TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2018.09.03

Episode Date: September 6, 2018

In this edition of Rabbit Hole Recap Matt + Marty discuss: Emerging Market currency crises Iran give Bitcoin mining the go-ahead Ethereum FOMC meeting Infura centralization ShapeShift Casa's new plug and play all-in-one Bitcoin full node + Lightning node Discussions of a new Bitcoin testnet Links: https://twitter.com/WallSt_Dropout/status/1037004709419278336 https://twitter.com/matt_odell/status/1003680779535290369?s=19 https://twitter.com/matt_odell/status/1003680779535290369?s=19 https://mailchi.mp/08ea1d23655e/martys-bent-september-5th-2018-issue-311 https://info.shapeshift.io/blog/2018/09/04/introducing-shapeshift-membership/ https://twitter.com/ConsenSys/status/1037339692981727233 https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2018/09/04/

welcome guys to another episode of rabbit hole recap i'm matt odell i'm here with marty bent sup freaks today's september 5th 2018 and the official bitcoin price is six thousand nine hundred one dollars and 22 cents on bitstamp right now it's about uh it's about seven o'clock here on the east coast indeed it is today uh we'll be talking about emerging market currencies and They've been having a lot of issues lately. Talked about Iran mining, mining in Iran. The recent Ethereum meeting. The FOMC, the Ethereum FOMC meeting.

We'll hop into that. Whether Bitcoin is fair money or whether it's not. Got some thoughts on that. It is. Shapeshift has recently added KYC, or they're about to. Very interesting story. We got Casa, Casa Hodel. They've come up with a lightning node in a box.

I've been talking about plug and play for a while. Excited to talk about this. And then we have the most recent Bitcoin Optech newsletter where they talk about the test net being reset. Potentially. Conversations have started. There you go. So let's jump into it. I wanted to start. I picked this topic to start. In particular, emerging market currencies extremely volatile right now. Shout out to WallStreetGerop out on Twitter posted a chart. developing nation currencies have seen the most volatility versus g7 currencies since 2009

and if you look at the chart it looks like things are definitely getting a little shaky in the traditional markets especially in emerging market currencies obviously we have turkey iran venezuela argentina exactly who else can be thrown into this mix right now i feel like there's a few others well russia had the issues a couple years ago a year ago something like that yeah i don't know if they're an emergency market um yeah but things are uh things are getting i think the uh the tinder is getting very dry it's getting dicey and it's getting hot out um but yeah this all bodes i mean i don't know if this bodes well for bitcoin but uh it is definitely something to pay attention to in the traditional markets i would say um is is the volatility against the g7

currencies and it's picking up pretty precipitously right now and one of those emerging market currencies that is probably causing some of the volatility in that index is iran some interesting news out of iran this week matt yeah so they've uh they've announced that i think they're basically going to start government sanctioned mining operations is what it appears to be the case here's what the uh the tweet says from hadanem at one block chain it doesn't really tell us much Iranian government has accepted Bitcoin mining as an industry PS electricity cost for mining one Bitcoin

in Iran is less than $200 this is going to be phenomenal but supposedly so the release was in Farsi so like I don't understand that but some you can't read Farsi I can read it but I can't

understand it by hearing it if it was a press release I would have been able to understand it but um some of the iranians i follow on twitter are they're basically saying that it they're basic they're the iranian government is saying that they're going to mine bitcoin um i'd be surprised if this is you know them first starting you know because why are you going to tell people if you're going to start mining it here's something uh a redditor adun slash d uh an update from iran on the ground apparently the central bank is moving into legalizing crypto

trading and establishing guidelines until uh towards the end of september uh so towards the end of this this month uh and this is uh because local fiat currency is falling rapidly so holy shit we've got iran turning to bitcoin as their currency is going well it makes sense for all these all these countries that have sanctioned oil large large energy resources that are sanctioned that they can't offload otherwise i make sense for them to mine bitcoin because they can basically turn they can turn that sanctioned energy into into money yeah and then they could spend it without i mean we talked about this about venezuela a couple weeks ago in the first episode and now that's happening with iran it's is this underscored is there a conspiracy to keep this

news underground i i feel like it's going to be the opposite i'm surprised we haven't started getting the like the next round the next one of the next rounds of fud narratives is going to be Venezuela, Iran, Russia, North Korea is using it to get around sanctions. Yeah, speaking of which, we're thinking about... Which they are, but... And we're thinking about introducing a new segment, Freaks, potential future FUD lines

that could affect Bitcoin and the social tax. Try and preempt the FUD. Exactly. We're going to try and preempt the FUD as best we can. We've got a topic on it tonight, but yes. Yeah, this wasn't actually supposed to be the topic. this wasn't supposed to be it but that's true though it is a good example they're definitely that's such an easy narrative for them to play yeah it will be played especially if if then you

link you know some type of terrorist attack and you say the iranians funded it and they used their bitcoin that they had in the mining operation to fund it it's perfect yeah and this is why i really push or try to tell people not to push the bitcoin or crypto community meme because what you have to realize that this if this stuff becomes ubiquitous there's going to be multiple competing and confrontational communities using bitcoin as a tool bitcoin is apolitical it's permissionless anyone can plug in a miner and just start you know bringing in that money so it's we by its very nature that's the value prop and that's why countries like iran or venezuela can No, but I think that's also why we need to combat this community meme, because it makes an easier argument for the governments that want to ban Bitcoin because of the Iran's and North Korea's of the world saying, hey, Bitcoin's a community.

You're letting North Korea and Russia into your so-called community. Right, exactly. They're not part of our community. Yeah. They're helping secure the network. But we don't get to give them permission or take it away. We just don't. That's not in our power.

No, unfortunately. fortunately or unfortunately probably most likely fortunately um just for the better good it's definitely positive eva at the end of the day i mean they're horrible government yes let's just be clear i mean bitcoin bitcoin is positive right absolutely i mean i mean for every for every venezuelan government mining operation you know you have a slush or something for 20s you have like anonymous people that are are you know just trying to make a living and they and their government, you know, maybe doesn't allow it and they have a small mining operation

that is relatively anonymous, that's hard to track. It's the easiest way. If you want Bitcoin, that is, if you're in a country that has Bitcoin banned, a lot of times the easiest way is to mine the Bitcoin because it's way easier to do that anonymously. Well, actually, it's a good time to plug HoneyMiner because if you're in one of these countries

and you don't have access to ASIC or an ASIC farm, which you probably need to to make considerable dent in bitcoin mining if you have gpu or cpu equipment you could uh download honey miner and start mining uh and liquidating shit coins into bitcoin immediately yeah so one of the reasons why you're getting this pod later than than you have in the past is because marty had uh coin easy on yesterday who's what does he do for your honey miner uh i think he was their first hire i think he's like like a marketing marketing element yeah growth instead of growth or something basically honey miner is an app that you run on your computer and it mines the most profitable altcoin and then it auto dumps it for bitcoin

and gives you bitcoin so you have like a small accumulation of bitcoin and then at scale it could it could lower altcoin prices and increase bitcoin price because you're basically selling you're basically mining the altcoin selling it on the market and then getting and buying bitcoin with it um it probably won't be profitable for a lot of people but it's kind of cool to you know just get get that accumulation that's what quinn easy was telling me is that they have people uh one dude in particular in nairobi who who set himself up and there might be a couple dollars a week or whatever but it's material absolutely and he said uh he came on dropped some stats about honey miners users and apparently 30 are from emerging markets which is pretty cool it's it is

if you have a computer already with spare cycles and you have some cheap cheap electricity it's the easiest way to get bitcoin uh you don't have to give them kyc information they don't take any personal information if bitcoin's banned in your country it's it's you'll probably be able to use it with just a vpn pretty cool pretty cool definitely pretty cool uh let's get on to the next topic uh these countries are turning to bitcoin because they fucked up their money either through a crisis of confidence in the government uh governing over the citizens or they messed up their monetary policy uh in the cryptocurrency space last week a couple days after our last episode uh ethereum had an fomc meeting and uh and changed their monetary policy so the ethereum

block reward is going to be reduced uh from three to two ether per block in the constantinople hard fork matt what are your thoughts i keep i keep going back to that pod you had with joe uh well he put it really succinctly that joe weisenthal with weisenthal check it out um that fiat is ultimately trust in institution that issues the fiat and with bitcoin you don't need that trust because it's math you know there's 21 million bitcoin you know what the supply schedule is you know how many are going to be produced so so you don't have to trust individuals or an institution or whatever ethereum decided that wasn't revolutionary enough and they have a group a small group of people that are deciding key things like supply rate and so ultimately

ethereum's value is derived from the trust of that small group of people right it's it's they're emulating the current fiat system with a blockchain yeah yeah and i've said this before just like on tales from the crypt in general but it ethereum to me feels like the the central banking and system of conspicuous consumption that we're looking to get away from with bitcoin i just think they totally missed a mark uh for what we're trying to do from a monetary perspective so basically what they agreed to is what is it's a three right now every ethereum block mind has a reward of of three eth three ether and there's a block and now every 15 seconds they they decided that they're going to

lower it to two eth starting in september i think um and so so basically they're taking money from miners and they're preventing current holders from getting diluted how do you think this affects miners do you think they leave well it hurts them do you think they leave it cuts their reward by 33 imagine if you put all this money in a mining op that's helping to secure the network and they just they just unilaterally decided that they're gonna to slash to slash those funds and now ethereum ethereum community members will tell you that uh that it was a group decision that there's consensus reached yada yada yada ethereum ownership is is is very centralized there's certain actors that have a lot of control over the system and they're going to make sure that

even if ideally in their situation there's they're making this decisions behind the scenes but when you have the actual meeting it appears that's not the case you know vitalik wasn't in the meeting i'm pretty sure lubin wasn't in the meeting like these are guys that are controlling everything you know they're they're handling the the changes behind the scenes they're pushing it in certain ways like there's no way there's no way that you have a mining reward reduction from three to two without lubin and vitalik it's so arbitrary too like why just one well so so the price is dropping right as well so it's a perfect time they're trying to shore up the markets a little bit try and get some faith in the markets you know don't sell the supply is going to be

less than you thought it was yesterday uh and they did this i think was it late 2015 that the difficulty bomb was introduced or early i think it was introduced right off the bat to i mean the whole so for you freaks that don't know what the difficulty bomb in ethereum it is ethereum's had a plan to transition the proof of stake since its inception um and the way to do this to incentivize them to do it they were going to create what's called a difficult or they there's technically a difficulty bomb in the code that makes it so it's almost impossible to mine well that already brought it down to three two yeah like it substantially reduced the supply curve uh and it it them doing that coincided with the rise in price as well you know so cause a you know

correlation doesn't mean causation but it was it's the same idea the idea is you lower the supply rate more than was expected during the ico or more than was expected than yesterday and and hopefully that well it definitely stops you from getting diluted if you're already a holder and it increases the prices though but how can you say that when vitalix uh famously been quoted as saying that the ethereum supply will never go over 100 million uh and it's what like 111 million right now exactly but isn't it 101 uh i think it's more than that debatable i don't know i don't know for a fact um should i check is that you this is not me i'm not ringing i think it's uh music outside or something like that yeah here uh we got we got the the office a theme song playing

somewhere in here um but i'm back to ethereum like changing again this is just we've shit on this project enough on this podcast in particular but again it's just a continuously moving gold post and never really achieving what they set out yeah it's 101 million f the eth people hate when you say eth well you know i've read it online for the longest time and i thought it was like eth like meth you know um 72 million eth were in the pre-mine well the ico an ico is just a pre-mine where you sell your bags before the network launches that's it's like the founder gets to unload their pre-mine before it happens so they have 72 million eth was sold in the ico or held by the founders and whatnot and right now there's 101 million eth in circulation so

basically 72 percent of eth in circulation was sold or kept during that ico genesis block period um and that's that seems pretty ridiculous it's ripple-esque yeah to an extent and then if you look at like the the uh the curve chart of the distribution of the ico it looks very weird it looks very like manipulated gamed a little bit by a couple actors but it's like they were trying to make it seem more uh attract or there was more hype around it than there actually was yeah i i narrowed it down to basically we have four guys that control the destiny of ethereum you have lubin you have vitalik you have anthony diorio and you have uh coinbase you have brian armstrong those four guys brian armstrong is a little bit less but he's he's moving on up with uh coinbase's

recent acquisitions uh that are that are very ethereum focused and those four guys really you're not making any of these changes without their either tacit or implicit approval I don't know if I would even pigeonhole it that way. We'll come back with the argument, these four people do not control it, which I agree with you to an extent. It's more like a veto, is what I would say. Yeah, but I don't even think we have to lean on that argument

to discredit what they're doing. I mean, so they, not even a week after the announcement that they're lowering the supply schedule, Consensus tweeted this out today This is ridiculous We didn't even say we were going to talk about this But I had to bring it up Like Infura, the company backed by Joe Lubin

Who probably exerts the most power Over Ethereum And a lot of people Since they can't download their own full nodes anymore Are depending on Infura To basically run nodes for them They run the majority of Ethereum nodes Unironically

Consensus tweets out today infura.io went from 20 million requests a day at the beginning of 2010 to over 10 billion requests today uh so they're they're they're basically hyping this fact up that that their end users have to use a third party service and that it's doing more requests than google does a day right that's what brendan said yeah so it's even questionable if they're they're servicing that many requests but the fact that so many people have to depend on your infura like we can use that is an argument too is it it was google does four and a half billion searches a day yes the number one website on the planet and infero says that they're doing 10 billion requests

today today so i guess per day right but today maybe today's a higher amount because it was dumping yeah but again like like it totally invalidates like an argument for decentralization like this is like completely right centralized so basically well we're actually going to skip an order right now and go to shapeshift why is this why we skip because infura infura infura infura is going to get the shapeshift experience soon is what i think is going to happen okay so let's explain what's happening so shapeshift is founded when was it founded 2014 2015 yeah by eric vorhees it was it was founded in the last uh like bitcoin altcoin apocalypse and it was it was actually like really revolutionary i would say when it came out basically it allowed you

without an account to seamlessly switch between bitcoin and a maraud of altcoins and between the altcoins directly so like a lot of times like altcoins only have a pair with bitcoin you have the sell for bitcoin and then get the alt it was like a first iteration of an atomic swap if you will well it was a it was a trusted one yeah basically you had the centralized actor which was shapeshift and they would be like the little broker in between the transaction but you would have you could switch between any any coin or they had some some tokens on there too and any other coin that they supported any two coins and you didn't have to have any kyc or account or anything it wasn't it went even further than something like binance which doesn't have kyc because

binance requires an account you have to register an account this was just you initiate initialize the transaction yeah exactly you just convert right over seamlessly and they they implemented in a variety of wallets multi-coin wallets so you can just trade between coins in your wallet yeah and it's important to uh to bring up the founder of this company eric vorhees i believe who has been the OG Bitcoiner. Yeah, exactly. Was really leading the cause in the beginning with Roger Ver. Extremely anti-state, very outspoken.

Yeah, so it's funny to see what happens. I think he lives in Panama intentionally. That's an extraditionalist country. Yeah, so the government's... He's implementing KYC now. He's defined as a bad actor by the government and they're coming after Shapeshift. That was in 2014 that they defined him as a bad actor.

But still, it's still in government records. Right, exactly. forcing him to implement kyc aml he basically has bent the knee because if not apparently he'd be going to prison yeah the accountless exchange is now going to have accounts and not only is it going to have accounts it's also going to have kyc um and on on top of all that to implement his kyc he's he released uh i'm a utility token i guess uh called the fox coin yeah the fox token so i you know if you're gonna implement kyc like just do it i don't know why you need another token involved uh why getting the securities from you're already getting be funny if after all this they

hit them with the securities violation instead but uh i would just not trust shapeshift i think it seems like sketchy stuff is happening there um he he the way he was tweeting was just you know my he's very cryptic yeah he said my my tweets are being watched everything i say is being watched for a while i have actually told people not to use shapeshift uh specifically because they they weren't it almost seemed like their business practice the way they were handling the transactions where they would instantly send out exact amounts without any kind of delay or anything was designed so that the authorities without shapeshift having to actively give them the information the authorities could track you cross chain and i remember i think a couple months

ago chain analysis released a product that allowed you to track bitcoin to monero transactions and monero to bitcoin transactions that go through shapeshift uh and that's exactly why it's because they they set it up so it's predictable the way their transactions go so it's like easy to easy to track so i was suspicious then now i'm actually less suspicious of that first thing because they're implement you would think if he was like playing ball they wouldn't have pushed the kyc so i mean but regardless don't use shapeshift he got he got the you know the us gov came down on him hard when you're a person you can get threatened with jail time and seizures super easy yeah no that's uh boy austin storms all storms on twitter he made a good point like what's happening there

where he's in shape shift right now is why satoshi left yeah this is why decentralization matters you know this is why you need your network to be distributed you know so we were talking about the reason i brought brought shape shift in here out of order a little bit is because infura infura runs the majority of ethereum nodes they're based in brooklyn or consensus is based in brooklyn i'm not sure where infura is i think infura might be based in manhattan consensus is owned by lubin and his partners then you have consensus owns infura infura runs the majority of nodes so all you need is the u.s government to come in to lubin and consensus or just go into infura or whatever and tell them you know kyc needs to be on ethereum and all of a sudden you know the majority of the

nodes of your network are either going down or requiring some like obscure i don't even know how they would do it kyc type type deal you know maybe they could bring in vinnie's scam token but they'd figure it out they'd either figure out some kind of kyc way to comply or they'd have to shut down and and if they do comply with the kyc type of situation i think it just erodes the whole value prop uh you might as well you know use td ameritrade or robin hood and use cash app or venmo certainly more efficient yeah if you have to if you have if you have to comply with the kyc anyway you might as well just use these these fully regulated offerings that offer you dirt cheap prices that you don't have to pay blockchain fees for

you know so this is exactly why decentralization is important this is exactly why having everything open source not having central actors you know being robust and being being prepared for this kind of eventuality when they when they start to fight back is you need to be ready for it otherwise you're just gonna you're gonna get crushed yeah um it'll be interesting to see if anything comes of it like they could skirt by who knows who infura infura and ethereum in general i think it's just like do you think they'll it's a well so so do you think they'll be vulnerable via this attack vector until they transition to proof of stake well proof of stake makes them even more vulnerable because then they'll have joe lubin you know now securing 15 of the

network like that's ridiculous if if it i think it there unless something radically changes which it doesn't seem like it will ethereum has already followed this path that will lead them to increasing centralization and and they have they don't seem to have any qualms about that or trying to stop that from happening and then ultimately like they're they're gonna get i mean there's like so so the major ethereum stakeholders especially the ones based in the united states are lobbying the government to try and get like a free pass yeah short of that free pass they are fucked so they won't tell you this because if they get fucked then they lose everything anyway so they might as well just be like we're not going to get fucked yeah that's that's that's

the game plan they're in the hope and pray you know and we saw that with the whole earlier last year i remember they were worried about the sec decision right yeah they were like please spare us don't you know that was the plan the plan was earlier this year yeah but everything moves so fast right the plan was just spare us don't don't don't kill us how long will uh uncle sam show mercy that is the question well it appears that that he's he's getting impatient it does so shapeshift uh because they must have threatened him hard because he's always been very anti-state yeah i mean he has more to lose now because he's rich as fuck that's true um yeah so very interesting development uh therefore he's another tragic story would you say a tragedy he's definitely

no g he created satoshi dice yeah and sold it for a hundred thousand bitcoin i think right wow like he sold it for a lot i didn't know that and he sold it like right before on-chain fees got really high so like the business was completely impractical i think it was like eight million dollars at the time or something like that holy shit um and then he launched shapeshift like perfect timing he did he was a proponent of segway 2x yeah that's i think that's sort of where his which tragedy culminates marty and i were against and uh would have been a miserable failure if bitcoin went along that path luckily it didn't uh i think he said sorry afterwards he may have i'm not positive he definitely at least paid a bet where he lost

so he's got that some people uh are not willing to do that yeah and uh i out of all of them out of all the segway 2x supporters you know i think he meant well and you know let bygones be bygones i agree but uh again let's just rope this back to the importance of anonymity for the like yeah especially when you get rich you know that like so like how so i feel like everybody's making this mistake that well neither of us are anonymous no no but we're also not no we have we're not running money compared to them yeah that and we're not like running an exchange or anything like that oh yeah that too like building something that we're not doing anything i'm intentionally like i that's why i run a podcast yeah i know i would have to like if i did any of these ideas i would

not do them based in the united states like that would just be a horrible that's you don't want to you don't want to do that here yeah so essentially he's doing it in panama he's doing in panama and just and still because it's centralized they can get to you you know they can say we're going to seize your assets so it shows how hard it is for these systems and these apps built on top of these systems to succeed um so that's what i want to highlight here is like you should be decentralized at all costs uh it seems like ethereum and shapeshift are are not decentralized at all and well shapeshift is way more centralized than ethereum is yes certainly but ethereum is getting dangerously centralized something like bisque or something like that could not be taken now which

is probably similar similar to shapeshift and because that's a more decentralized uh yeah this is the decentralized exchanges are going to take over is what's going to happen and then you'll have the centralized ones you'll probably have like a bucket shop or two like binance that's like a nice centralized exchange that doesn't do kyc that just hourly breaks u.s law and lasts for like a year or two and then the new one pops up and the nice thing about this the centralized exchanges will always have the advantage over the dexes the decentralized exchanges because it's just a better experience you're able to have you know more liquidity and and the interaction for an actual trader you know margin and stuff like that is like a lot better uh you know one

of the issues is with a lot of these daps and stuff specifically that are built on top of ethereum is when you have known founders hedge funds and vcs and they're all trying to make an roi they start throwing out you know a lot of the main principles we use to to make these networks decentralized and robust so they they want the roi at all costs you know but then all of a sudden you end up in situations where it's closed source or you have automatic updates you have a central controller you have someone who can pull back the token funds at any time uh and all these things are methods to to control their roi to make sure that they still get their return on income on their investment you know they want they want that money and it makes them vulnerable and

And it's not appreciated enough. There's going to be some type of reckoning where a bunch of these people are made examples of. And I think they were thinking they were going to do that with Eric. And he played ball. Yeah. Yes, who's next in line? Exactly. They're just going to go down the list.

That's my guess. Hopefully they don't have any podcasters on that list. I mean, they shouldn't. We have literally just abided by all your laws. We've been told to stay away from this stuff. Exactly. If you're listening. No ICOs, no shenanigans.

No shenanigans. But on to the next topic. And the first of our recurring segment, future FUD lines that we're going to debunk. And this week, it's actually been becoming more popular recently, I guess. A lot of people are flailing out as altcoins are falling pretty heavily right now. There's a rectining going on. And a lot of people are pointing to Bitcoin and saying, hey, Bitcoin's initial distribution is unfair. How could anybody adopt a money?

So it's been like no coiners and altcoin or shit coiners have banded together recently talking about Bitcoin's initial distribution, how it's unfair, how early adopters should not be that rich just because they were mining Bitcoin before most people know what it is. I'll let you start with this one. I mean, at the same time, they're screaming that Bitcoin is going to go down to zero. and you'd be an idiot to hold bitcoin so it's like how you i don't know how you square that circle uh well first of all for anyone who is a multi-coiner or believes that there's going to be multiple chains or if an altcoin is going to take over like you just literally have zero leg to stand on like there's there's none of the other cryptocurrencies like there's not even close like How would you argue that like Ethereum has a better, more fair distribution than Bitcoin

when you have like a closed group of actors like sell the coin before the network even launched? Like, that's just ridiculous. And then, you know, you have to ask yourself, you know, what are you comparing Bitcoin to? And the thing is, you know, it's a hard truth. Life isn't fair, you know, and we have immense inequality. It's not a hard truth. It's the way the universe works.

You know, it's it's it's very hard for a lot of people to just it's just not fair, you know, and there's tons of inequality around the world. There's people living with no money, you know, scraping by and Bitcoin isn't going to magically solve that. bitcoin just gives you the guarantee that you have fair money that anyone who has bitcoin provided work for that bitcoin at the fair market value that was achieved on a free market of various exchanges around the world and various miners computers around the world You either put in your work through mining, which the reward is dynamically changing every two weeks based on how many miners there are, or you're putting in your work by going to work and getting paid in your fiat and then buying Bitcoin with it at what the price is. So you have a very fair ledger that is that is literally just keeping track of people's stored work and and everyone can participate. There's no one is is barred from participating.

You know, if your government bans you from participating, you can still find a way around it. And, you know, that's not Bitcoin's fault anyway. You know, that's the U.S. dollar isn't fair. You know, gold wasn't fair. well then just like let's just bring it back to the genesis block and how satoshi introduces the world number one he introduced it october 31st 2008 so two two months and two days before he launched bitcoin and then two he introduced it to probably the only people on earth who would know how to run it and participate in the network uh being that group being the cypherpunk so he

put it on the cypherpunk mailing list so he tried to make it as fair as possible and still most of them didn't run it yeah but we know for a fact that hal finney was running it within seven days of the network being live he tweeted out running bitcoin horrible opsec terrible it was really bad i don't think he was worried about at that point in his life come on hal but uh but even so like yes you can be mad that a lot of early adopters accumulate a lot of bitcoin but there was an information asymmetry there that they took advantage of and that's how markets work and it was risky it was worth nothing you put in the risk there was multiple risks there was social risk like telling anybody you were into bitcoin people thought you were crazy there were temporal

risk you're spending your time on this so there's an opportunity cost of not making your money somewhere else and then there's like what's the other one i wrote about today the thing is is you have we're surrounded and financial risk they had to pay money to get this you found it they had to get this money they had to pay money to get the hardware to run this so they took risk well in the beginning they were running it on just like still somebody bought a laptop dedicated to bitcoin that was a no absolutely yeah so like the flood that there was not a fair distribution is some of the most laughable shit but the thing is you're never it's like the enemy of perfect is but the enemy of good is perfect right is you're never gonna have a more fair

launch the majority of the systems in our world are way less fair than bitcoin bitcoin can't be corrupted it can't be manipulated by those who are in power you know so every it's it's bitcoin doesn't exist in this vacuum you know and so so if you want to say if you want to tell me that bitcoin isn't fair i would say to you what would be a more fair system right and there's the word i propose it doesn't exist it literally doesn't exist there's like all these scenarios with airdrops to the world and stuff like that i put quotations you can't see my quotations it's all bullshit because it requires a trusted third party and then once you require a trusted third party to you know id people distribute it figure out how you're going to handle it

you have privacy issues you have issues with that third party taking more coins for themselves not distributing coins to other people it's just you know you have seed investors that keep private that's ridiculous you know and and part of that reason is is what you talk about a lot marty is is is that immaculate conception right the bitcoin immaculate conceptions no one was paying attention when satoshi released it satoshi mined presumably about a million bitcoin that he's never moved you know rather philanthropically of himself uh and and and so you have this situation where that can never be repeated we're all watching now you know how do you how do you have a situation where it doesn't get corrupted there's so many eyes on it right now like the fact that it was

born in some mystique like actually gives it more credibility i would say oh yeah i think that's there was less eyes to manipulate it at the beginning it's the main argument i think in my mind it's like one of the main arguments against uh any kind of altcoin flippening scenario is that you just can't repeat it you can't repeat that you know bitcoin doesn't exist in a vacuum but it was kind of born in one very authentic right and i was wow that was poetic yeah that was pretty good i just came up with that i like that one maybe that will be the tag including tomorrow's bent um yeah but hey be prepared this is going to be one of the biggest flood lines in the future uh especially as bitcoin continues to be successful and continues to mine blocks

and people with cognitive dissonance whether no coiners or all coiners are going to start screaming about this distribution so let's get ahead of it freaks make sure you educate people out there uh and and spread the message i don't think it really matters why not because bitcoin doesn't give a shit that's true i mean it's just if you don't want to buy in like but if we can save headaches i'm all to save headaches for people i mean yeah i mean absolutely like i think people should buy it sooner rather than later i mean it's ridiculous to say you're complaining about the fairness of bitcoin when 99 of people haven't bought any or participated at all so if you got in right now you'd still be earlier than the rest of the world in in this so i i don't

it's just nothing you know to buy i would i you either complain or you buy bitcoin but either way bitcoin doesn't give a shit so you can either join the movement or you can just wait wait till till you end up joining the movement later uh what a crazy and the us dollar is like the most unfair thing ever like it's ridiculous i talked about on pomp's podcast it's all the statists are the ones who are arguing this point too it's just like the most infuriating thing ever and also a lot of them have very short twitter names you know they have like the three digit twitter names which i think is unfair it's a little bit ridiculous that i have like a nine digit twitter that's an unfair distribution why

do they get we should start you know there's why why are we using twitter it's completely unfair you know it's ridiculous yeah at pt exactly two digits that's ridiculous i wish i had at mo that'd be awesome you know i'm not petitioning you know to restart twitter yeah it's unfair ridiculous that's a good analogy um but let's stay on this a little bit uh a little tangential to this topic but i was on pomp's podcast recently uh posted it today and he asked me a question like what's one thing that you think about that you think uh no other bitcoin i would agree with you or very few would and i was just trying to be uh a little uh uh what's the word i'm looking for controversial and i said uh everything would be okay if satoshi ever moved his coins what would you have to say

to that and let me lay out the scenario the scenario would have to be very specific we're in like a semi cypherpunk anarcho-capitalist future where a lot of people are running an anons he continues to be anonymous he doesn't tell us who he is and he only like uses his back bitcoin to um to contract out odd jobs around the world like hey i want something built here i'll pay you good jobs yeah that's me like a dam or something i don't know something i don't know whatever like a hospital for little children or something do you think that would destroy bitcoin if you started doing that uh well first of all satoshi is a woman no i'm kidding it's probably a group of people i think we both think it's a group of people uh first first of all the

most important thing is i really hope that we get some added privacy so we won't be able to track his coins i like that uh i i think bitcoin will have failed a bit if we end up in a you know in a future where chain analysis where there's not better privacy uh so i i actually have like this weird theory that he's waiting for a better privacy to get either forked in or added on top and and then once he he sees like if it's added on top it needs liquidity so he needs like sufficient liquidity to you know move through like 50 000 100 000 bitcoin or something but uh or if it's added through a fork in some scenario uh then he'll move them or they'll move them because once you he'll move them into like an anonymous area and then once he has them in

the anonymous area he can do and then spend them at will or they can spend them at will uh i but i do think that they probably they're probably gone forever uh i would agree to there's probably another stash that he the they she had you know that has been being spent and and you know still under their control and they you they use it you know whatever time to time uh and then this stash was the you know the bootstrap stash that they were like we bootstrap it and then we throw it away yeah uh just because this fucking hasn't moved yet you know you went to 32 then you went back down that's my point like will it ever will to shoot 50 then back down to 50 then you went to 1200 then back down to 150 let's say we're at a point where there is no fun

or comprehensive fungibility yet um and he she it they do decide to move them like would that catastrophic for the network i think if they satoshi wanted was waiting this long they wouldn't there's there's no reason to it would be short term a very big issue price wise yes and that's what i said and and it wouldn't help them either it wouldn't help satoshi either like that would it would completely they they have a huge value if they control a million bitcoin it would they have a huge value it would completely it would completely damage it so they're kind of even if they still have control of the keys they're kind of incentivized not to do that unless there's like like i said there's some type of privacy fork i could see a scenario where

and this is just all just this is all conjecture just ridiculous speculation but we're here drinking mcallen i actually tweeted out to mcallen i'm trying to get a sponsorship so mcallen this is your free shill of the day and all we need is 30 bottles a year should cover it and then we'll give you a shill of the day we'll give you a shill of the day it's our favorite it's our favorite liquor here it's very uh very smooth um so if if i i there's like a a weird a weird situation where what if if you had like a fork where you you put in snarks or starks or like some kind of privacy improvement and then he he moved or they moved their coins on the privacy fork but then didn't move them on the legacy fork like it would probably end up in a situation where the legacy

fork would get like wrecked right but i think the whole this whole bitcoin cash fork happened and there was no movement there was just sitting tight like if satoshi wanted to be political about it still had the keys like they had a very great opportunity to be super political one way or the other right didn't happen so like every day that it goes on like they're probably lost for good if they're not and satoshi still has them then good for him she they you know the price will fall a little bit in the short term to price it in and uh and then it'll recover and we'll continue on our march you know i like that i mean uh we had we our friend adam uh tashay uh told us he sent us an address earlier today that had 400 000 bitcoin in it and was like last

active in like 2014 they like sent out the 400 000 bitcoin in 2011 but like they were still transactions there from 2014 and uh and it's not connected to any exchange so so we don't really it's probably an individual like that satoshi isn't the only large holder you know and they but but their coins haven't moved so you know they're probably gone yeah it's an interesting subject what's uh another potentially future flood line to think about it's always fun to have those uh thought experiments it definitely doesn't increase the supply from 21 million if anything it just increases the supply from 20 million right and we've all been we've all been talking about 21 this whole time so and honestly like satoshi out of all the people is like the

strongest holder ever like not gonna dump the whole million like let's be fucking honest here like it would be like the coins would move everyone would panic the fuck out the price would fall like substantially and then like shit would recover when everyone was like oh you only sold oh i only sold 2 000 coins you know whatever it was yeah we're good good buying opportunity if that does happen um no that's that's uh interesting only 2 000 i don't think i don't think they'll ever move just i don't think they're ever gonna move uh i do think we will be okay in the long run if they do move but i don't think they'll ever move i i like i said i think the most believable story is that they have a separate stash and they've been using that separate stash

and then this is like the bootstrap stash that's gone forever and it's in their own best interest that you know that they don't move that because that's to the mystique of the mystique is fantastic i mean the ultimate holder right it's like it's like i satoshi gave you this dope ass tool network like a global money and and i mined a million of them to boot to bootstrap the network and i'm never gonna move them is like the most ridiculous story ever it's religious almost you You know, it's crazy. Are we developing a religion? I mean, look, Jesus didn't have like a block hash of his resurrection.

You know, you didn't have that definitive proof. No, it's only in the Bible. You have to go by the Bible. Don't trust Firefly. It's true. That's fascinating shit. So. That was a ridiculous tangent.

It was, but Bitcoin is decentralized because of that mystique. And because Satoshi did what he did, we are able to speculate like this. And it's fun. I had fun speculating with you. I think people appreciate the tangent. Yeah, I like it. That's the thing that our listeners that want the recap in the beginning to tell them what's going to be on the show. Like, they don't understand.

Like, we kind of just. We wing it here. We kind of just get drunk and just go with it. With that being said, we do have another topic. We have two more topics. Two more topics. What do you want to talk about first? Well, it's just we have Casa HODL.

Casa HODL coming out hot. This is something. i mentioned in the beginning uh something i've been waiting for i mean uh there have been other products similar to it the 21 computer uh bit seed bit seeds is that correct yeah bit seeds and then casa just announced they're coming out with a plug and play uh bitcoin full node and lightning node which is fascinating uh you'll be able to buy these these nodes plug it in just full disclosure i bought one uh because i want to experiment with full disclosure i did not purchase one um and uh yeah to experiment with um and so this is the type of hardware i've been looking

for i've i've always said uh the real long-term good play will be hardware i've got a lot of push back on that but i really think like if we want this to be ubiquitous we need simple ux hardware tools like this plug and play full node and lightning node that casas provided us um to really reinforce decentralization and going back there's a huge there's been a huge debate forever this is it's good actually a good thing to talk about like should everybody run a full node will everybody run a full node a lot of people are like nobody's not everybody's going to run a full node and i will concede that yes of course not but there's a lot of everybody should have the ability to it's like uh it's like the thomas jefferson quote like uh every once in a while uh a populist

needs to wash its hand in the blood and right the wrongs of the system they've been tyrannized under. Similar mindset with full nodes, whether or not everybody does run a full node, they should always be able to. Yeah, the thing is you should be able to spin one up cheaply if you need to.

Yes, exactly. And you should run one. Yeah. I have, if you want to run your own Bitcoin full node, i run bitcoin.com is is one of the domains i huddle uh and i i linked that to stop into crips awesome guide on running one we'll put that in these show notes i run bitcoin.com isn't that a great domain name i love it yeah i'm a major major bag holder of domain names it's like it's that and bitcoin are the two things i huddle um but anyway like the idea

of the of a lightning node it's both a lightning node and a bitcoin node it's both right yes and it's uh it's it's it's basically a purpose-built computer almost like a route a router is a purpose-built computer you all have them in your homes and basically the idea is that in like the don't trust verify age like you everyone or at least as as many people as possible should run basically their own home server their own bitcoin home server that's like home base and then that way you can interact with it with your phone or whatnot uh and and have that same security that you would have if you were on like a full computer you know uh instead of instead of having to trust someone else you connect back to connect back to your home bitcoin server yeah and that's if you're

going full cypherpunk you should run all your transactions through your own node so you know that you're verifying right i mean if you're going full cypherpunk you shouldn't buy uh a node like this that is the pre-configured oh so it's it's kind of nice from a consumer's perspective is is they have up until the point when you order it they load up the whole bitcoin blockchain so you literally just have to sync like the last uh two weeks or so uh that's pretty cool so it reduces your initial startup time and but that that does add an element of trust and then they have a really great interface supposedly that allows you to interact with with your node uh much more conveniently than if you were trying to go with like a homebrew type solution and on lightning

i think i mean i i assume one of the ideas behind this is that you can collect fees for routing payments yeah i would imagine you can grow your bitcoin but almost like a proof of state type of situation turn it on your corners and some bitcoin to a litecoin channel and just facilitate payments is uh as just provide liquidity to the lightning network let people run transactions to your channel and get some fees on that right exactly so like uh so uh with the bitcoin node you're not you're not getting a direct reward back you're getting uh you're you're getting better verification you're getting you don't have to trust anyone and and you're benefiting the network So you're tangentially benefiting yourself with a lightning node if you run a lightning node

You can route payments automatically and get paid small fees. They're like very very small fees, but they're fees nonetheless And you get paid for them. Yeah, there was one thing about this know that you were a little perturbed about It should be SDD not HDD. What do you mean by that? Oh, yeah, so it's well first of all, it's $300 and includes a 1 terabyte hard drive I Recommend to everyone on their nodes that they should run solid-state drives drives uh solid state drift discs and and the reason is is just that they have better speeds all their speeds are like way way way way faster uh so the sync time is quicker which you don't have to deal with with this as much uh because it's already pre-synced uh and they have better

lifetimes because if you're like constantly writing to a to a hard drive like that hard drive is going to degrade and and die a lot quicker than than the solid state drive interesting so and solid state drives are getting pretty cheap like literally if you want to run a bitcoin node like all you have to do is buy raspberry pi no you can just if you have a computer at your house that's just like a regular computer you can download the bitcoin software and run it and you're running a bitcoin node like that's easy peasy lightning nodes are a little bit more difficult right now that's why this is extra special uh but but lightning nodes are going to get way easier to run as well but it's kind of cool that you just can just have like this little

like router type thing that's in your house that's like your bitcoin control center yeah you know dope product shout out casa casa uh oh yeah so casa should we tell them what casa is casa is their main business model is like their custody they're a custodian that doesn't actually hold your funds so they set you up with the with a three of five multi-sig uh where you have i believe you have three treasures or ledgers like three hardware wallets that hold keys your phone holds a key and they hold a key and you're supposed to you never need to use them to sign unless you lose the rest of your keys and no no you use them to sign all the time you you keep two two of your four keys your phone and one of the hardware wallets you keep

available to yourself and then you use their third key to sign your transactions and then if you want to override them like you have two keys that you have like hidden in different locations like around the world or whatever you're correct i butchered that and then and then you grab those so like so that they can't take your money but they act as like an authorization point they had 24 7 customer service they start charge a subscription fee i think it's i think it's 10 000 a year um but yeah it's just very interesting if you have a lot of bitcoin like worth checking out um very great team like their team is just top notch definitely we're pressed for time here let's get to the last topic last topic bitcoin optex newsletter yesterday uh

something that caught my eye in the news section uh shout out david harding doing an incredible job on these newsletters uh there's a discussion of resetting uh bitcoin's test net and i just thought this was a good opportunity to sort of introduce you freaks to uh to a more obscure area of bitcoin development that being the test net and apparently we're on test net three right now the last time it changed was mid 2012 and uh people on the bitcoin mailing list are beginning to chatter about maybe resetting the test net and starting a new one um so this is nothing to worry about i mean it's it's you know so someone's using the test net a lot supposedly yeah there's this company very block i believe uh the samurai devs were saying something about them but um

yeah apparently they're they're stress testing the test net and uh it's getting to a point where um where other people uh other people's test net experience is being degraded because of that and like that's exactly you know it's because the tesla has no value this is exactly why value that's this is why bitcoin needs to exist the actual token bitcoin yes is because it allows the network to operate you know where spam is prohibitive um also bitcoinops.org just to throw in another shill there you have to that's where you would sign up for the newsletter you should sign up for it bitcoinops.org right bitcoinops.org exactly um yeah very good if you're looking for some technical insights into what's going on with the development with the

bitcoin core project specifically uh this is a great i mean they describe it really well like pretty much everyone like if you're subscribed to any other newsletters you know you should probably subscribe to this one david harding is really good at condensing everything so this is a quick rip uh it won't take up too much of your time um that was the last topic do we have any parting notes well i mean just just to throw it in there you know so this is the bitcoin test net uh it's fantastic it's been very useful to us the it has no value right and then we have an alternative it has no monetary value it has value and it has a huge amount of value but no monetary value because we're willing to reset it at any you know given time uh and i think the

difficulty adjustment the way they handle the difficulty adjustment is i think they can manually but then you have something like litecoin which is just like a straight overpriced test net that's like worth well like a billion dollars or whatever just completely not worth it you know so just you know keep that in mind that we have this other test net you know what's the point of of litecoin yeah who knows just throw that in there yeah just thought you freaked you know that's a interesting part of bitcoin development um and it does have its own sort of governance structure and that there has to be a discussion to reset it it's a little bit yeah discussion started um yeah it's wednesday night i think i'm gonna post this tonight yeah so i'm trying to get

marty to post this tonight so that's good that he just uh promised you guys that i'm not gonna edit anything i don't think we need also we're thinking about uh maybe doing like a live a live type show going forward so let us know what you think about that yeah we need to get um we're not going to ask you on twitter so you tweet at us if you think we should have a live show and we know you listen to the very end of the podcast so you're actually a listener yeah no i love that that's a good idea right and then another thing if you're still listening uh one thing that could be a huge benefit to us uh please like share subscribe uh whatever platform you're listening to this on it really helps us get more exposure uh and really help spread the word gets us more

exposure on these platforms uh a lot of competition out there in the in the podcasting game these days so any any help helps and and feel free to dm us at us anytime you know just just come at us dms are open exactly i try to get to as many of them as possible um that's all i got that's all we got this week freaks peace and love awesome cheers folks bang bang