TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Bitcoin Week of 2021.04.19

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Venmo adds bitcoin IOU support, no withdrawals - WeWork accepting bitcoin as payment and will hodl - Coin Center responds strongly against FATF - Turkish Gov attempting bitcoin payments ban - Turkish bitcoin exhange Thodex apparent exit scam - OKEx adds lightning support - Cashapp raises withdrawal minimum to 100K sats frok 10K sats - Bitcoin Core v0.21.1 RC 1 Taproot Speedy Trial client released - UASF Taproot client released - Aaron Van Wirdum write up on the two taproot clients - myNode v0.2.30 - Start9 adds Sphinx, Onion pages, Photoview - Square and Ark argue that bitcoin is good for the environment - Former comptroller of the currency Brian Brooks new CEO of Binance US - Former CFTC Chair joins BlockFi Board - The Intelligent Bitcoin Miner, Part II - Signal hacks hacking company Cellebrite 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 Braiins. Braiins are leaders in the mining industry; running Slush Pool, creating firmware to make miners more profitable (Braiins OS+), and building out Stratum V2 to help further decentralize mining and make Bitcoin more robust. Check out their mining profitability calculator.

What's up, peasants? It's your boy, Marty Ben, here to introduce this episode of Rabbit Hole Recap. Great rip, great rip. As soon as the rip ends, we get the Biden coming in with the increased capital gains tax. 43% is going to take it from you. High net worth individuals or high income individuals. Don't know what that threshold is, but come on, guys. Come on.

Come on, Uncle Joe, Sleepy Joe. It's coming in Wasting no time Coming after All your gains If the government Hasn't provided Enough value

Via the taxes That you've already Been paying Don't worry They're going to Take more And so that The value of the

Services that they're Providing should increase You're loving it right The government's Treating you well You're getting a lot Of value out of The services they're

Providing Never sell freaks Sat squeeze these Motherfuckers It's fucking Disgusting this is like late stage shit late stage empire shit 43 percent capital gains tax some states i think i saw california with their state capital gains tax it would be 56 percent

why even invest why even take risk why why do any of this hey it's for your better good it's for better services coming from the government which historically has provided incredible services incredible services the best services ever thank god we have bitcoin this rate was brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking cash up cash up something you stack that sunset receive sets sell sets if you so please we're saying sats sats sats sats because sats are the standard you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin you don't have to buy a fraction of a whole bitcoin you can buy whole sats there's 100 million sats in one

bitcoin you can stack a whole one one cuck buck will get you about like 1400 1500 sats right now haven't looked at it 1700 did not give that stat on the podcast second week in a row i forgot it so So 1,881 sats per cuck buck currently. You can get cash back if you're using their boost card and you have your boost enabled. You can get cash back at partner merchants and then sometimes even have sats back. If you go spend anywhere,

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You are going to get $10, and $10 is going to go to our good friends at Owl's Lacrosse. That's Owl's Lacrosse. Woo! owls lacrosse this rip was also brought to you by a very very very very very very very good friends at unchained capital unchained capital is bringing financial services to bitcoiners leveraging bitcoin's native properties and nothing highlights their their ethos and the products that they're building better than their vault product which allows you to engage in a two or three

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is gradually then suddenly, Dhruv Bansal, Bitcoin in Space, a bunch of other stuff. What's up, son? Son, you want in on this? What are you going to do with that orange? You can't eat that orange. It's not peeled yet. Just threw the orange. Anyway, back to Unchained.

Incredible content, incredible products. Go check them out, www.unchained-capital.com. It's www.unchained-capital.com. Again, tell them TFTC sent you for that white glove concierge. Vault set up. They'll take $50 off. We will link to that specifically in the show notes. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at HODL HODL.

HODL HODL. They have a lending platform that is now available for U.S. citizens. So 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, and on your own terms. I met a Bitcoiner here in Austin last Friday who's been using the LEND product and the other side of the LEND product where you can actually put stable coins up to get yield on those.

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and you'll be able to monitor that your sats are not being rehypothecated. If you have some stable coins, again, like around, you are looking to get returns on those, Lend a Hoddle Hoddle offers returns on that market as well. So create your offers and set your own terms at lend.hoddlehoddle.com. That's lend.hoddlehoddle.com. Last but not least, this rip is brought to you by our good friends at Brains. it's brains.os b-r-a-i-i-n-s b-r-a-i-i-n-s and brains is the team behind slush pool uh they've

been doing incredible things in the bitcoin space since 2013 slush pool was the first ever bitcoin mining pool they dropped that uh and they've been producing incredible products for bitcoiners since then particularly with their brains os plus firmware uh in 2000 whenever amplit came out I think it was 2017, became aware that Bitmain had a backdoor on their machines, and so Brains did not like that, so they created firmware that Bitmain users could download, and so they didn't have to depend on Bitmain's firmware, which was backdoored, and they could use a firmware that was safe and was actually not going to turn off their machine randomly. And on top of that, the Brains OS Plus firmware makes machines more efficient, so you can stack more sats.

You can get more bang out of your hash, more sats out of your hash. Right now, Brains OS Plus is available for S9s, S19s, excuse me, S17s, and T17s. On top of that, Brains is working on the open source decentralized mining pool known as Stratum V2, alongside Matt Corallo and Square Crypto. They're working on What's Miner firmware as well. When What's Miner, Ed? Ed, I'm going to put a bowl of queso on your head if I don't see this. What's Miner?

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. We're not going to get personal. I'm not going to threaten you with cheese. I know you're deathly afraid of cheese, Ed Evanson. Evenson? Evenson, excuse me. I know you don't like the cheese. I won't torture you with the cheese. Don't worry, Ed. You freaks should go check out everything Brains is doing. Again, behind Slush Pool, they've got this firmware that helps you stack more sats. They've got great content about mining, educational content. They've got profitability tools as well. So if you're a miner and you want to plug in your electricity rates, the mining model you're using, hash rate and all that jazz, they've got a great

profitability calculator as well. So go check all this out at brains, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com. Enjoy this rip. Enjoy the end of the empire. Hey, 43% capital gains tax freaks they're coming for it they're coming for it they deserve it too they provide a great service they should get all this money they're going to invest it well they're going to deploy it well your quality of life's going to increase the wealth gap's not going to increase this is going to incentivize people to like hide hide money in offshore accounts or anything like that it's certainly not going to happen enjoy this rip you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free

when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to rabbit hole recap it's your boy marty ben here with matt odell i'm still down in austin checking out the city checking out the scenes getting acclimated with the bitcoin scene down here matt odell coming hot off a hot week two appearances with michael

sailor on two different shows on michael's sailor academy yesterday with stefan and michael and i forget the third gentleman's name and then btc sessions last friday you crashed that session yeah just a little bit uh the sailor academy was awesome uh so much respect for what he's done over there you know such a great uh education resource all for free which is uh i feel like he doesn't get enough credit for that that's pretty commendable and stefan it was it was the final it was his final course so stefan's been working like super hard getting that bitcoin course together so everyone should go check that out that's completely free yeah go check it out i was able to catch the first 20 minutes um really good back and forth conversation and then uh you

and stefan dove into why privacy is important right after michael left correct yeah i mean it just the whole point was supposed to be uh like a beginner's uh an hour a tight hour for a beginner on practically using bitcoin uh which is i kind of really enjoyed it because because the three of us me you stefan you know we have hours and out hundreds of hours of bitcoin content um like no beginner content so it's like a really nice tight hour of beginner content and i like i sent it to a bunch of like friends and family and stuff um because i i think it's like a really it's a good it's a good place to start if you if you're new to bitcoin yeah i agree no i caught the uh the part where you're just saying hey when you're you're taking custody practice makes

perfect spin up a wallet send small amounts get comfortable sending transactions wipe the wallet recover the wallet get comfortable with that that's we got to do freaks practice makes perfect in this space demands extreme responsibility 100 so marty uh notice this beautiful hat you got there are you officially a texan now are we ever going to see you back in the northeast or is this a permanent move i'll be back in the northeast on sunday i don't know if i could ever be considered a texan having been born and raised in philadelphia live predominantly in the northeast and midwest for most of my life in short stint in south carolina but yeah no i do think um the prospect of me and my family moving down here for for at least a couple years is is looking pretty

promising right now after the summer i think we may head south the bitcoin scene here is insane it reminds me a lot of new york when when i first moved there and well a lot of the new yorkers have moved there i know i'm actually meeting i've met up with a bunch of them uh catching up since they moved here and it just yeah it's exactly what it was like in new york meeting people for breakfast for coffee just to talk bitcoin really high quality bit devs that was thrown at unchained capitals offices uh last thursday uh went to a bar after barbecue after and just yeah just the vibe reminds me a lot of what new york was last year the year before many years before that it seems like the meat space shelling point of

the bitcoin mindshare has shifted south uh at least in my perspective it was it was and that's actually when it comes to content i think that it's important to be in these spots like going to bit devs and going through all of the prs and all the stuff going on just like sharpens your mind to to what's going on in bitcoin and keeps you fresh and obviously there's a lot of people coming in and out of town here um so for the podcast uh it'll be easy to catch more legit guests and on top of that you have a cheat code it is a cheat code it is are you gonna come join us you should come i wonder that was an it's an interesting i might i might it was an inch i'll definitely come visit my austin boys i uh been meaning to for a while i gotta make it happen

i had massive fomo uh i still have massive fomo because you're still down there but between bit devs and the beef steak um i just just ridiculous amounts of fomo but that's an interesting point you made about the mind share moving to austin uh i wonder like i feel like bitcoiners are more mobile people uh because we have fuck you money um so i wonder if we see that happen more often or if you know there's a lot of austin maximus that say like this was the move right like now austin is the citadel of the united states like is there going to be another move in five years or 10 years or something i wonder we'll see yeah i don't know if this will be my permanent home but uh talking to parker lewis about it he he describes it as we have to retreat to texas to

austin um batting up the defenses down here and then and then attack north east and west as well if if you read if you read my private messages of parker you would think part of his job description is just to induce fomo in me for not living in austin what has he been saying behind the scenes it's like it's like new title at unchained capital is like just get get as much fomo and tomato dell as possible right i mean it's pretty crazy it's pretty crazy what's going on down here the uh it's a good vibe it's a good vibe i mean the city does remind me a lot of brooklyn some of the bad parts of brooklyn and the the social aspects of it in terms of virtue signaling but i think the the bitcoin mine share more than makes up for that so it'll be cool to

check it out it's a nice walkable city too i can get my steps in down here averaging well over 10,000 steps a day just walking around i saw your final thought that you're gonna walk more i you know that's one the good thing about having dogs i have to walk all the time yeah it's a good activity i I mean, Parker told me that if the mayor's office in Austin and the local government keeps going down a poor trajectory, then he's just going to run for mayor himself and take that on. Yeah, that's how he – I don't find that hard to believe. I would completely see him do that. Oh, no.

He's dead serious when he says that. He ended bit devs last week. There's a proposition vote May 1st. if you're down here they're trying to get the tents um out of the city again and the homeless tents and that's how parker ended the the meetup he was like hey if you're in austin make sure you get out and vote and if this persists i'm gonna run for mayor and he's dead serious about that he's a he's a very staunch texan austinite that wants to see the city thrive with bitcoin in mind it's fun

hung out with Alex Leishman, been hanging out with Ryan Gentry from Lightning Labs a lot there's a lot of good things going on down here it'd be cool too I'm going to put this out there on Chain Capital if you're listening if you guys move to a new office just get like a couple

extra spaces maybe Great American Mining can rent one out Lightning Labs business development team can rent one out, we've got a nice little mine share in the office think about it all right should we get to bitcoin big list yeah hit us current price bitcoin is 54 480 according to clark moody's dashboard that's 40

off from what we're seeing on crypto watch if you're watching the live stream uh we're at a 1.02 trillion cuck buck market cap right now we're 16 off the all-time highs which are 64 840 dollars and that was hit on april 14th so a little over a week ago uh right now one bitcoin is going to get you 30.2 ounces of gold that's 8.7 percent of the total gold market cap we're at block 680 158 in the 680 thousands now past that threshold in the last two days So we're chilling there. 18,688,398.46 Bitcoin have been distributed to the market. That's 88.99% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist, which is 21 million if you guys did not know. We are currently 1,250 blocks away from the next difficulty adjustment, which is estimated

as of right now to be may 1st 2021 uh it's estimated to be a downward adjustment of 22.1 right now and that is because blocks are coming in at 12 minutes 51 seconds on average we'll get into uh what's going on why blocks are coming in so slow on the list very interesting case study and actually pretty bullish even though blocks are coming in uh relatively slow compared to the 10-minute block production target. The story behind what's going on there is actually pretty bullish, if you ask me. We'll get to that.

Oh, we will. Mempool, 114,665 transactions at Clark's. Mempool, excuse me. What else have we got? Predict the next block. High fees. Fee versus reward is approaching 20%. there will be a estimated 1.5 bitcoin um reward and that more excuse me fee part of the the reward

which is pretty significant going to samurai whirlpool capacity i'm sorry i'm like stumbling through this i'm using my small laptop monitor and like early morning rip it's fine that and like all the all the boxes are not where they usually are my big monitor unspent capacities He's at 2,329.92. That's a significant increase, 127.2 million, right? Wasn't it hovering around like 2,100? What is it now? 2,329.

It popped last week, if I recall correctly. Yeah, after the guns of Bitcoin. I think it might have been a combination of guns of Bitcoin and also like fee expectations, right? Whirlpool specifically, if you expect fees to go up, you want to get into Whirlpool before the transaction fees go up. Yeah. Well, let's start off with that. I saw you were tweeting about that a lot this week. You discussed it as well. And Wiz was talking about how urgent is the fee situation? And obviously, this fall in hash rate is playing into that, particularly during the last week.

But just in terms of long-term thinking as a Bitcoiner and how to prepare for future transactions today with fees in mind. Yeah, so I mean, like we had a... For Dispatch, if you haven't listened to Dispatch yet, we had like an hour conversation in the beginning. There's just Bitcoin transaction fees. So consider go listening to that. If you're a freak that is curious. I mean, I think we got to dive into this pretty hard, especially from the mining angle about what caused it. Right. I think we all expect fees to go up long term. And it's something that we've been I think we can rest easy at night, Marty, that we've been getting the freaks ready for this. i mean we've been incessant we've been if anything we've been such a broken record about it that some people were like you know matt and marty have lost the plot like they just keep talking about these fees and they're just never coming you know um so i i think people need to get prepared and

unfortunately when we have these little spikes it tends to knock some sense into people you realize all of a sudden you're like oh fuck i wasn't ready at all um but but in this case right in this case i mean the number one thing is no matter what happens fees should go down substantially after the next difficulty adjustment now they might not completely clear and it might be the start of this of this new fee market for this cycle right where where we have like sustained high fees but they should go down substantially from where they are right now so if you don't have to make a transaction just sit the fuck you know sit the fuck down and just wait it out right yes and so So why are fees high right now? What's happening? And why is this bullish? In my mind, at least. So for you freaks that are unaware, there was a coal power plant accident in a province in China. I can't remember off the top of my head if it was Xinjiang or Sichuan.

um but basically there was a huge accident at a coal power plant and uh the government regulators came in and said hey we need to shut down all the coal power plants in this area to do like safety checks to make sure everything wasn't it a coal mine yeah it was a coal well yeah no i think it was like close to a power plant like it got flooded out and some workers i believe like a dozen people working at the mine lost their life, which is extremely sad. But in the context of Bitcoin, these miners were forced to shut down because the coal plant shut down and that was their power source. And what we found is that hash rate, now that we have a bit of a retrospective look back in the last week and a half particularly, it seems that 25% of the network hash rate fell

off the network, which is pretty considerable, obviously, but not as much as people would expect if you're to believe the FUD and fear mongering coming from a lot of Bitcoin's detractors that say 60% of Bitcoin mining is within the borders of China. And so with this particular province, it was estimated before the shock that 80% of Bitcoin mining within china is happening here outside of rainy season because that's where the cheap power is um and so there was actually mustafa what's his last name from bixon is it at bixon on twitter he wrote a nice thread i'm basically saying this is actually extremely bullish um because if we were to take those estimates uh and extrapolate them

to the bitcoin percentage the mining percentage in um china so yeah since then it happened in jinjiang uh and it dropped by an estimate 20 25 percent and if we were to take the estimates that the fudsters are throwing at that would uh that would have equated to like 40 to 50 percent of hash rate should have fallen off if what they're saying is true so it seems that there's considerably less hash rate concentrated in china than was previously thought so it doesn't really prove that no you can't well you can't really prove it with any certainty you're ballparking right the absence of evidence isn't evidence yes right like we we know we know what like 20 to 25 percent of the hash is located in an area of china

that could be shut down at the same time as each other that's like all we know from this event yes but you can look at pools and you see how much hash rate fell off the pools and you sort of extrapolate from there as well that's another data data point that you take and so at least a lot of people in the mining industry are saying hey this this actually may may prove not prove but it may hint that that there's less hash rate within china than previously previously thought but in the context of fees and why fees are going up obviously if you have a lot of the hash rate 25% of the network hash rate coming off the network between difficulty adjustments.

The difficulty target is going to be at a certain point where it's expecting a certain amount of hash rate to produce blocks every 10 minutes. 25% falls off. That means blocks are going to come in much slower. And so at one point, on average, blocks are coming in at like 13 minutes and 30 seconds. Right now, as we said, when we're reading the dashboard,

where they're coming in at about 12 minutes and 51 seconds. So it seems that hash rate is coming back on. Kevin Zhang from Foundry, he said that earlier this week that he expected the miners that were forced to shut down that were using the coal power plant electricity generation as their energy source to come on within one to two weeks. Thomas Heller, who's at Compass Mining, formerly of F2 Pool, he tweeted out this morning that it looks like some of them

are even starting to come up uh and hash um they're turning their miners on again already and that's evidence you can see the pool the pool hash rates specifically the chinese pools starting to increase again so it seems like the hash rate that was turned off is coming back on right now again the next difficulty adjustment 1250 blocks estimated to be may 1st but that could be subject to change between now and then i mean i think uh the the generalization of of using it as a as a bullish claim for you know uh hash distribution is a little bit of a stretch but i mean the bullish angle is that you can pull 25 of hash off the network which is something we already knew right but for the haters that you could you could pull that amount of hash off the

network and bitcoin keeps on working you know it's working as designed you can still send a transaction it's going to cost you more money um but if you want to send a transaction that confirms next block you can do it the network will still you know they will charge you the market rate for it um but but you can do it and you could do it the whole time that this was happening yeah like you think of disruption 25 of the hash rate falls off and blocks are coming in at 13 minutes and 30 seconds at the peak of the hash rate decline. Not terribly bad, right?

And right now, like looking at mempool.space, low priority transactions. So if you're willing to wait a bit, 153 sats per byte or $11.63. High priority, 262. So next block, 262 sat per byte or 19, around $20. the problem already is like in this fee environment like the low estimate isn't really a good estimate because it just can run away from you like i i know i've had so many and and i i think hopefully

this will be a wake-up call for a lot of people in the industry you know we've come a long way lightning has come substantially far for people like me and you uh you know i don't even make many on-chain transactions anymore i was you know i was ready for this i can continue to make lightning transactions um but there's there's still a big disconnect for new corners and and this idea of trying to conceptualize what the fee market is how to deal in a in a high fee environment um a lot of these wallets and services like aren't really set up to to handle it i mean we have on the list like cash app you know they they increase their their withdrawal limit because they pay the fee they would increase their withdrawal limit from 10 000 sats to 100 000

sats today um so it's like uh you know these are pain points and specifically where i was going with that is you know i've gotten so many dms about it which is one of the reasons why i focused on it on dispatch one of the reasons why we're focused on now um is like there's people that like three days ago they went on to mempool space or their wallet was you know either integrating with mempools apis or someone else's fee calculation apis and it's said you know if you want to get in in six blocks or 20 blocks you pay this fee and then the fees just run away from you you know like they never they keep going up so you don't you never that prediction is a bullshit prediction and it's very hard for someone to conceptualize you know do i pay 150 sats or 200

sats or 250 sats per byte and to me really has always been you know you either you either go for that next block in this kind of environment you either go for that next block or you're in the long term like i this idea that you're like targeting seven blocks in like a high fee environment is kind of bullshit i would agree with that yeah it's too hard to tell and then you're competing with like exchanges and other service providers that need to get move bitcoin around and will will pay to do that the service they're providing means they're willing to pay to do that and so you get squeezed out by them very interesting case study very interesting case study uh and so i guess from a best practices perspective what we can tell

newer freaks newer bitcoiners people are just getting in if you're buying on an exchange and you want to send a cold storage when you do send a cold storage you should always want to send it to cold storage or a wallet that you control at least uh you want to make sure that you're sending utxos that are they're pretty big right depends yeah the bigger the better well how big how what do you think is the minimum amount marty hard question right i don't want to sound like a like an elitist but like a contentious asshole right like a million sacks a million sacks you think the right amount is uh six hundred dollars anything under that is uh i mean i would even say higher if i mean if you're stacking

right now i've been saying 500 000 sets like our tf tc node to practice what i preach i i moved it down to a 500 sat minimum channel so if you want to open a channel you can get like a high efficiency routing node uh at 500 000 sets yes but that's a reach like i i'm just trying to be accessible yeah and so we're to the i don't want to put a sat threshold on it but just as you're transacting you're thinking as a bitcoiner don't be sending like five dollar five cuckbook you can even now yeah on cash app like fifty dollar like probably not enough um if the fee can't even do that on cash app anymore well cash app is 100 so it's 54 right now yeah hopefully this hopefully this pushes people towards lightning right exchanges particularly looks like i lost matt

yeah that's the real answer am i you see me now yeah the real answer and i said this on sailor academy because i i that video is going to last for a while it's like if you're watching this in like a year or two years like you're probably just never going to touch the chain right you just onboard directly onto lightning and you live there and then if you hit a certain threshold and you want to put like your savings away then you make an on-chain transaction but most people will never hit the chain they'll either use lightning liquid or another layered option yeah and hopefully we see more adoption because these this fee pressure is is up and i could see people clutching pearls right now and screaming oh my gosh bitcoins centralized people aren't people aren't touching

on chain like does that is bitcoin doing what it's supposed to do yes like this is something that's been predicted for a while yeah and i've talked about it many times on this podcast in the newsletter december 2010 hal finney wrote a bitcoin bank's uh forum post on bitcointalk.org and basically predicted this like hey in the future if bitcoin reaches enough adoption people are going to get priced out of on chain and you're going to have medium of exchange and and stuff pushed to second layers i don't think when he wrote the post he envisioned anything like lightning coming to market he talked about like a free banking system where you'd have like bitcoin banks have bitcoin in reserves and then they issue their own uh coins that that can

be used as a medium of exchange with with lighter fees uh but rest in peace how since he's passed we've had things like lightning come to market and i think that is something that's fulfilling the the vision that he had from the onset like these things are predictable if you understand the nature of scarce block space and just try to extrapolate scarce block space with a certain amount of people trying to use the chain um this stuff's gonna happen yeah i mean i triggered a lot of people this week because i said fees are designed to pump forever um but you know block space is scarce and uh demand is is is trends up forever so so fees are going to also pump forever and you should expect it you should prepare for it um i think lightning is you know so so the cool

thing about bitcoin is that you have a bunch of different because it's an open protocol you're going to have a bunch of different options right now you have lightning liquid and you have centralized custodial options the centralized custodial options are obviously not ideal that's probably more in line um with what how i was thinking uh but at least they compete with each other and users can move um liquid is like a balance in between which is like kind of feels like a free banking type of situation with the federation you know not quite custodial but not quite trust minimized fully you know uh but then lightning is kind of this interesting beast that has more complexity but as a as a result you have a way less trust and it's kind of interesting in

this fee situation compared to let's say 2017 um the similarities is all the bcash shills have come out uh the difference is what's interesting is bitcoin both has substantially higher on-chain fees than something like bcash or you know like a shit coin like an extra shit coin like litecoin or something i guess bcash is is if not more of a shit coin than litecoin even you know equal at least um not only the our on-chain fees are higher but our lightning fees are lower so some bitcoiners are paying the lowest transaction fees in the industry because they're on lightning or even if they're on liquid very few people are using liquid but liquid right now is 0.1 sats per byte so um but then there's another set of bitcoiners that are paying you know the highest fees in the

industry so it's an interesting dichotomy and it should you know start pushing people into these these other options um and pushing wallets into trying to figure it out i mean like if you're a wallet um and you only offer on chain you're like what the fuck am i doing right now like my users are just going to move to other wallets you know things like moon wallet which you know are are focused on being both lightning and on chain and giving you that flow m-u-u-n moon wallet yeah they got to change the name i'm sorry guys i love you but it's just like so hard to talk about on the on air um the other thing is uh that i wanted to mention and maybe you can you know since you're on the mining side i think it's really cool that people forget about

transaction fees is that in this situation right like we have you have 25 percent of of uh the miners leave the network right or approximately and so then you have the remaining miners right And you have this difficulty adjustment that is supposed to target two weeks, right? But when you have less hash, it's going to take a longer period of time. And this is where you end up in this situation that all the fudgers love to call like the mining death spiral. And what's really cool about transaction fees is the free market essentially comes in and increases transaction fees with demand because the blocks are coming in slower.

and it incentivized both it provides a higher profit margin you know people like you guys like a gam are making way more money because of the transaction fees and even if in an elongated period it can incentivize people to bring hash online that wasn't online before um because they want to they want to get that profit which is really fucking cool way it works yeah it's extremely dynamic can confirm i've been watching our rewards flow in from our pool over the last week and they have gone up we've been we've been stacking more sets and we would have if if hash remains stacked or was going up over over this difficulty epoch and yeah like you said like the way mining economics work like you're basically just looking at a profitability level that takes

your electricity costs into consideration and obviously the block reward and the amount of dollars that you can get from that to liquidate the cover opex and hopefully hold some stats on top of that and so if fee pressure goes up and you're stacking more sats per block it's a minor like there there's certainly situations out there where you may have people who have s9s and have like a three cent electricity rate where it wasn't profitable a couple weeks ago but now that hash rate has fallen off and block rewards have gone up they can plug in because it actually makes sense it's profitable they're going to be able to cover their opex and stack some sats on top of that yeah it's extremely dynamic and another thing the situation highlights and obviously

talk my book here disclaimer i work for great american mining but i think it validates one of our theses which is that uh if bitcoin wants to be sufficiently distributed and miners want to be sufficiently robust against these types of events happening on power grids like off-grid mining is is going to be essential like this modularized container mining that we're doing in the field sort of distributes our operational risk across many different geographic locations so we don't find ourselves in a situation where one big act of a government regular company and coming in and shutting down a centralized on-grid power facility affects our whole operation we do certainly have instances where a well pad could have some flow

issues or something like that that would take down a container temporarily but with our off-grid distributed model we're not really we don't have really concentrated risk from a regulatory or just freak accident perspective which is something to think about no yeah that's a really cool dynamic yeah i mean yeah and it's it's uh i think on grid versus off grid particularly like five years from now it'll be interesting to see how that that shifts obviously it's predominantly on grid now but it'll be interesting to see if people get priced off the grid or if grid systems start producing considerably more electricity that can then be

eaten up by miners the extra excess capacity great case study in bitcoin systems extremely robust extremely resilient i think bullish i do think even though you said it's hard to tell it's hard to prove i do think this does give us some insight into uh the i don't want to say fact but the possibility that there is considerably less less hash rate within china's borders than a lot of the fudsters would would like us to believe i just don't understand how 25 of the hash getting cut off in a single street is being flipped to say like oh this is like great for distribution of mining well no it's i said in the newsletter wrote earlier this week it is certainly still very concentrated but not as concentrated as many would have had you believe and there's another so

another actually interesting tidbit with this particular situation this may expedite the the annual migration of chinese miners to the sichuan province province from yin yang because of the the rainy season which is starting now so it's like about to happen right yeah it's starting now but that's like another narrative like i never heard that narrative before until like six months ago and they were like up all the miners are moving that was the like those like those two times six months ago and today and this week we're like were those the two largest single difficulty adjustment hash pulls let's pull it up i know you don't like this website but my favorite i just btc like just a steel man just a steel man it for like a second like

like we don't trust the ccp right so like if the ccp is cutting 25 of the hash they could easily believe the you know the remaining 20 they have online just to be like oh you know it's only 25 that's a good point they could be testing us you know they could be fucking get us used to you know seeing these rug pulls and hash and not get you know triggered by them not uh like i was i was saying too and i i want to be absolutely clear here that you know i am if anything i get shit for being too bullish on bitcoin i'm extremely bullish on bitcoin but i think it's important that that bitcoiners are adversarial um and if you were going to talk about a state actor fucking with bitcoin uh one of the ways the argument is is that they would pull a

large amount of hash at the beginning of difficulty adjustments right and it's like i feel like we're trying to normalize this idea like that's happening and i think a very common sense thing if you see a large amount of hash get pulled in the beginning of a difficulty adjustment and you're a large transactor is you should take more confirmations like you shouldn't you know all of a sudden you're gonna you're gonna want more confirmations uh before you like actually settle the transaction yes that's a very good point extend that beyond six confirmations which for some reason is the industry norm at this point especially if you're sending large amounts you don't want to get double spent um no and that and that is it was interesting the timing of this at

the beginning of the difficulty epoch um but maybe it was an unsuccessful attack or or attempted attack right i think they thought they're gonna have more if it was an attack like i honestly think it was um just people scrambling to quell fears uh in the social sphere in china i'm curious i'm curious on your thoughts here too there's another theory and this one like to be honest like i uh i just love these theories so i'm just gonna say it anyway um what are your thoughts about like a cartel of biners so like let's let's just say like you know there's like 20 percent like there's a there's a group of like guys you know that have known each other for a while um you know our space is kind of incestuous i imagine it's the same in asia

uh that know each other and they want to create uh they want to induce a fee spike they want to induce uh sustained fees for the rest of the year like a fee fomo type of thing like i feel like if you pulled and this is something i've been hearing but you like pull 20 of the hash and you create this fee spike we're more likely to not we're more likely to like continue the backlog after this than not would you agree well it depends how how much difficulty falls by during the next adjustment because right now you six months ago yes was the second largest adjustment at beginning of november at 16.05 the largest adjustment happened in 2011 around 18 and as of right now that one doesn't count yeah it doesn't count so modern times november 2020 was the most massive at 16

and this one right now is estimated to be at 22.1 i want to be surprised if this ends up being low 20 by the time it happens like around 18 19 so that'd be pretty significant it'd be like the same that happened in november in november it started way high and then by the time we got to the end more hash came back on the network yes and if it is to believe the the stories that are coming out of china in this particular region with these particular miners that were forced to shut down again it seems like they're already coming back on and if they're not already back on within the next week uh most of them will be plugged in again uh within two weeks and at that point you just have difficulty fall by let's say 15 to 18 percent and basically same hash rate as

you went into the last epoch and so blocks are probably going to be coming in at like nine minutes on average on the back end like what do you think about the theory in general that you we could have and this is one of the reasons why the difficulty adjustment is so so large that it takes you know the target is two weeks we saw with bcash early on they like switched their difficulty adjustment to like a 48 hour period or whatever and it was super gameable by like cartels of miners like they could just pull hash and then put hash back on after the difficulty adjust and fuck with everything but what do you think about the theory just in general that we could see you know maybe not even 20 of miners that we see 10 of miners or 15 of miners like

doing playing games with their hash to try and like like we saw in 2017 right we saw like roger veer and stuff at least we expect we we suspected them in combination with bitmain they were trying to juice the fee market to pump shit coins right like how is that argument not still on the table like how could you know i these guys could be neck deep in whatever shit coin yeah and they could be like juicing fees and then they also get to double dip because if fees stay up after this then they they'll get even more profit yeah i mean you gotta everything's on the table right certainly possible it's risky right if you take your hash rate off and you're unsuccessful in achieving what you aim to achieve with that type of manipulation and you're leaving sats on

the table and depending on where your power cost is you better hope your power cost is extremely low that you can stomach that risk uh yeah it's certainly possible i was talking to jimmy song last week about another type of mining collusion that that some people believe goes on which is like at at the top of these bull markets you have large miners basically dump a ton of bitcoin to crash the price and then squeeze out smaller miners and consolidate the mining industry um that way sense yeah just drive the profitability down to extremely low levels to try to squeeze out smaller miners that's it's one theory that exists in the bitcoin space as well as during these extreme bull runs they try to suppress the price and consolidate

hash rate within a few fewer players i mean if the goal is to pump shit coins you know the shit coins are pumping right like bcash bcash is up significantly you know the miners can switch to bcash that's true if they needed to switch if they needed to um where i'm from we're not supposed to trust the fucking miners so i just i think it's important that people just think about these things because i feel like no one's really talking about it everyone's just like yeah there's like this weird thing on twitter now where it's like if you don't like just tow the party line and just say bullish things which i'm you know guilty as anyone else on but uh it's like it's like then all of a sudden you're just like fudster and no one you know has the balls to actually talk about

this shit yeah yeah i agree i agree adversarial thinking is highly important anyway don't buy shit coins freaks yeah i wouldn't advise it these things can certainly happen they may be happening again i talk our own book at great american mining like we we don't play those games at least allegedly at least not yet i don't know like maybe at scale we think about i doubt we will but i don't think we would ever we're dedicated to bitcoin yeah then you have like the other thing like the slush pools the miners that sort of align with the slush pool mentality that they've had since they entered the mining space which is just be true to bitcoin there's a lot of those that exist out there but there's also those miners that just honestly don't give a fuck and they just

want to stack as many sats as possible or as much you want or usd as possible and play these games so something to take into consideration and to to understand but yeah i mean i think it's a very interesting case study we have the last two weeks people are like oh this is boring it's not interesting at all it's like yeah it's the best part you get you get some insight into chinese hash rate you get some insight into how the decline hash rate will affect fees and what that will do for minor profitability and what fees people are willing to pay to get included in blocks um all around it's win-win it proves that bitcoin's resilient difficulty adjustment works and that a fallen hash rate is not going to destroy the network. So very, very interesting

stuff. It's important for the freaks to realize, especially our new freaks that weren't around for the hash wars in 2017, is that if Bitcoin relied on the good faith of miners, it'd be a failed project. The key is that we don't have to assume good faith. We just have to assume that they're greedy and they're going to act in their own best interest. And Bitcoin is robust because of that. Yes. And that's, I think that's another way to put that is that the lesson the market learned in 2017 is that miners are at the will of full node operators. Miners are, I mean, some people don't like this terminology but they're literally slaves to the network and the consensus at any given point in time. If they want to get paid out and receive the rewards for expending energy and doing the proof of work to find a hash that allows them to add blocks to the Bitcoin network, they better be following consensus rules and making sure that only transactions that fall within the rule set are being included in the blocks. And if they don't, I mean, I think some people, they waste all that energy and all that money that it took to get that energy. and the stakes only get higher i think as the bitcoin price goes up and his hash rate goes up

because the amount of capital that goes into these operations increases significantly so maybe there's a case to be made that that fuckery becomes less likely because of the risk of the fucking up the capital outlay that you have in your operation at scale i mean i think slaves is a little bit uh people tend to go a little bit you know people hate nuance they go a little bit overboard i think it's more of like a type of a mexican standoff situation that's at least my opinion i think all stakeholders in this system can cause chaos at scale and uh we're loosely incentivized via loose game theory that that we're not going to want to cause chaos because you know we have massive uh incentive to see the bitcoin price increase and

chaos is obviously bad for business people want stability and predictability and they don't want chaos agreed i think bitcoin's incentives are beautiful i think they work everybody the only winning move is to play to play along as michael goldstein famously tweeted out a couple years ago all right let's get to the list uh venmo they had a bitcoin iou support no withdrawals do not buy bitcoin on venmo or robin hood or robin hood then robin hood that dude come out like posture like they're gonna add the ability to withdraw yeah they're all posturing robin hood's posturing and uh coin and coinbase and venmo is posturing it and venmo is owned by paypal and so paypal has been posturing but i'll believe it when i see it you

know and until then um nobody should be buying from them because nobody should be keeping custody with these providers anyway so if you can't pull them off then they're completely useless that said uh as we've seen with the doge pump uh retail is filled with idiots and they like these platforms these platforms have tons and tons of users so you know from a number go up standpoint uh benmo adding you know bitcoin buys should increase the the purchase base you know and and it should increase uh the price i mean i think it's it's still as as much as it's a roll your eyes type of news to me especially you know the twitter accounts that love to embellish news like this and don't mention the fact that there's no withdrawals and they make it seem like it's super

super moon things there is definitely a balance in between there right it's not a non i put it right in the front like i it's not non-news it's just not as bullish as people make it seem to be yeah from i think it's it's news in the sense like social acceptance bitcoin being accepted socially across industries i think proves that whether they do it correctly or not a lot of businesses particularly in the fintech arena are starting to think like all right we need uh bitcoin involved with our company in some way or form which is pretty massive i mean in the u.s there's only three really major payment p2p air quotes p2p payment apps and that's cash app venmo and paypal and they all have bitcoin purchases now right which is pretty fucking crazy to think about

yes only one allows you to withdraw right now disclaimer sponsor the podcast shop uh and they raised their withdrawal limit so be aware of that can you please anybody at cash app listening like just raise your withdrawal limits like in general like you gotta pump gotta pump those withdrawal numbers okay they know they raise their withdrawal minimum instead of their maximum yeah let's raise that maximum remember is we work another company that feels compelled to to posture like they're and they know about bitcoin they're accepting bitcoin uh as a form of payment as long as uh as well as other cryptocurrencies as well i believe coinbase is their payment processor and bitpay so not

surprising they're they're accepting bitcoin ethereum usdc and paxos and several other cryptocurrencies payment for its offering and it will hold it on its valid sheet all the cryptocurrencies are just bitcoin they didn't really say i'm just gonna assume only bitcoin i also i didn't list the other cryptocurrencies there also venmo has a bunch of shit coins they added as well and i just didn't mention that but it's like the it was a venmo like the like old bland like bitcoin litecoin bcash and ethereum or something like that yeah i hate that they all add bcash man like what the fuck where's the due diligence period where you're like i'm just gonna add this completely insecure garbage fucking bitcoin fork that's super scammy yeah i know

people are lazy people are lazy and we works a terrible company i mean this is this just seems like a a pr play by them well it's cool because they're accepting it for payment they say they're going to hold it on their balance sheet and they say if contractors want to pay them that they'll pay the contractors in if contractors will accept you know bitcoin then they'll pay them in it um and i i i think it goes hand in hand with coinbase has like a bunch of they have like a big contract with them in terms of office space um but yeah this is like what you kind of you know this is i think it's more bullish than like a 2017 news headline where they're just accepting it for payment immediately converting it yeah but bit paying coinbase as their partners come on come on

come on all right on to more interesting news and more important news in my opinion uh coin center's letter uh this week they sent another letter they send this directly to yeah they send directly to the financial action task force which again is an unelected group of bureaucrats who create guidelines around kyc aml compliance that for some reason all the large financial institutions just adopt wholeheartedly and so coin center wrote a letter uh comment to the financial action task force uh and they're posturing about potential guidelines that they're going to put forth for virtual asset service providers or anybody bitcoin exchange any other service provider that interacts with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies about kyc aml and i think this was really well

done particularly the like really pushing the ball forward and like hey if you're tying identities to particular addresses with particular amounts of bitcoin like you were literally putting people in physical harm's way which is something we just need to keep leaning into as hard as possible that and i appreciated that yeah that and the fact that these regulations are completely ineffective they don't do anything to stop the actual crimes that they purport to to stop yeah you know they're like twice a year three times a year coin center does something that earns their yearly donation for me and this is one of them uh i do think i share the criticism a lot of other people share that they've focused a little bit too much on trying to um to it to

make it legal for these companies to dump unregistered securities on retail uh which is just an issue i could give two shits about um on either side uh but it's it's nice to see them come back to the basics of basically as simple as you know they they they said it straight up they were like having kyc information tied to a bitcoin withdrawal address is is extremely dangerous for users which is fantastic that's clear straight to the point love to see it go support coin center shout out jerry brito naraj peter van vol dan balkenberg um this was actually from peter specifically um really really yeah really straight to the point good letter i mean again like we said last week fataf is an even illegal entity in france like they're not even

it's like some weird attack on society that was just like, nobody voted for them. Nobody asked for them. They didn't go through any like legal procedures, like domicile, as like a regulatory agency, apparently. And yet they have all this power. It's weird. It's weird. Why do these people have all this power? More people need to speak up against them. Don't give them the power we need to destroy the financial action task force there's like two demons within there that we gotta protect ourselves against everybody else may be like well-meaning people but there's definitely a demon or two within within the halls of fadif so shout out to coin

center uh be aware and they're just like fight back keep leaning into the fact that these people are unelected they shouldn't have no say over any of these regulations and more importantly these regulations are are wholly ineffective i think they literally do not stop the crimes that they're trying to and they put more people in harm's way and they save people bitcoin and governments turkey they want to ban they want to ban bitcoin turkey's banning bitcoin this is interesting right they want to ban bitcoin payments yeah not you can buy hold sell trade i just you can't they don't want you to go buy a sandwich with it are they doing that buy hold sell trade they want it on third parties though right

of course i mean you're going to do it on a regulated custodian but this is what we've been talking about right is is they go for the withdrawal and the the circular economy like the real threat to these authoritarian regimes is is bitcoin becoming a proper circular economy and you just route around all of their bullshit yeah so they don't want merchants downloading btc pay server accepting payments that way they don't want individual citizens sending bitcoin to personal wallets so here is the official press release and the bullet points they have laid out crypto assets entail significant risk to the relevant parties due to the following reasons they are not they are neither subject to any regulation and supervision mechanisms nor essential regulatory

authority their market values can be excessively volatile they may be using illegal actions due to their anonymous structures wallets can be stolen or used unlawfully without the authorization of their holders and transactions are irrevocable so another class doing it for their own protection yeah another classic case of the state doing all this taking these freedoms away from you to protect you you are not smart enough to protect yourself you need the turkey turkish government to come in and protect you from yourself any turks listening to this another uh key aspect here and you mentioned it in passing um this is why it's so important that we have open source uh projects and tools like btc pay server um that allow these merchants to you know disobey their masters

and and because like a bit pay or even you know fuck bit pay but like even like an open node who we love on the pod but is a centralized company they can't operate there like as soon at the end of this month they can know they'll be breaking turkish law if they operate there right but with btc pay server it's a free open source project if a merchant wants to keep accepting payments um they can and they can do it on their own in a self-sovereign way and if governments want to try and enforce it and stop it they're going to have to go store by store merchant by merchant and basically like get them in like undercover operations right where they like pretend like they're just a customer or client that wants to pay in bitcoin and like catch them

in the act that's like the only way to enforce it yeah dirty bodega owners accepting bitcoin without the eyes of the state protecting you from yourself how dare you off to the goo leg speaking of btc pay server let's just go right into shout outs we have four shout outs this week before we forget let's get into them first one up good shout outs this week too this uh this person was very proud of you last week matthew i'm drunk after listening to matt call out sailors custody strategy to his face and trolling teen on sessions tonight such a good time never change matt marty you're cool too your boy and poker buddy nate cheers i wasn't able to hear you call out tina well what were you were you saying he was too

bearish yeah i hit him with a little bit of taste of his own medicine it got a little bit excessive i will admit it wasn't uh had a little bit too much to drink but it was a fun time matt what are you talking about i hit him with his own medicine you know he's like fucking i just i think uh you know uh i'm just trying to weaponize price targets because uh a lot of people use price targets and especially a lot of shit corners and i i want the plebs to realize um i think it's imperative that plebs stack as much as fucking possible before we have billionaire fomo corporate fomo and government fomo all kick in very fucking quickly um and the only real way to to hit the gravity of that situation is to make is price calls uh you know it really brings the point home

um and bitcoin tina you know like he pretends to be a bull but he was saying like 200k by the end of the year and that just seems really bearish to me so tina but i love you tina 100 love you tina pump that t up bro 200k what is that i'm gonna pump those numbers sir we're hitting 800k by the end of the year actually i heard an interesting theory like uh what would a max pain scenario be like to try to shake people out of bitcoin this year there's a theory about like a carry trade like we we just like persist in this consolidation throughout the summer uh we get an etf everybody closes their shorts we like

rip it higher and then you have like an echo bubble in the altcoin world they pump too and everything crashes after the etf hype and uh we get like max pain again and like that max pain situation happened in 2020 man so many of our brothers and sisters got fucking wrecked in march so the max pain would be like a repeat of that like thinking that we're beyond that and just having it happen again not down to like three thousand but like a similar fractal from from the new highs there's a very simple strategy here freaks don't use leverage don't keep your coins on exchanges don't put them in custodians that re-hypothecate as a service just stay humble stack stats and you should be fine yeah um i uh what also what people don't realize and

is like we don't need a super cycle to hit 700k at the top of the cycle if if we're in line if we're in line with 2012 then that's 700 800k if we're in line with the last cycle that's about 300k if we're somewhere in the middle that's like completely within range if we hit like a humble 200k cool with that as well you know but this idea that like it's this this absolutely ridiculous concept that we could hit 800k a million dollars you know sat sent parity this cycle is not like that it's not that fucking crazy yeah that's actually a really interesting chart that you've been sharing in the sat standard uh over the last month is the halving tracker so if you're on twitter at having tracker into them yeah h-a-l-v-i-n-g-t-r-a-c-k-e-r at having tracker

on twitter and right now their last tweet was 12 hours ago and we're trending right with the the average of the 2012 and 2016 post having price pumps were literally right between what happened in in both so this is like a humble 600k top i'm seeing if we if we follow 2012 it would be like 700 if we follow the average of the two it'd be around like 300 would be the top no no isn't 300 the 2016 one that it won't and that lines like with the no the three 2016 would be like 275 it looks like on this log scale okay so then what's the middle one it can't be 300 then it's 300 anyway the halving track is run by uh uh is run by our boy bitstein so shout out to him fantastic little bot go check it out i'll just keep posting in the standards just really drill

it in um but you know if i'll take 6x whatever like this is this is crazy i i haven't the last time i felt like this was december and we were sitting at 18 and the last time i felt like that before this before december was like in march after we got fucking absolutely killed um so you know am i a permable yeah but my bullishness changes um that's one of the reasons why i fucking went so hard on friday uh is just because i just the gravity of the situation is still not being appreciated and i just don't want uh i just everyone thinks they're late you know and and these top calls are just ridiculous people's you know we we had the guggenheim guy who keeps calling for like 400 500k tops or whatever he's like we might go down 50 now like

they're just fucking with us got minred yeah and like it comes out like he'll call these crashes then it'll turns out he bought a bunch of bitcoin around the same time so all noise i mean that ends it every episode with that stay humble stacks that's just like the best strategy head down don't worry about all the noise out there and that's one thing too from like a fundamental perspective like too many people are focused on price look at what's going on the development space and i tweeted this out last night too like nothing like in the all coins like alts are pumping everybody's like oh my god is bitcoin gonna get flippant like what i'm seeing in the mining space again i've said this many times as well but the physical infrastructure being built

out for the bitcoin network far exceeds anything like it only competes with fiat currencies in that regard like the physical infrastructure that's been built out to protect the u.s dollar reserve system that's what bitcoin's competing with like none of the altcoins come anywhere close to literal physical infrastructure that has been deployed to distribute and secure the bitcoin network because that is the signal throughout all this altcoin noise in my my opinion like i don't even it's like not even worth getting worked up over it anymore too many people are getting too worked up over it just head down stack sets just try to focus on other things like yes you can try to stop scammers i do agree a lot of scammers you don't want to see people get scammed but

some people got to touch the stove and if it's not worth getting too emotional over and if you insist on talking price 500k by the end of the year let's go let's go these are my favorite shout outs man when you have people just talking to each other it has nothing to do with us shout out to my homeboy tyler shout out to my homeboys michael pj and vanessa tyler michael pj and vanessa i hope this message finds you well i have no idea who's sending it to you again my favorite my favorite type of shout out second to last shout out here first of all huge thanks to marty matt for making my week every week all right i'm calling the

freaks for help here i'm sick and tired of hearing the central banks touting their worthless cbdc initiatives christine lagarde's latest rant saying that people want private but not anonymous cryptocurrencies push me over the edge let's all start to call them for what they really are surveillance tokens i'm a pretty big believer in the power of the meme and if we all meme that shit right back at them all over the internet when they try to push their orwellian nightmare on us i think we may win people will start to automatically associate their cbdcs with surveillance even if they first don't understand why but it will make them think so freaks please let's start using the correct term from now on it's not cbdcs it's surveillance tokens stay humble d

i agree with that yeah i mean i've always hated cbdc's is like such a blockchain or shit coiner fucking term like that came out of nowhere fuck you just that's the horrible term in general it always it always bothered me and it's they're already digital like they're the central bank currencies are already like digital currencies they're like just like to think that the central bank digital currency is going to have like a blockchain in any way because it's stupid it's literally going to be the same thing just packaged and marketed a certain way with more granular control that yes it's a surveillance tool it's an orwellian control tool like so you say surveillance tool i'd like to say like control

tool they want to cattle herd you into these cbdc wallets so they can control who you can interact with how you spend your money where you're spending your money maybe how quickly you have to spend your money it's all about control they want to control you and these cbdc's are a very powerful tool that that they can do um that they can use to leverage and gain control over you which is a very scary thought yeah i mean the dollar is already a cbdc But what they envision when they say CBDC is they mean even stronger control than they have right now. And I do agree with you that I think the narrative should be more controlled because, unfortunately, while I do 100% agree that there are also going to be surveillance coins, and we've actually had them say it out loud,

you know, that what Augustin Carstens of the Bank of International Settlements, I think he said, like, specifically, he was like, we can basically replace cash with something we can completely track and trace. um the unfortunately uh i've noticed firsthand that not very many people care about their privacy so they tend to care more about their their money getting eroded their wealth getting eroded their and and just not having control you're not having freedom um this idea like i mean i think like mark cuban uh notorious shit coiner i i think he like he said for the stimulus right for the the checks that get sent out to people if we did it through a cbdc you can make it so that if you know they they have to spend it within like three weeks on specific

things um which is just like it just gets super draconian and like you know you know like the things you've got to spend it on are going to all be like the corporate bullshit right it's just like whatever corporation has owns our owns our governments are just those are the corporations that you're going to have to spend your shit on yeah i'm pretty sure like visa and mastercard are starting to team up with these banks these mega banks you know the central banks bank of an international settlement imf to to start to implement this stuff so again um i think it's all about control and so freak i love that you pointed out this christine lagarde comment specifically and this comes on the heels of comments made by augustin carson's like matt

mentioned we're in the normalization phase they're trying to normalize this stuff like christine lagarde stared into a camera and said people want this people don't want privacy they they need a a quote-unquote digital currency uh that that allow us to to see what's going on and keep everything above board so that we can uh take down like bad actors that's again they're using the guise of of protecting people from criminals uh to completely surveil and control them uh but yeah it's be on the lookout for bitcoin yeah good thing we have bitcoin but just observationally moving forward be on the lookout for these normalization campaigns like they're picking up like you're you're going to see more of this jerome powell will probably start talking about

this as well i don't even know if like the normalization campaigns are really like at the end of the day marty um they're gonna tell people we're gonna give you free money because we're a central bank and we're the only ones who can give you free money so we're gonna give you free money and if you want that free money then you're gonna fucking take it in this way and if you don't then you don't get it and and the overwhelming majority of people are gonna put their head down and they're going to take the fucking cuck box yeah weak weak man come on don't let them hang that that little carrot in front of you don't don't fall for that it's a siren call it's a siren call um all right last shout out very short and sweet yo from vague what's up vague yo yo

during the vague paid 20 during the session stream to tell me that i had a cluck mentality while i was up there a cluck mentality yeah clucker cuck yeah because youtube youtube won't let him youtube won't let him type cuck that's where cluck mentality came from is in the in the youtube won't let you type cuck yep i wonder what they think about our cuck bucks are we gonna get demonetized well we don't even monetize on youtube we're gonna get taken down dude we're already demonetized um all right back to the list back in turkey uh this is why you don't keep your coins on exchanges freaks uh we have a turkish exchange uh owner basically just taking all the bitcoin are running away flee the country suspect big crypto losses as exchange ceo goes missing is

the headline from blueberg earlier this morning uh the exchange is dot x t-h-o-d-e-x um it's a tiny exchange i wonder um it's awfully interesting that you know 10 days ago or five days ago six days ago yeah because it was in between last rhr so five days ago the turkish government says at the end of the month they're going to attempt to ban bitcoin payments and then this guy like exit scams right so i i feel like i mean fuck him for exit scamming but you know maybe it was like oh shit like i just got to get the fuck out of here so i'm just going to steal all my customers money as much as possible or if it's like a small exchange like you said is it a false flag like a a reason to be because that's like the second that's like the second bullet point of the

synopsis of the article is the market needs to be regulated advisor to erdogan says so it's just like a school that's perfect false flag right yeah all you have to do is pay off one guy right you pay off one guy who's already probably a little bit corrupt and then you just you use as a pretense to to to crack down on the bigger exchanges yeah we need to protect you government coming to protect you they always do a good job of it so trust them trust them we talked about this earlier in the episode but we'd like to see more exchanges adopt lightning and onboard people via lightning to help reduce fee pressure not fee not reduce fee pressure but to reduce the burden of individual users having to pay on-chain fees so they can keep more of

their sats and lo and behold okex adds lightning support they added lightning support this week so that's a pretty big exchange um basically adding lightning support and adding to that trend and i think i saw a freak uh ask in the youtube comments earlier are there any u.s exchanges that that have lightning support river.com does uh ellen strike does that's the only two you know bitfinex is only two i know i'm telling you man kraken's publicly working on it so hopefully they'll have that release soon they're they're all working on it there's no way that this fee pressure is happening right now and not all all the exchanges all the wallets they're all fucking scrambling to add lightning and probably also liquid to be honest because liquid i mean bitfinex was bragging

that liquid took them a couple hours to implement like lightning is a major operation to implement you have to have a liquidity strategy you have to have this hot wallet all this different stuff liquid um well i understand that a lot of people don't like the trade-offs you know especially the hardcores because there's there's more trust in this federation um uses the the same bitcoin apis they built liquid to you know to to be a federated basically a federated version of bitcoin it's got the same utxo models everything is super easy for these services to implement and you don't have to worry about the headache on the receiver side of liquidity or liquidity management or having any inbound. So I could see liquid becoming, look, if it doesn't, if liquid isn't successful

at getting adoption now in this fee situation, they're never going to get it. And I could see it getting, it makes sense to me almost from like a stacker's perspective that, you know, we were talking about what's a good amount to, to, to withdraw when you're stacking, if you could just, you know, auto stack $50 a day or a week or whatever to a liquid wallet. And then, so, so you go from a custody to less custody. So you have a little bit less, you have significantly less custody risk than if you keep it with a single

exchange. And then once you hit, you know, you know, 500,000 sats or a million sats, then you come back on chain or you go into lightning through there, right? That flow kind of makes sense to me in terms of a stacker's mentality. Yeah, I like that flow. Yeah, why not? Optionality is what you should look for. Different strokes for different folks.

Some people would prefer lightning. Some people would prefer liquid. Different types of users, different solutions provide different utility. So why not create optionality? Any of you Bitcoin exchanges out there that are messing in shit coinery, you're you're basically dropping the ball providing these services for probably like your core customer which is bitcoiners who you should probably be driving trying to drive more value towards instead of chasing the fees of shitcoin casinos i know it's very lucrative um it's hard

hard to not see why these exchanges would go after those fees again it's very lucrative but is it a short-term decision that that'll bite you in the ass in the long term i wouldn't i wouldn't be so surprised if it is so 100 it is if you already support bitcoin or bcash you can easily implement liquid just just get it fucking done i think like right now what is like bitfinex is the only one that i know of that offers it and they offer both lightning and liquid i'm trying to think okay i can't think of another off the top of my head um so with this okex news that deposits and withdrawals which is good to say so you're going to send bitcoin to sell if you're into that or withdrawal to a lightning wallet using okex

so shout out to that team more pressure all you exchanges out there get on a cash app get on it let's get on it you know cash app's definitely scrambling i mean jack has an investment in lightning labs i think that this okex thing is a perfect example right because they announced it a couple months ago that they were working on lightning and the fees definitely just pushed their hand you know they're like fuck we got to get it done how close are we you know like over 90 done with our integration like fucking bring it live we have to make it happen like some guys worked extra hours you know to make it happen and that's exactly what we want to see from this the fees right it's like it's like they create good incentives um to be more efficient on chain

yes yes yes yes already mentioned earlier but it doesn't hurt to announce it again cash app raises the withdrawal minimum to a hundred thousand sats from ten thousand sats so just be aware of that if you're a cash app user i'm sure the app will make you aware of that if you try to send less than a hundred thousand sets so yeah they didn't release that they didn't release a press release like it was discovered because people tried to withdraw underneath and it pops up a warning yeah um should be noted too like you can send if you're sending to another app user you can just send it within the app much easier send it to the cash deck if if both parties are comfortable with that i see you shaking your head over there

um custodial layer two how how finney's vision just kidding uh bitcoin core version 0.21.1 rc1 taproot speedy trial client has been released and of course it comes with more drama it's a tapper drama a lot true la false drama ever gonna end so yes speedy trial uh if you listen to the episode with uh ben carman if you listen to citadel dispatch and since last week speedy trial has been merged and activated into core uh it's going to start after the next difficulty adjustment which now is estimated to be on may 1st you can start signaling for that so you can download this version of bitcoin core and um that will have speedy trial activated and of course

not of course but um there's also a user activated software taproot client that's been released so that's at bitcoin taproot.cc um and so what what are you seeing with both activation methods playing out in parallel so um yeah so the last two the last two shows we've had on the podcast feed have have focused on taproot and they both had ben ben carmen in them um the so speedy trial is is i is is included in both clients um this second one this user activated soft fork version is if speedy trial fails if miners fail to signal which it doesn't seem like they will it seems like there's over 90 support to signal for taproot within the three month signaling period of speedy trial but if that weren't to happen anyone running this uh this

alternative client bitcoin taproot.cc um would basically uasf in taproot i think october 22nd um is somewhere around there is is is the time for them to do it so it's like kind of like a gun to miners heads um it's probably a little bit premature you know you could technically run it after speedy trial happens and and there'll be you know if speedy trial if the signaling fails um you can run it at that point and there's no you know there's no uh difference than if you were running it today um but you know it's good to see adversarial bitcoin is still out there you know there's it's important that bitcoin core isn't like this behemoth that can't be touched i think in my opinion and i i do think it's a very interesting thing to keep in mind in that

And in Bitcoin Optech, I love Bitcoin Optech newsletter, but they did not mention that this UASF client existed. They only mentioned the Bitcoin Core client, which is a very interesting thing just for the freaks to keep in mind. Beware freaks. Again, I think both, obviously Matt said both have Speedy Trial activated so that signaling will start at block height 681,408. so that's when signaling will be possible uh earliest activation with the user activated soft fork uh and a speedy trial um as well with the bitcoin core release as well is november 12th yeah you're gonna win the bet that's block 709 632 latest activation with the user activated soft fork would be around november 11 2022 um and the timeout height if it none of this works uh

760 032 block 760 032 which is estimated to be around halloween next year um this is for no that's not that's when the uasf comes into play that's when the time that's when it times out that's when like if you don't get 90 threshold with user activated soft fork then we go back to the drawing board again no no no no the uasf if you run the bitcoin taproot.cc client it's going to force it's going to force taproot in in october 2022 it's a timeout okay so the timeout isn't just stop it's just like all right it's activated if you're running this they both have speedy trial in them so if that's a three month signaling period it's a it's a three month signaling period if if miners if miners signal then both clients will just proceed for activating

taproot around november right of this year marty wins the bet i pay hrf a million sats if that three-month period it doesn't we don't have 90 minor signal which once again we i expect that we will but we don't then then if then the uasf nodes will fork off the network in october of next year and you know it's yet to be seen you know what happens in that situation right there's going to be a there will be a fight it'll be like uh it's kind of like 2017 it'll be a mexican standoff probably leading up to it um and we'll see who goes where yeah i don't think it gets to that point but if it does get to that point this is how it will play out with this client specifically uh aaron van weirdom incredible technical writer

over at bitcoin magazine has written um a write-up for this if you're interested to learn about that he dropped that uh three days ago so if you if you want to learn more and have that articulated in a much more technical fashion aaron has uh has laid everything out over at magazine so we're gonna link to that in the show notes um and now we're at software updates very short software update week two lines my node version 0.2.30 has been released looking at the release notes since we only have two releases uh it doesn't seem like anything too crazy they don't really have really good release notes it seems on the github page at least it just has source code yeah the release notes are separate yeah uh but from what i remember on a glance it

was just you know they updated a bunch of packages that were in there all right and then start nine there there's um this is a big one their note in the box that sphinx onion pages and photo view so sovereign and yeah so i had one of the co-founders of start nine on the show proof of Keegan on Dispatch, not this week, but last week. If you haven't listened, consider go checking it out. It's a pretty cool project. And they've just been adding new apps, if you want to call them apps, to this node in a box platform they have. These three are pretty cool. Well, Sphinx, obviously, we're big promoters of Sphinx here, so it's good to see them add relay uh so if you're a start nine user now you're joining uh the ranks of

umbral and raspi blitz and being able to easily uh run sphinx from your own node um and then they added this thing called onion pages uh i think they're calling it embassy pages that's their name the os but onion pages which is this idea that you can run a static uh tour only website directly from your node without exposing your ip address which is really fucking cool um there i think there's a service called an app called onion share on on desktop where you can do the same thing um so that's dope and then the last one's called photo viewer which is like a drop-in replacement of like google photos but you run it from your node so yeah cool yeah so their node software their operating systems embassy start nine labs.com is their website

s-c-a-r-t nine the number nine labs.com really cool team uh as matt said he had keegan on Citadel Dispatch, a couple weeks ago, Matt Hill, their CEO, has been on TFTC as well. If you're interested to learn more about that sovereignty in a box that they're working on with their embassy operating system, I highly recommend you check it out. It goes well beyond Bitcoin. When was Matt on the show? God, earlier this year or end of last year. I forget exactly when. I think he was just down in Texas for BitDevs and B-Stake.

i didn't run into him which is odd i should have i met him i met him and keegan at uh bitblock boom this year yeah good dudes very good dudes very good project again sovereignty in a box their embassy os square and arc they argue that bitcoin is good for the environment in their white paper that they dropped yesterday basically explaining that bitcoin incentivizes the production of renewable energy sources because bitcoin miners will be the energy consumer of first resort they'll be in the first customers that show up and say hey we'll take this cheap electricity and allow you to produce more and more of this electricity generation via solar and wind and hopefully by doing that it'll it'll lead to more green renewable energy generation

being produced and used by the world. What are your thoughts on this, Mr. Miner? I think it's good. I think it's true. Bitcoin mining certainly incentivizes this when it comes to particularly the levelized cost of energy in the paper. We had our engineers at Great American Mining talking about this yesterday.

And there's some misleading information about green energy production, as opposed to like something like something that's energy dense, like natural gas or oil. While yes, the LCOE, the levelized cost of energy has fallen 90%. Wind and solar saying is between 2% or excuse me, 2 cents per kilowatt hour and 5 cents per kilowatt hour. it's a bit misleading because the capacity and the intermittency of those green technologies is considerably low compared to like something like natural gas where it's around 40 percent capacity for the levelized cost of energy where something like natural gas is around 86 percent so yes they're in the same levelized cost of energy range however when it comes to actually being reliable um that they really don't compare so it's a little bit truth a little bit virtue signaling

would you agree yes and i don't it's important virtue signaling right because we have we have so many that virtue signal from the opposite side right that it's like it's very important that we have large companies just come out like did you see like the interchange between like jack and then elon musk responded underneath like true like that's that's fantastic for bitcoin in terms of um countering this uh this this narrative that bitcoin is bad for the environment yes well so preface this rant with the fact that i love everybody involved like a square crypto team steve lee of course our team yassine miles everybody involved i don't think we should kowtow to these people like we should not kowtow to the hysterics that want us to act a certain way

like again i've been saying this on gamcast particularly strong men need to stand up and speak sense to the world like i'm all for green energy production electricity production from green energy sources but we should not kowtow to these literal anti-human communists who hate the fact that we consume energy and produce electricity and that want to push us towards these literally unreliable like definitionally like you can't rely on the sun being out all the time or wind being blowing all the time and the batteries just aren't there yet and there's this very concerted effort by people who have, frankly, just been wrong time and time again for literal decades that are trying to push us towards this unreliable energy source that is

literally going to make humanity worse off. It's going to drive up energy prices. It's going to make energy and electricity deliverability unreliable, which leads to the blackouts that we've seen in austin in the texas area this year and in california uh and i just don't think we should kowtow to these people we should stand up and speak sense like fossil fuels are good organic fuels are good uh but are they really kowtowing like they have to they they have to fight back right so they and you got to fight back in like a diplomatic way you know i don't know if uh you know they're playing chess it's a but because the other side diplomatic about it like they literally doesn't matter you're playing

chess you got to win the chess game yes i mean it is true bitcoin mining does incentivize the production of of green energy sources right and it many bitcoin bitcoin mining as an industry is probably the highest penetration of green energy sources as an electricity generation mechanism of any industry in the world these things are true um however i don't think we should pretend like we're going to be able to uh transition to a completely green energy um future and then also sort of glosses over the amount of hydrocarbons that are necessary to actually produce this quote-unquote green energy future i say quote-unquote green energy because it takes an immense amount of fossil fuels to produce these technologies there's there's two different

things here right there's bitcoiners that are it's one thing if a bitcoiner is uh you know accepting someone else's narrative right and we shouldn't accept other people's narratives we should just you know stand our fucking ground um but these three companies that are involved here uh square tesla and arc they operate in the public markets right and there's a ton of market pressure in terms of being green and being all these different stuff so they have yes they have yeah they have fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maintain their share price and extend their share price i don't even know if it's they're basically justifying their support of bitcoin to shareholders from their narrative and it is what it is like that's their incentive

to do that right i agree i agree and again i think again there's some misleading stats in there but it is true that bitcoin does incentivize this this clean energy production but i don't know i worry like i've been completely alex epstein pilled like like if you listen to him you read his book and you you understand like the nuance around the conversation when it comes to electricity production like if if like the greta thunbergs of the world get their way it is bad for humanity electricity prices are going to go up electricity reliability is going to go down and people are going to be worse off for it and most importantly the poorest people in the world are going to be considerably worse off for it and that's like the

weird paradox of this whole green movement is it's it's uh posturing like it's going to save people and save the planet when it's actually going to hurt the most disadvantaged people on the planet the most i i just i don't think you're going to be able to i don't consider it really that much of a threat because i i don't think you're going to be able to stop people from using whatever the cheapest energy is that's available and uh someone that i respect the band already bent uh once said that bitcoin is the green new deal so i feel like this is just like the corporate this is the corporate way of saying that in a research paper yes it is it is but again i just want so that's the thing

but it is virtue signaling for this esg narrative to fill sit within these guidelines or these this narrative that's like cbdc yeah exactly and it's so like that i i've gotten a telegram chat about this yesterday like and people are like oh well this is the only way you get access to capital is you have to posture like you're doing this it's like what are we doing here like we're trying to bring bitcoin to the masses the bitcoin network the bitcoin ledger which represents objective truth and we're going to virtue signal for this thing that if it is successful is going to make humanity worse off and doesn't follow objective truth the the narrative that's being pushed by the the the climate hysterics is is like is doesn't have truth behind it it's they

miss they use statistics and probability to manipulate headlines and stories they cherry pick data and manipulate data to push a narrative that isn't driven by objective truth and that's why like i think again like in every aspect of what we're doing here in modernity like we need strong men to stand up and like speak sense we can't like kowtow to these hysterics who are wrong and they are misleading and they are disingenuous uh and be a bitcoiner at the same time like i just don't think that there's logical consistency there from like bitcoiners we we go and we're trying to bring objective truth to the world and via this ledger we should we should search and try to bring objective truth to the world outside of this ledger too to be morally ethically

logically consistent so that's where i don't want to kowtow to these people anymore and you don't have to you know the cool part about bitcoin is that we don't have you know a centralized messaging department right we don't have a centralized uh you know anything so the so so you have different participants and they're going to all act in different ways but ultimately our incentives align in terms of bitcoin becoming more robust and and the price going up so yes i mean obviously disclaimer we're for great american mining we use natural gases our energy source to produce electricity for our a6 okay yeah and again like but even you you do it in a green way right yeah yeah we we help reduce methane leak like we could that's the thing that

pisses me off is like we could we could take advantage of this esg narrative too like we we certainly do but it's like ah like the carbon credit game the carbon credit game the whole concept of like net zero carbon it literally does not make sense we are carbon-based life forms if you want net zero carbon like everybody would have to die on the planet that's what i'm saying right like it's not logically consistent my understanding is tesla thrives on that regulatory situation with carbon credits and whatnot they make a ton of money off of them um it's all accounting game like it's not no but but that's what i'm saying you can't purely you can't purely judge uh his like uh elon's moves based on a bitcoin narrative right he's got to do the tesla

narrative too like he's his whole company's based on that shit yeah and it's all subsidized a lot of it's subsidized by the government and again it's again objective truth bitcoin sound money leads to a more accurate allocation of capital good argument to be made that there's been a ton of capital misallocated towards these quote-unquote green energy solutions that has made society worse off if nothing had been done in terms of subsidies for those particular free market for energy we'll sort it out and bitcoin is that free market yes and again i want to say i love everybody involved yeah they they know i love them yeah yeah objective truth seek objective truth don't kaltel

to extremist because that's like that's how you get into these problems right like is it cow tail or cow toe cow toe k-o-w-t-o-w okay that's what i thought cow tail i i accent coming out here um and what's the what's the definition for the freaks there's someone asking in the chat uh basically be subservient and try to appear bend the knee yeah bend the knee yeah yeah okay bang bang um this is so weird dude i saw this i was like what is binance a spook company yeah former comptroller of the currency brian brooks the new ceo of binance usa so that we had two back to back so brian brooks is is extra funny because so brian brooks i mean this is just classic regulatory capture revolving door corruption bullshit so brian brooks was the

the chief lawyer at coinbase you know fought to dump unregistered securities on retail then he became the comptroller of the currency um then coinbase ipo'd or he left the comptroller of the currency because of the administration change then coinbase ipo'd i'm sure he got like a nice little package out of there and now he's joining binance us fresh out of the u.s government role and then we have um the the ex cftc's chair uh giancarlo um is now a board member of blockfi so like these you know this is the the corrupt old system just playing out just as it's always played out the revolving door it's like so this is like a is binance ever gonna get great play by binance yeah right like they're

they're like a lot of people expect them to get brought down by the long dick of the law but this is a pretty strong ally they brought on to to their funniest part was coindesk tv had brian brooks on for the news and he's like he's talking about how he wanted to join binance because these are the only ones that are really prepared to fight the largest incumbent coinbase and they just like let him get away with saying that even though he was the the head lawyer of that that largest incumbent he's a double dipping or triple dipping or whatever which all the power to him you know it's it's part of what it is it's playing um but yeah like i mean i this got to make you more bullish on binance's long-term u.s goals right in this to have i mean he's going to be

he'll probably be a fantastic ceo for them yeah i mean that in terms of like playing within the regulatory boundaries and trying to get a leg up in that perspective if you couldn't ask for and in some ways you know the corruption of the regulatory capture is like good for bitcoiners and you know i because because there are some incentives that are aligned but uh i i like this this idea that this idea that giancarlo at the cftc was was protecting consumers and just wants to protect consumers and then he joins like one of the most predatory companies in the space um as a board member um is just you know i i don't know like at least brian brooks was consistent you know he fought coinbase's legal battles then he went into he went into

office of the u.s government and he secured those legal battles and now he's going to fight the same exact legal battles continue that role over at binance but but with the the c going from uh the cftc where he giancarlo was saying that he was uh protecting consumers and then you just immediately go out to this feels a little bit more i don't know yeah yeah and the revolving door it should be expected and you just mentioned it right giancarlo former cftc head uh christopher giancarlo i believe he was known as like bitcoin dad yeah uh he joined uh block five's board of directors so widely recognized as a regulatory trailblazer in the digital assets base giancarlo will be a source of trusted counsel for the company as it continues to grow and

innovate yeah it's important he's going to make sure that they're too big to fail when the bailout comes matthew matthew speculation yeah 100 speculation you're correct um yeah so we have former regulators and brian brooks is that a regulator comptroller not a politician but i think that's a regulator yeah regulator joining i think it's interesting where where people talk about being hit they like some stories will call on the former comptroller and some will call on the former chief lawyer of coinbase it's interesting dichotomy yeah where's ben losky going next that's what we gotta figure out yeah so ben was the trailblazer right because he was at the new york department of financial services he passed a pit license to

protect consumers from rampant scams in the bitcoin cryptocurrency space and then he joined ripples fucking board so everything seems better than that yeah yeah yeah agreed on to the next one though two more items on the list actually three more items unless i want to just add something at the end there the intelligent bitcoin miner part two so uh team in anisha research leo zhang uh jack kohler uh teamed up with kareem helmy from galaxy digital move from coin metrics to galaxy to basically release a part two of the intelligent bitcoin miner which is a series that leo and jack have been working on and trying to help illustrate and create models around miner profitability taking electricity costs mining

model initial investment into consideration and this is a really thorough piece on some of the models they're working on they've actually open sourced it too so if you're a miner or just an enthusiast of the mining space is looking to get an idea of future profitability in different hash rate and price environments kareem leo and jack have open sourced this model on github so you can plug in your electricity costs the mining model that you're using your initial investment and these models will run different price scenarios and hash rate scenarios in the future and and give you an insight into what your potential profitability would be which is really cool do you have anything to add on this one yeah i mean cheers to them it's awesome that they

open sourced all the modeling and and the tooling um we have uh john fisher in the chat i just interesting little fact you know kowtow uh is borrowed from cantonese chinese and it's it it means when you kneel or bow all the way to your head touching the ground and that's where it comes from yeah shout out john fisher for that that insight but did you know it was chinese did not did not and neither did i cantonese kowtow yeah it's like don't be subservient to something that's not logically consistent or based on an objective truth i mean we're definitionally correct it's just interesting that it's based in chinese yeah um what we got here signal hacks uh hacking company celebrate this was interesting

super cool they're making up for their shit cornry so you want to dive into the exploited vulnerabilities and celebrate ufed and physical analyzer from an app's perspective yeah i mean it's a it's a mouthful of the title celebrate is famous for they have they have this tooling. They have these devices where you can pull all information off of a phone if you have physical, if you're holding it physically, and a lot of police departments use it. Authoritarian regimes, they sell it all around to all these different horrible governments to attack protesters and attack dissidents. They've been involved with, you know, hacking iPhones and stuff to try and gain access, and they try and automate it. And they're really veiled in a lot of secrecy. They

have nda agreements with these companies that use them that they can't share their stuff um and it's all very closed and and and there's not really that much insight into it so signal got um the single team got their hands on one of their kits um it's really funny because they legally can't have access to it so in the in the post he's like i was walking down the street and all of a sudden uh one of the celebrate kits just fell out of a truck right in front of me and i like walked up it and sure enough it said celebrate on it and i picked it up and i started looking at it so he's going through like all the code and and ironically enough this these guys are their business is finding compromises in these devices and these apps

and meanwhile their code just had tons and tons of compromises and part of what it does as a software is it basically is pulling all the files and everything off of your devices you know signal messages, stuff like that, WhatsApp messages, contact lists, locations, and it gives it to you in a browsable format on a Windows computer so that a police officer, law enforcement, authoritarian regimes, general bad guys can then go through it, border control, can go through it in an organized way. Well, it turns out that if you take a device and you just start pulling everything off of it onto your own device, you open yourself up to a ton of different compromises so they've developed um which also they can't say uh they they noticed

that if certain files get pulled off the phone um onto the computer you can compromise the celebrate installation and not only will it screw up the current uh download it will screw up all future and past downloads that are still on the device and they're completely coincidentally because they can't say this either at the end of the post they're like completely unrelated to the above we've added this new feature to signal that just happens to download these random files onto your device that are are just for aesthetic purposes it's just to make uh the app look nice and it has nothing to do with the celebrate article or whatever so they're basically threatening them that if if they continue to keep signal added they don't they'll never know if

at some point they'll just get compromised so they can just basically put malicious files in the signal app that if anybody ever tries to access it with celebrate old bork the celebrate implementation yeah it's not a malicious file to the single user but it's a malicious it's the compromise file that that'll that'll hit celebrate boss and then they also said they may or may not have shared that with other app developers like they completely just flipped it on its head boss shout out to i mean shout out to signal obviously we're not fans of the shit coining but this is a pretty pretty boss way to attack uh surveillance tech i dig it i dig it as well last but not least coming up on two hours here jeremy rubin we've been uh following

op chat template verify in the benton on this podcast for like two years now i think i first right about in like 2019 basically op ctv the shortened version of check template verify would create a ability to create very descriptive covenants in bitcoin transactions so you get really creative with with how you disperse funds and who can be involved in a certain transaction jeremy released sapio which is a library that allows you to construct op ctv transactions as well as a bunch of other things you can test like taproot stuff with it too i believe um and i just think it was a really cool tool jeremy demoed it to me over a year ago now at this point it was really cool then it was really rough around the edges and it seems like

he's tightened it up and has released it and he's got a few examples that he's put out there already one being uh if op ctv gets merged into core uh would one thing you'd be able to do with the covenant structure that it enables is something like a decentralized mining pool where you can decentralize the payout aspect of of mining which is which is pretty massive so um people working on stratum v2 brains and square crypto braid pool with bob macklerath and vascul which they're thinking about and then like this is uh another decentralized mining pool solution that could be possible if opc tv gets activated merged and activated um so that's bit 119 i think there's other ways that it could be obviously there's got to be some debate around whether or not that is

worth merging in um and yeah from what i can tell about sapio particularly this this library that jeremy built is that at least what i can glean from people talking about is that it's pretty impressive uh the things that you can build with a very little amount of code um but i am a dumb podcaster i can't speak to uh the expressiveness of it with with any authority so if any of you freaks uh know more about have used it um let us know respond to the the tweet cheers to you jeremy appreciate you yeah all right that was all we had on the list what else were you thinking i think it was a very expansive rhr and uh it's a very good rip coffee rip you weren't drinking coffee what were you drinking i was drinking coffee the whole time

yeah i did one bottle pop because there's a freak in the comments who said if i didn't do a bottle pop then they were going to assume i was a deep fake so i gave them a bottle pop it was a fake fake news us well i miss you brother you got to get down to austin you guys check it up yeah i i mean i guess no matter what i'll see you in miami uh within a it's almost like gonna it's almost a month out now it's uh pretty close it's sneaking up on us sneaking up on us um but i do miss you as well bitcoin conference 2021 in miami what is it bt.c b.tc slash conference b.tc slash conference go check it out we're going to be down there or are we still getting a humble discount

i think so uh but the ticket prices have risen so yeah discount humble all caps i believe it's 15 off i think this thing is going to sell out pretty fucking soon like it's really really tight um and uh yeah so if you haven't gotten a ticket yet consider it um it should be a fun time i am looking forward to we are going to do a live rhr there um i threw some shade at them that uh it's like last time we did on a picnic table you know and so i think we might actually be on the stage we'll see so i'm looking forward to it bang bang well thank you freaks for joining us and it was a little earlier this week hopefully we'll be back to our actually we won't be next week because i actually have a hop of flight thursday night um out of philly at a bachelor party in scottsdale

freaks um well maybe it'll be early i might be the weekend the week after that i don't know early afternoon um thank you guys for joining hey head down keep stacking sats i mean the price we're in this consolidation phase uh fundamentals are very strong right now uh we will have a difficulty adjustment at some point between april 29th and may 2nd i would imagine then we're going to see uh the speedy trial start so that'll be interesting to cover um yeah thank you guys for joining us thank you for the shout outs uh love the shout outs if you guys want to contribute tftc.io slash contribute if you're listening wherever you're listening if you can give us a like a subscribe a rating a review it all goes a long way trying to get uh stop being

stop being bearish freaks i love you all stay humble stack sets peace and love