TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.07.22

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: -BTCPayServer - https://stephanlivera.com/episodes/ - Wasabi & Samourai - Ethereum hashrate down 42% from ATH, bitcoin hashrate at ATH: https://www.longhash.com/news/ethereum-is-becoming-increasingly-vulnerable-to-attack - Coldcard + Wasabi video, class on the 26th at Chaincode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM2uhyROpAQ&feature=youtu.be - New Cash App UI - Ohmm - https://twitter.com/UpstreamDataInc/status/1152233409277648897?s=20 - Hong Kong protests take violent turn: https://twitter.com/mrjasonchoi/status/1152973052046524420?s=20 - Nodl Electrumx - https://twitter.com/BitcoinSchiller/status/1154400652979818498?s=20 - Parker Lewis' Gradually, Then Suddenly - https://www.unchained-capital.com/blog/dollar-crisis-to-bitcoin/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. 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.

I have no idea who's Maverick or who's... what's the other guy's name? I have no idea. I've never seen Top Gun. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. You're talking to two plebs who have never seen Top Gun. I said I didn't want to admit to it, so I'm already started recording. Got me on air. Gotcha, bitch. Yeah, welcome back to Rabbit Hole Recap. A little late this week.

Schedule's been tight. Just been pushing out that content. Pushing out content. Bitcoin meetings left and right. I met the CEO of Bitcoin earlier today. You met the CEO of Bitcoin. Yeah, we talked for a little bit. I actually met Satoshi yesterday, and he's a listener of the pod. He showed me his ID and everything.

Satoshi, if you ever want to move any of those early Bitcoin into one of my wallets, feel free. Oh, no, he's not the Satoshi. He's just a guy named Satoshi from Japan. Oh. I told him to rate and review the pod under his real name. Well, if this Satoshi wants to send us any sats, go to tftc.if slash contribute. There you go. Speaking of contributions, we've had a couple sponsors contribute to us as well,

and we're very happy for those sponsors. The first is Cash App. you freaks know all about them they're having their cash app friday right now uh hopefully by the time we record this it's still going on you have a chance to potentially get a full bitcoin they're gifting somebody with a full bitcoin today at some point uh on top of this cash app friday they just upgraded the ui their app bitcoin is now a first class citizen in the cash app dude that new ui is fucking dope it is dope it is dope and so you can still use your boost card and go to any merchant i went to a coffee shop this morning used it saved a dollar and then uh went to

chipotle for lunch with the ceo of bitcoin and save 10 percent uh on top of that they're letting you deposit and withdraw bitcoin from the app and they're letting you stack sats what we do so if you're going to download this for the first time ever make sure you use the promo code stacking sats you're going to get five dollars and then five dollars is going to go to a charity very near and dear to our heart here at tftc that's al's lacrosse out of chicago they're doing incredible work there so if you download the cash app from your local app store whether it be the google play store or the apple app store make sure you use the promo code stacking sats one word get that five dollars get five dollars to a good charity and then on top of that we got unchained

capital our second sponsor of this episode unchained doing some great things parker lewis from unchained just released his weekly newsletter uh earlier today the name is escaping me off from the top of my head slowly then short slowly then suddenly is the name of the the uh the weekly newsletter he'll be pushing out on top of that weekly newsletter they have their two or three multi-sig vault service you can use a trezor a ledger and uh set up a two or three multi-sig scheme unchained is there to be that uh second key if they need if you need them to sign it excuse me other than that you can uh sign by yourself and move off out of their vaults whenever you please uh and then on top of that they have their uh bitcoin collateralized usd

loans so if friends don't let friends sell bitcoin if you don't want to sell sats but instead use them as collateral to get a dollar loan you can do that unchained as well go to www.unchained dash capital slash vaults to check out their vault program and matt's got something to say it's uh the name of the the series is gradually then suddenly gradually then suddenly not slowly the first the first piece was great it was great how parker expounded upon how he came to understand bitcoin as money it's very personal journey for everybody i like the way he prefaces it you really can't come to fully understand bitcoin until you question what money is just the the the institution of money is in general um so it's a very good piece we'll link to that uh newsletter in this

piece as well uh excuse me in this uh in the show notes so you can check that out but yeah we've never seen top gun i'm not afraid to admit it that movie looks too intense i don't know i like the gifts i feel like i would be about that movie so i might have to go back and watch i like the whole 90s like american propaganda movies yeah like that rambo shit yeah rambo it's fucking great i love that i've seen i independence day i saw independence day with my brother and my dad i had to be like five or six years old my brother was like four or five years old ran out of the theater we didn't make it past the uh the part when they started dissecting the uh the alien in in area 51 i had to leave the theater at that point wait how old were you I was like five or six I forget my story

like that is uh I uh went to Black Hawk Down with my my dad when I was like 14 or something and we sat through the whole movie but like he convinced my mom I went with my buddy and my dad and he convinced my mom that it was okay because it was like a historical movie and have you ever seen it uh I've seen Black Hawk Down it's like super like intense yeah and aggressive for like 14 year olds to see yeah and then also one time we saw a movie about aliens but it turned out that it was about illegal aliens that come into like great britain and like they like give head like she's like it follows like the protagonist is like this woman who's an illegal alien and she has to like give head to her boss like in the like the closet room of the office and i'm like sitting there i'm like

15 years old like where's the aliens dad like i was like we watched we read like the little blurb in the newspaper back in the day when you used to do that when you used to call movie phone uh your dad's like damn this is the type of aliens i was expecting we never admitted that one to my mom well yeah that's what uh i think my dad got yelled at for taking us to independence day we might have been too young for that independence day was recently on my mind because you tweeted about those those air force guys that got in trouble for drawing the penis yes and like my favorite comment there was like that pilot's who we need if the aliens come right turn on a dime draw a dick in the sky it has like a good sense of humor because that's

what we had an independence day so that's what we think when we think uh i've seen independence day many times since that that first time where we had to walk out of the theater but enough about sci-fi movies from the 90s we're here to talk about bitcoin first up on the list we wanted to give a shout out to stephen lavera and the uh the btc pay server series he's been doing this week on his podcast he's had a bunch of the people working in and around btc pay server on his episode to explain what they're doing what they have on the roadmap and it seems like btc pay is just becoming some incredible piece of technology that's very flexible very robust and something that we use here on our website tftc.io um and it is making uh receiving sending and

invoicing bitcoin extremely easy for us but to see what they have on the roadmap after listening the stefan series is uh it's pretty pretty inspiring yeah so far i've listened to rockstar devs and uh pavel next and they were both great uh and then and yesterday at bit devs uh jeff van drew uh presented on btc pay too i'm like slowly becoming a btc pay maximalist i think yeah so jeff andrew is the uh maintainer of the python implementation of btc pay and he's been on this podcast before episode 80 something i believe so go check that out if you haven't already but what was i i unfortunately could not make it to bit devs last night what was he talking about wait i don't is he actually maintaining a python full implementation of bdz pay i thought he

he just he he did the bit patron plugin and the quickbooks plugin and he wrote them in python because it's a docker system so you can write them in python and it still works if i'm not mistake and i think he might be like he i think he took over the reins of coordinating the python development of btc pay i'm not sure um okay but i'm not sure i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure could be wrong either way anyway what was he talking about i don't know he was talking he was talking about and they were touching on this in stefan's in the stefan series that i've listened to so far too is that it's people think btc pay is just like a merchant processor software um and it's way more than that it's like a full stack like one of the ways he put it in an interesting way like to

compare it to like a node launcher right uh to pierre's node launcher where you can you run btc pay and you can easily launch lightning node a bitcoin node bit patreon you can all these plugins woocommerce and you can just um and if you want to like build a project it's super easy to just build a project as a docker uh extension to the actual btc pay uh setup yeah no i mean again going back to what we've done with our website i was incredibly impressed with how quickly we were able to build what we did which is we spun up our own node we spun up a lightning node we have invoicing services obviously and then we were able to uh basically custom brand it as well so we have like the tftc brand all over it's just very well done up to this point to think that it

started with a tweet that's about to be two years old in a few weeks the best tweet ever best one of the top top five like it's because the follow-through behind running bitcoin uh this might be like the second best bitcoin tweet ever and if you freaks don't know steven pair from bitpay tweeted something and nicholas dory i'm paraphrasing right now on the tweet right in front of me it was like you lie i'm tired of the lies i'm gonna make you obsolete obviously not word for word but that's the gist of his and then he did and then he did i mean people are still using bit pay but you're you're dumb if you are at this point i think btz pay is you know one of the most important projects we have in this space right now and that's pretty amazing how young it

is um fully open source like huge development like growing developer community located around the world you know another thing they mentioned was like a lot of people like you go to the website and it's like a really polished website people think it's a company um and they're not a company so like they expect a level of support that's not there because it is an open source project another funny thing that jeff mentioned is um they have a one-click setup now if you want to run it on a vps uh they they had it before for azure microsoft's uh cloud service but it was way more expensive and now they have it on luna node so it's way cheaper and did i also just see that you don't even need a url to launch one anymore either like you don't have a recent update

yeah you don't have to hook up your dns to it or anything like that yeah i'm not sure on the specifics but there was a big it was that was like a big improvement um but anyway the funny thing is they have this one click setup with lunanode and one of the nice things about lunanode is they don't do kyc and they accept bitcoin um so you can do it relatively privately but the way they accept bitcoin is bitpay so like the number one way the easiest way to run btc pay right now is lunanode's one click but like if you need if you're paying for it in bitcoin you have to use fucking mid pay that's actually pretty fucking hilarious yep the irony but are they talking to luna yeah yeah i mean i mean i imagine i mean he mentioned it but i imagine they roast them on that

all the time and i think this is while we're on the topic of btc pay it is important to note that yes this is a completely new way of doing something like using off open source software in this this fashion like you were like you said you have a business stack that you're basically able to bootstrap with because of btc pay and again the beauty and the the significance of btc pay server has been really driven home to me and and matt actually i don't want to speak for matt for me in particular last few months just using it it's like holy crap like it's on cruise control creating invoices accepting bitcoin uh the dime bag is looking if it gets a dime worth of satoshi's It'll feed you a final thought.

Like, it just works. No third party. No third party. We had a dev set it up in, I think, less than eight hours. Like, everything that we have functionality-wise took less than a day to get working, which is crazy. I'm setting up the LLC on, like, the business side of this stuff. And the amount of work you have to go through just to get a bank account, just to be compliant with everything, it's ridiculous. this um just like a very uh manual non-automated process and just to think of like that process

compared to setting up this store online with btc pay is is night and day it is the future right yeah like imagine if if you're in another country and you're trying to do international business and stuff like that everything gets even more complicated um and it's it's you get you get major privacy improvements because you don't have a third party sitting in between everything exactly it's uh it is really revolutionary technology and it has a whole accounting system built in so if you when you go to file everything it's you're not chasing things down they they track price and stuff like that so it's it's really i mean jeff integrated quickbooks yeah it's uh and it's happening like like uh parker's newsletter gradually then suddenly

it's happening gradually then then like suddenly holy crap etc pay server is like one of the most leverageable stacks that we have on top of bitcoin and that that was my ptc pay server right i'm just really bullish on it all right now i am as well shout out to to nicholas doria for putting the team on his back giving the middle finger to the man and making something better uh what do we got next are we going to talk about wasabi versus yeah yeah we have to talk about it So as you freaks probably have noticed, if you are on Twitter, it seems that there's a bit of a privacy flame war going on between the Samurai wallet team and the Wasabi team. Obviously, both pieces of technology or something that we shill here on TFTC. So it would be remiss of us if we did not touch on the situation that's going on.

And I'll just say off the top of my head, and I'll let you go, Matt. I just think everybody needs to chill the fuck out. there's a lot of childish petulant child behavior going on like we're all in this together working for the same ideals let's not cannibalize each other on the way to greatness ty our our good friend ty called me a notorious wasabi show yesterday well you we are i mean fuck can't deny that can you deny that no i'll always be shilling uh shill lately uh i uh yeah i mean i echo those those feelings i i kind of feel exasperated embarrassed uh disappointed parent type situation well let's explain it so with wasabi in particular the the we touched on it

last week i believe the like being breadcrumbed a little bit with the txo transaction the big problem is the defaults and the the way the defaults are now it's more likely that there'll be user error and they're changing the defaults you know the big one is uh right now it defaults to in an onset of 51 it gives you the green check you know nice and mixed check or whatever um that means with the round sizes which are targeted at 100 sometimes or less but are pretty much always over 50 that means you've only had one round of mixing um so you really everyone should be doing they should be remixing they should at least do a second mix so they're going to they're going to change those default anon sets and you can do that right now in the settings by

just increasing it so increase it to at least 101 because if there's a round of 100 then it no matter what it does two rounds at least um the other big thing was was uh spending your your utxos afterwards um you know the unmixed change is obviously clearly linked to you it has the the red the red box the red badge on it sometimes there's yellow if it's like a little bit um you got to be very careful with those utxos and i don't know you know that's not that post mix is not an easy uh scenario there's a lot of nuance there there's a lot of ways you can fuck it up um and if you do fuck it up uh you can expose previous transactions that you thought you were good on um and i i think you know one of the

issues here is like with the amount the the round size uh of a 0.1 bitcoin 10 million sats like people have unmixed change sometimes of like 7 million sats 9 million sats they're not just gonna like let it sit there and like not spend it um and i mean in this case a lot of this controversy came up because uh the wasabi devs themselves donated to tor and fuck this part up right so to say like only noobs fuck it up uh is explain that story a little bit they donated to tor and they posted the transaction id and they were like it went through wasabi so it doesn't matter that we post a transaction id and the samurai guys connected it to their wirex account and were like, you've sold six Bitcoin on YRX

and we could tell that from your donation. And it was because they merged the outputs and specifically some outputs that were very linked to them. And at scale, when you have people merging these outputs, it reduces the anonymity set for everyone. So like imagine you have like 90 people participating and 60 of the people are merging their outputs. Process of elimination.

Yeah. So you want to merge as little as possible. these are other things that can help in the defaults like warnings and when you merge double warning stuff like that and then the last thing that uh is is a real issue with wasabi's current uh default is that if you have a post-mix transaction let's say you have a utxo and it's you know 10 million sats because that's the size the average size of of a wasabi round um and you spend or let's just say we yeah yeah you spend 0.5 well not 0.5 you spend 0.05 you spend 5 million sats on well that's way too much on a bunch of cold cards you buy a shit ton

of cold cards at 5 million sats because i don't feel like doing the conversion of how much a cold card is and you have five million sats left over right and that change is still considered mixed at that point it has the same annon set as when you spent it before but really the annon set is now zero because cold card knows that you have that change they at least know your shipping address and your name you put on the shipping address right or even worse let's say you send it to cash app to sell you know not only are you selling which is deplorable and then you you also send it to a kyc service they know your identity that annonce it doesn't reset and their argument is well we don't know where you send it to the the the label on the wasabi transaction

on the the label on the utxo says um the label on the utxo says cash app if you like when you spend it asks you where you're sending it to so it'll say that you sent it to cash app but it still shows the green check with the with the anon set up there so you have to like the user has to know like oh shit like i have to remix that that's um that's connected to my identity now uh so i'm trying to push for them to just make that default back down to zero just like be extra careful right like side on that because because they're right that sometimes you'll spend and you don't leak any data but i think the majority of time if you spend you're leaking at least some metadata whether that's an ip address or an email address or a phone number something or twitter account right

like you're probably leaking something just assume they're leaking something reset it what they're doing is they're going to make it so you can manually change the badge so like if you do it in that situation you can like right click and like change it back down to a non-set zero um you know and if they didn't want to just default to switching to non-set zero it'd be kind of cool if they had like a when you're paying like is that does this service know anything about you and you check that box and then it resets or something i don't know but yeah these are difficult questions or ux issues um that's that's what sort of perturbs me about the whole flame war that's going on like these you can't expect to have all these problems checked off like all

these boxes checked off like out of the gate like these are obviously ideals that you work towards and both teams are certainly working towards and i think just trying to drag each other down in the middle of building this stuff out is not not i mean it is advantageous to be like hey you fucked up here like you do not want this happening but to try to like undermine the whole project does not seem worthwhile to me so for part of the part of the reason is because samurai it's going both ways so yeah oh it's absolutely going both ways but the way part of the reason is because samurai has these post-mix tools that are attempting to solve this issue, right? So they're pitching their solution as superior to Wasabi in this regard. You know, Wasabi also has other advantages

over Samurai as well. And, you know, particularly they have this, you know, this light client mode that doesn't completely destroy your privacy. It's easier to hook your full node up. And you can connect to hardware wallets uh you with samurai yes they have dojo but it's not fully fleshed out yet most users aren't using dojo and the users that aren't using dojo are sending all their addresses to samurai servers still yeah but again i'll acknowledge that but again dojo's just getting launched like it'll proliferate and more people will use it and that problem will be solved eventually and that's the thing i never attacked them for that right they're working on it they I'm really excited for the full samurai implementation when you'll just easily be able to, like, anyone can easily run their own dojo or buy the Noddle Dojo, you know, scan it with their phone, all the mixing.

You don't have to install an app on your computer. All the mixing is done on your phone, like all this stuff. And, you know, I think there was valid issues that were expressed by both sides. but then there was just like this they they they both got way too emotional about it yeah it got childish and i was like really i was really personally disappointed by no power's response specifically um like he let it get to him too much and he lashed out and he like semi-docs people and like you should just be like we know that this isn't a perfect solution yet we're gonna we appreciate any feedback that we get we have these pull requests we're working on it on

improving it these are the new defaults that we're setting to do this you know like be productive about it in the end i think all this competition is good obviously it's highlighting all these problems but it's just frustrating and annoying like being stuck in the middle of it uh and yeah i yeah it's it's just it's in that regard it's been a very frustrating week i think then the other thing is you know i've had people come to me like oh it's dangerous that you're um pushing adoption of these tools when they're not ready and you know my response is as long as you make very clear that this is not a perfect privacy solution that there's a lot of fucking nuance here and you can fuck it up very easily which i think we've done a pretty

good job at doing um this is clearly a net benefit regardless like even if you fuck it up like the the status quo here is so fucking dangerous to begin with where people don't know what a vpn is they don't know what tor is they're using their ledger with ledger live and they're sending all their fucking transactions to it they're using custodial wallets you know they're not running their own full node there's like so many fucking issues here and uh i'm a big believer and you need to lead by example yeah and and regardless of any belief on the coin join uh elements of wasabi the other elements of wasabi allowing you to easily connect your full node in a private way with your with your hardware wallet and if you don't have a full node run a relatively private

a light client with your with your hardware wallet is a fucking game changer in its own um there was no easy way for people to do that before and now there is uh so yeah that's i mean that's how i feel about that just refilling my whiskey no yeah that was our third sponsor today oh yeah um the great jake shervinsky awesome lawyer not my lawyer but a lawyer nonetheless gifted us a bottle of rabbit hole uh whiskey straight or excuse me kentucky straight bourbon whiskey fucking badass Shout-out to Jake. Legend.

Keep fighting the good fight, bro. Rabbit Hole Whiskey is not affiliated with this podcast. It's not, but maybe it should be if anybody's out there working for Rabbit Hole Whiskey. It's a perfect brand alignment. Consider a sponsorship, not a lawsuit. But, yeah, just to tie up the Wasabi Samurai thing, everything Matt just said, I would echo.

These are deals that we're striving for. They're obviously not going to be perfect out of the box. And, again, as two individuals who are shilling these products, we are obviously putting our necks out the line so again it would be remiss if we didn't touch on this and that again we want to be completely transparent here that we like matt said these things do come with nuance they're not perfect in any way we do believe you should be experiment experimenting with them know the risk and we will try to keep you abreast of uh the risk as they become known to us um that is that is what we can promise you here at tftc and if you try and

if you're analyzing your transactions to see if there's like any like links and stuff like keep in mind like you should be using it like a vpn or tor don't like delay when you search these addresses because like they could be any of these sites could be like taking logs and stuff like that there's like so much fucking nuance here and it's like really fucking difficult um it's a good point it's getting easier exactly it's getting easier like the things like not imagine when you have like esplorer running on the noddle and you can just use the yeah or btc pay server as mb explorer on it yeah um it's getting easier it's obviously not perfect yet that's why we're considered quote-unquote early adopters these uh these hiccups and these oh the rabbit hole

whiskey's got me all burpy right now these hiccups and these imperfections should be expected but it is uh tinkers and explorers and and users who will help flesh out obviously discover these pain points and flesh them out over time what would be cool is if wasabi and samurai had like built-in chain analysis tools inside of the software that all run either ideally on your own hardware like your own node um or through tor where it's does like with what wasabi does where it keeps disconnecting Tor and reconnecting so that you have a new identity every time, that would be really useful.

If you could put in two addresses and see what kind of link there is between the address so users could do their own more judgment there, that would be pretty awesome. Also, on another note, we finally started the TFTC video series. Our YouTube channel has been... We have a new YouTube channel.

um we all of our podcasts are back uh back our back catalog of full podcasts is put up there and we're going to put future podcasts up there uh as they get released we're planning on doing video podcasts uh a la joe rogan and all them and we did our first walkthrough video which was cold card and wasabi you did a great job on that sir thank you um i appreciate you letting me use your intro for the just came out naturally i didn't even think about it it's just how else was i supposed to start it uh sub freaks it's your boy matt odell i think that's how it started with me too i was like what the fuck do i say and um on that note as well a bunch of us uh the new york city bitcoin crew if you're our new yorker uh we're going to be doing a cold card plus wasabi

plus full node course a chain code on september 26th at 5 p.m uh so stay tuned and we're looking for like around it's gonna be like around 125 it's gonna include uh a cold card um pizza and beer and and we might rodolfo might show up so we'll see yeah and uh we promise that we're not gonna backdoor your cold cards before you get there no i mean don't trust verify like the post office could do it so so could we and you know cold card takes precautions for that and we will go over that in the class that was a test i was making sure you covered that there you go i'm So I believe that's a Thursday night, correct? 26?

That sounds right to me. Yeah. It's right after Riga. It's just, I was like, we were like, should we do it in August? And August was really tight. And then we all looked at our schedules for September. And September is so fucking tight, too. It's like ridiculous.

But we didn't want to keep putting it off. So hopefully that'll be the first of many. Yes. I'm really excited about that. And also, we have a lot more videos will be coming out of all different shapes and sizes. Yeah. So make sure you go subscribe to the YouTube, too. We're going to try and blow that out.

And again, that's one thing. we've realized here again i think we announced this in the beginning of the years we have big plans that site and now the youtube channel are on that we're trying to cover all content mediums it's written with the bent audio with this in the interview series and now visual visual with the video on youtube and uh different people have different ways of learning and we're trying to to adapt to everybody's way of learning yeah i mean we're working on it just gradually and then suddenly right yeah yeah i hope um we've made we've made so much progress this year it's been a fun year it's been a fun year thanks for listening freaks we really appreciate you this

would not be possible oh yeah that was the other thing the wasabi uh cold card video i left 194 000 stats on the seed great little easter egg and tell this story this is incredible okay this is the best part um so immediately post a video someone swept the seed within maybe 14 minutes 12 minutes or something but they used replaced by fee so then there was a replaced by fee war between like four or five people to actually get the funds where they kept increasing the fee on top of the other one and it that was fucking beautiful it was like best case scenario i Couldn't have hoped for more. The only thing I could have hoped for was that if no one got anything

and the Miners just got the whole thing in a fee, it would have been the best game theory result. How high did the fee end up? I'm not sure, but it was not the full thing, unfortunately. Well, yeah. Shout out to whoever won that RBF war from the video. That was a cool little Easter egg. I wasn't expecting that.

Yeah, that was pretty badass. I liked that. I thought it was a nice way to thank the freaks. Yeah. And speaking of thanking the freaks, we've got to give a shout out to this week's contributor. we got a contribution this week via btc pay btc pay enabling the shout out technology that we have here on this podcast really hardcore 21st century technology here here's the shout out shout out to

the bitcoin plebs doing their damnedest to expose the charlatans taco taco taco and that was from neil thank you neil taco taco taco thanks neil uh shout out to the bitcoin plebs uh i don't know your obsession with tacos but it sounds i love tacos the that's like a pleb thing we we love the tacos yeah tacos are good they're they're good they're a good food group are they a food group mas amenos tacos is very overarching because it's just what you put in it you know it's like being a fan of sandwiches yeah you know it's like i like sandwiches it's a very good point yeah um yeah myself i am like a chicken pastor taco guy oh very good i like a good fish taco as well i like all the tacos yeah it's uh it's hard not to like tacos they're very good

are you do you like guac i fuck with guac yeah my lady doesn't like guac it's her it's her biggest negative i didn't like it until i was like 18 i never knew what it was well obviously the avocado crazes happened like the last decade so oh i mean i was eating guac before it was cool of course you were for what it's worth um this is a fun one i'm having fun this episode we're halfway through here we always have fun here marty this is true i'm having a special i'm having a lot of fun on this one in particular there we go ethereum hash rate is down 42 from the all-time high while the bitcoin hash rate is at an all-time high this was just an interesting article from long hash that matt came across um and yeah it's uh the andy howell from long

hash.com again says ethereum is becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack i don't know how uh how uh alarmist that that uh that headline is there because it seems like ethereum's hash rate has recovered a bit from from its lows in in february of this year but uh it is pretty considerable of a statement that east uh hash rate is 42 below its all-time high while bitcoin's hitting all-time highs it's supposed to be the programmable store of money for the decentralized financial future i call this shit um what'd you call the hash rate the hash rate about it what the hash rate fall yeah i mean they've just they've done everything in their power to fuck with the miners on their network and what the fuck do you expect like they're not

going to if you first of all if you keep telling them that proof of stake is like three months away they're not going to invest any more on mining um even though we both know it's never three months away uh the perpetual three months the second thing is they floated forking the algo which would have fucked them early i think they're still thinking about it like yeah they're still talking about it programmable pow or something like that they changed the mining reward just on a whim whenever they want you know so like all these things they just talk shit about asics all the time like all these things lead you to a network where where people you know miners are businessmen or women they're not going to invest in securing your network if if they don't have

certainty they need to have some level of of consistency and certainty and expectation on where the network will be in a year i smell a new eth beam developing here on this podcast you know this is going to be picked up and used by them we could call it a mining death spiral no it is it is funny uh and i was surprised i thought i hadn't looked at ethereum's hash rate in a minute like i would have thought it was similar to bitcoin like near all-time highs Bitcoin is at an all-time high right now, right? We had a huge difficulty adjustment up. I mean, at least it was at all-time last week.

But anyway, I do think the long hash article was a little bit alarming for clicks. They tend to overestimate how easy it is to attack these networks. A lot of people make these assumptions that Ethereum doesn't have ASICs, first of all. They definitely already have ASICs. yeah bitcoin hit an all-time high hash rate of 74 exahash per second on the 21st all-time high right yep and um and like the other thing is like bitcoin sv is like stupid easy to attack and it never gets attacked so uh no that was another our friend of the pod yasina mandra he posted last night uh that bitcoin core has 97 of the sha-256 mining uh power in the bitcoin bitcoin cash and

bitcoin satoshi's vision in the sha-256 ecosystem yes um or among sha-256 chains and like so this there's obviously a lot of noise on twitter for for any of you freaks who are new to this and trying to look at quote-unquote crypto fundamentals uh hash rate is my favorite and it does prove or it doesn't even prove it signals where the market is like if miners are expending this much capital and energy to mine the bitcoin bitcoin core chain all right i just got fucking i can't believe i got mine played into that i got mine played into that it worked on me wow i'm sorry satoshi forgive me don't worry he's a listener um the bitcoin chain is is that's why look at the hash rate it's got 97 against the the quote-unquote uh competitive forks they're not competitive at

all but i'd like to add that it's been that way for a pretty long time now uh and i've i've been been calling attacks and stuff for a while why is this do you think the miners are also mining those minority chains are just just getting pennies you know i just don't think with that there's like there's not enough money to be made and maybe and coupled with the fact that miners don't think it's a threat like if they thought it was a threat then maybe they just kill it just you know like make sure like bitcoin bitcoin sv like might kill my golden goose like let me kill it but no one thinks it's a threat right so maybe yeah and the opportunity cost of switching your hash rate to that chain for any amount of time is probably pretty high especially

if you're unsuccessful in your your endeavors to attack it yeah i mean that's what i'm saying like you either do it because of profitability like you can make money attacking it or if you're gonna take a like an immediate loss on doing the attack you do it for like ideological reasons because you think like long term you'll be better off if you just kill the chain um so i but i have been surprised that there haven't been any attacks uh kind of makes me want to become a miner uh that'd be that'd be like fun i also was that's a rough business it's a rough business yeah i'm at bit devs yesterday uh we were talking about there was this monero just did a bug bounty program and they had a bunch of bugs and one of the bugs was that you could

time lock your monero when you sent it to an exchange and the exchange wallet couldn't tell it was time locked so like they could credit you with monero but like the monero might be time locked for 10 years or 100 years or something um this is how would the attacker be able to get access to that time locked minero no but they would just the exchange would credit them right and then they could withdraw either minero or something else right because the exchange thinks they actually deposited it yeah but they're are they they're not time locking this before they send it to exchange in that way they're finding time locked minero and saying hey i can't access they have like a special transaction type that like upon receipt it becomes time locked

is it just like i'm trying to understand if this is profitable or just to fuck you to exchanges well so here's the thing it's not profitable unless first of all it's fixed the the monero did this bug bounty program and they found this so it was a positive bug bounty program uh the only way it would really be profitable is if you were another exchange and you were trying to take down your competition so I was just the reason I brought this up was because

I really like to see like as much as I hate Bitmain like I like aggressive miners I like aggressive exchanges are we hypocrites though? let's go back to our wasabi samurai conversation are we hypocrites for for being okay in this realm and not that realm

I think both services to try and de-anonymize each other right i just think they should just stick to the facts that are the issue right like when you start adding embellishments and stuff like that it gets really fucking frustrating parsing through everything that's true um and like neither side should be saying that there's is a perfect solution because neither has a perfect fucking solution right so like don't be like you have to everyone in this space has to admit there's trade-offs on everything right like there there has to be trade-offs but like absolutely attack each other like i want i want you know and i love i was i was sitting there in bit test i didn't like raise my hand or speak

about it or anything but i'm just sitting there i was like why can't we live in a world with exchange to exchange warfare like when will that happen maybe it already is happening maybe maybe um so wait go back like how is this profitable so it's only profitable if another exchange is doing it to bring down their competition yeah i mean it's just you could fucking exchange if you wanted to you can't make profit from it but you can fucking not anymore you could but not anymore no yeah it's fixed right and then there was a similar bug that you could actually if you were a monero miner you could basically send like a zero balance transaction that they thought was more that was actual monero and get credited and you can make profit from that but that they've

that was fixed as well an inflation bug it wasn't an inflation bug it just tricked the exchange into thinking that they received big monero okay they didn't um but anyway yeah so that was i just thought that would be cool if we had exchange to exchange warfare that would be pretty dope um so if you're an exchange out there be careful you never know who your competition is who's looking to take you down oh and that was the other thing bitmex i don't know we don't have this on this also highlights the uh the the risk you take when you when you add a lot of coins to your exchange too yeah we talked about that a bit devs too and we've talked about this on the pod so many times yeah every new asset you add adds as a security hole yeah and you have to like keep

track of all this shit like it's so hard to keep track of and uh you know by a lot of people like monero is treated as one of like the more quality assets like imagine like what like vert coin vulnerabilities there are whatever verge i don't know like all this shit that binance has like you can't i can't even imagine like what kind of shit is going on there and this is also another example Clams was the example that wasn't even like a chain thing that was just like being able to trade on leverage fucked Polonius

and then there's a whole other thing here too that it sheds light on which is like complexity is like the enemy of security right like as these systems get more complex like in Monero's case like you could have these kind of bugs where like that could have been fatal

to an exchange if it was exploited yeah no it's That's why you've got to find beauty in Bitcoin's simplicity and the simplicity of a Bitcoin-only world. But what I was going to say before is we also have BitMEX got served. Isn't BitMEX getting sued or something by the U.S. government or investigated by the U.S. government? They are, yes, I believe so.

But I don't think it's anything like it could get – from what I can tell, the worst that will happen is they'll get a fine for allowing u.s traders to trade on there but they don't they i mean you'd have to use a vpn if you're a u.s trader and you're trading on there i believe so yes supposedly on bitfinex you don't have to even use a vpn you just like they ask you if you're an american if you say no they just like hopping on the porn hub are you 18 um i mean that's ridiculous like bitfinex should just be blocking usips but like if you use a vpn like there's nothing the exchange can do about it unless they compromise the privacy of all of their non-American users too,

which is ridiculous. Like, you'd have to force KYC on everyone, which is just, like, just as horrible for the privacy and security of users at the end of the day because that information can leak, can get taken advantage of. Why is this so hard for governments to realize? They don't give a shit. I mean, we saw Barr.

He was arguing. It's like the encryption war has started all over again. Or I guess it never ended. What do you mean by that? What's his first name? what is he is he the ag i didn't steven bar bar encryption no no i think his name starts with an a um andrew mit tech review anthony is my guess let's see no william did you say william uh i don't know what i said i was right though he is the ag attorney william bar's speech on

tuesday uh said that the government needs back doors and there's no such thing as a secure back door uh we've seen countless times the government loses control of this information so even if you trust your own government and the precedent has been set with the pgp wars of the early 90s like code is speech well that's what i'm saying these these wars have never ended the war is still going on uh it's more relevant now than ever we have more people using encryption than ever before and uh it'll i'd be surprised to see it go away anytime soon like we're gonna have to keep fighting That's a good segue into the conversation of Coin Center. So Coin Center has been a foundation or not a foundation, whatever it is.

They're in D.C. They lobby on behalf of cryptocurrency or at least attempt to lobby on behalf of cryptocurrency and has been much maligned by people like BeautyOn in the past. Like, why should these people be going and talking to politicians? And a lot of people will say that Coin Center is just going to try to craft law and whatever their backers want to see happen. But from what I can tell, from my arm's length view, it seems like Coin Center has been getting good information into the hands of Congress people and the reps in our government. And I mean, again, don't trust Verify and you'll never be able to fully trust this stuff.

But again, just optics wise, it seems like they're at least a net positive when it comes to being in D.C. and in American politics. yeah i mean that's if you have unmixed change that's at least smaller amounts um well first of all either we we actually didn't touch on this when we were talking about was the whole wasabi thing like just leave it there for now and figure it out in the future is like a good i think a good strategy um if it's you can always you can move it to samurai if you're running a dojo as well and mix it because they have smaller pools so you can mix it through them And then the third option is if it is a smaller amount, consider donating to Coin Center or Tor. You know, like that's those are two really good causes.

And and at least that on mixed exchange will go to good to a good use. I think Coin Center is doing really good work. these positive signs that we have seen in congress these last few weeks is is highly is is not mainly because of coin center but they're one of the one of the big reasons i think that we do see that um and and they all seem to be they all seem to be fighting the good fight so that's really good to see yeah um i think they're giving i mean from what i've seen peter volkenberg obviously naraj jerry burrito their whole team everything they've written they seem pretty down for the cause of not bringing a cashless society and they're pretty for financial privacy too which

we should all be for yeah they just yeah i mean we we well i definitely me i've i find a way to complain about a lot of things and i have no complaints about coin center so that's a pretty big deal um you know the other thing is uh i just i just lost it again i'll let matt uh gather his thoughts while we talk about this because again like matt said earlier these wars have not ended they're keep they're going to be going on in perpetuity it is under our control like you either stand up and do something about this and speak up about it or you cower at your computer desk and just let the the panopticon coalesce on you the so i've i remembered and forgot twice and And I remember it again.

Bitcoin Rabbi is sending a book to every congressman and every senator. And I think he's still like 150 books short. So consider donating to that. That's a great, great cause. I mean, I think I said on this pod that I think this book will be more influential than the Bitcoin standard. And this is exactly what you'd expect to see. Yeah, we need more Patrick McHenry's out there, freaks. i just wish i could be a fly on brad sherman's wall when he gets the bitcoin rabbi's book

maybe he'll burn it i bet he burns it he's also sending inventing bitcoin uh to them the rabbi is which was a pretty class act move again uh free shout out for both those books like you said uh like the bitcoin rabbi's book is incredible for just like getting a high level understanding of this and then when you want to understand the intricacies of how bitcoin works inventing bitcoin is the best two-hour primer and understanding like bitcoin as a system and as proof of work and how all that stuff operates what's the name of the bitcoin rabbi's book again put me on the spot here matthew well i keep calling it bitcoin rabbi's book i think it's called bitcoin money right i think you're right i think that's what it's called

yeah bitcoin money yeah a tale of bitville yeah so go check that out support that cause uh again we need to speak up we need to be heard yeah i donated to all three of those organizations organizations fyi uh we already talked about the new cash app ui here's something that i was really excited to write about earlier this week and that is upstream data released their their mini data center the ohm ohmm product and that is basically a uh a little box that can be brought onto oil and gas fields that are flaring off uh gas into the atmosphere or burning off gas which is a lot worse for the environment than capturing and using that that uh fuel um so these little own boxes will show up on these sites cap that flared gas and turn it into bitcoin

the worst is to release it yes then like the second worst is to flare it because you light it on fire yes and then the best is to turn it into digital gold and make some useful and get some get some useful use out of that energy uh and so the yeah like i have a vision of the future where these ohm data centers are on an oil field everywhere and these people these people these uh oil uh barons are trying to bring fuels to the to the masses the obviously climate change is a huge topic right now the earth's pretty dirty we're using a lot of energy i think it'd be stupid to think that we're not going to continue losing a lot of energy especially as the population balloons towards eight billion people and best course of action going forward is

probably to be as efficient as possible uh with these fossil fuels and and treat them as precious things that should not be wasted because we're we're number one polluting the environment and then number two just i don't know what's worse wasting the the potential energy or polluting the environment yeah i mean it's all about incentives bitcoin gives a direct incentive here to be more efficient to be more environmentally friendly you know these these uh these people would would not would not be flaring um they would just be releasing the gas into the atmosphere if it wasn't for regulations that forced them to flare a certain amount for environmental reasons these these little mining rig boxes you know i think they hold like 80 asics or something like

maybe 100 over 100 asics i'm not sure about the ohm in particular but there are some because he used to do the he still does he does the containers the big shipping containers but these are smaller and they can stack they're easier to move um you can move these with a pickup truck yeah these give um these give a direct incentive to flare because you make money flaring right like before it was like flaring just cost you more money but you did it because you had to do it for regulations um but but in this case there's a there's a direct incentive no matter where you are in the world regardless of your regulations to flare it uh and and to mine bitcoin with that with that energy generated yeah and uh so i believe steve said in his thread when he announced that last friday

is that this one one little fully packed ohm data center and this one mining field that he unveiled it in would save 7200 metric tons of carbon from going into the atmosphere yeah i mean the course of a year we haven't verified that number but even if it was half that or a quarter of that that'd be fucking huge right also the other things i keep saying flare but obviously if you're using it with the miner you're not flaring and you're just burning it for energy yes flare implies that it's part of that release process yes um but yeah so i i mean are we are we ready we're starting we're ready to mean that bitcoin is green right like i think i know dude i'm way ahead of you like if you're an environmentalist you're a hypocrite if you're

not pro-big exactly that's the thing that pisses me off like we have something like people want to cry to politicians be like let's sign a green new deal it's carbon tax the shit everybody how about you look at what you can actually do today and this is something you can fucking do today to cut emissions from the atmosphere stop talking start fucking walking the walk bitcoin is the green new deal bitcoin will solve every problem in the world oh i fucking pierre has just been on fire lately uh just like people like don't complain about trolling on twitter like that's what the platform is designed for and most of the people who complain about trolling are doing it themselves at the same exact time when they're complaining about it they're also trolling so

just suck it up develop some thick skin but that was a that was an a plus that was an a plus tweet uh would you expect any less from pierre no i wouldn't i mean bitcoin clearly doesn't solve literally every problem i don't know man that's what i think he said literally it solves literally every problem in the world um but i like that and then stefan took it a step farther he's like bitcoin fixes this you know like have constipation bitcoin fixes this stuck in traffic bitcoin fixes this yeah just know that you could uh hook up a miner to your car and start mining bitcoin to fix the the existential dread knowing that you're wasting time in your car um but going back to the ohm that ohm data center mined a bitcoin last week too in the first week that it was open

Obviously, he was contributing to a pool and did not see the full block reward and fee, but one of the miners within that OM data center solved the block last week. Shout out to that. Badass. Yeah. Contributing to consensus. Steve Barber killing it. He really is.

Steve, if you're listening, get your ass to New York. We need to talk. Have we not had him on the pod yet? No, we haven't. I mean, I've been talking to him. I've been flirting with him on Twitter for a while now. I slid into his DMs. you're about to tell me you weren't flirting um we'll end it on this hong kong the hong kong

protests turned very violent this week there was a bunch of men in white uniforms or not uniforms it's like white street clothes they were wearing like a gang uniform i think they were triads so the rumors are they were triads they were just going beating the shit out of protesters and more importantly the police that are omnipresent in hong kong disappeared and then all of a sudden these triads came in and they just started beating the shit out of the protesters um and it it seems like it's pretty clearly uh chinese state motivated yeah it's like the little green men in ukraine right like the russians send in troops and they're like well we took the patch off that says they're russian you know we're not there exactly the same idea i mean it could be like a false flag

presume you know right there's always that option right like maybe like the triads are pro-protesters and they came in to beat the shit out of the protesters to pretend that but then why weren't anyone arrested that's what i would say and no one was arrested they have cameras everywhere they have policemen everywhere and nothing happened like how the fuck did that yeah also highlighted the need for highlighted the potential need for a second amendment as well um yep yep people were very quick to point that one out like imagine uh yeah i mean it's crazy You have people running around getting the shit kicked out of them with sticks. At least some dudes were walking around with machetes.

Yeah, if you had like one or two people with guns in there, all of a sudden everything changes, right? But yeah, you know, stay strong, Hong Kong. I wish we could do more than just talk about it, but we support the mission and the fight over there. Talk about an intolerant minority within that. I mean, they're not technically mainland China, but they are within that Chinese territory and Hong Kong is that intolerant minority that's holding on to the last bit of freedom that they have. I'm not I hate to say it, but I'm not I'm not so bullish on their win.

I mean, you they're intolerant minority in terms of all of China. yes but one of the reasons the protests have been as effective as they have been is because there's a you know a large percentage of hong kongers are actually standing up i mean i think the population of hong kong i was surprised it's like eight million or something two million were in the streets like as a new yorker i was like ah flex i thought you guys were bigger than us um but uh yeah the two million three million what there's a large amount of people protesting uh and and showing support for this so that's always good to see um it's fucking human nature they're fighting for like it's visceral like the i wish you guys will our buddy and i'm not i'm not

i'm worried our buddy in china in hong kong uh leo leo weiss or weiss i'm not good at pronouncing names who was on the panel that i moderated for bitcoin 2019 um he was saying that he's noticing in like chinese publications it's like a change from from like chinese citizens in hong kong are protesting to like we have to quell the periphery like traitors you know like they're like the westerners it's like it's almost like they're not you know they're like dehumanizing the fact that they're actually outsiders that are rebelling against China. And that's a pretty dangerous change in tone to see. On top of that, you have what's going on in the East China Sea.

They're building out land there, which is a very highly contested area in the world. And that's a provocation in its own. I believe they recently made a deal with Thailand. I could be wrong here in the exact country. I think it's Thailand. I have not been following that. I think they might have, like, made, like, a military base in Thailand or something that's just stoking more provocation.

It's not, I mean, this is going all the way, like, the U.S. is. I mean, in their defense, if I was them, I would totally be building those islands and stuff. I think it's kind of a cool flex, but that's just me as a geopolitical nerd. You don't want them to build those islands because the building of those islands and what's going to go on those islands is strictly militaristic. No, but as an American, I don't want them to, but if I was, like, Chinese government. No, as a human, you don't want people building war, like, war infrastructure. That's basically what it is. I don't know. I want exchange versus exchange warfare. Like people should act greedy. And, and, and, you know, I, I, I respect balls, you know, like I respect when Putin walks in and, and, and does a little green men and it tells everyone that they're not Russians and gets away with it because it took balls. And I respect when they keep building these islands because it's in their best interest and we're not fucking doing anything about it. Right. So like they're being, it's effective. It's an effective strategy in their own best interest.

like if that's how the incentives work right like they need to defend their area what is the end game of the strategy though like that is like should we even be playing this game can we get people to move to another game look the u.s strategy is we have 11 aircraft carrier groups and the next country has like two okay so we try and control every single waterway in the world the chinese strategy right now is let's just have like decent control over like our own water right like that's a reasonable that's what i would do if i was them that's all i'm saying i can see that um and then on another note with this hong kong protests uh just once again to highlight the reason we know about this triad thing is because it was live streamed on twitter

which is crazy right like it's still pretty crazy to me that we can see these hd videos live as they're happening and it's pretty hard for it appears you know it's been pretty hard for the government to block them yeah no it's pretty heavy like you're just watching a live stream and all of a sudden people just start getting the shit kicked out of them there's a like i saw a pregnant woman got you got like her i mean i'm not trying to bring more fear and guilt into this but like well like it wasn't even like an actual protest on the street where they hit they hit like a subway people going back from the protest to the subway but some people weren't coming back from the protest right some people were just in a subway station because that's

what subway stations are used for you know there's like plenty of other people that are in that subway station yeah stay safe out there anybody listening in hong kong um the other thing is uh noddle just they just upgraded the noddle again uh so now electromex is is finally live boss um so i'm syncing that so we'll stay tuned for that we'll have some videos uh we'll have uh we'll talk about it on the pod um yeah oh and then the other thing is we had a listener reach out to me on dm from turkey and she just wanted to say that he really appreciated the pod and that that he knows multiple listeners in turkey and i just thought that was really cool that you you know he's like our currency already sucks like this is not a theoretical well shout out to you thank you for

listening uh and thank you for bitcoining and and again like my heart goes out to you too in turkey i'm sorry you had to live under erdogan's incompetence um yeah this is we're all in this together that's a crazy thing like you have somebody from turkey dm you and we have like as humans these especially humans drawn to bitcoin in particular we have this innate uh automatic connection because we just have these these common worldviews that that bitcoin sort of pulls out of all this and that's like going back to the social media aspect of being able to to videotape something and have what's happening in hong kong flash into our living rooms here in brooklyn like that's an empathy creation that's been the beauty of this podcast and what we're what we're

building here is is learning that there's a lot of others like us all around the world and shout out to you freaks thank you for listening yeah i mean it's not only empathy it's accountability it's fucking fantastic yeah yeah thank you for listening freaks we love you guys yeah it's perfect place to end it stay humble stack sets peace and love