TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap 191: The Gang is back in person
Episode Date: March 17, 2022This 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
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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.
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.
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
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
here at the Bitcoin Commons
the vibe is
very high
elevated
getting the studio
finally put together
and sitting down
the set that
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.
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,
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Been in Bitcoin for quite a while.
They're a team behind Slushpool,
which is the oldest mining pool
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Started in 2010.
They're a team behind
BrainsOS Plus Firmware,
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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
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They were going to throw a conference, but
they had to cancel it. They'll probably
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.
Brains.com. B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com.
This report was also brought to you by good friends at
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It's a great, beautiful thing.
Lend.HodlHodl.com.
This was last but not least
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
you forced me
to lead
last week
and step up
we might need to
meet each other
in the middle
well that was also
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
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
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...
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
we've gone from
the
we've gone from
the shared room
in my
apartment building
in Williamsburg
studio apartment
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
Marty's ever made
thank you Balaji
that's a 21
computer
supposed to
revolutionize
the world
and Marty
Marty got wrecked on it
it was
it was
a lesson learned
lesson learned
Bitcoin price
is probably like
what
$600
it was the first time
Marty ever mined Bitcoin
yeah it was
didn't
the
the 21 computer
didn't produce
a lot of
Satoshis
but it produced
a lot of lessons
okay
that's
that's an expensive
lesson as Matt
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
taking everything in
internally
I think they're going to
take everything in house
yeah
reduce
reduce trusted third parties
beware
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
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
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
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.
It was very transparent.
extreme ownership.
I think they're
exemplifying that.
Disclaimer,
Unchained is a sponsor
of this podcast
and the Bitcoin Commons.
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.
Okay.
So walk outside,
turn left,
Unchained's office.
They're down the hall.
Okay.
Okay.
All right,
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
telegram chat messages
no proper statement
has been released
we have no idea
of a regulation
one of the lead devs
leave
discussed
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
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,
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
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,
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,
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
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
Samurai is
it's demeaning
I'm sorry
it is demeaning
Samurai
proves to
be a better product
in this particular realm
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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,
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,
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
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,
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
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
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
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,
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.
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,
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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,
it's a,
what is a anchorman or whatever?
Yeah.
Put anything on the teleprompter.
I'm Ron Burgundy.
Yo,
fuck yourself.
Um,
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
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
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
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...
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
at scale
don't know what the status
of that is
but
I do need to
check in with
either the brains team
or
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
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
I believe a
20 page research report
really diving into
the intricacies
intricacies of
Stratum V1
versus Stratum V2
why it's important
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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,
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
car's got it off
car's quick
I mean it is
fucking ridiculous
that
they
they use like
terrorism and criminal
activity to surveil
us in every
aspect of
everything we do
and they are the
terrorists and the
criminals
it's fucking insane
meanwhile
like besides
Ghislaine
no one has
fucking
Jeffrey Epstein
stuff has just
been completely
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
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
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
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
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Prince Andrew
has
an arrogance
that hasn't
served him well
I asked you
what his age was
duck
duck
go it
duck duck
geese
DDG
DDG it
no
Prince Andrew
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
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,
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,
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
it's
bitcoindesign.guide
right
type into
duckduckgoose
bitcoindesign.guide
oh we didn't
talk about how
crypto.com
asked everyone
to pay back
their loans
yes that was
weird
I was wrong
so yeah
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
that's what we call
a nice
mid-raw lad
we're going to tie it
out with
tftc
yeah
cheers again
look you in the eyes
much love brother
much love
car
we love you
love you freaks
peace and love
bye
