TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2018.11.12

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

This week we discuss: - Bitcoin Cash hard fork - Bitcoin price volatility - Coinemine - https://www.coindesk.com/the-799-coinmine-one-will-look-like-an-xbox-and-mint-crypto-money - US Elections, politicians holding BTC - Blockchain voting - EtherDelta fined - https://www.coindesk.com/sec-charges-etherdelta-founder-with-running-unregistered-securities-exchange - Recent Bitcoin Core merge - https://twitter.com/MarcoFalke/status/1060913913221599232 - BitMex v. Hasu - https://medium.com/swlh/a-storm-is-brewing-over-the-largest-bitcoin-exchange-f956324b449f https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/bitmex-ceo-defends-his-firms-integrity/ - China Debt situation - https://mailchi.mp/3026673e9232/martys-bent-november-7th-2018-issue-356 - MakerDAI Get your Baboon Go-Bag right now! Use the code "CRYPT" for 10% your purchase at www.baboontothemoon.com

hey there freaks i hope you're doing all right it's uh been a long day been a big day big day in the markets bitcoin the uh the stable period that was august through uh half of november has come to an end a lot of volatility today but before we get to the volatility in bitcoin let's introduce you to our sponsor baboon uh baboon makes technical duffel bags for all laces ventures i'm going on adventure matt in a couple weeks and i cannot wait to flaunt my baboon bag throughout the airport uh the bags use waterproof materials are tear proof and will last forever every bag comes with free shipping and a lifetime guarantee excuse me that's a lifetime guarantee i mix it up there in my mouth a little bit matt because it's such a good deal i couldn't

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today charlie belolo actually wrote about it in the newsletter today you were tweeting about it earlier this morning he jinxed us he did jinx us he pointed out that uh i think bitcoin's three month annualized volatility was at an all-time low of 14 and only hours later uh the market broke it was like 20 minutes later yeah there was like a there was a thousand dollar candle so we The price this week, freaks, right now. Ooh, we finally get to read the price and make it matter. It's $5,500 and ranging, and right now it's $5,490. It's still pretty volatile.

And it went lower. How low did it go? It got to... Can it get down low? Still using our trusty Bitstamp here. Our Bitstamp has got as low as $5,325. What about XBX? You're on TradeBlock already.

Yeah, XBX. Let me check. i got i had a request i had a request from a listener to quote xbx xb that's the index price on trade block for you listeners who don't know um does it not just show it there no it does but yeah it got down to oh you're checking the low it's at like 5500 right now on the xbx yeah um the xbox charts are not as uh it doesn't show a daily low it does but it's at like the charts are not as good as they are they're not as granular no not as granular as they are for each exchange what did you say the daily low at bitstamp was

uh 53 25 i believe uh we got some panic in the streets some blood going out yeah it's people freaking out people texting us you get some texts today got a few texts got a few emails a few dms but i'm you know what i'm excited got the blood flowing a little bit it's been pretty boring it was kind of nice i trained a lot of my friends to check my twitter so that's good instead they just texted me a screenshot of me already saying that there's no specific cause for today it was just pent-up volatility i was going to bring that up um i thought that was a very good tweet so will you explain it uh a lot of people are trying to say that uh bitcoin cash in their planned hard fork and hash war that is supposed to commence tomorrow

the hash war is uh the cause for all this others like yourself would say it's probably just uh your regular market noise it was probably due time like we said volatility at all time lows they're going to be so many articles so many articles over the next week couple weeks trying and explain what the reasoning was for why it fell this time manipulation bitcoin cash some other bullshit you know and uh that's what always happens in these kind of situations but when volatility is so low for such a long time it's gonna break hard one way or the other yeah but matt matt the timing of a tweet that went around that made it into the bent this morning from uh ram ramen binance i believe it is some weird twitter name um posting reposting a message

from jihan wu in the chinese chat room and translating it for us us bitcoin or english speaking bitcoiners and jihan in that post said that he's going all out against craig wright he's going to move some hash power from bitcoin to bitcoin cash abc to win this hash war and as a result he predicted that bitcoin's price could fall to five thousand dollars and not hours later we had a thousand dollar wick on very low volume mind you is he manipulating markets your facial expressions were great during that um little rant uh i i also saw that tweet i don't follow what the fuck jehan was talking about like why would movie yeah his logic was pretty piss poor there was no it was just like price follows or hash power follows

price not the other way around and not even that it's like bitcoin cash they're fighting we talked about this last pod they're fighting over uh who has control of like six percent of the total hash exactly it's not even ten percent of bitcoin's total hash so like since then like roger uh ver uh on his bitcoin.com pool which i don't know why anyone mines with his pool but apparently some people do he has 2.5 percent of the hash rate at mining bitcoin and then he i don't know how much hash rate he has mining bitcoin cash of all bitcoin shot 256 hash is bitcoin.com pool and he just announced that he's forcibly moving that over to bitcoin cash um like that amount alone should probably tip the scales in favor of uh bitcoin cash abc client the the anti-craig

client yeah that's what i said in the newsletter today like the amount of hash power needed is negligible right that's what i wanted to say negligible but i i didn't know for sure if that was the correct term even moving like 10 which they don't need to move 10 is still a drop in the bucket it just means that for bitcoin miners it'll be a little bit more profitable this week and there's no reason for jehan to say oh the price will fall to 5 000 like that's he's just you know he's probably really stressed out right now he's lost a lot of money oh this is actually something we didn't put on this like rumors of jehan getting kicked off the board but like also that might just be restructuring for the ipo like normal restructuring yeah it's hard there's no

like it's not very clear there was other twitter rumors in the last like 12 hours that he's being moved away from decision making processes uh as well i mean look it makes sense if people at bit main are like we should just cut our losses here like this was a failed experiment i would uh well that's so that was my conspiracy theory at the bottom of the bend did you see that you didn't read it today i did read it today i did read it there was a kanye link in the bottom right yeah there was i got treasures in my mind i got treasures in my mind so not that far low higher up than that a little higher up but the theory was uh maybe jihan craig and crew have come to this realization and maybe this is a proxy war where they've admitted defeat uh on the bitcoin

cash of bitcoin cash uh on the open market and are actively trying to sabotage the project while shorting the markets uh destroying bitcoin cash in the process maybe there will be a failed fork each side will be able to blame each other and uh maybe in a little while come back into the good graces of bitcoin once they give some penance for for the folly of their ways what i what i think is and also could be a likely scenario or maybe even more likely we just like to talk conspiracy theories these are all conspiracy theories yeah i mean i i wouldn't i mean this is it's speculation i wouldn't say conspiracy theory but anyway um that's true because in a free market you know you have to include shorting things as a reasonable logical strategy in the

game theory um there could be a play here by bitmain to increase their bitcoin cash amount without really spending any money because if they let it appear that it seems like Craig is going to take over and that Bitcoin Cash Satoshi's vision client becomes a dominant client then they can wait to the last second as all the fork tokens and Bitcoin Cash itself fall in price and then they could buy their side because there's fork futures right on on phoenix and polo i think polo are the hottest ones right now yeah well phoenix came second polo did it first uh and so there's fork future so you could speculate on which fork bitcoin cash fork will become the one that's worth more exists in the first place uh because it looks like it'll

just be one or the other uh and well and let's explain why because i think bitcoin abc wanted to institute replay protection but bitcoin satoshi satoshi vision was like no thanks they copy their code and basically yeah made it so that's irrelevant if if roger's moving 2.5 of the hash over and then if bitmain just gets a little bit extra hash in there and there's so what i was saying is so they could be hiding for instance hash that's either not on not switched over to bitcoin cash yet because if they're mining bitcoin cash they're losing money so they want to mine Bitcoin as long as possible. Or they could even be pointing their own hash at SV pool to make it seem like they're supporting SV pool. So then you wait till the futures price goes really low on

Bitcoin cash ABC. Then you take your Bitcoin cash, you split it, and then you sell the SV side for Bitcoin cash and you could almost get three to one or whatever it is. And then you show your hand that you have enough hash because bitmain and co have so much fucking hash like let's be fucking you know serious here and then they and the next thing you know they're digging themselves out of this this huge hole they've built themselves of bitcoin cash because they can triple up their position or double up their position at like little to no cost and they could short it in the meantime they could do so many shenanigans it's like so this is some 3d chess right here matt you should be on on the team of one of these companies playing these yeah no thank you

you can be you can be like the old general in a tent like looking at a map this is this is how matt looks right now describing the situation the hash war this is the map no but that's it's fun playing through those yeah so the fork is tomorrow so like i've been pretty excited to like watch this shit show unfold you're hoping for a 200 block reorg yeah all i want for christmas is a 200 block reorg so the beauty of all of this is this whole time bitcoin cash has been one of the least secure chains in the whole market you know people are saying you know part of the argument that that bitcoin cash is the cause of this price collapse across the industry is because all of a sudden people are waking up that a top four coin uh you know could be taken

over so easily like bitcoin cash was never a fucking top four coin like just because they pump the price and make the market cap look big or whatever does not make one a top four coin and it not only that it's been probably one of the least secure chains in the top 100 like even like like some random ass shit coin that's at like 75 or something just because it's shot 256 and it's the minority chain so there's all this hash all these asics that are sitting around mining bitcoin that if you're just like a little pool there you can just come over and you can just fucking reorg their chain and while they're during during the fork they're going to be split 50 50 so you know they just all of a sudden you need half half the hash to attack it so like i

would ideally like best case scenario here like someone fucking just goes for it that's going to be an interesting precedent uh that's another thing i wrote about in the newsletter today is that i have no fucking idea how this is going to play out but we know for sure we're going to get a very very thorough case study on fork economics and hash wars which is uh promising it's a good data point to have here's the other thing you know do you think that if craig or g or bitmain lose here they're not going to go down without a fucking fight like it'll always be in the background especially if craig loses it'll always be in the background that at any moment you know he might come in and try and try and attack the chain again well i think uh these guys will go the

way that like garzik and crew went from last year um obviously he was part of the segwit 2x and bitcoin the reason why bitcoin cash became a thing eventually but obviously metronome the future of cryptocurrency yeah um so i'm not but he didn't really cling on to the bitcoin cash idea for too long after segwit2x failed and has sort of just fallen into the ether and not said much recently it seems like actually he's trying to get on everybody's good side now yeah he's trying to you just wait a little bit and then you come in and you say a couple like bullish things about bitcoin yeah and then people start to forget like all right yeah they're soft all right jeff you got it didn't you but uh no i think that'll be similar i mean craig obviously like hopefully he just gets

to the point where it's like obviously all right thank you well we need these people to lose all their money and then become irrelevant well i think hopefully just like people will realize that they are irrelevant after this whole shit show i mean people should have realized they were irrelevant a year ago exactly you know we've been screaming fucking from the rooftops for such a fucking long time well that's what pisses me off is that we're paying so much attention to this we just spent seven minutes on this and well i mean it's really you know i think it's these case studies are really important for us because we spent three years arguing about the block size right yeah and then finally we had the whole contentious thing go through where we all

had to run our own nodes and we made it happen and we said fuck you segwit2x and now we have segwit and all these good things are happening and lo and behold bitcoin cash minority fork bigger blocks they make bigger blocks and and what does craig do this month craig maliciously fills the box full and knocks nodes offline yeah bu nodes right right and that's exactly that's exactly what we all cautioned about we said you could have a malicious miner that knocks other miners and other nodes offline by filling blocks with bullshit just to make them extra expensive and hard to validate and he did it he literally did it so now we get to say next time this fucking comes up look you know it happened right and the irony of the situation is

so fucking beautiful the uh there's anti exactly there's anti big block bitcoin cashers now then that's the whole crux of the debate of the fork where right now is how they're saying 128 versus 32 yeah exactly that's all correct how big is too big exactly um so uh it'll be a beautiful shit show tomorrow but that's why it's important to watch and like the other thing is like do we have do we have a countdown to what block is the fork at i don't fucking know i just i literally just hope it just all blows up uh that's my big conspiracy go to bitcoinabc.org they probably say um yeah but i i just i'm not trading bitcoin cash i just you just because it's super easy to manipulate you bitcoinabc.com no ssl security certificate not sure if i like it where are you

sending me matt and it's probably wait that's weird just type in bitcoin abc and no.org i said oh.org did i just what did i just do i don't know hopefully we didn't get a virus all right Bitcoinabc.org Which does have an SSL certificate It does Incident report from September That was the Announcements

Yeah they're not really talking about it too much I don't know what block it is That's weird You'd think it would say it on the website Anyway it's tomorrow We have a global audience Matt When is tomorrow? UTC time

not today tomorrow utc it's gonna be and uh yeah it should be interesting i i don't really know of a place to follow it oh they have uh what did uh bitmex start coin uh fork monitor.info yes that's the website fork monitor.info will tell you if the fork happened um but like i said like i mean you shouldn't be holding big if you are holding bitcoin cash for some reason you know god bless your soul but i would don't don't be don't be sending it around tomorrow there could be some crazy shenanigans can go down and that's the other thing with this it just shows you what the issues are when you have low hash rates right where like where schmucks can just control half of it out of nowhere like this is the kind of issues you have see bitmax answering the questions we

need answered right now bitcoin cash is expected to conduct a hard fork upgrade at about 1640 utc on 15th november look at that we even got them utc right there you go told you fork monitor.info yep looks like a quality website just checked it out for the first time there's a free ad bitmex bitmex is the real winners of today they just been making bank they i literally my whole crypto uh crypto list on my tweet deck has just been bitmex wrecked all day some people sort of 10 million contract liquidation is that what we saw yeah i don't i yeah i mean i think it could be like highly levered right so you don't really know how much obviously somebody wasn't buying half the supply of bitcoin i don't know maybe there's some baby belugas out

there how much would that would be 50 50 bill wait it was 10 million bitcoin or 10 million contracts oh that's that's bigger than a beluga yeah i thought a contract was one bitcoin right yeah it is yeah um yeah so very volatile exciting i'm actually excited oh no a contract's one dollar on the xbt usd okay i'm pretty sure all right i'm not that big though i mean u.s users aren't supposed to use it so oh we didn't even have this on the list tony vays tone vays poor tone he uh he did his short didn't pay off because he closed his account after all that well feds you can tell i don't use bitmex i don't know how big a contract is i like i like to think well the ones that are the alt coins that trade alt to bitcoin those are denominated in oh in the alt coin okay

so it's one alt coin per contract one i don't know i might be completely wrong here anyway tone tony got his bitmex account shut down but he's a u.s citizen so he should have anyway tone and you had a 5x short. Tone, I love you, brother, but you're a bonehead move. Yeah, and you're like publicizing it. You're posting screenshots of your trades and shit. Yeah.

What did you think was going to happen? That's all I got to say about that. There's a little slap on the wrist. You kicked a hornet's nest. It's going to shit on you. And it's funny. It's sort of evil. BitMEX took his account and his referrals

and then uh bitcoin went down like a thousand dollars his short would have been that's what i'm saying his short they basically forced liquidated to short and you know everyone knows that feel yeah it sucks um yeah but next actually came out in defense of the article that hasu wrote a couple weeks ago this week um which is interesting indeed indeed of course they did yeah as so they're not going to say they're trading against their customers yeah so that's actually an interesting article article for as glowingly as we talk about bitmex uh you should have a well-rounded understanding of the news and rumblings around the exchange so i would go check out hasu's uh medium post that he put up a few weeks ago i don't we'll put the link he'll put

the link there and he'll put a link to bitmex's response too so we cover both sides exactly um look bitmex is a centralized exchange they can fuck you if they want to that's what it comes down to all these centralized exchanges you know trusted third parties there's security holes yeah that might trade against you yeah um coin mine is something you're you're uh pretty jacked bang bang right now um you do not like it well coin mine is like 21 computer part two uh balaji is also an investor uh coinbase ventures is backing it where are they out of are they in same friend probably do you remember 21 co i'm looking at my 21 computer right here on my desk i know i'm looking at it too uh marty bought 21 co probably for about a bitcoin i made him no money

whatsoever back in 2015 any money but it taught me how to interact with the blockchain and pull data from the blockchain there you go very thankful for so if you want to use the command line that was a lot a lot of fun but this doesn't even have the command line so this So this is an $800 computer that has a $250 graphics card in it that doesn't look like it can be upgraded, that mines altcoins for you with the GPU. Yeah. They take a 5% cut,

and it's going to be like a note in a box as well. Yeah, and you're saying it's going to be unprofitable. yeah i mean it'll you're better off if you want to go this route you're better off buying like a gaming pc and installing honeyminer shout out honeyminers one of our sponsors oh yeah our our our ref link for the pod is stacking sats.com is it working yeah it works from some browsers i'm not sure i haven't figured it out it might not work on it give it a shot if it doesn't work go to honeyminer.com and just fuck our ref link doesn't matter but but but you know so honeyminer basically creates that user-friendly experience that they're trying to give you but you can use

your computer for gaming you can still you can upgrade your gpu easily if you want to update your graphics card like i don't even think you can update the graphics card in this fucking box yeah that's crazy that's a benefit honeyminer provides over this services it's you just use a regular computer yeah you know you can bet you can i think it's mac and windows right so like you just get it and you uh not sure if they release mac yet but it's definitely only windows it's on the road i know it's not on linux which sucks but i mean it's not like you're working they're working on linux and mac it's not like you get a usable computer out of the fucking coin mine anyway you're better off at the end of the day like the only way you're going to make profit

on the coin mine is if you hold the coins and they appreciate in value and at that point you're better off just buying the fucking coins with the money you would pay for a core mine yeah and when i bought the 21 co-miner uh just like how i would recommend buying these products i i bought that knowing it wasn't going to be profitable uh just you buy it for a loss you buy it for a loss to learn and it's a good learning experience i'm not sure i can't speak to coin mine and i haven't used it i don't know it's like the casa hodl node or something yeah exactly except this is double the price and they're pretending like you're gonna make a profit on the mining like they're being a little malicious with their advertising i don't i don't appreciate um you know like they're

literally telling people in the copy to hodl the coins and then they'll make a profit so like they're literally trying to convince people to mine for a loss because that's what you're doing you're fucking losing a dollar a day or whatever it is in electricity to mine for a loss at a shitty hash rate and uh any of these coins if they get a6 then your fucking gpu is out of luck your gpu is going to get outdated really quickly too so that's even going to get worse and worse as time goes on yeah um i would have been way more interested in something like this even at a markup mark you know markups or markups um even at a markup if they had like a mechanism where they were like a normal user can easily hot swap and add new gpus like if you want to put like

if you want to keep adding like you pay 250 and you can add another gpu to it and another and you like slip in a module or something you know like that could be a cool thing but this is like they're packaging a gaming computer adding an extra margin on top of it and not even letting you game on it that was a loud ring no but i think you're describing undisturbed too is what Hyundai Miner provides. It's like, hey, we're just going to provide the software. You have the ability to scale up on the hardware side as much as you want.

This software is just here to help you. But with that being said, again, I don't want to pour too much water on CoinMine's fire right now. Let's pour all the water on it. Just soak it. We're soaking it. But I'd be lying because I like seeing these hardware. I love the hardware.

These hardware products built and people playing with it. We're giving them tough love. you know but make it better even if it's a failure it's a data point you know i would prefer if they made a product that wasn't an immediate failure instead you know i cc'd them in the tweet that i was angry about it you know yeah so that's coin mine um oh big election week last week here in the states bitcoin won bitcoin won so we had two governors governor of colorado the governor of we got jared polis in in colorado the first openly gay governor as well and he was like a major major bitcoin bull yeah i think he was one of the first ones to accept donations in bitcoin

and he had like an open contest with another coloradian coloradian and he had that great law that he tried to get passed in congress like the fair cryptocurrency law or something it was called and then the other one was gavin newsom who was also one of the first ones to accept bitcoin but a little bit more toned down than jared jared was very outspoken and he's the governor of california which is a way bigger state yeah it's a big part of the silicon valley yeah and then on top of that uh not elected to office but appointed to office the new attorney general after jeff sessions got He didn't actually take donations, Whitaker, but he did tweet about it in 2012, which is like, if it was on your radar in 2012, there's a good chance you own some. And if the attorney general owns some, then we got a little mole.

We got a mole in the White House, right? Yeah, it's fifth pillar, as Bitcoin sign guy would like to describe. Every politician that owns Bitcoin takes us one step closer to world domination. People aren't too happy about him, his overall policies, though. I have no idea about his overall policies. uh i know i know that he had he can lift yeah he's apparently jacked tatted up and jacked and i know that he probably owns bitcoin and i uh you know it's a win yes huge win no that's uh again a lot of people like to say that governments are the biggest obstacle that bitcoin has to

overcome in the future and i would argue that yeah that's probably true but the more politicians we get in the office like matt said that own bitcoin in our uh inside the golden gates sort of speaking on behalf of it in a positive way the better uh yeah we need to co-op them yeah it's a bit of a trojan horse strategy here just trying to affect the minds of the people making the laws and hopefully they will be uh very very good laws well the thing is too bad end of the tangent there is bitcoin is different than a lot of other assets in that you can get it um relatively anonymously uh so these politicians could be holding it and no one knows as well yeah which makes it particularly viral yeah i would say yeah um that's a the elections topic of politicians being

voted into office were uh pro bitcoin and pro crypto is a good segue into the subject of voting on the blockchain is it a good thing matt no uh yeah there was a lot of there's a lot of hype around like so people uh are losing confidence in our current voting systems that are run on software pretty pretty quickly i would say and It's been proven that the software that is used to tally votes in our country, in the U.S. in particular, I can't speak to other countries, though it probably exists outside of the U.S. as well, is easily hackable. It's been proven at DEVCONs and Black Hat hacker conferences many times over, and a lot of people are trying to say that, hey, we can fix this with the blockchain, but we're here to push back a little bit and say, hey, this may not be as advantageous as some people think. Well, what's really funny, actually, is that back in 2014, the reason I know that blockchain voting is not the miracle that people think it is, is because back in 2014, I was freelance writing for like TechCrunch and Entrepreneur and stuff about Bitcoin. And I pitched a blockchain voting, a Bitcoin voting article to New York Times.

So the reason all of this is on topic is because New York Times released an op-ed that said blockchain voting could solve all our problems. I pitched the same exact article to New York Times editorial board in 2014, November 2014 for that election. And they actually discussed it at the table, like they discussed it and then they turned me down. And then I published it in TechCrunch, I think, instead. and then once i published it i had a bunch of actual voting researchers reach out to me and they're like can we shoot your ear off like we want to talk about this and then i proceeded to have multiple conversations with them where i realized that all of my understanding of it was completely wrong what was wrong and the main thing is is secret ballots so the reason you have

public polling places where no one else is allowed to go into the voting booth with you And there's witnesses there to make sure that doesn't happen is because if someone knows for sure how you voted, it's really easy to buy or force someone to, you know, blackmail someone into voting the way you want. You know, if you know your wife exactly how your wife voted, you can tell her that if she doesn't vote that way, you know, like she gets beat at night or what? Or if I want to buy a vote for you for $25, like, I'm way more likely to buy that vote if I can tell, like, Marty voted this way, right? Like, I know for sure. I would never lay a hand on my wife. Yeah, I meant the metaphorical you. I know, I know, I know.

I'm kidding. I kid. No, but, like, vote buying is a big problem with blockchain voting. Any kind of remote voting system. Because you could have the person standing behind you. Even saying blockchain voting system is, like, It sounds horrible. Right?

and then on top of that you have civil civil attacks which have not been solved yet how do you know that it's one person per vote and blah blah yeah i mean you could do it similar way but then you don't know if if if it's based on private keys then you can the private keys can be sold or compromised or or whatever but but yeah all these remote voting things you always have the same issue where like literally you can do all the text stuff and if you can vote from your phone and from your computer you can just have the person standing behind you either paying you or coercing you to vote and they can just watch the screen as you click the fucking button i think you just take your phone and you're not looking to vote on your behalf yeah something like that's

simple or just give you 25 you hand them the phone and then they vote on your behalf yeah or whatever it is uh so that's an inherent problem that you just can't solve that just it's unsolved you need public polling places with with a secret ballot yeah uh but we're always trying to give out future business ideas so if you're looking to play vote arbitrage on the future maybe uh think about starting how you can uh make a buying vote startup a buying vote startup i mean i i could see i think there will be all the there's a lot of chains there's a lot of alt chains that rely on on-chain governance yeah so we're gonna have interesting like smart contract implementation and stuff of vote buying i think where you like submit your signed message that shows that you voted a certain

way and then they pay you out a distributed amount of money and then people can post bounties to buy votes and stuff like that yeah decred is probably decred tezos i think there's a couple unlaunched ones yeah um so yeah definitely again more data points uh from a case study perspective and I think they're going to fail beautifully, but we'll see. Well, I mean, you have something similar with current shareholder votes for companies and stuff, right? Like, I get, when it's time for my shareholder vote, I get an email from TD Ameritrade or whoever you use.

You get an email, and they're like, do you want to vote? And you click the link, and you put in your share number, and your vote is weighted by how much you own. and like that works for companies but the thing is if you want a certain level of integrity you can't do that so for some things it might be okay but for major major things like you know the global reserve currency like it could be a bad idea or for for the president of the united states like it could be a bad idea because because of those issues you have yeah um no that's a interesting highlight of different use cases in which

decentralization is better and centralization is more favored. Yeah, nothing's black and white, right? Yeah, the whole meme of we have to decentralize the world is probably poisoning the well a little bit because... Well, I would like to decentralize the world. Decentralize all the things that are possible, encrypt all the things that are possible within practicality. But you would agree that not everything needs to be decentralized. Decentralized toilets, I think It would be awesome. No, yeah, I agree.

I absolutely agree. Yeah. I do think someone should come up with an Airbnb for toilets. Like, if you need to go in the bathroom, like... No. God, no. Why not? It's a terrible idea.

Why is that a terrible idea? You could have different prices. Because if you're a toughy human, that is okay with random humans coming into your house and taking a dump. You set your price. It's a market price. You, like, set your price. Some people might charge more.

Some people might charge less. Some people might have an extra bathroom they just use as their Airbnb bathroom. Freaks. I want you to know this is not a future business idea I endorse, okay? This might be a future monetization strategy of TFTC here. You know, we don't know. Sounds like a stinky business deal if you ask me. Okay, there we go.

All right. Great idea. So voting on the blockchain, be careful. Probably not ready for it yet. I love those. Those are my favorite parts of the pod. On to the next one. Ether Delta.

Ran it to the SEC. long long arm of the la la la the long arm of the law caught up to them they got a couple fines i believe in decentralized exchange um as he came after them find them for running an illegal security exchange i believe um and not doing proper registered broker dealer yeah probably the same something like that yeah i know someone said to me like oh it wasn't about kyc it was about being an unregistered broker dealer or something but like i don't think you could be a registered broker dealer without kyc so it's like all fucking intertwined anyway yeah it's semantics at that point but the point is these exchanges aren't decentralized if they have a

founder that's bringing an roi well let's uh let's be true to the situation here apparently from what i'm understanding these underlying smart contracts of ether delta are still decentralized it's just the whole um they just went after the founder who sold it i think yes i believe he sold it uh months ago for like four million dollars or something like that uh but i believe like the smart contracts that make ether delta work are still decentralized so there's no is there no centralized interface i believe that yeah so i believe you can interact with the smart contract if you have the know-how to do it without the interface. All I know is if you're...

That is, I do not know that for 100% certainty. That is what I believe I saw and read. Well, neither of us have ever used EtherDelta. No, I have not. I mean, Radar Relay today... So IDEX announced they were complying with... Which is another major decentralized exchange announced that they were complying with the New York BitLicense.

they're going to block new york users a couple weeks ago and then radar relay announced that today i think they announced that they're doing kyc yep and not listing securities um so like the whole point of these decentralized exchanges are two things you don't want to trust the exchange with custody because they might like gox you and steal your coins um and you want to break regulations you don't want to do kyc and all those things if a decentralized exchange can't offer those two things it's going to lose out to a true decentralized exchange that can and i just broke a glass oh um watch your feet yeah so let's continue so i it's okay we'll clean up after yeah i hit it with my foot because i was lounging on this couch

uh so they're gonna get fucked like if if you don't offer that if you're not actually truly decentralized you've been able to get by up until this point as just using it as a marketing term but as soon as governments start enforcing this stuff which is happening right now like the curtain is pulled back and it's like immediately obvious yeah um so this is just a slow ongoing uh basically story people have been saying that the authorities and the regulators are going to go after these projects for a while now and uh slowly but surely the sec over the last few months in particular has begun enforcement definitely sending a shot across the bow of the industry particularly if you're uh messing with uh unregistered securities in the eyes of the

us government or the regulatory body and the problem here is is that the guys that run these things they're aware of this they know that that they're the the founders and the investors when you have american founders that are public and not anonymous and you have investors that are rich and not anonymous they know that they're exposed here they know the u.s government can crack down on them but they have no other option because to do it any other way they don't get to make a profit so they're just going for it and if they get forced to comply they'll comply and then they'll lose but they don't have any other choice there's no choice here for them really besides losing out on profit yeah the classic don't ask for permission ask for forgiveness exactly strategy it's a good

one it's worked in the past uh but it's ephemeral in this case i would argue um matt's going to get some materials to clean up the glass that he just broke he's getting another glass actually um yeah so that that happened i'll clean up i'll clean up after the pot i don't want to get distracted and miss out on you that makes sense yeah um but yeah so just if you're running or using a decentralized exchange there's no these risks exist and uh they will be exploited by the authorities in due time at some point in the future you don't know when it'll just happen at some point you'll wake up one day and you won't have access to your account so be careful and only allocate uh as many funds as you're willing to lose to these types of services

and that was the public service announcement from rabbit hole recap for the day uh a lot of bearish news a lot of bearish talk so far so i thought it'd be good to throw in a topic that's a good fundamental for bitcoin in particular last week uh there was a merge into the bitcoin core repository uh that went under looked in my my opinion wrote about it in the bent last friday i believe uh but emerged pr from ryanofsky uh which is a refactor to start start the process to separate the wallet from the node which is a very uh technical news item but it is an important step apparently for people working on the bitcoin core repository in particular the process of developing uh developing on top of bitcoin is arduous right

now because you have to interact you need to be careful the way you develop uh and write your code because it interacts right now the way the gui is set up with the wallet and the node you have to be very cautious of how they interact with each other and to make that process less arduous the core team wants to separate the wallet from the node in the bitcoin core gui and make it so they can be more efficient working on each separate function yeah it just makes sense it's a long-term goal that makes a lot of sense you know if you update the wallet you don't want it to affect consensus yeah so the uh marco falke who is a core dev i believe said this is the first step in clarifying the internal interfaces but hopefully a step in making the project

maintainable in the long run still a long way to go until full separation so again this is not going to solve all the problems overnight but it is another step yeah step in the right direction slowly but surely patience uh like like we said this stuff is not going to happen overnight and talking about bears i just uh doubled down with marty and marad did you agree to this this double down i assume you will because the momentum's on your side definitely agree to it we uh we doubled down on our steak on our steak bet it's going to be a porterhouse at a at a two-star michelin restaurant yeah um that was mirage choice how many stars fyi for what it's worth i just said deal uh deal i'm in mirage got some good taste uh champagne taste in this bear market i'm sure he's

very very happy with the way things turned out today uh or short-term bearish maraud um yeah i guess our last topic is i want to touch on because i wrote about it a couple times in the last week so the china debt situation um and i just think it's good to put things in a bigger macro perspective every once in a while and i think the geopolitical situation particularly between the u.s and china right now is very interesting because both countries find themselves in a particularly precarious situation from a monetary and debt perspective. And it seems like they're playing a game of geopolitical chicken

on the main geopolitical stage, I would say. Do you have anything to say about this? Or should I just riff off of it? I mean, on a macro sense, I don't really see how... So here's here's everything gets unraveled, you know, properly. Yeah, exactly. So here's the orderly. Here's a situation like it freaks to think about.

So I would argue I don't know for sure. I'm not sitting in the meetings that the leaders of China and other leading nations of the world are having. But it seems as though a few countries are positioning themselves to attempt to overtake the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency of the world. and to do that china has to keep its balance sheet and its growth looking pretty pretty good in the short term to give people confidence in the one to make this happen and china finds itself between a rock and a hard place with this debt situation where like many of the central banks around the world china pumped a bunch of debt into its economy drove up asset prices and And in recent years have since tried to wind that debt down a little bit and leading to economic uncertainty where unemployment is starting to rise.

And in China, when unemployment rises, it's particularly fickle because you have uprisings from the lower classes and there's been rumors of bank runs and stuff like that. So at a time when China and other countries are trying to usurp the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency of the world, they find themselves in this rock and a hard place. At the same time, the U.S. not doing much better. We have Donald Trump begging Chairman Powell on Twitter to lower rates because it's hurting our economy, as we're seeing this week, today in particular. Markets were tanking again. So during this very precarious time of the grand geopolitical stage, like people are playing 3-D chess at a nation-state level thinking maybe years ago

we're thinking maybe a new currency would usurp the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency of the world. it turns out uh the reserve that they thought would be usurping the u.s dollar might not be as stable as previously thought so maybe this is this is an opportunity for bitcoin yeah um so that was my long rant on it and this is completely hypothetical it's just something i think people should think about i think the time has come for money to be separate from state yeah and i think that people will realize it slowly and the long-term investment thesis for bitcoin is a very simple one that the more people that buy it the higher the price will go

and not many people have bought it yet so when people start to realize that they actually have an option that they can opt out of of all this bullshit being in the middle of these geopolitical games yeah exactly and including including the dictators and the government personnel and stuff who don't want it that are in america because america has this great deal where we can just inflate away all of our debt like we can just print money that we use to pay off our debt and everyone else gets a bad rap. So as they start to realize it, it'll just create a domino style effect

with either Bitcoin or derivative of Bitcoin taking over. And that's why we show up every day here at the TFTC Network, just to make people more aware of this option and try to fight for it a little bit. That's all I'm trying to do here. Should we do a wasabi check-in? You should run it. Looks like you're going to do it.

You should run it and use WasabiWallet, WasabiWallet.io. The more people that use it, the better it works, the quicker it works, and the more private it is for us. It gives you additional privacy when using Bitcoin. I saw somebody tweet at us. They downloaded it because they listened to the pod. Yep. Shout out. I can't remember who it was off the top of my head, but shout out to you.

I don't think it's his actual username, but it's HoddleMeTighter. Oh, yes, yes. But that's not his actual username, I don't think. Yeah. Shout out to Hoddle McTighter with the nice tux and his Abbey. Yeah, I mean, Wasabi's been going well. I've been giving it some liquidity, but we need more people. We need more people to use it.

If you don't care about your privacy, nobody else will, so you got to care about your privacy, people. How do we make people care about their privacy? What if people just don't give a fuck, dude? Well, that's why I really like how JoinMarket has an incentive layer, so I'm kind of hoping... I know Whirlpool Samurai's implementation is supposed to have an incentive layer.

Basically, if you put money up to get coin joined around, you get paid part of the fees. People love money, you know? They don't care about their privacy as much as they care about money, so if you tell them you can get paid... We're going to increase your privacy and your net worth at the same time. Big fan monetary incentives for things. Like toilets, like if you need to pee.

There should be a free market for toilets. I do not endorse this bad future business idea. I mean, I love the RV idea. RV's a good one. Yeah, the RV aircraft carriers. Yeah, you don't have your personal. The autonomous RV goes to the autonomous RV aircraft carrier. You go around the world in 60 days or whatever.

That would be fun. That would be pretty fun. Right, but what if you need a toilet on the way? You should have a free market for toilets. I think it goes hand in hand with everything you and Pierre were talking about. It's called Starbucks. You go and you buy a coffee, you get the code. What's your code?

Can I have a macchiato? No, I drink my coffee black. Thank you. That was the hardest statement of the pod. Do we have anything else to talk about? What's the price now? We're on Bitcoin death watch. We're up to 582.

Oh, wow. Climbing back towards six. Marty, did you? oh marty there was a there was a tweet today where it looked like you might have capitulated did you capitulate you'll never know you'll never know you didn't capitulate if he capitulated i wouldn't be doing the pod with him anymore i i said point blank that i would fork the pot no i'm uh i have resigned myself to the fact that i'm going down with the ship if it goes down this is where we earn our fucking keep this is where everyone says and in two years oh that was fucking

easy holding through that let me clarify so we're responsible i'm holding on to money i can afford to lose if if it all goes to shit um yes i would suck that's i mean if you go down with the ship you die like that is what that metaphor means you know the titanic goes down you're on the fucking ship you don't get in the lifeboat you die right some people made it up they didn't go not the people that went down with the ship the chef did the chef got so drunk he didn't freeze in the water you don't know this but he didn't go down with the ship he jumped off of it right so he didn't go down with the ship he panic sold yeah well i'm going down with the ship he panicked it went to zero he like panic sold big connect you know and it but with that being

said like i don't feel like the ship is going down at all i'm more are you i'm more bullish than i was last year oh yeah that's what i wanted to say like in 2014 2015 there was a real there was real worry that it was going to zero like people were like i was legit it wasn't this no it was not this i don't think it's going to go to zero i think obviously lindy everything blah blah blah the amount of capital that's that's been thrown into this industry uh i think it's sort of hooked itself into our psyche and our economy i don't think it's going anywhere that's another thing to watch uh completely unrelated oh i i also don't think i mean look we're the biggest fucking bitcoin bulls there are you know but this is where we earn our keep

they're gonna say to us in three years that we were lucky and that we did it it was all for it was all easy money and that we didn't deserve it and that the bitcoin distribution is unfair and i just want you to remember this feeling today where you're like holy fucking shit i don't want to tell my dad that i lost all my money and and realize that you earned it in two years you know you did yeah um i mean this is i mean going to like psychology of markets like this is the time when money is made you don't people who bought it like 17 000 at the height of the mania last year like can't honestly expect to make money that easily uh this is when there's blood on the streets the best time to buy as people say and i'm not saying go buy but we could go a lot

lower i'm not saying go buy bitcoin right now make sure it's in your risk tolerance and have i like the dollar cost averaging idea you know you just buy a little bit uh every week um out of your paycheck that you know you go on this cash app and you just buy a little bit that that you feel comfortable losing if you're a cigarette smoker you know don't smoke two packs of cigarettes that week buy twenty dollars of bitcoin and then do that every week and then maybe knock out another pack of cigarettes buy thirty dollars a week of bitcoin and you can just do it all the way down and you might be down a bunch of money but long term that should it should go up short term it's all gambling you don't really know it's a liquid market it can go up and down thousand dollars in

a day like today you don't really know so that if you dollar cost average you just level that all out and then long term you should be that's like my strategy at least mine as well and it's worked up to this point but i have a completely unrelated topic that i feel like we should cover just real quick before we end let's rip it how much time are we at uh 55 minutes we got 55 minutes perfect we got five minutes make or die oh so make or die is a stable coin but it's different than all the other stable coins because the other stable coins have their value because there's dollar bills in a bank account and then you have a trusted third party in between that is like i will exchange your for tokens um make or die is collateralized by ethereum so it's fully smart contract based

i think it is definitely least trust minimized but i think it's trustless it's pretty cool um yes but if the price of ethereum falls then those contracts get liquidated yes and there's The price point at which a lot of... Oh, we're really close. What is it, like 157? 157, 8 million Ethereum get liquidated. 8 million DAI worth of Ethereum get liquidated. So 8 million dollars worth of Ethereum get liquidated.

And then it just goes up dramatically after that point. So like you hit like 120 or something like that, there's like a lot of liquidations. So be on the lookout for the MakerDAI. It could cascade. It could be kind of a bit of a clusterfuck. yeah and uh as we all know bitcoin is the ship that dictates these markets so if it keeps hovering down i would imagine ethereum would would follow suit as well as most of the or all the market

so oh the other thing i was looking up was i was looking up uh i was looking up a lot of times the the main sellers the constant sellers in the market are bitcoin miners right because they have real costs yes they have um capex opex energy yeah rent labor yeah um and they have to pay that in fiat so they have to sell so like they're selling like 80 of their coins or whatever um we currently the amount of coins being produced every day is i think on average 1800 it's 12 and a half times six times 24 i'm pretty sure it's 1800 which is about 11 million dollars per day so anyone who tells you that your weekly buy doesn't make a difference is full of shit because if you have a million people buying ten dollars a day

that's the security spend it's eating that that liquid that instant that amount and especially if they're not all selling some of them are huddling the extra at least of their expenses yeah that's an interesting point very good point yeah exactly and as those adoption numbers go up and as the bitcoin amount goes down we're starting to see a almost a flippening of of that downward sell pressure yeah and i would advise you freaks to go check out pierre rochard's recent article on buyers the last resort he was the one who made me think of it because he's always talking about how everyone discounts the humble bitcoiner who is taking part of his paycheck every week and just adding buy pressure to the system right and like together we can all corner

the market of bitcoin you know we can make this a self-fulfilling prophecy if we all just buy The price will go up. Let's do this, Freaks, and you can buy using the Cash app. Go download the Cash app today. Yeah, user code Crypt for 0% discount. We don't have a code. Yeah, not yet. Hashtag MartyBen if you want to send me anything.

Tweet at Jack and tell him to give us a code. Yeah, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. We're working on something behind the scenes. Yeah, been a crazy week, crazy day in particular. I'm so excited for tomorrow. We may, yeah. so be on the lookout uh 16 40 oh my god twitter's gonna be so much fun tomorrow let's have a lot of

fun today uh if it's uh the volatility's back bitcoin's back baby you know no one wants fucking stablecoin bitcoin we all want 10 moves a day yeah both ways you know if you can't take the if you can't take the down then you can't take the up man uh i agree and for you freaks that are i pretty much cleaned up this glass i appreciate it appreciate it i was expecting that I hope you would. Yeah, obviously. Naturally. Free freaks that are avid listeners of Rabbit Hole Recap,

we may be moving this show permanently to Wednesday. I like Wednesdays better. I like Wednesdays too. Probably not good for next week. Yeah, I have a conflict. I got to go home. Oh, it's Thanksgiving. Fuck.

Yeah. Are we just going to skip an episode for Thanksgiving? I don't think so. We can do it Monday. We'll do Monday? So we'll do Monday next week, and then after that we're going to do Wednesdays. Yeah, like that.

This is like the only Wednesday of the year that's more inconvenient than a Monday. Yeah. Now Thanksgiving snuck up on me. I was like, holy, I was checking my calendar yesterday. We have a lot of things to be thankful for. Yes. Segwit2x not passing.

Life. Friendship. Bitcoin. Bitcoin. We're on completely different wavelengths. Being born at this point in time. Yeah, our partners. Yeah, my partner in crime.

Shout out to her. I hope you freaks enjoyed this edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. Shout out to our sponsor, Bonobo. go to bonobo to the moon bonobo i got this completely wrong it's fucking baboon it's baboon bags they're dope durable lifetime guarantee bags that are pretty fucking cheap baboon to the moon.com and you should just you know step away from the computer don't let the bear market get you down you know walk away go on a little trip bring a nice bag with you from baboon bags user user code crypt c-r-y-p-t 10 off c-r-y-p-t yes 10 off because we got a promo

code even though cash app didn't give us a promo code tweet out to mcallen tell them to go fuck themselves for not giving us a fucking sponsorship we are not drinking mcallen tonight i am not going to tell you what we are drinking until they secure a sponsorship this time and uh buy bitcoin buy bitcoin that's all we have for this week freaks peace and love oh and subscribe resubscribe do that subscribe resubscribe unsubscribe resubscribe tell your friends to subscribe tell your friends to subscribe leave reviews do the whole shabam thank you for listening peace and love adapt or die