TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap #198: The government spies and lies

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - coinbase launches revamped surveillance product - SEC doubles size of "crypto assets" unit - cdc tracked the location of millions of americans without a warrant - fbi did millions of searches of americans data last year without a warrant - bitcoin mining council submits letter to EPA - how women view bitcoin - mycitadel v1.0 - seed tool v1.0.4 - tor [v0.4.7.7](https://blog.torproject.org/congestion-contrl-047/ - mk4 shipping + new firmware) - cold card upgrade - lightning multiplexer - new lightning only vpn - voltage podcast index study - Mexican bitcoin exchange Tauros adds lightning - currency of last resort by gladstein - paypal being used to censor speech - all internet and payment providers ordered to block three streaming sites by federal judge Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl

What's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Ben here to introduce this RIP of Rabbit Hole recap. RIP 198 approaching RIP 200. Maybe that's when we'll officially completely move over to the new RHR stream as RIP 200. Maybe we start at a nice even number. Next week here on TFTC and then we move completely to the RHR podcasting stream on RIP 200. that could be clean just from an even number perspective. Yeah, if you freaks aren't aware,

we talk about in this rep, Matt and I, we're spinning out a new podcast feed for RHR specifically. So we'll have TFTC here for the interview series and then RHR on its own feed. Rabbit Hole Recap is what it will be called. The feed will be called in your podcasting apps.

So be aware of that When we do officially move that over, we're going to need your support. Like, subscribe, share, tell your friends, leave a review, help us get visibility of RHR. Obviously, we're 200 episodes in, but we're going to be starting this new feed from scratch. And so we're going to need help

developing the reputation on that new feed. So we would appreciate it if you guys would help that out. It was a good rep. I mean, a lot of stuff talking about it could be viewed as depressing. whenever he's going to make you aware we're going to win things are going to be okay we've got the the ability the technology the will to build ourselves out of the slavery it's going to take some time it's going to take some hard work but we're going to do it this room is 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 volts setup where you hold two keys and on chain 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 of failure bitcoin exchanges are known to get hacked they're known to be targets of regulatory scrutiny one day you can wake up you can either not have your bitcoin because the exchange lost it or not have access to it because somebody went to the exchange and said, don't give the

freak access to his Bitcoin, just because we said so. Unchain helps you eliminate that single-party risk, okay, by creating it to a three signature vault, a multi-sig vault, where you hold two keys again, so you have full control of your Bitcoin as long as you have those two keys. Not even Unchain can prevent you

from moving those Bitcoin. You can move them whenever you want, but Unchain does have a key in case you get in a pinch and you need them to move your Bitcoin. On top of this, they're providing financial services, they have a lending desk, They have an IRA product. They're building out a banger team.

Go check out everything they have going on at unchained.com. Unchained.com. Use the code TFTC. If you want to do the White Glove Con share service, you'll get $50 off. That package comes with video conference calls, hardware wallets, and a thousand cuck bucks

worth of sats dumped in your vault once it's all set up. This rip was also brought to you by my good friends at Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains, the team with the Brains to bring you the Brains OS Plus firmware that's going to help you stack more sats with your ASICs. If you're in the mining world and you have an ASIC, one of those computers that produces hashes that allow you to connect to a mining pool that then pays you in sats for contributing too. Producing

hashes that allow you to have blocks of transactions to the Bitcoin network. BrainsOS plus firmware. If you download it on an ASIC, if that ASIC is compatible, it's going to help you stack more sats because you're going to be producing more hashes. It's just going to get you more sats at the end of the day from

the mining pool or your own pool or your own self-mining operation if you have one. BrainsOS plus firmware is the firmware that brains is working on they're also the team behind slush pool which is the oldest mining pool in bitcoin's existence the first ever mining pool it's survived a lot have have come and gone but slush pool has remained steadfast stalwart in the mining

pool industry if you're using brains os plus firmware on your asic and you point your hash at SlushPool, you're going to get 0% fees from SlushPool, so that's a good perk. You don't have to point your BrainsOS Plus firmware enabled ASIC at SlushPool. However, if you do, you get those fees waived,

the pool fees. They've got insights.brains.com, an incredible website that'll allow you to get a whole perspective of the mining industry, profitability, hash rate, difficulty, pool distribution,

the profitability of individual ASIC models, the whole shebam, insights.brains.com. Go to brains, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com. Check out everything they have going on. It's all consolidated in that one website. Go to brains.com. You'll see Slushpool, firmware, the dashboard, the good content, brains.com, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com.

Last but not least, this report was brought to you by our good friends at Hodl. hodl hodl hodl is here to bring you a no it no kyc no aml lending uh platform that leverages bitcoin's native multi-sig properties you put bitcoin up as collateral in a two or three multi-sig escrow account you hold one key your counterparty in the loan holds one key and then hodl hodl is the third key the arbiter in the situation um the beauty of this you don't have control of the bitcoin throughout the duration alone however since you hold a key in the two with three multisig wallet, you have visibility into the wallet, which gives you the ability to

have confidence that your Bitcoin is not being rehypothecated after you put it up as collateral to get stable coin liquidity. You put your Bitcoin up in the two or three multisig, you get stable coins in return as long as you're paying back that loan plus the interest attached to it. You are going to get your stats back at the end of the day. The other side of that marketplace is the people giving out the stable coins. If you have stable coins and you want to enter a peer to peer, um, uh, anonymous lending market. You can do that at hodlhodl, uh, lend.hodlhodl.com is the lending platform. Uh, hodlhodl also has a peer to peer exchange. You just go to hodlhodl.com for that. Um, they're building incredible tools and products at hodlhodl

bang up team, really staying true to Bitcoin's ethos of peer to peer, um, commerce and leveraging Bitcoin's native properties to, to bring a future financial product. Well, it exists today. It's not a future financial product. It's here today, but they're creating a vision 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 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. Tight rip today. We got things to do in the afternoon. We've got people coming in the studio to record other podcasts. We got an hour and 40 minutes here, Matthew. Let's have a good one today. I know we're...

Let's rip it. Rip it and rip it, baby. We're going to jump right into it. the price gods have crashed the price today right before our HR crash may be a hyperbolic word but we're sitting at 36,695 CUC bucks

one CUC buck is going to get you 2,725 sats we are sitting at block height 735,055 we are currently 785 blocks away from the next

difficulty adjustment which is estimated to be 5.3 upward adjustment blocks are coming at 9 minutes and 30 seconds on average whoa mempool popping right now 31 741 transactions in clark's mempool yeah supposedly binance did a bunch of consolidation yesterday where are the average fees where the fees are just for just for the freaks just to recap what I mean by that is the number one driver of how much Bitcoin on-chain transaction costs you in terms of transaction fee is how many UTXOs, how many unspent transaction outputs you have on the input side. So if you imagine your Bitcoin wallet is like a regular wallet and you have a bunch of different bills in there, you have a bunch of different UTXOs that are all different

amounts, 10 million sats, 5,000 sats, 10,000 sats. When you do a Bitcoin transaction, if you're trying to send a certain amount, it's going to combine those UTXOs on the input side. The more you have on that input side, the higher your transaction fee is going to be. So these Bitcoin exchanges like Binance or Coinbase or Cash App, they could have millions of UTXOs from all of their customers, oftentimes, they're all these really small UTXOs. So if Bitcoin fees go up in the future, they're going to end up with a very high transaction fee burden. So what they do is they consolidate all of those UTXOs into one, I mean, to simplify it into one big UTXO. And then when they're sending transactions going forward, they only have to have one

UTXO on the input side. They have a limited amount of UTXOs on the input side. So right now, apparently, Binance is consolidating all of those UTXOs at a very low fee because fees have been extremely low. Just in case fees go up in the future, they won't have a high fee burden. Now, individual users should consider this as well when fees are low. But just keep in mind that you have an additional privacy concern that, obviously, if you combine all of those UTXOs into one big UTXO, all of those

all that Bitcoin is linked to each other and any previous transactions that have happened in the past could then be linked to the same user. Cheers. Thank you for that UTXO breakdown. Another thing, yeah, so consolidating

these UTXOs if you're a big operator is very important in doing it when fees low can save your ass in the future. What happened in 2017? Didn't Coinbase have something like 8 million dollars worth of UTXOs that were unspendable or they were really close to at least right so when the transaction fee is when the effective transaction fee is is a high percentage of the total amount of bitcoin you have um that becomes very painful to whoever's holding that

bitcoin and if it gets to the point where the transaction fee is above the amount of the actual UTXO, then we call that dust, which is essentially a completely uneconomical output where you can't spend it because the transaction fee is higher than the amount. Yeah. And so

Coinbase learned the hard way. I mean, they're lucky the fee market in 2017 the fees at one point did go higher than the subsidy. It was higher than 12.5 Bitcoin at one point in December 2017.

at that point in time. They waited it out and then they were able to spend it. But if the fees had never gone back down, they would have been completely fucked. Yeah. That $8 million worth of UTXOs that were does could have increased to something like Bitcoin 100x from there, $800 million.

Yep. So be aware if you're operating in space and you're operating with a lot of UTXOs, we should actually probably consolidate. we should DJ UTXO consolidation process we need to think about a business on air here because shoutouts coming in

that are paid for on chain we have two shoutouts this week both were over lightning but we do get shoutouts that are paid for on chain $50 it could how many sats is that right now it's

100,000 sats yeah 125 482 sets so and i just to while we're on the topic of transaction fees there's a there's a important distinction here because on lightning so on bitcoin on chain your transaction fee is the amount of data you're sending so the the biggest driver of that is how many inputs you have right how many utixos you have but so like a transaction that's for a small a small amount of total bitcoin could have a higher transaction fee than one that's for a larger amount now on lightning because it's data on lightning it's a percentage of the actual amount of bitcoin you're sending so you don't have this situation it's like okay i'm paying one percent of whatever amount

i'm sending or whatever the fee rate is that you're routing nodes that you're going through are charging completely different fee model i'm doing a lot of learning beginning of this we're not even done the dashboard freaks are getting value this week clark's men pull still around 31 243 transactions is this i saw samurai while tweeting the whirlpool numbers this week is a new all-time high 4544.98 that's what they said yeah i'm just i didn't verify it um so yeah it looks like whirlpool unspent capacity is increasing again it's 4544.98 BTC, unspent value with the price.

Where it is right now is $166.2 million CUC bucks. Yeah, it's interesting times. We're still in this range. Still ranging between mid 30s, mid 40s. Not that we care too much about price, but I do think

there is one interesting stat that I saw floating around earlier this week. If the week ends and we end the week down, this will be the longest weekly streak of red candles in Bitcoin's history. Something like six weeks straight.

Six or seven weeks straight, which is just a fun little fact, I guess. Making history here. Not the history many people want to be making. Making history on consistent dumping. Yeah.

I thought that was interesting. Alright, let's jump into the list. We got a good one today. A lot of spying. I titled the episode i titled the episode uh on youtube uh what did i title it um the government spies and lies so there's a lot of government spying and lying going on and the beauty is if you're watching it through youtube you're being spied on while you're watching it so everybody let's take everybody in the comments wherever you're listening just

take a moment to say hi to our fbi agent your fbi agent um they're friends at the cia just give them a nice warm welcome in the comment section and if you're listening via podcasting 2.0 app or spotify you can't really speak to the app or you can comment on fountain um i bet maybe our fbi agent is listening via fountain as well um comment there as well say hey we have a very dedicated fbi agent. He streams stats to the show to support us. Yeah. He's very kind actually. He's fifth column.

He's trying to break the alphabet soup agencies from within. So thank you to our FBI agent. Speaking of surveillance, Coinbase launches a revamped surveillance product. What are they calling it?

Coinbase Intelligence. Yes. Intelligence. It's very Orwellian. We're going to give you intelligent data that is driven by us buying on our customers know your transaction kyt they're really leaning into the vernacular of of the the surveillance state i think chain analysis uses the term kyt too to be fair but i mean what do you think like just they're just like openly leaning into kyc so they revamped they revamped their previous surveillance product and renamed it and then they added another product and then they combined them both under this new suite and uh they're

going to make it really easy for other businesses to package it rather than and they were already selling it to governments and intelligence agencies so now um i guess they're just going to make the process a lot more streamlined and more UX-friendly is the play. We have a great API to do all this. Know your transaction, the way they market it.

As the largest regulated exchange in the U.S., it has been critical for us to work on the development of safeguards against bad actors. After years of collecting signals about how to determine if an entity or transaction is facilitating illegal activity, we developed Coinbase KYT to help

Businesses and institutions better mitigate risk on their own platforms through our API. Illegal activity going on. They're looking for it. Know your transaction. They're going to reduce fraud, demystify counterparty risk, and help flag AML risk with sophisticated risk scores and alerts. As we know, KYC AML is completely ineffective,

So they're just doubling down on that at Coinbase and the other surveillance funds and trying to spy on you. So if you're using Coinbase, maybe if you're not even using Coinbase, their system is probably sophisticated to spy on people outside of their exchange as well. Oh, 100%. They're using all available data. And I wouldn't be surprised if when other exchanges and services integrate them, they use that data too. Yes. Moving on. For more surveillance and

enforcement, government intervention, the SEC nearly doubles the size of the crypto assets and cyber unit. So they're... What's the size going to here? It's 20 to 40. You have 40 people now.

The word on the street, or I guess the analysis of this announcement is that the SEC is really going to be focusing on crypto. Yeah, it's probably more relevant to shitcoins just because Bitcoin's not a security. But I think that cyber unit might involve us more. Yeah, we'll get to that as well.

Technically, this is a press release for both. Yes, the Division of Enforcement's crypto assets and cyber units successfully brought dozens of cases against those seeking to take advantage of investors in crypto markets. By nearly doubling the size of the key unit, the SEC will be better equipped to police wrongdoing in the crypto markets while continuing to

identify disclosure and control issues with respect to cyber security. It seems like they're one unit. I mean, they list those two units. Crypto assets and cyber unit. Yeah, I think that's one unit. Okay, well.

crypto assets and so it's notable noted noted um you know what I think

is a lot of people think Gary Gensler is a closet maxi another fifth column actor in the SEC

do you have any thoughts on this I don't think that's the case but okay I'm not yeah I'm not

convinced one way or the other pretty uh pretty if he is then why is there no Bitcoin ETF yet

because he knows a Bitcoin ETF is the is the what we don't want people are going to be holding their keys so he's holding it back

so people yeah I really think like a career statist is really concerned about holding your own keys hey I mean that would be

the tactic you would hold off the ETF as long as possible to incentivize people to take control of their own keys you know

yeah fifth column baby he he is uh he's definitely bitcoin friendly um like as friendly for bitcoin you can be as like an sec chair but yeah um yeah i mean you know i'm a fan of government sec regulators just please stay out of the way just let things flourish um say don't care i mean i imagine they'll go after a lot of these defy things like that like i'm not cheerleading for it um but i can see them doing that's definitely what the focus is like icos defy shit token stuff and nfts but again it goes back to the nanny state let me have a nanny state

100% we do just let people get burned that's how you learn lessons I got burned I got burned remember the min pal rug pull everyone got rug pulled on that

yeah I was one of those people I learned I learned a hard lesson yeah I lost all my coin on min pal and then I had to start from zero again it's all gone It's all gone.

But yeah, the nanny state stuff, we have the disinformation governance board, the TSA. It's just like we need to be coddled and treated like children and people that can't have agency and responsibility for ourselves. You need the government here to tell you,

this is what you can do. I don't like it. I don't like it one bit. Nor do I like the fact that the CDC was tracking the location of millions of Americans without a warren what the fuck this one we call but this one we've been shooting shouting from the rooftops for fucking like two years now three years but this is like so this is this is we've talked about this on rabbit hole recap multiple times uh this is the largest and biggest example

of it so far um so it's worth reiterating um we have you know we all have phones in our pockets uh they are running a bunch of different apps and services um those apps sell data to marketing companies that include your location that location data is even more precise than cell phone triangulation data super accurate because you have like location enabled you have your gps on um then the government goes and buys that data from marketers so because they're buying the data from marketers and you technically of your own free will like gave even though it wasn't really the case gave that information to the marketers um they don't need a warrant so they're able to buy all this data they pretend it's anonymized location data but like they know where you live

they know where you work they know everywhere you go it's impossible yeah it's impossible to have anonymized location data because your location is so intimate and connected to you especially if you have access to external data um so they use this to track track millions of americans now if you want to talk about um how we can stop this from happening going forward it's not going to be regulatory it's not going to be constitutional protections none of that shit's going to protect us you need to take technical you need to take technical steps to reduce your surface area here and the simple biggest thing you can do is just you know pull down on the top bar however the iphone works i don't know and then you press the location thing

and disable location disable location install as few apps as possible give them as little little uh permissions as possible ideally use an open source os rather than iphone or or google the two de-googled uh phone os's are calyx and graphene i recommend both either work reduce the amount of apps you use reduce the amount of permissions of the apps you use use open source apps as much as possible ideally don't have a phone if you can do that but i'm trying to be actionable here for car gps i really like the garmin gps's because they don't phone home they're very they're passive they just pull the you know they they're just using the gps satellite they're not actually sending any information out um so for for car navigation if that's something you need

and if you have absolutely need location you can press enable but keep it keep it disabled for as much as possible and this is not just about protecting yourself at scale you know we make all of our we help you help reduce dragnet surveillance across the board helps everyone yeah what was who wrote that article it was very interactive a few years ago that that showed how these companies track metadata by using the example of a protest in new york and then they were able the journalists were able to like identify particular people just by using the metadata you remember that um no some it wasn't it was the the they found the secret service agent's house or whatever yes that's the one you're talking about yeah they like started at

like a speech like a presidential speech and then they tracked it to the the secret service agent's house because he was at the speech he was here he was there and then he went and slept at home um and then there's another one that during covid i posted this one on twitter this week um they were bragging about how they could they they could track uh covid spread like one of these marketing companies and they like showed it they like circled they circled a group of people that were on a beach and they tracked them throughout the country and you could just see them go out the country so imagine people doing that with protests um other prohibited activities like they can see you know meetups conferences um there's a lot of information out there and

we're just willingly giving it to everybody this is one of the reasons why i said like 1984 is kind of not even a dystopian novel anymore because we've gone so far past it and most of it is a voluntary trade-off for convenience. We're just, people are just blissfully unaware and they just give all that information and they pay for the privilege oftentimes. Yeah.

Sad state of the world. But first part of fixing a problem is identifying it. Matt mentioned many solutions that exist out there for mobile phones you have operating systems like embassy os coming to market that are working on it from a desktop perspective and a home server perspective i do have hope that we will get out of this mass surveillance state though the situation is pretty dire i will say that the cdc uh was just exposed uh tracking tens of millions of americans location without a warrant and uh 99 of americans have no idea that happened and could give two shits even if they even if they

heard the headline yeah i mean if we actually lived in a country that respected the constitution and its laws and the sovereignty and privacy that individuals were supposed to be granted not granted very granted privacy is that that's an alien should be inalienable it seems like it has to be granted to us now um yeah if we actually lived in a sane country that practiced what it preach and rights are not granted yes rights are i believe in natural rights there's big debates about taking and defended yes um but going back to this particular i mean cdc and just for the whole covet lockdowns it should be the whole agency should be abolished walensky that whole the moral hazard in the center for disease control is pretty disgusting the fact that they were

layering that moral hazard with dragnet security of people is just like another tick in the box. Is anything going to happen to them? Probably not. Unless people stand up. With this particular story, what's going on with Peter Thiel?

So like, Palantir, so like the company, Safegraph. We love surveillance. Yeah, it's like, it's so weird. Like it publicly postures like this big rah-rah rights freedom liberty guy. And then he's heavily backing

all these dragnet surveillance companies. I mean, he was one of the most popular speeches at Bitcoin 2022. I love that speech. I like riled it up. Is he just posturing publicly one way and doing things

behind the scenes? I think he thinks private companies should be able to surveil on us, but the government shouldn't. But he's also fine with selling. Palantir's biggest client is the government. I know, I'm aware. Very perplexing.

Peter. He's very pro-surveillance. That's his core principle. Peter, if you want to come on the podcast and discuss, the invite is open. I know you're listening. I know you're out there listening to our HR. You come week in and week out.

It's like many of our famous friends. Hillary, pumped to hear you're listening as well. Please don't. Both Calix and Graphene also have this feature that if you do have to have an app installed, you can, you can set it so it doesn't have internet access without the VPN on, or you can set it so it just never has internet access. So like for, and, and you can also freeze apps so you can make it so an app is like essentially uninstalled, but it's just one click away from using. um i mean like my my favorite you know my my favorite surveillance app is uber especially when i'm in like a foreign city or something so if you have to have uber you just

keep it frozen and then when you have it enabled when you have it on you should do vpn only with location off like most people don't realize with uber and lyft you actually don't even need location on you can you know good old-fashioned put in the address that you're located at and a fucking car will come um so just keep that in mind yeah but then you're leaking that data to uber and they have but you're still marty like you're still if you have location on you're still leaking the data i know obviously but you don't have to enable location you can just put in whatever address you want yeah um moving along the fbi conducted potentially millions of searches of americans data last year reports is the fbi agent dude what the fuck's going on there bro

this one was uh immigration related i believe if i recall correctly shocker what does the fbi do outside of like entrap people and spy on people that's what they did that's that's what they did they just entrap like i mean occasionally they like arrest a murderer that went across borders or whatever yeah and likely if you like dig deep into the story they probably like drove the guy to murder at the end of the day

like this is Jevi Jevi we'll get to the good stuff soon don't worry sir um yeah the the FBI the Michigan governor completely fabricated that story

i mean there was obviously i mean i think it's public knowledge now i think leaving the new york times was admitting it earlier this year the january 6th stuff there was some fbi agents inciting some chaos at that story we've talked about many times that um autistic dude in florida that they convinced to like buy a bomb like set it up and then they're like arrested him in a operation making it seem like they were stopping a terrorist but they had created the terrorist in the first place I've been watching the

documentary about have you been watching this at all on HBO about the drug runner from the 70s and Gary something I forget the name of the show but it's actually not not not Gary Gensler but another one he was like a

crop duster turned into like a drug smuggler in the 80s moving a lot of cocaine and marijuana and the cia basically arrested him and said or entrapped him and said like if you either get arrested or you help us send weapons to nicaragua during the the iran oh iran contra yeah during that during that um debacle under the reagan administration to the CIA getting drug smugglers to smuggle guns into a country.

Yeah, they've been up to shit for years. That's actually a really interesting docu-series. And we had the one we have the perfect Bitcoin example too where the guys who took down Ross were also Yeah, they stole the Bitcoin. Idiots didn't realize

how a public ledger works and got caught trying to siphon off some of the Bitcoin. They probably thought they were going to be rich. But are they still in jail? Do they even go to jail? I think, I mean, one of them, Karl Mark Forst did.

Remember him? Yeah, so this is our three-letter agencies and this is how they're protecting you, your rights, your family. The great start of the episode. And we're like, this is the week we were handed, so. Yeah, exactly. At least we know about it.

They were spying before these stories came out. these stories are the good news yeah exactly now it's public we're identifying problems are we oh yeah it was deh and it's not fbi right oh dea another great agency yeah remember when the uh do we have an atf story too i mean there's there's a very big atf story about 40 miles south of where i'm sitting right now uh a town called waco texas never heard of it they they murdered they murdered a bunch of children and people who just wanted to live yeah um so yeah that happened as well so yeah atf did that dea stealing bitcoin fbi and trapping people cia smuggling weapons in the nicaragua among many other things

these are the united states intelligence apparatus and enforcement agencies that are here to protect you because you need to be protected because you're a dumb fucking cow that can't have sovereignty and responsibility over your own self you're too dumb let these people entrap you control your life

on to somewhat rosier things I mean I'm interested to get your take on this obviously I'm sure everybody knows that I have a take on this recorded a podcast earlier this week on the subject the Bitcoin mining council submitted a letter to the EPA.

It's a bunch of people. Michael Saylor, Nick Carter. Another three-letter agency. Yeah. The EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA, the government,

is protecting the environment. Okay? The EPA is doing a lot of protection. Marty, I was surprised that your signature wasn't on this. Oh, were you? Were you? Yeah.

I did get asked to sign it. um what's your take on this i mean i i get what's going on i mean obviously there's a lot of screeching by some people in the government about bitcoin mining there's been screeching about bitcoin mining for as long as it's been around it's energy consumption the letter's intent was to highlight that bitcoin mining uses a significant amount of quote-unquote renewable energy and they they're making the argument that you know bitcoin incentivizes more production of quote-unquote renewable energy um and they say it's going to help bitcoin mining specifically is going to help a transition the energy transition and the energy

transition is a transition away from quote-unquote fossil fuels to those quote-unquote renewables I'm saying quote unquote, because these words are nothing more than marketing. And I mean, let me be clear. I have a lot of friends who signed this. I mean, I like everybody. I met a lot of the people who signed this letter. I like them as people. I think there are many of them are good Bitcoiners who really want to see the network succeed

and want to bring sovereignty to the world. However, as you may know, if you read the newsletter I wrote earlier this week or listened to the podcast I recorded with Saifedean, Dr. Saifedean Amoos, on Tuesday, I just think this strategy and this narrative is a big mistake by the North American mining industry. um number one and we discussed it at length safe and i safety and i did a transition the renewable transition the energy transition is something that we should not be supporting it does not make any sense it's going to make humanity materially worse off and it's if we're being honest not viable without a shit ton of subsidies and hydrocarbons um so i think this catering to the frame that has been put forth by regulators and screeching politicians and screeching climate hysterics uh catering to that frame and trying to work within that as a mining

industry is not a good strategy we should not cede the frame to these hysterics these zealots these people who don't have the truth behind them and we should put our own frame forth which is bitcoin mining is good humans are good increased energy production is good hydrocarbons aren't going anywhere and bitcoin mining is going to make us extremely energy efficient in the long run and the fiat standard is actually what is wasting a massive amount of energy due to the misallocation of capital that it incentivizes so i think running with the narrative that the bitcoin mining council is sets us up for failure in the future or not failure but they're going to have a lot of egg on their face when number one bitcoin mining doesn't incentivize a full

uh energy transition because i'm seeing it up close and personal oil and gas companies are going to get into bitcoin mining in a big way and it's going to help them produce more oil and drill more wells uh and so that's like people are going to be like hey i thought you said we were transitioning to all renewables what's up with all these oil and gas companies mining bitcoin um so that's like that's happening already like that's that finger pointing is going to come if you keep running with this narrative uh and then yeah like i don't think we like should be catering to these zealots and those are my thoughts at least like off the top of my head right now what do you think you've been very um

apolitical about this what's what's the word you've been very uh non-committal one way i don't want to say non-committal you you're you're you're switzerland right now it seems like on this subject i mean look if the concern if the concern is that the large public warehouse miners are all going to get cucked by regulations yeah they're all going to 100 gonna happen uh whether it's through the environment stuff whether it's through uh terrorist financing or whatever fucking fat foot stuff they want to hit them with they're all going to get cucked in a million ways and i just think this is you know mostly a uh they're just rearranging the chairs of the titanic yeah

yeah I mean this is why it's important again maybe this ties in with like the alphabet soup agency talk we were having

earlier we need to call like stop falling in and like trying to cater to these things

that are objectively evil and bad and going to make us worse off as a society like stop like no bitcoin's good

sound money's good more energy production's good like I'm not apologizing for using hydrocarbons we would not have the life that we have today without hydrocarbons we're not going to have the quality of life that we have today if we try to transition away from them it's one thing i thought that was interesting here was uh that wasn't really the crux of the argument for this specific letter the crux of the argument was we are just data

processors we're not power generation processors so it's like why are you asking us when we're we're not actually affiliated with the power production we're just running these machines on power well that's again that's another narrative violation in the future but this is a new one right like i haven't heard that like that was the main argument here yeah the electricity is being produced anyway like we're just using it like yeah i mean that that argument is essentially like why are you picking up bitcoin miners and not washing machines um but again no no it's more like why are you picking on bitcoin miners and not like aws yeah but yeah i mean they're they're all interchange again like this is what safe and i

like they do they want us using less energy it's like any energy use is bad so if you see that frame uh that like particular energy use is bad and you try to cater to them you'll never be able to appease them because they think that all energy use is bad and that we need to use less and different kinds of energy. And so Bitcoin mining will just be using energy and taking away from things that they deem to be acceptable users of energy in the future. It'll be like, oh, Bitcoin's using all this renewable, it could be used for something else. We're already seeing that attack come, even though it's nonsensical, it doesn't make any sense because there's not many things that um are able to to actually use that energy because people don't care about facts

or logic or anything they care about control i've been saying this ad nauseum um and like again it's the the overarching theme of the letter was yes that the we're not the power producers but again if you understand the economics of mining in the future miners are going to become power producers or power producers are going to become miners uh so again that's just setting up a for some point in the future for people to point but like wait you weren't the power providers now you are like you said you were going to do this and you didn't and similarly with the energy transition i mean just these lines you're just putting expectations out there that these zealots are going to point to in the future and said but wait you said you're going to do this and it didn't

to happen so therefore you guys are lying we need to attack your industry more it's like stop being on going on the defense go on the offense these people are insane what's the offense energy usage is good we need more hydrocarbons aren't going away bitcoin is good it's going to make us more energy efficient the fiat standard is a problem which leads to a misallocation of capital so offensive on like the the narrative side exactly yeah do not do not imagine like look how much time was wasted across the industry this week like thinking about this yeah i mean we just wasted like what like eight minutes is it a waste is it a waste here though i don't know the freaks all know like you know i i this whole first half of the episode is like the freaks know

we're being surveilled already it's bad and what they should do most of them probably know how fees work most of them know est is a scam and an attack on bitcoin most of them know that large miners are going to get cucked like we just rehashed a bunch of shit hey we have new freaks coming every week matthew i'm glad i i hope the like the seven of you that hasn't heard those things we're having insane growth on the uh on the download side thank you guys a reminder spread the word about the show we're trying to educate people about this we will repeat this stuff in the future because there will more new freaks coming so if you're getting bored of it sorry but it's fun to rehash all this stuff and you got to stay up to date with it and it's fun uh at some point in the future when the zealots

do say but wait you said this you said you were going to do this but this happened we're going to be able to look back and go oh rabbit hole recap rip 198 we made everybody aware of this we have the tapes you can roll the tapes who cares about our show it is all about rhr pill go rhr pill the way you can help do that is hit subscribe wherever you're listening great review that helps it honestly does if i do want to get this information out to more people i think it's important we are in a narrative battle i i will be up front i just i think bitcoin's good i am going to try to propagandize to make bitcoin happen i'm going to be open about that we need to get yeah 100 um bitcoins fuck you money yeah but for a lot of people it's fucking me money so

um you actually reminded me uh just in our usual tactic of talking business on the air uh we do have a plan in place to roll rabbit hole recap into its own podcast feed it is not ready yet but I think it seems like right now it's like in two weeks

the only way to listen on podcast will be on the new feed so we'll remind you next week you're going to want to search rabbit hole recap in your podcast app and press subscribe over there yeah we're doing we're getting more organized

here housekeeping yeah some housekeeping separate streams all that stuff we should have done it from the start but we were young dumb and

looking at the way Adam Carey John Dvorak what Adam does with No Agenda MoFax, Podcasting 2.0 it just makes sense to do all that separate streams and it makes stuff easier for like the podcasting

2.0 splits and all that which become a nightmare intermingling the interviews on the RHR but anyway Carr's been working on that we're very close next week will probably be the last one on the TFTC feed and we'll remind you and then after that

they'll be on the RHR feed yeah and I'll be sure to continually remind people after the fact on TFTC feed so when we do launch when i mean should we go tell them to subscribe now i mean there is yeah car scene yeah i don't think it's up yet i think it's only on spotify card it's only on spotify now yeah so don't

subscribe stop using spotify freaks i still use spot i mean if you want to use spotify use spotify i don't really give a shit it's only it's only available on spotify right now well it was a little premature we'll remind you next week we need to syndicate the rss feed out get podcasting 2.0 set up and everything yeah and that was business on air that was a new thing though so at least it's our first non-rehash of the of the conversation yes this is pretty new i've never seen this type of data done how women across the world view bitcoin well i thought this was interesting because i think most people would assume like oh like spirals biased there So Spiral's running this right out of the non-profit, open source, Bitcoin focused.

Maybe, I don't know if it's non-profit, but it's definitely not tax non-profit. Division of Square, well, Block, formerly Square. I think most people would think this was maybe like a woke SJW type of study. But really, the findings of the study was like, women don't really view Bitcoin any differently than men. yeah bitcoin bitcoin doesn't care attitudes toward bitcoin are largely the same across genders now it was a study of a thousand women who had a thousand people both men and women that have heard of bitcoin but have never used bitcoin and they have a bunch of results and graphs whatnot but the big takeaway is that is basically the same yeah

yeah there's a lot of apprehension i think i'm on page um finding number three women are very concerned with trust and safety don't know if bitcoin is safe um omara from argentina is turning her argentinian argentine pesos into dollars and turning it into cash i would argue that's not very safe women don't find bitcoin easy to learn about from the people and formats they follow if there's any women listening to this show that think that please let us know we would like to change that um yeah so there's a i mean it does highly we have a lot of work to do in terms of like educating or maybe it's not us doing the work or people coming to understand it is a foreign

a foreign idea from us an alien idea is probably the best way to describe it oh man just in moving on now I just got some breaking news sent to via text message

what AG Merrick Garland announces the US Department of Justice is creating an office of environmental justice so another the oij yeah oej yes the oej so another three letter environmental with an i that's pretty bad oej oej so another three letter agency here horrible three letters that's not a good one oej oej ouija ouija ouija ouija ouija you say fast ouija ouija we just are summoning demons to control your life okay um we spun up a ministry of truth last week

now we get an office of environmental justice this week just more bureaucratic bullshit to fuck up your life we gotta change this just getting uh so that's new this is some new information this is the breaking news on the rip this is a three letter agency that's going to put Marty in if I can gulag that's literally so this is the text I got

they are coming for you if I invite it's important to laugh yeah you have to laugh you have to laugh speaking of laughing let's get to the shout outs we have two this week unless i refresh and we get another which didn't happen um so this is interesting greetings from finland shout out to our finnish freaks i don't know if you're aware but finland possesses over 1 000 bitcoin seized from a drug bust the government is planning on

donating at least some of it to ukraine this is just so short-sighted setting aside the method of acquisition finland possesses its own bitcoin treasury other than the cost of custody the finnish government could just hold it and when it comes to donating to ukraine finland has has its own problems finland is next up if russia decides that it cannot bear a further nato incursion on its borders we are prepared and we'll give them a bad time look up simo i do not understand how to pronounce it hannah stuff uh hiya hiya h a h a and the a's have like two dots over them h a y h a and the a's have two dots over them i don't know how to pronounce this email hiya um but maybe it would help to hold on to that bitcoin too i love the show keep up the good work shout out to our

finnish freak i agree i don't think i'm torn on this one oh yeah i mean yeah i agree if the finnish government were smart it would hold the bitcoin and want to donate them to like a a war i'm i'm torn on it well first of all on how to pronounce hiya no i'm i'm but the main reason i'm torn on it is because it seized bitcoin now i don't think governments i i definitely don't like this idea of like well we'll focus on our government i don't like the idea of the u.s government having a policy where they hold seized bitcoin i want them to fucking fire sell it for shit coins or or burn it right like those are like the two options i don't want this like there's like this perverted incentive there where it's like okay all of a sudden you know we're seizing

bitcoin and we're we're we're getting all these gains on our seized bitcoin right our purchasing power is protected um our bitcoin treasury is doing great and then they're just like passing new laws and using the existing vague laws to go after bitcoiners and seize more bitcoin right like that's a very perverse incentive we saw that happening um with independent police forces uh in terms of uh where they were like seizing cars and cash and guns and all these different assets and they were allowed to keep them um and so basically like these independent local police forces had like a massive revenue stream their main revenue stream was was it was taking people shit and you had if you wanted to get your shit back you had to sue them and prove in the court

of law yeah that it was rightfully yours and so they usually took your money which you would then you're not have money to fucking pay for your lawyer it's so fucking ass backwards yeah so that's what i'm really torn about like i don't like that yeah i mean and this bring it back to another like i guess it's not seizure but they found the bitfinex bitcoin the government is u.s government gonna give them back probably that's what i'm saying like should they should they hold that i think they should burn it just fucking burn the whole fucking thing i mean obviously we'd like that so i like i try and stay out of you know like political

lobbying or whatever but i feel like one of the single biggest wins that we could get would be if we convinced if we if we got like a law put in place that the u.s government had to burn any bitcoin they seized well when it comes to the bitcoin or the bitfinex bitcoin like they should give it back to bitfinex i mean it was stolen from them they found it you should get your stolen goods back right that makes sense in terms of seizing it from like the silk road even though i think the silk roads should be completely legal and people should be able to do whatever they want yeah they should give it back to bidfinex they're not going to no they should yeah um because bidfinex in that situation wasn't the alleged criminal right and the silk road is

large criminal but i think i would like i i don't know if that'd be so hard of uh of uh of a pull to convince you know government status types that like we should just burn all bitcoin like why don't we tell them it's bad for the environment and you know like they shouldn't be supporting bitcoin as an ecosystem and they should just it's like inherently illegal or whatever like use all the things they use against us and be like burn everything you sees and then just get that on the books and then from this point on they won't really have a strong incentive to seize bitcoin and if they do existing bitcoin holders get the benefit of more scarcity so increasing purchasing power yeah i mean we'd love that but then does the

government want that today they want that i don't know i think i think you know that if if you're going to lobby the government why don't you lobby them to do that burn it burn it how do you burn it you just send it to an unspendable address yeah yeah one bitcoin eater or whatever i mean you can do it to a bunch steve people got mad at steve barber for burning coins last year remember that he did like a satoshi sacrifice uh to pay homage to satoshi people got really mad at him i don't know why would you get mad at him like anyone can burn coins whenever they want to burn them yeah i think i think i feel like it was like aj i mean that's what i did i burned all my bitcoin and then i had to start fresh again yeah what is that

uh yeah i like that that's an interesting strategy i think bitfenix should get their bitcoin back probably not that's a shame these guys was like bitfinex so like so bitfinex is a little bit confusing right because bitfinex gave everyone a haircut at their exchange so it wasn't a forced haircut though yeah it was no it wasn't yeah it was you i mean you receive so i don't think you only have the ability to hold that token if you wanted to okay but if you only held ethereum on the exchange Bitcoin was stolen If you only held Ethereum on the exchange

You had the same socialized losses So they like cut your balance And then they gave you their bullshit token Or whatever And they were like you have the ability to hold this I didn't realize they cut balances Yeah and they replaced it with the token And then you could hold the token

That would be worth $1 when everyone was whole But people Didn't think that would happen So they were selling low And like the theory at least is that Bitfinex was buying them back low so that their obligations were lower. Yeah, there's going to be a movie made about the Bitfinex hack.

So it's not that clear. It's going to focus on this. That's the thing that's going to suck about the Bitfinex movie. Burning it would be easier. It would be much easier. But the thing that's going to suck about the Bitfinex movie is that it's going to focus on those two assholes from Brooklyn who probably weren't even the actual thieves

or the patsies. It's not going to focus on... You mean the richest rapper of all time? Of course it's going to focus on her. As it should. No. It should really focus on the discussion we're having. The intricacies of what they did in the afternoon.

The name of the movie should be Richest Rapper of All Time. Straight up, that should be the name of the movie. Netflix, HBO, Paramount, whoever. We're giving out free alpha here. Richest Rapper Ever. software updates my citadel version 1.0 has been released

this is a desktop client we only had one shout out oh no we had two good call we went on a tangent with the finish the finish freak sent us down the road shout out to you finish freak

second and last shout out of the week what's up dog nothing much We chillin' here We chillin' here Vake But like now That's a good name, Wrapped Bitcoin

R-A-P-P-E-D I like that This is the thing about the Are people impersonating Vake? Is this actually Vake? No, that's actually Vake That's definitely Vake Thanks Vake, love you brother Vake, if that wasn't you, just do a shoutout next week

to let us know Also Vake, where the hell were you at the Live Rabbit Hole Recap? you're supposed to come up on stage and we were supposed to lambast you in front of the audience. Yeah, you were supposed to join us for the live one. Cop out. Shame on you, Vic.

My Citadel version 1.0 has been released. Vic is in the comments saying it's me, but I don't know how he can verify that that's actually Vic. This is an interesting project. Vic got banned. he said we didn't call him up

we didn't call him up he's got a point we probably should have what are you going to do next year Vic we told you to meet us at the stage the week before we went live join us on the live RHR at BitBlackBoom ooh yes

you're in Austin Texas don't even have to leave that's Vic come join us for the and if we shout you out to come join us and you're not in the audience that's on you that is on you good timing don't even have to leave uh so this my citadel thing's pretty cool yeah software release yeah explain where i've seen like people tweeting about it and seeing screenshots but now i'm reading the release now it seems really cool like multi-sig lightning inheritance things uh well first of all it says

it's still in beta so don't use it with too much money um i mean i tried it out with with all my bitcoin and lost it also uh that one i'm fucking around about i haven't tried it yet um and but the cool feature that it has apparently is that you can make a multi-sig like you can make a three of five multi-sig that turns into a like one of five multi-sig after a certain amount of time goes by or blocks go by um this is so you can make it require less signatures so in an inheritance situation um or if you lose a key you have a safeguard so you can imagine like an inheritance situation um you give you give like your your kid or something like that like one key and you give a lawyer a second key or your aunt a second key and then but they need three keys to spend it

while you're living but if you die and then three years go by or whatever um then they only need two keys to spend from it and then they can spend it this is something i love to see one feature that Bitcoin has that I think is severely underutilized at the moment is time locks time locking Bitcoin this isn't a time lock so if you

do a traditional time lock it's it's no one can spend it oh right like if I did a 4,000 block time lock then it doesn't matter how many signatures you have

you just can't spend it for 4,000 blocks well this feature, it's a time lock not a specific time lock feature but using I have no idea what they're doing under the hood to make it happen I did not look into it, it's been a busy week this came out relatively recently, what was it like two days ago

it's like an on-chain dead man switch right, essentially that's the way to describe it I think it's Taproot is involved. It's a Taproot native wallet. And these are the guys that are doing RGB, so this is going to be

like, this is the base for their RGB wallet, which is their tokens on Lightning. But this is the on-chain component of it, so it doesn't have any of the Lightning stuff in it yet, is my understanding. Check it out.

Supports hardware wallets, all the good shit, open source. AirGap. all that good good uh so kita's asking how does it know when someone dies it doesn't it's just a straight up the amount of time since i believe since the last transaction uh is what it is so if you're still alive you got to make transactions so it doesn't decay you just signed does that that be possible what if you just signed no you got to broadcast the transaction yeah transaction has to be

in the blockchain it wouldn't be any different like from a from a private would it if you just signed with the private key

like I'm thinking it was a UX what if you could sign it would extend well then you need like a centralized server or something the whole point is that

everything's in chain yeah that's a good point but now Zorn is telling me that I'm mistaken I believe Zorn is telling me that I'm mistaken and that it has nothing to do when the last transaction happened and just has to do with when you created the wallet and the amount of time

that happens after you create the wallet which might also be the case like I said I have no idea I have not looked into it go look into it yourself freaks we'll have the link in the show notes don't trust us give us a shout out about how it works

go verify CTool version 1.0.4 has been released. Our friend Bitcoin Q&A has a nice little thread on this. The SeedZor is the cool feature where you can split up your seed backup

into two or multiple BIP39 compatible seed. So I guess you can is it similar like Shamir sharding or No. No. XOR is

uh what cold card supports already um and it has a there's some slight differences with shamir's first of all you can do everything by hand and verify everything by hand um it's like a very simple process uh in terms of intuitively um and with xor you need you need both you need all the you need all of the um pieces but it's nice because you can you can keep so the simplest is just two right and you can keep those two seeds in different places and it's almost like a poor man's multi-sig you need both of them to to restore the funds yes but it's good to see the improvements here uh this is also super fat arrows involved in this project too super Fat Arrow. What a nym.

Such a good nym. We're going to talk about the next software update, then we're going to blow through the rest because I want to talk about a lot of the topics we have on the back end of the show, and we have a tight 40 minutes here. Tor version 0.4.77 has been released. This

is the first stable Tor release with support for congestion control, which eliminates the speed limit of current Tor, reduces latency by minimizing relay queue length, significant performance improvement, and increased utilization of network capacity. this seems like a pretty big tour update am i mistaken it seems pretty big yeah i mean just supposed to make everything more performant um yeah this is also a very recent i think this

dropped yesterday yeah shout out to no bullshit bitcoin uh that's where i saw this first in their telegram channel um if they're sharing on telegram twitter rss feed great feed great feed MK4 shipping and new firmware is available MK4 is going out freaks

I've got my hands on one I've got to plug it in start messing with it plug it in not to the internet but just to some power source potentially a battery

yeah I have some MK4s here too I need to use and test haven't yet Lightning Multiplexer has been released by

bottle but he released just uh so what there's mk4 is shipping now that's harder while in the business and the new firmware is out he's insisting on calling them signing devices now i don't know if i agree with that but whatever i might agree with that i think i agree with that what about what about uh shishi's idea of a bitcoin computer bitcoin computer no i don't like that i don't know if i like either of them i don't think i like hardware wallet either but i i don't know if a signing device is necessarily the why not what's wrong with that's what it is you sign private key is the broadcast transaction yeah but that doesn't matter i don't know if the goal is to make like to have terminology that's like

accessible and easy for people to understand and explain to people yeah well it doesn't seem like that's one well i don't think that's the intention i think it's to be more accurate no that's the intention and then um mk4 mk3's uh firmware has been released there's a couple other things i don't know but they've been they've been running through uh mvk got mad at me last week because we didn't mention a bunch of shit so i i try my best mbk there you go rodolfo we're sorry we're so cold guard.com or coin kite.com and click their blog and see what they've been talking about it's a blog really really click their blog blog uh introducing multiplexer incoming payment failover this is pretty cool

yost jaeger who's been on the podcast jaeger jaeger jaeger tomato tomato very uh very critical lightning dev somebody's been working on it for some time famously left he left lightning labs to focus on lightning network security

and highlighting where there are inefficiencies and I imagine this failover for lightning and multiplexer is something that he's happy to bring to market because it helps with the UX side of things

so first of all this is open source um the cool part to me of this is that you're separating the invoice database stuff from the node um so we talked a lot about like in the past we've talked a lot about how if you have an lnd node like it's really hard to switch over to core lightning or one of the other implementations um i mean that sucks for individual users but it's even more extreme for uh businesses so in this case my my basic understanding with the multiplexer is that it doesn't really matter what the nodes you have in front of it are the multiplexer is the one handling all the invoice database stuff um so you can be you can like seamlessly switch between implementations or you can have multiple you could be running multiple different implementation nodes

and they're all connected to the multiplexer on the back end now i might be completely wrong about that but that is that seems like the cool part here um and if that's not the case my understanding at the very least is that this is like the setup process for that to be the case. Progress. Moving forward.

It's like detaching the node part from the actual database part. Yeah. Which is a pretty big step. Shout out to Yoast. Yeah, see,

in the future, support for node implementations other than LND may add it using a mix of Thanks, Car. Car scrolled away from me, but

um but using a mix of implement scroll up a little bit car i mean whatever you can use a mix in the future you're going to be able to use a mix of implementations right now you can't but that's the cool part to me yeah using a mix of implementations further increases the resiliency of the system correct um this is open source let's go check this out is just working at BottlePay now? Yeah, BottlePay's been funding him for a while now. I think they're lead engineer.

Sweet. Shout out to Yost and BottlePay for bringing that to market. Again, progress slowly but surely. Things aren't perfect. Bitcoin isn't perfect. Everybody should understand this. We're working to make it better.

There are things that you need to be aware of as much as people will say Bitcoin is perfect. does have a perfect monetary system, a perfect monetary policy, but the actual implementation of that depends on code. That isn't always perfect.

We're building in layers here. And with Lightning too, it's not perfect. We're still making that better as well. We need better privacy on both layers. Progress. Taproot helps us.

This stuff could get us to a place where um privacy is better on lightning as well and then do you see these comments is bitcoin nuking where are we 35 9 30 no not really i think it's higher than one yada 35 000 is not nuking and stay humble and stack sets i think that's where i think we're above where we are were when we started the episode. Not on air. Well, my block clock still says

54,000. Interesting. I'm going to pull this thread up because this is interesting to get your thoughts on this. I don't know if you saw this thread from Buck Dickerson. Buck Dickerson. Buck Dickarson.

I'm going to put this in our telegram this is definitely someone we know who just created a new twitter account it is someone we know i'm not sure do you know who it is yeah and he's a very solid bitcoiner so i don't know if you've seen this thread but it's an interesting take on what the lightning network is so i'll read the thread aloud for anybody at home uh that's listening can't see it on the screen first lightning isn't a scaling later layer it is bitcoin it is how bitcoin works natively moreover it solves Vitalik Buterin's idiotic blockchain trilemma. It uses Bitcoin security, it scales Bitcoin natively, and keeps Bitcoin decentralized. Second, Taro makes native tokens feasible without

the pitfalls of shitcoining by using the native network effect of the Lightning network. Stop saying that Lightning is a second-layer solution. Stop saying that Lightning scales Bitcoin. Bitcoin is Lightning, and Lightning is layer one. It's effectively just a wild implementation that keeps channels between parties open I thought that was an interesting framing of lightning network and explanation of it interested to get your thoughts

on that I mean it's I don't disagree because it is again it's like just like a multi-sig wild implementations take that multi-sig transaction do things yeah I mean if we want to call it a

layer one we can call it a layer one i just uh then what is on chain i you're just like at the end of the day like what are these terminologies for it's just for discourse between humans i thought it was an interesting term um like what like we're teaching someone how to make a lightning payment or whatever and they were like just be mindful that this layer one payment not a layer two payment but it's completely different than your normal on jane payment yeah but that can be abstracted away like moons do but it's definitely it's definitely completely different than something like liquid i would say like liquid is more of a pure layer two um agreed my guess is who's ever behind that account is someone at lightning labs

who put a lot of... Wrong? Wrong. Oh, I was going to say, I'm going to continue my statement. Who had a lot of good points and then mixed in a tarot justification in the middle.

I'll... Not anybody from Lightning Labs. I think you'll be surprised with who it is. I'll tell you after. Speaking of Lightning... What was the tarot sentence? second tarot makes native tokens feasible without the pitfalls of shit coining by using the native network effect of the lightning network and when i tell you who it is you'll get

why that was said um but it wasn't anybody from lightning labs okay well i mean that that's probably the only statement i would argue against because it's literally like how can you avoid the the perils of shitcoining when it's enabling shitcoins on Lightning? That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know.

I'm not even going to get down that road. I don't feel like doing it right now. I was going to say. I just feel like Bitcoiners have so many pointless things to argue about.

Do we really have to argue about layer one versus layer two? I don't really care. I don't think he's really arguing. I think he's just trying to illuminate a way to do it.

A narrative battle. that's not even heard about I would agree I would definitely agree that it's definitely at the end of the day they're batch Bitcoin transactions right yeah yeah I wonder if

yeah custodial lightning is that layer that's layer 2 yeah I mean if you I wonder his opinion on that and cash apps layer 2 coinbase layer 2 liquids layer 2 I think that's pretty

commonly accepted I think there's agreement around like exchanges and custodians being layer 2 solutions their internal databases are a layer on top of Bitcoin I guess not directly connected to the

chain but now we're just getting into semantics there's a new lightning only VPN lnvpn.net it's pretty cool uses WireGuard VPN client I don't think I've ever heard of WireGuard

so WireGuard's a protocol it's a it's a new VPN protocol that's more performant like all the good all the good hosted VPN providers are using WireGuard like Movad supports WireGuard

as a protocol so So this is they have their own they have their own servers and they're using WireGuard as the WireGuard as a protocol. So in practice, it's not really any different than MoVad. The main two differences are you're trusting a different individual or group of individuals. In this case, we have no idea who's running this and you can pay hourly and it's lightning native, which is cool. uh movad you have to use uh vpn.sovereign.engineering if you want to pay lightning movad doesn't accept lightning payments directly um and it's just kind of a cool idea that you

can do like a throwaway one hour vpn with lightning payment for like what it's like 10 cents or something for one hour yeah a few hundred sets but i just want to reiterate one more time that with a hosted vpn provider the main trade-off you're making is you're putting a lot of trust in that vpn provider and there's no way for us to prove that someone isn't isn't uh keeping logs so there's no way to prove you're not keeping logs so it always comes down to a reputation game um and these people have zero reputation uh with all that said i've talked about movan many times i've talked about ibpn many times they both could be honeypots um and we won't know until after we

get completely fucked but that's just the trade-off you make when you use a VPN yeah who is running this who are they you know they're they're

anons I have no idea they don't even list a nim I don't believe Berlin McWinter are saying they follow Warren Tagami

from Blockstream Light Rider from Fulmo yeah he's working on so Light Rider I guess he's a NIM it's Light Rider on Twitter got it? Light Rider 5 the number

5 Light L-I-G-H-T Rider R-I-D-E-R 5 is working on it the Twitter account follows three people Warren Tagami Light Rider and WireGuard and that's how you do research on the go folks

if you want to buy a month subscription I was doing math put on my calculator pretty cheap 8343 sats for a month long VPN there but be aware it could be our FBI agent Light Rider could be working for the FBI behind the scenes and could be our agent

he could have killed Light Riders 1 through 4 and then this is a really cool study the Voltage Podcast Index Study diving deep into the numbers. There's a lot of people listening to podcasts using Podcasting 2.0 enabled apps.

Shout out to those of you who are currently doing that as I speak. It's pretty cool that there's over 6,400 Podcasting 2.0 value-for-value podcasts. That's a lot. That's a significant amount of podcasts. A million stats a month.

Or is that a day? A million stats per day are being streamed which is pretty impressive the reason they know these stats by the way is because as part of the podcasting 2.0 spec uh podcast index as the index of all the podcasts has a sustainable business model of taking one percent of of the stream so when you stream sets uh to this show right now a portion goes to dj seeds a portion goes to car a portion goes to me a portion goes to marty and a portion one percent goes to podcast index so if if if you control the podcast index node which adam curry does which is being run on voltage then you can extrapolate from there and know how many sats are being streamed um per day and that's how they know

this yes i love podcasting 2.0 shout out to adam carry the podfather putting the team on his back fighting and many others who are building it now but adam obviously championing and it's his idea and he's running with it and trying to preserve pure content on the web and content monetization on the web in the digital age via bitcoin shout out to all you freaks again contributing streaming stats right now thank you for the value we hope you're getting value out of this smash that that like and subscribe button just gonna throw that in there randomly um this is cool are we officially changing the pronunciation to ebex yeah ebex mercado um is running the lightning implementation for right now mexican uh bitcoin

exchange torres so ebex uh partner first mexican bitcoin exchange to add lightning support for both withdrawals and deposits. We get to celebrate some very positive news out of Mexico and Cinco de Mayo. Let's go. Shout out to

Toros and EVEX Mercado. We believe lightning is going to take over the world, so it's good to see this stuff happening, lightning. Actually, I'm not going to speak for you, Matt. I just really, it's just really cool to see this Mexican Bitcoin exchange at another layer one payment option. It's really fantastic.

Here's a cool quote from the article. 2021 is the year the lightning burst into the Bitcoin ecosystem. 2022 will be remembered as the year Bitcoin truly became transactional and started transforming people's financial lives, said Mario Iglo... Oh, God. car how do you pronounce that he's halfway through the last name and he just dropped it oh god uh mary uh it's under the ad for the shoes if you get if you get a shoe ad i'm probably getting it's under the shoe it's the third paragraph from the bottom my understanding is everyone gets different ads yeah

no mario aguil aguiluz aguiluz aguiluz aguiluz um yeah yeah i agree like i think i mean we were just showing lighting network vpn uh i can't pronounce finnish or mexican last name so we figured that out this this episode laugh at me all you want freaks okay i'm sorry um VPN spending with Lightning beef initiative ranchers selling their beef spending with Bitcoin over Lightning getting easier

I had a valet guy at one of the restaurants down here I always ask now can I tip you in Bitcoin I do it before I go into the restaurant and today finally got the first yes yeah I take cash out of Bitcoin

i was like sweet i'll be doing that did that um what's happening did you tell him not your keys not your coins i didn't have the key not your key not your coin lecture on the way out my parents were in towers didn't have time um shot to my dad sent pictures to the family group text he went and shake his local rancher's hand in the pennsylvania area he got nice chilling the beef initiative to them. Um, uh, speaking of the beef initiative, I'm going to have Dr. Uh, Mary care on tomorrow morning at 9 00 AM. Uh, she's been working with the beef initiative. There's a beef, beef, uh, beef broth, bone broth, bone broth. There we go. Bone broth challenge, May 13th and 14th fast two day fast. Uh, you can only drink bone broth. I'm going to participate in it.

that starts next Friday Friday Saturday Owen Broth they're going to do it on the weekend god damn it but yeah go to beefinitiative.com

to learn more about that currency last resort by our good friend Alex Gladstein has hit bitcoinmagazine.com I have not read it yet but it's about

how bitcoin is helping uh and specifically it's about uh ukraine russia bitcoin bitcoin developer gleb yeah former new york bitcoiner who has been working on the ground uh in his home of ukraine that's what i was gonna say humanitarian work that was another thing i was gonna say during the finish thing if the government is going to donate to ukraine donate to somebody like gleb is probably actually getting it to people on the ground. Yeah, like do like

humanitarian aid, not military aid. Yeah. Shout out to Gleb. But they really should burn the Bitcoin, let's be honest. Gleb is a... Gleb's a real one. He's a fucking legend. He's one of the smartest young minds.

I hope you stay safe over there, Gleb. If you're listening, if you can hear this, I doubt you are. You're probably busier with other things. Yeah, I hope you're not listening to this. I hope you're staying safe and I mean in a very important young mind

doing incredible work on the P2P side, the networking side, lightning security, Antoine Riard, run a research company together. They're really trying to figure out how to make Bitcoin as resilient and robust as possible and he's doing good things

on the humanitarian side of Ukraine right now. Shout out to Gleb, a fucking real one. um this is pretty big this week paypal is beginning to use uh to censor more indie content producers uh mint press and uh what was the other one i don't know anyone surprised by this shit anymore and sourcium news yeah paypal is beginning to de-platform this is like the tale of this whole episode is just like centralized third parties in this case these large corporations are consistently being used as a proxy of of the u.s government to exact whatever they need to do without having to deal with constitutional protections so in this case you know we have

free speech in this country okay well pressure financial companies like paypal to make sure that they can't monetize easily now they could still speak if they want to um but we'll also pressure the social media companies to make sure that they censor them there too but those are private companies you have no constitutional protections oh we want to spy on you okay we'll buy it from independent corporations and we'll use independent corporate software to keep databases of it and do the tooling or whatnot so there's this massive um integration that has happened among the world's largest companies that are based in the united states um and our government and they're used to both monetize us

because we have extremely valuable data that corporations can profit off of, and then also to control us on the government level because they don't have any kind of regulatory protection or constitutional protection on that shit. Yeah. It's all fucked. It's all fucked.

You got to build your way out. There is hope. I mean, dude, what we're building with the Ghost BTC pay server implementation, I mean, we're trying to prove the way. And streaming stats, podcasting 2.0. yeah just accepting bitcoin payments period yeah without a trusted third party yeah i mean dj's been working hard behind the scenes building this ghost btc pay server integration and that

is a solution like ghost is open source you can self-host uh we don't do it yet but we plan on doing it self-hosting the ghost site so we control that we control a server that holds that uh content yeah when then we injected with btc pay server that runs on the node that we control and there's literally like the only like rough well did you see the last story i put on the list the biggest point of failure is the dns provider there there's there's uh what a federal judge ordered all 96 internet service providers every single internet provider in the united states and every single payment provider, payment app, bank to block three streaming sites.

By any technological means available. So in this case, once again, they're pressuring the companies that provide us internet, provide us financial services, and they're using that leverage to stop these streaming services. Now, are these streaming services breaking laws? yes am i making any kind of claims on whether or not um those laws are just or not no but my point is this kind of power will be abused and we're going to start i i think if you if you're in the if you're working in the bitcoin industry um if you're working in bitcoin if you're working on

open source projects if you're working in companies if you're working in the greater cryptocurrency space in the crypto space like this should be fucking scaring the shit out of you like this is you know this is the type of shit that we're going to start to see more and more of yeah

it's coming freaks it's coming so be aware be aware it's thundering outside right now my dog is scared shitless

aww sorry we got to wrap it up here soon we got less about 10 minutes left I put it on the back end of the list

Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve hiked rates by 50 bps earlier this week. That was less than the 75 bps that a lot of people in the market thought it was going to be or that the Fed said they were going to do at one point in the past. So they're not raising rates as high. The market's pumped. Yeah, highest rate hike in quite some time. but more importantly uh like we knew that was going to happen and negative g and no was going

to happen i knew it was a likely outcome due to negative gdp print inflation still going up but you have these pressures from the political class during a an election year a midterm election year the economy is the most important topic if you want to get re-elected you want a good economy gdp is down but then the market's dumped today yeah like really hard like for for them it's like i i didn't watch cnbc today but like if the s&p goes down three percent four percent like fucking it's straight chaos mode and and cnbc yeah there's uh i mean it's chaotic right you're having sovereign you're having the sovereign default bubble sovereign debt bubble well a debt bubble pop um the markets are all in whack they've been manipulated ad nauseum for decades

and now you're going to have this volatility and these chaotic days that really can't be explained by anything and another thing that came out this week uh it was made apparent that a parent i don't know if it was a comments from jerome pal but last fall when he was up for reappointment And they were sort of in limbo, is Biden going to reappoint me to Fed governor? There's word on the street that he delayed the initial rate hikes when they started raising rates because he was waiting to get reappointed. Fed chairmen say that people are saying he delayed by one meeting the rate hike because he wanted to get reappointed. and if rates were lower and the economy was going, that makes Biden look

good so he's more likely to appoint him. The reason I want to bring that up is because it just points to the abject moral hazard that exists in the Federal Reserve central banking system and the fiat banking system. You literally have one dude who just wants to keep his job not doing what he probably

should have done under the context of the fiat monetary standard shouldn't exist. the central bank shouldn't exist but like under the context of central banking like what he should have done was raise rates but because he wanted to keep his job he delayed that rate hike which could have effect on the economy overall maybe allowed inflation to run a bit higher than otherwise would have and just really acutely highlights the insane nature of the current central banking system where one man wants to keep his job can have an undue effect on billions

of people around the world yeah it's fucked up yeah so beware freaks it's centralized third parties humans are emotional creatures they have wants they have needs uh one of those wants is to keep your job jerome powell wanted to keep his job so he delayed rate hikes which again probably led to higher inflation than otherwise would have been um or you can make the argument who knows what would have happened uh last but not least let end on this i mean that's probably the reason why we didn't hit 200k by conference day right yeah it was all that strong pal wanted to keep his job asshole thanks jerome um so it looks like world economic forum and the un are officially like teaming up let's roll this clip car turn it up 21 second clip this afternoon the secretary

general and klaus schwab the founder of the world economic forum will sign him will witness the signing of a memorandum of understanding on a strategic partnership between the un and the world economic forum which outlines areas of cooperation to deepen engagement between the two institutions and to jointly accelerate the implementation of the 2030 agenda this afternoon yeah so the un and the world economic forum are completely are officially joining together in a partnership to accelerate the 2030 agenda that you didn't ask for you didn't sign up for all these politicians and these alphabet soup agencies and organizations and think tanks are are trying to force you into you are a slave to these people

they should just combine acronyms and make it un wef yes unwef unwef unwef unwef un should be disbanded you see the new building they're building car look up the un un new building construction are they building it in austin i don't know where they're building it but it's just really impressive you guys have built the crypto capital world over there I think crypto capital should get the fuck out of here this isn't Miami this isn't Miami sir

I'm just the lead up to the WEF conference that you guys are holding I mean the UN new building construction is not it's in Africa it seems

Senegal Senegal open that page it's like really not helping the optics of them being demons you can see an obvious

666 there part of being a satanist and the occult ritual I was looking really close for the 666 I see it part of being a satanist and a demon part of the occult

rituals is that you mock God and humanity by just being outwardly aggressive with your signaling this may be one of those signals I call these people demons a lot and they're not helping their case in this

construction of this building looks a little demonic to me that's all I'm going to say there's six sixes right? yeah yeah just rotating six six six six six six that's ugly as fuck

come on what happened to the days of building cathedrals remember the days of building ornate beautiful buildings that's just some

demonic that's one of my favorite accounts on Twitter which one Kelly Lannan Wrath of Non oh Wrath of Non

I've had the pleasure of DMing with Wrath of Non in the past he's an extremely kind individual I've never spoken to him privately

but he's great great Twitter account incredible twitter account um all right i know you gotta go yeah i gotta hit the road i gotta drive four and a half hours to uh good luck with that to a celebration of love oh send my love we'll do um yeah i got nothing reminder another reminder we're going to be spinning off rhr into its own feed in the next couple of weeks uh so prepare yourselves for that when we do that we're not ready yet i know it's not ready yet but prepare mentally to do it and subscribe rate review that um on your local app uh it's gonna be available on all podcasting apps yes um

but it's gonna be a completely new feed so there's gonna be it's not gonna happen you don't You can't bring the ratings and reviews and subscribers from TFTC. So we're going to need a freak nation to show up strong and support the show out of the gate. And go tell a friend that you know is listening to the podcast to be aware of the feed switch. And we'll talk about it here again. Probably tweet about it as well. Write it in the newsletter. We'll hit you from all angles.

but prepare if you're not like liked or subscribed to TFTC already like what the hell are you waiting for just go do it and still dispatch let's go I moved the I couldn't get

the CTV bit 119 conversation for this week so it's going to be on Tuesday with Rusty and Shinovich great conversation and we're going to talk about the whole lightning consensus stuff too

bolt 12 blips bolts be a fun one is it a blip or a bolt blah blah blah yeah speaking back to the world economic forum

like A16Z Coindesk ConsenSys a bunch of other people in the crypto space are teaming up with WEF too like Drive Narrative how to

yeah they're gonna have the WEF is having a conference a crypto conference in austin the mayor parker lewis is not happy about it i think everybody in the mining industry is like oh are you talking uh you're talking about consensus right i'm like no not after last year last year they put me on some like environmental panel and they thought i was gonna be like what was that digital it was virtual yeah it was virtual i just uh

I did not fall in line. I did not cede to their frame. I don't think they asked me back because of that. Or maybe they just don't think I'm worth worthy, which is totally possible as well. All right. Enjoy your drive. Drive safe.

We'll be back next week, freaks. The price might be dumping, but we're not done yet. Stay humble, stack sets. Peace and love. and the price like pumped a little bit since we last talked about

so $36,280 let's fucking go peace out the king