TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.04.08

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Julian Assange https://mailchi.mp/5a9e133f8318/martys-bent-april-11th-2018-issue-460 - HODL guide https://github.com/DriftwoodPalace/guides - Multisig scenarios - Coinbase https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/04/10/coinbase-launches-crypto-to-fiat-debit-card-in-the-uk-filling-gap-left-by-shift-shutdown/ - LND 0.6.0 release https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/releases - Zap 0.4.1 release https://github.com/LN-Zap/zap-desktop/releases - Managing a Lightning Node https://1ml.com/node/02d419c9af624d0e7a7c90a60b9ffa35f4934973a9d7d3b4175cc3cc28b7ffcde1 - Binance https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/binance-teams-up-with-ciphertrace-to-up-the-exchanges-compliance-procedures/ - Energy waste https://twitter.com/MartyBent/status/1116340276463714305 - China bans Bitcoin https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-cryptocurrency/china-says-it-wants-to-eliminate-bitcoin-mining-idUSKCN1RL0C4 Shout out to this week's sponsor, Unchained Capital. Check out their 2-of3 multisig vaults today! https://www.unchained-capital.com/vaults/?utm_source=MartyBentNewsletter

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here on an overcast Friday afternoon. Got the masters on silent in the background here with our boy Matt O'Dell. How's it going, guys? For another edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. I do not have the price chart up. Let me pull it up real quick. That's what I was just trying to do. you find the block i'll find the price the bitcoin price right now on friday april 12th at 12 31 p.m in new york city according to the trade block xbx index is five thousand eighty dollars and seven cents and the block height is 571 363 571 363 nice where were we last week this point we higher or

lower price wise obviously we're higher block wise we're at a lower block count what's the price now i think we're hovering around 5 000 we were like right here maybe a little bit higher yeah maybe like 5100 or something um a lot to talk about this week big week um big day on the internet yesterday but before we get into that uh i gotta give a shout out to this week's sponsor unchained capital you freaks know all about them just had an incredible episode with parker lewis that i posted on tuesday if you freaks haven't checked that out go check it out um the first 15 minutes we go over what unchained is doing their ethos their security first mindset uh and their 203 multi-sig vaults uh that's where that's what we're advertising here

in this ad is the 203 multi-sig vaults so if you guys uh are bitcoin holders and you're looking for a multi-sig solution unchained has done a great job of creating an easy onboarding process with their vault product. Most importantly, they're opening sourcing this product as well. So if you want to benefit from their multi-sig scheme, you'll be able to do so in an open source way too. So Unchained Capital or Security First company in the Bitcoin space, you can set up a vault with their two or three multi-sig.

And then if you guys have some Bitcoin in the vault, you want to get a little cash, you can also get a loan very easily so go check out unchained capital today at www.unchained-capital.com we'll put a link in the show notes matt bang bang bang bang i was pretty pissed off yesterday clearly yeah i think we all were yeah so as you freaks may know by now julian assange was ripped from the Ecuadorian embassy in London yesterday and is being extradited back to the land of the free. The charges specifically are for helping Chelsea Manning

break a password code or attempt to break a password code. I think it was a password, yeah. Wasn't she acquitted for that? Yes, I believe so. Yeah. But now she's in prison again because she refused to testify in a grand jury case. Yeah.

against Sanj and WikiLeaks. Yeah, so Sanj is on his way to the U.S. Ecuador just got a $40 billion loan from the IMF. No, it was $4.2 billion. $4.2 billion, excuse me. And that was a month ago. Was it a month ago? But they were definitely greasing the wheels, right?

It was definitely prep. Yeah, it was weird. Like the ex-Ecuador president, Correa, came out condemning the present president. It was a weird geopolitical game. so on twitter yeah it's a crazy world we live in very crazy world he just tweets out a dig at uh moreno yeah cray is not the best leader ever though i actually worked for a company based out of ecuador so had a a bit of insight into the inner workings of the ecuadorian

government and stuff like that cray was not a very good leader either but um back to julian assange it's uh brought back a lot of we were talking about this before we started recording brought back a lot of memories of the snowden leaks not that wiki leaks helped snowden but they did help him escape hong kong um right they didn't i don't think they posted the documents but i think they're up there now they gave them lawyers and and helped them yeah but they did manning links and other leaks as well proving um that russia spying on their citizens and other stuff as well they did all those diplomatic cables you remember the diplomatic cables came out yeah diplomatic cables they did the dnc in 2016 as well um but uh it seems that uh this man is being

persecuted for journalism uh for for exposing the truth uh which is which is sad to see right because uh this is something we talk about a lot it's why we're in bitcoin and that's what i wrote in the bent yesterday is like uh we're in this to preserve individual liberty and sovereignty and freedom of speech at the end of the day freedom of commerce is freedom of speech um and it seems that this is a clear-cut case of freedom of speech right yeah it seems that uh the u.s is trying to curb that speech because they don't like uh people finding out uh what they're doing behind the scenes i'm gonna let you talk now yeah i mean i i thought you very passionate bent yesterday and uh but you just you really distilled it to what a lot of us feel um you know this has

been a long time coming he's been in that embassy for seven years in a fucking bedroom with just like police surrounding them you know it wasn't even it wasn't even like a real embassy it's like a half embassy it's like an office complex or something it's a very small area it's coming out now that ecuador was spying on him towards the end they cut off his communication like a year ago um you know yeah it's just it's a continuation of this saga uh i think it's kind of interesting you know wikileaks is entwined with bitcoin since since the beginning when when don't kick the hornets and s bro the first thing they did to to go after wikileaks was cut off all their donation ability and and bitcoin would enable them to accept donations when they couldn't accept it

any other way yeah yeah and then wikileaks has a very storied history with bitcoin that was like satoshi came out and said like that quote i just said earlier don't kick the hornets and s bitcoin at that point i believe it was 2011 probably wasn't robust enough to get that much attention so i believe they also wiki leaks agreed and held off from from announcing that they were accepting bitcoin i'm not sure about that you're not yeah i'm not gonna i don't know how that that exactly went down i'm not i'm pretty sure that's how i think they held they just started accepting donations i thought it was in like 2013 either way yeah either way um like assange right now could just have millions of dollars worth of bitcoin and no one will know unless he admits it

They could take his freedom, they could take his speech, they could take his life, but they, like, can't get that money unless he gives it to them. That's pretty crazy. Right? No, it's like, let's stay on this theme of, like, it's basically oppression, like, trying to oppress ideas and oppress thought and information, more importantly,

like, true information. That's, at the end of the day, that's what WikiLeaks has shared with the world. And this instance in particular proves that our efforts against the state in trying to preserve these rights are pretty ephemeral and pretty weak at this moment. And Bitcoin sort of presents this leverage that hasn't previously existed. And that's what I wanted to get at in the event yesterday was this is why we Bitcoin. like yeah i don't know like like clearly you know freedom of speech is protected in the constitution in our country at least uh and this seems unconstitutional to me but at the end of the

day that is all it's enforced by men you have to rely on men to carry it out not abuse it not do all this stuff the beauty of bitcoin is that that it it relies on this code and this game theory so you don't have to um rely on on individuals um or groups to to act accordingly right act in good faith right um yeah so just touching on that and today's ben actually it was a good topic to to sort of riff off of this uh julian assange story was uh a very illuminating post not even illuminated it's very good post by uh hector rosecrans bitcoin is a weapon and hector was in the navy and sort of explain the power dynamics that work on the battle of warfare and sort of tied in how bitcoin uh the modern day warfare is all about uh controlling the commons because then

you can control commerce and then bitcoin is a way for individuals to sort of take the control of commerce out of the hands of of this uh sort of state apparatus military industrial apparatus if you will he he uh touched on the metaphor of bitcoin as ak-47 right yeah ak-47 is one of those nick carter say that a lot yeah so ak-47s are a prime example of a tool that uh gave individuals asymmetric leverage over bigger foes so the example he used in his article was the uh the rice paddy farmers in vietnam were able to stave off the u.s military during the vietnam war um and then bitcoin yeah it is a weapon not a physical weapon but a cryptographic weapon it's the most non-violent weapon most powerful non-violent weapon we've ever had right and that's

beautiful too like a lot of people are pessimistic about the world and get crazy uh thinking about like hyper victimization and and what kind of world that will bring in what It's like a peaceful revolution, I believe. Again, I say peace and love at the end of every podcast, and I do believe that Bitcoin provides an opportunity for a peaceful revolution. Well, I mean, I think there's scenarios at play here that could be really messy, but that's not Bitcoin's fault.

Those scenarios are going to be messy anyway. Bitcoin will make them as less messy as possible, the least messiness. Yes. um an order more orderly hopefully orderly reset is kind of yeah hopefully um yeah yeah a weird day on the internet yesterday it was uh i feel like there was like negative vibes i checked to see if mercury was in retrograde it's not um there you go science yeah but staying on the topic of free speech another thing that was going on on bitcoin

twitter yesterday was hodl not did he get suspended no he didn't get suspended he was getting doxxed by fucking calvin air yeah so some of you freaks like craig wright is a fraud craig wright is a fraud um and some of you freaks are aware there's been that a twitter campaign uh to basically out craig wright as a fraud it's like hashtag craig wright is a fraud hashtag craig wright is a fraud and hodl not uh again calvin air and a pseudonymous bitcoiner named hodl not on twitter started the lightning network torch um and he took a picture uh with the with the shirt that bit refill made of the lightning network torch bearers up to a certain point and in the picture you could see his tattoos which are very uh unique identifying uh things

for humans if you have tattoos and they were able to dox him based off that which is pretty crazy yeah i mean i think they were doing other things too it was really fucked up you put like a reward uh on information uh in like shitty bitcoin sv tokens so like worthless reward but he still put a reward up uh so i mean i assume most of our listeners know but craig wright is the guy who pretended he was satoshi like three years ago and then helped push forward the bitcoin cash fork and all the bitcoin cash people all endorsed him and gave him credibility and bullshit like that and didn't call him out at the time when it really mattered and then he like like a proper psychopath forked that chain too and now he has bitcoin cash sv and he still has yet to prove he did

this whole thing where he was supposed to prove he was satoshi got cameras got like fortune or forbes or whatever some big newspapers all in a room together to prove it and did a fake Anderson yeah he he tricked gavin gavin's never never pulled that back and he like did like a wishy-washy kind of like i shouldn't have been giving any credence to anything but he never actually said that craig wright isn't satoshi and and here we are today and now this is a desperate man and he's suing all the people to try and get some get some attention yeah and there's i mean it's totally plausible and i most i think i do believe that he was probably around in the early days but i think he's trying to manipulate uh manipulate certain avenues to make it look like he he was more

important or more involved than than he actually was but the thing is like if he had coins from like even like block 100 or like block 300 or block 2000 that were like kind of early-ish like i feel like he would have flexed those as well you know like because the whole way for the whole there's no way anyone can concretely 100 prove their satoshi but you can prove that you you were very early and might very well be satoshi if you either uh move move coins from an early address or if you use that address to sign a transaction so you can cryptographically prove it that's one of the beauties of bitcoin the one of the beauties of satoshi's creation is that you can verifiably prove ownership of funds at a certain given time

with math so i feel like if he had any kind of reasonably early stashes he would have already flexed that as like his you know oh here's like a little half proof or whatever this is proof i'm satoshi and he hasn't even done that so who the fuck knows the tool of trust bro you gotta wait till 2020 because that's totally a move satoshi would make create like a global trust minimized ledger and then hide the keys in a in a traditional trust you know that's a total total satoshi move fucking bullshit man and a lot of really prominent bitcoiners and shit corners got fooled by this guy either they got fooled or they just went along with it because it was convenient for them but they gave him tons of credibility and and most of them haven't walked it back

still to this day some of them have even doubled down on it in like the last couple of months and It's just absolutely irresponsible, I would say. Yeah. People like to cling to that idea. I think it's the quest for the better Bitcoin, the quest to get in Bitcoin when it's like $200, $300 that still exists and clinging to the very minuscule possibility that Craig Wright of Satoshi is sort of leaving that

quote-unquote opportunity open for for the believers yeah they like choose to be ignorant about it right because it's uh they're they're they're hoping their bags will pump exactly uh and just to go back like so a lot of people use nims on twitter on bitcoin talk on irc all these different uh places where bitcoiners communicate we have a lot of developers that are that operate under nims nims are super important it's a privacy it's a privacy thing you don't want you don't want to be connected to bitcoin it that's the ultimate the ultimate thing you can do for your bitcoin security is to never tie your real name to bitcoin um so like we need we need to protect the use of nims people should be welcome nims should be encouraged more people should be

using nims than not that should be the default of anything they were talking about i mean yesterday in reaction to uh the doxing of hodl not everybody changed their avatars and names to hodl not it was so confusing right but it did it was like a glimpse of if everybody who had changed their avi wasn't specifically talking about this or it was just like putting ideas out there and you couldn't tell who was who the meritocracy of ideas could arise from that right like someone was like it's like they ran wasabi on my twitter feed and now all of the all the outputs look the same uh yeah so like if if we should anyone who attempts to dock someone who chooses to use a nim online should be absolutely tarred and feathered in the digital world like that should

not fly in this community so i was it's really great to see the outpouring support for for huddle not yeah and again obviously satoshi was a name probably wouldn't have segwit without shallon foray who's a name uh is jimpo a none you don't know i don't know either um but yeah there's a lot of names involved like some of the the best ideas on bitcoin twitter that i've learned from throughout the years have come from anonymous people that i have no idea who they are or where they are and that's the coolest part like people think one of the biggest complaints is like oh you don't have skin in the game uh you know because your public identity isn't linked to it like nims have to work extra hard to get any kind of credibility because they're because they

don't have that real that real life identity to latch on to in the beginning they can't say oh a fund manager and then listen to me because i i i manage all this money instead they're they're completely judged by their ideas and their contributions and and how and how they you know how they contribute to the community and so if anything that's like the most meritocric merit meritocratic meritocratic meritocratic meritocratic there you go way to uh to do things and that's that's i think that's really fucking cool no i do too and it's yeah we've and it doesn't know sex you don't know the gender yeah that's a big that's a big one i found out somebody who i thought was like a middle-aged man was a was a woman in her 20s a couple weeks ago

it was blown away i was like what the hell uh not what the hell like but it was just like crazy you never know it's awesome um yeah so again nims are important uh doxing's not cool not cool at all Drag rights are fraud. You can put people's lives at risk by doxing them. That's fucked up. And it's against Twitter's terms of service, for whatever that's worth. Yeah, I mean, and it puts people's families... Like, Jameson got doxed and had a SWAT team come to his house.

He got SWATed. Yeah, they sent the SWAT team to his house. Yeah, not cool. Be aware, freaks. The hodl guide. We meant to talk about this last week, but it slipped from the subject line, and we did not talk about it the hodl guide who put it together justin moon and no it was it's some it's a nim it's a nim and nim put it together with he took feedback from

a bunch of people yeah i think justin moon provided feedback some feedback yeah among others and uh it's all on github so you can submit pull requests if you want but basically goes through the basics of using wasabi uh doing your own multi-sig cold storage so if you want to do like a multi-sig setup similar to unchained setup but without having an unchained as the third party like he he uh the guide walks you through how to do that how to safely use a hardware wallet so he has different levels basically exactly he has like a full multi-sig cold storage setup which is basically multi-sig with ledgers and treasures and electrum using as like as the client to put that all together and he shows you how to use electrum personal server and stuff like that

it's really good i'm gonna i i looked it over it's it's i i highly recommend it yeah no i think what you just said is is the best part about this guy has like different levels of competency and comfort comfort um so if you're looking for sort of a comprehensive guide on storage this is the one that we like this week and we'll uh yeah read it among others yeah many others one of my favorites of all time is a rusty russell's uh un unremarkable guide to cold storage is that remarkable yeah i think it's unremarkable but uh i really like how this one used yeah that was a great guy i really like how this one it's it's the the the the cold storage setup they say is is a that that he walks you through or she i guess is a multi-sig hardware wallets which i think is like the best balance of

for pretty much most threat models it's the best balance of convenience and security and you could do a lot with it you can get like really creative with multi-sig how you where you store the keys you know how you split them up well this segues perfectly the next topic which we meant to riff on last week but again slipped our mind was different multi-sig scenarios that you can join in um yeah so you guys you can get really unique with these setups and obviously we've been talking a lot about two of three but there's many ways through which you can engage a multi-sig three of five three five seven yeah and i really and don't don't go crazy at the keys you know two of three is probably good for most people three or five or three or five but

yeah you can have like a one with a relative the thing about unchained cap which is interesting which i for uh we forgot to talk about last week which is uh i wanted to bring up is there's only one key in that two of three that unchained considers the the parent key so if you give for instance like you give your brother one key and he lives on the other side of the country and then you hold one key and unchained holds one key unchained will never sign with your brother's key he'll only sign with your key so you know your brother can't steal your money but your brother you need your brother to give you the key to to move your money and unchained can't take your money so you have this nice little setup here where that's relatively simple to do without

needing to necessarily trust uh your relative or whoever is holding that that third key yeah and if your brother decides to be an asshole and just leave the country and not tell you and and fall off the face of the earth on chains they're the sign for you um yeah exactly and then you pay that's when you pay their fee it's 10 bips yeah 10 bips on the transaction yeah um yeah and then think of other ways like if you're a business business partner um and you guys are are controlling a multi-sig wallet uh for business funds you can set up a certain uh scheme with that and have certain conditions for that it's very conditional you can have you make it like an if and function for for these setups in a lot of ways yeah you can just get really creative with

it and uh and i think for yeah for most people multi-sig is probably uh is probably the way forward and then also just on top of all that with all these scenarios like use multiple methods you know like certain like key generation schemes like could be broken you're done improperly so you want to just always have you know like the titanic you want it all to be compartmentalized so you can like the titanic or do you want to like the titanic theoretically was supposed to work you know like if if a portion of the boat got hit it wasn't supposed to sink right it was supposed to well obviously that didn't work yeah not not not how the titanic came out but how it was supposed to work in theory is is a good way of setting it up yeah the uh the uh the specs the specs had it

perfectly uh the implementation did not no i think both was fucked right but anyway you understand the point just use multiple methods and and don't put all your eggs in one basket that's just a recipe for failure yeah speaking of putting a lot of eggs in one basket coinbase has added es to their platform um you put this on the list i'm not i'm not i put this on the list because i think it's finally the end of me ever having an opinion on what they add because they've added ripple and eos back to back so like really there's no much lower you can go in terms of of complete centralized shit coins uh so like any the right like they've set the bar so low at this point and it never needs to be brought up again yeah and this wasn't on the list but something we

should probably mention was somebody i believe sold 3 000 bitcoin in the span of a couple minutes on coinbase pro earlier this week and they had to shut down the exchange for two hours for two hours they're too busy adding shit coins and they're not focused on their core product it's like fucking ridiculous well that's well it's ridiculous especially after december 2017 when the app was practically unusable and to think that we're almost two years or a year and a half away from that and they still they can't scale on a bear market it's like what the fuck like what do you what are you doing they have no i don't it's a sell order it's not like it was a buy order either they i just i don't know what their target market is anymore they have no like what the the

real traders aren't trading on coinbase pro as as as completely evidenced by the lack of liquidity when there's a three thousand dollar three thousand bitcoin sell order um and and i i i think the consumer retail traders are that one like a bunch of shit coins are are probably on binance and then you have the the people that are just stacking sats and they're mostly on cash app or other the american ones are on cash app and the other ones are on other services that isn't coin base so like what what is their target demo and how is adding eos fucking doing anything to further that i don't know they seem very confused in their product roadmap and they lost a good member of their team dan romero uh he's been there forever he's been there since like 2014 yeah he was like

employee number 20 or employee number 15 or something like that yeah um and now they have a new debit card in the uk too wait let's just get back on romero like i think that you know this is probably proof that he also agrees with me that they have zero fucking focus i've never met dan or talked to dan so i can't i can't speak neither have i but in his blog post the blog post was like super nice whatever didn't say where he's going next or anything like that uh but you know i i can't imagine being i i can't imagine how infuriating would it would be being in that kind of position watching all this go down yeah because like who the fuck want eos really xrp like that's ridiculous that's ridiculous to me again they seem confused and this crypto card

this uh the debit card what do you think about that they already had it i don't did they they had it here in the u.s i used it remember the shift card did they get rid of it yeah it got discontinued at some point i don't know why but uh so this one's uk only yeah um you can now spend ripple everywhere visas except that was like and i only use my shift card like once or twice and it was back when uh people were preaching that you should use bitcoin and i was like i'm gonna prove that i can buy shoes with bitcoin i think i bought a pair of shoes using the shift card or something like that but you're really just instantly selling it and then paying the person in usd yeah it's essentially i kind of wanted i want to see a movement where people

spend bitcoin at places that pledge to not convert it to usd um like i feel like that could actually like because then it's more closed loop closed loop we'll be doing that here at tstc at some point but anyway this this card isn't a bad idea it's you know it's like a centralized layer too and uh yeah it's it's nothing extraordinary but it does kind of obviate the need it completely obviates the purpose of these more centralized shit coins like to pay to spend ripple or to spend bitcoin with that card costs the same amount in fees because coinbase is holding it for you the whole fucking time right so it's not like oh xrp super low fees that doesn't save you anything there right it's ridiculous yeah um but

it's available if you're in the uk you're a coinbase user and you want to use their debit card just don't um on to more technical discussion which uh we're not uh very uh we're not very technical but we like to talk about lnd 0.60 was recently released uh i haven't been up to date with lightning development lnd specifically is this the one with backups or are we getting backups i don't think so i'm like trying to ninja search right now um there's something in there i i'm not gonna speak on this but it's good that we have an update i haven't really looked into it yet yeah uh and zap updated accordingly as well yeah zap updated 0.4.1 uh which has back 32 address support so uh if you're running zap uh definitely upgrade that i'm still trying to like

catch up to the feature set of the previous lnd version right i really i yeah i have to say like the only way i can learn is just to jump in and you jumped in pretty uh just like pretty head first we uh our our noddle lightning node uh is breaking there's uh hitting the leaderboards on 1ml.com it's it's all it's all the freaks the freaks are are doing great things the freaks and you being being reckless how uh it's getting a little bit reckless how's so how's the experience of managing it's less reckless than max you know that's true so it's just all a matter of perspective yeah um but what's what's the node management been like how what's your process been like you want to look up our node how many channels are we at if you just go to a 1 ml and

then type in stack and sats it comes up um the noddle has been great it's been performing like a champ um i think we're like top 60 by capacity and maybe top 70 by number of channels does it say there channel count 174 so we have 174 channels open capacity we're ranked 59th channel 65 that's crazy it's running off this little 400 box you know it's been handling it like a champ it doesn't lag or anything like that um management is i'm getting more used to the ride the lightning app which is really really useful so let's zap it's basically i use i use ride the lightning zap and jewel so let's dive into the specifics of management um is it like riding a bike hard at first but as as you sort of get used to opening channels and rebalancing it becomes

more of a process an easy process well zap has come a long way um it makes is way more intuitive now uh i yeah i think i think it's definitely there's definitely a learning curve and i still i learned like new things about it every day uh but it's it's more it's way more intuitive than for instance when i had my first uh node set up for when we when i sent the jack torch that was that was way more uh clunky yeah i would say it's way more like you open zap it shows you all your channels it shows you basically a bar that shows on which side your liquidity is on per channel so i go in there like i i make sure that that the that the big that the big channels we have opened with like like bit refill and koala stud and stuff like that are that they still have

capacity for the outbound because really that's all i can control right now they don't let you there's no easy way to balance those channels um it's going to get easier but so like i have to always make sure that we have outbound uh capacity to them otherwise the freaks that are connected to us can't get to those services uh the the bitcoin rabbi on twitter he just released the children's book yeah uh check that out we'll uh we'll post the link in the the notes but we even did one better because he told us he told me uh that he was doing you're going to launch ahead of time and he needed inbound liquidity to his btc pay server so we just have we have i opened up a big channel to him before the book went out and then i wake up in the morning after he

launched the book and apparently he was doing pretty well because most of my most of uh my outbound capacity to him his inbound was was on the opposite side like they had been used so i opened up another channel with him to make sure that the freaks could could pay with lightning if they wanted to freaks let's take a second to to reflect on how crazy that is like you want to talk about d5 like it's a big meme and in the the quote-unquote crypto twitter order right now this is similar to it you're creating liquidity for an individual that you you know via twitter i don't think you've ever met the bitcoin rabbi no i didn't i actually yeah um not yet nobody nobody's stopping you from doing that and it's just individuals coordinating saying hey you're

launching a book i want to help provide liquidity for you here let's open a channel nobody's stopping us there's no there's nothing stopping us it's crazy it's pretty fucking cool right it's uh reflect on that that's crazy anyway so you can open a channel with us by going to uh going to 1ml.com and typing in stacking sats and comes up matt they're not even gonna have to type it in we're on the leaderboard so we're on the home page at 1ml.com if you go to it or if you just like open zap or jewel and you type in stacking sats that you come up to one word correct yeah or you could type in tftc it comes up or rhr hit all the tags hit all the tags and we'll just keep coming back to this we'll do we'll do check-ins hopefully we have

backup soon that would be nice once we have backups then we're golden well that's i think that's the next iteration of this is we're going to set up a powerful node uh in this studio and maybe set up like like backup notes and stuff like that yeah of course first of many yeah first of many but it's been a fun it's been fun watching it unfold

it's the best way to learn you just learn I learned so much more by trial by fire right it's a a proverb or it's not even a proverb it's a thought I live my life by too if you were wondering

if you're wondering if you can make any money off of being a node you cannot at least right now you can't you you might very well be able to in the future but right now you're not you're not going to be making any money doing it because of the cost to open channels or yeah i the the fees that are being paid on the network are just minimal okay like yeah they'll rise with demand yeah exactly and also i think i think a lot of people are you know the network is is more uh uh run by ideal ideological insiders right yeah so they keep their fees low people don't know they don't know that they can change from the default fee yeah um no yeah it's again it's been fun to watch that grow and sorry if i'm a little sluggish today

freaks i had a banger of a dinner last night i got home late had to wake up early to write um speaking of bangers binance partners with cypher trace you put this on i don't know i don't follow binance too much cz seems to confirm that they are uh kyc locking accounts too i saw you tweet about that earlier this week that's interesting um you heard rumors of people getting locked out of their accounts yeah i have i got some dms from people i uh i have two reports seems pretty credible they had accounts for a while uh always used a vpn never did kyc was like the base base uh unverified account and all of a sudden they just get locked out of their account and they can't withdraw their funds unless uh they provide full kyc like id face scan stuff

like that address and so i tweeted that out both users were using vpns um and so i tweeted that out and cz basically gave me like a pr speak where he he admitted that that's exactly what they're doing uh they partnered with a service called identity mind a month ago both these reports happened like within the last week two weeks and then today yesterday they announced they partnered with cypher trace as well so who knows when that was and they're both chain analysis companies so it seems like binance is turning up the heat you should assume that if you're an unverified account on binance you can probably get kyc'd at any moment and your funds locked not your keys not your coins so just take that you know just be aware be aware it's out there

now because uh binance since its inception has been the go-to exchange for for people who don't want to kyc yeah their privacy but yeah yeah so now that looks like it changing their they have a huge target on their back but yeah yeah yeah binance let's talk about binance for a little i mean i'm not too abreast of the granular particulars of their operation but it seems they're geographically disparately located probably have many they have like eight different sub corporations like all different countries that's how they're doing their fiat rollout is all separate companies in every jurisdiction they do fiat okay with like papa binance out of malta which is like no fiat and then they have this dex not dex in the works which is supposedly i

have not really looked into at all so it should be interesting to see how kyc plays into that because most of these i don't i i don't think i've ever seen an actual decentralized dex i guess maybe like bisque is kind of close uh something came out about these dexes today too about like miners being able to front run the traders yeah that's always i think always been uh an issue uh it's like kind of it's hard to solve i might be impossible to solve right if you have you well no i think i think bisque i don't know about bisque i think this was about like another see the difference is those are dexes i think that run on like smart contract platforms like ethereum or something yes this is so all the code is out there and it has to get confirmed by miners and

everything like bisque you run a separate client on your computer it's like a full node a bisque full node yeah and you're communicating with each other yeah it's similar to hodl hodl it's not right necessarily on chain right it is yeah except for the multi-sig back and forth yeah but with these like smart contract x's the miners who are constructing the blocks are obviously able to see what people are attempting to trade right so they can front run the trades or not not uh confirm a transaction or something like that yeah um yeah interesting it's crazy all the but with binance anyway so like their decks is probably going to be pretty centralized but they'll probably use it as like a regulatory arbitrage move where they pretend it's not

and then uh they don't do kyc but who knows how long that holds up for you know i think i said this about a year ago and it was like really controversial at the time because everyone was doing their binance uh pump their binance love fest on on twitter and in the community uh but we've seen this play out plenty of times in the past where you have a a new exchange come in in this case it was binance they have no regulatory overhead they're not a target at all they're able to list a lot of shit coins frequently updated constantly just keep they have nothing holding them back just keep adding new users and then once they get really big they become a regulatory target and they have to start cutting down on what they have kyc no new coins

start delisting stuff we saw this happen with both polonius and bitrix like each of them before binance was king like each of them were king and now they're like empty like no one uses them right and then that's what's gonna happen with binance like at some point you know binance will just get too overwhelmed and then even though cz does seem like he's more of a cypherpunk type nah i don't know but he's he tries to portray that in the media he's gonna go for it he's going for it you know he's not he's not yeah well i have it on the top of my mind another one of my ticks that you need to like snap at me every time i do is right like after you say something i say right that's another tip i don't have any issues with these but i will i'll snap i'm trying to get rid

of these ticks they they annoy me when posted at it when i'm like listen when i'm listening to uh these recordings okay so i'll make sure to tell you that in particular thank you asshole um china they're banning bitcoin again the end oh the end is near the end is nigh what uh do we have the china bans bitcoin scoreboard in hand what number is this uh we must be over 15 i think if you include last bear market when it got banned all the time last bear market 2016 and i think china banned bitcoin like five times in the span of three weeks it was so crazy how many times they banned it and then it was never actually banned never uh this time this particular banning uh was brought to you by the the energy ministry in china uh and they want

to mine or excuse me ban mining uh not necessarily bitcoin yeah just the bitcoin mining which is there's a lot of bitcoin mining over there because they have a lot of excess hydro yeah now this uh puts uh a lot of the bitcoin haters in a weird predicament uh where they're saying hey uh china's banning bitcoin that's bad for bitcoin or is it good for bitcoin because it helps uh make it more geographically uh disperse yeah i think it's like it's it'd be bad for china and they probably will not do it um but bitcoin you know bitcoin will either be unaffected or it'll be a net benefit because we have we have a decent amount of miners in china it has spread out more recently um especially as like china's becoming more they like they want miners to

register and do all this stuff uh so you at least want to move some of your minds out of there i've actually heard of a lot of chinese miners moving to the u.s yeah because we have super cheap excess hydro in a politically stable environment that's a great combination for a miner right god damn it So this will just spread out the... You said it right. This will spread out... I like when you say right. This will spread out the global distribution of miners.

It won't do anything, actually, because they're not going to ban it. This is the most likely scenario. The China ban is the Bitcoin equivalent to the boy who cried wolf. I think that takes the cake for that parable analogy. I think it's more likely they tax... They were already taxing Bitcoin miners,

but they put a bigger tax on them you might as well make money from it yeah and this is actually not on the list either but i saw a friend of the pod joe weisenthal tweeted out about uh the barian oil fields in texas were uh increasing the amount of flared uh natural gas they were exposing to the environment and presented like hey this is why we have bitcoin companies like upstream data this is we can create efficiencies in these places no it was it was i think the line was that they flare more natural gas than they sell no then they would need to power all the homes in texas which is crazy yeah that's that's a crazy stat and talk about wasting energy right yeah but and this is uh and so i quote tweeted i was like this is perfect example of uh an

opportunity for upstream data to to show up on the on the scene and uh steve barber hopped in and let us know he's sending uh he's actually is working with some companies in texas not uh on that field uh specifically um so it seems that at least some uh energy producers are starting to wise up and realize that that bitcoin can help and obviously that's uh uh one of my favorite FUD to refute is Bitcoin is an energy waster when in fact it is an opportunity to become as energy efficient as possible on this planet

and the way that reality comes into or the way that vision comes into reality is just by entrepreneurs like Steve Barber making the shit and sending it down there and you have energy producers using

it and noticing the benefits. It's just going to take time. Like all this, it's going to take time and patience. yeah exactly and but i mean it's the easiest sell in the world like you get to like you'll make more money yeah if you run this miner and then it also benefits the environment but they you know they don't even have to care about the environment it just happens to benefit it that's just a positive externality of the incentive system it's the best incentive ever right i think this environment would be the our environment would be way better if if everyone could make money at protecting it

yeah again like solve the problem with incentives and this is something that we've posited on this podcast frequently in the last few weeks but what if satoshi uh marketed bitcoin as as like a synthetic battery instead of like a money system would people uh rally around it harder um we'll never know but it's an interesting thought experiment i mean it is a synthetic battery right you can basically store energy as money instead of as jewels right that's pretty cool damn it i didn't even realize you say it that much until you brought it up it is annoying i'm sorry freaks um that was the it for the topic list do you have anything what time are we at we got we got 10 minutes left that that recent episode

you had with parker was fantastic thank you don't bet more uh don't risk more on usd than you can afford to lose that again i'm very excited that i was able to record that podcast parker somebody i've been talking with about fed policy for a couple years now and anybody who's listening to that podcast can tell how how knowledgeable he is on the subject uh of fed policy over the last decade and i we were talking about it before we hit record but uh for any of you traditional finance types out there or any of you freaks trying to uh help traditional finance uh people in that industry uh come to understand bitcoin this is a great episode for them uh because it really presents the case for bitcoin by showing how inefficient our current system is yeah i mean

The other day, I had a two-hour private podcast with Parker, a.k.a. a conversation, and he's completely blown away. That conversation just got me going. It's funny, right? Because this information's been out in the wild. It's just out in the wild. Anybody can access these transcripts and go through them.

It just took one man to actually read the 300-page transcripts. and put it into layman's terms of how inconsistent these central planners are with their policies. How long is the waiting period again? Like they release it way late. They release them four, I believe four or five years after the meeting. That's why we finally get to see what like the talks that were leading up and after the 2008 crisis.

You get the meeting minutes, I believe, the day or the week after they happen, but then the full transcripts of uh of actually what was said uh verbatim in in the meetings comes out uh four to five years later i can't remember i believe it's four i think it's like election cycles type stuff um well it wouldn't be election type stuff but point is it comes out later than than the meetings uh way later after the meetings i can't even speak dude i was up to like 3 a.m last night i had to wake up early here you go had uh gotta hustle gotta hustle um what else uh i listened to a good podcast this week uh what bitcoin did's podcast with uh nick

carter and pierre it's worth a listen that's a good listen a couple freaks that have been on this podcast they talked about uh lightning network yeah it's part of his lightning network series yeah um and that yeah so that's going on this month we got shit coin week coming up in a few weeks here in new york city are you excited yeah a lot of people come in you know excited to meet some faces meet some faces i'm both like excited and yeah i'm excited yeah for anybody i'm not going to consensus like they can go fuck themselves but yeah i don't think i'm gonna go to any obviously i want to record so i don't think i'm gonna go to any of the conferences but that's the beauty of this week is you don't have to get any like if any of you

are on the fence out there like should i buy a ticket you just come to new york hang out and find a party or yeah like the side events and stuff for and just people meeting up is where it's at yeah conferences are just riff on conferences for a second here it's just like conferences where you go for like booth to booth well consensus is like everything that's wrong with conferences all packaged into one really expensive event right god damn it um and not just like the whole just like a very like late capitalist type thing like just walking booth to booth nobody really wants to be there you're like squished with thousands of people but i mean not all conferences are the same right it's just true consensus is like particularly particularly

horrible there's a lot of good conferences that's true uh i'm talking about this this like booth to booth yeah and this week is always bad they're gonna uh ethereum land is also consent can uh coming down on us as well because they have the week before or like they start off they start off with their conference and i think in brooklyn yeah uh consensus is is not too far from where we record i believe they're done uh i think the eth conference is like bushwick or something like that ethereal or ethereal ethereal um yeah so everybody's gonna be in new york uh in a few weeks that's actually that's where i met bitcoin sign guy last year was that uh was that shit coin week oh yeah i met a lot of people at shit coin week last year

yeah including yeah including bsg yeah so i'm definitely looking forward to it it'll be a good time yeah um any plans this weekend not that i'd like to share with the freaks it's gonna be it's gonna be a good weekend though everyone should you know have a great weekend have a great weekend if As we described earlier, if you're looking to learn more about Lightning Network, set up a node and start experimenting with it. Yeah, open a channel with us. We'll presumably open channels back. I've still been opening channels back, but it's getting a little bit reckless. We need to wait until backups to ramp it up more.

Yeah, that'll definitely open up a floodgate of even more recklessness, I would imagine. but because we have so many channels it's like really hard for me to like look through them to see who's opened a big channel with us so we can open it back so if you do like either dm me or get me on telegram or keybase or wire my pgp key is there if you want to use the pgp key to communicate but we can you know i'll we can reciprocate yeah um you know where to find us freaks uh sorry if this episode was a bit sluggish uh that's all we got cheers stay humble stack sets peace and love