TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap LIVE with @arbedout: Week of 2021.10.18

Episode Date: October 23, 2021

This week Marty, Matt, and @arbedout recorded live from the Unchained Capital offices in Austin, Texas and discussed: - bitcoin hits new all time high - first bitcoin ETF launches - hacker steals identification info of every argentinian via government database - Jonas Schnelli steps down from role as bitcoin core maintainer - worldcoin launches - electrs v0.9.1 - rust-lightning v0.0.102 - specter-desktop v1.7.0 - elements v0.21.0 - nthkey v1.0.5 - joinmarket v0.9.3 - joininbox v0.6.2 - fully noded v0.2.28 simple bitcoin wallet v2.2.15.1 Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital Braiins Compass Mining

What is up freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this late episode of Rabbit Hole Recap. Matt and I ripped it live from the Unchained offices with our good friend Arbed Out. It was a great time. Shout out to the Unchained team for letting us do this. We're building something special. Not only in Unchained, down here in Austin, the vibes are high. I had the beefsteak last night. That's why we're getting out at close to 3pm on a Saturday, Central Time. I like central time I like where we are in Austin, Texas It gets darker later here

Which I like, I like the sun being up It's a bit darker in the morning That'll change next week We dropped the ball this year, freaks It's on Uncle Marty I dropped the ball However We need to bring back the Save the Sun campaign next year

This is imperative We just need to It's idiotic, it's stupid It doesn't make any sense We need to save the sun we're not setting the clocks back anymore in 2022 we're going to go forward in march of next year or april whenever the hell it happens and then we're never changing it again we're starting the 2022 campaign right now 2021 was a crazy year obviously we fell

behind the ball so 2022 save the sun start campaigning now this rip is brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking Jack Dorsey hyperinflation's coming I think he listened to the Larry Lepard episode liked it he's the CEO of Square which owns Cash App

Cash App can help you stack stats very easily you can get into stats very easily with Cash App I can't stress this how easy it is just make sure you're withdrawing taking their limits into consideration you can dca into stats you can set and forget it you can set buy limits you can set if you think you're going to be able to catch a little dip and set that buy limit for some reason you want to buy at a higher price you can set that too i believe or actually it doesn't make any sense but cash out makes it easy cash out can be your bank account

you can do it all it's got its boost card i use it today at whole foods no whole foods boost today though a little bum probably saw that at checkout but whatever still works use the code stacking sass if you haven't downloaded the app already you're gonna get ten dollars ten dollars gonna go to our good friends at owls lacrosse owls lacrosse it's owls lacrosse this was also brought to you by good friends again at unchained capital this is where this podcast was hosted you threw an incredible live show and then on top of that they threw an incredible bit that's god The vibes down here are so strong. There was a lot of power at that meetup to preserve privacy.

You're not allowed to talk about what happened at the meetup. You got to show up next time you're in Austin during a BitDev's meetup. You got to make sure you get on the list and you get there. On Chain Capital, they're helping you eliminate single points of failure in your life, in your Bitcoin life with their collaborative custody model, collaborative custody that is personified in their vault product. they have a white glove concierge service that's going to take you from zero to having a multi-sig vault set up at which you hold two keys on chain holds one you can always move your utxos

in and out of the multi-sig wallet at your own pace at your own volition you don't need anybody else there to hold your hand but if you do need someone there to be the second in the two or three multi-sig transaction on chain does have a key and they can be there for you they have a white left concierge service again is going to take you from zero to getting this vault set up with a thousand cuck bucks of sats dumped into it now they're going to get your hardware wallets they're going to have multiple video conference calls with you to get you comfortable with multi-state to get you comfortable with their vault product to get you comfortable with creating private public key pairs to get you comfortable with the concept of derivation paths they're there to hold your hand

go check it out at unchained.com eliminate single points of failure in your security model okay third-party custodians exchanges but they just hold the bitcoin on behalf of you you don't even own bitcoin you want to claim to bitcoin you own a claim to bitcoin do you really want to own bitcoin or do you want to own a claim claims are for lames claims are for lames unchained helps you make sure that you're not a limb with their collaborative custody model eliminate that single point of failure go to unchained.com check it out this group was also brought to you by our good friends of compass mining compass mining is here to get more individuals into the mining game okay now i'm whispering now i'm like intently talking to you seriously okay we need to distribute

individual hash rate ownership compass is here to help you do that you go to compass mining.io you can buy an asic have it delivered to your home they have an at-home mining support team that's going to tell you what you need to do from an electrical engineering perspective to have your electrical setup so that you can actually plug the thing in from an internet setup so that when you do plug it in you can connect to the internet and communicate with your miner and they're going to teach you how to connect to a mining pool so that you can send your hashes to a pool and get rewarded for it it's a beautiful thing also if you want to go to compass mining.io buy a miner you don't want to set it up at home they have partnerships with hosting facilities with

competitive electricity rates you can buy a miner pick a hosting facility go check all this out at compass mining.io this group is also brought to you by good friends of Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains isn't a zombie company. They're a company to help bring you auto-tuning firmware in the form of Brains OS Plus that's going to help you stack more sats with your hash, okay? They're also the team behind Slush Pool. They're Also, the team. I'm recording an ad here. Could you please not interrupt, sir?

You didn't walk out. You could hear you just screaming in the middle of my ad read. The Brains team is not going to be too happy about it. But what they will be happy about is if you download the Brains OS Plus firmware and start stacking more hash and, therefore, more sats. go to their website brains b-r-a-i-i-n-s dot com and find

the page where the brains os plus firmware lives and you can see what mining models are available to download brains on what's miners coming soon s19s are in private betas it's coming freaks it's coming what else they're hiring

they're a bitcoin only company that's hiring creme de la creme I would love to work for them if I was smart enough unfortunately i'm not i'm just a lowly podcaster i can't write and rust or do system admin stuff or work on hardware i'm just an idiot podcaster go check out everything brains has going on at brains b-r-a-i-i-n-s.com check out their blog check out the profitability tools check out slush pool i should say if you're downloading if you have brains downloaded on one of your asics and you're using it you don't have to point your hash at slush pool you can point at any pool you want

However, if you do point at a slush bowl, you're going to get 0% pool fees. Nice little fig there. All right, enjoy this rep. I'm sorry it's late. Forgive me, freaks. Forgive me. It's F1 week here. We had a beefsteak last night.

What was something funny that happened at the beefsteak? I don't even know if I'm allowed to talk to that. I don't care. I don't care. It was good times. Good meat. Good friends. Good fires.

Good stogies. I had a good stogie last night. Sucked on a stogie for quite some time. the ribeye was good as always shout out to mandrake for the baklava i had your baklava for the first time mandrake and it was uh it was delicious rich it's a rich baklava very rich blended on that you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.

So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt yet another live episode uh here at the unchained capital offices in austin texas disclaimer the response from the podcast uh f1 week in austin uh we're here with a guest

as we usually are in our life shows armed out who recently announced that he joined the How's your week been so far? It's been great. Does this count as doxing myself? Nobody else but the people here in front of us can see my face. So for those of you who are here, hi, I'm Arbedout. And for those of you who are not, the mystery remains. The first week at Unchained has been amazing.

I'd like to give thanks to everyone at Unchained who's made this week so awesome for me. Some of you are in the audience right now. Hi guys. I'm jealous I won't be able to do any for F1 or the Beefsteak on Friday night. you moving to austin real soon now marty real soon all right that's good to hear you were you were not moving to austin like to be announced they started work on me as soon as i got here they make a pretty persuasive case when you come down here they they lure you in with we're a remote friendly company and then they take you to all the barbecue joints and the top of places and let you

sort it out for yourself so you're officially a new yorker now we'll see we'll see this wow we're like 30 seconds into this and you've got me moving to texas i'm impressed well cole put the pressure on he said hard sell immediately nice nicely done all right now we uh we move on to our next recruit matt odell when are you getting down here first of all cheers to unchained capital for hosting us cheers to all you guys coming out i do love it um just uh one note about our hosts they've only provided us a single mic so we will be passing this around um you know new york bit devs had many mics i think i think all the guests even had a mic new york sucks

no money for chairs no money from mikes it's all rented all right we spent it all in the coins sorry what do you think of austin so far austin's awesome yeah it's been a good week it's a good city the energy here is palpable i've been here for it's the 21st 17 days and And I feel like I've been on the go the whole time. The Bitcoin shelling point seems to have shifted south pretty aggressively. And I'm just happy to be here. Anybody who's a native of Texas and Austin,

thank you for welcoming me. The southern hospitality is real. That's one thing my wife has been astonished that people are so nice here. Being from the northeast our whole lives, it's like, what the hell? People are saying hi to you in the morning as you walk by. just arming isn't it yeah it is like what do you want from me what do you want from me um as we do

always we have some lists here excuse me we've got some topics on a list here that we have put together we're going to talk about big week in bitcoin new all-time high matt's been staying humble we got to give it to him let's give it to matt o'dell for staying Cheers for actually all right should we start with Clark's dashboard he's got Clark's dashboard up okay let's fucking go yes we got Clark's dashboard up but we're not at all time at all time highs anymore we're at sixty two thousand eight hundred sixty dollars one buck is going to get you one thousand five 591 sets. We're now 6.1% away from the all-time high, which according to Clark's dashboard was

hit this week yesterday at $66,950, not quite $67,000. According to Clark, we're at block height $706,058, getting closer and closer to 90% of all Bitcoin having been mined. We had a difficulty adjustment earlier this week, and while I find it, I want to mention something a lot of People messaged me when we were like 29 blocks away from the difficulty target, like, oh my gosh, look, we have a 25% downward adjustment. I think we need to describe just how skewed the data is when it goes to a difficulty target.

This is going to be a very special Rabbit Hole Recap because the recording is going to be absolutely horrible. So you guys are going to have to experience it. No, I think I get the levels good for the recording. Yeah, famous last words. Yeah, we are currently 1,558 blocks away from the next retarget, which is estimated to be 3.5% up. That's because blocks are coming in at 9 minutes and 40 seconds on average. What else have we got here?

There are 9,039 transactions in Clark's dashboard. One separate, like, fees are going through. I can confirm I sent one today. And then Samurai Whirlpool capacity is $4,426.3 Bitcoin or $278.7 million. I think that's an all-time high. Yeah, number go up. All-time high. Woo!

Woo! All-time high. Price, Blockite, and Samurai Whirlpool. Blockite. The whole unspent capacity. Big week. I want to start it off with a topic that you did not put on the list, Matt. I put WorldCoin on the list.

All right. we'll talk about world coin eventually but let's start with some bullish news uh the houston firefighters pension fund allocated to bitcoin that was this morning they invested 25 million dollars uh they did they did buy either too but that's uh that's what i read about the bed today and i think it's going to be a growing trend here pension funds in the united states are notoriously underfunded and don't really have plans to actually provide their pensioners with do we have any details on that just 25 do they split it down the middle no allocation details how are they holding it how'd they buy it no

No allocation details, or costing details. Say that. If you want two nights, come to us and be it. There we go. Do you want to be our producer? The AV guy. The AV guy, Parker Lewis, let's let him go. So what do you think?

I think this is a pretty significant moment. I think pension funds adopting Bitcoin is number one, necessary. Number two, sends a strong signal to markets that Bitcoin is an asset worth holding, and not only worth holding, but probably completely necessary to hold if you plan to preserve people's personal power.

I think if pensions are gonna start buying Bitcoin, they should use collaborative custody. Thanks for the shout out, appreciate that. I do as well, I do as well. But they're not, they're probably in like Anchorage or some shit. Coin-based custody. That's it?

You heard it here first, freaks. And I did. Disclaimer, Nye makes a sponsor called J. Capital. Yeah, that was actually interesting. I talked to the Ibex Mercado guy. It's gonna be interesting to see how the custody stuff evolves. Because the way they do it down there,

they essentially are forcing enterprise clients to do the collaborative custody model. Like they're not gonna do the whole custody. Because they don't want the liability? I guess so, yeah. But that, and I think they're ideologically pure. They're just like, all right, what you're going to do, we're going to make you do it right. So that's a trend that I hope picks up.

I'd be very much interested to see what you think about this, Arvav. Is this going to be a growing trend, collaborative custody? Yes, absolutely. First off, because of, obviously, what you mentioned, liability concerns. Secondly, it's a problem that every Bitcoin holder ends up having as the number goes up. You need to bring a security posture that's commensurate with the amount of Bitcoin you're holding. So if you're holding Bitcoin that you bought at $500, maybe it makes sense to write down your C-phrase, keep it somewhere safe tucked underneath your mattress.

At $5,000 a coin, that was a couple of years ago now, geez, time flies. Maybe now you're investing in a C-plate. At $50,000 a coin, try to think of the resources that you have to bear to actually protect that amount of money. amount of money imagine if it were you know the equivalent in gold or cash what would give you that peace of mind to keep that amount of funds in your home in your place of business at your family office at your hedge fund is there a number you know at a certain point you have to look into other options unfortunately with hard assets like gold or cash or currency there's no real

option you just have to keep stepping up to another version of a safety deposit box a fancier vault you know a bigger fancier vault the great thing about about multi-sig is you have this primitive that allows you to distribute trust between parties where no one is at fault no one has the ability to deprive anyone else of funds so the great thing about collaborative custody is it allows you this capability that you've never had before you would never be able to do this with a tangible real-world asset yeah then right yeah imagine not only that like so much instances throughout history where governments take advantage

of these third-party custodians essentially forcing the fork over your wealth on behalf of the state I mean this wasn't on the list either Matt but the Turkish lira the Turkish central bank yesterday when they did the lower interest rates in the face of inflation was completely demolished the lyric overnight that was about two days ago yesterday yeah i've been too busy enjoying austin to build a good list yeah well that's a good segue into uh potentially the next topic which is world coin uh which i did obviously apparently there was an announcement made earlier today yeah we have So you can get your free WorldCoin, it's going to be the new global reserve currency.

All you have to do is walk up to this thing called an orb, get your retina scanned, and then you get a private key associated with your retina in a database, and they give you WorldCoin, kind of your fifth element fence. I believe the orb was like the evil empire or that planet that had the ability to destroy others. Think about how terrifying that is. Step one for this plan for a new currency, a new monetary medium is, let's collect every single person in the world's retina and store it in the largest biometric database slash honeypot you could possibly conceive of.

What's step two? Where do you go from there? there who on earth would trust these people with that if your first impulse is to bootstrap a currency this way do you want your uh eyeballs stored in europe no no and your friends and family well i mean i think that i mean obviously i i would hope that most people in this room think that uh right in the skin to receive your free mind uh shape the coin is a bad idea but i think you know one of the reasons why i i thought it was an important topic for us to discussed today is because this is literally the problem that distributed proof-of-work solves

where you want to be able to distribute a new currency and you want to do it in a trustless way without a trusted third party but in a fair way where people can abuse the system and civil attack it and get more you know get as much of the coin as possible and with the shit corners they think proof of work is an issue, they think it needs to be solved, so they come up with these, you know, insane ideas like scanning the world's eyes to prove that it's one person, one airdrop, but proof of work does this in a way, way more beautiful way. I mean, the marketing around it is pretty welcoming. They had a dude with a man gun and a mask on in the orb in the middle of Times Square, and they're like, hey, you'll get world coin. The marketing around it is just like, come, come to the orb.

Show us your eye. And then you have all the VCs pumping it too. It's the whole cast of characters. It's like A16Z, Coinbase is in there, three arrows, multi-coin, they're all collecting their 10% pre-mine and then another 10% of the pre-mine goes to the org the org entrepreneurs that are out there just org scanning people. And remember this is the name of doing a fair distribution, the proof of work. It is a fair distribution, I heard Meltem say it's a fair distribution. They just came up with their own shitcoin chain and launched it on top of another pre-mine shitcoin instead of, it's an ERC20.

Oh it is, of course it is. It couldn't even go full shitcoin. So we can find solace in the fact that it will never be successful because depending on a blockchain it will never be successful. There you go. Is it successful in scamming? What? Is it successful in scamming? Like does it have success? What, Ethereum?

Yeah. It's been a very successful scam. Maybe we can't say that. Do we even live in a free world right now? Down here in Texas we do, maybe. No, I mean, I think it was extremely tone-deaf, too, to launch this the week that it became apparent that the Argentinian government got hacked in every single citizen's date of birth, social security. They're holding all the information on all their citizens is on the Internet now.

And another, again, case point that proves that you cannot trust a third party. They fucked up so bad, even the president of KYC didn't fuck up. They didn't even protect that part. When will people learn? I mean, this is one thing that we press pretty hard here, is that KYC AML is more dangerous than it is actually helpful in catching criminals. Now these criminals potentially have all the data they could ever want to go scam Argentinian citizens and there's no recourse. There's probably just going to be three more strict regulations around KYC and AML after this. Even the honeypot grows bigger. I mean, I have my gripes with Coindesk, and you shouldn't read it at all, but they just did a report that confirmed a lot of what I've been talking about, which is that you can just go on Tor, you can just go on to the darknet markets, and you can just buy already signed up KYC accounts for like $200 of Bitcoin.

So the criminals get by completely fine, and it's law-abiding citizens that get fucked. And the president of Argentina. Yeah, we need to label every Bitcoin wallet address and associate it with a human being, because everybody who's using Bitcoin is doing illicit things. You're all criminals here. Can I pivot us to a little more serious subject? Yes, please. So by a show of hands, who thinks will be past 70k by the end of the month? Interesting.

Who thinks will be past 100k by the end of the year? Okay. For those of you who weren't able to see the hands, there's a lot of hands. Everyone rose their hand, basically. I'm not making any calls. I'm just going to sit here and stay humble and not say anything. But our doubts are buried. The last time we did this, after three glasses of scotch, you want to know how many of those cookies? It was more than three glasses of scotch.

You forced me into making a price prediction the day before the bull run kicked off. And now it's in the shrine. It's for the week before Christmas. Nothing's going to happen. Now we're on the run to $100K. I'm not doing I'm not doing this at this time I didn't raise my hand I didn't sit on my hands I have no comment on the price whatsoever you're not getting me twice you're a bear another thing that happened this week it's been much anticipation around and we've been telling people it's like official

Bitcoin ETF was approved the proto shares it is a shit going I mean it's a This should go into the Bitcoin ETFs too, so it's a futures-based ETF, and the way I understand it, the way a futures ETF would work, I mean these futures contracts have expiry dates, so you have to essentially roll over all these contracts over and over again, and that comes with fees and costs within that ETF, so even though it is an official Bitcoin ETF, you're actually getting raped by fees and rollover costs. And it's based on cash-settled futures to begin with, so there's no underlying exposure. And you don't have custody. There's a second one coming out tomorrow as well.

Is that physical? No, it's going to be all futures ETFs for the foreseeable future, I think. I don't think they're going to approve a spot one anytime soon. I'd like to be wrong about that. That would also be a big win. But I'd also like to be wrong about that. because i mean if we're going to have etfs i prefer if they were dominated by the spot etfs one one thing we were talking about in the lead up to the etf hype was that

gbtc's discount would get significantly worse as etfs actually got approved and barry's in like complete damn oh he's also an investor in world coin digital currency group which parent company of coin desk which by don't read them there you go well anyway I think they hit an all-time low all-time high discount it was like negative 22% off of spot price on GBTC so that should be interesting to watch because he's pretending that he's gonna get ETF status to try and bump that discount up. I assume he's going to get it. He got the ticker. When he just puts the ticker he wants on the application, it doesn't mean he's going to actually get approval. No, I

think you have to approve the ticker before you get it. By a show of hands, who thinks Barry Silbert is going to have an ETF conversion of GBTC with the ticker BTC by the end of the year by the end of the year by the end of next year okay there's like eight hands and martys we'll revisit that hey and we're loving barry get shit done in that world dude i think i wouldn't be surprised if it happens but let's talk about the ticker what are your thoughts we were talking about this yesterday you're like uh he'll fuck himself that's such a bad ticker but the black rocks of the world could have taken it he had to take it it could have been a shitcoiner taking the ticker yeah i mean they have shitcoin funds too yeah well it kind of is a shitcoiner taking

the ticker why uh why shouldn't somebody invest in the bitcoin i just like one question that i got after i wrote the newsletter like don't buy the etf buy bitcoin it was like what about my 401k i have a question for you marty actually i'm more curious on our doubts opinion on this gun to your head, you're not allowed to own Bitcoin. Would you hold wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum or would you hold the Bitcoin ETF? Is suicide an option? Yeah, you can commit suicide if you want. Ritual sentu. I would disembowel on that. I hope one of you would come in with a headshot. I just I think it's interesting that you know I would never hold, willingly I would never hold wrapped Bitcoin on ETH.

but we all agree that's like a shit coin that we would never hold but I would rather hold that than the ETF at least you don't have KYC you can transfer it at will you can interact you know you can you can swap it into real Bitcoin yeah maybe after like the gun to your head decision is made years later like you can actually try to convert that into Bitcoin and pay their level you would be able to do that with RatBitcoin Bitcoin, an ETF. And that's my main point. You can get Bitcoin price exposure via the ETF, but it's dollars inflating in the currency in which you cash out that ETF at some point. You're not going to be able to spend your ETF. You can hypothetically spend a wrapped Bitcoin and

turn it back into Bitcoin. That's my biggest worry, is that people are like, oh, I've got Bitcoin exposure via this ETF. And then a dollar an acre inflates. They go to cash out and they have like a bunch of cut bucks and they're trying to get back into bitcoin and the price is just running away and they could i mean they can freeze the etf if they wanted to i mean you can freeze wrap bitcoin too i guess that's a question like do you think there's going to be an evolution in these markets where they start allowing like the etf to be paid out in bitcoin like an underlying asset that's holding like is this do things get that bad where they start allowing that like that's what i'm looking for wait do you think if it gets bad they'll allow that

like yeah i mean i can see users demanding it like i don't want to i think if it gets bad then you even have a less likely of getting actual bitcoin out of it why is that because they're going to seal all the exits yeah but then you have this button and a bunch of bitcoin like what do they do I don't know tax the shit out of it that's like is it the point I'm trying to make like I'm learning they won't bring mining stocks particularly probably traded stocks I know it's like a huge name I'm not saying like run out I could buy it but what I would like to see is then like offer dividend payouts of

Bitcoin they have all this Bitcoin on the balance sheet like my cursor I think somebody in the space needs to develop the balls like yo like push for something like that, like innovate on the dividend structure. Isn't that what Blockstream's doing with their security token? They have like the mining securitized mining liquid token.

Takes a big sip. I think that's a shitcoin too, but... I mean, be cool, man. He's right in front of us. I mean, I don't know. Like, dividends paid out on liquid. Would you rather a liquid Bitcoin or

an ETF? Liquid Bitcoin. LBTC. LBTC, yeah. 100%. There you go. Isn't that crazy to think that these public-featured companies could innovate and pay out dividends of Bitcoin? I'm just trying to protect you from the Canadian SEC. I don't know what you're allowed to say. Neither Here do I. Disclosure. Marty's on the board of a Canadian publicly traded Bitcoin mining company. I'm not sharing any non-public knowledge. But I agree.

I think dividend distributions in Bitcoin would be fantastic and that would be a better reason to do it. I mean, I remember Havelock Investments offered that before everyone lost all their money. Have a lock investment. It's been a long time since I've heard that name. There you go. We're going to shout out Butterfly Labs next. Butterfly Labs had the dividend payouts, right? Yeah. Look what happened.

Yeah, exactly. Butterfly Labs, Big Burn. There are like three people in the room who are getting these references that we're making right now. We've got to get some background. These were old. Before we had the idea of like shit coins and tokens, they had to scam us in different ways. So they were mining companies that you would get suckers like us to invest in. Butterfly Labs and Havelock Investments were two of them. The idea of like, I guess what we call cloud mining and... Well, Havelock Investments was like a site where you can invest in Bitcoin companies with Bitcoin, and then Butterfly Labs was like a tradable

stock, if you will, on there, and then I just, everyone lost all their money. Right. Right, that's like... Yeah. Am I... Was there NEO and the B? I feel like there's a third scam that was right around that time. NEO and B also traded on Havlock investments, and they also I think paid dividends in Bitcoin. And if you invested in that you also lost all your money. But the idea was they were like ASIC mining companies, like you were, the scheme behind them was that you would be investing in a company that was building some form of like

either ASIC miners or hosted hash. Yeah, but NEO and B was, they were gonna be The Bitcoin bank. It was the future in Cyprus. Yeah. Oh, God. How is Cyprus not a red flag? How did we not see that?

Wasn't Mercia Popovsky and Popov stuff like this, too? No, Mercia had MPEX, or MPEX, the other one, which competed with Havlock. Yeah. And if you invested in it, you also lost all your money. Sorry if you're lost. There was a lot of pitfalls in early Bitcoin days. Yeah. That was reminiscing about early Bitcoin days and failed dividend structures.

Last topic before we get to questions and open it up to the floor. Longtime Bitcoin Core contributor Jonas Schnelli announced today that he's going to take a step back from contributing to the project. Not like her in any way, she made a funny reference to that. That was a funny reference. It seems like it may just be a bit of burnout. He wants to go explore other things. So let's give a round of applause to Jonas for all his incredible contributions to Bitcoin.

With that being said, I guess, as a developer, and anybody here who contributes to Core, is the concept of developer burnout, particularly on an open source product like Bitcoin, something that Bitcoiners should be aware of, focused on, trying to mitigate? Absolutely. If you ever see a Bitcoin Core developer, give them as much love as possible. This is an incredibly thankless job. There's an impulse, and this is just among developers generally. You want to work on something new and exciting and shiny and make your mark on the world. Protocol development work is inherently unglamorous.

It's the difference between, say, erecting a new building versus working on the plumbing and the electricity and the lighting. you know it's the stuff that everyone depends on and everyone needs and everyone requires to get through their day-to-day but the development cycle itself takes ages if you look at a pr in the coin core repository typical uh pull requests in software lifecycle when you're working in say a startup take maybe two weeks to go from submission to merge to live reproduction there are multiple pull request has been going on for years, people are diligently working through, discussing them, rebasing, trying to decide whether it makes sense to merge now or hold off for another PO that's going to merge in a year's time.

It's incredibly taxing as a developer. But the payoff is you get to work on this once in a generation, once in a lifetime, once in a millennia project. I mean cheers to Jonas like he is truly appreciated he's done a lot for Bitcoin he's been a lot of time for Bitcoin one of the things he did mention in his thread was that he it almost seemed like he insinuated that he wish he had done it under him and then he had done the anonymous there's a lot of pressure yeah so like I would like to see I would like to see more contributors as NIMH

right more contributors that are well I think you need to add more context he wants to see it because he thinks that there's going to be a lot of legal pressure exactly I mean there you can see it the writing is kind of on the wall there and I would like to see you know these different organizations that are providing grants to developers and whatnot going out of their way to provide them to nibs in a more privacy conscious way because I you know a lot of these foundations they basically have to dox you to give you the money didn't square crypto figure out how to use email yeah but if it's a 501c3 they they need to dox you okay

but square crypto is not a 501c3 square crypto is just square giving money to developers so they They didn't dox him, he's the anomaly. Is he the only one? That I can probably talk about, yes. Okay, all right. That's good to know, all right. Yeah, no, it's an interesting problem to try to solve. And I think like existing devs can even,

like existing contributors can just, you know, maybe Jonas is gonna come back as an imp. I'm not trying to blow up the spot, but like if you're a developer and you're worried about that pressure, step away from the project officially. You can even tell a few people, I'm coming back as a NIM, so you can build that web of trust way quicker

than starting from scratch, and then you're more resilient, more prepared. This was a conversation I was having earlier today, too. I agree with that. I do think there should be more NIMs. It's like aggro, we shouldn't feel like we have to hide to talk and build on this stuff, right? It shouldn't be natural, right?

We shouldn't be able to access Bitcoin. We shouldn't be afraid to be working and talking about this shit. What is the state of the world? Are we free? That we have to hide in the deep corners of the internet.

Mask our identities. Why can't we just be proud about this shit? I mean, I am, but what? It pisses me off that people died. I'm like curious on our doubts opinion here, because I mean you've been in this way longer than us, you're like the OG of OGs, not in Bitcoin land, but like in the internet. It feels weird espousing the virtues of being a nim when I have 75 people staring at my real world face, but hi everyone. um i think pseudonymity is especially for cypher software tor bitcoin the stuff that you're

building specifically to resist let's call what is resist the state uh i think the more privacy that you have the more control you have your identity the better i don't think anyone could have anticipated back in the beginning jonas got into it full-time 2015 part-time 2013 who would have imagined we would be here today i think you and i were talking about this back in like 2017 the possibility of like what would happen if number went up significantly how would that affect our upset posture and look at us we're both here now um yeah we kind of fucked it up yeah whoops um if i could do it all over again i would maybe i would find a way for us to hide our faces probably well yeah I mean I should be wearing masks right now at the very least but the next

step is we wouldn't have met each other I wouldn't there's so many people in this room that I consider brothers exactly that we never would have met yeah so that part's good um we might go to jail together though sweet I'm looking forward to it which we shouldn't because we're law-abiding citizens. Peaceful, too. Very peaceful, Marty. Is that what we're going with? Have we ditched boating accident? Are we on to a new meme? Oh, I lost all my Bitcoin on Havelock investments. All right, I lost mine on MPX, then. Is that going to be my excuse? Great. So should we move to Q&A, or what do you want to do? Do we have any more topics? I did forget a shout-out last week,

and I memorized it very short. R.I.P. Jay Stark. That was a shout-out. Oh, wow. Pissed off last week. We obviously talked about it on the show, but I do want to give the freak who paid for the shout-out a little bit of a save shout-out.

For any of you who paid and are listening at home for shout-outs this week, we'll get to them next week. Very professional, yes. It's weird reading shout-outs in the middle of the lab. Yeah, I guess we get over this Q&A. Yeah, the last topic, it really bugs me. I mean, obviously, Satoshi was a NIM. A lot of the stuff we've built in Bitcoin is a NIM. JSTART was a NIM. It sucks that we have to hide.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, like, that's how fucked up the world is, that we have to hide and build free-to-name technology. With that being said, let's open it up to Q&A. Do you think Tor is resilient enough for us to rely on? Wow. My answer to that has changed over the years for a combination of two reasons. As the internet has grown in capacity, the ability for an overlay network to handle the overflow traffic is a bit difficult and also nation-state actors have started

taking Tor more and more seriously I think you need to narrow down that question what do you what's your threat model I mean you can't we can't really use lightning unless we rely on Tor well I would have to create better incentive mechanisms within TOR, particularly using lightning to make it more robust. I'll agree with that. I'll add that recently... What do you agree with? Hang on a second, let me jump in. I think we need to make... I think we need to realize that TOR can't be the be-all end-all. We've already added ITP support uh in core and a pluggable transport uh module is being worked on if we really want true resiliency

we're going to need more than one overlay network there's work being done on mesh nets there's work being done on um what's the that donald that's proprietary that i hate that's proprietary yeah there you go uh there's even a ham radio uh hack that was being worked on back in the day for being being able to transmit transactions back and forth. And became the lane where you should have that. Yeah, yeah. We're going to need all of those, every last thing. Because if we just flood onto a new network,

we're going to find nation state actors trying to attack that network. So the answer is we can't rely on it, or? We can't rely on any one thing. We can only rely on each other, man. Well, I want to make a case for mesh networks, specifically, that Lightning needs to leverage. LaserHot will tweet something else.

I think we're going to talk about it next time we talk. but he'll go into more depth. But imagine, I think it would be far beyond Bitcoin, but imagine the power of something shut down the internet. Obviously, we would be able to buy Bitcoin, propagate, minash, just to add blocks to the network. Imagine if we were quick enough to build a mesh network, which Bitcoin users could use a lightning network, right?

They could have weeks without the internet, and we could use the lightning network or a mesh network never have to append to the main chain and we can still transact during that time that the internet is down and then figure things out when it gets turned back on. Would that make sense? Yeah absolutely. This might be a bit of a tangent. I like your tangents. Oh boy I don't know if these guys are. One thing that I don't think is mentioned a lot when we discuss lightning is there is one global lightning peer-to-peer network, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the topology of the lightning network.

There can be multiple individual discrete lightning networks, like the three of us could have a set of go-tos and have channels between us and settle onto the main chain without anyone here in the room dealing with those lightning peers or worrying about those transactions. So think about scaling that out to a community layer, a city, a county, a state, and having multiple lightning networks all interacting with each other, settling on the main chain but not being aware of each other. yeah that is a lot more resilient than one global uh peer-to-peer network that is eventually going to attract attention yeah it's more robust topology yes exactly it's decentralized yeah

we have uh phil has a question what's up It's not about that. Can they hear me with that? Well, I'm glad, whatever. So, okay, sure. Thank you. Someone relevant, I had Matt Silligan on my show recently, and I think it was someone from Missalvi, but he got some of the most excited about the Bitcoin related, protecting the future, and decided, I'm actually barely aware of it. I know it's still in the research level stage of things. I'm keeping an eye on the Chami and Ekiash stuff, but there's nothing there for me to bang on and test,

so I don't want to speak to it. Who was working on it? Was it Eric Sirian? Someone was working on Charmian eCash on Lightning in like a custodial Lightning wallet. Yeah. That has like the Charmian eCash properties, but then you can also interact

with the open monetary network that is Lightning, which seems pretty promising. I mean, state chains I think seem pretty cool, have a different trade-off model. Cause that Charmian bank model, Like it's custodial, but it's actually private. It's private, but you still trust them with your funds, right, so they can steal your money, but at least.

They don't know who you are. Yeah. And I think they're incentivized not to steal your funds in some way at all. No, I don't think so. I think they can just steal all your funds. But I think they can make fees if they operate like a reputable custodial wallet.

Exactly, so they're incentivized not to steal. Like imagine Wallet of Satoshi, who hasn't stolen user funds yet, right? And, but private. Yet. What? You should just assume to this point, you should just assume that every custodian

is gonna take your money. Everyone's a scammer. Everyone's a scammer. Exactly. Thanks. Cheers. Thank you. Do we have any other questions?

Awesome. Yeah, I just scratched his head. I thought he was going to ask a question. How's the mining going? Still hashing. Still hashing. Let's fucking go. Do you know anything about the blockware situation? I do not. I didn't. I heard somebody mention blockware earlier today. I didn't even know anything was going on. What's the purported rumor?

I mean, you're the mining guy. I heard they got rug pulled. they were like renting out power capacity from an aluminum smelter smelter smelter smelter it's not a rabbit hole recap without at least one mispronunciation and and now all those miners are offline so like a bunch of people have miners hosted with them that are yeah i mean oh we were talking about this last night weren't we i think we were right yeah marty pot bottles of champagne last night which is why we dumped yeah i mean this is this is why i remember this is why i'm showing off your mining and if you're not operating at home as much of the stack as you can like here that's the trust that they're

part of the aluminum smelter. It's technically their energy or electricity to do what they want with it, what they want, excuse me. But yeah, it's something to be aware of if you're setting up a host team facility, like how much control you have over that electricity, over that energy. um that's why i'm a big fan of off-grid mining and vertically entering off-grid to infrastructure to the miners so eventually you can get to a certain scale and pool and that's going to become the size of mine i mean that's basically why i think like mining stocks are coins because yeah i mean a lot of things probably might have disappeared I'm just saying we're all on board with the public trade one. A lot of things, yeah, a lot of things,

like coasting agreements and centrally located stuff and warehouses. I mean, it's not only public trade. There's private buyers as well. Blockers are private. They got a lot pulled, apparently. So that's one thing to be aware of. You have something to add here?

No, you just handed me the mic for a reason. I mean, we have no questions here. excited for my first Austin BitDevs. Should we wrap this up? I just wanted to thank Unchained Capital for hosting us and I want to thank all you guys for coming. I'm excited for bit devs. I haven't been to a bit dev since April. Austin bit devs is a religious experience. You're going to have a great time. You're going to sweat. I'm sweating so hard. Let's not talk about New York here. Okay. Yeah.

All right. We've had three. You've had three? Yeah. What's... No. We're like going all over the place. It's underground.

It's no longer underground. Oh. Okay. So I'm allowed to talk about it. My bad. Yeah. I was trying to keep it on the down low. Sorry, Ty.

down though sorry Ty. Yeah I mean the year it popped around like first it was at Unisport Ventures, then it was at like some other startup, it was at Chainco for a bit, then it was at ME for like the last year and then things got weird. There's something special about it, it's the Socratic method of talking about these things. I mean we just talked about some of the things going on at Pinpoint but the The topic, the topic's going to be covered in the hour after this, we're going to go far into that, and it will be much more fabulous to the people. I look forward to not understanding the majority of it. Yeah, that's the best thing, I mean, everybody knows you're first mid-tents. I guess somebody who went into his first mid-tents in like January 2015 in New York can remember. You're like, what the fuck are these people talking about? You just get enthrosed most of the time. Yeah. Just keep going and keep going. If this is your first time here and you're about to experience and go through pull requests and potential bugs and CVEs and things going on in other places in a big world stack, you're just like, what is going on? Keep coming. Keep absorbing. Eventually you'll be able to put some of it together.

Hey, you listen to super complicated, interesting shit, and then you get absolutely trashed with your friends afterwards. Yeah. What's not to love? I guess we can wrap up there. Last thing we have is one opinion question we want to ask. It's a questionless crowd. I got one.

Over, under December 2022, Matt moves to Texas. Under. Under? Yeah. You should set up a DLC, Marty. That's... I can't say it obviously. I don't know.

set up a DLC, Marty. I can't say that I'm with you, though. I can't say that I'm with you. I want to make it even harder. If I do move here, I'll give you January 1st. Alright. That's all we got on this week's race.

Peace and love.