TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.02.18

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: -Galaxy S10 Bitcoin wallet confirmed https://bitcoinist.com/samsung-galaxy-s10-bitcoin-wallet/ -Jack activates tippin.me https://twitter.com/jack/status/1098324828182831104 -Coinbase acquires chain analysis company https://twitter.com/francispouliot_/status/1098275229556768768 -Elon Ark Invest pod https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1097905577831862272 -Coinmama KYC breach 450k customer affected https://twitter.com/bitentrepreneur/status/1096549320302776320 -IMF NIRP Blog post https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-negative-interest-rates-work/ Thanks to this week's sponsor, Honeyminer! Head over to stackingsats.com and download Honeyminer today! The easiest way to begin earning BTC with your spare computing hardware. Now available for Linux (www.honeyminer.com/labs).

what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here for another edition of rabbit hole recap on tales from the crypt uh me and matt are recording remotely i just fucked up that intro like six times in a row it feels weird when you're not here matt it doesn't feel natural i don't like looking at you through a screen yeah i like looking at your pretty face yeah well you can see it now it's just obstructed via via the digital world um yeah what's this today today's Thursday the 21st? Yeah. Thursday, February 21st.

The price of Bitcoin, according to the TradeBlockXBX index, is currently waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. $3,884.76. I'm recording from Brooklyn. Matt's in Amsterdam. It's 5.30 there. 11.30 a.m. here. I'm drinking coffee. matt's drinking scotch cheers to you sir before we jump into the topics cheers before we jump

into the topics of the day um first like to introduce this week's sponsor you guys already know all about them honeyminer uh honeyminer is your place to go if you want an easy way to use your computing hardware to earn bitcoin they set it up where you can basically connect your gpus using their software basically mine the most profitable altcoin chain at any given point in time uh and then dump it on market for bitcoin get paid out satoshis i believe every hour um and it's just a constant stream of sats we actually have a referral link matt and i stacking sats.com that's stacking sats.com we're all about stacking those stats there's no www www in front of it just straight stacking sats.com um and most importantly if you guys are linux

users out there who have been itching to get on honey miner they recently uh released their linux implementation you can go check that out at honeyminer.com labs for you linux users in particular they have special deals um zero fees no account required bitcoin again pays out excuse me every two hours and profitability is about 10 above market value this is compatible with ubuntu 16.04 ubuntu 18.04 and sen os 7 so go get started now honeyminer.com slash labs or stacking sats.com check them on twitter too at get honeyminer matt we were just talking before we hit record it's been a pretty slow news week it's been uh been dragging it's been hard to write the bent i was telling you um but we do have some topics here first how's life in amsterdam been

what's been going on out there i love the city it's just a it's a nice r&r vacation i got going on over here just trying to unplug and relax and you're tuning out man how's it how's it feel to tune out it's nice it's important to do that uh both in bear markets and bull markets right and this city is one of the best to do it in highly recommend i love this city i've never been what's it like it's just really chill people don't realize like they have a shit ton of canals here you know like venice gets all the credit but amsterdam is very much a canal city so you have all these beautiful canals you're walking all over the place it's not like that big of a city so it's like coming from new york it's like kind of you know it's like uh it's a little bit bigger

than boston but it's just a lot chiller than boston one of the chillest cities yeah like uh i like chill cities so anybody uh that describes the city as being chill uh makes me want to go there i gotta check out amsterdam and weed and shrooms are legal here so that's also a plus have you been partaking yeah no no comment but uh it's a nice city i i appreciate a city allowing it at least yeah do you feel free free as a bird is there any uh any merchants accepting bitcoin that you've noticed no no there had there there have not been any unfortunately unfortunately i have seen i have seen some advertisements for bitcoin though which is cool some some exchange advertisements it's some exchange that's

over here okay does crypto need rules over there crypto no that the ad actually yeah the ad wasn't very it's you know it's a decent ad i guess it's it's just the website name and a picture of a bitcoin yeah simple simple but effective if you're remembering it now um where do you want to start should we start in the real world or the fake internet world fake internet money world excuse me um let's let's start in the fake internet money world okay so in the fake internet money world it seems like uh samsung just announced that their galaxy s10 uh is going to come with a bitcoin wallet has been confirmed this is not fake news correct it's not it's it's real news yeah it's real news it leaked a while ago we talked about in the past i think

yeah we talked about it a few episodes ago uh but now it's officially official uh can you explain like the full specs and what uh users of the galaxy s10 could expect when it's delivered with this bitcoin capability um well we don't really have that many details but uh presumably you know the the samsung phones already have some kind of secure space on the phone uh that they that they use for samsung pay and and other nox features they have like all the business and encrypted stuff they have so they're probably just you know sticking a wallet functionality into there um it looks like it's going to support ethereum ethereum tokens and bitcoin i'm not sure if any other coins have been mentioned uh interesting yeah i you know it's

i i hope they don't advertise it as cold storage i don't know what they're necessarily advertising it as but uh it's obviously a hot wallet you know it's on your phone it's connected to the internet um it's gonna be closed source i'm sure but it's good you know they have this is the you know the number two smartphone maker in the country and probably the number one in the world i'm not i'm not sure if they're ahead of apple but they're up there maybe number one in the world yeah one or two and and now they're shipping uh with bitcoin wallets with crypto wallets so that's that's a big deal regardless i wouldn't use it but you know it's a big deal right what is that yeah and it i'm interesting to see if it's like a second class citizen on the phone or if it's like pretty

easy to find uh like we'll be on the home screen like you hit your wallets button i don't for i'm comparing this to ios i don't i don't use samsung but i use a samsung phone i have the s9 right now i i i like you know i they go a little bit overboard with some of the shit they do but as far as android phones go they're pretty good um yeah i mean they're like loaded with features that you never use so it'll probably be like kind of buried but there'll be an icon you can put on your home screen or maybe they'll put it in with samsung pay uh i don't think it'll be any more buried than like the samurai wallet app right you just go to the samurai wallet app this will just be another wallet option you have um that already goes with you know like samsung has like a secure

folder where like you can you know use your password or your pin or your fingerprint to like encrypt a folder on your phone that no one can see you know keep your nudes there or whatever um you have nudes dude like who who knows like they say that encryption's all like certified and shit but who the fuck knows right but it's presumably better than just keeping it in the regular files app on your phone so it's uh it is what it is but them offering support is a big is a big deal yeah no that's what like i guess now i'm a little confused like is it going to be like the health app that comes pre-downloaded with apple like this bitcoin while it's just gonna be pre-downloaded when you get the phone it's not gonna be like samurai where you have to go

to the store and download samurai it's probably gonna my guess is probably gonna be like a setting okay yeah like in this settings menu yeah but samsung does have like a samsung health app too so maybe it'll be like that who knows yeah um fascinating so that's some news uh i don't know how that will affect adoption? Do you think that entices people to develop bad habits with their first experiences with Bitcoin

if they depend on this? There's probably worse wallets for them to use besides the Samsung wallet, right? There's some really bad wallets out there. So I don't know. Well, that's actually a good segue into what I wrote about in the bent today.

Our boy StoppaDecrypt uh thread that he wrote a few days ago just basically explaining uh what a wallet provider would need to do out of the box to create like uh basically almost like the essential perfect wallet given the functionalities that exist today that you can build um and i guess that sort of ties into this conversation and drives an interesting question like even if uh so let me basically just read what stop at the crypt said uh basically how to build a bitcoin lightning wallet that people want to use it's available on ios looks nice works smooth fully fledged bitcoin while users connect it to their own bitcoin or lightning nodes

and your service actively maintains its own node your app provably doesn't collect data it has a warrant canary on land launch excuse me simple advanced expert user toggles with warnings so ux warning stuff like that allows the users to create transactions offline and announce them elsewhere like block trains explorer app users can open channels with any node not just yours so like providers have a node but uh users are allowed to access outside nodes um non-app users can also open channels with your node blah blah blah just goes on checks the list of what i think would be like an ideal wallet if somebody were to bring it to market would sort of crush but maybe uh if samsung comes to market with this shitty wallet out of the box like people

will be enticed just to to exhibit bad habits out of the box and maybe those other potential better wallets won't uh won't get as much adoption what do you think matt i mean i mean that thread like what you just described is like it's the dream wallet right it's like the yeah you know it would it would it'll come eventually and there'll be demand for for better wallets right there'll always be demand for better wallets and there'll always be like the super mainstream uh like shitty by our standards wallets uh you know if if a like most people's first experience is like the coinbase wallet right yeah and that hasn't stopped awesome wallet development from happening uh across the space right a lot of the things here mentioned i

we know of teams that are like working on different parts the hard part is like making it easy to use and putting it all together yeah but as long as there should be demand for it right like that's why part of the reason we do this podcast right to educate people to try and you know to to people have a financial incentive to increase their bitcoin knowledge right unlike a lot of other things so hopefully you know you'll have a way way more knowledgeable base of users than in in other scenarios yeah it was actually promising to see that uh wasabi wednesday this week was a little active the hashtag had some activity uh yesterday well it helped because Is Coinbase really, you know, they timed their announcement to try and boost Wasabi Wednesdays this week.

Yeah, so let's talk about that, Coinbase's big announcement. Good segue. They've hired, or they've bought, basically a chain analysis company. I forget the exact name. Neutrino. Neutrino, yeah. Not to be confused with the SPV wallet. But the SPV-like wallet.

Protocol, yeah. Protocol. But yeah, so they bought this Neutrino, this chain analysis company. It just so happens that a lot of the team on this Neutrino team is previously from the hacking team in Italy, famous for helping despotic governments spy on their citizens and sort of track them down and commit human rights violations against them, if you will. yeah yeah the hacking team yeah um yeah i think they were helping the saudi government spy on

their their citizens uh other governments buying their citizens they're like mercenaries right yeah now they're working at coinbase yeah so that's like you know that's not a surprise uh the bigger news is is you know that coinbase is going like full-on into chain analysis right which is um it should be expected right i feel like that's like a super easy path for them to monetize they already have a ton of user information and they just combine that with you know the all the different blockchain information they have and they they have a particular so like they've been working with like chain analysis and other companies for a long time now presumably but now they get to bring it all in-house and they have way more information

than like chain analysis has because they have all the coinbase user records right they have all the names and addresses of all these different people and then all the merchant transactions and you know presumably they release that non-custody wallet right the coinbase wallet that has also a merchant side like farm information from there and then they get all that's proprietary for them that's not like public information so they are particularly well suited for this yes they are merchants users out there start using btc pay server um protect your sovereignty protect your privacy don't let a coinbase spy on you um no that's again they're coinbase positioning themselves uh in a very certain way i would say um i don't know i i feel

like the the important point here though is like we can be mad at coinbase like he seems like a you know a horrible dude and like coinbase fucking sucks for plenty of reasons um but like it should it shouldn't be possible for them to do this tracking in the first place right like we should make it technically impossible for them to do it or at least very difficult like make their lives like as hard as fucking possible and until that happens like i feel like i don't know complaining isn't going to solve anything you should expect that it's like a perfect path to monetization if someone can do it someone will do it and uh like i'm waiting i'm i'm i feel like facebook would be fucking perfect for a chain analysis like if they just release facebook

releases a wallet everyone uses it and then they any any big wallet provider would just you know they have so much information and it's so sellable every you can monetize it so easily yeah this is actually um a good segue uh you talking about like we can't complain because it's technically possible like they're going to do it because they can and we can't blame them for that and that's that's true um though in that same vein this week blockstream uh officially released test code for uh like what would be a proposed upgrade scenario for to schnor so hopefully um not hopefully but this is very promising uh to see that schnor is finally hitting test net starting to test it out we may be able to get a technology that can help boost fungibility and

make chain analysis companies jobs a lot harder um so the path towards uh making it impossible for these these companies to track you down uh is still being forged forward thoughts on that matthew yeah and i think just like the increase in in coin join usage with wasabi is a really big deal um yeah it's getting up it's getting updated on wasabi wednesday what uh did you check in on anything any stats that you have any uh any upgrades um no they just there was a big that was a big upgrade last week um but you know the more people that use wasabi the more effective it is the faster it is um you know we want as many coin join transactions as possible so that you hide in the crowd way easier right um so just seeing more people use it

is uh i think it's just a really big deal and and uh it kind of gives us if we can get like widespread use of coin join ideally through other clients as well as wasabi you have multiple of them that all are like relatively and you know compatible with each other we can get like a bare minimum you know kind of privacy situation we wouldn't put chain analysis companies out of business but we can make their you know job really really fucking difficult yeah like at what point is the privacy at the protocol level or the fungibility at the protocol level sufficient enough that the resources expended by these chain analysis companies just aren't worth it and i have to figure out other ways yeah i guess that's the uh i think

it's the equation you have to run it's like what we said last week like at the end of the day what it comes down to is i should be able to spend money to you without you knowing all my past in future transactions right and i think that's attainable some way it's attainable it seems like it should be attainable without sacrificing the auditability of the supply right which is like the big trade-off so as long as we can attain that that should be in my mind like the bare minimum to be able to you know say like okay now at least in this aspect we can ossify or we can right be like relatively solid no i would agree um so we'll keep following that it seems it is a race you have uh two different types of wallet providers coinbase acquiring chain

analysis companies and then the samurais of the world working to destroy their heuristics at every turn um and it is a race and it it would seem that the uh the race towards a sort of orwellian surveillance or not the race but the uh the money behind uh the surveillance team is a lot more than the privacy team it's my my two cents my two satoshis well i mean i also think that anyone you know anyone who has bitcoin can immediately see the value in that so or they will see the value and they try and use it yeah and speaking of seeing value i think uh We talked about this last week. Jack is starting to see the value of Lightning Network tips on Twitter.

He was stacking sats. He was stacking sats. He just activated his Tipping.me account. I really didn't think he'd do that. I really didn't think he'd do that because it's a third-party company. I intentionally didn't include them when I tweeted out at him to try and take the Lightning Torch. I egged him on about accepting Lightning tips,

but I didn't bring up tip and dot me cause I was like, he's not going to want to like incidentally give exposure to this third party, but that's pretty cool. But like, yeah. And shout out to tip it. Not me.

I mean their extension, I downloaded it last week and I mean the button on Twitter's client on the desktop, like fits pretty seamlessly. Like it looks pretty natural. What were the permission requests requests? I haven't downloaded the extension yet. Um,

or is it anything crazy i don't think i don't believe so i like that you can use it without an extension you know you don't even need to download like if you just want to tip someone you could just use any lightning wallet and the web page like that's pretty fucking cool yeah yeah yeah i wanted to test out the uh to see what it looked like so i'm gonna turn it off now because i did not do my due diligence and check out the permissions too well you're gonna be mad at me matt i'm sorry well what i do is like i usually have like a browser that has extensions and then i have like a sandbox browser that's just free of everything yeah that's usually a good policy yeah and i still just a bare minimum amount of extensions because i just don't

just another hole um and then the other controversy then there's people because tippin.me is custodial I think we kind of preempted this conversation last week when we talked about it but it got pretty heated on bitcoin twitter I brought it up last week Brian Troll has been leading the

leading the fight against the custodial tippin.me it is an interesting debate to be had out it does seem though that somebody from btcpay server came out and said they can build a non-custodial implementation pretty easily and they're going to come out with it

so we'll see if that happens um yeah but then everyone has to host their own tipping server to send like two cents across across twitter yeah is that the case i wasn't positive i don't know i just assume so right if that's what you're trying to solve if it's not custodial yeah um i don't know i think like you should just withdraw often when one of the nice things about tipping as opposed to change tip which we were talking about is like change tip you had to like to use it you had to load up your account right so you had to like trust that custodial wallet with like a hundred dollars or fifty dollars or whatever you wanted to tip people with before you could tip but with this you don't even have to load anything up you could just pay with any

lightning wallet right so then it's up to the receiver he receiver can just pull out when he gets like five dollars or ten dollars or whatever yeah um and which yeah which is something i would recommend but i think i was following the debate on twitter and again bringing back brian trolls he brought up a good point that when you do uh sort of take those satoshis off of tipping.me into your own custody if you bring them into your own channel be careful when you close that channel because you're going to mix up those tips with your UTXOs if you send them to, like, an on-chain address. So that's, like, a potential doxing scenario.

Ooh, that's interesting. I believe. Yeah. So then... Maybe send, if you're going to close a Lightning channel, close it directly to, like, Wasabi or something like that, if possible. Yeah, I mean, that's always been the issue with tips in general is that they get linked. Like, we were talking about, like, a lot of people just post addresses, right?

And you can end up connecting the UTXOs way easier with that method. I mean, one option... This is kind of fucked up. One option around that is you could withdraw to BlueWallet, which is custodial. so you could you could withdraw custodial custodial and then from blue wallet you could go to regular btc and then you could go into wasabi if you wanted to i guess yeah that's complicated see this is the point the the point is that our privacy guarantees are fucked in bitcoin as it is that we have to do all this shit to get it to to maintain any and if you

make any little like fuck up then your privacy is fucked yeah yeah yeah this is not acceptable but yeah i mean tipping on me is like a hack proof of concept that that this guy i think his name is sergio right put together he seems like a good dude yeah he seems and and you know it's gonna get better you know he knows he knows these are issues as well okay yeah and again it's like something i touched on the newsletter today too it's like it's just proving a use case like throwing the ball out a little bit and then everybody else is like all right the ball's here now let's push it a little bit further uh let's make this a little bit less custodial to give users more control proof of concept is there though tipping on twitter is pretty cool

like seeing that people are tipping me for tweets like one satoshi for like tweets is like pretty cool to see and then so then that's the other thing like which we also kind of preempted last week where people are saying like why are you guys excited about change tip right yeah i always like tipping i thought tipping is i thought and it's even cooler that you could send fucking one satoshi like i sent jack one satoshi and i just put the comment because i can like that's is cool right yeah is this time different matt a lot of people are saying it's not i i think this time is the same but better and i agree that's cool we're improving yeah i could i could see uh i could see this uh

light lightning tipping on twitter fizzle out pretty hard uh in the next like month or two um similar to how crypto kitties uh fizzled out pretty hard well what i there needs to be more like social levers there uh to to basically pressure usage of it i i i think that um the the bullet the most bullish thing that could happen here is that jack gets sold on the idea and integrates it both as a bitcoin holder and a twitter shareholder and keep in mind like that's going to be totally custodial and like i said in the last episode like we'll give them shit about it being custodial but it's definitely going to be custodial it's going to be a fucking privacy nightmare as well um but like imagine if like on the different tweets it said how much was donate

how much was tipped to each tweet and there was like a little bar that's you know filled up or stuff like that like there's game elements where you can really gamify it i mean like even like if you if you compare tipping up me set up compared to change tip like change tip was way more of a social signal right because when you tip someone you literally tweeted it out to the whole world i'm tipping you five dollars from me to you with tipping up me like no one knows if you don't even put in the message no one knows you even tipped them that's a very good point this is a very good distinction too um uxy's one thing i think that tipping.me uh could take from change tip uxy's is like basically if somebody tips an account that isn't created yet um maybe notifying that account

like hey somebody's trying to tip you start this account um because that was one thing change tip did really well basically create an account for you uh and you could basically go claim that money is that not what like brave was doing that they got shit for yeah but they were like offering i forget i think brave got shit because they're like if the um if the user didn't accept the bat that was being donated to them like brave would keep it or something like that right with change tip they just wouldn't send it if they didn't accept it yeah exactly so there's a little distinction there it could be like a little spammy like i mean i i even spoke like last last week like my favorite use of change tip was to be a spammy troll

like that was literally what i'm nostalgic about doing i went back after we recorded that actually my my friend uh who i was sending like beers via change tip in like 2015 like brought up some old tweets it was uh took me down memory lane that was like yeah that was how i tried to get friends in the bitcoin back and i was like dude i'm gonna tweet you some bitcoin right now like look at this shit yeah in reality it wasn't i love change change tip is great and i think tipping on me is pretty fun whatever don't keep a lot of money and it's a custodial wallet yeah and they freak out over people that are keeping like three dollars on a custodial wallet like the privacy issue is you know it's a bit of consider any consider anything that that is

connected into tipping dot me that that that that guy sergio can compromise your shit like you can find out your utxos and stuff assume that yeah and maybe until proven otherwise just use the satoshi's on there just to play lightning network games online just do something safe don't even take them off chain just keep them in the browser yeah i mean like play light like all the people that are on bitcoin twitter are like are broadcasting their ip addresses to twitter you know like there's like plenty of privacy issues that we have to you know i don't know just be aware people be aware hashtag be aware um what do we got next coin mama kyc breach talking about fucking security staying on this

topic uh queen mama in exchange where are they i have no idea i've never heard of them till today i've heard of them before i believe they're in asia it sounds like an asian exchange um i'm looking it up yeah they had a kyc breach 450 000 customer um records were lost yeah no coins no coins just yeah personal information which is almost is just as bad not worse is it though everybody's personal information's been ganked at this point i i marty we were just talking about like privacy and everything right like this is that's a lot of people well all the americans got fucked by the equifax one so equifax yeah literally half the country so but this is like passport scans probably and selfies and

yeah like a lot of people just got doxxed that's fucked that sucks um this is what KYC is bad right and how like we've had this conversation so many times

when does it get to the point that people realize this and non KYC options are are okay go use

huddle huddle freaks oh they're based in Slovakia Slovakia okay I'm surprised they had KYC

yeah again slow news wake freaks oh wait February 20th did they increase it now it says 1.4 million coin mama accounts maybe only 450k had KYC and some were just email addresses and stuff

interesting fuck okay well that's not great yeah it's not great and it's not the last it's not the first and this won't be the last time this happens um i'm trying to think like

what what can we do as consumers to sort of push back against kyc aml don't use our datas don't use kyc exchanges or services except like you might have to use just one just to get on to begin with and if so if you do just use one you know pick one that you think is you know place your bet on which one you think is the most reputable you know we if you're in america we really like cash app and then like only you have that be your only kyc service just get in and then once you get in just wasabi right and then you should be relatively better off yeah and again ideally we don't have to worry about this at some point in the future um but we should really push for this uh because this is a topic actually somebody tweeted at matt and i to talk about

i actually wrote about in the bent earlier this week um the battle for privacy and freedom in the digital age it's heating up uh last week i believe or the week before i think this blog post might be a couple weeks old the imf official blog the official blog of the international national monetary fund basically uh released a blog post explaining how uh the world can push for a cashless society uh on route to instituting negative interest rate policies uh so basically uh the one of the institutions uh part of the global banking system that is uh charged with sort of pushing the floor of quote-unquote economic theory and sort of monetary policy is championing a cashless society a dystopian cashless society run on e-cash distributed by

governments and banks within the system so they can institute negative interest rates on deposits So essentially taxing people for putting money in the bank. And this, again, this is one of our favorite stats here, but at a time when the average American can't afford a $400 emergency expense, the banking system wants to tax your deposits right away, make your life a little bit harder. Matt, thoughts? well we kind of already knew this was the plan right this is kind of crazy that they wrote it

on a blog yeah like so overtly yeah it's pretty and and and that's like that's what i wrote about in the bent like the thing i want to stress to you freaks that like so they have to do this because they've been on a hundred literally a hundred what was it 1913 so that's like 106 year experiment we've been on now of monetary policy and uh due to the amount of debt that the the collective global central banking system has accrued they literally cannot raise interest rates above a certain point because they will not be able to service the interest rate payments on that debt and so literally their only option at this point given how much debt they've accrued how economies around the world are slowing and uh basically where inflation is at some point

some points in the world they have to institute negative interest rate policies to sort of keep the charade going to keep the music playing to to be able to pay back the interest that they've accrued on the debt that they've created right the strategy the recent strategy is is when you have like some kind of recession or something you you lower rates right so if rates are already near zero then the only place to go is negative um yes but you can't do that if cash exists because then people will just take cash and put it under their mattresses yes so that pressure combined with the fact that people just don't like using cash that much anymore um will probably lead to the end of cash in most places so that they can not only do negative interest rates but also

surveil the public way easier exactly and what's what was most scary about this blog post in my opinion was like the attempt to like normalize this activity like what people have to realize is negative interest rates should never be, like, good. Like, nobody should ever welcome them with open arms. We literally have to do this because of the monetary experiments that we've been running on a global scale for the last hundred years.

Like, the decisions of these academics who run monetary policy have forced us into this corner, and because of their mistakes, they now want to punish everybody with negative interest rates to sort of make up for their planning on the go, which has turned out terribly.

That's what I said in the newsletter. People need to wake up and notice, like, all is not well. This should not be happening in a global economy that's healthy and has a good monetary system. And some countries have gone, like, quasi-negative already, right? yeah i believe switzerland and sweden are negative already um i don't know yeah yeah countries that are essentially cashless i think sweden like is almost cashless pretty sure switzerland's up there as well and like what a lot of places do

ahead of time is like they make it so like you can't make purchases over three thousand dollars in cash or whatever they like make all these limits and these arbitrary spending limits and then you get to a point where even if cash isn't like banned it it's like got a criminality to it right like oh why do you want to spend 150 in cash in that store what are you like up to something or so it's a very slippery slope yeah swiss bank is running a negative 75 bps uh interest rate policy right now i believe but i think it's for a higher higher deposit level accounts it's one of the ways they've been getting around like people freaking the fuck out yeah this article is from 2015 i'm not sure what the swiss banking policy is right now at this

moment but they have instituted negative interest rate policy in the past and i do believe uh their interest rates are still negative right now just not certain either way this is extremely bullish for bitcoin right would we say on a fundamental long-term level this is not you know short-term trading doesn't matter at all for that but for long term this is like going to be the main one of the main value drivers of bitcoin yes i would agree um and they can't help themselves they have no other option this is the path yeah yeah man that's like it's sort of scary right it's like they're forced like when like is there a point and this is something i've pondered for years like coming from finance and like i always like probably young and naive but like my early

20s was always just like all right maybe there'll be a point in time where we're all like just stop collectively and say hey this is obviously not working this is we should not keep doing the same things and expecting different results um but it seems as though uh we're being pushed towards It's sort of a point at which we're forced to confront it and we don't collectively sort of try to attack it head on. Yeah, I mean, I just I feel I I think I realized like, you know, five years ago, four years ago that just everyone's kind of winging it. Right. Yeah. There's no like there's really no good answer. And everyone would rather just push it off than try and do anything of substance. That's why I like this.

Continue. No, it's a good segue into what I wrote about yesterday in the bench. Shout out to Arbed Out. He highlighted a passage of Iranian history. It really had me questioning, like, why can't we do this today? So, like, apparently in 1294 AD, like, the, excuse me, the Mongol ruler Persia, like, tried to decree paper money into his realm based off of, like, the advice from Kublai Khan. and like the merchant class basically revolted through kublai khan like into the square like toward this guy who basically suggested that they uh introduced paper money into their economy and

said fuck no and stuck to like the denar which was a silver backed commodity for 600 years they had like sound monetary policy until 1931 until uh england took the world off the gold reserve or excuse me the uh uh one of my things yeah the gold reserve what the hell they took the pound off the gold reserve right yeah they took the pound off the gold reserve that's exactly it um but just like it's like small stories throughout history like people like at some point in history had like the innate basically understanding that like paper money is bad and there's many examples this just being one of them of people revolting about paper money being introduced into their to their societies um but maybe we are so just we've been so inundated

with uh paper money our whole lives and the it's the system we grow up and we don't even know to question it um but there are like again signs throughout history that hey people cared about this at one point maybe we should start caring about it uh here in the present at some point i thought that was interesting well i mean like i remember like i my uncle the gold bug right like i feel like everyone has an uncle the gold bug just screaming about paper money um but yeah for us for for people our age like most of them think like it's the way it's always been right they don't yeah they don't realize that we came off the gold standard what like in 1970 or something like that like it's really recent 1971 when we officially uh

disconnected from uh from the gold uh completely um yeah but i the process began again like going back to like 1913 1931 um it's also what they teach you in school they don't teach you this shit in school right like uh the fdrs gold seizures like they don't talk about any it's all whitewashed be aware people be aware this stuff happened um well so shout out our yeah shout them out shout them out shout out arbed out one of the most underrated uh twitter follower or twitter follows out there excuse me at arbed out that's at a-r-b-e-d-o-u-t good dude I think you know

people will slowly come to realize it and as they do you know bitcoin adoption will increase all this stuff used to drive me fucking nuts and now that bitcoin exists I'm just like I got my peace of mind

you know this is good for bitcoin so we'll just see how it turns out yeah What else is good for Bitcoin is if we get more developers. And I wrote about Bitcoin Optech last week. I was actually just reading them this morning. David Harding put out a great Bitcoin Optech newsletter earlier this week filled with a lot of dense information.

A lot of the guys at Chaincode are working on that. And if any of you guys are developers out there, Chaincode Residency is coming up this summer again. so go to residency.chaincode.com if you'd be down to check that out for their summer residency I believe it's closing soon the registration so if you're interested

in learning from some of the best go check out Chaincode's residency what do we got here Matt slow news day I don't like this separation I don't like talking to you through a screen everyone should subscribe to Bitcoin Optic like even if you're not a developer or whatever just just subscribe to it pay attention to it

really good resource and while you're at it subscribe to this podcast that's what that's what we need freaks we need uh if you guys are liking this stuff make sure you subscribe share it trying to blow it up we got uh a lot of good interviews coming up i've been uh working hard to get some quality underrated guests and uh i think we got a lot of good things cooking here Yeah, dude, you've been hustling. I haven't listened to your two most recent pods. I'm looking forward to it. I've been in vacation mode.

I'm behind on my pods. Stay in vacation mode. You've got a long flight back. You'll have time to catch up. That was the other one. Elon recorded with ARK Invest. Oh, yeah. Our buddy Haseen shared it on Twitter.

I haven't listened to it yet. I don't think you have yet either, right? I have not, but apparently he thinks Bitcoin has a beautiful design. Yeah, so I've got to put that on in the plane. yeah i'll i'll take that elon elon you ever want to come do a rabbit hole recap let us know invite is open yeah you got what you see you got jack coming up march 1st gonna fly out there for him that's coming up for the next week yeah dope a week away um yeah sorry this was uh this was a little off this week freaks yeah the remote recording not a fan yeah well you know we're

we're fortunate enough that that we get to record together you know nine times out of ten right most people don't have that liberty that is true what do you got uh what do you got on tap for tonight you're going to dinner yeah i got nice women in the canal we got some really nice dinner tonight and then uh we come on tomorrow should be good all right man we'll enjoy it wine and dine your lady um take in the canal scene in amsterdam one more night and then uh we'll see you back stateside next week absolutely stay humble guys chill lightly all right peace and love freaks