TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap #197: The Disinformation Governance Board is here to tell you how to think

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - ukraine central bank bans bitcoin - binance and the FSB - HRF announces five bitcoin in new grants - central african republic makes bitcoin a legal tender - bitcoin core v23.0 - btcpay v1.5.0 - fountain podcasts v0.3.16 - braiins farm proxy reduces data [usage](https://braiins.com/blog/why-miners-need-farm-proxies- amboss launches new liquidity market called Magma ) - amboss magma - synonym launches blocktank LSP - americans can now pay bills through bitrefill - bitcoin jungle in costa rica - Apple Private Relay causes VPN leaks - farrington: I Finance the Current Thing - Negative GDP print - New “Disinformation Governance Board” formed in the US - German PPI - Ruble strength / yen weakness Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl

What is up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this rip of rabbit hole recap. What a week. A lot going on. Very dense, tight, not tight rip, two hours, 20 minutes or something like that. Dense, definitely dense. Great conversation back and forth with Matt, as it always is weekend week out very lucky to be able to do this with a good friend of mine my best friends matt odell and you freaks thank you guys for tuning in if you're contributing via podcasting 2.0 app thank you for the stats thank you for the value i hope you're getting value out of this show if you're listening on youtube which you you aren't if you're listening to this because we don't put ads on youtube but if you if you so happen to like double double check this episode

you watched on youtube and you're watching you're listening here now thank you i love you freaks this report was brought to you by good friends at unchained capital unchained capital is here to bring you financial services to bring you security to bring you education to bring you white glove concierge service that'll take you from zero to having a two or three multi-sig volt setup where you hold two keys and unchained holds one key this is important you eliminate single points of failure if you have all your bitcoin on an exchange that is a single point a failure. Bitcoin exchanges are known to get hacked. They're known to be

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of what a future financial company may look like. Lend.HodlHodl.com for the lending platform. Enjoy this riff. 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. Everything's perfect. All is well in the world. There's nothing to worry about except for disinformation on the Internet. This statement has been certified by the Ministry of Truth. Ministry of Truth which goes by the name of Disinformation Governance Board here in the United States we'll get to that

it's the name of the episode we'll get to it, Matthew are we allowed to talk about you moving studios? moving yeah we can tease it

I just teased it to marty and car right before we went live matt's going to be in a new studio soon nashville bitcoiners getting their shit together catching up to us austin bitcoiners a lot of surprises in store yeah uh but yeah anyway i should be out of this home studio within i don't know a month what's your background going to be you're going to go bookcase block clock you're gonna have animals what do you think i mean there'll definitely be a block lock involved i mean bitcoiners are pretty uh predictable you gotta have moscow time behind you you know hey hey moscow town right now is uh 2504 it's a pretty good time yeah it is there's more than 24 hours

in moscow so but uh yeah but so yeah the studio is located in there's there's going to be like a whole bitcoin community center and then mixed in with that is going to be the studio so i'm pretty excited about it are you going to do live radio show more info coming soon you should do like f we should do like a sports radio type show we just talk for three hours i told you what my grandmother said right no radio my grandmother she was like how like you curse so often like how have they not kicked you off the radio yet? Grandma Odell, we're on the internet radio. It's because I never called it a podcast to her

because I didn't think she'd understand. So I just called it a radio. Then I had to have like a 30 minute conversation with her about what podcasts were. Yeah. Well, thank God for podcasting 2.0 because the Disinformation Governance Board, aka the Ministry of Truth,

may not like us cussing on air. and may try to stop it. Expelling bad information about being polite on the internet and respecting your fellow human. I can't believe it's real. I read it in the bent. It's real.

Yeah, we'll start with it. I guess I don't mean I can't believe it. I'm not that surprised. I'm not really surprised at all. All right. I should have actually called it the Ministry of Truth, though. really missed opportunity well they can lean into it

we'll get into it we'll start with Clark's dashboard then we'll get into it Ministry of Truth is from 1984 right yeah which is right up here on the bookshelf I don't know if you can get the full in a post-truth world fiction is reality boom

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London chief city of airstrip one Big Brother stares out from every poster. The thought police uncover every act of betrayal. I don't even think 1984 is dystopian fiction anymore. It's pretty rosy compared to reality. Will you let me finish reading the back cover?

When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Ed, Winston, and Julia begin to question the party. They are drawn towards conspiracy, yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent, even in the mind for those with original thoughts

they invented Room 101. If any freaks haven't read 1984 yet, they're not going to make it. It's too late for them. Shout out to the anonymous freak who included this in his box of books that he sent us. But I will reiterate that I don't even think 1984 is dystopian fiction anymore.

It's pretty, compared to our current reality, It's a pretty rosy depiction. Yeah. It was prescient, right? It was a predictive book, novel. I'd base all my life decisions on lessons I've learned in science fiction. The mandibles. We have someone in the comments,

Fahrenheit 451 was fucking fire. Everyone should read that. i had a good tweet uh that started with just a thought which was after we lived through the mandibles which book comes next fahrenheit 451 here's another good one oh you really do love your background who's a freak that said that yeah i do love my background carlos lamardo marty is too excited about his background have you read Fahrenheit 451 Marty I'm not we'll read must read we'll read the uh the first paragraph of the introduction sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist

we do it for a hundred reasons because it's good to look forward not back because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take because the world of the future seems more enticing and more interesting than the world of today because we need to warn you to encourage to examine to imagine the reasons for writing about the day after tomorrow and all the tomorrows that follow it are as many and as varied as the people writing this book this book of warning this is a book of warning it is a reminder that we have that what we have is valuable and that sometimes we take what we value for granted and your uncle marty can't read too good today leave it leave the reading to guy swan marty yeah no like so like you said this isn't

fiction these are warnings as uh as explained by by neil gaiman who wrote the foreword to this um neil gaiman's great too yeah so these are warnings they seem to be coming true it doesn't seem like many people are heeding the warnings i mean the ministry of truth okay so well 1984 like the government installed all the surveillance and in 2022 people just go out and buy the wire taps and install them all throughout their house and brag about how they have like a voice assistant yeah car you're right pull it through and we'll get to clark's dashboard later we're already so we're talking about this because the oh that's a great freeze frame the biden administration announced that they have established a disinformation governance board under the

Department of Homeland Security. Right now, that is being run by this woman, Nina Jankowicz, I believe her name is, and she is the leader of the Disinformation Governance Board, which you should just read Ministry of Truth. The mission of the Disinformation Governance Board is to dispel misinformation about migration in Russia, particularly. So two subjects is the mandated mission of this Ministry of Truth at the moment. But as I said in the bent last night, as we know about all these temporary, there's nothing more permanent than temporary government endeavor and so you can imagine that the scope of the disinformation governance board is going to expand beyond migration and russian disinformation and they'll begin clearing things

up when it comes to inflation and what causes it they'll certainly be getting into climate change stuff too i imagine and other things like whether or not laptops are are worthy of inspection and, and true. Um, yeah. And so you had Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, two war criminals, uh, just in the last couple of weeks, specifically really coming out of the woodwork randomly and denouncing disinformation. Hillary Clinton, um, was cheering on European Union and their digital services act, which is going to attempt to thrust KYC onto the internet and saying that more transatlantic allies need to push for this type of act within their countries. And then Barack Obama, he was somewhere, I think it might have been Stanford or some college,

he gave like an hour and a half long speech about the dangers of disinformation, misinformation. They're using the words interchangeably. Thought crimes. Yes, and they're basically coming at quote-unquote thought crimes, but they're setting the ground for the the kyc of the internet they want um to censor content and then to it's already pretty kyc'd yeah well i mean you still have vpns you still have all these have you tried to register for an anonymous email lately it's really fucking difficult well you see c templar shutting down that's what i was gonna

to say i see templar shutting down even like proton i mean you have to put in a phone number i don't think so duda has rate limiters i don't think i put a phone number in proton if you didn't put a phone number you put in an existing email from a different provider yeah that's what i did uh well how'd you get that email well um maybe that different provider was two to nota i'm not saying it's impossible i've done i've done it many times it's just they make it as difficult as possible yeah to get both phone numbers and emails that are not attached to you and then all services require those so like it's not formalized but we're already kind of there yeah um big fan of proton we've moved all of our tftc stuff to proton it's

been much different ux um but it feels more secure like when you click a link it's like are you sure are you sure you want to click this it's going to take you somewhere here's the actual url it's taking you to feel safer um but back to the ministry of truth here in the united states it's pretty laughable number one i mean we had to laugh if it wasn't so i mean it's scary obviously you have the united states government in a land that's supposed to have free speech free thought um and free individuals who should be able to collect and dissect data and come to their own conclusions via their free will um it seems that again they're starting with two i don't know why migration is when it's very interesting

that it shows migration um maybe like the mexican border stuff is making well i mean i think as we if the world starts devolving into more chaotic situations as we expect is that's when you see large migrations of people yeah i mean i'm like i migrated to texas yeah i don't think that's not what i meant but yeah well that that may be a thing uh texas secession maybe maybe now that we're down here in texas is hey maybe i'll leave the secession campaign things are too crazy i mean parker now apparently texans don't like when you actually bring it up it's like the unspoken thing you don't talk about it it's just gonna happen one day you may have a problem with a lot of those things marty yeah i did we're on air don't fucking talk about it yeah too late um

but again i mean clown world we we have a literal ministry of truth in the united states mandated by the Department of Homeland Security. Well, actually calling it the Ministry of Truth is disinformation and it prohibits its feet. Take me in, sir. Take me in. But, I said this in the event too, it's, we've

had the quasi corporate Ministry of Truth, like YouTube, Twitter, other social media networks, and the corporate mainstream press trying to dictate what is truth, censoring people, putting the disclaimers under certain tweets and other youtube videos but to see it move from the

corporate fascist world to the the actual federal government is is a step in another direction which is well presumably the reason they're doing it right is because everyone that was controlling the main speech and collaboration outlets were on board uh and now that they see elon coming in as a wild card they feel like they need to formalize it because they're afraid uh like i i've had mixed feelings about the whole elon twitter takeover yeah um but my one consistent thing is is twitter was dying a slow death uh and was just going to get worse and worse and the trend was going to continue and the censorship was going to get worse and the noise was going to get worse

and the priorities were fucking completely misplaced and that would have been boring no matter what Elon does there's going to be an element of chaos to it and that's just exciting and interesting so I'm looking forward to that yes it's very interesting again

we briefly touched on it last week I believe I think you just said I don't want to talk about it no I just grabbed it as a spectacle I just wrote it off as a spectacle. Yeah, that's the thing. It is a spectacle. It's going to be great.

Yeah. Well, it seems like, I mean, obviously the current employees of Twitter are freaking out. Already worth it. Yeah, there's a lot of speculation. There's a lot of speculation that they're like digital paper shredding,

the shadow banning stuff. I think Project Veritas actually had a whistleblower show, a Slack, an internal Twitter Slack chat where an admin essentially admitted to shadow banning. I think MyShadowBand got removed. Yeah, because apparently they're... I'm pretty sure it's been four months and just coincidentally it got removed. Yeah, so I think there's an element of digital paper shredding going on

where they're bleeding all those algorithms and all that censorship before Elon takes the helm. Because you've had a bunch of people who exhibited what in Twitter's mind was wrong thought in the past begin like seeing crazy follower numbers because their profile's been unleashed to a different section of the

application so does it like seeing like he called out Twitter's head lawyer oh that was such a good tweet yeah Cernovich tweeted about Twitter's head lawyer

and like tagged Elon and he responded like this is unsettling or something like that No, no, no. He called out the New York Post getting banned. Was that the one he called out? He called out a specific instance. And he was like, unsettling to say the least. Just search Cernovich, Elon Musk. he also tweeted out while we're looking for that he tweeted out which i thought was really interesting that twitter dm should be n10 encrypted so that twitter staff can't read them and i kind of feel like one of my theories in the back of my head for why he was buying twitter was

just imagine the power of being able to read anyone's dms at will like you can just choose whose dms a full history of their dms whatever you want to read is like insanely powerful and of course twitter has always had that power but like in my in the back of my mind i like i like to think that right before he sent that tweet it came to his realization like he had the realization like oh shit i could read anyone's dms and send out the tweet they should be encrypted so i can't do that yeah it's um it's they can read it like that's the thing um so like what if he like what if he does make like a positive change and he i believe he tweeted out this morning well he'll probably know he's tipping yeah that's like that's like that's

why it's like a like a car i just put it in the tftc chat not financial advice but um that's probably gonna pump and we're all gonna fucking be sitting on the sidelines complaining about it maybe maybe we'll get lightning pilled who knows um yeah this was the cernovich thing let's read the tweet first so i don't really care about that yeah twitter lawyer jim baker when General Counsel of the FBI personally arranged a meeting between the FBI and Michael Sussman. In the meeting, Sussman presented

fabricated evidence in the Alpha Bank matter. Elon Musk, this is who was inside Twitter. He facilitated fraud. And then go down, Carr, to the responses. Go down more. That's Cerno's thread. Yeah, Elon, go up. Sounds pretty bad.

Oh, this was a different one. I was thinking about... I don't know. there was a different one yeah I was pretty sure it was about the New York Post getting banned so do you think the Biden administration coming out and

officially announcing this is coincidence or a reaction to definitely not coincidence there's no shot in hell that is coincidence well a data point in that they were doing all this behind the scenes

and they had you know backdoor meetings they had backdoor meetings where like all the had i mean if you if you look at the main social media platforms besides tiktok which is chinese controlled which is one of the reasons why there was so much and i mean tiktok can go fucking fuck themselves like i don't think anyone should use tiktok but the reason there was so much anti-tiktok propaganda when it was getting ground and getting big was because it was the one social media outlet that wasn't controlled by the US government. But up until this point, they've had complete control. They don't need to pull back the curtain and make an official ministry of truth. But now when they

have this wildcard Elon here, they're a little bit frightened by it, especially going into midterms, right? Yeah, especially going into midterms. So they want to have some kind of regulatory teeth in order to push them in line. And this is the first step in that. It makes complete sense to me. once again looking forward to the chaos yeah the chaos is going to be fun but freaks we don't like this chaos the United States of America

officially has a ministry of truth wake up wake up they don't want you to think for yourself I mean that's why the Ben started off on like a satirical tilt yesterday congratulations you don't have to think for yourself anymore

it's really liberating it is See, actually, let's talk about the positives of this. You don't have to think anymore. They're going to do the thinking for you. Well, the good thing is most Americans weren't thinking already, so. Yes. Now we can make it official.

You don't have to feel bad about it. It's just accepted here. The Disinformation Governance Board is here to give you exactly what you need. Did you see Bloomberg reported today on the German inflation number and they said it was unexpected? well it's particularly their ppi number which is crazy we have that on the list too sorry their inflation numbers was extremely high it was like eight percent but their ppi in spain's ppi to spain's ppi year over year is like 45 or something so the producer price

inflation so that is like the basis of the economy um like the raw materials part of it That gives you the end products that their prices have like a lagging rising effect. They rise after the PPI rises. The PPI, producer price index across the world is rising significantly. Again, I mean, Spain's reaching hyperinflationary levels. Hyperinflation is defined as 50%. a 50% inflation rate and they're getting really close to that

Spain or Germany due to the energy crisis that's going on with everything going on in Russia and their previous energy policies over the last couple decades their raw material costs are going up too and so I don't think prices are

the inflation rate's going to stop its acceleration anytime soon around the world I mean that's all well and good Marty but BTC Pins wants to know what's PPI spelled backwards IPP IPP

worth it thank you BTC Pins appreciate your contributions we have to laugh, we have to joke, we have to pal around things are getting so crazy I do pee pee we all pee pee, I hope you all pee pee if not you might want to go see a doctor

go get that checked out um yeah so that's that's happening and so i guess we'll we're gonna be having meandering we have like a list that we're gonna go down but now we're just like bringing topics up randomly but this ties into the negative gdp print that we saw here in the united states today and that's actually what i'm gonna write about in the bent this is also unexpected yes so this is the thing like people like oh my god we're gonna see a recession next year and actually behind the scenes I can't prove this on air because I haven't been saying it but

I've been saying we're in a recession already so the definition of a recession by the NBER which is the department that officially announces a recession or declares a recession is the right term there

they define it as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth so Q1 2022 numbers just came in yes, today, negative, I believe it was like negative 1.4% GDP growth. And so if we have another quarter of negative GDP growth, you're officially in a recession. And so we'll find that out end of July.

Second quarter ends June 30th. Usually takes a month for the data to get aggregated and then released. So at the end of July, we will get the next GDP print for Q2, which we're in the middle of right now. And if that's negative, we're technically in a recession, which is going to lead to a very interesting scenario because if between now and the end of July, you have inflation here in the United States continue to, at the pace that it has in recent months, hitting new all-time highs or 40-year highs over the last three months consecutively, that trend

stays flat or continues upwards into the summer and we have another quarter of negative GDP growth and we're officially in a recession that puts the Fed in a really weird spot because they've been saying they're going to raise rates

throughout the year to fight inflation but we're going to be in a recession so they're going to print a shit ton of money yeah and the politicians are again midterm election year that's like the last thing the Democrats won who had the majority of the House and the Senate

and obviously the presidency at the moment, bad economic times are what cause people to get thrown out of office typically. And so they're going to be begging the Fed, like, oh, you guys need to print money. The important thing is the Ministry of Truth will keep the messaging right on point. Yes.

Maybe that's another reason why the Ministry of Truth got spun up right now too. But this is why I, well, that's why I was, I mean, they didn't need to spin it up if they had control of over all the social media platforms yeah um because they were doing it anyway but this is like what i was trying to get at over the last few weeks um you know people talk about efficient markets they talk about things getting priced in they talk about all this shit and like in theory a lot of it makes sense uh that as information if we have relatively free

markets as information uh becomes available to people it gets priced in and markets are efficient um and i do think obviously bitcoin markets are the most free particularly on the proof of work side on the mining side but um you know people are people get stuck in the status quo they get stuck in this is the way it's always been thinking they get they get in denial like most people are not thinking about inflation right now they're not thinking about a recession they're not thinking about um supply chain issues like this is gonna this stuff that we're talking about is gonna catch 99 of people off guard and they're not they don't they're not aware of it right now so you know i'll reiterate what i said last week which is i hope that we're in the suddenly phase

because that means that it's not going to be as painful as it's going to be but i very much feel that we're still in this gradual phase and it's going to just fucking smack people in the face. And there's going to be like a panic, chaos type of situation as the reality sets in for people. You know, I was talking to someone in the real estate world about long term retail leases. And he asked my advice. And I said, you cannot sign a 15 year lease with 3% increases without at least a cpi clause in there like if the cpi is higher than the three percent then you the increase is the cpi and he said to me he said you know matt like i've been in this business for 30 years 40 years i've never put a cpi clause in my contracts i was like yeah well we're entering new

territory and you're gonna fucking regret it in 10 years if you don't do it now and you just got to get ahead of it so most people people look at me like i'm fucking crazy when i mention inflation concerns period right now yeah how how how can people like they're comfortable they're comfortable and they're not paying attention and they'd rather not think for themselves and they're not taking personal responsibility and they're just you know once one foot after the next just doing as they always did yeah yeah i'm happy uh my half cattle rides this afternoon nice i have a quarter quarter cow coming yeah um neil's drinking claws brush your teeth let's read the whole thing for the podcast we got uh ronan minor here saying rhr notification woke me up now i'm drinking claws

and haven't even brushed my teeth yet he's located on the west coast so it's it's before 10 a.m right now hey happy brunch sir liquid brunch um yeah so again negative gdp print today if we get another one towards the end of July which is when the next one will come technically in a recession at which point the Fed is going to need to print more money

they're going to be begged to when they want to hike but it's a very precarious economic situation where you're in a recession inflation's running in that recession because of supply chain problems and an energy crisis

very very peculiar situation from an economic perspective that the United States is going to find in the summer. You just print and let inflation run, right? I mean, that's a thing, though. If you don't print,

inflation's still going to run. That's what I'm saying. So you print and you try and save markets. Yeah. It's a very interesting situation we're going to find ourselves in. prepare middle of the summer that maybe that's the suddenly moment when people are like,

Oh shit, we're in a recession. Prices are still going up and the feds got to print more money. Holy fuck. Yeah. Um, we'll see. I think people just need to really be smacked in the face before they realize

we have a memory man in the comments saying agent Elon is not our friend. Um, I just want to be absolutely clear. Like, you know, I'm not hero worshiping the guy. Like I, there's just,

uh, twitter leadership definitely we're not our friend and at least this will be interesting yeah i really like as far as i'm concerned i got nothing to lose because i've already been treating twitter as as dying anyway so uh it's not like i'm worried about him ruining my treasured twitter it's like whatever how was your conversation about uh i haven't listened to it yet it was great everyone should go listen to it i had uh uh fiat jeff and uh mr kooks and jb55 on civil dispatch to talk about nostra no one knows how to pronounce it no stir if you're doing that it's like nostre but like so i thought of it i always

thought of it as a twitter alternative which it can be used as a twitter alternative but it's actually way more powerful than that um because it's it's essentially a protocol that allows you to um transmit and relay signed messages with a public key uh well you sign it with a private key but verified with a public key um so it can be used in all different sorts of situations including a lot of bitcoin applications uh particularly a lot of these things that you often hear where it's like oh we need to use onion messages on on lightning um and then it's like oh you paying for those messages are they spam there's this whole back and forth well you could actually use nostra as the messaging layer for communication um and if like things like coin

join coordination like you could and you know right now join markets using irc to coordinate coin joins or to coordinate those messages back and forth that offers um you could use no stir for that situation you can use no stir to replace a reddit you could use no stir to replace a to Twitter. You could use Nostra to replace Signal. So it's a generic, powerful messaging layer that is cryptographically verified so you know who you're communicating with. And it can be used in all these different situations because the client is interpreting the data however they want to interpret it. That's pretty sweet. Yeah. It's really fucking cool. It blew my mind. I'm the first one to admit I was kind of sleepy on it. It was a fun rip because it was one of those rips

where like i really had no idea uh what was going on and it was just like okay explain to noob no stir noob matt you know what the fuck is going on so i was like learning on the fly while we were while the freaks were learning yeah if you're not following jb55 on twitter he's great he's been posting like what he's been building on there it's following my no stir too yeah i got to spin up a no stir account um it's all client side it's really cool so it's like you're not make an account on a website it's just it just holds that data on your browser on your locally on your machine and then you transmit and pull data from relays it's really really cool concept interesting trade-off balance does it leverage bitcoin at all so there's a spam issue

where obviously anyone can make a new noster public private key pair and keep spamming right I mean, look at Twitter. They have all these dystopian algorithms and stuff. And still, every time I tweet, there's 10 spam bots underneath me. In traditional tech world, a lot of spam control has gone to basically surveillance, right? So you do a bunch of surveillance. You try and figure out who the real people who aren't. In the most extreme cases, they use KYC, phone number verification, email verification. All this stuff can be thought of as light KYC to prevent fraud, spam. In this case, obviously, you don't want to do that. So one way that you could stop spam as a relay operator, so you're running this relay and this relay is transmitting the Nostra messages, is you can, if someone wants to use your relay and have their messages relayed through your relay, have them pay you a certain amount of SATs.

so there's actually a direct monetization model for someone to basically run anonymous relays you don't even have to know who's operating the relay and bringing in a constant sat stream of people who want to use that relay there's other options there um will jb55 mentioned like doing some kind of proof of work similar to like the hash cash method um but personally i really like the idea of SATs as a spam mechanism for the relay operators and then the relay operators get to

actually be monetized in a very easy, trust-minimized way. Yes. That actually ties into the back half of the conversation I had with Lalu on Monday, where we talked about LSAT and LNURL loss. I feel like that could tie into that

incentive mechanism. It feels like it's coming together shinobi's worried about lightning network privacy yeah i mean i've been worried about lightning network privacy for a long fucking time on your mind what is the uh the lowest hanging fruit to improve lightning network privacy let's focus on the lowest hanging fruit let's say it's it's a very daunting daunting problem the lowest hanging fruit to me is that on the receiving side is when is is is you're just exposing the static public key and then this like when you when i when i send you an invoice rendezvous routing um

yeah when i send you an invoice like my public key is in that invoice or in this you know in podcasting 2.0 your public key is literally in the rss feed then you use that public key and you can see the receivers channel balances like how much public liquidity they have and then if you know what you're doing you could probe them and see their private channel capacity and then you could potentially link it to the actual utxos that created those channels um so that's a massive privacy issue on the receiver side um the receiver side is is to me is the bigger is the bigger concern right what you just what you just described isn't the lowest hanging fruit that's the biggest problem like what is the first step we could take to begin solving this problem in your

mind oh i mean i don't know i it's above my pay grade but that's the problem that's the main problem that needs to be solved that's in my opinion a priority wise that should be the number one priority i would agree and it should be it's like conceptually it's very easy to grok right which is we haven't been reusing addresses in bitcoin land for fucking six years now right general practice is never reuse an address but with lightning we're just all reusing our pub keys yes um and then shinobi's worried about the metadata associated yeah i mean there's a bunch of i spent like two and a half hours with uh tony on dispatch talking about all the privacy nuances one of the things i like is really difficult with lightning and privacy is that

there's so many different like nuances of different ways you use it and how you leak stuff that it's not it's not like it's an easy thing to even explain where the leaks could happen right so it's not like you have a context yeah like if you're talking about like amazon alexa It's like, okay, you plug in the Alexa, you have a live mic in your house. And like, you're obviously giving them that information. Or if you're using a Fitbit, you're giving them your heart rate information. You're giving them all this stuff or whatever. There's no like two sentences or three sentences, or if you reuse Bitcoin addresses, like you're

connecting those two addresses. There's no like two, three sentences that you can say about where you leak information on lightning and how you leak it and what you're leaking. Right? like there's no easy way because there's all these different ways of using it and that's how you end up with these ridiculous flow charts where people are like if you send it to waldo satoshi and then you send it to moon you send it here and then this and like you're in this all this crazy and it's because there's all these different nuanced areas where you could get um

yeah yeah yeah it's beginning stages big problems to solve hard problems to solve but I'm happy that we have these problems an alternative and a project

to work on because the other system is completely fucked this I mean let's be clear all the moon boys out there Bitcoin has a lot of flaws that need fixing um own it and and get working this is uh it's good it's it's it's not good that they have

flaws but it's it's just inherent in i was just thinking about this oh sorry go ahead i was thinking about this today because you remember our first ever rip before rhr existed yes we got very drunk it was right after you had corallo on and corallo said he put bitcoin at like a five percent chance of succeeding no one percent increase at the five okay and i on that on that conversation with you i was like uh he's a dev he's being you know whatever he's being like prudent and uh responsible and like he needs to like have that framing uh i was like but bitcoin cannot be stopped like you know we're going to the moon we're going to win together just like super bullish right just like ridiculously and there is something that like as as you get more

obsessed and like take everything in constantly and try and increase your knowledge base as much as possible and you start to have a public platform and you start to have a larger audience and people start to really listen to you, um, where it becomes almost like morally required or ethically required to have a sense of restraint and reality and pragmatism when you talk about this stuff right and uh i was just thinking about like our journey from that point when that was like three and a half years ago to today um and i think i like i think it's important for us to be critical and acknowledge weaknesses in bitcoin because otherwise it's stronger yeah it will never get stronger if you don't do that yeah i mean he was still ridiculous saying one percent

chance of success like it was just completely off on that but it was just my example I forget when it was it might have been when we had like Val him in what else came with him on that episode was it Ark it was just me you him and

it was just the four of us maybe it was just me you him and Val it was definitely him and Val that was a later episode that was like a year after that yeah but I think I asked him to give Bitcoin's chance of success update and he bumped up to like 40% killing it

yeah at one point a lot of problems out there gotta acknowledge problems fix them that's

what we aim to do here at RHR so think about this privacy and the lightning network what are the low hanging fruit what is the biggest

problem what are the low hanging fruit that help us solve that problem let's try and identify those fruit

and begin chomping on them to the list officially to the list here Ukraine central bank bans bitcoin

very interesting what the fuck especially yeah you had right you know the government openly accepting bitcoin donations and then they're just going to ban it for their citizens well you can't buy it with ukrainian currency you can't buy with the ukrainian hervinia i don't know how to pronounce that you can only buy with foreign currency and there's limits in place very odd i love their wording the measures are being taken to prevent unproductive unproductive outflow of capital from the country under martial law yeah so they've been under martial law since the invasion and they're using martial law as the excuse here um the central bank

is uh the one pushing this um they're obviously massive hypocrites because they received a ton of international donations directly to the government, um, using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Um, but this just goes, you know, constant reminder, not your keys, not your coins, your government that might seem friendly now, corporation that might seem friendly now, friends and family that might seem friendly now, uh, might not be in the future. And you need to proactively protect yourself. Uh, if you want to be able to use Bitcoin in times of chaos, when you absolutely need it because that's when that's that's when you feel the pain and that's when your mistakes previously become very obvious to you and there's usually there's no moving back

at that point you're already fucked yeah and this is another glaring example of don't wait do this stuff now yeah if you if you're getting bitcoin and able to if you haven't bought bitcoin yet but you're able to and you're able to move it to your own wallet start now i'm like oh i'm gonna do it next week start now earlier the better yeah and this is probably like this is one of the better examples right because like if you were thinking about like any world government that was going to crack down on on you buying bitcoin and using bitcoin ukraine wasn't high on that list like they were they have bigger issues to deal with you you wouldn't most people wouldn't think was going to happen and it can happen at any moment anywhere um so don't rest on your laurels

and figure i mean everyone's super excited this week about um like fidelity adding bitcoin iras yeah and like i mean not your keys not your coins like the majority of people i've i've come to the conclusion the majority of people that own bitcoin are just going to own ious with trusted third parties and it's going to be a fucking mess but that is what it is that's not my problem that's their problem well it would be cool disclaimer sponsor of the pod but like if if someone like fidelity implemented like right chain with their ira where you can hold they won't well i think they're i think they may be forced to in the future though well i don't know what was

what was interesting when they were saying on cnbc was like the labor department decides like if it's safe for companies to have like offer their employees the option of using bitcoin in their retirement accounts and like that the companies can't have to be able to cover their ass and they they're like held liable for their employees retirement choices freaks we live in a nanny state the fact that the bureau of labor statistics has to give fidelity the okay for you to put your 401k 401k money where you want you need permission to handle your retirement from the government this is we don't i mean we don't live in a free country no i love the transition to that but do you see what i'm saying like yeah don't you don't you see that like at least in the short term like

i could totally see those types of regulatory bodies being like you need to keep it with a full custodian insured fidelity because they think of it in a completely different they're gonna they're gonna say it's to protect the employee but it's really putting the employee in a worse situation because they don't have they're not you know holding their own keys yes yes again we get weird by saying like when the laws are unjust it is right and just to disobey those laws we just need again i know the likelihood is probably not high but i will keep beating the drum we need any of the the people in the the public sector running companies we need some civil corporate disobedience at some level to say hey you're insane you're in

any state we're gonna go the other way um and just do this it's again it's scary everybody wants to bend the knee everybody at the esg panel was like you don't know you have to work with the regular no stop oh i watched it what'd you think i thought it was great yeah it was everything i was hoping that panel was going to be anymore go check it out on youtube freaks i was bummed though i was pretty happy when i came out it had so many more views before um before not that i care but um mentioning it maybe i do care deep down subconsciously but i had more views before got taken down then yeah ads were put up wait so it got re-uploaded and the view count it was like a new video yeah interesting yeah yeah um and again i will say i'm not a conspiracy theorist

but like the comment uh the tenor in the comment section of the original video is much different than the other reposted video just want to mention that um the but yeah i think i mean i think that It was definitely, there's no need for conspiracy. It was to put the ads in. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's public. I mean, because Bitcoin Magazine would prefer to have a higher view count and more controversial comments. Yeah.

That's all good for engagement. It is. Engagement, engagement, engagement. But we need to engage the corporate world, individuals in this world, to civilly disobey, peacefully disobey. I mean, we're going to talk about it. let's talk about it right now too um i mean right before you hopped in the uh the the room here for the live stream no bullshit bitcoin posted um a an announcement from the new york department of financial services that is essentially forcing individuals to or consuming companies to implement

chain surveillance technology into their services. Car, go to my Twitter page and just go to the tweet. Not here. Go to my tweet because I highlighted,

zoomed in and highlighted a particular section. Again, we've been beating this drum too and I will continue to beat this drum. We need to make this a meme in the space.

It all stems from the Bank Secrecy Act. Go down one tweet, Car. the uh this is what all the stems from so blow that up um here i'll just read it because i can't i can't see my eyes are going this is a marty reading episode yes um so the for you at home and cannot see the screen compliance in a virtual currency context financial activity involving virtual currency can involve among other things different sources destinations and types of fund flows than are found in more traditional fiat currency contexts.

For example, virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Ether can be transferred peer-to-peer directly from one individual or entity to another pseudo-anonymously. I butchered that word. Absent the use of a regulated third party, for example, between non-custodial wallets or a self-hosted wallet that allows users to maintain control of their private keys, thus to effectively address compliance requirements under the New York banking law

and the New York financial services law, as well as federal bank service act slash anti-money laundering, BSA slash AML and office of foreign assets control OFAC requirements, virtual currency entities must be sure that their compliance programs fully take into account unique characteristics of virtual currencies so they want these regulated service providers to use chain surveillance to surveil you after you leave their services and before you get to their services and again mentioned directly the bank secrecy act um and anti-money laundering money laundering isn't even a thing it was a made-up crime uh when the bank secrecy act came to be the 70s and everything in terms of you being surveilled and your privacy being torn away from

you in the financial system stems from the bank secrecy act i think in the the new york banking law probably stems from the bank secrecy acts like this is all a corrosive outcome because of this thing at the root of the problem, which is the Bank Secrecy Act, which is wholly ineffective. Again, beat this drum, ad nauseum, doesn't protect consumers, doesn't protect individuals, doesn't stop crime. It makes us all worse off, puts us in very precarious situations because our data are held in insecure databases. And again, we're going to change the ESG narrative and the energy narrative and we're going to do the same thing with the bank secrecy act we just got to keep beating the drum and make it very apparent and voice our disdain and our lack of

intent to be surveilled anymore because it's just making us worse off at the end of the day and everybody's like oh everybody's like oh tough for new yorkers tough for new york like if you're a company that operates in new york as well as other states like you are subjected to this like even if you're outside of new york you're going to be like drug into this two things i will add here is first of all the new york ny dfs is ben losky's old organization that he was leading uh before he went into corporate lobbying and corporate revolving doors um joined the ripple board and then joined nidig he's on nidig now just they're the ones who released the bit license back in 2014 2015 um which was a horrible piece

of regulation that pretended that it was to protect new yorkers but really it hurt new yorkers and hurt people around the world and they use it as an excuse to hit international companies that explicitly say we're not like forget you mentioned you know companies that do business with new yorkers but even if a company says new yorkers are prohibited like the famous screenshots of like north like people from north korea iran venezuela and new york cannot use this service they say that if you don't do kyc on all of your customers if you don't do massive surveillance on all your customers just to make sure that new yorkers aren't part of your business then you're liable as well because new yorkers could theoretically access it using a vpn

so they they use these types of local regional regulation to then go after businesses that are way outside of their jurisdiction under the guise of new yorkers can still access it because that's the fucking beauty of the internet and then the second thing i would say is you know marty mentioned he he got this on a no bullshit bitcoin feed fantastic feed like what those guys are just fucking doing great work they're on telegram they have rss feed i use the rss feed all the time it's fantastic really good source very good source and they're yeah fuck the ny dfs yeah yeah again we just gotta voice our disdain for all this stuff and begin changing the narrative publicly like make make people this particular announcement though like uh i assume most new york regulated

companies are already doing surveillance already using these surveillance tools it seems like this wasn't i was surprised they hadn't formalized it already but this is like a formalization of that policy so that they can go to certain companies and be like why aren't you using it because there are certain companies in the space. I think everyone assumes. Unchained is one of them. Everyone assumes that all these companies are doing surveillance on their customers,

doing chain surveillance and other surveillance on their customers. Stefan got into hot water for saying Swan doesn't. Prime Trust, who serves Swan and Strike and many others, absolutely 100% does. But there are a few that don't, that me and Marty are aware of, but I'm not going to mention them on air

because I don't want to blow up their spot. I just mentioned Unchained, but I think they've been public about it. Yeah, but there's another one specifically that I'm thinking of. Do you know which one I'm talking about? No, I can't think of it, luckily for them. I'm not going to blow up their spot.

They said it to both of us in person, off the record. Okay. They're out there. Again, an example. It can be done. Have some testicular fortitude, people in the corporate world.

let's begin pushing back against this madness stop but with the formalization of this type of stuff they might not be long for it right fight back let's fight back let's just say no whatever happened to saying no

this is not going to work that statement is disinformation by the ministry of truth yes you can't say hey maybe I don't want to do this we've always been at war with East Asia we have we have always uh on the similar tip i mean it came out this week that binance

was working closely with like the russian fsb which is the new kgb yeah the new kgb and like doxing russian users that were using binance so great job specifically specifically supporters of Navalny's campaign, the opposition, the main opposition candidate against Putin, who's been accepting Bitcoin donations for years now. I think the main reason I put this in the list is because the US government and their allies do the same exact thing to these exchanges. um and if you're the type of person that is under the belief that the u.s and the allies do it we're justified it's important to realize which i don't think is correct but even if you do believe that it's important to realize these same systems in place these same tools in place these same

data collection dangerous data collection policies can be used by governments you don't agree with and organizations you don't agree with to attack dissidents protesters activists by authoritarians yes god damn it we're gonna laugh we're gonna be optimistic we're gonna fight back we're going to win we just need more people to stand up and begin pushing back again these don't these these surveillance tools these laws this data collection does not actually help at all it's uh puts people in harm's way adds compliance costs to companies at least sort of like think of just how much capital capital has been misallocated because companies are fucking spending money to comply with these laws imagine where we would be if we could spend that

money on things that actually do good for society don't like think about how crazy it is spending millions, hundreds of millions, potentially billions of dollars globally to comply with these laws that put the end user in harm's way. You're spending billions of people, billions of dollars to put billions of people

in harm's way. It's clown world. Wake up. Go shake your local fluoride stare neighbor who's like, this is fine. Disinformation governance board said it was good. Shake them.

telling people we're getting made materially worse off on to better rosier topics the human rights foundation should we do Clark Moody's dashboard let's do this then we'll go to the dashboard and then we'll go to shout outs human rights foundation grants five

bitcoins to bitcoin projects 100 million satoshis it says bitcoin no no no it says BTC and BTC is short for bitcoins no it isn't uh the africa the africa bitcoin conference uh received the largest gift of 100 million satoshis

50 million satoshis um have gone to venezuelan bitcoin developer francisco calderon uh who's working on lmp2p bot which is a non-custodial peer-to-peer telegram bot allows users to trade Bitcoin using the Lightning Network. That's pretty fucking dope. Ruben Somsen and Dhruv Mehta will also receive 50 million sats together for their work on space chains.

Another thing I have to look into that Ruben's working on is silent payments. There's a lot of people talking about that. I haven't dove into that yet, but it's something we should cover. Shinobi wrote a good write-up on that in Bitcoin Magazine. Yeah. Go check that out. Shinobi's putting out great content on Bitcoin Magazine these days.

50 million sats are going to netblocks as well I love netblocks I'm really excited about this one yeah they're the company that monitors like internet usage they're the cool charts when people's internet gets cut yeah 25 million I was really excited about that

I messaged Gladstein specifically on that one I was like fuck yes boss 25 million sats are going to Paulo Sacramento for the Bitcoin design guide that's the last 25 million sat grants is going to bitcoin pakistan um to to bring more content resources in urdu

which is the language um first of all netblocks really cool organization you if you follow them on twitter you can get like notifications as internet gets cut in different places as bitcoiners it's very important to be aware of this stuff uh hrfs grant is specifically going to be uh helping them on their work in terms of of bitcoin traffic being cut off um in different regions so definitely uh if you're a twitter user follow them on twitter or go to their website a great service um second thing is really excited about this africa bitcoin conference um so they're getting a full bitcoin they're the the largest recipient of the grant uh fode is is taking the lead on on that and i'm i just bitcoin in the developing world is some extremely powerful

shit it's one of the things i'm most excited about in this space um so really good to see that and then last i think you left it out but one and a half bitcoin is going towards three media organizations i did not see that that are non-bitcoin media organizations to cover bitcoin in a responsible and better way which i thought was an interesting aspect of this grant i mean that's a significant portion right that's is that like i mean your organizations are getting 10 is that a bribe marty this is like the texas secession you're not supposed to say these things on air i think it's a very interesting initiative i do too you guys can pay me to write bitcoin probably yeah that was my first thought when i read it

i was like nice we're bribing them hey you tell it like it is sounds a little bit like a bribe you know they're bribing we're bribing everybody's bribing somebody somebody's ass is getting rubbed somewhere okay you can bribe me i'll write good things about bitcoin i would love to get bribed right good things about bitcoin doing it already um let's go to the dashboard sorry to everybody at the human rights foundation it's caused a shitstorm for you i've been working with them a lot recently because the oslo freedom forum's coming out so i'm pretty excited about that yes i'm bummed i can't make it May 4th?

That's next week. No, it's not May 4th. It's the May 20s. It's the 20s. It's like the 22nd, 3rd, 4th, or something like that. 24th. I knew there was a 4 in there. This is going to be my first time going to Norway. I'm pretty excited about it.

I will not be making it. I'm going to be bummed. It should be a great event. Hopefully, I'll be there next year. I love working with dissidents and activists. It's just really rewarding. yeah i mean oslo it really humbles you oslo is like one of the events but talking to alex they're going to do it i mean they've they've had their miami event before and i think they're going to take it to other places as well well the reason i had the miami event last year was because

covid because everything moved to miami so it was the oslo freedom forum in miami but yeah historically they've had i mean i went to like a satellite version that was in new york once i think historically they have smaller events and like then their big one is is in oslo yeah get to norway some point in the may 20s next month if you can um clark's dashboard the current price of bitcoin has denominated in cuck bucks It's 40,195 CUC bucks. Been a bit volatile today. Back over 40.

Right back below, below, above, below, above. One CUC buck. Oh, sorry. This is Moscow Times now, 2,488. One CUC buck. We'll get you that amount of sats. Below $800 billion market cap, sitting at 764.7 billion CUC bucks.

We are at block height 733,980. We had a difficulty adjustment yesterday, which was a 5%. Where is it? Why can I never find this one? Oh, it's over here. It was a 5.6% upward adjustment. Blocks are coming in at 9 minutes and 31 seconds on average.

and so we had to make the difficulty target lower to make it harder to mine so that it comes into 10 minutes on average as Satoshi designed and currently since that adjustment which was less than 200 blocks ago

156 blocks ago blocks have been coming in at 10 minutes and 13 seconds on average so as of right now the next adjustment is estimated to be on May 10th 2022 and that's going to be a negative 3.7 adjustment as of right now but as we all know if you've been listening to this podcast long enough 156 blocks away from the last adjustment isn't a great data set so may not be as accurate that is subject to change between now and the next adjustment there are 14,204

transactions in Clark's mempool and Samurai unspent capacities back above $4,500 at $4,508.9 BTC or $181.4 million cut bucks in unspent

value. Did that mid-show, we were probably at a different block rate. Difficulty adjustment was probably different when we started. The price was different when we started, but hey, we got there. Back over $40,000.

Whee! What'd you think of Arthur's latest piece? I liked his price prediction. It was a little bit bearish. Only a million? Is that sent parity by 2030? I don't mind that. Is that sent parity?

100 million? Dude. I mean... Marty, basic math. Oh, yeah. That's dollar set parity. A million dollar Bitcoin is I know I know I know I know you can't think too good my parents got into town last night and

had my brother over and some friends and we were hanging out by the fire and I didn't go to bed till late um I um I was at a bachelor party right after uh RHR last week I went to a bachelor party um 10 guys 10 dudes you're telling me how was that Airbnb situation