TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Bitcoin Week of 2021.06.21

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - bitcoin hash drops amid chinese crackdown - gbtc redemptions hurting bitcoin demand - the b word initiative - lnd v0.13.0-beta - specter diy v1.5.5 - rust lightning v0.0.98 - joinmarket v0.8.3 - joininbox v0.5.0 - bluewallet v6.1.6 - lightning terminal v0.5.0-alpha - sparrow wallet v1.4.2 - umbrel v0.3.13 - microstrategy buys more bitcoin - british FCA cracking down - iran seizes miners - pysa ransomware targets education organizations - gladstein on monetary colonialism - mccormack interviews president of el salvador Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital HodlHodl Braiins

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Benton here to introduce this rip of Rabbit Hole Recap. Coming to you day late. Sorry about that. Matt is in a remote location. Had some technical difficulties yesterday when we tried to record, so we did it again this morning. Happy that we did. High quality rip. Good old get-together between Uncle Matt and Marty. A lot to talk about. A lot going on in the world right now. it's a beautiful day it's a beautiful friday let's end the week on a good note freaks let's go into the weekend with some energy with some rhr all right this rip was brought to you by our

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brought to you by our good friends at brains brains brains os plus all right brains os plus is the firmware that brains is offering the brains team tells me that the slush pool update is planned for july okay they're just triple and quadruple checking everything in simulations to make sure it's a silky smooth transition when the update goes live it's coming soon tm july is what we're hearing meanwhile the latest update for brains os plus firmware from the brains os plus firmware team includes full support for aminer s17e and t17e as well as some significant improvements to the auto tuning for all x17 devices and is available now at brains.com slash os slash plus it's brains b-r-a-i-i-n-s dot com slash os slash plush since network hash rate is at one year lows

due to the china crackdown now's a great time for miners to juice up their asics with auto-tuning firmware and stack even more sats take advantage freaks take advantage for those who don't know how it works it mostly comes down to the silicon of the hashing chips there are small variations and the silicon quality of every chip in an ASIC. Typically, stock firmwares that come with the machines treat the entire device as a uniform unit, sending the same frequency of voltages through the hashboards. BrainsOS Plus boosts performance

by experimenting with different frequencies and voltages on each individual chip to learn which chips are higher quality than others. Then it calibrates to send more work for higher quality chips and less work for lower quality ones. The end result of this per-chip tuning is more hash, and thus more SATs per watt of power consumed. Currently supported devices are the AmpMiner S9, S9i, S9j, as well as the S17, S17+, S17 Pro, T17, T17+, and the ones just added, the S17e and T17e. Next up are What's Miners, of course, along with the S19s from PitName.

stay tuned tm for more updates on the firmware and slush pool and check out insights.brains.com that's i-n-s-i-g-h-t-s dot b-r-a-i-i-n-s dot com for content stats charts and mining profitability tools to stay up to up on top of everything happening in the mining industry shout out to the brains team shout out to everybody shout out to you freaks still on uh still on the mend here getting back into it. So bear with me. Thank you guys for listening. Enjoy your weekends. Enjoy your life. Enjoy your life. 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 and we're going live so the ball's in your court the ball is in my court what is up freaks welcome back to rabbit hole recap a day late sorry about that we had some technical difficulties yesterday matt is uh in a remote location living his best life we're here though early friday morning rep let's end the week on a good note matt are we going to get overly emotional today is that is that what we're here to do Now we're going to have a nice, quiet, level-headed conversation with minimal emotions. Just a very monotone hour and a half maybe we'll target.

I think we can definitely do that. So we're going to drop into our NPR voices today. We're going to keep our quiet tone. We're not going to get too toxic, if you will. We're just here to talk about Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer distributed cash system, on a Friday afternoon in June. A lot going on this week, Matthew. What are you most excited about right now? I'm going to have to lean on you a bit here because I took a step back from the internet and Bitcoin Twitter for the last week.

I've just been enjoying nature, which has been really good for the soul. Um, I know there's been a lot of panic on the streets, uh, which is kind of what I love. Uh, it's like my favorite time in the space is when just everyone is losing their shit and there's bears everywhere. Um, it very much does feel like stackers paradise right now. Haters out in full force. You know, I checked Twitter. I've been checking Twitter, like trying to keep it down to once a day.

Um, just trying to keep my phone used to a minimum. um and uh every time i check it's just like uh my notifications are just filled with absolute haters which is usually bullish as fuck and you just love to see it yeah water good on water good on look go down the wrong pipe crazy buy signals in my opinion i'm gonna like everybody's hate hate hate hate hate on bitcoin kramer selling it he's like i'm in ethereum now i'm into china bitcoin it's like this is this is like stack stacking opportunity alarm belts are going off all the place in my mind as well kramer tweeting kramer panic selling on tether fud and chinese bitcoin banning fud is the most mainstream eternal september we've ever had like this is

this is almost exactly the kind of fud that wrecked people last cycle but this time is coming from like a mainstream finance talking head who has a bitcoin podcast every morning um so it's uh it's pretty unreal to watch i think uh a lot of us that kind of expected this phenomenon to happen but to actually watch it happen in real time is uh a little bit unreal right yeah yeah a lot going on it's i mean bitcoin is i wrote about an event last night i've watched for some reason i watched a lot of cnbc this week and it's crazy i focused on esg and their coverage of esg but they've been talking about bitcoin at least once every 20 minutes on every show um at least it's basically the most watched bitcoin podcast network in the world now like that's what cnbc has become they've

They've just become another Bitcoin show. Yeah, but it's a pretty shit Bitcoin show. They have... Well, look, most Bitcoin shows are filled with shitcoiners. This is a prolific thing that's happened. It always happens. When we started this show, I think the Bitcoin-only landscape was very small.

It's been fantastic to watch how much it's exploded. And there's just so much Bitcoin-only content available. But historically, the majority of Bitcoin content was intermixed with tons of shitcoin content and that's what cnbc is right it's just they have shit shitcoin equities and you know shitcoin fiat that they're talking about all the time and shitcoin bonds that they're talking about all the time and um but it's the same kind of concept right yeah they had uh they had katie hahn from anderson horowitz they were parading her around yesterday uh the woman who persecuted ross albrecht and she was shilling nfts and all

that bullshit and anderson horowitz new 2.2 billion dollar fund uh you hate to see and she was being prayed around as like an expert like industry leader made me sick to my stomach but before we get into everything let's get to the dashboard well before we get to the dashboard marty i just want to say you're looking a lot better today than you did yesterday do you want to talk to the freaks a little bit about what you've gone through the last week yeah i just uh have a bit of an illness uh getting back on my feet and feeling good feeling good knocked on my ass for a few days there um my husband right he's gonna put me on the spot yeah of course i'm gonna put you on the spot we've been talking about it all fucking year

i got i got the vid um and uh yeah been recovering from it ivermectin it works uh I haven't really turned my life around within a couple of hours. So, yeah, I think I caught it down in Miami during the conference and it lagged a little bit. It didn't catch me until really like Sunday morning of this week. Knocked me on my ass for a few days. Got my hands on some ivermectin and I'm feeling a lot better now. So there are treatments out there.

i highly recommend ivermectin if any of you guys get it the sooner the better um but it is not easy to get i did have to like haggle a couple pharmacies to actually fill a prescription of ivermectin was it a prescription or it wasn't over the counter yeah it was a prescription well you look visibly better than yesterday so i'm glad you're on the app thank you no i think the content's gonna gonna shine through today uh according to clark's dashboard the price of bitcoin is 33,085 dollars one cuck buck's gonna get you 3,023 sats it's the most sats you've been able to get with the cuck back on rhr in some time uh we are block height 688,795 the next difficulty adjustment is in 677 blocks estimated to be on july 1st 2021 and it is going

to be a negative 21 difficulty adjustment as of right now it's because blocks are coming in at 12 minutes and 39 seconds on average since the last retarget that is due obviously because the great chinese mining exodus that is going on right now there are 15 176 transactions in clark's mempool uh transaction fees not that high uh and they're oh drop will be recorded yesterday but not a precipitous drop uh samurai unspent capacity whirlpool is 2995.39 btc we were popped over 3k for a little bit there yeah back under back under yeah so where should we start you want to start with the chinese migration you want to start with 3 000 bitcoin in post whirlpool utxos and the haters would have you believe that no one uses that shit

that's you know that's that's a lot of fucking bitcoin could it be more yeah sure well let's make it higher yeah start whirlpooling freaks get your ronin dojos set up get the sats in there be conscious of fees all that good stuff well marty you know the the mempools the mempools are never going to have a backlog so we don't have to worry about fees it'll just be one sap per bite forever yeah well let's talk about that do you think it's really it's crazy that the mempool like clearing so aggressively now could be because blockchain.info upgraded to segwit finally do you think that's it i think most people are using custodial regulated platforms and they're not withdrawing from exchanges and if they do withdraw from

exchanges they're sending it to a custodial regulated wallet what custodial regulated wallet well like you know uh anchorage and coinbase custody and what it's a fact that like blockchain on info is like the most useful right sure the the the bulls the on-chain bulls would have you believe that uh it's a combination of segwit which has a lower fee burden um based on the weighting mechanism the segwit addresses and lightning which is lightning is inherently a batch transaction and then also more efficient use by exchanges of batch transactions you know native on-chain batch transactions ideally with segwit to reduce their block space burden um Sure. Those all contribute to it. But I think ultimately, most people that are getting onboarded right now are not taking custody of their own keys. And they don't have an on-chain presence, right?

freaks if you're new go through the process start learning how to take possession of your own keys and like i said we talked about this last week or a couple weeks ago there's definitely a lag though like a six to seven month lag period of first purchase on a custodial exchange to all right maybe i should take control of my keys not everybody goes through it but certainly percentage of the funnel does oh 100 uh i think it's even longer than that for most people and i'm not i'm not trying to blame the freaks i think the freaks are i think our people are are the exception to that rule for the most part yes um but i i i think it's awfully convenient i'm extremely bullish i'm

always fucking bullish so don't accuse me of being a fucking bear about it but i think it's easy to get into this like lazy excuse making where you're just like oh it's all rosy and stuff like i think in practice i expected more people to be consuming block space at this point in bitcoin's history than are currently doing so and i think most of that is because of these custodial services and exchanges um you know if you want to go get your six percent interest on blockfi and use your favorite influencers reflink to do it you know you're leaving the chain and you're going over to blockfi right and you're going to keep their you're going to give them custody of your coins and they're going to go and they're going to mix it in with gemini's wallets and lend it out and do

all this other fucking shit and you're not going to see that on chain right yeah um speaking of and custodial wallets let's just segue right into something that happened overnight that we didn't get to talk about yesterday when we try to record first uh in the el salvador uh wallet chizo i think is the uh the government issued wallet that they're they're giving to the citizens and airdropping 30 dollars worth of bitcoin and what are your what are your thoughts on this this seems uh this seems i'm not a big fan of it off the bat what are your thoughts i haven't really he announced it yesterday i believe yeah he gave like a presentation it was a fully it was a fully spanish presentation which is fair you know that is their language um would you expect him to speak

to the country of el salvador no my point is is that i don't really understand the specifics of that of that wallet do you are you aware of like it is a forked from an open source wallet i assume it's completely custodial one of the aspects i saw is that that you can seamlessly switch between us dollars and bitcoin so to me in my head what i think is you know like a white label version of strike for a country but i'm not sure are you aware if it forked from a project or if it's open source or if it's custodial or non-custodial or any of the important specifics i'm not aware i think i mean i think you do have to register for it i think you have to tie your identity to it obviously um i'm not aware if it's forked from anything uh they use the help of strike

camilla campton is staying in the in the shown uh excuse me in the uh comments chat live chat um so it'll be interesting hopefully you said it it definitely has kyc yeah it's chivo not chizo um chivo c-h-i-v-o yeah um so yeah i think this is kind of what you would expect in this type of situation is that you'd have a custodial kyc wallet that allows people to move in and out of fiat and bitcoin um and you give that to people as like base level uh if if they need to accept bitcoin as a merchant and they have no experience or know what they're doing and specifically with you know we have critics who say uh that the legal tender bill says you know you have to accept bitcoin if you have the means to do it and this kind of

wallet allows people to basically just accept bitcoin as digital dollars um if you saw a government move to ban cash and remove cash and move you on to a completely digit digitized system this is exactly what you would see without bitcoin right where you'd have a custodial kyc platform that they have complete control i don't think it solves any kind of the unbanked issues the whole reason people are unbanked is because of regulatory cost and regulatory burden and being able to identify people and push them through kyc systems the nice thing though is that you have that which is not a great setup but it is what it is and it's kind of what we'd expect especially in the introductory periods but you also have this open monetary network in bitcoin

that ideally i i assume that wallet can i hope that that wallet can pay a lightning invoice and receive from other lightning wallets right and as long as it connects into that open system then users and citizens will have a choice to use a non-kyc non-custodial alternative yeah yeah yeah no i i think the important thing is that users don't have to use this wallet to use bitcoin within el salvador they can use non-custodial open source software as well i believe i think this is just the government trying to provide a service if you want to get 30 dollars that they're giving out i think you have to download cheap chivo and do the kyc and all that good stuff but or all that crummy stuff but um yeah i mean they're rolling this

out pretty quickly was it announced three weeks ago they've already got a wallet being launched and they're giving out thirty dollars to bitcoin worth of bitcoin yeah which i guess they can instantly convert if they want to yeah which is a common tactic to just encourage people to install an app or something i do you know want to push back a little bit right it's like this kind of app is going to be very good for financial surveillance right so it would be nice to see you know maybe in the beginning a higher percentage of salvadorians will use um this app for Bitcoin, but we'll move to more private alternatives. I hope to see that that's something I think we should watch. I think on the flip side, if you have like a popular mobile

wallet, or, you know, custodial wallet that has a lot of private information, that could be logging a lot of private information, whether that's IP addresses, or, you know, on chain addresses, or lightning transactions, if it's a custodial wallet, and then it gets purchased by a KYC regulated company um you could have a lot of the similar issues and it could happen in a situation where the user isn't even aware that that is going to be connected to kyc records in the future so at least here at least here it's it's already it should be more visible to the user i assume because they're gonna come in and they're gonna have to provide their id and stuff uh then if if something flips to kyc after the fact um which i expect us to see more of in the

future so i in either regard you know we really just want users to hold their own keys not use custodial services and ideally use wallets that use their own node or use their friends node so that they're not leaking all this network level information um you know ip addresses stuff like that to lightning transactions to a centralized provider yep we need more uh to gyms in el salvador getting uh getting people set up with nodes and helping people get connected to their node tio is uncle in spanish if uh if you didn't under understand that um i mean i'm very aware i speak decent spanish i i can understand spanish i just i speak it better when i'm drunk i i do as well i do as well i'm doing i do a lot of things better when i'm drunk

are you drinking on this uh on this episode today no i'm i'm in the eastern times zone so it is in the morning right now i understand you've been drinking a lot of rum this week i have been how's how's that how's that for a drunk a rum drunk it's very summery have you been singing a lot no no okay all right well next topic chinese migration it's happening as i alluded to while on the dashboard hash rates fallen pretty significantly blocks are coming in or down 12 minutes and 40 seconds on average uh But it looks like China's finally cracking down. Bitmain had a big VIP conference last weekend

in which they were letting their big clients know where they may be able to end up in the U.S. specifically. Kevin Zhang from Foundry Services shared a slide from that presentation which highlighted over 10 gigawatts of capacity in the U.S. by 2022. I'm a bit skeptical that that's going to be able to be fulfilled within quick order. Capacity in the U.S. is already pretty tight for North American miners alone, but then taking on an influx of the largest part of the mining industry

on top of that over the next two years seems a bit wishful, if you will. So I think this migration is definitely happening. Miners are definitely unplugged. They're definitely either sitting in warehouses in route to places that did have capacity. But I think a lot of these miners are going to sit on the sidelines for a bit just because the degeneration capacity needed to fulfill um that demand needs to be built out and that takes time 9 to 18 months at the earliest in a lot of places um and when you consider the the amount of pure hash rate that's looking for for new homes uh i think it's going to take quite a while um for all those chinese miners to find homes but it looks like it is it is real this time at my chinese mining

sources seem to have confirmed sources in china hey they turned out to be reliable this time well i mean look i said a couple weeks ago or a month ago that what i wanted to see was some you know more verifiable proof um that this kind of crackdown is happening uh because we've seen time and time again that you cannot really believe anything that's coming out of china and everyone has a book to sell you. I don't think it's a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of accounts talking about the end of mining in China are American miners, but we'll leave that for another day. I'm very surprised if this is actually the case, if this is actually what the Chinese government is doing. If you wanted to have more control over Bitcoin, it'd be better to

identify and regulate and control the miners within your borders rather than kicking them out of your borders and letting them leave with their machines um so if that is the case um i think it will go down as one of the biggest blunders in ccp's history um that's not to say they don't make mistakes so maybe they are making that mistake um i i clearly there's a ton of hash moving out of china i wonder what the magnitude of that is um because i've seen some reports that say like 90 the full hash rate in china is going to be out of the country within the next month or so um usually when you see numbers that high about anything it's yeah kind of filled with bullshit yeah i don't think 90 percent um is the right number i've like chinese mining sources

have told me that there are um many like under the radar operations that are still up and running and yeah so this really attacked um the bigger operations i think last year uh there was an initiative to have the big mining farms officially register with the government um and i believe a lot of them uh went along with that and and went through the proper registration and and i think those were the main ones targeted this time around too so the ones that actually went did all the paperwork and kyc yeah the kyc it's almost like the first step is you kyc your targets and then after you have them under your thumb you fucking push yeah and so that's that it's shame right they tried to comply and like be within within the books and actually turned

to uh came to backfire on them getting forced out and it's yeah it's a real shame right like we've said this many times on the podcast like the chinese mining industry is arguably the most ruthlessly competitive part of the bitcoin industry to date the first 12 and a half years right like they've they've innovated they're ruthless they're like very capitalistic it's is ironic being in uh in china that you have this crazy capitalistic industry in the bitcoin mining industry whether it be at the actual mining of the bitcoin or the the creation of the asics and the computers that make it go around um and it's yeah i've seen videos of uh actual chinese minor citizens leaving china being like all right we can't do this here i'm leaving um and so

videos of uh of people just collapsing from covet in the middle of chinese streets this time last year so we've also seen videos that have been just constantly from other you know storms and shit that happened that they're like oh the chinese miners just got flooded and all the machines broke and stuff this is a bit different though right like i don't know marty all i can say is to to distill what my point is i guess um is that no one should be surprised if authoritarian governments try and stop their people from using freedom money and try to actively fight bitcoin um if this is the tactic just kicking out miners and letting them leave with their hash power

um we dodged a bullet that is fantastic that is best case scenario if if the chinese want to attack bitcoin by kicking out hash rate and letting it leave their borders and from where they can control it um if the u.s government wants to do that that'd be fantastic that that would be the best way the worst way for them to attack bitcoin but the best way for us um so we'll see how it plays out yeah i think it's going to be an epic blunder um we mentioned this yesterday when we when we spoke but like it seems throughout history that china's always had been on the cusp of being able to take uh take the stance of like a great superpower and maybe we'll look back decades from now if bitcoin is as successful as we believe it should

be and will be uh china making this move uh just especially considering how much hash rate had within its borders and how much um good things it had going for it in the bitcoin world And this move maybe looked at as just a complete shot in the foot and setting it back decades, not centuries, because they just did not like that. There was a free peer-to-peer distributed cash system within their borders. yeah so like a couple of the reasons that uh people are throwing out there for the abrupt uh kick out of the miners uh capital flows obviously mining allows you to take your yuan buy electricity with it produce bitcoin then send that bitcoin wherever you want in the world you can skirt uh capital controls um and secondarily and not secondarily probably

primarily. It seems that the Chinese grid system is becoming better connected. They're better able to transfer electricity to Chinese citizens. And so with the increased interconnectedness of the electricity grid, Bitcoin miners started directly competing more with Chinese consumers for electricity. And that just became politically untenable. And so the Chinese government said, hey, the citizens need this electricity. We need you to get the hell out. And so with that being said, that should be a lesson to everybody throughout the world

that's taking in some of these miners as well. These political risk on the grid exist where you live too. When push comes to shove, if Bitcoin miners are consuming electricity and competing with local consumers, the local consumers are going to get priority over Bitcoin mining. And so this does not preclude

miners in the United States or anywhere else when they're mining on-grid from getting kicked off because of political reasons as well. So be aware of that. Think off-grid. I think that's the future of mining

throughout the world, not only in the US or anywhere particularly. I mean, I think on a long enough time scale, mining has the opposite of what people usually see, which is it has diseconomies of scale. where i think you know twofold basically you're able to get cheaper energy in smaller amounts

you know the cheapest energy you're not going to be able to necessarily have a huge massive warehouse to do it and the second thing is um is is is what you just kind of described which is this regulatory burden this regulatory risk that you you face if you're a larger operation specifically if you're a larger operation on grid um i expect smaller operations that are not only professional off-grid operations but also smaller operations that maybe are you know subsidizing heat for boilers and hot water and stuff like that and smaller and and home miners right stuff like we see with our buddy uh econo alchemist or diverter where they have or or or neil ronan uh ronin miner where you have you know 10 to 12 miners in your in your house or in your shed

or something on your property and maybe you're willing to mine a little bit of a loss because you have kyc coins kyc free coins um the main the main thing that has been pushing that away from reality so far has been that the asic life cycle hasn't been that long but we're already seeing that start to extend uh with the s9s i mean the s9s have been profitable for half a decade or something now right like six years some of them yeah that's insane right so that's exactly what you want to see because if you do like one of these small level operations you don't want to see your hardware just go out of you know become obsolete within six months seven months and then because the bigger companies always have an easier job sourcing the new hardware

So having that older hardware last longer and longer, I think, really just helps distribute hash rate, and we'll see it go to smaller operations around the world. And right now, we're kind of in this, like, muddy transition period. um and that's why like china's if if everything we're hearing is to believe is to be believed the ccp is making a massive mistake here and basically pushing that pushing us past that point of no return where we go to a world where you know no specific jurisdiction or country or region in the world will have more than let's say 30 of the ash yeah thank you ccp thank you for the uh for the assist are they really that that's like this is where like now i like try to put my chinese 40 chess hat on are they really that dumb to let this happen like this what do you think we'll see they don't you know they they're pretty uh they've had pretty

effective policy in in other regards in terms of their influence and expansion around the world so so how yeah like how could this be how could the i don't want to say backfire but like what could the long con be here what could the long con be the easiest long con is that they're just fucking that this isn't actually happening that the majority of the miners are just being put on lists and kyc it up the kazoo and they're regulatory capturing them while pushing this narrative to kind of drive down the price of bitcoin and deflate our sales which is a narrative they pushed many times in the past which is just a very simple you know china's china's banning bitcoin just create some fear um but in reality what they're doing is gearing up for a 51 attack

um alternatively you could just see some basic regulatory capture where they just have their own blacklists and they force their miners to try and um not mine those kind of transactions and push up the price of those kind of transactions specifically privacy preserving transactions they can also quietly have miners submit all their xpub data and submit all their utxo data so that they're building a surveillance system on the side that no one really knows how big their data set is um and they can make it so you know if if you're a chinese mining pool and you want to pay out to your individual miners then all those miners have to be kyc to subset something like that yeah we shall see we shall see um that is uh

one of the things that people are saying is driving the price lower too is a lot of these miners uh have to pay to move their stuff out of china so they're having to sell bitcoin that they would otherwise have held and that's why we're we dropped below 30 temporarily earlier this week and i'm hovering in the low 30s yeah i mean it's easy for us to say in the western world uh oh this is you know the 10th time chinese you know banning bitcoin fud isn't going to get me but if you're a rich chinese miner and you're already on the ccp's radar like absolutely you're going to fucking panic you know rather than than hodl you know of course you're going to try and get some cushion um and protect yourself a bit like that's just

natural and that's why it's been effective in the past whenever they they they announce that they're going to be some kind of restrictions or whatever it's usually met with panic um i saw i think yesterday or today pool and announced that they're stopping payouts on their uh they have those they have these cloud mining tokens where if you hold the token you get a proportion of that hash rate return um and they just stopped the payouts completely for that which is another case of you know why cloud mining should never be done by anybody it's not your machines it's not you know your bitcoin um but but that's that's them panicking right that's them you know not sure what the regulatory environment is going to be so they just cut off the maybe

they're just using as an excuse so that they can take the bitcoin instead of sending it out to customers right now but yeah just interesting watching it all play out really is this is a historic moment in bitcoin's history i mean if it is if it is true if it is happening it does seem to be happening at least to a certain degree um seismic shift in in the dynamics of the network particularly the mining uh industry this is a huge opportunity for the mining industry outside of china i mean it's been one of the the i don't want to say darkest clouds but it's like it's one of the the heaviest uh sort of lines of fud that have been launched against bitcoin and bitcoiners is all china controls mining blah blah blah blah now that's not true uh if that if if

the migration is really happening and that turns out not to be true anymore uh that and is really good for bitcoin if that hash rate gets distributed uh i don't want to say equally but distributed sufficiently across borders across the rest of the world so i i believe a lot of the chinese miners are going to kazakhstan europe obviously the u.s canada uh latin america is on people's radars as well so go to volcano mine yeah go volcano mine go use some hydro down argentina i think it's going to be good for bitcoin in the long run it's going to make it extremely robust extremely resilient and again it's an opportunity for the rest of the mining industry outside of china to take on some hash rate scale up and and create a dominant business as we head into

the roaring 20s here so it's an exciting time in the bitcoin world and it just shows how incredibly dynamic bitcoin is the fact that blocks are still being produced yes it's a little bit slower but you have a huge disruption of one of the largest parts of the market literally having to turn off all their machines and move everything on the the flip the switch to turn of a dime and it's happening beautifully like it's it's so crazy to think that uh bitcoin is this dynamic like you can have this big of a disruption or quote-unquote disruption um and still maintain block production yes it's coming in a bit slower but we'll have a difficulty adjustment around july 1st and things will get back to normal it's the beauty of fees aren't even up

so yeah whatever yeah bitcoin is incredibly dynamic it's a beautiful system satoshi should get the nobel prize in economics gbdc redemptions hurting bitcoin demand this is an article in magazine by dylan this is by dylan leclaire yeah our boy dylan btcization on twitter yeah essentially diving into the fact that people are redeeming gbtc um and so that the redemption's happened what six months it takes six months to redeem whatever um so people are i guess they started redeeming earlier in the year now they're starting to liquidate that is that what's happening here um so i mean gbtc is something that we've been following on this show for a couple months at

least now specifically the premium versus the negative which is you know gbtc is grayscales um like their cell looks pretty flat is grayscales custodial product trades on like your normal brokerage account or something like that. I mean, I don't think any of the freaks should use it. Commonly, when retail uses it, they use it as a 401k, an easy way into a 401k. But I really think people should hold their own keys and use our boy Vanjoo's services and in collaboration with Unchained Capital, they make it very easy for you to still get those tax benefits in your retirement account while holding your own keys. But on the institutional side, a lot of people tend to be preferring it because it's very easy for them to do on a regulatory

basis. It's just a very low hanging fruit for them. Most of these companies, even someone sophisticated like Michael Saylor, they don't hold their own keys anyway, right? They use a regulated custodian. So Grayscale kind of just handles that for everyone. Now you have two sides that trade you had block fi basically sending out pitch decks to people trying to get them to arbitrage the premium because it was trading at like a 15 20 premium for a while did they want them to lever up on block fire yeah so they would they would borrow the bitcoin from block fi and they put it through the redemption process which has a time lock because it's not a proper etf and the idea was by the time they got out of that redemption process they'd be able to

get that free money which is that that premium and um like most things in life there's trade-offs and nothing is free and if it's too good to be true that's full of um and too many people tried to do that at the same time as the price started to come down a little bit and the thing just turned negative and it's been trading negative for i'm probably over a month now i think Well, that I imagine, right? Yeah, for a while. And it concerns me. I don't know exactly what the concern is completely, but it concerns me because I speculated for a while, even when we had the premium, that it was going to trade at a discount after ETFs got approved because

it's it's still got that high management fee it's got that two percent management fee so inherently it should trade at a discount but it should trade very close to par it should level itself out especially if you think that that barry will be successful in turning it into an etf because if he turns it into an etf that redemption process becomes better the arbitrage window should close and it should come very close to par and right now it's very below very below the value it should be at. And no matter how long it's been there, it hasn't come back up. So that to me, and we saw Barry, we saw Grayscale tried to, they tried all these different techniques. They're like, we're going to buy $250 million on the open market. The thing barely budged, right? Like he's

like, he does all these press releases. He's like, we're going to make an ETF. The thing just barely moves. So that concerns me on a separate note. My understanding of what Dylan is saying here is that if you're an institutional investor you can come in through gbtc and you're able to get that discounted price um instead of buying real bitcoin and holding it yourself you can get that 12 discount if you just buy gbtc yeah gbtc man just buy bitcoin they're they're moving fast to turn it it into an etf though so we'll see how successful they are in that endeavor i'm getting sick gptc talk yeah i mean if they don't turn it into an etf and there's other etfs that exist it will forever trade at a large discount yeah because it's just a worse product if they do turn it into

an etf and keep their management fee which by the way they said we're going to lower our management fee that still didn't help uh really reduce the discount um it should still trade at a slight negative to real bitcoin as participants become aware that they can actually own their own bitcoin and hold it themselves like that it's a worse product custodial bitcoin should always trade less long term someone else is holding your bitcoin for you yeah we shall see i think that discount's going to be there for quite a while so beware yeah and you had like institutions piling in as well um welcome to the gbtc trade the b word i hope they all get fucking wrecked yeah teach them a lesson the b word in the party risk announced today jack and kathy wood and the team

at paradigm are teaming up for a one-day conference july 21st of this year how institutions can embrace bitcoin they're trying to demystify bitcoin and break down why it's important how it's being leveraged currently and how it can be leveraged in the future um and and really dig into the importance of of bitcoin and its existence on this planet right now um so the crypto council for innovation which i guess arc square and paradigm are leading um are running this matt you will be um presenting what are you presenting on dev incentives or bitcoin and privacy uh bitcoin ethos and self-custody i'm looking forward to participating bang and it looks like elon and uh dorsey are gonna have uh they're gonna have what they called

the talk about bitcoin it was like elon was like how's that dude a billionaire it's just like so you know what they're gonna have the talk jack jack and elon are going to talk it out this is all going to be virtual by the way yeah it's all virtual i have faith that uh jack will be convincing maybe get him uh maybe get elon thinking straight not going to hold my breath though and my understanding is twofold so they're going to have like a live event and then they're going to basically have cut up pieces of content from that event so they'll have like a library of free content focused on um the institutional side people so that and just keep building up that content so there's like a

home page where they can just send people that are that you know are working for these big companies um and give them some bitcoin education for free hell yeah oh yeah no i love this initiative shout out to jack kathy team at paradigm you know arjun um is going to be participating as well. Shata Yassin at ARK, looking forward to that event. Very important work, demystifying, having those strong voices, getting out in front and debunking FUD and helping people to approach Bitcoin in the correct way. Not just look at the price, but the freedom enabling aspects of the technology, the peer-to-peer distributed nature of the technology the the how it works the why it works um this is important it's important stuff can't

have just kramer screaming about the price and people calling it digital gold without combating it we need we need voices to get out there and and push back like hey it's not just digital gold you can do really cool things you should learn about the lightning network speaking of the lightning networks this is on the list but uh ryan gentry had um some nice stats all the all the um all the uh like met i know you don't like metric stats but uh all the lightning network stats are looking pretty healthy right now in terms of like bitcoin locked in public channels um amount of nodes on the network i'm looking for this particular tweet right now give me a second here

uh now my internet's being slow here it is and network capacity nodes approaching 15 000 nodes on the lightning network channels approaching or above 50 000 channels right now um and bitcoin locked public nodes is above 1500 bitcoin and probably more in private whirlpool's double that whirlpool's double that hey those driving fees those driving fees trying to at least apparently not um 1500 is in public publicly broadcasting channels and then you have private channels which are harder to determine um how much is there yeah you would assume there's probably more

um private i would imagine there's like probably large private channels between regulated enterprise lightning routing nodes uh like something going between bitstamp and strike or strike and bitfinex um or strike and their like subsidiaries that they have around the world um i kind of don't feel like that is the lightning network right like we have we're basically what we're gonna have is we're gonna have um we're gonna have the the the main lightning network and then you're going to have these like private networks that are existing around the sides kind of and that interact into the the main lightning network which is like the where you see all the public channels and you have you know uh sovereign node

operators that are running tour only nodes and have their public channels you know broadcasting that anyone can connect to right and then you're going to have these professional lightning nodes that are kyc'd run by regulated companies uh that are going to have restrictions on who can open channels with them and they're going to have large really large private channels as well between their business partners because they don't want those routing relationships to be broadcast to the world and then on the other side for the like the sovereign users we'll see private channels um for like end users so like if you open for instance like i believe like all the channels that breeze opens for their users are private channels right and those are small um hundred

dollar two hundred dollar channels uh and and they only need like one or two to like a big routing node in order to access the broader network um so if you if you subtract the So that latter type, I don't think really accounts for that much yet. Like I think it will going forward as there's more end users that are using these mobile first wallets that only have like one or two channels that are all private. I just don't think those users really in terms of Bitcoin volume are a very large percentage yet. I think the majority of private channels right now, and this is all intuition, right? because they are not being publicly broadcast um are between these you know these large routing

notes these like regulated companies yeah i would agree with that that makes i mean that would make the most sense right now at this particular time like yeah it computes should we get the shout outs sure all right we've got two shout outs this week Hi, Marty and Matt. Listener from Switzerland here. I want to say that you two are awesome. RHR is fantastic. I never miss a show.

We love you and your work. Your work is tremendously important for the community and for the world as a whole. The fight is tough, but we will win. Bitcoin will prevail and great peace will come. If you ask me, Bitcoin will swallow it all. The nasty elites, Fiat fraudsters, and anybody who is a traitor to individual freedom. Please keep on doing what you do. We cross the pond.

do our best to spread bitcoin to accelerate adoption to get people to listen to rhr thank you the world need you because in the end we're all americans at heart americans in the sense of the founding fathers americans in the sense of being born to be free and americans in the sense to make the world a wonderful place through hard work integrity and love the orange light will shine upon every single human being stay humble and stack sats cheers dobby thank you dobby that was beautiful i really appreciate it man appreciate you dobby very heartfelt uh i'm gonna go grab a beer oh whoa whoa 11 30 beer for matthew um yeah no thank you i mean i think we say we do this as a labor of love

we love doing this we love uh coming a week out weekend a week out who freaks here to talk about bitcoin do this because of you guys uh yeah it's always crazy there to get shout outs like that um here's the second shout out of the week if i hear blockchain one more time uh ellipsis thanks for the great content marty and matt much love from a member of the blockchain guild at a technology consulting firm stay strong brother stay strong blockchain guild they gave you the guild name at the consulting firm that must feel good this guy works at the blockchain guild well he's he works at a consulting firm and he's on the blockchain guild team um i guess something that's something hr thought would be funny it sounds like your consulting

firm is short bitcoin it sounds like it's a short consulting firm too right a guild i can't think of anything but like the lollipop guild from what is that the wizard of oz uh how about i don't have this on the list but uh a16z launching a 2 billion plus fund and calling it the crypto fund and not writing the words bitcoin anywhere in their fucking 4 000 words announcement is the most bullish fucking thing ever yeah that is our edge freaks shocker shocker shocker like uh we i think i mentioned it earlier too they were like parading katie hahn around on on cmbc yesterday um you think they're gonna invest in any coins they already have they will continue yeah i know hey the we coinbase is just the

is their dumping grounds for all their shit coins it's the portfolio consolidation company of of a16z uh it's really amazing it's really i mean i guess you can't you can't expect someone to think differently than what pays them right like they just make so much money off this that it's like i wonder what their personal portfolio breakdowns are in terms of bitcoin versus coins that's the thing is like the corners a ton of the corners have a large portion of their net worth in bitcoin they're not loyal not see the opposite the opposite is not true yeah yeah they're like 90 bitcoin usually if you ask any of them um so 90 90 bitcoin

never see anybody who's like 100 ethereum or anything like that not even vitalik is what does that tell you what does that tell you um we're rolling into the software updates looks like all the devs heard your call for updates last week back to work devs build build on uh lnd version 0.13.0 has been released specter diy version 1.5.5 has been released running that consider upgrading rust lightning version 0.0.98 has been released we're gonna read some release notes here because it's pretty major This is what they've been working on at Square Crypto,

this Rust Lightning implementation for quite some time. And so this should be considered a release candidate for the first alpha release of Rust Lightning and the broader LDK Lightning Development Kit. It represents several years of work designing and fine-tuning a flexible API for integrating Lightning into any application. LDK should make it easy to build a Lightning Node or client which meets specific requirements that other Lightning Node software cannot,

as lightning continues to evolve in new use cases for lightning to develop the API of LDK will continue to change and expand however starting with version 0.1 objects serialized with prior versions will be readable with the latest LDK so yeah seems that the rust rust lightning implementation is in the wild now at least in beta this is something that square crypto team Matt I said what do want to work on we want to work on lightning what do we want to build we want to build an implementation we went with the rust implementation and the lightning development kit and looks like the the fruits of that labor are are being brought to market now um so shout out to the square crypto

team and everybody else who contributed to that lightning implementation i'm excited to to test it out looks like we lost matt here we'll see if he comes back i'll just keep rolling with the uh software updates here yeah join market conversion 0.8 point three has been released join box version 0.5 point zero has been released by open arms blue wallet version six point one point six has been released you're running blue wallet consider upgrading their lightning terminal version zero point 5.0 alpha has been released sparrow wallet version 1.4.2 has been released and last but not least umbral version 0.3.13 has been released so if you're running any of that software

consider upgrading letting matt back into the room now we lost you there brother you're muted i am back thank god i was worried about you i had to restart my computer everything just broke over here that was pretty quick it's a pretty quick restart um we just finished the software updates awesome bullish as fuck appreciate you uh reading those to the freaks oh hey hey i think they appreciate it too they know hey i have to go download my my new software what was your favorite software update this week i think it was the rust lightning it's just interesting to see them finally get something to market you know awesome what about you i don't have the list in front of me and i'm afraid my computer is going to break down so

what's going on with your computer dude um i'm excited to see progress on more lightning implementations it'd be nice if we didn't once again appreciate all the work of of developers out there that are a lot of times doing this stuff for free and doing it for the mission and um i'm not doing that so i'm not trying to throw stones but it'd be nice if we had uh but kind of an existential threat for for lightning short term is if it's just one major implementation so to see other performant implementations get released and worked on um is definitely really good to see yeah agreed agreed moving back to the list micro strategy bought more bitcoin you like that the headline much more uh now they hold over 105

five thousand coins um it's quite a lot of bitcoin quite a lot of bitcoin held by micro strategy um just can't stop stacking their uh their cost basis on the last buy was 37,617 so they're still underwater on that um by about four thousand dollars it feels relevant but i feel like we just bare minimum talk about it i'm kind of done with the topic at this point yeah thank god bitcoin's not proof of stake um if if we ever actually have a a major proof of stake uh cryptocurrency i look forward to uh these types of attacks happening on it because it's fucking inevitable like of course the corporates are going to try and fuck in oh and like the etfs too like between gbtc and micro strategy and coinbase well funny you say that hold so much

bitcoin thank god we don't have proof of stake did you see what happened to the like what the the ethereum staker this week it's like they like sued fireblocks or something yeah like one of the top 10 stakers of eth 2.0 i think they had 75 million dollars for the eth which is many thousands of uh yeah the the their custodian didn't didn't uh back up their seed phrase or their private key and they just completely lost it so they lost like 10 percent of stake or like i think it was like 8.75 percent of i don't know it like read kind of fishy the the whole thing is was just uh it seemed like it seemed like the participants of of that lawsuit lacked personal responsibility

and kind of deserved it whatever happened there like there's a lot of things we can blame proof of stake for uh i think those people would have had fun staying poor even if they were using bitcoin yeah no what does that do like yeah if you just have all that state you don't have the private key there's just stake in the perpetuity and you can't do it no one knows marty no one knows we we've already discussed it too far all right all right i'm sorry the british cf or excuse me the british fca is cracking down uh they hit 111 unregistered crypto asset firms with what they hit them with subpoenas fines no they like shot across the bow yeah warnings so So this is very relevant because it's kind of been happening behind the scenes and no one wants to talk about it.

So the FCA is the British rulemaking body or the regulator that Bitcoin companies fall under. And they practically made the UK one of the worst major jurisdictions to launch a Bitcoin company. The FCA has only approved five companies so far. so they just they just approved the fifth company now um and there's 111 a large portion of that 111 they just called out have been trying to go through this approval process like if you think the bit license is bad in new york the fca's process is way worse it's it's extremely convoluted it's expensive there's no clear answers and it's constantly moving they're constantly moving the goalposts and attacking these companies even after they've been approved um so what does that mean

what does that mean that means that we should expect once again we should expect most freedom hating governments to attack freedom money um and they are going to do it from these kind of different basis and on the short term that's going to suck for the citizens of those places especially if you're trying to launch a business um that interacts with these things but ultimately long term it should mean that we see these businesses distribute out to better jurisdictions where they're they're treated properly right yeah yeah it's a shame the british uh do not like freedom anymore if they ever liked it at all uh the fca cracking down making it prohibitive to run a bitcoin company it's a shame it's a real shame um hopefully it doesn't happen here

in the u.s outside of new york uh speaking of new york mayor front runner he seems to want to make new york a bitcoin city dude doesn't even know what bitcoin is he just was saying buzzwords yeah he's like we're gonna bring bitcoin people like don't don't what people say doesn't matter what they do matters more yes yes just uh judges you know i'll believe it when i see it what they do not know what they say the good thing is at least it's like a positive buzzword talking point now right and he could have said blockchain or crypto or digital assets and he said bitcoin um i think he specifically said bring bitcoins to new york it doesn't even make any sense grammatically but um like at least it's a buzzword i guess we have that going for us

we got the buzzword bitcoin is a buzzword is it a trigger word i guess that's it i still think the plural of bitcoin is bitcoin it's bitcoins yeah i know we disagree on that this is one of the important debates of our time um we we at least i think we disagree on at least bi-weekly on how on how that that works yeah i buy bitcoins bi-weekly you you buy bitcoin bi-weekly i buy bitcoins bi-weekly on the cash i stack multi multiple bitcoins just kidding i wish that would be dope um iran i think sats is plural like it's it's not sat it's sats yeah you know 43 million sats but 0.43 bitcoin 143 million sats 100 million 0.43 bitcoin 100 million sats is one bitcoin 200 million sats

two bitcoins it's very simple it's very simple it's very straightforward man i don't see how you can what is one point two three four five bitcoin it's a hundred million that's not my point not a hundred 123 million sats is 1.23 bitcoin 43 million stats is 0.43 bitcoin no it'd be one bitcoin so it'd be one bitcoin 200 or 23 million sats or whatever what was that it'd be one bitcoin 23 million sats and if you get to like 200 if you get 2.3 that's how we're going to pronounce it 300 we got to work this out the decimals because the decimals it just makes more sense if it's just bitcoin okay all right and also it's just better for objects sakes too especially in and you know as the price continues to go up that's true

speaking of obsec iran uh sees 7 000 uh bitcoin miners in an abandoned factory um um this page is loading uh we don't know if they're even bitcoin miners but i assume they're bitcoin miners yeah they said cryptocurrency computer machines computer mining machines iran police chief general hussein harami said that 7 000 computer miners were seized in an factory in the west of the capital city state new jersey irna reported um this was after the state put a four-month moratorium on mining due to stress on the grid uh what's the plural what is if you see like seven deer it's deer it's not deers what about what about like uh you're still stuck up we're talking about iran i i caught i caught 20 fish fishes fish no no fish

yeah sorry we're talking about iran we're talking about iran though okay please let me pull together here so uh iran sees 7 000 machines again they had a four-month moratorium on mining over the summer due to the stress on the grid they didn't want miners taking electricity from the grid during peak summer hours and i guess they were able to identify this abandoned warehouse mining operation using the grid again highlights political risk and mining on the grid easily you can easily be identified if you're mining on the grid and you're not registered um so beware But it also highlights what you would expect an authoritarian government to do when they're attacking miners is they bag and tag the compliant miners, and then they make an example. Maybe they do a four-month moratorium, and then they make an example of anyone who's mining and hasn't complied, right?

And what do they do at that point? they don't say oh well take your miners and go sell them to uh to to to miners in another nation that we're competing with in every other facet of the world uh they actually seize them and take control over them the mind for themselves or pres or they you know you know they have uh a dude who's like connected to the regime and they have him run the operation right yeah and well they already are effectively forcing the register miners to mine for them right they have to give their their Bitcoin to the central bank exactly so yeah if you freaks didn't know that Iran last year at some point made it so if you're a registered miner

you had to sell your bitcoins to the central bank I believe they're gonna use that for the sole purpose of purchasing exports excuse me not purchasing exports purchasing goods from um outside the country so iran bitcoin mining story grows more ransomware matt wants to make you freaks aware of ransomware it's not in the mainstream paiza ransomware this is targeting educational uh entities in the uk and in 12 states in the united states um not too sophisticated but uh just a another example of ransomware in the wild matt matt's got a deck beer that looks that looks very good is that flying dog flying dog yeah because marty's owl in the comments asked what i was drinking so i was

trying to do it in a non um well there we go didn't mean to interrupt you continue no i was done no the ransomware oh yes so this is just another ransomware i i i i've decided that um with all the talk of ransomware being the next narrative against bitcoin every time i find a small little story about some random ransomware we're going to talk about on tails in the crypt yeah let's expect uh expect the ransomware heat to heat up this was not in mainstream news or anything this is just this is like a bleeping computer article about it yeah gladstein our boy gladstein had an incredible piece in bitcoin magazine yesterday fighting monetary colonialism with open source code he dove into uh the history of

uh basically french colonialism across 15 african nations uh and basically the forced currency that uh these african nations are are forced to use by the french the frank de la communita financier africani or frank of the financial community of africa um and it just highlights very in a very detailed fashion uh the ways in which colonialism still exists and the ways in which the the french government is basically manipulated in the currencies of uh the african nations that it has this weird control over um debasing the currency overnight many times over and really putting these African nations at a terrible disadvantage. And he also highlights how Bitcoin can help these nations

and be a better alternative than this currency controlled by the French government, which is completely detached from the African continent. So very illuminating story. uh gladstein doing a great a great thing to put this stuff out bi-weekly uh incredible content incredibly in-depth well researched uh he does interviews with um a couple of africans on the ground um who who have lived through this and um have have been subjected to uh the debasements of of this french currency and and now they are getting into bitcoin advocating for bitcoin as well so beautiful to see yeah i love i love that our boy gladstein has been you know released in

these posts every two weeks uh focused on on on the ills of fiat currency basically because you know people don't ask what the history of their money is and how their money has been used by centralized actors to influence policy decisions and make people's lives worse in a lot of ways. And he kind of just pulls that argument instead of being, you know, Bitcoin's bad to let's have a discussion about your existing money, the money that you just take for granted that you just expect. Just really quick, Marty, what is the plural of ransomware? Ransomwares. It's definitely ransomware ransomwares i agree to disagree i'm gonna die on this hill marty maybe maybe this is the hill i die on

it's not gonna be bit cloud it's gonna be bitcoins uh shout out to gladstein he's he's a real one he really is uh last but not least on the list peter mccormick interviewed president bukele of el salvador very very great interview eloquent um president bukele was very eloquent in his reasoning behind bitcoin why why he believes it's important why he feels confident to have el salvador go out and and put their neck out and and champion bitcoin um so if you guys haven't gone to listen to that or watch it yet go do so learn about the first nation state to make a bitcoin legal tender first sitting president to go on a bitcoin podcast if you don't include cnbc

yeah yeah that seems big to me that's that's the big headline boom cnbc got uh got front ran too it's beautiful to see you have anything to riff on here this is good this is so much better than yesterday i'm happy we recorded this yesterday i was like i tried to go to the top of this cabin and i was just doing it on a on my cell phone speakerphone on marty was in bed it was uh we love you freaks we'll we'll ride or die we'll be here every week it's been three years every fucking week um can't stay away uh you guys you guys make it worth it um i had what was it cypherpunkpay.org

is a new btc pay alternative that a freak sent me that he's been working on that i have not tested out yet but the idea is to be more lightweight and has a bit of a different trust model you don't have to use your own node it randomly uh uses uh blockchain explorers different uh bitcoin explorers and it uses different tor circuits for it so it does it in a relatively private fashion without using your own full node kind of geared towards uh being more accessible for activists to accept donations which is one of the use cases we've been talking about a lot on this on this show um i have not tested out myself or you know looked at the code in any kind of way but this is like a call to the freaks

who are interested in that type of thing which I think there's many of us that are to look into it because it does seem like an interesting project. Cypherpunk Pay is a modern self-hosted software for accepting Bitcoin on ClearNet and Onion websites. Project prioritizes simplicity and privacy being a single Linux daemon.

It is easy to install with no dependencies and near zero configuration. It will run fine on a $5 VPS. boom um one thing i want to bring up too something i read about the bent earlier this week uh article on recode highlighting two things that i'd like to talk about uh one the stress on the texas grid and ericott uh into spyware uh apparently there was a program in texas with some of the energy companies if users signed up they basically hooked them in uh with the chance to win five thousand dollars off uh of their energy bills over the course of a year and so people obviously signed

up hey get five thousand dollars off but they didn't realize i guess in the fine print it said if you sign up for this we can manipulate your thermostat remotely and so during the heat wave last week apparently a bunch of people started noticing that their their nest thermostats were were up to like 78 degrees and they couldn't change them and that was because they basically signed away the rights of their the control of their thermostat to the energy companies and when the grid got stressed out last week uh they the energy company went to these people signed up for this program and turned up their heat to reduce the load on on the grid um so it just highlights the fragility of the grid in texas which is still mind-blowing and then the power you give up with

spyware devices so throw your nest out or your lex out your google home whatever it is get them out of your house or they're just attack vectors you correctly pluralize spyware um the i think we're gonna see more and more of this surveillance capitalism um people opting into it uh giving up control of things that they've historically controlled locally um for more convenience and easier cost it's going to get worse and worse and then more people are going to get burned and And as people get burned, as their friends and family get burned, as they read on the news about other people get burned, but especially as they get burned themselves and they touch the stove themselves, they're going to start to realize why it's important for us to take

sovereignty over our lives again, specifically in the digital realm, which is growing a larger part of our lives every day. And at that point, we really need to have the platforms and the tools available for people so that they can opt into the more sovereign option. um and i i think that it's a lot more productive getting that ready for when people are ready rather than trying to push people to be ready when they're not ready yet i think when when people sense a need they will seek out the better alternative and we need to be ready for them in that situation agreed agreed so crazy and they can just it's so creepy fucking in the middle of a

heat wave i mean yeah that is that but but one thing is is is when it when it comes to electric and gas we especially if you know if you're in a developed part of the world we've kind of already ceded control to centralized options like we we see that's what rolling blackouts are right like rolling blackouts are a centralized company the grid operator is trying to ease portions of the grid so they'll they'll roll blackouts in certain areas and keep on the lights in other areas and switch um what really scares me is like the ring camera's getting normalized yeah um because doorbells were never a centralized like in third party and now people are completely fine with every single person going in and out of your house is just going to an amazon server somewhere

and like five other servers you know like that's fucking crazy to me one of the cops um what is that going to the police too like they have like a partnership with police departments and it's technically opt-in but like you're peer pressured into doing it because you don't want to be the neighbor who's like what are you doing what are you doing over there like you're not opting into the thing so you have this like social peer pressure and then like on top of it it's you know i go over to a friend's house or whatever and i'm like like why are you exposing this to me right it's super frustrating it is it's only going to get worse and then it'll get better there'll be some major hacks

there'll be some major issues that come up there is already like people's thermostats are getting manipulated we've had like the instances of people's children being spied on remotely and like talked to through like the then the rings like it's already very creepy get it together get it together we need to get it together we need like start nine labs matt hill when he was on talking about building a sovereign closed loop security system we need that to get out there i cannot wait to pick that up once once it gets to market um we can't end it without talking about john mcafee sir never ate his dick i really don't think he killed himself he didn't he didn't maybe he od'd maybe he overdosed but i don't think he killed

himself getting that good smack in uh in prison i'm not gonna pretend he was like a legend or a king like people are like god you know cheers to a real one like dude was a fucking scammer and he was an asshole um but he lived life by his own rules and i do not think that he was the type that would kill himself which begs the question why i don't really think he had that much dirt that's the question there's a lot of epstein theories going out there i mean he pissed off a lot of people i think it's a very different i think it's a very different case i just don't uh i just don't yeah i i i think the default should be that if someone tells you that

someone committed suicide you should just assume they didn't first and like that could that goes with me as well like i will never commit suicide you should be inherently skeptical if that is what they say i love life i've got a son i'll never commit suicide okay um we have someone in the comments mentioning this like i'm not giving any more time to the asshole who refuses to take personal responsibility and i just want to say i'm still a bit disappointed that more public people more public big corners didn't stand the fuck up here because i think frankly it's pretty obvious what the fuck happened and i've said my piece already and that's it yeah we don't need to to waste any breath on that i mean it's

right less i guess that's all i would say it's real shame very quick very quick fall people act like this is a rare thing this just happens all the time yeah people get too hot too hot comment it's the it's the common ending for this type of story yeah it's almost poetic how predictable it is how beautiful how predictable it is who's next i don't know let's end it on a positive note yeah what should we end it on it's a beautiful day where i am right now i make it it's a miserable day where i am right now that's why i'm recording inside uh it's foggy and bright look at these windows it's crazy what uh what should we end it on what should we end it on i'm bullish on bitcoin man i know we're hovering here at 32 000

stackers paradise man it really is living in a stacker's paradise living in a stack of this paradise it's gonna be a great it's gonna be a great year right already is a great year i'm excited for summer coming into full swing i feel like this is going to be a fantastic summer i feel like people are just ready to go after the last year of nonsense the village by the sea is popping right now vibes are high we got the whole that's why i'm on the back deck we got the whole family in the house right now so it's me my wife my son my in-laws my wife's sister her bro my brother-in-law their kids packed house that's awesome yeah i think people should just you know in this in this sideways action there's a tendency for

people to uh go a little bit crazy on the internet uh specifically on twitter because twitter is designed to just fucking one-liner at each other um you know just take a step back don't stop stacking and just like enjoy the little things and just enjoy your family and enjoy your friends um because that's that's you know life is short that's the most important thing yeah seriously yeah i've uh i've been taking a break from twitter this week too it feels good we have bitcoin books asking bitcoin and books asking in the comments if we're going to elzonte to bitcoin beach anytime soon we did talk about this last week we both plan on making our pilgrimage down there at some point that's what every bitcoiner is expected to do now it seems

marty seems like he wants to broadcast to the world when he'll be doing that uh i will not be mentioning it until after i come back uh but it is it is on the list i would love to i would love to go down there i will be making it down there as well probably not anytime in the next few weeks i need to get a negative covid test i imagine um one of the guys from barstool actually reached out to me he wants to go down there and shoot some content potentially in november um and i might meet him down there for that do some barstool content with him it'd be pretty fun i just fucking love what they've been doing down there i've loved what they've been doing down there before the legal tender thing i love what they're doing down there

now i love their initiative with uh katie diaz's memorial fund um to to create an official olympic center there for the surf team uh for the el salvadorian surf team a shout out to uh the dirt bags in al's lacrosse's uh group his chat uh we raised i believe over 14 million sats or 0.14 bitcoin um for the katie diaz memorial fund uh so that's just awesome to see hell yeah shout out to the dirtbags you scumbags I don't know why you hang out with Al he sucks

he's creepy oh it was 10.4 million sats .104 bitcoin it's the noon bell in my village by the sea we have a noon bell here

yeah beautiful day enjoy life enjoy this time on this this rock that we have enjoy bitcoin thankful that we have it this particular juncture speaking of which like we just had a very high uh inflation indicator to the pce so i think it had his highest year on your growth ever um so it doesn't seem like inflation's gonna stop jerome powell really pussyfooted around um the inflation question on congress while speaking on congress uh last week uh there's really no talk of like tapering or anything like that like so it seems like they're going to go full bull or head you have

christine lagarde at the ecb really trying to drill negative interest rates into people's heads she's like it's good for people it's good it's good she's like literally gaslighting people with like don't worry negative interest rates are good it's good to steal your money from you um so yeah the central bankers are not stopping what they're doing at all they're gonna go full bore ahead uh and so thank god bitcoin exists we have the sound digital currency uh sovereign digital currency in the digital age keep stacking love you marty love you freaks i'll see you all dispatch next week and rhr stay on one stack peace and love