TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.04.29

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Bitcoin v.0.18.0 released https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-core-0180-release-heres-whats-new/ - Bitfinex spread increases, https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/bitfinex-plans-to-raise-as-much-as-1-billion-through-an-ieo-shareholder-says/ - Cashapp $65.5M quarterly bitcoin sales - Amazon Managed Blockchain https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/amazon-made-its-blockchain-service-available-to-the-public/ - #dropgold campaign - dropgold.com - Ethereum is now money according to ethereum.org - CoinJoins as a Percentage of All Bitcoin Payments Have Tripled to 4.09% Over the Past Year https://www.longhash.com/news/coinjoins-as-a-percentage-of-all-bitcoin-payments-have-tripled-to-409-over-the-past-year - Samourai Whirlpool enters mainnet testing phase - Nine in 10 Americans have heard about bitcoin, Blockchain Capital survey finds https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/nine-in-10-americans-heard-about-bitcoin-survey-finds/ - Fidelity surveys 400 institutional investors, 22% already have exposure, 47% think exposure makes sense: https://medium.com/@FidelityDigitalAssets/new-research-institutional-investments-likely-to-increase-over-next-5-years-729fb1ca3c52 - eTrade joining the party, plans to offer bitcoin trading to its ~5M customers https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/1121868559330598912 Shoutout to this week's sponsors: Cash App, head over to the Apple App Store or Google Play and download it today to start #stackingsats Unchained Capital, check out Unchained's 2-of-3 multisig vaults product today and get 3-months free of Saifedean Ammous' The Bitcoin Standard Research Bulletin. https://www.unchained-capital.com/vaults/?utm_source=MartyBentNewsletter

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in Brooklyn, New York for this week's edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. Right now, the Bitcoin XBX Index, according to TradeBlock, is sitting at $5,399.66. Matt, do you have the block at hand? No, I do not, but I am ridiculously bullish. I am as well. Super excited this week. We've got a lot of topics. Before we dump into them, let's give a shout-out to our sponsors.

This week's edition of Rabbit Hole Recap is brought to you by Unchained Capital. You freaks know all about them already, and they're two of three multi-sig vault services they just launched. Go to www.unchained-capital.com to check these out. It's compatible with your Trezor and Ledger. When you guys are not connected to your computers, it's 100% cold storage. and these vault solutions will also give you access to credit down the line

with Unchained's loan services. On top of this, if you sign up now using our ref link, which will be provided in the links, you freaks get three months free of Safedina Moose's, the Bitcoin Standard Research Bulletin, some very good economic information about Bitcoin

that you're getting with your vault services. So again, go check out www.unchained-capital slash vaults or use the link that we provide in the show notes got a got an old sponsor coming back matt she is also sponsored by the cash app you freaks know about them our favorite app to stack sats here in the u.s cash app has been the number one finance app in the app store for almost two years it was the first major peer-to-peer payments app to support bitcoin you freaks know all about it it's still the fastest and easiest way to on-ramp Bitcoin users from the fiat world, no more waiting for five days for your ACH transfer

to come through. With Cash App, you can buy Bitcoin instantly and send it to a wallet of your choice. Cash App also comes with standard banking features and direct deposits. And others your bank would never even consider, like the Cash Card. We've talked about this before. It's a debit card you get. It comes with their boost program. It lets you save money every time you use Lyft, Whole Foods, Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, Dunkin', local coffee shops, and a bunch of other stuff you save money at these merchants you use that to stack sats download cash app today from the app store or google play matt it's only been six days since we last met um a lot's going on bitfinex tether is still still big in the news well let's not even well

let's just hold off for a sec i mean well first of all the block block height is uh 574 311 it's a lot of blocks getting closer to block 630 000 by the day it's just you know it just feels good this week you know I just everything just felt really I don't know am I being too enthusiastic and felt really like bullish this week it's just the calm before the storm before the Bitfinex shit storm yeah it could quite possibly be we wanted to start with something else but let's just jump into this we're already talking about this topic um so Bitfinex tether has been in the news all week uh it seems as though bitfinex to get around their their liquidity woes with that 851 million is going to launch an ieo initial exchange offering i believe for

1 billion dollars is that correct yeah yeah yeah 1 billion dollar ieo yeah there's rumors swirling uh that that's already half half the uh the raise has been committed these are twitter trader rumors we cannot confirm them but uh it seems as though uh since the last time we met uh that bitfinex as a company and tether as a stable coin has held up pretty pretty well uh despite despite all the news the premium bitfinex is what like six and a half percent right now yeah i checked i've been tracking the premium for the last few days it was at 6.25 percent six and a quarter percent uh three days ago trickled down it's about like five and a quarter percent two days ago yesterday started creeping back up and now yeah it's about like six six and

a half percent the second highest ever it's been since two years ago yes correct um so that's something you look at the premiums basically created people are looking to get out of the tether are on bitfinex in particular probably buying bitcoin on that platform which is driving the price up well you can't it's like i don't know if it's possible to withdraw well it appears that it's very difficult to withdraw U.S. dollars from Bitfinex, which makes sense because that's where their money woes supposedly came from, the $850 million that was seized through the withdrawal process. So the proof that U.S. dollar withdrawals aren't working well is this premium, right? Because if you can't get dollars out, you can't arbitrage it away.

The only way to get money off of FinEx right now, which is similar to other exchanges that have been when they were failing, is is you convert to to Bitcoin or a different cryptocurrency and then you withdraw that way. So all of their pairs have have premiums on them. Yeah. And this is. So that premiums has materialized on Bitfinex over the last week. And then this has obviously drawn a lot of attention to Tether, which has held its peg pretty well throughout all this chaos. And there was a bunch of chatter today in particular. Where's Tether trading at?

Like 98 cents or something like that? Yeah, I think it's back above 97, pulling back towards the dollar. But there's a lot of speculation, or not even speculation, there's a lot of questions out there about why some people aren't, I believe there's a premium to lend out Tether right now. If you're willing to lend out to shorts. It's really hard to short Tether. Okay.

You either have to do it through FinEx itself. Yeah. Or through like an OTC desk. Yeah. And the rates are like ridiculously high. Up to 20% I've heard. I think they're higher on Bitfinex. I would imagine.

Because that's like P2P, like retail-ish. Yeah. And especially on Bitfinex, you're really vulnerable there. Because if Bitfinex is, you know, they're all... While Binfinex runs Tether, they could totally screw with the price and shit. They can manipulate it to take money there. Yeah. Well, we also touched on this last week, too.

A lot of other bigger exchanges are sort of entangled in Tether, too. So maybe there's some game theory at play where to keep the stability of their exchanges, they're forced to sort of hold Tether and not put it out there on the market. yeah i mean i i don't know when you have like something centralized like this do you ever really get like true like i feel like you can never really get like that proper downward exposure because you never know what could happen yeah it's too tightly controlled yeah so the market doesn't really find itself but obviously you know

we haven't heard any issue surprise i'm really surprised that we haven't heard any issues with bid for next withdrawals um like you said the the peg is staying like decent amount and like my question is like who the fuck would be holding money on bid for next or in tether right now like who are the people that left holding it right they must either be like insiders or close to the inside that have a lot of faith in the project because I feel like they should have run out of money by now if that was the issue, if the issue was like exit scam, fraud type issue,

not government closure because that could just still happen at any time. That's interesting. The saga of Bitfinex and Tether continues on. It's one that we don't necessarily love here on Tales from the Crypt, but it seems that the issue has been forced upon us in the last couple of weeks. I have a fun little thought experiment.

Okay, so, you know, we're just like minding your own business and like in a week or two weeks, like Bitfinex stops processing withdrawals. They stop processing withdrawals and then they like basically go like completely belly up within the next month let's just say this happens like how does that affect bitcoin how does that affect uh the rest of the ecosystem it's uh it definitely affects the perception but it does not affect bitcoin at all i'm sure there would be do you think we would dump hard on the price like dump hard on the news

it's a good question uh i mean quadriga was what 190 million quadriga was like a nothing exchange yeah in my opinion but there was a bit of hoopla after that like a lot of i know a lot of people a lot of canadians who are on quadriga definitely think of bitcoin in a in a worse light than they did before uh they got exit scammed oh absolutely and definitely like canadians in general probably have more exposure to that yes um so bitfinex felt yes i think it would be bad for the market temporarily short term medium term but long term no bitcoin itself could be long-term healthy for the ecosystem just to get this this wart on the industry's ass the not from a just from a pr perspective like it's just like there always seems to be problems throughout the years of bitfinex

and tether and it just seems like a an avenue through which no coiners and shit coiners like to attack bitcoin but it really does not affect bitcoin at the end of the day yeah but if it's i i agree i mean i think like obviously medium to long term would be no effect definitely no negative effect um i think that i think if it's not tether they'll just pick a different reason you know like i could see like bitmex being an easy target as well um and i i i personally hope that we will always have you know like the more the more cowboy-esque elements in uh in the bitcoin space um like u.s regulations are have a huge overreach so whether or not you know the specific situation of bitfinex and tether like i hope we see a lot of these companies like

like bitmex that you know don't do kyc don't you know do things the bitcoin way yeah and this is this actually brings up wasn't on our list maybe it was on our list i haven't seen it yet but no i don't think it was you i saw you in uh responding to cz today and his explanation for why they need to implement kyc aml he's saying it's to stop hackers and fraudsters and to help users, but you made a very... It's the third company they've hired in like a month. And they're not firing the other companies. They're just adding on top of it.

It's a chain analysis company. Yeah, it's a chain analysis company. And they're doing what we talked about, those shotgun KYC requests where they lock your account and won't let you withdraw. And he's selling it as security bonus. But I guess it's like kind of security for him, but it's not security for his users.

it just puts them at more risk and he didn't respond he didn't respond uh yeah let's put it in layman's term it puts users at more risk because you just have your information out there and some data repository held by somebody that could be bitfinexed in the future yeah and i was talking to some of these people like they were anonymous already and then they have to do kyc And like like CZ saying it's like for like account verification, like CZ has nothing to verify it against. There's no person on file to begin with. You know, that's the first. So like that, it doesn't even if you get your account hacked, it doesn't help you in that situation because the hacker will just do the KYC or just get a straw KYC person to do it.

Like have someone else do the KYC. So there's some Orwellian wordplay at play here with Binance's implementation of KYC. it just comes down to that that regulators are compelling this stuff and binance has become that big of a target you know we saw it happen with bittrex we saw it happen with polo and now binance has become this big of a target that they have to if if they interact with the you know the traditional banking system yes which is also you know bitfinex for the longest time like how do you imagine moving billions of dollars without permission without bitcoin Like, with actual U.S. dollars?

Like, that's insane. Yeah, I think Safe just tweeted out there was, like, a $220 million Bitcoin transaction that happened yesterday. I think the fee was, like, $3 or something like that. Just a crazy thing. Some people are speculating that's a whale moving to dump, but who knows?

That's what's the funniest about all this shit is every time... Like, a lot of people don't know, like, gox like was also just a fraudulent business but they what really tipped it over the iceberg was they had money seized too in a u.s bank account and i feel like every time this type of thing happens it just people always blame bitcoin for it but it actually proves the value prop of bitcoin that you know that we do need a value transfer protocol that we can just easily transfer value around the world that's why we have a bitcoin and uh good segue here because the latest release of

bitcoin was released last night version 0.18.0 is it considered a major release i guess so yeah we're on from 17 to 18 now yeah um yeah so with this comes a couple of upgrades so if you're running a node could be uh could be opportune time to upgrade and start testing this out one known issue this is for advanced users who've enabled coin control and are using multiple wallets with the HD feature the the core developers are recommending that you do not use coin control features if you have multiple wallets loaded up and then speaking with the wallet a sub project a Bitcoin core now provides hardware wallet interaction scripts which allow you to interact with

your hardware wallets and the bitcoin core uh wallet via the command line so a bunch of cool upgrades um haven't gone through all of them yet still have to but yeah that dropped last night we'll put a link if you're running a full node uh you can update that now um the hardware wallet support is really it's a big deal it's a huge step in that direction and that's i think i think that's the same uh that's what wasabi used to integrate hardware wallet support in their wallet and i think that'll be like a huge advantage for people to run their full nodes is that they can actually use their hardware wallet with them yes i think in this upgrade also it's forcing miners to recognize segwit transactions as well yeah and they get blocked template yeah and they get

get blocked template to help them get as much fees as possible but i yeah i think and like pretty much every miner already is uh unless they fuck something up because otherwise you you just wouldn't make as much money yeah they've included like an error message to let you know that you're not not making as much money as you could um yeah so it's bitcoin version 0.18.0 it's out there another big thing that was in the news yesterday square announced their quarterly earnings from the first quarter and their cash app uh their cash app team on their platform sold 65.5 million dollars worth of bitcoin stacking sats stacking sats freaks disclaimer obviously cash app sponsored the pod but uh hey do you think hashtag stacking sats had any influence

on this um you know i like to think i like to think so but you know i think definitely they didn't they report that most purchases like it was very distributed very small amounts of purchases yes another interesting thing is like this didn't catch the run up in early april which is the second quarter so right exactly so i think i think it really shows the power um of just the masses like large amounts of people just buying small amounts on just weekly basis just stacking sets yeah and that sort of lays into what i touched on in the bend today is again maybe these incumbent companies like a square which has an established revenue stream via its point of sale services and its merchant services and everything that's built up to this point

maybe it's easier for them to implement uh and spread bitcoin because they are one already have a bootstrapped user base with all their clients and app users and then two uh they're able to sort of laser focus on bitcoin in particular not to worry about other revenue streams provided by The risk of getting into all coin trading and stuff like that, you know offering tokens at a token casino if you will So I touched on this in the pen today I think maybe squares the first not the first but one of the biggest Probably overstock you could argue has been in it for a while, but they're not on level with square I would argue but like an incumbent institution stepping in being able to provide Bitcoin with like an on-ramp that doesn't need

to sort of bootstrap bootstrap a whole user base, right like a like an app they already have 15 million users exactly it's already without bitcoin it's like the number one app on the app store number one finance app for the last two years without bitcoin like the majority of users that are downloading it aren't even downloading it for bitcoin they're just downloading it because cash app's a dope app yeah um and and right there in two clicks they just have bitcoin at any point if they if they so desire and who knows the integrations they could do like could be they you know they could there's there's multiple different paths here they can go down yeah so and it's interesting that there's revenue growth is happening in the

depths of a bear market as well um which is extremely promising yeah revenue like massive growth i mean uh uh larry uh larry from the block uh he was he was uh law master law master yeah he was making fun of a projected square cash app growth chart and it was like by like 2024 um cash app would be selling more bitcoin than the total bitcoin in circulation and like obviously like there you can't sell more bitcoin than our total in circulation but like you really like start to think like how much that like adds up like when you have like access to bitcoin so easily to so many people and so few people own it right now like you know you really start to realize gravity of that yeah and like how scarce bitcoin really is

it's pretty crazy yeah i mean that's what we talked about with tom and tom garibald and johnny dilly a few weeks ago is that these bull runs are precipitated by on-ramps being produced that make it easier to buy bitcoin where in 2017 to get set up it probably took three weeks between uh initiation of a coinbase account they were like selling polo accounts do you remember that shit yeah like and people were trying to buy bitcoin and they would have to wait weeks and now i mean cash app it probably takes a couple days to get your account set up and your bank account hooked up do you only do the kyc after you and when you only when you enable bitcoin do you do additional kyc is that it i'm not positive yeah i'm trying to think like if you're just a cash app user

do you actually have do you have to do more verification than you already did to enable bitcoin i think to withdraw possibly it happens at the withdrawal process possibly i think it might be when you activate it but either way it definitely requires more right yes it's a selfie yeah selfie or a driver's license picture i believe um so it'll still take like a new my point is it'll still take like a regular cash app user if they wanted to buy bitcoin it'll take them like two days or something yes the first time and then even so once you if you are set up already instead of having to wait five days for the ach transfer and then five days for the bitcoin to hit your coinbase account you can get it immediately and send it to a trezor within

minutes right you already have it yeah still the quickest way even with that process and new users will feel way more comfortable doing that with with a company like square you know a publicly traded billion dollar company billions of dollars and uh so this then like a rando so this ties back to like what i was touching on a bit earlier like does do you think like incumbents are sort of waiting on the sidelines like for a certain lindy threshold to be hit again i mentioned in the bend today i think a decade is a big mental uh sort of checkpoint for a lot of people do you think you think these guys these a lot of incumbents are waiting on the sidelines just looking at bitcoin startups kill themselves and figuring out how they can perfect like an onboarding process

just to come in later and sort of take over i i think there's a huge difference between nine and a half years and ten and a half years it's just some weird human psychology thing um and this is not to like discourage bitcoin startups i think this is just something i'm curious about i mean they're gonna try to you know whether they'll be effective at doing that or not is is yet to be seen um i mean we're we're seeing it with cash app versus like a coinbase which was like the main american it still is the main american point of adoption um so we'll you know we'll see how that plays out there's probably room for for both of them um coinbase is like kind of an exception when it comes to bitcoin startups though because it's like the like the heavyweight in the room

bc backed and whatnot um i don't know i think like something like coin kite like you can't replicate coin kite from a big business like there's no big business that's going to come in and make big coiners buy you know lose faith in rodolfo and coin kite unless you know he does something completely separate from that big business coming in but like he's carved out a really strong niche and reputation and there's like a web of trust there element yeah the guys at trezor yeah the guys at tftc we have to watch our backs from like the incumbent media try to come in yeah when like cnn's trying to take our jobs yeah it's gonna happen at some point we just hope you freaks stay with us you know been around no no i like i don't think any incumbent's gonna

come out like better hardware like them rodolfo or trezor or ledger like so like an interesting one is like a i think on ramps is like a very specific vertical where they could easily easily take because they flex their regulatory muscle right there their fiat compliance like square already had banking relationships and everything um i think with like exchange products you could see that you know really easily you see it with like the futures you know cme futures um while while bitfinex bitmax has to operate in like a complete legal gray area and have no fiat connections cme just has full banking privileges uh so yeah like i i absolutely anywhere that it connects to like the an interesting one will be like fidelity like the fidelity versus like a

zappo right right it's gonna see like fidelity has people like bob macklerath on their team i'm sorry if i butchered your name there bob if you're even listening to this but he seems like to know what he's talking about and it seems like they snipe somebody who's very uh sort of aware of the nitty-gritty stuff that's going on within bitcoin which is what you want to see oh yeah no exactly that's why it'll be interesting um yeah i mean infidelity is like an extremely established custodian but then zappos an extremely established bitcoin custodian so yeah should be interesting to watch it all play out zappo which is a small tangent here it's a company with ceo wences cesaris he's one of the few people in the space who has had the balls to

uh to swallow his pride and admit that he was wrong he's the only one right yeah literally the only person who applied uh who uh apologized for segway 2x shout out to wences a true man of honor i don't think there was a single other person i don't either of like the top dogs um i didn't look too far into this uh amazon managed blockchain uh takes aim at centralized shit coins this one was fun you like my headline that was a great headline it's a good headline um no they can just like they they called them decentralized apps which is hilarious but you can just spin up a blockchain i think what is it hyperwave and ethereum right now is what they've hyper ledger fabric and ethereum um similar to what azure did yeah but now amazon's

doing it okay i just it was like another day like if you have a centralized project like i can just spin up one right now on aws and like i'll have amazing connectivity and whatnot yeah this was pretty predictable yeah this is uh is this mean ethereum's uh getting adoption no it doesn't it's not any it's not i guess like it helps them like test apps and stuff they have like that going that advantage but it doesn't it's not any meaningful amazon's not like using ethereum will it eventually be connected no good questions yeah this is uh it's the normal ones yeah we should find out um yeah so that's the thing it's completely expected uh facebook this is almost either but they're they're turning they're very private private uh privacy conscious

now apparently they're working on a blockchain as well do you have faith in that project they need the blockchain for the privacy uh no i mean they're just private and they're just it's just lip service they're just giving lip service obviously you know and they're adding the blockchain buzzword they also want like ai to moderate things with machine learning they love all the buzzwords and then they bought a vr company turn them all together yeah i have uh not been on facebook for about eight months now and i've never been happier i deactivated i deleted my account a couple years ago i don't miss it at all delete delete delete um this was cool this dropped yesterday i was happy to see this i'm not a huge fan of this product because

i don't think it's the best way to get access to bitcoin that product being gbtc offered by grayscale investments but they dropped a hell of a meme of a it was an expensive commercial campaign so the drop gold.com if you freak start we'll put the link in the uh show notes uh obviously drop gold.com uh it's grayscale investments is advertising their gptc it's barry silbert's barry silbert's uh it's a way to get uh uh excuse me um exposure to bitcoin it's very limited very like a fake etf so basically a fake etf trades at a very high premium i believe it's like 20 20 to 25 percent of times the premium changes yeah yeah just based on they own like a certain amount of bitcoin and then they keep there's a redemption process where

you can add to the amount that they hold and basically arbitrage the premium but that process takes a year because it's not a true etf it's like i don't know it's like on pink sheets or something yeah it's on pink shoes um so there's that there's that premium there but it's an investment product that a lot of people like it because you can use it for your retirement accounts and stuff like that in america at least yes so this drop gold campaign is them basically uh pitting bitcoin versus gold buy gold buy bitcoin bye gold bui bitcoin and it was a very they say that in the video i don't know if they said it in the video but it was on the landing page it wasn't their copy yeah i thought that was your i thought you wrote that you came up with

that i was like ah marty that's a great meme well done oh that well yeah it wasn't in there was two headlines one said buy gold and then they gave a little spiel and the next one said buy actually gave the spiel sort of combine them help them out a little bit simplify the message for them uh but no again like this is incredible messaging it's going to be blasted out to normies all across america i think it's going to be on like cnbc commercials and shit like that yeah and i think an expensive commercial yeah i can see it's definitely i would not be surprised to see it on cbs on sundays watching golf um but it's going to be it's great guerrilla marketing and i think the one thing beautiful about it seemed a little selfless on their part was just

basically bitcoin versus gold didn't really pump gbtc too hard i think um it's like the gold versus bitcoin is like it's kind of like a false dichotomy um i think bitcoin is superior to gold but i don't think it just completely replaces like i think like to quote litecoin like i think gold is like the silver to bitcoin's gold right it's a backup plan yeah and it's like a physical kind of a physical scarce representation um but the important thing about this is it's triggering a ton of gold bugs and there's going to be this whole debate that happens while they try and prove it wrong where people are basically comparing the properties of bitcoin and gold and that's got to bring some new people in yeah bitcoin's going to win out on merit there we would we would

argue and like just qualities it's just better money i think yeah and the uh if you freaks haven't seen the commercial yet the sort of visualization that uh the commercial brings to light is like trying to transport gold people are carrying it like chain purses and wheelbarrows and dollies and stuff like that and then like the second they dropped the gold and like took the bitcoin they were just they were sprinting and they were free and they were running and everyone was like young and good looking yeah is that all down on wall street that had to be expensive to shut down wall street to get that supposedly they've someone said they filmed it in buenos aires really yeah i don't know that's just a random tweeter responded to my to my tweets

they replicated the wall street uh subway stop the six stop very well then maybe not maybe they didn't um who knows that was just a random tweeter i did not follow up on it at all so americans out there that should be coming to a tv screen near you be on the lookout for it uh just awareness drop gold.com is this going to be better than the bit pay uh super bowl or uh excuse me college bowl sponsorship i think it's way better i think honestly i think there's a lot of things that were better than that i was going to like start there's so many that were better advertisements than the BitPay. I put my hand up.

I'm going to give some props to Roger Ver. I think his Bitcoin is the honey badger of money. Yeah, that was a pretty good meme. That was a big billboard, right? Yeah. I thought that was a good one. Yeah, so again, be on the lookout for that. Oh, and that's obviously custodial.

They're not your keys. Yeah. For most people, you should self-custody your own keys, not your keys, not your coins. For most people, I would imagine the process of getting access to GPTC would be too arduous. They would just choose something like the cash app anyway. But this is going to pump Bitcoin no matter what. It's not going to pump Bitcoin.

When I say pump Bitcoin. No matter what, guys. No, I mean, pump in an average. It's going to advertise Bitcoin. Yes, yes. And it should increase adoption, I would say. Increase awareness. Pump awareness.

That's what I meant to say. Not the price. Talking about awareness, the blockchain cap had that new study that was like 9 of 10 millennials. I have the excerpt there. The cohorts were more granular than just millennials. I think it was like 18 to 25 year olds. Oh, so it was even smaller. Yeah.

9 of 10 have heard of Bitcoin. 11% of... Let me pull this up. it seemed like a lot of people have heard of it but a lot of people don't most don't own it i'm pretty sure i put them there and then the other one was fidelity fidelity surveyed 400 uh institutional clients and i think 22 said they already held bitcoin or another digital asset and 47 percent including that 22 percent said that they wanted exposure in their portfolio yes um so i got this on blockchain capital uh study up bitcoin awareness has gone up to 89

from 77 overall uh from the fall of 2017 when we were in the midst of a bull market mind you to the spring of 2019 let actually a couple weeks ago i believe the data was collected yeah so awareness is at 90% between 18 34 year olds almost 90% between 35 44 year olds almost 90% across the board a lot of people are familiar with it 43% have a respondents had a positive connotation with it where it was 34% the fall 2017 so across the board it seems that people are more aware of Bitcoin and more attribute positive feelings to it more than they did a couple of years ago.

But they don't own it. They don't own it. I believe, yeah, so Nick Carter, I believe, tried to crunch through numbers of the total number of Americans. This is all Americans, too, mind you, that were surveyed. He crunched the numbers, and it's the same number, like 25 million would have owned it if if those projections are true which seems a bit high there's no way i feel like it's got to be lower than 25 million on bitcoin yeah but somebody

in the uh somebody responded to nick in that thread znd toshi i believe yeah he's an anon and he actually brought up a good point that uh people may have just been uh sort of virtue signaling that they own because they they see it as like a thing of status like yeah i own bitcoin like i'm in on it like plenty of people will lie about yeah having stack sets which is like another and i guess we can get in the service the survey is obviously not uh foolproof 100 i'm looking at this sample right now and like they had like pretty good samples 2000 people 2029 people and it's like split up pretty well they actually they surveyed more women than men interesting yeah that's interesting um i uh i you know i think the interesting thing is every time uh when you start

your podcast your interview series you say how did you get into bitcoin um a lot of people almost all the people actually say they first heard about it and they just dismissed it and then eight months year and a half two years later whatever something brought them back in and then they jumped in and you know that's how it happened to me i think that's how it happened to you yep um so all these people they've been primed they're they've they're aware of it now now it just needs to jump back into their consciousness another time or another two times and bang bang bang bang is right uh maybe a grayscale will help us with that that consciousness this jumpstart um no but again this is uh slowly but surely and i think the one thing that spencer

pointed out in his conclusion with this is uh he referenced it as a mega demographics uh sort of trend and it's the youth leading it and sort of understanding bitcoin uh more innately than the older generations which makes sense for a lot of reasons obviously because we are internet natives lives at least people our age are i would say i'm just on the cusp i remember life without the internet but it wasn't too long um really like aol yeah we had aol uh chat rooms i got aol in the back of the millennium backstreet uh backstreet boys album i'm pretty sure um but again it's just it's more natural like a conversation with jack he said you look at kids now i've got nieces nephews cousins have kids they're two three years old they already know how to enter their parents

passwords find pictures of themselves and stuff like this is gonna be more innate for them that's another reason and another factor of this is probably like generational i don't want to say envy but like hey we we sort of got the shit under the stick here and maybe bitcoin could provide a better future that's what i would imagine sort of are the reasons for that that demographic push from the younger people to sort of come to bitcoin more easily yeah i mean i feel like yeah it's it seems like it's like one of those every once in a while like a generation has like an opportunity for like massive wealth transfer events um is it every generation though no i every every every so often a generation gets that chance um like we saw the like the um

i don't know what generation they were but like if you're in like that prime age group uh of like 22 to 30 in like the late 70s going into the 80s like in finance like you just made fucking bank yeah um or like real estate or something like that yeah we were neary opened up the uh the credit or excuse me the uh collateralized debt obligation markets really right exactly they just like everything exploded and it was just right place the right time yes um so it's that's not unheard of for for that to be the case and i think that young people in general are it's easier for them to grok and understand this shit um having value online uh and they have much less to lose they've they've been sold a bad rap they're young they can take

higher risks um so like i'd be really surprised and i think we see that in bitcoin i think it skews young in general yeah i would say with a lot of certainty that it definitely does i mean i love our older like our older community but shout out to bitcoin tina i know you're listening but like we definitely it definitely skews younger i would say and i think that's going to be awesome i do as well because because the older folks they talk down to us you know the older no corners are the worst they're the worst earners they have they have more to lose right yeah exactly yeah I'm excited to watch them lose it. Speaking about losing it,

lose those chain analysis companies following you and join the people who are coin joining on the Bitcoin network. Recently, I believe Kyle Torpy reported this on longhash.com. Coin join Bitcoin payments have nearly tripled and account for 4.09% of all transactions on the network. It's not a huge number, but you know, it's not too shabby. none looking at that chart it's funny going back like coin joins were very popular in like 2012 they made a resurgence in 2014 yeah but they were worse implementations the early ones were like

people testing there's a lot of mixers too back then right yeah but those don't show up as a coin join that's true in that chart yes um the big hump that it looks like we were doing really well and then we like lost progress was blockchain.info shared coin service which was like coin joined in your browser and there was a lot of issues with that implementation so like even though like and i remember using that you never did you ever use shared i never used the blockchain that info wallet uh well i use it just for shared coin because you know i wanted to try it out or whatever it was just horrible this is a horrible experience and supposedly like the privacy wasn't i i think you had to you obviously trusted them you know uh it was going through their servers

and everything and then as a result they were liable so they made themselves like a regulatory target at the same time um and it just was ineffective from a privacy perspective so that's like this is really the best on the the best percentage the strongest the strongest use of coin joins that we've ever had yes i would say yes yeah and it's rising and like we've said a massive i like i it'd be awesome if the price rose at that rate just everyone's it's just it's awesome to see yeah like we said privacy loves company um if you're not coin joining and you're looking to i know it can be stressful stressful for me as well we're not it was pretty simple right it's pretty simple but it is stressful moving moving utxs yeah i mean i think like if

you move like a small amount i mean and the minimum is 0.1 so that's like 500 so it's like impossible to really move a small amount so i guess i'll take that back but if you start with like smaller amounts and like get used to it like that's good yes and the ux is getting better and while we're on this topic samurai they're entering their mainnet testing phase for their whirlpool which is another um sort of it's another coin join join yeah another way to mix up your utxs and develop some sense of privacy yeah the more the merrier as many as we have so they're going through testing right now they're doing so wasabi is doing rounds of 100 um at 0.1 minimum i've seen samurai's doing point half the minimum half the amount because you have to do coordinated

amounts everyone has to be sending the same amount no matter what otherwise you can't mix them together uh but samurai plants because they're using smaller round sizes like five it's quicker um you know at the sake of some privacy it's quicker and and you get uh you can do way more denominations different denominations because you can spread your liquidity out more yeah so it's 50 million satoshis is the minimum yeah um not 50 million 50 right 0.05 or five zero five million yeah that's five million it's marty math for you wow you're really fucking with me five million i was like there's no way it's definitely yeah five million satoshis excuse me okay there we go i'm sorry well at least we got it at least

you gotta um thinking in sats we gotta start thinking in sats uh i saw the demo somebody demoing i don't know was this whirlpool or the coots thing they have where you you can just in person coin join by like scanning the qr code then you scan the qr code yeah that's their other that's i think cahoots that's what they're calling it right i haven't i haven't tested out either yet i've been in the i i've been meaning to test out the samurai world pool but i haven't yet yes and and cahoots i need someone to be in cahoots with so i'm working on that one too but yeah that's like a small person coin joint yes and um yeah with this now like they're gonna they plan to open source everything in the future correct not yes yes the back end i i don't think

is still not open source. Still not open source. So there's a degree of trust there where you're running stuff through their servers, but they plan on moving away from that in the future. Right. Yes. And now they have Tor integrated,

so presumably they can't link your IP. Yes. Thank you for bringing up Tor. We talked about this last week, like running around Tor node. Was it Pierre or Max Hildebrand? And I don't think they brought it to our attention, but they brought it to somebody's attention on Twitter that if Tor goes down,

you sort of have to have a kill switch in your node because it sort of exposes you if your Tor node goes down while your information is running through it. So just be cognizant of that. And like a lot of VPNs, too. Well, first of all, if you use Tails with Tor, um it automatically it only connects uh through tour um a lot of vpns like in the vpn app or in

open vpn if that's what you use or whatever you use like there's usually like a check box to to kill it um when there's because you don't want it to just switch to clear net if you're doing all of a sudden it's just the nodes open on clear net yeah it's just like ripping your your towel off if you're walking through the house everybody's gonna be able to see your private parts or what you thought was private bad joke i know i was just thinking about about the kill switch issue yeah it is so it's the issue is that if tor goes down on your device you don't want you don't want it to all of a sudden be broadcasting whatever you're broadcasting um and if you're it's your node if your node's running through tor

If your node's running through Tor And then Tor gets killed The node needs to stop running Instead of continue to broadcast Yes So just be aware of that I do not know of any Sort of simple solutions to that

Off the top of my head Well I'm trying to If like for instance like Kasa doesn't even run their node Through Through Tor to begin with I'm pretty sure they only run the lightning portion Through Tor

um i have to i'm gonna ask the knot i'm curious what the if the noddle has a kill switch for their tour uh integration um and then whoever who commented on twitter about that i think it was pierre or max hildebrand i'm not positive there was someone responded that so what i was talking about was like a software level kill switch uh so that's that's like if if if the node just at the software level realizes tor goes down and it just shuts it it just cuts it cuts the internet yeah i feel like there could be a fan function like if this isn't messaging through tor then don't send it yeah but there is but the guy whoever responded was like you still might leak there's still like if you really do care about your privacy like i think the only way to properly

do it is separate hardware so like basically you have like a piece of hardware in between everything that that runs that logic so that you can cut it out from the hardware level not rely on any of the software to do the right thing and make sure you don't leak any actual so like you know privacy like it's just always trade-offs between convenience and privacy and convenience and security and hopefully these types of issues will become easier for the end user hey we're here to highlight pain points for all you wily entrepreneurs out there okay you guys see these issues and they aren't solved yet get out there fucking solve them that's stressful um probably should attack this on to the blockchain uh survey but fidelity surveyed 400 institutional investors oh yeah i

drop that while you were while you were searching yeah yeah i was searching all right yeah you did fill this out i gave that exact stat right 22 percent i have bought already already have exposure 47 uh i think exposure makes sense for 47 right yes you see i even have the numbers memorized that's a good one that's a really good one 22 is still not that many of them no um it's uh marty's trying to do math in his head right now it's not happening 78 percent left yeah and who knows how much the 22 percent on they probably don't even own that much they're just dipping their feet in yeah that's again slowly but surely it's happening again lindy comes into effect every block that bitcoin produces just makes it more probable that

survive into the future and the fact that it's becoming more probable that it'll survive into the future is forcing these institutional investors these big public companies and other and governments even to sort of think about this it's it's a thing that they have to deal with now i think the majority they said 47 percent were interested 22 percent already owned it um so that's 25 difference those 25 percent like basically what they're waiting for is they're just going to fomo buy in and like a little over 10k yeah and then that's just gonna like they wait for the confirmation yeah another stat out of this which may be more important is that financial advisors and family offices uh respectively have a 74 80 um favorable view of digital assets

bitcoin probably being the number one digital asset on their minds and those are the people selling to to the people with money so that's good to see as well yeah i mean i think it's an easy sell for family offices i mean why not one percent as our boy wences would say um more institutions getting into the freight e-trade is joining the party this news dropped i believe while we're recording last week um they they plan to offer bitcoin trading to their five million customers and this just loops back to what we were talking about early as incumbents basically creating more on-ramps. It's just like a Robin Hood where you're not going to be able

to get access to your keys, obviously. Yeah, same with TD Ameritrade and shit. It's super easy for them to integrate this. And a lot of people are going to use it. Yeah. So E-Trade's joining the party, joining Robin Hood, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, other big institutions. That's crazy.

Like that is Absolutely insane Imagine if we had that infrastructure in 2017 Can this Can this bullish fundamental news Overcome the bearish news Of potential Bitfinex The Bitfinex is just gonna

I mean it could go It could go the two ways basically Yeah But I think no matter what We're gonna have to talk about Tether and Bitfinex for like way too long for so much for it's like nothing's gonna happen quickly unless it just all implodes do you think nothing good nothing good is gonna happen quickly i mean that the possibility of something just being rosy and everything going great and not having to talk about it all the time

is zero there's no way that happens especially with this ico they're doing and shit yeah it's bitfinex about the red wedding us like everything's all cheery and then they just everyone dies you know that'd be exciting i'm gonna use a little bit more excitement it's been uh it's been a pretty boring six months has it been no it hasn't been boring at all that's true it's never boring uh maybe we're just jaded or i'm just jaded jaded about what i've just been seeing too much shit what kind of shit uh where should we start i mean should we go all the way back to like 2013 the the all coin launches remember that crit when david seaman was going around pumping hyper

hyper coin when i always forget about david when bryce was was launching zeta coin dark coin drake dirac that was some shit getting exit scan by min pal that was that was my hard first lesson no matter what well no matter what era there's always an exchange that everyone thinks is going to be uh the best exchange forever and ever and just dominate everyone else and no one else has a chance and like right now that's binance like for a solid period there it was min pal i feel like you know it never really i don't think it was ever like the main exchange like one of the top exchange but it was like always around that had such a good reputation and then it just yeah apparently the uh the founder of min pal is a pretty huge scumbag

i'm pretty sure he's a domestic abuser and shit like that and that just took that's pretty fucked up just took a bunch of people it's obviously bitcoin's fault yeah bitcoin's fault that he's a shit person do you remember neo and b this rings a bell yes it was like the bank in cyprus danny brewster's yeah danny brewster's and he sold an ieo or i mean i guess ieo is supposed to stand for initial exchange offering but he sold equity of neo and b it was going to be like a bitcoin bank and like cyprus was going through shit at that point so it was like the venezuela situation whereas you know bitcoin could help cyprus going on yeah um and yeah and that just that whole thing just completely imploded on itself yeah i've come a long way since that era

i thought that was going to be the future at one point i was like yeah there's just gonna be like bitcoin banks in the corner hey we don't know there may be in the future he's gonna like do like customer support i don't know so i guess it's just an idea so we had that the icos of just ahead of its time going to an ethereum meetup and having them pitch icos to company like the day after vlad was like please do not build critical apps on ethereum that was a it's another thing that drove me a little nuts there was a couple months there where i just i just thought i was like maybe i was wrong you know like maybe and it's funny because a lot of people you know like you get that during the bear market but like i got it during like the height of

2017 bull market because like none of it made sense the like the token craze the whole ico fucking mess i was just like maybe do i am i missing something am i an idiot like what's going on here i don't know this is a good segue into the last topic which is ethereum.org officially updated their website oh eth is money now eth is money now so this goes into like that token economy didn't make sense uh token economy built on erc20 tokens fueled by gas which is ether uh eth was always money like people like everyone knew even during like the ico and shit it was just all marketing yeah so they've changed their marketing they pivoted from unstoppable touring complete world computer applications to fueled by ether which is gas to i believe

a decentralized finance platform with ether as as the money token is this is this goalpost moving is this sharpening the narrative is this a pivot what is this yes i would say all of those um but uh i mean look we've all been saying that eth is a competing is a competing money for like the longest time so for them to admit it is like that's got to be a positive right i don't know i'm like happy about that like now like like if you compete on terms of money like bitcoin is is the better money like bitcoin is the best money we have no degree i just think it's hilarious watching the ethereum thought leaders uh sort of adopt the bitcoin narratives that bitcoiners have been trying to educate them on for years now it seems like they're finally

coming around uh will he be able to outcompete bitcoin we shall see i'm not uh too optimistic on that but oh you're not you're not optimistic on uh ethereum no not too too optimistic they even know what ethereum is going to be i yeah i mean i don't i'm not positive neither am i but we'll we'll include the ethereum.org uh we don't have to include it in the show notes you can just go to it if you want to go to it you can go to that too uh but it was interesting that was a they put money like three times on that the front like it's money now like they they went full it wasn't and the site has been a a cause for contention over the years because they haven't updated it since like 2014 i believe yeah i went back did you go back to the archives i i saw the

one somebody posted the archive link to a certain state i was just going i you know you you go to like uh archive.org and you can just click through all the different years and it's pretty interesting watching you can see the pre-sale like it's just pretty interesting watching it progress yeah um what's going on uh programmable pow is that i believe they're they're taking the foot off that gas pedal yeah i i'm probably i don't have no idea who the hell knows i haven't been following it i think i heard rumors are taking their foot off that really i'm not sure i was surprised that i'm good for them prog pow was uh i don't think it was a good idea so yeah all right that's all we got for topics we got a few minutes to riff here you have riffing topics on the top of your

head uh we're gonna be at bit block boom and the san francisco bitcoin conference 2019 i think our code's rhr for both rhr for both i'm gonna be at the value of bitcoin conference in munich in june 2 um speaking about bitcoin and traditional banking this is a cool conference it's bringing of bitcoiners and a bunch of german bankers together to sort of pitch bitcoin excited for that um i guess one thing to riff on here to end it too is that i guess there was an article on coindesk venezuela came out um basically saying that bitcoin is not a panacea for venezuela and shouldn't be marketed that way and that's something we agree with here at tftc it's uh absolutely we've said it many times it's not a panacea it's simply a tool that that is available

if Venezuelans want to use it. No, and you really want to have it before the crisis happens. Yes. Like, it's really hard to get afterwards, you know, which is way more difficult. The ideal situation is to have Bitcoin first. I have something to riff on. Is Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme?

Ooh. This was FUD that I thought was extinguished. Is this from the Stripe guy? What? Is this from the Stripe guy? No, this is from tweeters. Tweeters? yeah like people um so my belief with bitcoin is that it's a scarce asset

so the more people that buy it the higher the price goes right um the but the higher the price goes like when we have those price pumps like i think it it's the main driver of new adoption like people actually hear about bitcoin and pay attention to bitcoin because the price is going up through the roof uh and then they like come in and like or maybe like they get aware of it once they don't get aware of it till the next run up or whatever but then that new adoption then brings the price up even higher in the next pump and then that brings even more people and it's like this ridiculous like feedback it's a beautiful feedback loop right so like then so like i posted a tweet about that i saw that i could have worded

it a little bit better you missed you missed an important part hash power plays into that feedback loop as well right yeah but that's just that's more adoption yes hash power is more adoption so i think that so then every so i was just getting tons of haters just saying oh like bitcoin's a ponzi scheme and like a lot of them were either bitcoin cash people or alt corners it wasn't even like no corners well that's why i think not having the hash power aspect into it sort of hurt your argument because hash power represents a sort of a sunk cost of hardware and energy that sort of proves that people are willing to put skin in the game to to acquire this scarce token which i think would would sort of destroy the ponzi scheme

argument right but i wasn't making an anti-ponzi scheme argument they were levering ponzi scheme at me and then yeah yeah the main response in my mind is that pow gives you permissionless access right so you can exchange work at a true market rate that's not controlled by anyone for bitcoin from the network yes um and i thought it was interesting that like ethereum people were leveling this at me and like proof of stake is way more pyramid characteristics than bitcoin like i would never say that to them but like it's ridiculous that they would i don't know say that bitcoin is a you know like it's not even a ponzi like it's more pyramid scheme than ponzi like you need a dude named ponzi at the top to be a ponzi yes you need a central you need a madoff yeah

so i can steal like a vitalik type or something like that you know so it'd be pyramid but anyway Right, that's besides the point. No, and then with proof of stake, if we're playing out the logical thought experiment, if it ever does become successful, people are just going to be incentivized to lock up their tokens. And you can have cartels that don't sell?

Yes. They don't sell. So it inherently requires more permission because you have to buy from an existing holder. You can't just plug in hardware and get distributed coins. Yes. um so bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme it's a bad argument but maybe ethereum is

no i think that's like i just i just think that like cryptocurrency be like multi-coiners like shouldn't be they shouldn't be don't call bitcoin a ponzi like anything turned to bitcoin can be thrown at you like five times as hard so yeah i just and like it's just a losing i i don't i just a bad i don't know bad precedent to set uh you know yeah throwing stones from glass houses and it's definitely i i wouldn't say it was a pyramid scheme either like there's no other way that you could bootstrap like a new like a new money in a fair way that was that i it's hard to imagine like a fairer method than like people buy in at their involuntarily like when they when they want to yeah you're preaching to the choir brother it's uh you don't have to sell me on this but yeah

i think if you threw hash power into your uh your formula you would have so where am i putting hash power in it so it was a bad tweet i could have composed the tweet better so it goes price so i would do it price leads to more hash power because miners are going after a token that has more value so they're willing to put more uh capital on the line uh and which inherently makes bitcoin more secure to an extent and that in turn makes the proposition value of owning bitcoin more valuable which because it's more secure yes coupled with the price i could see that yeah and then um more people drives the price up which drives the hash power i was just trying to keep it really simple i should have kept it simpler it's just my bitcoin thesis is just

with adoption the price will go up so as more people adopt it the fucking price will go up and I think more people will adopt it. So that's my thesis. Buy gold, buy Bitcoin. That's all we're trying to say here. Drop gold. That's all we got for this week, freaks. Thank you for joining us, as always.

We haven't even talked about the site. I think we're going to launch that tonight at midnight. Or actually, I'm not going to put a date on it. I'm not going to put pressure on the dev that way. We will announce the site on Twitter in the next 24 hours. I love that. The hats will go on sale. they're very limited supply um they'll be under the merch tab you'll be able to find them there

so yeah i think we have to use shopify for the shop to start because btc pay server doesn't have their shipping uh end of things figured out but i think we'll go completely bitcoin native pretty soon but it uses btc pay server for the bitcoin payments yes um yeah it'll be using our btc pay server um for that even when it goes through shopify i'm pretty sure yes yeah yeah um yeah i think so yeah so you but you will be able to pay in fiat if you if you so please um and are looking to stack sats um spend fiat stack sats um are we a lolly partner no we're not a lolly partner we should become a lolly partner you should because that costs us any money i don't know alex if you're listening he's hi alex we'll uh we'll talk we'll sidebar this

Yeah, we'll message you. All right, you have a final note for the freaks? Stay humble, stack sets. Yeah, peace and love. Stay chill. Pecker! Just kidding, freaks. Talk to our dev.

Site will be launched on Sunday. Sorry for getting your hopes up there. We aim to please here. We want to make sure that the site is perfect before we launch it. It will be launched on Sunday.