TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Bitcoin Week of 2021.03.01

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - bottlepay flagging samourai whirlpool coinjoin deposits - bitstamp flagging wasabi coinjoin usage post withdrawal - I2P network support merged into bitcoin core - Regtest demo of zcash based bitcoin sidechain - Arthur Hayes negotiating surrender agreement - Umbrel v0.3.6 - BlueWallet v6.0.6 - Whirlpool CLI v0.10.10 - Eclair v0.5.1 - Lightning Terminal v0.4.1 - BTCPay Server added to Voltage - Citi bank bullish report - Goldman Sachs bitcoin trading desk - HRF $70K in bitcoin dev grants - Bull Bitcoin and Wasabi Wallet $40K grant to Luke-Jr - Unchained Capital $5.5M seed round led by NYDIG - Bitcoin voicepaper - Kentucky bitcoin mining incentive - PayNyms 101 - This month in bitcoin privacy - DEA report mentions bitcoin and 'virtual currency' - Mempool joins COPA - Germany considering KYC for emails and texts Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app. Unchained Capital. Check out their white glove vault concierge service that will take you from zero to secure multisig setup in no time. Use the code TFTC and receive $50 off that package that includes 2 Trezor Model Ts and $1,000 in your vault. HodlHodl. Lend at Hodl Hodl is a new non-custodial bitcoin backed lending platform, that allows peer to peer lending and borrowing between users, globally, anonymously & on your own terms. Create you offers & set your own terms on lend.hodlhodl.com

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this incredible rip I just ripped with Matt O'Dell. They're all good, but I think this one was especially good. You guys will find that out. We did a shout out section, didn't forget the shout outs this week, but if you've been paying attention to Twitter between the ending of the recording of this episode of RHR and the posting of it to the internet, to our RSS feed, you may have seen that we got a shout out literally five minutes after we stopped recording uh matt and i talked he said okay you

can you can read the shout out without me if you put it before the ads please stay for the ads i love our advertisers but i gotta read this first uh so this is a shout out that came in five minutes after we recorded uh looking for a jewish wife to have lots of babies with on remote off-grid homestead in the pacific northwest about me i'm a 30 year old i'm 30 years old and i'm passionate about jewish mysticism bitcoin anarchy with a strong emphasis on agora i enjoy doing mushrooms and other hippie slash esoteric slash naked stuff under the stars and moon i figured you are not on a dating app and running into you in the woods seems unlikely so a tftc shout out might be the best way to find you apply at boundless pearl at pm.me that's boundless pearl at pm.me uh first

ever shout out looking for a mate on tftc if you like if you're a jewish woman you're into the jewish mysticism i've never heard of jewish mysticism uh it's a new new phrase to me and you like doing shrooms naked in the pacific northwest woods uh hit up boundless pearl at pm.me he's looking for he's looking for you he's looking for you great rip privacy focused rip this week a lot of good stuff going on in the privacy world a lot of disconcerting stuff going on in the world of kyc aml particularly in europe aml d5 pretty messed up pretty anti-freedom pretty anti-free speech pro digital panopticon you'll hear we had the whole conversation this episode brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking cash app sorry for cursing in

front of you so what do you say about the cash app he had nothing to say he's shy he's mike shy put the mic in his face he didn't say anything we have some guests coming so he's going to leave the room uh where are we cash app cash app so you stack sats send sats receive sats sell sats we're saying sat sat sat sat sat because sats are the standard if you don't know what sats are there 100 million sats in one bitcoin you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin you can stack sats you can buy dollars worth of sats on the cash app uh you can get cash sats back using the the cash card boost uh when you go to shop with your cash card wherever visa is accepted cash out can be your bank account they're offering account numbers and routing numbers uh and seeing your direct

your paycheck direct deposited into the app and start stacking sats that way dca and the sats set it and forget it daily weekly bi-weekly if you haven't downloaded the app what are you waiting for use the code stacking status s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're gonna get ten dollars and ten dollars gonna go to our good friends and owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse in chicago doing incredible things this rip's also brought to you by good friends at unchained capital what a fucking team at unchained capital they keep crushing it we talked about their their seed phrase led seed phrase we didn't talk about their seed phrase because we don't know their seed phrase because they're protecting their seed phrases

because they're a custodian business. We talked about their seed round led by NYDig and they're going to be doing great things with that money, building great products, great things, incredible things because they're building Bitcoin native products for Bitcoiners, right? With custody in mind and security in mind. What we're shilling today

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incredible uh content to the game gradually then suddenly droves uh bitcoin in space series the hodl waves very innovative uh research analysts of bitcoin moving over time and i can't say enough about unchained go to unchained-capital.com to check everything out and we're going to have a link to the white glove concierge service in the show notes last but not least our good friends at hodl hodl uh are on the roster as well and they uh they have a a new product that's available to u.s users a lending product if you want to put your bitcoin up as collateral and similarly similarly not have to give up full custody you put it in a multi-sig escrow uh you can get you can get uh stable coins

in return for putting your bitcoin up as collateral and if you're a u.s user you can access this now So if you're in the U.S., which I know most of you listening to this podcast are because I can see the stats, I can see the data. HODL HODL is here. They have this new product that's available to you. You borrow between users globally, anonymously, and on your own terms. You meet on the HODL HODL lend marketplace. You find a counterparty. You engage in a multi-sig transaction.

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earn yield on them if you want to do that so go create your offers and set your own terms at lend.hodlhodl.com that's l-e-n-d dot h-o-d-l h-o-d-l dot com shout out to all of our sponsors shout out to you freaks thank you for listening thank you for joining us week in and week out if you guys are liking this please subscribe share rate review every little thing goes a long way it really helps us out we really appreciate the feedback you guys give us really appreciate the shout outs that you guys give us we really appreciate everything we appreciate you you guys are the reason we keep coming back um if you feel so compelled or generous to give us a subscribe rating or review we'd really appreciate it buh-bye y'all enjoy this trip

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If 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. You probably should be.

matt we're uh we're not at 65 000 you came close though pretty close yesterday yesterday when when the price started pumping again the freaks were like he's gonna do it he's gonna make it i let you guys down i'm sorry we're close we're only 16 000 away i mean that's just one big just one big move yeah it's one big 30 35 move upwards and we're there i think it could happen maybe it'll happen during the show well you know it seems like the macro climate is is is the most interesting it's been since since the beginning of the pandemic i would say it's interesting how like the stock market is kind of wavering interest rates are going crazy we had another repo spasm last night yeah i mean yesterday yesterday uh i and i only talk about it

when it confirms my biases uh yesterday the stock stocks were down gold was down silver was down um the only two things that were up were was oil and and bitcoin and bitcoin was up like eight percent for for the quote-unquote day i mean bitcoin doesn't really have a day yeah um but i feel like if that happens you know if bitcoin just like holds you know holds itself strong it doesn't even have to go up much like in a in like a macro downturn type of situation that especially with all this macro attention it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy people will start you know truly believing that sats are their safe haven i agree i agree no it's uh it's just going to hover around this 50k level uh sustain uh the the onslaught of bad macro news

we will be good yeah there's a bunch of things going on oil and bitcoin pumping two of my favorite things uh actually just recorded an episode for gamcast with a very intelligent oil analyst um and he's he's specifically looking at a an energy bill that's making its way through congress right now and things that will have some uh some impact on on macro tensions as well as well if it gets passed but we'll see i can't dive into too many specifics because we were speaking off record at this point but um yeah there's a lot of a lot of stuff going on a lot of moving parts we're here to talk about bitcoin we mentioned the price again freaks i'm sorry we're not at 65 000 i try to be bullish what about next week marty next week yeah next

week we'll be at 70 so we're gonna make up for it next week well i've been jesse powell ceo of kraken he just said bitcoin bitcoin price to infinity i mean it pumps forever he's stealing he's just re-architecting your your meme bitcoin it was in all caps too he said in all caps what they it was on bloomberg and bloomberg did it it's uh yeah it's going to infinity we got the shark shark tank guys in it right now kevin o'leary is kevin o'leary your favorite shark do we pit him and cuban against each other i love that he capitulated so early in the cycle i expected it to be longer he did say yeah the blood coins thing is like we get the fuck out of here dude

yeah and he said he said uh a three percent allocation split evenly between bitcoin and eth so i mean it's too small of an allocation but at least uh yeah i i it's funny seeing these guys turn i think the funnier thing is just seeing mark cuban for the second time he did the last cycle for the second time go from like absolute bitcoin denier like bitcoin's bananas to just like neck deep in shit coin bullshit right he's like back to the ico in 2017 didn't he yeah and now he's on like a road show about defy or nfts yeah he's like doing a bunch of different promotions for them do we have to touch on nfts are we going to be forced to do that um i we're definitely going to have to talk about it way more than we want to talk about

of the cycle like i don't think people realize um so i mean and like they don't realize like how early into the bullshit of the cycle we are like it's already blowing up you know last last cycle we saw like paris hilton shilling like her own ico and stuff and now um she's going to be shilling her own nft and this nft is this idea of a of a non-fungible token so like while here at tftc we've been focused on improving and making bitcoin fungibility easier um i guess and we should have been working on the opposite this whole time right because all of a sudden people are pouring tons of money into these digital tokens that are you know not fun not liquid between each other not fungible between each other uh so like you see things like it's like basically like a certificate

of authenticity on a blockchain yeah i mean it's already a mania phrase like yeah like grinds sell like three million dollars worth of nft that logan paul sent sell like 10 million dollars for the pokemon nfts i mean kings of leon just they're about to release like an album on yeah that's what i was looking up uh kings of leon rolling stone tweeted out yesterday like that's just starting that hype cycle is just starting they came out there was a there's a new platform that joe weisenthal tweeted out yesterday satirically obviously uh called nft phi and it allows you to take collateralized loans off of your off of your fucking entities like that won't end absolutely horribly hey you're anti-innovation toxic maximalist let the free market rain no look i'm

i'm about people i don't think anyone should stop it i think you know let them let the market run its course like people have the right to get wrecked uh if they choose to you know try and speculate and trade on these things um i think long term you know they'll trend to zero when priced in bitcoin uh and i don't think you know they're a threat to bitcoin i just the hype feels exactly the same it feels like almost identical to the 2017 bullshit hype wise um and you know uh narrative wise you know oh like you're just a closed-minded maximalist and and to be fair like 2017 felt like a derivation of of the previous cycle as well right and i think this is what a lot of bitcoiners um refuse to believe in the in the bear market and

i think i was pretty consistent about it that like forever and ever there will be these things happening because this is what you know an open permissionless you know finance system represents once you have this this base money that is that is censorship resistant uh permissionless doesn't have any centralized ruler involved um then all of a sudden like there's going to be a bunch of different scams and stuff that are going to accept that and operate on that around the world yeah no i mean i agree with you i'd like to hope that they would end i think they're getting like less effective and egregious or maybe they're getting more egregious yeah it is annoying we're gonna have to put up with it people are gonna call you stupid if you just say hey i don't like

nfts i don't see the reason in them i'm not gonna buy them they're gonna call you idiots some people are gonna be able to time the market correctly and they'll be like haha have fun staying poor but really it's a long-term game i don't think maybe nfts have a place somewhere in the market long term but i just think the valuations that are out there right now are mind-bogglingly stupid i think it's like not it's like novel like this idea of like a like a certificate of authenticity that we could store the same way you would store uh you know bitcoin um and and trade the same way you would trade you know trade bitcoin is is like is novel and could be useful um but i think like it's filled with hype it's filled with bullshit um and it's nothing new too like that's that's

another thing that annoys me about everybody's like oh look this innovation it's like counterparty was doing nfts and yeah but it's cleaner like it's more polished now right yeah exactly it is but like they're acting like oh this is brand new like innovation it's like no it's actually been around for seven years if you actually paid attention but uh i mean this whole like lending thing is they're gonna build like this whole system on like it's just gonna be it's going to be a fucking mess and and the biggest issue with with shit coins has always been their lack of liquidity um and now you're literally bringing down the liquidity to like one or like four or ten or three hundred or whatever the the amount of of any specific nft is and it's

just gonna be brutal like when it turns it's just gonna be you're just not gonna be able to get rid of them uh you know people talk about bitcoin as being like beanie babies like this is gonna be like the like the proper beanie baby craze like a better you know more analogous to the beanie baby craze and it's just gonna end so fucking it's just gonna get you know fucking destroyed yeah it's nice to see people care about artists though finally for some reason yeah everybody's like very worried about artists and their ability to monetize so there's an opportunity to to rip off people look i still think uh and maybe this is controversial i think nfts will form a place in this but you know usually with art um you see the real valuations of the art it increases after

after they die or significantly after the artist has has made their art um i i think with the more revolutionary thing for artists here and you know i'm not an artist so maybe i'm wrong about this uh is is that a permissionless patreon global financial patreon s global financial system right like this idea that you could have people from around the world basically sponsor your art creation um in in a permissionless way with that you don't have to give patreon a cut and that you know that's what bitcoin enables that's what streaming payments could enable through lightning um so i think i think that's really going to be at the end of the day when we look back five years from now and we look back and who's the most uh successful like

mid-tier artists um i think it's going to be the ones who have uh basically a strong audience that that is loyal to them and enjoys their their their art and wants to see more of their art and is willing to pay them you know sponsor them for that creation yeah or just stream them as they consume that art particularly music in this context like the sphinx model right like sphinx mixed in with patreon yeah yeah i agree maybe we'll be those artists who got it right in the long run uh is podcasting an art form maybe or can we start calling ourselves artists i'm i well let's do it for a couple weeks see how many people we trigger okay yeah no i mean i've been working at this art for for quite a while there's an art form

to timing this conversation to having this i'm an artist i'm a fucking artist freaks deal with it all right that was artists that never edits that's part of the art that's part of the art matt it's an art form sorry for that 15 minute uh spat of you guys hearing pftc talk business off air that he's not sorry at all wound up being on air um yeah i mean i and i i'm i'm more sorry about you know front loading this whole this whole episode with nfts when this is supposed to be like our nft free safe space so we're going to try not to talk about it that often but but people are getting very taken away by it and i think it is important that we do comment on on those kind of things as they unfold this bull market i think so as well i think we did a good job i think this

that was a good opening segment that we're going to be able to go back and point to like hey we already talked about this we covered it here it is instead of rehashing it pun intended right on to what we are here for the fungible token bitcoin current price is 48 275 dollars that's uh uh at 725 uh so 16 725 dollars off for my um prediction last week sorry freaks uh one cuck bucks getting you 2071 sats we're hovering right at a 900 billion dollar market cap uh gbtc and the qbtc premiums have been decimated they're now trading at a discount around four percent that's been interesting to see uh one bitcoin is going to get you 28.2 ounces of gold this ratio is skyrocketing It's at 8.31% right now.

We are currently at block height, 673,152, 18,644,611.34 Bitcoin have been distributed to the market. That's 88.78% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist. We've got a downward difficulty adjustment coming this week. Tomorrow is estimated to be the adjustment or 192 blocks away and as of right now and that's looking to be a negative 1.3 adjustment and a downward adjustment down by 1.3 blocks are currently coming in at 10 minutes and nine seconds that's nine seconds longer than the 10 minute block time target that satoshi set in the

protocol when he launched on january 3rd when he put it in the protocol before he launched it but you get what i'm saying uh fees per block over one bitcoin right now predict the next block is is 1.1 bitcoin uh that would be 14.95 of the total block reward samurai unspent capacity it's uh staying strong at 1979.31 btc that liquidity equates to 95.6 million cuck bucks um they just they just updated the whirlpool cli too do we have that in the show notes yeah we have that in the list okay big update big update big performance improvements yeah 2000 bitcoins like it's that's no joke no it's not it's a lot of sats it's a lot of sats freaks uh i don't did we i mean we already talked about this pre-show

matt and i as always basically recorded a podcast before we hit record uh should we touch on the downward difficulty adjustment and dynamics of the mining supply chain right now let's talk about this marty because i've been staying at airbnbs and i wanted to just bring around like an asic with me and just like plug it into all the different airbnbs i go to um and i'm having a like it's a very it's very hard for me to source a miner that's a reasonable price even used market um what gives yeah it's it's tight out there it's tight out there so there's many factors one the the suppliers like new models are taking quite a while to come to market and there's a lot of backup and lead time for those uh due to the fact that space leasing space on the foundry

floors where the chips are manufactured is very tight right now as we have shortage of ASIC chips throughout all industries, whether it be Bitcoin mining, automotive, military, industrial complex. So the demand for ASICs is extremely high right now and love it or hate it, Bitcoin ASICs don't have very high priority or the ability to sort of sway enough capital to to get space on the floor so that's certainly contributing where there's not like a lot of new asics coming to market um another thing and i think this is something that the market many people are overlooking and not counting into their analysis of the the asic market right now is the fact that I believe there's a number of companies that have pivoted to Bitcoin mining,

particularly publicly traded companies, and they FOMOed into the mining industry and bought tens of thousands of machines without really knowing how to plug them in at scale. And so I think that's also a contributing factor. If you look at the press releases that have dropped from public mining companies over the last six months they're forced to make these press releases because they're publicly traded and you add up the amount of miners that that uh that these releases have have uh made the market aware of uh when they were supposed to be delivered and what the hash rate is at now it seems to be evident at least to me and many others believe this as well that they have the miners they just don't know how to plug them in in their quarterly statements

shouldn't it say how much revenue they're making like how much bitcoin they're making so we should be able to tell we won't know that until like future statements yeah quarterly earnings um i mean this is something we kind of we've speculated about on this podcast on twitter a bunch of times uh in terms of for me in terms of the bull case of of bitcoin mining censorship resistance district distribution so i mean one of the big threats for um you know censorship on bitcoin is to basically corral the miners right and and we've seen these big companies like marathon um talk about like their clean block mining uh where they want to do like basically like chain analysis on the on the transactions they include in a block um one of the things that

that i've always considered that will make that less likely is i think that as these asic lifestyle life cycles increase like as these asics remain profitable for a longer period of time um all of a sudden getting the electricity cost is like the is the number one the number one decider if you make if you how much profit you make how profitable you are how where you can mine and what you can mine profitably um and it's hard to do that at scale right isn't it like it should be a lot easier i think to have like a 500 machine operation than have like a 50 000 machine operation and and get low power at the same time like there's only so much cheap power in a certain place yes and we're getting into a very nuanced conversation hit your bingo boards uh and uh part

of our strategy at great american mining is we intentionally seek energy sources that are off grid because like you just mentioned scaling on grid is significantly harder you just run into competition with consumers who are using that electricity and drive the price up and then uh yeah the physical constraints of any given uh the centralized energy provider um and so that's why we focus on off-grid energy sources at great american mining because we just think long-term miner is going to be forced off the grid because the competition is just going to get too hot and the prices are going to be too elevated and are those usually smaller operation yeah like our containers uh have like 130 to 160 or we can get 200 and some of them actually we

think it's like a magnitude smaller than some of these like massive operations yeah and we can just deploy in chunks when we find that stranded energy and we think it's a much more scalable version uh of this business model long term which is actually pretty contrarian but i think we're being validated just to a certain degree it's interesting because for pretty much everything uh in our lives there's a massive economies of scale so the more you make of something in a central location um the cheaper you can make it uh and and and so so natural natural market forces lead you to um you know basically having the market centralized between just a few players uh the with with mining though with with getting power at at low cost

it really does as more power is needed especially by the network and more power is consumed by the network it becomes harder and harder to get like a large percentage of of of the network's power capacity or however you want to word that power draw um in like one central location or country or something like that yeah you just natural forces the market price you out cool yeah and i mean we're pretty happy right now that you're gonna have a downward difficulty adjustment this week because because again like so if anybody's new to bitcoin new to this podcast number one welcome thank you for joining us uh number two the nature of the feedback loop historically in in bitcoin is that the price rises and that creates an incentive to plug in miners which

increases hash rate which makes the network more secure which makes people more confident to put their money into bitcoin which raises the price which makes the block reward more lucrative so it makes people plug in more miners and so this is the natural feedback loop that that bitcoin uh incited in january 2009 um but right now due to the factors that matt and i have been discussing um uh over the last 10 minutes the feedback loop has sort of been perturbed a bit where the price has gone up 5x over the last six months or i don't know exactly what timeline it's gone off significantly uh but hash rate has not tracked that um right now we're sitting at 147.2 exahash per second and we were at like 135 in september of last year and the price

of september of last year was significantly lower than it was so you would actually expect hash rate to um to track oh excuse me 147 exahash over the last 90 days over the last 2016 blocks it's 153 it's a little bit higher but still not as high as one would think it would be as the price has been running as hot as it has been over the last six months so i mean uh i mean i i think we we never we didn't have this issue last cycle uh so so it's it's this this increase in price to it's just really stressing all the supply lines and then you also have i guess you think a couple supply supply hoarders or that not supply hoarders but they're holding they're holding machines that they're not running so i guess what's the next step the next step is

is that those those companies will either figure out how to plug them in or they'll sell them on the market probably for bitcoin right yeah to my we're they're publicly traded companies so i don't even know if they can trade them for bitcoin well if they trade them for dollars and then immediately convert their treasury into bitcoin it's the same shit yeah exactly um yeah that could certainly happen we'll see uh yeah it's many factors right you got to take in the it's like this perfect storm like last year the supply global supply chain shock that's playing into it as well um yeah it's a beautiful shit storm where if you're minor that's able to execute right now you're you're benefiting pretty pretty handsomely from from this this location um

i feel like last cycle we had way more uh pow shit coins like most of the shit coins now are like prove a stake right like is there like a is there still a gpu market like where what's going on do are you connected at all into the into the shitcoin gpu market uh no i mean we focus on bitcoin obviously that's the only thing we mind but yeah i have heard that gpus have have been going i mean eth is pretty as much as we disagree with that project and it's well eth has asics now no they don't i'm pretty sure they're still gpu they like no they're they're not like official asics yeah i'm pretty sure it's been speculated for a while that there's unofficial asics on ethereum and no one wants to really talk about it too much because

there's a very anti-miner contingent in ethereum and they know that they'll either change the algorithm or they'll push to get proof of stake done quicker um if that's even possible but like but basically the whole play on the ethereum land is to scare the shit out of anyone who wants to do a long-term mining investment on ethereum which is so stupid but with that being said i don't yeah well i do know that gpu price has been going up pretty significantly i don't know if there's a supply shortage i know the demand is certainly high and the prices are rising but uh yeah i we don't purchase gpu so i don't know that i just feel like i just feel like i saw way more people talking about gpu mining last cycle uh and and and it wasn't a lot of times it was

it was to immediately convert it into bitcoin they would just mine the altcoins and then they would immediately convert them yeah and i actually haven't been hearing that much about it this is a good natural set yet neither have i um i think people are just speculating on the spot markets but it's actually a good a good segue into our shout out uh section and the first shout out of the week um you'll understand why in a second let me start by thanking you guys for all the good work you do thank you appreciate you thanking us uh this week a huge mining platform kicked the can and took the nice face or quote unquote nice face mask off nice hash went down the path of full kyc and using very worrying terms of service they forced all users to accept the new terms of

on march 1st or to delete their accounts they will now sell user data provide personalized ads you know how this works force you to run their mining manager with full admin rights on your pc and a bunch of other sketchy things they are making it look like they're the only way for you to be able to be into mining they had a huge marketing campaign on youtube and a lot of very young kids are joining uh and running the software on their gaming pcs nice hash also started banning users on reddit who are calling them out and telling other miners they can mine without them they can't mine without them i think um that was a typo a lot of shit is going down in that platform be aware uh so shout out to this freak for the shout out i think this is very interesting

information that i was not aware of until um this has always been sketchy yeah they got hacked um and you had all basically all the bitcoin stolen out of hot wallets the the two easiest ways to mine with gpus minor gate and nice hash and they're both always have been very questionable yeah um this shotgun kyc is is the worst though i what i hope they didn't hold funds hostage but i assume they probably did and then nice has also has also has like a mining rental operation right where i think they do i think they broker rentals between people i'm not sure that's what like the calculator when it's like 51 attack how much does it cost is based off of if you rented the hash off of nice hash because you can rent like um like you can rent the hash to attack bsv or something

because it's like one percent of the hash power you can just like rent it on nice hash to to do the attack if you wanted to yeah yeah so beware freaks the fact that they're selling they're making you use their firmware taking control taking admin rights of the pc is very sketchy like i would not i would consider that malware yeah but these softwares are always like malware-ish and basically what they they trade you is they trade you the convenience of not learning how to use the command line and using the default client of whatever coin you want to mine and they also usually have an auto switching uh component to it so like um and honey miner did the same thing and the honey miner was also you know very questionable

um and they oh they there was a stage there where they were holding user funds and they they finally did the withdrawals um but uh the the the model is is like it's just this clean little program that you can install and it'll automatically switch between whichever shit coin is the most profitable at any given time um instead of you know you picking individually which one you want to mine and using like the command line and then they also take a cut on top of all that they usually you know i i think i don't know if it was honey miner or minor gate one of them got caught lying about the hash you were producing they would just say like you were at a certain rate they were just skimming the top and then taking a fee as well that's fucking

screwy if you want to mine alts go into reddit you know go into their discord and shit and like learn how to do it the proper way like use your own full node if you're going to be a shit corner be a proper shit corner use your own full node run the actual software and learn how to do it the right way yes it's good advice if you want to do it um i'd recommend just buying bitcoin but yeah it's a good learning experience you can't do that with bitcoin now uh so like you can you can see how it works because a lot of them are forks of bitcoin uh so like the it's it's very similar to so their their their mining cli interfaces are like very similar to bitcoin as well beware freaks beware thank you to whoever sent us that shout out

that psa second shout out of the day try you don't know what you can do unless you try this messes with purchase with funds from a friend's dead ec that was brute force with a python scripts make yourself challenges and try step into the unknown and learn best regards from the underground ben bitcoin crew backstory my friend purchased a dead handwritten private key from his ex-girlfriend over a year ago and he was very sure he would never see the funds again over beers he starts telling us the story and i and said if i could break it he would split the funds with me 50 50 so we used a python sha 3 and ecdsa library to generate a private public key and address nested for loops did character replacements on the original seed and compared

to output addresses to the funded address the code ran for 25 minutes on an offline computer with over 1 million attempts before getting the seed two hex values had been written down wrong uh so that was the problem with why they couldn't recover it um and the eth has been traded up for bitcoin so be kind um and i guess if you're looking for the servers service as well if you think you could have a seed that is uh that you wrote down improperly uh you can email these guys at bendoregonbitcoin at protownmail.com don't send anyone your private key freaks no that's a good point is this a honeypot do we just honeypot the freaks do not do not do not send this guy do not send whoever marty read read the thing see this is why we have matt odell here

um we'll hope that it's in good faith but still at the same time do not send him anything yeah don't do that but i guess this is a good lesson on private key entropy there is a um a respected og um who i i know multiple people have used him for that you could use it as your like last ditch like really you should never send anyone anything um but if you tried every other option uh really what you should do is you should wait even longer just you know because if if there there might be a solution in the future um but if if you're in a rush and you want to just try and get it done and see if something can happen i think it's wallet recovery services.com um like he's been around since like like 2012 or 2013 or something

like that and he's had so many big guys that he's helped um so like at least from reputation wise uh they he's got a pretty good reputation but uh i mean obviously you are trusting him with with private information yes and this is a good lesson this is why it's important when you first create a private public key pair make sure you write it down properly and before you send any funds to the public keys associated with your private key test it out make sure you can recover create a wallet wipe it and then recover make sure you can import that seed and does so correctly and has the same public addresses that it did when you first created it you you do it once and that's the best thing too once you do that recovery

and you you document that you did the recovery successfully you have that peace of mind knowing that if you're able to protect that seed you know that it will work if you need it to recover because it worked in the past yeah i mean you kept breaking up for me on my side yeah you were you were cutting out i think we're good on my side i think it was your side but in general i do agree with the premise that you should just you should always test the restore process and specifically if you're using a hardware wallet it's just best to have a second hardware wallet restored to that and that way you have a a fully initialized backup device that's just a direct copy of your existing device yes beware freaks last shout out of the day

really really interesting one i met a bitcoiner in person near my village by the sea and he did the first ever in-person shout out exchange so he gave me an open dime with fifty dollars worth of sets and a handwritten shout out on a piece of paper that i'm about to read this is the coolest shot and the best part is it's an orange open dime did you verify the open dime i did it works use my block clock to do it too oh that's dope right it's uh it's sweet so here's the shout out alex oh sorry most people don't realize that the block clock is like an open dime hub yeah it's pretty dope okay continue alex andrew at all i'm stoked to join the team looking forward to meeting up with everyone on monday that's simple um let's fucking go yeah

that was really cool experience i'm not going to dox this bitcoiner but we we met um at a bar had a few drinks yesterday great conversation he had a son right around the age of my son we met up again this morning for a little play date it's a good time good time shout out shout out to you freak you know who you are it's a pleasure meeting you in person don't uh just just keep the money on the on the orange open dime i feel like a a a unbroken orange open dime could be worth quite of a premium in the future that's what we'll do um all right back to the list we haven't even gotten to anything on the list and i know it's a little stressful to you we're going to start we're going to front load with controversy bottle pay flagging sam rye whirlpool do you want to do

disclosure disclosure matt's an advisor bottle pay um yes i mean it's been a uh so this was on tuesday um right before dispatch so this is following my discussion that i had on dispatch with the freaks if you tuned in for that um bottle pay just recently relaunched fully kyc uh regulatory compliant business in based out of london based out of the uk um they're currently only accepting uk customers um uk works under amld5 uh and their interpretation of it and i'm not i'm trying not to speak for them i'm an advisor but like you gotta have a very you know i have a small little equity position i'm an advisor and i try in my best to um try my best to help to help them build the best product possible right and and it's not

in return for promotion or endorsement uh i think that's very important to make clear um also i cannot speak for them so i'm not speaking for them i'm speaking for myself uh they have not released a statement yet they are going to release a statement they told me they're going to release statement um one of the issues with these types of things is that because of the regulatory environment people don't feel comfortable talking freely like everything has to go through like a bunch of different uh compliance people and shit like that um but anyway what happened was a user deposited samurai whirlpool coin joint funds uh bottle pay flagged it and they sent back the funds to the user didn't close their account or anything um this is obviously you know not ideal

uh it's a concern that we've had on this podcast for basically since we began which was that coin join is very obvious on chain uh it's a trade-off we tried to make very clear to the freaks uh that that services could flag uh they could you know not accept uh coin join funds i do want to be clear that whatever happens going forward i am completely in the same boat like i all my funds i have going to history so like i theoretically couldn't deposit into bottle pay either uh so i mean besides the fact that i'm not a uk resident so i think that's an important thing to keep in mind um i mean i i think really i i i don't think people should send send funds into these into any kind of kyc service uh i i think of them as like i think kyc is extremely

dangerous privacy wise and i the carve out for me has always been uh if you're taking like your fiat kyc paycheck and you're taking that from your fiat bank account and then moving that into bitcoin and then going into coin join so we have talked explicitly on this podcast before about the potential of services blocking coin join usage blocking accounts flagging accounts for coin join usage after withdrawal which isn't what this was this was during deposit and we've seen that with block fi in the past and today we had a report that bitstamp is doing it on the withdrawal side so i had a freak reach out to me this morning um saying that bid stamp is flagging withdrawals and he used wasabi and he used it after they removed the fixed fee address the

freaks remember we had the fixed fee address issue where basically it seemed like exchanges it was rubbed right in their face it was like plus token was like one hop away um and just they were just flagging a bunch of wasabi transactions this one was after that happened so it was about a year ago this guy did this wasabi corn joint so he withdrew i i i told the freak i'd be as i'd say the the over the what happened but not any details about him um but like he sent me screenshots and stuff the and apparently he sent 6102 screenshots as well um i he was like a normal stacking freak right so just a very simple flow of just constant buys no sales no deposits he was just constantly buying a small amount withdrawing it and then

going through wasabi um and like a year ago he did that and he still has been using his since then and it flagged from a year ago they asked him questions about that and they made him give a bunch of new kyc information and then they said here's your two transaction ids what are the post mix like destination addresses where did these where did these coin joins go um and we want proof of that you know um so it's escalating what go on did he give him that info so what's really fucked up is they asked for the additional kyc info without mentioning like the wasabi anything and then after he gave the extra kyc they were like okay now there's these two transaction ids where do they go yeah he has some after that so i don't think he gave them that second part

and he was a responsible freak he has no funds on the exchange right which is i think a really important whenever you're using one of these regulated entities you want to keep as little funds as possible on them so that if there is a closure and you have like three hundred dollars on it like you lost your 300 um but but uh so i don't know what he's going to do next over there but uh he or she but uh yeah so between the two of them in the same week different services right so neither service can be like it's you know one of the others it's it's samurai whirlpool on the bottle pay side and wasabi on the withdrawal side on the bid stamp i would say the withdrawals are more troubling but just in general i mean um i think we're it's it's it's it's been a it's been

a bit of a bearish week for me in terms of of that aspect you know i think people don't realize like it's the regs are going to get tighter i think companies should fight back more now because i think they can um but i think eventually they won't be able to but they still can right now and i i'd like them to fight back more i think it's important for users to realize that that companies feel that they can't communicate as well as they as they probably should be um and and there's like this big mexican standoff going on but like regulators just have guns to the heads of like all these companies and like no one's talking about it okay that's not a mexican standoff that's a hostage situation um so i mean i think i but i think this is something

that like freaks should expect so we should expect basically you know the these regulated companies like there's a chance that that on ramps get we've said this in the past they like they make it so that self-custody becomes more and more difficult one interesting aspect here is if we go back to the bottle pay thing is that they do have um lightning deposits and withdrawals um so i wonder how that factors into it i mean you know uh you know if your coins are in utxo goes into lightning before you deposit it um so so i i think lightning could be an interesting that's an interesting thought like do the receiving lightning payments and it can tell the node that it's coming from they look at the channel opening transaction and then make a

decision from there and what and like maybe that lightning node got funded by another lightning node right so there's like there's definitely some interesting aspects there but i think ultimately what happens is is is is on a long-term basis as long as you're willing to hold for five years um which is what i think everyone should do any i think it's a prudent financial decision which is like accumulate and hold bitcoin um there's no way that you can enforce coin black lists like at scale uh with people running like independent btc pay servers and stuff like yes it could be practical that they that like the powers that be are able to stop you from easily converting you know like a half a million dollars into your bank account your regulated bank account

um no one's arguing against that like i wouldn't even want like you try and do that now they're gonna like be all up your ass no matter what right but like if you're buying like a 15 sandwich like if you think well first of all that sandwich you know got really expensive because of the patient but if you're buying a 15 sandwich like what is the merchant gonna do expect it to do uh like complete chain analysis on you like where does it where do you draw the line like where is where does where does that utxo stop being risky is it is it once it touches coin join forever forever and ever until bitcoin dies like it had already touched coin join once so now it's like never spendable again or is it more practical and it's like a couple hops in a

couple years and then like where do you draw that line and you can't that's the issue um so it's just it doesn't be at scale if you try and do any of these policies um i think you just end up basically with a in practice like a self-custody self-sovereignty ban um they just become so onerous yeah like to operate in any kind of self-sovereign manner uh that most will choose not to but at the same time like they'll just be like a whole gray dark economy that's happening right and that economy will be hard to stop so i just it's a it's a bit troubling and and you know i'm hoping that the statement tomorrow is a good statement i would like to see a statement from bitstamp like we probably won't get one um but it does i do feel like

and i have disclosure i've thought this for like six years i do feel like the noose is tightening faster than than we would like um and it's going to get i think it gets harder rather than easier to buy bitcoin in the near term um and it could become like almost impossible to sell bitcoin uh through any of these like regulated entities and and then and that that should be the the model that that the freaks are operating on i agree now huddle around freaks huddle around turn up the volume it's time to pep talk we've got a fight back event against this like matt said hey, people working at exchanges, I know you fucking listened to the show. Start fighting back. This is onerous. It doesn't make sense. And like we say time and time again, it's completely

ineffective. This is not freedom. A CoinJoin is just a certain transaction constructed a certain way. If you seed ground on CoinJoin specifically, you're basically saying people can't use Bitcoin in a certain way it is the nature of the open source protocol the way you can construct transactions it's just possible on bitcoin so if you start there and you say hey you can't use bitcoin in this way uh what's to stop them from saying hey you can't use bitcoin at all you got to start fighting back the bank secrecy act is a fucking shit stain on united states and freedoms kyc aml is completely ineffective and the people enforcing these laws are the biggest criminals in the world like it's i know you people working on exchanges around the world i know our audience

is global i know you're listening i know you like our shit it's time to start standing up we need strong men and women to stand up against this insanity it's time to fight back grow a sack grow a vag like it's time to go like we need to step up and speak up and that's why we have this show that's why matt's extremely vocal about this why i'm extremely vocal about this is because the power of speaking up actually works like if you just cower in fear and get get dicked in the ass by by these onerous regulations let it happen without speaking up and pushing back so it's going to keep seeding ground keep seeding ground they're literally trying to make it illegal to do construct a bitcoin transaction in a certain way it's a communications protocol you can communicate

in different ways a coin join transaction is one of the ways in which you communicate They're trying to make that illegal. Stand up, fight back. These people are evil. They are the biggest criminals in the world. And they don't care about you at the end of the day. They don't give a fuck about you. Well said, Marty.

I just, you know, a CoinJoin is a batched multi-party Bitcoin transaction with privacy best practices taken into account. um they're extra important because if you don't use caution when sending bitcoin um if you don't use caution when sending bitcoin you can leak a lot of financial information not just with the person you're transacting with um but also from an external observer and i think from a practical sense like people have to ask themselves um should your boss know your spending habits like should your should your landlord know your spending habits should the chinese government know your spending habits should some random ad agency um some massive surveillance ad agency know all of your spending habits your net worth your salary husband know

your spending habits like exactly it's ridiculous it's just it's it's not it's it's it should not be a controversial opinion that people should have basic financial privacy when transacting with bitcoin um and coin join provides that uh in a way that is is not illicit in nature there's nothing inherently illicit by constructing a bitcoin transaction using privacy best practices um so i think it's important that people make that really clear uh and and then people practice that right and actually use the tools uh because that's really like that's why we talk about the world pool liquidity pool right like that number going up is super important because that number that number is the amount of bitcoin that that these institutions are are not willing to fight

for in terms of customer base right so the more we have of people doing that um the more financial incentive you have for for these these companies to to actually be aligned with with their users in that respect right yes yes so let's pump that number let's get that number going up should we just start memeing we're all pulled to 100k but to be clear like i like this is something you know the thing that the what i'm most disappointed about is just like the lack of of clean communications and messaging and and and that's part of like the regulatory environment but it's not a full excuse for any of these companies and and and they they should have as clear of a framework as possible for their users ahead of time for their users to know ahead

of time while still complying with whatever onerous regulations they have to comply with because the user should know and and in that respect i do appreciate that like the user's account wasn't closed and the funds were immediately returned to him they didn't hold the funds hostage they didn't request all these extra documents and stuff they just sent them the money back um that's a way better to me i we've talked about this in the pod before i as far as i'm concerned i'd be fine with all regulated institutions just not allowing deposits yeah just one way one way out swan doesn't even let you sell let alone deposits it's only withdraw but you know buy and withdraw is all you can do on swan i don't think strike i don't think strike

takes deposits like i i think i think i'm i'm completely fine with that as a model uh i know a lot of people aren't but whatever because i just would never use that feature and it gets it creates buy pressure on bitcoin um but i think there is a i don't think you can safely use these services um unless you also use them with coin joint because you're when we talk about you know tying your tying your financial transactions and leaking that data with someone you're transacting with imagine the person you're transacting with has like all your passport information all your identifying information as well um and and they might not even be malicious that information can get leaked or hacked um so if you can't use coin join in connection with that

there is zero safe way that you can ever use that service yeah putting people in physical in harm's way right like imagine like if you're not allowed to use coin join you're like i mean you're somebody who has a lot of sats like and you do a transaction one-off transaction with somebody you may not know too well and they're able to see your full stack of where your utxo is coming from and they've done a transaction with you and have some identifying information can find you in the physical meat space world and they know how much bitcoin you have and disincentivizing coin joins uh leads can arguably lead to more dangerous situations in the real world it's fucked imagine if you went to a bar and like you bought a drink and the bartender

knew your fucking salary right like that's the most it's the most crazy fucking thing in the world it's not practical and as you know especially in a world with lightning and stuff i lightning and liquid and other other layer twos atomic swaps all these different fucking things like it's it's hopefully it is just it hopefully it should just be a short-term pain point because we still have these you know these large connections to the these large connections to financial institutions right like ideally there's like this whole circular bitcoin economy that develops that is completely separate um from from those hooks it's gonna take time with all this being said i know we're a little uh down in the dumps right now but uh the the state

of being able to attain privacy using bitcoin has gotten better throughout time i think it will continue to get better with some of the solutions that matt just mentioned it is it is very important to be aware of the subpar nature of privacy when using bitcoin uh at the current time but also be aware of the progress that has been made and that could potentially be made in the future if people keep bringing these tools to market which i believe is going to happen well i mean i think you know I think one of the reasons why we're so so these companies they rely they outsource their liability this whole world is is set up in a litigious way where everyone just tries to offload liability onto others right um and these exchanges and services offload their liability

oftentimes you know to these change surveillance companies and the change surveillance companies give them risk scores um and we know that some of the some of the companies simply they just flag it as coin join they say coin join has happened this is a risky behavior and they're kind of you know they're kind of admitting that they can't tell the difference between the overwhelmingly legitimate law-abiding use of coin join and the illicit use because it actually works you know so instead of instead of actually determining okay this is illicit this isn't they have to you know they don't have to but they instead they they respond by just trying to label it all as risky yeah so it kind of shows that that that it kind of shows how much of an improvement we've had in terms of

of bitcoin privacy tools over the last two years we've been massive like the the samurai stack alone is is massively easier to use and more powerful than it was two years ago agreed agreed let's continue that progress we're going to talk about the whirlpool update later but we got a very heavy front load of privacy tech on this week's list so again i know we just went down a very nuanced conversation about coin joins but hey we're going to add another layer of nuance to this privacy conversation because there's many ways to leak private information when when using bitcoin one of the ways in which you can do that is when you're and you're actually broadcasting transactions to the network if you're using clear net and your ip is identifiable that is a privacy

leak the government could see your ip know where that ip is physically located and come knock on your door and say hey i saw you broadcast this bitcoin transaction a way to make that more private is to use services like tor and now um which has been included in core for for some time and now and with the release of version 0.22.0 of bitcoin core which hasn't been officially released yet um they're they're tightening up the code base what is going to be included in that is the inclusion of i2p network support which is a tour like service another anonymous communications protocol that allow you to broad broadcast transactions using this avenue to prevent the the ip leak that that would leak some privacy data

uh yeah i mean i2p is something that uh we've talked about on this podcast before about it's an alternative network to tour um so that doesn't like it too much but um well i mean it's just it's it's been a in two weeks kind of thing for a while you know people have it's been hyped for a while um but it's good to have options in core especially since recently uh tour reliability has really been put into question um so yeah i mean it's fantastic it's fantastic to see yeah it does not really help with any of this it's completely different privacy conversation it's network privacy instead of chain privacy which is what we're just talking about yeah i also want they're just you know freaks if you think like this isn't like all i've been thinking about this whole week like you're

completely mistaken uh so apologies if i bring it back to it one more time i think there's also like a distinction here that people should realize from the u.s based companies versus the europe based companies um and like in a lot of ways europe was was had had better regulatory environment for a while and now it's significantly worse i think and in both these cases the two recent ones um was bit stamp and bottle pay uh so hopefully and this is like such a ridiculous statement to make uh hopefully american regulations are a little bit more sane i mean we have the worst regulations in the world is historically and we tend to put it on other people but uh in terms of coin join there's like a very strong free speech argument and and we do lead the way in that regard

still yeah let's hope we can keep leading bitcoin is free speech money uh yeah these countries trying to flag coin joins are are not free speech advocates you hate to see it uh this is something that the world has been waiting for for quite some time because it's been talked about for quite some time uh is still gonna take quite some time yeah so uh paul stork bitcoin developer who's uh who's been pushing the idea of a drive chain which is a certain type of side chain uh on the bitcoin network for for years now um he wants to create uh a an app called hive mind which trade prediction markets and futures markets via sidechain on bitcoin uh it's been talked about for for a long time and people have been wondering all right like when are we going to see a drive

chain in the wild uh we're not going to see it on mainnet just yet but earlier this week uh paul launched a a zcash uh drive chain um which zcash is a privacy cryptocurrency uh privacy focus cryptocurrency and uh altcoin the word you're looking for is shit coin marty yes shit coin um and so that they're so there's a drive chain on reg a regnet regnet or reg test what is it reg test so the the the trade-off with zcash is uh is a trust-based trade-off in terms of their trusted setup but also not only that not only do they have the trusted setup the the the way the way the trade-off works is they have a private private transactions and non-private transactions in the private transactions there's no way on a transaction level to enforce uh fixed

supply um so there could be unbounded supply creation like someone a malicious actor could just be creating private zcash the the rest of the network is protected because it's only the people that are in the private pool are at risk um but that's like a pretty big trade-off to make that happens to be the same trade-off that uh drive chains make um so it actually works pretty well in this situation because then you don't have the shit coin so you don't have the exposure to to actual the zek token which just keeps going down it really embodies the trending to zero concept um perfectly as a token um so you don't have that exposure um but you still but the other trade-offs that might be you know a negative to someone usually if you're talking about trying

use bitcoin more privately um were already present if you were using zcash so it's kind of elegant in that way but also at the same time this is a demo but it still needs um bip 300 which is you know still under development and not merged in any way and it's kind of it's a little bit mental masturbation you know it's like uh it's it's it's it's It would be awesome to see it as an option for Bitcoiners. But don't give me the, oh, I'm not going to look into Bitcoin privacy landscape right now or privacy tools right now

because I'm waiting for this Zcash-based sidechain to exist. Yeah. Progress. It's progress, though. Progress. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this demo on testnet. It was more fleshed out than I expected. Right?

Yeah. So shout out to Paul for that. Appreciate you. Yeah. Shout out to Paul. If you freaks have not read Paul's blog, it is one of my favorite resources, especially trying to define the value of proof of work.

Why proof of stake is just as expensive a proof of work and not as secure. go to truth coin.com i believe it's a dot com let me double check right here um but check out info it is dot info you're correct um that was back back when the ogs thought dot info was like a good suffix yeah so truth coin.info um go check out the blog there it's it's incredible content to learn about the nature of proof of work system proof of stake and a bunch of other topics pertaining to bitcoin again shout out to paul very very uh pleasantly surprised to see see this launch on on reg test i think people are they overthink that there's there's like a mix of

lack of practical tools and overthinking some of these some of these problems like so so So Whirlpool's zero link implementation is a very elegant implementation. And one of the elements to it that is really cool is it has this original transaction in the beginning, this transaction zero, when you prep for the transaction. There's a heuristic that anything in that TX zero is the same user, right? So what happens is when you enter the mix, you are whatever goes into that TX zero could be the same user. So it's something that a user has to keep in mind.

It's one of the few gotchas that they haven't been able to iron out of that implementation yet on a user error kind of level. They're planning on releasing multi-party TX0s. So this update is leading the way for that. Once they have multi-party TX0s, that heuristic gets broken. then they already have their post mix tools which they have the the two main ones or the three main ones is a multi-party coin joint to a non-participant receiver then you have a multi-party coin join where the receiver is actively part of it that's like a pay joint and then you have a fake one that just looks like a coin join but it isn't on top of that they plan on adding coin swap

as a post mix tool too so you combine that whole stack together and this is an open source stack so if you don't you know like how the samurai guys talk on twitter you don't like how they talk to people or you just don't like them in general like you can fork it and have the same exact stack and the same exact implementation now when you combine all those things together really the only thing that's stopping bitcoin from being pretty easy to use privately is you need a large amount of volume to use it you at that point you just need people to fucking use the thing care about it and see the need and actually use it because you know if if you if you only have 10 000 people using it then you're one of 10 000 yeah yeah we don't need pie in the sky ideas we just need slight

improvements to the existing things that are there and then we need education and usage and motivation that's the most and then i'm not even i haven't even talked about you know using lightning as well like lightning as a post mix tool is a could be fantastically useful yeah i mean especially if we ever activate taproot but even without right yeah but taproot would make it so much better but even without we don't have any there's not a single coin join lightning wallet that exists right these are like little things and like i i respect the fuck out of out of people doing any kind of work in the space right but a lot of times i feel like a lot of the focus gets focused on things that like oh we're four years out or five years out in like best case scenarios

um when there's like a lot of like low-hanging fruit yeah that we can just knock out yeah hey any wallet builders listening to this take heed not take heed but maybe take some advice maybe maybe focus this and speaking of that um that's why i was a little distracted christopher allen from blockchain commons just dm me um sharing their their gordian wallet architecture um trying in this project the blockchain commons project is trying to create um basically ways to make different bitcoin wallets interoperable by them using a standard so that they're compatible with each other so i just retweeted that go check that out and they just got funding from hrf they did i need to get christopher christopher if

you're listening i'm sorry i've been slacking along with janine and the lead dev of moon wallet yeah janine and 10k congrats girl on for you um well deserved all around yeah yeah we're going to dive deeper into this blockchain common stuff i need to get chris on the on the show at some point chris if you're listening i'm sorry i've been slacking in that regard you're probably not listening you're working i think our our boy fontaine's been working with him too yeah yeah looking at now like um sparrow wallet uh blue wallet uh fully noted uh foundation wolf mcnally i'm not sure what that is or bitmark um seem to be working on on air gapped wallet standard um our boy our boy arthur hayes what a fucking boss

sending a letter to the new york department of financial services or new york attorney general i forget exactly which one telling them that he's not going to show up in person in court but they can meet him in hawaii uh to to do a little uh negotiating or whatever need be and then from there he's going to stay in singapore uh and and just do zoom calls for for the court uh and yeah so these are it wasn't even a letter right it was his lawyer was in new york talking to the judge and was the transcript yeah it was a transcript of the uh negotiation for surrender it was ben dello's trial or ben dello's proceeding his his co-founder um who was in america and got arrested and then they were talking about arthur and reed or no ben bendello no no it's his last name to

read thomas reed i think the name might be now we're gonna have to look this up yeah no i'm looking right now but anyway uh it it felt very sovereign individual you know like this guy's like in singapore um they're not able to seize his funds and he's like negotiating on his terms when he is considering to come in and how he's going to do it um is very interesting to me yeah i love it i love it again like what did they do they never interacted with usd what did they do wrong it's interesting how they're like trying to like completely turn into like a regulated product they're like an offer like custodial services and they they brought they they went they went full kyc you're right with ben you're right with bendo i think reed is another co-founder but

he's the other one yeah samuel reed is his name there you go and um yeah no so it was it was samuel reed's case oh not bendella's case not bendella but he was brought up as well so yeah i mean the three of them are obviously intertwined uh the that vanity fair article is really good they used to go and read the vanity fair article about arthur but uh i i think not enough credit has been given to them uh that when all this went down and you know one co-founder got arrested and i guess the other one they arrested shortly after um they like processed like a shit ton of withdrawals and they just like withdrawn like everyone's money who wanted to get out they just like everyone's money and then they were like okay now we'll get regulatory compliant like they gave

everyone that like one last exit that one last hurrah and i think that goes underappreciated like when one broker went down and a lot of these other services go down they immediately go to save their ass um they go into save my ass mode or whatever and they just like shock and kyc everyone and they make sure not to do like any kind of dicey move and like that was like the last fuck you a bit max was like and and if people remember their withdrawals automatically go out at like 9 a.m at the time they just fucking did it remember it wasn't yeah everyone was like we're gonna have to wait till the next day and all of a sudden withdrawals just started processing yeah boss again it's such a shame bitmex like provides a product to the market that the market obviously

wants there's extreme demand for it it's a very well put together product doesn't touch us dollars so arguably shouldn't have any any uh shouldn't fall under the purview of the bank secrecy act like the again if people it's a free it should be a free market like look look at how far away we've gotten from freedom freaks like these people provided a product to the market is just an options product hey you want to lever up and trade bitcoin you can do so on bitmex that's all it was if people want to take that risk most of them are going to lose their sats but hey they're free they're free able-bodied men and women who can take that risk or at least they should be and the fact that you have samuel reed bendello and arthur hayes as bendello and arthur is

fugitives samuel reed in custody it's disgusting do we live in a free society is ben a fugitive still he's in london right he is planning or at least counsel has represented he's planning to appear in new york so i guess he hasn't appeared in court yet bendello took the giving pledge or whatever the billionaires pledged that he was going to give up up to half of his wealth by the end of by the time he died yeah coming after coming after black founders and the bitcoin space very racist by by the new york department of finance yeah i mean i i think we haven't hit the then they fight us phase yet freaks like people don't realize like it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better

and get ready to fight stand up again if we all it's that meme of of the dude at the podium standing on a plank and the the group is standing on the other side of the plank if you walk away the the regulators are behind the podium telling us hey you can't be free you can't build these businesses you can't use bitcoin in this way and we're all standing on the other side of the plank and if we just walk away and say hey fuck you enjoy your trip down into the cavern uh it could work the power of the people stand up speak up be brave be bold this isn't bad bitcoin's a beautiful thing they want to crush innovation of one of the most they want to crush the ability to innovate with the arguably the most important technology that has ever been brought to market in human

history that's like these few very few assholes and that's the other thing it's very few assholes globally out of eight billion people it's probably less than like this may be even behind 20 000 individuals that that make the the rules for the the eight billion uh individuals living on the planet just walk away from them there are more of us than there are of them and they're literally curbing freedom in the digital age fuck them getting all jacked up and it's a coffee podcast i'm not even drunk read more at no kyc only.com and bitcoin privacy.guide yes all right to cool off a little bit i'll transition into the software updates section matt when i get to whirlpool you take over uh and explain what's going on there uh which is three updates and umbrella version 0.3.6

has been released if you're running umbrella you may want to upgrade to that blue wallet version 6.0.6 has been released um definitely check that out as well um i'm checking their their fixed bugs because i i noticed one the other week on what umbral no blue wallet what bug did you notice marty it was like changing the amount um the dollar amount or the bitcoin amount the dollar both the dollar amount could just be a price api fuck up yeah samurai doesn't even have dollars in their wallet boss yeah and i'm not seeing that but last cycle what happened was like they kept hitting customer support things like i put ten dollars in my wallet and now it's worth eight dollars where'd my two dollars go and they

just like fuck you if you're just gonna just make sats the standard they just removed the the dollar denomination perfect transition while we're on samurai wallet what's going on with this new whirlpool update so i mean i have been kind of out of it so i'm not like fully in tuned here but i my understanding is like just major performance improvement um it seems like they've just from the changelog that they've removed the mixed target selection which i think is a good idea uh and they're just doing it themselves um and yeah i i think the big thing is i've noticed with the updates is just massive massive performance updates performance improvements every time oh yeah it's good to see i really want to see i see one thing in the change log here that

goes that you can do now multiple utxos if i have like a bunch of transactions i can put them into a single um transaction zero um but what i the real the real coup de gras is going to be when we could do that with multiple so they have this they added this thing sarban right which is like this tour layer where you can communicate with each other so right now i can send you a pay join um they call it stowaway by just you opening up your samurai wallet i open up my samurai wallet i put in your pain in like basically your username and then it'll just automatically connect and encrypted via tor we exchange all the different information and we do a we do a full page on peer-to-peer um the ideal ideally what would be really cool is like me you and like one of the

freaks like all decide like we're going to go into whirlpool and we have a bunch of we have a bunch of change right that is lower than the threshold that we otherwise we couldn't mix right and we just take all of our change outputs and like the three of us or like five of us or whatever all go into whirlpool at the same time and just the act of going in in the first place is like a non-equal amount uh round right because it's like we all go in and this collaborative transaction you don't know for sure you know what's happening which who's or who's you just know that all those transactions belong to the full cumulative set of participants and then you go into a proper coin join round after that that's like it's just a that's a massive improvement in terms of the

amounts that you can come in at um so i'm really that's the big update i've been excited for the most and we're not quite there yet well shout out to the samurai team put your heads down the shipping code proving the product improving privacy for for individual users uh i guess good good psa like bit 47 let's let's push for it oh uh i have it lower in the list but might as well say it now uh bitcoin q a put a paynims guide up which is that bit 47 payment codes um and i think it's at usepaynims.com i'm seeing bitcoiner.guide slash paynim yeah that's that's the main link yeah there you go um we'll have that link in the show notes obviously eclair version 0.5.1 has been released for running the async wallet in eclair think about

updating lightning terminal version 0.4.1 has been released by the lightning labs team i think this is some performance updates as well um and ui fixes ptc pay server has been added to voltage voltage really great service run by graham krezic and drew valic we had graham on the podcast a few months ago i believe in november but highly recommend checking that out i really like their service uh allowing you to spin up lightning network nodes in uh the cloud on servers but the way they they encrypt everything on those servers they have no idea what's going on uh in your node there's still trust yeah there is trust obviously um amazon could say hey voltage we're kicking you off they can man they can man in the middle of the process if they wanted to

potentially i think it's it's mostly it's mostly a regulatory um it's just best practice it's best practice to have it encrypted with local keys uh and which is what they do um so if everything goes the way that they say that they should never have access to the keys they should never be able to see anything but that also allows them that's the difference between this being self-custody even though you're running on their servers versus being a custodial product in the eyes of regulators so it's important for both those reasons yeah i mean and the news coming out of voltage uh is that they added btc pay server support so now if you spin up a voltage node you'll easily be able to to spin up a btc pay server as well very highly requested uh uh what's the word i'm looking for feature

there we go it's an easy turnkey way of just having a btc pay server yeah big fan of the uh the team at voltage and graham if you're listening graham is actually trying to help me set up a separate rss feed for sphinx tribe members so that will be an ad free version i have been slacking on that freak stay on top of me we're going to set up a separate rss feed where i put a different audio file in and point that at sphinx specifically um so that you guys don't have to listen to add on sphinx because you're already contributing in the value for value model there um we're working on it graham's trying to help me um hopefully i have time to to fix that problem make it happen marty make it happen i've been extremely busy freaks extremely busy if you

haven't have you noticed that the bench been coming out pretty late um i'm doing my best i'm doing my best no excuses no excuses marty you bitch um city bank very bullish report 120 page report is that what i wrote just very bullish report you wrote uh what did you write i thought that was the bank bullish report i added very bullish during eight pages what they call it bitcoin at a turning point at a turning point yeah i mean i think they actually just read the bent and took my 2020 was a bitcoin cultural tipping point and just turn it to turning point i'll take it you know if i'm infecting the minds of city bank analysts i'll i'll take it um i agree and it is a cultural tipping point uh just talking about like the ways it's been it's

an extremely long report i'm just blowing through it right now i think all these banks just realized that their their valuations are trending to zero when priced in bitcoin and they're just finally capitulating i mean goldman also relaunched their bitcoin trading desk this week the goldman man buns are back they really it does feel like uh i mean i i think for people that weren't here last cycle they might not realize but uh i mean all these banks were saying blockchain bullshit last time yeah and now they're saying you know accumulate bitcoin put it on your balance sheet which is a wholly different uh kind of excitement and i mean i guess it is really timely from what we said you know what we've been talking about on this podcast fucking for a while is that just

because these guys buy in um you know that doesn't mean that we're going to have better regulation for the freak that's using CoinJoin in their own node and being self-sovereign. Agreed. Agreed. But it's extremely bullish for the price of Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah.

We got to run your own full node, use your own full node. These banks are coming. They're pretty cozy with regulators. They like regulators because it allows them to create what is known in the business as a regulatory moat where they are able to stave off upstart competitors

because of the compliance costs to comply with regulations. So these institutions are coming in. The Bitcoin network is an open network. Anybody who wants to access the Bitcoin network can do so, including large institutions. They're doing it. They're going to continue to do it. As individual Bitcoiners, as average Joes, as common men,

we have to ensure the integrity of the network remains intact. And the best way to do that is to use and leverage the native properties of the network, which means you should run your own full node and use your own full node to confirm the transactions that you're receiving and sending for yourself to verify yourself and not trust anybody. These institutions are likely to attempt to bring the regulatory modes to the Bitcoin network. And you know what? We're not going to let them. Yeah, I mean, yeah, they love regulation. and and and now even the bitcoin companies the big bitcoin companies like the regulatory modes help them too um you're going to see coinbase continue to push for stuff that um allows them

to operate in markets where their smaller upstart competitors can't um kraken's also looking to go public they're both looking to go public they're going to have like massive public offerings um turd turd and meester mentioned on twitter and i think he's absolutely right that kraken probably has this massive bitcoin treasury because you know i mean uh i've never loved their position on shit coins uh but uh jesse always seemed like someone who was who is very uh bitcoin orange pilled and i'd be very surprised if kraken didn't have a large amount of bitcoin on their balance sheet probably significantly more than coinbase so that could be a second blockbuster ipo that happens um and both those guys they're gonna they're gonna push for

regulations that protect them uh or they're not gonna they're gonna stand by while they happen at least um so it's just something to be aware of and people need to just push back and and take individual action um to to try and you know to protect our rights as as sovereign bitcoin individuals be aware freaks be vigilant but on a more on a more cheeky note i just want to say that that city bank report was basically 108 pages um of them explaining how they're short bitcoin and they just realized everybody short sat squeeze is underway are you prepared that's the question you have to ask yourself every night before you fall asleep am i prepared for the sat squeeze no one's prepared no one's ready no did you stack today

always don't forget to ask your normie group chats that every morning Moving on, we already mentioned it, but just to give a proper line in the list here, the Human Rights Foundation has given out $70,000 worth of grants to privacy-focused developers and individuals covering privacy in the Bitcoin world. mentioned janine uh blockchain commons uh jesse posner who's working on adapter signatures and discrete log contracts got a grant as well um i think that's about it you say the moon wallet moon wallet yes the moon wallet moon wallet is really intriguing to me we haven't really talked about on the pod because i haven't had the chance to play around with it but the interface is have you is this on your radar at all it's it's not honestly it has not been on my radar oh and it's moon m-u-u-n for anybody out there we've talked about on the pod before that you shouldn't

have a name where you need to spell it out but uh the this is argentinian-based startup and it's really cool because it's open source which is important um it's apparently self-custody i'm not sure how it works on the lightning side because you know they're doing something in terms of of the way they're handling inbound capacity but uh so there is some kind of trusted element there something like phoenix or breeze but self-custody and it's a single balance so if if you receive lightning or you receive on chain it just shows as a unified balance and when you send it the wallet's automatically making a decision so the user doesn't know if they're sending on chain or lightning boss yeah it could be but in theory it seems awesome right but i i

don't i haven't dove into the specifics or used it enough to really talk about it concretely but i love it as a concept like that's what we want to see really yeah right yeah um shout out to human rights foundation for giving out these grants and to all these builders building these privacy tech and keeping us up to date on what's going on staying on the grant tip bull bitcoin wasabi uh have teamed up to give a forty thousand dollar grant to luke jr bitcoin court contributor longtime bitcoin court contributor uh he's been very very important in bitcoin's history uh he helped with the uh pay um was it pay to script hash or pay to pub key hash pay to script hash p2 p2sh he helped with the p2sh oh luke yeah yeah he he figured out how

to soft fork segwit into uh the code he's um in the middle of the conversations around taproot activation right now yeah you could say that yeah look he's a prolific developer he's an og bitcoin developer uh that's done a lot of good for bitcoin i don't agree with all of his views his his most notable contribution in recent years um at least post segwit he he was a big part of the whole segwit uh debate um and execution uh is is bitcoin knots which is his own implementation his own fork of bitcoin core um and the two main things that it does differently is that i'm aware of at least and this is why wasabi was using them is it was serving up neutrino filters publicly before bitcoin core merged i think bitcoin core has since merged it um and it also has like his

his blacklist is implemented about you know things like i think he he doesn't he blacklist transactions to gambling websites really yeah that's like famously in bitcoin knots but and that goes with christian values but uh i uh yeah cheers to luke he deserves it it's good that he has a funding i actually fund him as well on github so the more the merrier bitcoin i do not fund i do not give him forty thousand dollars bitcoin devlist.com check it out but if you want to contribute to him and others go to bitcoin devlist.com as marty said yeah uh good news keeps rolling people getting funded and in this case it's our it's our longest sponsor longest running sponsor unchained capital uh raised a seed round led by uh ny dig and to make sure i got that

correct i didn't want to trigger matt and why dig uh took a minority stake in unchained capital um and the the 5.5 million dollars also comes with um a big chunk for the credit fund that allow them to give out more loans i believe as well too um it's a good partnership and this is actually good to see ny dig getting getting um ingrained with unchained capital because as you guys know disclaimer sponsor of the pod big unchain capital likes to leverage bitcoin's native properties particularly multi-sig um to to provide financial services to users and multi-sig uh because custody uh gives users the the ability to have full control over their stats if they want to collaborative collaborative custody with unchained uh is sort of a bridge between full

custody and um and what collaborative custody you don't trust them with custody at all you have you have the threshold of keys yes they can still hold your hand they're there for you they can they can provide it works it should work really well for high net worth individuals and large companies that are trying to get allocations um because it's it's just strictly better than a custodial partner yes and you get a lot of the same benefits that people like that those types of people like from custodial partner right without actually giving up custody yes and the point i was trying to make with that uh that fumble it was and it's good to see ny dig getting uh giving money at Unchained and investing and getting a stake in that company and a validation of

collaborative custody and the native properties that Bitcoin enables. And again, a New York company really pushing the innovation of custody towards the users is good to see. Yeah. I mean, so, well, first of all, not only they are sponsored, but basically it's just a company filled with our buddies over at Unchained. So I'm very excited for them. I had Parker on the bitcoin magazine live stream last week for the anniversary of mount gox and i had a whole line of questioning where i was like pressuring him like like why are the billionaires not using collaborative custody why aren't the corporations using collaborative custody and stuff and meanwhile he was doing this ny dig deal and he couldn't talk about it you know obviously um and

ny dig you know that's ross stevens you know leads ny dig and that that's that's who everyone saw in MicroStrategy conference and got really excited about, they're very focused on that segment of the market, on onboarding billionaires, onboarding high net worth individuals, onboarding regulated corporations that are looking for a path. So for them to be leading this round with Unchained is very bullish in regards to those types of people actually holding their own keys and having some sovereignty. Now, Unchained also has a separate product. So that's their Vault product, which competes with custodial solutions and also they have a they have an element there now they have this white glove service which you might have heard marty say in the ad read where they can just

bring you straight into the vault um but then they also have a whole separate product which is this collateralized lending this idea that you use your bitcoin um and you take a fiat loan off of your bitcoin like instead of like a home equity line of credit where you're taking it out of your collateral is your your home in this case your collateral is your bitcoin and in that case there's a big users should be always concerned about rehypothecation and whether where their funds are and third party custody risk and unchanged should be the model for that in terms of they do it in a way where they only they hold one key you hold one key and then they have a third party company partner company that holds that holds the third key so you always see your

funds your collateral on chain you know it's not getting re-hypothecated and if those companies want to fuck you they have to fuck you together it would take two companies to fuck you instead of one um so it's really like the it's it's the gold tier of of that type of of that type of product right yes if you want access to the if you want access to the to the proper you know fiat banking world no and this is why we have unchained as a sponsor and have for years we love their product and and to another point about their loan product the recent i think we talked about last week or the week before but it doesn't hurt to rehash it they've increased the amount of collateral that needed to take out loans because they don't want to have to liquidate users which

like hey you may think like ah i don't want to over collateralize this this much but it's all in an attempt to make sure that you keep your bitcoin at the end of the day right the major negative of these products um is is is it's it's you're basically you're you're you're leveraging up on your bitcoin so if there's price volatility and the price volatility goes down uh significantly you could end up losing all of your bitcoin uh so so really i think unless unless you're an advanced user you should not be you know fucking around with these products um but it's good that people have the option i also wanted to add and it's great that unchanged is trying to prioritize reducing those liquidations because no one wants to see those liquidations and and you can end up

in a situation where you have like a big collapse in price and it ends up in cascading liquidations and the price keeps going down and more people get fucked um humble stackers unaffected in that situation but you hate to see people lose their hard-earned bitcoin one thing i'd like to add here is going back to the bottle pay thing because literally the only thing on my mind um and bitstamp thing we have a lot of companies in the space that have not you know flagged coin join users um and big big shout out to all of them there's only a single regulated company that is i'm pretty sure that has ever had a public statement that says they do not use chain surveillance and they do not flag coin join usage and that is unchained capital they're

on the record saying that publicly and i understand why a lot of companies that maybe are pro coin join and aren't flagging it aren't talking about it because they don't want to get on the bad sides of regulators but there needs to be a very big shout out um to the team over there for publicly standing behind um private bitcoin usage and it's joe kelly too joe the ceo front man came out and responded somebody was interacting with the unchained capital yeah somebody was interacting with the unchained capital twitter account and joe personally put his neck on the line said hey we don't do that we don't think we have to it doesn't make any sense and yeah again we're very proud to have them as sponsors of the team joe drew parker will uh

phil puck like they're they're just crushing it over there um so hey keep on keeping on our friends in texas uh we're proud again to have you guys here and we're very excited that you've got this funding and and we'll continue to bring incredible products to bitcoiners keep it up five and a half millions no joke boys looking forward to drinks on you next time i see you guys i think they already give us enough uh it's a really cool project hand up to anybody who was a part of this project again like i mentioned earlier i've been extremely busy uh i i got offered a line in this but just like literally couldn't record the video to get it there um i'm in it marty the bitcoin voice paper

um dim zayon was leading this initiative uh so if you go to dim zayon.com slash voice paper.html that's d-i-m-z-a-y-a-n.com it's just a bunch of bitcoiners reading the bitcoin white paper very powerful uh video uh really helps drive home the individual nature of bitcoin um and and why we do this yeah it's a great art project it's open source and it's available to all and there's no nft involved and it was just a big fuck you to craig and uh it's cool to see the community come together like that i actually got uh i got seduced by daniel prince so shout out to him on the once podcast yeah daniel seduced me into it i flaked i'm sorry for flaking everybody involved doesn't count as a seduction if if you didn't close that's that's true but he successfully seduced me

very a very good thing to see again like people we've been talking about regulation and stuff like that the context of a regulation talk up to this point the episode has been at the federal level. One thing I'm looking for specifically and paying attention to as a trend is regulation at the state level, trying to court Bitcoins and fight against the federal regulations. And this isn't a shot across the bow of federal regulations, but what we're starting to see, at least in the mining industry, something I've been paying attention to due to the nature of what I do at Great American Mining, is you're seeing states, particularly small states, trying to court bitcoin miners with tax incentives the latest of which to do that is kentucky um so

they they advance a data center incentives bill that will give um operators uh tax credits or give them i believe is the credits or just tax breaks it's a sales tax they don't have to pay sales tax on uh the electricity they buy yeah yeah so they're incentivizing bitcoiners coming to kentucky buy low-cost energy they're not going to get sales tax helps them again drive their their energy generation costs lower and bring business to the state of kentucky a small state looking for an economic boost uh so it's incredible to see that uh i will say there is a similar bill on the floor of north dakota their legislator they're they're doing a similar bill to give tax breaks to it's not i don't believe it's on sales tax but it's on producers using flared gas

um to for data center use right this is data center too they always say data center yeah yeah um but it's only bitcoin it's it's another kind of it's another way to say bitcoin mining it's like amazon or bitcoin mining yeah so there's there's a bill on the the north dakota floor whether or not that would be passed i i don't know but it is encouraging to pass eventually yeah it's encouraging to see that and then wyoming i think too is mulling around some of some similar ideas so you're seeing it at the state level um these local governments trying to court bitcoiners which i think i think we saw yeah and suarez in miami even more he's just going ham he's just like fuck your bills i'm just gonna do all the things at once yeah well and even the

santas at the governor level in florida so that's like another interesting trend i want to start paying attention more attention to is like states pushing back against the federal government i believe we saw something in missouri around second amendment like local second amendment law like if federal agents ever come and try to take people's guns in certain counties in missouri like the the sheriff's departments in in those counties has the right to arrest the federal agents so you're seeing this like state versus federal government battle war conflict whatever you want to call it um begin to really hit the head and like and again the federal government is antagonizing some of these states wyoming their economy is driven by the oil markets predominantly i believe

80 of the revenue of wyoming's economy is driven by oil and gas and you have biden coming in and shutting down uh new drilling on on federal lands which makes up a big part of wyoming so the federal government is antagonizing states and it'll be interesting to see if they fight back and use bitcoin as a way to do so i mean i saw i think it's bigger than bitcoin i mean i saw a tweet from our our buddy michael krieger um who's basically just a bitcoin account now at this point uh bro um but uh he uh like he's fully engrossed in bitcoin twitter he's one of us a hundred percent now he always was but now he really is uh but but he mentioned that like he's seeing these trends of increased you know like regionalization or local localism right like in america and it's i think

is a theme that we're going to see really play out in 2021 big time and not just um not just bitcoin related bitcoin is is one of the tools and one of the aspects that is going to be there that people are going to compete over i think another one is is going to be water rights and water access um guns is going to be a big one but like even if you look like right now like texas they decided they're like moving the mass mandate we're fully open fuck you just fucking doing it right and that's going to create this whole uh it just feels like we saw it happening in 2020 and it's just the culmination of it it's just it's only going to amplify from here it's hard to see the cat go back in the back yeah i'm actually all for it like it's what give power back to the

states for this country was founded on federal government was never supposed to exist i think the closer government is to the people the less corrupt it is the more efficient it is right now because it's like an information flow thing like how can you have a centralized government in dc making decisions for wyoming for texas for florida like the information is 350 million people like have different priorities yeah and they're so far away from the sources of pure information that they couldn't make accurate decisions and nor should that like nor nor could they even right like like the the two people the two sets of people live in completely different worlds they have completely different needs yeah so hopefully this trend continues uh it actually

makes me extremely bullish too on bitcoin for bitcoin or for humanity both both agreed if i'm bullish on bitcoin i'm bullish on humanity so there you go we already talked about paynims 101 again bitcoin or dot guide slash paynim uh for a guide there this month on bitcoin privacy you mentioned janine got a um a grant from the hrf uh her issue for february is out 11 minute read eight topics on privacy uh we're going to link to that in the show notes uh this was interesting i saw this come out on the no bullshit bitcoin feed yesterday dea report mentions bitcoin a virtual currency by name did you look at the report um i just read the little blurb they have on the telegram yeah so i linked to no bs because they have the actual pdf up there

um and i didn't want to link to a dea website i feel like that was in poor taste yeah so drug traffickers and money launderers are increasingly incorporating virtual currency into trade-based money laundering tbl tbml activity as the use of these currencies become more widely adopted dea reporting has revealed instances which bulk currency contracts were fulfilled to the use of virtual currency instead of cash with this money subsequently being integrated into the TBML cycle. They love their acronyms.

I mean, Bitcoin was mentioned like seven or eight times by name and there was a whole section called virtual currency and like future finance or something. Like this is just, I think it's important because it's a narrative that's gonna, we're gonna see play out more, right? I think the first rule of thumb is you do,

is you say the tools are being used by criminals. right that's what we're seeing with coin joy and that's what we're seeing with encryption um and that that's what we historically we've seen with bitcoin and then we like we're in this like little honeymoon phase we're like i don't know if you remember like every article about bitcoin was like the currency that most families is used for silk road and the drugs and all this criminals activity was always like the first paragraph of every mainstream media article about bitcoin and for the last couple of years we finally shed that it's about to come back i think i think like we're about to hit the new narrative again yeah and we're gonna have that phase for a

little bit and to equip you freaks with a rebuttal to that narrative it's like bitcoin is for enemies yes these these people will use bitcoin because they can because it's open network it's the nature of the protocol and the access to that protocol but again you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater bitcoin's also providing value to individuals in nigeria when the nigerian government shut down the bank accounts of the nsars protesters the woman women marching in that that protest particularly they turned to bitcoin hong kong similar situation belarus similar situation venezuela uh you have starving and sick people who can't depend on their local currency needing to get bitcoin sent to them from family members abroad so that they can buy medicine and

food to survive bitcoin is helping these people like yes drug dealers are accepting bitcoin as well like it's just a fact that you want to throw uh all the value that bitcoin is providing a myriad of of different types of people um away just because some people uh are are selling drugs and then you get an old conversation of like who cares if people are selling drugs should it be shouldn't that be a free market as well every single convicted felon in the united states has used the us dollar yeah maybe like 17 of them have used coin join maybe maybe high yeah that's probably a high number conservative on the high side it's like absolutely ridiculous um i'm already put it really well but i i think a really a good way of looking at it is is like if you can block

if we can block a a dictator or a war criminal or some kind of you know global recognized criminal from using bitcoin then a dictator can block a refugee that wants to use bitcoin and so in order to protect the overwhelming majority of law-abiding users um and their freedom and their privacy uh you have to protect everyone and that doesn't mean that criminals will run free it So it means you just have to do some good old fashioned police work to get them. Yeah. Yeah.

Whatever happened to good old fashioned hard work. The law enforcement agents are getting very lazy. Getting very lazy. Try to put us in a digital panopticon freaks. Don't let them fight back. Stand up, speak up. We're on the other side of the plank.

Just walk away. We'll fall into the cavern. Think about it. Mempool. Our good friends at mempool.space have joined COPA. i forget what copa stands for it's a patent alliance crypto open patent alliance yeah we only call it copa because we don't want to say the word crypto yeah um yeah it's an initiative started by square square crypto um i think squares one of yeah square crypto i think started it

yeah maybe square started yeah and so it's an alliance to um fight back against patent trolls it's good it's a defensive group where they all share their patents and they agree not to be offensive with the patents they only defend it so man i just got a text one of my brother's friends what do you think the text was um what do you think about cardano close keep keep going i'll give you one more guess what ripple to two dollars no should i buy an nft of my god that's i knew it i was just in the wrong cycle i was in the wrong fucking cycle uh it's the third one i've gotten from my bro for some reason my brother's friends are all texting me it's like not even my friends my brother's friends every cycle yeah should i buy

nft of banksy no just focus on accumulating bitcoin bro you do not have enough none of us have enough bitcoin focus on it stop trying to fucking trade you're gonna lose more money most people will lose more money some of you might make bank like kobe got did you see what kobe made on his bullshit nft token no kobe got like i guess like the platform that nba top shots or whatever has an underlying token to it and he got like an early allocation for 100k it's worth 40 million dollars right now holy shit yeah so like some people especially the insiders will do very well on these things i'm not saying that's not the case i'm just saying for the average person you will probably end up with more bitcoin in five years

if you just don't think about it and you just stack every day or stack weekly. Just stack on the reg, humbly, without leverage. And like Insider, typical ICO, pre-mine, whatever. We're not going to get into it. Last but not least, Germany considering KYC for emails and texts. What the fuck? How is this even possible?

What the hell are you doing in Germany? That's what people don't realize. It's not a Bitcoin thing. bitcoin just gives us is one of the few tools that allows us to opt out of the kyc bullshit that's everywhere it's like encryption and bitcoin are like the two the two things on the surface that that opt us out of the kyc and like soar it's never a good sign when germans are making list uh so this is fucked up though so they want all messaging services to collect id information so like already for phone numbers like sims and stuff are like pretty kyc they're like at least

like kyc light it's like hard to get one without doxing your information but emails are looser some of these emails now require you to use a phone number so they like piggyback on to the kyc as a phone number but emails are still a little bit better and then the messaging services so they want all these companies to keep detailed private personal you know intimate information sensitive information on their users which they're not going to be able to secure properly and and i'm it's going to go hand in hand with also breaking their encryption if they decide like okay well marty's using this account now give us the back door to his encryption so they're going to have back door access and they're going to have intimate information all their fucking

users and then they're going to pretend that it's for our own benefit which is like the biggest slap in the face ever like at least at least in these authoritarian governments like no one no one like pretends like it's for your own benefit they're just like oh the dictator is trying to oppress me like that makes sense but like in some of these western democracies they just fucking do the same thing and they're like you're welcome ah freaks they're coming for us they're trying to put us they're trying to cattle herd us they don't want you to be free speaking freely amongst ourselves too dangerous don't think for yourself you need the nanny state to come in and tell you what's acceptable what's not don't think just give up all this information let it be held in

poorly secured databases and just just go along with what big brother's telling you all right slavery is freedom war is peace fiat money is real money it's all fucking bullshit this was a rip man i think we vibed well on this rip i miss you bro i miss you too when are we gonna see are we gonna have to wait till miami to see each other in person i don't think probably not oh that's a good reminder though uh they're they're rug pulling my promo code what uh so so the promo code like is just something that like i negotiated with them and i make no i get no ref from it or anything and i was just like give me the highest percentage

you're willing to give uh the people i show it to and they gave me 21 and it's just been way too successful so they're kind of they're gonna pull the code tomorrow um they're either gonna lower it or completely remove the amount that it gives you off so if you're gonna if you're gonna do it uh now's the time it's code humble full caps um and it's b.tc slash conference dope domain get that use that promo code while it's still last they're gonna rug pull it overnight yeah beware freaks don't get complacent like i tweeted out yesterday too like i was like in the shower literally had a shower thought like i was i almost let the propaganda get to me matt i almost let it get to me it may seem the world may seem dire things may seem dire all caps marty

if you let the propaganda gets you freaks there's never been a better opportunity to make the world a better place honestly the technology flow through you marty let the caps flow through you seriously take advantage of this opportunity that we have while it lasts hopefully we can make sure that it lasts for as long as possible we have an incredible amount of powerful technology at our hands we just need to get it into more hands and we need to uh we need to champion it publicly that's why we have this podcast that's why we tweet that's why i write the newsletter that's why matt does everything that he does on all these different platforms like we can win we can make the world a better place bullish very bullish is that it i mean i love you freaks i think two

hours is a very strong rep i hope to see you again soon marty um i mean i kind of wanted to there was like two things that i wanted to talk about before we ended but i don't know if we've gone too long i don't think the freaks are gonna mind you don't have a hard cap right no i gotta write a bent so taproot just seems like a clusterfuck that blew the fuck up yeah yeah it's a it's a shit show so are you feeling a little less bullish than you were the other day about your yeah i have a feeling i'm gonna be sending a million cents at the end of the year it's amazing how quick that switches right um it's just everyone's arguing over the activation now

uh the activation methods i mean we've talked about a bunch on the pod uh i just do you have any new comments about it besides i've got nothing productive to add to this conversation um if you if you if you freaks haven't listened to sit i'll dispatch we had uh james o'burn joined us uh so uh he is a bitcoin core dev former new york bitcoiner um and we had some good thoughts on taproot at that point so uh even though that was two days ago and it's gotten worse since then so yeah i checked in on the mailing list the other i was like holy shit this is this is just getting yeah out of hand um but i think it will get activated and i just think it's you know this is a feature not a bug freaks like uh we don't want this stuff

to just be able to get railroaded through uh that's why bitcoin is valuable uh because in every other project it can get railroaded through um so don't be surprised uh if it takes a little bit longer and that is fine we're not we're not in a rush in that respect there's there's we have we have time in that respect and it'll get activated eventually or it won't but i think it will possibly couldn't be but like if you guys want to activate it before december 31st like i'm all for that the important it'd be fucking hilarious if it gets activated like january 3rd that would be uh the way the world works that's probably how it's gonna go down it's either gonna be like january 3rd or december 27th you know it's gonna be it's gonna be tight i'd like the

thing that would would completely caught me off guard if it's like a september 15th activation you know like if it's just some like rant like very like or like the opposite like next september like just like completely wrong what if what if our bet like has some influence on activate like that's good that's what we want to see okay is this like a quasi it's a prediction market it's like a little prediction market yeah i kind of well actually you're not really helping the network i help the network because i'm providing an incentive incentive to activate early i am right oh no yeah because you're good well no you're providing incentive to activate later i'm providing a bet against me i imagine the freaks want to bet with me though

i like i have the same bet with peter mccormick peter mccormick's incentivized to try and get taproot approved before january 1st because of my million sats bet or with him it's not a million sats it's a bottle of glenn farclay's 25 which is good because that's trending to zero millions a million sats is going to be is going the opposite direction but it provides an incentive to get them to like a prediction mark like uh i don't know it's cool we should have a prediction market for it though instead of just podcast betting sure it's atomic finance matthew um get on it let's make that happen uh and then and we should definitely have one for like election season next election season i would hope it's kind of late we have one for this one

so i imagine we well we didn't really you know it was like it was really half-assed that's not called half-assed okay they got a minimum viable project yeah minimum viable product okay i'll give i'll give them that the other topic i wanted to bring up was uh coin swaps fixing uh the bottle pay bit stamp issue there's like a whole argument in my mentions about coin swap and i've been completely ignorant to the context so we talked last week we talked about the difference between coin joint and coin swap right and i had the analogy that with coin join you have let's say you have five people with a gold coin each and then we all melt our gold coins and then we have we pour five new

gold coins right and then coin swap is you exchange you have a gold coin i have a gold coin and we just flip each other each other's gold coin right and then you do that a bunch of times in a row right but we're just trading gold coins now obviously gold coins don't have like a public ledger history for all of time but bitcoin does right so you're really trading the coins history right so if you do coin swap the cool thing about coin swap is you can't tell a coin swap happened it looks like a regular transaction but what that means is especially in the beginning when we're in an adoption phase of coin swap and no one's using it let's say we have like 17 people using it um i shouldn't use the same number let's say we have 25 people using it uh 50 people using it

uh the chain surveillance companies are going to assume coin swaps aren't happening so they're just going to assume if you coin swap with someone and that had a bad transaction history and you send it then unknowing to yourself you're sending a coin with whatever history is considered high risk or fraudulent you know the big examples let's say it's plus token right um now the idea is when coin swap is used at scale when let's say millions of people are using coin swap 70 of bitcoiners are using coin swap then chain analysis companies can't assume shit because every time there's a transaction they don't know if a swap happened they don't know if it's my history or if it's some schmucks in history from nigeria or something right it's a threshold that

high i'm just it has to be significantly high higher than adoption phase right like there's there's an early phase in the beginning where users are at high risk right now coin join is is is the opposite so coin join is a you don't really know what the you can tell that a coin join happened it's immediately obvious on chain right and there's like this there's this narrative that that is a bug that it's too obvious right but encryption is extremely obvious if if some if external observer is watching your communications they can tell you're using encryption they just can't tell what's going on in the conversation um so there's an argument to be made that from a user perspective the combination of coin join and coin swap is the best of both

worlds especially in the adoption phase in the beginning because you you do the coin join and you basically are smelting new coins or creating new coins um with this this shared history that's like a shared unknown history but everyone knows coin join happened and then you're properly you're completely breaking the trail on chain by doing coin swaps between two people who have already post-mixed so as a post-mix tool it's infinitely more power it makes both used together it's like one plus one is three like both of them have these these different trade-offs right and both of them don't solve this by themselves but used together they become way more powerful tool yeah it makes a lot of sense to me and this is chris belcher made this apparent like when he first started

talking about his design last year right so chris's plan is to deprecate join market and replace it with with coin swaps except with with with the the nuance that he wants to do a combination pay join coin swap um so it it doubles up on both of those but i think i think the focus should be on uh using these and and the thing is from a purist point of view the coordinated coin joins isn't like purely since you know distributed decentralized it requires a centralized coordinator right but if if those centralized coordinators aren't getting uh if regulators aren't saying that those central is core they're not squeezing those coordinators and we can use those coordinators this is like kind of schickler in the logic you know like you

don't have to go to the full extreme unless you necessarily have to go to the full extreme right we can make some trade-offs there in terms of a centralized party that that that has a trust minimize relationship with the the whole process if we can do that and we can use that as the base and then coin swap on top of it it becomes super fucking powerful and no one would have any you would you would you wouldn't have that issue you wouldn't have that issue of the taint as much yeah uh even though there shouldn't be taint you know in that adoption it's it's that it's it's a growth period in the beginning is where you have the issue if we just immediately had the overwhelming majority of wallets are doing coin swaps and just everyone just assumed in the

beginning like oh just everyone's doing coin swaps so that's how the protocol was designed in the beginning then you wouldn't have that issue but as it starts when and when when we first begin it um it's going to be like a major major headache for coin swap users and basically what happens is if we don't have the the equal outputs as a base if we don't have coin join as a base i mean it doesn't even have to be the equal we could have like a join mark style coin join as the base if you don't have coin join as the base we won't get the adoption in the beginning because it'll be so there'll be so much uh anxiety or concern over getting in trouble for it yeah for adopting somebody else's history yeah it makes a lot of sense right yeah because like the way i view it

is with the coin join is almost no taint there's taint but the taint is coin join but there's like know it's like the one coin that is like like i think only like when i visualize it only post coin join is a taintless is a is a is a taintless coin everything else has some kind of history that's attached to it bullish on privacy who's gonna be the first wallet like again drop the flame wars come together a little ego it's going to join better than coin swap it's going to swap better than coin join matt just described stronger together we're all stronger together i'm fine with this because neither of them are stopping each other chris is going to work on his implementation and it seems like the samurai guys are going to try and add coin swap in the

in the in the mode of as a post-mix tool they're going to add it into their post-mix thing and chris is working on his implementation and bitcoiners will have options and we'll have we'll have a bunch of options in front of us maybe what's hobby wallet 2 comes out um and then we'll have even more options and and that that's best case scenario um worst case scenario is just like people fight and get discouraged and nothing gets built and it doesn't seem like we're in that mode which is good the only discouragement of the fighting is that it does seem to put off average users um who might not be as motivated but i think maybe those users would probably be put off anyway and the real motivation is getting burned so like this

fight period that i'm expecting to come up will probably encourage things in the future that are you know for users that there's yeah yeah we can't you can't force you this whole thing is supposed to be individual personal responsibility you can't force users to do anything users are going to have to learn on their own why privacy is important and be motivated enough to try and seek it out and like we've been preaching here for years it's better to get on it early than to have to do it when you absolutely need it yeah and i think like there's like this idea and i guess there's like a certain corner of like cuck bitcoin twitter that is like that is like matt can't talk about privacy as a public person like unless you're like jason

born or james bond you're never gonna have privacy anyway so you might as well just walk around and ask the government for permission for everything and just completely trust them with all your financial transactions and every counterpart you ever transact with and like that's bullshit like there's there's it's there's a scale here there's a sliding scale here and you can improve you can fundamentally improve your privacy both in bitcoin land and greater technology just your your world around you by just caring and just doing small things and improving over time yeah fuck those people complacent cucks it's just weird fuck a cuck and fuck a cuck buck start to a wrap start to a wrap in my head there right now i truly have to go i have to write a

band i've got i've got dinner with my wife tonight i'm happy that we talked about those two topics though me too i love you marty i love you freak stay humble stack sets i love you too love all y'all peace of love i'm like trying to hit on record on local recording i didn't do local i did zoom now i'm gonna hit stop recording there Thank you.