TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2018.09.24

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

On this week's episode of Rabbit Hole Recap Matt and Marty discuss: CVE-2018-17144: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/ Monero bug: https://getmonero.org/2018/09/25/a-post-mortum-of-the-burning-bug.html Baltic Honey Badger Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66ZoGUAnY9s https://hodlhodl.com/ Argentina: https://mailchi.mp/86b9b2200711/martys-bent-september-25th-2018-issue-325 "Please stop deploying d-apps to Ethereum.": https://twitter.com/5chdn/status/1042860655114694656 B Foundation: https://twitter.com/TheB_Foundation/status/1043805473949065216 Thank you to this week's sponsor, Honeyminer. Use the ref link below for 1,000 satoshis and use one click to start mining today: honeyminer.com/referred/59rtk

What's going on, freaks? Welcome back to Rabbit Hole Recap with Matt and Marty. We're in a new studio here in my apartment. I had a lot of jet lag from my trip over the weekend to Riga, Latvia. Pretty lazy right now, so I invited Matt over to my apartment. Matt, welcome to my abode. How's it going, guys? Marty docks himself a little bit.

I'm sitting on his couch right now. I trust you. Can I trust you? Yeah, you should be okay. We'll see. We shall see. Time will tell. um yeah today is september 25th i'm gonna give the date since you freaked out at me last week

price is about 6400 on bet stamp been a long week been a very long week uh last week we talked about bug cve 2018 17144 but at the time that we spoke about it we had only known about one part of the bug which was the denial of service attack vector uh since the last episode we have uh become abreast of a very more serious bug and within that same bug which is an inflation bug uh and that caused a lot of drama this week matt what are we thinking did uh did honeyminer drop us do we not have an ad this week they did not drop us uh did you did you forget to read the ad or are we supposed to just read it in the middle or something we can read it in the middle or we can do it now honeyminer is an app where you can run it on your computer it mines the most profitable altcoin at any given

time and then they auto convert it to bitcoin for you so you can just keep stacking bitcoin yeah it's a credible product go to honeyminer.com one click download only available for windows computers right now um but i saw coin easy over the weekend who is working for honeyminer good friend of mine now uh they're working hard on linux and os uh or excuse me mac os implementations so they will be out soon yeah honey miner if you're looking to basically turn your leftover computing space or any any gpu space you got sitting around in your house any old computers plug them in download this software hit a button and start making bitcoin immediately stack satoshis honeyminer.com and we'll throw our reference link in the in the

show notes in the bio if you if you use that we get uh honeyminer makes money by getting an eight percent cut we get a we get ten percent out of out of it not comes out of yours it comes out of of honeyminers honeyminers end yeah making uh making very few satoshis but uh every satoshi counts absolutely absolutely uh matt and that is what we call in the biz a mid-roll read that was pretty good i think we did pretty good it was a good mid-roll read um speaking of mid-roll bitcoin uh is an ongoing system that creates blocks every 10 minutes and uh mid-roll for that we discovered it had a pretty critical bug that luckily wasn't exploited so let's talk about the inflation side of the CVE-2018-17144 bug

that we did not talk about last week. Right, so originally when we first talked about this bug, it had just been disclosed, and core devs and important community members were urging everyone to update, urging exchanges to update, urging miners to update, and the main reason was denial of service, right? So it was if the offending block went to your node, your node would crash and you'd have to restart your node.

And if you were a miner, it was probably the worst for miners because then you would stop mining the second day. So you'd have to restart your node and then they could do it again. So you'd have to actually patch your node and get back up and running. yeah and then since then we found out that it also had an inflation component um that wasn't exploited but that would allow a malicious miner to inflate the bitcoin supply um i think it would have been caught it would have been caught by the the earlier nodes that were yes that's a lot of older nodes a lot of the discussion that's been going on over last week is like how could this bug have been exploited and if it was even exploited how long would uh the

valid block remain before getting reorganized around because of the potential for old nodes before 0.14.0 uh and other implementations basically uh pointing out that that that bug was sort of invalid and that bitcoins were being printed yeah i think a bunch of us would have noticed right away um i mean how quick do you get a the patch out and all that going on is a whole another story you know what exchanges are going to stop trading i don't know it'd be it'd become like a huge uh probably become like a huge clusterfuck yeah uh but it would get noticed right away and one of the cool things is about running your own node is if you patch if you patch your node with the fix or download the new software which already includes the patch

when it when it scans the blockchain like it is actually verifying to you that there's no that it was never exploited yes exactly that was pretty cool so that's how we can tell it's never been exploited uh because since the patch uh version 0.16.3 being released anybody that's downloaded that redownloaded the blockchain history uh can tell that it hasn't been exploited because if the with the patch if they downloaded the blockchain it would have shown that hey this was uh yeah the block would be invalid so it wouldn't show yeah no it would show it would show a different chain really yeah like there would be a different order of events that happened right because there'd be an invalid block in there but who would be nobody knew

was an invalid block at the time so everybody would have been building on that chain anyway correct well i think once you do the fix it would reorg to the the most work valid chain it'd be too late to reorg to that wouldn't it i don't know but what the point is is that when you i don't know what do you mean too late to reorg like to reorg you would have to right but the fact that it isn't reorging shows that it hasn't been that it hasn't so you think okay so you're saying if uh if with the patch the new version discovered that it had been exploited they would then begin to attempt a reorg well let's say it wouldn't happen right away let's say like your favorite block explorer was running

the compromised version right yeah so there's exploited inflation in the chain that the block explorer is showing right like blockchain.info right yeah and then you load up the patched version it would be going down the chain and then it would hit the invalid block and from that point on it would be on a different chain than the block explorer whatever but it's confirming every block that happened after that invalid block on the same chain if there weren't miners mining that chain then that would it would stop there okay right until there was because you'd have the invalid block right there in between so if all the miners were still following the that's why this is the thing like it could be detected

it would have been detected pretty much right away but but then you need miners and miners to switch otherwise they're going to be building on top of of the invalid block right yeah but as far as the software is concerned once you have it patched that invalid block is an invalid block so all blocks after that block are invalid blocks because they're built on top of an invalid block so that's where i'm confused i guess like how like the fact that your software opens up and once it rescans the blockchain and everything verifies all the blocks and you're on the same chain as

all the major block explorers and what not and then you know it wasn't exploited okay if you load up the software and it says all is good to go and then you check other people's

public facing software which is basically what block explorers are right yeah yeah well it wasn't exploited so this is like a right interesting hypothetical to go through on on if you were running old software right and one of these offending blocks happened the second exactly the second that invalid block gets built on top of you would be i'm pretty sure you would be on a fork yeah reordered away well you would yeah you your your node would start showing your software would start showing

the last good block and it wouldn't be keeping up with like all the other block explorers and stuff that are presumably on newer on newer node versions okay yeah but here but the thing is is so right now is a situation where a lot of people that might not have been running nodes before might say like okay let me just run a node real quick just to verify for myself yeah right so it's the the whole the whole uh narrative about run your own full node one of the most important things isn't necessarily that everyone is always running a full node because let's be honest like it's just not realistic to expect every single person using bitcoin to be running their own full node but just that they have the ability to run one when necessary right yes yeah um yeah exactly

that's the beauty of it and uh actually happy you brought that up because luke dash jr uh who's a bitcoin core contributor uh i think he was spreading some fud on twitter today saying like only 80 of 80 of nodes 87 of nodes excuse me are still vulnerable to the bug because they haven't upgraded and i think that's a little bit disingenuous because you can't really know that for sure like you could have an old version of the software and patch it yourself without without uh um without downloading the new version of the software and still being on that and on top of that right the patches don't show if you patch it if you patch it it won't it won't show anything different yeah and then another part like not all nodes are equal uh the people like the big

economic players quote unquote the pool operators exchanges where yeah basically exchanges and minors yeah right yeah the are the most important to upgrade the first people are as possible yeah exactly if other nodes are uh i mean the only way to know for sure is to feed that bad boy an invalid block you know like then you'd see yeah you'd see really quickly which ones which ones have updated and follow follow the valid chain and which ones follow the invalid one that's interesting it would have to be a minor right because you have to be a minor to explain i mean the patch also stops the dos so i mean you could just you could you could do a dos uh you could exploit the dos element of it and then whichever nodes you knock down you know haven't been patched

yeah no it's a few interesting rabbit holes you can dive down with hypotheticals in this bug in particular i think one thing uh the emergence of this bug and the subsequent patch and drama has shown that uh it was a humbling experience really right like it it proves that hey uh these systems are fallible or the people that make up these systems are fallible uh something some things can slip by and just sort of reinforce the need to be extra cautious cautious and uh and basically verify not trust you know i mean i think it should be more of a wake-up call than it has been really uh i mean a lot of people in the industry have used it to uh attack bitcoin as insecure and to like promote their altcoin projects when in actuality like

bitcoiners have been screaming from the rooftops about this for a long time which is why development moves so slow and conservatively this is what the whole argument was for the last you know three years or whatnot you know scale on second layers try and keep protocol development to a minimum on on on layer one not do anything crazy or too fancy tried and true things with lots and lots of review i mean it's the most review in the space yeah um so really what you should be saying to yourself is if if the software if the project that has the most eyes on it the most review goes the slowest implements the most conservative things can get a bug in it then every project is vulnerable which i mean i don't think is news to us but like it isn't

now it's important to reiterate this and this shows that right yeah you know exactly not like i said it like reinforces the need to to verify uh john newberry had a good thread uh taking self-responsibility we all as bitcoiners should take uh i am john newberry i am john newberry well basically what he said was he was like i'm to blame for cve for this for this exploit and and his point is is that we're all to blame you know it's not just on the core devs this open source software yeah the the code is out there for all of us you know don't trust verify um and and you need to it's a it that's that's part of this it's been sitting out there for 18 months you know it's on all of us exactly out in the wild now in the um now we learned other

things from disclose about the disclosure and then the responses uh the response system as well with the communication channel so that was another thing that actually failed is uh brian bishop explained this at riga is that uh the bitcoin mailing list they had a problem getting the message out uh via the mailing list with just because uh their mailing server had had some bugging in or something like that what to upgrade yeah so they were trying to reach out to the mailing list to tell everybody to upgrade and even that wasn't working because so see this is interesting so so bitcoin used to have an alert key where you could send out an alert through the client and now this is an issue because it introduces centralization right so

like who controls the alert key how do you decide when to tell people to upgrade it's an attack vector right and what if somebody got control of that and sent out a fake alert and it's the same issue with auto updates that's why a lot of people say you'll probably hear a lot of people after this say that software should auto update if there's an important update you just you'll you can get we won't have 80% of the nodes not updated right because we'll just push an auto update and then that's an attack vector like what if the auto update adds the inflation instead right you know um so i mean i think that was definitely made sense to get rid of the alert

key uh you have a lot of informal different ways you know to communicate with people um that are more resilient to kind of like mass social engineering attacks including twitter and bitcoin op tech and and just phone calls and emails and exactly signal messages right and you know all of them slack groups exactly irc of course it always yeah um no it's just uh it really exposed uh different different parts of bitcoin as an ecosystem and how we all interact with each other and i think actually that actually proves that it is truly decentralized that we were having problems like that you know i don't know i it wasn't exploited it was a really good response yeah um it was hand you know i i i like i like the

idea of of using the dos vulnerability as a way to try and drum up support to get people to upgrade without playing the hand completely yeah um it was a bitcoin cash dev who found it so we should uh give him a thanks for that that was and he responsibly disclosed it which is good yeah all many right yeah i mean i never heard of him before but no i don't know if that's just a one time pseudonym or if it's his main name or yeah thank you for that and i mean that's i mean that's the way it should be done but see but that's that's one of the things it's like the reason bitcoin code has so many one of the reasons bitcoin code has so many eyes on it is because you have all these forks that use bitcoin's client as as their base right like litecoin was

vulnerable bitcoin cash was vulnerable so so when you have these bugs in bitcoin not only does it affect bitcoin it affects a lot of these a lot of these forks i know dogecoin wasn't affected because they just haven't had development at all for two years so they they predated it they're basically all running old nodes um but their eyes are also on it right and then and then ideally like they'll responsibly disclose that upstream like like he did yeah uh that's fascinating how that works though um and that's yeah it was a long week that was a big discussion in riga but i kind of think of it also like at least it's kind of like when you're like your favorite restaurant has like a food poisoning outbreak you know like it becomes way less likely that

there'll be more food poisoning in the near future yeah because everyone is all of a sudden like way more alert you know like maybe there's like a little bit of complacency there i mean that's kind of what john was talking about right like john was like i just assumed a lot of these elements were were were people smarter than me or were more focused than me were looking at them right exactly and now that element of complacency has been ripped off a little bit yeah this is always good now and it definitely made me think like over the weekend like maybe there should be like a healthy amount of churn in the development at a certain point just so people don't get complacent and you have a certain level of alertness and awareness and uh non-complacency

um but yeah that was one bug i guess there was another bug discovered this week in monero not bitcoin though um and i guess it was today i was disclosed like four hours ago but it was discovered a couple days ago i guess and uh yeah all the exchanges have their monero while it's offline i do not too know too much about the particulars of this bug you know i don't know if they all have their wallets up because i because at least according to the disclosure a lot of the exchanges had already switched before they disclosed it yeah um because this particular bug the main attack the pretty I think pretty much the only attack vector is is attacking exchanges and merchants but presumably more so

exchanges because the idea was you could send a bunch of transactions of Monero to an exchange and only the first transaction would be a valid transaction all the other transactions would be burnt so you can send like i guess the example they used was you could send a thousand xmr to an exchange in a thousand different transactions of one xmr and if you construct it a certain way the exchange can only access one xmr 999 of them would be inaccessible they would be burnt and but their their wallet would still show that they received a thousand until they went to spend it and then they would realize they couldn't spend it and they're just so they would credit it on your account then you trade it out for bitcoin or whatever and then

you'd pull it out and the exchange so you it actually costs real monero to send you're actually sending real monero it's not like you're sending fake coins but the exchange can't access them so it's just a fuck you it's just basically yeah i i guess it's because you're changing at a market rate basically so it's just to attack an exchange like explicitly attack wow because you'd make just as much money if you sent them a thousand monero for real that they could spend that's real cruel i was so i think one of the reasons it was an oversight was because you know because of that right there was not really a financial gain uh element here yeah it's just uh very it's like it's a troll it's a troll bug yeah wow i didn't i didn't realize that yeah and and and since they

have their like hard for culture and whatnot there's no old nodes or anything like that any any node pre-hard fork is irrelevant that seems very particular like you only get to keep one manero the rest get burned it seems like somebody would have to with intent write that into the code or no it has something to do with like how stealth addresses are handled and and you have to construct the transaction to like base to like break that system okay like they're specially constructed it's not like you just open your wallet and you can you know with the default settings do it yeah all right um yeah so that's an ongoing uh thing right now but the the thing is here is is well they said most exchanges all the big exchanges have updated they said no one

was exploited they said the protocol was fine worst case scenario only exchanges got fucked yeah um i mean it's gotta hurt monero in terms of exchanges willing to list them right because you're in liability you know all these monero is thought of as more of a premium altcoin project but but specifically like the shitty tokens and the and the shit coins like are major security vulnerabilities for these exchanges right like because if they have um yeah tax and whatnot that leave them holding the bag or their customers holding the bag yeah and they're just naturally the biggest honeypots in the space and they all have to run all the different softwares they're running you know 100 different wallets exactly i would not want to run an exchange and historically

uh for you freaks out there exchanges have been the most vulnerable within the ecosystem always yeah it's uh it's pretty much a round robin there's very few exchanges that have stood the test of time um this is like the strongest class we've ever had yeah yeah it really is and it's been the longest since like the last our last big hack was that bitfinex one that happened last year and they skated by it yeah i'm trying to think and didn't binance get hacked but they promised to make everybody whole or something like that that was like a trading bot like i'm not counting like the little things okay um yeah that was that was not binance's fault and binance just was being good guy binance they wanted their customers to be happy okay they might have

reversed some trades to cover some of the losses or whatever all right um yes it was a week filled with bugs but yeah just bugs can happen in all these projects i mean parity the the number two reference client and uh so like the other thing that a lot of people have been saying is why don't we have multiple reference clients you know but then you're splitting up your resources amongst each other it's way more likely that forks could happen you're going to share a lot of the same code too probably yeah and then with ethereum we had the parody bug two two parody bugs happened with multisig last year and i remember i'm like pretty sure like gavin wood that the head dev for parody like just merged those things in that caused the bug like there was no review process

you know and now it's funny it's ironic because i'm pretty sure he's advising a company that got affected by the bug i mean his own the most funds were lost by himself yeah you know so like at least like i guess that's a little bit better right yeah there's a little skim in the game but uh like at least he trusted it but i just there's no perfect solution you just want to minimize the effect that any bugs have and minimize the amount of bugs that there will be and and just review as much as possible be conservative as much as possible you know just billions of dollars at like let's and this really reinforces the uh the point that that we should aim to get bitcoin to the point of ossification where the protocol level is sort of okay no more upgrades we're

only going to look for bugs and patch them when they're found uh so we have a better chance of avoiding uh bugs via new implementations and and or excuse me not new implementations but new versions that may introduce bugs right i mean that's the ideal the ideal end goal is is that you get the protocol to a level where like you never have to update the main layer right yeah um or like not significantly yeah um i don't it might that might never be possible but that's ideal ideal we should try to get as close to that as possible uh which historically people have said is a negative of bitcoin is is that it moves too slow right it's like too close to ossification right well people don't don't see the beauty and simplicity matt they really don't it is pretty

cool they don't get that bitcoin only has to do one thing and do that well extremely well if it can do that perfectly well the value of the system is a lot higher than it's currently being valued at damn right um next topic we missed you in riga over the weekend uh norwegian fucked me i had everything planned i'm so sorry dude that's the kick of the dick yeah i was i was bummed all all weekend watching the live stream explain to the freaks what happened so i just we you know i had everything planned i had my hotels i had my connecting flights and everything and that's flying norwegian and they just delayed delayed delayed and then they they canceled on me and and the worst part was like i had i bought new connecting flights because the delay

and then by the time they canceled on me i just it was like 2500 euro to get there and i would have been like a hat like a day late i would have missed like the first half of the conference so i was just like two that's too expensive that's ridiculous i'd rather i'd rather buy some bitcoin yeah it's pretty fucked sorry dude but i but the nice thing is they put on one of the best live streams that it was just it was quality they just and they they uploaded them all the day after So you have a full video that just, you know, no ads, basically straight straight through. You can jump around wherever you want. We'll put links to those in the bio.

And and Brian transcribed a bunch of the talks, too. So you can read them if you if that I went over to I went over to like look over his shoulder to watch him type like one of the one of the speeches. I think it was Elizabeth Starks. Actually, I'm not sure if it was that one. but that the how that you can type so fucking fast it's it's believable and to have the the ability to to transcribe while you're listening i would never be able to do it someone uh on my feed because i linked to his transcripts they asked him uh what brand coffee he was he was taking because they wanted to wanted to get the coffee and he's like it's adderall but anyway the transcripts are great they made it way easier to to digest um yeah but i mean

the part that i missed out on is i wanted to you know see everybody and yeah it was good this shit and it was good meeting everybody that's like the beautiful thing about the stuff you talk to people around the world you converse with them uh via telegram twitter dm whatever it may be and then you finally meet them in person it's like you already know each other it's uh and it's cool you feel that camaraderie like immediately it's in it's easy icebreaker too you know um but you were missed uh a lot of people said they were sad you couldn't make it yeah i wanted to do uh at the at the last episode i said we had a surprise for you guys i wanted to do like a panel show in riga yeah that would have been hard actually what i found when i got there

is like i wanted to listen to the talks i don't want i would i would have had to record during all the talks so i only got like 45 minutes of content over the weekend no i mean you listen to the talks and then the reason and then you got really drunk afterwards yeah that happened right yeah so like if you just like mixed in mics with the drunk part afterwards like interesting things would have happened yeah it would have been a logistical nightmare though right you just needed me to you needed me to to make it happen slightly push us in that direction nah i probably just would have gotten drunk anyway yeah but on to the talks uh you watched live stream what was your favorite i but i mean i really liked i really liked uh lobstock oh my god it was hilarious

because he made me feel a little bit less paranoid why is that why is that because he wants to be able to have his identity in the open but just be secure on the back end no because i thought i was paranoid and then i saw his talk and you know some of the things he was saying you know i don't i don't know like having your cable under a different name yeah and then he was like that that was the kicker for me he was like but then when you want to go get your driver's license you don't have utility bills with your address and your name on it which is what they use as residency proof right so he's like so then you have to get like a neighbor or like rent an rv in an rv park and then get those utilities to your name and then bring those to the driver's license and like

there's no way he didn't do that like yeah absolutely right like how do you how do you work through that unless you actually fucking did it uh the incredible thing about that speech i was like right after that lunch break that day and like everybody was like there was a problem on day one of people like talking in the back uh and it was like sort of distracting uh for people who were giving presentations but everybody was still hanging around talking like after the lunch and then lop get got on stage jameson and the intro he gave was just like so captivating everybody immediately sat down shut the hell up within like 30 seconds that's fantastic um now that was a good speech one of my favorites safe gave a good speech and sort of uh um safety to moose author of the

book bitcoin standard and he sort of uh he talked about the bitcoin standard but uh added to some of his points one of which he made was sort of analogizing federal federal reserve banks as gold full nodes uh and i think that's a very good framing when you're trying to explain bitcoin to uh to newcomers yeah that's interesting sort of being able to compare uh a quasi full node system in the traditional banking system to bitcoin's full node system and point out how bitcoin is is massively more decentralized yeah i mean it's only it's like delegate proof of stake more is what it would be right yeah exactly but like safe doesn't he doesn't look at the shit coins he doesn't even know what that is probably the better analogy yeah um so that's

like that was a great talk yeah it was a great talk eric vascul's talk a lead maintainer of the bitcoin first talk of the weekend i think he did a really good job basically breaking bitcoin down to its simplest form it is a market of miners and users and participants merchants um and merchants he described them as um and i think he yeah i talked to him uh like after day one of the conference we were in like a group of five guys and he was just uh explaining his beliefs and why he's into bitcoin and what he's doing with bitcoin it was fascinating he's he's pure man he's a pure anarchist yeah that talk was that talk with something else yeah um and what else did i like uh nix was good yeah we'd be remiss of us

if we didn't mention that talk i mean and i think his talk is very important we should start uh start signal boosting this talk because it is very important that we do start to use correct metrics when when trying to value these systems and i think what he proposed on sunday what is very makes a lot of sense the thermo cap was pretty cool yeah and then what was the other one the realized realized realized cap so the thermo cap is measuring the value based on when each bitcoin was mined and what the value was at that point yes right because that shows inflows into bitcoin through actual mining investment right and then the the realized cap was basing it off of when bitcoins when each bitcoin last moved and then the value at that point right yes

and what uh as opposed to market cap which is just amount of coins that exist right now times the price yeah or times the price excuse me and he really pointed out that that is pretty stupid to value uh value like we currently are and what the realized market cap really does is is it really proves how valueless these shit coins are he used bitcoin private as an example and it's I think it had a market cap of

110 yeah because like no one even dumped their coins yeah exactly like I didn't go access my bitcoin private like I guess I still own a lot of bitcoin private then but we haven't even touched it right so like don't count my shit

towards the value I mean it's The prevalence of market cap in the industry is because of two reasons. It's because of laziness. It'd be absolutely annoying unless you're Nick to like, I mean, he measured it for Bitcoin, right? And he measured it for like a couple other forks and altcoins, right? But like imagine measuring it for the 1600 different coins that coin market cap lists. Like that's a lot of numbers you got to go through. That's a lot of data you have to go through.

I wouldn't be surprised if coin metrics, you know, And Nick's site does that because they're just fucking badass, that kind of thing. But up until this point, like laziness was like a lot of the reason. And then the second reason is because like you needed a measure to show like how much like we were talking about unit bias. Right. And and it was the easiest way to show that, you know, if Ripple has billions of coins, you know, if Ripple has 100 billion coins in existence. like ripple's not cheap because the price is low right exactly and the market cap does get that kind of that gets that point across like pretty well yeah um no so that was a great talk um gave out his dice his fud dice yeah we have one of the dice here one of the die here uh it was very fun

playing with that throughout the weekend yeah it's a multiple multiple dices watch that dice get born on telegram yeah we did um see i'm trying to think of what other talks really stuck out to me in particular uh the hoda hoda or the hoda hoda guys the uh the uh host of the conference i think that what they're doing is really interesting uh especially with their house hodl product um and what they're about to roll out uh they're gonna have smart contracts uh they have a smart contract uh product coming out and then a futures contract as well on top of uh their product uh household hodl it's i mean what hodl hodl is like a semi semi decentralized exchange is the idea it's a p2p p2p yeah and then house hodl is the same idea but they add a house

on one side of it and they add yeah they have bitcoin on the other side yeah i think they act I think they're what they support Litecoin to, right? I think they might, yeah. Yeah, so that was interesting to see. How about the stuff, you know, that we didn't see on the live stream? Did anything interesting happen that we weren't able to catch in the transcripts or the video? No, I mean, it was just like I wrote about it yesterday in the newsletter, sort of reflections on it. It was just like the vibes were very high, like outside of the conference.

Everybody just wanted to continue talking about everything. and the types of conversations that were going around like there was everybody hung out outside of the warehouse where the conference was held for a few hours every day and we're just shooting the shit yeah i really like the founding fathers uh metaphor used it really gave me a massive amount of uh fomo it's true though it was just people drinking and playing out uh these thought experiments what we can do with bitcoin especially since the bug had just happened too like that's how you know those conversations were like top-notch oh they were they were it was just like everybody's thinking of every single attack vector that bitcoin has and how you might attack and how

you would defend it and then talking about my favorite part of this space there was a lot of talk about like when governments start attacking like eric basically kicked off that that sort of line of thinking with the first speech of the weekend where he's like governments are going to attack and as long as bitcoin enables the black market it is successful yeah this is the peace period yeah um we haven't seen anything so there's a lot of people sort of hypothetical preparing for a hypothetical future in which those attacks start happening and and what we can do now and to begin preparing for that which is very important to start thinking of and then yeah once we moved away from the warehouse yeah we went to the bars and continued talking about the

shit i ended up the bars are really cool looking with like all the bricks and the old the old bars yeah oh yeah they were awesome like riga riga is a beautiful city reminded me a lot of uh spain actually the way like the the streets and the back roads were were constructed not completely like it but similar vibe um i'm not as well traveled as i like to be either but it was cool to see he's obviously been to spain um funny story i puked on uh on the flight from uh talian talian estonia to riga we were on some pond hopper and i just got motion sickness it was bad you weren't with corallo at that point right no you just puked all by yourself all by myself in the seat or did you did not make it to the bathroom i had a barf bag though it was only a

little bit it wasn't too much it was a bit embarrassing though his dedication yeah his dedication what was it was like a 20-hour trip you took right ended up being like yeah like 18 hours like your flight was delayed or canceled uh the initial flight from jfk got delayed which made me miss my connection so i had to rebook my connection but like what was it finnair finnair hooked you up right yeah finnair qual hairline qual airline excuse me um would recommend finnair had a good experience use finnair not norwegian yeah i'm gonna use norwegian if they give me a credit they haven't given me a credit yet but i'll use them never again the wi-fi over greenland is terrible though so if you're looking to use wi-fi on that that's just impressive you had wi-fi over

transatlantic flight in the first place right exactly that's just cool i was getting angry at one point and i thought of that louis ck joke where he makes fun of people that are pissed that wi-fi isn't working in there and it really really brought me back what i thought was it was like a really simple thing but i thought it was really cool was that you know like i was barbecuing on saturday like all bummed out like a little bitch about not being in riga and i'm barbecuing and i'm watching the talks that you're watching live on my phone in like the best quality ever it's like a small screen but like the best fucking quality ever and then i like pop out of that and it goes into picture and picture mode it's still showing on my screen and i jump into telegram

and then i say something to you guys who are sitting in the actual conference room and then i like pop back into the video all while i'm just like chilling there in my backyard like that's freaking badass we live in a crazy world matt and that's such a simple thing that you know you just take for granted you don't even really think about it exactly exactly we are lucky to have this stuff could be taken away in one moment you get like a little solar flare fucks up the whole grid i mean if google decided that we weren't allowed to watch that on youtube like yeah true that's that like that's you don't even need a fucking solar flare right that's true so you need censorship resistance yeah google's getting weird man yeah weird i'm a little torn because i'm i i i have shares of

google full disclosure thank you for disclosing that yeah um yeah it's one of my bags that's not I mean, that's another thing. We've got to threat model that stuff, too. All the big tech is basically just an extension of the state at this point. And it's not even their own fault. It's just because they're centralized. It's the way the regulatory structure works. They have to be.

It's capture, yeah. There's just nothing you can do about it. If they want to be in business, then they have to play ball. Exactly. I mean, like Apple has fought back a decent amount, but who the hell knows. They've shown a valiant effort to preserve privacy. yeah it appears that way yeah yeah um no it was it was uh it was an awesome weekend in riga uh shout out to how to huddle for for organizing it very high quality low signal to noise ratio

um obviously there were some talks that like hey i already know all this but it's good to refresh fresh your memory and stuff like that and and then again meeting the people uh meeting everybody sort of that you've conversed with you only know them as like random like cartoon pictures on the internet uh and you meet them in person and and it's like it's like you've been lifelong friends i uh i successfully gave away both my conference tickets to good on you latvian locals good on you did either of them buy you the beer they told me they were gonna buy you no they did not so i've got somebody to track down i was a little bit cavalier about it i was like when you see marty bent there like you gotta give him you gotta buy him a beer

you gotta buy him a beer that's like the deal and like they don't fucking know what you look like why exactly but you know i was feeling good about it so i told him to do that it's better than two tickets going to waste first i tried to sell them and i was gonna donate them to uh btc ven the the venezuela soup kitchen uh bitcoin charity that would have been cool yeah but no one no one was biting so then i gave them away it's sort of hard to to book a last minute trip to riga it's like six hours that's why the local latvians was a good was i think it was it was a good call yeah it's a good uh it's a very good call did they get back to you they actually end up going yeah they had a great time awesome they both had a great time um yeah

so overall great conference uh like you said the conversations were were very intriguing uh especially due to the the bug um and i think uh i think it it was cool just to sort of reinforce i don't want to say the mission but like the reason why i'm in this in particular really sort of reinvigorated the drive i have to sort of make bitcoin a thing and and uh just to know that there are other people out there who are just as passionate was uh was cool to be a part of yeah i mean you're bent uh yesterday i guess was it yesterday it just got me fucking pumped let's fucking go right now like i said these are the type of people i would ride or die with just great people yeah good people all around and horrible people but mostly great yeah and

it's not this isn't saying that we use this space has the has the best of the best and the worst of the worst it's true it's the beauty of it but we're not saying there aren't good people in other projects either oh no that's what i'm saying this space in general i think has the best of the best and the worst of the worst exactly um yeah it's a cool event i mean even if they don't admit it a lot of them are bitcoiners as well most of them are they do admit it at least to me some of the biggest ethereum fans i know will admit that their portfolio the way they bought the ethereum in the first place was often with bitcoin yeah but they are they very easily admit that yeah biggest holdings are big bumpers and they have 30 ethereum exactly exactly um

yeah uh so where do you want to go from here you want to talk about argentina a little bit yeah we could talk about argentina you covered that a little bit in your newsletter yeah talk about the newsletter today and it's i think it's just like sort of something went under the radar uh the last three days in particular it's funny it started with a santiago siri tweet where he posted a picture of uh somebody it's a butcher shop a butcher shop in argentina pricing their meat and bitcoins at the same time you have the argentinian pesos experiencing and yet another bout of hyperinflation uh the next day after santiago tweeted that out uh a headline dropped down my tweet deck uh argentina is looking to extend its credit line with the imf and they just

took out a credit with the imf i believe in the beginning of the summer a year after taking or issuing a hundred year treasury bonds so their currency is obviously in dire straits and then today uh the headline runs down my tweet deck uh argentine and argentinian central bank uh the head of the argentinian central bank steps down like he resigned um so things aren't aren't going good there and i think this is yet another example we're talking we talk about venezuela a lot uh where bitcoin can step in again it's not a panacea but it's obviously a tool that people are using down there at least there's one anecdotal data point um so and i think like we've said in the past countries like argentina like venezuela that may begin this this revolution

you know yeah i mean this is basically going to be a a reoccurring reoccurring segment very sad but it's just gonna as this podcast evolves it's just gonna be us saying the same exact thing we're reporting the different country with a different country but with the same exact talking points um you know if you got to trust your government with your money and your government's not good with your money like that's what happens right yeah like just a summit and let's uh shout out santiago siri here my favorite my favorite tweet in that thread was was i'm long bitcoin because i think it can save my country yeah santi's poetic man can you not how can you not relate to that and let's give a shout out to santi he's going to the upper echelons of the

argentinian political political system something he used to be a part of and really advocating for them to adopt bitcoin at least in some fashion um so that's a high leverage act any bitcoiner can do so shout out santi the other thing and he was on the pot he was on you interviewed him too yeah i listened to that yeah he's like he was like so if you go back if you if you don't remember it you didn't listen to it you can you can scroll back and he's he's there he's in tftc yeah he was uh he was one of my first interviews i was lucky to get him on early on yeah i'm a big fan yeah he uh yeah he's doing some high leverage actions right now at the argentinian government that who knows who knows he's all over the media especially like local media and latin american

media i uh the other thing he mentioned was that is that butcher was pricing it in bitcoin he was accepting other current cryptocurrencies but it was yeah bitcoin there's a couple different i think it was like ethereum bitcoin like coin and dash uh but uh but he priced it out in those currencies he was it wasn't priced out in argentinian pesos and then converted right and he was saying how that that's like a mental thing that the next jump for bitcoin is is when people start what's the unit of account once yeah once you start thinking in your head that right it's like Like when you talk about a foreign language, like, oh, I think in English and then I'm converting it into Spanish versus I'm just thinking in Spanish, right? Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Very good way to put it. I've never heard that one. I like that. I mean, I just know because I always have to think in English before I speak in Spanish. Very slow. Me too. Me hablo muy poquito. ¿Te hablas español?

Me llamo Matt. See? I like that. Very good. Giochiero, Honeyminer. So slowly but surely, the reason for Bitcoin, governments mishandling cryptocurrencies continues to happen and more and more governments fall prey to...

Well, he's actually trying to get Argentina to adopt in the reserves, right? I think so, yeah. So you don't even have to own Bitcoin as an Argentinian if they start stockpiling it in their reserves. Yeah. It could be good for all Argentinians. That's interesting. It'll be interesting to see if they do that because Saif was saying in his talk over the weekend that central banks probably would not.

I disagreed with that portion. Did you? Why? So Saif was saying. Why not? Because it sort of destroys their whole purpose of being, I think was his argument. But like adapt or die, right? Yeah.

They hold gold. Yeah. So why wouldn't they hold Bitcoin? That's a good question. I don't know. i wouldn't i wouldn't fault him for holding bitcoin yeah i i think the first step will be will be be them buying bitcoin and then the second step after that will be them being irrelevant anyway or like mostly irrelevant i like those steps i don't disagree i just i just think that

the first country to like start you know accumulating bitcoin for their reserves that's major will create a chain reaction that will automatically make them a shit ton of money right right so who's gonna do it yeah exactly and especially the leader somebody's gonna capitulate at some point all those leaders that are in charge of either the central banks or like the sovereign wealth funds or like the president you will go down in history no but they'll also if they own bitcoin then it's even more of a reason for them to do it right exactly it creates like this perverse incentive to to pump the price yeah satoshi created a beautiful incentive system here yeah and it's going to happen at some point potentially yeah i mean even if you think that's a bad thing

that it creates this incentive that every bitcoin holder you know wants to promote bitcoin and increase bitcoin ownership so that their bitcoin goes up in value like you can think that's a bad thing but if you accept that that's a thing then you know the value prop of investing in bitcoin goes up substantially yeah actually i actually had a conversation with jameson lopp about that where he's saying like there probably won't be legislation against bitcoin because there's a good chance that some politicians already own bitcoin and their distance we already know some do yeah because they had to disclose yeah yeah but there's definitely some that are not even disclosing right i would imagine does trump own bitcoin

i bet he does uh donald's gonna say bitcoin leading up to the 2020 election putting a 70 percent uh guarantee on that but that's actually an oxymoron there's no 70 70 chance on that on on him doing what on him saying bitcoin leading up to the 2020 elections just bitcoin is he going to tweet it is he going to say in a speech we might get might get the elusive donald trump it won't be blockchain it'll be he's going to say bitcoin if he's chatted enough he will well if i mean look if he tweets out if he just tweeted out the word bitcoin the price doubles right like instantly you think so yeah i i really i really do like why like imagine if the most powerful person in the in in the western in the world the most powerful person in the world

tweets anything about bitcoin is gonna be it's gonna be crazy what if he has a series of tweets he has bitcoin one word next tweet is is like three hours later oh my god next tweet is so much volatility well that would be like that that'd be the true the true the true uh money maker right yeah then you go long oh i think you go short i think it's inevitable it's banned i forget who tweeted this out first and put the incepted the idea into my mind but like i've been thinking about it more just like leading up to the 2020 election it's going to be like the may before the election is going to be the next having and it's like what is like there's gonna be so many narratives around that can't wait to hear them yeah the next having is already

it's already coming up yeah in bitcoin years it'll be like 20 years from now though right exactly this has been a long year already this has been a very long year we're almost we're like we're like 80 done with it 70 done with it i think so yeah we're rolling in october here so what else do we have do we have so argentina is and argentina i think like every 15 years or so goes through one of these right this is like yeah yeah it's like historically yeah latin america in general is you know europe and america really fuck them in a lot of ways yeah like when I've never been able to dig out of it. When Santi came on my podcast,

he described how he vividly remembers as a kid people getting paid and immediately running to the grocery store to buy food before the prices change and stuff like that. But this is the first time that Bitcoin exists during it, which is a game changer. Yeah. Especially if you're like... I keep going back to it too.

Because it's an internet currency, if you're a coder or web designer or or if you sell sheep's wool you know or something i don't know like you can you can actually participate in international markets right and and sell your goods and services for bitcoin regardless of of of your government's competence like why should your government's competence matter in that in that regard yeah that's pretty cool enabling people to join the global economy just download a wallet people send them an address and then send the goods um last topic uh i think this was a funny we'll end on a light-hearted note i thought i saw a funny tweet uh parody dev tweeting out uh please stop deploying d apps

to ethereum uh we are we are running at capacity uh so an ethereum dev trying to tell people not to use ethereum uh you called them d apps he he announced them d debt or d slash apps d slash apps i've always said daps i've said daps laps we got the lightning apps the daps laps i don't know i wanted to quote him correctly so i said d apps okay that's fair uh i mean i'm not you think he's being serious i mean i think i mean he's i mean he's got a point it's not really it doesn't make any sense you know you can't run these things at scale so yeah i mean if you want to test it out or whatever it reminded me of vlad's tweet early last year i don't know if you remember i remember that most responsible tweet ever yeah nobody listened to him what was it what was it i believe

it was something along the lines of ethereum is still beta still experimental technology not ready for mission critical apps right it was like the price was 13 or something yeah and it was like yeah it was around 20 yeah i remember like quoting like quote tweeting that like two months later and the price was like $120 or something. I mean, him and Vitalik sold a bunch, I think, around there too because they actually believed it like they weren't. Yeah. No, it's interesting.

Markets are irrational. But yeah, I just thought it was reminiscent of that. It's funny that Vlad said that at $20. I mean, we say that too. Everyone says that, right? I mean, except like the ultimate shit corn pumpers. Like, don't invest what you can't afford to lose. Like, it could be gone tomorrow.

Yeah. like especially if like it matters what your risk profile is like if you're keeping on exchanges and stuff even more likely you know but no even if you have it in cold storage like who the fuck knows you know no and that was another uh another topic of conversation of the week in origa too is especially with this bug uh making everybody more aware we are aware that hey bitcoin's not a foregone conclusion uh it's not a successful experiment yet um and it is a possibility that it may not succeed in the long run so definitely keep that in the back of your mind as you're making investment decisions meanwhile the price of bitcoin pumped after the disclosure right uh

substantially yeah so like if you like entered a short position because you found out the bug was being disclosed you got burnt um last year both parity bugs were followed by ethereum going up in price because i remember shouting at the charts um which is why also i wasn't surprised when i went up this time i was like you never fucking know it you know it's like ridiculous and uh i mean monero was up today so i don't know but like the insiders weren't trading on it you know and bringing the price down so like if you i mean i well i don't even know what the market is really i mean the mark maybe the market is saying you know that that there was it was it was handled extremely responsibly and i mean it was right yeah uh but like short term the market doesn't

know what the fuck it's doing and i think long term even a bug of this magnitude you're just talking your first of all you're not talking bitcoin zero no um you're talking a clusterfuck that would probably result in exchanges stop trading and then you'd have like a situation where like they come back online within a day and then like the price like immediate falls by like a couple thousand dollars or something um and it sets us back you know it sets us back a year or two or whatever yeah we're lucky that bug wasn't exploited yeah but you still have to have i mean look we had the most eyes in the space looking at it we had we had some of the smartest minds in the space like really focusing on it

and and looking at the code and all the code and they didn't spot it for 18 months right so like the chances of someone who doesn't like bitcoin or wants to see bitcoin fail discovering this bug or a bug of this scale is is probably reduced um because they just don't surround themselves in it enough right and and that's why the game theory the loose game theory that's happening at the same time as all of this like really matters right like if you're a major miner or major bitcoin holder or if you just love it you know you're not gonna you're not gonna do something that's that's like super like even uh the the bcash dev that that donated he wasn't that that disclosed that he gave a donation address yeah you know so like he wasn't against

making money for it but he didn't want to fuck over you know bitcoin right because he loved it so much that's why he's looking at the code all the time and knows so much you know and and studying it and caught the bug in the first place exactly no no that's something that vladimir the one of the maintainers was pontificating about online was that we should be donating to these people and maybe that's another thing that was announced over the weekend is the b foundation maybe we should talk about that for a little bit too people go both ways on that yeah yeah people are pretty divisive like it's better if we just ignore the devices stuff so no one gets angry guys i'm kidding guys i'm kidding we would never do that but uh no there it really highlights the

need not only for protocol development but uh sort of incentivization for protocol development but for testing and reviewing wait so let's talk about this beat foundation let's talk about it i was actually recording with somebody you didn't watch it i wasn't i was i didn't hear it live but i spoke so i was i was here and i saw it what did you think so hearing it live so let's describe it first i like facepalmed a little bit okay so but i think it's probably i don't know i wouldn't do it if i was them but like bitcoin's immune to bullshit so exactly it doesn't matter so i don't think if if you if you think they could be a threat to bitcoin then you have very low uh thoughts of bitcoin to begin with like i don't think that 12 people creating a foundation

becomes a threat to bitcoin it becomes a threat to their reputation for sure yeah uh so we had the bitcoin foundation that was founded um 2012 12 13 maybe yeah not 13 maybe it was it was 12 or 11 anyway it was founded by a bunch of scammers already they were already like what like carpolis was on it the mount gox guy was it was gavin gavin jeb might have been on But Jeff Garzik was on it, I think, at one point. But anyway, they all ended up. The thing is, is like these foundations tend to attract ego heads, right? Yeah, they attack ego heads.

And what went wrong with the original Bitcoin foundation was the mismanagement of funds. These guys were just taking. It was John Matonis who was taking like a elaborate trip. He was taking like elaborate trips. Brock was on it. The Eos guy. Yeah. They weren't very transparent with how the funds were being spent.

they were using it for their own advantage uh and so over the weekend uh giacomo uh elena they used it to launch their own projects and stuff too right like like we had bruce fenton even like who's who's probably one of the more respected people from the bitcoin from the bitcoin foundation particularly because he came in later on and like put in a lot of his own money to kind of just try and like write the ship right and he wasn't able to but even him like he's on he's like he's like a major part of raven coin right now right so like they tend to and particularly because they have this ego and this platform they tend to end up launching yeah uh their own projects so with the foundation that was announced over the

weekend i spoke to jameson about it he's he's a member um or involved with it can we list who's in it uh jameson lopp giacomo right elizabeth stark elena um whale pandas whale pen is in it i'm trying to think of who else again i didn't see that i didn't see the talk i was recording so that's that's a good number okay so you're talking to jameson about it yeah go on no and they're going to be i mean so number one i think most people are perturbed at the thought of a foundation like the word foundation in particular i like they didn't use bitcoin in it or they just called it b they didn't call it btc bitcoin nothing it was just the b foundation but the thing people have to realize that it is it is technically a foundation for like tax purposes and stuff like

that so that they can organize in a certain way and distribute funds a certain way right um they had something similar last year they announced which was the bhb association right yeah which had a slightly worse structure they were saying right that that the foundation lets them do more exactly with the funds and properly and they're very transparent in that they're going to be transparent with the funds like you can set up bitcoin wallets and lightning nodes that show transactions that are uh you're basically you allow your node to be transparent and what you're doing with the funds that are running through it um and they're basically just going to invest in try to invest in developers uh projects that are working on the ui and user experience

and education i believe in marketing marketing yeah the marketing is iffy that's the one that everyone's worried about the most i think yeah um you know i'm cautiously optimistic like i said i think it's more risk for their individual reputations yeah they also have the benefit that they learned from what the bitcoin foundation did wrong um bitcoin was way more nascent back then now it's way bigger economy way bigger industry uh so there's they're less likely to take such an authoritative role especially since the people in this i respect way more to begin with and they all have their own side gigs already going on that are all pretty much bitcoin related and solely bitcoin focused and relatively successful as well right so like when

they get quoted in in like the new york times or wall street journal or something it's not going to say like jameson lopp like chairman of the b foundation right like it'll say cto of casa casa huddle right like that'll probably be what it says and even just the fact that it's just the b and not btc or bitcoin like makes that quotableness like less uh ideally like it'd be great if we actually had you know like 25 foundations focused on this stuff yeah and then you wouldn't have to worry about any individual one and we'd get tons of development funds getting moved all around into you know independently and is it really any different than what some uh company like chain code is doing whereas chain code is solely focusing on right i think it's just it's because

they're thinking foundation i the marketing that's why the marketing is an issue yeah you know that's what because it's like don't tell me what bitcoin is right you know you don't get to decide what especially since like everyone is still really sore about like the last couple of years where there's been uh you know the so-called store value thesis versus payment system yeah coffee coffees for payment versus store for venezuelans right like uh and that's a very much a marketing thing yeah yes it'll be interesting i wish them well i do respect yeah i do respect everybody involved i would love if it goes great and maybe yeah they are putting their reputations on the line so i think they're gonna they're gonna act uh to preserve those reputations i would argue

and it's just donation based only they don't have like that whole membership structure that they had with the bitcoin foundation yeah so uh yeah the b foundation is now a thing and i think they're actually open to changing the name just so people aren't so butthurt i kind of like the name i mean what else are you gonna do foundation is going to be in the name regardless because that's the organizational structure they need yeah and that's the part that's triggering everyone yeah you know yeah so like what are you gonna call the foundation yeah even if you called it the foundation people would be pissed if uh if the bitcoin foundation was never a thing i don't think people would be as pissed do you or well yeah but it's always going to be there no matter

what right people are okay with the ethereum foundation no i mean not the same people that are complaining about the bitcoin foundation complain about the ethereum foundation that's true and then you have a subset like me that complain about the ethereum foundation but but then you know but then don't necessarily be like oh the b foundation will give them the benefit of the doubt and we'll see what happens yeah i just i think i think that bitcoin's a fucking honey badger and you know if if you think that 12 people deciding to launch a foundation uh can cripple it then like first of all where were you the last two years and second of all like you probably shouldn't own any bitcoin because there's no future for it exactly it's

very good point um yeah so i think that's all we have to talk about you want to add anything else i don't think so i don't either do we know how long we've how long we ran for an hour and eight and a half minutes in did we say the price the price was 64 64 i think it's still around there i don't know for sure um yeah so that was the weekend it was a long week tough week i think it was very uh sobering week for most people very humbling uh and again i after especially after this weekend going to riga i'm i'm very invigorated right now feeling very invigorated about the mission of bitcoin and and the people involved in particular i still can't believe it pumped after the no yeah i'm i that's why i wanted to go i mean when i read your when i read your

bent i was just like i was so pumped and i just that's why i wanted to go that's because it's not even necessarily about this talks the speeches it's about all the little conversations that happen on this side yeah it's really cool the people you meet along the way it's really pure Some ride-or-die fucking legends in this community. I'm, like, fully lounged out on Marty's couch right now. I've slowly gotten more comfortable. You look like you're about to light a cig. As the pod has continued, I'm like a model over here.

Like Burt Reynolds looking on the bear skin, except you have your clothes on. Rest in peace, Burt Reynolds. That was recently. We're going to end on that. Let's pour some out for Burt. We'll see you freaks next week. Take care, guys.