TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.01.21

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Venezuela - https://twitter.com/btcven - Post-Soviet LN + Satellite API messages - https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1088402776638541827 - Lightning games - https://mailchi.mp/9e176e464777/martys-bent-january-21st-2018-issue-402 - Georgia & Bitfury - https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1088816882872926211 - Taproot article by Aaron van Wirdum - https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/taproot-coming-what-it-and-how-it-will-benefit-bitcoin/ - ETF withdrawn - https://twitter.com/gaborgurbacs/status/1088173233722089486 Thanks to this week's sponsor, Honeyminer! All you home mining freaks should head over to www.honeryminer.com/labs to check out their new version, now available to Linux users!

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here for another edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. We've got Matt back in the studio, back on solid ground here in the United States. Not that you were not on solid ground in Hong Kong, but it's nice to have you back stateside. How was your trip? I wasn't renditioned. That's always a plus. What? I don't know. When you go to China, you know, I feel like you're a known Bitcoiner. Really?

This is probably like the one last good opportunity to go to China before the next bull run. Yeah. What did you think? It was pretty badass. We were in Hong Kong. Yeah. Hong Kong is a really badass city. How was...

It's like New York City in Asia. Yeah. How was the documentary? It was like no zoning laws, so they just go really high. It went really well. It was fun. I've just been wrecked by... I never thought jet lag was a thing, but the 16-hour flight plus 13 hours time difference

just completely destroyed me. Dude, I was wrecked when I went to Paris. I can't imagine going all the way to Hong Kong. Yeah. europe's a europe's a piece of cake compared to this um yeah i'm glad you're back glad you had fun we've got a lot of topics to talk about this week um before we do that though honeyminer's back as a sponsor we got them back and they got a big announcement our friends at honeyminer uh new product announcement honeyminer max for linux so you freaks out there have had linux hard

hardware have been wanting to participate with honeyminer uh you can finally do this uh they've finally launched the Linux product. So Honeyminer Max, you go to honeyminer.com slash labs to get started. It's compatible with Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, or CentOS 7. Zero fees, no account required, Bitcoin payouts every two hours. That's every two hours and profitability around 10% above market value. No fees, no account required, Bitcoin every two hours, and 10% above market rate. Or market value, excuse me. Seems like a good deal to me. You auto-mine the most profitable shitcoin at any given time,

and then they automatically dump it for Bitcoin and pay you. Doing a great service. You use your GPUs to help Bitcoin out. Yeah, and they're holding strong with KYC. A good, clean way to get Bitcoins. Yeah, there's no KYC. No KYC. And this is actually a step above their other product

because it's more of a beta product for advanced users. It's all command line. There's no GUI, but... Yeah, you were playing around with it, weren't you? 0% fees. No fees. That's crazy. For now, I'm assuming they're just trying to bootstrap it,

but it's a really easy way to... You connect a bunch of GPUs, and you connect it to a little Linux box, run this, and they're just automatically dumping Bitcoin into your account. You don't have to worry about which coin you're mining at any given time. They just handle all that for you.

Yeah. So definitely go to honeyminer.com slash labs. Check it out. Doing really cool stuff. If any of you freaks with Linux machines out there, give it a try. Shout out HoneyMiner. We spoke last Friday. Meeting on Fridays now?

Are we switching our schedule up? I kind of like this Friday happy hour with Matt and Marty. I like it, too. I like it. I like it. My wife works from home every once in a while. We could play it by ear. Yeah, we'll play it by ear.

Keep changing it up. Keep them guessing. Yeah. It's been a long week since we last spoke. I can't believe it's only been a week. it feels like it was a month ago at this point it feels even longer for me it's nice to see your pretty face again though yeah right remote that remote stick is uh it's tough it's either the rapport isn't there you need and we also like bad wi-fi between two hotels yeah i think uh

different continents might have been spied on while we were having that conversation but i think we got over it i kind of hope so like it'd be you know it'd be nice if they recognize their greatness and that'd be cool buying on us yeah well i lost uh lost you towards the end of that episode had to cut it short apparently you were screaming uh asking me if i could hear you i couldn't sorry for cutting us short if you had anything anything else to talk about it was a it's going to be a little piece of rhr historical gold right there okay so you want to intro us with the price what's today's date today's date's january 25th 25th the price is like 3500 something yeah it's been uh it's been pretty range bound for last week or two

it's at 3614 right now um yeah it's been pretty range round since january 9th it's been in this tight range um so yeah right now uh the xbx trade block index is quoting at uh 3549.78 cents been pretty boring yeah we can save the we'll save the price talk next week we're gonna have murad in so he can yeah murad's coming back he can draw your lines in your in your in your ears we're gonna eat some steak i'm very excited for next very very delicious steak yeah um but beyond price a lot of uh geopolitical stuff going on this week uh let's start in venezuela venezuela we always have a keen eye on what's going on there and it seems uh as though there is a coup this week uh if you will some people are calling a coup who knows what happens like a half

coup yeah trump uh declared uh the uh uh what would you call it um opposition president whatever it is and i think this is like a perfect situation where it probably did more that probably does more harm than good like the most sketchy part about this other dude that i don't really know anything about is that all these you know trump and all the like bolsonaro uh endorsed him too all these endorsements kind of make it more sketchy but uh yeah there's a there's an opposition leader it seems that is trying to use the venezuelan constitution to depose maduro and and the big thing that maduro has going for him he's got the army on his side and he's not going to go down without a fight it doesn't look like yeah um

i'm trying to find this guy's name i didn't prepare well for this i'm sorry it's with a g it's gaido or something like that i guido guido um so guido is the opposite apparently he's a bitcoiner he's been talking about bitcoin well you talked about in 2014 he had one tweet about it yeah um but yeah no it does get into this this weird sort of idea of uh i don't i feel a little dirty of trump just like uh claiming this guy's president in the tweet and it was like very organized within like 15 minutes it was like 20 different countries all said it right yeah which is yeah as much as you hate maduro it's like but it was the best way to do it they were absolutely in communication you know it was they knew that maduro wasn't going to just

step aside they wanted you know they needed to go through this like formal process of recognizing a different government to lock up his assets and stuff like that yeah and i was uh and i'm very confused as like an outsider looking in i've seen many videos uh on twitter over the last couple days uh both in favor of maduro and in favor of guido um from what i hear a lot of people are like apprehensively optimistic but uh i really don't know i don't have any intel on the ground yeah i mean i feel i feel wrong like making any kind of any kind of statements but you know i i think objectively maduro is is a very shitty leader so obviously or i i guess is a yeah i mean i i think it's objective but let's just call it subjective but whatever look at the currency the

currency is just a fucking mess the economy is a mess um but the one bright spot is that local bitcoin's volume is sitting near all times highs measured in bitcoin um yeah i'm pulling that up now um now i was checking other local bitcoins or excuse me coin.dan's fixing up their site so we don't have access to the chart at the moment but uh well a while ago lawmaster did the u.s version i think it's sitting around all-time highs and measured when measured in u.s dollars as well um you know it's a perfect example of bitcoin giving people an escape route whether that's corrupt government officials or regular people it's it's a mix of both um most definitely it gives it gives you a way out of your your national currency if your government is just completely

inept and can't can't handle it yeah and again this isn't a panacea for venezuelans bitcoin in particular um it is a tool that can be leveraged uh by good and bad people as matt pointed out your part the particularly interesting thing here is that venezuela already has a major major state mining operation like probably top five in the world and this is actually uh thank god you brought that up because this is something we should definitely bring up uh while we have venezuela on top of our minds they cannot get their gold back from the bank of england like the bank of england is old they can't repatriate their gold back not your keys not your gold not your keys not your gold it's 1.5 billion dollars worth of gold i believe uh that venezuela maduro in

particular was trying to repatriate back to venezuela and bank of england is just like nope we're uh not going to give you your gold uh which is like hey yeah like he's a pretty terrible dictator but it does get into that question it's like ah like not your not your not your vault not your gold yeah i mean gold has a major custody issue right like it's really hard to transport it's really hard to store securely yeah it really shows gold's achilles heel when compared to bitcoin exactly and so even if you're like if you're in venezuela right now you're a corrupt government in venezuela and and you have a large amount of gold reserves being held you know foreign gold reserves and you have bitcoin reserves even if those bitcoin reserves fall

a half fall 70 because of volatility in the short term at least you still have access to it right like you have something it's way better than nothing there's a major advantage and you could transferred all around the world you can pay for things and yeah exactly this is probably a glaring uh example of why the gold standard failed eventually it's because governments confiscated all the gold and centralized it in their vaults and very few people around the world dictate who gets it and when um so that was interesting uh so venezuela again uh any of you venezuelan freaks if uh you want to reach out give us some information on the ground if you're even listening to this i'm sure i think we have a lot of venezuelan listeners we definitely have

a lot of venezuelan uh tweeters we're gonna get there's a great way to to get get some kind of glimpse into into that world and i try and boost them whenever possible yeah and alejandro machado was um tweeting out about uh like bitcoin venezuela fund that uh you can donate well btc vent yes on the pod in the past i actually linked a project in in this uh in the agenda that they they're running right now a mesh net project that is is a it's a more open setup than gotena okay um uh it's tiny it runs it looks like it's almost the size of like two two sd cards really uh and it's just very low cost low power consumption uh easy for them to mass produce and allow them to send messages and bitcoin transactions without any kind of uh formal

internet or cell service that's pretty dope so um that's btc ven on twitter at btc ven yeah we'll link it in the show notes i didn't even know that yeah they're in i think they're in the testing stages right now well yeah uh they have uh they have you have the ability to donate to this cause so if you have a few shekels to spare they accept lightning they do it's pretty cool they were like way ahead of the game in accepting lightning um yeah um so to more cheery news a lot of good demos this week i wrote about it in the bent on monday lightning game demos are starting to really pique my interest matt uh there was one in particular uh of a shooting game uh i forget who exactly demoed it i wrote about i should know his name but excuse me he used lightning network

microtransaction paywalls to get access to a wall in the game. And since he released that demo, he's released more and more. He's been iterating on it and making it so users on Twitch can interact and pay for monsters to come attack him

and stuff in the game. And just really getting creative with the use cases that can be enabled with Lightning Network and gaming in particular. Ever since I discovered Bitcoin, i wanted to be able to play a first person shooter type game like a counter-strike um or maybe like even like a fortnight which isn't formally first person shooter but you get

the idea where every kill you make the person you kill pays you a little bit of money but no kyc or anything so some like kid in like singapore that's just like fucking dirty at can can bring home like enough to feed his family just from like killing noobs in america online like it's like the future of gambling to me and the future of gaming and it's just fucking badass like that's way cooler to me than like buying skins or something right um and i think like we're closer to that than ever because of lightning uh and particularly with the games right now it's it's more easy to publish than it's ever been before to be like an upstart no and that's like the interesting sort of thought experiment i found myself going down like thinking about how this is going to grow and in the bent i

was uh like maybe like somebody like sony would implement this to make their payments easier but they probably act as a payment processor make a lot of money from that so it's probably going to be more of an indie game yeah all these these big companies can't because there's too much there's too much legal exposure for them and they they have no reason to they're already making money like for instance like like fortnight i don't know if you know how fortnight works like you it's survival you 100 people drop on like an island last man left wins right played fortnight so it's super easy for them to do a mode where everyone deposits five dollars on from their credit card or whatever right and then the the winner gets 500 or 495 right you don't have to

do any kind of micro transactions or anything it's literally just a a pot a pot that you win um i think that would be wildly popular they could take like 10 off the top 15 on the top they've absolutely thought about this their issue is they gotta like kyc each individual person make sure they're like legal age is gambling legal in their country does this classify as gambling or is it a skill-based game all these different stuff they're like nah well we're better off just selling you like this ten dollar costume right this dance move yeah so so the hurdle here isn't so you could do it with the traditional system if if you're gonna follow regs you could do it with this traditional system as it is uh and so that's that's a real hurdle so you need

like some like anonymous indie type person who like drops an apk online uh or you know drops an exe drop some kind of game file online whether that's for computer or mobile that enables this without kyc that anyone can play yeah and somebody actually brought that up like in the thread after the ben i wrote they're like i love the thought experiment but this is really only going to enable uh be best like applied to to illegal type situations or situations that are uh banned in in your typical western first world country um but even with that being said though like thinking about bitcoin adoption long term and this is a great trojan horse for adoption especially if you get gamers that the indie game uh community is able to like implement lightning

and sort of prove out the use case for this uh maybe gamers start demanding like that they are able to compete for satoshi's because they recognize the upwards potential of bitcoin's future valuation and they don't want to like put money on a platform with a credit card and just use that they'd rather win satoshi's and maybe hodl i mean i mean once we get to that level where people prefer bitcoin you know we've made it that's so of course right but yes but but i'm thinking like adoption like who's going to be playing these games younger generations like they probably will innately get bitcoin more than anybody so maybe do you think they would rather like bitcoin than b bucks i don't know i don't know i don't know i know i'm not as involved in

that culture as i should be to make a an educated uh response to that question i play way too many video games i haven't gained and i am hard in a while i am i would not call myself a degenerate gambler definitely not a degenerate um but i do have a bit of a gambling problem uh see i would love to mix those two worlds and i'm extremely competitive so like if i could mix those two worlds together and make like a little bit money playing video games like that'd be pretty badass am i fortunate that i never caught the gambling bug it's like really never been like appeased me at all i mean you got a little bit of it in you because you're a hodler so like i feel like if you're in bitcoin you're a bit of a gambler to begin with that's true

but sports betting i'm like i don't know i've made one sports bet in my life junior year in high school ten dollars the eagles would cover against the patriots really that's it that's the only time you've ever won it did they cover they covered i won i like you just went out on top you're like 100 baby um yeah i mean i i stopped sports betting sports betting was one of the reasons i i one of the ways that i discovered realized immediately like the the purpose of bitcoin because they tried to block all of our like i had money stuck on an account yeah i mean this is a good history lesson bitcoin that was probably like i still have that money stuck on that account i think i don't think they never like actually allowed bitcoin withdrawals but

I was like, but if they did... That's well-known in the online gambling world. What did they call it? Black Friday or something? Where everybody got, like, cross-the-board banned. But, yeah, they went with the payment processors was the way they stopped them. Yeah.

Because they couldn't actually go for the sites. Yeah. No, but staying on Lightning, another Lightning sort of news item this week, our boy Grubles, at not Grubles, G-R-U-B-L-E-S, on twitter uh share i guess he's running he works for blockstream very involved with their satellite api and sort of expanding the satellite api and he was scanning uh sort of the record receiving yeah he was receiving messages uh from the satellite and he noticed that somebody

we don't know we can't confirm this but somebody claiming to be an individual from a post-soviet state keeping a journal using the lightning network and the blockstream satellite api to send basically completely anonymous messages that nobody could trace and sort of i described it i wrote about in the newsletter as well and described it as somebody exploring the edge of a cypherpunk future that the rest of humanity doesn't even know exists yet do you have any comments matt i just poured myself some more scotch uh first of all i love grubles is awesome and i i love his display name because he makes you have to say grubles who's at not grubles on twitter

but um yeah so this message was i mean it was just like badass to read right it got you like all all all pumped up like this is why we do it yeah um it was you know it was like a message in a bottle type exactly type type deal through a satellite to where grubles is located i'm not gonna like doc like i don't know exactly where he's located but for my observational skills somewhere in america so like that's pretty badass and like That went out to everyone who's receiving data. All the data is just coming down from the Blockstream satellites, so if you're set up for receiving,

you're getting a stream of data and these messages. Yeah, if you're able to see the radio waves, correct? Coming from the satellite? Yes. Yeah, if you're able to receive the radio waves and if they hit your area of the world, you can receive these messages which are encrypted. You don't know where they came from,

which may not seem that... You might be able to put two and two with the lightning payment or something i'm not yeah you might be yeah there's some you know i wouldn't say complete you can do it anonymously yes it would take some effort you can do it anonymously yeah i haven't actually played around with it i really want to that'd be really badass but for you freaks who sort of can't grasp the gravity of this i would say like so somebody in china who lives under the great firewall of china in particular from an internet service provider perspective uh like an area where they're not allowed to search about the tiananmen square

massacre or something like that uh and if they were to they'd number one be arrested and number two wouldn't find anything um somebody could relay information about this via the block stream satellite sending messages via lightning and so the key here is like we already had satellites that could send things right the key here is that anyone now can broadcast to the satellite network and transmit whatever they want for a microtransaction with lightning network right that's the key is that there's an api here where they can send they can send the the goods and and they can pay for it with with an uncensorable censorship resistant network i found myself in a in a like a philosophical quandary uh because i described uh the use of

this lightning network and satellite api sort of use case as free speech but is it really free speech you get to pay microtransaction like this is just like some high thought i had i mean i think free speech can have a cost yeah free speech always has a cost um yeah like as a fraction of a penny uh negligible to be considered free speech this is like so yeah i guess i guess it's not truly free right yeah but it's free speech enabling technology right exactly that's i guess would be the proper term that's a pretty funny rabbit hole though yeah um and then the other thing is this block street well first of all i'm pretty sure this is test net so he actually paid nothing it was test net yeah yeah so he so he actually paid nothing to do it yeah and then

the second thing is block stream free of charge also sends down bitcoin blocks so you you can run I guess a fully validating node without an internet connection yeah and I think it might have been Grubel's too who was showing data of the speed of transmission with the satellite and it's actually faster than internet in some cases well yeah it matters how fast your internet is

but yeah and it's a nice little redundant thing like we were talking about like the potential of like Eclipse attacks with the ETC blockchain like did Coinbase's nodes get surrounded basically and getting fed bad information which wasn't the case it turned out but like if you also are connected to the satellite you can

confirm that you're getting the same block because the problem is if you're only getting the blocks from the satellite like you're trusting but you're you know block stream to be sending the right stuff the idea is they they hope that other companies will do similar things so you can have your satellite hooked up to like four different feeds coming in yeah and then you're you have you're trusting that they're not all colluding yeah no and people are like oh block extreme bilderberg x uh centralization was like somebody's got to prove the use case we've said this before um and i'm happy that they're proving this use case holy shit there's some like who knows the post-soviet guy sending journal messages every day could be a psyop i just like i mean it

could be advertising even exactly even if it's advertising rubles who did it right now i uh i just i thought it was funny because when we talked about this the first time on rhr i was like yeah you could have like weather sensors like in the antarctic that that that are paying to send the information back like that was my first thought or whatever and like this like live journal thing kind of is really cool right it's like it's so simple but like on a global scale yeah it's really cool yeah so i mean and people shit on lightning but It seems like the growth and the innovation, the speed of innovation is just accelerating. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's just really, especially with jet lag, it's really hard to keep up with it all. What's jet lag feel like? How would you describe it if you had to say it in a few sentences? Well, I was talking about it yesterday. When you try and sleep, you're exhausted, but you can't sleep because your body's all fucked up. and it kind of felt like like if you lay in bed on shrews you just like the second you lay down your mind raced even more like and then you got up and then you're like kind of exhausted but then you lay back down and you just can't fucking fall asleep and like my appetite is all fucked up

that sucks i get like hungry at like the weirdest times of day do you think massively hungry do you think you'll recover soon yeah i think the scotch is helping this is my first drink since since i got back i'm glad to be sharing it with you yeah um likewise marty likewise next topic uh we don't know if this is true we weren't able to confirm this a block wrote about it uh regardless if it's true or not i think it's a good topic to bring up just so you freaks out there know uh the vulnerabilities that exist out there this is particular story uh is about uh exchanges that were hacked uh they basically uh bittrex i believe binance was on the list again can't confirm this but the story goes uh somebody hacked their servers got access to personal information of

the users of those exchanges including passport information social security numbers other personal uh information uh and somebody is selling it on the dark market like in mass for like ten dollars a pop um again can't confirm but this it is important to know that this vulnerability does exist if you are sharing your passport information your social security information with these exchanges just know that they are honeypots of information that are huge targets for hackers counterpoint like so is the u.s government right like they're what didn't like the irs lose a ton of stuff equifax which is a third party right the equifax said everything but i think the irs also lost a bunch like a couple years later but yeah equifax is even worse i forgot about that

they already have my social security number and every single other social security number because they all got dumped but what if they want to know people that own crypto specifically no i know i agree i mean kyc is a security hole right well first of all this is completely unconfirmed we were like trying to confirm it yeah like i'm pretty sure this is all based on a on a crypto coin news report and they're like a horrible horrible website like really no one should ever go there or ever use it as but it got picked up by some other people as well and they started talking about it but i'm pretty sure it all just comes back to this one report like really no one should ever use that website just a really really yeah horrible source of information yeah but

that being said this is a good learning time to make a learning point right yeah exactly that like kyc is a security it does more harm than it's good as these leaks happen it's less effective because they'll just open up accounts with bought credentials so it's not even like you know i i the most recent hack um i said something like oh right the etc from the most recent reorg went through binance and i mentioned on i was like that we should be able to find out who the person is if they really want to by just finding out from binance because binance has a withdrawal limit if you're not kyc'd and someone pointed out which they made a good point that they could just be using a hacked account or or fake kyc credentials and then you're just looking at

a victim then they just washed it through a victim's account and that would make more sense it's crazy so it's not even effective it's not even that effective and it just puts us all at risk um and i don't trust these companies to actually protect our stuff no neither do i and can you blame them either that's such a burden to put on these companies number one but this wasn't they didn't even they offloaded the burden if the alleged report is correct it was like the third party kyc processing company that got hacked really yeah it wasn't even uh that's what the ccn report says it says that they like outsource their kyc to a third party because they were like this is too much of a burden and then that company got fucked and this is pervasive dude like this is

a big problem like how do you like is this solvable well this is what you know bitcoin gives us that other path right yeah but you need to get into the system in the first place yeah but like once like in a post bitcoin world kyc is unenforceable yeah and we just you just got to seed the system first exactly but and like you can't enforce kyc on mining that's one of the beauties of mining right you can in a pos system you can enforce kyc system-wide listen you're in a pow world you can't you're talking somebody completely agrees with you but i do think there is a pr battle that we face like people think that kyc is for the good like they're again like uh chris dan in the episode i of tales from the crypt interview that i dropped yesterday

that was a lot of that episode was talking about like media framing and framing of conversations and debates in particular and the kyc debate is framed in such a way that people want the safety of aml kyc because they're worried about drug dealers and criminals and terrorists laundering money and what we've come to find is that these people launder money through the banks anyway like who just deutsche bank just got fined cash doesn't have kyc cash app no like the actual oh yeah green dollar bill yeah obviously but like they're trying to get rid of cash so yeah um yeah i mean look at like the patriot act like there's a whole especially if you have like some kind of um major event or catastrophe you can always frame these things to push them through

like governments tend to become more dominant over time like of their people over time um and take more rights away and then and then all this technology enables them to do it right there's a huge huge surveillance world like i when i was on the podcast with pete he said to me matt do you ever worry like uh he he brought up um sorry about pete mccormick yeah he brought up some he brought up a quote that was i forget who said it tim may tim may yeah tim may said it um that if if we go down the wrong path we end up in like a horrible horrible result and i think that really that result is inevitable without bitcoin regardless so so even though it is true that if if if we go down the wrong path here with bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general um we could end up

with a way more surveilled society financially but i think without bitcoin you end up in that situation regardless like that's the direction we're going in no this is actually a great segue into the next topic which is uh taproot uh aaron van weirdom from bitcoin magazine shout out aaron shout out bitcoin magazine always putting out high quality content uh aaron in particular is very astute at breaking down very complex topics uh in regards to bitcoin protocol development and his latest piece he broke down taproot mass snore uh and and pay to uh script hash signatures and we highly recommend that you check it out and it relates to what matt was just talking about because it would uh make bitcoin a lot more fungible at the protocol level and sort of

fuck up uh a lot of the tracking abilities uh that could potentially lead to a dystopian future in bitcoin yeah i mean it seems like uh it'd be a pretty huge upgrade um we need as much privacy as possible with these systems yeah aaron's fucking awesome everyone should definitely read this post yeah and i'm not even going to try to like explain uh what aaron uh like the the depth of the article and explain what mast and schnor and taproot are but it is crazy uh like the depth to which these bitcoin developers go to figure out ways to to make this stuff work like it is an intricate uh process uh taproot or intricate sort of scheme um taproot is that you like greg maxwell found ingenious ways to sort of combine a bunch of things to

to make bitcoin scripting language better number one and then more fungible and more efficient so um definitely go check out that article learn about the potential upgrades that can be coming and know that like this is just one proposal of many so that's actually probably what we should talk about is the packaging of these upgrades so this is just one way to do it um the the main drive of which is to get Schnorr implemented, I would argue. Right, that's like at the base level as a soft fork. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, all these improvements are designed to make Bitcoin more private and more efficient. Those are the two key cornerstones. And to do it in as conservative a way as possible, like Schnorr has been tested now pretty heavily. Decades.

And, you know, that's really that's what it's about. So everyone should definitely give this this post to read, and they should follow Aaron because he's one of the best in the space. He really is. Shout out to Bitcoin Magazine, too. Big fan of

them. Always putting out quality content, and they're back on a Bitcoin focus, which I'm a big fan of. You put this on the list. Georgia and Bitfury. This was a big rumbling on Twitter today. This is pretty cool. Nick brought this to our attention. Nick Carter.

Yeah. So it looks like georgia i tweeted out ali ayakta s the die have been cast it looks like they might be the first nation state to sort of subsidize bitcoin mining in particular or at least uh from a tax perspective yes like known yes because like venezuela is is straight up mining themselves like 99 sure they've never officially admitted it yeah like they're definitely doing that let me pull the quote up So Georgia is Georgia, the country, not the state, is they have really cheap electric energy costs and they've been subsidizing Bitfury with no taxes, like just basically no taxes, cheap ass land. Right. What is your quote say? He said, as soon as Bitfury opened its doors, Georgia created free economic zones where mining activities and electricity weren't taxed.

When Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were exchanged for dollars or pounds, Georgia treated the exchange as an export exempt from value added taxes so Bitfury could keep every penny of earnings. And there was like an investment there. Technically, it wasn't an investment. It was a loan of $10 million by one of the higher ups in the government to Bitfury in the beginning. so there's like even though there's no official taxes there's probably different pay schemes that are involved to enrich certain people here right so like let's not pretend that bitfury is getting away scot-free like uh i was having this conversation on twitter and people were trying to take the negative angle with this and i think long term it's a bad assumption to make that

there's no taxes of course there's going to be hidden taxes and and low taxes right but they'll just be at a competitive rate um they're they're located on land like in your country country you know you you have the army there and whatnot so there's there's a protection racket to a bit but you got to pay something right um and and so countries that want to foster this now are going to give even better breaks now right and then they'll raise a little bit in the future yeah um and it gives them the if this becomes what we think it'll become bitcoin it's a strategic reserve right it's like having major gold mines in your country or major oil reserves in your country having this kind of facility set up they do r&d and everything

yeah i'm getting in this early so you can well uh the block reward subsidy is still considerably high compared to what it will be a few decades from now in like five years we're gonna be like it was huge it was huge it was huge i was telling you you guys don't even know the block reward was huge back in the day i remember when it was 25 bitcoin back in my day um yeah so keep an eye on that and nick actually in this thread we'll we'll we'll uh link to nick's thread um but he he made a prediction a year ago in april 2018 april 12th 2018 probably less than 12 months until nation state announces a special crypto economic zone basically called it out word for word georgia announced that so shout out nick very good

prediction came true um we'll see who's next i wonder who it will be i mean you got to play ball otherwise you you start to fall behind the only winning move is to play i really i really hope america doesn't uh misstep here let's not fuck this up america i have faith i have faith we won't um this is probably not going to be uh uh you guys probably aren't gonna like that i just said i have faith and then i'm saying this topic the etf was denied again officially um no it wasn't actually pulled off the table cboe pulled it off the table yeah van x cboe pulled it off yeah which i yeah and which means they knew it was gonna get denied yeah otherwise you don't pull it off there's like right like you have 15 chance they already knew it was a long shot

if you have like a decent chance of going you're gonna still just risk it did the shutdown play into it that's what they said yeah yeah is the shutdown officially over is this true no it's not i thought they announced this afternoon i think really might have missed it yeah at least temporary i don't know what the fuck's going there's no way there's no way uh if i was a betting man i would bet on it i think it's open at least temporarily i could be wrong i could be wrong well i did you see the news about the irs like 15 000 people or something ridiculous and show up yeah apparently they can't go on strike so they're all sick or something yeah they're all sick leave um i think that's the faa had that problem too today yeah but anyway what were you talking about here we

were talking oh the etf no not the etf yeah we were talking about the etf yes we were and backed also got delayed but we talked about that last week that wasn't recent don't hold your breath freaks it's just been coming for five years the etf is this was like it was still a long shot but it was our best shot this was the one they intentionally made it like super expensive you had to pay like 250k a share or something like that to keep out like the the normal retail um everything was based on otc prices they set up a whole otc index for it and everything yeah um so they tried to go above and beyond so this was like our our best shot um but you know it'll come when it comes anyone who wants access to bitcoin can get access to it right now

right even if you want like a full custodial like etf style option like you have robin hood you can just yeah do robin hood no and again to sort of highlight the signal against the noise like the etf yeah it would be great but really look for the developments around lightning like the use cases being enabled there uh georgia setting up these economic zones it's probably a better uh better narratives and stories to focus on because i think they'll have a larger overall impact in the long run i just think this is like kind of significant one because if i remember correctly like the etf narrative was really like that trigger in with like late 2016 early 2017 we got we had like two big ones i think it was like the

Winklevoss was one of them and they got like we like pumped up to the announcement and then they got denied and then we dropped a little bit and then we pumped again. Bitcoin was primed to pump anyway with like halvening and restriction of supply and whatnot. But that narrative was like a major narrative that led into that whole 2017. Oh, totally. but i think the narrative of people actually using bitcoin via microtransactions to accumulate satoshis like in gaming is such a sexier like road to adoption than etfs just buying a bunch of supply and holding it both will probably happen but that's just my two set two satoshis

yeah i mean it does it definitely feels like very 2013-esque yeah um what else was i going to bring up i just had something on my mind here oh uh what i wrote about in the bed today um adam back basically gave a history of all the iterations of digital cash that came before bitcoin and why they failed and basically explained that um the inability to uh control the the supply the supply inflation without a central authority sort of plagued the digital currency digital cash space until satoshi came up with a bitcoin based on proof of work with a difficulty adjustment with the difficulty adjustment being probably the crux and the most important part of the incentive system so

definitely check that out if you haven't read the bent yet today uh the difficulty adjustment is a very unheralded, beautiful feats of human ingenuity, I would argue. He used the words inflation control. Yes. It was the big innovation. It was a nice little trail down history. Trail down Adam Beck's memory lane. i

that history is is super fascinating and like everyone should read uh like as much as possible about about about everything that led up to it it's it especially if you fall prey to the narrative that like bitcoin is the myspace of digital currencies and stuff like the stuff has been worked on for decades now at this point it was a long time coming yeah very long time coming um no so i thought that thread was was pretty cool um wrote about it today a lot of exciting thing happened like like i said we talked in the beginning of the episode price is dead it's been in this range of bound uh sort of situation for the last few weeks at least things are very boring right now things are very quiet crypto twitter let's talk about crypto twitter a little

it's been uh very very truly bear market yeah right you know i people snapping at each other man i was like this whole time i was like it's not that bad it's gonna have to get worse it's gonna have to get worse like like engagement seems like pretty good everyone seems pretty friendly ish and then it just like really took a dive like like i expected it to get worse and then finally when i was like wow maybe it won't actually get worse maybe like we're adding more new people still even though it's a bear market because it's like a bigger pool um like a different stage and then it just recently it just fucking got bad yeah and like people are losing it they're like there's there's rage quit watch going on a lot of bored people out there what are you like

if and i'm guilty of this too i mean i contribute to it every once in a while twitter's incentives are designed to troll people so you can't yeah you know but then you're losing money everything's going to shit it's kind of boring like you're losing money with like low volatility so you're not even like all the traders are bored you can't go up or down so you're like trying to do like the high leverage it's just you know just take a step away from the computer take a step away from the phone take a walk uninstall the twitter app from your phone and uh you just like remember why we're all here or like why most of us are here i hope yeah and uh it can be boring for a while you gotta have

the long-term view with this shit the only all this all this shit is just straight up gambling except for the long-term bitcoin hold the long time bitcoin hold i'll just be like insanely bullish about all the fucking time and like people can think i'm crazy about that but i think that's just like the best risk reward ratio that like people will ever see in their lifetime uh but everything else is just straight up degenerate gambling yeah i would agree bitcoin is getting us back to uh a sense of reality in this world uh objective truth which i would argue uh the human race is becoming more disconnected from truth in the modern age i i think that's like a i don't like that meme i like it i think we have more access to truth than we ever had before

right and we have more access to all the horrible shit that that we didn't you know like and and propaganda stuff i agree but to understand that i would argue you need to be able to critical thing critically think excuse me and i don't think a lot of people are thinking too critically these this in this day and age look at this podcast this podcast we can hit like it's podcast people don't think about are a very open platform we can hit all these different apps on all these different devices people around the world can listen to us just fucking shoot the shit drink some scotch on a friday and talk about all this real shit and that was never possible before i agree i agree i would just think this is not as popular i think it's getting better i would argue

that but uh i think a vast majority of people are still stuck in uh anachronistic ways i would argue okay i i can agree with that i'm optimistic i'm overall optimistic it's just a little light a fire under your asses out there you guys that are you freaks that are listening or thinking critically obviously so um that's the last topic that i had to talk about is there anything else you want to riff off what else happened this week i don't know do we want to you look tired bro i'm so tired you look like you're about to pass out i'm like i i'm i'm just happy to be in front of you be back you know be back here

making the group go yeah i'm making these friday apps too they're fun um any cultural lessons from hong kong you want to imbue on the crowd what was your favorite part so they're doing massive massive reclamation what do you mean out there like land reclamation where they just basically you know they just wall off a portion of the of the water and then they dredge all the water out and then they i don't know if dredge is the right term and then they just fill it back up and then they so so people who had waterfront property 20 years ago are like 150 feet from the water like i went to the the hotel my grandmother got married at it's called the peninsula hotel um it's in kowloon it's not on hong kong island and

right in front of it there's this huge balcony area and that's where she got married and right in front of it there's like a massive six-lane highway and i was like you know what's going on here she's like she's like matt like when we got married here like it was on the water the water was right in front of this balcony and it was called the peninsula hotel because it was on the peninsula and now it's like 250 feet from from the water it's pretty crazy so they're manufacturing like interesting but it's not so scarce right no very interesting yeah i don't know i thought that was and but they're running out i think if they want the harbor to still be there they can't like reclaim that much more right but like we did massive here too like i don't know

if you ever saw like the boston maps like it's sitting on like all where there used to be water they're pretty crazy like all the really built up parts are all interesting and like battery park in new york it's all reclaimed yeah interesting yeah i've never thought that but it's like extra massive in hong kong and extra recent which was pretty crazy are you gonna let us know when uh we can access the documentary i don't know i i yes i guess i guess i someone's gonna probably docks it anyway oh never mind we'll see we won't chase it down we'll see i they don't know how long it's going to take them to come out with it i was like i'm like i said to them as i was leaving i was like i'm really looking forward to seeing the documentary and they like chuckled you know like

it wasn't coming for a really long time and they were hoping it was actually going to happen so we'll see well i hope you had fun it's glad to have you back uh face to face is much preferred to a signal call while recording locally. Yeah, I think in hindsight, signal was probably the worst idea because I think they blocked that extra amounts or something, I don't know. But whatever, it worked out.

It came out pretty good. I listened to it. It wasn't that bad. I'm glad we recorded. That was my first time recording locally. I bought a mic for you guys and I recorded it locally and I didn't fuck it up.

There was a pretty high chance that I didn't record any of it. The whole thing just wasn't recorded after it was all said and done. right like that was like a 15 chance something like that yeah we just we would have just posted the one side uh just you talking to yourself me talking to myself that would have been funny that would have been a classic what was matt saying i don't know we'll never know what was he saying lost tapes can you hear me dude um yeah that's all we got for this week freak shout out

to our sponsor honeyminer go to honeyminer.com slash labs you linux users they're uh they're looking out for you um that's all i got this week freaks matt tell mirad you're excited for his episode next week mirad can't wait for next week bruh we're gonna uh enjoy some steak and and talk bitcoin always exciting cheers guys peace and love