TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.04.22

Episode Date: April 26, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Bitfinex gets sued - https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet?documentId=vIexA1b0spKOnK_PLUS_ZUGTJ3A==&system=prod - https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/356 - Erisx and TdAmeritrade - https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/04/24/erisx-is-testing-its-new-crypto-exchange-and-tdameritrade-is-one-firm-looking-to-link-up-with-the-market/ - Ledger Windows phishing attack - https://twitter.com/Ledger/status/1121439219086495745?s=20 - Wasabi update - https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/releases - https://twitter.com/matt_odell/status/1121203954145222662?s=20 - Lightning Labs releases Beta Neutrino Lightning App for desktop - https://twitter.com/lightning/status/1120735863225237506?s=20 - assumutxo proposal by James O'Beirne - https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2019/04/09/ - Satoshi's Treasure update - tinyurl.com/dpravengers - Samsung invests 2.9M into Ledger - https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/samsung-invests-2-9-million-in-ledger/ - Gemini integrates SegWit fully - https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/gemini-wallet-now-fully-supports-segwit-protocol/ - Bitmain rumored to be abandoning BCH - https://twitter.com/btcking555/status/1121699148523352064 - Casa privacy campaign + tor update - https://blog.keys.casa/casa-privacy-and-data-protection-policy/ - finalmessage.io - Run a tor relay node! - https://blog.torproject.org/new-guide-running-tor-relay Shoutout to this week's sponsor, 21Lectures! If you're looking to learn how to build on top of Bitcoin and LN check out 21Lectures.com today!

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here on a rainy Friday afternoon drinking some LeFrag Scotch. Is that how we pronounce it? LeFrag, I think so. I'm pretty sure. Badass. Badass is right. It's very tasty. Yeah, what did I call it, like LePrague before or something like that? What, you sent me in the text message?

Yeah. You were completely off. I don't know, LeBlat or something. Yeah, I got, you know what? LeBecta. if you guys read the bent you know i'm not the best speller um before we got a lot to talk about this week uh for the last month it feels like i've been like oh slow week slow week very very big week this week a lot to talk about may run over an hour the list is very long today feels like bitcoin again right it feels good before we get started price of bitcoin is 5100 on the dot oh

excuse me that's according to bitstamp we are using the xbx index which is at 5100 on the dot as well we are at block uh 573 365 and this edition of tales from the crypt is brought to you by our friends at 21 lectures 21 lectures mission is to bring more developers to bitcoin to the bitcoin ecosystem with more in-person courses lecture by world-renowned bitcoin and lightning developers 21 lectures courses teach participants the fundamentals of working with the Bitcoin blockchain. They cover cryptography, the structure of transactions and blocks, how they are chained, smart contract languages, the lightning protocol, as well as software toolkits to develop on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and lightning. To learn more,

go to 21lectures.com, 21, the number, lectures.com. We will put that in the show notes. We're always looking for more developers, more eyes on the code. So if you're a developer or look in to learn more about Bitcoin, 21lectures.com. Matt, like you said, it feels like Bitcoin again. Bitfinex, back in the news, the New York State Attorney General's Office officially sued them on behalf of New York traders. Apparently, they're missing $851 million. And it's a whole sort of mishmash of shadiness, uh shell companies the government big story bitcoin fell what three hundred four hundred dollars yesterday it like slightly dipped under five thousand yeah at least on at least if you

were trading on bitmex you got like liquidated if your like liquidation price was at like 49 60 or something in my opinion uh holding up pretty pretty good i i considering the news i didn't expect it to hold over five thousand dollars overnight which it did which is pretty i think it's pretty bullish like even if we go down from here the fact that we didn't just go straight elevator down is is is pretty fucking bullish no i agree it's very bullish especially with it's just more proof that bitcoin's a scam you know so right well let's jump into the specifics so yeah yes this news dropped around like 4 30 yesterday um according to the uh new attorney general's office uh bitfinex is connected with this company crypto capital which holds their

in custodies their funds um and bitfinex went to get 851 million dollars to sort of facilitate their their business and crypto capital came back and told them that the government uh the u.s government and portuguese governments had seized those funds so i believe that's where we stand but new york hasn't admitted that the funds have been seized i don't think yes bitfinex says the funds have been seized crypto capital says they've been seized new york says they haven't been seized another interesting thing about this so again bitfinex has a long history history uh in bitcoin a checkered history uh they were hacked of 119 000 bitcoin in the fall of 2016 and yesterday uh some of those bitcoin moved for the first time since the hack i believe yeah which is weird very

weird which some people say points to it being an in that that previous hack being an inside job which already made a lot of sense that it was an inside job a lot of these hacks are inside jobs um the weird thing is it wasn't that much bitcoin it was only 300 bitcoin only but like in terms of in terms of that hack it wasn't that much of the hack and 119 000 bitcoin 300 is not that much yeah so who would i you know i'm trying to like work through the reasoning and like unless you're like a complete fucking dumbass insider at bitfinex yeah why come out of the woodwork yesterday why even move it like where like first of all it doesn't look like they moved it to an exchange it doesn't look like it went to an exchange address it's a legacy address it's one and

second of all they're missing 850 million dollars like you what you you move like one and a half million dollars that doesn't do shit yeah very perplexing um so what does this all mean where are we matt well first of all like crypto capital it seems like they started working them relatively recently this was mid 2018 when the when the funds got seized um you know bibfinex and tether have been operating in legal gray area if not just straight illegal for a while at least based on u.s regulations um you know everyone says like tether competes with all these other regulated with all the regulated stable coins but they really don't because the whole point of tether is that you don't have to do KYC AML.

That's not the case. Well, it kind of is the case with some of the regulated stable coins, but I don't think it will be the case going forward. They're just kind of also in a legal gray area, and that'll just get cleared up, and you'll have to do full KYC. And we've seen some of the regulated stable coins get funds frozen and stuff and force KYC on them. So when you have that,

and you have billions of dollars of fiat in your custody, like imagine the crazy shit you have to do to move that around the world like and not get it seized by the u.s government so they did a lot of questionable shit and one of the that one of the elements of that was trusting this fucking company with almost a billion dollars crypto capital and and look what happened yeah so let's play devil's advocate for bitfinex here they're obviously operating in this regulatory gray area with tether um which was birthed in the aftermath of this hack correct and bitfinex because bitfinex doesn't do kyc either yes uh so they're yes they're operating that regulatory gray area from bitfinex perspective from what i can tell with

their sort of posturing is like hey we're trying to run like we're trying to facilitate our our exchange and our business make it so users can take money in and out of the exchange uh they seem to believe they can take out a loan based off their their balance sheet and and sort of facilitate the withdrawals on their uh exchange and it seems like withdrawals have not been affected at all by this so they took a they took a loan so according was from what we know right now it seems like they got the money seized it was bitfinex money almost a billion dollars so then they loaned it took out a loan from that money from tethers coffers and exchanged it for shares of bitfinex um and and that's where the charge is actually from the new york ag

like the government the government seized their funds allegedly and then waited for them to try and cover it up and then charge them with fraud and money laundering for the for the actual cover up of moving those funds so who's at fault here which is classic that's classic gov gov move yeah it's like a trap um you know i'm not gonna defend bitfinex bitfinex is just fucking sketchy ass exchange like you shouldn't keep any money on it i just want to play devil's advocate yeah just want to play devil's advocate what they're posturing so this is how they're posturing and also the other to play devil's advocate for bitfinex is they'd block all new york users like intentionally yeah then that if you go through the uh the court proceedings the official

uh lawsuit i guess they they specifically like mention uh the time period before bitfinex uh closed off new york users yeah and also i mean new york users could just use a vpn and connect to bitfinex and the only way bitfinex could stop that is if they did kyc to every single one of their customers just to make sure that none of them are new york based which is fucking ridiculous that you have to like compromise the privacy of all your users just because one state in one country you know cares about it yeah so what does this mean is this uh the sly roundabout ways that the u.s government is starting to crack down i mean i don't even know if it's sly roundabout like i think this is exactly how they would do it especially since now they have all these

regulated stable coins that are like registered in new york that it kind like all of them came out of the woodwork they're like oh we're not tether you know so it's like that's the perfect play uh and i i expect this kind of action to happen to like a binance as well um what's interesting here is if you compare this to bitmex's business which is probably the the only exchange that pisses off american regulators more uh more than bitmex is probably Bitfinex. Bitmex is probably number two. But Bitmex, even though they give you exposure to USD, they never handle fiat. So that whole issue that we were talking about where you have to move billions of dollars of regulated US dollars all around the world,

they don't have to do that. They just opted out of that and they only allow Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals. And that makes them way more resilient to this type of action. I know we've done this before, but let's just bask in the brilliance of that first principle. business plan that bitmex has it's so smart like even like a binance like binance is is so much more fucked because they handle fiat and that and they also accept uh you know tons of alt coins that come with their own security risks and whatnot yeah so where do you think uh this goes so obviously uh are they going to go to court they have to go to court correct or settle outside of court uh don't they just do like a duel and like whoever

no i uh trial by combat well another it's interesting that the tether peg is still holding holding right and ibifinex has processed like 200 million dollars worth of withdrawals since the news and it seems like they're running smoothly a lot of reputable people coming out on twitter saying they had no problem uh withdrawing as long as you withdraw with with crypto with bitcoin or like ethereum or something uh don't don't withdraw with usd like that's who the fuck knows what'll happen there yeah so do you what do you how do you think this ends do you think bitfenix gets shut down do we end up fines uh slap on the wrist uh confiscation tether could never exist like regulated so there's no like i don't think there's like a gentle way

out uh for tether and because bitfenix is owned by the same people like there's no gentle way out here i thought they were fucked after 2016 and they somehow dug their way out of it with that whole little token scheme they had which is questionable that's what tether came out of correct no tether already existed at that point did it yeah but they created that bit bitfinex token pegged it to tether no it was traded against tether but it was technically pegged to to uh shares on the bitcoin that were stolen yeah yeah it was going to be paid back in full over time but you could buy the shares early you could buy it get sold sell out early yeah so this was like the first big use case for tether i would argue right i don't know i think the big use case

of tether was like back in the day like it was like from what we talked about about transferring us dollars around and getting bank accounts and stuff it was so hard for exchanges to get access uh tether getting born i think it was born in like 2014 2015 tether being born allowed all these little exchanges, even stuff like Binance, to really blossom because they didn't need a bank account. They could just use Tether as their US dollar source. And I think that was really the major use case was basically Bitfinex got to share their fiat access with a whole ecosystem of little exchanges. Yeah. That's crazy how it's evolved over the years and where it is now. We'll see where it's going uh we've been warning you freaks about tether for a while now here's another

uh sort of warning tremor from from the authorities uh is bit finnix uh vindicated no he was he was completely fucking wrong um and i think that's what's important here uh why was he wrong because his claims the whole time was that tether was unbacked and there was not actually money in reserves and that that pumped up the price of bitcoin and that the price of Bitcoin was artificially inflated and that we should sell at $800. So now we're sitting at like $5,100. It appears the New York AG is saying that Tether was fully reserved

until mid-2018, right? Not November 2018. Was it like May 2018 or something when it happened? I believe July was when the problem started. So they were fully reserved up until that point. November was when the AG asked for more information or something like that. Yeah, and then here we go. and like right and right now like it looks like all this could come crashing down and bitcoin

price is you know you'd still be up over 5x from where bitfinex told us to sell uh and and and we all knew that at any point bitfinex and tether could get hit with money laundering they didn't even need this they could just be like people transfer tether to each other and don't do kyc and they're terrorists and that's money laundering you know like it's super easy to hit them with a money laundering charge so like my prediction here is um the u.s government will continue to try and fuck bitfinex and tether and bitfinex and tether will continue to try to not get fucked and and like eventually they'll get fucked that's the prediction it's uh it's a catch me if you can scenario right yeah so who knows how long they could they could handle it right but

another interesting thing that i don't know if uh i think it was confirmed in the course i think there was rumors of this going around but i think the filings sort of confirmed it was that uh bitfinex has been using the bank accounts of friends of employees to send to send users uh money which is like people were reporting that like they were getting transactions from just random people this is exactly the kind of creative bullshit you have to do you have to interact with fiat and you're like an illegal business yeah it's just crazy so like just know that like this exchange is doing some pretty asinine things like they're using individuals that like that makes sense to me like what other option do they have like that's exactly

you know that's exactly the creativity that tether gave them those are some ride or die friends like yeah you can just no they were getting a vig everyone was getting a cut i'm like i mean we don't know that but i would be surprised if they weren't it's a massive risk for the big yeah yeah i guess we'll find out i mean i wouldn't i wouldn't lend bit for next my bank account but uh yeah so it definitely is a massive risk i think they get paid i think they probably got paid uh yeah i mean you gotta you just this is why bitcoin exists it's like every time this kind of thing happens it just proves why bitcoin exists uh is that it's not easy to move us dollars around unless you have permission yeah it's uh it's funny these these these attacks

are glaring endorsements is this an attack on bitcoin it's funny that it's a glare it's a glaring endorsement to people in the know but to people like have you read any headlines today i haven't read any of the headlines but it's definitely like like bitcoin ceo money laundered 850 million dollars or whatever yeah it's coming right off the heels of quadriga it's not great press either for for bitcoin overall um froggy voice here uh yeah that that hurt it was i worked with some canadians who were affected by quadriga and they saw this and and were like oh look another quadriga and i was like god damn it on the bright side at least no one's talking about that fraud craig wright anymore well you just brought him up we were going to try and not bring him up at

least i called him a fraud yeah it's true well meanwhile we're having a conversation on your favorite subject which is tether which you don't like talking about the second i saw the news broke that was the first thing i thought about i was like oh marty's gonna love talking about this on on rhr well i'm like i'm okay talking with it now because i think again up to this point the price has been stable and tether's been a much cause for fud in the past i don't think it's as as potent of fud as it was in the past and in previous it was like unsubstantiated fud and like at least this is like actual fudge yeah there's like there's like chat logs and and evidence of what's going on and there's there's like a lot of fear here especially for like

alt coins and any any any person who owned who has money on exchanges is at increased risk here and they might not even realize it like binance holds a shit ton of tether a bunch of these exchanges hold huge amounts of tether so like really you shouldn't i mean you should never keep much money on exchanges but right now more than ever uh you know like if you're using exchange that that holds a lot of tether like you shouldn't probably withdraw that to keys you control good advice good advice and before you do that uh check out the hodl guide which we have shared uh on this show before i actually shared that today somebody emailed me looking for uh for a way to to create a wallet i said hey here's the huddle guide i keep it that is like along with

like three other links i keep in my bookmark toolbar when i get dms so i can just send them out um next topic eris x and td ameritrade are testing out bitcoin trading uh for their 11 million customers for td ameritrade's 11 million customers so eris x is a an exchange that lets you trade uh spot contracts for bitcoin uh based out of chicago uh they're looking to level up and they're it looks like they're partnering with more legitimate uh sort of investment platforms td merit trades testing it out with them we were talking before uh it allows you to trade bitcoin spot prices but we're not sure if there's any underlying physical bitcoin being delivered or anything you're definitely not getting physical bitcoin delivered like they're not going to give

you like you can't give them a withdrawal address no no definitely not they i mean hopefully is it like a robin hood or is it i'm pretty sure aerosex actually holds bitcoin okay that's part of the platform they hold the bitcoin that's being traded okay i'm pretty sure like night let's say 95 percent um either way this is a huge fucking deal uh you know this is this is first of all exactly what happens when regulators fucking drag their feet on giving retail like a proper etf because all these different uh brokerage services need to basically offer their they're offering their own alternative to the etf you have robin hood offering it you know fidelity is working on something similar td ameritrade is going to offer to their 11 million customers um so

So it gives similar exposure to an ETF to mass retail. Any of these 11 million people that have a TD Ameritrade account, your uncle who's like 55 years old, who kind of wants to get Bitcoin exposure, but doesn't want to deal with any of controlling your own keys or any of the technology. Guy could barely send an email like he can buy it on TD Ameritrade. and i think if anything the fact that they're dragging their feet on the etf it's kind of nice because we have all these little options where you can get exposure and instead of like one massive etf that holds like 40 of the bitcoin or whatever it would be if they got in early like that's where the you know you're watching the uh the market get creative as the regulators drag their feet that's a great point to make like you let all these options flourish and maybe people

would just uh night not naively but uh lazily just invest in the etf uh without even thinking so now yeah i mean if you didn't have any other if the people who were tech illiterate and didn't want to try and learn personal sovereignty and whatnot and learn how to use bitcoin properly but just want exposure to it understand that as an investment it makes a lot of sense um but are like kind of statist and are like fine with like trusting the state in a lot of ways like if if their main way of exposure was this just one etf or two etfs uh then that's where everyone would go but because they because this takes a lot more time to get something like this out because you have to do it on like an individual brokerage service basis but but now we have the

time so we are getting all these little things so maybe it'll get more distributed out maybe it'll be more spread out and i think that's better like i don't think custodian like i would never recommend a custodial service uh especially to anyone in our age group i would never use one but like it's it's definitely like a reasonable option and it's it's it's good that we have options out there and and no one's saying that either you you do a hundred percent uh you know you do a hundred percent in a custodial service some people might you know feel comfortable more comfortable like having like 20 in a custodial service 80 they control their own keys maybe you know they split that up between like a hardware wallet and cold storage so like they

have multiple you use multiple methods and that way uh any particular threat can't can't fuck you yeah so this heiress news is just uh another in the long line of uh positive news from the institutional side slowly but surely the on ramps uh to investing in this asset uh are being built out being widened being becoming more robust it's uh beautiful to see and exactly i agree and for what it's worth uh i think this is like mostly a rumor but it's it seems like it's like a confirmed rumor but you know how it is in the bitcoin you know how it is in the space no eris confirmed it Eris said in the release from the block, testing is best practice necessary for us and our customers

as we build the most robust, transparent marketplace for digital assets. That's the phase they're in now. Right, but I'm saying they're testing. That means they could launch in three months or they could launch in fucking five years. You know, like you never fucking know. Well, they say it's in a production environment with a limited number of participants.

Exactly. Where's backed, you know? That's true. When ETF, Marty? That's true. So just everyone, you know, don't... That's what we said in the beginning of the year. Don't hold your breath on this stuff.

Yeah, don't hold your breath on this bullshit, but it's still good news. Still good news. Not as good news. Any of you Ledger users out there, there's currently a Windows phishing bug going out. So Ledger detected a malware that locally replaces the Ledger Live desktop application

with a malicious one. Users of infected computers are asked uh not to enter their 24 word recovery phrase uh after a fake update please refer to our security best practices we'll we'll link to that tweet they fucked up that tweet um they told people to enter their 24 word phrase really on the tweet did they delete it they did not users of computers are asked to enter their 24 word do not enter your 24 word uh they kind of anyway the this isn't really that big of a deal if if you one simple rule to follow that would make sure that this wouldn't happen to you is just always enter your seed on the device never enter your

and same with the password when we're talking about the passphrase always enter it on your device don't enter it on the computer if you're prompted to enter on the computer it's it's phishing scam yeah just be very uh be very skeptical if you're ever asked to enter your seed phrase anywhere triple yeah triple quadruple check and with specifically with ledger and trezor you can add it right on the device intentionally so it never touches your computer do that yes um and if anybody ever asks you for your seed phrase just be inherently skeptical don't dm people your seed phrase you can dm them to me if you want to uh next wasabi updates hardware wallet support is moving along uh have you used it yet uh with the hardware yeah i have

not admittedly no so i i tested it so we got the new update for wasabi uh we have to go through the stats first go the latest update is a 20 x increase in bandwidth 12 x increase in load time reduction or decrease in load time reduction excuse me uh you got lurking wife mode it's been a pr to change that uh and support for p2p communication has been added okay so i tested out the new this is a big update it's a good update uh for the load time it cash it it keeps an index of of your addresses locally uh so the first time you load the wallet it'll be slower to load but then after that it's way quicker which is awesome um i tested out the hardware wallet integration right now it supports the new trezor so the trezor model t uh the nano s the ledger nano s and the

cold cart um they're working on testing out and getting support for the other ones uh i was correct it is a separate wallet so you have you have your hot wallet for mixing and then you have a separate wallet uh through wasabi that's for hardware wallets um and they just have mixing disabled separate wallet like a quasi treasure bridge what is it i'm still trying to like conceptualize that i mean so your keys are held on your treasure right so your your public key is shown to is shown to wasabi and then wasabi pulls the transaction info um and the way wasabi does that is their server is sending block filters out um that tell you what transactions are in each block and then you pull the blocks that um are necessary for your transactions either

from your own node if you have your own node connected um if it's running on your own computer it automatically does that uh or from peers and when it does it from peers now there's with this update that's all through tor as well and when it takes a block from a peer it it it disconnects them afterwards so you can only take a max of one block per peer uh so that's way more and that that's in light mode and that's way more secure for light mode if you're not running your own full note and if you're using your own full note it's even more private yeah that's what i was going to ask is it seemed like you there's a if wasabi was just feeding you the blocks there's a trust layer there um so if you're able to get them fed by peers it seems right so wasabi there is a

little bit of trust, but Wasabi is not feeding you the blocks. Where Wasabi could break your trust is if Wasabi doesn't tell you that a transaction that affects you was in a block to look at it for the first place. When they send those filters, they're the only ones sending filters right now. Presumably, it can be made that others can send filters. It's similar to Neutrino, how Neutrino works. So you need more people to send filters to reduce that trust. but even still wasabi isn't actually sending you blocks they're just telling you which blocks you might want to look at okay um anyway so the hardware wallet integration is pretty slick one negative is that it defaults to beck 32 addresses just like you know native segwit

just like regular wasabi and no one who's been using hardware wallets has been using those addresses so none of your old balances will show only balances that are in bc1 addresses interesting uh so that's a little bit wonky yeah a little bit wonky for people to grok you know you have to send them to the new addresses uh for them to show and uh no but yeah it's it's it's fantastic and uh wasabi usage keeps going up we had a the biggest coin join round um i think that there's ever been which was 100 100 people um wasabi now is set so a round happens either if we hit 100 participants or the round hasn't happened in two two weeks uh two two hours okay in an effort to be uh intellectually honest here a good friend of the pod

fellow beefy bitcoin boy james o'burn posited yesterday on twitter uh about the the testing and auditing of wasabi's code like where are we on that like obviously in production it's working now but what do you what are your thoughts on that i mean uh most projects in the space need more auditing and uh i sure as hell i'm not qualified to do it you're not qualified enough to do it um it is an open source project so anyone can go and audit it if they if they wish um i i think it's just if i i i think that if if you are in this space and you can't you know read the code you can't verify stuff for yourself then the best practice is is to always be using multiple methods you know like you shouldn't you know don't like rush out and like put all your

funds on a treasure through wasabi like that's just reckless you know so you have to yeah you just have to you have to plan accordingly split up your risk amongst uh yeah another thing but but you know i've been using it for eight months now and i haven't had i haven't had a single satoshi stolen for me that's that's something confidence creating and and we also preach that you should treat this as a hot wallet don't store all your all your shit wasabi right but that's why it becomes interesting now that you can access your hardware through it right because people might feel as they should they should feel more comfortable holding more coins there um so like at least it's like the the hardware wallet feature

like you know like let it test it out i tested out with send i i i connected my trezor to it um uh i tested that it works with a pin and an extra passphrase uh i received to my trezor and then i sent back out no problems um and the other thing that's oh the other thing that was kind of cool is once you set up your trezor you don't have to plug your treasure in to receive you can just open up wasabi and and press and press open up wasabi and open up the hardware wallet portion of wasabi and you can generate a receive address and you can send to that receive address without connecting your treasure you only have to connect your treasure when it comes time to spend and i tested that out too and that that worked so it just pulls

your xpub key list it already has it yeah when you first set it up it takes your xpub and then And hopefully it's encrypting it with your password. I'm telling you, man. Wasabi's got some of the best UX at the wallet level out there. Yeah, the UX is great and just keeps proving. They just keep adding editor improvements. Yeah, so if any of you freaks out there are listening and are able to audit their code, please give it a look if you have some time.

Yeah, or, you know, 21 Lectures, right? Yeah, 21 Lectures. If you can't audit it yet but hope to at some point in the future, go to 21lectures.com. What's Justin Moon's thing, too? Biddle Boot Camp. Learn to code And then What was the other thing I was going to say

Biddleboocamp.com Yeah B-U-I-D-L Yes Biddle always sounds weird Yeah it sounds weird It makes more sense written About wasabi Oh right they gave us belts

We got belts So congratulations Marty I'm excited to tell my mother about this um i feel like i can't take any credit i feel like you you you put me on your back and carried me across the white the white belt line you can take plenty of credit marty we did this together um anyway i guess the belt system is a way to reward people who are educating and doing things in the wasabi space yeah so it was an honor to receive it i think it was unnecessary our privacy is enough reward for us but yeah i'm gonna wear it with pride absolutely happy to spread the good word i don't think we actually get a belt but yeah no it's it's virtual and then the other

thing is is it a is it a non-fungible token belt they would never do that we would fork wasabi i um the the funny thing about is when in the discussion on twitter no power was like uh he's like well like i have certain standards for for uh giving people belts like i wouldn't give joe rogan a belt if he tweeted about wasabi and then that led me down a path where i thought he meant that joe rogan tweeted about wasabi and i couldn't i was freaking out because that would be fucking dope so supposedly if you're a blue belt you can promote your own belts so like they have to be careful like they should never promote me to a blue belt because like i would absolutely give joe rogan a belt if he tweeted he tweeted about wasabi like absolutely fucking worth it

you wouldn't even make him tweet about it you'd give him the belt and be like Joe you got the belt now you have to tweet about it yeah you gotta tweet about your belt Joe no it was shout out to Max Hildebrand for giving us the he promoted us

on world crypto net is his show yeah he's talking about somebody who's doing an incredible job educating the space keep fighting the good fight Max um next up lightning labs releases beta neutrino lightning app for desktop have you tried this out have not so after like my embarrassment about eclair like i'm i i pledged to you freaks that i'm trying out all this shit before we talk about it uh on the pod so i downloaded this app

uh it's lightning's lightning labs new i guess flagship lightning app uh it's on desktop this shit it looks hot i see the vision i see it's a beta it's their first mainnet release it runs it uses neutrino so it doesn't have a full node uh so neutrino is similar it's the new proposal uh for better spv wallets better light wallets it's similar to how i just explained for wasabi they send you filters instead of you sending the trans sending the addresses you need they send you filters and then you know which blocks to pull so it's more privacy preserving i'm pretty sure neutrino just got merged into the new version of core so that core nodes can send out neutrino uh these filters that that you need for this because right now i'm pretty sure

lightning is just the one sending out the filters which is obviously not ideal uh the good thing about that that core merge is i'm pretty sure it's not on by default so if you're running a node you can enable it i'm going to enable it because you know people are going to use it anyway might as well have more people serving up the information and um but anyway because you use neutrino super fucking fast sync you just you you uh you you install the program and basically their idea is that you're synced by the time you you write down the 24 words and then confirm it in the app but like i just didn't practice hop second i just copied and pasted it so it still took a little bit while to to sync um but this is just a test wallet so whatever like but don't do

that um super quick to sync it was like within within three minutes i had it up and going i had a transaction from wasabi to fund the lightning wallet um and then so they have autopilot on by default which automatically is supposed to connect you i don't like autopilot yeah well supposedly they refined it and they have it on by default and i wanted to like see what their vision was and what would happen if one of the freaks downloaded it without going into the settings and turn it off right so i left autopilot on and they just like immediately put all my like i sent point one because it was like from wasabi they immediately put all five hundred dollars in one big channel with an ellen big node which just really grinded my gears so now i have some i

wonder if maybe are they picking ellen big or are they just looking for a channel so then i close that channel i close that channel and it opened with a different non-ellen big note i think it opens with high capacity nodes and they try and put all of it in there so you can send a larger payment but that's questionable to me there's there's a trade-off there that i'm not sure if i'm happy with and i wonder if ellen big is intentionally because ellen big is spinning up so many nodes and i wonder if one of the intentions is to basically game this autopilot system the autopilot system is supposed to rely on capacity and reliability like they're doing like reliability scores to see which nodes stay online and have a lot of connections and act as

good routing nodes basically their vision is you connect to the the big routing nodes with autopilot and then you use lightning loop to take that to get some inbound capacity from that channel right that's that's the vision um i'm not yet like i said uh how many lm big channels are there the highest i see right now is 41 there's a lot but look if you look at the top 100 they're like half of the top 100 it's not great um sorry i'm looking at a 1ml.com this website's awesome yeah i really like that website okay so the other thing that's interesting is they don't give you a pub key anywhere accessible i couldn't figure it out so i can't open a channel to you if you have this app installed which is weird you can't get inbound channels also usually you can take the

pub key from so so then after i tested out the autopilot the next thing i did was i closed the channel again and then i opened a channel with stacking sats our node because i wanted to see what was going on here uh and i'm pretty sure they they default to private channels so i couldn't even get the pub key from myself opening a channel our other node so you have to go into like the command line to find it or something i think their dream is to have no inbound because you get inbound through lightning loop so their dream is you have one you're like a leaf node you're like literally contribute shit all to the fucking network and you just boot this up with neutrino you connect to one or two big routing nodes through autopilot and massive channels you know as much as much

capacity as you put into your lightning wallet uh and then and then so because you have a private channel no one else can see it and no one else can route through it except for you and yeah i think just you and uh and then you do lightning loop through it so it's like relatively private you run the whole thing through tour but there are a lot of sovereignty trade-offs there that are happening what do you mean like you you don't sovereignty and the ability that you don't you don't have the ability to get uh you're like trusting one node and you're not helping the rest of the network route payments uh which isn't great you know and you're not even a fully validating node to begin with so is this for is this for our 55 year old uncles who can't send

emails yeah i mean the vision here is that this competes with custodial wallets and is better and a little less custodial it's yeah i mean it's it's i would say it's not custodial but it is yeah i i i don't think the receiving party can close a private channel like i said i'm i'm like 99 sure this is my first time really fucking around with private channels so feel free to correct me freaks on twitter um but when i opened this channel from this lightning app to the to the noddle it didn't i'm i mean we have a ton of fucking channels so i had to like go through it but like i'm 99 sure that i didn't see it on my side on zap so i i can't close it as the receiving party so maybe that's a little bit safer like at least they can't like maliciously

uh close out on you you're like broadcast an old state or something um but yeah i mean i like i said i think this is supposed to be like the same target market as a custodial wallet get up and running real quick but not not custodial the other thing is the interface is i see where they're going with it and i like it everything first of all it's displayed in dollars um it's one unified balance among your on-chain wallet and your and your lightning lightning funds because you just loop in if you need it no you don't loop in you open you're actually opening channels you actually are open you loop in would imply that you were you were just funding an existing channel which is what a lot of the custodial services might use um but with this you would just

uh yeah you they're opening channels but they keep it as the as one unified balance it's depleted in usd and then right underneath it it says the percent in lightning the amount that's in the lightning channels and that'll always if you have autopilot on that will probably always be like around 99 it seems like they just pop it up uh and and what's interesting is when you open channels and you send payments they've removed there's no sats or anything it's all dollars everything is in dollars if you open the channels pages where it shows your pending channels your open channels everything is in dollars how do you feel about that i think it's sats now baby like i don't know i i'm not their target market you know i i think i think it's interesting i i i i like

the vision it's something different it's more mainstream user um and we'll see how it plays out i'm like i'm definitely not gonna hate now uh but but yeah it was intriguing i i i didn't love the lack of public key like at least put that in like advanced options or something let me yeah no so we'll i'll i'll play around with that this week and talk about it next week uh but staying on the topic you could literally if you install it right now by the time we finish by the time we finish recording this episode it will probably bought something it will automatically it'll already have like your channels open and ready to go like if you have it on autopilot like it takes i would say i mean what like it takes two confirms before a channel opens or maybe three

so like the whole process from install to having open channels and being ready to spend on lightning is like 40 to 60 minutes it's not too shabby no not too shabby and most of it the user is just waiting for the actual confirmations anyway yeah so slowly but surely shit's getting better and like again like we always talk about like the the differing solutions is what blows my mind like you said there's different trust trade-offs with this model you don't have your public key it's a different set of use cases a different ux flow uh like the more the merrier this is just one app of many like we talked about eclair uh eclair's async a couple weeks ago uh extensions like jewel casa's extension just other ways in which to interact with this app

uh it just keeps growing it's awesome yeah yeah so this app i think you could compare it very easily to something like async because that to eclair async's the company right to to the eclair wallet because that's also um a full lightning node but a light bitcoin node not a full bitcoin node yeah but with with eclair you have there's a lot more power user options uh that that uh this lightning app just doesn't even give you it just keeps it as simple as possible yeah just tries to let you know give you as little decisions as possible yeah let me just get you up and running with a couple clicks yeah um talking about getting up and running quickly uh staying on james o'burn who we brought up uh and that's how in the wasabi section he recently took to the

bitcoin dev mailing list to present uh assume utxo which is a proposal uh to basically insert not a checkpoint it's not a checkpoint but it's like a hashed uh not a checkpoint marty it's not a checkpoint i got that wrong yesterday in the bank we've officially said the checkpoint word like four times now we got no no more using that word no it's not a checkpoint but assume AssumeU2XO would allow you to basically a user who wants to set up a Bitcoin full node quickly and transact in a timely manner. Initial block download from scratch takes four hours to a couple of days, depending on what your hardware solution is and your Internet. AssumeU2XO would allow you to take sort of snapshots of certain block heights that would be hashed at certain levels. and it would allow you to download quickly

and transact, receive and send transactions. Meanwhile, the full state of the blockchain would sync in the background and once it's to the full tip, you're basically using a full node. Yeah, that's why it's not a checkpoint because you actually do, it's just to get you up and running quickly,

but then you do go back and validate the whole thing and then you'll see if you've been lied to or not. Yeah, so if you've been lied to, it'll go back and say, hey. And like once one person's been lied to, like everyone's going to flip a shit as well right like it's not like the because because first of all it's not like any old joe is is giving these assume utxos basically like a group of developers come together make a hash of of the utxo set at a certain point that's relatively back

far back yeah it's tens of thousands of blocks back i don't know if they're going that far back on this proposal no yeah but still pretty far back yeah um and uh and they all they all agreed to it they you know they they merged the code and like everyone's looking at it too at the same time before it even before people even it gets shipped out so um so it's relatively trust minimized uh and it gets uh ibd down a lot tremendously especially if you're running a tour note because if you're running a tour note ibd takes fucking forever you know from experience it just yeah it just really really takes a long time tour is slow apologies to to fellow beefy bickway boy james for for misrepresenting assume utxo on the band yesterday is not a checkpoint i mean some people

call it a checkpoint but it's important i think to make a distinction i think and this is also why it's different from like geth fast sync and stuff because it actually is validating the whole chain it's not just relying on headers yeah so james i wasn't at bit devs this week i was busy couldn't make it so he presented this a bit devs what what was he compared it he did a good framing of comparing it to geth first you said um yeah i forgot to tell you that before you wrote the bento or two days ago whenever you wrote it um so yeah what was the framing there yeah that it's that it's not the same as geth fasting because which is ethereum's fast sync and that's because you're actually are validating everything yeah for and and after after the assume utxo you're

validating everything after that as well uh before you validate everything else you know so you start the assume utxo you validate everything past that and then once you do that you go back and validate the whole thing that never happens with ethereum fasting yeah it just seems like it could be implemented into bitcoin in a very similar way that neutrino was like we just described you make it modular and say hey i want to assume utxo on this on this ibd i mean we have one tile it on and yeah one thing i liked about the bent that you said was like that's how it that's how i agree it should be implemented which is uh and i don't think they've even gotten that far yet in the proposal but like basically like it should be a button and then like when you click it it

should be like warning like you're not validating all the previous you know before block height whatever until after the sync or whatever yes they give you a nice big fat warning and make it optional don't make it so that always and i would even you know i wouldn't be against just like a completely like a fork of the client being packaged that's like bitcoin noob version you know and it like it gives you it like keeps neutrino enabled keeps you know assume utxo enabled and like has some of those more newbie defaults and then you give them like a big fat warning in the beginning you know like that's cool as long as the warning is there and as long as people understand the trade-offs and the risk involved everything's okay and again with this

the fact that uh the full state of the blockchain is downloading in the background is very comforting as well right and i think i mean the best argument for this is that you know it'll make it so that that people that want to get up and running right away tend to pick worse wallets because they don't want to wait for a full node sync so if if they're going to pick worse wallets anyway by doing this then they'll then they'll actually run a full node and they'll rely on their shitty promise in the beginning which is better than the promise they would be relying on whatever other wallet they were using and then ultimately they will become a full node user and contribute back and self-validate themselves and be a you know a full bitcoin

citizen yeah uh and like i said tour notes it'd be i think it incentivizes tour notes tremendously because i just get so bad on tour notes yeah so if you wanted to run a tour node not even necessarily want to transact quickly just want to be able to use your node in a timely manner or not in like 30 minutes but like in a day or two this is probably yeah i mean i think it takes i haven't synced to torno in a while i think it takes yeah i think i mean it definitely takes more than a couple days i think yeah um and like and that's a good reminder like now that you know bitcoin really relies on tor and everyone should be running if you're running a bitcoin node you should also be running a tor relay node uh a lot of people think that

running a Tor node puts you at legal risk, especially in America. That's not the case because a Tor relay node, you just stay within the Tor network, which is if you're running like a Tor Bitcoin node, that's what's happening as well. It's never leaving Tor and going into the clear net, the regular web. That's where you have issues because there's a second type of node called a Tor exit node. And if you're running that, then people might be looking at like child porn or something, doing illegal stuff through your internet connection, going out to the clear and that could be really bad but if you run a tor relay node you're just you're just helping out the network you're helping out bitcoin network and you're helping out tor and that's just a big deal

i think so and that'll help too with ibd if more people run tor nodes and tor relay nodes more people run tor bitcoin nodes more people run tor lightning nodes um that's just win win win i feel like i can feel the samurai wild guys getting all hard right now listen to you pump this tor stuff You've got to make the belt worth it. No, it's crazy. And this is something we talk about. We have a conscious decision right now as humans transitioning into the information age. We can go down one or two paths.

We get the dystopian, centrally planned economy of the world where you've got facial recognition and you're only allowed to see information that's presented to you by a few gatekeepers or you work hard for a world in which privacy and freedom are enabled, but you have to work for it. That's the thing. You have to download the software, you have to run it, and you have to participate. It's not just going to come to you.

You have to be a citizen. Yes. I'm happy. We got the Node running in the background, and I'm pretty sure the Node launcher has Tor enabled by default now. There you go. So we're supporting it in the background. I think it does.

I haven't tried it since. Yeah. Next, Satoshi Treasure update. Not going to lie. been uh been away from the dread pirate pirate roberts our team first of all is fucking badass we have a fucking badass team we have all four keys they're going above i think everyone does at this point but they're going above and beyond they're like blowing me away with they have like management team management software and application process and everything and me and marty have just

not been able to follow along at all they've just like completely blunt it's out of my i feel bad even like saying i'm on the team at this point you know i feel like our place is is more you know we we help with team enthusiasm we help with outreach and exposure uh and and i i think you know whether or not they decide to like cut us out of the ultimate winnings like at least our team has agreed to donate 10 to free ross so we know like we did that right we did that we named it found the first shard hey that's all that's all that's all i need to do be nice to get like a little cut you know i'm gonna try to work harder i'm gonna i'm gonna work harder too just i'm not gonna be solving any uh like crazy i'm not gonna be brute forcing anything but it's

not even that i like i check discord and there's like 400 housekeeping messages because they're doing so much i'm so impressed there's not even it's not even necessarily like in the clue downtime in between when there's going to be clues they're just making everything better we have like a website portal and john john cantrell john cantrell ordo that yeah he like set up and he open sourced it and released it out to the other teams too like what the fuck dude beautiful shout out john cantrell yeah uh a wizard we found a wizard yeah he's on he's on our team he's he's a leader we're on his yeah we're on john we're on your team this is no longer our team anyway we're still looking for recruits um we already have like a pretty geographically dispersed team

but we're always looking for more talented people, more people around the world, because you need to be based in different locations. We have Clue No. 5 coming out on Sunday, so we're going to throw the link for the application that they made up in the show notes. I think it's, what is it, tinyurl.com slash gpravengers? I believe, yep, that's exactly it.

tinyurl.com slash gpravengers, Dread Pirate Roberts Avengers. So sign up for that, and if you don't get included, you don't be angry at us because I don't even think we're part of the application process anymore. I hope we're not. I hope we're not because nothing would get done if we were. There you go.

Samsung invests 2.9 mil, basically 3 mil into the ledger. This kind of went below the radar. Yeah, what's going on here? Bullish. It's huge news. hasn't samsung been working on like their own phone wallets and stuff yeah they have that bullshit ethereum wallet that has like engine on it and engine pumped like 1200 percent remember fucking ridiculous um it doesn't support bitcoin it's all about partnerships it's all about

partnership yeah they have a wallet built into the s10 their new phone that's coming out and uh yeah and they i think they have like brave integrated and shit but i i think you know this is a big deal samsung is the largest phone manufacturer in the world um they eventually have to support the the number one cryptocurrency in the world uh and and ledger is one of the top hardware wallets so this kind of thing is like i think this would we would absolutely imagine how much we'd be freaking out if two years ago we found out samsung had invested in ledger like that would have been crazy it would have been absolutely crazy so jaded by this point you know there's so many of these announcements it's uh but ledger's like the perfect fit because like

ledger was like kind of like the more statist hardware wallet company you know like they believe in like proprietary security chips and stuff like that that's their that's the trade-off they're willing to make while treasure tries to go like fully open source cold card tries to go fully open source i imagine the new bluetooth functionalities with ledger yeah exactly they do bluetooth appease samsung as well and ledger's experimented in the past with um you know samsung has like a quasi they something they call a secure chip uh but it's like a i guess like a quasi secure chip on samsung phones in the past and i remember ledger had an app for a little while that would use it was only compatible with samsung phones this was like three years ago

or something like that and it would use that secure element in your in your phone um but no used it but but yeah so like they're like it's a perfect fit and uh that's awesome i'm excited that ledger got more funding i'm excited that samsung's got skin in the game you couple that with their crypto wallet and this is just this is a big fucking deal and uh meanwhile apple's you know releasing a credit card without a number on it hey i think there's some apple pay uh team members that listen to this podcast shout out to you guys we want to see an apple uh bitcoin wallet i'm excited guys you know make me proud i i have to say like i two years ago i thought it was a very real possibility that for like the next 10 years so like eight years from now because this

was two years ago we would never see any bitcoin wallets on the apple store like i for the while iphone was just banning bitcoin wallets in general so the fact that they don't do that anymore i think is just massive so we should just be happy about that because that's something that would just be unsolvable they have a little closed guard in there with their app store and they could just be like fuck you and they didn't do that so that's good yeah and going back to bit phoenix too like the fact that uh the new york attorney general is letting them like run operations and they want to make sure that their users aren't interrupted or anything like that is like sort of a boat of a boat of uh approval or a vote of approval excuse me what do you mean

In my mind, like just the fact that they didn't seize it and shut it down. And maybe they can't, but like Hasu said, you don't think the New York AG would just shut the whole thing down if they could? Well, so Hasu brought up this example going back to Black Friday in the poker world when they shut down. I forget what website it was. And it's like a famous day in the poker world. Poker stars or whatever.

Poker stars wound up buying this company. So what happened was the U.S. government shut them down. I remember that shit happened. But they wanted to allow their customers to get stuff out. So they made it so that people were able to get their money out. They were able to withdraw. Yeah, eventually, over time. And now online poker is a big thing.

It's becoming more palatable here in the States in particular. And maybe this is just another thing. Like, hey, we don't like what you're doing with Tether. We don't like what you're doing as an exchange. but we don't want you to interrupt your your users who who are uh acting in good faith in their in their mind so the user is actually using bitcoin or using it in good faith which is a good sign i would say i well first of all yeah that that whole going after poker uh going after gambling online sport uh online sports and poker gambling in america was like a key reason for why i realized

bitcoin was going to have value in the first place because you have the way they went after them if i recall correctly was they went after the payment processors they went after visa mastercard banks and shit like that a more recent comparison i would say would be one broker who they took down they got the fbi right fbi they took down their website domain page right and i and deposits and withdrawals were frozen um like withdrawals worked for a tiny little bit afterwards but then they got frozen um what's that hasn't happened with bid for next but what's also interesting is you know like unlike the your black friday example and the one broker example like you could still deposit into bid for next like the new york ag doesn't want you to deposit

into bid for next right now right so i i i would be hesitant to say that the reason you could deposit and withdraw on bitfinex is because the new york ag is just so compassionate that they just care about the bitfinex users like i i think to the new york ag they'll never say it they pretend they're protecting users but really they hate all the bitfinex users just as much as they hate bitfinex because they want every single one of those users to register with them know who they are yada yada yada fuck you ben mosky to new york ag privacy is a crime yeah i mean this is a little tangent here we're over an hour by now too we're at 102 really yeah but we're riffing we'll make this one an epic this is gonna be an epic pod yeah but like the uh again we're going down back

to the discussion about we're going down a path we have a decision to make do we want the centrally planned panopticon or doing a fight for these privacies like some woman traveling via jet blue last week uh made twitter aware that she like thought she was going to need a boarding pass but they just facially recognition like recognized her without even asking her so convenient and that was her ticket and i like it like airports scare the shit out of me man they're like and it wasn't even opt-in airports are normalization camps man it's uh so like this is yeah you have no you have you have zero privacy at an airport the thing is they already had all those pictures they jet blue actually got the pictures from like u.s customs and or like immigration or someone like

that some u.s agency gave it to them so they already have all the pictures uh they know you're going to be on the plane they're already doing facial recognition to you while you're walking through the airport when you're going through security and all that shit when you go through customs they take a bunch of pictures of you now i went to hong kong the first thing they did was take a picture of me um so like i you know like this particular thing like it sucks that it's like getting normalized um but like some people are talking about like oh i'm gonna switch airlines like they already have the pictures they're already doing facial recognition to you that doesn't do anything like just like the only difference is you actually have to pull out your

boarding pass like that's the only difference how do we fight back against this well i think well first of all we just for the face thing we're just fucked because you're face fucked yeah i just i i don't know i we can do like masks and all this other stuff you know like minority report i really like the fake eyeballs like the black market or like black market contacts or something contacts i don't want to change my eyes what was minority report was a full eyeball transplant i think they did a full eyeball transplant then he also had like this tool where he could contort his face but that only worked for like a few hours yeah so like we'll have like masks and stuff but i and hopefully but maybe we'll have like societies

that have like camera free zones and stuff try and take it back piece by piece but i think you should just assume assume that your face is being tracked at all times yeah like wear a hat wear sunglasses cctvs everywhere in this city you can't walk out outside without seeing a cameras like on on a light post yeah like google facebook apple they're all doing face recognition too so you don't even just have the government's you have all the and and what the data leaks it gets out i mean there was what was it a wired article that was talking about like academics doing facial recognition i linked it on twitter in response to one of your tweets um like academics are are taking a lot of photos to do in facial recognition studies and like those photos find

themselves in like all different databases around the world because they've leaked and been shared all over and like some of them are like college students like walking because one of the things is like original facial recognition uh like machine learning training kind of shit was done with like models who were like standing in front and looking but that doesn't really work in the real world so what they need is they need real world people that aren't aware that they're being pictures taken of to feed into their algorithm so they're like taking pictures with like telephoto lenses from uh like in onto college campuses but like the kids are like supposedly warned because there's like flyers up that say that it's happening but the kids are like looking at their phone

texting they don't fucking know that it's happening and now they're you know their faces are part of a database and like a chinese company like that's fucked it's fucked i guess we should just submit to this reality and react accordingly yeah i mean i i think everyone has to care about their privacy and you know we'll turn bits and pieces people will care as they as as they get fucked basically as they get burned by this shit and it's up to us to take it back and and and we have tools here that that can prove very useful but we have you have to actually care you if you don't care about your privacy like no one else will like we can't hold your hand you have to care the number one rule is care it's care and and beyond that like it's important like you should like the consequences

of not caring and not acting in accordance with that caring or dire i would argue like i mean it's like authoritarian it's very authoritarian and i believe we're easily slipping into a more authoritarian world uh so we need we need a call to action of more people being proactive running tor nodes running bitcoin full nodes speaking just in general speaking up like hey don't fucking facially recognize me without my permission and yeah stuff like that you know it's a lazy argument but you know those are the best arguments like hitler would have loved facial recognition you know dna databases databases of everyone's dna their faces their fingerprints their locations like come on yeah all you freaks out there sharing your locations with your friends

on snapchat stop that's like that's some generate gen z old snapchat there's any there's any gen z listening out there like i see my sister she's like on the cusp millennials and gen z's they They don't care about privacy at all. Some of them do. Some of them are Bitcoiners. I see them in my DMs sometimes. Nice. That's good to know.

Hey, you young youths listen to this podcast. Keep caring. Yeah, we have at least one five-year-old who listens to the pod. 15 months. 15 months. Look at that. Is that Gen Z? I don't know.

He probably doesn't understand what we're saying. I'll tell you one thing. I doubt he's sharing his location. It depends. Does he have a Bluetooth-enabled nookie? I hope not. i don't know um next topic gemini integrates segwit fully they just deserve a shout out for both receive and uh send functionality yeah shout out to gemini i'm not a big fan of your marketing

tactics lately but i will give uh give props for props or do this is huge we crypto doesn't need rules but bitcoin needs segwit so yeah there you go thanks for helping it out um casa again another update that we meant to talk about this last week they announced it like right before it recorded forgot to put it on the list uh they enable tour support as well and they have a huge sort of data privacy initiative going on they're gonna have a blog series on why you should care basically in in line with the the topic of conversation that we were talking about 30 seconds ago why you should care about your privacy how you can protect your privacy and your data online yeah one of the awesome things about casa is

They don't require KYC for their multi-sig solution. They're trying to be a privacy-first business, take as little private information as possible. Their privacy policy is very strong, and they're trying to promote this, and that should definitely be applauded. Tor node, by default, is fucking huge. You know, going back to our other conversation,

the Bitcoin node on your casa, it doesn't use Tor. And part of it is because of, I guess not IBD, because it's pre-synced, but because it's just way harder to keep sync with Tor nodes. But yeah, this is huge that they integrate a Tor by default on the Lightning node. Everyone's Lightning node should run through Tor so you don't leak your IP address

unless you're trying to run a bigger node. That does a lot of connections because Tor nodes can connect to ClearNet nodes. So, like, if you have a Tor node, absolutely connect it to our node. And then we can reciprocate. We can't open a channel to you. Only a Tor node can open a channel to you unless you first open one to us. We need to see you as a peer first.

But we can still open one back to you. And I'm debating whether or not. So this brings Kasa in line with Noddle, who also lets you run Tor. They don't have it on by default, but it's just a couple clicks. So I'm debating whether or not we pull our node behind Tor. There's pros and cons there from a routing perspective, because at least all you guys can connect to us through Tor, to us, and then we can give high performance because it's on a gigabit line.

So we'll see. We're playing that by ear. I'm definitely not going to do anything until we get static channel backups, which should come next week on Noddle the way that they plan on doing it is really cool I think is you plug in a USB thumb drive you first

you put your PGP fingerprint on the device you know like basically your public key and then they encrypt your seed and the channel backup with your pgb key on your usb drive and then at any point if you need to to force close all those channels and restore your backup you can just use the thumb drive

so it should be nice super convenient and then i'll feel more comfortable playing around with some of the things be aware these things are coming they're on the horizon they're coming from every angle man it's like this is the best bear market that's ever been so do you think uh after bitfinex do you do you think uh the price goes lower again man we're still above 5 000 right now above 5100 right now the key price not to break is the 3400 august price for the mirad bet and we need that no but like even if even if that broke then he was still wrong because he he already changed his mind on that yeah um i still don't think even i'm like like you said it's been the most bullish bear market i think we've ever had and the fact that we just haven't

just elevated down here on this news i think it could presumably hang over our head for like a long time and just be constant FUD but uh I I I think we're like I'd be really really surprised if we broke December's lows yeah no it's uh again I wrote about a couple macro themes earlier this week it seems that a couple countries across the globe are in a heavy gold accumulation phase that's been not necessarily under the radar but not not talked about too much um we'll see if bitcoin plays into that that safe haven asset in the future who's secretly stacking sats out there well china i went back and looked at it today at some bullion star which is some gold dealer posted a chart of rushes they just last quarter they raised their total gold reserves again to

like 21 2168 tons i believe so that like led me to go check the gold charts just i believe it was economictrades.com they have really good gold charts of accumulation over time it's just tech checking like the top 10 countries and china and russia in particular over the last two decades china has four and a half x their gold holdings and russia over the last decade is five x theirs the question marty is how do you use gold to pay for coffee i don't i think you would need gold notes do you need a whole system a whole bill system build on top of it what's a gold a gold note is like a aircraft carrier or something no gold note like a bill oh that represents gold held in a vault oh so you're yeah but it's not practical

like fiat gold yeah um no and that's sort of the line of questioning that popped in my mind like why are they doing that are they trying to get on par with the u.s and if you look at like u.s germany other major gold holders their their gold holdings are going down uh not at nearly the pace that china and russia are buying but which begs the question are they hedging against currency risk local economic risk do they just want to get on par with gold reserves with the rest of the world these are the questions that drive uncle marty crazy at night they want to like a a censorship resistant store of value wait wait till they realize what bitcoin is yeah we're uh 115 in it's a long one it's been a fun one we got uh some mercia show we finally got some merch

we got sup freaks hats coming for you yeah we're both wearing our hats this is uh first foray into into merch into design we're going to try and have this site up i think hopefully by the time we meet next week the site will be up suit we're super excited freaks we got a lot coming for you Yeah, it's going to be fun. It's been fun building it. So be on the lookout for that. Very limited supply of merch. So we're going to drop it.

We have 40 hats to sell. And these are first edition, very special, near and dear to our hearts. So it's going to be very limited supply. We're going to drop it. We'll tease that on Twitter and maybe on next week's show. And so make sure you get them while they're hot. Make sure you're paying attention. And you can only buy them with Lightning.

Lightning or Enchanto. Oh, we're accepting on-chain? Yeah. It's a limited edition, Marty. Yeah, limited edition. No fiat. We're going to be Bitcoin closed loop to start. I was wearing my Run LND shirt that I bought.

Shout out Willowburn. That I bought from Willowburn. Not only could you only buy with Lightning, you could only buy it if you had an LND node. Yeah. It authorized, it checked your node. You had to sign with your node. He did that to tease something he was working on. What was he working on with that?

I think he was just testing out, basically, signing with your node to provide authorization. okay um yeah so we're oh shit man how the hell have we not talked about this yet i'm so sorry you fucking co-host here launched a product this week i forgot to final message you've been working on this since before we met i mean you talked about it when we initially recorded last year you were telling me about it after yeah i wanted to shill it on the first episode that i recorded with you on tftc and then we got drunk and i forgot so and good thing i didn't show it because it went through so many iterations since then uh you got a proud co-host over here smiling from ear to ear this is dope product uh concepts sort of walk us through what and you tried it out right

yeah i tried it out for me yeah it works um i mean so basically i thought of it during the bull market because i was riding my skateboard and i was like fuck if i get hit by a car and like lose my memory or die like 70 of my bitcoin are gone um because you like have to do a balancing act where you want it to be easy for your heirs or like your loved ones to to get your bitcoin if something happens to you but like you don't want them to be an attack vector like you don't want like your mother like putting like a post-it note on next to her computer of of your seed phrase or something or getting tortured for it if we want to like get really morbid yeah um so the first thing that came to mind was dead man switch and i had already been familiar with it snowden really

popularized it he had his own dead man switch which is basically a message that gets sent out to pre-designated recipients if something happens to you um you know if basically and the way it's set up is like there's no easy way to tell if someone if something happens to you so it runs on the opposite idea where you have to keep basically pressing the snooze button otherwise it'll send out and if you stop pressing the snooze button you assume something bad happened whether or not you were imprisoned if you were imprisoned they would go off or if you get if you get if you die or or if you lose your memory um so then i was looking around for like an easy like privacy preserving solution they didn't exist unless you ran your own server so i was like okay like so

we should build we should build this um and then we just did multiple different iterations we were trying to figure out like a nice balance here i decided that you know some things just you know it's just not practical to eliminate all trust so it's like very trust minimized it's just a very simple tool the only trust you have in us is that we actually send the message because for two reasons you should make sure

that the message isn't if it can get compromised imagine it gets compromised it shouldn't affect you you should structure it in such a way the message is encrypted too so you can't read it right but that's just like the encryption is like locally on your browser

and it's like an internet connected device and who the fuck knows who your adversaries are or what not so like that's just an added bonus to make sure that we're not storing any messages in clear text we don't know what your message is we can't get if we get compelled by the government we don't know what your messages are we only take the the only required piece of information is the recipient email addresses you can send multiple email addresses uh and i i really like oh and and the only way you can you just pay us it's a flat rate it's right now we're starting at fifty dollars a year paid with bitcoin only um we have no intention of converting into fiat and just for whatever

that's worth and um it scales down so if you do a smaller amount of time you do a week or whatever you like pay 96 cents it's equivalent uh and you know we might offer discounts and stuff on that price i just wanted to like offer a sustainable price where no matter what kind of usage i have like i can just guarantee that i keep this thing up and iterate and improve on it uh for like 10 years or however long you know you might need it and i'm hoping we can reduce that last bit of trust which is us actually sending the message um if something happens to you uh by basically having like redundant redundant ways of of that information passing so you just use final messages as like an extra um you know like one thing i was i was thinking is like like unchained capital

like offers a two of three multi-sig where they keep one key for you like you could also put one key in final message and then you have redundancy there if they can't sign for you then you could use that key um and then because you can send i think with multi-sig it's it just really ups the potential of this kind of of this kind of tool because you can put a multi-sig key in there and even if the encryption fails multi-sig by design i can't or the me or the government can't spend your money with just that one key and then you could do like really cool things like if you had like a five of eight multi-sig and you have like four errors and they each have a key and then you email them all with the final message you email them all the the fifth key not only do they need

that final message to come through they can't spend your funds until then they all need to come together and agree combine their keys add the fifth key and then they can access the funds so you could do like really cool things while i'm just keeping it really simple it's just a text box it's just i really like that idea of just a nice simple tool that people can just add to their toolbox you know do whatever they want with it it's beautiful and again man i'm proud it's fucking incredible simple elegant and seems like a very good use case and for somebody hates ninja launches so much you ninja launch the shit out of this we had been like we like it just like like refactor the code and shit and it's just been kind of like dragging on for a while

i've been getting feedback from people and like we're about to like scale up tftc and stuff and i was just like we need to just we need to put this out there we're gonna put it out uh we like kept tweaking little things we still are gonna i i right now we're calling it beta release um you can test it out with a weak switch if you want it's 96 cents everything works um but we want to add more features uh one of the things we don't have right now is you can't cancel the switch you can't cancel the message and the reason that is is because i think that's an attack vector you don't want like someone to cancel your message and then never goes out um but a lot of people like the cancel option so what i think we'll do is we're going to add like a two factor optional

two-factor where you like scan it with an app on your phone like app-based two-factor and if you do that you can enable it so that you can cancel it if you have that two-factor code and you can the only way you can add more time is with the two-factor code because right now it operates kind of like koala uh koala studios does where you get a random account id right and that's how you add time to it you pay and you add time presumably there's an attack vector here the only attack vector that i that we haven't really eliminated um is that if someone gets your account id they could presumably just keep paying us so the message never goes out but they can't cancel it so that that added feature would make it so that it'd be much harder for them they need your

phone basically to either cancel or or um add time to your to your message yeah it seems like a great mvp at this point exactly that's exactly what i wanted congrats dude thank you again you've been talking about this since i've done it i'm happy to see that that you've released it into the wild it looks a lot better than when i first saw it too yeah we just kept you know we kept getting nervous and then just changing everything this is like this time i was just like no we're launching sometimes you just gotta let them free yeah i was just like fuck it yeah um so yeah it went really well and i'm excited and people are testing it out and we're seeing what users say and we're going to keep iterating and uh yeah i'm excited matt odell bitcoiner podcaster builder

there you go that's all we got for this week freak sorry we ran a little bit longer wait do we really i thought there was definitely something else there uh oh bitmain this yeah that's a big one yeah so all right we'll keep going this would be a ripper uh so our bitmain source for the last the year almost now i feel like we're getting close to a year btc king 555 came out and said uh the now acting ceo of bitmain uh is looking to uh disassociate bitmain from bitcoin cash so any of you bitcoin cash holders out there just be aware bitmain's a huge holder of bitcoin cash and by extension bitcoin sv as well um so if they're looking to disassociate themselves and they're in a bit of a liquidity crisis as a business,

they may need to unload some of that balance sheet, which is heavily denominated in those two fork currencies. Well, we kind of knew this was, I mean, this is a rumor, but we kind of knew this was coming anyway because they're two founder CEOs, Jihan and the other guy that is always more under the radar. Was it Macron Zhao or something? Did I just make up that name?

I don't know. No, you're very close. yeah mccree zhang there you go that was pretty good i'm gonna give myself credit for that um they both had to step down and they were like the ones who led this whole bitcoin cash insurrection so mccree zhang's there now and he wants to disassociate so i don't get credit for it no you don't get okay but jihan and his other founder both had to step down and then this guy takes over so of course you know they're going to start unwinding that and you know bitcoin cash from the beginning

and I think Segway 2X in a lot of ways was a bit main power move trying to centralize the market around themselves

and and they fucking failed and then this is what they have to deal with yeah they have to put their tail between their legs come back to

Bitcoiners and be like we were wrong now they're trying to save face well they haven't said we were wrong I think this is an admission

that they were wrong they're trying to disassociate this is a rumor though well I want a letter I want them to send out a letter btc king 555 has been pretty uh pretty credible source up to this point he has been he's been hasn't he yeah everyone said he wasn't but he he definitely has been um i believe oh we got a

couple things to shill here already shilled the merch we're going to be at a couple conferences this summer uh the bitcoin conference 2019 in san francisco hosted by bitcoin magazine uh if you guys that have not bought a ticket to that yet you can use the code rhr uh for a discount there and then we're going to be at the bit block boom conference in dallas in early august i believe and same thing rhr i believe you get 30 off the tickets it's pretty great because we we get to get hit the two different dichotomies of bitcoiners the san francisco bitcoiners and the texans bitcoin yeah i think those are going to be two live uh rabbit hole recaps with guests on stage that's that's the way to do it i think yeah and then more live shows and also for we might have

something we might have something to announce uh about a live show during uh consensus shit week oh yeah yeah we should i think we should do a live show during there that should be cool i haven't talked to them in like a couple months we should try and make something happen i don't know if i want to no no not at consensus oh during the week of consensus when everyone is in new york we i would like to have like a side event where we do a live rabbit hole recap we can make this happen yeah so if any of you freaks can help make that happen we're looking for venues and equipment and consider this a tease be on the lookout for information regarding that yeah freaks thank you for uh indulging us as we go a half an hour longer than we usually do

uh we really appreciate your time and your viewership your listenership like we've teased earlier we got a lot of big things coming some merch coming a site coming a lot of live shows we love you if you love us let us know uh on twitter via reviews uh on itunes whatever podcast platform you like let us know what you're thinking how you're liking us matt you have anything to end this on yeah reviews really help us uh so leave a review a good review and stay humble stack sets yeah peace and love freaks