TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2018.11.19

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

This week we discuss: Gold hoarders executed Iran - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/as-sanctions-hit-iran-executes-gold-currency-speculators - Ledger & Trezor issues - https://blog.trezor.io/psa-non-genuine-trezor-devices-979b64e359a7 https://twitter.com/matt_odell/status/1062876921787236352 - BCH post mortem -Lolli https://www.lolli.com/ -nodl.it http://www.nodl.it/ -SIM Swapping, App based 2FA psa - https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/130-lizard#episode-player -SEC coming down on ICOs

hey there freaks welcome back to rabbit hole recap with marty and matt odell uh how's it going guys it's i'm surviving i'm doing okay matt uh a lot of drama a lot of volatility volatility is back we'll get to it um today is monday november 19th 2018 uh day will go down in infamy for some people i'm sure uh before we jump into the topics of the day this podcast was brought to you buy the cash app our favorite app uh our favorite app to buy bitcoin buy bitcoin uh you already know the cash app is the number one finance app in the app store you've heard the spiel many times uh if you've been listening to this podcast you know about the boost program the boost program is something uh that i have been taking advantage of a lot of advantage of actually actually i use

it almost every day uh basically what you do is you order uh the free cash card after you download the cash app uh and you get boost which get you discounts at certain retailers they just added taco bell to the list last week uh the retailers include whole foods chipotle uh dominoes like i said taco bell's now on the roster take care of taco bell get the cash card and uh you can get a little discount there and then the coffee shops as well it's my favorite one the cash card puts in control your money with an extra in-app safety feature that lets you pause your card with a touch unlike a credit card there are no fees ever and the credit check isn't required to get one uh we're not using the other apps anymore don't even know their names

visit the app store google play marketplace and download the cash app now and tell them we sent you we're big fans of them uh and their bitcoin buying capabilities best way to buy bitcoin right now for for a u.s person yeah their ach setup is uh impeccable the money comes from your bank account to the app uh and you can buy bitcoin right away and then send it out of the app as quickly uh as possible you can buy bitcoin and have it in a personal wallet within five minutes depending on what the congestion's like on the network uh matt we're sitting large at 4890 right now on bitstamp our favorite exchange uh been a bit chaotic i believe last week we were still at 6 000 only five days ago where was it we're being 5 000 inch no we were like 6 300 2 6 300 right

two episodes ago we're talking about five days ago we were six days ago we dropped it on wednesday we hadn't even broken 6k yet i don't think so i don't believe so i have to go back we have to run the tape back i think we i think we had just broken 6k yeah it seems like there's some capitulation in the air some more a lot of people freaking out uh well maybe it was the day after we dropped we broke we broke 6k yeah because we dropped on wednesday and the the b cash fork hadn't happened yet right yeah it was the day before and the narrative needed the b cash fork to be blamed for the price drop even though it was completely unrelated yeah well um yeah the narrative the volatility was at all-time lows like we were talking i think we practically called it

we're like volatility is at all times yeah it was about the break uh what's interesting is global markets are suffering as well uh the traditional stock market's been they're getting hammered today nasdaq was down a whole three percent yeah it was but uh maybe bitcoin is playing into a larger global macro play here and people are a risk off scenario risk off yeah which may be more likely and then uh the sec uh the sec announcement from last week i actually think would have more Yeah, that could have been insider trading, too, before that announcement. That as well. And I think that would have a bigger impact than the Bitcoin Cash.

That's what Preston Byrne kind of called. He was like, someone asked him, I think Breaker Magazine asked him, which was funded by an ICO, by the way. Breaker Magazine asked him what they thought the reason for the price fall was before the SEC news came out. and he said it's probably some uh insider information leaking before the yeah people reshuffling the deck chairs in the titanic before the sec hammer came down uh i guess that'll be our first topic outside of prices the sec came out for you freaks that don't know last week and it seems as though they well they uh went after two icos in particular a paragon what was that like a weed uh a weed token they had a lot of celebrities right i don't know it's new but i'm pretty sure

that was the one paris hilton was on uh and if and i think money mayweather might have been on that as well um and then air swap was the other one it wasn't air swap wasn't air fox air fox excuse me excuse me air fox not air swap which is also another token yeah um here in brooklyn i believe uh but what we are learning from this enforcement action from the secs look it seems as though they have structured uh sort of copy and paste uh format for coming after these icos they can sort of play mad libs with the different ico uh founders and names and sort of start going after everybody so i mean the big thing i think was aren't they making them refund the tokens yes or the u is it the u.s dollar value at time of sale at time of sale i'm not sure i haven't

really looked into it that much i everyone was freaking out about it but i you i just expected the sec to crack down on all this shit so yeah i'm very very much the same way again i think it's short-term noise but uh it was bound to happen we've been talking about it like but if they have to liquidate their treasury holdings which is usually both ethereum and bitcoin but mostly ethereum like that could have a major effect on the price yeah uh the ethereum price that's uh it's approaching some very very crucial levels for for the maker die in particular uh well people they keep padding there yeah so let me pull up the site but uh ethereum ether is trading around $150 on

Gemini right now. Yeah, Ethereum's down about 14% today and Bitcoin's down 11.3%. So, Ethereum fell a little bit more than Bitcoin. Yeah, I'm looking for the site that tracks the make or die.

Bloody, bloody day, man. Well, it's bound to happen, right? While Marty is looking for that, just wanted to let you freaks know that I I bought him a nice new tumbler to replace the one that you might have heard me break last episode.

Thank you for that. He's currently drinking out of it right now. The bottle we're consuming today is Monkey Shoulder, and it was actually a gift from one of our listeners at Upstream Host. So give him a follow. He seems like a good dude. Bought us a bottle. Thanks for that, bro.

It's very tasty. enjoying enjoying it a lot all right i'm on the site here have you been on the site you know how to navigate this all right here we go um are you on the site yeah so the next big liquidation is at about $142.45 right now. They'll have to sell off about 7 million Ether if the price gets to that level,

just to keep the peg intact. Because it's collateralized. Yes, exactly. It's collateralized with Ethereum. So once it falls to a certain point, they have to sell the Ether to compensate for the shortfall. Yeah. So that's another thing to watch out.

uh again this is uh this is i don't want to seem too harsh here but the type of capitulation we probably needed to see um there needs to be a cleansing of all the bad actors and uh basically people have to be punished for making stupid uh economic market decisions um i mean i don't think these icos are i think it's a little bit wishful thinking uh to think that the bad actors will all be flushed out but a lot of them will be no but there'll be uh uh this this happening will cause people to pause going forward and i mean this is twice about two three other times already yeah and obviously yeah there's new scammers and new scams every cycle but uh like it is like the tide coming like there are more and more people get uh get a hardened defense against these types

of scams going forward oh sure sure i agree i mean every time you get scammed you learn exactly as well yeah uh and and uh yeah as far as bottoms you need like full despair you know if if it's going to be anything like the previous one which which is the only one me and you have lived through um and i've talked to people who have lived through um the 2011 one and you know you need to be and it needs to be like bitcoin is over and i just fucking wasted all this time so for the majority of people in the market yeah we're not there yet but uh at candle hater on twitter has a nice thread going uh going around looking for people capitulating in tweets i'm out fuck this crypto bullshit i'm done i'm not wasting any more time here fuck crypto twitter

fuck bitcoin fuck matthew mcconaughey call a capitulation i don't care goodbye um fuck matthew mcconaughey i like matthew mcconaughey crypto all right all right all right crypto panini gone one down uh one more goddle member at goddle member i'm capitulating fuck you all i lost a lot of money fuck crypto worst year of my life keep gambling fuck wits i lost seven grand Fucked a lot of you I hate crypto And I hope you all Commit suicide

Wow God'll member That's fucked up That's a bit harsh man That's really fucked up Alright we'll go one more We'll go one more Don't commit suicide

Ethereum West Parentheses not a security At Ethereum West On Twitter I'm out of crypto Probably won't trade again Until the manipulation stops Tired of the bad actors

In the space I wouldn't be surprised If we see a hundred dollar Bitcoin It's a scam to buy right now So those are just a few Capitulation tweets i would buy all of the bitcoin at a hundred dollars man i don't know i don't think i'll

ever get to a hundred dollars uh again that'd be a fucking mess i mean i'm glad that we brought marat on right right when we we brought marat on he basically this is his scenario that he played out for you guys was three episodes ago four episodes ago this is why we brought him on let me uh we brought him on october october 8th you guys knew this was a was a scenario likely scenario that could play out here yeah um so stick to the plan that's like well we're not giving you financial advisors it's like we're we're observing uh the market actions as they as they progress through time and uh today was a particular this weekend was particularly uh exciting exciting but uh i don't want to say exciting but definitely it's more exciting when the volatility goes

upwards yeah invigorating i would say uh i feel alive for the first time in a while in this space you know there's a few boring months there over the summer um yeah but the problem is is so now we have this heavy ass drop we're gonna have that same period when when this all settles out we're gonna have that same period of three months but we're gonna be doing it like a lot poorer yeah um yeah so i would i would argue that uh we're definitely not not through the worst of it yet but well the key is what like did you see that bloomberg just donated 1.8 billion to with john hopkins his alma mater i did not see that for scholarships like imagine if you put a fraction of that into bitcoin that's what we need to turn around the turn around the bear market

yeah just bloomberg just needs to announce you know 400 million dollars market buy uh i'll get on it i'll get on it i'll email someone's got to tweet it tweet it tweet it mike yeah um yeah that's all i'll say about the current market conditions we try not to focus on price too much here um let's get back to why we're in this uh in the first place and There's always reminders in the news, and last week we got a very stark reminder of why Bitcoin exists. A couple of gold sellers in Iran were executed by the Iranian government. The Iranian government accused them of cornering the gold market and manipulating prices. They called them hoarders.

Yeah, called them hoarders. But if you look into it, it seems as though they were running a legitimate business and were being very beneficial market players by creating the service that they did where people could buy gold in a country whose currency is hyperinflating due to the fact that they're being sanctioned by the rest of the world.

So these two were executed, and I think it just, I wrote about it in the bent last week, and I think it's just a story that should highlight why we're in this. uh bitcoin provides a non-physical uh bear asset that that people in countries like iran need uh to preserve their wealth and and self-sovereignty and uh the physical nature of gold makes it so that these government agents could basically see that they were selling gold and

and step in i mean yeah you still might have gotten caught but and executed but they might not have actually gotten all the it would have been harder would have been couldn't at least they wouldn't have had the incentive of being able to steal all this money too at the same time right yeah i mean they might have by torturing him or whatever but you never know maybe he only gives up one password or he gives up another password or something you never really know if you get it all yeah the gold you just walk into the room and just all sitting there yeah exactly um and the word hoarders just really triggers me like they use that a lot in the last bear market um to why does it trigger you to deride big bitcoin bitcoin savers um because i i think i think that

over the years we've been sold like this false narrative that you know you you should spend you know you shouldn't save your money and i don't think that we should uh deride people who want to store their wealth for their children um and i think that also so that's where like the hoarders element comes in and then they also shame hodlers and i think you know if you dollar cost average and you you know hold long term that that's the more conservative play than trying to time short-term moves in like a highly volatile market so like that's ridiculous you know it's easy to say like oh like you should have sold higher right but like when it all levels out 99 of people are going to be way better off dollar cost averaging and huddling yeah i mean it's a

strategy for wealth preservation over time and you can't deride people for for wanting to save some money over time you know you don't not even saving money to hand over to their kids just if they want to buy a house or something but i think the hoarding narrative is going to become more of an issue as as we go forward well that's interesting that's a good segue this wasn't even on the topics list but what i talked about in the bend today is uh coming more and more to the realization that bitcoin's biggest attack surface might be misinformation and it's tough the mainstream media there's a lot i said there's a lot of uh uninformed informers and in the mainstream media who are uh the loudest and have the biggest audiences and are putting bad information in

people's minds and that's why we do this podcast and why i write the newsletters actively uh battle that misinformation and try to put good information out there um but like you said uh i think i think bitcoin is highly resistant to that uh type of attack um i think who's more affected are you know the people who could miss out on possibly the greatest investment opportunity you know the greatest wealth transfer event of their lives uh because they could get fooled into oh it's beanie babies or oh it's gonna boil the oceans but like bitcoin doesn't care if an article comes out in the economist that says that bitcoin is going to boil the oceans like that doesn't fucking do anything to bitcoin but there's examples of misinformation leading to bad policy

like in quebec for instance oh sure i agree with that i agree with that but but then it comes down to so you're fucking that line of reasoning is fucking over the citizens of quebec right so it's still screwing over specific end users or specific people individuals groups rather than bitcoin because then you know so then there's no bitcoin mining in quebec so it happens somewhere else that's true yeah but or like the bit license for instance right like that fucked over new york that didn't fuck over bitcoin bitcoin said fuck you do it yeah that's true it's a good point very good point um but i do think it is advantageous for us to get out in front and try to oh absolutely yeah um ledger and treasure issues is this has i did not do much research on on this before

hopping on the uh mic but is this about the btc pay server right so x pub thing so ledger first the first issue arose earlier this week with ledger which was a privacy issue um where if your ledger is unlocked and your bitcoin app is open on the ledger then any application on your computer or presumably any web page you visit can pull your xpub keys which is can pull your xpub which gives them all your addresses and future addresses so basically your privacy is completely compromised you they can't steal your coins or anything uh i mean they it can make you a bigger target because like someone might know you have coins yeah and how much you have uh but but on a pure basis it's a privacy it's

privacy not security and ledger has a fix coming out um in their next update they said yeah i thought trezor said they were immune from this issue though yeah they've been going back and forth the key is i'm pretty sure the trezor gives you a prompt that the way the way to mitigate this kind of issue you're always gonna you should just assume that if you plug a hardware wallet into a computer that's connected to the internet you could end up leaking privacy right so like you don't have to worry as much about security but you should assume that you could be leaking you know wallet balances and stuff like that and the easiest way for them to mitigate this is that it prompts you on the screen of the device.

Do you want whatever website to see your keys? And it doesn't prompt you on Ledger. The update's going to prompt you. And I'm pretty sure it prompts you on Trezor. And then on cold card, you can do it without connecting to a computer because they have an SD card. So then you don't even have to worry about it

because it's just mulling the signed transaction over. I need to mess around with the cold card. I haven't done that yet. yeah i i have i have two i can let you fuck around with one thanks how's that fucking around with the casa i'm still sinking okay yeah jeremy i spoke with uh you freaks will hear this interview tomorrow i spoke with jeremy welch yesterday and he actually he answered your questions uh very thoroughly awesome i'm excited yeah he answered those towards the end of the podcast so definitely listen towards the end to hear some important uh security privacy uh questions answered in regards

to the casa note but let's go back to ledger treasure okay real quick and then and then we can go back to all these new sexy hardware notes we have um so so we have that with the ledger so you have a potential privacy leak so i if the ways attack like this would look as if you had you know like an app on your computer that was a bad app or even we haven't seen actual proof concept and we probably won't see one before the fix comes out anyway but like the idea would be like you embed something in a bitcoin payment screen because you know they're going to unlock their ledger on that web page to pay the invoice so they'll be more likely to leak their keys okay um and then you also have all these other privacy things like oh if you're using the ledger software

you're using the treasure software are they leaking keys there and stuff you know so so whenever you're connecting these things to internet devices you should assume there's some kind of privacy risk then with trezor today they released a blog post did you see this about the knockoffs oh i did not see this the boxes look the same the devices look the same but they're not legitimate devices uh and right now they don't think that they're being used for malicious reasons it's literally just the usual chinese play of knocking it off and offering it for cheaper but the same idea could be used to give you a malicious device where they could steal your keys right and steal access to your funds uh oh damn yeah so you should read the

blog post to see like how sophisticated some of these fakes are that's one thing especially when you're first opening your treasure the box the sticker is is probably the most important part But so the sticker is like a limited, you should look at it and like they put another sticker on the bottom of the Trezor 2 of the new one where the hole is. And like you should examine it, but it offers you a limited benefit because someone could get their hands on more stickers, right? And try and put it down. So that's why they have like a lot of residue on them. So this happens because you bought it on Amazon or somewhere and you got a knockoff instead. I always tell people just to buy on the website, even if it's more expensive.

So you want to buy on the website first off. Right. And now when you buy on the website, if you give them your home address, all of a sudden you're on a company's list that sells Bitcoin storage devices with your home address. So like it'd be best if you use like a Dropbox location, like a UPS store or something like that to ship to. And then if you bought it with with cryptocurrency, if you bought it with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency that if they support another whatever, instead of credit card, because with credit card then you end up on a list where like your name bought that right i mean with me and you were like kind of public already but like there's no reason to telegraph and get on lists if if you own bitcoin yeah um and then the other thing to note is that this type of attack could also happen if your shipping gets intercepted so you could order from trezor get it shipped to your house or dropbox or whatever and then while it's in the post office

like someone could switch it out and like i guess it'd be more likely for it to happen like over like where's treasurer's czech republic i think uh i believe so yes so like from their distribution center like that'd be the most likely right like if like a czech republic postman was like switching them out yeah and so you could have supply they're called supply chain attacks where they switch out the package mid-route. Yeah, it's crazy. It's scary, too. How do you ever know?

Well, so one of the interesting things about this is the ledger is immune to this to a degree because it has a secure element in it. So when you plug it in, the software checks to make sure that the secure element is legit. I'm like 99% sure that's the case. That means the ledger isn't fully open source,

which is why people don't like the ledger. but is that a trade-off it's a trade-off so it's a different threat model are you willing to accept that trade-off well so if you're worried about like a state actor right if you're worried about like a government pressuring ledger into compromising their wallets right then then ledger might be a worse worse option than a trezor right but if you're worried about any other threat model besides a state actor then the ledger might be more secure i think like at the end of the day you should be using multiple of these things from different brands and true cold storage for your real your real stash you should be using you know true cold storage and then that

way if any of them get fucked you know as as some if you're a non-technical person like that's the best you can do right i think like you just don't rely on a single device yeah diversify your risk exactly like the titanic you gotta compartmentalize the titanic's always a good example such a good reference you know they're coming out do you see they're coming out with the second one in like three years fuck you hollywood no not the movie they're coming out with a replica titanic oh for cruises and i think it'd be perfect for the next crypto blockchain cruise right you'll never find me on one of those i thought they're gonna remake titanic yeah we would never be on a crypto cruise but i i that's fucking hilarious they should put

i thought hollywood is about to do another remake i'm sick if the ship goes down you can bet your ass will come out yeah um yeah so for you freaks that don't know i have very big gripe with hollywood and their lack of uh ingenuity and uh basically creativity these days it's all remakes shit in my opinion um but we didn't come here to talk about movies uh we came here to talk about cryptocurrency and before we left you freaks last week uh bitcoin cash was one single chain and now it is three three correct no the original died it's did it die all right now it's two the original is dead now you have bitcoin cash abc and and bitcoin cash uh i always want to say silicon valley uh sv satoshi's vision yeah um satoshi's vision got reorg today uh no it was

it was just two blocks it was probably just because they have big blocks and they're just shitty miners in general yeah um it was probably just an accident yeah um two block reorganizing that out of the ordinary no but we've uh got interesting data points uh in regards to the nature of hash wars and uh minority forks the first and most important thing is that bitcoin cash is dead now yes it is we can officially proclaim it a centralized piece of garbage uh i would agree and so this is a very nuanced point uh with the checkpointing in particular so for those of you that don't know at some point i believe it was friday thursday or friday night uh the bitcoin cash abc developers whatever you want to refer to them as uh it's so complicated

instituted uh checkpoint uh at the tip of their chain at the fork block at the fork block secretly uh yeah secretly so without any like uh consensus with people they like pass it out to their miners because bitcoin.com switched over their bitcoin hash rate to bch they basically 51 attack the chain at the time of because they brought on more hash to bitcoin cash than total hash was there from bitcoin over um and in support of bitcoin cash abc because that's rogers rogers company uh and then at the same time they were running this slightly altered code that had the checkpoint um and so were the exchanges the exchanges were too yeah did they know about it yeah really it was part of the agreement it seems it seems it was part of the agreement um to deal with the

clusterfuck that was bitcoin cash who came to the agreement you know because the exchanges are worried because the exchanges are dealing with crediting user balances and depositing and withdrawing so two block for instance two blocks before the checkpoint a million bitcoin cash was sent right if that bitcoin cash was sent to an exchange and then post fork got reorged then that exchange it just fucks everything for that that exchange so so it seems that a couple of the big exchanges particularly polonius um agree they wanted they wanted the checkpoint protection they wanted to know that everything before this block was safe otherwise like you can imagine like that's what i said

when when the polonius first released the futures trading i love fork futures i think they're a great idea um but with bitcoin cash it's such a shit coin and it's so manipulatable like so much shenanigans could happen which is what we were talking about in the in the previous episode right before it happened that they were really opening as a u.s regulated exchange that has like goldman as an investor like they were really opening themselves up to like complete getting fucked right um and this was but we didn't know that they were doing a secret checkpoint in the background and that protected them what do you think about the reorg and it seems like craig tried to reorg and hit the checkpoint and wasn't able to what do you think about this okay so first

disclosure is satoshi was a fan of checkpoints yes in the beginning and but the key is that there's some nuance here so this is what we want to get into yeah nuance because i got caught i got caught with my pants down a bit uh james o'burn uh shout out james he was the one who showed it to us yeah shout out james ob for calling keeping us in check that's what i love about twitter yeah uh and and then i found the commit like i was just googling around for the most recent commit. So Bitcoin has had checkpoints in the past, but if you go and you go into the commits

and you look at the discussion around the checkpoints, it's vastly different. So the most recent one was over four years ago. It was blocked 295,000, 295,000. And the checkpoints were always put in. I mean, I don't agree with checkpoints at all because it's a centralized point of failure. you have a small group deciding on on on it changes the chain security model but with these

checkpoints they were farther back in the chain so like they already had 200 300 confirms um even more than that i think well the early ones didn't but towards the end like the last one had even more confirms yes right so you have all these blocks on top of it and they're not really making consensus but if you do it at the tip of the block and you do it which is what bitcoin cash did And you do it at the tip of the block during a contentious hard fork secretly with like a closed group of like three miners and like five people in a room decided that this block is the valid block for Bitcoin cash. At that point, you know, you have you have a centralized expensive to use worthless token. Like I don't if it's not decentralized and censorship resistant, then, you know, it has no value. Yeah, it was pretty alarming to see that they would do that.

It was just like, how could you do that in that way and not... Well, they knew they were going to get reorged. Like, Craig caught them with their pants on. They finally got what was coming for them for running a chain that had minority hash rate on an ASIC to ALGO instead of changing their POW. Because then they couldn't pretend it was Bitcoin if they changed the POW. So they were running this risk the whole time.

Craig finally caught them with their pants down and they knew they were going to get reorged so they had to resort because this basically shoots themselves in the foot like there's no coming back from this right and they still felt it was necessary to do it which I mean that tells you something right

exactly but I'm going to focus on excuse me the exchanges like I understand that it would be chaotic for them but should they have that much uh should they exert that type of power not list it right or they should not list it or just list the two separate chains as different tickers and not worry about it right well no so part

of the problem is right so it's like well yeah it could still get reward pre bca you could reorg it if you have enough hash you could reorg it well you know way back yeah uh yeah i mean i think i think chains that list these exchanges exchanges that list these weaker chains or they open themselves up to huge amounts of liability if they don't take proper precautions like certain number of block and firms like extended level yeah but it also highlights another attack vector of the whole industry at large which is exchanges like imagine if there was a large rework like even a bitcoin cash now if they chose a winner it's still a minority fork it's those minority hash rate like if a big bitcoin pool decided for

some reason to switch their hash rate over to bcash and reorganize at some point like that's still a possibility and that would fuck up the infrastructure of the exchanges um so that's why we tell people to get your shit off exchanges yeah that's why you should have very little on exchanges and if you do have it on multiple uh like split up but could you maybe that's like the first big state attack is that's the way the other thing that i don't know if you saw my tweet but they were someone tweeted out the rich list this weekend yeah i saw that i saw that it was binance's binance became the richest their address or which is wallet because uh bid info charts combines addresses um and then like if you look at the other ones was like it was all the exchanges

but it was like the sketchy exchanges first right uh the more sketchy exchanges you know the ones that don't anyway the point is if you switch to a proof of stake system all of a sudden not only do the exchanges already have all this soft power but as major token holders they're also going to have hard power as as a form of validators for your network you know imagine if the miners were also the exchanges they were the same only one entity seems just crazy to me right um no that's probably the biggest knock on proof of stake is like these exchanges are going to become the quasi gods of these systems and and people said that this wasn't going to happen no one would be cool with exchanges doing it or whatever like binance is already doing it gate.io is already doing it coinbase

announced they're going to do it you know like the users demand it the exchanges want to offer it because it's another product line they get to offer they get to incentivize volume to come in they get to have more influence over the different networks right as validators yes it's almost like we have to avoid this allure of like easy money and uh quasi casino uh with the exchanges yeah you just have to treat them as they are you know just imagine that any money you send to them could always be lost at any moment like a hundred percent lost yeah you know like you could lose it's not a hundred percent chance you'll lose it but if you do lose it you'll probably lose all of it yeah so just be aware of it you know just be aware of it that's uh and we haven't had a major

one in like a long time it's been a minute it's been a minute right it's been a fucking long time when was our last one was it bitfinex in 2016 um besides all the random asian ones yeah i never heard of until i got hacked there was a japanese exchange um yeah i think there's a korean one too i think the last big one was definitely bitfinex uh it was like 116 000 120 000 bitcoin um yeah so i don't like what the exchanges did there i'm just gonna make that known i'm not a big fan of of uh them agreeing to this checkpoint and instituting it and then claiming a winner so quickly even though i don't care yeah i mean i about cash the best part about this is i think we have two takeaways here we have um bitcoin cash specifically is extremely

centralized and if you can have like one or two dedicated attackers um cripple your chain then like your threat model was like super naive to begin with and you know you're not up to the task it's just you need a censorship resistant money you're not going to be able to even dream of of standing up to to nation states if you can't handle craig wright um and then the other thing is i think people need to put not all chains are equal just because it's hard to double spend attack on bitcoin you know or or do a reorg attack a 51 attack on bitcoin doesn't mean all these other chains are equal like if your chain is just gpus like you're at risk like because only the most prop only only the most valuable chain in this case ethereum for gpus is actually secure because

all the other chains are just you know they're just sideshows so at any point you could have a massive amount of gpu power graphics power come onto your chain and then the other one is if you're a minority if you're a minority chain with an asics asics on your algo which is what bitcoin cash is you're almost even more vulnerable i think probably than a gpu chain because uh that hash power is way easier to mobilize you know with bitcoin cash you only needed six percent to reorg their chain this whole fucking time that's ridiculous so and and both investors and exchanges need to understand the risk that they're they're taking on when they when they use these in less secure even less secure chains yeah um and as an exchange like i wouldn't even want the

headache of that and so i think that's what's crazy to me you know like why are you listing zen cash or whatever like are you really getting that much volume from it no right like it seems like it's over the long term you're putting way more tail risk you're putting way more risk there um that's why we're uh fans of cash app here they make very sound uh risk assessments bitcoin only bitcoin only very sound risk assessment if you were like oh bitcoin max wasn't only saying that i'll tell you it makes the interface like way more clear right like i was trying to walk someone through fucking coinbase and gemini's interface and it was just like way difficult i haven't seen their interface because there's just so many coins there now that on on coinbase at least that they

make it like super difficult to to actually just do your normal your normal shit it's a shame um enough about exchanges and bitcoin cash though let's talk about uh exciting products in the space of lolly lolly.com l-o-l-l-i.com uh so i'm a little torn on this project why uh so explain it yeah why don't you what did you you explain and i'll tell you what i'm torn on i'm pretty sure you just shop on lolly and they give you cash back rewards of bitcoin correct but you're not shopping on lolly you install the lolly extension and when you go to participating retailers websites you get you basically get cash back yeah cash back as bitcoin to your extension wallet um it's basically all of the basically all the retailers that are on amazon

right so it's just like another attempt uh to drive traffic to non-amazon uh retailers the problem i have with it is well right now you can't withdraw your bitcoin they say that's coming soon so you don't really own bitcoin at any point you can then sell your earned bitcoin for cash and get the cash um so that's a little bit annoying doesn't seem like why i came to download the app but we had was it the founder of the app hop in our menchies over the weekend so yeah you said he's gonna do it he's gonna do that soon that's not really my issue they're gonna they'll do that soon they'll let you withdraw if you use the app you should definitely withdraw right away um let me i'll start with my positive my positive is i think it's a really easy way for people to

get their hands on bitcoin for the first time i also think that's a great way for us to help end this bear market because if we all we all shop way too much probably so you know if if you go and and you buy a great duffel bag like baboon to the moon um use the use the code crypt 10 off you can get bitcoin back and they're they're basically what the retailers are market buying bitcoin for you with the cash back and giving it to you so it gives a little bit of buy pressure every time i like this you go to one of these websites so that's really fucking cool now my issue is the business model is literally they're tracking you and they're paying you for it so like at least you get paid but like i would never install this extension no no because i'm like

too much of a like why like i'd rather keep my privacy than get the bitcoin yeah that's uh that's what it is they're literally buying your privacy and how much yeah i mean you'd have to do a lot of shopping now now he was called out about this on twitter and he said all the right things you know it's generalized anonymized data they like take data security like seriously but like their terms of service have some questionable stuff it literally is their business model so you know way the be aware just be aware just use it in a different browser maybe i mean but still then they know all your purchases but it's pretty cool you get bitcoin as cash back yeah it's cool seeing bitcoin getting worth mentioning getting uh more into the minds of like retailers and stuff like

It's interesting. Lolly.com, free ad. Noddle.it, what is this? I haven't even looked at it. So now we're back to the sexy world of hardware nodes. We first covered Casa HODL. Then we covered CoinMine, which we told you not to get, but they had the similar idea as Casa HODL,

but they put a miner in, right? Now, this one is more cypherpunk than all the others. Okay. a monetary library excuse me monetary liberty in your palm bitcoin full node lightning node btc pay server plug and play financial self-sovereignty it's a souped up casa hodl node um the specs are a little bit nicer i like that it has an ssd instead of a hard drive you get like way better performance they don't pre-sync the chain for you um so it reduces trust a little bit and they plan on making it oh and it runs btc pay server which is a big thing out of the box um

and you can the dream is that you it's going to be you can run all a bunch of different things on it um you know as they as they continue to develop it you'll be able to you know run all it'll be it's a note in the box for everything not just necessarily bitcoin specific things it's pretty dope yeah i mean i i like this idea that you have like a little box at home that runs all the things that we've recently thought we should run in the cloud and you run it at home instead and and you're connecting back to to your your hub yeah no i like that that idea a lot like similar to what trezor does where you just interact with your device uh locally uh you're not sending calls to the cloud which is a huge security breach uh or uh leaves you vulnerable to security

breaches um so yeah cool cool yeah so it has a little bit it's souped up its processors a little bit souped up it's got that ssd in there instead uh and and the btc pay server and then i think they also have a cloud a cloud version where they run it on a server for you instead yeah so check it out noddle.it n-o-d-l dot i-t um cool to see these products getting built out this shit gets built in the bear market like price is bad we had a big dump this week but uh i think we were discussing this earlier like 2015 people legitimately thought it was going to zero uh and at the same time the last bar bear market excuse me we had the xt attack where we we were fighting internally as bitcoiners the whole block size debate and everything like now like

at least we won't like try and slit each other's throats for like another year and a half hopefully probably yeah i mean and maybe like snore or something yeah we'll figure it out We'll get to that. But yeah. We got rid of a lot of the bad actors because they went to the forks and the altcoins. Right. Which is fantastic.

Some are trying to crawl back, I believe. You know, Bitcoin's permissionless. They can. Doesn't mean we'll forgive them. And that's all right. People don't forget. Sim swapping back in the news. It's increasing.

Listen to this great pod. We're going to plug in the show notes. What's that? I put the link there. It's Reply All. Have you ever heard of Reply All? I've heard of it, yes. I've never listened to it before.

One of my buddies sent it to me because it's related to Bitcoin and like this actual episode is. So basically... Is it about SIM swapping in particular? Well, kind of. So some girl lost her Snapchat account at Lizard for Snapchat.

and that's like it's like a it's like original name it's like one of the og names um so it's worth a lot of money so she got it hacked and then this reporter who does this podcast uh started looking into it for her and he originally thought it was sim swapping and his investigation like gets him he gets into the discord group of like all these teenage and like 20 year old uh like hackers who are sim swapping people and password cracking people and uh he gets to a point where he like gets paranoid about it so like he investigates himself and realizes like it's super easy for him to get docs so he starts trying to like harden all of his stuff so it's like a fun way of like learning about you know how how you need to be aware of sim swapping and password

protections and stuff uh and yeah he actually got the guys who so the guys hacked her snapchat account it turns out that they didn't even need to sim swap her because she didn't have two factors set up and she was using like top 500 password or something so they just cracked her password uh but then once they cracked her password they like threatened her they said they were going to release her nudes like if she tried to take the account back turned out she didn't even have any nudes on snapchat but she wasn't sure like if she saved one of her nudes so she still like took it at face value and but they sell it on this site called og usernames.com or og names.com and it's all bitcoin they sell the accounts for like fifteen hundred dollars two thousand dollars

for bitcoin um and that's how these kids make money and then they buy like prada shoes and stuff and they brag about it in their discord channel that's kids these days man vicious but i guess we should tell people what sim swapping is just to make sure yeah well it's on the well that's why i got confused i didn't i didn't realize you're gonna jump into uh rehashing that podcast but with sim swapping and the back channels people i've been talking to has been on the rise again um and sim swapping for you freaks that don't know is the practice where somebody will figure out your phone number it'll be associated with your gmail or your uh exchange account and they'll basically go into whatever your provider is whether it be verizon at&t sprint

uh pretend to be you and get a new phone and a new sim card yeah they can just call up even and just get it switched yeah get it switched so they then have control of your phone number and can get like your 2fa and reset password sent to you um sent to them sent to them and then they get into your account and then it's they just drain all your bitcoin yeah um so it's a it's it's a very prevalent problem with bitcoiners and crypto enthusiasts in general um and the carriers of well there's there's faults on both sides like everybody needs to take care of their personal opsec but then the carriers i think they need to step up their game a little bit well the problem is like the phone number is treated as like an authentication token and it's not secure at all

right uh so with bitcoin they have like an easy way to monetize a sim swap because if your account if they can get into your coinbase account or something with your phone number then it's super then they take your money and that's like they make money off of sim swapping but with that's what i found interesting about this og names thing because you never think about that you know so that's another super profitable thing that's really easy to target people because you just look for the og names they're all public right like at fuck on instagram this guy had stolen really yeah he had like all the big ones at loser on twitter um but like so these are these names are worth you know tens of thousands of dollars and same with your bitcoin uh so like the way

you protect against this is you try and i mean it's not possible for people not to know your phone number so i think that people that's what like lop will tell you you know like don't make sure no one gets your phone number but i just assume that people are going to be able to get my phone number um you should get a google voice number which is a free number from google that can't be ported it's tied to your google account uh your google account should not have a phone recovery attached to it you should be using two-factor but uh app-based two-factor not text based two-factor everywhere yeah and ideally get like a designated hardware device for two-factor like a ubi key yes but the phone base the app ones are like google authenticators for all 99

99 purposes google authenticator will um protect you in these scenarios so the key is you have to make sure that even if you have the app based like for on google for instance on your google account you can set up app based two-factor but it doesn't automatically remove the phone number you originally put in as a password recovery option so you have to go back and manually do it and then on top of this when you do download the google authenticator app make sure you write down the extra keys that they have to give you access in case you lose your phone your backup keys you need to back write those down and do not lose those so if you have if you have uh it changes your threat model a little bit but i think it's worth it if you have android phone i'm not sure

if it's on iphone but there's an app called authenticator plus and it works on the same system that google authenticator works on uh but it saves a copy of all your backup codes it saves a copy of all your codes uh to google drive encrypted so then you can put in like a super complicated password there and then as long as you keep that password if you lose your phone or something you can then restore all your codes which is really convenient yes and like so that makes you like a little bit weaker to like maybe like let's say like a state actor or something but it makes you it's just way easier if your phone falls in the lake yeah because that's that's a fucking headache it's a headache especially you have like 20 if you have like 20 different

sites using it exactly you have to put in the like keep and manage the backup codes of each one like this that that makes it way easier i think yeah um so yeah use 2fa and then use 2fa correctly make sure you're checking all these boxes on the back end and make sure you don't get screwed if you lose your phone it's crazy you have to really go through them i go so another way to check is is if you go to a website and click forgot password and try and get into your account with only the phone number. So if you can get, like pretend like you just hacked your phone number

so now the hacker has a phone and then try and only get into the account with the phone number, you know? Play around with it and click the way that they would be clicking. Think like a hacker would. Get into the mind. And then if you have to,

use that Google voice number or burner phone. Like some services, which is annoying as fuck, like Twitter, for instance. Refuses to use 2FA. Wait, no, no. So you can use 2FA now, but first you have to put in a phone number and then they give you the option to switch to app based it to fa yeah but if you delete the phone number it makes it way more likely for them to

close your account or lock your account or something like that really yeah bad opsec twitter come on so then you use a google voice number use a burner phone number yeah um so yeah these are on the rise be careful um one thing you can do but it seems to be uh to have been uh in vain up to this point is call your carrier and say hey if somebody's trying to no that doesn't do anything yeah well that's what selkis did yeah right ryan selkis uh twice he got hit twice he's been sim swapped twice i believe they got his wife recently which sucks yeah and they got they got their internet at their home they turned off while they did it um so that it'd be less likely for them to respond he like his building has like a uh like a cafe study area where there's there's uh building

wi-fi otherwise he wouldn't have been able to like sign in and close all his accounts because they like cut his internet out of his house the lengths through which these people go it's uh it's scary but yeah you freaks need to know that these threats exist and they're out there um Shout out to Ryan Selkis Sorry I had to go through that shit It sucks That's That's all I got on the docket

What do you got? The other good thing is like Unique emails If you use unique emails Yeah For different services You can make like Free email accounts

On Tudor Or ProtonMail What Yeah That's important too Use a VPN Blah blah blah The whole spiel

Yeah but some sites If you use a VPN Then they block your account Yeah So but youtube will do that um because i think you're getting around geographic restrictions or like my my brokerage account thought i was like a hacker from singapore but i was just vpn'd nice um that's all i got for this week uh anything what's our time what's our time on the thing

we're at 56 and a half minutes right now we hit the list right hit the list i mean it's like five days so we're gonna come back on Wednesday of next week have a great Thanksgiving guys enjoy Thanksgiving if you're here in the states if you're not in the states enjoy your week you know this is it's like real Bitcoin again because like

you don't know what the price is gonna be when we come back right you know exactly be anywhere we could be it'll be interesting to see where we are but yeah like like we said in the beginning episode this is it's just part of the process it's part

the cleansing period of the last mania of last year we'll see how low it goes uh we know our buddy mirad is is very happy right now he's so annoying we'll have an update with him in january you know the bottom won't be in until mirad doubles down on his short right next to it yeah we'll catch up with mirad the night where we have her steak dinner ah it's gonna be so much more expensive now for me we'll record and then we'll go eat um there's still time we can recover yeah uh we'll we'll see keep telling there's no way i definitely lost this bet there's like no way keep telling yourself that there's no way it'll recover that quickly we shall see at least i get to have a good steak dinner with some some good dudes have some good conversation let's say that's

what life's all about the connections you make along the way um i hope you freaks are making good connections out there i hope you enjoy the show if you did please subscribe unsubscribe resubscribe rate review share get the word out there um like before you press enter on twitter like just i don't know just take a deep breath and like think a couple seconds you know before you're like a complete dick to some random stranger on the internet like everyone's being really salty right now yeah uh a lot of us have lost a lot of money and you know some more than others and just you know the time to be like absolute dick wads to each other is like during the bull market you know that's like the best time to do it um because you know you know you're not

kicking them and you're not kicking them when they're down and uh just ignore the noise and Just focus on the good shit. Just be grateful. Just be grateful for life and that we're here right now. Enjoy your weekends, freaks. Peace and love. Enjoy your weekends. It's a Monday.

It feels like the weekend already. Okay, take care, freaks.