TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.03.25

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

This week Marty and Matt Discuss: - Coinbase, stake is on the menu - Steve Barbour WSJ article - BSV - Bitmain IPO not happening - ryanofsky PR merged - Gemini bech32 + Blockstream explorer - Eclair mainnet full release - Craig Wright is a fraud - Dream Market shutting down - BitMex LN research Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Unchained Capital. Head over to https://www.unchained-capital.com/vaults/?utm_source=Marty%20Bent&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Vault%20Launch and check out their 2-of-3 multisig vault product. If you're in NYC on 4/1, head over to Galvanize to check out a live demo: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/unchained-multisig-vault-demo-tickets-59545962577

Like, our boy something. He's not our boy. Like, it'd be cool if I could bleep you. That'd be cool. They just gave me the power. If I had the bleep button. Wouldn't that be cool? Well, hey there, freaks.

Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent. You've been fucking recording. I recorded a little bit, yeah. Matt wants a bleep button. But not for curses. Not for curses. Just for shit corners.

For when I call people our boy. They're not our boy. Just bleep it out. Put it on the list. Hey, it's, what's today? 29th? Yeah, it's the 29th. It's March 29th.

Bitcoin's pumping a little bit. The price, according to the TradeBlockXBX index, is $4,083.33. This week's episode of the Rabbit Hole Recap is brought to you by Unchained Capital. They have that two or three multi-sig volt solution that they just came out with. Perfect for anybody running a business who needs a third party to help them with their multi-sig solution. If you're an individual, this is a good solution for you as well. Unchained, they're actually going to be in New York City Monday night

Debuting their multi-sig vault I believe they're working on Air-gapped Offline transactions As well, they'll be Debuting there as well So if you're in New York, Monday night 6.30 at Galvanize

They're going to be giving a demo there And then also if you're signing up for the vault program You're going to get three months free Of the Bitcoin Standard Bulletin by our boy, Saifuddin Amoos. Matt, we got a quick recording after this episode, so we got to get through our list. We're going to try and keep it an hour,

maybe 50 minutes to an hour this episode. Let's jump right into it. I want to start with Bitmain. So Bitmain became apparent this week that their application for the IPO in China expired, so they're not going public right now or anytime soon. It seems like Jihan Wu is stepping down. And his co-founder, too.

What, Micron Zahn, I think his name is? Yes, yes, both stepping down, so it seems like Bitmain, a story that we've gone back to the well for here on Rabbit Hole Recap, is turning into more of a train wreck than previously thought. Yeah, they came out the king,

and they fucking missed. They didn't go full out. Yeah, Bitcoin is a cruel, unforgiving bitch. That was such a good line in the bent. Right? it's uh if you think that you have the power to change her whether it be by uh throwing hash power or money i think uh bitcoin will teach you a harsh lesson and bitmain is learning that lesson right now and at least like go for the double tap you know what do you mean by the double tap

it's like we've talked about this before like and when when the coinbase ninja launch thing happened and there was all the chaos they had a move there they could have they could have forced a bitcoin pow change they could have went all in but instead they like half-assed their bitcoin cash takeover attempt and it completely completely screwed them like if you're going to attack bitcoin you gotta you gotta go for the kill you can't just shoot it in the knee it was a shot to the knee shot to the shin it was pretty annoying that's why the double tap is when the person's lying on the ground and you shoot him in the head it's the double tap uh yeah double tap um i believe my neighbor who's a who's a big tea bagger uh i can't see him playing halo every once in a while

he would he would double tap he's big on the double tap there you go double tap guy uh so what do you think happens with bitmain do you think they recover from this do you think they can remain like a smaller business and sort of chug along or do you think this is it for them i don't think they go out of business no but uh the days of of the line the mining landscape being dominated by Bitmain are probably over. Yeah, and one interesting stipulation about this is that there is a redemption clause in their investors' contracts.

It was only the round right before. They were raising the pre-IPO round. Yes, so the pre-IPO round, I don't know exactly how much they raised. It might have been $100 million or something like that. It was a decent amount of money. I think it was higher than that. I thought it was like $700 million or something like that.

It might have been that much. I might have misread something. but regardless there's a clause in that specific round where the investors can redeem their shares so the ipo doesn't happen which is not happening which is not happening so they're i would imagine a lot of those investors are going to redeem their shares it'll be interesting to see where bitmain pulls that capital from and maybe uh they're they might have to sell bitcoin cash I mean, basically, the Bitmain philosophy was they just kept going high leverage and reinvesting it in the business and going big. And then when the bull run finally ended, it caught them off guard.

If they had like a couple more months to get, that was the whole beauty of the IPO. They could get to the IPO, get the ridiculous valuation they were hoping for. They could get out just in time before the bear happened. And they just tripped at the finish line. Yeah, the train left without them. And again, this has been my line with Bitmain. They are the Icarus story of the early Bitcoin industry, if you will. And Icarus is falling to the ground right now.

It is extremely bullish for Bitcoin. I cannot say that any—it could not be more important. It is extremely important. the biggest threat to bitcoin was bitmain in late 2017 early 2017 even early 2018 that area we were under heavy not even just bitmain possibly attacking us but bit bitmain getting co-opted by like the chinese government and then attacking us yeah so this is definitely bullish uh for many reasons one a government like china can't can't control bitmain and be used bitmain as a proxy and two it just allows other players to come in and decentralize the mining industry in particular

a little bit more all right that was the first in particular i'm gonna try and not say it for the rest of the podcast keep me to it in particular yes okay um no promises so that was bitman yeah good luck bitman seems like things are pretty shitty over there right now uh coinbase it leaked or was there an announcement or did it leak i saw a tweet that it leaked somebody leaked a screenshot but whatever the news is out coinbase is enabling staking features for their tezos uh for their institutional it was a press release it was a press release i saw a tweet somebody leaked it before the press release i mean tezos was up 17 over the last day before the press release was unembargoed so i i imagine they sent it out to news agencies ahead of time too so and it's up

a hundred percent over the last month so if you you know if you want to say that's not insider trading but there's probably something went on there yeah so as you freaks can assume from this conversation coinbase for their institutional clients i believe to start uh have enabled staking for tezos and plan to uh enable staking for maker as well so he is a hilariously high it's like 20 i think they're taking off the top really they have all staking profits on i think the tezos nor like the normalized fee after they take their cut and everything's like six percent or something like that yeah yearly let's talk about you've been uh grooming a thread for almost two years now for a year and a half at least uh so let's talk about the nature of these exchanges

and the centralizing nature of of uh offering staking services well it's a centralizing incentive of proof of stake systems inherently. These custodians, exchanges tend to be the largest custodians of these assets, have a direct incentive to stake their user funds and then return either, if they're like a straight up malicious exchange, just keep it for themselves. But if they're a competitive exchange, then give some of that return back to their users to attract the users onto the product to begin with because if they keeping money on the exchange then they're more likely to use the exchange for other services trading other all pairs stuff like that um so it's like a value add service specifically things like tezos

which are designed to stake relatively easily in cold storage environments um and and without that much penalty there's not really tezos has no lockup like you don't get rewarded. If there's a delay to get a reward, so it's like a soft lockup, like you have to wait like 20 days or something like that to start getting paid. But there's no actual lockup. At any point, you can pull the funds out of a staking address and give it to your users. So there's really, there's very little negative for the exchange from a process point of view. Now, the issue here is exchanges are already major centralizing forces in our ecosystem. They're the easiest to regulate because they're usually connected to banks. Coinbase, obviously,

you need to connect your bank account. They're completely captured by the regulatory system. And they're very easy to regulate in that regard. Out of all things in this ecosystem, the exchanges are the easiest. So now, not only are exchanges naturally a centralizing force, But if you add proof of stake into this mix, then they're also validating your chain. They become even more of a centralizing force. And what that means is, is if Coinbase is holding, you know, ends up holding 20% of the Tezos or whatever, they'll also be the 20% minor of Tezos at the same time. That's crazy. That's absolutely, that's a horrible incentive structure.

and the thing is these exchanges in a lot of senses are prioritized they're not doing it yet i mean we talked about coinbase they're charging a 20 fee which is crazy uh but i think in the future they will even give you returns that are higher than what you would get if you did a normal self-custody staking because they want you to trade on their platform give them fees give them leverage over other exchanges you know they want to be the one who stakes the most yeah do you think or have you heard of a g hash like self-regulation where if they got too much of of the supply they would not allow more people to stake with them well we you know we haven't gotten to that point yet um this is still very fresh like all the other examples i had were

mostly like random ass exchanges on random ass coins with the exception being binance who's been going pretty heavy on this but obviously they're not like a regulated entity in a lot of ways uh not like coinbase they're like the first like real legitimate regulated exchange uh so we'll see like i i the the exchanges have less incentive like ghash was a bitcoin focused company they had a direct incentive to make sure that that the bitcoin network was not seen as overly centralized but if you're a coinbase and you have 30 different coins on your platform and you stake all these different coins do you really care like if the tezos community is like oh you're at 40 like i don't know if that incentive is as strong um it's not as aligned as well they're inherently

multi-coiners right they're inherently not ideologically driven by either any chain yeah no that's a good point and i think this is a good opportunity to give a little bitcoin history lesson here with ghash what year was that 2013 2014 yeah they arose during the 2013 bull and they disappeared in the ensuing bear i think yeah so at one point this was a mining pool ghash.io they had amassed up to it was cloud mining which was big they were a mining pool plus cloud mining so anyone could buy hash rate and trade it on their platform but they controlled all the hash so they were even worse than a regular pool because they actually controlled the hardware the majority of the hardware that was in their pool it wasn't like other miners

from around the world were pointing it at them yes and they got to a point where they amassed what like 40 to 45 percent might have even passed 50 for a little bit i think so yeah it might have gotten above and and g hash came out and said hey we obviously we're not going to 51 attack the network and then on top of that they got caught 51 percenting a couple times wasn't it like gambling sites like like satoshi dice type sites i'm not i'm not uh certain of that i don't know there was rumors at least that weren't perfectly substantiated that there was a couple couple attacks against illegal sites so they knew they weren't going to get uh get hurt as bad of a blowback yeah um yes but they did uh i can't confirm that sounds like it's plausible but even so they came out and said

all right we're gonna we're gonna make it so we can never have more than 40 percent and then they just disappeared right but that was all trust anyway because they could have just moved it to other pools but yeah then they just went out of business with the bear market um you know cloud mining is a very odd business very fickle business um the other thing that's worth mentioning here is that in proof of stake chains you know we always talk about not your keys not your coins at least with a proof of work chain as long as you practice that yourself you're gucci you know it doesn't matter like coinbase gets taken down all their funds seized or whatever doesn't matter to you as long as you don't have money on coinbase as long as it's your

own keys. But if one of these exchanges is holding a ton of Tezos or a ton of Ethereum after proof of stake, and they either get robbed or they get taken down by a government, that becomes a security risk for the entire chain, every single user of the chain. If a POS chain gets an ETF and that ETF amasses 60% of the coin supply, then all of a sudden the guys in charge of the ETF can 51% your network you know like that's crazy to me yeah and it's it's almost like people pushing for proof of state can't see this and maybe they won't see it until it's right in front of their face and maybe we'll know sooner rather than later as as this practice uh becomes more popular yeah i mean i think i think we've said this a couple times on on other pods that

there's still very strong support in the pos communities and we really basically need we've never had a big chain that was running proof of stake so we need these big chains to happen and fail before this actually before people admit that it's an issue right yes yeah so we shall see the the ball is definitely rolling in that direction uh so coinbase if you're an institutional investor with some tezos so you want to stake it you can do it there uh mainstream media came out with a very good bitcoin blog this morning of course they put it behind the paywall it is behind a paywall um i was able to access that somebody shared a copy with me in some some way to to route around the paywall but it was a very good article uh specifically talking about what steve barber

and upstream data are doing in alberta canada at the natural gas fracking sites up there uh what they're doing is they're they're going and they're capping the the methane and natural gas which otherwise would be released into the atmosphere and they're turning that into bitcoin uh just in terms of public image of bitcoin in the mainstream this is probably one of the best articles i've seen in probably years to actually like give a good a good uh argument for bitcoin which is energy efficiency i mean i think this company is called what upstream data yes um we've covered it in the past it's the ultimate case study for bitcoin because literally the methane that they're that they flare off the natural gas that they flare off is bad for the environment unless it

gets burned it's like something like 30 to 40 times worse than actually burning it yeah so using the miners to power the miners off of it is creating a direct benefit to the environment it's not just like offsetting or whatever it's direct directly making the environment better um steve's seems awesome we know him from online hopefully we got him on the pod soon what i really thought was interesting about this wall street journal article was there was no like no four paragraphs copy paste on the bottom that was like bitcoin was created in 2008 blah blah blah blah you know they always do that on every bitcoin article yeah and it's like we're finally getting to the more mature stage of the market cycles where people are like they know

what bitcoin is you don't have to put the stupid ass copy paste on the bottom explaining what it is exactly it's a good sign it's a very good sign and i guess we should tell the freaks out there we're out there molding the minds of uh the youth of france this morning uh we went to baruch college to talk about Bitcoin, and the class was filled with a majority of French exchange students. Was it 28 undergrads? Yeah, something like that. It was a fun experience, but this is a topic that we got into,

and I really do think I noticed at least some eyes pop up when we jumped into this energy topic in particular. Ah, damn it, number two. This energy topic. In particular. A lot of eyes peaked, a lot of ears peaked up, perked up, and I think, again, this is something I've been saying more recently, is that the uh bitcoin as a synthetic battery as a way to be become an energy efficient society

is a very good uh framing a narrative that's all i had to say about that that's pretty cool that we spoke in front of a college class today yeah well how'd it feel it was your first time i've done it twice before today uh this is my third time but uh yes shout out to charles wong uh adjunct professor at baruch college here in new york teaching a blockchain class i've gone and he's on twitter too he's on crypto yeah he's on twitter he's uh i've had him on tales from the crypt there's an interview i forget what number it is but you guys can go to the archives it's there um and he does a very good job of bringing guests in to to speak with these students and it's always fun i had a lot of fun today yeah that was great it was a great interview uh that you had with him

i remember listening to that that was my first introduction to him and i didn't talk to all my friends that told me my twitter shit posting would get me nowhere that's pretty cool right that it seems it was a very engaging class that's what was uh uh encouraging to me at least these kids were looking to learn asking very good questions there were some incredible questions asked too yeah i think you know there was like five or six future future powerful bitcoiners in there one girl in the first row she was on her shit asking really good questions pertaining to uh the topic of conversation we're having now with exchanges uh there's a woman woman for my heart like what do we what do we do about people storing their bitcoin on coinbase

um no yes that was encouraging uh always feels good to go see what the younger kids are saying uh this question was just posed to us before we hit record but bitcoin sv hash rates plummeting uh why aren't we attacking it why isn't it being attacked this is a good time for uh our dan dark pill shout out oh yeah craig wright is a fraud he's indeed a fraud say it loud and say it proud craig wright you're a fraud brought to you by dan dark pill free sponsorship of the day um bitcoin cash sv hasn't been attacked yet because it hasn't been profitable enough to attack it yet it's super easy to attack they're always under risk of being attacked but you have to think about it these miners bitcoin miners like to attack bitcoin sv isn't a a free endeavor they they lose the

opportunity cost of mining bitcoin while they're doing the attack so there needs to be a profit motive for them there so what's the profit motive for attacking a chain there's two things you can do you can either short it or you can do a double spend attack on an exchange that supports it and steal their money uh there's not that many exchanges that support bitcoin and cash sv and they use heavy confirmation numbers uh to keep any kind of attack in that realm relatively small so really if they don't fade into irrelevance which they probably will but if they don't and they last around a little bit longer and it goes up in value a little bit then we'll probably start seeing more markets you know come around that you can short and once once you're able to short it

then an attack can become very profitable especially if it's somewhere unregulated like a bitmex or a deribit where you can just get nice bitcoin out of it guaranteed pretty much and just attack the shit out of the chain and short it at the same time yeah so if those products ever come to market that's when it'll most likely be true because you want to have a hedge against your attack in case it goes wrong well not even that like you want to be able to make money or money you want to make money off the attack like how can you make it's very hard to make a sizable amount of money off of a bitcoin sv attack right now because it's a piece of shit chain that's like not supported anywhere did you see what happened today or yesterday uh to their

chain in particular i think somebody i think ryan x charles uh or somebody on the bitcoin cash sv team i'm getting confused with which chain it is at this point i think he's sv i think he's sv too uh i don't think there's any bitcoin cashers anymore they've just all dwindled away they've disappeared yeah they did not that they did not win the uh the shelling point war neither of them but uh i believe somebody uploaded a block with like a hundred megabyte block or something like that and all the block explorers went down all their nodes all their six nodes all went down yeah they're like block chair went down or something like that well that's great they're gonna just have to propagate that transaction for the rest of their fucking little ass existence

yeah um yeah so bitcoin sv not being attacked right now because uh it's not as profitable as it as it could potentially be if there were futures markets involved led by a fraud gonna trend to zero long term never forget craig wright is a fraud uh let's stay on the exchange tip Gemini enabled BEC32. You can send it straight to Wasabi now. Yeah, you can send straight to Wasabi from Gemini, and they're using Blockstream Explorer as their explorer. Blockstream.info, yeah.

So it seems like Gemini is doing some good shit out there. Yeah, I mean, Blockstream.info is top two block explorers with OXT.me, I would say. So that's really good to see. And then BEC32 is obviously. BEC32 is huge to see. Yeah, that's huge. are they the first major exchange outside i don't know i only i only uh

bitmex might withdraw to beck 32 bitmex was like one of the first to switch to segwit yeah that wouldn't surprise me if if bitmex was forward thinking on that but but at least out of all like the regulated fiat gateways i think i think they're the first big one to do yeah so shout out to the Winklevii. Thanks for enabling that. And BEG32 is the new Segwit native address format. You have the lowest fees, the best privacy. It starts with the BC1.

Yeah, and this is, well, we have BitMEX on top of mind. We don't have this on the list, but it just made me think of it. They put out a good research paper on the Lightning Network. They've been running routing nodes, and they just put out a really good research piece on, really just pointed out how hard it is

to be a good routing node route routing node uh there's a lot of hands-on uh it's a lot of active management yeah it's a lot of active management challenge channel balancing and uptime you got to make sure your node never goes down your node goes down then all of a sudden you know might get some money taken and yeah people force closing channels on you yeah and so uh another thing that they pulled in that article as they dove into the return that they've been making from being a routing node it seems to be at least a little bit profitable for them up to this point but again i think the more uh pressing details of the article around the the clunky ux and the the hands-on need the the need for hands-on activity with your routing nodes at this stage of lightning

network's life you know it's amazing to me it's absolutely still very hands-on but it's amazing to me how much progress keeps getting made in like one month time two month time like i updated zap the most recent update to zap is like fantastic like to see like how your challenge channels are balanced in a visual way and you can see it very easily they have a nice little colored bar uh jewel added something similar um you know i've been testing out the noddle for us and they have ride the lightning integration in it so you get all this channel information all in a nice visual gooey format you know because humans that's a human's work right humans need to it's so much easier to see it visually how your notes connected how you're routing stuff and it's amazing how much

progress gets made every every day yes i'm confident that this will get easier through time but uh it is definitely not ready for the mainstream at this current uh iteration you can't even really easily back up these things so like yeah it's definitely not ready for mainstream yeah but but it's it's being built and it's fucking way better than i expected it to be at this point me too i keep getting blown away right um so shout out to everybody working on the lightning network and the people uh helping to educate everybody out there oh that was another thing we got a jewel update too we did get a jewel that was a pretty big update uh what were the exact details i'm fuzzy on the interface is a lot better um i think i think now you can i i

think the channel management was a lot for a while there like to use jewel you basically also had to use zap there was things you'd have to like go into zap and handle and then it would show up on now you can pretty much do everything in the extension directly in the browser in the extension shout out to Willowburn and everybody working on that more dev praise here

did we talk about this last week? Russell Yunoski's PR get merged? no we didn't Ryan of Sky so Russell Yunoski who's working at Chaincode Labs has been working very diligently over the last 19 months on a very particular PR, which keeps the ball rolling

to help separate the wallet GUI from the node in the Bitcoin Core software repository. And this is a huge step in making Bitcoin more modular in the long run. This will help us become more modular. And if anything, this one particular PR proves just how thorough and how arduous the Bitcoin core process can be and actually sparked a good debate about the bitcoin core process where it is right now and how it can improve but this is something that in other software projects would seem trivial to sort of fix it's a rebasement uh rebasing uh libraries and stuff like that but because bitcoin uh development is so uh not fragile but it's uh it's like nuclear warhead development like you have to be very careful and even the simple task can take

something like a year and a half i mean yeah we've been talking about i think since before i was even in bitcoin people have been talking about splitting it up like the whole idea is is you'll have the node portion and then that portion is handling consensus and everything the stuff that you know really makes or breaks the chain the stuff that can lead to hard forks and stuff like that unintentional hard forks you separate that out and then you can iterate and upgrade all the other components without worrying about them breaking consensus yeah and another topic of conversation around modularity of bitcoin recently has been neutrino uh and people fighting over neutrino and it's another example of something that that should be uh optional can be modularly added

to if you want to use it you can if you don't want to you don't need to right like if you have the node to something as something separate then you can just yes exactly add the pieces you want and this is again this goes back to the unix development philosophy carl dong and i spoke a lot about this in the episode we recorded a couple weeks ago but it's just making bitcoin more in line with that philosophy of modularity of tools that do one thing very well and separating them so they're not into connect interconnected and uh potential to have a tax surface increased if you're if you're trying to to worry about two things being connected at once i don't even know if that was a good way to describe it but whatever um

jim and i back there to craig raise the throat eclair another lightning update eclair main net full release it's not on main net yet though i think it is main net no it's uh it's on test net will be launched on main net in a few weeks really yeah so receive over lightning is now enabled on eclair mobile test net main net version will be released in a few weeks so if you guys When did that tweet? That's a recent tweet, right? Oh, that's from February. Oh.

There you go. That's not recent. They just released the main net. So now it's released on main net. Yeah. That announcement was a few weeks ago. I didn't check that date. Yeah.

So now you can receive. It runs a full node on your phone, and it can connect for the Bitcoin blocks, the Bitcoin D blocks. It can connect to your Electrum personal server. So these guys are using Neutrino, I would imagine, right? I don't think so. They're using BTCD? no no but they can just you can connect to your bitcoin node at home okay through electron

personal server i i don't think they're using neutrino i think it's like a i think it's a legit it's a the the they're using some kind of spv type situation on uh oh maybe they're they're using neutrino for the blocks if you don't connect to your own node and then or neutrino like thing and then for lightning it's just a straight full node right because neutrino is for pulling in filters for actual bitcoin blocks yes all right dope so this is for android android users only correct yeah iphone sucks do you use uh do you use this app eclair i used to use it a lot in the beginning but you can't you couldn't receive so it was kind of is kind of annoying.

Yeah. I switch, you know, I switch. Actually, right now, I don't really use Lightning on mobile at all. Yeah, I mean, it's too early. Yeah, I really want this. The Zap app isn't out for Android. It's only out for iOS, I think.

Yes, I believe so. That's what I really would like. I would really like mobile Zap. It's also really hard to remotely connect to your Lightning node. why is that i'm not i'm not it's just a i think the way it interfaces and and connects through is just kind of a reliability clusterfuck going on right now yeah i think the way to do it is is like through tor there's some kind of remote connection connection to tor similar the way

samurai's doing it with dojo but that's not lightning that's just regular um you know there's a lot of security implications and privacy implications involved with all this shit. All right. Bang, bang. Yeah, no,

and it's just a reminder. The stuff's getting built out slowly, but surely actually quicker than we expected. Like we said earlier, and, but like one, one step at a time, like it was receive only.

And now you can, or excuse me, it was send only at one point. Now you can receive and block by block, pull request by pull request, merge by merge. This stuff grows. i think the problem is is like the reason it's the the reason they waited on receive

is because we don't have watchtowers yet so if you're running a lightning note on your phone and you go offline you run a risk there of losing some money yeah and i think they might have just said fuck it because we don't have watchtowers yet not yet so i'm not positive on that note so use with caution use all this shit with caution but it seems like a really it's great wallet great team this is the aca acinq team async um into dark market news dream market shutting down largest public dark dark net market uh they announced that they will be shutting down on febru or excuse me april 30th so the end of next month um and they didn't get shut down though that's like the thing no they that so that's their

announcement that i gave you the link to um and then the next day the fbi released a press release for their operation that they called sabo tour which i guess is like a play on saboteur but it has tor as in tor in it um and they arrest they announced that they arrested 61 vendors and buyers they seized they seized four million euros in cryptocurrency two point million euros in cash and 35 million euros worth of gold that's kind of funny that they gold bugs uh conducted 122 interviews it's like a pretty pretty big operation pretty extensive 51 firearms so saboteur did they did they break did they exploit tour in some way it was between january 11th and march 12th 2019 was the it was the invest it started july 2018 but they didn't

execute like the searches and stuff till january 11th but the saboteur uh title of that does that mean they like are they trying to hint that they that they exploited tour in some way i don't i don't think i i mean i think it's probably mostly good old-fashioned police work okay just a clever name all these dark markets work on on tour for the most part so they probably thought they were being clever there um there there's There's been lots of speculation for a while that they run a ton of toward relay nodes and exit nodes trying to de-anonymize the system. Wouldn't surprise me at all. But who knows how effective they are.

I mean, look at the scale of it. Even those numbers, those aren't like the biggest numbers in the world. What, like four million euros in cryptocurrency? Like there's a lot more on the dark markets than that, right? so like if it was any kind of systemic it's probably similar to what they did with the silk road right like you de-anonymize a couple guys and you know you go for the head and then once you get in then you start you know the biggest risk for these dark markets is the the mailing of the substances because you can't really do that in a distributed censorship

resistant way remember we were talking about the russian one the russian ones they're doing it right where they're just dropping packages in the woods with uh like in the city and stuff like under a phone booth or something you're just dropping gps uh and they give you the coordinates for where it's located yeah but besides that usually everyone's mailing it right so that's how you get them a lot of the time yeah we need to get to the world uh that bitcoin sign guy envisions of tour like routing drones onion routed drones yes one drone drops it off to the next drone and drops it off to the next drone fucking love it cypherpunk future is upon us freaks prepare accordingly just be aware just be aware uh be aware of this asus software uh was recently

back to where this is you a you topic i haven't jumped into this it was just an auto update that asus had the computer manufacturer uh their windows computers were updated by malicious malicious software um what was the intent of the malicious software i'm not i don't think they told us no but it only targeted certain individuals which is interesting but could have targeted any of their users the the reason is because these companies for their updates they use uh signing keys to prove it's them issuing the update the key got compromised asus was told the key was compromised i think they waited like five months to patch the key so the exploit was in the wild so you have to realize like if you have

when you get these computer vendors this is not just a one-time trust thing like you're trusting them to handle their security in ways that don't completely jeopardize you uh i'm not trying to scare people out of updating you should 99 cases be up to date as far as possible probably shouldn't be using windows probably shouldn't be using an asus computer you know now that we saw this with asus at least but you should be updating and you should just assume that your internet connected devices are compromised yeah somebody's trying to fuck with you yeah always assume that always have your head on a swivel freaks and then if you act under that understanding then your private keys will probably be safe in 90 of the times because you won't be put in that situation yes

exactly um next topic last topic we have here we're probably going to cut a little short because we're going to record an episode right after this uh apple apple card apple's getting into the the credit card game it seems and it's like more it's not just credit card right it like it it bolsters the mobile payment yes yeah they're trying to make apple pay more robust and more uh more like a you're going to be able to get it seems like they're going down a path we're going to offer financial solutions yeah more more they want they want it to be more accessible and more vertically integrated like they like they like with all of their products yeah i mean we should stop working on bitcoin is it even worth it anymore i remember when apple pay first came

out people were saying this when google wallet came out they've been saying about venmo and stuff like the krugmans of this world always like saying it uh you know these things you'll probably be able to send zero i don't know if you can already can you send apple paid transactions from person to person like cash app i don't know i imagine you will be in soon relatively in the future or whatever you'll be able to send low cost relatively private not censorship resistant though transactions between users to merchants stuff like that uh this does not compete with bitcoin because it does not have censorship resistance but it does compete with centralized shit coins because all they have to do is all they have to do is add bitcoin deposit support

and then bitcoiners can get take advantage of relatively private fast and free transactions on basically like a centralized layer too right that's what like same with cash up cash up implements bitcoin deposits which they don't have yet you know then all of a sudden every single centralized chain that prioritizes low fee and fast transactions gets obviated yes um and then apple's also partnering with goldman sachs to offer some they run the card goldman sachs runs It's a MasterCard network. Goldman Sachs is a bank. Don't worry.

They're not going to sell your data to third parties, though. Yeah. Apple says they don't have access to your data, supposedly. But Goldman does. But Goldman said they won't. Yeah, Goldman's not going to use that. In Goldman Sachs, we trust. That data for anything.

I do trust Apple, though. I trust that Apple is. I don't. You don't? Nah. Why not? You just don't trust anybody. Well, you can verify, first of all, because it's all closed source.

That's true. and you know they've been really pushing this privacy angle really hard yeah they've uh they during the tournament they've had this uh huge media tv commercial blitz yeah i don't know i uh they're a very great if they were playing ball with the nsa that'd be a great coup for the u.s government right this is actually something my wife is in the advertising business and she works for a big tech company as well but apparently that's something that is on their like yearly themes is privacy and security so even in the corporate boardrooms at these companies it seems that uh privacy and security is becoming more more uh fetch these days yeah but it's mostly

you know it's what's it called it's they're like buttering it's like butter up talk it's bullshit yeah it's it's all flaky but i think it uh it speaks to an ongoing conversation we have about apathy we we always say people won't care about privacy and security stuff but now that it's affecting corporate boardrooms maybe people are waking up yeah i mean i i think because they have to react to what right there's a profit there's a profit motive now to become more private with all the recent um leaks and and failures that have happened you know especially to like the facebooks and the and the googles uh there's yeah there's definitely i mean i think people like we said we said in the past that as as people

store more information online the compromises will be bigger and as these compromises happen people will wake up to the reality that they're living in a very shaky privacy landscape and try and prioritize improving their privacy and sovereignty going forward. Yes. So it seems like maybe people are waking up. I'm not going to hold my breath, but let's keep pushing. Let's keep pushing. One person at a time.

Just one person at a time. That's all we got for the topic today. What do you want to riff on? Should we tell them the block height? Is it too late to tell them the block height? It's never too late. We'll tell them the price, too. We already told them the price.

We told them the price? What's the price? It was at $4,083.33 at the beginning of the episode. It has risen to $4,089.61. Wow. It's huge. Huge. The block height is 569,350.

That's pretty crazy for 560,000 blocks. 569, nice, bro. i don't know what do you want to riff on i think uh it was encouraged let's riff on what we talked about this morning or experience this morning was encouraging it was very encouraging very engaged class and it was a blockchain class so it wasn't like a bitcoin's focus class no i think and think this was the first time they were really getting like the hardcore philosophy and uh sound money free speech money uh pitch we had a couple f heads in there i think yeah you think they were yeah they were like kind of trolling us a bit with the questions and like laughing

did you see them like laughing a little bit in the background yeah i saw that they were like looking at their computer and then their phone and then laughing a little bit yeah matt are you gonna beat up some some college students you got a little bit triggered when they brought up the energy thing i did get triggered you can't get triggered marty you just gotta come and collectively be like well tough luck well because it's a shit argument uh and it really triggers me um because it's very bad false equivalencies why why why do people get angry about bitcoin energy consumption and not cruise ship energy consumption yeah you were going hard against cruise ships bro fuck cruise ships i would never go you'll never find me on a cruise ship uh and your energy

consumption is very low on the list of reasons why it mostly pertains to being in the ocean with people you don't know uh and cheesy experiences you would have on that boat it was just such a funny thing that you jumped to straight away you're like what about cruise ship did you see that one a cruise ship got stranded somewhere it was like a rocket back and forth they had to like evacuate like 800 people via helicopter or something that's happened a couple times and then they had the one that crashed like in greece or whatever and spilled oil everywhere and the uh bitcoin will never crash and spill oil everywhere bitcoin will never crash and spill oil everywhere um in fact if if if a tanker crashed and spilled oil i would imagine

bitcoin miners would show up and suck the oil up and use it to mine bitcoin we need floating bitcoin miners to take out oil slicks and mine with them future free uh future business idea that's a fun idea yeah we'll uh we'll end it on that the free business idea billion dollar idea i said no the toilet idea is way better toilet idea sucks pooper sucks pooper sucks um thanks for joining us this week freaks uh let us know how you're liking the show if you like it please rate subscribe share uh again we got big things we're gonna get a lot more interactive with you freaks moving forward uh we'll we'll update you once we're ready with that stuff matt any last words is this our shortest episode ever 46 minutes it's not too bad short we have like kind of we

have some fun coming up for you on the next episode because it's going to be a four-person panel and we're literally recording it right after this so yeah it's very i'm very excited for this panel don't feel like we cheaped you out that's going to be like kind of like an rhr tftc hybrid thing going on so that'll be fun very excited for this conversation we have to go get ready for it so peace and love stay humble stack sets