TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Bitcoin Week of 2021.07.12

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - bitmex dev grant program accepting applications - bluewallet mobile focused lightning implementation powered by LDK - trezor suite app officially launches - bluewallet v6.1.9 - rust lightning v0.0.99 - nix-bitcoin v0.0.47 - zeus v0.5.2 - fully noded 0.2.18 - sparrow wallet v1.4.3 - mint mobile data breach - powell on capitol hill - unrest around the world 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 is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here to introduce this rip of rhr a very good rip if i do say so myself very level-headed not very emotional very level-headed a lot of tech talk a lot of software talk a lot of software updates a lot going on in the space on the software side on the building side which is good to see uh i think you guys are gonna like it this was brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking breaking news wasn't able to talk about it uh on the podcast because jack dropped this thread 25 minutes ago and we stopped recording like an hour ago but it seems that square is creating a new business joining seller cash app and title focused on building an open

developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial permissionless and decentralized financial services our primary focus is bitcoin its name is tbd they're going to do this all out in the open open source so it seems like jack is creating a new business focused on building open developer platform for creating what seems to be bitcoin defi products very exciting obviously square is the parent company of cash app sponsor the pod cash app you can use to dollar cost average into bitcoin you can stack sats as the kids say these days dca dollar cost average you set a set amount that you want to buy on a set cadence you can do it daily weekly or bi-weekly on the cash app cash app can even be your bank

account they're offering account numbers of routing numbers so you get your paychecks direct deposited into the app they've got their boost program that allows you to personalize your own debit card which is accepted anywhere visa is accepted it's all gucci over at the cash app if you haven't downloaded it yet make sure you use the code stacking stats it's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're going to get ten dollars and ten dollars is going to go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse owls lacrosse this trip is also brought to you by good friends at unshamed capital or very good friends at unshamed capital and bear with me don't bear with me go on a journey with me freaks neil woodfine's taken over the marketing department over at unshamed and

we've got some new ad material to talk about we're still going to talk about their concierge uh onboarding program it's proven to be very popular and there's just a little switch up to the ad here all right there's an urgency to upgrade your bitcoin security beyond custodians even single sing sig wallets multi-sig as we said before gives you significantly more security because you can hide keys in different geographic locations which makes it so a five dollar wrench attack uh will not be successful in moving your bitcoin unless they were to travel to each geographic location where your multi-sig wallets are held which makes that much more expensive and time consuming unchained makes setting up collaborative custody really really

easy for you um so what we're showing today is their concierge onboarding service or their free consultation service which they've recently added okay so for long-term bitcoin savings it's important to eliminate again single points of failure no matter how careful you are sometimes things can go wrong and when they do you need to be confident that you're not going to see your savings go to zero if you're using any exchange or custodian the single point of failure is obvious not your keys not your coins it could be the company staff or your login sim swap we talk about it in this episode but even if you're using a hardware wallet you're still exposed to other single points of failure your wallet its backup and even yourself so think about collaborative

custody based on Bitcoin multisig where no single key controls your Bitcoin and one key is shared with a trusted partner, in this case, Unchained Capital, who will be on the hand to help with recovery if one of your keys is lost or stolen. Requiring multiple keys to spend your Bitcoin ensures that your Bitcoin savings are safe, even if you make a mistake while ensuring you're always in total control. Setting up a collaborative custody vault may sound daunting for some listeners, but our friends at Unchained Capital have made getting started super easy with their concierge service uh i was a beta tester their concierge service would walk through the process myself i have a portion of my stack in an unchained vault i highly recommend it the

concierge team will provide you with personal one-on-one guidance to get you set up with a secure solution fast even if you've never held drone keys they ship hardware devices to you directly from the manufacturer walk you through the setup steps at your own pace and cover everything you need to know about Bitcoin security. Once you're set up with Unchained, you can easily access other services, including buying and selling Bitcoin, Bitcoin retirement accounts, and Bitcoin-backed loans. You can begin the concierge onboarding process on their site at unchained-capital.com slash concierge, concierge, C-O-N-C-I-E-R-G-E, and get $50 off with the promo code TFTC. If you're not quite ready to dive in yet,

they're offering a totally free one-on-one consultation to help you learn more about what's on offer so if you just want to check out see what they're all about you can do that as well again we love the team at unchained all their products their bitcoin first their bitcoin focus their security focus they're building some of the best products i use their products i use their content to help orange pill people incredible team and it's only getting stronger unchained dash capital dot com slash concierge is what we're shilling today but go check out everything they're doing if you do do the concierge service use the code tftc to get 50 off this rip is also brought to you by good friends at hodl hodl hodl hodl is also leveraging multisig and the way

they're doing it is to create a lending platform lend at hodl hodl is a new non-custodial bitcoin back lending platform that allows peer-to-peer lending and borrowing between users globally anonymously and on your own terms no kyc no aml available to u.s citizens because it's non-custodial and again they leverage bitcoin's multi-sig so the way it works is you put your bitcoin in a two or three multi-sig wallet as an escrow account and acts as an escrow account you hold one key your counterparty holds one key hodl hodl holds the third key um and so the way this works you put your bitcoin if you're short funds if you need some liquidity put your bitcoin in this two or three, uh, multi-sig escrow account, you get stable coin liquidity in return. And as long

as you're paying that stable coin loan back and you're making sure that you're, uh, you're collateral, you're sufficiently collateralized throughout the duration of the loan, you're going to get your stats back at the end of the day. And you know this again, because you hold one of the three keys in the two or three multi-sig escrow, which means you have visibility into the wallet at all times, which means that you can ensure that your sats aren't being rehypothecated you don't have to entrust anybody you can trust yourself and a block explorer that shows you that your bitcoin has not moved if you have stable coins laying around you want to get some yield in them you can enter the other side of that marketplace you put

them up to be lent out and you get a yield in return for for offering that service so create your offers and set your own terms on lend.hodlhodl.com that's l-e-n-d dot h-o-d-l h-o-d-l dot com last but not least this rip was brought to you by our good friends at brains guess what ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding the slush pool upgrade has officially been pushed we've seen it at great american mining it's beautiful and they made it within july they said they were going to get it done in july they were triple quadruple checking and guess what july 15th dead smack in the middle actually they launched it yesterday so the 14th right before the middle of the month pretty impressed not gonna lie when what's minor when what's minor

that's my question guys uh the brains os plus firmware update uh there was a brains os plus firmware or let's talk about the slush pool update first the slush pool update uh comes with a better layout UX UI wise. It's got dark mode, but it's also got more flexible payout schemes. So you can set thresholds for when you want to get Bitcoin sent to your wallet. You can split payments as well. If you're pointing your hash to Slushpool as a business and you need to distribute the mined Bitcoin to multiple stakeholders in your business, the new upgrade has made that possible. They've also updated their BrainsOS Plus firmware, which includes full support for the s minor the ant minor the s minor the ant minor s17e and t17e as well as some

significant improvements to the auto tuning for all x17 devices and it's available now at brains it's b-r-a-i-i-n-s dot com slash os slash plus brains double i b-r-a-i-i-n-s brains os plus is compatible this is important service announcement it's compatible with any mining pool a lot of people think that if you use brains os plus firmware you have to point in that slush pool this isn't true you don't need to mine a slush pool when you use the firmware but if you do mine with slush pool you're going to get zero percent pool fees so that's their incentive to get you to point that brains os plus uh jacked up hash at slush pool zero percent pool full pool fees since network hash rate is at one year lows due to the china crackdown now is a great time for

miners to juice up their asics with auto tuning firmware and stack even more sats and i love this part of the read because we get to learn for those who don't know how this works it mostly comes down to the silicon of the hashing chips there are very small variations in the silicon quality for every chip in an asic typically stock firmwares that come with the machines treat the entire device as uniform unit sending the same frequencies and voltages through the hash boards brains os plus boost 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 to higher quality chips and less work to 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 amp minor s9 s9i s9j as well as the s17 s17 plus s17 pro t17 t17 plus and the ones that were just added the s17e and t17e next up is what's minor of course along with the s19s from bitmain edward austin wants to see that what's minor firmware he's been asking stay tuned to m4 updates to the firmware and slush pool actually you don't have to stay tuned for the slush pool update it was pushed yesterday we already described it check out insights.brains.com i-n-s-i-g-h-t-s.brains.com for content stats charts and mining profitability tools to stay up on top of everything happening in the mining industry hope you guys enjoy this rip enjoy your

life enjoy the time on this earth and fight stand up fight fight against the authoritarian cancer that's metastasizing around the world. It's time. You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's

part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here for another edition of rabbit hole recap i'm setting up the live stream sitting down with our very very good friend matt o'dell matt how the hell are you what um let's filler we need some filler for the for the podcast freaks as i get this set up what's some good filler use your own node learn how to use coin join care about your privacy stay humble and stack all right that was that was some good filler some good filler we need just one more filler which i would listen to marty's uh interview with michael saylor very controversial a lot of mixed reviews on that one well maybe we'll talk about it um

when we go live here because i think other people may want to hear it um tftc 21 all right we're going live right now boom boom what is up freaks in the live stream we're here for our hr rabbit hole recap uh today is july 15th payday for a lot of people around the world congrats i hope it's a good thursday for you all um yeah we were just saying it's a bit of a quiet week but uh still in this consolidation phase we're currently sitting at 31 000 i don't have the dashboard up what an amateur move currently sitting at 31 285 dollars one cuck buck's gonna get you 3 196 sats let's just go through the dashboard right now we'll jump into conversation uh we're at block height 691 166 we are uh 322 blocks away from the next

adjustment which it seems like some hash has come on the network since last week last week when we met here uh the adjustment was estimated to be like negative 11 and estimated to be on july 21st As of right now, it's going to be a downward adjustment of 5.6%, and that's estimated to happen on Sunday, July 18th. So that's interesting. It's an interesting thing to note. Currently 479 transactions in Clarksman Pool. It's a ghost town.

It's a fucking ghost town in there. It really is. It really is. Get your one sat per byte transactions in if you need them, freaks. whirlpool capacity exploding 3135.25 btc awesome unspent value is down though as the price has fallen below 100 million currently sitting at 98.1 million cuck bucks uh yeah that's all we got for the dashboard finally got samurai wallet on the feed yeah it was a great rep it was you um samurai wallet and open noms correct return dispatch guest open arms matt are you are you monero shill

no i'm not uh if anything uh that influencer who's calling me out shows it more than i do but uh i'm waiting for him to increase his bounty that's why i didn't answer that narrow is clearly a shit coin yeah i've said many fucking times well people ran with that tweet that you put right before dispatch oh that was a trigger tweet for dispatch too yeah yeah they thought you were shilling monero but if you actually comprehended had the reading comprehension of the tweet you're just saying hey don't get mad get even by competing i'm in the unique position where uh the status bitcoin influencers don't like me and the monero stands don't like me either so It's a great position to be in. I don't know if I'm in a similar position, but I'm definitely in a position where I think a lot of the statists are not happy with me.

There comes a point where it's, you know, like I don't block people so they can, you know, they can run around in my comments if they want to run around in my comments, but I'm not going to engage with someone that continuously acts in bad faith and has zero respect for me whatsoever. So like, uh, if, if you're wondering why I don't respond to certain people, um, it's because they can simply go fuck themselves and, uh, there there's, there's never enough for them. They'll never be quenched. You know, I could say whatever I want to, I could say exactly what they want to say and they'll still, they'll, they'll still be, you know, making up baseless accusations. Um, so like that's just exhausting.

There's not enough time in the day to deal with that shit. well that's why i take the exact opposite approach and i i block liberally because i just don't have the mental um time the time to expend mental work on trolls and other people it clears your headspace too i highly recommend it no blocking i block so why we come here that's why we meet here different perspectives uh big week not not a big week pretty quiet week one big thing we'll do so what do you think let's start with blue wallet and their ldk the lightning development kit implementation that they um teased earlier this week they have a github page for it as well obviously it's open source but it seems like the first at least that

i'm aware of um implementation of the lightning development kit which for any of you freaks out there who are unaware it is the uh lightning implementation that the square crypto team's been working on for some years now they officially released um the kit a few weeks ago um and this seems like the first wallet to actually leverage ldk which is um an implementation written in rust um and it was worked on by matt corallo um val if you guys want to understand uh how the square crypto team was thinking about approaching this ldk specifically and go find the episode with um with matt corallo and val from gosh i was back in the brooklyn studio days good times um but it seems like one of the last rips there right yeah yeah one of the last rips um

and a lot of what we talked about then seems to have come to fruition particularly the ability to open channels via hardware wallet which uh is one of the cool features that blue wallet highlighted in their in their video yes i mean you can open directly from the hardware wallet um and you can close the hardware wallet obviously when they're actually when the channels open it's hot yes um because it needs to be because you're constantly updating channel states um what's really cool here is uh their implementation is in react native uh which is a very common uh language used in in mobile development for both ios and android so it's cross-platform so it should be way easier for wallet devs to add this

lightning implementation to their mobile wallets yeah and apparently it's very lightweight you can leverage Electrum with it and yeah it just seems like it's pretty pretty high performance and a pretty well done implementation I guess and we've had this many times this conversation on this topic many times like it'll be interesting to see what the landscape of the lightning network looks like a decade from now are all the implementations still around what are the network effects look like how do they interact and interoperate with each other are certain implementations used for certain use cases and others for other use cases uh it's one of the unknowns uh in the lightning network space

at least right now which will be fun to see how it plays out um how do you think i mean we've had this before but i think you could see them coexist for quite a while i think like there's going to be one or two implementations that take the overwhelming majority of use uh i think that's just how things go um but it'd be nice if we had some healthy competition uh in the meantime yeah yeah um i'm trying to think of enlightening i think in general mobile right like the overwhelming majority of end users are going to be mobile users um i feel like this is uh it's a thing that like the hardcores generally disregard both in terms of not only lightning but also on chain usage um the overwhelming majority of people in the world when they

interact with bitcoin is going to be with their mobile phone it's their main computer it's it's how they interact with everything else you know i i don't know the exact numbers but i assume the majority of people that interact with twitter are doing it you know through their mobile phone um especially in the developing world so a we we need more more tools in that ecosystem um and the more the better more options better yeah i mean it's not even naive to think that it's not going to be mostly mobile it's it's just ignorant and um it's it's very western perspective right like like this it's if we want to get a billion people as elizabeth stark she wants to make the number of people go up if that if we are successful doing that

a vast majority of them are going to be using bitcoin mobile first and it's just a fact that you have to take into consideration um and just come to grips with and design around that too which is another interesting topic to bring up. It's like the design of these wallets and the interactions and something I wrote about in the event a couple of days ago. Zender, Zentoshi, and Damien Ma were just having like a conversation and thread about QR code UX particularly.

And I didn't know this, but apparently with the QR codes, like wallets can set up, obviously Moon has this interoperability, but you can, it should be extended to other wallet softwares. like the ability to get a qr code and it has an on-chain address and a lightning network public or excuse me lightning network invoice embedded in it as well so if you just point your phone whether you're using lightning or on-chain it'll be able to pick it up and you don't have to choose i think the the pain point zender was highlighting specifically was with btc pay server you have to

choose on-chain or lightning it's just a mental step that a user has to take and another friction point if you will um just highlights the need for for good designers in the bitcoin space which there are plenty of right now but we could always use more um something i've tried to like highlight in the newsletter is if you're a designer out there if you're a ux designer a visual ui designer like the the opportunity to create new experiences around bitcoin and as apps get built to interact with the bitcoin network is massive like if you're a designer is a go-getter and wants to be known for innovating in that field particularly like bitcoin is a wide open space that desperately needs help and um you could go down as

an epic designer if you design these experiences and and help people adopt bitcoin and use it much easier 100 i mean so marty before we get into the next topic i feel like a lot of freaks kind of want a postmortem of your, uh, your epic conversation with, uh, with sailor. Do you want to, uh, well, how do you feel about it after the fact? Yeah, there's been, I mean, it seems pretty split down the middle, uh, in terms of reaction of the, the conversation. A lot of people are calling it a debate, but you need a moderator for it to be a true debate. And it was a back and forth about the bitcoin mining council and esg obviously uh and yeah it seems pretty split i mean i understand the the perspective of michael and darren uh especially as they run businesses that

are public and plan to go public at some point in the future they have to posture a certain way particularly as it pertains to esg um and i get that i understand it but again as has been made very apparent on these airwaves and gamcast and on my twitter account like i think esg is a potential attack vector um that could coerce some bitcoin companies particularly publicly traded Bitcoin companies to act in certain ways that may not align with the ethos or the reason they taught of the Bitcoin network. And just, I think it's important to get that perspective out there and really hash this out. And again, a big topic towards the end of the conversation was pick your battles, like why are you trying to take on ESG, which is a movement

with $30 trillion of AUM behind it and you're taking on the capital markets and the biggest institutions in the world. And do you really want to pick that battle? And I would argue, yes. You want to start that battle now as opposed to years down the line when it could be a battle that potentially cannot be won

because there's been too much influence exerted via the ESG movement on these Bitcoin companies. Yeah, so I guess that's my postmortem. And I think Freak Skeef out there, he had a really good tweet earlier today that sort of really lucidly described the distinction of the debate. So two fundamental questions on the ESG debate that Skeef sees is, number one, are we adapting slash redeeming the existing system or building out a new parallel system people can opt into or not? And then number two, does the mob defined as 80 to 90% of the population matter for what we are trying to accomplish with Bitcoin? And I think point two is particularly leaning into the part of the conversation with Darren and Michael where they're like, hey, we're just trying to get the 95% of the people who are in the middle and pitch Bitcoin to them. And I guess Skeef saying here is like, do we actually need to do that for Bitcoin to be successful?

um could this be something like the founding fathers um and their the quest to separate from from england uh in the 1700s some stats the actual percentage of people who were supportive of the the revolution vary from as low as two percent to as high as like 30 i believe um so i guess you just should we hone in on it kind of makes sense right if you think about today i mean with our rights that continue to get trampled on and i feel like the majority of people in this country uh would probably be uh loyalist uh to the to the british if if the revolution happened today oh 100 yeah yeah that's another thing too i'm sorry if i've been bombastic on Twitter the last couple of weeks, particularly, but I don't know, maybe it's Tim Foyle hat. I was

accused of being paranoid by Michael Saylor. Maybe I am paranoid, but I don't know. It just seems like there is this global coordination of politicians and powerful entities that are really making a big push towards authoritarianism. It seems very overt and very coordinated and very aggressive in the last couple months particularly obviously i had a thread that i started over the weekend just trying to create a dystopian black mirror picture of the future that these people want the world economic forum bank of international settlements the ecb jerome powell coming out this week talking about cbdc's they're openly talking about their intent to push us into this digital panopticon um and i don't know i just feel very compelled to viciously and aggressively speak out

about it and try to make more people aware of the fact that they do have an agenda they're openly talking about it and they plan to to push it on them so first of all i mean just to go back real quick to the last point um i've i've felt this uh conflict not necessarily with esg but just the idea of Bitcoin marketing in general. I don't think we need to convince people to like Bitcoin or buy Bitcoin or use Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is like water. You need it. Most people don't realize they need it yet. And when they realize they need it, we need the tools to be robust and ready for them so that they can then seek them out when it's time. They will figure out the need and then they will seek out the need. Maybe that's a little bit different if you're

trying to operate a business in a certain jurisdiction and you you know you don't want regulators to you know destroy your business but that's independent to bitcoin to me and i think people often conflate it like oh we need to we need to convince people that bitcoin is good or useful or whatever uh when really what they're saying is i i want to defend my my business interests not bitcoin um the second thing is i'm curious like uh i've kind of definitely i i'm definitely more um sympathetic to that viewpoint in terms of it does feel like there is some level of coordination going on um even like with the vaccine passports we saw them get rolled out in multiple countries back to back uh i'm curious if you've changed your opinion on whether or not

china is sophisticated enough in seizing minors uh when when you relate to like that level of coordination the idea of a global coordination um of human rights on human rights scales uh is a way is way more difficult of a coordination than than just a single chinese communist party seizing hardware i mean again i will concede i do think it's totally possible and there have been so rumblings through the grapevine that potentially being thought of by the ccp as well so something we should be aware of and cognizant of and hyper vigilant about as a bitcoin network as participants in the network yeah i mean it's totally possible whether or not they will do it again is something that we we have yet to see and but we should look out for

i mean again like we described in the opening looking at the dashboard it seems that some hash rate has come on the network between last week and this week so which is a good sign does that signal that miners are making it um to shores abroad maybe uh can't know for sure um it'd be nice to see a difficulty adjustment up next week yeah next uh difficulty next epoch yeah um yeah The amount of worry I have about the scenario of miners being seized at the border has increased over the last couple of weeks just because it's possible. And this coordination that's going on,

like why bitcoin is china i don't think china is coordinating with everybody i think they're like an antagonist in the background but um yeah bitcoin does affect their ability to to exert the control that they want to have over their constituents or they're not even constituents they're the citizens of china um their subjects yes exactly well on that subject too i mean big move big move from um the the senate today i mean senate passed a bill obviously it's got to get signed by biden uh that would ban uh u.s companies or individuals from receiving products from xinjiang province uh citing the the subjugation and and encampment of the Uyghur Muslims. And this is where they're producing the polysilicon, the cheapest

polysilicon in the world that goes into all, not all, but I think it's like 40% of the polysilicon is from Xinjiang. And that's what makes a lot of the solar panels. So it'd be interesting to see how it affects that market particularly yeah i mean i just uh just uh i i would just push back a little bit you know it does it does uh we could have governments around the world all take advantage of similar situations to take power away from their people without uh sophisticated centralized coordination right like they're all operating under the same um similar situations or watching each other um it doesn't necessarily just because it might seem like there is a central coordination i mean that that is obviously way more difficult uh

you know coordinating large groups of people is is is always difficult with different uh personal interests yes yes but that's why they use indirect means to do that right i like to use the media it's like i said in that thread i wrote over the weekend like it's crazy because again particularly with cbdc's it's insane how out the open all these central bankers are talking about cbdc's and the granular control the lab over the the ability to to spend and receive those uh and it's part of like uh the ruse or you say this stuff nonchalantly out in the open and you get the media to parrot it and ridicule and fight against

valid dissent uh about cdbc cbdc's and the public most of it that 80 to 90 percent that that skeef mentioned uh they don't really think for themselves it's just the truth they're sheep and they'll just take what authority figures tell them and go along with it um so this is why like anyone who like there's got to be like i'd be i i i would love if that's if i'm wrong about that prediction but like there's got to be we have not hit the then they fight us stage yet i don't know is it Well, like Bitcoin, like how does how do they if if if if the plan, whether coordinated or not, which I I still I would push back that there's like some centralized global coordination here. I think it kind of works if it's it makes sense to me logically that you have self-interested parties that all have similar goals.

um but if the goal is surveillance money digital surveillance money that they have full control over um then a free bitcoin a freedom money is obviously going to be a threat and is going to be dealt with in that way yeah so i would argue the fight's starting right and like how do you attack bitcoin there's many ways to do it you could do a 51 attack but you can have the chinese government the ccp sees all the miners trying to escape china figure out a way to plug them in and attack and reorg the network that way that's a that's a very overt attack at the network level but there's other types of attacks uh social attacks being one of them and is bitcoin being socially attacked right now is esg a vector through which bitcoin can be socially attacked i

argue yes um and then there's other like so there's gonna be a private i feel like the privacy attack is an easier attack because the groundwork is already there and it's like a slow boil right you just do kyc you bag and tag 95 of big corners you track all their transactions and then you just force overbearing regulation on them and then you punish those who don't comply It's a relatively straightforward regulate, control, tax strategy that governments around the world have employed for many years in other industries. well but then there's other instances like again it's pretty vague what's exactly going on at least to me i'm sure there's freaks out there in europe who understand obvious who i would hope understand the landscape of the european union and the dynamics of the

european parliament specifically but i wrote about it on monday apparently last week uh the it became apparent that the european parliament is putting something on the floor to quote unquote deal with or regulate cryptocurrencies and a lot of the political parties in the parliament are pushing for an outright ban of proof of work uh citing esg compliance goals and they're pushing people towards pos systems like cardano and i think they said algor land and shit like that but uh which would they don't really want you to use those either christine lagarde wants you to use her ecb cbdc um but then that's an attack i mean they're attacking proof of work overtly at least some political parties are whether or not that

will make it into the proposal and get past is uh yet to be seen and could have just been some radical progressive parties that are pushing it but miners should improve their opsec get in and learn you know if if there's active attacks against miners if there continues to be active attacks against miners they will learn to either improve their opsec and or move to better jurisdictions um and uh it's just a common case of need to get burned first which we see in every aspect of our lives but how crazy would that be another double uh i hate to hate to bastardize the term black swan but you have china panning mining what if who knows if they will but what if you're we always knew we always knew the large mining operations were you know one of the

vulnerabilities of bitcoin it's you can't hide those operations they're not they're very visible obvious operations uh they have real footprints on the ground agreed but completely agree like what is the what would the social implement implications be of the european union doing this right that obviously china's done it everybody's like oh it's china but like a western power like the eu but the eu also has like super expensive electricity usually right like yeah i mean germany germany germany's household uh electricity costs are the highest in the world at like 36 cents per kilowatt hour or something like that so they probably don't even have like i wonder how much mining is happening in the eu to begin with i saw today like there's a headline kazakhstan is

now number three yeah but kazakhstan even like kazakhstan like did a did a beautiful honey trap rug pull with the mining industry they're like hey come here we'll give you tax credits and then they were like oh no tax credit servers you're eating up too much electricity and then they hook up all these co-hosting facilities with a material amount of hash power they're like actually we're going to start taxing you now um i believe it's two and a half or zero point zero zero two five highly competitive what hour yeah but it's i mean it's just you go from credits to nothing to a small tax you know probably eventually increase um but no i mean that that small 0.0025 cents per kilowatt hour uh does eat into margins uh materially i mean the game

of driving your electricity costs in the mining world is a game of tenths of pennies um so that will have an effect on on profitability particularly if people are leveraging and co-hosting facilities which add cost on top of the all in power costs that they get makes sense so what do we have next on the list some rosy things bitmex yeah this is good they've got their dev grant program uh up back and running so if you want to apply if you're a developer contributing to the bitcoin protocol or um technology software hardware around it um applications are open uh so i guess they stalled this for a little bit um but yeah it's back what do you think about well they've been they've continued to fund devs

but they hadn't brought any new ones on yeah and now they're expanding again it's great to see they've they've led the way in this regard and they continue to lead and uh it's always great to see bitcoin companies give back to the ecosystem yeah more of that please and bitmax is they've got a lot of fire on them right now and the fact that they're able to focus and do something like this considering the stress they are currently under as a company is just like, again, one of the OG companies in the space has always been true to Bitcoin outside of the reuse of addresses and but they're pretty based.

So more dev grants are on the way. uh and i'm very excited to talk about this with you like treasure suite uh is officially replacing the web app is this what's going on correct they're getting rid of the web app i guess treasure suite was already out in testing in beta but now it's officially launched yeah i've been i've used it yeah it's really it works it's good so it's cross platform it's available on mac and windows and i assume linux as well and it's it's the default way you interact with the trezor now instead of the browser wallet um it's still so so what's good here is they have a renewed focus on privacy um it has built-in tor um their goal is to also make it easier to use

with your own node because right now it's really hard to use with your own node using uh you have to run their like their version of the back end uh which is it's difficult to run um but they want to integrate it with the plan is either uh first electrum and then include bitcoin core binaries directly in the app so you can just run bitcoin core directly in the app hell yeah um and then they also said that they're planning on adding coin join and coin control which neither of them they have yet so um i think coin control and using your own node are the two most important things but it's really good to see that they added Tor support. And regardless, I still think best practice,

if you're going to use a Trezor, first of all, you should use it with a very strong passphrase because it doesn't have a secure element. So if someone gets the device, they can pull the seed off the device if you don't use a secure passphrase. Or with the Trezor T, it has this feature where the SD card slot,

the SD can be used to encrypt the seed. And then you need both the SD card and the device. So if you keep them separate, it adds an additional security layer there. But regardless, if you're using a Trezor with those two caveats in mind, I still think you're better off using Spectre or Sparrow. They're definitely a little bit more advanced than the Trezor suite. But as a result, they give you easy full node support and coin control and labeling. so but all that said good to see their default option become more private and it looks like

they're in a good trajectory in that regard yeah i'm making strides making strides i mean this we've been pretty critical of trezor specifically around the the lack of prize privacy and the fact that you have to dox your xpubs to their servers still have to do that but they're making strides at least our isp um has been cut out of the situation if you toggle tor on um technically you don't give them x pubs there's a distinction um you send them addresses and you they fetch the addresses for you but so it's like you send them the next hundred i'm not sure the exact number but you send them the next hundred addresses and they watch the chain for you now in practice if you keep using it it means they know all your transactions know all your balances um but it

comes with the benefit that if you go to a more secure setup in the future doesn't mean all your future addresses are necessarily docs just like the next hundred or whatever yeah yeah but you should still best practice if you're trying to improve your privacy is to generate a whole new see it when you use your full node yes yes beware freaks be aware i'm told in the live chat that treasure does labeling i'm pretty sure they don't they might have accounts that you can label but they don't actually have utxo coin control labeling cheers i'm not sure i'm not sure um i know they said they were looking they were going to add coin control in the future to treasure suite so if they don't have coin control they don't have

utxo labeling but they do have account labeling which is also what it's the same it's a similar concept as what green wallet does where they allow you to label individual wallets but not um the actual utxos not the actual transactions you want to when marty sends me a transaction i should be able to put the label you know marty sent this to me you know marty beer or something and then i know that was marty's payment for beer in like 10 years when it when i'm going to move it i know you know what that transaction was or cash app or bisque or something so i know what that utxo is so i don't combine them and utxo management be aware so there's another aspect of their privacy thing too which is pretty cool the lock time so you can set uh you can pre-sign a

transaction um and then set set it to be broadcast after a certain block height is reached how does this work like like how would this work in practice um so the main purpose of this is that when when it comes time so so using your own node to receive transactions and verify transactions is strictly better for your privacy. If you don't use your own node, then you're using someone else's node and you're trusting them with your private information in terms of transactions, IP addresses, and balances. When you're broadcasting, using your own node isn't necessarily best case because there's techniques used on the broadcast side to try and make it harder for someone to determine your ip address and if you

use a vpn or tor obviously uh you're you're blocking it in that in that regard but strictly speaking the the best way to broadcast a transaction from a privacy point of view is to use something like uh blockstream.info's api that broadcasts a transaction you can connect to that through Tor. So the idea here is that you can construct a transaction. And instead of broadcasting out of Trezor's node, or presumably in the future, your own node, you can go and you can take that transaction, you can save it as a text file, and then you can copy and paste it at a later date into blockstream.info or a similar, I think mempool.space has one too, into a similar broadcast um only transaction api um so it's just another tool in the tool set i

think that's one of those things that most users will probably never use but it's nice that it's there yeah helps with the robustness of these authoritarians ever do begin overtly attacking the network and bitcoiners this is a way to use it more privately so you can hide from those authoritarians in the future shout out to trezor making strides improving the product and most importantly helping to improve user privacy which is something that that we talk a lot about here obviously i can't i'm still thinking of like the sailor discussion as well and like the whole i know freaks in the commerce like stop talking about esg but fuck you whatever um the uh i lose you it's my internet going i hear you okay frozen there you're back too um it's a similar attack

vector right we talk a lot about kyc aml um particularly holding your coins on exchanges that thrust kyc aml um is a way to to attack bitcoiners and potentially the network down the line like imagine if these tartarian governments begin saying nope you can't you can't withdraw from exchange um i view the esg angle being pushed on the mining industry in a similar way like hey you get down a certain point in the road it's like all right to be social to check off the s you have to point your hash at this at this mining pool that is going to censor transactions for these publicly traded companies and they'd have to disclose that in filings

and all that and track that granularly. And I think on a long term, that's a decentralization incentive. Agreed. Agreed. But in the short term, it can be pain. And same with the KYC shit. Yeah. It's interesting too.

If you get all this capital and particularly publicly traded mining companies companies that go down that path and are forced to go down that path i mean the capital providers behind them essentially the stakeholders and the companies shareholders have control over a significant amount of hash potentially um that is that is forced to be directed in a certain direction or another um just interesting thought experiment we have so trinity in the comments uh guess we should just jump ahead but he wanted to do a shout out uh to craig raw for being such a fucking boss because he just uh pushed out uh taproot support um on testnet on signet and reg

test um for sparrow wallet uh one of the first wallets that supports receiving on taproot addresses um all while the craziness in south africa right now is going on yeah i mean we're going to touch on both of those we'll touch on south africa towards the end when we get to like macro economics and the macro landscape uh it's insane what's like the videos coming out there are fucking insane um but again we'll get to that let's jumping ahead to software updates we're actually there on the list pretty sure like there's like not that much news this week but there's a fucking shit ton of software updates just what you like to see fantastic consolidation phase work getting done all the uh the price volatility noise is at the wayside at the moment

seems like people are getting shit done uh we mentioned blue wallet in their ldk implementation earlier but they've also pushed a new release version 6.1.9 if you're running blue wallet consider upgrading to that this supports added support for urv2qr codes uh offers additional file save destinations on android and includes a mac os widget um to make your access to the wallet easier and the information on it on ios just to be clear freaks you know we talk about updates a lot you know you don't want to rush into updates um and you know you want to let them sit a little bit uh just to make sure that there's nothing no funny business going on there's no malicious intent there and you absolutely without a doubt

i was talking to a freak with this the other day and i don't think we say it enough is especially on mobile where it's very easy to do you do not want to set auto updates on for any of your bitcoin wallets because then an auto malicious update can just come through um and especially in in in the mobile world you have these closed wall gardens you have these the google plays and the Apple, iStore, what did they call it? The iTunes store. The App Store. The App Store.

And you never know. They could just feed an update and just sweep your coins. So you want to disable auto-updates. And we have examples of this, not particularly with Bitcoin and Bitcoin apps. Maybe there are examples, but we have a big example. And apparently, a lot of the ransomware attacks recently were enabled via an automatic update of Windows, particularly that uh included malicious code correct it was an auto update of a program that was running on windows but yeah yeah it wasn't actually windows but yeah it came with the back

door that apparently enabled a lot of this ransomware stuff they compromised like the management software and then the management software compromised like a bunch of independent corporations yeah yeah so that's a very astute example of the dangers potential dangers of automatic updates so when it comes to bitcoin related software obviously your number one priority should be security at all costs you do not want to lose your sats um and so like matt said make sure you wait a bit um with mobile wallets with mobile wallets it's like you're a little bit more vulnerable with hot wallets you're a little bit more vulnerable right because your keys are actually directly managed by the software um you have a little bit more leeway

you should still not have auto updates enabled but for something like sparrow if you have sparrow and you're using it with a hardware wallet or multiple hardware wallets multi-sig um they can't just sweep the keys right the keys are offline in whatever hardware wallets you're using um so they're it's a it's a more difficult process in terms of trying to compromise it now privacy they they can compromise your privacy still that's hot um they can show you invalid information to try and trick you into signing something but it does give you an additional layer of security there yes yes and i hope it's clear freaks whenever we do the software updates i say update if you yeah consider updating consider updating if you want to 100 that's why it was

an important psa i think so i just agreed agreed no completely agree and i just want to make it clear that's why we use that particular language consider if you feel comfortable um with that said we're like yeah like hardware firmware too like be be aware of that um as well uh for your hardware walls the sticky situation is when you get into like uh like something like bisque right like this most recent vulnerability they were like please update asap there's a there's a privacy vulnerability that we that we can't disclose yet right and then you just have to well we had that you have to use your own judgment you know there's not always a clear answer there um we had that with bitcoin core too what was that 2018 2019 uh with that cve bug right um didn't affect every

version but it affected every version after like 16 point something or something like that and then there was an argument with that because you could actually instead of updating you could downgrade you could downgrade yeah which is a little bit less risky in terms of that direct model yeah yeah so much so much nuance that goes into all this hit your bingo boards freaks uh continuing with the software updates rust lightning they released it and they're just getting to work version 0.0.99 has been released um nix bitcoin version 0.0.47 has been released i'm just going to keep rolling here uh stop me if there's anything uh pressing for any of these that you're um that you want to highlight zeus

version 0.5.2 has been released uh i will highlight something here not about this particular update but i was talking to evan uh colludus in dms yesterday and he was saying that uh the the bitcoin design guide and the bitcoin design team i guess from square crypto is working on some stuff for zeus and it's just been incredibly helpful um for the ux ui design for i think he's creating an ios implementation or something like that um or updating the ios implementation um so just like i again i want to we've talked about it before on the podcast i about it yesterday in the newsletter but like a huge shout out to the square crypto team for the bitcoin design guide it's a massive asset and i said it yesterday in the newsletter for new

designers coming to the space uh something like this design guide will significantly reduce the amount of time designers spend on the learning curve just having these heuristics and these examples in a consolidated place is is a massive asset for the designing community what are you laughing at i agree i'm just laughing at all caps at trinity kramer sold all his bitcoin lmao sold it for a farm too or something like that still holds eth well eth is going to be the esg friendly they're going to transition to proof of stake and guess what they have a shit ton of apps you can do way more stuff with ethereum marty it's a bitcoin only podcast oh i'm sorry i'm sorry are we are we going to become an ultrasound money podcast at some point in the

future i love these periods where it just feels like everyone is shitting on us oh it's the best it's the best this is where the real conviction is built that and it's like this is where you get to nerd out about the software side of things and it's actually fun to do and get a better understanding of everything and when it's quieter you can dive into these things um fully noted version 0.2.18 has been released uh there was something big in this release it added lnd support that's what it was yes they already had c he already had c lightning support fontaine already had c-lining support um but this adds lnd support yeah and it's got tor integrated and you just scan the qr code this idea of just connecting a node by scanning a qr code through tor is the

best ux in terms of connecting a node especially especially for mobile um and it's just so good for uncle jim's you know i just this idea that you can just give a friend a qr code and have them scan it um it's great now in lightning's case um if you do the lnd quick connect qr code uh you're sharing funds so like you don't want to do that uh for uncle jim but like in terms of like samurai wallet like the way you connect your dojo like you just send another person your qr code and they can connect to you um or how lnd hub works uh that's pretty fucking cool to me yeah yeah again massive ux that's for me too like yeah i'm pretty technical but i'm lazy and just being able to like it's massive so shout out to fontaine and the fully noted team sparrow wallet version

1.4.3 has been released as matt mentioned earlier if we jump jump forward to this one um they've got taproot support is it just s net yeah signet signet and reg test which is reg test yeah yeah um so if you're comfortable consider updating to version 1.4.3 if you want to test out on signet you can do that yeah 100 i mean this guy just fucking ships man i fucking love sparrow I just recently had Craig Raw on Dispatch for the second time Not the most recent episode, but last week So if you haven't listened, you should go listen to it That's Keto and Craig Raw, Keto Miner

We have MG Blazer is asking me why Marty is receiving phone calls during He's asking me were mempools this dead during past bear markets And that's what's weird is because usually someone at least is spamming it, faking it right like there's no one even faking uh mempool activity i remember the last time there's a bit of nuance to that spamming attack it wasn't it wasn't what spoof transaction volume to make it look like bitcoin was being used more which it certainly did it was to clog block space to push the big block narrative right yeah but you know it's always it's it's it's been um it's a common shitcoin tactic to uh transaction counts on low fee

networks are very gameable metric because it doesn't cost you that much money to send the transactions because the transactions are low fees so we saw a lot of shit coins have done it in the past i'm not going to name the specific shit coins but they say you know look at all the transactions we're doing but if they have low to no fees then it it the cost for the players of that network to to make to make this uh make it seem like there's activity on the network is very low um so you you got to take it with a grain of salt the only real transaction numbers when you can really trust them is when fees are high because there's a real cost to those transactions um you can say that there's an upper bound obviously there's not more transactions than

what we're seeing in the mempool right in the mempools there's not a single mempool everyone has their own mempools but they all look relatively if everything's going according if everyone has good connections it should look similar everyone's mempools if transactions are propagating um amongst nodes you should have so it's kind of weird that we'd have no one faking it you know like you'd least expect yeah i don't think it's that weird again like the like so if you got if you if you guys want to dig into some bitcoin history particularly like on chain history and investigative work i mean laurent from oxt.me works closely with samurai as well is he officially on samurai or like yes yeah this is on the samurai one of the samurai team members

Yeah, he did. He did a deep dive into the spam attacks of the summer of 2015, 2016, throughout 2017, leading up to the block size, the block size wars, if you will. It's just fascinating. The amount of research he did for that particular, I think he, what was it called? Bitcoin's Moby Dick was the name of that. I remember it was a good piece. yeah he always does good work yeah it does really good work great block explorer as well what was I going to say yeah I mean transactions are low

but like you said earlier bitcoin is like water people are going to use it when they need it transactions will increase when more people need it apparently there's a lot of people around the world who don't think they need bitcoin

as much as they may Specifically, they don't need, you know, private sovereign usage of Bitcoin, which uses more block space. Yeah. Because if you use a custodial exchange, if you keep your money on a custodial wallet, if you don't use CoinJoin, if you don't practice coin control, good coin control, these are all aspects that produce your on-chain burden. If you if you want to practice better privacy, if you want to practice better sovereignty, those users are going to use more on chain space. Their demand for for chain spaces, block space is going to be much higher. And that is like a little bit of the bearish aspect of it is that, you know, I was hoping that at this point in Bitcoin's adoption cycle that we would have more people actively using the chain.

um but it just you know we're we're more we're more early than than even i thought yeah and it is what it is it is what it is um luckily right now the uh the block subsidy is material enough at 6.25 bitcoin that miners are incentivized to keep their rigs up and running but again this is a highly debated and discussed topic uh in in the bitcoin world what will the long-term security of the chain look like once that subsidy decreases to a point that is not as material as it is now but nuance there yes it's decreasing in btc terms but if the price continues to do what it has throughout the last 12 years which is go up and to the right trend up and to the right at least the the purchasing power of that

uh decreased subsidy may be competitive what with what it is currently with with a higher amount of bitcoin released there's also like there's another incentive um like a large miner has an incentive to fake uh more transaction volume because they mine they can mine their own transactions to themselves so they don't have to pay full fees maybe that comes with risk 100 like what if you don't get that block that's why you have to be a large miner yeah a massive miner but you could also like not train you cannot broadcast that transaction until you're about to like you find a block could you find a hash and hold the transaction to yourself and you gotta because you have to

find the hash first and then you construct the block right so you can just include your own transactions in before you broadcast it i wonder sometimes when you see like the super large fees that you're like why did someone pay that much or whatever if like some funny business happened it is a thing that could happen yeah like you could bitmain right now could just or whatever like antpool could you know mine a full block with they're not but they could with like 150 sap bite fees in it that they don't broadcast to the rest of the network until the block gets broadcast and it could be it'd be a completely valid block and if you looked at mempool.space or whatever it would show that the average fee in that block was a certain price

again yeah it is risky it is risky because even though you find the hash then you present the block and between finding the hash and presenting the block you could add that transaction um a lot of the way these blocks are constructed a lot of the blocks um they'll construct it in parallel with attempting to find the hash um just because it's literally a race to to beat the other miners by milliseconds um so does that addition of that miners transaction take too much time uh in the competition that they could potentially lose that block well i think there would be an advantage right if if you're a large miner and you include transactions that other miners haven't seen until they receive the block

then the other if you're especially if you're a large miner the other miners are at a disadvantage on the next block finding all right adrian adrian in the in the in the comments is saying you can't add a transaction because the hash would change i was i was always under the impression that you find the hash and you present the block you construct the block afterwards yeah you what yeah i mean that's why you see mining pools were doing like zero zero transactions i don't think i don't think the discovery of the hash has any or the addition of transactions to a block has any effect on the hash they're separate you construct the block and then and then you and then you mine right

discovery the hash that's why when they when they had the zero when they were doing the zero it was just they would just ignore transactions and they just immediately start constructing yeah the way i under or there's another person saying you can't add a transaction after finding the hash yeah well maybe we're wrong maybe we're wrong no no i think that's correct but that's not what my point was okay you could still when you construct the hash you you include transactions that no one else sees the merkle tree of all transactions is in the construction of the block you're hashing the info from transactions you can't find after

but you can include transactions that no one else knows about okay that makes sense but yeah of course you can they're valid transactions they're just no one else has seen them yet the hashes of the info of the block

I misunderstood that I thought you construct the block I thought hashcash shot 256 was separate from block construction I didn't realize the transactions in the block affect the hash which is what the freaks are barrages making me aware of in the comments you learn something new every day i gotta reread mastering bitcoin it's been like six or seven years and it's probably out of date because it didn't include segwit stuff

appreciate that freaks good uh way to keep us honest yeah good live fact check yeah you're saying it's exactly as you said you just hide the transaction you broadcast it when you when you broadcast the block um this mint mobile data breach pretty pretty big bleeping computers they're becoming a bleeping computer.com becoming a go-to source for for rhr indeed um so mint mobile disclosed uh and had a data breach of unauthorized person gaining access to subscribers account information imported phone numbers to another carrier i like bleeping computer they seem to be doing good work very good work um so what is mint mobile is it a it's like one of the shitty american uh like sub carriers what do they call them mvnos or

whatever where they like really don't have their own network they're just uh they rent other other people's uh cell towers um so it's like a budget carrier but uh it's just fucked up right like it's like you can't uh you can't trust anybody no not only did their users get a bunch of their users got their numbers ported completely which is like a sim swap um they also got like all that personal information on them there's like a massive data breach names addresses i think social security numbers yeah and they're they're sort of doing damage control and trying to make it seemed like it's not as big uh subset of users they don't say how many well here's how they describe it between june 8th 2021 and june 10th 2021 a very small number of mobile subscribers

phone numbers including yours were temporary ported to another carrier without permission um as i'm being aware i mean that could have affected bitcoin users right like report yeah i mean if you especially if you don't have if you have like uh if you have sms2 factor which you should not have and they port you and we see a lot of these sim swaps are inside jobs yeah so you should just assume that your phone number is not secure you should you should never be relying on the security of your phone number yeah i mean yeah imagine if somebody just ported your number you didn't have 2fa from a third-party app you're completely borked if you're if you're

holding your stuff on exchanges get your coins off exchanges freaks help support the mempool hey marty still doesn't know how mining works even at 2x hey btc pins it's very technical i'm doing my best here behind he's still behind apparently i sound better at 2x i'm also like it's it's a 130 rip today i'm coming i'm coming i'm coming right off uh a weekly stand up a great american mining in a gym session before that so i've been going for like three hours straight but we'll turn up the energy to end this episode with the the last couple topics matt x frog wait x frog had really good phrasing just to make it absolutely clear miners start hashing when they receive the header of the last block they can mine an empty block with that until

they receive the transaction list from that block to make sure they know which transactions not to include yeah yeah because it was good phrasing mine an empty block very clear because they would still get the subsidy um because they would because they would have confidence that there's no uh conflict with the transactions of a block before it right yeah thank you x-rock thank you freaks for contributing to this conversation maybe maybe the comment section is a good thing Comment section was always a good thing. It's all about the ride or die freaks. Love you, freaks.

I know. We love you. We thank you for your time. I don't know if we, I don't think we have shout outs this week because our BTC pay server has been borked. Oof. Got to get on that.

Yeah, I've been working on it because it happened last week during the show. Trying to figure out what's going on. DJ, our dev, is very busy living in Hawaii on vacation. It's fucking. We need a new dev.

We love you, DJ. We do love you, DJ. And he loves us, but he's amazed I did him. He's a professional. He's a very highly skilled, sought-after security engineer. Well, freaks, if you want to help out, reach out. Yeah, reach out. Yeah, so last two topics are macro events.

I mean, we touched on it, both of them earlier, but I think we should expand on them. Jerome Powell on Capitol Hill this week answering questions. from uh congress and in the senate uh or congress is the senate uh about uh monetary policy and obviously there's a a bunch of questions about bitcoin and central bank digital currencies and stable coins and there's just a few like it's it's crazy i tweeted out this morning like the fed is either incompetent and ignorant or they're completely nefarious and malicious and this is in regards to an answer jerome powell gave uh regarding fed policy and whether or not it was

contributing to or is contributing to the growing wealth gap in the united states as qe whatever we're on now uh continues qe 27 yeah we would argue i would argue that qe has a significant effect on asset prices, particularly stocks, real estate assets that the rich have access to, more so than the middle class or those in lower levels of the economic ladder. The value increasing of those assets makes the rich richer and they drive that wealth gap further and further. He basically took that question and was like, oh, no poor people have have ever come to my office and asked me to raise interest rates it's like what the fuck dude like how number one how tone deaf are you like again these people are on the lower rungs of the economic

ladder are literally living paycheck to paycheck trying to keep up trying to keep their head above water trying to keep their families fed trying to keep the lights on you don't have time to study and understand the intricacies of the monetary policy which you switch on a whim month to month year to year quarter to quarter some of them are like day trading on robin hood to try and keep up yeah and it's just sort of disgusting right it's completely disgusting i mean and look they're like oh we're gonna do like a modest we're targeting a modest inflation of two percent and then we have the 5.4 which we know they lie about they already discounted to begin with right and it's if that's coming in at over five percent then the real rate is way higher than that

it's i mean it's bad out there my wife she's pretty sorry i mean we had ribs yesterday she went to the grocery store bought ribs it was like it was like 45 for a rack of spare ribs when she was like last summer the i swear to god these were like 16 bucks so like bitcoin is the price the real price of bitcoin is is way lower than it is right now right yeah because because there's so much there's been so much inflation that really like if we're like in 2015 dollars right like what's what's the what's the price of bitcoin in 2015 dollars it's like 18 000 or something i think you still have higher purchasing power but the pace that increase in purchasing powers slow down compared to years past like did we pat are we above the 2017 all-time high right

now are we above 19 000 in 2017 at 32 in 2021 so we're 50 above the height of 2017 if you compare it to your rib prices we're not right that's crazy like again the gas lighting the double speak all this so this that's just one comment we'll get to the cryptocurrency comments he made um but it's it's it's insane like i was at the farmer's market this week talking to my my jerky dealer and the supply chain the supply chain issues are real like he was distraught man i felt terrible for him i was like it was like the first i don't he hasn't been at the farmer's market the few times i've been there this summer it was the first time he had a booth um and i've been eating this jerky for years down here and he didn't have again i was like i love the intense heat he didn't

have it and i was like i wasn't like i thought because like i walk up to the the stand and he's he's got like the menu of jerkies that he has and he's got like 10 of them crossed out and i was like ah you must have been busy today like sold out of all this and he was like no actually like I can't make all this because I'm only able to buy 200 pounds of beef at a time compared to the thousand pounds of beef I was used to buying before the lockdowns happened. So that's like, just like an anecdotal data point. Supply chains have constricted and that's material. I mean, that's 20% of what he is used to buying.

yeah and i mean i imagine with jerky specifically there's a lack there's more of a lag because he needs to actually jerky it yeah yeah he needs to like dry it out and all that stuff um we have someone in the comments justin evadon who's saying that if you chart bitcoin against m2 that we're like right around the 2017 peak if you adjust for inflation real inflation hey you're maintaining value maintaining purchasing power at least you're maintaining it i haven't completely lost it um but again like yeah and then it's just like they have to be nefarious number one the disgusting response to that inflation and the wealth gap question and then like the the overt double speak around

the question that came up about stable coins uh private they would say private because they mean like private uh private it's weird like bitcoin's a public ledger it's for the public but it's private in the sense that it's not an issue by central bank yeah by government connected central bank um and it's like oh yeah like once we get our cbdc out there there'll be no reason to use stable coins or private cryptocurrencies was was the new words that he decided to run with but it's like they exist because the central banks are are mishandling the money and this whole posturing from the augustine carstens christine lagarde's jerome powell's of the world that the central bank digital currency is going to be like material different from the currency system that we have

now like we have digital currencies like the us if anything are digital currencies that we like the digital versions of the dollar today that aren't using like a formalized cbdc kind of like blockchain based centralized blockchain based process are are you know have less control and less surveillance capabilities than these cbdcs do so if anything the cbdcs are worse for the end user then the you know they come with the same exact trade-offs that the early digital versions of the dollar have which is censorship and surveillance and lack of access and then they add on top of that even more of it right like it's not even an improvement over the current it's an improvement for them but it's not an improvement for the end users yeah so

jerry jerome powell mentioned that the federal reserve plans on releasing a cbdc white paper at some point this fall which will describe the pros and the cons of the cbdc that they plan on launching uh i'm sure they will list all the cons that you just mentioned i'm sure they'll talk about not allowing you to buy certain goods with your cbdc it's my favorite expirations right here's your you know twelve hundred dollar stimmy and you have to spend it in the next six weeks do your part and you have to spend it at these merchants for these things yeah do your part surf stoke the economy we need growth we need growth they want control they want complete control and again they're saying this overtly nonchalantly out in the open the brian stelters of the world the msnbcs

of the world the fox news of the world cnbcs of the world especially are going to parrot the lines that the augustine karstens christine lagarde's and jerome powell's put out there which is bitcoin bad cbdc good they're going to gaslight the public they're already starting to posture heavily about this so just be aware i mean we had two articles this week that i noticed that kind of did that we had the rolling stone one about uh the conference that kind of did that they called us like a religious cult really yeah and then the the there was like a cnbc article about our lady uh katie the russian um and then it was like it was very much of like you have to if if we don't like put more regulations on big corners then they're going to not pay their fair

share of taxes which is like that's a very easy sell emotional no corners yeah again i would say the war is here we're being socially attacked pretty aggressively um the cbdc is it's a bait and switch it's a social attack they're going to try and convince you that it's it's better it's safer it's more environmentally friendly which is what the ecb is leaning into they're just gonna to and they're going to make it more convenient for people and they're going to force people to use it which is their classic strategy it's a two-fold strategy yes yes but that's why bitcoiners need to start learning about how to use bitcoin more sovereignly and and and more privately now that you have to be prepared now because because it when when you absolutely need

it it could be too late at that point yeah and and and us as bitcoiners we're leaking way more data than you realize we're leaking tons and tons of shit ton of data um freaks i mean we got to start spreading this met again like i said in the beginning of the rip i felt compelled to be more vocal about this stuff because it does feel like the walls are caving in a bit and get is that just me am i being paranoid or deep i know you sense that a little bit too right yeah i mean look i i think uh you know the darkest hour is before the whatever it's darkest before the dawn exactly there you go um i'm like very optimistic on the medium to long term um but i think there's going to be like a period of chaos and i think bitcoiners are like easy scapegoats and i think most of us

are super vulnerable i think we're extremely vulnerable myself included marty included um very public about all this it's up to us it's up to us to to individually and for our friends and for our families make ourselves less vulnerable before it's you know maybe not possible anymore yeah why are they going to start killing bitcoiners not another realm of possibility honestly um speaking of chaos that's what the topic i wanted to add on just like to highlight like these kleptocrats this political central banking corporatocracy technococ technocracy cabal technococracy technococracy you got technococks

they're transhumanist robot penises everywhere but in the cause I mean so there's massive riots going on in France about the vaccine passport that Macron is mandating

the riots the protests we should not call them riots that's like that's using their terminology yeah I should have used riots protest i thought i said protest i said right i think you said both um yeah uh macron if you guys are unaware came out earlier this week announcing that in starting i believe august 6th they're gonna be mandating vaccine passports if you want to go to shops restaurants public basically public

companies if you want to go out if you want to get out of your pod in france you're you're gonna have to have your vaccine passport in the uk too right yes but in the uk they've been a lot more docile um and did i i thought i saw like two except for except for in ireland um in ireland they're protesting i saw i saw like two of the main bars i think in the uk that said they're just not they're not going to comply yeah they announced that they announced that um in london two bars said all right we're gonna let everybody in tomorrow night without two clubs yeah do something about it which is good to see ireland people hitting the streets as well south africa like i'm honestly a bit ignorant to the situation down there it's just just obviously hard not to

see the videos coming out of south africa it's like holy shit what is going on i cannot speak to it really but it does not look good no it doesn't look good at all um and all this unrest just highlights i would argue quebec has the vaccine domestic vaccine passports too yeah Yeah, I think we're seeing the products of attempts to micromanage, control economies and large masses of people centrally from a top-down fashion. Whether or not the people engaged in these protests would highlight that as the cause for their strife and the impetus for them hitting the streets. um maybe not all of them recognize this but this is what i would argue is like we're just seeing the products of of authoritarian authoritarianism growing and governments getting bloated and bigger and trying to amass more control over their populations and

we have the cubans standing up it's good to see you see the new york times tweet chanting freedom and other anti-government slogans so like again tune out the mainstream media their propaganda arms of this marxist movement that's being thrust on the west uh what else oh yeah haiti the president got fucking assassinated that was fucked up yeah a lot of shit going on in the world a lot of shit um stay safe out there freaks any of you freaks any of the countries mentioned hope you're all staying safe out there particularly in South Africa

the videos coming out of there are just jaw dropping South Africa's been like unfortunately just years of fucked upness obviously you had the apartheid and now the pendulum's swinging the other way where the racial

division is I think it's bad here yeah it's actually i mean a legit race war where people are getting killed and intimidated and stuff like that um for years now i mean the white farming class in south africa from what i understand has been targeted for for quite some time um but again i'm not i'm pretty ignorant on yeah i'm not going to comment on shit i just hope that the freaks are all safe everywhere and that uh keep your head on a swivel no matter where you are take care of yourself don't uh at the end of the

day the only person that's going to take care of you and your family and your friends is yourself and your friends and your family yeah you gotta you gotta protect your tribe and you gotta you gotta watch out for your own neck yeah and a part of that is educating like make your friend family friends aware of this i try to obviously not this is uh not not literally shake them uh tell them like hey things are fucked up but lightly shill like the the fact that authoritarianism is growing and um i think again maybe i sound somber this episode because it's been pretty heavy this week and the the mental toll of trying to shake people out it's like oh shit does anybody even care does anybody even realize and if not what does that mean for the next few years

pretty heavy shit freaks pretty heavy shit but there does seem like there's been a material shift in again the coordination to thrust these authoritarian policies on the populace and um and the unrest throughout the world and i would argue the the source of all this is the attempts to centrally plan the economy in masses from these governments and central banks it all stems from that 100 should we end on that somber note um before we end i mean uh our buddy The NBK would be a little upset with us. He tagged us both in this upcoming feature that's coming out on cold card, which allows you to take those.

During the rep. No, he did this. I just realized it, but he did this like yesterday. The, the child seeds, it has this cold card has this feature for BIP 85, where you can, where you can export child seeds of your main cold card seed. So all you have to do is back up the main cold card seed and then you can use those seeds in mobile wallets

without backing up the individual seeds. And to make that import easier, now it'll display the QR... Well, in the next update, it's going to display the QR code directly on my cold card, which I think is a pretty cool feature. Hell yeah. Shout out Rodolfo.

haven't uh hit that bingo that bingo uh square in quite a few weeks sorry rodolfo i miss you i haven't seen your face in a couple years um i had something else i wanted to throw in there um but i'm losing it i'm losing it you have to remember the index of the child seat as well as trinity pointed out but like if it's index one index two index three you know it's not uh the the hardest thing to remember but yeah yeah and i remember what i was going to say uh towers comics in in the uh live chat is asking am i going to do a pod with laser huddle yes we're we're coordinating we're going to do a pod joel aka untapped growth um is probably going to join us and we'll we're going to continue whether you like it or not i know a lot of you freaks are

annoyed about it but i don't care i feel like it's essential we're going to continue appealing back the the layers of the esg movement we're going to get into um specifics about who's pushing it uh what organizations and what their intent may be um so we've had a few podcasts about that recently and love it or hate it we're gonna we're gonna go a little bit further so awesome more content the better um yeah i mean this has been a great rip marty I love the freaks. And don't let this sideways Bitcoin world just discourage you. It's part of Bitcoin. And use Bitcoin more. Use the tools. Learn. Educate yourself. Get comfortable with it. you know now's the best time to do it if we're if we're correct and fees do go up now is the cheapest time to learn how to use the chain in a more efficient privacy preserving way

um and you if you don't teach yourself no one's going to do it so yeah the a very cheap time to practice uh your your bitcoin usage and take advantage of it because again this stuff at any movement volatility could pick up memples could fill up and all this practice could get a lot more expensive volatility is coming i repeat my we either go up or down significantly but i i really do like i don't know man i i feel like this is like such an amazing stackering opportunity that you know but you know i who the fuck knows anymore i love you freaks just stay humble about in stack sets love you freaks too peace and love enjoy your weekends enjoy your life enjoy your family enjoy your friends you only got one life very very limited amount of time

on this world use it wisely