TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap Stimulus Package: 2020.04.20

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Join Marty & Matt as they discuss: - BTCPay Server adds payjoin support - Trezor update breaks HWI support - Cobra and Theymos split ownership of bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org - Purse.io shuts down - Breez wallet adds keysend support - Nodl adds keysend support Nodl OG - Juggernaut messenger - Oil markets - MMT - 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 Bent here to introduce this episode of Rabbit Hole Recap Stimulus Package. Matt and I just had a good rep. A lot of rambling towards the end there. Just bouncing ideas off each other about the current state of the oil market, MMT, a bunch of other things. We did talk a lot about Bitcoin and everything going on in the Bitcoin world. the first hour of the episode last 20 minutes is all macro and just spitballing ideas with each other crazy times for living in freaks very crazy times there's a lot of unforeseen externalities that are really coming to the floor as uh coronavirus shutdown starts affecting the markets and demand uh the demand side of things is so weak that the supply side is starting to

react pretty viscerally and pretty aggressively. So I think you guys are going to like this. One caveat, your Uncle Marty learned about money laundering through a thought experiment he had by himself. I want to make it clear I'm not money laundering anything. I just had a thought experiment when it comes to pay a join, and it just so happens that that thought experiment led to me potentially being a money launderer at some point in the future, which is not going to happen. I can promise you that. I will never launder money. Questioning whether or not if I should stop record and re-record this preview.

But you know what? Fuck it. I'm feeling some type of way right now. The world's going to shit. Who cares anymore? I'm definitely not going to money launder, but I sort of explained how you could money launder in this episode. This episode of Tales from the Crypts is brought to you by our good friends at the Cash App.

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with the signature uh you save a little bit money and you can take that money you can stack stocks excuse me stack stat stack sats with that um and then on top of that if you have not downloaded the cash app yet and you plan on doing it make sure you use the code stacking sass that's one word s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s stacking sats you're going to get ten dollars ten dollars going to go your go to our good friends at owls lacrosse doing incredible things in chicago that's owls lacrosse not that dirtbag owl owls lacrosse use the code stacking sats download the cash app enjoy this episode rabbit hole recap stimulus package please forgive me

for coming to like realize what money laundering is on the go it's on the go it's a thought experiment it's a thought experiment i'm sorry you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back tales from the crypt we got a rabbit hole recap stimulus package

get it in this week matt just popped his bottle of mccallan how the hell we doing brother did the mic pick up the poor i guess we'll find out afterwards i'm sure it did we shall find out cheers it's your mic cheers i'm drinking whiskey with you as well i got the bullet he's got the mccallan he's sipping on something much smoother i had to go on a run for this speaking this week you ran to the liquor store no i mean i drove there but no like note to self you should i know i think you always under expect how much how much scotch you can use in uh in a bug out period in a global pandemic yeah yeah we actually went on a liquor store run this week i did this weekend stocked up a lot of

vino a lot of vino the essentials um yeah matt and i were talking before we hit record i'm going crazy not crazy but just like it's groundhog day sure you freaks are experiencing this too it's the same thing every day they shut down the beaches here we can't even go on a nice beach walk we shut down the parks here can't even drive to a park uh let me go into the no we did do a drive by the one park right they've made they've started like the cops are like patrolling so they weren't when i yeah they weren't when i put this it makes no sense dude um but we're not going to start a pandemic stuff we're going to start on bitcoin stuff uh today specifically there's a lot to talk about um but first we have to get some shout outs this

one wasn't even a shout out somebody bought us a bottle of whiskey and in the part where they're supposed to put in the whiskey bottle we should buy he just put in a message and the message was drunk af american hodl a little bitch sent from coinbase because i'm a little bitch too lol um so that was the first shout out don't know who that's from thank you for the whiskey appreciate it we'll get a bottle american hodl american hodl if american hodl if you're listening this man thinks you're a little bitch just uh just want you to know or a woman could be a woman um and then this one uh was very happy to uh i don't say edit just to read through this article before it got posted you guys should go check it out hey freaks i hope you're all hanging in there

as the virus and the fed turn our lives upside down if you have some extra time on your hands get a friend or family member and learn a new skill together i've been learning to code and it feels great to have something to focus on please take a few minutes to check out my first ever blog post on privacy avoiding the digital panopticon on medium thank you matt marty for all the incredible content you can find our buddy eric on twitter at eric b underscore 10 or on medium at eric b 10 no underscore so on twitter at eric b underscore 10 on medium at eric b 10 go check out that article avoiding the digital panopticon it was a really good one um i thoroughly enjoyed it was humbled to be uh to be mentioned in it thanks eric

shout out to eric um what's going on a lot of bitcoin stuff to talk about this week uh the first topic uh was the topic we actually mentioned literally the last sentence of last episode we were wondering uh about ptc pay server adding pay join and i think as literally as soon as we hit stop record they sent a tweet that said that that they did uh launch their latest release which which includes the p2ep p2 i always say p2ep p2ep implementation pay join um so it's pretty huge we've been talking about this for quite a while matt uh tweeted out a beautiful sound clip from your episode with Stefan Levera describing

why P2EP and implementations like PayJoin are important. This is going to be massive for privacy. You're just basically trying to make every spend a CoinJoin. And so... What?

Just you and acronyms, that's all. Sorry, continue. Yeah, it's not good. Not good. Pay to end point. I should just say it. Colloquially, PayJoin PayJoin yes much easier but PayJoin is an implementation of P2E

that is Stonewall not Stonewall Stowaway is on Samurai Stowaway sorry there's so many goddamn names to remember with the Samurai stuff Blockstream worked and collaborated

funded the implementation I guess is that the correct phrasing to use there uh i think they provided a grant to mr kooks who was the primary developer yeah i'm like 90 sure of that so but regardless they provided some kind of funding there but yeah mr kooks was the primary developer uh he got this shit done uh it's fucking big deal it's it's it's it's really important and like the the beauty of pay join is that um with pay join you have in every bitcoin transaction you have inputs and outputs you

have the transactions that are on the sender side what's usually believed to be the sender side and then you have outputs which is where the receiver gets his coins and then one utxo is changed it goes back to the sender um so with pay join both the sender and receiver contribute inputs so you can no longer assume but it still looks a lot of times a pay joint transaction will look exactly like a regular transaction you can't tell the difference and in that case you can no longer assume that all the inputs belong to the sender for all bitcoin transactions so it gives like a passive privacy improvement to non-users of it if used at scale but the main issue with it is that the receiver needs to be online um or available right so you could do it through like something

like nfc or qr codes or something like that as well um samurai has it implemented with qr codes um but the nice thing about ptc pay is you're already online the merchant's already online so all they have to do is keep a small hot wallet online as well um and then they're able to enable pay join transactions which is i i think it's a really big deal yeah huge deal and like you mentioned need a hot wallet uh to make this possible and so if you do implement this with your btc pay server you can mitigate the risk of having too many funds in a hot wallet or or uh by using the btc transmuter plugin which will help you sweep that stuff uh after a certain threshold you can set the um set the threshold to make sure that

you're clearing out that hot wallet as need be uh as you're receiving and and participating to bitcoin's privacy overall um that wasn't the only thing in this release they had a bunch of ui updates it's very very uh sleek much sleeker than it was a week ago they got dark mode and then more importantly they have coin selection which is pretty huge uh coin selection again talking about privacy one of one of the ways to fuck up your privacy is to use a wallet that doesn't have coin selection you really don't know uh the utxo selection of that wallet software unless you really dive into the code and so what happens a lot is the wallet software just automatically combine utxos which is obviously not ideal for privacy if you want to be selective with

sending particular UTXOs that you know the origin of and can be confident in mixing them if you want to mix them. So coin selection is huge. Yeah, what you want is you want to be able to not only select UTXOs, but you want to be able to label them so you know what they are. And for the same reason as why PayJoin helps here is because if you combine them in a transaction when you're sending, it can be assumed that all the inputs belong to the sender.

I just wanted to make three quick comments about PayJoin. First of all, we will be implementing it on our BTC Pay shop. That should happen shortly. So you can PayJoin if you buy us a bottle of whiskey, which would be dope. Wallet's supporting it. Right now, from BTC Pay itself, you can send PayJoin transactions that are compatible with BTC Pay. They're the only ones right now. Green Wallet, Blue Wallet plan to support it.

There's a couple others along the BTC pay implementation. JoinMarket has its own implementation that works between JoinMarket and JoinMarket users. And Samurai has its own implementation that works between Samurai and Samurai users. So hopefully we see more wallets implement pay join implementations. Hopefully we see more usage of it. And hopefully we see, as Marty said earlier, we see more coin control with labeling, just as an option. Like if your wallet wants to default to just doing the whole balance as if it's one giant as UTXO, then by all means. But in the advanced tab, you should be able to have coin control with labeling.

Yes. Slowly but surely, the stuff is all getting better. And then on top of that, they added QR code camera scanning. So the new scan option lets you use your device's camera to scan an invoice when sending from the wallet. so that's just a good UX improvement and makes makes BTC pay more more useful so shout out to the BTC pay server team Nicholas Doria tweeted out a few weeks ago that this was going to be one of their biggest code pushes to date and I did not disappoint so this is BTC pay server version 1.0 point 4.0 so if you

haven't upgraded it yet updated it make sure you do that and take advantage of of all the dope features uh enable pay join help out bitcoin every bitcoiner's privacy and that's the beauty of when you when you interact with pay joins p2ep you're you're not only helping your own privacy you're helping everybody else's as well um and let's bust up these chain analysis heuristics we talked about that on thursday how how fucked up they are and speaking of something we talked about on thursday which we wanted to bring back up uh is trezor they had uh released a blog post uh talking about their latest update which included uh the new passphrase changes and then wipe code sd card feature

yeah the sd card feature with the pin which basically makes it like a 2fa um but what we did we caught one version of of the release blog apparently there was another blog post released that day as well that talked about uh some security fixes that they made as well in that pusher we just wanted to touch on those as well um well first off we have with the security first of all i thought it was you know it's a little bit questionable that they had two blog posts one did not have the vulnerabilities that were fixed in it and the other had all of the first one but then also these four vulnerabilities that were fixed i mean we missed it we were looking at it real quick before we started recording last week but

still uh we missed it and it kind of feels like it was intentionally misleading um but anyway uh there's there's four vulnerabilities three of them are bitcoin related that were found by Salim uh fucking destroyer of hardware wallets like that guy over there and the fourth one was a Monero one that someone else found is he legal yeah that's a weird question is he uh is he 18 very odd wording Marty I believe so but the internet the internet will forever think he's a 16 year old I think I saw someone under his thread it was like ah crazy that a 16 year old kid did this and i i hope it was a troll i think it might have been a troll i'm not sure yeah for those of you who don't know uh rashid salim has been a very prolific

uh bug finder in the hardware wild space for quite some time he's uh yeah he's a good hacker um yeah and the in the other the other bug was like a monero issue right yeah you could set unlimited lock time an attacker could. Ugh. You can force someone to force hodl their Monero. Yeah, what kind

of attack is that? Well, it's kind of like a ransom. It's a ransom attack. It's like ransomware. But even if you... How could you get out of it, though? If the lock time's initiated. You can't, like, pay your way out of that. Yeah, I guess you're right. I don't know how you would monetize it

I guess it's just like a grief Yeah it's just There's like a word for it Griefing Is it griefing? When you're just like kicking someone in the balls Just kick someone in the balls Yeah

It's like a Yeah just a mean A mean hack Fuck you I'm going to lock your coins up for a million blocks I guess you could do it to an exchange and then if they didn't notice you could withdraw money uh that makes sense i think it does so they're just keeping it in their ledger at the back end yeah but anyway there was four vulnerabilities uh we're linking to the blog post uh in the show

notes with the vulnerabilities in it um but even more of a reason to update yes make sure you update oh update and it broke hwi support oh yes this is uh this is important to talk andrew chow tweeted this out for hwi hardware wild interface users which is something he's been working on and we talked about in the episode that he joined us for was that last summer last fall feels like forever ago at this point um these firmware versions will not work with the new firmware versions of trezor will not work with hwi treasure one removed the way that we were implementing the prompt pin command this will be fixed shortly the sessions changes the model t are causing hwi to no longer

be able to communicate with the device a fix has been prepared for these two issues however the passphrase changes to the treasure t means that the user experience with it will be severely degraded either you will have to one enter the passphrase on device every command or to enter it in cli options a la trezor one so that seems pretty annoying yep um and yeah just like unintended consequences with these things externalities um external i wanted to uh yeah so if you're using hwi which most people use to interact with core directly with their hardware wallet um then don't update your treasurer i guess until they update hwi um but what i wanted to say about pay join is there seems to be some people who are pitching it basically as a

replacement to coin join or um that that that these coordinated coin joins like we see with whirlpool like a whirlpool wasabi implementation uh that they're not necessary and the thing is is you have to realize these are complementary tools. We need usage of both of them to go up. They break different heuristics, right? Yeah. I mean, if both sides of a pay join transaction are known entities with their UTXO set completely known,

it doesn't matter that you pay joined. To an external observer, it matters. Like someone who doesn't know any, you know, any metadata attached to these UTXOs, but someone who actually knows that KYC information or just general metadata, IP addresses, email addresses, stuff like that, could see right through that pay join. They know which inputs, which input. Yeah. what i was actually thinking now that we're back on pay join like would i be able to buy it's probably too expensive probably not worthwhile with other implementations like whirlpool and wasabi out there but like would i be like with our merch store like would i be

able to just like coin join with myself nobody else would know but me um and just pay the x amount of dollars for the merch i'd obviously have to buy a lot of merch probably be dumb to do but i if i was like hard pressed i don't know what you mean by just using pay join yeah so our store has pay join set up right and i say i have a bunch of utx's and cold storage that i want to um coin join i could do that from our store obviously i'd be paying it'd be like 12 to 20 dollars per per mix or i mean it's not really a mix that's the thing it's not uh it's not um it's not a coordinated there's not like the thing is you you still it's not even it's not even like

a two you still there's still heuristics that can be applied there right if you know two parties which two parties are transacting with each other so it's only two people um and well that's the thing I'm the merchant so I only I know that in this case what do you mean like I'm the only one who knows both sides of the transaction or me I both parties don't know in this situation I thought it was an interactive process what oh oh I would be both parties oh oh so like you'd be buying this is me like you'd be buying our own merch yeah exactly yeah i mean it gives you a limited privacy bonus and that that sounds um sounds illegal way too expensive uh is it would it be illegal yeah it depends how you treat the

profits coming into the store yeah that's a good call we're not doing that no obviously we're not doing it our fbi agent that's listening right now don't worry we're not doing this but that's the same idea as something like self-shuffling right where you like simulate coin join rounds between yourself and and no and no one else right so you have uh it it's a much reduced anonymity set like to the point where in most most cases it won't be effective like you need new liquidity the whole idea is like you need um you need it can't it can't just be like incestuous you need more users coming into the system yeah no it was just a thought experiment i had after this came out i was like yeah because i was just thinking like what if i bought

some merch with bitcoin on the site um that's that's how that thought experiment started i'm like huh i'd be paying for that and the conclusion i came to it would probably be way too expensive and stupid to do that because you just because you're paying for the transaction fee and then the merch on top of it where other implementations of coin join you could just pay for the transaction fee yeah i mean i think for the privacy benefit you get whirlpools cheaper in that situation yeah yeah hey thought experiments just push through them uh this was something that i did not catch till you put it up on on the list pretty funny that happened um so for you freaks who don't know huge contention uh about bitcointalk.org and bitcoin.org two websites that um in the early

days were more popular than they are now bitcointalk.org is still relatively popular bitcoin.org i guess people um are not big fans of it anymore um co-owned by thamos and cobra who's both anons um a lot of a lot of drama has been created because of the the ownership of these websites and the people who run them over the years and it seems that last over the weekend late last week they decided to split up they're uh owning both sites 50 50 but now cobra has bitcoin.org and um thamos has bitcoin talk.org so they're they're going separate ways what do you what do you think about this match it's funny like old drama getting is that a resolve uh a resolvement of that it's kind of weird uh you know i don't really know any of those internal

politics like they're both you know the ogist of the og uh as much as i've disagreed with both of them plenty in the past uh it is does seem kind of weird doesn't it that it just like happened it seems very mutual um i like question like is something happening behind the scenes did one person pay the other you know like bitcoin talk.org uh while a mainstay of of early days of bitcoin is like way less valuable of a domain than bitcoin.org um so i just i it makes me curious and then the other thing is um just for undue speculation sake there's a post by greg maxwell underneath that says on the announcement of bitcoin talk that says i'm really sad to hear this it seems like bitcoin faces such tremendous headwinds

which is like eerie as fuck I'm really sad to hear this it seems like Bitcoin faces some tremendous headway April 18th 2020 Greg Maxwell did it respond anymore to it let's see if a conversation got started there

Greg why are you freaking out no so if you if you freaks are relatively new to the bitcoin world bitcoin talk.org in the early days that's where i got a lot of my information it sort of turned into like a a place where shit coiners were launched their pre-mines um but in the early days this is where satoshi was was posting a lot and interacting with people um about the code base and everything that was going on and all the old threads are still there yeah so you can go back it's it's a great historical artifact at this point one of the best that exists can we just talk about what greg maxwell said underneath this this post for a second like isn't that eerie as well yeah what what are the

headwinds yeah why is this does he think one of the two domains is going to be used uh as a weapon Or like an anti-Cobra comment? Like he wishes Thamos still had control of Bitcoin.org? I don't know. That's a theory. That makes sense to me. Here's another OG commenting

Midnight Magic. I think peeps need to step back one or two steps and be calm. There were a lot of times that Bitcoin.org could have gone wrong, but ultimately didn't. I think maybe some folks are assigning too much retrospective probability to Cobra's potential

to be maligned functionally and operationally and especially authoritatively nothing's changed far as i can tell right i think cobra says things a lot of the time that are ill considered or appear to look one way or another and there was an odd security warning a few years back for example i forgot about that but so far at least either something has been moderating this response or he's been arriving at an ultimately correct decision to act on his own in the first case hopefully whoever uh whoever it is that can continue to offer advice in the second case something in there has prevented him from heading towards for example bcash all on his own i think cobra himself would agree that downloading the client for bitcoin.org uh maybe that's a bitcoin.org

being a place where you usually download um versions of bitcoin could be used maliciously to have people download a bad version or something like that yeah that's always been the concern um and like suggested wallets and stuff like that um there's also bitcoincore.org and there's also um the github page but and i'm sure it's just go to the github page yeah i'm sure it's sorry i'm sure it's mirrored in a bunch of places yeah um but i think the bigger concern is always we're sitting on that asset wow i'm sorry i think the bigger concern is that we um um my mom just walked into the office the bigger concern is bitcoin.com

hey miss odell i mean yeah well bitcoin.com well did you see they we didn't talk about that They laid off like 60% of their staff or something like that. But that's where noobs go first, right? They type in bitcoin.com and they just go to it. Yeah. I've actually been getting quoted in bitcoin.com articles more.

Matt's giving his mom like, what the hell's going on right now? Ridiculous. No, but yeah, bitcoin.com, just from a nature of seo and being around in the early days they dominate all the seos anybody searches bitcoin bitcoin wallet like they come up first but they are struggling they are in a it seems they are in a very vulnerable spot i wonder how long do you think roger ever comes back do you think uh no you think no no never gonna happen

he's lost I gotta get a forked out we gotta check the hash rate he's lost absolutely lost hey I believe in redemption oh my god when was their

when was their hard fork Bcash is at 1.55x a hash right now uh when was the hard fork it was like what like a week ago a week ago yeah they're seven day hash rates hovering around 1.7 x what's the percentage seven days around one 113 1.7 over 113 uh whatever that is doesn't it shows the percentage I'm forked out LOL I like percentage number it's good

it doesn't show percentage it shows it just shows ratio which equals percentage but they don't do the math for you we all know Marty math is pretty bad definitely on air my math is way worse on air I promise you that

the other piece of news they do have the total it's two it's currently 2.08 percent marty we're like six weeks into not seeing each other and we're finally talking over each other while we're trying to record that's because i what's going on man what's going on it's the whiskey i got like people screaming downstairs if you freaks can hear them if my mic's picking it up it's chaos i get my mom walked into the office grabbed a pen didn't make eye contact with me wrote something down walked over handed to me walked out of the office and on the uh on the note it just says when sausage

because we're eating sausage tonight for dinner like that's what just happened to me and i tried to try to maintain my composure i had to share it with you freaks when sausage when sausage i think you may need to make a t-shirt out of this no we're not making a t-shirt out of this when what kind of sausage pork sausage yeah we uh yeah we have pork sausage we've been eating really well we have like steaks all the time like we just filled up the freezer with just tons and tons of meat well i've been eating really well too we've got ribs in the in the oven right now um but i've been a sucker for like local or small one-off farm butchers i've actually started to get targeted with ads on instagram with these

butchers i i succumbed to one of them today one in wyoming i forget the name and i don't have my phone near me so i can't give them a free show it's the best they they just ship that shit to you it's fantastic yeah i bought 10 pounds i'm getting a tomahawk i've like been craving a tomahawk for so long and they don't have the butcher down here doesn't have any so i'm very excited to have that delivered to my doorstep within the week fucking fantastic that's the one thing i miss that's one thing i miss saint anselm's man would you love to go to saint anselm's right now and get get a tomahawk dude fucking steakhouse beers just at a bar be great be fucking fantastic it would be incredible

a steakhouse can barely go outside now a steakhouse ah right just drinking martinis i don't i don't drink martinis you know what i've been you know what i've actually been thinking i want to find uh i want to find a speakeasy i know there's a speakeasy somewhere like it's going down i want to find like a parlor like speakeasy where they even let you like smoke stogies or cigs uh you can just drink without social distancing maybe play little cards if anybody knows about of a speakeasy in south jersey let me know like that's happening right now he's looking it's gotta be it's gotta be are we just the return of the speakeasies probably here are we too old to know where

the speakeasy is is that the issue no i think we're too young i think the people thrown the speakeasies are know what they're doing they've uh they've uh been around the block a couple times i don't think anybody i don't think any millennial is starting a speakeasy maybe you never know yeah it started by like corrupt government officials and uh and mobsters that's who's running the speakeasies that's like the old version of the speakeasy there could be like new age speakeasies operated by the new age speakeasy would be like it'd be like alcohol free but no this is the generation that you know was on spring break

while the corona was was going they're not gonna let a little uh little virus stop the partying well that's actually funny you bring that up spring break because that's the interesting thing about like social distancing and the externalities of like the country ride lockdown like in jacksonville they opened up the beaches earlier this week you see that picture yeah um there's like hundreds thousands of people on the beach and i spoke with somebody who actually spends time on that beach in the off season pretty pretty regularly she would be down there right now if the virus stuff wasn't going she was like the beach is never that that busy this time of year like so like the fomo to just get outside

and experience nature drove like more people than would otherwise be there uh to the beach so it's like weird yeah when you tinkering with with human nature when you take something away from someone they want it so much more yeah as as you freaks may be able to tell from this tangential conversation on speakeasies that we're having right now yeah like i just just a steakhouse You know I just want to I want to spend an inordinate amount of money At a steakhouse Just with the boys

Like that'd be awesome It would be That's Hey When I'm back in Brooklyn That's what we're going to do We're going to go get a steak at St. Anselm's I'm down

By the way By the way It's the best steakhouse in Brooklyn Peter Luger's way overrated I don't want I don't want to Force St. Anselm's to jump the shark By pumping it too hard

But in my opinion it's the best steak in the city maybe not even just in brooklyn it's great it's fantastic um new york's a big city so i will not back to bitcoin i will not speak in absolutes yeah you know i like to do that um back to bitcoin topics this is actually one news that broke while we're recording last week people like why don't you talk about this why don't you talk about this i was like ah literally stopped recording check twitter and saw it uh purse.io which has been a huge marketplace for i don't want to say huge marketplace been a marketplace available to bitcoiners for quite some time uh decided to shut down its doors

so that announcement dropped last thursday while we were recording and it's sort of sad to see even though i was never a purse.io user and provided utility to a lot of bitcoiners and i don't agree with everything they did over the years but you can't deny that they did provide a service for people i saw rumors that the amazon affiliate link rev share went down and may have hurt them amazon squeezed their affiliates yeah so i think that may have been the reason i don't know if that's what they described in there well so i don't think the whole idea of purse your blog the whole idea of purse was that if you wanted bitcoin you could buy products on amazon that the seller of bitcoin

wanted and then you got their bitcoin so if you had bitcoin and you wanted something from amazon you would do the opposite process um so in the beginning they had some big issues with credit card fraud i remember you remember the guy who got swatted um basically he was selling bitcoin and he wanted these amazon items and the buyer of the bitcoin bought with a stolen credit card and then shipped it to this dude's house so the cops hit his house um so then purse added like a ten thousand dollar insurance or something like that for damages in that situation and cracked down on it i'm not sure if it happened again after that um but that kind of freaked the shit out of me so i never tried it um but they did have the founders were very supportive of bcash

which marty kind of alluded to um this amazon affiliate link kind of uh you know affiliate thing probably hurt them as well and then probably just on top of that just being able to buy gift cards for amazon from fold and bit refill um probably drained up the last of their customers they had there right yeah yeah uh probably definitely the ux is definitely better the fact that you could do it on an app person might have had an app again the bcash stuff i stopped um really following when they went down that path hard but cannot be forgotten that they are the reason that um for bcoin which is another implementation uh of bitcoin with javascript implementation i believe they created so um yeah weird uh

winding history with that company particularly they they wound down and ended with a wind down um last thursday that's what a lot of people are asking if they're going to open source um the code so we'll see if that happens but whether you love them or hate them it is a a calling of of a company in in the bitcoin space it's just interesting to see um and this next topic you you put the uh you put the purse link in twice uh but breeze wallet did add key key send support yes um we have we have three major key send stories we have breeze wallet added key send. Noddle added key send for the original Noddles, but the others to hopefully follow soon. And then so key send is the idea that instead of giving an invoice, you can send

just to the pub key, just the node ID that the node is node by. This is only supported in LND right now, this implementation. I guess actually Breeze is written in Go, I believe. So it's separate um but besides breeze it's only lnd is my understanding i believe so too um so that's pretty cool just being able to send satoshi without invoice um improving ux slowly but surely the third story here is juggernaut messenger which leverages key send to send it's it's like the evolution of whatsapp uh to send messages encrypted messages um from node to node using your public key uh so it basically sends one sat one sat payments that are encrypted messages um you connect it to your lnd node

yeah this is crazy so this is actually i read about sphinx last week in the bent i believe It was Thursday or Friday. Juggernaut John Cantrell, who created this, reached out to me and said it's different than Sphinx in that it is use your own node first mentality. Sphinx allows you to connect to your node, but if you're not able to do so, you can just use that app. Well, it uses the nodal cloud.

So it's totally Sphinx. You have your own node in the cloud. Yeah. um and but that's the beauty like this is i said it last week this is massive just from an application standpoint so imagine we chat or alley pay but without the surveillance state tracking you like you could so it's got the website of juggernaut lays it out like this got familiar messenger so if you've used telegram whatsapp or signal you'll find most of the features that are on those app there's no phone number email connected again

it's just your node native payments so send and receive payments as easily as you send a text message so that's how like alipay wechat come into play there's no third party uh there are no juggernaut servers to connect to all the messages are routed over the peer-to-peer lightning network which is insane like i don't think people are really grasping the gravity of how huge that is like and that's the the the line i say a lot on this podcast and other podcasts that i go on like we have a decision to make we either get the chinese surveillance state exported to the rest of the world and the u.s surveillance state too let's be honest or we we work hard to build out these systems in a centralized distributed fashion on top of bitcoin

in other similar open source projects and the big hurdle to actually making sure that these things uh are adoptable and people want to use them as ux and again i tried sphinx i have not downloaded juggernaut yet i can only speak for sphinx but the ux was pretty impeccable and it was very easy to set up and it is crazy to think that these messages are going through the lightning network and it's peer-to-peer it's not going to a server and then going to the other person on the end of the conversation's phone like it's literally via the lightning network which still i'm like trying to wrap my mind around it uh i it could be massive i do agree um we have this this network that that is unrouted and

incentivized to route those messages um where you're getting paid um so it could be it could be massive um one thing to keep in mind here is key scent is very new feature um the implications which are not really known exactly i was talking to keto miner um of the noddle team and he was saying um you shouldn't so so so for sphinx they're running he's running a ton of noddle clouds instances right so a ton of nodes that are sending these one sat payments between each other for sphinx and he said the elements to routing are a lot different than like normal payments um so consider instead of if you are running a routing node a node that's set up for you know routing larger payments um you should be wary of enabling key send so quickly maybe run it on

which is what i'm doing run run a separate instance of lnd um that is like your key send your key sentences basically you want like a nice big channel with a routing node and and you get all you know your messages reliability becomes way better very good point but will you agree that is pushing the ball forward and hopefully they'll be able to to fix that ux hurdle in the future like again we're talking about progress oh yes absolutely absolutely i think this is it's i think it's a key again going back to to wechat like you can basically create a very similar experience via even if you don't want to key send just via

the invoicing function of the lighting network within the apps and so that's like one thing people pay their bills uh they do e-commerce shopping they pay friends in vemo style over these apps like we're building that out on lightning now it's fucking insane yeah i've grown to love the invoicing which is weird because one of the things i liked about bitcoin was that it was push payments it's still push payment yeah it's still push but there's like that invoice step you know i don't know it's just something about like the scanning the qr code and having it auto-populate everything yeah it's dope and speak do we uh mention that the human rights foundation implemented a

pay join on their btc pay so the only reason i bring it up is because i did donate after Alex made that, I donated it to the Lightning Network. The way Zap makes it, the way it populated, going back and checking through it. That's exactly what you were describing. Yeah, exactly. That's what made that pop up in my mind. It's underrated that it's just in there.

It just says HRF, right? Is that what it shows there? Yeah. That's awesome. Something like that. Yeah, HRF added it. The Blockstream store added it. There's a couple others.

you know it'd be nice to see a lot of merchant adoption here um what i expect is uh to see obviously adoption first among like the ideological companies in the space um there there are going to be the first movies how huge is it though to see hrf like and i said we talked about this with alex when he's on the podcast i don't remember we talked about it while we're recording or off the record but me personally i have a lot of inherent skepticism towards alphabet soup organizations like the World Health Organization

CDC UNICEF the UN a lot of these what's the issue with UNICEF UNICEF's kind of whether they're like really corrupt right like the margin is ridiculous what actually gets to kids

yeah it's like yeah them like the Red Cross they like they like well the red cross is in the three market themselves like they say the agency yeah no it's not but it's a it falls ngo right is that what we call them but i guess so i don't know i don't know um i don't want to bring any heat towards the hrf for for shooting on every other alphabet suit but they back it up with action and good education like that covid 19 conference and and then alex is trying to get people to use bitcoin in the right

way yeah and you were scheduled to go um to go to sit before the covid happened to go to san francisco and walk some refugees through this stuff i mean you already did once but you're supposed to do it again well not refugees but uh i think they call them freedom fellows dissidents yeah activists freedom fellows dissidents sorry yeah um hrf is great it's good to see them add pay join support i look forward to seeing a lot of other people also add pay join support let's get pay join usage up that'd be great to see and we're gonna we're gonna make sure that happens at the tftc store um yeah we we ran through all of our topics the last one we have is macro oil yeah we

the may contract went negative today what the fuck is that about marty you want to provide some insight for us yes i do have some insight on this speaking with a co-worker today it was very intimate knowledge of the oil markets and honestly um i'm able to draw some of my experiences from when i worked in finance many moons ago yeah obviously everybody's talking about oil going negative but it was particularly the cme may contract um i believe it hit negative 60 at one point and so how does that happen how can oil prices be negative people are asking like what's going on so you have like a little people and i was trying to describe this to matt earlier um before we hit record it's like it's funny that people have the the mining

bitcoin mining death spiral meme is is pretty big uh do you like my photoshop sort of what's going on i did that was great some people thought it was real i didn't really that was that was exactly i thought it was real first and i was like there's no way cnbc is saying a death spiral but it is sort of a death spiral because the oil producers find themselves in a very weird spot where They're highly indebted. It's like they make up a large portion of the high-yield bad debt markets. And so as oil prices are dropping, which has been happening pretty consistently for the last couple months

as the economy shut down and demand has fallen precipitously, you have this weird sort of loop where as prices are falling to make sure that they're able to pay back the loans that they have. Oil producers are actually almost forced to increase production so they can sell more barrels to get more revenue to pay back their loans. And if you don't have demand following that up on the other side, what happens is you get a backup in storage. So that's what happened today.

It became pretty apparent to everybody in the market that all the storage uh for the oil and in the u.s shale industry particularly is full so you literally can't move any more oil into storage at this current point in time because obviously the economy shut down people aren't driving as much factories aren't running uh you basically just don't have economic activity people aren't shipping oil so far off land to then be consumed because they're shut down as well so you have this weird sort of doom loop where these oil producers need to try to keep their revenues at a point at which they can pay back their debt but that forces them to produce more and then as they're producing more storage is becoming full

and uh it's gotten to the point where it's it's it's full and you you can't put oil in storage if it's full so that's why i went negative today oil companies would be willing to pay somebody to take the oil from them and put it in storage because they want to keep their production up on the other side and it's a weird sort of doom loop and like you were saying before we had record the cme contract particularly dictates that they have to find storage in oklahoma which is another weird caveat and it's just a bad situation all around they have to take custody in oklahoma which is like how do you get there was it trains i'm guessing or trucks or something yeah trucks if there's no pipelines directly if it was bitcoin you could just send them a text

uh it wouldn't be that private you should at least send them a signal message or pgp or something um yeah but so it's this specific contract though right like other oil markets around the world other you know uh instruments financial instruments that you can trade oil they're reporting higher prices right like this is not like oil is not around the world at negative 40 or negative 30 or wherever it hit for next month it is so wti is like the most popular contract that's traded w tag crude um and so it's it's negative for next month because so what that basically says um what are we april 20th 420 happy 420 freaks didn't even realize um uh basically what it's saying is the the market the futures markets don't expect uh the economy to go back

to normal by next month so they expect that storage will still be full and because of that that's why you have the negative price so as you go further out on the futures curve into june july august september like the prices are going up because there's a an assumption that maybe the economy will get back to normal demand will will will show itself well like and so there's like air travels down like 95 domestically no one's driving exactly there's no it's none of it's being used demand has come to a fucking complete stop yeah and so the price is being i believe they're like 33 six months out 33 a barrel uh that's basically the future traders hoping that there will be enough demand to demand that price at that point in time but like you just alluded to

are people going to be safe or feel safe hopping on flights are our companies even gonna like keep their their uh their office space leases going are they gonna let their employees start working from home which would increase or excuse me decrease demand for for gas because people aren't driving to work as much like there's a lot of externalities and again talking about like things that you don't expect when you shut down the economy it's a very intricate uh complex organism and people aren't gonna like fly right away particularly no no they're not they're people gonna be scared of shit um but so can we just so wti crude which you're telling me is i know it's what they show on the top of trading view but you're telling me it's the it's the number one

oil product in the world by by trade volume right i'm pretty sure okay so but if it's not it's probably high up there right it'd be like number two definitely i'm i mean so it's what about brent it's wti brent is brent bigger yeah um no i think wti okay anyway by far it went down like what like 135 i thought you can't go down past 100 is is do we count that as 99 or do we count that as 140 the biggest print i saw was 320 percent see i didn't even know that was possible i thought you could only lose a hundred percent um that's pretty crazy and we can lose you can lose as much as you invest and then you have to pay people on the other end so you like you're basically just

adding adding to that loss of your initial investment so you're adding more money to get rid of it um than to sell it at even a loss you've got to you've got to add to your loss that's ridiculous by paying people to take it away do you yeah what's annoying here is proponents of the efficient market hypothesis will say that this was this was priced in no no this was the market pricing in this externality but i would say like if it's going to price it in all on one day does that that shouldn't count right like you can't you can't you can't count that in that's like ridiculous like it should have it should have known that storage was filled right like this is a known thing like people stop driving people stop flying

i completely agree like even if it didn't know that storage was filled at any particular point in time you should just be able to surmise if you're an efficient market that storage will become full at some point in the future if there's no demand to soak up the supply and you can just you can literally look at the supply numbers the supply prints every day and be like all right this isn't fucking acting right so so you have this like super liquid super developed market that's supposed to be super efficient um not effectively price this in uh and then you're going to tell me that this super immature asset that's brand new that's barely a decade old is is that every everything about it is priced in like the having is priced in is the most

ridiculous is the most ridiculous concept ever like that's ridiculous it's going through its adoption phase like barely anyone owns it maybe more people know about it now but like they don't really know about it they've heard of it they they know the name yeah i mean you know i've i've been clamoring that the having or bitcoin's not priced in it like it can't be priced in nobody everybody's like oh the market automatically prices this in but then what is the market the market of people who are buying bitcoin are people who know and are convinced that'll either appreciate it or that they could trade it and that's a very it's 130 billion dollars right now like it's not priced in because you're you're completely discounting the money outside of this bubble

that has not uh hit an education threshold or even dabbled in bitcoin like that is not priced in it's literally not priced if i was if i was a proponent of the emh i would tell you marty that we don't need all the participants to price in the knowledge we just need a select few with deep liquidity to to price it in so it doesn't really matter that other people don't know uh it just matters no and then value at risk like so efficient market hypothesis people don't understand the concept of bar then value at risk like even if somebody a huge institutional player had a lot of conviction in bitcoin they have fiduciary responsibilities to limit their value at risk so even if they believe that bitcoin is going to go to 10 million dollars

they are still constrained within the the mandate of their fund to put i mean you could be uh more risky than others if you want it to be but it's you're not gonna be able to market that well to investors yeah it's not man var isn't mandated it is we when you go pitch a fund you say hey our var is between per trade is at x amount and you should stay within certain var thresholds if you want to be able to market your fund and raise money so i think so even if a huge institutional player believed in bitcoin that it was going to get trillions of dollars market cap maybe their their their value at risk and their their risk uh sort of thresholds would would stop them from putting more money than maybe their chief investment officer would want to

yeah i mean i think uh my answer to that um would be tangential to yours like adjacent to it i think uh institutional money is too there's too much focus on it or like big player money fund money because at the end of the day the like the average joes that don't have that much money that are just dollar cost averaging over and over again i think those guys have way more upward pressure than people give them credit for like just like just regular people buying bitcoin so those people don't have they don't have deep pockets like they can't effectively price in their belief that the having should increase the price right like they're being held back by their financial situation uh and you can't price that in like we there's no that's the delta

i have been and still am one of those people like i still dca after every after every paycheck like if i could price in more of the bitcoin market cap i would but uh sort of hindered by my success in life at this given point in time and so are a bunch of other people and yeah it's asinine to think that those people heavy hodlers given the opportunity to throw a bunch more money wouldn't do it um yeah i mean there's asymmetric knowledge everywhere there's there's it's not priced i try fully it can't be priced once a week i try to help price in the having that's what i do yeah uh you got me on a i was already i was already screaming about mmt today big mmt debates recently i'm already riled up about that and you just have to throw

some efficient market hypothesis stuff in there mmt is dumb in my opinion it doesn't make any sense but it's gonna happen saying the market is centrally planned it is well apparently it already is happening yeah that's what that is what that's exactly what's happening yeah and that's the whole like so that's the whole argument i think if it's happening do you go along with it and try and profit off that or do you try to recognize the stupid will lead to uh bad decisions and a massive misallocation of capital that you try to stop Just because I will concede that it's happening and probably will continue to happen and actually become more predominant in the world of monetary policy in the mainstream. But that doesn't mean I can acknowledge that it's going to happen and still think it's stupid and probably not worthwhile to go down that path.

Sounds a lot like shit coins. Do you want to explain what MMT is? Modern Monetary Theory? Well, that's the thing. They make it so confusing that it's hard to fucking explain. You get MMT-splained pretty hard by people who have read thousands of pages of this. It's so intricate.

Just off the bat, from first principles, it's so complicated that it can't be distilled in a three-hour conversation. If you spoke to somebody for three hours, Just to try to get the basics of MMT, it would be so fucking... It is confusing. So I have a TLDR. Tell me if you think it's appropriate.

Okay, I'll give the TLDR. TLDR is, right now, QE is not doing a good enough job of allocating capital. It goes to the banks, it pushes financial assets up, and it drives a wedge in income inequality. modern monetary theorists believe that the state should come in and take it more control of how that money is allocated basically how qe money is allocated wouldn't be qe exactly but the gist is how money should be out it shouldn't just go to banks balance sheets and then they can do with it what they want obviously they aren't giving out loans people aren't taking out loans so there

needs to be more concerted effort to push that money to push the flows to certain areas of the economy and it is infinitely more stupid than qe if qe wasn't stupid enough mmt saying all right qe's not working we're not able to allocate obviously this capital's not being allocated efficiently so we're not the state the government step in and tell people how to allocate this this capital. Um, so it, you're, you're basically taking what QE is and you're turning that up to 11 and saying, Hey, the state is, uh, the state is going to step in and be way more efficient than QE is. And they're, they're going to be able to pick the winners and losers. And, uh, and then you get into the whole conversation of how they curve inflation. You can do that via fiscal policy

by lowering taxes and taxing more when inflation's getting out of hand so you pull more money out of the market and you bring inflation to a sort of bound that is controllable. But it's all, it's, again, we talk about this a lot on this podcast, you can't micromanage complex systems. We're finding that out right now with the oil markets. It's the other thing. The oil market's like one of the only non-manipulated bailed-out markets

in the world, and we're seeing what happens when that happens. like you get true pricing coming into play why is it not manipulated isn't it aren't there like tons of oil subsidies and whatnot well they're not getting bailed out there may be subsidies but i don't think but yeah i mean i think your last two sentences there were like the perfect tldr right like it's all about micromanaging everything and that you you can like over engineer the problem into a solution yes and that is exactly what i think is is what mmt is and over engineering a bunch of intellectuals thinking they can dictate the the most advantageous flow of capital and i just it heuristically that's it could pump the stock market right for like five

years or something yes yes and i don't deny that i'm just you know definitely it doesn't make it right though will it really help inequality i don't think so yeah i mean it definitely won't help inequality is that what you said at the end there yeah yeah it's not gonna do that but like if it's gonna happen you know you have to plan accordingly right so like you got to keep your mind you gotta be ready for it now i'm gonna be that i'm gonna i know i know but like if you look at the cares act look at everything that got through there pelosi schumer did you see all the colleges they didn't pass the act yeah all the colleges columbia mit 12 billion dollar endowment i know

yeah heart like all these colleges with crazy endowments which are supposed to be either funds to invest in reinvest in your school and your alumni association your alumni network or a fund for a rainy day and we have multi-deca-billion dollar endowments getting bailed out while people are working excuse me people aren't working uh they've been furloughed or completely uh fired at this point uh are sitting at home with their thumbs up their ass wondering where they're gonna get their next hundred bucks to buy food and fucking columbia is getting nine million dollars that they don't fucking need this the president of columbia makes four million dollars a year take a pay cut for one year bro like what the fuck or like just dip

into the endowment a little bit it's they didn't cut tuitions yeah no it's so ass backwards and that's why i'm torn on it you don't right because the if you're a smart investor you don't make decisions because of your your your moral compass but with mmt particularly like i think it's getting to a point where it's like hey i know historically from an investment perspective that's not wise like don't fight the fed don't do any of the shit but for me it's like i'm throwing my hand like how more blatantly crazy could you get like more people than an mmt particularly they're basically getting into an exotic form of price fixing so here's one of like the go-to papers on modern monetary theory written by Fulweiler, Gray, and Tankas. Here's one excerpt that Dave Collum shared

in his end of year review last year. We need alternative tools in place to manage the power of big business and ensure their pricing policies are consistent with public purpose. Because of the pricing power of big companies, whichever administrative agency or agencies is responsible for managing aggregate demand should not be responsible for overall inflation on its own. It should either share joint responsibility for keeping inflation on target with other agencies responsible for regulating business pricing power, or new indices should be constructed that exclude concentrated markets where prices are clearly acyclical. So you have some weird, that paragraph basically describes some weird exotic form of price fixing that has historically not worked out. Number one, are the bureaucrats that are going to decide which big businesses or industries are mispricing goods

and how are they going to dictate what is the accurate price of the goods that those industries are pricing? Then you get into a whole terrible, slippery slope. Ridiculous. but i mean price fixing is ridiculous i didn't realize that was a possibility i don't think that's a possibility do you really think that's a possibility well that's the thing that's why i said exotic form of price fixing they're not going to say hey here's the price of this you're going

to mandate policy that pushes prices in a certain direction around behind the scenes to like make the prices that yes they're going to say hey we think this is mispriced so we're going to dictate policy in this this way so that prices hopefully move in this direction which we think is more fair and that's like who is the we who is the we making these decisions the same people who are giving columbia nine million dollars who wouldn't pass the cares act until the kennedy foundation got 25 million dollars like the human error and human greed comes into play like the people making these decisions have incentives to help certain people that finance their campaigns and stuff like that to think that mmt would be bereft of the corruption that exists in our political system is dumb

yeah i mean i just want to say one thing that you know i think these are all loans right that may be forgiven um and so the way they constructed the whole system the way the federal government released the whole system is they released it in this gameable way right where you have a limited amount of funds to be lent out that the banks are going to take on a portion of that risk of the funds that are being lent out um so the banks wanted to like they would love to just you know out of all the people to lend to, you might as well lend to Columbia with a, however billion endowment they have,

10 billion endowment. Right. So like the incentives and like, of course, if you're Columbia, you're going to go for it. Right. If it's offered to you a super low interest loan,

you're going to take it. Well, we saw that with, we saw that with Shake Shack too. Danny Meyer, Shake Shack took the, took the loan. 10 million.

Like they got political pressure. Yeah. It took 10 million. then they got pressure from the public like what the fuck do you need 10 million for shake shack like this is supposed to be for small medium-sized businesses and ruth chris and they gave it chris got 25 million what and they fired like all their employees but they kept all their management like upper management um i'm just saying like if you have broken incentives like they're gonna take get taken advantage of and i i don't think that when it was implemented they cared that they

knew exactly who was going to take advantage of it well and that's exactly my point why is this going to be under any different under a modern monetary theory regime like it's if anything it's only going to get worse the incentives get skewed even more yeah but stocks might pump and bitcoin they'll definitely pump all bitcoin can pump in other ways though it doesn't need mmt to it doesn't need mmt to pump yeah i mean i think it would pump in in bad and good situations but i'm just infinitely bullish in my bitcoin zen now so don't listen to me i mean i've been in my bitcoin zen for quite some time mmt is like because it's gonna happen that's something that makes me mad and you know what

people are going to profit off of it it's going to make markets scream for a little bit maybe it doesn't make it right at the end of the day oh i mean who knows we should have a bitcoin standard right a sat standard i could be speaking out of my ass hey maybe mmt is actually good for the world and will help bring wage inflation to the point at which uh the purchasing power the common man has has come in line with his productive capital. I'm not holding my breath now. How noble of you.

What, I should be holding my breath? No, I just, that you said that MMT could work. I mean, I agree with you. I don't think it could work, so, but we'll see. They're definitely going to try it. They already are trying it. MMT is arguably already here, so. It's all too complicated.

I mean, yeah, with the, exactly like how can you not like this oil thing this oil thing like there's going to be a shit ton of ripple effects here right like there's no way this is not all interconnected like they can't handle negative prices but what the fuck yeah i mean yeah it's great to start coming out talking about how we're going to use gas product byproducts from oil extraction to mine bitcoin no i mean as a great american mining we're like covering this we're covering this we're uh assessing the situation very closely luckily where we are right now is safe for the time being but yeah i mean this could affect us this is a variable is it in consideration when you're doing

um gas byproduct mining but i mean i think it's gonna affect like all these other industries and stuff that people aren't really thinking about i mean we we always see like the break-even price and they have the charts of the different countries with the different break-even prices. If I recall, none of them were at negative 30. Well, I think you had to take into consideration the average of the whole curve. Negative 30 is just a May contract.

It could go up further. But that's not to say that moving forward as time passes that other months won't go negative as well depending on uh whether or not we get back to work and people are consuming that oil you need the demand to follow up with like presumably and that's simply there's guys building like huge ass tanks right now right like they they're off to the races but like trying to to get it you know at the cheap price i mean there's a huge arb like if you're able to get it at negative forty dollars barrel which basically you get paid to take it and you're able to hold it and make sure the quality

of the gas doesn't depreciate over a time frame that allows you to then sell it at a positive price like that's a big that's a big profit right there um but whether or not that's possible whether or not uh our officials let that happen by letting people go back to work is uh yet to be seen yep you know we'll see what happens there i i it was crazy it was crazy it was a crazy day watching it i had no idea i had no idea prices could even go negative so that was a learning experience for me today it makes sense it makes complete sense and they and the cme announced it like right before they went negative like hey just so you know this shit could go negative and people are like, what?

No, I wouldn't actually be surprised, again, if today was a Lehman moment where you have some unintended ripple, not even unintended, it's like unforeseen ripple effects that come from this. Again, the oil industry makes up a good portion of the high-yield debt market. And so if you have a cascading effect

in them defaulting on their loans and you have a couple of banks that have pretty fickle loan books and that starts to bleed into other stuff that they have on their books. Who knows? You could see a cascading effect there. I'm not going to claim that's going to happen, but it wouldn't surprise me if something like that happens. Some unforeseen externalities coming up.

I mean, unprecedented day today. Like we're such a double-edged sword being alive in 2020. it's like one of the worst years to be alive but also one of the best from like an experience level like how much worse could could we go through and how much stronger will this make us in the long run just individuals living through this at this particular age i mean i feel like it could be a lot worse um so you know maybe we lucked out here fingers crossed we'll see how that works out I mean, hopefully it's like a warning lesson, you know. How bad do you think you can get?

What's going through Matt O'Dell's mind right now? Like, what's the worst case scenario? Well, I mean, the virus could have been... People in the streets stabbing each other? The virus could have been more fucked. And yeah, just like the lack of general civil unrest so far. Well, I think the powers that be want you to believe that people will go crazy and start killing each other and like purging each other at a certain

point which some people may but i do believe truly deep down in my heart that most people are good people and they would be more willing to help their fellow man i don't know and stab him in the eye i mean i believe that too for the most part but like still like cities and stuff shit breaks down real quick i'm uh yeah i i i think you know cautiously optimistic that that it does that the virus doesn't fuck us up that much uh but this the shutdown like i've been bearish i've been bearish for fucking forever right so if if i've been bearish on like equities stock market and whatnot just our general economy just seemed like a house of cards so now obviously i'm even more bearish but i'm trying to check my biases so that's that's where we are

today well there's a complete dislocation in the pricing mechanism of the stock markets in reality it does not make any fucking sense that the stock market is where it is it is a completely manipulated market and if anything were to drive that home it's the last month and a half you literally have we'll see the print on thursday definitely more than 20 upwards of 25 million americans unemployed right now yet stocks are fucking skyrocketing i'm actually gonna drop my episode with ben hunt tomorrow and we talk about this like he's not so convinced he's not so convinced that we're gonna see the v-shaped recovery that some people are like it's it's just gonna be too glaringly obvious like you have you have what is 20 of the workforce 25 of the

workforce out of work and you're like valuations are going up it doesn't make any fucking sense hey it's good it's good for the people yeah it's working that wage inflation is gonna come right away for this 25 million unemployed nah it's fucked up now you got me on MMT again it doesn't make any fucking sense but they're

gonna try and force it down your throats you can micromanage that shit though the the stock market is just it's it doesn't it doesn't really matter right it's just it just goes it just money gets printed it's fugazi it's

fugazi but like where else you put your money the money's not printed dude the money's not printed dude it's just a you're just you're just switching reserves with the banks you're not really printing money that's the other argument i hate is they're like oh you're not actually printing money that Money never makes its way to the economy via loans. But the executives that benefit from QE in the form of asset price inflation in the stock market and real estate, they can then go sell those stocks to that real estate

and take that cash out that way. It's just a roundabout way to say that no inflation exists. And I guess their counterargument would be if they were all to do that at the same time, you'd have asset valuations crash. but they don't do it all at the same time. I mean, I think for that model to be fair,

like the populace would have to own a portion of the total assets, right? But you don't see that distribution. Obviously, people on the lower end of the income scale don't own any assets, so they don't see any of the rise in that. They just see declining purchasing power, and they just get wrecked. It's the hidden tax. Yeah. But it's our way out, man.

Let's just do it. We're just going to do it better. We're going to do it by allocating that new money better. But anyway, Bitcoin held up well. I might be jinxing it by the time this drops. All right, yeah. We didn't get to Clark Moody's dashboard. Let's check it.

Yeah, let's check it and wrap this baby up. We're at $6,866 right now. A little lower than we were this morning. Tor node's still at 42.2% of lightning network capacity. Next difficulty adjustment is scheduled to be tomorrow. 49 blocks from now, actually. Excuse me. Last Thursday, it was 11% upward difficulty adjustment.

Now it's 8.5%. Blocks are coming in at 9 minutes and 13 seconds. on Thursday it was 901 so it seems like we've had hash rate drop off the network and the halving is only 3,073 blocks away estimated to be on May 11th now

I believe that's a Sunday we should see hash rate go up with oil oil falling why not energy prices in general would go down no yeah I mean but you'd have to have your miners deployed right next to the oil ready to turn on that's like i mean that hasn't been well i mean like in like over the next couple of months like we should get a hash rate bonus

from it you don't think so no no no if anything i mean what we're doing depends on oil production and luckily where we are it is profitable at very low prices to to drill the oil so we get the byproducts still but there are other like in canada it's very negative up there so if you have individual miners using gas byproduct from oil drilling to mine bitcoin and they're shutting down all their capacity it actually would reduce your hash rate unless you could quickly transition to consuming oil over the gas which with the way the generators are set up you don't think probably you don't think grid prices go down with oil like do does grid electricity no what what grids run on i don't know just because it's like an energy

does energy go down together or is it it's disjointed i hope that's not a stupid question i asked what grids i feel like most of the grades are on natural gas or damn I just figured it was like energy like there was some correlation there

it depends what the source is like it Yeah, I can't speak with Stardew on that. I'm not going to try to. That's something I should know, though. Not just from Great American Mining, but from my days in the commodities markets. I'm pretty sure natural gas is the biggest resource used on the grid,

and that's because it's so abundant and so cheap. So I mean, natural gas is cheap already. It can't get much cheaper. Fair enough. so no no hash rate bump maybe i mean yeah if you want like hash rate bump like talk about externalities if you had like companies completely shutting down with less stress on the grid so you have less less uh resources vying for the same energy source

yeah maybe who knows but it's gotta fall it's gotta fall oh well then you have people at home all day and they're using their acs and their their heaters so if they're not at work trying to heat their houses until they don't have enough money to pay for that i'm thinking out loud now i don't know i don't know well marty this is a banger of an episode but i have to i have to get to dinner so i'm gonna go eat that sausage i have to go make the sausage so oh you're making the sausage that's why i kind of deserve the note because i didn't really tell them what was happening but but yeah i have to go make the sausages tell your family i said hello uh and that i'm sorry that i delayed their sausage consumption i love you freaks i love you marty

stay humble stack sets peace and love freaks