TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Bitcoin Week of 2021.10.04

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - hackers compromise 6000 coinbase accounts due to 2FA flaw - liquid network downtime and hard fork - lightning network vulnerability disclosure - el salvador star...ts mining with volcano energy - Binance hires two former IRS investigators - bluewallet v6.2.9 - electrs v0.9.0 - lnd v0.13.3-beta - umbrel v0.4.3 - joinmarket v0.9.2 - joininbox v0.6.1 - sparrow wallet v1.5.1 - eclair v0.6.2 - analysis of ransomware payments - 30 countries launch ransomware initiative - U.S. Justice Dept launches new initiatives on cryptocurrencies - this month in bitcoin privacy - https://oslofreedomforum.com - https://oslofreedomforum.com/bitcoin-academy-off2021 Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital Braiins Compass Mining

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What is up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this rip of Rabbit Hole Recap. Matt and I, tight, quick, dense, very tech-heavy. It was a great rip. Sorry again, three weeks in a row with no Thursday rip. Did it Friday, today, getting out a little bit late. But we're here every week. We're here every week, freaks. We come, we do it. We'll be back on our regular scheduled Thursdays. Next week, thank you for joining us. Thank you for being patient. This report was brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking Cash App.
Starting point is 00:00:32 Cash App is how you stack sats, send sats, receive sats, and sell sats. We're saying sats, sats, sats, sats, sats, because sats are the standards. 100 million sats and one whole Bitcoin. If you want to buy a whole Bitcoin, you don't have to buy a fraction of Bitcoin. You can buy whole sats, stack whole sats. Instead, Cash App makes it very easy. You can DCA into sats. You can set price targets where you want to stack sats.
Starting point is 00:00:51 Now, they have their boost program. It can be your bank accounts, a dope app, new bank, great team. love everything they're doing they've been great supporters of us and we in turn support them i do use the cash card every day this rip or excuse me if you haven't downloaded the cash app yet make sure you do so using 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 going to go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse owls lacrosse this rip was also brought to you by good friends at unchained capital Unchained, another incredible company in the space.
Starting point is 00:01:28 They've got a new website. It's unchained.com. Unchained-capital will redirect you to unchained.com. They are leveraging Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties to bring a collaborative custody model to the world. You want to eliminate single points of failure in your custody model. You don't want to hold all your coins on an exchange. You don't want to hold all of them in a single sig.
Starting point is 00:01:47 They could either be confiscated by the government on the exchange or a single sig wallet. lets you, if you fuck up, if you have human error, you could lose your Bitcoins forever. That's why Unchain is here. You're bringing their vault program, their product, excuse me, that is a collaborative custody model. It's a two or three multi-sig where you hold two keys, Unchain holds one. You can always move your UTXOs in and out of the vault by yourself.
Starting point is 00:02:11 I actually did it yesterday by myself with those two keys that you have. If you're ever in a pinch, Unchain is there to be that second in the two or three multi-sig signature. they've got a white glove concierge service for anybody who wants to get onboarded to this and may be a bit nervous it comes with multiple video conference calls uh multiple explanations of how multistake works how their vault product works specifically they're going to send you a couple of hardware routes have you get them set up and have their seed phrases backed up properly and then you're going to set up your vault and they're going to dump a thousand bucks worth of sats
Starting point is 00:02:41 into the vault if you tell them that tftc sent you you're going to get fifty dollars off that package again they're going to walk you through everything video conference calls they're going to get you comfortable and they're going to dump sats into your multi-sig vault so go check that out unchained.com uh tell them that tftc sent you and they're also doing free consultations if you just want to learn more and aren't comfortable with with diving straight into that whole package right away this rub is also brought to you by our good friends at compass mining compass mining is here to get more individuals owning hash rate around the world you go to compass mining.io you can buy asics they're offering asics uh they also have partners partnerships excuse me with
Starting point is 00:03:18 hosting facilities with competitive electricity rates. So if you don't want to mine at home, it's your expensive electricity, and you want to get cheaper, more profitable electricity, they have these hosting relationships, you can get your miner have it plugged in at the hosting facility, and they'll stream the sats directly to a wallet of your choice. They also have their at home mining package as well. If you want to mine at home, you want to take it upon yourself, be fully sovereign. They're offering the ability to buy ASICs again, get them delivered to your home. And then they have a support desk on top of that who will walk you through setting up your basics getting connected to a pool and all the cool stuff that comes along with mining at home
Starting point is 00:03:51 they're there to support you so go to compassmining.io to check all this out we have a special link in the show notes if you want to support the show that link allows you to do that compass mining check them out last but not least this rip was brought to you by our good friends at brains brains brains is the team behind slush pool the oldest running mining pool in the world they've mine 1.25 million bitcoins since their inception uh brains uh acquired a majority stake in 2013 acquired the rest of that stake last year uh not only do they operate slush pool but they also operate brains uh auto tuning firmware which is going to get you more sats for your hash uh and and so they have the brains auto tuning firmware you download it onto your asics and it makes it
Starting point is 00:04:39 more efficient. They basically have found a way to find the hashing chips that have a higher frequency and therefore get you more hashes to send to the pool and the lower frequency chips that don't allow you to do that. And they sort of fine tune, they auto tune to focus on the higher frequency parts of the ASIC and so that you can get more sats. And I've seen testimonials of people running brains on their S nines and other devices. Uh, and it really works. You're really going to get more sats. You're going to get more where you're ASIC. Okay. Uh, on top of that, they've got a ton of, uh, resources on their blog. It's brains, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com slash blog. Learn about mining and profitability tools. And on top of that, they're hiring. So if
Starting point is 00:05:26 you're a rust developer system admin, uh, and you're, you're interested in the mining space is one of the fucking top teams in the space i would love to work for them if i was smart enough unfortunately i am not hopefully you are and if you are and you're looking to get into the space brains is a bitcoin focused company that i highly recommend go check out everything they're doing at brains again that's b-r-a-i-i-n-s dot com uh and if you want to follow them on twitter where they're posting deep dive threads into the mining industry one of which they dropped today go to at brains underscore systems enjoy this rip freaks very dense it's happening baby it's happening bitcoin is winning from all angles whether it be human rights the energy sector the financial
Starting point is 00:06:11 sector bitcoin is taking over enjoy the ride you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here with our good friend Matt O'Dell. It's a Friday,
Starting point is 00:07:04 third week in a row we're not recording on Thursday. We're both tired. Matt, how are you? you know it's uh i'm exhausted but i we can't miss rabbit hole recap that's for sure right i think next week we'll be back to our regularly scheduled regularly scheduled programming i've been in the middle of a move this week moving van just showed up this morning a week late so that's where i were a little delayed today matt has been spreading the bitcoin privacy love across the country here in miami and nashville this week how was that yeah i was at the oslo freedom forum by the human rights foundation of miami first um which is a really special event met activists from around the world fighting for human rights
Starting point is 00:07:55 we taught them some bitcoin knowledge um when i first started working with alex gladstein at our boy gladstein chief strategy officer of the human rights foundation 2019 we taught a bunch of activists in like a small room like a small classroom and this time there was actually two years later fast forward two years later and the oslo freedom forum is their main event that they do annually and we had a gladstein put together a full bitcoin academy track on on the side so So they had their normal Oslo Freedom Forum programming, which I suggest we have links in the show notes to it. I suggest people go and watch.
Starting point is 00:08:40 Not even, I mean, there's links to the Bitcoin Academy videos as well, but to link to the actual, to view the actual presentations by the activists, because it's truly moving stories. I mean, it really puts everything into perspective. it's uh these people are fighting for human rights around the world backs up against the wall you know bitcoiners talk about like oh maybe i'm like if i if i try and use bitcoin privacy techniques like i might put a target on my back uh and meanwhile these people there's like people talking about being thrown in jail 40 times 50 times brothers go missing they don't know you know the parents get killed they can't go back to their home country without fear of of getting
Starting point is 00:09:25 killed or jailed and um just it was it was it was really dark but it was really moving you know and there's it was a true inspiration and it was it was an honor to be a part of that event i'll tell you that much yeah alex uh was actually in austin he's in austin today he was here last night as well there's a texas blockchain association event happening in austin right now alex flew in for that i was speaking with him last night he was describing it um sorry i got my son crying in the background uh and he said it was it's the point i'm trying to make here it's like crazy bitcoiners are full throttle right now traveling like you did miami you did nashville last night you did a bitcoin and privacy panel with stephan lavera and and um ptc kite is that his name
Starting point is 00:10:15 bit kite bit kite yeah um and here in texas today i'm not at the event obviously because i had the moving man show up so i wasn't able to attend the actual event as it's going on right now but i will be at the after party tonight i was at the pre-party last night and there's just a bunch of bitcoiners here in austin shilling uh bitcoin uh and energy i believe ted cruz gave a very moving speech about uh bitcoin mining on flared gas and and the potential for texas to be a leader in the bitcoin movement so it's really interesting to observe how hard bitcoiners are going right now to to get bitcoin into the hands and minds as many of as many people as possible uh we had a human rights activist in miami earlier this week and here in texas we have energy industry folks and
Starting point is 00:11:07 politicians um it is a really concerted effort and really powerful effort by bitcoiners uh in all aspects of life right now to really highlight why bitcoin is important how it can help the world it's just a beautiful thing to say yeah man we need a more now more than ever right yeah there is no other option yeah there is no alternative bitcoin tina where are you i miss you uh with that being said i'll add uh i did an interview with uh the barstool chicago guys yesterday uh so that's another thing i said at the beginning of this year as the bitcoin price goes up obviously bitcoin's going to be on the minds of a lot of people outside of our bitcoin bubble and uh in in the greater pop culture scene and so if we want to get good information i think it's important to
Starting point is 00:11:58 to get on on these other shows and these other audiences and give a bitcoin perspective that we would deem probably uh more worthy than some crypto guy getting out there and shilling the promise of blockchain technology and smart contracting so look out for that next tuesday next tuesday red redline radio be on podcast platform near you and i believe it'll be on youtube which is about to censor uh or demonetize anybody that that is a quote a climate change denier so we don't ever monetize on YouTube I don't think we've ever made a dime
Starting point is 00:12:33 but we're certainly not going to make one in the future probably because of me did they announce that is that a public announcement yeah in December they're going to start demonetizing whatever fuck YouTube bitcoin tv.com let's go
Starting point is 00:12:49 how did the live stream work last night that was bitcoin tv live stream correct yeah we live streamed it through bitcoin tv it worked well hell yeah hell yeah we gotta start doing our hr live stream through there dude uh the i agree the new uh the nashville big corners meetup man we had like 120 people there massive turnout for month number two um love to see it just like all these meetups springing up let's go let's go yeah when i was in nashville last week we just missed each other for that live podcast with peter and
Starting point is 00:13:23 Preston Pish, sold out. Vibes were high. There's something in the air, freaks. There's something in the air. You smell that? Smells like freedom. And on that note, we'll turn to Clark's dashboard. The current price of Bitcoin is $54,280.
Starting point is 00:13:39 One cuck buck is going to get you 1,843 sats. We're at a $1.02 trillion market cap. We are currently at block height, 704,105. Where else are we going here? We've got the small screen today. We are... Liquid sidechain has 3,297.08 BTC on it. Interesting, we're going to talk about liquid today.
Starting point is 00:14:09 They had a bit of a kerfuffle earlier this week. We are, can't find it, 1,495 blocks away from the next difficulty adjustment, which of this moment is estimated to be a negative 3% adjustment on October 18th, and that is because blocks are coming in at 10 minutes and 19 seconds on average since the last adjustment, which happened between now and the last time we met here on this dirty corner of the internet last Wednesday. And so between now and then, we had an upward difficulty adjustment of 4.7%.
Starting point is 00:14:45 um hash rate's coming back i was wrong hand up hand up hash rate's coming back much quicker than i expected after the fucking vengeance man right it's uh it's very uh nice to see and there are 12,644 transactions in clark's mempool and i will say from personal experience yesterday i sent two bitcoin transactions and i was in a bit of a hurry and so i i used blue wallet and trezor to send these these transactions and i use their fast estimate and it took longer than expected for my my transactions to get included into a block um so starting to feel the the the fee fomo or am i gonna yeah i think there is a bit i would just say at least this week at least yesterday specifically yesterday uh there was a bit of a fee market developing if you will let's
Starting point is 00:15:40 Check the estimated next block fees. They are... Looks like 10 sats per byte. Pending predicted next block is... about 0.11 BTC. So 11 million sats in fees. Not too crazy. We're just getting used to the one sat per byte next block.
Starting point is 00:16:06 Right. Right. Samurai hitting new all-time highs, $4,254.82 BTC, or $230.6 million bucks worth of unspent capacity value. Order of a billion. All-time high in both US dollar terms and Bitcoin terms. Hamp it. Hamp it. Were you talking about Samurai last night on that panel? Yeah. I wonder how much the Sparrow wallet Whirlpool integration is pumping it too. because that integration is clean as fuck it's really really nice yeah let's talk about that for a little bit right like this is a very unique way to create a circular bitcoin economy that is profitable right like sparrow is making money by providing that whirlpool liquidity correct
Starting point is 00:16:48 yeah the way samurai set up whirlpool was they set it up in a way that other wallets can plug into the same whirlpool coordinator um so they share a liquidity pool so if you use any client that uses whirlpool shares the same uh group of users that are doing these collaborative transactions together um so instead of competing with each other they share the users of both get better privacy because more users are using it right that's a key aspect of privacy in general but also with bitcoin privacy right that you know privacy loves company you need to have the more people you have using a privacy technology uh the better privacy you get because you you don't want if like only you know i'm going to be hyperbolic but if you only have
Starting point is 00:17:36 like 10 people using it then those 10 people are very obvious right it's like okay those are the 10 people using uh coin joint transactions um but the way they designed it is so that any wallet can plug it in and then they split the fee so if you use sparrow uh part of the fee goes to sparrow and part of the fee goes to samurai every time you do the coin join transactions yeah and you've said i believe in the last week that sparrow has become your new favorite desktop wallet yeah it's fucking awesome i even without the coin join it's it's my favorite wallet but with the coin join it's the first wallet where you can uh directly in the graphical user interface direct without going into command line or anything do easy mix directly to cold storage it already
Starting point is 00:18:26 has full multi-sig support it supports all the different qr code signer ones that are air gap signers so you can literally set up a multi-sig wallet connect it to your own electrum node or bitcoin core node or you can use a public electrum node if you want but you should really use your own node um and you set up a multi-sig wallet and then you can pick how many rounds of coin joins you want in whirlpool you know coin joins are um you only pay on entry and so remixing is free so you pick how many remixes you want and once it hits a certain amount of remixes it'll just automatically send to your multi-sig cold storage uh which is a super desirable feature something i've been hoping for for a while so you pre-sign that well no the beauty of it is
Starting point is 00:19:16 right like like uh your master public key for the multisig is on sparrow wallet so you don't even need you're just receiving to multisig you don't have to actually sign with your multisig so you can have a geographically distributed multisig with keys all around the world and the only part that's hot is the coin join wallet and then yeah so that's what i'm asking so that how does it automatically send you so you pre-sign when you pre-mix no you just tell the wallet too and the wallet knows the addresses of the multisig wallet right because because it's already it's already up you know you already you've already set up your multisig on sparrow so it knows it knows the next address to send to there just pulls an address and then automatically sends it because the
Starting point is 00:19:59 the CoinJoin side's a hot wallet. Really cool. Also, like, I mean, me and you, like, you remember, like, how difficult it is, like, how difficult historically it is to, like, connect an Electrum node. Yes. Connect to your own Electrum server
Starting point is 00:20:19 or even, or, like, a friend, if you're trying to do, like, the Uncle Jim model where a friend is hosting it. So they have, a sparrow has tor built into it so all you need to do is if you have uh i like electris the best electrum rush server if you have an electrum rush server onion address all you have to do is paste it in the required field that's it and just press go and anywhere around the world you can connect to that electrum node through tor without setting up anything on your route or anything so you can
Starting point is 00:20:51 give it to friends or whatever they can use your electrum node um super easy setup it's amazing how clean it is oh yeah hell yeah shout out to the team at sparrow team at samurai pushing this stuff forward um when i get my desk set up here my desk arrived broken so i need to go buy a new one um that's that's the desktop wallet i'm gonna begin playing around with all right let's jump into the list starting with disclosures coinbase came out uh within the week and announced that earlier this year 6 000 of their customers uh were were compromised due to a 2fa flaw uh this was reported on bleeping computer uh and it just highlights another reason why you should not keep your your bitcoins on uh third-party custodians like exchanges and
Starting point is 00:21:46 especially coinbase coinbase like this this 2fa system that they have is is pretty irresponsible especially considering how long they've been around i mean a key aspect here there's two key aspects uh first of all i read your bent on the subject and it was it's a common misconception you know this was sms two-factor issue but it wasn't sim swapped their users didn't get sim swapped which is the usual way that these these sms two-factors text message based two-factor authentication codes get compromised right you swap you sim swap uh you like basically steal someone's phone number and then you receive the text and then you sign in coinbase had a bug on their side so it didn't even you could just get around yeah you didn't even have to sim swap them
Starting point is 00:22:36 so first of all they didn't get sim swapped uh this was a really bad bug that's on me um don't worry a lot of people got confused because you know how it is we see so many people get sim swap do you see sms2 factor bug and you just assume uh it was a sim swap um and then the second thing is so some people lost funds right the hackers got full access to the accounts uh it was between march and may 20th um coinbase said they're they're refunding any users who lost money due to the bug so they're like accepting responsibility in that respect um it's kind of it's been a while like may 20th was when they said it stopped so i i assume they figured it out in late may and stopped it but they only announced it now which is you know kind of
Starting point is 00:23:25 irresponsible yeah exactly like um also like that was during the period when they were ipoing like i think well they ipo'd so like it started in march and ended after the ipo um but the second thing is they had the hackers had full access to the account so uh they had full access to withdrawal history transaction history all withdrawal addresses you know all deposits uh potentially like bank account information so personal addresses like home addresses uh so to me and and like coinbase just kind of glossed over to me the the bigger you know the bigger loss here for users was privacy it wasn't the funds because the funds got returned to them yeah it's uh just another another data point a long line of data points of coinbase being somewhat clumsy arguably
Starting point is 00:24:26 irresponsible uh and is this a product of lack of focus because they're they're adding a bunch of coins and they don't have enough people on their security team they're they're more worried about adding coins and supporting those chains i would argue it's probably certainly uh certainly additive to the situation certainly a contributing factor right yeah like another thing you don't have on the list which is uh probably should be mentioned too is a switch or excuse me twitch uh data breach apparently hackers got access to a ton of information including uh financial information on on users that were monetizing their twitch accounts yeah but i i think did they get they didn't actually get personal information besides
Starting point is 00:25:16 uh like the amount of payments they received is that it the main what i read the main the main thing uh was like a bunch of twitch like unreleased code and stuff got taken like they're going to release a steam competitor but but supposedly it's uh the the leaks are ongoing like they were like this is leak number one so maybe it was really really bad um in in both cases right it's just a perfect example of why you know these companies should be trying to collect as little information as possible uh because it's very difficult to secure and oftentimes gets hacked or leaked um and in the case of coinbase i mean it's another example of how kyc is so dangerous to law-abiding users um these just transact like lists of
Starting point is 00:26:10 bitcoiners and all their transaction history and all their personal information um and it doesn't stop criminals you know it's uh criminals get around it they either buy um they buy real kyc info or stolen kyc info and they they're able to to use all these platforms fine but law-abiding users get get the brunt end of the stick super frustrating very frustrating criminals are always going to criminal freaks they don't care about kyc aml we're going to get around it um rolling along with uh disclosures bugs whatever it may be like i mentioned earlier liquid had a bit of a disruption earlier this week they had a planned hard fork upgrade they were going to upgrade to they did eventually upgrade to this dynamic federation's dynafed as they're calling it
Starting point is 00:27:02 it's a feature on the lightning network uh they had a problem where they're doing that hard fork where uh the functionaries the said lightning you meant liquid liquid excuse me yeah liquid not lightning um the lightning also has a cve bug that we're going to talk about um but liquid But during the hard fork, I guess they're calling them, what do they call them, co-signers or what do they call them? Functionaries. As a federation members. Yeah, the federation members, they were unable to produce blocks.
Starting point is 00:27:38 They discovered the bug and sent out a patch to all the functionaries. is funny in this uh in this liquid blog post diagnosing the uh and describing what happened uh they they sort of try to highlight this as a as a product of of relative decentralization of of the functionaries uh so it was down for about 22 hours correct liquid was uh yeah i mean i've been pretty distracted because i it happened while i was at ozzo freedom forum um basic premise my understanding was so like liquid previously you couldn't easily change who the functionaries were so liquid is this federated system you basically have you know all these like almost like super nodes like running on the network what is it 17 or 18 federation members i think it was 15 15 um
Starting point is 00:28:37 um so they went to upgrade this was like a long heralded upgrade that they were talking about it was a hard fork and they were supposed to and it gives them the ability to add and change add and remove at will uh without network downtime and the irony of it um and the hard fork had a bug and so they went down and then they had to fix it but now i guess the hard fork uh went through successfully um but this is like i mean obviously it highlights how centralized liquid is well in the liquid block post they tried to highlight they said the patch would have been released quicker uh if if this was a more centralized system the fact that we had to get it out to the uh dozen plus functionaries and have them upgrade individually
Starting point is 00:29:23 is a product of the relative decentralization i think that to be fair to liquid and everything has trade-offs right so the spectrum right it's not it's not perfectly centralized where it's like apple or amazon just upgrading something to their whole system it's not as distributed as bitcoin it's somewhere uh between those two it's relative relatively more decentralized than the amazon and apple apples of the world and relatively more or excuse me less decentralized or distributed than than the bitcoin network at the protocol level yeah i mean and it also shows uh it shows like one of the dangers of hard forks um because there wasn't any old there wasn't any old uh nodes that could continue when when the
Starting point is 00:30:12 new upgrade broke things um so you're always extra vulnerable during hard fork periods because the only client that's the only client that can actually validate transactions are the new clients um and then i guess on a positive note no funds were lost yeah we should note that no funds were lost um it's just the network wasn't functioning and here's how they diagnosed it in their in their blog post the root cause was determined to be a failing consistency check for the value of the consensus parameter sign block underscore witness underscore limit in the liquid production network this value is hard-coded elements and included in the headers of the first adina fed block after dynafit activation the block signer calculates a value based on the size of the network and
Starting point is 00:30:58 expects this value to match the value in the chain headers the hard-coded value which was 14 16 was inconsistent with the computed value which came out to be 13 25 causing six block signers to terminate on startup the other nine functionaries so it is 15 running an earlier version of the functionary software reported errors but did not terminate the patch allowed value of sign block witness limit to be overridden in the production block signer configuration and set its values to that of the existing liquid chain so uh just a forced uh consensus between those 15 uh functionaries yep the lightning network vulnerability worried me more than uh liquid you were liquid's biggest bull earlier this year you know i like options i think people
Starting point is 00:31:51 should have options i think liquid it's cool that it has confidential transactions on it where the amount is hidden um i but you know it can't be really used as a privacy tool unless more people are using it or if there's uh you know specific privacy focused apps you know like they're like there's no coin joint implementations on liquid yet so um but i do encourage people to to play with it at least with small amounts and just see what's out see what's out there right yeah and the lack of a fee market is also uh you know when you when you can when you can pay one sat per byte and you're sending a transaction for like 120 sats um on chain like there's way less reason for for using something like that i do i i think it's it's part of the reason why i like
Starting point is 00:32:51 state chains and i hope that state chains come out all these different layer twos all have different trade-off balances um and state change we've talked about previously like the big issue with state chains is if uh the state chain coordinator i guess or the provider colludes with the counterparty they can take your funds um with liquid if uh if the federation if the majority of the federation colludes they can take your funds um and uh but with both of them what intrigues me is if we have a high fee market right um and fees are fees are substantially high for a decent amount of time on chain there needs to be easier ways to basically consolidate small utxos in a privacy preserving way right so oh to me always like that one of the what what i
Starting point is 00:33:54 think would be really cool on something like liquid would be if there was like a a wallet where you could you know you you put your seed into the wallet you have all your utxos there and a bunch of them are small utxos and you set a bunch of parameters like over the next two weeks uh like if the fever hits this level no like pegging pegging these utxos into liquid at random intervals and then once they get into liquid because the confidential transactions you don't need equal amounts for coin join once it gets into liquid they do a bunch of coin joins automatically and then after a certain period of time that you set then it pegs back out to on-chain bitcoin and larger utxos because right now um if you have a bunch of small utxos and
Starting point is 00:34:45 you're worried about higher fees making them uh cost prohibitive right like if fees go up and you have a small small utxo it might the fee might end up being more expensive than you know it might eat the whole transaction yeah um if you're trying to make those bigger utxos in a privacy preserving way because if you just consolidate the utxos a lot of people will just put them all together to make one big transaction obviously links all of those transactions together uh so i would like to see and i think that's just something that will happen uh if we do see a sustained high fee market right like it needs to be a pain point and if it becomes a pain point then hopefully developers will you know build apps and tools for those specific use cases yeah yeah exactly you have
Starting point is 00:35:36 to go explore those limits and then find creative ways to to get around them i really like that idea though so you would just put a bunch of smaller utxos into liquid combine them on liquid with confidential transactions and peg out with larger utxos i like that right but if you just if you just do it yourself you're really you're subject to a bunch of timing analysis right like if and uh if you can't just like naively combine them either because then it's obvious as well because even though the amounts are blocked the addresses are the same so for something like that to work you you not only do you need to be doing it over like a random time period an extended time period randomly um you need a bunch of people doing it because if if just one person is is
Starting point is 00:36:21 just pegging into liquid it's like kind of obvious that you're linking it together and then you need coin join on the other side on the liquid side and you actually need people using that coin joint on the other side it can't just be like two people using it um but uh in my head it seems like it could be a novel idea um and and that's also something that state chains could be helpful with with state chains um basically just pass along private keys right but yeah on the second layer exactly but essentially like everything is is basically blinded so you go in there you do a bunch of uh mixing in the state chain and then you come back out and on both sides you have it it like a randomized timing yeah um yeah the uh if you guys want to learn more about stage change
Starting point is 00:37:11 gosh it's almost been a year since we did that interview with tom from mercury wallet i believe that was november of last year we should get him back on we should we should get an update what's going on mercury tom if you're listening we'd love to have you back on um the lightning network vulnerability so i read through this it's a bit confusing so it has something to do with the dust limit so if you open a channel with somebody you put a utxo that is smaller than the the dust limit your counterparty in the channel is has set it creates some fuckery it allows funds to get locked up i'm uh not really properly versed on this one yeah there's a couple vulnerabilities uh most of them seem like they were like if you had a malicious peer they could basically burn your
Starting point is 00:38:01 funds but they couldn't take your funds except for one case where if they were a minor as well which is things that that threat model has been discussed previously where if you have a large minor and they're also your peer on lightning they can do some fuckery I believe it's patched now in lnd v 0.13.3 slash beta and also eclair released a new version i don't know if sea lightning released a patch yet i think all three were vulnerable lnd was the most vulnerable yeah so uh our boy antoine riard uh took to the mailing list to to reveal the cve this was on monday of this week vulnerabilities are expected to be patched in eclair version 0.6.2 plus lnd version 0.13.3 and ldk version 0.0.102 the vulnerabilities are also affecting sea lightning um so i don't know
Starting point is 00:38:58 if sea lightning has a patch yet as of monday at least but i mean on the bright side i mean this is what we've uh first of all i appreciate them you know stress testing the network and doing responsible disclosures um yeah this is what antoine and uh leb no manco have been working on they're they've basically set up a company to attack the lightning network to highlight these pain points and this is something we've talked about previously i mean like the lightning network has grown extremely fast but it's still very new um and it it does oftentimes feel like it hasn't really lived in an adversarial environment yet you know like i've still been waiting just for like my lightning channels to get emptied um and it hasn't happened yet knock on wood
Starting point is 00:39:44 so that's good at least yeah update update your your lightning nodes if you have a lightning node yeah i believe this had something specific to do with the bolt specification too is that correct i'm not sure man i'm i'm exhausted and this was all happening i was like i hope i didn't lose any money and then i checked my node and i didn't lose i checked my notes i didn't lose any money and i just updated them and uh we'll talk more about it next week i'll look into it more and we'll talk more about it next week but in the meantime if you're running a lightning note update yeah um yeah i read through the disclosure i mean these guys are so smart like even though if they like put it out in plain terms i'm like what the going on here it's like
Starting point is 00:40:27 i'm happy that we have smart people like this working on bitcoin and lightning next on the list we have el salvador starts mining with volcano energy using that geothermal i'm sure you've seen uh president bukele hit to twitter to troll everybody else in the world about the fact that the government is mining bitcoin using geothermal from the volcano i do have one critique of the mining operation there's a containerized air-cooled mining op president bukele if you're listening you're going to want to dump those asics in cooling immersion liquid at some point being that close to the salt air is going to rust out those machines and they're not going to last as long as you'd like them to that's all i'd say yeah the the liquid cooling setups are super cool
Starting point is 00:41:10 immersion mining um not only cool but necessary in certain environments and i would argue that environment very close to the ocean is one of those um i mean the coolest part i mean at least for like a home mining perspective is is the sound the lack of sound um which is a massive massive improvement if uh you're mining in your home um it's also makes it much easier to capture the waste heat so like i had coin heated at coin heated um on dispatch and like he heats his family's pool with it um so like in the middle of the winter i forget where he lives he lives somewhere cold like really cold in the middle of winter like his pool is just steaming hot it's just uh it's all free waste heat from his uh asic rigs yeah power to el salvador for actually
Starting point is 00:42:00 following through with this uh it seems like it's very much a proof of concept still yeah that's what it makes sense that they went with the air cooling yeah he like posted you see like he posted like his mining pool dashboard yeah he had like he had like 200 000 sats in it and people were like shitting on them like you only have we're right yeah you only have like 256 worth of bitcoin it's like come on people he's testing it out like but it's funny like we're all humans right it's like uh like a whole minor seeing their first payouts come in and or a president of a country seeing like their first few payments coming in and it gives you the same kind of joy yeah i need to screenshot this and share it with the world on twitter did you recognize which
Starting point is 00:42:41 mining pool that was which mining pool dashboard it was it definitely wasn't slush pool um i forget he cropped it out so you can't you can't i wonder what pool they're using but uh maybe pulling i don't expect him to disclose it nor should he but no i wonder yeah i'm not sure i haven't seen that that ui either um yeah they're mining they're they're putting uh putting skin in the game as uh some people would say they're they're out there in their mining and like we said earlier mining is coming back with a vengeance it's uh again one of the biggest stress tests in bitcoin's history with china forcing the miners out uh not only the bitcoin passed the stress test it seems to be passing what flying colors were
Starting point is 00:43:34 approaching the all-time high in hash rate that was reached earlier this year just crazy to see how quickly and dynamic the bitcoin network is like we matt and i uh we had our our uh we do every semester we we join uh charles wong uh in his class at peru college uh we do we do like a we just talk with him for like an hour and a half and we we did that this morning that was one of the questions that was brought up was uh the possibility of 51 attack and i think i think it's it's waning especially after the summer i think it's become very that drop of hash and then the recovery of the hash is like the most bullish fucking thing ever and it's definitely not priced in yet no no it seems like people are starting to price
Starting point is 00:44:24 some things in though we've had a little upward pressure on price there was a lot of green candles earlier this week we've uh consolidated around the mid 50 000 right or 50 between 54 and 55 It was pumping during the Oslo Freedom Forum, and me and Gladstone were joking around that it was the freedom pump. I like that. Freedom pump. All right, what do we got next here on the list? Finance hired two former IRS investigators. Lovely.
Starting point is 00:44:55 One worked on Mt. Gox, and the other one worked on Silk Road. and one of them worked on who is that the centralized mixing service the custodial mixing service Helix, the one in Ohio yeah so they hired like
Starting point is 00:45:13 two of the major heavyweights investigators federal investigators for these Bitcoin operations and now they're top dogs at Binance their uh their new titles is a vice president of global intelligence and investigations
Starting point is 00:45:33 while price will serve as the senior director of investigation so it seems like binance is doing investigations on its customers uh uh not going about the exchange freaks and don't don't play in the coin casino it's not worth it another example of just a revolving door right like yeah government agents just coming in for their payday and these exchanges like just being complicit in the whole thing yeah i know this works um another question i was asked on the red line radio show and the barstool chicago guys yesterday was uh they asked whether or not institutions buying up a lot of bitcoin holding it would be bad for the network number one no um and number two the free flow to bitcoin like outside that is on exchanges
Starting point is 00:46:28 or the amount of bitcoin on exchanges is we constantly have to remind ourselves it's not that many bitcoin like so one of the biggest this is a tweet from mr hodl earlier this morning who was quote tweeting uh a tweet from lyle pratt who's a an austin native somebody has to meet up with Lyle tweeted, traders fighting over less than 15% of the Bitcoin supply. Some portion of that already off the market. Keep it simple, folks. Alluding to just stay humble, stack stats, I believe.
Starting point is 00:46:55 One of the biggest misconceptions, as in Mr. Hoddle's quote tweet, is that majority of Bitcoin will be held with custodians, not realizing that over 16 million coins are already held in self-custody. We are so early. This is just another reason that without a fast distribution in the early days, Bitcoin would have been captured.
Starting point is 00:47:13 Good luck banning self-custody when a majority of the ecosystem hasn't been captured so as much as we talk about getting your coins off exchanges which you should definitely do it is always surprising to remind ourselves that there is a lot of bitcoin in personal custody to be fair uh there's a little bit of nuance there i mean uh like glass node and these other analysis platforms that that follow exchange balances uh they don't track the regulated custodians so like i mean you mentioned the institutions uh the institutions are holding it with regulated custodians sometimes they've been holding it with like coinbase custody um so like the for instance like the amount held
Starting point is 00:47:55 by coinbase is significantly higher than like glass node would report it as um i think they're probably like at like one point one point two million 1.8 i think 1.8 just coinbase alone coinbase exchange and custody yeah um but i agree with you i mean i think institutions holding coins like the the worst they could do is uh just dump the price short term um to me the bigger risk is like these large corporate miners uh especially the ones you know located in america i would say um them gobbling up hash rate could be a threat i don't i don't think it's you know it's it's it's not like a uh existential right now well it's not like a pressing threat it seems like they're not going to have a significant majority of the hash rate but if they were to that could
Starting point is 00:48:48 be a threat versus institutions holding bitcoin we're not a proof-of-stake system you know it doesn't matter how much bitcoin you own you don't have more power over the network yeah completely agreed and it's uh i'm bullish i don't want to dox anybody or give up i talked with a gentleman last week while i was in nashville who is uh helping with el salvador's onboarding not el salvador's but the companies that need to accept bitcoin due to the the new legal tender law in el salvador and i was very happy to learn uh the stack in which they're using to to on board these these multinational uh conglomerates on the bitcoin and they're not going all i'll say is it's not like coinbase custody at all they're somewhat forcing the
Starting point is 00:49:45 hand of these conglomerates to do self-custody which i'm happy to see i think i think we'll see a lot of innovation emerge from these emerging and developing economies the bitcoiners in these areas doing it right i was just very happy to see that um that people are doing it right and forcing these large corporations to self-custody which is even if you don't uh if you're a large corporation and you don't you know you're like too scared to self-custody um i would like to see more of them move to like collaborative custody models yeah i think so that's i think that's that was part of their model is a bit of a collaborative custody awesome yeah um that's beautiful to say uh we're gonna break here for shout outs we only have one shout out this week but i think it's a
Starting point is 00:50:34 it's a pretty good one it's one that scared me and sent shivers down my spine marty is there something wrong have you been sick late i'm trying to do an accent i can't do it have you been sick lately or gotten kicked in the head by a mule because i have no idea why you keep asking me every week who i am you know who i am i've been at every birthday party as you grew up there's really no reason you should continue to ask who i am and what i am trying to do i'm trying to do the same thing i told you i was going to do when you were a little kleiner young running around in lederhosen i told you back when you were stark and gastahind that only the only way to push the world away from the dollar hegemony is to replace it with something better so please do not forget
Starting point is 00:51:24 i bought your first bitcoins love uncle klaus oh it was klaus schwab yeah klaus he's a freak he's listening boy i forgot that he bought me my first bitcoins thank you uncle klaus Please stop creeping out the rest of the world I was confused at first I thought maybe it was your FBI agent Nah he's listening too He's been DMing me Telling me to
Starting point is 00:51:47 Chill out Chill out about everything It seems that more mainstream people Are getting the Bitcoin tip too I saw Candace Owens Tweeting about it Particularly conservative tilting quote-unquote influencers well i mean i'll tell you man after after it's so it's such an interesting
Starting point is 00:52:12 uh we really are very privileged in the western world and when you know at the human rights foundation oslo freedom forum um like these activists like you don't have to explain why like bitcoin is needed they already experience it you know their bank accounts get closed all transactions are being tracked you know they're getting arrested left and right um and i expect that to happen in the western world uh but you know obviously to a lesser degree uh it'll probably be more of a slow ramp we already see it happening right people's getting their bank accounts frozen getting kicked out of the financial system um so like as this need becomes apparent for a uh censorship resistant money um that's independent of governments uh people are
Starting point is 00:53:04 gonna naturally come in and we need to just have the education and tools ready for them so that they can you know follow their own journey once they realize the need i really i really do believe that we don't need to convince people to buy or use bitcoin the utility is undeniable they'll figure out the need eventually and we just need to be ready for them when they actually figure out the need agreed agreed if you build it they will come and that's one thing uh glad scene was actually telling to me last night it was very uh i don't want to say surprised but it was a very interesting observation he made where at the oslo freedom forum event it wasn't financial journalists coming to uh cover bitcoin it was uh freedom fighters journalist uh activist
Starting point is 00:53:53 journalists uh people covering uh human struggle around the world who are coming to cover this event particularly and they were automatically receptive to bitcoin at least from alex's observations he was like it's not financial journalists just trying to on bitcoin because it's it's not uh their toy that they like um it was human rights activist journalist uh very happy that bitcoin exists because it's providing utility for these people that they're they're cheering for it was a super humbling experience and i it was inspirational it was very humbling it gave you know i just we need i just we need to do better in all the things and it just but it really reinforced to me you know how important all these open source tools
Starting point is 00:54:41 and developers are you know bitcoin included but also the open source tools tangential to bitcoin like encryption and tor and whatnot um that that help empower individuals because like i said it just it's so it's so fucking dark and the the fight is real it's happening now this is not theoretical and it really does feel like open source is is the hope open source is is is the is the are the tools that we can actually use to to improve the world for the better um and it also gave me a while we're on the topic i mean when i first started working with them in 2019 like it's easy with rabbit hole recap we do it every week like get caught a little bit in this like not necessarily like the shit corner perspective like bitcoin never changes but
Starting point is 00:55:35 like where you get like frustrated that like oh maybe like you don't have apps that you know could be the apps could be better or this could be better or the wallets could be better uh like when will they improve them um it's like easy to get stuck in that hole on a week to week basis but when you look back like two years ago like moon with two moon wallet with two years didn't exist like blue wallet i don't think existed yet sparrow wallet didn't exist samurai was in beta you know wasabi had just barely launched uh lightning was like a dream still there definitely wasn't any like mobile lightning wallets that were very easy to use that were non-custodial um we've come such a fucking long way in two years yeah when you actually look back on it
Starting point is 00:56:25 it's crazy it is insane it's happening at a rapid pace again you have the combination of the tools that these developers are using to build these applications getting better and easier to use than the applications themselves just getting exponentially better. Like yesterday, about in the Bent, over in Prague, what's that, Perlini Polis, that cypherpunk conference?
Starting point is 00:56:56 Perlini Polis, I believe it's called. I'm butchering it right now, They had a demo of an NFC or lightning payment that leverages LNURL, specifically LNURL withdrawal, the functionality of that with the LNBits app to enable NFC payments over the lightning network. It was a little janky. If you read the thread that I shared in the newsletter yesterday, the implementation is a little janky, but it's a good proof of concept.
Starting point is 00:57:25 You can make the UX of Bitcoin extremely easy over things like NFC with these technologies that are being built on Lightning. So I believe the way it works is LNURL withdrawal allows you to basically determine a set amount of Bitcoin that you're willing to spend in a one spend condition. and so they were able to put that on an nfc enabled device the nice thing about mfc is nfc is super cheap it's in all our phones already it's in all the payment like all the new payment processor terminals already have them all those credit card terminals already have them um you don't you don't need a battery or power to use it um the only thing missing is basically a static a static invoice ability um and that's you know besides just like reusing addresses you don't want to like reuse static addresses um so that's where things like paynims on chain
Starting point is 00:58:29 come into help that's where ellen url comes into help uh on lightning all 12 when bolt 12 if bolt 12 gets implemented that'll be the holy grail because right now ellen url while great um requires you to have a 24 7 web server up uh if if you're receiving l and url payments or giving one of those withdrawal l and url uh invoices so with bolt 12 it's just it's a static it's a static qr code it's a static invoice uh so it's either static qr code or static text string and it's just completely lightning native you don't need to run an additional web server so hopefully we see that get implemented soon well i believe the new cold card is going to have nfc on it too yeah yeah rodolfo was at your bingo boards he was uh demoing uh using nfc
Starting point is 00:59:23 to to sign a psbt uh which makes it easy if you use nfc to do that just like completely makes the user experience of using a cold card to do a psbt exponentially better instead of having to sign on the sd card take it out of your device move it or or construct a contract a transaction on a computer take the sd card put it in your device sign the the transaction take the sd card out put it back in the computer broadcast the transaction the nfc functionality makes it exponentially better there's a lot less transferring of that sd card in fact there's probably none and if you guys are interested about LNURL, LNBits
Starting point is 01:00:08 and just really cool experiments going on on the Lightning Network with those technologies specifically a follow that I've recently found he's been putting out really cool content and demos is BenArk on Twitter that's A-R-C-B-T-C
Starting point is 01:00:24 that's his handle at A-R-C-B-T-C he's the lead maintainer of LNBits yeah, he's been putting out some dope demos i i can't believe it took me this long to find also have ellen bits has an offline mode i i assume it requires some trust because you can't actually you need to actually check the network to make sure the payment got settled but uh he he got it so it can it can work offline at least for small amounts yeah you're willing to have some trust there yeah ben if
Starting point is 01:00:56 you're listening i'd love to have you on or if anybody knows ben once they pass the message along let them know i'll probably dm them too um on the software updates blue wallet version 6.2.9 has been released as always matt stop me when you uh notice something i don't know if you've been too busy this week to pick up on anything but electris version 0.9.0 has been released lnd version 0.13.3 beta has been released again with that cve you probably want to upgrade your lightning nodes um if you're running lnd that is available to you umbrella version 0.4.3 has been released join market version 0.9.2 has been released with that join box version 0.6.1 has been released sparrow wallet version 1.5.1 has been released and declare version 0.6.2 has been
Starting point is 01:01:52 released as always we'll have those links in the show notes if you're running those software any these software projects consider updating um these these updates are available thank you for the archive link for this for this topic uh uh chain analysis did analysis of ransomware payments um and they've been working with ofac it seems and this this archive article this title effect highlights the importance of ransomware prevention and reporting and latest advisory um And they have a nice chart in here of the ransomware, the growth of ransomware in U.S. dollar terms. It's gone from $505.9 thousand dollars in 2013 to 2020 to the all time high $422.1 million. And as of right now in 2021, there have been $258.6 million worth of ransomware attacks.
Starting point is 01:02:55 attacks so these payouts are just uh those are payouts yeah at least known payouts some of these companies pay ransomware without disclosing it and i think you know chain analysis is one of the main surveillance uh mercenary firms in the space um so i think it was a mix of disclosures but also them watching known payout addresses but if you look at it it's just number go up you know it's it's you see that graph it's just going up pretty quick yeah ransomware payouts rose more than 300 from 2019 to 2020 when they reached over 400 million worth of cryptocurrency based on available data data ransomware attackers show no signs of slowing down in 2021 we need part of that reason part of that reason is because of uh there's these new ransomware gangs that are basically
Starting point is 01:03:49 offering like ransomware as a service so like you don't have to be a very technical uh hacker to attack someone with ransomware you just use this like out of the box tool you do the ransomware and then um the the tool maker gets a a cut of the of the ransomware profits okay ransomware for service this is another interesting part of the the report of fact is recommending not to pay the ransomware payments. And I think the U.S. government proposed a new law that is going to force companies to disclose if they pay. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:04:28 So new and OFAC's guidance is the explicit recommendation that companies not pay ransomware extortion demands. OFAC cites concerns that companies that facilitate ransomware payments on behalf of victims not only encourage future ransomware payment demands, but also may risk violating OFAC regulations. Further ransomware payments may threaten U.S. national security interests by enabling criminals and adversaries with the sanctions nexus to profit and advance their illicit aims. OFAC advises that the U.S. government strongly discourages all private companies and citizens from paying ransom or extortion demands and recommends focusing on strengthening defense and resilience measures to prevent and protect against ransomware attacks, which, got to give credit where credit is due, that is probably what they should do. yeah the secondary part but the first part is ridiculous i mean uh one of the reasons why these ransomware attackers have been so successful is because they usually make their ransomware
Starting point is 01:05:26 requirements relatively affordable and they scale it depending on who they attack yeah apparently they they do a lot of research on the insurance that you have right and they try to get it but sometimes what they do is so like the hacker compromises your system right and like the normal ransomware attack is then they encrypt everything and then they hold the encryption key hostage until you pay them right so when they hack you a lot of times they'll they'll look at financial documents and they hack you to see how much they're going to charge you and then there's a new breed of ransomware where they'll actually steal customer data too and they'll threaten it so then it's not just getting your data back it's also uh used as an additional threat that if you
Starting point is 01:06:09 don't pay us we'll leak this data or we'll sell this data and unfortunately um well first of all i mean companies should be securing their stuff more they should be securing their shit better um and they're learning the hard way uh the second thing is yeah i i i got distracted earlier but it's important to realize that most of the time if you pay your ransomware they actually will follow through with it because they want to have a good reputation they want people to actually pay them and then the third thing is like unfortunately it feels like the way we're going here is they're going to use these ransomware attacks as a reason to increase kyc requirements and you know have more what is that and more personal information held and then it's just it's it's a
Starting point is 01:06:58 feedback loop because then all these companies are holding more personal information so then the ransomware attacks become more profitable bigger like yeah they like they're making bigger honey pots and then so the ransomware becomes even more profitable for them um so it's really counterintuitive and you just hate to see it well hey matt don't worry president joe biden and 30 other leaders are gathering to jointly crack down on ransomware gangs behind a barrage of attacks impacting organizations worldwide this month united states will bring together 30 countries to accelerate our cooperation and combating cyber crime improving law enforcement collaboration stemming the illicit use of cryptocurrency and engaging in these issues diplomatically
Starting point is 01:07:41 president biden said we are also participating closely with nations around the world on these shared threats including our nato allies and g7 partners i am committed to strengthening our cyber security by hardening our critical infrastructure against cyber attacks disrupting ransomware networks working to establish and promote clear rules of the road for all nations in cyberspace and making clear we will hold accountable those that threaten our security joel biden is here to save the day the one sort of line in here that really worries me is working to establish and promote clear rules of the road for all nations in cyberspace seems like uh an entry to more strict rules on the internet if you will yeah we already see i think in australia and
Starting point is 01:08:27 some other countries they like require ids to set up certain accounts stuff like that social media accounts um it's definitely extremely troubling um in america we do have some constitutional protections so i don't think like vpns or tor are going to get outlawed in america uh that would be the real that would get really dark really quickly um so there's only so much they can do in terms of trying to close off the open internet uh without completely infringing our rights but you know you never really know um you never really know how far uh some of these governments will go uh it it will be it obviously hurts your law-abiding citizens the most uh because once again you're just creating more honeypots and you're just creating more attack vectors i would
Starting point is 01:09:17 say that this is you know the rise of ransomware and the rise of cyber attacks i mean facebook just recently disclosed that i think 1.8 billion customers uh personal information got hacked um which is that's that's 5x the population of the united states that's a quarter of the world I would say that this is something that I've theorized for a while and expected for a while, because this is very, it's very new. You know, we've never had so much of our lives digitized and put on the internet and stored on these servers and securely. so like as more of our lives become digital these hacks are going to get bigger and bigger and eventually people will start to learn and they'll start self-hosting and they'll start seeking out privacy tools they'll start encrypting their data and they'll start protecting themselves but first you know people need to touch the stove and get burned before they start to realize the
Starting point is 01:10:13 need so ultimately i think long term i'm very optimistic uh that we have better privacy tools and that we have more people using them and we have better privacy education because the pain will get so bad that people will realize that need. Agreed, agreed. But between here and there, I have a feeling the politicians
Starting point is 01:10:38 and the governments are going to try to fuck things up. Again, criminals are going to criminal. Just like throwing more laws at this shit is not going to make life better or reduce crime materially. you probably need better boots on the ground investigators and law enforcement uh law enforcement's got very lazy in in the digital age um and you know speaking of facebook right they had i guess it goes to the theme you have the ransomware stuff um which is easy attack vector
Starting point is 01:11:11 for bitcoin um they'll use it as a tool that's enabling these ransomwares and try to drive fear to you like bitcoin's bad it's doing all this again it's not again props for props are due happy to see that ofac is recommending that companies and entities uh bolster their security their digital security that's what you should be doing that's what these ransomware attacks are actually incentivizing is for people to have better uh system admin security so get working on that do it before it's too late before you get ransomware attacked uh and then so that's one the ransomware and then i guess facebook went down this week when did you follow that at all i know you were in miami you're probably very busy but uh that was during the hrf thing too
Starting point is 01:11:55 yeah it was a big story it was interesting it went down and facebook went down yeah and lightning out of vulnerability i was like i can't deal with this right now so it's facebook instagram whatsapp they were down for a considerable amount of time i think most of the day either monday or tuesday um and just know that and and then they had that whistle it was like facebook employees couldn't even get into their offices yeah their digital key cards yeah their badges weren't even working so pretty bad fuck up on their part is a cyber pandemic upon us we shall see facebook i don't think it's like uh you know i i don't think it was is like a coordinated uh
Starting point is 01:12:38 conspiracy i you know i i think that this is the issue with centralized third parties trusted third parties this is why bitcoin needs to be distributed and robust and our tools should be self-hosted um but i do believe that as these outages increase as hacks increase as attacks increase um it will be used as an excuse to you know to have more burdensome laws that just hurt law-abiding citizens and uh yeah it's frustrating to see but i think with this facebook thing it wasn't even a hack right it was just they fucked up something on their end yeah they had an outage i mean there was apparently like their urls were were available for sale on dns providers but it wasn't really it just looked like they were like you couldn't actually yeah i think i think that's
Starting point is 01:13:31 what it was someone got fucked up with their dns certificates or something like that and took down their whole network uh but so that was separate from the night before or two nights before i forget it was monday or tuesday we're on 60 minutes he had this facebook whistleblower i missed that completely yeah it seems like a very coordinated this seems like more coordinated conspiracy I mean, she went from 60 minutes to meeting with Congress the next day to being verified on Twitter after joining and having like 56,000 followers in the day. And then Facebook came out and said, well, not that we like that she's whistleblowing,
Starting point is 01:14:12 but we agree with her. We think that Congress should enact laws that basically bring us closer to what Australia has with strict identity online. And it gives Facebook a regulatory moat because it's harder for competitors to pop up because Facebook can comply with it easier. They already have large legal teams that are on their payroll, talking money behind them. It's almost too good to be true. I mean, the memes that have been coming out from around this woman's quote unquote whistle blowing are hilarious.
Starting point is 01:14:39 I completely missed all of that. I saw it briefly. Yeah, it seems like a big CIA sigh off. The fact that she came out, and she was blowing the whistle on things that are like everybody knows that they're using algorithms to manipulate people's actions and stuff like that it's like everybody fucking knows that like there's nothing shocking that you're really revealing um and then like again well anyway freaks use social media less yeah delete your friends in your accounts i i know i'm a little bit guilty on twitter but it's the only one i use but uh yeah same use it less i deleted facebook years ago in my life i don't do not miss it at all i couldn't even tell you what facebook looks like these days at bui um
Starting point is 01:15:23 but yeah i mean 60 minutes on capitol hill facebook coming out and say oh we're pissed you whistle blue but like yeah we think you guys shouldn't act laws it's like hey well well too good to be true and your uncle marty's uh and your uncle marty jones's tinfoil hat world um do you mean to talk about this yet the u.s justice department launches a new initiative around cryptocurrencies uh it's also ransomware focus yeah so it's coming from all angles every angle man it really does feel like the heat is on right now bring it bring on the heat unsettling bring on the heat bring on the heat um bring it i think bitcoin again like the the experience you had earlier this week in miami uh it's just highlighting is it is a human
Starting point is 01:16:15 rights tool if you want to respect human rights and enable individuals and empower individuals to have freedom in the digital age bitcoin is probably the most powerful tool uh protecting that right now here in texas we have a lot of people meeting right now in austin talking about how bitcoin and the energy industry are merging i think i think you're getting too many like bring on the fight i think we have merit behind our arguments for bitcoin again it's a human rights tool. It's going to make us more energy efficient. It's sound money in the digital age. It's distributed. It's open source. It's fair. Let's meet on the battlefield of ideas and talk about the merit. Is it worth throwing this technology out because some people are using it for things
Starting point is 01:17:00 like ransomware attacks? Certainly not. I think the benefits far, far, far, far, far outweigh any cons. And you can actually argue that ransomware in the long run is probably a benefit because it incentivizes the bolstering of security of our digital companies and our systems. It's like a free market bug bounty program. Exactly. Last but not least on the list, we make you freaks aware every month when this comes out,
Starting point is 01:17:30 Janine's This Month of Bitcoin Privacy came out. Obviously, it's the beginning of October, so that dropped earlier this week. No, it was a little bit delayed because she presented with me at HRF. It was me, Evan, and her. How was she doing? She killed it.
Starting point is 01:17:47 She always kills it. She was remote. She was in proper privacy. She was remote audio only. We were both sitting there with our faces. She's got nine stories that she covered from the month of September. We're going to link to that in the show notes.
Starting point is 01:18:04 Always go check that out. all right that was it that's all we got for the list today it was tight a lot of technical talk today yeah i'm glad it was tight man i have i still have a busy day left yeah well i uh i spent seven hours yesterday and probably about the same amount of time i'm like halfway through my day today uh with the bitcoin magazine guys planning the conference at bitcoin 2022 april 6th and 9th it's going to be fucking ridiculous it's going to be absolutely ridiculous and on the open source side to make up for the lessons we've learned from the faust dome instead of a dome it's going to have open source devs are going to have a dedicated conference
Starting point is 01:18:51 hall yeah that was an open source sweatshop dude yeah and um it's open source open source dev stage open source stage uh 2 000 person capacity um as usual you know all speakers are going to get free free tickets and uh if you're if you don't want to speak but you're an open source uh contributor specifically uh right now bitcoin core if you're a bitcoin core contributor who's done a commit before october 1st so that there's no spam commits um they're giving out free tickets to them, and they're going to start launching. Every month, they're going to announce a new project that they're going to do that for. So it's really cool. They really want to embrace the open source community and support them. Very exciting. And I also saw the ticket price
Starting point is 01:19:45 increases. So if you want to join us, you should probably buy your tickets sooner rather than later and they did release a code it was uh one trillion uh the number one trillion uh which is a 21 off code which is the largest code i've seen to date um so if you're considering it use that code that's a b.tc slash conference but uh some crazy shit i'm excited to talk more about it but you know a lot of it's uh tight-lipped right now are we going to get better better stage presence like is kevin o'leary going to be in the air-conditioned uh in the comfort of air conditioning or are we still gonna be i loved our stage last year i thought our stage was dope for rabbit recap but yeah we're gonna do rabbit recap again uh live
Starting point is 01:20:32 there uh third year in a row i mean skipping the covered year uh skipping 2020 they i it's they still don't get enough credit for having a 13 000 person conference with no mass mandates no vaccine passports you could register with the nim in the middle of in the middle of all the coveted hysteria um but yeah we're gonna do rabbit hole recap live there it's it's being held at the miami beach convention center which was across the street uh from the new world center which is where hrf held their event uh so i saw the convention center it's massive so it's all you know all inside air conditioned um it has like 120 000 person capacity i believe so yeah they're they're doing it big and they're doing it right it should be a
Starting point is 01:21:24 quite quite the bitcoin only conference oh and uh you mentioned kevin o'leary um our boy p uh is doing uh he's in charge of programming sweet i'm working with him so uh i think the programming this year and the speaker agendas and like the schedule and stuff is going to be absolutely insane and i think people would be very impressed by it so look out for look out for those announcements 200k by conference day maybe who knows not falling into that trap again we will find out well matthew i know you have to get on freaks thank you for your patience i know we've been off schedule the last three weeks we will be back thursday next week uh back to our and if you're going to be in Austin in two weeks
Starting point is 01:22:13 we're going to be doing a live show before the Austin BitDevs so how are we going to do that are we doing like tickets for that I don't know we got to talk to the Unchained guys yeah I'm going to be with them tonight so I'll brainstorm some ideas with them
Starting point is 01:22:29 I don't want to live stream it so if you want to see it you should come to the you should come to the event obviously it'll be posted to the podcast feed afterwards but if you want the authentic experience you should come to the event yes maybe we'll sell tickets and just contribute to open source with them i'll be down for that they include beer and then uh like any any profit after that just goes to open source that'd be cool yeah i'm down to do
Starting point is 01:22:58 that um awesome well i love you bro and i'll see you soon and i love you freaks and stay on most access love you too brother thank you freaks as always if you're liking the content please like subscribe share rate review whatever if you want to buy a shout out tftc.io slash contribute we do this week in a week out because we think it's imperative that we get quality bitcoin information out there i hope you're liking the information i hope you're picking up what we're putting down thank you for joining us peace and love

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