TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2018.12.17

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

This week Matt and Marty Discuss: RIP Tim May Minisketch - https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/synching-data-between-bitcoin-nodes-about-get-easier/ & https://twitter.com/pwuille/status/1075460072786935808 Blockstream satellite - https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2018/12/17/who-needs-verizon-blockstream-broadcasts-entire-bitcoin-blockchain-from-space/#548f7bc75a80 Unchained Capital Dust analysis - https://blog.unchained-capital.com/bitcoin-data-science-pt-3-dust-thermodynamics-615dd51f49 Basis - https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/12/12/stablecoin-project-basis-is-shutting-down-and-returning-the-majority-of-capital-raised-to-investors/ Coinbase - https://blog.coinbase.com/ethereum-tokens-dai-dai-golem-gnt-maker-mkr-and-zilliqa-zil-are-launching-on-coinbase-3065eeb42d5b & https://blog.coinbase.com/direct-crypto-conversions-on-coinbase-e458af083c62 & https://medium.com/hydro-protocol/why-we-are-forking-0x-97dc48ee0426 & https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-continues-to-explore-support-for-new-digital-assets-92ba4ab7f465 Tether - https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-12-18/crypto-mystery-clues-suggest-tether-has-the-billions-it-promised ETH Constantinople fork - https://www.coindesk.com/block-7080000-ethereum-developers-propose-activation-point-for-next-hard-fork Gazprombank - https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/one-of-russias-largest-state-owned-banks-is-developing-crypto-banking-services-for-institutional-clients/ Japanese tax law - https://www.coindesk.com/japanese-lawmaker-proposes-4-changes-to-ease-crypto-tax-burden Rumor Bitmain IPO not happening The Patreon War Mulvaney a Bitcoiner - https://twitter.com/ObsoleteDogma/status/810957268950859780 - Samourai Dojo - https://samouraiwallet.com/dojo -Mining in Iran - https://www.coindesk.com/cheap-power-lures-crypto-miners-to-iran-but-its-not-as-easy-as-it-sounds Thanks to our Sponsors: BlockFi: Sign up at blockfi.com/talesfromthecrypt to get $25 in free crypto added to customer collateral for loans under $10k or $50 in free crypto added to customer collateral for loans over $10k. Applying takes less than 2 minutes. Tallyco.in/BTC_Spot/ - Head over to http://tallyco.in and raise funds with some of that unstoppable, censorship-resistant, magic internet money today!

Hey there, freaks. Welcome back to Rabbit Hole Recap. We've been away for a couple weeks. I'm glad to be back in the studio with my boy, Matt O'Dell. Before we hop into the topics of today, I'd like to introduce all of you freaks to this week's sponsor, BlockFi. No one likes having to sell their crypto if they don't want to. Whether you're paying off credit cards or buying a house, BlockFi helps crypto investors use their Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin without selling. Backed by our friend Mike Novogratz over at Galaxy Digital, BlockFi is a leading crypto to USD lender in the US, servicing over 45 states. Interest rates start as low as 8%. That's Ocho, 8% people. Visit blockfi.com slash talesfromthecrypt to learn

more about using your crypto without having to sell. And BlockFi, they're so generous. I've got a special deal for you freaks out there. For any loan under $10,000, they're going to give you $25 worth of free crypto towards your collateral. And any loan over ten thousand dollars you're gonna get fifty dollars that's double uh of crypto collateral added or excuse me of crypto added to your collateral uh also we've interviewed the ceo of block five zach on this podcast before go check it out learn more about crypto collateral lending and uh yeah i guess we're gonna jump right into rabbit hole recap it's been a been a minute since we've uh been together here on rabbit hole recap took a quick trip over the atlantic and back it

It was very fun, but happy to be back in the studio. Missed you last week. Matt, how are you feeling this week? I felt so empty last week without the rabbit hole. It's good to be back. You know, we wanted to record on Monday. The timing just didn't line up. And we're so eager to make our reunion comments here that we forgot to say the date.

It is Wednesday, December 19th, 2018. the price of bitcoin is at 38 38 right now on bitfinex uh rallying a little bit uh i don't know where it was last time we met but a lot has happened since last time we met we got a lot to talk about this might be an hour and a half ripper tonight yeah i don't know what price we were at two weeks ago probably higher or lower yeah i don't know i think we were definitely higher right like a lot higher i think we might have been were we lower it's all just a blur now we were higher yeah we were higher yeah so there temper your enthusiasm people we were higher last rabbit hole recap um yeah but a lot's happened we've got a lot to talk about

i think we should shout out to uh twitter user mf underscore hodl for tonight's beverage mf hodl M.F. Hoddle with the hottest business card in the street. Such a fucking dope business card. Why don't you present this mezcal? I don't know much about it. It's very tasty, though. So we had Mr. M.F. Hoddle is a listener. He's a fan of the pod, and he donated this mezcal to us.

It's called Santa Pedrera. Probably just butchered the... It's a good attempt. It's echo in Mexico. It's made in Mexico. Echo. It's quite delicious. wouldn't you say yeah i'm liking it smoky it's good i'm a bit under the weather right now i'm

hoping uh the alcohol acts as like a quasi medicine yeah i think that's like how it works i mean i'm not a scientist but it's a western cure i'm pretty sure pretty sure um so let's get to the topics again a lot has happened since we last met uh gonna start with a heavy topic throw out a rip in peace to our boy tim may uh on a more serious note tim may passed away since we last convened here on the Rabbit Hole Recap. One of the fathers of the cypherpunk movement and he wrote

the Crypto Anarchy Manifesto which is, if you haven't read it yet, you should go read it. It really drives the ethos of sort of what led to Bitcoin and why we're all here. So he passed away. And he didn't become a villain before he died.

He died a legend, gracefully. A true legend. RIP Tim May. yeah like some of his colleagues who have decided to uh spin out shit coins while they're still here uh some would argue they're they're living long enough to become the villain tim luckily uh did not see that feat stayed true to the end um so that was quick don't want to get too depressing start off mini sketch we learned a little bit about this last night this is a proposal by peter willa uh correct yes yes and it will drastically uh make block propagation more efficient

potentially potentially okay right it's still work in progress yes it's uh yes it's very high level i think he just released like the first proposal of how it might work but uh i think you know more about this topic than i do off the top of my head what uh what are the specifics no i really don't um it's but it is it's it's supposed to create a lot um you know it's gonna be a major improvement for bandwidth usage for notes okay that's that's what i know so far right now um bitcoin magazine dropped like a pretty good post on it but they dropped it like right before we came in here so i haven't given it a full read um and to really try and wrap my head around it but uh peter said on twitter he said 1.5x to 3x bandwidth reduction which is like a

pretty big deal like the made the major cost uh to running a full node is is bandwidth it's the internet usage you use to upload and and download the blocks uh is by far the major cost and is it it's a threshold that some people's internet can't meet right if they don't have good enough internet yeah no i think i'm experiencing that in this apartment right now my casa node uh there you go i think there's definitely an extra load on my on my internet it's a material difference my wife's not too happy um it uses a lot of bandwidth people don't realize how much bandwidth it uses so we can cut that in half like that's fucking huge yeah and that's also like an argument for small blocks and correct because uh the larger blocks are the the more bandwidth there's the main

argument it's the main argument for small blocks i would say yeah um but even if we can't get too deep in the mini sketch last night at bit devs there was a lot talked about uh i mean middle of the bear market that meetup in particular was jam-packed last night such a good meetup uh shout out to uh to jay and john newberry for running a top-notch meetup uh no bullshit so dense filled with information and yeah i've never been more bullish on the fundamental sort of uh infrastructure build out of bitcoin than i than i am at the moment i feel like you know it's a good meetup when like 50 of the stuff they talk about just goes right over your head right exactly yeah that's the thing about but that's you just go and you literally probably

won't i at least i don't i'm not technical uh don't understand like 90 of it but i feel like i've learned via osmosis over time just by you just try your best and you listen yeah um yeah speaking of fundamental innovations uh block block stream announced that uh their satellite coverage is now practically global they added southeast asia so now uh billions of people have just been added to uh the potential pool of people who can use satellites to propagate bitcoin transactions and on top of that announcement they announced that they now have a lightning enabled api call to the satellite for app developers that's so badass that's like so it's two things right two things it's it's actual bitcoin network data

and then you can also send any data you want through the satellite and then pay per data with Lightning. Yes. It's pretty cool. Pretty badass. And that's like, so that's what I was trying to discern last night.

Is it just like bells and whistles, like cool feature? Like, is it sort of unnecessary to do that via satellite or just being able to do that type of API call to a satellite sort of open up a realm of possibilities for app developers? I'm not sure. It's the latter.

is it because the key here is you know we've been hearing people talk about it for the longest time like machine to machine payments the key here is like it doesn't require kyc or anything right so you can if you have any device i guess basically anywhere in the world and you need to send data from point a to point b you can do with micro transactions and a satellite right right i'm i think that's a really big deal yeah i'm again i'm not sure i don't need somebody smarter than i so if you freaks out there smarter than i i want to uh tune in on twitter and let us know what's what's good i'm thinking like sensors and shit like that right yeah like if you you want to place temperature sensors around the world or seismic sensors or stuff like that atmospheric

sensors no it's uh have them ping each other i mean i imagine it does open up a realm of possibility so it doesn't hasn't existed yet i mean we could potentially use it for like transaction tenna you can send if you could get like a like some kind of relay like a bridge system where you you have a computer running connected to a go tenna and then connect it to the satellite and it acts as like a bridge oh there are there are teams with this vision in mind i met i met one of them while in paris shout out to the noddle noddle guys we love noddle over here uh yeah just i mean team of two right now i believe and a few a few other helpers but the vision they have is sort of enabling those type of transactions completely off the grid

uh basically using a mesh network to send to propagate relay transactions to a satellite or similar some similar setup richard just richard myers of gotenna and the gotenna team they just released an sdk so you can connect it via usb and and it makes it a lot easier to like to connect it to a computer really and i think that's just like going hand in hand with the with what the guys at noddle are doing yeah and no it's what the guys are not all doing it's crazy you're going to be able to have all these i mean they're going to use utilize open source stuff like btc see pay server uh hypothetically they can add lightning functionalities jewel potentially and stuff like that zap whatever you will just out of the box basically creating sovereignty

in a box and uh it's cool seeing these products get built out i wrote about it in the bent while i was in paris like i i truly believe and i have said this for a long time that like consumer hardware is going to be very important for the decentralization of bitcoin i think i fucking love the hardware we're getting so much hardware right i mean this week we samurai announced that they're coming out with the node in partnership with bit seed and one of the cool things is they they plan on you just scan it with the samurai app on your phone you scan the code and it connects to it through tor uh and what i really liked was that they say their intention is the whole thing's going to be open source and you can just flash it onto any hardware you want so

if you have like an old computer or something you can just turn it into you know samurai compatible full node implementation yeah i mean the stuff is getting built out and again that's why i said i've never been more bullish on the fundamentals of this infrastructure i'm happy i mean sort of cliche and some people say it's a cop-out or uh it is a cop-out marty i know what you're about to say what building in the bear market yeah the bear market's such a good thing because it really is it births all of these things for us it does though no i they would you know they could have gotten birthed during a bull market and then we'd all have more money like what no there's like a little bit of a cop-out people are working on those products they're more worried about the

price all these people were working on these products when the bull market was going on they just have to finish them during the bear market and it's a lot more difficult to finish things during bear markets all right matt thanks for keeping it real i guess you knew it was a cop-out before you even said it yeah whatever whatever so blockstream shadowlight be aware of it it exists it's really badass i feel like it's not getting that much press yeah well people will all right so let's address the fud around like the blockstream satellite obviously it's a central company uh well at least like bilderberg group did this for us right they built this satellite network well and technically they're renting space on a satellite is this correct as well

oh is that the case i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure that's how it works that you rent like a channel they're not like actually sending up satellites i'm not positive uh their video made it look like they did but i don't i don't think they did i think they may just be renting channels that's a little bit less cool but as long as it gets the job done i guess yeah but no with that being said somebody's if not them then who like somebody's got to be the first mover hopefully and it proves a use case and entices others this was like garzik stream you know and like somewhere he fell down the shit coin hole right and then block stream did it instead garzik said making his way back is it you remember like in like 2013 he wanted to do this shit he's like we're

gonna put a full node in space i remember this i do remember this um and there is one now but again like people be like oh blockstream centralized like doing this it's like yes obviously but they're the first mover again hopefully they prove a use case and somebody else launches another satellite get a few more satellite yeah i mean ideally you'd want like multiple satellite networks yes and like gotenna networks and traditional networks just all the types of networks all inter intertwining yes as many and also like if you send like an encrypted a data blob through block stream like yeah you're like trusting them with the transit but you're not trusting them with the contents yeah that's true it's true um yeah so satellite's

out there it's pretty chill uh getting back to on the ground things here at the bitcoin protocol level drew bansal over at unchained capital one of my favorite writers in the space because it goes so deep uh just dropped the third in an ongoing third part excuse me in an ongoing series uh basically where he's exploring as he would describe it bitcoin's digital geography and this particular piece was on uh dust transactions dust utxos that exist on the network how they uh sort of ebb and flow with rallies and and price falls and how we can be more efficient with with dust and do bringing up the concept of like a maybe like a spring cleaning event in the future where everybody works to to consolidate this dust into bigger transactions and maybe distribute it

distributes distributes it to uh bitcoin development fund or something like that um regardless of that like he gets really technical into the utxo set and the history of it so definitely go check that out um wrote about today in the bent just think it's a fascinating article there's an alternate reality where like coinbase lost like a hundred thousand bitcoin right or something ridiculous what it like like during the fee crisis there all their utxos were just like all fucking dust it was just they were they would have just like and even the stuff that wasn't dust it was like half you know like the fee would have taken like half of the amount right and they just would have gotten wrecked like they got so lucky that the fees came down

when they did well it's like that and then like apparently only something like 366 000 dollars uh worth of utx's in the bitcoin protocol right now are unspendable as dust which is pretty good right it's a pretty low it's a product of the fee regime the free market right i have some dust do you have some dust i don't know i don't think so it might i don't know i had a lot of dust at the top of the fee market i like squeeze squeeze some transactions in there with low low one sat per buy it and just like waited for months to consolidate back in um yeah so no that's something as stewards of this network i would say uh we have to be very cognizant of like use the blockchain responsibly it is precious block space i think a lot of it comes down to

like how the wallets yeah um display this information like a lot of people don't realize that you know your wallet might say two bitcoin but there's like 65 different utxos in there so like it's good to combine those utxos every once in a while because when you pay your fees you pay it per the number of utxos that go into it and how would you do that but keep in mind that if you combine them you hurt your privacy a bit because you're linking the different utxos together so and how would you do that be aware would you just create a new address in your own wallet in your hd wallet yeah i mean basically if you wanted to combine all your ut if you had like 40 utxos in a wallet and you wanted to combine it all into a single utxo so it'd be

low fee in the future you would just like copy the receive address in your wallet and send all of your funds back to yourself and it would just be in one utxo then and you could pick like a low fee because you're willing to wait a couple hours and then all of a sudden you know you have a nice juicy big utxo with with a very low fee yeah um no and then but but then they're all linked they'll probably be linked anyway if you're if you're using a wallet that's just combining those utxos but it does create like a stronger uh thing for chain analysis right they see like oh they literally are all together at once yeah would you consolidate then send to wasabi and then send back i mean ideally you'd probably want a wasabi before consolidation so one of the cool things

about wasabi is if you send individual utxos to wasabi you can label them as you receive them so you see all your utxos in your wallet and you know like this one i last used to spend pizza or this one came from cash app or this one you know i used to fund jewel and it like so it's all labeled there for you and you can make sure you're not mixing ones that you might not want connected to each other and you can take proper precautions. But yeah, Wasabi makes it

way more easy to do these kind of things. Interesting. Download Wasabi, people. WasabiWallet.io Basis. We have our first major ICO money giveback.

Basis. The geniuses of our Basis. i'm pretty sure there's one or two 30 under 30 there's one there's one right uh yeah was there two i don't uh i think there was just one at least one um we're gonna make one of those algorithmic stable coins uh and totally decided not to even go to market uh returned the funds in u.s dollar or ethers and whatever you donated it in so donate whatever you invested it in so if you uh sent eth then you get back the eth amount you sent if you sent dollars you get back the dollars and i think it was like 94 percent of funds they're returning interesting but i don't know how they calculate 94 percent of funds because that kind of seems weird if they're

sending them back at different assets yeah um but anyway like it didn't make any fucking sense i mean i remember at the time like i thought i was a fucking idiot because so many people were crowding into this trade and it just there was too many moving parts people got people got uh hooked on the credentials princeton phd x google i'm gonna save the world it's just really funny that you know uh forbes put them in the 30 under 30 and now they're like writing all these articles about like if they couldn't do it no one can right so they're like just completely flipping the narrative but uh you know i guess this is a good story they return the money you know all you basis investors like congratulations you lucked out don't complain yeah some of them

are probably going to sue definitely a sign on the on the road back to earth uh or back to a planet called capitulation uh so we're getting closer to the bottom i would say this is these are the signs you want to look for uh maybe we'll see some more consensus layoffs coming soon i don't know if we talked about that did we i don't i don't think we did you just kind of dropped that one in there yeah i'm like i'm loopy right now i'm like well status just laid off like 25 of people what's that you remember status no status was one of the big big icos that happened last year that was like the ethereum browser messenger it's like an encrypted messenger and you can use dapps on it and then coinbase bought their

competitor right coinbase or maybe coinbase bought status i don't know they i think they bought their competitor that was a similar idea it's not a similar to toshi oh toshi right they built that coinbase built that no no no but then they bought someone else and like integrated into toshi so toshi is not completely in-house there's i think it was called cypher or something anyway status is the competitor to toshi uh messenger and shit like that and it was a major major ico like you couldn't use the ethereum network for a day or so while the ico was going i was one of those and they just fired 25 of their employees damn um yeah so it's interesting seeing how these tokens token projects manage their treasuries how much burn they actually have and how much

the market sort of dictates their their runway and and their ability to build uh speaking coinbase we'll just stay on this topic token base token calling it now token base 12 days of coinbase i put so many links yeah 12 days of coinbase and we haven't had a rabbit hole recap for 12 days there's just 12 days of just shit from coinbase that we have here you're pretty riled up i'm so riled up you you have a you have a problem with their education uh i have a problem with the fact the next bull run all my like real life people are gonna be texting me and shit asking me about whether or not they should buy mana on fucking coinbase or loom or zaliqua or some bullshit you know like that's ridiculous i heard i was already annoying about litecoin and shit

now i gotta i don't know it's it's just it's gonna be really annoying they're pretending they're doing this whole education thing they they released today they released the zrx video yeah you watched it i didn't how is it you get paid zrx to watch them shill you zrx on coinbase that's what it is right now and it's fucking the video tells you nothing about zrx they're just like you can tokenize the world every asset's going to be tokenized you don't have to trust a third party which isn't true because it's a real life asset so someone's enforcing it there has to be like a third party in there and that you can just like sell alice can sell her house to like timmy in beijing or something yeah this is funny i'm not gonna dox

this person but last night after bitdes we're talking somebody working closely on the 0x protocol and they like and it's just like jquery and completely unnecessary to have like a token to use it somebody building like somebody probably knows more than most about building on this protocol on that subject i mean we had ddex came out ddex is the number one exchange that uses the the zero x protocol and they're like we're they have like 50 of the volume and then there's a like radar relay there's a paradox is in there paradox is owned by coinbase you know you see the connection coinbase at zero x but anyway ddex is like fuck it we're forking we're forking it we're getting rid of the 0x token for us so 50 of their exchange volume is leaving for a tokenless but

they might have a different token but the point is you know it's like a little they're just gonna keep forking out these tokens because each exchange wants its own while the whole idea was that you're going to share liquidity yeah so these token experiments don't seem to be going well they have they have coinbase has 10 tokens now and six fucking cryptocurrencies and like the the alt coins choices they have are like not you know they're not premier chains you know like a bitcoin cash and ethereum classic and shit yeah they just have like in my opinion they've completely lost their way uh that's my opinion who knows they could be right maybe the token economy is the future no this this i i think we will have tokenized assets i think they're not as

revolutionary as people make that seem they're like an evolutionary increase you'll still have trusted third parties but like for instance like they'll be easier to buy a lot of things with bitcoin because you'll have tokenized assets but the way they're going about this like selling it directly to retail like in their like retail web facing product and then giving these so-called educational videos where they're straight up shilling it to retail with not really giving you any education it's like a yeah i don't know it just seems like they're so lost they could just be like the best you know bitcoin ethereum bank and then everyone else you can just have people go to like decentralized exchanges and stuff to deal with the shit coins and deal with the shit

tokens and deal with all that stuff yeah it seems it's simple seems as they're in a race to create Like a regulatory moat around themselves. They already had like a regulatory moat. And now it's almost like they're draining the water from the moat and they're just increasing their attack surface. Right. Like it just it becomes so much harder, I think, for them to defend themselves as they continue down this path. Yeah. The good thing, I guess, is that I noticed that they haven't been, you know, they added all these other so-called assets.

they don't include them automatically in the coinbase bundle the coinbase bundle is like 83 bitcoin and then it's ethereum litecoin it's the first five ethereum litecoin bitcoin cash etc because i think that would be like a real problem if like people are buying like loom and mana and shit yeah well we got in the bundle product two more days of token-based christmas we'll see uh we'll see what else they have in store for us be on the lookout for that freaks uh tether back in the news uh all the tether haters uh haven't heard much from them since the story dropped apparently bloomberg very reputable source bloomberg has been funding tether too they were like one of the main sources of mainstream tether fund yeah well they've

righted the wrong they did their their research did the uh the journalistic research that they needed to do and they got in touch with tether's bank and their bank proved that i believe it was 191 billion dollars they had in their account um no wait what'd you just say not 91 billion it's like 2 billion too bad yeah i think it's 191 billion 1.91 billion that's what it was that'd be crazy 91 billion dollars tether's the new reserve currency um yeah so tether apparently fully reserved what does that uh what does that say to all the haters you throw a whole nelson uh i um you know i still think that tether's biggest risk you know tether's third party so you have

third party risks there the biggest risk of tether though is is government intervention they're the breaking kyc aml laws yes so that could happen at any moment you never know when that's going to happen but uh this whole solvency thing was always unfounded and it was like mostly pushed by Bitfinex who's gone private and blocked me so you can't see all of our back and forths that went on for like two years Matt is very upset about that Bitfinex come on man

at least just un-private so like people can see the back and forth you know it's informative they get to see where you went wrong transparency it's important ETH Constantinople hard 4 coming between January

14th and January 18th I put this one in for you so you can riff on it we'll see if i'll be added to my uh my thread um yeah this is i think this is going to happen after they initially wanted to happen at some point last month but the test net uh forked into three networks when they tested it out the infamous triple fork yes um so uh they're forging ahead apparently it'll happen at some point between january 14th and january 18th uh waiting with bated breath to see how it goes wishing you guys luck it'll be interesting to The big change is, in my mind, is the mining reward goes from three ETH to two ETH.

Yes. They're trying. Yes. So supply should go down, which should restrict supply and hopefully buoy the price. Yeah, we'll find out if monetary policy on the go like this is advantageous in the long run for these cryptocurrencies. I think they should cut it to one ETH. Times are dire. They can raise it in the future if they need to.

just let's signal to the market that that will turn it around well you know nothing would surprise me at this point uh goalpost specs timelines have been moved uh again not not not waiting with any bated breath uh gazprom bank i don't know anything about what's going on this one's a big deal supposedly okay what's going on major major russian bank wants to offer crypto services like bitcoin and the major altcoins like custody trading all that good shit for like rich russians love it let's go so it's a big deal supposedly it's like real supposedly it's you know like 80 it's an 80 deal you know it's like it's like the etf things you got to be a little bit Yeah, with that being said.

Hesitant about it, but this is a big one. With that being said, any rich Russians listening to this podcast, I don't know how much you can trust your government, so make sure you've got a portion of your funds in private keys that you have control of. Oh, yeah, you probably shouldn't use their custody services. But it's a big deal that they're offering. Yes. And if you're Kremlin connected, you'd probably go for that route.

It would make sense. Path of least resistance for most, I would imagine. But just keep in mind, definitely have a little. you should hold on to at least one private key yeah definitely yeah don't don't don't keep your money with them but that's a big deal i think that's a really big deal speaking of uh big deals happening on an international landscape japan uh fix their tax uh tax laws regarding bitcoin no that might not be a big deal they well there was like uh i don't know how their government system works but like one of the reps like proposed a law that makes it way better tax

wise in japan and it's probably just a posturing thing you know it's not going to get past he's probably like japan's crypto representative you know every country has one yeah but i i just wanted to take the moment to say that you know all these companies all these countries are going to start competing right and you've already see it happening in the you know without bitcoin just countries competing for the ultra wealthy and and they'll compete for Bitcoin and crypto companies and they'll compete

for you know holders of those as well yeah that's what will be interesting to see how how this dash for sort of setting a regulatory structure that is sort of welcoming to Bitcoin holders be interested

to see that play out Bitmain IPO not happening rumors are swirling we've talked about the subject a lot on this podcast in particular bitmain uh seems to be a bit of a precarious situation especially after the uh bitcoin cash hard fork of last month uh i've only seen the rumors on twitter but apparently yeah it's a rumor it's still a rumor there's no confirmation um you know i would expect them to pull out because the ipo makes them very vulnerable the way they have to be transparent with their books and stuff uh in a business that the reason they dominated was because they were

so secret and nimble right and when they made this decision they were trying to exit at the top ish yeah and it took way longer than they thought and it's probably time to regroup and be secret and nimble again for a little bit and you know try and salvage this business yeah not the best time to launch an ipo uh for these guys so yeah we'll we'll be following that as we have been uh here uh at the rabbit hole recap but but the the fall of bitmain is like one of the bullet most bullish fundamentals for bitcoin there is we have so many other hardware manufacturers coming in now and uh the future looks bright in terms of hardware essentialization yeah incoming self-shield definitely go check out uh the most recent interviews with yassin

almandra uh for tftc i just dropped that yesterday we go deep into mining and sort of the supply chain and long-term economics and where uh mining operations and uh hardware manufacturers will compete in the future won't necessarily be uh where they're competing right now yeah that was a great that was a great app uh yassin one of the bright young minds in the space happy to have him on the front lines with us um patreon war it's heating up man we got a bunch of uh everyone's getting kicked off of patreon now well i don't think everybody's getting kicked off i think everybody's leaving because one person in particular got kicked off oh and then someone else got kicked off at gofundme but they might be they're being supposedly they're like white

supremacist uh alt-right s groups and people yeah well actually i read about this in the been on monday uh yes it is but what you're seeing is like people further from the edge of polarity like closer to the middle like a dave rubin or jordan peterson some would consider them a little bit more extreme than others i would consider them pretty logical uh they're starting to sort of uh notice that all these i mean yeah once you call one person a nazi it's like it's a very slippery slope well it's not even that i'm not even i'm not i'm de-alienating between the content of what people are maybe saying on these sites i don't know but just sort of people that others would deem rational are seeing the that others are getting the platform and trying to

act preemptively to say hey i don't know what's going to happen in the future maybe i should find a platform that this cannot happen and as we've seen a few of them have turned to bitcoin dave Ruben being one, I believe Jordan Peterson another. And TallyCoin makes it easier because it's like a Patreon-like front end with a Bitcoin in the back end. I'm very happy you brought

TallyCoin up because we actually, they're a sponsor of this episode. TallyCoin. This episode comes to you from Twitter. LightningNote operator at BTC underscore spot. That's BTC

underscore spot. introducing tally coin tally coin is the bitcoin alternative of patreon kickstarter and fiverr start fundraising today incentivize donations and get paid instantly all with zero fees at zero fees people all donations go to your own bitcoin lightning wallet that you control they never touch your funds every satoshi goes directly to you receive more donations by giving something back in the form of perks perhaps uh it's an image a written article or personalized video for your donors with perks being unlocked instantly upon payment no minimums no maximums this is your fundraiser your rules at btc underscore spot is not affiliated with tally

coin he's just a user he just wants you to know that if you're an internet dog you know he just wants you to know that if an internet dog can raise money for dog food and bitcoin bear markets with tally coin and so can you this is an internet dog that was just a beautiful ad placement uh Fucking Marty did not tell me he was just going to pop that ad in there. Head over to TallyCo. That's T-A-L-L-Y-C-O dot I-N. TallyCoin, just with the dot between the C-O and the I-N. And fundraise with some of the unstoppable, censorship-resistant, magic internet money we know as Bitcoin today.

And don't forget to peep our boy at BTC underscore spot on Twitter and help him get fed. And we'll post the link. it's tallycode.in forward slash btc underscore spot forward slash on tallycoin. That's a horrible fucking domain.

Yeah, we'll put the link in the bio. The domain for tallycoin is t-a-l-l-y-c-o dot i-n. Tallycoin. And it seems to be an overt reaction to the Patreon deplatforming.

Yeah, it's very similar to like a patreon uh interface but everything uses bitcoin and now they've added like uh lightning network add a lightning network we could feed this internet dog um and it's pretty badass yeah so the question yeah let's get back to the question is is like can these like the dave rubens is jordan peterson's the world like obviously they're not going to be running their own full nodes yet and connecting to this maybe they will be who knows but uh it is the first iteration of a step towards a direction where uh completely sovereign platforms may exist yeah i mean they can still like people can still go after tally coin because like aws could de-platform them or something

but like they at least they don't have to worry about like the card providers or any of that and like worst comes to worst they can you know like get a noddle and have a self-hosted btc pay server handling it all uh so so you have that option like the ultimate back against your wall then you just run it yourself yeah the the key is that at the end of the day once you start censoring people it's you know who decides who you censor so for bitcoin to succeed and one of the reasons bitcoin is so amazing is that it doesn't judge that it doesn't matter like if you can if we could block like different groups of people from using bitcoin then like the project has failed in the first place so like this whole like moral argument of like whether or

not these people should have a platform that's all just fucking irrelevant it's moot yeah exactly um no and if you're into bitcoin seriously and you're sort of uncomfortable with the idea of people having open access so like they hey take a deep look inside and and try to weigh the pros and cons in your mind i mean i think overall it's a net benefit these are military grade technologies and i would argue the the options that lay before us or are you either let the gatekeepers decide who gets to use them or you let the technologies proliferate and sort of give everybody a fighting chance in a in a sort of uh nash game theory scenario but like if if like someone does something bad you just have like good old-fashioned police work does that exist anymore

no but like because they've gotten lazy because they can just fucking de-platform them but you know if someone's doing anything then you just you arrest them you do an investigation and you arrest them yeah and a social pressure enough do you think social shaming public shaming what do you mean like uh like sort of self-policing via social shaming calling people out boycotting seems like the boycott of patreon's working yeah i mean i think so i think i think social media is weird in that way that it like it helps you know with the proliferation of knowledge and information but it's there's so many things that are wrong with it right yeah so but it does really come down to the different communities i think like some

communities are better about self-policing and some aren't right yeah no yeah it's interesting interesting debate and probably an impossible problem to solve especially on this podcast yeah we're definitely not solving i mean i don't i think it's unsolvable i think you just everyone can post whatever the fuck they want and you know there's no point in arguing it because that's what it's going to be that's what i think so i don't like arguing the morals of it because i think it's irrelevant exactly it's uh it's coming it's here some would argue um adapt or die like you like to say fuck yeah um mulvaney oh yeah the white house chief of staff health chiefs of staff does not like to fed he owns bitcoin well he doesn't we don't we don't

know if he owns just like assuming people calling it he owns bitcoin um that's a big deal he's in the white house now yeah mother jones obtained audio of mulvaney's speech to the john birch society chapter in the speech mulvaney blasted the federal reserve saying its actions have effectively devalued the dollar and choked off economic growth he praised bitcoin as a currency that is not manipulatable by any government i mean this is in 2016 bitcoin was trading at like 700 and mulvaney had a huge ass bag of it and and now he's in the white house the funniest part is this article is from mother jones so they released the speech to shame him and then we read the speech we're like dope this is awesome completely spin zone this uh everything he said is correct

which is not wrong yeah he definitely owns bitcoin that's pretty cool well how can he affect uh do you think he probably doesn't have any effect on policy though does he we could get trump to send out a bitcoin tweet that would be pretty huge the i feel like that's a very tangible goal the uh the elusive trump bitcoin tweet we thought he's going to do it last year's bull market um we got kanye to do the bitcoin tweet but not not trump yeah they kanye the kanye pump never happened yeah maybe uh never we never got the soldier boy pump either well they're just they're just individual nodes in a distributed system so it proves that not it's a collective it's collective uh effort here right now one person's gonna affect it but trump tweeting about bitcoin

probably be pretty i think it'd be like three three to five x like instantly right uh i don't know if you're like crazy i think what what what if the tweet said what if the tweet said we are gonna buy bitcoin for our reserves period that's it that's all it said go to a million dollars right away it wouldn't go to see that's ridiculous i said three to five x you said that was ridiculous now you're at a million if it's that specific tweet so what if he just said bitcoin that's it you just typed out bitcoin oh have you seen bitcoin or something i don't know what would he tweet hmm that's a good question i don't know what would he tweet bitcoin i've heard incredible things about it still have to do more research i'll let you guys know i don't know

oh my god that'd be so good that was good that would be like a two to three xer i'm more i'm less uh less excited about the price of more excited about crypto twitter's reaction i think that would uh oh my god crypto mirage would have a great great meme about it mirage would be right on that like white on rice uh we already talked about the samurai dojo they're coming out with a node uh oh wait no samurai dojo is like the new interface right the new ui no no it's the node we already talked about it isn't it i like slipped it in there when you brought up noddle um and then iran iran's got some miners going on the electricity is super cheap there because they're sanctioned and they can't sell any of their shit so miners go where electricity is cheap

they're going to iran is the state trying to confiscate that bitcoin big mind i assume they just tax it it's nice and like it's probably risky like i wouldn't go mine in iran but like i think this is a case where small miners that are more nimble are willing to take those political risks uh to go and seek profit in iran and that's part of what you know decentralizes bitcoin mining hash war dogs let's go um no i don't know i wouldn't trust again just as the or a rich russian friend shouldn't trust uh gazprom with all their bitcoin holdings i don't know you're definitely taking a risk if you're if you're mining in iran no but you deal with like you deal with that and you get outsized profits if you know higher risk higher reward that's true

um we blew through that list we're at the bottom of the list we're at the bottom of the list we're only 45 minutes in wow we fucking killed it what did you think about uh vitalik giving out a thousand dollar or a thousand eth yolo yolo i liked it i'm not gonna hate on him for it yeah team's struggling looking for help it's a good strategy he has what he has like 330 000 left eth left like he could give like 50 000 of it away and still have a sizable chunk he should just life support the system if you're giving it out vitalik i mean the newest development grant system you just have like a super rich early benefactor he pays you on twitter tells you to get to work uh what's that say about the state of ethereum i think ethereum is going to be

it'll probably be fine yeah but it's going to be like a kyc mess yeah it'll be like like coinbase is like basically saying like right now coinbase is saying if all else fails like we can hold up this whole thing on our own they have paradox they have their status competitor toshi right they have all the things in place they have retail can go straight into die now they can just buy die on the on coinbase so they have it all set up but uh no i think that's good you know all power to him like he should let him send his money wherever the fuck he wants to send it it's true i think they're working on some kind of scaling thing you know so at least it's not you know like crypto kitties hey crypto

kitties is a cool project um no yeah so that happened what else happened um it's the holidays people uh could have a lot of different types of conversations around the dinner table this year compared to last year i know i already have what do you mean oh like is bitcoin dead yeah is it all over a lot of oh are you are you doing okay are you okay a lot of are you okays i um i'm fine people i was talking to uh my friend's dad and i i when he asked when he asked me i immediately responded with oh no yeah it's it's dad is going to zero and then i launched into the conversation and it's fucking great his face was beautiful yeah it's done um but it's it's been pumping the last two days we've had two days of green for

christmas that and it's uncorrelated to the stock market which has been tanking it's nice to smell like a little narrative brewing possibly potentially uh let's not get our hopes up though you know you know marad is is sitting there you know in his shorts just he's like this is definitely a bull trap it's got to be a bull trap please be a bull trap i wonder what price he like decides it's not a bull trap that would be good to know it's probably a bull trap the chart looks ugly right now it's like that probably definitely a bull trap yeah we'll see uh this is not financial advice um yeah that's all i got for this week again go check out that episode with yessi and i thought it was very well he's uh very very intelligent when it comes to

mining and the supply chain and the energy consumption um that was a great conversation He's got an incredible story of how he came to New York and sought out the life of low time preference. Oh, that story was great. Yeah. Red Hook. Yeah. So check it out.

If you told that story for me, I was like, you've got to tell it on the pod. You dropped the other pod, too, in between when we last went. Yeah, Matthew Majinxius from Crypto Voices, the voice of an angel. He's got such a good voice. The voice of a god, actually, not an angel. I love the ads at the end.

Yeah, let me know what you freaks thought of those ads. We're thinking about making a soundboard like the old E-Bombs World soundboards with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Back to the chopper. You should do that. That's a good idea. Yeah, we're going to think about that. Do you have a parting note for the freaks? The Nottle guys gave you a yellow vest, right?

They did give me a yellow vest. I got a yellow vest in this apartment. I got one for you as well. That's pretty fucking badass. Thank you for reminding me I have to give that to you before you leave There you go

Fuck yes That's my parting note Do you have a parting note Marty? Do have a parting note Don't forget that this episode of Tales from the Crypt was brought to you by BlockFi

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