TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.01.07

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

This week we discuss: -Deplatforming + -ETC 51% -ETH Constantinople and progPow forks -10 years since Hal - https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988?lang=en -Zap POS app https://twitter.com/JackMallers/status/1082778829217808384?s=19 -Gemini ad campaign - https://twitter.com/Gemini/status/1082726902622797825 -Bitcoin mining pools over time, BetterHash - https://coinmetrics.io/mining-pool-mapping/ -Kraken compliance report https://twitter.com/krakenfx/status/1081701788464558080?s=19 -Nodl.it -Bitmain founders rumored to be stepping down, new CEO inbound https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/bitmain-to-appoint-new-ceo-as-co-founders-wu-and-zhan-step-aside/ -Norwegian Monero Ransom -ShapeShift lays off 30% of their team, 37 people - Bezos Commencement speech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmavNoChZc Thanks to our sponsors: BlockFi. Head to www.blockfi.com/talesfromthecrypt and check out BlockFi today! BUIDL Bootcamp - Next course starts January 21st, head over to www.buidlbootcamp.com and sign up today! (Online Courses)

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt and this week's edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. It's your boy Marty here. After a long week, it's been a long week for me in particular. I got a bout of the stomach flu earlier, or excuse me, food poisoning earlier this week. It was pretty terrible. Very unpleasant experience, Matt. Matt was a journeyman this week, traveled to Canada and back. Made it all the way back to New York for this recording.

It's been a long week, Matt. I actually rush shipped a microphone to Canada and it cost me $66 into shipping into Bumblefuck Canada and then we cut our trip short anyway so then I put it in my car and drove down here and now we're recording here anyway. Well, high time preference move. You'll think about that and adjust accordingly going forward.

I love our freaks. It was worth it. We're going to use it in the future anyway. Yeah, we will use it. We're getting high tech here at Tales from the Crypt in 2019. That's our motto here. Before we get high tech or jump into the topics of the day, this episode of Rabbit Hole Recap was brought to you by BlockFi.

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They got that special deal for you, $25 of crypto collateral added to loans below $10,000 and $50 of collateral added to loans above $10,000. Matt, it's been a busy week. We've got a lot to talk about. First topic of the week, something I wrote about today. Date and price. Date and price. Today is, I couldn't tell you, January 10th, I believe?

January 10th. It's January 10th, Marty. We couldn't tell you. And we're on a different website here. I have Bitcoinity up right now just to check price. uh actually you know what we're gonna get a bit stamp so i'm not trade block but yeah we're back on trade block we're gonna use the trade block index the xbx index from here on out it's january 10th 2019 year of our lord the price is three thousand six hundred thirty three dollars and

ninety three cents perfectly divisible by three right now freaking me out a little bit um and that is on bitfinex uh but yeah a lot of talk about this week in particular um what we're going to start out with something I wrote in the event today, the growing theme of deplatforming and having these content creators and social media companies at large that are getting deplatformed. Return to Bitcoin has been a growing theme. One thing I'm worried about is confusion. A lot of these people turning to Bitcoin and quote unquote crypto for their answers.

I hope they get some good advisors out there. It seems like Gab.com in particular has good advisors. They seem to be Bitcoin maximalists and actually just sent out a huge email to 850,000 Gab subscribers, enticing them to buy Bitcoin, which is pretty huge, showing the ways to buy Bitcoin, where to buy Bitcoin and why it may be important. And their particular framing is instead of Bitcoin as sound money, is Bitcoin as a free speech money, which which people are taking a like to on crypto Twitter in particular. uh so first off gab is a is like a twitter competitor yes and with a free speech focus uh it's centralized just like twitter but they're very free speech focused and they have a monetization element that's different than twitter where you can pay for premium services and also the people that pay for premium services can lock certain tweets and you can own certain

gabs content whatever it is and and you can only unlock them if you pay micro transactions to unlock them and then gab takes a cut and then the content creator gets a cut so when they got deplatformed from the you know all the the major financial institutions all block their payments because there's been all this controversy there they needed a new payment method so it's important for them to educate their users how to buy and spend bitcoin because otherwise their monetization strategy goes out the window right like the main there's a use case here now that if you're a gab user and you want to use the premium services you have to buy bitcoin and send it to them what do you think about all the haters out there calling gab out for using

or advising users to use centralized services like cash app or or other centralized exchanges you know i think they're the it's the easiest way the easiest way to buy bitcoin as an american right now is cash app uh it has more downloads than vemo it's a very simple way to onboard and it's even though even though gab was blocked by the same financial institutions and Cash App recently blocked their founder's account, Andrew Torba, it's a lot less likely that they're going to block all the individual users that use it.

It's a large amount of people. You said the mailing list was like 800,000 people or something. 850,000, I believe. Insane. So we can cross that bridge if it comes to it. But Coinbase blocked them. Cash App blocked them. But it's a little bit different because Cash App doesn't even let them sell.

So it wasn't like Gab was selling their Bitcoin through Cash App. It's just a way to buy. And it's a lot harder to block all the individual users and they probably won't do it. There's probably not the will to do it. But if that happens, then, you know, we move to the next step. Yeah, exactly. No, but it's very interesting to see this sort of worlds colliding. I'll use a Seinfeld quote here.

There's definitely worlds colliding right now with the niche Bitcoin world and sort of your quote-unquote taboo. I don't consider them taboo, but a lot of people in the mainstream would consider them taboo content creators. Yes, Gab definitely does come with the vitriol of people in the alt-right, and they do have ardent Nazis on the platform. I do not agree with any of them, obviously. But they are bastions of free speech in a time where it's badly needed, I would argue. And I think it will be interesting to see how these people receive Bitcoin, how they approach it, and whether or not we as a Bitcoin quote-unquote community are able to equip them with the knowledge needed in a timely manner. I mean, it's coming at the same time that platforms like Patreon are also blocking people on the right in the political spectrum in America.

And it's the perfect use case for Bitcoin. You know, it's educating all of these people why Bitcoin exists in the first place. and it just goes with what we've said a lot where the governments and the financial institutions are the best advertisers of Bitcoin. Like when PayPal blocks your account, it's immediately obvious to you why Bitcoin exists. Yeah.

And so let's talk about the particular framing. Bitcoin is free speech versus maybe Bitcoin is sound money. Do you think that's maybe a more advantageous sort of first push to give somebody into Bitcoin? he's speechless i i do like that i do like that phrasing um it's one of the reasons why i like the censorship resistance uh phrasing as well because when in america at least it makes a lot of sense because we have the constitution so free speech is protected uh and even our courts have said that that money is speech and it's protected that's why we have unlimited anonymous donations

political candidates citizens united case yeah and then beyond that they've also ruled that that code is speech as well which bitcoin is arguably software at the end of the day yeah so it all comes together it's a confluence right so free speech money that works you know it's bitcoin call it what you want to call it i like that branding the branding works i think gab is doing a great job at promoting it they have users that have an immediate need for it and they have an immediate need for it and it turns out that because gab is is censored on the sell side that they're actually forced to create this closed loop, which is what we've always wanted for like the longest time.

You want the services that accept Bitcoin? The 2013 move was merchants accepting Bitcoin, but they were all cashing out to fiat. Yeah, they're getting BitPay, Commerce, or whatever, and cashing out to fiat right away or something like that. The 2018 move is only using merchants that keep their Bitcoin. And Gab is a perfect example of that. Like, Gab will pay for their hosting, presumably, and all their web hosting and their employees' salaries and everything directly in Bitcoin.

And it'll be a closed loop. Yeah. No, that's interesting. And that's actually one thing. Actually, this is sort of tangential to that point. But one thing I wanted to touch on in the bend today is that we do have to be cognizant of the different ways in which Bitcoin can be blocked. So in the same issue of the bend today, sort of there are two stories going on in parallel. Excuse me.

this gab deplatforming moving to bitcoin but then at the same time i brought up the the headline that samurai was involved in this weekend where google the google play store made them uh disable certain functionalities within the samurai wallet i believe one of their functionalities that allowed them to like shut off the sim card remotely some sms functionalities and then some stealth mode functionalities that people in say venezuela can really use right now so beyond uh just censorship at like a payment process processor level and an on-ramp level there are these app stores where people that trying to download apps to utilize bitcoin that's also sort of a weak point so that's also something to be cognizant of as we're building out this infrastructure and

this industry is how can we make it so like a google play or an ios store cannot cannot censor these apps i mean we didn't get the first iphone bitcoin wallet wasn't approved until either 2015 or 2016 they were super slow originally they banned all of them uh and then so that so this is just more of that i feel like well i don't even say what is more of that i think it's more specific like more specific to the use case like like specific voices getting deplatformed on certain platforms like specific use cases of this app are saying hey you can offer a bitcoin wallet but we don't like we don't want to allow you to offer these functionalities um i'm not sure if it was a a foul swoop by google play they did this to a lot of apps and uh samurai wallet has to sort

to go through like a side channel and work out their case uh sort of separately but uh it seems like uh like an attack vector to me i don't think it's definitely an attack vector i i think it's way more you know these walled gardens will always be um issues for us to break into you want more open systems the thing that's nice about android is that you can sideload it you can use an alternative app store do a lot of people do that no i do that more people will do it if they have to do it as things get banned i mean the big one was fortnite which is one of the most famous you know one of the most popular games right now um they just skipped the google app store you have to go to fortnite's website to download it and why did they do that because they don't

want to pay google a 30 cut of the of the app store right so they're educating all these young people about how to sideload apks sideload the application files and i think that trend will hopefully continue um that's not the case on apple though where it's like a complete a complete you have to go through their their app store the other thing i would say is um i mean i i think people should probably it was from a privacy point of view and a security point of view it'd probably be better to download samurai in the first place from an f-droid which is an open source app store for android or like directly from their github um in terms of you can't inspect the source code of anything that comes in through google play store so it's kind of a blessing in disguise

and then the second thing is i'm not sure if it's as sinister as it seems at first glance because these features are awesome of samurai but they're kind of hacky you know like does does google want an app locking sim cards does a do they want them playing with the dialer so if you put in a code into the into the phone app you know the app opens and stuff like those are kind of in the wrong hands that could be like a spyware type of thing going on right so i i personally am hoping that it just happens to be that they got hit in this sweeping wave to try and make you google's stuck in this situation where apple's app store is a lot safer because it has a lot more restrictions and google has always been open way more open um probably a lot because they're

they're more inept in terms of the moderation there but you have a lot of apps that are you know like the flashlight app that steals all your contacts and stuff right so they're probably trying to clean that up and and samurai got hit in the crossfire would be my guess yeah that makes a lot sense that's what i was trying to allude to earlier it was like a foul swoop action that makes it definitely an attack vector they're a central point of failure they can they could censor us and you know you want stuff like the prism phone and stuff that are more open yeah and this led to a conversation between you and i and telegram today just a personal dm or like my biggest worry for bitcoin's long-term adoption of mass adoption is apathy and

for mass adoption and for it to be as robust and strong as possible i would argue that we need people to start worrying and care about using services like f droid like we just described and these decentralized services and staying away from centralized services to a certain extent for certain apps uh particularly in and around bitcoin um so that's what we so we just wanted to bring that up like so that's my biggest fear in the long term is just apathy people just do not feel the need to, to make these changes. Right. And we said the, the negative, uh, the negative example that would make you really, uh, worried would be the Snowden leaks because we had the Snowden leaks. And meanwhile, most people, they were massive, massive, uh,

info dumps where we found out all this spying was going on. Most people haven't switched in encrypted messengers. People are installing wiretaps in their homes with Amazon Alexas and Google Homes and Nest. Now they have cameras too. Yeah. Like people are apathetic by design. Like we were talking about the voting, um, voting percentages, you know, 70% of people in America don't vote in every election. Like if, if you counted that, then no one would win, right? People are just naturally apathetic. But then the opposite example is like in Venezuela, like Venezuelans aren't apathetic anymore because they have no choice.

Their livelihood is at risk. So you need something like a really severe event, not just a Snowden leak. It needs to be things that actually risk people's livelihood and then hopefully that'll be enough to make them realize what's important, realize their privacy is important, realize their sovereignty is important.

Yeah. Do you think it has to get... Then that's what sort of bummed me out this afternoon. It doesn't have to get to a point where there's like a paradigm shifting world event that makes people like shook to their core with like, holy shit, I should rethink the way I'm operating completely.

I would hope it doesn't have to get to that point, but it does. Like I said, apathy is my biggest worry and just like seems up to this point it may, like these hard events may need to happen to force people to change their mind. I think you can get like gradual improvements without it. But the majority will never – if you're comfortable, you get complacent, right?

Like, if your life is, like, pretty good and you're not – you know, you don't get worried about these things, you're not actually going to try and change anything. Yeah. But, I mean, it should be interesting to watch play out here. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see the yellow vest. we'll see if the uh the reported potential bank run that they're going to try to do on saturday comes to fruition uh and we'll see what type of chaos if any that incites uh in france in particular

yeah i mean france is known they always protest they're really good at protesting yeah really good um so i would say like as a people they're probably less apathetic right but but the same thing with the yellow vest right like they had to get pushed to the limit right like most of those people have no money you know their livelihood is completely at risk and they have no other option right so so that's that's the situation where you actually get changed you get i mean we talk about it specifically in the bitcoin world right like no one is going to uh stop investing in alt coins and guard you know like specifically like really really bad alt coins and tokens and stuff in a bull market because the money is going crazy right but when

they're when their livelihoods put at risk when they lose 90 of their value 98 of their value like then they start changing their mind right all of a sudden you have all these people that were ardent multi-coiners that you know sound like your your normal bitcoin maximus yeah no it's a very good point that's a very good analogy i like that actually um moving on though uh i guess yeah let's start 10 years today's a 10-year anniversary of how finney's running bitcoin the goat bitcoin tweet r.i.p r.i.p how i can't wait to unfreeze your ass bro it's our third 10th birthday for bitcoin this year yeah that's the uh that's what i think we have to come to consensus moving forward uh when do we celebrate uh 31st october 31st uh january 3rd or january

9th just celebrate them all yeah i had fun fun celebration we had fun last week thank you freaks for coming out last week by the way and if you guys have made it to to rise new york here in the city it was a great time yeah we threw our own bitcoin birthday that was a lot of fun it was it was um so shout out hal true pioneer in the space if you freaks have not uh gone to bitcoin talk.org or the early uh uh cryptography email uh mailing list and red hell's work definitely go do that um highly recommended he was putting out fud uh years before anybody was even thinking about it uh in today's world as as in he was he was disproving the fuzz yes putting out fud fires Hal wasn't FUDing Bitcoin 10 years ago.

He was doing the exact opposite. Yeah, he was destroying FUD before it even came up. And famously, he's the number two Bitcoin user after Satoshi. First person to receive a Bitcoin transaction outside of a Coinbase reward. Bang, bang. Yeah. Yeah, so shout out Hal. Next zap.

Looks like Jack Mahler. I think it's tonight. Is it tonight? Did you read that thread? Yeah, I did. Badass. I think it might be tonight. Is it tonight or Saturday?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's tonight because it's the 10th, right? Yeah, so tonight in Chicago, our good friend Jack Mallers, shout out Jack, he was on Tales from the Crypt interview series, go check that out. One of your best episodes. Thank you. Jack led that episode. Tonight he is debuting a proof of sale system at a bar in Chicago. Point of sale. Point of sale. What did I say, proof of sale? It's like proof of stake mixed with point of sale. Point of sale. Point of sale system, completely driven by Bitcoin. I believe it has a node running in it.

Completely driven by lightning. Lightning and Bitcoin, yeah. Right. Yeah. So he he teased the UX on Twitter. Looks very sleek. Very cool. I guess it runs on like an iPad that the waitress walks around, the bartender walks around with. Yeah. They just click the button for whatever you order. It's really seamless. They have no control of the like the the bar owner has control of the keys. But the actual like waitress or bartender like can't spend any of the funds or anything.

Their their unit is just receive only. Yeah. They can only make invoices. no it's a it's a proven uh i don't even want to say prototype it's a proven app at this point that this can work uh i don't think the the restaurant is only accepting bitcoin and lightning transactions but um it will be available and the ux seemed pretty impeccable i mean it's a test run and the idea is that the way he has it set up is it's super easy for these places to implement so that's you know part of the beauty of it is that you can just test it for you know a night like there's no way you can like test a credit card system for a night that takes a major investment in contracts and stuff right yeah for just shits and gigs if you want to see if it may be worthwhile

the software is going to be out there i believe there's a hardware component as well i isn't it like i think it just runs on like ipad right but i think he i think i think he said they have a node set up at each location cool yeah we'll link to the thread yeah we will in the show notes um so check that out and and just just to add on top like i feel like bars um are a natural adoption point for bitcoin because bars in general like cash they like cash way more than they like credit cards credit cards are like a whole mess for them that's a good conversation starter at a bar you know exactly it's a lot i gave a lot of bitcoin out of bars back in the day it was giving a lot people a lot of people five dollars worth of bitcoin at bars back in the day it's

that alcohol effect yeah um and they all lost it not all of my friends i have friends hit me up you're like dude that five dollars is worth a good amount now i owe you dinner yeah i had both ways i had people hit me up during the the run in 2017 they were like i just have no idea where that wallet is i kind of vaguely remember you shilling it to me and sending me some and it's gone for good don't do that as often anymore i should get back to doing that or not yeah no it's always good i think it's it's a good way people the easiest way for someone to learn is to send them five dollars and be like you know figure out how to spend that yeah that is true um yeah so speaking of exchanges of giving people bitcoin gemini we spoke about bitmex's uh

publicity stunt in the times of london last week when we last met uh since then gemini has come out with a huge uh on the ground campaign here in new york city in particular uh crypto needs rules matt what are your thoughts revolutions need rules revolutions need rules there's never been a revolution that had rules before i just seems really out of touch uh i don't really you know the crypto word is i hate that word too so that being front and center kind of bothers me uh i did i did see two good takes on twitter about it the one is that uh they knew it would brew controversy in the bitcoin community so we gave it a ton of publicity on twitter we're giving it publicity right now on the podcast i actually think zach prince pointed this out from block

fi sponsored the show um ceo block fi called that out he said he was on the subway i was taking pictures like i know everybody's shitting on it but everybody's talking about it like everybody on the subway that he was on he said was talking about it yeah exactly so controversy is publicity nonetheless and then the second thing is you know the Winklevoss twins own Gemini and their play this whole time has been the ETF and the reason they created Gemini in the first place was because the ETF stalled and they needed they the one of the main reasons why the ETF kept getting disproved was because disapproved was because how do you price it like how do you decide what the Bitcoin price is at any given time and is is that a proper price is that really what Bitcoin's worth

so they were like we'll create a whole exchange so that the market on our exchange can then set the price remember they had the wink decks first which i combined multiple different exchanges and then the feds were like no that's not that's not enough so then they were like we'll build our own exchange so this could kind of be a nod to the regulators because they know they're watching right like look we're going so hard on on regular regulatory compliance that we're willing to do this huge ad spend saying as much right yeah they bought a fucking bus and drove it around the city did was that their bus or did they was that wasn't like a commuter bus or anything right it might have been i don't know i'm not positive i would imagine um i figured they just you know did one

of those silk screened ad runs on buses because you see those sometimes yeah i mean the picture i saw it looked like the whole bus was plastered with the ad campaign it looked like it was almost painted right i saw that one too it was like a blacked out bus looks like they took it to pimp my rides to get pimped up with some ad campaign just drawing around driving around throwing satoshis to people right out the window wait first give me your name i'll throw you a satoshi just follow this kyc approval procedure and then i'll give you five dollars um uh yeah and then going on from there i wrote about it yesterday there's a lot of great content uh in bitcoin in particular crypto twitter has been a vapid wasteland of of vitriol recently but

been able to wade through the bullshit uh there was some signal through the noise this week one of them in particular was coinmetrics piece uh they broke uh they didn't break into they they broke down uh the coinbase input data uh all the historical coinbase data in the bitcoin blockchain to sort of decipher uh the the the the uh breakdown of pools that have one bitcoin over time And it proved that, I mean, if we have to assume that the Bitcoin mining pools are writing these Coinbase messages and not trying to deceive people, but it seems as if Bitcoin mining pools in particular are viciously competitive. So just to be clear here, you're not talking about the exchange run by Brian Armstrong? on no point so there's in bitcoin whenever a block is created the miner that mines the block can uh there's there's a coinbase output uh and they can input a message into that coinbase and

that will get transmitted to the network right and that's where coinbase took their name from which is extremely confusing just like how blockchain.info took blockchain yes um and now they have blockchain.com which is annoying uh that so so so basically a miner can voluntarily say i mine this block and that's how we can say whatever satoshi used the coinbase to write uh the times times of london banks on the second or chancellor on the second ballot to the bank right so but it's it's a user input so they can put whatever they want there and historically they they put you know we mine this and it's like kind of like advertising but also it's like a voluntary thing for the network so you have to keep in mind like they could even

write somebody else's name yeah they could put a different pool or one of the things he noticed is the unknown amount went up so the amount of miners that aren't listing anything in the coin base transit the coin base has has has gone up tremendously i think it's like 25 now or something yeah another good point that was brought up in the coin metrics piece is that uh the you were the um the friendliness of miners more recently to sort of announce which blocks they mine the pools in particular may uh have been because of last year's fork wars and sort of the signaling around that and that was sort of important at that time to sort of gauge interest of the pools in particular and what they were thinking so that may not be the norm going forward it may just be during these

times of strife when we're trying to figure out what to do and there's uh not consensus around how we're going to proceed maybe that's when minors become more vocal yeah i mean i just i think the key here is you should take it all with a grain of salt i mean if i was a minor i would just be fucking around all day just like switching which pool i am and going i'm now i'm unknown you know now i'm bitmain you know let's just go all over the place right but um yeah so just take it with a grain of salt but bitcoin mining pools are more distributed than they've ever been bitcoin mining is more distributed than they've ever been and hopefully if better hash comes to fruition like the actual power of the individual pool because the thing is people see these pools

they think these are monolithic entities but they're made up of many different miners around the world like you could be a miner in new hampshire and you could be mining with ant pool in china you know that doesn't mean that all the miners are over in china yeah exactly but they don't have as as a pool user you don't have any control of like what transactions go into the block building the blocks and stuff like that the pool operator has control so there's like a soft check there that the the miners can leave the pools um if they think the pool operator is misbehaving but it's a very soft check and they can only do it after the miners misbehave after the pools misbehave the pool operators with better hash the actual miners get to construct the blocks

and and and choose how that works so it takes out way it takes out a ton of power from the actual pool operators yeah so right now the pool operator serves two function like you said the block construction the block template they decide how it's templated and then they divvy up the reward once blocks are mined commensurate with hash rate contributed uh better hash yes would separate those two functions where individual miners would be able to construct a block template and decide how their blocks are templated uh and then all the block or the pool operator excuse me would do is divvy up the reward yeah there's no way you can distribute that aspect because that's actually like the block the the pool operators is measuring how much hash you're contributing to his pool to

divvy that out in the first place yes so this is one thing as bitcoiners that i would argue we should be pushing for is better hash uh one thing one i don't want to say con of better hash but one hurdle that needs to be overcome is that if you are an individual miner you will have to run your own my or excuse me your own node at home on top of your mining node to sort of dictate the block template so apparently right now miners aren't doing that too well um so there's there's definitely better ux at the node level and helping them set them up easier well it goes hand in hand with all the sexy hardware we've seen lately exactly is like hopefully someone you know hopefully multiple people multiple companies will be making like six hundred dollar boxes that a miner just

plugs in like picks his parameters exactly and it just handles everything for him is always on he doesn't have to worry about it he just puts it in his farm and it's just you know he's got he's got 400 asics all hooked up you know he can have a six hundred dollar computer right next to it to managed time right it's not that big it's not you know it's it's more of a i think it's a smaller hurdle than than most hurdles that we face in bitcoin but a hurdle nonetheless yeah and i think that what motivates it but going back to the previous thing right is what would really motivate better hash is if we have another you know big mining pool act out like you need people's livelihoods otherwise the miners will just be apathetic and they won't switch to better hash

exactly it all goes back to yeah two people's livelihoods need to be at risk yeah so again maybe my miners will be apathetic until until need be which isn't the worst case if they continue to be apathetic it means that none of the pools acted out of line well there is one thing to take into consideration as better hash taking a consideration with better hash excuse me i do believe there is a short window of time in which it can be implemented because it is basically a carrot on the stick problem with the stick

getting longer as hash rate grows. So the faster hash rate grows and the larger hash rate becomes harder to sort of bootstrap a pool with enough hash rate to make a dent and create like a payout variance that's profitable for individual miners.

Well, yeah, because you need for BetterHash to be actually effective on a network-wide level, you need the highest percentage of miners possible, right? Yes. Well, not even that. Just to bootstrap it, to entice miners to join the pool, you'd have to have a significant amount of hash power, say 3% to 5% to make sure the payout variance is so that miners are remaining profitable or at least aren't losing too much money. Right. So to expound on variance, what that means is technically, it doesn't matter how big your pool is, everyone should get paid

the same amount but if your pool is larger you get paid out more frequently and because a6 have a set lifetime where they start becoming obsolete really quickly if you don't get paid out quickly you end up losing a ton of money because your minor goes outdated before you you get your income back so you want to minors want to get paid as often as possible and the bigger the pool the more often you get paid exactly so if we only have better hash on pools that aren't paying you out that often then you end up in a situation where no one wants to use that pool yeah so i would argue there's a bit of urgency here if we want to uh lock down this form of decentralization and better hash but i mean like alternatively like people thought slush pool

couldn't come back because they had too little amount right but we had all the scaling wars and everything happening i would argue it's completely different though because you have to people seeded it though right people were like i'll take a hit because i am ideologically motivated my livelihood at risk i don't want bitcoin to get attacked so i'm going to join this friendly pool and try and boost yeah but again there's a whole mental rewiring behind like uh using better hash as a opposed to stratum like everybody just uses stratum right now that's it's super simple stratum is super simple it's just one line yeah on your minor config so there's definitely an education gap there and again i would stress maybe a little bit of urgency needed so let's

get the message out there push for better hash um segwit fud you put this on there you want to handle this ensure this oh i thought i removed it i want to give them publicity okay they're just the same they've been fighting segwit for two years now i have all my bitcoin and segwit addresses they should just you know either put up or shut up like steal my money there's tons of there's more money in segwit addresses than ever before and it's just all it's a crock of bullshit i'm skeptical until proven otherwise exactly as you should be um cranking compliance report um so cranking came out of the compliance report and basically proved that in the u.s in particular uh the financial burden and time burden it takes to put up the legal fees needed to comply at

regulations is a hefty part of their balance sheet um so that was something elusive we'll link to that matt do you want to expound upon this at all this was crazy i mean we all kind I knew this was happening, but it's nice. Well, first of all, Jesse Powell is a badass, the CEO of Kraken. The CEO, the anti-Brian Armstrong. So part of his point was this is why U.S. customers are blocked from so many Bitcoin services. BitMEX blocks U.S. customers. HODL HODL blocks U.S. customers.

And it's because they don't want to deal with this compliance hurdle. And so he posted this. These charts they posted is crazy. um 315 requests from the u.s this year and well last year and the next biggest one was uk at 61 and then after that it just drops off because it who's de denmark denmark they're at 34 but anyway the u.s is at 315 maybe deutschland they have the fbi they have the u.s secret service they're asking for stuff the department of justice the irs obviously the sec they're getting requests left and right and they're supposedly like super broad requests

and they're just fishing they're on fishing expeditions and these exchanges are perfect targets because they have all the user information they have to do the kyc and so they have they know everything about you they know where you're sending the transactions what does this say about the land of the free like i don't want to sound like a hard ass here but like how free are we as americans right now like if you were the land of the free and a bitcoin exchange like america what did you say the u.s had 361 requests 315 315 the next country was 50 you have a 6x yeah amount and it was the it was the uk the uk is not great about this shit right yeah number two at 61 it's perplexing it's perplexing it's kind of like an emperor has

no clothes moment right is because you you see it point blank like as as an american i am disadvantaged in the bitcoin space right yeah but in that and i haven't said this on this pot in a while but it's like frogs boiling in water like these are little it's the apathy all over again exactly it's but that's the exactly this is the theme of today's pot is apathy like that i would argue that should that should shock people um the other big thing is in 2017 they only in 2016 they had 71 requests worldwide in 2017 they had 160 requests and in 2018 they had 475 requests so it's accelerating as the price goes up naturally interesting interesting um yes we'll be following that shout out to cranking and cranking i think they said they're i mean they they fight these

requests as ardently as possible to protect our users privacy and they try their best but they have u.s banking relationships i imagine they comply with most of them yeah um and then the other thing is is this is another perfect example of why privacy is so important um and using the privacy tools we have at our availability right now which the main one that's user-friendly is wasabi so you know if you're a cracking you if you're an exchange user when you when you transfer when you buy bitcoin on an exchange and transfer it out to your address the exchange knows that address and they can use that information to then figure out all your other transactions that happen after that fact so if you use something like wasabi you can help break that

that blockchain trail so it makes it way more difficult for them to track it and and oh so like i don't care if cash app knows where my transactions are going well i do care but i'm saying like thought experiment i don't care about that yeah but they have to comply with government requests and stuff so you never know where this information is going they suck at security the government so like all that information can get in the wrong hands then you have some criminal knows exactly how much bitcoin you have what transactions you make like that's a huge issue so you have to if you don't care about your privacy like no one else will and i i think people should use wasabi as a middle ground in between the exchange and whatever wallet they're storing

it and whether that's a hardware wallet cold storage hot wallet whatever yeah uh completely concur with that line of thinking and then when you once that happens if you want to take a step further uh and take your personal sovereignty to the next level uh recommend checking out the noddle noddle.it they just sent us a free node it came to your house i haven't seen it yet how's it looking it's a pretty sexy piece of hardware they did send it to us for free so disclosure um our integrity is not for sale we will be just as hard we're going to be more hard on them than we usually are on on most things um i'm very excited it's been a very promising project i really like the team there i become friends with them uh and so you know so we're

going to run it through its paces i'm actually going away i'm going to be recording remotely for the next podcast which is one of the good reasons i bought that nice mic so you guys can can hear us well and when i get back we're going to give you a nice full rundown review and our plan is actually like it's like maybe we'll use this as the tftc node you know yeah no that's that's our that's the vision i have in mind the cool thing about the noddle is it runs btc pay server runs all these other things in addition to lightning and and bitcoin comes over the sabi too right it might be the plan i'm not sure if it's there yet anyway i haven't run through the paces yet right so we'll talk about all this but shout out to them for sending it to us they sent us 40

stickers we got uh 21 genesis block stickers it's a nice touch very sexy sticker there's a genesis block sticker on the side of it they gave us some yellow vests we have some yellow vests here in the states if we ever want to incite some uh some protests in the streets yeah marty met them when he was in when he was in paris yeah shout out gave us uh yellow vests that say not a lid on it if you want to talk about a team that is uh true to the ethos and the core of bitcoin uh the noddle the noddle team from what i can glean from my i don't know if they're trying to do but they're bad ass i don't think they are but i don't think they are their their intentions are pure in my mind but don't trust verify exactly and they would tell you that they're actually saying that like

has anybody ever they were like asking me has anybody ever ordered it wasabi i was like i don't know but the package was actually really funny because it doesn't say don't trust verify it says don't trust ver which i thought was a nice little um yeah so that's uh noddle it and we're going to pause here for an ad mid read this is an ad i think you freaks are going to like uh justin moon he's been on this podcast episode 53 i believe uh his buildle boot camp uh they're starting another class i believe the 21st so it's an online bitcoin programming course if you guys listened to justin's episode uh you've definitely learned a lot about it he's iterated on it it's been getting bigger teaching a lot of people this next course um what they're going to focus on

First, you're going to build a miniature implementation of Bitcoin and Python with all the major features, peer-to-peer networking, Nakamoto consensus, monetary policy, and more. Deploy the network along with your classmates. Build some simple infrastructure for it and exchange in a mining pool, excuse me, and practice attacking it. Second, program the real Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. Connect to your peers. Send and receive messages. Write a crawler that can visit every public node in the network. implement naive headers first initial block download and build a space excuse me a basic

spv client and then third you're going to build a hardware wallet with micro python firmware just like trezor generate seed words create hd wallets construct and sign transactions and lastly build a project of your own choosing justin that was a mouthful of a read that i did not look over before i read it but he's clearly not a marketer he's not but the course sounds incredible if you guys if you guys are developers out there it's a remote course it starts january 21st and it will repeat monthly throughout 2019 um it's a completion of an introductory python programming course is the only prerequisite visit biddleboocamp.com to learn more that's b-u-i-d-l-b-o-o-t-c-a-m-p.com biddleboocamp the d and the l are switched like hodl like hodl um shout out justin check out that

episode if you have yeah we had you had justin on the pod as well that was an epic that was an epic that was a drunk one we went on for two and a half hours i was so jealous you never get that drunk with me marty well we will we need to do like a an outside the rabbit hole recap uh recap if you will there you go marty marty told me that he wasn't going to drink today but nonetheless nevertheless he's drinking with me right now so cheers to that don't tell me a sposa um yeah so shout out noddle and we're gonna keep giving shout outs shout out to satoshi's place uh we put up an ad so satoshi's place holding my hand up here didn't make my first lightning transaction until a couple weeks ago first transaction was some graffiti on satoshi's place and was details from

the crypt uh billboard a little ad there thought it was cool cost me like 40 cents uh and i was just proud to see that it stayed up there for a week without being bastardized with any dicks right it's it's been a little it's been has it been defaced do we have a dick on it's been defaced a little bit but the whole the whole page has been uh no dicks just uh some squiggly lines It was pretty impressive because for the longest time, not only was it not defaced, it was improved on. Yeah, it's still there. It's still pretty good. Yeah, it's still visible.

So, I mean, not only shout out to Satoshi's Place, shout out to the random freaks out there. The maintenance freaks. Yeah, that are maintaining it and improving it. Oh, wait. We do have a dick on it. That's bad. There's a dick coming onto the T. No, but that's not.

It's coming out of Donald Trump, though. yeah it's technically an adjacent dick that just happens to be slightly overlapping hey um hopefully we're not incentivizing people to go draw dicks on our little tftc poster up there but um shout out to whoever's maintaining that we really appreciate you and that's why we do this shit we love you freaks yeah and shout out uh lightning koala for making that online graffiti it is a uh a very steady source of at least one chuckle a day a fun little test case for the lightning network exactly great if you haven't made a lightning transaction yet and you want to make your first one highly recommend starting at satoshi's place satoshi's dot place um bitmain

founders rumored to be stepping down new ceo inbound apparently they lost 1.2 billion dollars last year you come at the king you best not miss i in our last episode i made a pretty or no two episodes ago uh not the live episode but our last not live episode i made the bold prediction that i think bitmain will be the last uh 51 real 51 risk that that we have with bitcoin and you know this is extremely this is extremely bullish for bitcoin they attacked they attacked us and they got caught holding major bitcoin cash bags they got and they just the market turned on them and as it should the icarus story of crypto they will be bitmain will go down as the icarus of crypto the first 10 years i believe um but yeah shout out to what is it btc king 555

is that his uh yeah i think that sounds right um there's some anon the leaker guy there's some anon leaker on twitter he's probably part of bilderberg though he might be or axa one of the two um but he's been calling us out people have been calling him out but he's been pretty i'm pretty sure he's been pretty accurate up to this point in time so made or misses you know yeah this is still a rumor fyi we're not sure here this is yeah we're not sure this is still speculation so so we could this could be we could have got duped who knows i mean it's i think it's a chinese a chinese newspaper broke it so maybe their source is btc cake you never know we shall find out um only time will tell we'll see if that ipo ever gets off the ground oh but bin main did lay off

a shit ton of people so we know they're hurting their ipo has been stalled they're they're definitely hurting that is not a rumor the question is did the two founders jihan and um zhao zhao is the other guy uh he's less he actually owns more of the company but he's less public zhan zhan yes um they're they're supposedly stepping down yes well speaking of layoffs so we talk about market sentiment and where we are maybe in this bear market a lot of uh a lot of layoffs shapeshift had around the layoffs 37 people they they fired which is about 30 of their staff yeah and they had uh and that was due to a i think they released the numbers after they instituted kyc their volume just plummeted so they didn't they actually have the numbers on

their website for the 24 hour i mean you can see it all in the block the respective blockchains as well um they didn't blame it all on kyc a lot of people are saying you know they're an altcoin they're multi-coin business um so they they get hurt more in bear markets uh multi-coin businesses rather than bitcoin focused slow businesses that are like slow and steady bootstrap type of businesses um but kyc is the real hurdle here the whole the whole value prop of shapeshift was they took no information from you and it was relatively frictionless you know it was just super simple and relatively fast to use you didn't have to have an account or anything like that the second they implemented kyc there's all these competitors that don't and you know we saw bisque

get huge volumes uh this changely was one for a little bit i think they implemented kyc since no they have quasi kyc like if you send a large amount of monero they might hold your funds and kycu at that point which is almost even worse uh but then you have smaller competitors like one is like flip me flyp.me they don't require kyc like these little companies that pop up with non-founders are like way easier for them to you know skirt these laws and and shapeshift really can i don't think they can ever unless they do like a full-on pivot to a completely different business like their core business is dead like with kyc it's useless it's like absolutely like some people still use it but the majority of the users are never coming back yeah that's interesting

and they had no choice like they yeah they were forced to bent the knee like like eric vorhees is has always been a staunch anti-government libertarian that's a crazy thing is like he's had to so you know they put his livelihood at risk they were like we're gonna fuck you and like he had no choice like so i'm not angry at eric no um his other option was probably lose everything and end up in jail yeah but you know maybe you should just close it all down because there's just no point and just cut your losses he has shareholders and stuff people say you have shareholder you know fiduciary duty to them to act in their best interest and you know shutting it down wouldn't be in there i think actually shutting it down might be in their best interest

just liquidate it all, pay them out, and maybe start fresh on something new. Yeah, and Eric's a very good writer. Actually, the post that he wrote announcing it was very eloquent. Maybe he could contribute more to writing about Bitcoin and stuff like that. I don't know. I think that ship has sailed, but we'll see. We shall see.

But again, staying on the layoff theme and where we are in capitulation, I think we've talked about it in the past, but ConsenSys had massive layoffs as well. they're cut down i bring them up though just a segue to the constantinople hard fork and what ethereum is going to do consensus with the y the ethereum juggernaut led by joe lubin yes so they had layoffs they've consolidated and actually we can talk about one of their portfolio companies and fura was in the news today they run a lot of the ethereum nodes that

run on the ethereum network are run via infura via aws so a very centralizing factor i would argue both on the aws side and on the first side and if you're based in brooklyn aws is based in seattle or whatever um yeah so you go into the nitty-gritty you go into the nitty-gritty details you're better at this stuff than me i mean the whole value prop of all this stuff is quasi-legal right censorship resistance that's why you're using it in the first place um the reason a prediction market doesn't exist where you can bet on us elections is because they're illegal so if you have these central points of failure specifically if they're based in the united states then when you put that into your threat model like that's ridiculous like like literally

they just have to pressure joe lubin like joe lubin gets off a plane and they like bring him somewhere and like dude like or jeff bezos you got to shut down yeah or except maybe that's why got divorced you know maybe they were like you got to stop running the inferior nodes honey i don't like it it's hurting the environment they got into a fight about it she was a maximalist and she's like no you can't do that she's whoo from uh married to the richest man to the richest woman in the world they both like people should give her a little bit more credit like they launched together and stuff that's true but uh and she's like really smart as well yeah i don't know much about the relationship yeah i mean neither do i just he had a really good commencement

speech i forgot what his alma mater is and i watched the commencement speech like four years ago and he talks about how he started the company i mean we're kind of going on a tangent but he started the company tangents and they both they both went to like stanford or wherever he went they went i think they went together then they were both in finance and they both left their nice paying finance jobs to start an online bookstore and everyone thought they were crazy you know and they like kind of you know not necessarily bootstrapped it but like they like work their asses off in the beginning so like in a lot of ways they were very much partners so you know you shouldn't discount people i'm not accusing you but people a lot are saying like oh

now he's she's taking half of his net worth you know like they built it together but anyway thanks for that history lesson i did not know that yeah i was talking about it yesterday but yeah the commencement speech is really good maybe we'll link to it in the show notes maybe we won't but if you just search jeff bezos commencement speech in youtube really really good commencement speech and uh i like commencement speeches they're pretty good i do the good ones i didn't like mine but um i didn't like mine either but i like other people's commencement speeches because you get to pick and choose right like there's like probably like 8 to 12 really good commencement speeches those are awesome yeah and uh whether or not you have good or bad things to

say about uh amazon they're a perfect example of low time preference getting shit done being impatient and just waiting for the market to accrue around it. So very good case study for Bitcoiners who are expecting a technology to take decades to come to fruition. And the other thing is, so like back to the central point of failure, let's go back to Inferra. You know, AWS won't host Gab, right? Bang. You know, there you go. Proof. So that's an issue. That's a major issue. Not only do they control presumably the majority of the nodes. Now, we're not even just saying that the Infura CEO brags about it. And not only do they control the majority of nodes, the main nodes, the ones that like MetaMask and all the major dApps use are almost all in Infura.

So, you know, that's part of the reason why not only does Lubin presumably own a large percent of Ethereum and have investments in many, many of the companies that dominate the Ethereum space. he all one of those companies in fura and they control a ton of nodes so this is a huge huge not only central point of failure but he has massive control over the the direction ethereum decides to take right yeah the whole ecosystem and i got a peek into their transition to eth 2.0 and my god um i'm interested to see how it goes yeah i mean i think it's too far off it's important not to start speculating on far things for ethereum because they just change their mind every four months and then they like scream at us and they're like but you didn't see the new thing we're doing instead you like do not follow it it's like ridiculous how am i supposed to

follow it like you shouldn't be miners and users and business owners need to make long-term financial decisions you can't just keep changing what's gonna happen um stop in a blink of an eye and that's a good transition to the prog pow fork well wait we're not done there we're not done with Constantinople yet no we're not done with Infura yet well yeah well okay I blanked there for a little

bit but yes we'll end Infura on a point of objectivity let's be objective here apparently they're working on ways of decentralizing Infura and there are decentralized alternatives that Ethereum enthusiasts are suggesting so definitely seek those out if you're

running an app through i don't think they're necessary the idea is that other companies should offer infuriate like services so if you take down one of them and they'll be located in different areas like it's not like it doesn't make any sense they're all holding the same data right but it's not like if you had like a company in slovenia that also ran ethereum full nodes for people then you know you need the slovenian government to go after them and the u.s government so it's not like there's like this new technology where they figured out how to decentralize that right um and like from infiora's point of view like okay maybe we won't run it all in aws maybe we'll run it you know some of it in just a different server company right yeah like

we'll run some of it on azure or whatever i don't know yeah interesting so we'll be following that and transition to constantinople so constant was that the 15th or the 16th 16th i believe uh 16th is the estimate right now it depends on block time yeah so that's like the upcoming ethereum fork they're going to slash minor rewards um i think they like they're like fudging with the difficulty bomb or something yeah they're pushing it back a little bit more yeah i again yeah so the difficulty bomb is like the idea is that if you don't get rid of it like it becomes completely unprofitable to mine blocks so like forces miners into forking and like creates a fork incentive where you not continue the main chain i think it's like a pretty useless

mechanism because in any kind of situation where you actually like hit up on that difficulty block like difficulty bomb miners will just fork out the difficulty bomb it's like the easiest consensus ever uh yeah and that's their business is like why would they why would they just sit there they were obviously just fork it out so it just creates this like forced attack vector type when you have a hard fork there's attack vector exactly and not only a forced attack vector but a forced precedent that you set by pushing it back you just basically set a precedent like hey we're willing to change this on a whim um like just from like a an initial design perspective that makes no sense to me so they decided on the 33 percent decrease in in block reward i think like five months ago or six

months ago or so let's fall so like imagine like you're a miner and you spent all this money securing the ethereum network you know you're not doing it out of the goodness of your heart you're doing it to make money but you're also kind of doing it because you're ideologically motivated you know most of these miners are ideologically motivated and then they just like pull the rug out from under you they're like oh we want to transition to prove a stake so we're just gonna lower your reward you know like that's a little bit ridiculous like every time you fuck with miners like they're less likely to invest more in protecting your network and like don't bite the hand that feeds you right yeah and so like so that's just one aspect of it so that's

the first aspect is the the cut in uh block reward the second aspect is i believe it's six months after constantinople did january 16th hard fork they're going to institute what is it pro or prog post separate prog but yeah it's completely separate but it does hinder minors as well they're making prog pop they announced like what like two weeks ago or something like that recently um ProgPow is basically, just to sum it up, is they want to fork out ASICs, similar to what Monero did, kind of similar to what Sia did. I don't know if you remember our Rabbit Hole recap episodes. Impossible to forget. I got obsessed with Sia forking them out.

I thought this debate was over. ASICs are super important. they make they enhance the loose game theory that secures these networks because the hardware becomes that if you have hardware that's specific to your chain attacking the network renders that hardware either worth less or completely worthless so it makes the attack way more difficult and if you don't have general purpose hardware it's way harder to acquire large amounts of it to attack um so people should embrace asics i have a great thread on on that I actually said today, I was like, I feel like Ethereum stakeholders should pay me for all this free advice I give them.

Like, maybe I should just shut up and just let them fuck up their network even more so it just comes to an end quicker. But I like highlighting this stuff because I think it's important case studies for Bitcoin. This is like, it's a really good tangent for like, ETC got, Ethereum Classic got 51% attacked. We haven't talked about this yet. Jump into that. Well, they didn't. They got, they got, um, what is it? Uh, cascade attacks.

No, no, no. It looks like they got, did they get both? They got tacked both ways. The Ethereum developer community. They don't even know. It's so small that, and like so non-existent that they can't even give any definitive answers around it. Ethereum classic.

Yeah. It's just like, but anyway, Ethereum classic uses the same mining algorithm as Ethereum, eth hash so ethereum asics can mine ethereum classic and gpus can as well that created a situation where ethereum classic is super easy to attack so this is a almost it's like a warning sign for what ethereum might face if they fork out their asics because then you only have gpus mining and you're easier to attain yeah and then once you use the general purpose hardware to attack ethereum you can just switch to a rival chain that uses it and your hardware isn't isn't bricked yeah your hardware isn't bricked yeah um yeah so and there

was a miner in particular i forget who it was sorry for uh this fact slipping my mind right now but they basically came out and said hey i just put a multi-million dollar four million dollars it was lindsey i think or something lindsay yeah something i don't know how to pronounce it um but it basically came out and said hey like are you ever going to have a discussion with us like i just spent four million dollars to come protect your network and i'm going to be bricked in six months specifically they spent four million dollars to develop a new f hash asic yes and now that f hash asic might not be worth anything if uh prog pal gets implemented and like I personally, one of the speculations I have is that, you know, ETC has been super cheap to attack for a long time.

And it looks like we had a preliminary report out of a Chinese company that I guess their business model is they track these chains and they issue warnings to exchanges to give them a heads up. Like, looks like there's an attack going on on Ethereum Classic. And they released a report and it looks like all the attacks failed to actually steal any money. So the way you would steal money from these exchanges is you send them Ethereum Classic. Then you exchange it for a token, for a Bitcoin or another coin. And then you withdraw the Bitcoin or the other coin. And then as soon as that happens, you reorder the Ethereum Classic chain. So that original deposit never happened.

You get basically free money. That's how the attack happens. And it looks like none of the exchanges actually lost any money from it. So maybe one of my speculations is that Ethereum stakeholders are attacking Ethereum Classic to try and dissuade miners like Linzai that created these ASICs from switching over to ETC because they have the same mining algorithm when that happens. We've got a hot Matt O'Dell theory right now. But I think that is a misnomer anyway.

Even if that's the reason they did it, that's dumb because Ethereum miners that are against this ProgPow change to fork out ASICs would be more likely to just not follow the ProgPow fork and continue mining the regular Ethereum chain. Maybe fork out the difficulty bomb because that'd be the super easy consensus. Like, why would they switch to ETC? ETC is a dead chain. It's trending long term to zero. The only reason we're talking about ETC right now is because it's a really good case study on POW assumptions and what you should know about it. Yeah, can we play devil's advocate here, give a pro of Prague POW? No, there's no pro.

Brace ASICs. I mean, their argument is that if we get rid of the ASICs now, that when we switch to proof of stake, it'll be less likely the miners revolt at that point. that won't be as powerful. It's a dumb argument. You should just embrace ASICs. Again, I've said this for a while. Ethereum is the epitome of Gauss's Law. They started with a system based out of complexity,

and it is impossible, I would argue, and many others would argue, to get to a steady-state system when you start so complex out of the box. We're an hour and six minutes in here. It's a long rip. Are we really? Yeah.

Wow. We got one more topic left. Or did we already talk about the Monero ransom? No, we didn't. All right. So, in Norway, there's a bunch of kidnappers holding, I believe, some high prominent person's wife hostage for Monero. $10 million for Monero.

$10 million. There's some conspiracy theories out there that these are just Monero holders looking to get an exit pump in. That's what I like. I like that theory. That's the only reason I put it in there. Let's not forget there's somebody who's been kidnapped. I know, but it would be the first time that it was like a kidnapped pump.

Yeah. So the argument is that you can't really, you know, the idea is that, oh, Monero is relatively anonymous, so you can easily take that ransom and spend it. But $10 million worth of Monero is a large amount of the supply. So it would be really hard to hide that amount. So someone speculated that maybe they already hold Monero and they just want the news to pump it. Which I just thought was interesting to note.

But cryptocurrency ransoms will be more likely, whether that's in Bitcoin or Monero or anything else, because it's just the ideal ransom. And this is another perfect example where people say like, oh, Bitcoin holders are more at risk for kidnappings. Maybe in the beginning, but it's getting to the point where it doesn't matter if you own cryptocurrency. the people doing the ransom just assume that you can get your hands on $10 million worth of Monero or Bitcoin. So it doesn't matter. Just all rich people are going to be more likely to get kidnapped because we have like a really great ransom money.

Now this is a beautiful future you're envisioning here. It is what it is. When you have better money, you know, that's what happens. We'll see. We'll see how it plays out. Hopefully it's a more peaceful.

I'm hoping I'm optimistic. Um, yeah, it was, uh, it was a great rep. I think we covered a lot there. Um,

It's great to be back in person, one-on-one. It was a little nerve-wracking last week. I haven't spoken in front of a group ever like that. Yeah, I was both nervous and excited. I think it came out pretty well, all things considered. It was a fun night. Yeah, and that crowd was very involved. Shout-out to Jay and Aaron from the CoinPod, or CoinTalk.

CoinTalk, excuse me. They had a very interesting open, talking about Satoshi and particularly the writings of Satoshi and trying to break that down. um fascinating stuff so definitely go check that out as well shout out to iterative for putting that together shout out to our sponsors block fi and the biddle boot camp and matt's got more more to say i actually had my first ever sober podcast with uh pete mccormick on what bitcoin did which you guys should check out very good i listened to it while i was in bed suffering from food poisoning and it was a very good he said I'm honored I'm honored you Peter and Neil Woodfine

was on that episode Neil Neil's great we had a great chat it was a really good time we talked about what we we were hoping for in store for 2019 you had a very similar pod with Pete before that people should check out the other things I'm pretty sure it's not only was it my first sober pod I'm pretty sure it was Pete's first explicit pod because even though I was sober I still dropped a couple of bombs a couple shits we have yet to uh to have an explicit podcast on the itunes store to date so we don't mark any of ours explicit not yet so please don't report us guys that would be fucked up all you haters out there i don't even mean to i cursed while i said that um yeah no it's a great week uh thank you freaks for joining us if you like what we're

talking about please rate share subscribe trying to blow this up we got big plans for 2019 we're going to take this to the next level appreciate you guys for staying along again thank you guys for coming out who did last week here in New York peace and love RIP Hal long live Bitcoin RIP Hal can't wait to unfreeze your ass