TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Stimulus Package 2020.03.23

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Join Marty and Matt as they discuss: - Markets down, bitcoin up - Sunday futures limit down in 3 mins - 60 Minutes interview Kashkari "infinite amount of cash" - Fed announces unlimited QE - Russian central bank added 400k ounces of gold to its reserves in february - TFTC.tv guides - Graphene & MyNode - JoinMarket v0.6.2 - JoinMarket PR for fidelity bonds - Nodl Dojo v0.0.8 - March Whirlpool volume higher than last 3 months combined - LN Markets released on mainnet - CashApp adds option to display in sats - Magic Internet Gathering bitcoin gaming initiative announced - HRF deep dive into buying bitcoin anonymously - DOJ seeks permission to detain people indefinitely without trial - Israel to go into full lockdown with phone location monitored and Ministry of Health to release new tracking app - The Chula Vista Police Department to use 4 drones to monitor Coronavirus shutdown - Nascar virtual races on fs1 - much more Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Rabbit Hole Recap Stimulus Package. Matt and I talked about a lot, particularly the Fed printing infinite cash, opening up the amount of assets they can buy, the doors to QE infinity, the failed stimulus bill that did not pass the House today, all the pork that was in that bill, and a lot of Bitcoin updates too. bitcoin uh tech uh coin join updates join market had a really cool update regarding fidelity bonds we talked about that for a little bit we had a huge debate towards the end of the episode about whether or not china will be the dominant superpower coming out of this crisis so i hope you guys enjoy it this episode was brought to you by our good friends at the cash app you freaks know

all about them they just made stats this stats why don't keep saying stats they just made sats the standard it's a little bit of a it's a tongue twister there sats the standard sats are going to be the standard and our good friends at cash app are making that apparent miles suitor good friend of the show uh tweeted out last night that android users of the cash app now have the ability to make sats the standard within the cash app and in that same thread thread fred in that same thread in that same thread somebody asked miles hey when are you gonna when are you gonna add auto buys and he said soon the uh he responded soon to that so it seems like auto buys like i've been mentioning in these ad reads are coming soon just be aware soon is a huge meme in uh the bitcoin

slash altcoin space uh soon may not be as soon as you think but it will come eventually hopefully uh so as you may know the cash app lets you stack sats send sats receive sats sell sats if you so please they just added cash app investing which lets you stack slivers of stonks if you have a favorite stonk out there that's too expensive even after this market route the last couple weeks you can buy as little as one dollar and because cash app is directly connected to your bank account there's no four to five day waiting periods you can start investing today cash app investing is a member excuse me a subsidiary of square and a member s sipc member you get what i'm saying on top of that they have their boost program make sure you're looking for boosts that

you can use door dash is a great one during these quarantine times um support your local business by ordering from them via door dash save a little bit money during these trying times with that boost if you guys have it wherever you are use the code stacking sats as always when you download the app if you have not downloaded the app yet and you're able to do so download it use the code stacking sats you're going to get ten dollars and ten dollars going to go to our good friends and owls lacrosse get your local app store download the cash app and enjoy this rip of rabbit hole recap stimulus package 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. You probably should be. what is up freaks welcome back to rabbit hole recap stimulus package edition we're here on

another monday night uh matt's popping bottles i'm sipping on coffee and water i've been drinking too much in quarantine i need i need like a three-day detox here matt what is up freaks welcome to the weekly whiskey mondays podcast matt drinks whiskey i sit here and drink coffee and uh and we talk about the shit that's going on again we we drew this stimulus package episode in on monday nights because uh obviously we're in the midst of some type of crisis here there's a lot more news uh to fit in uh from week to week so we decided to cut it up into two episodes and matt and i just spent 20 minutes going over the list so it's a list as long as a weekly rabbit hole recap used to be um so thursday to monday

that's ridiculous over the weekend which is historically you know is usually the quiet days yeah i forget where we were on for uh thursday i think we might have been around this point we're at uh according to clark moody's bitcoin dashboard hovering around six thousand three hundred twenty $23 sats per dollar is 15,815. Um, fees have been up. I know we touched on that on Thursday, but I think that persisted over the weekend. Uh, yeah. Fee, the fever subsidy ratio was up a bit. It's at 3.17%. Still not incredibly high, but it's, uh, it's encouraging that it's going up a bit um average fees per block are 0.4 btc uh i don't know how long he's how far back he's looking to calculate those averages but with that being said we have

7,318 blocks till the halving it's scheduled right now to happen at may 12th so a little bit uh A little bit later than earlier, a few weeks ago. It was May 9th at one point. Let me find the average block time. The average block time this period is 11 minutes and 32 seconds. So it looks like hash rate has fallen a bit. It's hovering around 102 exahash per second right now. Those are some good stats.

Shout out to Clark Moody for putting that together. uh yeah hash rate has fallen a little bit uh over over the weekend uh and things are just getting crazier in traditional markets but before we jump into all that matt how was your weekend you're working on some guides i have an ever-growing list of guides i'm working on and um friends and family keep wondering why why i say i'm busy when they're trying to has everyone has everyone in your family both me and my lady's family they all discovered zoom for the first time so they all want to do zoom chats now we've been uh me and my family we've been heavy on facetime we've been doing a lot of facetime chats facetime i got you i got you

yeah my dad knew my family knew what facetime was before but they just they discovered zoom like a week ago and somehow 10 family members over 60 were able to figure out how to how to get it going on whatever device they were using without me because like i opted i i jumped in like 15 minutes late 20 minutes late i was really i was surprised should have i should have bought more zoom stock it's like it's the only stock i own right now zoom no need for uncle jim with zoom you figure it out by yourself impressive ux i'm surprised but yeah i've been working on the guys i got my my node syncing right now um so i'm waiting for that sync to go i think it's been it looks like it'll be like right around 20 hours 21 hours without quick sync um to sync it to the raspberry

pi i have an ssd attached um we linked the parts list uh last week if you want to buy some parts and work through the guide with us once it's released. Ministry of Nodes just released a really great MyNode guide, so you should check that out too if you're not patient. I also got a Pixel 3a because Amazon slashed the price $100 this week. So now it's under $300 brand new. And I flashed Graphene OS on it, which is a privacy-focused hardened Android OS.

It's completely de-Googled. There's no Google Apps on it. So I think I should be able to get that guide down to about 15 minutes for the graphene guide. I think right now when we see governments around the world increasing their surveillance capabilities, using the crisis as an excuse to do that, now more than ever it's important to use software that takes your privacy seriously. And, uh, it's the only real productive way to fight this kind of encroachment because, uh, I don't really think politics works, especially in times of fear, um, when everyone just goes along with it. No, I agree. The bent on Friday was catered towards keeping your antennas peaked for privacy and civil liberties encroaching laws that are going to be attempted to be passed and probably will successfully be passed in the wake of this crisis.

And only a day later, the Department of Justice moved to make it so that people could be arrested without due process and held without trial indefinitely. I think they're using the guise of the coronavirus as basically they're saying, hey, if we think you're sick and you're not self-quarantining, we have the right to lock you up indefinitely. But as we've seen with things like the Patriot Act, those are basically Trojan horses where they'll use that as an excuse and then expand the offenses to the list and just abuse that law. With the DOJ in particular, that case, it seems their reasoning is that they can't conduct a trial because of the virus. So you can't get like jury and everyone into the room. So that's why they want to be able to detain you indefinitely without a trial. But as we know in the past, you know, things that get passed during times of crisis, it's very, it's very rare they get rolled back afterwards. And just one other thing, I just, if you are looking forward to those guides, you know, you're going to be able to find them on our YouTube channel, which is tftc.tv.

um so go there and subscribe it helps the podcast out and you'll get them first definitely smash that subscribe button very easy to remember tftc.tv our our domain hoarder hook that up our resident domain hoarder made sure it was very easy for you guys to remember um yeah so i guess let's yeah let's dive into it the coronavirus still sweeping the world everybody's on lockdown markets are reacting uh i guess let's focus on what happened last night today the fed basically came out and uh they announced their their meeting minutes and came out with some pretty pretty big announcements mainly that they're going to do qe infinity and neil kashkari who is the federal reserve the head of the federal reserve of minneapolis

came out last night on 60 Minutes and told the U.S. citizens, don't worry, the Fed has infinite cash at its disposal to make sure banks and ATMs have enough money. So a very big admission there from Neil Kashkari, and that was actually the focus of today's bent, and this is really fascinating that he's saying he said that last night considering only a month ago at a event where he was invited to come have a conversation at a fireside chat he said when asked about bitcoin funnily enough in cryptocurrency and how how it

might affect fed policy he said the bitcoin and cryptocurrency it's basically like a giant garbage dumpster the reason that the dollar has value is because the u.s government has a legal monopoly on producing the dollar if you go into your basement and start photocopying your dollars the secret service will come and knock on your door and arrest you only the u.s government has the authority to produce dollars that scarcity is in part what makes them valuable so right there that last line particularly he's saying or at least he said at this event last month that the the scarcity provided by the fact that the u.s government has a monopoly on the production of dollars produces a scarcity that gives the dollar value. And then last night on 60 Minutes, he said,

you don't need to. Your ATM is safe. Your banks are safe. There's enough cash in the financial system. And there's an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve. We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that there's enough cash in the banking system. So that phrase made famous by Mario Draghi in 2011 or 2012, I believe, we'll do whatever it takes, seems to be coming back and just a month and 11 days after he said that uh the u.s dollar has scarcity because only uh the u.s government can produce it which is also a bit of an orwellian wordplay the the fed is plays a big role in the production of dollars actually so he's trying to deflect that to the government but they're all i mean the fed is supposed to be private but they're

really connected at the end of the day um but last night he comes out and as we're in the midst of this crisis the fed can't play that game anymore they have to uh posture like they can provide infinite liquidity to the markets as as the economies are grinding to a halt in reaction to the spread of the virus absolutely fucking unreal i i just to see him say it so point blank um but let's just go back a little bit here so our last podcast was thursday on friday uh markets dumped and the dems proposed completely seriously they proposed minting two trillion dollar coins two one trillion dollar platinum coins um to fund the stimulus right that's fucking insane yes we used to joke about that in college i remember like it was like a

joke proposal in college and now it could be reality rashida talib who i believe is she michigan or minnesota i think she's michigan she's the representative who who proposed it and yeah you saw all the all the tv men who have been calling for this to get all horny over it yeah so the the gist of the proposal is and it's been on the table for years and like matt said has been made fun of on bitcoin twitter and uh austrian circles for quite some time the business class has made fun of it yes um but it was seriously proposed two platinum coins each worth a trillion dollars and then the fed adds that to their balance sheet and can do with that what they will but it's like after kashkari's comments last night it doesn't even seem like

they need that like it would just be a formality at that point but i mean they're already printing as much money as they want so then after that we had saturday happen so markets were closed and then sunday at 6 p.m eastern time is when futures opened the chicago mercantile exchange and trump limit down keep doing the he continues to try and do the justin sun playbook and so he released a speech he was gonna he spoke at 6 p.m right as the futures opened and they didn't even give him a chance to speak three minutes in it limited down to five percent circuit breaker got hit and their markets were closed till the morning i believe that was a record and i believe the circuit breakers were triggered because the market was expecting him to announce uh that

republicans and democrats and the house and the senate had come together and signed a stimulus package to save us from this virus uh but that did not happen as as many of you know by this point and i guess they had a vote on the floor today uh to try to pass it again and uh the the bill did not pass again and markets tanked and it's coming coming out the the actual bill is coming to the public and it really reminds me of tarp and this is what set me on the path to studying economics and eventually finding bitcoin and championing bitcoin and being a bitcoin evangelist if you will because i remember how pissed off i was a 17 year old in economics elective class going through the TARP bill and all the quote-unquote pork that was included

in the Texas Toxic Asset Relief Program bill that was supposed to save the economy in a very dire time. And it became very glaringly obvious that the powers that be, mainly in the House of Representatives and in Congress, have ulterior motives and were trying to sneak, and did successfully with TARP, sneak provisions into that bill that had nothing to do with the financial crisis so this time around doesn't seem like anything has changed uh here's a couple of clauses that nancy pelosi and crew wanted to include in the bill uh so here's somebody who was covering this really well on twitter wall wall me at wall wall me matt wall is his name he first retweeted rachel bovard pelosi's covid 19 bill is 1119 pages that contains

provisions for conducting risk limiting audits of results of elections so section part 8 section 298 line 18 availability of grants the commission shall make a grant to each eligible state to conduct risk limiting audits as described in subsection b with respect to the regularly reschedule general elections for federal office. So that's the first one of many. Second one, WalWalby tweeted this out. Nancy Pelosi and crew wanted to make it so if the bill was passed, there would be a study commission on climate change.

So Section 707, study on certain climate change mitigation efforts. in general no later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this act the secretary of transportation shall seek to enter into an agreement with the national academic academies excuse me of sciences engineering and medicine to conduct a study on climate change mitigation efforts with respect to the civil aviation and aerospace industries tacked on to that uh you wanted to replenish african development fund to help america and so something completely unrelated african development fund the african development fund act 22 usc 290g etc is amended by adding at the end of the following news section so they wanted to amend another act and another

fund in general the united states governor of the fund is authorized to contribute on behalf of the united states 513 million nine hundred thousand dollars to the 15th replenishment of the resources of the fund so they just wanted to sneak in uh half a billion dollars with the funding to something completely unrelated uh and then lastly uh she the i'm not uh nancy pelosi signing all this and handed it over she wasn't the only one contributing to this but she played a big part uh how does forcing airlines to disclose greenhouse gas emissions help fight coronavirus so uh section 706 improving consumer information regarding release of greenhouse gases from flights in general not not later than january 1st 2023

the secretary of transportation shall develop and implement by regulation a program to require air carriers to receive assistance under section 101 provide passengers with information regarding greenhouse gas emissions resulting from each individual flight so before you got on your flight they wanted so the the airlines tell you how much greenhouse gases are going to emit into the atmosphere and again this is what i talked about with kyle bass and parker lewis they they seem to think that the fed cannot do this alone they need fiscal stimulus which this bill is supposed to provide and these assholes in the house of representatives in congress are playing fucking games when the situation seems to be dire they're trying to push their ulterior motives on

the public it's fucking disgusting this is what always happens you know this is when you get to Add all the pork belly into there, pork barrel into there. And everyone has their own little pet cause and their own lobbyists that pay them off. And all of our politicians are bought and paid for. This is why I like the route of opting out rather than, you know, fighting them in the corrupt game that already exists, that they've established for themselves. And then the other thing I'd like to add is it just, I think it highlights to me and everyone else watching that they really have no idea what's going on in terms of the Fed and Trump and just the politicians doing the stimulus with the $2 trillion coins. They have no idea what's going on. They are running around with their heads cut off.

And meanwhile, markets keep on tanking because nothing they can do can stop that. for like if you announce infinite qe and the markets are still down that's that's pretty you know that's pretty telling i would say yes these people don't give a shit about you like and that's what pisses me off like matt i prefer to opt out that's why we do this podcast that's why we talk about bitcoin that's why we're encouraging everybody to use open source software free and open source software that can allow us to build a freer more open system that is completely anathema to what the people in the u.s government i'll just speak about our government specifically are doing again like apparently the country's in dire need they're

trying to make it right and and we're on the ropes here and we need them to uh pass this stimulus bill and they can't just focus on what needs to be done they need to get their ulterior motives across and fuck these people they do not give a shit about you they are not going to get us out of this problem if anything the passing of this bill and the infinite money printing is just going to exacerbate the problem longer and we really like that's what i said in the bent today individuals anybody listening to this podcast and i'm sure a lot of you already are if you're if you're listening to this you're you're probably um just speaking to the choir here but spread the message like nancy pelosi and crew is not going to fix this problem neil kashkari and jerome pal are not

going to fix this problem these are systemic societal problems and they need to be fixed from the bottom up starting with the individual how can you better yourself and then better your community and better your local government think about that first don't think about having fucking cuomo come out and saying he wants to nationalize the fucking supply chain dude it's because we said a couple good words about him last week he had to he had to come and fuck us with that look they're all bought and paid for both sides 95 of them 98 of them bought and paid for it you're never going to get any solution out of that meanwhile bitcoin's up so we got that going for us is it officially decoupled yet in my mind it's always decoupled but i i would say no

probably not um but it's teasing it it's teasing it it honestly these are the kind of times where there's two crazy things that could happen right is if you have your if you have your bitcoin on a with a custodian and in very volatile times there's chance high way higher risk that you lose your money because either they uh end up losing a ton of money or it just the volatility shows they're it exposes them even though they were already insolvent so you have that risk but i also think you have the opposite side uh this feels like the type of days where you could have one of those bitcoin tina like rip your nads off wicks you know where at any moment you can just the price could just go ridiculous to the upside right and i i so i've been feeling

FOMO I've been just trying to control my FOMO uh but yeah I have as well I have as well and but to induce further FOMO let's go into the the nitty-gritty of the Fed's policy we're not done with these assholes yet um so uh over the weekend they announced or this morning they announced excuse me uh their measures that they're going to make so the Federal Reserve's role and guided by this mandate from Congress to promote maximum employment stable prices along with its responsibilities to promote the stability of the financial system in support of these goals the federal reserve is using its full range of authorities to provide powerful support for the flow of credit to american families and businesses so now we're about to get into what

they've actually uh changed in their policy and what they're going to do moving forward which is pretty fucking drastic uh so they're going to support critical market functioning the federal open market committee will purchase treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities in the amounts needed to support smooth market functioning and effective transmission of monetary policy to broader financial conditions and the economy. The FOMC has previously announced it would purchase at least $500 billion of Treasury securities and at least $200 billion of MBSs. In addition, the FOMC will include purchases of agency commercial-backed securities in its agency mortgage-backed security purchases. So a couple of things here. It has completely eliminated dollar amounts that they will support the market with. So they mentioned previously they said they'd support it with $500 billion. Now the literature is saying, excuse me, we'll purchase treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities in the amounts needed to support smooth market functioning. so as much as it takes that's one thing and then two in that line uh they added another type of

uh another type of asset that they can buy there they've extended this mbs market to commercial real estate it seems so they're going to be able to buy uh commercial real estate mortgage-backed securities as well as uh just regular home mbss okay that's first bullet point first of one two three six uh so they're going to support the flow of credit to employers consumers and businesses by establishing new programs that taken together will provide up to 300 billion in new financing the department the treasury using the exchange stabilization fund will provide 30 billion equity to these facilities so basically extending loans to small businesses and employers establishing new programs not exactly sure what they are and to be clear about the first

bullet points basically qe infinities here there's no dollar amounts they're just going to buy as many securities as they need to uh third bullet point establishment of two facilities so new a new sort of mechanism by which they can alleviate the markets or help the markets out to support credit to large employers the primary market corporate credit facility for new bond and loan issuance and the secondary market corporate credit facility to provide liquidity for outstanding corporate bonds so this opens up the the floodgates for them allowing to buy corporate debt which we've been talking a lot about this podcast and in the bed for quite some time so they're officially going to buy the bad debt a lot of it which was used to facilitate buybacks which allowed ceos to

retire at the top um not all ceos but some and a lot of them yes so next we have an establishment of a third facility, the term asset-backed securities loan facility, to support the flow of credit to consumers and businesses, the TALF will enable the issuance of asset-backed securities backed by student loans, auto loans, credit card loans, loans

guaranteed by small business administration, and certain other assets. So now, they're getting into buying student loan debt, auto loan debt, credit card loan debt, and a bunch of other stuff. They should buy some Bitcoin. Should definitely do that,

because they're fucked next second to last bullet point facilitating the flow of credit to municipalities by expanding the money market mutual fund liquidity facility to include a wider range of securities including municipal variable rate demand notes and bank certificates of deposit so i think just municipality debt they're going to get into as well and then the last one facilitating the flow of credit to municipalities by expanding the commercial paper funding facility to include high-quality, tax-exempt commercial paper as eligible securities.

In addition, the pricing of the facility has been reduced. So they're trying to provide liquidity to municipalities there. Basically, they're going to buy a ton of shit, but not stocks. Not yet. Like everything but stocks. That may be the last arrow in the quiver.

stocks is just like and gold it's like a hot dog in the hallway they can already buy gold i'm pretty sure but are they why aren't they are they i don't know the crazy thing to me is is that this is like self-imposed we shut down like all businesses i mean it was already a house of cards i think one of the issues that a lot of these guys are are making that are leading to bad decisions is they are actually operating under the belief that we had a healthy economy before we went into this thing it's like oh the virus came out of nowhere we had such a healthy economy but when you look at it from the perspective of that wasn't a healthy economy that was a house of cards you look at it with a completely different perspective and and

for them to be throwing out all these guns and just like going balls to the wall here after self-imposing a shutdown for or it's already been like a week in most places and now it's going to go even longer um and just ignoring that whole aspect while throwing all these guns is like pretty pretty crazy to me yeah it's crazy and on top of that here's here's a cherry on top of all this ben hunt um pointing this out this morning lost in the fed shuffle today is that they relaxed bank total loss absorbing capacity buffer restrictions specifically to allow banks to continue discretionary bonus payments and this you would not find this in the press release this was hidden deep in the minutes so they as everything's going to shit they they had to

make sure that they included a clause that made it so bank executives could get discretionary bonus payments which if you're important marty which if you remember correctly hit an all-time high after in 2009 after after the crisis they all paid themselves as they were failing so fucked um i wonder if ben is uh bullish on bitcoin now i wonder if he still thinks we're gonna get dragged down the street and shot yeah gotta get him on that gotta get him on the pod uh one other thing i wanted like get him on the pod again one of the uh things i wanted to mention um just as like a corollary to bitcoin and why bitcoin has value and why the overwhelming majority of altcoins

don't compete with bitcoin uh one of the reasons they don't compete with bitcoin is because it really comes down to to how hard it is to change that 21 million cap and with bitcoin it's extremely fucking difficult it'll be like it's pretty much impossible to change it um and all all these other projects um they can be changed just as easily as it's as it's happening right now with the u.s dollar uh and that i think it's an it's important uh lesson for people to learn while this is all unfolding might as well learn that yeah yeah it's um it's extremely hard to change bitcoin everything else created in this wake is a scam in my opinion i'm not going to speak for matt but i don't think you'll ever be able to replicate bitcoin's immaculate reception reception inception

excuse me the fact that it flew under the radar was in conception inception conception no inception yeah but conception is a play on the actual immaculate conception right yeah yeah true true i'm talking about the fair launch though like the fair launch the fact that it it laid under the radar for so long and then only became not only became but it people just slowly trickled into it over time it became robust over time naturally now if you were to launch cryptocurrency there's too many eyes on the space you're going to bastardize that whole process it would be as pure yeah i mean i don't i don't call i don't think every project's a scam i think they're all trending to zero i think

the majority of them are scams uh but it all turning to zero in terms of bitcoin because bitcoin is designed to pump forever uh but what i i just i just want to highlight that again because it's really hard it's impossible to actually quantify how hard it is to change the cap of any of these projects or the u.s dollar or anything really it's it's hard to quantify how it how hard it is to change but it's there it's tangible but it requires observation and basically assessment individually over over how hard you think it is for it to change because there's no way to really say like oh well bitcoin's got harder to change or less hard to change like over time you just have to kind of kind of take a subjective assessment

yeah i mean i i tweeted about it yesterday the uh bitcoin sign guide meme like the buy bitcoin sign that that meme is the most powerful meme in monetary history in my opinion because of the juxtaposition of buy bitcoin and that's the headline on bloomberg particularly that day was uh janet young the fed is opposed to an audit of the federal reserve and so the juxtaposition of buy bitcoin next to that headline where janet yellen saying no you can't audit the fed you can't see our books you can't look at what we're doing is so powerful because again bitcoin the nature of it is so that matt like matt just described that you can audit at any time if you're running a full node you can literally go into the command line and see how

many bitcoins have been dispersed to the market at any given point in time and you can confirm that your transactions are actually coming through your node to the address that you have created with your private key. And in the Fed, you don't get that. They won't even let you look at their books. It's a black box. They have infinite cash. They have infinite cash.

They're not going to tell you where it's coming from. But believe me, believe them. It's there. They can do it. BSG also had great performance since that stunt he pulled. What was it? It was like the S&P was trading at 2,400. Bitcoin was trading like in a similar range.

And now Bitcoin's over 6,000. The S&P is at 2,300. Yeah, it's lower. That was a great stat. Whoever threw that out there, I can't remember off the top of my head. But yeah, great stat. And that wasn't even on my mind. I didn't realize that.

So that's good to know. Bitcoin has outperformed the S&P since July 12, 2017. it's a good range for us things are just getting going touching on did we did this hit the recording or do we talk about this after we recorded what the potential for there being like a gap step uh return to the gold standard no we talked about that on the episode i i disagreed with you i said we're gonna have a standard i agree to i agree we're going to get to a sad standard but on that subject uh russia has continued their their accumulation of gold i've heard about it last april april 23rd 2019

over the course of the first two decades of the 21st century china and russia have been heavily accumulating gold and in that in this particular bent where i talked about this the question is are they just trying to catch up with other nations is there a long-term plan uh to make a move in the currency markets like what why are they doing this i still don't know why but it came out last week a lot of people thought russia was sort of going to curb their their gold buying uh they're buying a bullion and it came out that they added 400 ounces or 12 almost 12 and a half tons of gold to its reserves in february which is double the amount they added in january and again a lot of people

were surmising that they were going to be cutting uh their purchases so it seems like russia is stepping up their gold purchases as uh when that was in february so that was before the sort of mass hysteria took over mass hysteria didn't really take over till the middle uh first week in march so it seems that that russia again is posturing accumulating a lot of gold and that's having a lot of people question why are they doing that like are they thinking about regressing or not regressing uh reverting to a a quasi gold standard as as money markets around the world go a little crazy you think putin owns any bitcoin i would not be surprised i think he i think he owns some bitcoin yeah that's crazy that they're just and i i think

francis uh francis posted the gold reserves for canada like a week ago or something did you see that chart yeah they sold all they sold all their gold reserves they're so dumb oh my god complete capitulation on that one ah that's gonna bite them in the ass um everyone has it all the countries have a chance at a restart year if they if they start accumulating bitcoin consider it yeah definitely consider it um i think yeah things are getting frothy freaks and like going back to neil kashkari like a that that gif or that video that little 18 second clip if you're like a practitioner of body language this dude is freaking out his eyes are all buggy He's blinking.

You can tell he's a bit nervous. It seems like the powers that be are trying to hold everything together, and they're freaking out on the inside. It's weird times, weird times. Should we jump into some Bitcoin things, and then we'll go back to authoritarianism at the end? Yeah, let's do that. So JoinMarket just got updated.

V0.6.2 is a big maintenance release. so if you use join market go go check that out go download it uh and join market they just uh they just submitted a pr for fidelity bonds it hasn't been merged yet um but the idea of fidelity bonds so join market is a coin join implementation um the the biggest issue with coin join is something called a sybil attack which is basically you have a malicious individual uh try and be as many of the participants of CoinJoin as possible, so then they can de-anonymize the process based on the information that they've collected being part of all of them. And if you target a specific person,

you can reduce the amount of Sybil attacking you have to do. So the idea of fidelity bonds is... So the main way to combat a Sybil attack is two ways. That has been in practice. just sheer volume that you know the more participants in these coin join implementations the harder it is to isolate any specific participant because you're hiding among a crowd it costs a lot more money to sybil attack and then the second thing is a fee and the idea is that the fee costs you money so as you try and scale up a sybil attack it it becomes more and more expensive for you to actually pull it off so the i but the problem is it's hard to find the balance where it reduces a sybil attack because the fees is high but it doesn't reduce usage which

is what you want you want a lot of people using it so the idea of fidelity bonds is that you basically uh provide like a security deposit a time lock security deposit and the idea there is that it it becomes very expensive for you to sybil attack but if you're an honest actor you get the money back at the end anyway um so it's an interesting balance uh and seems kind of promising i'm pretty excited about it yeah chris uh chris belcher i hope i'm pronouncing his name right um uh presented this to the bitcoin mailing list in early august i believe or late august early august and uh when he described when he dropped it on the list then he basically described it uh as something that makes a lot of sense for committed long-term hodlers like you were saying

matt because it sort of aligns incentives uh where if you're a long-term hodler you are incentivized to uh interact with these fidelity bonds they use op check clock time verify which basically dictates that your coins are held in a multi-sig address for x amount of blocks and if you're a long-term hodler you want to make some money on your bitcoin and you want to increase everybody's anonymity set this makes a lot of sense because you increase the authentic anonymity set which leads to increased utility which leads to increased demand and therefore an increase of price over time so the way these fidelity bonds are set up really incentivize people to participate especially good actors and like matt said if people are civil attacking to um to basically mess up the

coin joins they probably want to do that in a timely manner and this really throws a wrench in that by making them have to lock it up for for a long time so it may dissuade attackers from even trying yeah it definitely makes it more expensive it exposes them to more price risk um and but it good uh you know users acting in good faith aren't really penalized for it if they're going to hold anyway they're going to hold um just one thing here is i think samurai handles this kind of elegantly too um with with the way their fee structure is set up is specifically set up to deter it deters civil it costs a civil attacker more money but it costs a user acting in good faith less money on the fee that gets charged and the reason for that is because the more you send

in to a pool at any given time um the lower your percentage fee is uh but by doing that uh the software knows that they're all connected inputs um so none of them mix together so if you're trying to sybil a mix uh if you well i'm not i'm trying not to say mix anymore but you're trying to sybil a coin join round what the fuck man you want to get like let's say so a samurai round is five five utxos per round the idea is in the ideal situation you're a simple attacker you want to be four of the five right and then you you know who the fifth one is because you're the other four um in this case you would have to basically run four different instances and pay four times the fees as the honest person because the honest person doesn't care um that they're

all in different rounds because all the UTXOs that come in at the same time are all in different rounds so that's a pretty cool way that they handled it but I also think this fidelity bond idea is very promising yeah no I mean it seems like there's a mad dash to make privacy stronger make the privacy assurances stronger for for users via coin join which is incredible to see the the competition is heating up and while we have whirlpool on top of the mind uh it seems that march march volume is going to uh be three times or higher than the last three months combined excuse me massive just going straight up last so on thursday we mentioned that it was about to breach the point where it was higher than the last two months combined and since then not only have

we breached that point but we breached the last three months combined um yeah and so right now uh one other thing that's interesting uh and just like just keep in mind um there's no way for us to verify the number but the samurai guys are tracking how many users are using dojo versus using no node the no node users versus the node users and it appears that the most the highest percentage of users using their own node is the 0.05 pool the middle pool and then it goes to the i think it's like 80 or something and then it goes down to like 60 for the 0.5 pool the 50 million the biggest pool. And then the last pool is 50%. So I just, I don't know. I just thought those, those numbers are interesting, but we can't verify them. So, uh, just keep that in mind.

Um, you know, I just from logic would think that the majority of the liquidity is going to be from users that run their own node, because if you're running this thing 24 seven, why aren't you using your own note um and then on that note noddle dojo got updated um this is uh i was i was very happy with keto minor for for getting this update out um and it brings rtl onto the dojo and it oh it updates rtl but it also brings whirlpool cli onto it uh which was sorely missed so i'm super excited that it's finally there so basically with the noddle dojo because you have dojo and whirlpool on the device um you can run the the coin join rounds 24 7 and because of the way samurai is set up you don't pay for those rounds that are running in the background so you just

set it up on your noddle dojo and you're good to go slowly but surely let's fucking go shout out to the noddle team shout out to the samurai team again really really helping build the the privacy assurances which again we've said this a lot they're subpar at the moment if we're being honest with bitcoin's uh privacy assurances they're subpar but tools like whirlpool uh tools like the noddle that in my node which make access to these tools easier are really going to help push against that threshold join market adding fidelity bonds adding to the the incentives of providing liquidity for uh coin join pools is is incredible to see yeah i mean i the freaks know i think it's bitcoin's biggest weakness so um it's really fantastic to see and uh i think now that we

have that whole scaling bullshit behind us i mean we've seen for the last last year and a half two years um massive improvement on the privacy front let's be honest there was it was a very low bar uh but it's it's it's been the momentum seems to be building and i look forward to see what they have for us store no and i guess this is a good time to mention too we should take extreme ownership over this just don't if you're explaining bitcoin to somebody be open about this stuff like hey, if you're going to use it, just know that the privacy assurances aren't perfect at the moment. They're getting better. Here's how you can make sure that you're using Bitcoin in the most private way that you can. Be upfront about it. It's important that we have extreme ownership

and we don't try to sugarcoat anything. We should be as open as we can about this stuff because at the end of the day, it really only makes us stronger. You highlight pain points and try to fix them and it's actually a good segue into human rights foundation article by eric wall uh privacy and cryptocurrency part five bisque runescape and stories from buying bitcoin anonymously so he described uh ways in which you can you can acquire bitcoin in in a very private way he bought through runescape yeah which is which is pretty crazy you know i i think that he was doing he was doing like he was doing like actions in the game and then getting paid for a service no no he did the trade in there and he traded rune i think he

bought runescape gold and then he traded the runescape gold for bitcoin that's what it was and he successfully completed a hodl hodl trade um he got he got held up on you know bisque requires a bitcoin security deposit so he said that disqualified them but anyway it's good it's a good deep dive the you know the tldr is it's extremely hard to buy bitcoin um perfectly anonymously and then there's different levels there um you know like when he bought through hodl hodl he he did it through revolute which is uh like a traditional banking system app um in europe or maybe it's just it's completely digital bank but anyway um so so the person he paid knew but hodl hodl didn't know so there's all these different trade-offs um and he goes

into them so that's really great um and and he does mention which i still think i mean friends and family and those kind of connections are always um going to be superior in the in these situations i think um and as we see bitcoin adoption increase um the people that you know that have bitcoin um or want bitcoin uh increase along with it yeah slowly but surely that's a great article go check it out human rights foundation man alex gladstein eric wall eric's no longer working for them full-time but i guess he's still writing stuff for them uh they're really for the cause alex specifically uh he came out he's oh i mean not that he came out in defense of bitcoin recently he's always in defense of bitcoin but he's really uh on the front lines of of calling

out despotic governments and pushing bitcoin forward as a human rights issue and something that that we need uh if we want to have freedom in the digital age so shout out to them a lot of People have preconceived notions of these foundations and the authenticity of what they're doing. And from what I can tell, I know Alex pretty well. I don't know Eric as well, but his content's incredible. They seem down for the cause. Everything they put out is really up to snuff, on my radar at least.

At a Gladstein on Twitter. Just Gladstein. He just says Gladstein? yeah it's just gladstein wow i wonder if he has the domain that's a great tag alex well done um sticking on bitcoin shout out to our sponsor cash app they're making sats the standard our good friend miles suitor tweeted that out yesterday uh android users only right now they're working on ios you don't have the update i believe not not on ios yet do you no i have it on android it's fucking sexy dude the purchase history is fucking dope it's just like millions of you know

million sats here million sats there all in like the millions it makes you feel like a baller but anyway it's great to see there's a little option in the you can toggle it on or off uh It's not the standard yet. We're getting closer. Right now, it defaults to Bitcoin still. Yeah. But yeah, one step at a time, one company at a time, Sats will become the standard.

Now, another important thing to note, which we've been teasing in the ad reads in that same thread, where Miles announced Sat the standard, somebody asked, Cash App just gets it. Kudos. Went auto buy for Bitcoin. And Miles responded, soon.

So it seems like we'll be able to auto-buy via the Cash app soon. Soon is a funny meme throughout the history of Bitcoin and altcoins specifically. Two weeks. Litecoin is going to get added to Mt. Gox in two weeks. Soon. The butterfly miners will ship in two weeks. But auto-buys is huge. Auto-buys is huge because, yeah,

it's just it's just a very convenient way to stack because you just don't have to think about it and it's a good way to take like a portion of your salary um and just on payday just have like a portion of it it's like you're getting paid in bitcoin um yeah it'll make the fryer happy i have a friend who like that's like the one like coinbase can go fuck themselves and i i don't use coinbase but the one good thing that they've had forever is that dollar cost average tool and i have a friend who you know he just didn't even realize it's just been running for like two years just added up a ton yeah that's it's huge um and it makes sense it's uh it should be the standard all these these exchanges too should be that easy to stack sats you should be able to put a little

bit of your paycheck in it as soon as as soon as you get it um we're seeing it become much more yeah we got uh we got the original bitcoin wizard back the uh one of the first advertisements uh magic internet gathering and basically out of aka mint gox um out of the demand for virtual experiences that's being driven by uh the world grinding to a halt it seems that a bunch of bitcoiners got together and created a magic internet gathering as a socioeconomic movement as an experiment in new behaviors and activities that are purely virtual does magical internet money enable us to come together for new types of activities using the magical power of the internet let's find out so it's going to be on cyberspace it's going to be

monthly events uh and the first one is a virtual fighting championship yeah so so that this is it's the team behind zbd uh bitcoin gaming company um so that's the whole idea the whole idea is to basically promote this online bitcoin gaming uh concept while everyone's stuck stuck at home in quarantine uh and i think it's a great fucking idea um i have it i had it as like the last story on the list because i thought it was feel good but i think there's like a good connection here like did you see that they had nascar drivers in like full simulation uh controls i thought it was formula one it was it was formula one wasn't it no it was i think it was nascar on fs1 wasn't it it might have been they had formula one as well um i know they had

formula one did it too they did like a grand prix virtually and people were saying it was more exciting than real grand prixs and i've been i've been like hey i might i think i might be the biggest formula one fan in the world now i watched that netflix documentary on formula one never really uh got interested in it till i saw this but now uh big fan of the formula one world it it seems like an intense highly competitive uh sport where i just sort of ignored it i want to go to monaco and see grand prix there it's strange it's not bigger in america you know nascar really dominates here but anyway that's pretty this this move to esports um even traditional sports moving to esports uh is you know pretty interesting to watch and i wonder how much it sticks and i mean

I think it was kind of the future to begin with. Not that all sports are going to get removed, but that esports were going to do, you know, bigger and bigger audiences, bigger and bigger revenues as well. But I think this is going to hasten it. I think we should see some, you know, rapid change here and stick with it through the crisis. And one of the things that someone mentioned to me

that I didn't really think about was gambling. All the gamblers, they, like, need something to gamble on. That's big business. So you've got to get these things out just for that alone. There's no other sports going on. Yeah. Now, this virus, this economic crisis, whatever you call it, it's going to hasten a lot of things.

I already don't work from home. Like you were saying, your family's congregating on Zoom. We've talked about it in the last couple weeks. It's really driven demand for 3D-printed goods. I saw a 12-year-old printing 3D-printed masks for people. I think it's going to accelerate or decelerate the globalization of the world. I think people are really going to start reconsidering how their supply chains are constructed and where they're located. Massive ramifications.

Automation. Everything. So you disagree with me here. Drone deliveries. I put this in the standard, and you mentioned it. um so we might as well talk about it now so i think china comes out of this thing stronger than ever like i think china gets into even better position geopolitically than they were before um and i mentioned in passing last last uh last week on thursday that

these companies that fail they're going to be gobbled up by a ton of chinese investment um so you do you disagree with that you think china ends up worse off after everything settles i strongly disagree yeah i think i think this whole event uh specifically the the supply chain um being centralized over there and then the the posturing of china not not chinese citizens the chinese communist party specifically throughout this whole thing not being upright with what was going on in Wuhan and what was going on with the virus and sort of keeping everybody out of the loop as that was spreading in their own country,

which a lot of people think allowed it to spread to the rest of the world. I just think the trust is not going to be there. I know Trump specifically, he's been on sort of a beeline to sort of restructure our agreements with China. I don't think things like Hawaii, however the fuck you say it, bringing 5G to America, I don't think that's going to happen anymore. Huawei. That's one of my favorite companies to pronounce. Yeah, I strongly disagree because I think at least America, I'll speak for America only, is going to strongly reconsider how we interact with China.

um i mean it came out that they're they're paying um they're paying harvard professors to basically engage in espionage which is pretty fucked like i think there's going to be some repercussions from that it's what winners do there will be a line drawn we're not gonna what are we gonna do to them for that we're not gonna do it um i fear for our country i i think we are witnessing you know, we were the ultimate superpower. No one came close to us. I think we're witnessing the reversal of that. And it's coming quicker than expected. I think what we're going to watch play out here is basically America just struggling to do anything. You know, in our own domestic sphere, we're having trouble right now. And you're going to see China basically do their version of

the marshall plan they're going and they're rebuilding all these countries and where will we be i don't i don't know if we'll be there and i i think i think it should be interesting to play out that's a cuck mentality in my mind uh i don't it's not a cuck mentality i don't think yes it is because i'm not the one doing it what do you mean i'm not in charge of that you know i just it's my observation you know as much i am an american and it sucks to see but like what am i supposed to do about that it's just it's like the whole thing we've been fucking talking about dude we've been talking about this the whole like we need top or excuse me bottom-up changes like we should be shifting

away from that type of mentality where these autocratic regimes basically make decisions from the top down and that is and again with that being said i think i don't think china's stable i don't think the way they make decisions is stable the top-down decision making that they have it's proven not to even work for the chinese people in the long run like it is i'm not saying instability i'm not saying it's gonna last forever but even if we have fragile even if we successfully enact bottom-up change in citadels basically um china's gonna dominate in the near term until they fall as well like they they their top-down approach extremely centralized and corrupt as it is is a very effective approach and they've been winning

i and again if you think our economy is fragile the the shadow banking system in china is 10 times worse all like this if if you have some supply chain shift away from them that'll be massively bad for their for their economy and then on top of that they have a demographics problem as well due to their one child policy I don't think yeah and I

don't I don't see China taking over the world that meme has been going around for a while I do think it's a cuck mentality it's not a cuck mentality let me talk it is you're saying oh they're going to take over the world America can't do anything about it we have created

the best apps the best companies the world has ever seen i can't believe i said apps we've created the best companies we're the most creative country in the world when it comes to producing things like i don't think that's going to stop just because we've been complacent for a little bit here due to monetary policy and the the slow centralization of our government i do think the ideals of americanism and freedom and ingenuity still exist uh within individual americans and i do think a fire is currently being lit under our asses that will uh that will incite a renaissance like we have not seen in quite some time i'm not gonna bow down to china and let them bring i'm not gonna bow down to i don't bow down that's what you just said

no it's ridiculous it's ridiculous to call me it's not a cuck mentality it's an observation it's a cuck mentality what it is and and you're absolutely right people have been talking about it for years my grandfather talked about it until he you know passed away for like 20 years he talked about he said that matt when you turn 50 you're going to speak mandarin and you know he was wrong he's going to be wrong but it's only because we're going to have like auto translators at that point so like no one will have to know the different languages again i don't think it's stable enough i think that the the top-down nature of the government's uh very fragile and and i think i wouldn't be surprised if after all this virus stuff you see actual like civil

disobedience within china or civil uprising by the peasant class because of the way they were lied to and the whole virus was was taken care of they just rounded up exactly they rounded up like everyone who was anti-government in like the recent in the curl the whole coronavirus response they like eliminated all of their fucking enemies they got all the protests to stop i don't know i i hope i hope people around the world stand up to their governments but we'll see Yeah, I don't want to see a future in which China dominates. Fuck the CCP. Fuck those people.

They literally have concentration camps bigger than fucking Auschwitz. How the fuck is it any way, shape, or form acceptable to believe that they're going to take over the world? Maybe that's something we should harp on more here in the West. they literally have concentration camps that are bigger than auschwitz was at its height like they people are calling trump racist for the chinese virus stuff like the chinese are probably the most racist regime in the world right now they're rounding up muslims and selling their fucking organs to the highest saudi bidder it's fucked up i don't want that regime being the dominant regime in the world and i'm not i don't think you are either of course we need the mentality of

we need the mentality of we're gonna fucking beat these guys in the long run the ccp fucking put up they're fucked no we don't put up yeah it's true that's why we bitcoin freak sorry you had to hear that that little tiff between me and matt like fucking hitler dominated for a while you didn't have to agree with him but the people that the people that said he was going to dominate for a while they ended up being right you know i don't think they were cucks how much did he dominate for i don't know like 10 years maybe yeah yeah china i mean a lot of people would say china dominated the world markets the last 15

years and have really amassed and they have been the fastest growing economy maybe that was their their 15 years of dominance and this may be the event that sort of wakes the world up to hey what the fuck is going on i hope so the ccp they're rounding up fucking muslims and killing them alive sterilizing them taking their organs and selling it to people we do not want them to take over the world and the fucked up thing is they're selling it to other muslims who need uh halal organs exactly that's fucked up on the on the buyer's part you know yeah yeah right see this why i put the nascar this is why i put the nascar story last because i was like oh we can we can end on on nascar virtual nascar and on fs1 that's crazy um i'll end it i got a good note to end

it on well let's not end it yet because we should we should still go on the negative news we should talk about this uh california police department that now has four drones to monitor coronavirus yeah shoot them down you don't need to use a gun you can throw toilet paper at them shinobi that's made it clear that you could take down these drones yeah it's true you have to decide do you want to waste bullets or or toilet paper but yeah the and it's crazy that's the other thing we talked about it last week the virus the fear is at an all-time high right now people are scared as shit fear is at like heights not seen since 9 11 and this is when the sociopaths like to fucking pounce and they like to tighten their grip of control over you and it seems that like

we already mentioned the doj seeking permission to tame people indefinitely uh israel went into full lockdown and they're basically using phone data monitoring phone data and to track people and whether or not they have the virus or have taken medicine for it and they're about to release a phone app for it too in israel that checks all your location data and then checks it off compared to uh other people that have had coronavirus and tells you if you should go home or not yeah and then matt just mentioned the chula vista police in california are going to use four drones to monitor the coronavirus shutdown and they're going to be using chinese uh software that basically allows you to use cameras to identify people

and has mics on it to yell at people. It's minority poor shit. This is fucking unacceptable. They're trying, they're going to say, hey, this is only going to be for as long as the virus is. We need to disperse crowds, and we need to do it without touching people or being physically around them.

And then once the virus is gone, which it probably inevitably will be, at some point in the near near to medium term uh they're gonna be like hey these drones were cool we could use these for other things and soon enough um you're gonna have 50 people gathering to talk about their right to own bitcoin and the drone's gonna come in and start spraying you with bear mace i love how they tried to pitch it as they were like but we're also going to tell like homeless people with the drone like where they can find uh special treatment and stuff like that um i like that that was their pitch uh we forgot to talk about ln markets

oh yeah it's true what do you think of this ln markets i haven't tested it out yet uh it yeah basically it's a derivatives market that allows you to trade bitcoin derivatives via the Lightning Network without creating an account. You just hook up your wallet to the exchange or the derivatives exchange, and you basically do non-custodial derivatives trading. I have not tested it out. I cannot speak to the quality of the app.

I believe it's custodial, but instant settlement, isn't it? So it says, too long, don't read. LM Markets is a Lightning Network application for derivatives trading leverage your sats in the trust minimized environment no email or registration connect your connect your funds instantly with your lightning wallet so you're it's connected to your wallet that you're identifying um and it only has semi-custodial lots of phoenix blue wallet jewel etc etc um this is just the beginning the lightning network will be used the settlement rail by all leading financial institutions um so the demo is pretty

cool i mean they're just uh quick settlement to start trading derivatives with bitcoin again if you want to trade this seems cool that's been the biggest knock on trading uh particularly arbitrage between exchanges is that the nature of bitcoin at the protocol level with 10 minute block times and the need to wait for x amount of confirmations before you can be confident that the block that your transaction is accepted in isn't going to be rewritten. Lightning Network really helps with that with instant settlement.

So this is allowing you to move funds to the LN market derivatives exchange instantly and trade instantly. But again, I have not tested it out yet. I can't speak to the quality of the app or the legality of trading these derivatives. it's definitely not legal for americans yeah um so i won't test it out but uh it'll be hard to i feel like it'd be hard to scale something like this um so i it's it looks cool i'm curious to

see how it all plays out um but you have you know i think lightning's still very much in its nascency uh so you know we have what if if you if the average users their channel needs to be under 16 million sats um the custodial platforms still have a lot of advantages over something like this at least in the near term um and for for someone like me i this is not a product for me i would never i would never use this um i just dollar cost average bitcoin it's a fairly simple strategy i suck at trading um one other thing i said yeah i was gonna say i suck at trading as well um and i'm a dollar cost averager as well but there are traders out there who like it let us know what you think if you're trading if you're testing this um in in a legally in a legal jurisdiction

let us know and yeah i mean it is going to take some time probably to find liquidity on the books I don't know. Maybe maybe Alan Markets is doing some market making, providing some liquidity on the other side. But, yeah, it's interesting. It's it's a it's a stepping stone in the right direction, I would imagine. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I like I have nothing against traders. I just think 99 percent of people would be better off dollar cost averaging. But for those one percent, absolutely. And is it a huge value prop of Bitcoin that you have all these markets you can trade on with limited identity information, sometimes no identity information? Absolutely.

Another thing I wanted to bring up that I don't have on the list, I forgot to put on the list, and it's kind of just tangential. A lot of the Internet companies, the ISPs in America, have pulled their data caps for the coronavirus. They signed a pledge like Comcast and a bunch of others. which is great and all. That's great. Everyone's home. They're working from home. They're watching Netflix. They're doing all their Zoom chats and whatnot. Let's alleviate them of their data caps because we're good Americans. But I want everyone to remember here that the whole reason those data caps exist is because they said during times of high congestion, there was no way for them to manage the load without the data caps. Meanwhile, we have the highest congestion ever in residential

areas since the internet ever got it ever got created and they removed the data caps and everything's going swimmingly so you know fuck them for that something to think about wow wow yes thank you for calling that out wow another thing the crisis is really driving home is the internet a public utility they're treating it as one right now um right you know i this it's a very it's a very hot topic um i think our biggest issue with the internet uh as it stands internet infrastructure is that that last mile to homes in america at least this is america specific um you you don't have any competition there usually a home gets one or two max good internet providers um so they're it's very easy for them to gouge you on price

and limit your internet service and just give you you know overall shitty terms and one of the reasons for that is because if you're if you're laying fiber down you need to cross all these different public right-of-ways roads train tracks stuff like that and it's really hard to get those approvals at the local state and federal level so we end up in this situation where regulation itself stops the competition right so like ideally you know we see inroads with wireless and stuff like that that increases the competition on the on the local level and then you won't have that issue you'll just get really quality service at a competitive price because everyone's competing with each other um but until then uh you know it's it's a really

messy situation. Like I, I, I personally think, you know, people shouldn't get internet for free, but the actual providers, like if you're, if it's, if it's, you know, at least in the near term, while we're in a situation where people only have one or two providers, those providers shouldn't be able to, um, like segregate your traffic, like decide which traffic is, is good traffic and which traffic is bad. I mean, ideally all that traffic should be encrypted and they shouldn't have any idea what's flowing through there they should just be offering you the pipe and you're using it yeah yeah very nuanced interesting discussion we'll have uh we'll have a more nuanced discussion on that at a later date check out uh nyc mesh if you're in new york

help uh help drive that conversation or excuse me a competition from from the bottom up yeah that's the ideal that's the ideal and i think that's the most effective what a rip man hey freak sorry sorry that you you saw uncle marty and uncle mac in a little fight there um one of us will be right and one of us will be the cuck time will tell we shall see we shall see um anything you want to end it on i i love you freaks what i love you too no i remember the uh the positive note i wanted to end on i meditated for 10 minutes today first time in quite a while felt good focusing on my breath just sitting there in silence you didn't use an app or anything you just did it yourself i did it myself yeah very good cross my legs worked on my posture

some deep breathing and i did i just set a 10 minute timer and when it when it went off i was actually surprised it went by a lot faster and then i was able to gather my thoughts make some actionable and make a list of actionable things i could do after meditation got them done felt good felt good next time you should do a one block timer then it could be like 30 seconds or it could be an hour you just don't even know oh that's playing oh that's an app idea it's an app idea you could just call it block timer block timer meditation uh what would uh what would the name for the meditation app be i don't know variable meditation variable meditation probabilistic meditation time

if you're listening freaks you're feeling motivated make it yeah um yeah thanks for joining us again that was a long stimulus package we went hour and 20 minutes almost a lot of shit to cover love you freaks peace and love Thank you.