TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Freedom Edition Week of 2019.07.01

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

This week Marty and Matt sit down on the 4th of July to discuss: - Bitcoin's revolutionary nature - Sats App announced by Casa https://blog.keys.casa/announcing-sats-app-with-satsback/ - 300 tickets sold for Bitcoin2020 - LND 0.7 released https://twitter.com/lightning/status/1146107267592445952?s=19 -Zap desktop 0.5 released https://medium.com/@JimmyMow/announcing-zap-desktop-0-5-0-beta-7622672ce582 - Coldcard v2.1.1 update adds dice support https://twitter.com/COLDCARDwallet/status/1146410794315390977?s=19 - US House of Reps Committee of Financial Services asks Facebook to hold off on Libra https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/07.02.2019_-_fb_ltr.pdf - Cloudflare went down due to faulty upgrade https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/02/a-cloudflare-outage-is-impacting-sites-everywhere/ - Whirlpool desktop 0.7 released with full tor support https://twitter.com/SamouraiWallet/status/1145998882947682304 - Hong Kong - Chinese border guards put spyware on phones at Xinjiang border https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/02/chinese-border-guards-surveillance-app-tourists-phones - Bitcoin as a safe haven in FT https://www.ft.com/content/f7643858-98f8-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36 Shoutout to this week's sponsors: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Unchained Capital. Head over to www.unchained-capital.com/vaults and checkout their 2-of-3 multisig vaults. You get 3-months free of Saifedean Ammous' The Bitcoin Standard Research Bulletin when you sign up.

boom what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here in a very the most beautiful studio i've been in a while i'm down the shore on a back deck i'm sure you might be able to hear the propeller plane in the background flying over with some mad for for a dive bar here in the city i'm sitting uh looking at a computer screen looking at my beautiful co-host matt odell who's somewhere else in this world right now matt how are we doing what's up freaks i uh in the very near future hopefully we'll have well i mean hopefully but we'll have plain ads that that are advertising that the new hottest shit coin no it's not going to be the new hottest shit coin i've actually thought about this i've looked it up it's only 450 to 500 for one of those ads

and this summer by the end of by labor day i'm going to buy one of these plain ads for south jersey uh it's going to be a bitcoin ad so this is actually a call to action for you freaks out there we got to get a quick like i think less than 280 character quip on bitcoin that we can put on a plane that people will see on the beaches so get on twitter 280 character what is it a tweet less less than a tweet like an original tweet like 140 character tweet like old school tweet um i think we'd have to just say it should just say stay humble stacks at tftc.io let's make it happen boom yeah we'll do that there you go if you guys want to contribute help contribute to that ad you can do so at tftc.io slash contribute speaking of which um let's get into the price the

price right now according to the trade block xbx index is 11 874 dollars and three cents um looking up a block right now uh right now we are currently at block the internet down here is slow waiting waiting waiting we are currently at block 583 814 and i don't have mempool stats right now actually i do have mempool stats i'm a member dot space there's uh about three thousand fifty seven transactions in the mempool right now according to mempool dot space oh mine says 27 000. well different mempools different nodes you know no i'm mempool.space oh you are yeah oh yeah it just went down 2742 keeps fluctuating yeah well that's a mempool it's organic yeah um and we're at um we're at 84 cents per sat

84 sats percent yeah it's uh the dime bag has been getting way less than a thousand sats per per final thought which is uh which has been a little disconcerting but also comfortable comforting knowing that the price is going up but your penny's not going as long your dimes aren't going as far as they used to people how about that price man i this price action is pretty crazy yeah we um again we're hovering around like 11 9 right now we got up to 14 we touched 14 i believe or not even got close to 14 about a week ago um right when we actually we spoke like when we did the live episode we were we were crashed we crashed during the live episode down to like 11 2 so we're a little bit above where we were then yeah we we started well

we started the live episode at the top right i think it's like 13 something yeah there you go we can't do any more live episodes the price just dumps during them yeah we can't but before we get into everything we gotta give a shout out to our sponsors here shout out to the cash app we finally have an official promo code with the cash app that's stacking sats one word uh if you download if you haven't downloaded yet if you have friends and family who haven't downloaded yet in the states make sure you let them know download the cash app use the code promo code stacking sats they will get five dollars and then five dollars will go to a charity called al's lacrosse which i worked for in college i volunteered for them

was actually there when they first started in 2011 and they've actually had their full cycle of an 8th grader going from 8th grade all the way through college and it's done some incredible stuff for the kids of Chicago particularly in particular neighborhoods in the west side and south side

it's something I'm very proud to have contributed to and something that I'm proud to contribute to now from afar so if you guys download the cash app make sure you use the stacking sats promo code and then on top of that as you freaks know you can buy bitcoin on there the first p2p app to allow you, P2P Payments app

to allow you freaks to do that. They recently allowed deposits on the app, so if you have Bitcoin and you want to send it to the Cash App to sell or send to somebody on the Cash App, you can do that now as well. Go to the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store and download the Cash App today.

And then be remiss of us if we didn't give a shout out to our second sponsor, Unchained Capital. You freaks know all about them. They got the two or three multi-sig volts helping you take your financial sovereignty into your hands Unchained will hold one of those three keys And sign for you if you are ever in a pinch

And need help from them Other than that they've open sourced their multi-sig Solution so if you don't even want to use Unchained you can use that Open source tool that they've built Again it's an incredible team On top of the vault program they have Bitcoin collateralized loans

So if you have BTC and you don't want to sell Friends don't let their friends sell Bitcoin You can use Unchained's loan services as well If you guys go to www.unchained-capital Capital slash vaults today and sign up. You're going to get three free months of Saifedean Amooses, the Bitcoin Standard Research Bulletin. So go check that out. It seems like Saif actually just put out a website, too, with some great information as well.

So check that out, too. That was a free ad for Saif there. Yeah, Saifedean.com, right? Yes. That was one domain I unfortunately didn't get my hands on before he got it. I thought you would have had it, man. I thought you would have had it. Uh, and then, Hey, we got two shout outs this week, Matt, um, from, from the freaks out

there. Thank you for contributing a fellow TFTC fan and holder, uh, wants to buy a version one bit seed. If you have one for sale, please DM at low BTC on Twitter. That's at low BTC, L O W BTC, uh, we'll pay Bitcoin on chain or lightning. Again, he's looking for a version one bit seed, a very good friend of the pod, a collector and, uh, is looking to add this bit seed to his collection. Um, he, he was the, uh, the fellow who, who gifted us the, the Yamazaki when, uh, when

we did our first live show, Matt. Yeah, that was quite delicious. That Yamazaki went by. It went very quickly. We, we blew through that bottle and then we have a second anonymous shout out. It's not even a shout out. It's just a statement. Bitcoin has more intrinsic value than gold because generating it turns energy directly

into hard money. whereas gold has limited industrial use cases which are far removed from the energy required to produce it just a good statement there and from uh from a freak thank you for that i love it i love it don't know who it was from that's all it said hey we don't it's anonymous it's anonymous yeah beautiful beautiful we love it yeah um all right so on to the topics of the day been a busy week it's fourth of july here in uh in the united states of america 243 years ago the founding fathers signed the declaration of independence telling king george to fuck off and uh starting this country that we that we now sit

in i think we're both in uh two of the original 13 colonies right now damn right oh geez fact um yeah and that's what i wrote about in the bent today just before we get into the topics like Bitcoin is a modern-day revolution and a modern-day manifestation of freedom in the digital age. And, again, like, Bitcoin is a revolution. And on a day like today especially, I think it's important to reflect on what we're doing here, the mission we're on, and sort of the gravity of this protocol and the effects it will have on the world and humanity going forward. Obviously, the Declaration of Independence had a huge impact on the course of history and how we've got to where we are today. And I would argue that January 3rd, 2009, with the mining of the Genesis Block,

will be looked back in retrospect hundreds of years from now as a similar type of Declaration of Independence from a monetary tyranny, from banking tyranny, if you will. i mean if the founding fathers had asked the king for permission to secede he would have he would have said no like this is like it's it's that's inherent to to the bitcoin movement is that is that permission shouldn't be required yeah i think that was the whole reason why they declared independence because they asked for permission to to be represented in in the king's parliament and they said now fuck off and they're like all right we will fuck off and create our own country um like i'm sure the king would wouldn't want you to do coin join either definitely around in his

day you wouldn't be able to tax as much you know there's uh the the boston tea party uh would not have been would not have been as big of a party if there was coin joins back then and people were able to hide the uh the wealth they were trying to tax um yeah so just reflect on it freaks this is uh i mean obviously bitcoin a lot of people get into it for the gains quote unquote uh and the price action but there's uh there's a lot more going on under the hood and uh philosophically and ideologically this is a quiet peaceful revolution too it's the other beauty beautiful thing we don't have to re revert to a result to guerrilla warfare like our forefathers did and attack the the system head-on with violence we can do it with code and and and moving

uh our finances into the system pretty peacefully and the other thing that's beautiful is um not only is it is it a peaceful tool and a peaceful revolution but it's also voluntary um you know one of the issues when we did secede um was that there was plenty of people in america at the time that didn't want to secede but they didn't even have a choice like they they they had to get involved in everything that was going on um with with bitcoin you know and then they ended up you know brothers fighting brothers right that was the whole thing uh with bitcoin like if you don't think bitcoin's a good idea then you know ignore it you're you're welcome to ignore it we think that's probably a really horrible decision on your part um but you're completely welcome to

ignore it while while we do our thing that's a very good point to be made this is completely opt-in uh this goes back to balaji in the vols uh tweet threads from a couple years ago and voice ever exit um voice and exit so we we have a voice now and an opportunity to exit into a new system and that's bitcoin and again if you don't like it or don't agree with the the implications of bitcoin you do not have to participate uh though if you do not participate just be aware that your life will probably be affected in some tangential way uh due to bitcoin success or non-success yeah i mean you don't have no matter what you're participating in this broken system we have so you might as well participate in the in the fixed one yes um yeah so just on a day like today fourth

of july just just reflect and think about the gravity of this and uh the the latin phrase that i put at the end of the bend today um i think is is a very very uh very important with this stuff and it it was uh written by i don't know if jaman jaman i don't know if thomas jefferson uh was the first person to coin this latin phrase but uh it's a latin phrase none the yet none the yet and it's uh let me pull it up here real quick excuse me it's oh wow i haven't read latin in so long malo peric periculosum libertam quam quietam servitutam uh i definitely just butchered that but when you translate it to english it means and a dangerous liberty seemed preferable to quiet servitude so i would argue the the quiet servitude of living under the current banking

system uh is something that is corrosive and it eats away at uh most uh most importantly people's purchasing power and their ability to save throughout time uh and and bitcoin oh it's noon here in the city sorry about that we're gonna have to go through some some background noise here all right that's over wow wow they're trying to censor us guys they are trying to censor us um yeah so that that phrase in particular i think it's important to to think about bitcoin is um it's a dangerous it's almost a dangerous liberty because we we are we are confronting the state and their ability to print money and central banks and their ability to print money and obviously that is going to perturb some of those the people in those places uh at some point it

already has uh to some extent bred bred uh sherman here in the states um but it's not going to be an easy ride but it is worthwhile it is it is preferable to the quiet servitude of living under this oppressive uh tyrannical banking system be a citizen not a subject fact all right let's get on to the topics that was our that was our freedom spiel 15 minutes of uh shooting the shit and talking about freedom and and shout outs and ads there's some ads thrown in there too So let's start with the Sats app was announced yesterday by Kasa. So Kasa, the company that's making, has the multi-sig solutions. They have a node, a personal node for you.

They announced the Sats app node yesterday. This is an app that you can use to connect with your Kasa node. And they're working on something called Sats tags as well. And these will be sort of readable, human-readable addresses that you'll be able to send Bitcoin to within the Sats app, trying to make the UX around address creation and invoicing a little better for Bitcoiners, for Kasa users particularly.

Matt, thoughts? So, Marty, I'm really conflicted, man, right now. This app is very cool. I'm glad they released it. Basically, they have their multi-sig, and then they have the node and there was no way to interact with your node

mobily, like on a phone and they didn't want to integrate which makes sense to me, they didn't want to integrate it into their multisig app, they wanted to keep it separate so they came out with a new app that allows you to easily connect to your Kasa node through Tor it seems like it's

very easy to use, nice UX, so very happy about that that we need more of that also you can because it goes through tor you can just connect to it from anywhere you don't have to be like on the local network so it makes you know accessing the lightning network uh with your own full node in like spendable environments like what we saw at bitcoin 2019 conference where they had the the open node arcade machines like if you're in that situation with the sats app you'll be able to easily pay for the arcade you know no matter where you are through your own full node. I also like the push towards Sats being the

standard, right? We've been pushing for that here at TFTC for a while now, and I want to see more and more apps go with Sats as the standard. My main issue is with this announcement is I'm getting sick and tired of companies using bitcoin terms as their as the name of their products you know it's like someone's gonna i'm not gonna be talking to a noob and they're gonna be talking about how they they sent sats from the sats app or to the lightning app to to the blockchain app like fuck are you fucking kidding me it's so confusing man it's like it's ridiculous no we touched on this a couple weeks ago when lightning labs released their lightning app it is it does it is cause for some confusion or could be caused for some confusion and something that should be

considered when making products that's something why i try to stay away from like crypto and bitcoin and and and stuff with uh like when i was making marty's bent and tales from the crypt just trying to not make it overtly uh tied to bitcoin and hopefully to to help avoid some confusion yeah exactly i i like look at zap right he called it zap it like it has an an illusion towards you know an insinuation towards lightning lightning makes zaps right but it's a different name it's got everyone knows exactly what it is you google it you know exactly what it is we're talking about it we know exactly what it is he didn't have to call it you know the lightning app or you know the sat sap like that that kind of bothers me um and uh yeah i just i just want to

see less companies doing that i was i was thinking you know how many moons does jupiter have jupiter has something like that maybe 12 well how many maybe 12 moons those are like great those are great product names they're they had the they had the allusion to the moon we're going to the moon but we're not even going to our moon we're going to jupiter's moons and there's so many of them and they have like crazy names use that yeah there are some good uh jupiter noon i'm pulling up jupiter moon names right now um i think that's a good idea i so yeah i want to see more of that um you know i didn't really the sats tag right is like it's like a it's like a cash it's it's they instead of the cash app it's

the sats app and instead of the cash tag it's the sats tag and you know i guess it works so you know it is what it is but uh it's always exciting to see new ways to use your full node easily as like an everyday person you don't need you know the setup is minimal you plug it in it runs you connect it with your phone you're good to go yeah let us be clear that uh our only consternation is with the naming of the product it seems like a very very good product and one that will help push ux and usability of bitcoin forward which we very much appreciate and hats off to the casa team for for getting this out there to their users um they've been working hard i know they were pumped to release this so um it is a useful app despite the name um

and i was way off there are 79 moons on jupiter look at that look how many startups you have like That's great. Europa. Good products. IO. Calisto. Calisto is a good one. Calisto would be a great name for a lightning app.

Or Europa would be good, too. Hey, this isn't the first time we've given out free business ideas here on TFTC. So we're going to wake up in a couple months. There's going to be a Calisto app on the lightning network. You heard it here first. um so yeah again shout out to the casa team for launching that um pushing ux forward great to see it again there's we love everybody building on bitcoin we talk about not a lot we talk about casa we talk about unchained they're incredible companies working on different parts of the stack

some of them overlapping and anybody working on this stuff pushing it forward you got to tip their cap to them um yeah i mean i i also i really like the idea of usernames right pay to usernames like the sats tag like that is um you know everyone one of the biggest uh pre-coiner complaints is is that you know no one's going to be able to use the address formats um you know it needs to be like email or something like that so like that can be that can be solved through like centralized and semi-centralized uh methods with usernames and whatnot yes no um no it's great and i hope we see more of that because yeah showing normies uh a regular public case is never uh never uh an easy task and it's it's always usually pretty daunting for them um yes so if any of you freaks

have a casa node download the sats app link it to your casa node and then let us know like your thoughts on it because uh neither of us have one to test it out on so let us know yeah um please let us know and then you put this in there 300 tickets already sold for bitcoin 2020 next year uh how boss was it that they offered them for 20 and 20 cents yeah and all those tickets were sold for bitcoin through lightning or on chain that's pretty that you know no one uses bitcoin well there's at least 300 people that just did yeah exactly in oriole nobody uses bitcoin nobody buys anything with bitcoin there's 300 people at least buying tickets to this one conference and yes it's $20 20 cents pay via Bitcoin and we were talked to the

conference organizers really oh you might want to keep this price at this you might want to keep this price point while bitcoins at this price level because as we get closer to the happening the time of the conference the the Bitcoin earned may be worth far more than a regular ticket sold for US dollars yeah I think I think they're huddling it but they did bad news they did announce with the 300 sold that they they are no longer offering that deal and it's now a hundred dollars hey well you missed out freaks still great we tweeted about it still a fucking deal a hundred dollars for a conference is not bad at all yeah i mean the crazy thing is those

first 300 tickets they don't even have the date yet or the venue they just they're like march next year and and people you know this this first conference was great america has needed like a major big bitcoin conference i think for a while all the existing ones like the north american bitcoin conference in miami consensus and whatnot um you know they just haven't cut it magical crypto was was supposedly pretty good but it's still called magical crypto in the name of the titles it kind of disqualifies it in my opinion yeah no i agree and um yeah so check that out tickets have been bumped up to a hundred hundred bucks um so it was we had a great time i believe we'll be doing another live show there next year at least that's what we we are uh toying with right

now it was a lot of fun if you guys can make it out to wherever the conference is next year highly recommended um next topic lnd version 0.7 was released and this release was a pretty big one comes with watchtowers reliable payment tracking better fee control with cpfp smart routing smarter routing excuse me and improved performance uh and more um so this is uh watch towers are officially uh in the lnd version 0.7 beta um reliable tracking is a thing now and this is just another example of slowly but surely fleshing out the lightning network building utility and tools that make it more user-friendly and this is a big step forward for the lightning network in particular any thoughts about yeah this is big news yeah this is big news uh yeah

they just keep stepping forward i i i think the watchtowers is a really big deal um and uh yeah it's just good to see i mean i haven't tested it out yet myself yeah watchtowers um we haven't tested it out but were you at bit devs when will burn uh yeah that was awesome that was awesome so we'll give us a nice demo and in watchtowers they might just serve as like in the future just people are just disincentivized to even try to uh maliciously steal the other end of the channel because they know there's potential of a watchtower watching that and they'll get their money stolen And so it's almost like, hey, like in a bodega, I think we said this a couple of weeks ago. It's like the sign at the bodega that says, hey, you're being watched. Smile. You're on camera.

So it's like a herd immunity. Yeah, they won't try because if they do get caught, then they lose everything. They end up losing money. So the key is to make the punishment so severe that, you know, even if they get away with it like one or two times, the third time just makes them lose more money than they that they made. exactly um so shout out to the l and d team for for pushing that out um yeah i've been using lightning more more and more every week i've been giving a lot of uh dime bag demos to people to show them how microtransactions can work with bitcoin um you know the the child pays for support is really useful too uh now that i'm looking at the change log i uh is that for channel i i really like yeah i assume so or and channel closing i imagine um but that's that's

pretty great because because then you can really i really like um the ux the the flow of child pays for parent as opposed to like replaced by fee um because like you don't really have to you don't have to do anything ahead of time you're just trying to pay the lowest fee and if you need to if you need to bump it in the future you just send another transaction that bumps it uh like samurai has had that integrated for a while and it's really clean i remember i used it during the last fee crisis it was super useful yeah no it's um can we go into the intricacies of the difference between replaced by fee and um child pays for parent well i mean i think the the the big difference from a user perspective is that uh for replaced by fee transaction you have

to signal it as a replaced by fee transaction before you do it yep um and yeah so like if you didn't do it ahead of time like you're out of luck but with with child pay because most people don't realize that they need the feature until they have a transaction that's stuck for a week exactly right yeah so at that point you're kind of too it's kind of too late if you haven't already done it yeah you'd have to construct a transaction with uh with replace by fee as like a sort of a a base case which isn't which isn't uh the way normal most users are constructing transactions right now so right and i don't think there's there's much wallet support for it because i the only one i know is electrum that signals for rbf when you send and you have to it's you have

to check the option yeah it's a toggle it so yeah child child uh child pays for parent is um is you basically construct a whole new transaction that says hey i'm gonna replace this transaction with a higher fee please ignore that and use this one well well with rbf you're like actually replacing uh the transaction but you're still paying both fees with child pacer parent my understanding is it's like you're sending another transaction yeah that's like the unconfirmed change of the previous transaction so it's connected still yeah so then they get confirmed together that's my understanding at least i might i might be completely wrong on that i could be too But it's good that L&D is implemented,

and if you are opening and closing channels with other people and you happen to send a low fee at first, this is now an option for you to expedite the opening or closing of those channels. And the routing, and they said it's smarter routing. I don't know what that means, But that's one of the things that Ketaminer said on our last podcast, our conversation with the Nautilus guys. He said that's really important, so that's really good to see, too. Okay, shall we go to Zap?

Yeah, I was going to say, if you haven't checked out that Nautilus episode, go check it out. Michael and Asquedo are two very good friends. We had a great conversation. And, yeah, we talked about network routing at one point in depth. and Lightning Network routing definitely needs, as a topography, definitely needs a lot of help and a lot more eyes, if you will. But yes, let's move on to Zap.

Desktop version 0.5 was released this week. Jack tweeted out, I believe, yesterday or the day before. And so this comes with a bunch of new upgrades as well. So it's... Were they on mainnet now? yeah so they're fully supporting that go ahead yeah that's the big one the big one is like they they're fully mainnet supported uh neutrino light wallet now um similar to lightning's desktop wallet for a little bit now right yeah so they're officially on mainnet now uh which is a big step

and and zap is like we were talking about them earlier another another team that's that's creating great ux i use i use the zap app on my phone every day um to see what's going on with our tf but that's yeah that's with our own node yes uh which connect so it connects remotely to the node but right this now lets you like i think i so i tested it out um i i i just tested out the new version um like 20 minutes ago and it literally it syncs within uh like a minute and a half two minutes it syncs uh it defaults to beck 32 now you deposit into it um you can change that in the settings um and and then you're good to go i like that they don't have they don't default to autopilot which i think is still like premature to use autopilot it does more harm than good um

and so you just you just open it then you can make your own channels you can open a channel with us you can open a channel with pierre and it defaults to private channels um so i i think it's It's, this is like, so the key thing here, though, is you're not running your own node, right? So you're using Neutrino, and there's a big trade-off there. It's always, it's always more private, and, you know, you can verify your own transactions if you go through your own node. Yeah. No, it's, again, incredible sort of push forward. And on top of this, the mainnet Neutrino stuff, they have channel backups.

uh they've changed their preferences and improved channel management as well um and this is actually i'm actually happy to mention like private channels because that was something that was going on on twitter earlier this week a lot of meth heads were calling out the lightning network for increase or excuse me decreased capacity um but uh it is important to note that that decreasing uh observable capacity could be because people are moving their channels to private channels instead of public channels yeah and anyone who's loading up the lightning labs wallet or loading up zap now um the light wallets like they're not their nodes don't show up publicly they don't publicly broadcast their channels don't publicly broadcast and that's how

the majority of people that are like non-routing nodes are going to interact with this network is is that you either run you run your own node um or you do a light client and then you just connect with the one or two private channels out to like a bigger routing node and then you settle out the balance with something like loop out you know so so then you have inbound capacity you have outbound capacity and you're basically you become like a fringe a fringe user like on the on the outside of the mesh um yeah so so so don't use capacity as a metric don't you know get sold off on that yeah it's uh it's more intricate and more nuanced than just looking a pure capacity, you have to take into consideration which channels are private and which are public,

and it's becoming a lot easier for channels to be natively private, and then there's a lot of services that are popping up that are going private first as a sort of product ethos. As for the new Zap features, yeah, they made the interface way nicer. You can choose, like, your block explorer and stuff like that, which is really cool. I mean, we already like Zap. Zap's our favorite app to interact with our nodes. But the channel backup feature is strictly for if you create a light wallet, right? So when you set it up, they give you your seed words.

Then they verify your seed words. You know, you enter three seed words to verify. And then the last step is you choose a backup location that's encrypted by your password. so you can either store that in the cloud or you can store that locally and it just automatically does it for you, which is a really fantastic way to handle the backups, like pretty seamless for the user.

Yeah. Again, shout out to Zap pushing the UX and usability of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network forward. Again, slowly but surely, freaks. We're 10 and a half years into this revolution. A lot of people like to shit on Bitcoin and Lightning Network for their UX, their current state of the user experience

of the protocols. But again, these are networks and protocols, excuse me, just burped, that we expect to be around for centuries, if not millennia. And to expect all this to be fleshed out within the first decade is just asinine, in my opinion.

So as we see, steady progress is being made and it's encouraging. next up we got cold card they just upgraded their firmware a big upgrade for them uh now supports uh creating seed words with um by rolling dice so you can roll six die and to create entropy for your seed phrases which is really cool and really sort of uh drives home the the the point of being a sovereign individual and really taking your your financial freedom into your own hands and making sure that you are not getting screwed at any point of the supply chain or uh from some random entropy creating device right so the the worry is is is like you you create a seed on a

treasure or a ledger or a cold card and the source of of randomness isn't doesn't have proper entropy So it's not actually truly random or it's not random enough. I don't know if anything can ever be truly random. So so if you use dice, you can basically generate the randomness yourself. Now, a lot of, you know, using dice to create private keys is not a new a new thing. But a lot of times what they would it's complicated process usually. and you um usually have to use like a special dice you know like a a bigger 20-sided numbers on it yeah so this uses like a standard six-sided dice just like whatever you find in like your yahtzee

board or something um which is awesome everyone has like way too many six-sided dice to begin with the second thing is it all goes through the cold card so it's like really easy presumably to use i haven't tested out yet i plan to this weekend um today is is is purely for celebration with friends and family and rhr um but uh the third thing that's really cool about this is so using six-sided dice it takes a while to get the entropy you need so what cold card does is you can either do it all yourself like very long process or you can have cold card create the seed just like they normally create it and then you can add dice entropy on top of it which i think is a really cool ux way of doing it so like a 25th word phrase via roll dice or excuse me dice rolling

no they literally added into the entropy of the of the whole seed phrase uh so the seed phrase changes as you add new dice rolls into it uh which and then you can add a passphrase if you're choosing on top of course as well so that's pretty fucking awesome i think that's fascinating as hell and i actually just picked up uh just ordered a few cold cards myself i think we're going to be uh experimenting and doing demos with them um in the future so look out for that on the site i'm very excited to get my hands on them and start uh start uh experimenting with them especially because now with this update as well they they uh wasabi like with their wasabi uh support they removed extra info from a skeleton file they changed to xfp endian and added version field

so they're they're just making their wasabi uh integration uh easier and more useful um so for me i mean we we've been talking a lot about hardware devices and what you can trust and what you can't and i don't want to jinx cold card but it seems like they they've got the the security and and the security first principle down pat and and something that that i'm going to be using more in the future i believe yeah i mean i really like the idea of as like a as a as a simple pretty cold storage with privacy um and sovereignty mixed in set up being cold card plus wasabi plus full node right and the new wasabi update is that they're going to release soon has a ux change there where it lets you know uh based on the color of your

connection on the bottom um whether or not you don't have tor on which is hard to turn off tor you have to like go into the developer settings or whatever don't do that um if you're in spv mode where you're you're fetching filters from the wasabi server or if you're running through your own full node so it'll be super easy to just run your full node connected to wasabi connected to cold card and uh that's a i think that could be a really good solution for a lot of people yeah so shout out to uh rodolfo and team for pushing that out and and continuing to to make the cold card pretty fucking badass um who i couldn't tell this like this is real so this is real this is from the financialservices.house.gov file so the u.s house of reps committee uh of financial

services asked facebook to to put a moratorium on on the uh the launch of libra calibra um whatever it is whatever they are um so it seems like libra it's called libra the the wallet is calibra yes um so maxine waters came out and asked zuck like uh yeah don't don't do this you're and it's crazy I couldn't tell if the letter was real or not because it almost read like satire because they were basically just explaining how Bitcoin can attack the state's power of money but focusing their ire on Facebook and Libra. So, yeah, the U.S., at least the Financial Services Committee, seems to be scared of Libra. They think it would compete with and potentially undermine the dollar in the long run.

So they came out and admitted that in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, I mean, companies can't just be their own central bank. Like, this is why Bitcoin exists. Right. So what do you think? Do you think Facebook fights back? Do you think they tell the government to fuck off? Or do you think they bend the knee?

You know, I don't... I mean, the freaks know how I feel. Even before this, I was saying that they weren't going to let them launch. We had a long conversation with this the day after the Bitcoin 2019 conference with somebody who was a Libra bull. Yeah, I mean, Facebook is already a huge target without this mess. You know, there's multiple presidential candidates calling to break them up. So who knows? I don't think I the only way Facebook's able to get away with this is if they give the U.S. government like a shit ton of power over the system in terms of both surveillance and control of the money, some of the monetary elements.

And so if that's the case, then, you know, it just further solidifies that Libra doesn't compete with Bitcoin. Right. Yeah, exactly. that's it's funny that they decided to come after libra would have i mean other than brad sherman again nobody's really and that's the beauty of bitcoin maybe they nobody has done it yet because they literally can't like nobody has sent a letter to anybody tell them to stop using and running bitcoin and again this is the get driving home the value prop of bitcoin there's nobody that this financial services committee could send a letter to to shut down bitcoin it is a hydra that

cannot be killed right i mean they can't shut it down with just a letter they would have to do more than that exactly letters are easy to write right so very easy to write uh finding and bombing mining servers is not as easy or as palatable uh two more topics here four more topics here and then we'll wrap up and get on with our fourth of july cloud flare went down uh due to a faulty upgrade i believe they pushed an upgrade and and there was something that uh basically burned out their cpu power their cpu uh caching or something like that and it took down i don't know the exact number of websites but it took down a good portion of the internet that are the websites that are using cloud fare for anti-dd os attack um safety uh so this was a big wake-up call for the people

using the internet like wow a lot of companies depend on this one centralized service so let's explain how cloudflare works cloudflare's business model is they um so sites one of the most common ways to attack a site is a ddos attack um we've seen ddos attacks happen all the time basically they you like take over a bunch of computers or a bunch of devices um and you have them all hit a website at the same time. I think Aaron Schwartz also had ways to protest using DDoS attacks where people would install an app on their computer and they would voluntarily do it and it would automatically take part in the DDoS. So basically, you just keep hitting a server until it goes down or it just is unreachable. And this is also why CAPTCHAs exist, right? Like, are you a human?

Prove you're a robot. So what Cloudflare does is it sits in between the user and the site. So when you go to the site and you hit the site, the first thing you hit is one of Cloudflare's servers. Then Cloudflare is making an educated guess on whether or not that you're a bot attacking or if you're a real person. They might give you a capture, they might not, and then they send you on to the existing service. And one of the issues is that Cloudflare is on so many sites, especially like in the Bitcoin space, Bitcoin exchanges, stuff like that, Because because they they there's massive economies of scale in their business because because the more customers they have, the more servers they're able to afford around the world. The more the more servers that they can bounce things off of gives them massive economies of scale. And and Cloudflare really got ahead of this in in like like the 2012, 2013, 2014 era.

I remember people getting angry in the Bitcoin community about people using Cloudflare then. and and it was because cloudflare offered a free product that like scaled it was a freemium they that scaled in and they basically you know locked all these people got all these people in and now they're just so massive that it's that it's really hard for upstart competitors to uh to to join the market what uh what are their their largest competitors out there yeah yeah exactly like i don't even i don't even know yeah um but but like pretty much every i think all the bitcoin exchanges use cloudflare uh and and the other issue is like from a privacy perspective is that they're sitting in between all these users and and uh the websites in question so they can see

you know who's coming and going on the on these websites it's a major privacy privacy concern is there a like how do we solve this problem like is there other than captcha or like the alternatives to ddos attack protection yeah i mean you know it's not an easy problem to solve i'm sure people are working on it what if you had to pay sats to access a website i think that i mean yeah i mean people have proposed that that's you know that's an idea it's like a it's like a paywall captcha or like a lot of people proposed for a while they were saying you know you do like a proof of work captcha so like cost money to do that you know this is like this is why bitcoin transaction fees exist right because if it was

if it was free to send a bitcoin transaction like when we had the spam attacks the spam attacks on bitcoin were basically ddos's they were just denial of servicing if you have if you have uh if the transactions are cheap enough then it costs you nothing to just flood the network with transactions yeah um yeah so it's a problem that's doesn't seem to be uh very well solved and it uh doesn't seem like it's going to go away uh we're very dependent on cloudflare as we found out this week um so yeah just be aware be aware of what services are using it i believe uh on some exchanges the price of bitcoin was showing like some indexes were showing like six dollar bitcoin just because they couldn't access the uh exchange api data um so that's just like

another attack vector social attack vector if you will it's part technical part social where Somebody could use Cloudflare to to socially attack the masses into thinking that something's happened to Bitcoin when it when it hasn't. I mean, it should be mentioned, as as Pomp made sure to mention on Twitter, that that Bitcoin didn't go down, that if you were running your own node and your own wallet was connected to your node, you could participate in the Bitcoin network just as you would have otherwise. yeah no i um yeah thank you for pomp for always pointing out when uh when bitcoin survives and when other things go down bitcoin never shuts down no no bitcoin does sometimes it has in the past but very very negligible amount 99.999 i don't think percent of the time it'll be up yeah i mean you shouldn't there's a website was it bitcoin uptime i feel like you shouldn't say never though because like it literally has it has been down it's true um march 2013 2011 2013

uh yeah those are the last two times right yeah yeah 2010 and 2013 yeah bitcoin has been up for 99.983936344 percent at the time yeah and i believe that's what we should be saying i believe july 2010 was a coinbase reward bug where there was like an eight billion bitcoin coinbase reward but it was forked out within 100 blocks before the coinbase was given to the miner uh or the coinbase the miner was allowed to touch the coinbase transaction and then march 2013 was a consensus bug right that forced the hard fork um yeah so beware luckily both of those were early but yeah so just don't say never but it's it's pretty much always up and if you when you're comparing it to the banks it's particularly uh brutal because the banks are like they're closed

today in america the stock market's closed today they close every weekend you know so they just can't even compete like even if you know we have a couple hours here or there where bitcoin is down they they're not even close true um yeah so be aware be aware this is a beware segment of this episode uh uh next hong kong hong kong they were back in the streets they took over uh the legislator the the protesters broke into the legislator building they put up a british colonial flag and graffitied the lettuce the legislative building um so it seems like things there are are heating up and kyle bass this morning was tweeting about um uh the hong kong dollar peg uh sort of disconnecting from the it's peg with the u.s dollar so it seems like in hong

kong in particular things are getting tumultuous the more like i'd like to focus on the protest and taking over the legislator right now that's like a huge fuck you to mainland china and it'll be very very interesting to see how uh xi and company responds to to this overt middle finger to to the chinese regime did the didn't the hkd peg it went up though in value right uh yeah i gotta look at the chart um like why that i don't understand what's going on um i cannot speak to exactly what's going on either let me see but like what's kyle what's kyle's point there let me see he's saying it goes up first and then it falls is that what he's saying

seems like i would imagine the up and then it i imagine maybe there's a demand right now people are storing their hong kong dollars in in treasuries denominated in that currency and Maybe they're dumping those treasuries for Hong Kong dollars, which is pushing the price up. This is complete speculation. I have no idea, but that may be something that forces the appreciation of that. And then, yes, maybe it's a step into getting out of Hong Kong and selling those treasuries, which forces the currency up. And the next step is getting that currency into a sounder vehicle, maybe Bitcoin, maybe gold, maybe the U.S. dollar. That would make sense to me.

I don't know. I do not know that to be a fact at all. I'm just speculating. Right, right, right. I mean, I think everyone's speculating, including Kyle, but he's the expert. So I was trying to read into what he was saying and it was a little bit difficult. But anyway, two things I would touch on about Hong Kong is that one was while the latest protests were broken up, like me and thousands of other people on twitter were like able to watch live streams from people that was so cool thanks for sharing that link dude how crazy is that like all it takes is like you have a phone and you have an internet connection and people like across the world can view it live and like we're not going through like cnn or anything like that's fucking crazy

they don't have like a huge setup or anything they just have a phone yeah that's the beauty of the digital age the information age like this was talked about in the sovereign individual like individuals are going to be the journalists and the newscasters of the future and all you have we have these supercomputers in our pockets that can can send information globally around the world and you can turn that little hd camera on and provide news provide uh actual data and information to to other human beings you don't need the gatekeepers anymore which is crazy yeah it's that that like blew my sometimes like the little it's like the little things that like you just you kind of take it for granted and then while you're taking for granted you're like what

the fuck well that's right crazy that's how i first got hooked on the twitter was during uh like 2011 2012 when things were popping off with syria and isis like that's when i realized the value of twitter and the the individual uh journalist on the ground that's sort of being able to follow locals uh and get their their perspective on things that were happening was was very eye-opening for me yeah and i remember reddit too like they have a syrian uh civil war there uh reddit uh whatever whatever reddit section is called um yeah that was and also uh i remember when bin laden got assassinated the first report was like from some random pakistani guy tweeting it out yeah and qaddafi qaddafi too when he got assassinated i'm pretty sure that was

live streamed as well that's crazy yeah we're entering a new era here man like we've never this has never been possible before so it should be interesting the implications are are vast freaks just the implications are are vast be aware another addition to the be aware topic and then the the other thing i'd like to touch on about hong kong just again is like imagine how i mean imagine how freaked out you would be if you own like a 60 million dollar building in hong kong or like a hundred million like if like 90 of your net worth is like wrapped up in in hong kong real estate there's like all these hong kong families that's crazy like they must be freaking out yeah i mean for good reason too like it again that's why i'm very very very interested to see

how china reacts to this i don't think they're going to react lightly um it would be it would be astonishing if they if they're like hey you guys obviously want your autonomy here is um i don't think that's going to happen and i'm and i feel like an asshole sitting here like at the beach like talking about the strife of the hong kong people but i feel i feel i'm where i worry for them i feel that china is going to come down with an iron fist um yeah i mean we stand with them uh and all the power to them they're fucking they're they're impressive very well very impressive very well organized protesters and you can tell they they feel the need to fight for their rights to fight for their freedom to fight for their autonomy and it is uh inspiring

nonetheless or excuse me inspiring if nothing else that's what i meant to say um and then staying on china chinese border guards are putting spyware uh in one province in particular the Xinjiang border um border guards are putting spyware on tourist phones Matt I'm sure this makes you pumped I'm sure you're excited about this yeah I mean uh so I guess it was like a it was a triple report but to the Guardian New York Times and someone else um this is a province it's on uh I don't know how to pronounce it I think you did a pretty good job um it's on like the it's on it's a border it's a border province and it's right next to tibet um i think they've been cracking down there pretty hard to begin with so now anyone who

enters in or out from there gets their their full phone gets downloaded everything that gets on you have to unlock it and hand it to uh the border the border guards and then they install the spyware they download everything and uh then they give you back the phone um yeah so what is your advice to uh westerners traveling to china oh well i mean i would never go to china um that is the rule that i've i i'm i'm really upset about it because i really want to go to china i feel like i missed my you know we're we also we fucked up because we're like public facing bitcoin figures so i feel like public facing Bitcoin figures definitely shouldn't go to China. But anyway, if you're traveling in general, I think this is going to become more common. We've seen the British do it.

We've seen Americans do it. I think we talked about this on the on the last podcast with the Nautilus guys is that basically they can you have you have no legal rights when you go through these borders they can put you in a room for like 14 hours until you decrypt your drives so you should go through with the bare minimum at all times just every time you travel just assume that just everything that you have with you is just going to be searched and gone through and maybe taken from you you know get a travel phone don't keep anything on the travel phone like wipe your computers before you travel with them you know that if you want if you need to back them up and then restore them when you get home like stuff like that just be encrypt everything but like

they they can encryption you know only help so much if they throw you in a room and they say decrypt it what are you gonna say like oh well i encrypted it but then i forgot it like really like they don't you they know you're full of shit i have six concussions i have no idea i forgot it just slipped my mind you know hey yeah it's not plausible i think this is gonna happen more and more yeah no again again and like we touched on at the beginning of the episode this is stuff that needs to be fought for it is a revolution and um bitcoin uh probably plays hand in hand with the data revolution of self-sovereign data and and keeping your data out of the hands of grubby politicians and corporations and obviously they want that data and they're they're forcefully

taking it from people at borders now um so again huge be aware episode be aware it's happening travel safe yeah i mean wait wait till like once like bitcoin gets bigger too they're gonna there's even more incentive for them to play these games um play these games at borders because they don't know they don't know if you're traveling with money or not so even if you're not even if you're being honest it's gonna it's gonna get i i think i love traveling personally um and i've i've i've been blessed to be in a good financial position at a young age uh so i am trying to travel as much as possible right now just in general not even not even bitcoiners related i think i think right now we're probably in like the the the peak of of travel convenience like we can go as

americans we can go to europe just go all around in europe europe europeans can go pretty much anywhere they can go all around in europe uh like travel is super easy and you just got to take advantage of it right now because i think it's going to get way more difficult and then we'll be taking like airships from our citadels between our citadels and shit like that well i hope you're wrong for the sake of our society me too me too but hey uh if if current trends are pointing towards an outcome it seems to be the one that you just described uh but again we gotta fight back speak up freaks speak up stand up fight for your rights right you gotta you gotta like the the quote at the end of the but like quiet servitude that's that's what we're we're

slipping into you gotta you gotta fight for your right to to be a free human in in today's age especially in the digital age where it's considerably a lot easier considerably easier i can't speak today considerably easier for for nefarious actors to to sort of control you and your data and your and your travel and your being and your financial being and yada yada yada yeah i mean if you don't care about your privacy about your sovereignty like your rights like nobody else is gonna like care about it for you yeah um last topic we're over an hour landed on this financial times coming out and officially labeling or asking the question prompting the question is bitcoin acting as a safe haven asset in this current geopolitical

macro environment and i've been writing about this for months now i think yes it is and it's crazy to see the Financial Times even even appeasing this this narrative I mean you can see me over here I'm all smiles this is is my favorite narrative it's it's the overarching Bitcoin narrative I think ultimately it will be a safe haven and I think we can meme it into safe haven status quicker but you You know, I it's it's pretty much still a risk asset, but right now it's not behaving like one in this macro landscape. And I think part of the reason is because we fell so hard, which was really nice.

It exhausted all the sellers. So if we're in a situation here where we're like leading into the halving and and we have all this other adoption price pressure pushing us up at the same time as this macro landscape unfolds then we're basically like the the safe haven narrative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy yeah and uh yeah it's beautiful well and let's not just uh denigrate bitcoin as a safe haven just narrative it is a good safe haven like it is a good place to save and store your capital from people who are trying to take it from you like it is the definition of a safe haven it is a haven from a system that is continuously taking your money from you and taxing you and

and confiscating your goods it is a haven from that system oh no yeah absolutely i mean like look if you're in hong kong like i'd rather have bitcoin than than real estate in hong kong you're in venezuela you know you're in iran all these different places um and and i just um like when does like when does Bitcoin supplant the U.S. dollar or, you know, gold as like the world's safe haven asset? You know, we're we're it's ahead of the game right now. Right now, it's mostly adoption speculation. Right. Because it's so early and the price is so low compared to what it could be in the future is that we're going to have these these volatile adoption cycles. But yeah, Like from from a from a natural the natural essence of Bitcoin is that it is a safe haven.

It's hard to confiscate. It's hard to block. It's hard to seize. It's really, really almost impossible to inflate it. And yeah, that's that's beautiful. It is it is definitely a safe haven. But if Financial Times starts posting about it more being a safe haven, then I think people will start believing it sooner and that'll be fucking beautiful. Yes. So shout out to the good people at the Financial Times, Francis Coppola, Isabella Kaminsky, Jamina, all you beautiful Financial Times writers who love Bitcoin. Shout out to your publication. We really enjoy you helping us push this true narrative forward. Bitcoin is a safe haven. So cheers to you on this 4th of July. And with that being said, Matt, we're out of topics. We're out of time here. You have any final words? um that was a that police siren i think passed marty that was that's not in your rearview mirror so yeah um it's important here at tftc we have police sirens often in our recordings we're

working on that just know you just be aware you always got to have your head on a swivel we do it intentionally to make sure everybody's aware at all times um no i just i just you know cheers to the freaks um you know enjoy your friends and family today those are who are in america uh enjoy work today if you're anywhere else in the world because we do luckily have listeners throughout the world and uh stay humble and stack sets yeah guys and uh yeah especially you americans today celebrating independence day reflect on the power of bitcoin as a revolution and and fighting for financial sovereignty in the digital with that we'll end it there peace and love freaks