TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.05.20

Episode Date: May 23, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Who would you want to tweet about Bitcoin? - LN node update https://1ml.com/node/02d419c9af624d0e7a7c90a60b9ffa35f4934973a9d7d3b4175cc3cc28b7ffcde1 - SIM Swaps https://medium.com/coinmonks/the-most-expensive-lesson-of-my-life-details-of-sim-port-hack-35de11517124 -lncast.com launch - 60 Minutes https://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/video/HaKmux455gSICzgSiGqzyUPIfGhuxnTG/bitcoin-s-wild-ride/ - $8 trillion hidden around the world and Elizabeth Warren wants to tax it https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-23/the-wealth-detective-who-finds-the-hidden-money-of-the-super-rich - BestMixer shutdown: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/dutch-authorities-shut-down-bestmixer/ - CoinCenter - Non-custodial cryptocurrency mixer developers are not subject to U.S. regulation. - https://coincenter.org/link/non-custodial-cryptocurrency-mixer-developers-are-not-subject-to-u-s-regulation - Bull Bitcoin starts mixing user funds: https://twitter.com/francispouliot_/status/1131309370900402178?s=19 - Kraken equity offering at 4B valuation, $1000 min: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/kraken-is-offering-itself-to-customers-in-chunks-as-small-as-1000-for-its-fundraising-round/ - Bitfinex LEO token: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/bitfinex-to-start-trading-its-exchange-token-leo-on-may-20/ - Polo/Circle blocks tokens from US customers, lays off 30 employees https://www.theblockcrypto.com/tiny/poloniex-continues-to-advocate-for-better-crypto-regulation-as-it-goes-on-a-delisting-spree-in-the-us/ https://twitter.com/jerallaire/status/1130912877991333891?s=19 Shoutout to this week's listener contributor @mdotbit (https://twitter.com/mdotbit) Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Unchained Capital. Head over to www.unchained-capital.com/vaults and checkout their 2-of-3 multisig vaults. You get 3-months free of Saifedean Ammous' The Bitcoin Standard Research Bulletin when you sign up.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to this week's edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. It's your boy, Marty Bent, sitting down with Matt O'Dell. Just one-on-one for the first time in a few weeks. What's going on, dude? I'm excited to be intimate with you. A lot to talk about this week. Fucking exciting week.

Very exciting week. A lot of good, healthy conversations being had this week. So, excited to expound upon those. first before we hop into it uh the price according to the trade block xpx index is $7,797.42 and according to my node which was launched using pierre richard's node launcher we're at block 577,436 where i think we're officially within a year of the block having yeah probably a little bit sooner yeah because hash rate keeps going up yeah and we're at 12 800 sats per dollar bus bus uh again the dime is not going as far as it used

to i've been uh i've been checking the dime bag on uh tftc.io and and we're getting less satoshis per dime it's a shit coin what can i tell you yeah hey if you're willing to dump it into uh into the dime bag we'll take it um uh before we jump into our topics a lot to talk about this week as we already discussed gotta give a shout out to our sponsors uh first we got unchained capital you freaks know all about them already if you sign up for their uh volt solution which is a two or three multi-sig solution that's compatible with treasures ledgers uh when it's not online you guys are 100 cold storage uh unchained is there to be the third key or excuse me the second of two keys if you're ever in a pinch and need them to sign for you um but you'll have two of

the three keys in your possession at all times, or you can even get unique with it depending on what situation you're in. If you're a business, an individual, a family office, whatever it may be, you can get very creative with these multi-sig solutions. If you guys sign up now by going to www.unchained-capital.com slash vaults, you're going to get three months free of the Bitcoin Standard Research Bulletin. That's some quality information for free. So again, www.unchained-capital.com Also shout out the Cash App. You freaks all know all about them.

They're helping us stack sats. They're also the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years. First P2P payments app to offer Bitcoin selling to retail investors or retail retailers, we'll say. They also have the Boost program.

You freaks know all about it. I've been pimping out the Boost card for quite a while now. I honestly do use it every day. saves me money uh one of my favorites more recently is whole foods actually bum they cut it from 10 to 5 but i'll take the five percent uh prime member as well compounding savings there uh download the cash app start stacking sats today google play store or the apple app store matt where the fuck should we start this week hopefully we get sats back soon

in the cash app too sats back that'd be fucking dope sats back at the store yeah the boost instead of getting a discount, Sats Back would be a very good. And then you use your boost card to buy something through Lolli. And you compound your Sats Back. Yeah! It's so much stacking there.

It moved a little bit. I feel so bad for people's ears. That wasn't me. That was Marty. Dude's a little bit excited. Very excited. Lots to talk about this week. Let's start with a little fun.

a fun uh we'll start with our our weekly contributor or our excuse me our listener contributor we uh shout out to um m.btc at m.b excuse me at m.bit excuse me at m.bit m-d-o-t-b-i-t uh bought a shout out this week it has a question for us matt what single person would you like to see tweet i am already all in on bitcoin it is the future of money keep the fire pods coming shout out m.bit thanks for the uh thanks for the contribution m.bit's awesome uh we've both met him fantastic dude uh yeah but that's regular appreciate appreciate the contribution to the pod um i think every single podcast listener knows exactly what my answer is and he has already got a big bag of bitcoin in my opinion and his name is is is

donald trump donald trump you think he's you think he's uh i think he's securing the bag of sats right now yeah he's i'd be so surprised i'd be absolutely surprised if he doesn't have it what is the situation that that entices trump to tweet about bitcoin like what is it is it trade war uh sort of the impetus for this he's like fuck it we're going to bitcoin screw you or is it anti-bitcoin as a positive bitcoin what do you think i mean i don't know why i just stood up there yeah i mean i would be fine if you just sent a tweet out that just said bitcoin you know he doesn't have to get into the weeds but um i mean there's plenty of ways that that he could pump his bags if he wanted to pump his bags uh and you know i i don't think he would be against it you

He hasn't shown much moral restraint in any kind of way. Yeah, he definitely doesn't have a leash on him when it comes to tweeting things out. Exactly. So I'm hoping for that 3 a.m. toilet tweet. Maybe Bitcoin is the best money we have. Something like that. Just like a toilet thought tweets it out to the world.

That would be awesome. For me, we discussed this before the podcast. I think Kanye, I would like to see Kanye, a big Kanye fan. And I think we talked about it earlier this week. It's a good segue into another topic with Russell Okun, who's shout out to Russell if you're listening to this. Thanks for listening to the pod. Apparently he's been listening to Tales from the Crypt

as well as some other Bitcoin-focused podcasts. And yeah, so I think, I really do think people like athletes and artists like Kanye really drive culture, whether you like it or not. That's sort of what drives our culture, what drives what people pay attention to. They're role models. Yeah, so I think if Kanye tweeted something, he's at sort of the pinnacle of pop culture and culture production, and it would have a very heavy effect.

What would a Kanye tweet look like? Whoo! I could see him hopping in on the stacking sats meme, dude. Just popping on a thread, stacking sats? Just nonchalantly, like, yeah. Post a screenshot? Stacking sats, yeah. $10,000 buy?

Yeah, if you're listening, join us. We're on Saturdays, usually. If Kanye's listening? Yeah. rumor is kanye is a very die-hard listener of tales from the crypt yeah um still waiting on the uh the invitation to sunday service but he uh would not be he's talked about bitcoin before pretty openly he has yeah on uh with charlamagne i believe he's another one that he probably owns a bunch of bitcoin would it be surprised yeah he just hasn't shielded yet yeah and uh again

production of culture starts with these with these idols if you will again whether you like it or not and uh i think it would be good for them to to get people into to bitcoin the self sovereignty and to sound money i think i imagine a lot of these people um a lot of the more higher profile americans specifically got in in a big way over this last bear cycle so they're still sitting in a position where like they might not want to admit it because they might be wrong but they'll be more likely to admit it when the adrenaline is going and it's like $15,000 and we're like approaching the next all time high and they just feel like a genius.

Cause let's be honest, when the price goes up, we all feel like fucking geniuses. Was it, was it Katy Perry fucking painting her nails? That was the top. That was the top. She had all the alt coins.

She had like Monero and Litecoin and shit. She had like paid ads on her Instagram and shit like that. Yeah. Jesus Christ. So that's when they come out of the woodwork, right? They, they gather their bags now and they.

Yeah. No. So let's segue this into the NFL versus NBA topic. That was a tight, tight poll we had there on Twitter, which Players Association will own more Bitcoin by 2025. The NFL won out 51 to 49 percent. I couldn't believe it was so close. For the longest time, it was just 50-50.

There was over 2,500 votes, too. So pretty good sample set. And you didn't put a show me the answers, though. I don't like that. I like show me the answers. It's a binary option. you realize how little conviction people have when you put the show me the answers because even something as like just like pick one simple as that i bet you like 35 40 of people would

click show me the answers yeah just add some complicated math and as we all know i'm not the best at math especially on the go i like i sent a poll out once i was like do you use a windows computer and it was yes no show me the answers it's like 35 show me the answers like guys that's just say you know there's no uh yeah exactly that's why you only give two options um but this leads into the conversation of which league which league do you think well you said nba well i said nba i was you know kind of also trying to egg on russell because i knew he was watching um i don't know it's a it's a toss-up i mean we have uh the owner of the warriors is like a major proponent of bitcoin yeah chamath patapatia i believe um big big proponent of bitcoin and

actually uh i like his his term bitcoin is an insurance policy against the idiocy of central banking um that's one of his sound bites that i really like and yeah there's been rumors for years rumors can't confirm them just coming through the grapevine that that some leagues have have paid players on the side with with bitcoin and stuff like that to entice them to come play for them i mean i could see athletes in general um being more likely uh to end up with a lot of bitcoin uh when this all young rich it's a perfect demo they like the risk appetite is higher yeah they have a lot of disposable income matt barkley came out he said he was mining he's been mining cryptocurrencies um russell coon actually obviously hope it's not cloud mining

matt if you're listening matt mr barkley make sure you're like my age matt do not cloud mine make sure you got like s9 set up or some shit please sir no cloud mine for your own sake um no this is a growing trend again like bitcoin we talk about adoption a lot and like what's gonna drive adoption we talk a lot about the uh the mechanics of that and more about infrastructure on ramps and stuff like that but uh adoption of bitcoin as an idea in people's mind i think uh athletes talking about it more openly and stuff like that is is very good for for just again the virus spreading it was pretty fun watching russell go down the rabbit hole live on twitter right you know and uh i have have there been any have there been any known

baseball players who have come out the mlbs uh they had that uh that erc20 like baseball card Oh, yeah. A crypto kitty card. Yeah. MLB has always been cheesy. Yeah. But the individual players make a ton of money and their careers are long. Careers are longer. They make the most money. I'm pretty sure. I would not be surprised if there's MLB players that own Bitcoin. I know like A-Rod is like a Buffett man. So like maybe he's just walking around telling people it's like baby brains trading or something.

Yeah. And he he co-hosts a podcast with Big Cat. and I think big cat definitely has positive connotations of Bitcoin at a certain price level there you go everyone has a price yeah everybody does have a price anyway that's super exciting right yeah I'm super excited

no yeah the more again not just the ideas right and people be more aware and again breaking down the taboo of talking about Bitcoin people just throw it to the wayside like oh that Ponzi scheme whatever if you have again people's idols talking about it a positive light and exploratory in a in a sort of open-minded way

it'll hopefully change people to think differently as well um just orange pulling one person at a time exactly uh speaking about one person at a time uh what's going on with our ln node we're trying to we're trying to onboard people at the lightning network one one person at a time was a cheesy segue i went for it i went for it i'm sorry so we have we have the stacking sats note um it is currently being operated by a undisclosed thief who's a fan of the pod uh we're now running it through tor i don't like his dirty tactics but i like that he's a fan of the pod oh he's definitely a freak um he is still reciprocating channels so if you open a channel with him um he will open one back uh of of equal amount over over two million sats uh please uh just

because it it reduces the future fee burden uh you know the larger your your channel is the less percentage that on-chain fee is to open and close this is good planning for the future yeah uh i i think i was talking about on twitter like an interesting stat to watch is going to be uh the capacity and the number of channels on Tor-only nodes versus ClearNet nodes. Right now, the network is mostly dominated by ClearNet nodes. Part of that reason is because the network is dominated by LNBIG nodes, which are all running on ClearNet. It seems like most of the

node providers are going towards the Tor as a default, which is good. That's where we want to go. Every single end user should be running their lightning node through Tor. So you're not broadcasting your IP. Ideally, you know, we're a podcast. You know, our node was public information. Look what happened to it. But like, that's why, you know,

if you're a company or something, then your node's public information. But if you're an end user, you shouldn't be, you know, connecting your node to your real life identity, run it through tor and then in the future if people talk about like oh do wasabi fees stuff like that do they get um untenable as as as uh transaction fees increase and the beauty of lightning is if you fund your own lightning tor node with a wasabi output you greatly reduce the

need to to remix again um because it's like going into like a black box of sorts yeah no this um as more and more nodes start running through tour which it seems like like you said it's going to become a sort of standard out of the box that we've talked about in the past pierre's node launcher is going to be if not already will be tour native in the future it's not already yeah it's in progress yeah that's like probably the biggest hurdle right now casa defaults to tour not defaults to tour that's what we're running it through this idea that like tour isn't uh capable of what the robber's running it through right that's that's the robber's running the thief is running our our our formerly our our tour note and um

the the the idea that tor isn't capable of handling this traffic is is being proven wrong by our node which is the 46th high largest node on the network high uptime um everyone if you know it's a little bit more difficult to run a tor relay node but if you can figure out how to do it you should do that as well and you know just so that we can keep that bandwidth up the one issue we we do see with these tor nodes is the channels like if you're if you have an existing channel with the stacking stats node um the and you're still running through clear net it will show as sporadically offline like the channel's offline even though the node is still online and that problem is because it's routing through an exit node to get to you a tor exit node and tor exit

nodes are legally difficult to run because like anyone who's using tor is like broadcasting through you to the clear net so like if they look at like child porn or something is like the you know is the usual example then it comes it looks like it comes from your ip so we don't have as many of those as we'd like to have but that issue solves itself once we're all running through tor because then it never has to go through an exit node so i understand if it could be annoying but keep in mind that if you wait and once you finally do upgrade your node to go through tor all those channels will still be there and they'll work better than ever so unless you like absolutely need the money now i like it'd be better if you don't close those channels and

you just wait and they'll just get upgraded over yeah no i think like you sort of touched on there highlights the need to if you're technically competent enough and willing and able to to run tour nodes uh relay nodes because we will be leeching off this this network and we should probably contribute back to it um now these are these are hurdles to overcome and um again do you think having watched the uh the thief uh manage these channels via tour and stuff like that do You think this is scalable? You think you're average? Yeah, like running everything through Tor.

So first like running a full node, then running a lightning node, then running it through Tor. It seems pretty arduous, obviously. It's coming out of the box for a lot of people. I mean, on the Noddle, it's literally just two extra clicks. And for the end user, they don't see really any degradation in performance, except if they're trying to connect to a clear net node. So it's being abstracted.

And the thing is the clear net routing nodes, a lot of them dual broadcast and dual listen so they have an onion address and a clear net address so you have no issue connecting to those routing nodes the issue is the ones that are solely clear net they don't just do they they don't do um tor as well yeah yeah this is uh actually a very good precursor to the next subject which is the the seizure of bestmixer.io earlier this week by dutch authorities um this was a centralized mixing service uh and it was again seized by dutch authorities and brought up the question of privacy in bitcoin and the nature of mixing services versus coin joins and in the narrative around this the a couple publications came out

um and and we're conflating coin joins with decentralized mixing services and it's important And to sort of de-alienate between the two, mixing services, a centralized basically arbiter who's taking people's UTXOs and switching them out. Receiving Bitcoin and sending different Bitcoin back to you. Exactly. And Coinjoins are a specific Bitcoin transaction designed a certain way. Non-custodial. Non-custodial that people interact with freely. And it's just it's it's you're able to do it just the nature of the Bitcoin protocol. There's no changes to it.

In Wasabi's case, there's a centralized server that is coordinating everything, but they never have access to your funds and they don't know who the individual participants are as opposed to... The biggest issue with these centralized mixers is they're actually, theoretically, the most effective way of mixing

because there is literally zero link. Zero trace, yeah. With a CoinJoin, the link is still there, but there's 100 other links, so you don't know which path is the one it goes down but with the centralized mixer it's actually just splits it up and there's been a lot of them in the past and best mixer i actually wasn't aware of what a great name for a mixer just going straight great great straight to the point advertising there the big one i knew back in the day was bit mixer and it was also it looked like

they got there was never a formal announcement that they got shut down but they like closed down like out of nowhere like really quickly right before btce went down um i remember i interviewed that guy and they were like mixing back in the day i interviewed him and they were mixing like a ton ton of bitcoin and the the yeah so the way this works is they they had like a website and and best mixer operated the same way they had a website you could access it through tor clear net and you would send them bitcoin they'd put it in their pool of bitcoin and they'd send you different bitcoin and they'd give you options like should we sell send it in different segments different timing amounts they could send it at a delay we'll send it you know um six hours later

we'll send the next payment so you can't conflate the amounts so for someone who really wants privacy these centralized mixers are a nice tool in the arsenal you could use them like in combination with something like wasabi um but you couldn't ever rely on one alone because the actual mixer could be a honeypot they they have logs of every single transaction they could connect all your address is that was the major the major negative and it's easier to to go after them and they're more i think from a legal standpoint because they're custodial it makes them more liable because they're literally they they and a clear net custodian at that they they see the bitcoin come in they might have an ip address for you they know what address you sent it from and

then they're actively sending you different bitcoin there's more of a money transmitting happening there yeah um shout out stop into crypts who pointed out that if you're going to run one of these mixing services you should probably launch it anonymously and running it through a dot onion url run it through tor um if you're if you're gonna be engaging in these types of services that's what bitmixer did that's why bitmixer just like shut down out of nowhere instead of seeing it in the news that did they are you sure did best mixer they were actually running it as a company in the netherlands yes yeah with bitmixer they were all they were not oh i got best mixer i thought i got bit mixers mixed up with best mixer yeah they were like a little bit

cocky also the the all the articles said that they were actively advertising to criminals like that's absolutely bullshit they were not doing that um if you run a privacy service like you can't pick and choose none this is uh highlights the topic conversation that laurent brought up like we like yes these privacy enabling technologies are going to be used by bad people and you do not throw the baby out with the bath water by just letting not letting anybody have privacy and making all this stuff illegal because some people are are are doing bad things and and using privacy technology as well um so we like we've expounded upon this many times before on the podcast on rhr in particular is like we just need better police work like good old-fashioned

detective police work like uh just like cash yeah and it's like we say a lot like another theme like the bent and this podcast as well is like complacency kills like if you're just gonna get complacent and like again throw the baby out with the bath water uh in the name of protecting people like that's bullshit i think i think people have to have some self-respect like big uh privacy isn't illegal and using bitcoin privately does not make you a criminal as we head into memorial day weekend exactly remembering the people who fought for america in particular country founded on the principle of freedom a free thought a free speech a free commerce like we cannot allow these freedoms these human rights to be decayed and they will

be if we do not stand up for them so like that's what worried me about like the bitcoin magazine piece and the block and the block is they've both since retracted and fixed but conflating uh this stuff with like criminal activity and making it look bad like we got those edits done We did get those edits done, but we can't, we get, we have to push narrative like, and shout out to Neeraj at Coin Center who, uh, they, they posted a blog a couple hours. This morning. Yeah. This morning.

Um. I donated right after they posted it. Not, we'll put it, we'll put it in the, the link in the, in the, um, the description obviously, but non-custodial cryptocurrency mixer developers are not subject to US regulation and thank God. It's like what we said, there's a major difference there between a custodial service who's actually handling your money versus a non-custodian yes and then again going back to like this is possible via the nature of the bitcoin protocol which at the end of the day is beauty i'm like the article

is just speech because it's lines of code and uh and it's good to see in the land of the free as we headed the memorial day weekend here that it is as of right now still protected but then again complacency kills we should be loud about this topic yeah so coin center is telling us that wasabi is legal so mix all your fucking coins right now and if if you know if they try and say it's illegal in the future then we'll you know oh we didn't know we're at uh four there's no reason probably if you're american i would imagine we're we're higher than four percent which was which was uh in the news like a couple weeks ago kyle torpey at longhash.com shout out kyle but the four percent of bitcoin transactions were involved in some sort of coin joint a few

weeks ago i wouldn't be surprised that's higher now but we need to pump those stats it's gonna get even higher because bull bitcoin the canadian oh yes brokerage shout out run by francis yeah yeah so let's talk about that they just they they just made live wasabi was they're going to run all of their their user deposits through wasabi yes so shout out and again massive liquidity boost from like a legitimate source like it's really important that people that like get freshly kyc coins like you get coins from cash up and stuff and and you want to mix those because you want to break that KYC link so you have a reason to do it

but it also helps the whole pool because those are seen by law enforcement as like the most legitimate of Bitcoin. So as those enter the mixing pool it makes the whole thing that much more legitimate in their eyes. Again, we're going to harp on it. We're going to pound narratives into your head.

Privacy matters and privacy loves company. Like the bigger companies just doing this automatically is huge. Just for mixing, for liquidity, for everything. so which service is next it's a good question um i don't want to put pressure on anybody this is no this is exactly the time okay when bitcoiners need to bitmex polish their pitchforks bitmex has has been uh has a lot of bitcoin trading on their on their uh ideal candidate they would be ideal um there a bit as well uh any of these any of these uh what i would call i think kraken would

be a good fit because jesse just likes saying fuck you to the man a lot yeah kraken as well um but i think like bit like bitfinex obviously is a tenuous subject right now but bitfinex like all these uh they don't really help give us legitimacy no but i think the company's most well positioned to do this are the ones who are have sort of been cavalier and bitmex and oh absolutely absolutely in these other companies but like bull bitcoin gives us i i feel like it also gives us like a lot of legitimacy like kraken would be a really nice one bit refill would be a really nice one shout out to uh tftc alum eric spano who started my bills which is part of the bull bitcoin umbrella now that's yeah that's badass i listened to that one that was a good

episode eric we need to catch up if you're listening there's uh there's one more thing about wasabi i i obviously that's the the the the main way we've been suggesting people to coin join their coins so a lot of people's question is you know especially there's bitcoin magazine in the block uh articles they kind of alluded to maybe wasabi would be at risk as we said earlier they've they've the way they've designed the whole system is designed to reduce their legal footprint they don't know who's using it they don't have custody of your funds um the other thing is they i don't know if you remember but like a couple weeks ago like people are giving them shit on twitter because their terms of service is like you can't do

anything illegal on it it's like super strict and like anti-cypherpunk and like people are getting really angry at them like that's why they need the terms of service like they have to say that to protect themselves so like give them a fucking break and then the last thing is is like if this doesn't like if they do decide to shut down wasabi like someone can fork it and run it from a different jurisdiction or they can even run it anonymously so that would obviously suck for the wasabi team and we love those guys you know but but there is options on the table there and that's what makes it you know kind of like guacamole it's just hard to enforce i think adam and team are are pretty aware of these these possibilities that exist that's why that terms

of service exists yeah i mean again you have to fight for these these privacy enabling tools and shout out to the Adam Fiskers of the world putting their necks on the line fucking building this shit. Yeah and remember when you pay that tiny negligible wasabi fee to them it includes all that fucking fear because that's scary as hell.

Right. So respect. Tons of respect. Shout out to anybody working on CoinJoinTech. Also donate to CoinCenter. Yes. Through Lightning. Boss. Speaking about Lightning shout out to the

man to the beast to the legend who helped us build tftc.io dj seeds uh a mensch of a 22 year old he made our our site bitcoin compatible with btc pay server he customized it he created some custom btc pacer is so cool yeah he uh he really put the team on his back and he also just relaunched lncast as a completely decentralized tool um so lncast.com it's not completely decentralized no i think yeah because we're receiving our payments for our podcast right to our bdc pay server yeah it's non-custodial yes it's non-custodial non-custodial there we go well because it was kind of alt coiny yeah i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry 100% trustless yes i'm sorry ridiculous there's no absolute thank you for the correction thank you for the

correction very dope though it's very dope site um so yeah ellencast.com you can go uh pay 10 cents if you want to contribute to tales from the crypt uh by by listening through your browser and paying 10 cents first um you can do that at ellencast.com shout out dj again kids a beast it's an experimental uh podcast paywall with with lightning so you you can listen to any episode of the supported podcast i think we're the only one up there right now right i think so yeah and and to unlock each episode you pay us 10 cents through lightning and it instantly unlocks in your browser which is just kind of cool experimentation going on yeah again like that's when i went to work that's how i found dj originally because this was a completely

custodial service at one point and that's why i reached out to him i was like ah like i love what you did with this you want to come help me build this site and he did but like that's like things like the dime bag like little micro content like i think it's so cool all right you were saying uh yesterday when we met up like was it yesterday a couple days ago yeah with arbed out yeah uh arbed out is that how you're supposed to say it arbed out yeah arbed out of a tree really yeah it's not arbed out no it's arbed out oh wow fuck man uh great great guy incredible guy dude uh yeah i was saying i you know there's something about the lightning ux flow and especially with these smaller payments that really just

makes me feel compelled to spend bitcoin in a way that i've never felt in the past yeah you said you've you've sent more bitcoin transactions in the last six months than you did in the first half decade of your bitcoin yeah but most of those are wasabi coin joins and lightning opens lightning channel opens but still you know those are two things that weren't here six eight months ago ten months ago good usage um speaking about good things that weren't here 10 months ago uh pretty pretty positive uh pretty positive spin on bitcoin in the mainstream media this week uh 60 minutes anderson cooper interviewed uh niha from the mit bitcoin club or the mit um i'm sorry i'm this is uh not coming to mind is it the institute is it yeah the mit

or something yeah the the blockchain institute at mit whatever it is mit bitcoin thing charlie shrem uh bitcoin's first convict and uh in lazlo bitcoin's first uh transaction and actually let's give a shout out to lazlo people know him as the pizza pizza guy pizza day was yesterday that's why we met up with armed out to celebrate pizza day talk about bitcoin but uh people a lot of people don't know lazlo uh is responsible for the first mac os uh implementation of bitcoin and he was the first gpu miner yeah it's uh so dude you know he talked about somebody who's down for the cause also a lot of people don't know that 10 000 bitcoin transaction had a one bitcoin fee really that's pretty crazy damn it was like 0.99 bitcoin 99 million satoshi fee that's the other

thing we were saying yesterday everybody talks about laszlo sending the bitcoin nobody talks with the guy that got the 10 000 bitcoin great trade we made a fantastic trade so you didn't watch the full 60 minutes i watched like five clip five two minute clips so i feel like i got most of the segment well you missed three minutes i think it was like a 13 and a half or something i don't know it was i i was such a hater before it aired i did a preemptive it's gonna be shitty tweet and i'm the first to admit that that was like i think that was the best mainstream coverage like we couldn't have asked for a better mainstream coverage yeah a lot of people were giving niha shit for for not jumping into the fact that like

money isn't a hallucination isn't a collective hallucination like it can be like it money is a tool and a value will accrue to the best tool that is money and people think bitcoin is that people are giving her shit for that but like try think about like trying to jump into that on 60 minutes she did fine she did great shout out to niha the great representation of bitcoin like that's i watched her mainly her interview uh part and uh i think uh again good positive spin again like going back to talking about athletes and rappers talking about bitcoin it's seeping into the culture we talk a lot about adoption via on-ramps and stuff like that we got to talk about adoption of it just like being in people's minds and the 60 minute shit definitely helps i

don't even think if people even still watch 60 minutes i don't think they i think their ratings are pretty high um i i i don't think they mentioned drugs once in the whole episode they didn't they didn't that was that was that's amazing right that's pretty crazy that's pretty crazy yeah it was i thought it was really good press i'm trying to i'm trying to look up the mit bitcoin i don't even know whatever everyone knows what it is except for us mit digital currency initiative initiative found it apologies apologies appreciate you guys yeah mit bitcoin expo is one of my favorite uh one of my favorite conferences to stream every year

very technical um moving more into geopolitical stuff Elizabeth Warren, who's running for president here in the United States, is looking to tax $8 trillion that's hidden around the world in offshore funds and other savings vehicles, just highlighting the value prop of Bitcoin. Seems like there could be some kind of demand for a global censorship-resistant money. they're gonna come after people i mean that's like actually there's a book here on my bookshelf that i've been meaning to read about the panama papers so that was a big thing about the panama papers it basically uh brought to light that this amount of money was was being eight trillion dollars eight trillion that's a lot of trillions that's like almost like half the u.s gdp per year right almost like a little less wait till they realize that bitcoin is way better than you know

the rare art they hold well that's the thing like going back to the panama papers i'm surprised more as it come out after that but they basically you're surprised that the richest people in the world weren't able to shut up all of this no but now we have elizabeth warren like screaming like we're gonna come tax that shit and the panama papers prove that they have the information to go after these people so that's the point i'm trying to drive home um and again highlights the value prop of bitcoin uh that could be a lot of inflow do you think that whole eight trillion could move into bitcoin or do you think they would i'll take it uh i but who knows we could just use a couple of it that's fine yeah i'm fine with that um i mean

i think that there's like especially as bitcoin matures there'll be like no reason to hold like it would be the best best thing to hold why would you you're gonna hold the majority of your wealth in it yeah why would you do otherwise if it's it's gonna be highly liquid you know relatively stable but like constantly like going up in purchasing power basically and so why would you ever hold anything else you can just move out of bitcoin whenever you need to yeah no it is it they also drives it drives like the thought experiments in my mind like what happens when these they can say like elizabeth warren gets elected or somebody like her bernie sanders and aoc in the future and they're hard on about getting getting the taxes from those offshore

funds and people those rich are diving into bitcoin and the ire turns from that offshore those offshore vehicles to bitcoin like uh is that the point at which the political realm wakes up to the fact that there's nothing they can do about bitcoin is the sovereign individual thesis of as soon as there's a digital currency that lives on the world wide web the the powers to tax individuals will become more ephemeral well i think they'll move more to like a consumption tax and uh and uh like a an income tax or something like that but you can still do or like property tax you could do like property tax um you can have the employer take out some money just like they're doing today and the employers have property relocations you know where they are

so they have to do that and then you do a consumption tax and you can do like a property tax consumption tax makes more sense to me but again it's regressive you have the regressive argument and there's got to be a way to make it work at some point right i mean i just i think you're going we're going to have to there'll be no other option that's what they're going to have to do and actually in a lot of ways bitcoin can make it easier because you can just set up the software in such a way that it like every transaction when you buy something the merchant is all like auto forwarding to the tax agency it's pretty fucked yeah but it will you know it'll make like wealth taxes and stuff like that harder to enforce yeah no that's another um i got

a helicopter flying above us right now that's another conversation we had yesterday too is that it'll be like two different economies that develop and you'll have like a dichotomy between the fiat world and the bitcoin world that should come to be in the future

would you think it's gonna there'll be like two economies yeah I mean you see this I mean there always are in places where there are multiple currencies being used you don't think like bitcoin will be legitimized it's not already becoming legitimized i mean it's being legitimized but again

it's not gonna be i don't know if it'll be ever be completely legitimized by i'm saying like something like cash crosses both those economies right cash is is both in the black market and the white market and you go to starbucks you know if you're a drug dealer and you sell someone some drugs then you get that 20 bills they paid you you can go to starbucks and spend it there and that's true it's like the simplest crossover yeah so if like bitcoin is successful like you should be able to do that in my mind no i think you will be able to i do believe there will be laggards who refuse to adopt bitcoin for whatever reason certain countries will get isolated yes basically yeah i think not only this is what first of all why it's important that we like prioritize

um keeping bitcoin as efficient as possible and as distributed as possible and as you know as hardened from like any kind of like state act or attack or or stuff like that but it's also important that by the time they realize the threat a lot of the corrupt politicians and stuff will have bags of their own so they will be incentivized to to not do anything like i've said a lot of times like regardless of politics like trump was like the best thing that could have happened to bitcoin because like hillary was like she would have been i she was like born to regulate regulate the shit out of bitcoin um so like as we have like politicians holding holding these funds they're going to be incentivized to pump it and who knows maybe even like national treasuries and stuff will

be holding this you know we'll be secretly building bitcoin bags as well wouldn't be surprised if some are already um we know bulgaria is sitting on like 200 000 bitcoin that's a that's a where it's unconfirmed rumor what remember they like said they got it they're like a news stories came out that they said they got it and then immediately after they said immediately after they said i thought i saw you don't have it i thought i saw a story recently that really mentioning that it was from the seizure right they like seized from uh i think it was dark Dark Neck Market? Dark Neck Market or BDCE involved with that.

I think they might have called the BDCE guy. I mean, either way, if they have it, they should deny it, right? I would. That'd be pretty crazy. Yeah. We don't know how the U.S. has seized Bitcoins and sold them. Tim Draper got a lot of those. Do you think Bulgaria...

Was it Bulgaria or Belarus? It was Bulgaria? Pretty sure it's Bulgaria. Do you think Bulgarian government officials listen to the podcast? I hope so. not your keys not your coins guys make sure you know yeah don't hold this don't hold this on some custodial service yeah and don't trade hey you you politicians you bulgarian politicians if you don't know how to trade if you've never trade i know it seems enticing don't do it you're

gonna get wrecked it's uh uncle marty's advice for the day there you go oh that's an interesting thing that i wanted to touch on um over the last two weeks or so we were officially at the point where if you bought the same amount of money if you did like the most simple stacking sad strategy where you just bought like 20 a week or whatever every week at any point if you started at any point you would be in profit right now damn like a month ago we hit the point where if you bought the exact top but the thing was if you bought like a couple weeks before the top you still weren't in profit but if you bought the exact top you were in profit now it's literally any single time if you did that you'd be in profit right now that's pretty crazy right

that's what makes me like is it how can it be this easy it feels like it's too easy this uh this recovery yeah i better go do like 100x a max or whatever stacking stats is too easy not yet oh you mean this recovery yeah it could be just like a head fake or whatever yeah um and then you know but if you do this you know if your dollar cost averaging with like money you're willing to lose then you can edge out this volatility um i mean like i'm more bullish than i've ever been but i'm always bullish so me as well but going back to uh the bulgarian politicians who should be uh self-custodying uh that was also in the news this week with sim swaps there was a couple of uh high profile bitcoiners working at uh well there's one

particular person working big one was big go yeah one of the lead devs of bitco um got sim swapped lost a hundred thousand dollars of bitcoin that he's holding on coinbase uh so a bitco engineer what the fuck man holding his money on coinbase with sms to fa it seemed um no no it was it was uh maybe it was yeah it was sms but it was also the guy owned his email he recovered his gmail account through through the sim swapped uh phone number so on gmail you can turn off first there's like a million different ways this guy could have stopped from getting robbed even on like the simplest if he had put in like coinbase's vault thing he would have been fine speaking with the fact that you have a bit go engineer storing it on coinbase in an insecure way because the

custodial service itself yeah then they have multi-sig because multi-sig you know what what the fuck what's going on here why do you have a hundred thousand dollars in a coinbase hot wallet like like i said not even the vault they have like the vault vault supposedly where you can like time release and stuff like that didn't even have it there he had it just in like the normal hot wallet um and his gmail had sms based recovery his his most his main email address your main email address i mean ideally you shouldn't have a main email address you should have many email addresses but let's be honest most of us have one main email address that email address is your most secure possession on the internet because once someone owns that they can i forgot my password

into every single thing you have right so you need to make sure that your phone number is not anywhere near that email address it can't be used as two-factor you should be using an app-based two-factor and it cannot make sure it's not there for like i forgot my password so like go into the website that you use security the thing that sucks about google though is they like entice you to put your phone in and yeah they encourage you back you have to go back afterwards and delete your phone number yes they will you have to do it at first to sign up yes and then you'll have to go back and delete it and they'll tell you like are you sure you want to do this you should probably keep this there don't listen to them it's fucking stupid because in their defense uh they have

backup codes that you should write right they give you back in there it's the same thing as what people say like people are too dumb to have remember their seed or something write down their seed and recover it if if you if you don't have the phone number and you lose those backup codes and you forget your password like you're never getting back in that account again but what's nice is google because they've you know google they're tracking everything but because they've been the target of of a lot of chinese government stuff because for chinese dissidents they give you like a lot of features there's account deletion um there's like there's a free version of of what i of the dead man switch that i have a final message like if if your google

account is unactivated for like six months they can either delete it they can give access to someone else or they can send a message to someone else for you and delete it or give them access um like obviously don't put anything in there unless you encrypt it first but um yeah so if you delete your if you delete your phone number this attack never happens and one the best way to test a service for this vulnerability is you you go in through incognito you go into private browsing and you literally try to get into your account through the i forgot my password button that's what they're doing they're going through the i forgot my password and if you can recover it with just your phone on you like you're fucked you gotta fix that right yeah no and it's again

what the fuck man you work at bitco working on their their engineering team like that's better practices there if you're looking at i don't want to shit on an individual i feel bad if you had a ledger or a treasure or a coal car whatever just the most basic hardware if he had like i i i don't know like this is this is even more sloppy than having a hundred thousand dollars on like blockstream green wallet on your phone yeah and again it highlights like this is probably the most effective way to quote unquote steal people's bitcoin like you're not like the most attacks are going to be phishing attacks sim swap attacks like attacks where you're not physically harmed should we explain what a sim swap is yeah so sim swap is if somebody goes into uh they find

out your cell phone provider they find out your self-identifying information they go into a local uh say whatever we'll use verizon as an example to go into your actually at&t i think they usually call up they just call up and call up but they know your password um and uh they just say they want to activate a new phone i'm going to activate a new imagine if you called up yourself your cell phone provider and you said to them i lost my phone i got a new phone i want to activate it with my number and then they pretend they're you so they like either you know they they get some of your security questions or something like that know your pin information and they social engineer their way into getting well there's there's even some of the attackers do have to go to

physical locations because for some cell phone providers uh uh basically dictate that you show photo id in person to do this stuff and some people have gone as far as to make fake ids with the names the sims well that's good if cell phone providers did that it'd be well that's better well that's that's been the the problem is people have tried to put these security checks in place um and they just haven't followed through and the the cell phone companies are really falling on their fucking faces and not addressing this huge security vector. That's another thing we talk about with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin creates the incentive to highlight these security vectors, and this is a huge one. So if you, again, like we've said for the last five minutes, if you have your phone number tied to anything and they're able to SIM swap you, they can fuck your life, basically. Yeah, use app-based two-factor and make sure that sms isn't activated on any of your accounts like i said test it out through

i forgot my password and if you're and the most important is your main if you're holding a hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoin up your security game you should not be holding in a hot wallet no but he could he could who knows he might have 10 million dollars worth of bitcoin right and he could have it in the most elaborate cold storage and it's like 100 000 like i want to play around with coinbase shit coins was on coinbase and that's what got stolen so uh if that was the case then like a little bit then that's way less right like that was his high risk wallet but still he's you know he should have done better um hey sean sorry for we were too harsh there well he even says in it he feels really bad i mean he

learned his he definitely learned his lesson the hard way yeah um it was nice yeah i i i'm glad he wrote it up but i'm just disappointed i am as well better better practices and then it looks like selkis got sim swapped for his third time because he tweeted out to coinbase to shut down his account which like your security model should not rely on publicly tweeting out to your bitcoin brokerage yeah i saw their head i saw their head of engineering got back to him right away yeah email us please asap um yeah again beware sim swapping be aware sim swapping is a thing burners help too if you get a burner phone burner email addresses you use different email addresses for different services this is what we go back to earlier when i was like your

main email account is your most important because they can i forgot my password everywhere well if you have different email addresses registered through vpns and stuff then then they then they can't do that diversify your risk freaks diversify your risk especially as we head further into the information age this stuff's only going to get more elaborate it's going to get more fierce beware um last subject the IEO is hot in the street bro what do we think about it cranking or excuse me cranking into an IEO they're doing an equity offering um thousand dollar minimum to the public four billion dollar valuation uh being run by bank of the future which is like no token or anything it's just like you log into a website and you have a share right

yeah it's pure equity I'm pretty sure it's like the same idea um I guess I guess the big difference is the leo token is more like a bnb type thing where you pay fees and stuff in it yeah so the leo token for you freaks who are unaware is the uh the token of bitfinex that bitfinex has launched it raised a billion dollars they raised a billion dollars a lot of it uh four billion valuation i think yeah it was it didn't even reach the public did it ever reach the public now it's publicly traded yes the pre-sale was all insiders which is i i don't know like bitcoin is a better investment than either of these or BNB. You're just adding risk on top of your investment.

Yeah, it's crazy how... This is the hot chick on the block right now, though. IEOs are pumping. They've been pumping like crazy the last couple weeks. I don't like to talk about it. It's because of BNB. Yeah. Oh, no, you're right.

So then the IEOs is like the evolution of the ICO. Yeah, it's just new makeup on the pig. It's literally an ICO just facilitated by exchanges like binance yeah the initial distribution is slightly different and i think so binance like your position in the ieo like cz just keeps adding like these random schemes to pump the price and so like your position in the ieo is determined by like how much bnb you hold and uh just a word to the wise multi-coin capital is uh bullish on this stuff so just be aware after it all blows up they're gonna say they were short on it fyi this is true just a heads up um

And then Circle, which is under the Goldman Sachs family, I believe now, or at least Goldman Sachs investment. Goldman Sachs is like a minority investment. Yeah. So, yes, they're part of the family. Yeah, they acquired Poloniacs about a year ago, a year and a half ago, maybe even sooner than that. I'm not sure. Whenever they had Poloniacs, they just had to lay off 30 employees or 10% of their headcount. And they delisted nine tokens from Polo for U.S. users.

for us users only yeah because they're afraid they're securities which is interesting because it's the exact opposite of what coinbase is doing right now yeah and again this goes back to uh another ongoing topic here at tftc is uh when you're not focused and you you pivot from idea to idea circle is a is a great example of that jeremy lair famously came out a few years ago and said that bitcoin was going to fail um and became anti-bitcoin since it's come back into the bitcoin fray but uh again if you don't have any focus or a long-term vision and are sort of going uh going with the the wind per se uh i don't think it's a good long-term strategy and you hate to see people get laid off but uh it's sort of predictable when you don't have any focus

you know the whole benefit of poloniex was that it was a bucket shop so like when like a goldman sachs company buys goldman sachs backed company buys it like that defeats the whole purpose that's why we see with like binance right now you can trade alt coins with limited kyc now they're gonna start springing kyc on people because they're too big they're a target they have to legitimize so then you have another one pop up and that'll be like the premier place to do alt coins same thing happened to bittrex right like we just see it all over and over again that's crazy how like poloniacs and bittrex they were they were the the hot chicks on the block four years ago, five years ago, and they're zombie.

Even at the beginning of the 2017 run, they were the place to be. Yeah. Didn't Bittrex do an IEO, too? Bittrex has been doing some sketchy-ass shit. They did the Veriblock IEO. Yeah, they've been doing some sketchy-ass shit. They have that...

They have an ex-Department of Defense attorney on their staff, I'm pretty sure. On their board. It's important to participate in regulatory capture. in this industry if you're in america at least i mean it's short-sighted they're all screwed it's just going to move overseas most of it yeah except for the on-ramps that's why it's smart what what square is doing because they're just focusing on like the lead the lowest regulatory burden just

be like the best on-ramp they could be and like if you want to like play in the casino and stuff like you do that without them knowing yeah and if their quarter-on-quarter revenue growth is any sign it's a it's a good strategy up to this point disclaimer cash app is a sponsor of tftc um yeah a sponsor and a highly used highly used product yeah um that's we got anything to riff on um one of the things that was interesting about that we're gonna link to that elizabeth warren article bloomberg did a whole thing on it and it's like she has this like uh this economist uh like he's going to be like her chief economist if she gets uh elected and he does all this analysis like he uses panama papers and stuff to figure out he's the one who

came up with the what i what i say eight trillion eight trill yeah and it's interesting because he was saying that um the top one percent controls 40 of the wealth i think or something like that the top 0.1 percent controls 22 of the wealth holy shit so like all this bullshit about like bitcoin not being fair like at least they can't break the rules and put it in their own advantage and increase their share of that wealth unfairly to you. Like, Bitcoin is way more fair than, like, the U.S. dollar. Yeah, that distribution was attained via the Cantillon effect, some would argue.

Yeah, here was Ronald Reagan, the top 0.1% controlled 7% of the nation's wealth. So, what was that, like, the mid-80s? Mm-hmm. And now it's 22%. That's crazy. and I would look at the growth of that concentration and overlay the growth of the monetary base over that same period.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what happened. They just cheated and just increased their part of the pie. So remember why we're in this. Free speech money, sound money, private money. We're in it for freedom freaks as we head into this Memorial Day weekend. Think about freedom. Cheers.

Peace and love.