol, and many people have been working on the upgrade to that, which is Stratum B2, and it has many benefits, one of which it allows individual miners to actually construct a block.
Starting point is 01:20:19 So right now, that's a very centralizing factor of mining pools is that individual miners contribute a hash rate to a pool and the pool takes care of actually constructing the block and broadcasting it to the network. So while, yes, you have many individual miners making up the hash rate in a pool, the pool to date has been constructing the blocks of the pool decides what transactions go into a block and then get broadcast to the network. stratum v2 would change that and it would allow individual miners to construct their own blocks so it distributes that process more granularly which is good to see on top of that it creates efficiency data efficiency and more data privacy importantly the the data that miners send to pools will now be encrypted and this helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks which actually is probably the number one reason why we should upgrade to Stratum V2
Starting point is 01:21:15 is as hash rate grows and it becomes more integrated with the energy sector and becomes like a large industrial part of the world, the incentive to attack the mining industry and the infrastructure around it increases. And so even though man-in-the-middle attacks have not been very popular or frequent, common to date. The incentive to wage a man-in-the-middle attack is rising.
Starting point is 01:21:45 And if you can implement a protocol that would prevent that from happening, it's probably advantageous for the network as a whole. It's harder than the protocol. Yeah. But the big thing for individual miners constructing blocks rather than the pool constructing blocks, individual miners using their own node
Starting point is 01:22:06 and constructing the blocks themselves and choosing which transactions are in it reduces that censorship risk that comes with pool mining. Now I say reduces
Starting point is 01:22:18 first of all I still have to broadcast so I have to get over there. Yeah the mining pool can reject it. The second thing is we have like a kind of a rough
Starting point is 01:22:29 check on that in that if the if miners realized their pool is doing censorship that they disagree with they can then go and leave the pool but that's like an after the fact type of thing um the third thing is these mining pools are still custodial right they're holding your bitcoin for you um so there's that central point of failure where we could see you know them get hit with regulations um and then the fourth thing is i think it's an unsolved problem with strategy 2 but there needs to be some rules in place basically
Starting point is 01:23:02 to make sure that like a miner doesn't come in and just construct poorly payout blocks, right? Like blocks that are not including transactions or including low fee paying transactions is not as profitable. Yeah, how do you ensure an individual miner will- Because you're socializing the profits among all the miners.
Starting point is 01:23:21 So if a couple of miners are intentionally sabotaging- It doesn't even have to be intentional. It just could be incompetence too. They're not able to collect transactions with high fees, which miners want. Yeah, how do you fine-tune for that? I know that they've been working on it. I think that's something I actually have to ask somebody
Starting point is 01:23:43 in the mining pool industry, I believe, for this to actually go live. I mean, Brains has it. If you use their firmware in their pool. If you use their firmware in their pool, they have it, so you get the benefits of the encrypted data. but I think you don't get that block instruction
Starting point is 01:23:59 you just get the other benefits of strategy 2 yes and I think the last I checked and I don't know if it has been merged
Starting point is 01:24:07 or if it was merged with tapers there does need to be something soft fork into the protocol I think it pertains to the payouts as well before it can go live
Starting point is 01:24:16 at scale don't know what the status of that is but I do need to check in with either the brains team or
Starting point is 01:24:24 somebody else at the pool level who who has better insight onto that so if you want to learn about Stratum V2 Carr's got the the brains
Starting point is 01:24:35 blog post with two I's brains with two I's brains he's got their blog post up on the screen now but Galaxy Digital wrote a
Starting point is 01:24:44 I believe a 20 page research report really diving into the intricacies intricacies of Stratum V1 versus Stratum V2 why it's important
Starting point is 01:24:52 and everything you need to know about stratum v2 uh in its status as of right now uh if you want to read up on the history of stratum v2's development go to tftc.io slash tag slash stratum dash v2 um we've been covering it again since 2019 and it is good to see the progress is being made so again car if you can pull up the tweet below this yeah this so um and i can't read his hand can you zoom in a bit excuse me i just burped you have a tendency to do that yeah mike yeah so this uh free what is it free shit max free underscored shit underscore max bitcoin terrorists
Starting point is 01:25:41 on uh on twitter i believe he's actually sponsored by spiral btc um he hosted a a live demo on test net of um a strata b2 pool spin up and it seems to be working on test net at least so it's very encouraging to see that code is being written it's being tested and we're getting closer to having this deployed widely throughout the mining industry and again it's important we'll help with privacy we'll prevent man-in-the-middle attacks we'll help distribute block construction uh it's a step in the right direction and in the galaxy research report they really stress that it It actually is very important that we get this upgrade through its time. Typically in Bitcoin, people are very cautious about any massive upgrades.
Starting point is 01:26:31 And Galaxy's mining team thinks that there's been enough research, enough testing, enough understanding of the changes that it would bring. And it is time to upgrade the mining pool protocol. Maybe we'll get somebody in the mining industry to come give an update soon. Mining pool industry. you're dirtying the bookshelf with Topo Chico I think they look great this episode is brought to you by Topo Chico hey Topo
Starting point is 01:26:59 if you're looking to sponsor let us know Marty's wife, I don't want to dox her name he's drinking his second Topo Chico no one likes a counter yeah you're counting, live on air honey, it's been a long week you know that
Starting point is 01:27:14 I'm glad you're drinking with me Marty, I appreciate it I need to give a special I'm going to use this platform to give a special shout out to my wife I love you honey you've been very patient this week you're very pregnant she's great there's been a lot of people in and out of the house this week and you've been a trooper
Starting point is 01:27:31 so I want to thank you for that I really do appreciate her she's my favorite bent so another topic that I really wanted to talk about today was the was the UK has banned Bitcoin ATMs they have force closed a bunch of Bitcoin ATMs what was their justification
Starting point is 01:27:49 apparently they were listening and they realized that you discovered the beauty of Bitcoin ATMs and they banned all the Bitcoin ATMs in the UK yeah
Starting point is 01:27:58 what was it this was it's not like oh they left the EU no it's UK FCA the financial they're the worst
Starting point is 01:28:04 they're the worst the worst financial organization in terms of Bitcoin right now what was their justification just lack of they said it's used being used for bad things
Starting point is 01:28:13 yeah it's always the justification market what are you guys doing about Prince Andrew in the UK wasn't he doing some bad things you're going to kick out the Prince Andrews
Starting point is 01:28:22 you're going to ban the Prince Andrews in the UK huh priorities people just want access to freedom money you got one of your princes running around dealing with people you should take care of that first but this is I think a perfect
Starting point is 01:28:39 example of you know on ramps will be cut off especially on ramps that give you decent privacy guarantees um you know so so stack stack while you can stack early and often and get it ideally and like take advantage of ways you could do it in more private ways while you still can um i think all the chaos that we've seen in first canada ukraine russia really just shows firsthand um and before that we saw it in Kazakhstan, we saw it across the world. When chaos does hit, when crises do hit,
Starting point is 01:29:18 it becomes much more difficult to secure the things you need, including Bitcoin. And you should have a plan in place that has you prepared before that happens. And this has always been one of the reasons why I've never tried to trade volatile Bitcoin movements besides the fact that i just not a good not a good trader uh neither of us are and most people aren't 99 of people will just get fucking wrecked it's always worried me that like if i sold my bitcoin i wouldn't be able to get back in when i needed it you may not be able to get that back and i just would rather i'd just rather ride this shit to zero and watch it you know become the world reserve currency and just yeah become the money of the world and just not
Starting point is 01:30:05 I'm riding this baby to hell if it goes there I'll be going to hell in a sat basket hell in a sat basket? yeah wait Carl pull that back up I want to read the regulator quote so the regulator said we regularly warn consumers that crypto assets are unregulated
Starting point is 01:30:22 and high risk which means people are very unlikely to have any protection if things go wrong what's it say oh so people should be prepared to lose all their money if they choose to invest in them there's like fun it's like complete projection i mean what's going on right now in the u.s with the u.s dollars
Starting point is 01:30:47 they have a different part there that's like they so they have limits for like uh no kyc they have limits and i think it's 200 pounds and they're like it seems that people are doing many under 200 pound transactions they're calling it smurfing to get around the restrictions but it's like yeah well if you made the limit higher then they would just do one transaction but you had the limit at 200
Starting point is 01:31:12 like what do you expect well think about that 250 pounds how much money is that especially in this world of high inflation you can buy like three loaves of bread and a steak yeah they don't like they want to control you in the UK you're not free we're not free here in the
Starting point is 01:31:28 US they literally don't think you were an adult, you were capable of doing things worth more than 250 pounds without being labeled suspicious. Think of how insane that is. We live in a world, a complete nanny state across the globe. These people are completely insulting you. They do not think that you have the mental facilities or that you are a good enough person to be able to spend 250 pounds, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things and make decisions for yourself without the state interjecting
Starting point is 01:32:04 and surveilling you to ensure that you're not doing anything that they do not like. But if you're the prince, you can go to Diddle Kids, you can go to Jeffrey Epstein's Island, you can get pictures with Bill Clinton and a bunch of underagers
Starting point is 01:32:18 and people will openly know that you were sexually assaulting underage women and just be free. The queen just goes, hey, Andrew, we're going to take away some of your inheritance, okay? But let's go stand in the corner. You're not going to be in any family pictures anymore. Think of the world we live in. You can't spend 250 pounds.
Starting point is 01:32:42 You can't buy 250 pounds of Bitcoin without having to give up all this information. But Prince Andrew, hop on the Lolita Express and go diddle kids around the world. On your dime. On your dime, too. Keep pointing. Pointing into the camera. This is like a great thing of the studio. You can just like,
Starting point is 01:32:59 ah, aggressive points. This is going to be the studio of aggressive points. Live from the studio of aggressive points. I mean, Bill Clinton, one of the people he was associated with in Haiti, a priest,
Starting point is 01:33:13 a pastor. He just got yanked for diddling kids. Pictures of those two together. It's two tiered society. The rulers who make these rules and do whatever the fuck they want to. But you, you, you can't do this
Starting point is 01:33:27 car's got it off car's quick I mean it is fucking ridiculous that they they use like terrorism and criminal
Starting point is 01:33:35 activity to surveil us in every aspect of everything we do and they are the terrorists and the criminals it's fucking insane
Starting point is 01:33:42 meanwhile like besides Ghislaine no one has fucking Jeffrey Epstein stuff has just been completely
Starting point is 01:33:52 forgotten memory hold Never happened. It never happened. Zoom in on this car. Like, look at this. Bill Clinton. Please do not retweet this picture of Bill Clinton
Starting point is 01:34:07 visiting the U.S. pastor in Haiti who adopted children and was just arrested for child sexual abuse. Gordon Clay ran the Apparent Project with many celebrity endorsements, including our ex-president Bill Clinton who we know
Starting point is 01:34:27 is doing some weird things who we know was on Jeffrey Epstein's plane at least 27 times who we know is not fucking Hillary Clinton come on come on
Starting point is 01:34:37 we know that two-tiered society you can't spend 250 pounds these people can go do whatever the fuck they want men lecture you and tell you you're a bad person and you're suspicious
Starting point is 01:34:50 alright What do we think about Block's new hardware wallet? I want to talk about Kazakhstan next. Let's talk about Kazakhstan. Let's go to Kazakhstan. Seized $200 million worth of mining equipment. Yes. From unregistered miners, so non-KYC miners.
Starting point is 01:35:12 And then they did, what are the stats there? If you scroll in, I think they said they forced, they got 55, what is that? 55 mining companies to basically comply with their regs and KYC themselves. Voluntarily closed down. Oh, no. 55 voluntarily closed down. How many registered?
Starting point is 01:35:32 Scroll right. 25 registered, 55 voluntary closed down, and 51 were forced to close down, and $200 million of their equipment seized. And this is a country that has roughly 12% of the hash rate, which we actually know relatively well because they shut down the internet countrywide and the hash rate dropped by 12%. So like most countries were like estimating
Starting point is 01:35:56 how much hash rate they have. Kazakhstan, still an estimate, but the fact that they shut down the whole country's internet and the hash fell by 12% is a pretty good indicator. Yes. And so this is somewhat similar
Starting point is 01:36:09 to what Venezuela and Maduro did. This is actually... This seems more sophisticated than that. More sophisticated, yes. Because they honey trapped the miners first. They said, hey, come in. We're going to give you tax breaks and all this excess electricity.
Starting point is 01:36:21 Come into Kazakhstan. Right. A lot of them came from China when the exodus happened. Come mine. Before the exodus. Come mine in Kazakhstan. We're going to give you tax breaks.
Starting point is 01:36:29 You're going to get all this cheap electricity. It's sub three cents. It's beautiful. Come into these centralized on-grid locations where you just like plop it down, build a massive facility, take our electricity, mine Bitcoin. And then it was a slow creep, a slippery slope.
Starting point is 01:36:44 And they said, you know those tax breaks we're going to give you? yeah they're they're not here anymore and we're actually going to tax you a bit more than our other customers um yeah and you know what actually you don't have these registrations that we just threw on you so we're just going to take your shit like that's and that's what happened in kazakhstan it's pretty fucked up it's pretty fucked up i mean there's publicly traded mining i mean i i wonder i doubt up genesis is one of the largest miners in the world i would imagine that they they're one of the 21 that registered yeah imagine the one of
Starting point is 01:37:15 21 that register but i mean this again we're sitting in texas this is um a big meme here in texas right now and i don't i mean with that being said i do think texas would respect uh private property rights respect would respect private property rights better than kazakhstan however i mean we will find out i mean this is what's happening here they're saying bring all your hash rate here, build these monolithic, multi-hundred megawatt facilities, plug into our grid.
Starting point is 01:37:51 And then follow these very simple KYC regs because, you know, don't you hate criminals? You don't like terrorists. You don't like criminals. Just follow these. Just fill out this simple registration form next year. Make it a little bit more information.
Starting point is 01:38:06 Make it a little bit more information. Censor these transactions. Boil the frog. yeah censor these transactions but like you know Prince Andrew's trying to pay for
Starting point is 01:38:15 for for a little sex slave you're just really obsessed with Prince Andrew today I mean it's just I think it's funny that he's a prince
Starting point is 01:38:24 but isn't he like 90 no you're thinking of how old is Prince Andrew you're thinking of the guy who died car duck duck goose it
Starting point is 01:38:32 Prince Andrew's gotta be like in his 60s I would imagine okay yeah that's the one I was thinking of I just over aged him you're thinking I'm thinking of like
Starting point is 01:38:40 there's this meme of that one like I think it's like the queen's wife or husband where he's like in the car and he's like
Starting point is 01:38:45 Prince Andrew has an arrogance that hasn't served him well I asked you what his age was duck
Starting point is 01:38:55 duck go it duck duck geese DDG DDG it no Prince Andrew
Starting point is 01:39:07 is be on the right side there 62 wow i called it miss 60s i mean i hope you knew his age i mean you're an expert shouts medical expert first then we were geopolitical experts then precious metal experts and now out of all of them i'm more of an expert on this stuff royalty i just don't talk about it as much on on the show we're trying to oh i forgot urban expert we're clinging on the youtube and uh they don't like when you talk about the pedo rings the elite pedo what was that the elite pedo rings that blatantly exist around the world thank you for speaking up yes um so now
Starting point is 01:39:52 we can talk about blocks hardware wallet what do you think formally square uh they released more details uh they're planning on putting a rechargeable battery in it uh with usbc uh it is going to be nfc based which is we already knew that i love nfc i'm a big i'm becoming an nfc maximalist these days it's okay uh it's a cool it's a cool tech um everything has trade-offs there's no screen they're going to put an optional fingerprint reader on it rather than a pin pad um and i think and it's going to be extremely cheap it's going to work with a mobile app The mobile app, you will basically set limits on it. If you pay from your phone and it's below your limits,
Starting point is 01:40:36 this is my understanding of what they posted. Let's say you set your limit to a million sats. Any transaction that's under a million sats, it just operates like a normal phone wallet, something like a Blue Wallet or a Samurai. If it's more expensive than that, whatever your internal limit is, then you have to tap the hardware device on the back of your phone to spend,
Starting point is 01:40:59 maybe scan your fingerprint. Look, I mean, there was a lot of outrage about this. Main reason is, well, two main reasons is first of all, the reason we have screens on our devices is because if the phone is compromised or the computer is compromised, you want to check the offline hardware's device screen to double check because there's an air gap there. So it should show what you expect you're confirming.
Starting point is 01:41:29 On this, you can't do that. The second thing is fingerprint. Obviously, we all have our fingerprints. They're tied to us. Hey, don't speak for me. I don't have any fingerprints. Someone can cut off your finger. Someone can pressure you to do it.
Starting point is 01:41:42 We recently, you see cops do it all the time where they try and face ID you or they try and take your finger and place it. You actually constitutionally are not protected if your phone has a fingerprint scanner. but if it's a pin uh you have the right not to unlock it yeah not to not to uh disclose that um so so ideally for authentication uh fingerprint is not ideal um but trade-offs are everywhere people lose pins people use easy pins so like look at the end of the day
Starting point is 01:42:19 I think what Block is trying to do, what Square is trying to do, is have a very low-cost open-source hardware wallet that improves the security model over someone who's just using their phone wallet. They're only using a mobile wallet. Bitcoiners have other options that are more secure, like Coldcard and SeedSigner. And ultimately, people should make trade-off decisions and balance those trade-offs and make their own decisions. So I actually, um, I'm pretty intrigued by this project. I like, I'm not going to keep my life savings on this thing. Um, but in terms of accessible security in a self-sovereign way, like they might have something here.
Starting point is 01:43:03 And I think it's really fucking cool that, uh, it's going to be open source so that basically they're going to release these schematics. Ideally, I assume they're going to release their own device, but other people can go out and, and, and build and iterate on it. which is pretty fucking awesome for a publicly traded company. Yes. I mean, I agree. I think a lot of the initial outrage was a bit short-sighted.
Starting point is 01:43:29 We talked, Rodolfo and I, about this yesterday. He has a similar product that he's releasing. Yes. But no, I think Rodolfo makes a good point. He's like, stop making the same thing, hardware wallet companies. There's many creative things that you can do. And I think what Block did here, whether you agree with it or not, I think it's undeniable that they've expanded the design space of the hardware wallet industry with this.
Starting point is 01:43:52 I mean, it's very unique. I mean, the tap signer is literally, it's like the same concept. Yes. Without the fingerprint, it's just a pin code on it, right? But again, I would have put the tap signer in this too. They were released around the same time, expanding it. The fingerprints added variable with Blocks products. But yeah, no, I think, again, there's...
Starting point is 01:44:15 Options are good. options are good trade-offs exist like matt said you're not gonna put your life savings on this hardware device or your tap signer probably but it does allow you and will allow people designing products around this thing to think more creatively it just expanded the the landscape for which to think of designing experiences around interacting with the bitcoin network so yeah they got a lot of shit for this but i mean i understand why people were screeching on the internet but again i think i'm a fan of expanding the design space in this way i will say what i'm intrigued about here as well is um is the fact
Starting point is 01:45:01 that originally i thought it was kind of going to be rolled into cache app as like a multi-sig kind of setup, and it still seems like they're going to use a multi-sig setup in terms of that authentication, or maybe add that as an option. Maybe it'll work as a two-factor or multi-sig. But what's interesting to me is it seems like they're going to
Starting point is 01:45:21 make a brand new mobile wallet that's open source, powered by BDK, which they're funding through Spiral, the Bitcoin development kit. They're also funding LDK, so it could have lightning support. And it could support NFC
Starting point is 01:45:36 interaction with a hardware wallet in an open standard could end up working with things like TapSigner and other NFC hardware wallets. It could work with QR code signing devices. So I'm actually pretty intrigued to see what they come up with in terms of open source mobile wallet. Because let's be honest, the overwhelming majority of people that onboard to Bitcoin are going to be doing it through mobile wallets. um we have some good mobile wallets but like it'd be nice to have more uh and i i think that's a space that's very limited uh especially i mean like you can count them on you can count them on your hand it's like samurai blue wallet moon breeze and they all have different trade-offs
Starting point is 01:46:19 phoenix they all have different trade-offs some are lightning only some are on chain only like i want to see you know i want to see as much as much development there as possible so you have them doing that. Foundations mobile wallet is supposedly based off of BDK and Flutter. So it should be interesting to see what they come up with on the software side. I assume it won't be locked into Foundation only. I would hope that it's fully open source and you can use it with any QR code based wallet, ideally NFC too. So there could be some interesting things happening here on the mobile wallet space. Maybe you can get a cheap tap signer, cheap, whatever they call this thing uh for five dollars like seed signers already cheap so i'd like 50 60 dollars but you
Starting point is 01:47:05 get down to five dollars all of a sudden you can have you know maybe you can have like a multi-sig setup with a with the blocks thing with your phone that you already have no forget the cold card for a second with the tap signer and with the seed signer and that's like right that's a That's four keys at like under $100. Yeah, that'd be insane. Each with different trade-off balances and not trusting any single manufacturer. That's pretty powerful.
Starting point is 01:47:36 Like I said. That's empowering. That's empowering to the global, what they call the global south, like people that are just disadvantaged. They don't have that much money, but they want to be connected to a worldwide financial system.
Starting point is 01:47:48 Yeah, and it's, again, It's expanding the landscape of the design around interactions with the Bitcoin protocol, particularly private keys. So yeah, I'm a fan of it. I know people get a little weary when biometrics get added to Bitcoin. Oh, and the biometrics are supposed to be local too. Like it's not supposed to go to a server. But yeah, no, I'm a fan of it. So it will be very interesting to see
Starting point is 01:48:21 what they come out with as they continue to make us more aware of what they're building. So, I mean, a lot of people talk shit about Square, Blocks, Cash App, what they're doing. I mean, I think what Jack and team are doing at Blocks is add a lot of value.
Starting point is 01:48:40 I mean, LDK is valuable. BDK is valuable. Spiral is sponsoring the dev. It just came out with that strategy too. Bitcoin design community. yeah bitcoindesign.guide or bitcoindotguide
Starting point is 01:48:53 it's not bitcoindotguide it's bitcoindesign.guide bitcoindesign.guide it might be bitcoindotguide it's bitcoindesign.guide car's gonna figure it out the first one doesn't work out
Starting point is 01:49:06 yeah that was all we got should we I mean we don't have any shout outs is that all we have let me triple check I mean we have a hard stop in 18 minutes
Starting point is 01:49:17 it's bitcoindesign.guide right type into duckduckgoose bitcoindesign.guide oh we didn't talk about how
Starting point is 01:49:38 crypto.com asked everyone to pay back their loans yes that was weird I was wrong so yeah
Starting point is 01:49:51 we didn't talk about this this happened last bitcoin.design that's what it is we were both wrong oh fuck we were both wrong well together we were
Starting point is 01:50:01 still wrong it's funny so I was walking around the Colorado River here in Austin, Texas a couple Sundays ago after the last UFC fight
Starting point is 01:50:12 and I was talking with a couple of bitcoiners like how the hell is Crypto.com have all this marketing budget. They've paid for that commercial with Matt Damon. They sponsored the whole UBFC. Matt Damon's so brave. He's so brave.
Starting point is 01:50:25 He's so good at South Park. Fortune favors the brave. Matt Damon lost my family all their money. But it was brave. They hired Matt Damon for a Super Bowl commercial. They paid F1 $100 million. They paid F1 $100 million. I don't know how much they paid the
Starting point is 01:50:41 UFC, but they're on every UFC Jersey. And it was funny that this news dropped last week after we had this conversation. We're like, how in the hell do they have this marketing budget? Are they using user funds to front run this or to support this marketing budget? And I'm not saying
Starting point is 01:50:57 that is the case. There's no evidence. There's no evidence to prove this at all. It's just a hunch, a theory. But yeah, it was a bit weird, a bit odd that they came out only days later to beg or not even beg, demand
Starting point is 01:51:12 that their clients pay back their loans by March 15th. Which was two days ago. So what happened? I don't know. I don't know anybody who uses. I don't know anybody who uses crypto.com. It's rehypothecation as a service. I mean, they literally lend out your
Starting point is 01:51:28 quote-unquote crypto because they don't just do Bitcoin. I don't know anybody who uses crypto.com. Have you ever met anybody? I know F1 uses crypto.com as a sponsor. I only know people using it to get ad money like you realize they like did the whole uh like they sponsored the league is what they did so every race they have like a crypto.com corner where the cars go by
Starting point is 01:51:52 and she's like crypto.com crypto.com crypto.com yeah so much fucking 100 million dollars insane so crypto.com is interesting because it's actually been uh i mean they can go fuck themselves but It's probably one of the most successful ICO executions because they, I mean, I know domains are shit coin, but it's a harder asset than most things that ICOs do. And what they did was they did their ICO for their token, and then they went and bought crypto.com. Like the ICO wasn't for crypto.com because they didn't own it yet. And there was this guy who owned crypto.com for cryptography, and he said, I'm never going
Starting point is 01:52:31 to sell it uh to a bitcoin or crypto company um and then in 2000 because he was like it's going to zero everything's going to zero in 2018 he actually thought everything was going to zero so he sold it to them for like nothing at the bottom in 2018 he sold them to them for like eight million dollars or seven million dollars or something for crypto.com and then they built this whole company based off the name crypto.com with ico proceeds um so they can go fuck themselves but uh it's a pretty good snag on a domain name right yeah i mean they're they can go themselves but they're very savvy they're an on-ramp too it's not just like i think a lot of people i think a lot of people buy from them as an on-ramp like they must like the app is you
Starting point is 01:53:14 know they have an app or whatever i don't you know i assume they're pretty successful i think they're i think they're like obviously you go crypto the app store first one to come up you get on and then you buy or you just type in crypto.com like there's people that just type in the thing they want and add .com at the end. Yes. And they get thrown here and I'm sure they're
Starting point is 01:53:32 selling these assets and just making a killing on the fee side of it. I think they have a credit card too. They do. And... But yeah, going back to like their savviness,
Starting point is 01:53:42 they... They were like the first cryptocurrency after Bitcoin to get the hashtag their shitcoin emblem. Well, they paid for it. Yeah, they paid for it. Bitcoin just got it
Starting point is 01:53:55 through Lindy. that's not a person that's an effect big fan of unique domain names alright we don't have any shout outs this week so I guess we're in person we've got 13 minutes until we need to get out of here I do need to
Starting point is 01:54:10 to unload some of my bodily fluids at some point let's answer a couple questions how's the live chat looking is it lively do we have like two people listening like how Adele thinks millions is nothing I mean for crypto.com
Starting point is 01:54:33 I think that's pretty cheap right like I think he sold it at the bottom for that yeah he could have they spent a hundred million dollars for a one year advertisement on F1 but they spent eight million dollars on the fucking name of their company and the domain
Starting point is 01:54:48 yeah that dude could have easily gotten ten figures if he would not 10 figures he settled for 7 he should have gone for 8 or 9 excuse me we got nothing else? we gotta go
Starting point is 01:55:05 Luna Market buying a billion I don't understand what this is we were talking about this earlier I heard what's his face Novo got a tattoo oh my god it's so fucking cringe
Starting point is 01:55:16 I thought it was fake hopefully it is I haven't seen it it seems like a shitcoin game I haven't looked into it. Just be wary. It's very hyped. Another heuristic, usually a local top
Starting point is 01:55:27 when people start getting cryptocurrency tattoos. There's like a stable coin involved. They're like buying a lot of Bitcoin to back the stable coin. I don't really understand what's going on there. I haven't really looked into it. The way Matt described it to me earlier, because I had no idea what it was either,
Starting point is 01:55:42 was trying to, it's a more centralized maker down with Bitcoin as a collateral asset instead of ETH. so like tether they pretend like usdc is backed by us dollars i believe this is just backed by bitcoin um and uh yeah i mean sats are my stable coin i had a friend reach out i got i mean obviously a lot of people's bitcoin guy and he like reached out and he was like matt like i know like they always have to preface it before they ask me about shit coins they're like matt i know bitcoin is king like i woke up to this text but like what do you think about luna and terra buying all this fucking, you know, Bitcoin
Starting point is 01:56:20 to like back their new project. It's like really big. What are your thoughts on it? And I responded back like, I was like, I have no thoughts. I literally am just hearing about this for the first time. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:56:31 And then I kind of looked into it and now then I ate breakfast at Marty's and now I'm here. Yeah. Are you guys sticking around for the concert of Bitcoin 2022? Yes. I will not be.
Starting point is 01:56:42 Sound money fest. When are you flying? I'm leaving that morning. I've got a very pregnant wife that. Oh, fair enough. going away for that long yeah i'm i'm doing miami third through 11th um you always put at least in one extra day after a conference unless you have a pregnant wife uh because just you're going to be burnt out uh so that's why i did that and um yeah and yeah i mean i'm bummed i'm missing
Starting point is 01:57:09 what are you going to be on the front end of it i'm coming in i'm coming in the six leaving too bad yes doing a live dispatch on the 5th if you want to join me alright maybe I'll maybe I'll come out
Starting point is 01:57:20 the 5th is going to be dispatch then BitDev's in the same venue and then Beefsteak right afterwards Beefsteak that is a big draw to come
Starting point is 01:57:29 also the open source stage a lot of programming is about to get released guys it's going to be fucking insane I'm just
Starting point is 01:57:35 chilling in the open source stage the whole time you will have a fucking great fucking time b.tc slash conference ticket prices going up
Starting point is 01:57:45 between now and the conference or are we yes we at the high it'll go up okay I don't know when they're going up use the code TFTC for 10% off
Starting point is 01:57:52 there's another code out there that'll get you more off I don't remember what it is I may have mentioned it in other episodes if you're too lazy to go find it and you don't remember
Starting point is 01:58:02 what it is you can always use the code TFTC but open source is important all caps yes this is fun this is great I fucking love the live rips
Starting point is 01:58:15 yeah we will be doing a live rabbit hole recap on the open source stage on the first day to wrap up the thing and our boy Captain Youth
Starting point is 01:58:22 will be performing immediately following that he wanted to do this a bit block boom but we couldn't make it happen so he's he got he got denied
Starting point is 01:58:30 for sound money fest I was like we got you you can close that rabbit hole recap we'd be honored yes we are we are honored
Starting point is 01:58:37 they're gonna close it out for us Captain Youth and what was I going to say? I was going to say something else. Oh, yeah. I'm on a mining panel. Is ESG an attack on Bitcoin?
Starting point is 01:58:49 Wait, has that been publicly released? I think so, yeah. Okay. Fuck yeah. Yeah. I was pretty excited about that one. That'll be fun. And where are you emceeing?
Starting point is 01:59:00 You're on panels. What are you doing? I'm running the open source stage. I'm doing a home mining on the mining stage and Bitcoin node panel, node round table. I'll just be living in the open source stage except for the mining
Starting point is 01:59:16 the whole mining for KYC pre-sales when did we announce the ESG one it had to be yesterday I had people texting me I was really excited I've been talking to you
Starting point is 01:59:28 about that one for a little bit I was very excited about that one it'll be a fun one I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say my answer now
Starting point is 01:59:37 I'll keep it for the stage you're gonna have to go and find out well I originally wanted the panel to be called ESG is an attack on Bitcoin
Starting point is 01:59:42 and then we decided on we'll put a question mark it's more it's more amicable yeah it's more it's more Socratic if you will
Starting point is 01:59:51 it's not a it's going to be a great event it is be there be square Miami April 6th to the 9th b.tc slash conference
Starting point is 01:59:59 that's what we call a nice mid-raw lad we're going to tie it out with tftc yeah cheers again
Starting point is 02:00:06 look you in the eyes much love brother much love car we love you love you freaks peace and love bye

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