TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.05.27

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Wasabi update: https://wasabiwallet.io/ - Erlay proposal, https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2019-May/016994.html - New bitcoin ATH in Argentinian peso - 4.1 billion people living under authoritarian regimes according to Oslo Freedom Forum - Proposed FATF regulations - https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-492/ - defendcrypto.org - Facebook - Bitrefill + ACINQ 1 BTC channel - https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-494/ - Trade Wars - Taxi medallions Shoutout to the MIB Chad Index Funds 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.

matt we fucked up what do we do we uh we just recorded a whole episode and forgot to shout out our listener contributor of the week we got one we got three contributors to shout out actually fuck yes two that we know uh one that we don't um we got to give a shout out this was we were told to read this um we'll just read whatever you tell us to read yeah um i don't know if this is a leg but this is somebody this is what i have to read it's what i have to read right now Shout-out to the MIB Chad Index Fund. We only buy tops with no stops on margin. Oleg is a Chad of all Chads, a true thundercock.

Bless up, Marty and Matt. We love you. We love you guys, too. Hey, we love our listener contributors. If you guys want to contribute, go to tftc.io slash contribute. You can send a message like that there. Oleg is the Chad of all Chads, a true thundercock. I would like to be referred to as a thundercock one day.

I don't know if it will ever happen. I don't really know what the message means, but I'm digging it. it uh we're gonna drop this in the beginning of the episode just because we fucked up so bad um but before doing that we got a shout out to uh jw or next to me not jw we gotta give a shout out to far face 2000 who bought us a bottle of jw blue um to celebrate when we pass 10k if we pass 10k at some point delicious and then uh when we pass when we pass um and then uh somebody an unnamed listener um bought us a bottle of balvenie as well it's delicious um yeah we can't wait to enjoy that shout out to you freaks thank you for contributing i just want to say like i think it's

so cool that people can just contribute anonymously right there's like no we have no idea who it is we just have utxs we're not following them we're not we're not a chain analysis company no we're not um yes you know coin join before you send them to us definitely definitely send them straight from wasabi don't even think about sending it from from your or lightning yeah um yeah thank you for you freaks for contributing if any of you freaks want to contribute by buying a bottle whiskey just throwing us a donation or buying a shout out do so at tftc.io slash contribute enjoy this uh enjoy this riff we just ripped what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here on a gloomy thursday back in the studio

with our boy matt odell for another episode of rabbit hole recap matt what's going on how's it going guys it's going good good week we just uh pumped over 9k there for a little bit for for half a minute i believe you're like the only person in the world who caught it yeah blew my load early with the vegeta meme can uh can't repost it on the way back up right now we're sitting at 8 627 dollars and 67 cents according to the trade block xbx index and we're at block 578 561 according to my node 116 sats percent people there you go your pennies are not going as far as they used to yeah we've been uh last time we met it's a week ago what chart oh i had the week chart up i'm like what the hell is going on here it's a big candle

not to one hour bitcoin's volatile again it's beautiful it is volatile again last time we met on the 23rd we're at like hovering around 8 000 um volatility's back uh before we get into the news topics there's a lot of drama this week probably won't dive into the drama it's not even worth it this episode of tales from the crypt a rabbit hole recap was brought to you buy unchained capital you freaks know all about their vault service already they're helping you secure your bitcoin and their two of three multi-sig vaults you can use your treasure your ledger and electrum i believe as well um ideally use the hardware wallets and you have unchained there as a second signer to a two or three multi-sig if you need them and they're working

on ways to get more creative with their multi-sig if you guys have businesses and stuff like that and you have unique key schemes that you want to use uh they're gonna they're gonna help you out moving forward. Right now, if you sign up by going to www.unchained-capital.com slash vaults, and you sign up, you're going to get three free months of Safe at Noon Mooses, the Bitcoin Standard Research Bulletin. Very high quality publication there. Again, www.unchained-capital.com slash vaults. This episode is also sponsored by the Cash App. You freaks know all about them. the first p2p finance app to offer bitcoin selling on their uh excuse me p2p payments app to offer bitcoin buying on their platform their number one finance app in the app store for the

last two years they're helping us stack sats and they also have this boost program which i use every day uh you get a card you get to personalize it put your signature put a little bitcoin there put a little in the fed whatever you can get creative with it doesn't really matter um whatever you want to do uh download the cash app today at your local app store and start using the boost program saving money stacking sats hopefully they uh implement sats back in the future at your local app store yeah there's like two and f droid yeah yeah yeah it depends where you are what device you're using and uh hey while while we're talking about local app stores let's talk about local podcasting platforms if uh you freaks are out there and you

liked this podcast please like subscribe review every every like every pound every subscribe goes a long way yeah the reviews help a lot i didn't realize that they do they really do um speaking of reviews why don't you review the latest wasabi update it looks like they have an osx stability improvements and treasure one support has not been added yeah the bigger the big thing is the max stability improvements uh the the latest the latest update of wasabi previously was freezing up for people running on mac um so it shouldn't do that anymore and and their their fee selection changed a little bit so it's it's going to be a little bit cheaper but confirms will take a little bit longer for the actual coin joins oh really yeah they uh the way they already had it

set up was basically it uses the lowest fee possible and then it can keep joining it could keep participating in rounds if it's unconfirmed so they would raise it would just keep raising until it confirmed um and i think there's a max of 20 unconfirmed transactions that could be there yeah so now they made it a little bit more aggressive so it tries to get even cheaper fee because you know fees have been going up lately yeah i saw that uh there was almost the first hundred person coin doing last night on wasabi i think we've had one before but maybe not that's all i think i saw but we almost had one again yeah i saw adam fisker tweet about that this morning um so it seems like more people are using it yeah i mean we got bull bitcoin using it which is a big

plus probably um but yeah liquidity in general seems to be going up usage in general goes up and as more people use it the better it gets right so yeah and today uh i think it looks like there's a uh update to ledger live in the pipeline which you probably shouldn't be using ledger live from a privacy perspective anyway because they can see all your transactions um but they updated it so it can finally they're about you know there's an update in the works that that allow them to send to beck 32 addresses which is what wasabi uses because up until this point you had to use an intermediate intermediate wallet to transfer in between um yeah that was that the thing where the beck 32 address weren't showing up in the gui and you had to no with ledger they weren't even

letting you send in ledger live app like the actual app they weren't even letting you send to beck 32 addresses you had to send uh oh to a different wallet first like a samurai or green wallet and then or electrum and then send from there to wasabi oh i misheard you i thought you were talking about the treasure one oh yeah the treasure oh yeah treasure one support is now active the issue with that was you couldn't type i believe the issue with that is that you know you can't type the pin or the or the passphrase on the device on the original um so now i'm assuming they give you prompts when you do it uh the treasure t obviously doesn't have this issue uh the cold card doesn't have this issue because you just enter it on device

which is the way it should be done probably yeah i think i think it's you know obviously it's way more secure if you if you do it on device yeah and this is a good uh wasabi usage and becoming more private with your utx is a good segue into something i wrote about earlier this week that i thought was going a little under the radar i don't know how uh alarmed we should be or or i think we should be pretty alarmed i think we don't know how severe the threat is but we will in a few weeks so something to be on the lookout is um the financial action task force releasing guidelines over the next couple weeks about how uh cryptocurrency exchanges and other custodians should act and they're going to have to join this coalition and check off a bunch of kyc aml

check boxes and basically uh taking a lot of data on their customers uh sort of uh chain analysis company porn uh make it so that uh everybody's being tracked on chain at least through these custodial services um and and the the rule they're falling on is the quote-unquote travel rule for correspondent banks so it seems like they're maybe legitimizing these exchanges as financial institutions but trying to drag net their digital panopticon over to this industry you know i don't think obviously this is not great um especially for businesses that operate in i i think like pretty much most countries have to comply with these kind of rules yes it's it's a fatf i keep missing it's a it's an awkward uh alphabet soup acronym fatf uh financial action

task force is a coalition of 38 countries i believe it was started in france i'm pretty sure they're unelected officials who are just writing these draconian laws on people yeah so anyway you know it's not great preferred wouldn't be happening but even if it does like you should have just assumed that this was going to happen anyway i think this is the natural and end game this and so bitcoin will go through like an intermediate phase where it'll be harder to get harder to use in a lot of ways because of draconian regulations and then it'll emerge pretty much relatively unscathed from it because that's how it's designed it's designed to not give fucks about this is this uh the beginnings of the potential for a bifurcated

market for utx's those which are quote-unquote tainted on the uh regulated exchanges and those which are not no i mean i don't think that we should we shouldn't you know just assume that using bitcoin privately makes you know is an illegal action and i i feel like uh like the more we just because it's possible for them to do it doesn't mean we should even consider it because it's just a ridiculous concept like if we everyone can has easy access to coin joins now you can mix relatively easy through wasabi um if if you try and ban with usage you know as usage grows which it is growing if you try and ban transactions with a coin join history you're just basically banning self-custody altogether it's like if they just ban bitcoin yeah they can

ban bitcoin right but the whole point is if if if banning bitcoin is an effective way of destroying bitcoin then bitcoin shouldn't have any value anyway in the first place right it's gonna have to take these hurdles on head first and like i said the title of that ben in particular is the battle is well underway um so yeah just be prepared for this stuff it's going to be tumultuous it's going to be a little awkward it's going to be you're gonna have to stand up and say hey no we we want to defend this right to transact in private and have financial freedom at the end of the day your government is probably going to make you disclose addresses disclose ownership amounts um and and so so you're gonna you know that's going to be really hard to enforce um

and it'll be harder to enforce on an individual basis if you learn to use bitcoin privately today you know before any of those kind of onerous regulations come to pass no this highlights another thing that we harp on is that it's better to get on this stuff earlier rather than later and um yes start today when you don't necessarily think you need it and you'll be you'll be very happy when you do need it at some point in the future um this goes into something else that i want this is going to be a segue for something i missed the segue um it's the worst type of segue i know i missed the segue i'm sorry freaks uh oh here's a segue to help combat this we need to make bitcoin as decentralized as possible and a couple days ago um brian bishop

up uh this dude gleb gleb's last name's escaping me peter woola greg maxwell and a couple other cryptographers uh released a proposal for uh early which is a a proposal for a different uh type of transaction relay network uh between nodes and this would considerably uh decrease the bandwidth needed uh to to transit or excuse me to relay transactions between nodes so by a shit ton by a shit ton so if you go i wrote about it the other day if you uh go to the paper and this is basically on their test with their the variables and the parameters that they set in this test which may not be exact when it hits the market but is directionally very close um if you were a full node connected to 32 peers if you are a full node currently connected to 32 peers on

average uh you're you're spending about 17.3 gigabytes of bandwidth per month with this early network that would be severely reduced to below one gigabyte 0.94 it's fucking insane yeah um so we talk about decentralization and the path towards decentralization means that people need to run full nodes be able to run full nodes and this allows people with lower power devices and people in areas with suboptimal internet connectivity to to run full nodes if implemented Yeah, you want more full nodes, the better. Yes, and this would severely increase the ability to run a node. And the way they're doing this is they're using Minisketch.

I'm not going to describe the technical inner workings of this perfectly, but the way I understand they're using Minisketch in a way to compress transaction states or transaction sets, excuse me, making it easier to relay. um and basically the trade-off with that is latency right now takes about uh 3.15 seconds to get a new transaction relayed across the whole network the trade-off if early we were to be implemented it would increase that to 5.75 seconds but the the the authors of the paper seem to think this is a a good trade-off it may even combat some some timing attacks yep uh i mean we're going to link to the actual proposal as well yeah and these guys can describe this much better than

uncle it is it is you know it's a little bit dense it's it's mostly magic they mostly use magic to accomplish this yeah it's magic internet money yeah but like so efficiency improvements like this are the things you'd like to see if we were ever to need to increase the block weight in the future yes um no need to put the you know the cart ahead of the horse exactly and this is again this is something i get another thing i think went sort of under the radar that is important to highlight these are the dull boring upgrades that you should be looking for the ones that cut bandwidth uh for full nodes connected to 32 peers from 17.3 gigabytes to below a gigabyte every month that's a crazy improvement bandwidth is the biggest restriction and cost for running

these nodes um in some places you can't even get that kind of bandwidth capacity to to run an effective full node um and and node runners don't get they're not getting direct benefit you know there there's there's plenty of indirect benefits like full sovereignty and better privacy and actually verifying the chain being a full bitcoin user um but you're not actually getting paid to run it uh so you want to keep those costs as low as possible otherwise basically what you're doing is you're socializing transaction fees to all the to all the people running nodes yes um just a crazy step forward um and again on top of that so the announcement cost right now on top of that uh connectivity cost the announcement cost to just like sending the

transactions uh per month right now is 4.33 gigabytes this would drop this to 0.7 gigabytes so two areas efficiency and again this is based off of the parameters and the variables of these particular simulations within the paper but it seems directionally like a huge huge boost in efficiency um speaking of huge boosts uh bitcoin just hit a new all-time high in terms of uh based in argentinian pesos so uh i i like that meme that's going around you know like the chart this is how argentinians see bitcoin yeah um there was another one on there it was argentina i believe turkey was on there as well the lira has been falling falling fast against probably above the all-time high for venezuelan right yeah most likely um yeah so bitcoin continues to uh to

beat up the the the weak currencies in the world yeah we'll just see more and more of them fall yes until i mean once it hits once it hits a new all-time high in usd again it's basically a new all-time high in all of them so yeah and uh who knows with the volatility lately that stuff could come faster than you think this again i don't we don't like to talk about price loud i will just we like to talk about price we talk about price well let's just note that this uh this recovery is happening faster than i expected yeah it always does it doesn't matter could be pump thick could be pump thick yeah and then it'll go down faster than i expected or go up it just always catches you off guard it does well when you have billionaires trying to buy a 25 of the

whole bitcoin supply it's definitely a bullshit article i mean yeah you're you're twitter profiting off this i know i i feel a little bit dirty about that one but it's uh i mean imagine what how bad of a broker you would have to be so forbes has an article today where they said that uh a particular client of a particular art dealer that also sells bitcoin otc um told told her that he wants 25 of the bitcoin supply and so that's completely outlandish to begin with he's never going to be able to do that even if he wanted to i would love to see him try and then the second thing how bad of a broker would you have to be to oh yeah i'll go get that i'll be right back no like and you like start the process and then you like announce it to the world that you're trying to get

25 it seems like a it seems like a media ploy for this person's art art career yeah i mean i mean she's selling her her bitcoin brokerage business right like she she's telling people in the article to come to her if they want to sell or buy well like you said she's obviously bad at this business if she's yeah that's making the market aware of the fact that somebody's trying to buy up a quarter of the supply yeah i just thought the article was funny for a bunch of different reasons so i just hope i think most people understand that it's bullshit yeah uh without me having to like actually spell it out to them in terms of but there are billionaires around the world that are fucking taking notice absolutely i mean look we have fucking jack is is the newest billionaire

to actually come out really full support of bitcoin billionaires football players matt barkley was telling people to bitcoin to chill earlier this week you see russell put up stickers in his locker room he did shout out crypto graffiti for providing that that koala meme game in the back of nfl press conferences um yeah slowly but surely the virus spreads as pump says um let's talk about uh there was they had the oslo freedom forum yes and there was like a big focus on bitcoin this year supposedly yeah so joe carlson was there um with the open money project with alejandro as well um alex gladstein yeah drop dropping that episode with him tomorrow that's a really good one for you so look out for that are you dropping it tomorrow yeah oh awesome

i'm excited um yeah but bitcoin was a was a big topic uh they said 4.1 billion people are living under authoritarian regimes it's more than half the planet yeah that's pretty crazy and people say bitcoin doesn't have a use case fucking ridiculous what's the uh what's the definition of an authoritarian regime they didn't include america there they did um they didn't um you know it was like they had china there i think they had russia on it there's a map with it they like redded states yeah that's uh that's a lot of people owning or not owning bitcoin but under authoritarian regimes who probably should own bitcoin that's pretty crazy before things get too desperate there um another thing like china in the news like the trade wars are starting to

heat up still heating up starting to heat up they've been heating up they're boiling um haven't been following the the yuan to bitcoin charts too too closely this week but uh it seems like trump trump was in japan he went to the sumo wrestling uh event with uh shino abe and it seemed like a very very big posturing event for the u.s and japan against china so it's big dick flexing when you when you know these geopolitical sort of dick flexing pageantry stuff that that one was a big one of my mind because the japanese chinese relationship isn't the best and yeah that's an understatement yeah and uh trump doing that's definitely a sign of like hey we're partnering with your enemy yeah i mean you don't have to look at the yuan charts

it's the same charts anyway uh i mean i like that narrative that that the trade war has been pushing up the price if i was a chinese person i would be absolutely going whole hog into bitcoin but i mean i'm an american person and i'm doing that anyway right so well uh eric melzer he said he was in uh in beijing this week and a lot of people are talking about stacking sats hashtag stacking sats in particular in beijing it transcends transcends cultural borders hey that's what we do here we don't care about culture we do care about culture we uh let stacking sats fly there you go i uh the other thing i wanted to talk about was the defend crypto bullshit that's going on let's let's spend some time on this this kin kick bullshit kin kick bullshit uh

defend crypto.com if you want to go help no it's dot org dot org excuse me if you want to go don't go to it don't go to it uh so let's talk about it a lot of people there's a bifurcation in the quote-unquote crypto world definitely not a bifurcation in the bitcoin world of whether or not to support kick's uh court case against the sec uh basically so what's kick first of all it's an app um it's like a whatsapp competitor it's like a whatsapp competitor they basically were a company that was dying and they decided to launch an ico they raised 100 million dollars i believe and i think like union square ventures was already an investor in kick yes fred wilson right big token guy big token guy so then they raised 100 million dollar ico for their kin

token the kin token is used in kick to buy like themes and shit yes and if you look at apparently it's the uh the number one used blockchain in the world right he had the nerve to say that yes he had the nerve to say that to me on fucking is it run on stellar right now or the most used cryptocurrency in the world is his token kin and he's getting his ass handed to him by the u.s government and he's launched this fundraising campaign called defend crypto.org and like shapeshifts behind it a couple other big names are behind it i know massari is behind it yeah um they're on there ridiculous like how can you defend someone who's willing to like blade like he just spelled it out for us how much of a blatant liar he is like even if you're like

a ripple head or an eth head or something like you know like you think more people are using kin that's like a ridiculous like at least like some kind of believable fucking lie it was funny the last time i haven't seen the landing page in a few days the last time i saw the uh most of the donations were being made in ether uh bitcoin and second and kin and third wait so he donated so they took part of their 100 million dollar ico and they donated 2 million in ether 2 million in bitcoin and a million dollars in their kin token that has like 1.8 million in volume daily volume a day like fucking ridiculous donated his own funny money well i just thought it was funny that uh ethereum was leading the the fundraising charges that the uh probably the most that

platform in particular probably has the most to lose if if this case goes awry um this is this is an interesting battle for for the ico industry to pick is is kick as as the leader against the sec in my opinion i mean i think if you're if you're willing like you're fucked if you're willing to just back a known back that bad actor like this like you're just proving their point i loved uh fred wilson's letter about it when he uh when he wrote the kin token in parentheses definitely not a security it's just like that oh case settled not a security yeah i mean like as far as i'm concerned like they should just be able to do whatever the fuck they want um and like just push things out of america uh but they also should have known that this was

the expectation like we've all been warning of this the whole time that's why bitcoin has the design restrictions that it has so that these kind of regulatory enforcements can affect the underlying system but they just ignored that and and they either just out of ignorance or in some cases like actual like malicious intent like they just wanted short-term gains while the party lasted yes but are we uh are we bad cypherpunks uh quote-unquote cheerleading for this this court case to go awry i mean i as as an american i would prefer if the sec took like a very hands-off approach on all of this like let just let's let everything play out you know more free market because the thing is at the end of the day as a bitcoiner i could give two fucking shits and i'm

not going to defend a fucking guy who's i i think i don't like calling people scammers but like when you make a lie like that like you're a fucking scammer and um yeah like bitcoin you know as like a bitcoiner it doesn't really matter but as an american like all this sketchy shit is just going to move to another place yeah it's not going to go away no um but again it's interesting that the industry is getting behind this product like you said like overt lying about like the underlying fundamentals of their network um and how it works and how much how distributed it is i think somebody looked into the distribution like the amount of people with more than 30 worth a kick or kin whatever it is is like less than 1500 i think they're just going to be some interesting things

coming out of this um and uh like a lot of people are looking at the chain now and stuff so yeah we'll see well so i'm confused about the chain is there a stellar chain in the erc20 chain no so they started as erc20 then it was supposed to go to stellar i believe and now they're doing a fork they have their own fork chain of i believe stellar um so like a federated model yeah it's i mean look i don't even want to all the specifics don't even fucking matter because it's definitely not the top used cryptocurrency in the world there's barely even a cryptocurrency so like fuck you man like that's just a ridiculous lie and he should be called out for it and uh people shouldn't you know people shouldn't be defending bad actors like this it just makes

everyone else look bad and i refuse to to do that i'm uh definitely not having any of my bitcoin that's for sure none of mine as well and uh i'll stand starkly with you it's it's interesting to see who is backing this though and uh think about the the entrenched incentives and motives that that the people backing this defend crypto.org campaign have just take it with a grain of salt think about uh people with perverse incentives did we talk about i don't think we talked about this last week global coin we didn't yeah that's why i threw it on there um facebook's uh shit coin yeah facebook has come out with the most orwellian uh coin name i've seen in a while global coin i don't think it'll be called global coin i heard somebody say it's gonna be called

like libra or something yeah libra would be a good name though libra just piggybacking off the uh piggybacking off the winkle vibro they're gemini and they're gonna go libra oh that's true zuck doesn't have a fucking but libra is good it's like what like free what does it mean like in latin it means free yeah it's free yeah i don't know i think they could there'd be worse names than libra as much as it's a fucking shit coin like this global coin is the worst name global coin is like probably the worst name you could do especially when people think of you already as like an orwellian type of i'm gonna use facebook's global coin yeah well a topic of conversation that came up in the midst of this uh libra slash global coin announcement is that

facebook was helping sort of censor post and denying access to people in some countries a couple weeks ago when when the authoritarian regime asked zuck to to cut off access and just think about what's going to happen to your libra global coin when when you make a transaction that that mr zuckerberg does not approve of yeah i mean it obviously doesn't compete with bitcoin you know like he's like it's competes with like paypal and stuff like that could this be the aol of the quote-unquote blockchain adoption where people get sort of incepted with the idea of the internet via AOL

and then move to the free internet? Is this the same with GlobalCoin? Will they get inundated with that and be like, oh, this sucks, I'm going to go use Bitcoin? I don't know. It depends how Facebook does it. If you put a Bitcoin and Libra wallet in every single WhatsApp,

they could quickly become one of the biggest Bitcoin wallet companies. um it'd be fucking horrible the most used cryptocurrency in the world it would be horrible but uh they could also then use that as the launching point to be like one of the preeminent chain analysis companies in the world because they already have your facebook data and then they just pair it with your bitcoin address data but then the alternative approach is the users may never see an address and you just send libra from one person to another and at that point it's really not red pilling anybody it's just venmo some more venmo

bullshit yeah or like snap cash remember snapchat i don't know they still have it i uninstalled it but snapchat used to have snap cash so you like you could send people cash through snapchat like that doesn't red pill anyone i mean more so than they've already been digital payments yeah so then i never used a snapchat version either um yeah so we'll be following that as it as it progresses as well um last we got the short list we're already on the last topic yeah i mean this week was like kind of it was kind of a slow week and memorial day uh sort of calmed everybody down they're not definitely calm anybody down there's a fucking a shit ton of drama on twitter maybe we'll touch on that later but first for not to but okay me

either but uh maybe we have to bit refill and async yesterday uh opened up a one bitcoin channel between each other which is the biggest channel to have opened up to this point uh the lightning network has in its current implementation its current uh specification a limit of 0.16777 etc bitcoin 60 million sets yeah um as a limit they can open the channel async and bit refill made a custom implement or custom specification themselves to allow for a one bitcoin channel they open that in the 100 million sets 100 million sets and the the uh sort of impetus for that was to allow uh bit refill customers using the lightning network to buy more at once um no it doesn't really do that because that's what they said in the bit refill blog i'm pretty i know i

mean but they're like testing it out but no one can really take advantage of it because no one else's channels to like bit refill or async are over 16 million sats right so you still can send you still can't route a payment through it like the average user can until the default gets that's true that's true but it's still huge it's still huge nonetheless but it's mostly for routing between the two of them yeah we'll see uh if it says stable shout out to uh sergey john carvalho just a carmana and team at bit refill really pushing again pushing the edge we don't know lightning networks i said in the i wrote about on the event today lightning networks further along than we thought it would be anybody that you talk to that's building or using the network

ourselves included will openly admit it's got a lot more excuse me work to be done going forward than has been done up to this point but stuff like this is promising and um we need more people pushing the edge like this just fucking being completely reckless making their own custom specification and just proving like hey maybe if their node and their channel is working uh comment or is working well for a long enough period it'll convince uh uh the lightning specification to to get a little bit uh looser with the amount you can put in your channels yeah i love this shit just keep flexing pushing the limit yeah um it's the best way to learn it is and oh this brings us to our node moved up from number 46 to number 45 in terms of capacity

uh by a number of channels we're number 48 and the thief have we heard from him yeah our fans node he's a huge fan you know i've been talking to him through his his email address that he posted up up on the stack and sats at, at two to nota.com. Is he, has he been friendly? Does he think he'll ever give the node back or is it, I think he,

he plans to pass it to, to another fan so that it can just be fan run. That would be the, the lightning node torch. There you go. Um, but he's still reciprocating channels. It's growing.

What's the minimum or only minimum reciprocation to 2 million, 2 million sats. Yeah. Um, so you can find that by going to one. Yes. I guess we'll reciprocate lower than that, like higher than $1 million, I guess. The price has gone up since that limit.

I'll talk to him about it. No, it hasn't. If you guys open up a channel, you want to experiment with some Lightning Network payments, check out the Dimebag. We're actually working on another iteration of the Dimebag, another cool little gadget that'll be on there hopefully in the next couple weeks to a month. so be on the lookout for that officially sold out of hats there's no more sub freaks hats the first batch

this very scarce batch is sold out there will never be any more of these trucker hats made so if any of you freaks out there were able to get your hands on one congrats, it's a very rare item hold on to it dearly until it shows up

on Canal Street at some point in the future yeah i mean that's uh we have to figure out we still have to figure out what kind of merch we're gonna go with next um we'll figure it out slowly but surely no rush no rush we're only 35 minutes in is this gonna be a 35 minute rabbit hole recap it's definitely not gonna be a 35 minute whole rabbit hole recap so we're out of topics let's just uh let's riff on something something you sent me earlier today uh rise wallet they sent us a couple of free vouchers they're canadian based company correct yeah this is not sponsored content but they sent us free they sent us free vouchers uh they're canadian based company that lets you onboard onto bitcoin without

uh kyc i guess you like go to a store and you you buy the the voucher with with cash and then we actually tested out the voucher yeah tested out the voucher simple imagine going to a wawa or a duane reed or a convenience store that sells something like an amazon gift card apple apple itunes gift card whatever it is and it would have these rise wallow gift cards and certain denominations where it's 5 2500 i'm not sure exactly how high it goes yeah i don't think it goes above 100 but i'm not sure um they sent us 25 cards they sent us 25 cards you download the app again no kyc uh it'll be connected to to your to your phone obviously in your your account on the app store but um you can there's like literally no sign up you scan it and it's not

it's not a custodial wallet like they generate keys for you on your device yep um and then they send you bitcoin for the equivalent amount so it's like pegged to the dollar amount until you scan and then you can just immediately send it away to a new wallet if you want it's pretty crazy yeah no i scanned the uh the pdf of the gift card happened in seconds and i sent it to treasure pretty pretty seamlessly it's fucking slick it's a good app they want to like put some education elements into it uh and i i guess like they're canada only now but i i think they're trying to get into the u.s so just something to keep an eye and i think that's like a really easy way to onboard people um especially if they add an element of education there then the user doesn't go through

kyc uh they never actually trust anyone with the keys you know they're they're holding their own keys that's pretty cool another way to stack that's very similar to the azteco model um that pewdion's working on and but that's in the uk right that's in the uk now i believe they uh they hope to go global eventually but yeah these uh and there's another one there too fast bitcoins or whatever by uh the neo b guy danny uh danny brewster danny brewster yeah what happened he uh he's he's on a path towards penance correct yeah he like said that i i don't know if i've yeah he yeah he he want he he basically blamed it all on the cypriot authorities yes i think he raised money for a fund or something like that or something he raised money for something

went around he's doing this fast bitcoins thing and it's the same idea it's a voucher system i think this voucher idea is good but it's going to be and that's it's even better for this reason but it's going to be like patchworks of different voucher systems everywhere because of the regulatory environment it's really like an regulatory like arbitrage type of play yes and again just some more buy pressure on um on bitcoin and little little little uh the other one that was at the time well what i'm bringing up now sorry i fell off there because i'm looking it up but uh it came out that in april uh grayscale their uh their bitcoin their gptc product was responsible for for buying up 11 294 bitcoin i

believe um and now the total i believe is like something like 20 of bitcoin that were mine that month oh shit what's how many what what did you say 20 of bitcoin i gotta find let me let me make sure i'm gonna find the tweet um that's pretty crazy and i was joking the other day like when lolly rewards are greater than the block reward that would be but that's pretty crazy they're just sucking it all up no yeah that and then gbtc is a notoriously hard vehicle to get into they it's run on pink slips it's uh uh it's arduous um it's arduous uh to get into but it's for mainly targeted towards high net worth individuals and family offices and here's the exact stat it was off by a little bit uh grayscale bitcoin trust accumulated 11 236 bitcoin in april

currently 54 000 bitcoin or mine per month so they are buying up if they keep that pace 21 of the new supply of bitcoin per month which is crazy 21 yes that's craziness yeah um and we're a year away from the halving if they continue that by pressure it's like half it's it's 42 that's crazy and just one fund just one pink slip fund but the halving's priced in marty but think it is we went over 9 000 a little bit came down pretty hard having stephanie price i like this narrative too that this is having action going on what is it why why do you 11 236 bitcoin in one month like that's a lot of demand and there's a lot of isn't it like a lot of like wait time to get into that product so is this like a lagging buy

i have no idea it's not a product that i would ever be interested in yeah what is it total like two billion is it are they at two billion now um assets under management i'm not positive but the gbtc it trades at like a ridiculous premium gbtc is trading at eleven thousand nine hundred and twenty two dollars it's because there's no etf in america if there's if there was ever an etf then it would go down yeah yeah but like that's what i mean that's a lot of high net worth individuals that are into gptc and got in early they're using that as like a great arb strategy and barry's just pulling uh crazy fees yeah he's just pulling his management fee out of it like in most lucrative business is this bad for bitcoin

buying at one fund buying 21 no it's fine i imagine if it was proof of stake though right then it could be an issue well proof of stake uh it would be easier it'd be harder for nation states to take on a proof of stake network i saw that you got a little argument i don't think that's true what was the uh was the reasoning of the the premise of the argument oh oh the one with santee yes uh the premise was that maduro and other authoritarians could shut down bitcoin miners um and they trace them by their electricity so they're easier to shut down is that a good that's a pretty good argument uh i would i would no um so one of the beauties of bitcoin mining one of the beauties of mining in general of proof of work is that anyone can plug in their hardware

around the world do no kyc or anything and they can access the system and get paid out for the work they provide right that's where like bitcoin's true permissionlessness comes from like the lack of permission there on actually getting your hands on your first bitcoin um in a proof of stake system like that doesn't exist get the buy-in you have to buy it from someone so if you regulate all the exchanges and whatnot it becomes really difficult to to get fiat basically into the system um so i would say that like the it's like a it's almost like a fictitious alternative to have oh well the venezuelans already had coins somehow like how do they obtain them and then they're staking so then there's no

you know electric costs there and they just get keep get keep get keep keep getting paid the rewards and then you have other issues with like pos proof of stake where like it's going to centralize with exchanges and funds and stuff like that and those are easier to target and regulate while mining you can do like relatively anonymous um so bringing it back to gptc like what happened if if a government or something where the u.s government tries to seize their their fund in particular you think that could ever happen it'd be pretty bullish be very bullish the u.s government have a huge chunk of of bitcoin though yeah i i mean i it'd be really bad if it was proof of stake right that's what i'm saying yeah um but with proof

of work you don't have that issue what kind of they don't get any they could sell exactly does i talked about bulgaria does the u.s government have any uh sees bitcoin still to auction off they keep there's like rolling auctions when they like get it usually happens around this time of year though right like early june mid-june i believe that's when i'm pretty sure that's when draper bought his silk road bitcoin they don't definitely don't have large amounts i think it happens multiple times a year yeah um i'd be interested So to say, if any of you freaks know if the U.S. government has any seized Bitcoin on the balance sheet, let me know. I think we're past the point where they would ever seize GBTC.

I did too. I was just trying to make a semantics point about it can't affect proof of work system. They love GBTC because that's just like fully regulated Bitcoin. No one has any self-custody rights or anything. Again, just let that be an indicator for you freaks out there. there's very rich people paying a very high premium to get into this fund right now. And there's also probably middle-income people paying, too.

You think so? Yeah. Yeah, like people that just want to easily put in their IRA and they didn't listen to your episode with Andrew. Isn't the minimum buy pretty high, though? If you just buy it on TD Ameritrade or something? Yeah, you can buy it on TD. I think you can just buy it on TD.

They sell pink slips on TV? I wasn't sure. Yeah. You can just... It's like the easiest way for just, you know, some middle-of-the-road American who's comfortable with, like, the stock market account to do it. Hey, drop gold, buy Bitcoin. Buy gold, buy Bitcoin.

You know? Shout out to them again for that incredible marketing campaign. Have you seen that in the wild yet? I haven't. I don't watch TV commercials, so... Neither do I. So I wouldn't know. Yeah.

but they're targeting all the the key the key channels like the cnbcs and the foxes and stuff like that i think it'll be a pretty good campaign it's it's already been successful because it riled up all the gold guys how do we think of uh mainstream media coverage of bitcoin this time around as the bitcoin price starts to pick up again cnbc is tweeting about it more i saw they just tweet like they just tweeted up bitcoin last night cnbc fast money like product hunt tweeted out i'm uh i'm worried uh the there was a another cnbc segment earlier this week where somebody was lamenting that that people need to sell their houses sell their wives sell their children sell their dogs to buy litecoin um just be aware be aware of the sources of

information you're taking in during these uh fanatic euphoric periods of of the price swings yeah i mean i think i think the coverage is is more favorable uh in general it seems and and that should become the case as bitcoin gets more developed um it is a bit frustrating and i mean i didn't have i tried to temper my expectations but like all the same shit that we saw in 2017 is still there right oh yeah it's just like hiding slightly below but like well like fucking leo got launched the bitfinex token and like people are pumping that i don't know it's just i feel yeah it seems like the animal spirits are riling up all across the markets um no no vegeta memes were released during the recording of this podcast we're still below

9 000 yeah you you're you're really excited to post that that i wouldn't have known it was over 9 000 unless i saw your meme i uh it happened so quickly i'm sorry for um for jumping the shark they're they're freaks we're not jumping the shark shooting jumping the gun did you see this this app that uh dan held shield get pie or whatever get pay get is that how you think yeah yeah get pay pay uh did you try it out i've not tried out but i've talked to people who have um i have you tried it out yeah i installed it what do you think um it's okay it's sad satspec satspec you have to tie in a credit card right yeah i looked at the privacy policy it's like all right i guess like they're they're claiming the same thing as lolly basically which

is that their business model isn't selling your data uh and that their business model is instead i'm just getting a commission from retailers that you use you register your credit card super simple um it uses played in the background or plaid plaid uh and uh yeah it uses that in the background to pull your shit and i yeah so i hooked it up to one of my credit cards uh you know i just i assume all that credit card information is just fucking up for grabs anyway yeah equifax got pretty pretty face fucked so it's probably out there somewhere and the big the most you know what the problem with all these things is like partners right and you know like held is like posting withdrawals and stuff but most of that

is because he posted his ref link and that's where he got paid um but they have like uber uber is like a big one i guess um and then like a lot of fast food i don't eat fast food so random uber tangent here as a lifelong new yorker how's it how's the death of the yellow cab company uh how's that that's sitting with you are you gonna miss them um the actual company went out of business no it's not going out of business but i watched uh i watched like a mini dock on with a bunch of like yellow cab drivers and the medallion prices have obviously crashed and uber is is competing at at a pace at which they cannot it seems like the yellow cab may be going well the yellow cab is a great story because um you had these people who who would invest basically all their life savings

were invested in these medallions which allowed every time you had a medallion you were able to run a yellow cap but the medallion system was based on a government enforced scarcity model where the government was not issuing new medallions there was a fixed amount and it was a clear case of like it's like a centralized chain like you're trusting a central validator to say that there's not going to be any new medallions or any new tokens so the first thing the new york government did that really fucked them was they decided you know the green cabs yeah they were like ones those medallions aren't true yellow medallions we created these new green medallions that allow you to have a green cabin it can only be in the outer boroughs and they basically inflated the supply before uber

even came into town and then uber came in and basically broke down that scarcity model because they routed around it you didn't need a medallion to run the things and all these people they just like lost their life savings they lost everything because they took mortgages out on their medallions and they took loans out on their medallions at their peak a medallion was like a million dollars like that was right before uber hit and then it's like very few people were lucky enough to sell the medallion at a million let me say it that way right and like it just fucking plummeted like you can't even really sell them anymore um and that's just what happens when you trust you know like the government to run your your basically your money right yeah a small micro uh example of of these

systems playing out are you gonna have any nostalgia for the yellow cabs well you love taking yellow cabs i do like i do the majority of time i take yellow cabs i take them with you yeah because they're always just there yeah they're well they didn't used to be it used to be really difficult to get a cab all right now it's super easy to get a yellow cab they're like in vogue again yeah um because of that bullshit scarcity they had in the first place this is uh this is why we're here people talking about truly scarce resources like bitcoin uh you're never going to print more than 21 million not my lifetime at least um that's all we got you want to riff on anything else are you gonna miss the yellow cabs that's what i like no no i'm uber

provides a better experience yeah the yellow cabs were resting on their laurels they were it was you know it was a government sanctioned monopoly uh and i wherever is the case i would like more free market so you know hopefully uber has some competitors that you know they they do kind of right but hopefully they have more competitors and i think the customer will end up seeing the lowest best service cheapest best service we need a competitor to come in and light a fire under the mta's ass that's next um you know elon if you're listening i know you are get the boring company out here we need some underground tunnels by uh private companies yeah don't get your hopes up i'm not no i i think we wouldn't even let bezos come to queens

i can't imagine letting elon come into manhattan and uh and doing his thing i just i think that like in a city like new york like how do you do subway costs and stuff with like the safety that you have nowadays it's just super expensive everything's super expensive so like why not just wait five years you know and and have like autonomous bus routes that you don't have to do like any new infrastructure basically you could just do like uber pool but with like bigger ubers yeah we shall see we shall seem so much cheaper the landscape has changed a lot watching that again that mini doc i think was vice um just caught my eye colin colin quinn did i'm a big colin quinn fan um but uh that was interesting and i think the key there is that

if you did it in a public transportation setting you could have like if you had divided lanes if they were in their own lane then you're basically it's like you're running a train without train tracks you know then that's super easy to run autonomous vehicles we already have hard part when you have them with people and shit mixed in. Yeah, we already have the red bus lanes here. Yeah, all right, freaks. That's all we got this week. Peace and love.

Stay humble, stack sets. Peace.