TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.04.15

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Satoshi's Treasure https://satoshistreasure.xyz/ & https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeawYh0POJhlKjaUM4Gor240vH_yVN9Urni7VjPYlh4Z5rlRA/viewform?usp=sf_link - Reports from CoinMetrics and TradeBlock dispute Reuters $100M whale story - https://tradeblock.com/blog/analyzing-the-bitcoin-price-surge-in-april and https://twitter.com/coinmetrics/status/1118603910522994688?s=20 - Wasabi Wallet hardware wallet support in testing - https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/blob/master/WalletWasabi.Documentation/Guides/20190416HardwareWalletTestingGuide.md - lLND 0.6.0 - static channel backup --- release notes: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/releases --- Channel backup guide: https://wiki.ion.radar.tech/lightning-technology/research/static-channel-backups - Lightning Powernode Launcher will default to Tor https://twitter.com/pierre_rochard/status/1117567495680950272?s=20 - Nodl update- https://1ml.com/node/0331f80652fb840239df8dc99205792bba2e559a05469915804c08420230e23c7c - hodlnaut BTCPay fundraiser - https://weareallhodlonaut.com/ - US Sanction Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua - https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/714552854/trump-administration-announces-measures-against-cuba-venezuela-and-nicaragua - Proof of Solvency piece - https://medium.com/@nic__carter/how-to-scale-bitcoin-without-changing-a-thing-bc4750dd16c7 & https://blog.coinfloor.co.uk/post/183567327051/provable-solvency-report-60-march-2019 - paywall.link and lightningscratchcard.io Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Unchained Capital. Check out their 2-of-3 multisig vault service 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 Ben on a very overcast Thursday afternoon here in the studio for another edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. What's going on, Matt? I'm really excited for today's episode, guys. Yeah, we just spent like 45 minutes going over the docket. We basically just had an episode. I don't know. Okay, but anyway, it's going to be great. Yeah, before we jump into everything, we're going to shout out our sponsor first, Unchained Capital. You freaks know all about them. They recently released their two or three multi-sig vaults growing on their product suite, which started with a collateralized loan product. We had Parker Lewis on a couple weeks ago on the podcast. If you haven't checked that out, go check it out.

And then go check out Unchained's vault at www.unchained-capital.com slash vaults. That's www.unchained-capital.com slash vaults. Don't forget that, Dash Freaks. and we'll put a we'll put a special ref link in the notes as well uh before we jump into the topics the bitcoin price according to the trade block xbx index is 5277 dollars and 66 cents i believe a little bit higher than where we were last week it's basically moon man what block are we at uh we're at five seven two one nine seven it's a lot of blocks a lot of blocks a lot of We, uh, 630,000.

How many blocks away from that are we? About 90, 89,000, 88 something. What is it? What's the block height again? 630,000. 630,000. Wow. Way off.

Way off on that. Yeah. I was just way off on that math. 58,000 blocks. Yeah. 58,000. I was off by. To having.

Yeah. I added 50,000, 40,000 there by accident. um that's what that's what happens when you try to do mental math we're great at math here at the rabbit hole recap um yeah speaking of math got a lot to talk about first topic of the week has to do with cryptography uh satoshi's treasure uh was dropped this week not his treasure his treasure his treasure no but it kind of sounds like you he he dropped his treasure his like hardware wallet yes satoshi left before treasure ever became a thing i believe but treasure like a pirate treasure there's a there's an international treasure hunt for a million dollars

worth of bitcoin have we confirmed the bitcoin amount is around 200 bitcoin i think it's going to be around 20 billion satoshis 20 billion satoshis which is which is 200 bitcoin yeah um um but they the address is hasn't been shown yet they're gonna that address is gonna be one of the clues like the way they disclose the address is an upcoming clue yes for you freaks have not heard who have not heard yet uh there's again an international treasure hunt for around 200 bitcoin it's ready player one yeah it's basically ready player one in real life here with bitcoin in 2019 with bitcoin so the deal is there are 400 shards of a private key uh that will be just that will uh a thousand no they split into a thousand but you only need 400 yeah okay

so there's a thousand shard are you sure i'm i'm 99 okay yeah so well uh thousand shards you need 400 to put together a private key which gives you access to this bitcoin and then you don't need any permission or anything then from that point you just send it whoever gets it gets it gets it yeah so there's like all these crazy game theory things that go on at the end there when you like get when you get close to 400 so yeah so let's jump in let's jump into that so it's crazy so three keys or there's only been three disclosed right now three shots i think so yeah unless we're behind the game yeah let's air high five we have all three shards there you go bang bang so yeah it was released earlier this week uh eric melzer and i believe he's behind this unknown unknown yeah

um and yeah it's really cool so the first three shards were found and somebody was able to read the uh the html css file via uh checking the index john cantrell yeah john cantrell of of uh the website and was able to sort of brute force the third key yeah he the he brute forced the second two the second two keys yeah because it was local all the code was local but and they were just short words but yeah and this but this was sort of intentional it seems right to yeah eric was eric melzer was on the citizen bitcoin podcast and at least he pitched it as as it was part of the not all the clues are going to be set up this way where you go to the website and and you enter a password and then part of part of the whole thing was he was wondering if if people were going

to uh figure that out yeah and so they're trying to discern the the mental acuity of of the treasure hunters and and make the game harder uh as it goes on depending on on that on how good the treasure hunters so the crazy thing here is um he kind of it seems like he envisions it as a reoccurring type thing like he wants like this is it seems like this hunt will they expect it to take like they they refuse to say but it seems from context that they expect it to take like a year maybe two years max and then they'll have another one and another one and another one and at the same time they'll have all these little hunts that will be for smaller prizes so it's not like everyone you know has has to go for the the big prize yeah there's like crazy secondary

markets that can be built on top of this game as well yeah they're gonna have like an app and they're gonna allow you to sell keys between people and stuff like that and they'll have a leaderboard it's very very ready uh ready player one-esque where there's gonna be a leaderboard of teams we have a team out there the dpr avengers uh and we plan on giving if we if we find when we win when we win when we get the treasure we're gonna give 10 to free ross to free ross yes um so we are accepting uh applications for team members we're looking for wizards people that are uh smarter at cryptography than us and uh are geographically dispersed as well it's important to have people in different parts of the world for this treasure hunt this is so ridiculous

that this is like a thing right this was yeah awesome i'm i'm very excited yeah so it was cool um yeah so they they had people walking around at different parts of the country or hot hid different qr codes in different part of the country they were looking at different parts of the world yes yeah so there was one here in new york and times square there's one in boston by mit one in san francisco i believe so those were like all the same key right yes and then they had another batch of keys that was in asia and then i think they had a batch that was in south america is this how bitcoin goes viral can you see this catching on like in the mainstream i think i think so right like you don't have to be a bitcoiner to be excited about finding you know a million

dollars worth of cash right and like you can't do this you can never do this with any you couldn't do it with fiat if they want to do with fiat it'd be ridiculous imagine trying to coordinate like all the payment providers and all the different countries and stuff be ridiculous yeah bitcoin we've always talked about uh bitcoin and ar like sort of geocaching and dropping qr codes like in parts of the world and doing like a physical treasure hunt like that which will probably come in the future but you don't even need the ar aspect of it you can completely completely cerebral and in a puzzle math based and i mean some of the clues might be ar based you don't we don't even know maybe they are like they do have an app in the works so there's there's a

bunch of different possibilities here it should be interesting to watch it play out now and if you're a bitcoiner has ever seen ready player one while you were watching that movie if you were watching that didn't think bitcoin enables this yeah well yeah i mean it's like ridiculous that bitcoin wasn't included in the in the book to begin with was it written after bitcoin was created i think so right isn't like a relatively recent book i'm not positive i'm like pretty sure it's a relatively recent book all i know is i like a lot i like reading a lot of new sci-fi and i almost bitcoin has kind of ruined a lot of it for me because if they don't incorporate bitcoin into it it's just like i it's unrealistic do you watch mr robot yeah yeah and you know

bitcoin's incorporated so it makes more sense to me yeah i've never uh i've never watched mr robot but told i should it was like i was thinking you should definitely watch mr robot and especially as like a bitcoiner it's a really good you can like pretend it's like fake studying you know what it possibly could could go down um i was thinking like uh with like our wiki leaks conversation last week and uh julian assange uh that was one of the light bulbs for me with wiki leaks how powerful it was that i you would watch like action movies and drama movies and half the movie would be like irrelevant because the plot would be you know they find something that they have to tell the world and they're trying to tell the world but all the bad

guys are stopping them they all they had to do is just drop it to wiki leaks and just completely destroyed the plot the born series completely destroyed yeah you just why didn't you just upload it to wiki leaks uh yeah there's not much uh not much new news on that front right i think he's still in the process of being extradited still london yeah i'm not sure um yeah so toshi treasure dpr avengers we're looking for teammates we'll put the link in the show notes uh if she can help us out we're uh we're gonna go hunting i mean i think yeah everyone should be going and go and hunt him for this thing this should be fun and and if there's a lot of traction and a lot of activity with it then you know there'll be a lot more of them i i imagine yeah and the uh another

thing to think of the prize is uh one million dollars right now but depending on where the price of bitcoin yeah it'll be locked in bitcoin amount once at least we'll know for sure once we see the address yeah when i think we should lock that down sooner rather than later what the amount yes yeah i i i i'm 99 sure it's pre-funded it's already funded but i you know i haven't seen anything for myself so imagine the fervor around this hunt if it's like the middle of a bull market i was thinking like just if if we if things got a little bit crazy in december and that's when it kind of happens that could be uh that'd be pretty crazy just like if we were in like a similar bullish kind of situation as 2017 while this prize was while people had like 300 keys or

like 350 keys i can see a whole cottage industry being birthed out of this game that's all i'm gonna say next topic oh one more thing one more thing they ask for when you if you go to the website i think it's satoshi treasure.xyz yes they they can send you notifications like of new clues and stuff and there's an email and a phone option that phone option is optional you don't have to fill that in you do not you do not you don't want to give melzer and crew your your phone number yeah or if you have a burner that you want to use for the treasure yeah you know you can use a burner email yeah um yeah so definitely duly noted that that that phone is optional it was not clear but now now that i think they put optional on it but still it's worth mentioning

um so the price pump the earlier in the month uh april first and second people ran with that story uh the hours and days after that 20 percent jump overnight from april 1st to 2nd uh this week trade block and coin metrics have come out and sort of disputed the popular uh narratives that were going around and basically proved that bitfinex was the one who led the charge yeah and i guess coin metrics also said like hit btc yeah and hit btc um so there was uh i believe right after the pump people were saying was three exchanges coinbase bitstamp and cranking cracking yeah cracking maybe um it turns out i think so it wasn't so but that we talked about on the pod i think like the the reuters article oh that's what we're talking about how to pronounce it reuters

reuters the reuters article uh you know it was based on some random dude in fucking england who was like one guy did it so there you go and no one really knows anyway you're just looking at the volume numbers on the charts yeah no one knows i mean i i guess the the main crux is bitcoins were actually bought like the price oh yeah a lot of bitcoins are bought a lot of bitcoins are sold and right now a lot of bitcoins are being bought and a lot of bitcoins are being sold yeah it's like people get into this thing in their head where oh like we're in a bear market everyone is selling no like literally there's another person buying on the opposite side it's a weird mental block thing to get around yeah if somebody's buying

somebody's got to be selling on the other end otherwise we'd be at zero um no but it's like how is that not obvious right after the fact like how did it take us like a few weeks of jumping into it like how how is it like not obvious on trade block like hey i mean i think it probably was obvious i guess this is more of a question into how could the news get so uh well because all all reuters has to do is just publish an article with a one-line quote from some dude you know in in london and that's their amount of due diligence and work and and trade block and coin metrics like sat down with the data and like made some reasonable conclusions based off of all the data they have but they still even both of them like they never

made it concrete but you know reuters just runs it on the headline bitcoin pumps because of 100 million dollar trader i saw marad was coming at trade block for their their choice of uh chart they changed their color yeah because their colors were like all blue so it's hard to uh yeah it was it was a hard hard uh chart to discern it was a pretty funny tweet by murad um oh this has been hot this week i talked about in the bed you tweeted about it 2019 seems to be the year of privacy in bitcoin uh this week in particular i'm gonna say it uh Pierre pushed, or I don't know if he pushed it yet, but he plans on the next major release of the Node Launcher

to make it a default to Tor. So anybody running Pierre's Node Launcher will have sort of inherent privacy at the network level and the messaging level. And then on top of that, Trezor came out and said they're working on... Wasabi. Wasabi and Trezor are working together

and Wasabi and a bunch of hardware wallets are working together to make it so that you can use Wasabi with your hardware wallet and make it easier to mix your UTXs. Yeah, so my understanding is they used the same integration that Bitcoin Core recently put in? Yeah, so they will put the GitHub page in the notes and so far it's compatible

or the the test they've run with two hardware wallets the treasure model t and the cold card on windows ox osx and linux have passed their test they plan on testing uh digital bitbox keep key ledger nano s and treasure one uh and running those through the gauntlet soon um so it looks like wasabi will be compatible with hardware wallets in the near future yeah so this is fucking huge news it's a really really big deal explain the gravity of this to us so before when you needed to use your hardware wallet and you wanted to use it most people used the the trezor ui on the web the web browser and the ledger ui on the the ledger live app that runs on your computer or now even with the with the new ledger they have the app on the phone

because it's got the bluetooth um basically when you did that you were leaking all of your transaction data is going to ledger or going to trezor you're going to their servers so you're just telling them all of your addresses all your balances everything you know hopefully they're not storing that information and sharing it but um you have to trust them so the alternative has been to run electrum personal server with your full node and then connect through electrum to your electrum personal server and use because electrum supports hardware wallets because if you use regular electrum then you're connecting to a random server and that random server could be logging all your shit so this finally gives hardware wallet owners like a turnkey privacy

focused alternative to all that because electrum personal server by the way that hodl guide It has how to set up an electric personal server if you want to do that. But it's a more complicated setup. With Wasabi, you just download it. You can use it on any of the platforms. It's got a nice GUI. Automatically connects to Tor for you. And then if you run a full node on your computer,

it automatically pulls blocks from your full node. Or it can work in light node mode if you don't want to run your own full node. So, it gives you, like, the most private way of interacting with a hardware wallet. And it's, like, super user-friendly. It's fucking crazy. I love how Wasabi has made, like, UTXO selections so straightforward. How has this not existed yet? Yeah, the only ones who came close was, like, Electrum.

But the labeling system in Wasabi is just so much easier to use. It's, uh, ain't no par, Adam. done a great job UX wise and UTXO selection, something huge and something that should be at the forefront of these wallets, in my opinion. So it's great to see now with hardware wallets, you'll be able to one use Wasabi and then I guess just an added benefit is their,

their natural UTXO selection. So, so my understanding, I haven't tried it with a hardware wallet yet. My understanding is, so i might be wrong here but my understanding here is that there's a you still have the traditional wasabi hot wallet for your coin joins because they need to be constantly signing those transactions and including them in coin join transactions um and then you also

can interact with your hardware wallet through it so you can you basically like still are like transferring in and out of wasabi so it's like a new treasure bridge but via wasabi or something like that almost yeah i mean like you can interact with your hardware wallet through wasabi and you can interact with your coin join wallet through wasabi and and if you want to move funds between the two then obviously you can do that at the same time yeah it's pretty badass pretty badass and it's a really big deal and i think uh ragnar tweeted out today like a lot of people were saying 2019 was going to be the year of lightning but it does look like it's shaping up to be the year of very good hardware and privacy uh improvements um as lightning infrastructure

gets built out i think it's i mean it makes it ridiculously easy to use use your heart i think one of the reasons so few people run full nodes is because you can't easily just use your hardware wallet with a full node and uh that changes now with with this with this new wasabi update that that changes and that's that's really cool by itself and let alone all the knock-on effects that it's going to do with more people do using coin joins because they're they can use their hardware wallet right in the app yeah making it easier will certainly certainly incentivizes and this is something i've been thinking about a lot uh this week i've been wanting to write something in the bent but just haven't felt comfortable like does and this is something i'm very interested to

get your perspective on like do these improvements is it inherently improving bitcoin's privacy or is it just better use like bitcoin's not inherently more private it's just being used better or is the fact that a bunch of people are mixing utx's make it inherently more private you get what i'm getting out there like bitcoin hasn't changed yes exactly um i think it makes using the bitcoin network for everyone more private right because when you start doing widespread coin joins it just it just helps everyone yeah uh but does it make bitcoin any more private i could you say yeah is there like a thresh yeah exactly that's what i said like a semantics argument i've been having in my head it's there that argument is there i think

Yeah. Is there a threshold of mixed UTXOs that would make Bitcoin more private? I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. Well, the big thing is like if you mix in these techniques that like Samurai is working on and stuff where it basically every transaction looks like a coin join, even if it's not a coin join, then you get some really interesting things when you have, you know, masses doing coin joins. And then the other thing is, if they ever tried to do some kind of blacklist on Coinjoins, it's way harder to enforce the more transactions that have gone through it, right? like what are they gonna like if if you start banding because they can't just ban direct coin joins into exchanges it would it would be like a couple hops so then how many hops you know and so if everyone's using coin join and the vast majority of of bitcoin users are using coin join on the regular then any kind of any kind of blacklist on coin join histories becomes basically the equivalent of like banning bitcoin self-ownership in the first place like self-custody

in the first place yeah so that's what i'm trying yeah is there what is the threshold at which the exchanges and the on-ramps who would have the ability to block these transactions when do they throw their arms up and say hey there's nothing we can do about it well i think either way it's like probably unenforceable because someone will accept them you know so yeah and just becomes like un unrealistic to have to check the full history of like any particular utxo like that's ridiculous and and uh onerous on the on the receiving party so in a lot of ways i think exchanges should welcome coins that have gone through coin joint because for them you know what they don't know can't hurt them they you know they prefer to not know it's like a bodega

owner getting a five dollar bill exactly that it reduces liability i think part of the reason people even talk about taint and all this stuff is is because the capability is there that's what makes people think of it in the first place like if you didn't have that capability then it'd be way less of a discussion yeah uh it'll be interesting to watch this uh play out and And hopefully, this Wasabi hardware wild integration will incite more coin joins and increase the anonymity set. Yeah, like run your own node and then connect Wasabi to your own node. If it runs on your computer, you can use Pierre's. You want to really be a power user, you use Pierre's PowerNode launcher, which is going to default to Tor.

you run it on your computer it automatically runs in prune mode so if it needs to so it won't take up too much space i think what it's like takes up like less than 20 gigs and then you install wasabi and wasabi automatically connects to that that bitcoin node and then if you if you run coin joint transactions not only do you help yourself because if you got those coins through like a kyc type exchange then you can de-link them from your identity so you can help yourself going forward but you help all bitcoiners by improving the liquidity of of coin joins so join us where are we join us where are we uh on the wasabi anonymity set or how many bitcoins have been run through it well last time i checked they had 26 000 on the and last time i checked they had collected about

16 bitcoin worth of fees it's like it's kind of cool they keep the fee address is is a static address so you can see that's how you kind of measure usage but you have to remember that that could be gamed you could have like 40 computers all running coin joins from the same person it's true uh that's why the more the merrier yeah more the merrier and that wouldn't surprise me at all if that's going on yeah exactly um that's how you would try and attack it if you're going to try and attack it you would you know if there's 70 participants in a coin join you try and be as many of those participants as possible it gets really impractical the more people use it so yeah so when in doubt mix so let's get these uh these hardware wallets tested out wasabi

implemented and start and start coin joining people i really well the treasure t already works and i think that is like and the cold card the best the the treasure t is like the best entry-level hardware wallet like that i that's the one i recommend like wholeheartedly and then cold cards like great for power users yeah so those are like two huge ones that's awesome um speaking of awesomeness lnd 0.60 uh the latest big release of uh lnd was released this week and it comes with static channel backups which i called out last week i knew it was going to include them you weren't certain you know i gotta go back to the tape error on side of caution um yeah the release notes they're highly encouraging that people upgrade if you

are running lnd nodes and this is yeah we're upgraded yeah we're upgraded on our our nodes if you want to open channel not all made it super easy how so there was just he pushed the update and then there was an update button and you you press the update button and you wait for it to update then you just stopped the lnd service then you updated that and then you started it it was like three button clicks super intuitive yeah well shout out to the model team for being on top of that it's pretty badass they got it out really quick and yeah so we're we're fully upgraded now uh this channel backup it's an interesting sort of way to to back up everything it basically makes it so that uh you're able to get messages out to your peers your channel peers and politely ask

them to close so that your funds get back to the on-chain address right they force they force close the channels and it goes back to the address yeah and this is incited via message that you send to your channel peers uh so what does this mean what does this give you a sense of you know just step in the right direction you know you don't you probably won't lose everything if something like catastrophic happens yeah uh it's still not ideal because you don't have your channels up anymore you know you have to and you have to pay all those transaction fees to close all the channels uh so ideally you'd never have to use it but it's a nice it's it's good to have a like a like a fallback this is actually a good caveat into a subject that was not on the docket but i

saw you uh and nick batia who's going to be in town next week on the podcast talking about our uh our gnar on our on our our routing node which is uh was it the uh node accrual rate is that it yeah the node accrual or yeah node accrual rate accrual rate and sparked the basically trying to discern uh the amount of interest earned via routing lightning network payments this is what nick battia is trying to to sort of develop ideas around and a process around and the concept is you can uh sort of discern a percentage gained uh from your node because of routing transactions and fees that you accrue but you brought up a good point that our node is probably net negative because of the the cost of opening and closing channels on chain well he

brought up the cost of the noddle as well um but we they sent us that for free so it would be unfair to include that uh but yeah i mean we have the on-chain fees we have the cost of the hardware uh whatever you're running it on right we have internet you have to pay for you have to pay for obviously electricity but that's minimal um yeah and so it all comes out it all comes out negative now the other thing i said you know it's first of all it's very early to make any kind of conclusions um i kind of disagree with nick in a lot of ways that i don't think that people are going to be honestly reporting what kind of fees they make so that just throws that whole thing out the window and then the third thing is there's other benefits that are really hard to quantify

in running your own full node right like self-sovereignty and being able to verify your own transactions and increased privacy. So if you're already running your own full node you just end up running a lightning node as well. That's kind of... That seems like a variable cost dependent on

the individual. Yeah, and it's hard to put that cost totally on running a lightning node. Yeah. That was an interesting conversation. Maybe we'll link to that if we can find it. I'm sure we'll be able too well so i recently discovered how to like adjust i'm like just just learning on the fly

i discovered how to change the fees of the channels from the default because we were just running on the default for a while so um you're just gonna you you lowered our base fee right so so lightning light yeah lightning 10 mil satoshis or something like that the way lightning fees work So on-chain transaction fees work by the size of the transaction in bytes, like how big a file it is. The Lightning transactions go by how much money you're sending, right? So there's a base, which is just automatic charge, and I think that defaults to one Satoshi.

So I lowered that to 0.1 Satoshi. And then... 100 mil of Satoshis. Yeah. so it makes super small payments like ultra cheap and it basically free and if you're making big payments it gives us a little bit more of a big so then yeah i changed the rate on the satoshi's per byte yeah the the variable rate i raised that but like not that much i'm not it's hard to visualize at those small numbers how low it is so i'm i'm just i'm just experimenting i'm

just gonna i'm gonna just keep changing it around but it's always gonna be low for at least for now trial and error baptism by fire i mean part of the reason why i think it's gonna be hard to make like reasonable like extra reasonable returns on these things is because there's always just like some guy who is just doing it to you know like help the network or whatever who's just running big channels all over the place with very very low fees yeah the ultra yeah the altruistic uh node runner yeah it's super easy to undercut especially with like private channels and stuff then other people won't even see it yeah the private channel is more what i'm more worried about for developing these

these uh statistics and rates and stuff like you could be running tour nodes right like tour lightning nodes i'll be running them by default mostly the people running like like if well oh yeah hopefully the majority of our nodes will be running tor by default but uh you know then people aren't going to be honestly reporting their fees why would they do that yeah there's no incentive to except like the public if there's like publicly traded routing companies so they have to so that's that's what i'm getting at is there'll be like a two-tiered or a bifurcated system of like an underground lightning network and an above ground kosher network well that's like kind of like the one of the reasons just jumping head first into

into like running this node because um i feel like you can't like if you're not trying to not make that happen then you can't really complain about it and i think once you have like reliable backups like a lot of people will i think a lot of people will you know prefer not to send it through send their transaction through some major routing node we're a major routing node now no i think we're like uh we're just just like a nice i don't know like it's like the anti it's supposed to be like the anti-routing node like it'd be nice if we could like yeah just like have a uh i've i have i didn't i've closed any channels that ellen big has opened with me so i've i've just i'm disconnected from him your big ellen big conspiracy we have huge channels with like pierre

i don't know it's just like the friend i guess the friendly routing node yeah like there's the friendly community routing your local routing node yeah two freaks that you you freaks know at least we hope you know us a little bit by this point we're here to help i just want i want the network to be as distributed as possible like the least hub and spokey as possible yeah it seems like it's getting easier to make that uh that uh envision reality a real reality yeah i mean i think the big thing is just like really reliable backups like once you can give people that you of peace of mind well lnd 0.60 took a big step in that direction so if you haven't upgraded yet upgrade uh in the github release notes uh they say it's highly encouraged uh because

um you can't participate in the static channel backups yeah due to the nature of some of the bug fixes which were made during the implementation of the new scb feature users are highly encouraged to upgrade to this new version uh staying on lightning though a couple cool apps that we wanted to bring up ellen paywall link is the first one and this seems like a pretty simple thing you put any any link behind a lightning network enabled paywall basically like a bitly but for for people who want to make satoshis on this yeah it pops up a little lightning invoice and then your the visitor pays a lightning invoice they get redirected you get paid and the guy who runs this gets paid a bit so you could like paywall anything right like yeah but like

once they get through then they have like the regular link right it's still really cool i think it's a really i like simple tools just like little things it's a very cool uh it's a very cool proof of concept uh we'll definitely share it in the the show notes paywall dot link and then the second one we want to highlight is lightning scratch card this one's really cool uh so this is uh not exactly the same idea but what it is is you you pay micro payments to scratch off a piece of an article uh a bit at a time and leaving the rest of it uh sort of communal paywall yeah it's a communal paywall that you can pay so like right now i'm looking at uh an article that has only been 25 revealed and starts it stops like three quarters away through the first paragraph that's

all i can read right now but if i were to pay 100 satoshis i'd be able to get a few more lines you're not going to contribute and help help people read the rest uh no my note configuration right now is not ideal i i i scratched off like half a paragraph of a different article the other day it's pretty cool it's like uh it's an interesting idea for a paywall it's a very interesting idea because then everyone because once one person scratches then everyone can see that part that is now visible you can yeah this is a very cool like gamified way of interacting with content and it's something that's only possible with like a with a with lightning network yeah well i mean yeah pretty much yeah yeah and it could probably be enabled with other

technologies in this space but the the fact that we have without having to do like kyc and everything yeah like you could probably yeah you could probably like integrate it with stripe or something if you wanted to that'd be a pain in the ass um yeah so these things are getting built and it's cool to see them uh we are building similar things uh we're gonna be we're gonna be working on like similar content uh was that a little teaser gamify ideas as well a little teaser and both of these we open channels too so that that's like another reason that the note is really useful is because if if we talk about something then we we can open a channel to it ahead of time check the note right now channel count 207 207 channels open i think that's

that's pretty high yeah i mean it's it's not pierre's node what's yeah but look up pierre's node type in uh power node users lightning power users is what the node is oh pierre's got a thousand two hundred twenty insane holy crap insane he's been fighting the good fight shout out to pierre um what uh what else have you learned managing our node anything anything new from last week no it's it's been going great it's uh the noddle makes it extremely easy uh staying on lightning a little bit not directly involved with the hodl not btc pay fundraiser was run over the last week that was badass that was badass the website was badass

it was all run through btc pay server run through btc pay server and it was very interactive so you could tell like it was you could tell in real time when people were donating it would show whether it was an on-chain transaction or lightning network and the amount just came down in a ticker that was so fucking cool yeah it's uh it's crazy how and again like gamifying this stuff like gamifying uh a fundraiser for defense fund uh it was fun it was like you know I donated through Juul, and it clicked because you go there, you click donate, and then it just pops up right through your browser and just makes the payment instant. And then you see it pop up on the little ticker that everyone sees. That's pretty fucking cool.

Little bar moves, global payments. This is the theme of tonight's rabbit hole recap is gamification from Satoshi's Treasure to Scratch Off to this. like is this the way like we get bitcoin to the masses is sort of gamifying all the stuff well i like games so i'm fine with that is this for uh i think it'll be effective is this going to be adopted by rich billionaires looking to stash their wealth or people looking uh to interact in in a in a gamified world i mean i think it's already been gamified to many degrees i mean like you have the the whole trading element like we had what okay casino right you know you we have BitMEX is like a straight...

That's like a video game. That's how it's all set up. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was going to say, okay, because, you know, bring me back to the

okay wood chipper, which also made me think of the article that Nick Carter dropped this week about proof of solvency and the horrid history of exchanges

and proof of solvency. Yeah, and I think OKCoin specifically faked their proof of solvency, right? yes they did they deleted it there's like a if we'll link to the next piece as well but there's a laughable history of exchanges saying that they would provide proof of reserves and then either never following up following up and only once and not repeating it or following up and

completely fabricating it like okay coin did there's one exchange coin floor out of uk that has produced 60 months in a row of uh proof of reserves but they're tiny little yeah they're tiny little uk exchange but they've been around for a while i think 60 months is five years they've been around for at least five years that's a pretty long time in this space providing proof of reserves every month that's 2014 that's pretty long yeah um so we have some unknown exchange leading the way on uh on proof of reserves which is something we probably don't talk about enough on this podcast is is something that is enabled with this technology that should be demanded by the market do you think so well it's never really been possible before bitcoin yeah um i think now

that it's possible that yeah it should be demanded i mean at least some i'm surprised some services haven't risen to the occasion just to attract business you know like at least a couple of them should be doing full-blown badass proof of reserves yeah and coin floor there if i went and read their their monthly report like it's very very nice put together very easy to read and very step by step here here's the hash of what what we prove we have you can go double check it cross-reference it using these steps and so it should be like it should be like a monthly investor report it should be at the bottom like oh by the way here's our proof of reserves to give you some comfort that we actually have the money

that we're saying you have access and ownership of on our platform. But then on the other side, they have all these USD and Euro liabilities and whatnot that they can't ever give you proof of reserves of that. So you're still, you know, the proof of reserves isn't a bulletproof. i guess like especially something like an etf or something like that proof of reserves is extra i would say it's like extra important right because then they can give you the full 100 what you need to see there's no fiat holdings on the side that that complicate the picture yeah because like an exchange could have full

they could have their full bitcoin lot you know full everything they need for bitcoin the right amount of bitcoin have no no usd in their bank accounts if they needed to if there was like if they were using proof of reserves that's what they would have to do well that's what nick that's what nick brought up in in his article as well like some of these exchanges too could easily game this by like buying bitcoin moving it to a wallet exactly before or something like that and then it's the opposite effect because then the exchanges that are hurting and that are below the amount they should be at they're like insolvent um put themselves in even more risky position by getting into like highly volatile bitcoin instead of holding cash positions

right so that could even have like a knock-on effect it'd be worse yeah but this is in the current paradigm we're living like in a in a future hypothetical bitcoinized world do you think think it makes more sense yeah i mean there should be like proof of reserves for everything yeah i was thinking uh yeah and like proof of reserves and like multi-sig just lots of multi-sigs with you know like when you enter different contracts and stuff you'll have like a third party uh art you know just executor yeah exactly um handling any disputes and and not only will you have proof of reserves you'll also have proof of no one party can move it yeah slowly but surely slowly but surely be aware these things are coming we're getting

there quicker than that's what i thought we were gonna get in the pen i wrote about i wrote yesterday it's like bitcoin's quickly becoming more uh scalable more efficient more private more robust uh another thing not on the list that that came out this week block stream push an update for the satellite it's now extremely more efficient for cpu on the cpu or or less uh burdensome on cpu so they're running it on the same chip now as the noddle yeah which is pretty cool yeah so it's it's just making it more accessible with with cheaper hardware uh so again that's a it's a different transaction relay option to use as the satellite and that's just getting easier to use now um and it seems like everything's getting easier to use quicker uh

like the the wasabi trezor like they were not even trezor just wasabi hardware compatibility i thought that would take a while to implement but it seems like it's pretty easy he kind of teased it on our show with us when he was on with us yeah it's crazy to see that that exists sorry it feels like just six months ago we were we were talking about testing out wasabi and it's already implemented and yeah i mean they're just fucking beasts over there they're just fucking killing it all the time keep killing it yeah i mean that wasabi news is it's just like such a big deal that i could tell people you know like buy a hardware wallet use it with wasabi you know have a full node use it with wasabi should be good for 99 of situations yeah uh it's happening

faster faster than i expected uh moving to the macro scene to the geopolitical scene seems like the u.s is sanctioned uh cuba venezuela and one other bank i believe nicaragua nicaragua yeah there you go uh with the a thousand dollar remittance cap every three months no no so just cuba has a remittance cap okay just cuba has a remittance and then they sanctioned the central bank of venezuela and then they sanctioned uh financial services business in nicaragua um but the so the remittance cap is that's the big one that's the big one especially where bitcoin's involved yeah um so that's three billion dollars that americans at least in 2016 i imagine it's gone up that americans send back home to the cuban relatives um every year three

billion dollars and now they're capped at a thousand dollars a month per thousand dollars every three months yeah so a thousand dollars a quarter four thousand dollars a year uh finally some good math some easy math thank god uh it's pretty pretty fucked up but again it proves uh a hurdle through which bitcoin can route around yeah i mean it's just like this is it's kind of ridiculous that any given country can tell you that you can't send to like like the european union and uh i have someone else but the the european union came out you know like they were like this is ridiculous it's like a horrible idea they they're not having any sanctions on their side

so bitcoin can freely move in and out of the country through the other you know for arbitrage or whatnot now and it highlights a very hairy situation that we're finding ourselves in especially as the uh geopolitical landscape heats up and uh sort of tensions rise on the international stage once you have these sort of disagreements uh between like un countries nato countries when you're sanctioning stuff just inherent uh attack vectors for friction and and uh and tumult that bitcoin is sort of just doesn't even have to worry about it's sort of completely separate and could provide the solution where people are like all right this stuff is getting to a point where it's unworkable it's too political it's too much of a bureaucracy bureaucracy excuse me that this

just presents an easier uh less system with less friction yeah i mean like at the end of the day like bitcoin makes these kind of rules unenforceable and that's why when people say like oh bitcoin is too expensive you know it's too complicated all these different things like that's the cost for being able to send a payment you know back home to your family members when you otherwise wouldn't be able to like you're not going to be able to like send ripple payments back to cuba you know like that's because it's a centralized system like if people do that like they will shut it down um so so like that's that it just highlights the value prop like so clearly and then when you have like venezuela central bank getting sanctioned like that

highlights it from a completely different angle like this you know the cuban um story is is is more about the individuals and people but but uh in in venezuela like the the corrupt government over there is going to want to move more into bitcoin because they're because their central bank is is sanctioned yeah and speaking of not even corrupt governments well yeah corrupt governments and sort of uh countries with the ability to take bigger risks because of their current situations we have not confirmed this it's been hard to confirm there was a news story about uh meetings in the middle east it seems that afghanistan and tunisia are talking about exploring have you looked into that at all i've looked into it and like so like there's one little

blurb and i think it's not real yeah it might i haven't i didn't have a chance i bet they said blockchain so that's here's the it was a horrible source it was news btc which no one should ever go i didn't go to news btc there was uh there was a this was in asia today oh someone tagged us in a news btc uh thing on twitter so i went to i went to try to find like the the at least there's something closer to the source uh asia today and bitcoin was brought up but so was blockchain and hyper ledger there's no way something could have been lost in translation but at least they're talking about i really i don't know i guess i don't know well if they let's this is this is a this is a risk it for the biscuit uh not full information call out here because hey if if

afghanistan is thinking about denominating some bonds and bitcoin you heard it here first that's the that'll be the real you know that'll first of all i really don't think it's i don't think it's a true true story but yeah no i think it's i think the meetings definitely did happen and the conversation was brought up it's what are they trying to make a gov coin or no they'll probably just do like a blockchain bond or something yeah whatever it's just buzzwords buzzwords all right sorry for that buzzword i think i haven't looked into it so maybe you know maybe you're right maybe it's good if i am right you heard it here first i think that'll be a game changer when you know afghanistan starts issuing that's when the world will start taking notice of

bitcoin um this is something you want to talk about there's a couple apps in europe we've been obviously stacking sats on the weekend make sure if you're stacking sats you're doing so in a very obsec uh stack sats responsibly yeah stack sats responsibly don't flaunt big buys on twitter especially if you have a real name uh but obviously we've been stacking sats use wasabi use wasabi as well we're u.s citizens we can only use certain apps uh we've had european freaks uh join in our stacking set Saturdays. Uh, and we've seen two apps in particular,

get bitter and Amber. Amber's Australian. Amber's Australian. Get bitter is, is Europe and Europe, France or France and England. Now that's separate. Right.

Yeah. I don't know if they officially exited yet. I mean, they're still part of Europe, right? I don't know. Even though they're not part of the, it's all very confusing to me.

No one will ever know. We'll never know. I heard they have to vote again though. Yeah. So get bitter is a cool, it seems kind of cool, but but uh i guess basically you give them an address and then whenever you transfer money to them from your bank account they just automatically put the deposit of bitcoin in your address so

they're like non-custodial fiat to bitcoin gateway it's like an azteca almost i mean but you're like sending them bank transfers but if you do an automatic transfer like you can basically basically every week just funds get deposited to an address of your choosing it's kind of cool that's very cool but so i don't know if it's legit or not so if any of you have used it it doesn't allow americans so if any of you have used it let us know if you hate it or you or if you love it yeah or if it's just kind of decent yeah then amber just seems like a amber looks badass yeah it's it's uh explain it it's like i think the app is called like acorn in america yes where they like take your change and invest it for you like any purchase you make if you have

like a little spare left over to round up to the dollar like they take that amount and they buy bitcoin with it yeah so like goes with the involuntary stacking stats like like yeah like constant small buys constant typing uh so i don't know you australian freaks if you're using that app or have used it uh let us know uh we're we're trying to uh expand the apps through which uh you can uh stack sats because cash up's only us so only us and we have a global audience it's crazy so it's nice if we can leverage them too like that's awesome yeah so like tweet it at us maybe yeah tweet it at us keep stacking sats but also stack responsibly that's a couple weeks ago people we're getting a little outlandish out there it's gonna be okay marty i hope so bitcoin has always

get a little bit outlandish it's true comes with the territory yeah um that's all we got on topics this week got a few minutes to riff what uh what are you thinking um well i have a couple things to riff about this time since i didn't have riff matt brought notes matt brought notes i guess it's not a riff if i if i brought notes um so uh we have i have i got two more reports of people getting their kyc blocked at binance of not getting their non-kyc account locked and kyc forced on them and so far like the common denominator is that everyone was using uh just like a vpn service like a shared vpn service so i i think they might be like flagging vpn ipn ip addresses yes if you're trading shit coins on

binance be aware uh they're tracking ip addresses yeah i mean they're obvious well we always knew they were tracking ip addresses that's just to be flagging ip but yeah they're flagging them enforcing kyc so if you have a non-kyc account with them just just i mean you should be using a vpn when you connect to their service which is kind of um ridiculous but that they would flag them in the first place but if so if you do just you gotta assume that you're gonna have to give them kyc at some point or just forfeit your funds so just be aware be aware uh yeah i haven't had a phone for the last three days it's been pretty therapeutic let's riff on this i've gotten a lot more sleep i'm not having a phone like next to your bed you haven't had a

phone for three days three days that's pretty crazy like why uh so you should get a new one i am trying to get a new one i was telling you this before the podcast you obviously weren't listening yeah but you told me but i did you did not say three days three days is crazy three days yeah well these telecom companies move at a snail's pace sprint's website is one of the worst websites i've ever used uh and i just dox my my phone care now you got to change it that's good because sprint fucking sucks so you should change it but no it's been terrible i'm like i mean you're telling us i'm almost ashamed to admit it but i'm getting off the family pen now um she's like kind of dox i don't know you're just doxing yourself left and right yeah all right maybe i

won't riff on this long story short it's pain in the ass to to get off the family plan start your your own plan and keep your number yeah just stay on the family plan forever that'd be badass too yeah i feel it feels dirty at this point you could always just like pay them under the table with bitcoin when you're a married man just just send you know just send your send your parents lightning payments for you can give them a little bit extra too to make it worth their while you just stay on it i'm not sure if uh lightning's at the point at which my parents are using it yet yeah so just send them on chain payments that's true um so i also thought it was interesting just to get back to bitcoin that uh luke martin interviewed arthur hayes recently oh yes

and he's talking about spx swaps right uh yes he is he is talking about you know being able to trade basically uh equities yeah but yeah like derivatives of them or whatever um but he also reiterated their firm stance against kyc so they don't accept us customers but there's no he like re reiterated like how important it was that they that they don't do kyc and i just thought in dichotomy to like how cz and binance is currently handling um their kyc procedure that's that's pretty interesting well this is what you said last week towards the end of the episode is any exchange like every exchange their their way to uh get market shares to come in be anti-kyc aml allow people to just rush on and eventually they get too big to not kyc and they wind up

doing it but bitmax is arguably one of the biggest economic drivers in bitcoin and is still a stalwart in denying that and uh um one of my blank and arthur arthur hayes like reiterates that last week as he's coming out like yeah we sort of have to comply now like is arthur hayes the most badass ceo in the world right now i i yeah i'm i'm a i'm a huge fan i think he's just it's like just even from where they they set their principles like in the right place to begin with because they have the whole business is run through bitcoin they have no fiat you know entrances or exits they have no alt coins they allow you to trade alt coins but they only accept and withdraw bitcoin everything is just priced and based in bitcoin like that is from a security

point of view um and from like a regulatory arbitrage point of view it gives you like super you know movement there big long-time thinkers there long-term thinkers uh and their research page bitmex research is one of the best blogs in the space from a from a tactical perspective yeah they just put out like how much miners have lost mining a bitcoin sv bitcoin cash sv i think it was five million dollars since inception 5.4 million dollars and they're just susceptible to attack at any given time and so they've just been that just useless security and it seems like they're uh they're not going to be traded on many exchanges for much longer yes they did get delisted cz dropped the hammer on them um political play i have a lot of complaints

about cz but he's also just he just does what he wants to do that was pretty like why would they like kraken also delisted after that and they were like people were giving uh jesse powell shit about it and he was like they're suing us they're like they're fucking suing them over the handling of the checkpoint bitcoin cash's checkpoint um which also you know but they're suing them over that and he's like well you expect me to list your coin while you're fucking suing me yeah yeah don't bite the hand that feeds yeah so then bitcoin cash changes feed you liquidity but we've said for a while that all these guys were like it's all trending to zero this just just look at the people who are involved freaks they are just like just from a pure character

analysis they are terrible people that's all i'm gonna say i mean yeah i guess it's a questionable argument but is it though yeah because you but it's still the fork is is a minority fork it's worthless it's centralized it provides no value whatsoever and it's also you know controlled by some very horrible people. Yes, this is true. All right, we're four minutes above our one-hour time. Thanks for joining us this week, freaks. Matt, any last words?

Stay humble, stack sets. Peace and love. Okay!