TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.02.11

Episode Date: February 14, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: -Tippin.me extension -Lolli extension -Spacebit.live -Venezuela ATH LocalBitcoins volume - 2454 Bitcoin / 8.95 million USD https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES/BTC -Bitcoin Ham radio https://twitter.com/nvk/status/1095354354289135617 -Full nodes, block size, offline transactions, 65% of 4000 said no full node -JPM shitcoin -Bitdevs https://www.meetup.com/BitDevsNYC/events/258566808/ -Wasabi update -Coin Center on cash + privacy https://coincenter.org/entry/the-case-for-electronic-cash Shout out to this week's sponsors: Lolli, head over to www.lolli.com/ref/tftc and start earning Bitcoin when you shop on the net today! Honeyminer, head over to www.honeyminer.com/labs to check out their new Linux compatible software. Or head to stackingsats.com to pump our ref link.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt, this edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. What's today? Oh, it's Valentine's Day. February 14th. February 14th. 2019.

2019. The price of Bitcoin, according to the TradeBlock XBX Index, is currently... Waiting, waiting, waiting... $3,576.09, the XBX Index. That is, shout out TradeBlock for putting that together uh we got a lot to talk about actually we don't have like too much to talk

about today we're a little struggling a little bit on the list but i think we're gonna be able to riff off some stuff this is my third time recording this week you've been fucking hustling this week man there's uh yeah so i got a lot going on in my mind in particular before we get into the topics uh new sponsor actually interviewed their ceo earlier this week alex adleman uh i would like to introduce you freeze to lolly um lolly lets you earn up to 30 back in bitcoin when you shop online. They have over 500 merchants. So you can shop on Jet, Overstock, SeatGeek, Priceline, Hotwire, Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, Gap, Macy's, Hilton, Marriott. And the list is only getting longer. What you do is you basically shop like you would online. Normally, Lolly has an extension

that you download and you just shop via their extension. They have deals with these retailers for you uh and as part of a ebates like cash back deal every purchase you make gets you a little bit of bitcoin so go to uh lolly.com backslash ref r-e-f backslash t-f-t-c to check out lolly download that extension and check out the interview with alex it was a good one i like what they're doing at lolly trying to get uh bitcoin in the hands of consumers uh i think it's a very very good way to sort of introduce people to Bitcoin and excited to have them on board. Welcome on board, Lolly. I'm like halfway through your pod, your Lolly pod, the most recent one. Very good. Very good. Pretty exciting stuff. Thank you, sir. Yeah, no, it's interesting.

Seems like things are starting to click for people in sort of the mainstream consumer app world. And it's good to see consumer facing apps like Lolly, which sort of don't run on Bitcoin or something like that but implement bitcoin in a way that makes people sort of curious to to acquire it you know spend fiat stack stats yeah exactly spend fiat stack stats um and they're what i was actually happy to hear after speaking with alex is that they're very privacy focused very security focused uh one of the interesting stories he told uh in the interview was the fact that uh the previous company he was building before lolly cosmic was one of the few retailers online that had access to target's api right before the hack and they were one of the few vendors with access

to their api that was not responsible for the leak so that gives me a little bit of um uh what's the word i'm looking for that's what i'm looking for gives me a little bit of uh comfort peace of mind yeah peace of mind there we go yeah that was my biggest that's my it continues to be my biggest concern right because you're installing an extension they're seeing all your purchases um i haven't actually checked the extension yet i'm not sure what permissions they take but it seems like they don't do any type of kyc for bitcoin withdrawal but i'm not positive i don't think so at this point now but either way you know whenever you install extensions onto your browser you know just be aware of it be aware they are a privacy and security hole

this is true whether that's the casa node extension or the jewel extension or the lolly extension yeah don't be too reckless only keep as much bitcoin as you're willing to lose obviously this is beating a dead horse here but it's never actually i don't think this horse can be beat dead it's a living horse the horse is living and we're beating it yeah we're gonna beat it forever until you freaks uh take responsibility for your private keys now you said backslash for a ref link it's forward slash right it's forward slash yeah so lolly.com slash ref slash tftc yeah yeah the slash is going from top right to bottom left i love these i like i feel like honey miner is a similar um situation here because basically the user is doing something they're already doing

whether that's running their computer or buying things and it's automatically creating buy pressure for bitcoin so i really love that that circular feedback loop it's pretty fucking fantastic i do too and that's a perfect segue into the second ad for this uh this episode's also brought to you by honeyminer a very great uh partner that we have here uh you freaks know about them they've run ads here and in the bent before uh check out their new linux implementation for any of you guys with linux hardware out there that want to mine go to honeyminer.com slash labs uh there's Zero fees, no account required, Bitcoin payouts every two hours, and profitability is about 10% above market value,

specifically for this Linux implementation. So it's compatible with Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 or CentOS 7. So get started now at honeyminer.com slash labs. Our ref link for that is stackingsats.com. Stackingsats.com. No www before. Yeah, no World Wide Web. Fuck that shit.

Just straight stacking stats. Also, I did not know we had a Honeyminer ad, so that was not intentional. that was not intentional at all but thank you for sponsoring the pod honeyminer but again going back to what you're saying with these circular uh sort of closed loop systems that's like what i got into with alex a little bit too it's like crazy like all right lightning i mean honeyminer isn't as uh tied together with lightning as lolly has the potential to be um but like uh we were talking about how uh the incentives sort of compound compound from layer to layer so lightning sort of proving a use case where in the future uh a closed loose closed loose

system may make sense because it would be irresponsible not to use lightning as a payments network because it is arguably cheaper than the alternatives which is credit card or debit card payment systems well i mean lightning is useful for both of them in that they both are measuring returns in satoshis there's a very you know small incremental returns you're getting in bitcoin and by utilizing lightning they're able to create the withdrawal threshold could be way lower right because like both honey miner and lolly you're using basically a custodial wallet their custodial wallet until you hit a certain threshold where it's worth it for both you and them to actually withdraw it out to your own wallet right and if you're you're paying on-chain

fees that threshold is going to be way higher than if if you're doing lightning withdrawals that's true um yeah and i would not be surprised at all if these teams are working on on figuring this out like that like open node for instance which is custodial merchant uh lightning processing um they let you withdraw your balance from their custodial wallet if you're a merchant at any time if you use lightning network but if you want to do it on chain you have to do it on a weekly basis when they batch out all their transactions otherwise you have to pay an increased fee so it's the same exact type of you know where where you have custodial situations where they want to minimize transaction fee costs as much as possible yeah great point um and also

side note i think i just saw honey miner came out with some uh mining educational resources uh on their website so if you want to go check those out i haven't checked them out yet so i can't speak to how robust they are but it seems like they're trying to help with education too which i'd love to see it's our mission here at tftc rabbit hole recap is to educate you freaks yeah they brought not so fast on and i feel like i have a shit ton of respect for him in the mining space so at not so fast on twitter has been a been an og in the space particularly mining he's been mining many many chains he's a spec miner so like he gets in before there's exchanges or anything like that which is basically what like honey miner is trying to do for you but you don't have to

worry about it because they pay you and they auto dump it and pay you in bitcoin yeah um but i actually liked that you brought up uh replacing fees in that previous conversation because that's something we want to talk about i wrote about it in the bend today uh bitcoin optech their newsletter if you guys aren't subscribed to that yet please go subscribe it's some of the most rich uh information pertaining to bitcoin sent to your inbox every week and this week in particular there was a report and analysis if you will dropped by the student mike schmidt from blockstream who basically tried to see how exchanges wallets and block explorers are handling rbf transactions replaced by fee transactions he also pointed out that only six percent of

bitcoin transactions right now are rbf compatible uh but uh the rbf transactions that have been used in the past are able to go from wallet to wallet exchange to exchange explorer to explorer and see how they're visualizing this for people and while the report was about replaced by fee it really i think it was about overarchingly was like the poor ux that exists for these service providers uh so i'm like a huge ux freaks as you freaks know um so it really just highlights the dire need for better ux practices from wallet providers again exchanges and block explorers like if you're sending the example used was a replace by fee transaction so if you're sending an rbf transaction you want to know uh what transaction it could potentially replace when

it does replace it and just have a clear understanding that the original transaction wasn't sent your rbf transaction was included and sort of visualizing and making it sort of clean cut for everybody right now because most wallet providers exchanges and block explorers do a pretty piss poor job of that right now yeah i remember during the fee crisis it was like a super common thing for me to get questions from people um i sent this transaction eight hours ago it's not confirmed yet where's my money did i lose my money how do i fix this you know what's the solution here and these all stem from mostly ux issues i mean even stuff like uh fee estimation like all the wallet all the main wallet providers basically had to figure out on

the fly during the fee crisis during the most recent fee crisis how do we handle fee estimation do we want to estimate a little bit too high so the customer is happy that it went through even if it cost them more money um do we want to estimate a little bit lower you know be conservative about it so they don't pay as much and then if you have people estimating higher it creates this circular loop where all the wallets are estimating higher and the fees just keep going up and up and up right um and so in a lot of ways that was very important because now the fee estimators are way across the board on all the major wallets are way more accurate than they were before they make way better assumptions than they were before and then also you have you know

user education side where like users should know like if you want to save some money you know let your transaction sit for 24 hours do it ahead of time you know consolidate your utxos stuff like that okay so here's one thing uh that i learned today that was a little bit ignorant of so you basically have to have your utxos set up in an address structure that allows for rbf right because rbf it was in the original implementation then satoshi turned it off for a little bit and then peter todd wrote a bit that got implemented i believe five years ago but again mike pointed out that only six percent of all bitcoin utxos are in addresses i could be butchering this explanation i think it's when you send it right

the format when you send it yes i think this is rbf compatible yes i mean the made the the only wallet that i know that supports rbf reasonably easy is electrum yeah um yeah like electrum's always on top of this shit and like when you send the transaction it's like you check off the rbf box yeah before you send it exactly um so that's just one thing to be aware of especially if we enter another bull market and uh fees do start jumping and the pool gets filled up again sort of be cognizant that if you do send a transaction in the future make sure uh especially during times of high fees and high congestion on the network that you make it rbf compatible so you can get that through uh if if you're if if you need to get through in a

timely manner and your fee wasn't good enough the first time around absolutely yeah so i was talking to rbf i mean i think that it's it's like everything else with bitcoin right we'll see it um we'll see it roll out slowly across the board and uh we'll probably to see it actually really truly roll out like we need another fee crisis yeah that's what get you know that's when customers start pushing for this stuff that's when users start saying why are you using that wallet you should be using this wallet you know it handles it better yeah blocks are getting full right now i just saw kyle torpey retweeted something like the average block over a very recent period the average block size is like 1.3 megabytes call me a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist

but it is awfully coincidental that the mempool seems to be filling up a little bit here once all this block size talk started up again right and uh i mean i noticed f2 pool people don't realize that regardless of all this soft fork talk everything miners get to choose how big their blocks are you know up into the limit they can make them as small as they want they can include like no transactions um and they lose out on the transaction fees naturally that's the that's the incentive for them to include transactions and i i noticed one of uh one of my buddy sent me either yesterday or the day before like f2 pool it's like not completely out of the ordinary but f2 pool mined four empty blocks like amongst all this right and f2 pool is

one of the guy you know those are the guys that like they teeter around with us last time teeter on the fence yeah wang chun remember when he was like fucking around with litecoin segwit and uh And they were fucking around with their coin-based messages, too. Yeah. Yeah. So just be aware, you know, there's... And that's why the block size limit exists in the first place because if someone is trying to maliciously fill up these blocks,

it gets too costly for them. They end up burning through a ton of money because the circular loop, as they keep sending them, the fees go up and then they have to pay higher fees to keep doing it it yeah it makes it unprofitable yeah um yeah so again just be aware of that uh that debate god it's just so it's all mental masturbation so fucking nostalgic you know it's like what would it be a true bear market if we weren't arguing over the block size and whether or not the fix

the supply should be fixed like i feel like crabs in a bucket man i feel like 10 years from now we'll be in another local bear market and we'll be arguing about the block size and hopefully in 10 years we won't have to fight as vigorously I mean I don't think we're fighting as vigorously now I think most people in the know just know this is all just

bullshit this is just whatever it's not going to happen it's completely unnecessary Bitcoin is extremely efficient as is it's relatively easy to run your own node that's not i don't think bandwidth costs and accessibility is what's holding back people from running nodes right now no i don't think so either um and my node running on my shitty internet connection is a

perfect example of that and luke's been on this 300 kilobyte bullshit for like ever yeah so you know and and of course like all the bitcoin cash people are like feigning bullshit support like half the people supporting this idea don't own any bitcoin anymore they all just got wrecked in the last yeah they just want to see the world burn um speaking of bitcoin cash uh craig wright he came out with some evidence that he wrote the white paper in 2001 what are your thoughts how the fuck does selkis keep taking this guy at like fucking face value face value he was like this confirms it it finally confirms that's what are you kidding me dude yeah wikileaks had to come out bring the hammer down

wikileaks called him the bernie made off of bitcoin right yeah and basically showed how he doctored it and and the funny thing about the proof that he provided that he wrote the bitcoin white paper was that he didn't even fucking recognize that there was a a draft of the bitcoin white paper released in august 2008 that had very different verbiage and he was apparently that white paper he wrote in 2001 was based off the final draft the final draft yeah and then he went back to the drawing board before he released yeah okay dude i mean it comes down to the fact that can he definitively prove he's satoshi by signing keys no but if he signs with early keys his technology satoshi's technology bitcoin allows you to

prove ownership of funds in a cryptographically secure way that doesn't require trust by signing a message with your private keys and so if he's really he can prove that he's like a true og from right in the beginning and and give way more plausibility that satoshi if he signed some of those early blocks with you know some of those early coins uh if you use some of those keys to sign a message and he hasn't he just keeps doing all this bullshit run around stuff and once that started happening for like six months like anyone who isn't like completely naive should have realized like this is just a straight con man like this is what he is like frauds do a straight con man and a lot of respectable people in this industry fucking fall for it dude i had uh i

mean i've told this before but i've had prominent fund managers look me in the eye and tell me that craig wright is satoshi so well they got everyone at the satoshi roundtable last year last year everyone went to like a bunch of people went to the private satoshi roundtable hosted by bruce fenton and uh they came away like convinced that craig wright was satoshi so i don't know what the fuck happened they had the original designs to the bitcoin logo man there you go it's definitive proof yeah fucking ridiculous and now and craig's on like a tour about how uh bitcoin isn't for anything illegal yada yada yada uh we should respect all regulations bullshit bullshit bullshit just start ignoring him that's what i've done

yeah i wasn't even i was hoping i didn't think we were going to talk about him today but whatever I just had to segue into it. Segway was there. Got to take it when it's there. Next topic, Tippin.me. New extension, hooks up with your Twitter account. It's a good way. It's a custodial service to get Lightning Network,

or to get Satoshis via the Lightning Network. I saw Brian Trolls was coming at Tippin on Twitter yesterday telling how using this extension in particular links up with your Twitter, which potentially links up with your real email address could be a huge doxing situation yes and it's custodial um the nice thing about tipping.me is if someone activates their account you can just go to tipping.me slash and then whatever their at name is on twitter and it'll pop up like we have tftc is there um i have a personal one like that's our whiskey fund

but um they just came out with an extension that that that if you have the extension installed and remember our disclaimer earlier about extensions i haven't actually installed this extension but when you have the extension installed it'll show a tipping button next to anyone who i think it shows it for every tweet but if if you click it and they haven't activated it then it doesn't work but if you click it and they've activated it not only that if you have jewel installed the jewel browser extension the lightning extension it'll automatically read the invoice so you don't even have to copy and paste or scan which is really fucking cool um all lightning transactions that go through something like twitter

or can be linked to your twitter account i would actually say this is probably a privacy bump more private than something like putting a bitcoin address tip address in your twitter profile which is what a lot of people do as an alternative um then that bitcoin address is linked to you and anyone that has a copy of the blockchain can look up all your transactions to and from that address with tipping.me they can expose your privacy tipping.me sees everything that's coming in and going out but no one else does there's not there's there's i'm pretty sure unless you're like actively refreshing and checking the invoices and stuff there's no way to it's very it's much more difficult i don't like speaking absolutely it's much more difficult

to track those transactions like if i wanted to track the tips you're getting it'd be a lot much more it'd be way more difficult for me to track those than if you just posted a bitcoin address true and if you are going to post a bitcoin address try setting up a samurai nim address correct um it's probably the best way to do that uh without fucking up your your privacy um what's he gonna say i have something to say about tipping in particular so you have to trust tipping what else was i gonna say you're only trusting them with little amounts because you can withdraw at any time through lightning here's what i wasn't gonna say anything i was gonna ask something is is this time different how is tipping different than change tip i fucking loved change tip i did

too so let's explain change that to the free change tip was the same exact idea except they instead of using lightning they used a custodial bitcoin wallet so you would like load up your change tip wallet and then you would tip someone on twitter or reddit and you would you'd basically it's like the xrp bot you would like notify the bot you would tag the bot and you'd be like send one beer so like i would always send like and like you could make whatever you could make the names correspond to whatever amount of bitcoin you wanted so like i would send like like 50 cent i would send them like a blunt on twitter you know it was like a good way of like and the beauty about change tip was because it was all custodial if the recipient didn't accept your tip it never

actually went through so it was like just a great way to that's why the xrp tip bot guys are always just fucking sending tips all over the place but um the big issue with change tip is there's no real business model there because these networks are so open that a competitor can come in and undercut you if you charge any kind of real fees uh tipping on me is way lighter weight because it's lightning network so even though it's custodial even though this guy has to run servers and stuff the onboarding process where you're not actually loading up money you don't need you know a tip in account to send a tip you just need any lightning wallet and stuff it's just way more lightweight there's way less transaction fees than on chain

and you know he can probably get away with like a one percent fee or something in the future yeah um i mean his big issue is going to be when twitter inevitably rolls out their own in-house custodial lightning tipping right yeah um which hey it might be on the docket i don't know but i've been i've been itching for a tip bot again for a long time yeah yeah and then so before change tip we actually had on reddit at least we had an actual on change tip bot that would send a bitcoin transaction with no custodial or whatever and then the fees got too high and then change tip got created and then change tip got bought by a big company and not airbnb right i don't know about that it was an aqua hire i know someone it was like an airbnb or something like completely

unrelated change tip team at one point um i forget it might have been blockchain no i i think they got no his other company zero block got bought by that's what it was yeah but i think he was on the change tip team i'm pretty sure the change tip team got bought by airbnb as an aqua hire and they just closed it down but either way tipping on me is really cool um it's just like i don't don't know i like look at us as like podcasters like it's just really easy for us to set up a tftc tipping.me it's linked to our twitter account you know it's us you know where to find it and you can just send us 17 cents towards whiskey if you wanted to right like that's cool every satoshi counts every satoshi counts stacking sets.com um speaking of stacking sets how about

sending sets to space space bit dot live uh cool thing that you who put it together ride the lightning mediums yeah medium squeeze at medium squeeze on twitter yeah um and you basically put together this uh website space bit dot live that allows you to use testnet lightning network uh satoshi's to send messages to space and apparently you spent one it's a it's the web It's like a simple web interface for Blockstream's satellite API, right? Mm-hmm. So instead of having to go through whatever you have to normally go through, he made it so it's just a website that's super simple.

You enter your message, you pay with Lightning Testnet coins, and it gets broadcast. Yeah. Were you playing around with it? I might have been. I might have been. Scouring for the messages. I sent out a little troll message, that's all.

what um we've talked about this or tried to talk about this before like i'm trying to wrap my head around like what does an open api to a satellite like what type of applications is that like open the world to like is it that big of a deal or is it just like a cool toy well for whistleblowers alone i think it's a big deal right yeah yeah i would agree i still like my like weather sensor idea and stuff like that right where you can have you don't have to worry about like making backroom deals with people and everything to hitch a ride on their satellite for communications you can just anonymously make have your systems make microtransactions to send information across the world yeah it seems pretty dope i would love to see some somebody build an app around that

i know i can't do it right now i could see like like uh yeah you can just I mean look once you if you encrypt the text you can do some crazy things with it like you can you know like bitcoin private keys

like a single multi-sig key so even if someone has access to a multi-sig key you know if it's two of three they still need a second one stuff like that like you do some crazy shit

yeah the future's here boys and girls and it's weird and I like it I hope you freaks like it too um next topic one of our favorites venezuela uh hit an all-time high bitcoin volume on local bitcoins last week with uh 2454 bitcoin being traded weekly let yeah last week uh at a notional

value of 8.95 million dollars um a little over a million a day a little over a million a day That's all-time high in both U.S. dollar measured volume and in Bitcoin measured volume. Yeah, so this is something we've been trying to figure out. What's been going on? Are they using Bitcoin as a rails to get to U.S. dollars? Are they holding? It seems as though they may be using it as a remittance network for U.S. dollars. Both?

Maybe both. But yeah, that's encouraging to see. And I don't know if we talked about this last week. I think we did talk about it last week. but uh the paper that that matt that we talked about that but we didn't talk about all-time high because of the the recent venezuela weekly volume hadn't been been posted yet yeah so after that article which we talked about last week uh it seems as though that trend is continuing um so again go to what is it btc ven at btc ven yeah go check out at btc ven help them out if you

and they're probably the organization that we trust on the ground down there? Is that safe to assume? Yeah, we're like pretty sold on it. Yeah. You know, I've been shilling them a lot lately, so hopefully they seem like good people, and a lot of people that we know have vouched for them and have met them in person.

And, yeah, they've been fucking hustling down there, giving out food, giving out water, education. Yeah. they have this new project a mesh net project that you can also support separately yes yes mesh neck um very interesting stuff i'm actually going to talk to richard myers this summer next time he's in town badass yeah i had some coffee with him he's an awesome dude seems like an awesome go tenna yeah but speaking of uh alternate transaction relay networks our boy novak at at nvk on twitter our canadian brother and up north ceo of open dime and cold card uh he was

experimenting sending bitcoin transactions offline via ham radio waves and he successfully sent one to sam patterson from i believe montreal to uh maybe alberta i'm not positive where somewhere in canada of the ionosphere yeah bouncing off the ionosphere i believe sam patterson was somewhere in the midwest and then what's actually even cooler is that adam kerry who's the godfather of podcasting we gotta pay respects to him um and he was like an ex mtv news host he's getting into bitcoin he just so happens to be a ham radio enthusiast as well and asked novec to send him a transaction via ham radio wave and he accepted it so this is somebody like in the mainstream and that was international too yes yeah where's sam he's in austin in austin adam curry is located

in austin um so it's cool so now we have internet obviously we have satellite with the mesh network and now we have ham radio so like consumer style radios are are good enough to send bitcoin transactions um and i believe this was done completely offline like novak constructed the transaction he didn't even construct a transaction he sent a brain wallet oh yes the private keys basically it's not even he didn't even send a signed transaction yeah so that way you don't need to know an address you're sending it to that's the big difference right like if you private key you don't need to know the address yeah fucking fascinating dude stuff's getting weird and then uh nick zabo hopped in and was basically uh teasing the

project that he's working on which has to do with balancing radio waves off the ionosphere and he was talking about mixing in mesh networks with like gotenna with it so and then you're mixing the satellite good and crazy quick it's getting real crazy but bitcoin's not innovating dude bitcoin's stagnant there's no innovation what's none um there's no innovation whatsoever meanwhile we spend like eight hours a day on it right right ridiculous did you think we'd be here five years ago 2014 on the way down no we're beating all expectations i mean i i thought bitcoin was going to be made illegal in the united states really yeah how certain were you of that you

know the ethereum crew actually you know they don't get enough credit for that they uh they built us a nice little buffer because there's they're like all like just create a mass confusion yeah and they're really good at like regulatory capture and stuff so you know they're lobbying everyone and they're you know lining coin centers pockets and everything and it's it it definitely helped us yeah you know while if they're shilling something that's even more experimental than bitcoin then it gives like bitcoin this like you know like this easier path and then once all these rich people have it in their pockets it becomes so much harder for for uh the government to come down on it yeah but did you hear the news today what jp morgan just killed bitcoin dude oh yeah

bitcoin's dead i forgot about that dude it's done jp morgan came out with their their e-corp coin bitcoin's dead e-corp e-coin e-coin e-coin yeah was it worth it putting all this time and effort in just to have jamie diamond come in and destroy bitcoin in one day i just think it is extremely blasé at this point or stereotypical that of course the big bad evil banker who has been talking shit about bitcoin this whole time launches his own shit coin right like that is that's what always happens are you worried at all man so so this jp morgan coin is a stable coin it's a ripple competitor that is launched uh they launched it on quorum which is like their private fork of ethereum um so it's basically an erc20 token that's on their own private chain that has

like zero censorship resistance or anything like that um so it's like not a competitor to bitcoin at all right right and it's not even different than what they're doing now i forget who i think it's like an r3 ripple competitor type of deal yeah who put this out there let me find and they're like competing with swift yeah so our boy uh michelle raux he basically described it perfectly it's not a cryptocurrency the blog post suggests it's an internal accounting system to instantly settle customer balances the degree to which the infrastructure is blockchain inspired is unclear um let me find the one tweet i'm looking for in particular yeah so what's funny about the you send 1 million usd to jp morgan to get credited 1 million jp

morgan coin is that's exactly how their payments work already like when you get a direct deposit that you basically get a digital currency it's not a crypto press release yeah um i think there's something there with these private chains if they have like you have like eight banks get on board and like each each of the eight i don't really know about how their system specifically works but like if you think of it like in a ripple s system it's where you have like eight validators so like if you have eight banks and they all have a validator and the only way that one one can steal money from the other is if like six of them or five of them act in the bad interest of the whole group and then so like yeah so like there's a marginal improvement there instead of like each

bank trusting each other like you minimize the trust a little bit right like it's not competing with bitcoin but like there is some marginal benefit there potentially with the private with the private chains for the interbank transfers potentially but i feel like uh the world of banking is a huge dick measuring contest and uh the fact that jp morgan created this will be unpalatable to the other banks they'll just be like we don't want to be part of this we didn't create it that's great i hope they i hope they fight over their standards for a long time before they start wising up right all right so bitcoin's dead this might be the last rabbit hole recap ever this is now a uh it's no longer a bitcoin podcast it's a jpm coin podcast yeah we're here uh we're

here at your service jamie you want to come on the pod yeah send us uh since this is all recovering from now on send us the merch we need it we need to put like cnbc barons gardeners everyone was releasing the bitcoin fud today right yeah bitcoin's dead barons ridiculous does anyone read barons anymore i'm pretty sure registered investment advisors do to think fucking shitty blog i think yeah it's a very mediocre blog very mediocre blog they're hiring some of the worst they're bringing some of the worst bloggers in the world to that publication so be careful be careful um what is this full nodes block size offline transaction oh we already talked about that um bit devs it does was cool monday well the full nodes i uh i like did a poll and it was like

4,000 people answered it, which is really good for a Twitter poll engagement. 65% said they didn't run full notes. Was it a one, two option answer, or was there a show your results answer? It was yes. Running on my computer, yes.

Running on a separate hardware node, yes. Running on a VPS, no. 65% said no, so 35% said yes. I think you're looking at this very pessimistically. I know, I agree.

I think 35 is really nice. I think you can't expect everyone to run full nodes. The key is that... That's 1,200 people on that poll. Yeah. I think the key is that you can run one if you need to. And it's mostly going to be like a diehard group that is running the majority of nodes.

And the plug-and-play nodes and whatnot will make it way easier in general. Yeah. And, ooh, actually, there's a good point. I liked somebody tweeted out yesterday making all the gaming consoles nodes, like just implementing nodes into them they're uh heavy duty hardware that's constantly plugged in and on the internet and it would just like make sense especially with this coalition of uh

or this uh collision of bitcoin particularly with the lightning network and gaming right now they also have gpus on them it'd be nice to run a little honey miner action on my xbox right i've been uh like a little shitcoin dream of mine for a while has been uh for microsoft to release a shit coin and just make it so it can only be mined on xboxes so like still be a centralized piece of shit but like that'd be kind of fun experiment right like it's a shit coin i would mine i have an xbox like why wouldn't i just liquidate it yeah i mean i guess yeah but no it seems like a practical avenue through which you can get like a node in every home microsoft it's an interesting out of all the game console companies right you have nintendo

sony and microsoft sony has just been like fucking around in general with their mainstay electronics business microsoft has azure you know their cloud services they have you know like the one click load your own private blockchain you know they're competing with aws you have um they're working on that decentralized identity project uh shout out csu wildcat yeah exactly csu wildcat and so like they're actually a classic fit for someone who wants to launch a shit chain right like we could like i could easily you know like we speculate about like facebook launching something or you know all these companies launching you know like we're talking about jp morgan right now with their own private chain microsoft actually seems like kind of a good

fit so if they're going to do it anyway instead of using eight validators you know use 300 000 xboxes more than that or whatever it is right yeah it'd be interesting right like i had uh andre nevis from qual studios on last night we were talking a lot about gaming and bitcoin and i don't know i just feel like it feels right oh it's it's i i love wagering on chess against random people and i'm just like i'm just getting my beak wet like let's give me some you know give me some more juicy games yeah this is a good segue to monday night's bit devs meetup it was a good one that was great it's packed it was hot every time i go to bit devs i just want to market buy bitcoin afterwards yeah it was um yes we went over some pull requests some bugs out there

apparently there's a big android bug um that people should be aware of yeah i mean it kind of went over my head but it seemed pretty bad yeah most things do uh not your head they go over my head too i know i just gave you a look that was like yeah i wasn't saying that no yeah like fit like over 60 of the stuff at bit devs goes over our heads yeah you sort of just pull it in the osmosis over time eventually we'll figure it out that's what's that's how you know it's a great meetup and it was pretty amazing how many people were there right in the midst of a bear market yeah it was different night than usual it was a monday instead of a tuesday and it was just filled yeah a lot of quality conversation and then there was two presentations andre who

i spoke with last night presented lightning chess and then carl i don't want to get his carl don is that his name i think so yeah i think it might have been carl dong is that chain code now was previously at block stream you have a really good presentation on like supply chain attacks and uh sort of the infrastructure of um trusted binaries like actually getting the software to your computer basically and sort of ways through which we can mitigate potential rooting in the future it was very fascinating i'm gonna try and get him on the pod actually super complex yeah it is quite the quite the hurdle we have here yeah but uh it's pretty cool that you know this isn't a new problem but now that money's on the line there's an incentive to clean it up and

make it as secure as possible you know we're seeing we're seeing with bitcoin in general all over the place is is that now that you have this financial incentive um like actually you can just straight up lose money if you fuck around that people are cleaning up uh their acts and they're going out of their way to clean up other people's messes like things that have added up over time all this technical debt that have made these systems less secure

and more complex thank you little beer reload there drinking Stella's today keeping it pretty simple yeah no it is we gotta have a clean head for the significant others for Valentine's yeah it's a night of love

you can't be all drunk on the night of love but um going back to carl's presentation the supply chain thing like you said like we are cleaning up we got to clean up the tech set that uh basically comes with the the internet as it was built its first iteration so it's cool to see uh the developers like you said finding the stuff and trying to to make the attack service as small as possible um i'll see if i can find a link to share that presentation maybe it's on bit devs so definitely check it out there's a lot of cool graphs in that presentation yeah that was a great presentation i talked to him afterwards

great dude yeah really good dude shout out to chain code thanks for sponsoring that uh wasabi update what do we got uh it now officially pulls pulls the information from your full node if you're running a full node on your computer what do you mean uh without any setup it just goes to where the blocks are usually stored and it pulls the information from there instead of uh from a random node boss yeah so it's just a nice little now you can easily use your full node with wasabi with with no actual setup on your end it just auto detects it has a liquidity pool looking is it growing grows every day plateauing i'm trying to create a new thing wasabi wednesdays yesterday i saw that the more people that use you know privacy loves company the more people

that use this shit the quicker it goes the the better it gets and they're just iterating like crazy and it's fucking awesome to see uh and to see the improvements they've implemented it where you don't need equal inputs correct kind of yeah so like if you put like a large amount in um it will what's considered a large amount like so like the minimum amount you need to do a coin join is 0.1 bitcoin so is that like 350 bucks yeah if you put in more than 0.1 bitcoin when you deposit into wasabi it will try and match up higher denominations in the beginning to speed it up but at the end of the day when you're finished with you know your 50 rounds or your 100 rounds that you do it they'll all they're all going to be 0.1 at the end but like maybe like

you send two bitcoin and like in the beginning like it'll mix a couple 0.4s like a couple 0.6s because it has someone else that it matches it with but that only gets you to like an anonymity set of three or four and then it keeps whittling away at it so like at the end of the day you're still going to end up with point one but they do some auto you know auto magic in the beginning to to speed up the process for you yeah i think this would be a good time to remind you freaks out there that if you are sending from the wasabi wallet after you mix make sure you're sending it per utxo correct well you don't taint well you can so wasabi is ideally supposed to be used as like a spending wallet so like you're not supposed to combine the utxos afterwards if you combine the

utxos afterwards uh you're reducing your anonymity set right um because you're making they the person doing blockchain analysis after the fact can make some inferences there additional inferences if you combine it especially if you send like two Bitcoin to Wasabi then you mix it all and then you combine all 20 outputs into a single two Bitcoin UTXO

again like that's the most obvious fucking thing ever they're going to be like that's the same two BTC and they're still guessing to a degree right you still get some more plausible liability but they'll probably be able to connect it to you especially if you know they're not an idiot um i still think that privacy has been such an issue for for for bitcoin for for so many years

that it's it kind of makes sense to do like a spring cleaning here where you cycle your bitcoin through wasabi um in batches and then put them in a new fresh wallet But when you combine that, so you're going to want to combine them at that point because otherwise you're going to end up with a ton of 0.1 UTXOs. And if we end up in a fee crisis again, the more UTXOs you have as inputs in a transaction, the higher the fee, right? So there's like a balancing act here. You know, combine them when you move them to your new wallet,

but don't combine too many of them at once you know if you use a higher anonymity set the default is 51 you can set it in the config file you can set whatever you want so if you're combining them increase the anonymity set you know maybe make it 101 maybe make it 150 or something and then like keep change up how you combine them you know so like if you combine five of them together for like 0.5 UTXO. Then like the next one, you know, combine eight of them for 0.8. Do it at different times a day. Don't like withdraw from Wasabi and then immediately deposit from your other wallet into Wasabi because like they can make some inferences here. There's not that many people

using Wasabi. The guy who just withdrew 0.7 and then deposited 0.5 is probably the same dude, right? Because he's like trying to keep his balance low. So like try and think adversarially, right think like who's the guy who's looking at the data in five years trying to connect these dots and uh try and switch it up and be creative um you know anything that's that's that's above 0.4 per utxo like you're probably not going to get skewered in fees anytime soon right like the big the big transactions that were skewering people in fees was when their utxos were like 100 000 satoshis or like 400 000 satoshis or something it wasn't dust before the fee crisis but it became dust right yeah exactly so be cognizant of that like your utxos may not be

dust now but they could be in the future exactly um and i think it's a good segue to the final topic uh which is the coin center paper on cash and privacy which i thought was actually very illuminating and very very good for the industry and the fight for liberty and freedom in the digital age especially revolving digital cash and i think what they really did a good job of is defining what cash is because a lot of people have sort of misunderstandings of what it is and especially after the Quadriga CX debacle

of people losing their Bitcoin on that exchange, you have to realize that Bitcoin is a bearer asset. It's cash in the sense that it's a bearer asset that you can exchange P2P with other people and that gets lost in the sauce, I feel like. A lot of people blame the exchanges like, oh, that would never happen in U.S. bank. well you don't have a lot of bear assets in custody at u.s banks um you have bear assets

when you go to the atm and you get cash out but that's about it yeah and then you have the privacy aspect right yeah which is what they talked about yeah like privacy is it's a human right obviously but a lot of people are fighting against it like uh a lot of society that's actually the interesting thing another interesting thing about the paper is they talked about societies that are going cashless like china and i believe sweden was another one and then other countries which are staying cash heavy like germany uh who still has like the remembrance of the weimar republic in their mind and uh obviously the wealth confiscation that went on in that country post-world war ii um so there's interesting to see that uh some societies with wealth confiscation wounds fresh

on their mind are are very heavily involved with cash economy as well others like china which are turning toward towards dystopia are going completely cashless i mean germany is still part of the eu which is making great strides to reduce cash transactions this is true um i mean part of the reason i'm so bullish on bitcoin in the first place um in the space as a whole is just that i think cash is on its way out unfortunately i fucking love cash most of our peers don't um So it has two things. Cash has two things working against it. It has an actual usability issue where like people, especially our age group, prefer to pay with card. They prefer to pay with, you know, Venmo or or cash app or whatever.

They prefer to tap their iPhone and pay in like China. It's even more so right with mobile pay and stuff. and then you have the other incentive which is on the government side which is way easier to control their people uh surveillance uh negative interest rates um lack of interest rates are so evil dude yeah exactly so i think it's inevitable that they're going to start and we've started to see countries actively do it so it's it's it's on both sides it's it's the actual people are not demanding cash as much uh you know like there's places here in new york where like yeah coffee shop downstairs in my building doesn't accept cash yeah i have a taco place

that only accepts credit card and i pull out my cash every time just to like fuck with them just to remind them like i would wish to pay with cash but they're like credit card only right and like that's that's only going to accelerate and like from the merchant point of view like it kind of makes sense they don't have to deal with a cash register they don't have to worry about their employees stealing stuff everything just gets automatically accounted for not to worry about robberies yeah it's clean and so like the incentives are there to move digital and i think that's going to accelerate bitcoin adoption accelerate cryptocurrency adoption because yes you need privacy there's you need private transactions you need sovereignty

you need to be able to hold your money yeah and then going back to what we were talking about earlier where especially if lightning becomes fleshed out and becomes the network that we think it could potentially become again it's going to be economically irresponsible not to use not to use Lightning as a payments network as opposed to like Visa, MasterCard, fees being the main reason. Then I don't know if this was in Stefan's episode or Jack talked about it somewhere else,

but Jack Dorsey has mentioned like a lot of their metrics are based off how long it takes one of their Square card readers to basically read the chip and confirm the transaction. They said it started at- 12 seconds kills the deal. Yeah, it was at 12 seconds when it began. They got it down to like below five, I believe.

But imagine a world where you have Lightning Network payments and it's literally instant. Like Francis Paulette was giving a demonstration and literally couldn't videotape it because the confirmation was so fast that like they couldn't catch it. So you're breaking that. So you're talking about like an order of magnitude

improvement on the speed at which like these transactions can be processed, even if it's going from three seconds to less than one right but i mean like i mean america's like a bad example because especially with our butchered switch to the chip where like you don't know if you're like supposed to stick your card in or swipe and then like we don't even get a pin with it like in europe you have to fucking sign still like on the stupid touch screen where like you can't even fucking do a proper signature like no one's checking that signature because it's not my fucking signature like how do i even fucking do that um but when you start talking so that's

actually kind of good because they're they're butchering their rollout and just fucking around there which is like really good for us uh but like when you start talking about like mobile payments and stuff which is like probably where this stuff is going tap to pay and and uh maybe like like bluetooth like close access close like bluetooth low energy like really close bluetooth i'm like for instance like if i wanted to send you a cash app payment right now like that shit goes through instantly yeah right so that value prop is probably more limited uh the big thing is chargebacks right like the merchant is fucking getting their money right away instead of 45 days or whatever the amount of time is for clearing tap and for the credit card companies yeah that's that's the big

one i think and then like through the three percent fee they charge the the instant a little bit less so but still nice little bonus right it makes it actually viable it doesn't actually put it ahead of the competition but it brings us up to par maybe a little bit better than the current implementations and yeah chargebacks fuck merchant server yeah pretty hard um yes so the push versus pull mentality is uh is one that should get its day in the light i believe uh and it will what's the last topic of the day what do you want to riff on here got a few minutes um i was over at eric demuth at eric underdash demuth right now is trying to get elon to accept the lightning torch that would be fucking nice elon i know you listen to this podcast pick it

up man so i retweeted it and i uh i might have played my hand a little strong i like total told elon he didn't have what it takes because you know he responds to that really well like if you tell him yeah you got to challenge people you know yeah you just tell him like oh you're inferior to jack like you can't do it so like i'm hoping that that'll help build some steam that would be imagine if elon picked it up yeah that'd be great how many followers does he have let me see 24 million people to show it to that's 24 million almost 25 24.7 million people holy shit bet you elon owned some bitcoin i wouldn't be surprised anyway the other thing is uh the fold team did ellen oh yes i did want to talk about this way to bring it up

yeah so fold it's uh it's a consumer app it's allowing people to buy stuff via merchants like dominoes i mean their first just dominoes just dominoes right now they plan to roll it out to starbucks and other merchants as well but uh yeah people were buying a bunch of pizza with bitcoin via the lightning network last night uh particularly with dominoes what uh how do they set up these partnerships do you know i think they're literally just dominoes has no idea they're just using like dominoes gift cards and stuff in the background yeah like they collect all your information for you the address the order everything and then you're making the ln payment and then dominoes doesn't see the ln payment they get forwarded the the order the

order and the delivery information or the takeaway information interesting what are your thoughts And supposedly, one of the Fold guys reached out to me for feedback before they launched. And one of the questions I asked them was, what do they do with that information? Because, you know, you're entering your address into this website. And so they said that they just, he told me that it's in their privacy policy, which I haven't verified. But he said it's in their privacy policy that they just, after the payment's confirmed and they forward it to Domino's, they delete it all. So that's good. that's good yeah well uh we'll hold them to that and i think fold has like they do like uber and

starbucks already and some other things yeah i'm not sure if they've activated lightning for those but they do they do accept bitcoin for those yeah i guess like it goes back to the question i asked earlier is this time different like are we getting too hyped up about these consumer facing apps implementing bitcoin is it just uh uh smoke and mirrors or bells and whistles or do you think it's different this time i think it's not like a big deal in terms of like bitcoin's price or anything like bitcoin's price isn't gonna like yeah rebound just because you can buy you're basically selling your bitcoin for fucking dominoes which is like horrible pizza we make fun of laszlo for doing that but what he did papa john's which the bit refill guys uh cleverly noted

that you can get papa john's through lightning with bit refill i thought that was cute um but uh you know the more ways to spend bitcoin the better i have no desire to spend bitcoin i do it in certain situations where i i want more privacy or or i i don't you know i don't want my credit card company to know about it or it's ideological reason or they don't accept fiat um and then even in those cases then i buy back some bitcoin like through cash app to immediately replenish the amount the amount of satoshis i sent um it's more of a thing that we'll need in like 10 years time who knows if these companies are actually able to pull a profit from it but even if they don't they're like setting the way they're setting up the business model and someone else will do it

and uh it's a net benefit it's cool it's cool that you can just oh one of the cool things about this was medium squeeze the same guy we were talking about ride the lightning at medium squeeze on twitter uh said he'd buy pizza for anyone he's not in the u.s it's u.s only fold up uh right now uh he said he'd buy pizza for anyone in the u.s who posted the qr code of their lightning invoice so he was able to buy pizza for some guy located in miami because he had to post on his twitter so i knew it was he's from miami but anyway he bought pizza from this guy that lived in miami doesn't know the guy's address right because all he sees is a lightning invoice and the guy doesn't know anything about his payment so neither of them know anything about the other person but

he was still able to buy a complete stranger delivery pizza with no identifiable information from across the world that's pretty fucking cool right that's pretty dope shout out medium squeeze You're doing a lot of great things. And that wasn't like there was no technical integration. Like the dude posted a screenshot on Twitter, right? That's cool. Pretty bare bones. Yeah, it was all the topics we had this week, freaks.

This week, freaks. Hope you all have a beautiful Valentine's Day. I liked Michael Goldstein at Bitstein's advice. If you have a loved one out there, you don't have any plans tonight, why don't you guys open a couple lightning channels together, you know? Nothing more romantic than that. No, and if you do have plans, maybe cancel them and decide to spin up a couple lightning channels with your loved one. I hope all of you freaks are finding love out there.

Matt, do you have a parting note? Jack's confirmed, right? March 1st? March 1st. Bang, bang. Flying out to San Fran, got 30 minutes in and out. Very excited. I think it'll be a fun one. We're going to get cosmic. You know, people are just getting really salty on Twitter, guys. Like, just, it's not worth it.

It's not worth it. Take deep breath. look your loved one in the eyes and forget about bitcoin tonight chill out and you know unless you're spinning up lightning nuts yeah and enjoy yourself yeah enjoy and this is not gonna be your last bear market if you stick in this so you know get used to it get used to it enjoy this life you only got one of them you know it's a beautiful night here in new york now we're really getting cosmic yeah now we're really getting cosmic you got one life freaks enjoy it peace and love cheers