TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.07.29

Episode Date: August 1, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - JoinMarket, fidelity bonds, and privacy - https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2019-July/017169.html - Capital One data breach - https://www.cnet.com/how-to/capital-one-data-breach-what-you-can-do-following-the-banking-hack/ - Zap update + full node - https://github.com/LN-Zap/zap-desktop/releases/tag/v0.5.2-beta - Fold App Kickbacks - https://medium.com/in-the-fold/introducing-fold-kickbacks-5b1d255621b3 - "Stacking sats" - Hong Kong - https://twitter.com/alessabocchi/status/1156513770254012416?s=20 - Fortnite World Cup - https://twitter.com/matt_odell/status/1155838643094917121 - much more 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.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. In this edition of Rabbit Hole Recap, I'm here on the roof with our boy Matt O'Dell. We've got helicopters flying above us right now. They're on to us. What was that? I think they're on to us. Oh, they're on to us, yeah. Yeah. Do you see any ladders coming down?

Not yet. Not for this recording. Maybe in a future recording. It's a beautiful day we got here on the roof. Gorgeous. Happy to be here, as usual. Happy August. Happy August 1st to you. Oh, we don't have this on the list. How did we not have this on the list? We knew we were forgetting something. There you go.

It's August 1st, a two-year anniversary. Some people want to call it an anniversary. Bitcoin Independence Day. Bitcoin Independence Day when the user-activated soft fork was enabled. Is that technically what happened? What technically happened on August 1st? Didn't everyone go with Segwit and then Bitcoin Cash happened? Yeah, Bitcoin Cash forked off.

Because the Segwit2x folks were like, oh, everyone will go along with it, and then we'll do the 2x part later on. I think it was 90 days after. Yeah, so it never actually... I mean, it kind of did happen, right? Right now, it's two years later. Some people call it the most important event

in Bitcoin's history up to this point. Would you agree with that? It's pretty crazy. It's been, yes, one of the most important events, but yes, it's pretty crazy it's been two fucking years. It feels like it's been a lot longer than that. yeah no it is um does it feel like it's been longer lightning was like but a dream two years ago on this day right like we needed segwit for lightning there was no lightning clients and

there's no lightning network it didn't exist yet and yeah now we have crazy proliferate we actually had a lot of lightning news on the docket for this episode in particular um but yeah all enabled by segwit and uh users sticking up for themselves and sticking up for the network and not not caving to to the demands of what some would uh consider an economic majority not that they had the power anyway but this proved without a shadow of a doubt that that full node operators sort of dictate the rules of the system well you know we kind of talked about it on um july 4th and also on the podcast that we just released with richard uh you know so many things in this world end up getting co-opted by centralized actors right and and this was a very unique case where bitcoin was

able to to not do that you know by because of both uh activism from the stakeholders but also because of how it's designed to be highly resistant to change in the first place yeah now then a lot of people argue whether or not that that event in particular sort of launched the the crazy mania that we saw for the rest of 2017 uh in my opinion was definitely a bullish event to prove bitcoin's utility and overall its robustness and decentralization at that point in time yeah because you had that you had the bitcoin cash fork and then you had the segway 2x failure think about all the shit that's gone down in the last two years that's what i'm saying it doesn't feel like two years and here we are you know just two years later and people are already complaining

that lightning's moving too slowly you know now and that goes back to the statement i made a couple weeks ago when i was on that bachelor party like it's quiet too quiet like i feel i feel like things are too good almost um but yeah we'll touch on a lot of that before we get into the topics of the day we got to give a shout out to a quick shout out to our sponsors cash app let you freak stack sats they they just rolled out a new ui if you haven't checked it out yet check it out uh you can buy bitcoin uh send receive bitcoin on the app now and they're rolling out beck 32 uh enabled uh sending and receiving or i'm not sure about receiving but you'll be able to send to a back 32 address uh it looks like soon that's being rolled out yeah i

think receiving is is uh it's not even a segway address right now uh not positive i think it's still a legacy address i know mine is pretty sure it's legacy um but beyond that they have uh the boost program as well i use my boost card this morning at the coffee shop save myself a dollar you get a boost card you get a merchants like a local coffee shop a whole foods door dash taco bell they're adding others and uh you shop at these merchants you get money and then you can stack sats with that so use the promo code stacking sats if you have not downloaded cash app yet that's stacking sats one word you're gonna get five dollars and then five dollars is gonna go to a very uh cool cherry that's near and dear to our heart al's lacrosse out of chicago

so go download the cash app today use stacking sats as the promo code they're gonna give a shout out to our other sponsor unchained capital you already know all about them uh we mentioned parker lewis is gradually than sunny suddenly newsletter last week what we did not mention is that he also dropped a link to his incredible paper enders game which is on the unchained site right now but beyond parker's writings they also have the two or three multi-sig vault program if you guys are looking for a third party to help with your custody unchained is there with their vault programs where you can use a trezor or ledger multi-hardware setup and unchained will be there to be a signing member if you ever need them to come sign a two or three multi-sig on top

of that they have their loan program on the other side if you don't want to sell your bitcoin and use it as collateral to get usd loans you can do so on uh their loan side so go to www.unchained-capital.com slash vaults check out their vault program um and yeah shout out to our sponsors matt it's been like a a good a good week in terms of a mix a good mix of macro news we have lined up a good mix of technical news and a good mix of uh uh some other topical stuff in the bitcoin world so it's an interesting far-ranging conversation we're about to have where do you think we should start um let's start with uh positive news um jack mauler's uh announced that they're working on a full node completely integrated into zap you basically have bitcoin core in zap already so

when you just launch that it'll give you everything yeah it seems like pierre's node launcher with a better ui on top of it yeah just all wrapped into a single uh program right yeah so like you can imagine people running that and then then you could easily run wasabi or you know electron personal server next to that and use it with like a cold card or something so you'd have you'd have basically like two app install that's that's pretty simple for what you get a full a full bitcoin node a full lightning node um and a way to interact with the hardware wallet yeah on top of that they have the mobile app so you can connect your node to your mobile app and monitor your node while you're on the go

and transact while you're on the go if you're using lightning as well so shout out to zap just putting out good shit week in and week out it seems this came out of nowhere i wasn't expecting this was this uh on was this like known on their roadmap i feel like this was a bit of a surprise you kind of just teased it on twitter right yeah i was a great surprise i was really happy about that yeah i think it'll make it a lot we already love zap and i think it'll make it a lot easier for people to to use it uh to its fullest right yeah exactly so shout out to the zap team um pushing that forward and i guess it's a good segue into bitmax they put out a blog post this morning uh sticking on the lightning network here they tested out watchtowers and they did a nice

write-up of uh basically then setting up a watchtower and proving that it it caught a malicious uh transaction and and uh what's the word i'm looking for punish the justice transaction yeah a justice transaction such a good term was uh was executed um so we'll link to that uh in the show notes it's just a blog post explaining how they did it how it worked and they they set up some pretty granular details in there so it's a good good way to see how this watch tower system works in the wild like we said we saw will burn uh demo this at bit devs a couple months ago and it it works it's pretty cool to see it uh in person actually go down but bitmex research does a lot of good write-ups like this so yeah that's one thing i'm going to talk about

bitmex research they had to shut down their uh their their node uh their ethereum node because it was getting too expensive and they had a bunch of them right that's the whole point and they had their version of fork monitor where they run all the different bitcoin clients yes um and i guess like no one was using it and it just got really expensive to run and then on a similar vein uh did you see what ryan x charles posted the the bsv guy i muted that guy a while ago our former hero at reddit who then fell and became a a villain um he's not even a villain he's just the dunce so it's actually really funny okay so so bch split off like two years ago right on this on this day um and with the goal of making blocks bigger right and what what the non-beat you know

but the what bitcoiner said was it doesn't you don't want to increase those block if you increase the block size too much if you increase or the block weight that is that's how we calculate it now the block weight but if you increase that size too much it becomes prohibited prohibitively expensive to run a node um because you have your bandwidth requirements keep going up and up and up right you have to send more data and nodes don't get paid so then uh after holding up craig wright as their false idol for maybe 10 months or however long uh they had a falling out with him and that Then we had this split up where you had SV, then split off from Bitcoin Cash. So now you have two Bitcoin Caches.

SV was like, well, we have to go even bigger, right? Because it's like once you go, once you start increasing, how far do you go, right? Once you send it, you got a full send. Right. So they went even bigger. And now... Two gigabytes, right? I don't even know.

It's just big. It's just large. and they're putting all this useless data on there because the fees are so low. Most Bitcoin SV transactions are this weather service that's just decoding the weather into this blockchain. So Ryan Charles, who is a former Bitcoiner, then Bcashier, then Bcash SVer,

runs the site Moneybutton, which is one of their so-called premier projects in the space, and he just wrote a tell-all blog post where he's like it's too expensive to run a node like we need donations like you don't understand like we don't get paid to run a node the blocks are too big it's like dude are you fucking kidding me and then not only that the b cashers are like we warned you guys we told you that was going to be bad because sv went bigger than them you know while they're doing the same they're committing the same exact foul and they just think like it's proving them right so it's pretty pretty

hilarious development poetic justice at the end of the day right oh it's fucking hilarious And let this be a reminder to you freaks out there. This is why me as an individual, this is why I choose to download Bitcoin Core, because I think the people working on that repository and code base have these tradeoffs in mind. And it is do not raise the block size at all costs. Let's do everything we can before that ultimatum is pushed on us and try to be as efficient as possible in the time being. And I think Bitcoin up to this point has done an incredible job as that. And if you actually look at the annualized growth of the blockchain or excuse me, the chain state in terms of gigabytes, like the annual annualized growth is sort of the slope is decreased and it's growing at a slower or a lower percentage rate over time

because of these efficiencies that have been gained via Segwit and bandwidth efficiencies and stuff like that. Yeah, you want to keep it as efficient as possible. And what's really cool is what people don't realize is one of the benefits of these failed minority forks and of altcoins is that two years ago, four years ago, five years ago, when we were having these debates, it was all theoretical. and I mean the safest decision is to side on the conservative side right but now these forks come

out they've they've done it in practice and now we have like real use cases to point to where we're like look they did it this is the issues with it you can see it clearly creates centralization you know becomes prohibitively expensive to run a node you know even something like ethereum proves a lot of the debates that that we've had over the years yeah and that's why it's important to try to seek out like the signal and all these scaling proposals like just arbitrarily raising the block size is lazy and not a really obviously obviously not a really clever way a real clever way to try to solve this problem and comes with major trade-offs exactly so that's why things like Erlay, things like U-Tree XO, try to focus on those proposals that approach scaling in a clever way

instead of just arbitrarily changing a variable in the code. So Erlay will help a lot with bandwidth. U-Tree XO could potentially help with the chain state size as well. So things like that instead of just chatting the block size. yeah and you don't want to make changes you know there's no once you like once you do it the damage is done so you want you want to be as conservative as possible you can always make changes in the future if they become necessary yes um yeah so that was talking uh development process and efficiency uh the thing that i wrote about this morning and hot topic in the news recently has

been coin joins and in particular particular coin join implementations whether it be wasabi or samurai one that is not talked about as much i feel but it's been around the longest and has a very unique way of solving or excuse me facilitating coin joins is join market and last week chris belcher from join market uh sort of proposed the concept of a fidelity excuse me fidelity bonds on coin uh excuse me join mark join market there's too much coin join and join market going on here um so basically a fidelity bond would help to prevent sybil attacks so a sybil attack can happen right now on the maker uh on the maker side of the maker taker market within join market basically you can have one entity represent a bunch of inputs to sort of

reduce the anonymity set of a coin join and so fidelity bond would force makers to tie their bitcoin up in a time lock contract for a certain period of time uh to sort of increase the price of the cost of attacking or executing a simple attack yeah join market was the was the first one of these three implementations um i remember when it came out i was like super excited about it The cool difference here is that it runs on a maker-taker model, similar to a lot of exchanges. So basically, if you have a lot of funds that are available to be mixed, you're the maker, and you get paid Bitcoin to facilitate those mixes. Now, the issue with all coins, so that's different than something like Wasabi, where you're paying Wasabi's coordinator money, or something like Samurai, where you're paying Samurai's coordinator money, but the two people involved in the transaction aren't getting paid for it.

So with JoinMarket, it's kind of nice because it creates this free market incentive that really is similar to Bitcoin in a lot of ways where it aligns incentives to add liquidity to the network. The biggest issue with JoinMarket has been UX. It's a lot more difficult for the average user to use. And then the other thing is with all these CoinJoin implementations, we have the issue of Sybil attacks, which is basically just imagine if an attacker just tries to participate in as many CoinJoin rounds as possible. and the way most of them get around it is um by introducing this fee right whether it's a samurai fee or the the wasabi fee and and that's it it may it puts a cost to the attack right which similar to uh like bitcoin transaction fees like if you try to flood the network you have to do this cost but with with with join market you don't have that it's a reverse incentive right because the

maker is getting paid to do it so you're actually you can get paid to do sybil attacks so this is a very clever way to try and get around that yeah no and it again it puts a cost on uh the attack the sybil attack and then on top of that it creates a sort of natural incentive for long time long-term holders to participate in these fidelity bond sales and purchases because uh an increased anonymity set makes bitcoin more fungible which therefore makes it more useful gives it more utility which therefore drives demand for it and the price higher so if you're a long term holder with a financial incentive, to me, it just seems natural that buying and contributing to this Fidelity Bond model sort of makes sense in the long term.

I mean, I think if you're a long term holder, like participating in providing coin joint liquidity in general already, like I like I imagine most makers in in joint market system were already long term holders, right? It's just this added mechanism works well for them because, as you said, they're already long-term holders, so they'll be comfortable time-locking some Bitcoin to prove that they're a responsible actor, basically. Yeah. Now, another thing about Fidelity bonds, while we're on the topic, I just thought it was

a pretty unique implementation of op check lock time verify, which is basically the time lock function, an op code that allows you to lock your UTXOs up for a certain amount of block time. Did he say how long he wants to lock them up for? It's just a rough... I bet there will be a market. I assume there will be a market for it. The longer you lock it up, maybe more credit you have?

Yeah, more. And the more you lock up, the longer... Yeah, so it's like a quasi-reputation system, too. Like, you're trusting the people who own these bonds and have for a certain duration of time, I would imagine. It's pretty clever. Yeah. You know, I would love to see joint market usage go up.

I do think the main issue is UX. Right, yeah. So if you are participating in this Fidelity bond system, you have to be careful with your UTXOs before and after you use it. You have to make sure they're well-mixed before you purchase a Fidelity bond or lock your UTXOs up in a Fidelity bond. And then once that bond duration has been met, you have to be careful with what you do after it to remix it and stuff like that.

Yeah, because they're linked to your CoinJoin identity. Yeah, so if you fuck up after the fact, you could fuck up anybody who participated in a CoinJoin with you. So that, yeah, like these UX problems exist. And I said it in the bent today, like a novice is not going to be cognizant of this or savvy enough to do this, I don't think. I got to jump back into Joy Market and try it out again. But this also brought up like, hopefully in the future, things like P2EP, like pay to endpoint will be more commonplace. It makes it easier, again, for the developers and then the end user as well. It's just like every transaction is a CoinJoin and a pay-to-end point.

But there are trade-offs there as well. Yeah, because both parties need to be online to do that. Yeah. So that's why I like seeing things like Zap make it easier. Yeah, I mean, you can still do stuff like the Stonewall transactions in Samurai where you're simulating a CoinJoin amongst your own outputs. Yeah. So at least it kind of looks, at least it looks like a CoinJoin.

Capital One breach. Capital One breach. Capital One lost, how many accounts did they lose? 106 million, I think, all in. Oh, my God. Potentially more. Mostly in the U.S. Canada was affected as well.

Yeah, so apparently the story goes there is an engineer at Amazon And she found this breach within Capital One's system on Amazon servers and then moved the data that she secured from this breach to a personal GitHub account and was pretty lazy with her trail of information. No OPSEC. Yeah, no OPSEC at all. And I think she might possibly, she didn't actually sell the data, right? She just leaked it and then someone else sold it. Yeah. And then the worst part is Capital One didn't even realize that it was compromised for like a year or something.

Yeah, some GitHub user found it and alerted them, I'm pretty sure, and said, hey, I hope you know this breach is out on GitHub right now. The craziest part, like we were literally talking, I mean, we talk about it all the time, so I guess it's not that coincidental. And these things happen all the time. But we were talking with Richard the day before this breach happened about how, like, will people care about their privacy? and like i'm an ardent believer that as more and more of our information is online and more and more of these hacks happen people will wake up um you know the look we have equifax was trending that they're giving everyone the 125 blood money which i did you did you claim your equifax money i tried to really i'm not eligible why aren't you eligible apparently my information did not

get leaked in it every adult american's information got leaked i thought maybe i did it wrong i don't know i didn't claim because i felt like it was a slap in the face and i don't want the money could have stacked sass with it i could have yeah um yeah so we had the equifax thing trending now we have the capital one um and just getting to the point where like all this information that people think like what what is private what private information do people have anymore um you know addresses phone numbers email addresses social security numbers like Nothing is sacred, and it's all out there. And if we don't stop giving these companies information, it'll never get solved.

There's no way. They can't secure it. There'll always be, whether they intentionally leak it to governments or for their own ad purposes, or if they get hacked, it is all just a ticking time bomb waiting to get released, any information you give them. But, Matt, we need to save people's lives. We need to collect this information to protect people from themselves and, more importantly, terrorists around the world. Is there a threshold at KYC that is acceptable?

It is not effective at stopping bad people, and it just puts good people in jeopardy. So it's an absolute net bad. uh it should just be the thing is the thing is uh kyc is necessary for a lot of things in the legacy financial system just because of how they handle fraud like their fraud systems aren't effective without it but with bitcoin we don't need that because it's a push system right yeah because it's a push system and it's you know a digital bearer asset that they can verify themselves so it doesn't really matter what the identity is um no but it is no it's a very extremely good point like bitcoin as a push system versus the credit and debit system

and ach system which is pull uh like pushing your utx's out is a completely different model than than the way our traditional financial system works right now and but going back to kyc aml's protection against terrorists and and the fear used to to protect these what we would argue dangerous policies it's so it is a game of changing the dialogue and the narrative around this like we have to change the connotation like we're not trying to that's why i love the richard conversation like the current financial system is surveillance tech as a service uh sort of changing the conversation around that like this isn't here to protect us it actually pretty empirically does more harm than good yeah i mean it'd be like if if like every person got

mug shots taken because some criminals exist or something right like that's ridiculous you just mug shot the criminals like you don't just you don't jeopardize everyone else's uh like privacy and freedom and security i mean imagine all this capital one information got leaked and also it leaked all of your bitcoin addresses and your transactions and your balances and shit like that gets that gets really really dicey really really quick and it's it's it's fucking dangerous and no bitcoin companies have you know that are just straight bitcoin only businesses have no excuse to be doing kyc if they're doing kyc they're fucked someone like a service that's not doing kyc is going to be successful now i would agree i would agree um so capital one

breach another in a long line of uh of data breaches that are affecting hundreds of millions of people 106 million people in this one one breach and then capital one tried to come out and say uh like we didn't leak anybody's social security numbers except for like 800 000 accounts or no wasn't it bank accounts like they were like uh we only a hundred thousand bank accounts got leaked no it's just like such a weird way of putting it so be aware just be aware of these breaches be aware how much information you have out there let me see what that and then i guess there's a good segue into liquid tether because this sort of enables uh these bitcoin only businesses and it actually

helps them transact more privately uh as well and why does tether the reason tether is the most successful stable coin by far is because it doesn't require kyc while all the other ones are regulated businesses and while not requiring full kyc yet they will have to and the funds are subject to freezing at any at any point exactly so for you freaks who are unaware uh tether has been launched on uh the liquid side chain you can now the exchanges within the federation and i assume individual users as well can can use tether on the on the liquid side chain and where this really gets interesting and that the debate it sort of sparks is is liquid tether in particular are going to be the vehicle through which exchanges and traders start moving funds

between exchanges uh because of the the advantages afforded uh on the liquid side chain like confidential transactions you can't see balances yes it's it's super fast and you can't see balances what are your thoughts do you think this this seems like a good hypothesis i think that makes sense right because uh it's like what our buddy nick said he's like why would you know why why would you want if you're a big trader why would you want um your funds show up on whale calls right like the twitter account that just says when there's big large fund movements yeah exactly that's gonna be annoying as hell you know 300 000 followers of whale call i don't know how many followers they have just saw that i moved millions of dollars it should be interesting

though because uh i mean tether this whole time has always been a fuck you to governments around the world uh so this move uh does make it more private it should be interesting to see uh i mean i don't know how they could get more pressure on them they already have so much pressure but nobody even on top of that couple that with liquid which has uh a lot of people will question whether or not it'll find a product market fit it seems like maybe this tether use case in particular may be the first killer app on the liquid side chain if you will um well like i think the advantages are you get like uh the so-called benefits of something like ripple uh while being actually less centralized than ripple and easily with very little friction move between bitcoin and

that chain um and i so i think we'll see like many different uh experiments in this regard where you have different layers with different trade-offs all very different trade-offs uh so the user gets to choose what they want to do and in this case you know i i see like a pretty clear value prop for basically moving bitcoin uh and like tokenized usd like across uh between exchanges um the real question is is in my mind with all these things is it going to be um are you know is there going to be legal battles here uh because because we know who the federation is right so there's people you can go after you can go after block stream if you wanted to yeah but is the federation spread out geographically yeah yeah across jurisdiction

so that's a little bit of cover yeah and you need like nine of 16 or something to do anything yeah um no yeah but again this utility continues to expand the optionality continues to expand and this is something definitely to keep your eye on whether or not uh uh liquid tether on liquid gets a lot of demand we suspect that it may may drive a lot of demand yeah and as always with tether just remember like not your keys not your coins tether requires the trust of third party that trusted third party is actively breaking u.s laws and laws around the world so at any point that shit could be worth zero yeah yeah bitcoin is my stable coin um what should we move to next talk about product launches fold app they just launched their

kickbacks canal sats back sats back baby so you use the fold app basically shop at their partner merchants with lightning with lightning and you're getting sats back they automatically convert it to fiat and then they give you up to 20 percent uh back in the form of bitcoin yeah which is a nice little incentive i mean i've always said that that uh users will start the two biggest hurdles of users spending bitcoin is i think um or i guess three is if the merchant converts to fiat anyway you're like less ideologically motivated um so really what you want is like small merchants that accept bitcoin directly because they want kyc free bitcoin and they give you a discount and they hodl um and then the second thing and then the third yeah this the other thing is so you want

discounts like if you're going to spend it you need a discount and then the third thing is the tax uh the way it's handled tax wise is just completely ridiculous and burdensome so like who wants to keep track of all those little purchases you might as well just spend in fiat and accumulate bitcoin until they like figure that out right yeah and it's actually reminding me of a good piece from alex gladstein that i read this week uh and he sort of laid out a vision of lightning progression through the like into the future and in a few years hopefully if bitcoin adoption continues to pick up and people do need to use it as a medium of exchange and they do that via the lightning network and merchants start accepting bitcoin via the lightning network it

might be a market-driven choice because the fees compared to payment processors credit card and credit card processors and master and visa card are considerably less than the lightning network at least at this point yeah one of the guys on the btz pay team uh pavel next uh had an interesting tweet which i was it was on a similar tangent of a couple of my thought processes i've had uh in my own head and i thought it was it's a really cool concept a really good idea basically you have a btc pay merchant um let's say it's some you know it's a shop owner he owns a he owns a cafe he accepts bitcoin through btc pay in store runs his own full node um he offers a discount because he wants more kyc free bitcoin um trying he's trying to stack as many stats as

possible so he offers a little discount user comes in pays him in bitcoin now he's got a stash of bitcoin that he's accumulating there he could then operate as a point of sale for bitcoin and you know do small purchases so like users could come in and pay him cash customers can come in and pay him cash and get paid bitcoin he's like a he's like a decentralized bitcoin atm and that way he has fiat access for some of his bitcoin without having to be connected to any kind of like fiat off ramp or anything that's fucking beautiful right that would be a really nice closed loop and there's a lot of good incentives at play there uh i think for both the store owner to shill it and for the customer to want to use it so maybe that's who we have to reach out to

is our is our bodega owner our local bodega owners here yeah i mean i think once we get um just like a super simple btc pay uh like point of sale uh system in place like we're very close it's such a young project you know it's crazy you can just tell them to like plug it in and yes if you're actually this is actually a good segue into i saw it's a open source project it's run by volunteers basically at this point and they take donations and i saw last month they raised 0.11 bitcoin which is nothing it's 11 million sets 11 million sats but for a project that's producing so much um please consider donating yes um yeah consider donating to them we should we should probably set aside some funds of the tftc maybe

we'll send some try to figure out a way to immediately send some of the dime bag sets i've donated to them a couple times i have as well but yeah maybe we'll do like some kind of i like the idea of fundraise drives too yeah i mean they just did a really successful one for tour they just need to do one for themselves we could do one for them maybe we could do that with the merch too they're just so humble that they're better at raising money for other projects than for themselves they did a great one for hot they did a great one for tour shout out to the uh the bdc pay server team again um yeah and then while we're on the uh the topic of like sats back and stuff like that i probably should mention lolly there was obviously some hoopla earlier in the

week probably incited by me in particular yeah i wish i would have worded that tweet differently i don't know we were pretty tame about it all things considered it was like it was it was kind of fucked up you know seeing that on twitter just seeing and it wasn't just the fact that it was trade that they put the trademark so they put the trademark next to stacking sats trademark symbol and they put it next to sats back but it wasn't just that right it was like the description of stacking sats is like earning sats through lolly like it was like some kind of lolly specific uh thing marketing campaign or whatever while really it's like i mean millions of us have been stacking sats for years we just didn't call it that it was

a fucking lifestyle like you're frugal you're just trying to accumulate bitcoin you know and just and trying to accumulate as much bitcoin as possible while being frugal and not overextend yourself um it's like it's so much more than just a way to earn for any specific company or anything like that yes yes it's like trademarking buying bitcoin or hodl or something yes and we should be clear that lolly has no intention of of using this trademark to profit right they said it was defensive they pulled it from the site after the controversy so yeah that was good they made a mistake and they they fixed it yeah we're still huge fans of lolly here and yeah so i don't think they're trying to use the stacking sats trademark to profit at all i don't think like if they if a

company wanted to send out cease or desist or whatever like they wouldn't be able to defend a stacking sats trademark i don't think um yeah so that's that you know i don't love trademarks because I don't think we should be trademarking memes. It's so much more than that. And regardless of what any company does, we're going to keep saying it. We're going to keep doing it, keep living it. It does bring up an interesting debate, though.

Is defensive IP purchasing okay? You know, this is part of the reason why I like having my Fiat job still. is because we're just Bitcoiners. We don't have any ulterior motives here except to have more educated Bitcoiners and to pump the price of Bitcoin. But there's always been,

in the history of Bitcoin, there's a reason... Bitcoiners respond quickly and swiftly and um a little bit aggressive but in a loving way because we've had so many people and companies that have appeared as good actors and then have completely eroded away that trust and tried to fuck us right um so yeah so i don't think lolly is one of those companies and but i think that is is also a very positive um display because it showed other companies you know there's a bunch of companies that have been had they've had their eye on stacking sats right trying to

wrestle it for themselves and i think like it tells you that um at the end of the day if any of these companies try and co-opt movements that are big to bitcoiners like it will be a net negative to their business anyway so there's really no incentive uh to try and monetize it yes exclusively yes if everyone can everyone's welcome to monetize the shit out of it right but not it's not an exclusive thing yeah it's a lifestyle it's a lifestyle goddamn right shout out to lolly still great service yeah lolly's gonna take us to the moon man i use them to buy my flights to dallas that's pretty awesome i forgot i forgot to do that but uh but my lady just bought some tickets and she intentionally used price line i think right

which is the they have cheapo air i think they have price line too yeah she like went out of her way to use price line to get a lolly i just think that we like live in this like debt-driven society and people spend way too much money so it's like the ultimate bitcoin weapon is to like weaponize that spending like weaponize that spending to pump up the price of bitcoin like that's what it's doing right it's like you're you're doing frivolous consumer spending that's like this debt-driven society has led us to and instead it accumulates bitcoin and pumps the price up creates all this upward pressure like that's badass so use lolly if you're shopping online freaks i really i'm waiting for the day that the lolly rewards are greater than the mining rewards

and then we'll then we'll have truly pump task pump tasticness wow i i've never even thought of that that would be awesome right just constant upward pressure just from debt-driven spending yeah always trying to expand the lollipop guild so if you know any anyone who wants to join the guild tell them download the extension um hong kong blowing up right now we got china on the border with their army military is rumored i've only seen rumors on twitter i don't have not seen pictures to confirm or anything like that but rumors are that chinese military on the border of hong kong uh protests are still uh raging on protesters are getting very uh clever and very very good at deterring uh tear gas cameras and other stuff uh the police in hong

kong are are getting uh increasingly physical as well so it's getting really aggressive on both sides yeah yeah no the protesters are fighting back as well physically do you see those lasers yeah so they were like shooting the lasers to blind the cameras and the people i think the protesters were right like super high powered lasers yeah to uh to mess up the facial recognition and then uh the cops were doing it back but now with lasers or flashlights they were like flashing their lights on and off at people recording them um that makes sense that's a normal procedure yeah and it's fucked up man and i think they're clamping down i've noticed the live streams have gone in less and less i'm not sure if like anyone can live stream out right now

and you're saying airdrops being used a lot yeah they're using uh apple's airdrop which is like kind of like a faux mesh right uh how did have you used airdrop before i have an apple device yeah it uses wi-fi and bluetooth right and what you can like set yourself to discoverable so some random stranger can just zap you stuff right yeah somebody at uh at bitcoin 2019 was airdropping memes to people uh as like that had their airdrop open i mean you should not have your airdrop open at a bitcoin conference that's probably a pretty bad idea um so be aware freaks uh but yeah so like people are airdropping uh this reporter was on his way on a train out of hong kong into mainland china and he got airdropped a bunch of stuff from like someone that was just like on in the station

so they're using airdrop to pass along information and photos and stuff like that which i thought was pretty novel and interesting yeah um but it's not looking good no i mean it seems very much like uh yeah i mean i don't know how does how does china just like let it go they're not gonna ever let it goes right and they're so they're just gonna it's just gonna get worse yeah but it's important to fight you know is it like a franz ferdinand moment though you have to fight i mean it's interesting something like that like a black like china basically denying hong kong its autonomy i don't think that has that played into uh the the game theory of of the geopolitics up until the last six months i mean i think that it's interesting that all this stuff is being filmed

now and being aired and people can see these protests relatively live and in hd um they kind of create they must they create this knock-on effect right where like people around the world are seeing and china it's a check like look there was like didn't russia have like the biggest protests they've ever had yeah recently yeah because the uh putin's uh party or whatever basically arrested the opposition party or the head guy like the head opposition leader didn't he get like a food allergy or like a so-called like quotes quote-unquote food allergy yeah something they poisoned him or something um but like you have to imagine that these people around the world are watching each other's protests right and they're getting inspiration i mean i'm i'm

inspired as fuck by what's going down in hong kong like like we said like the the cards are stacked against them and they don't care they're gonna fight and they're gonna they're not gonna make it easy for china and that's fucking admirable it's very it's extremely admirable no and it is extremely inspiring too but like we've said the last few weeks i'm not hopeful i'm not i mean i do hope i am holding out hope but i am not very hopeful that china's not going to come down with an iron fist and what is the implications of that if they do and it really i'm just throwing out a theoretical there i'm not even asking it really does highlight the when when you don't have when the citizens not citizens aren't allowed to be armed like how much of a change it

makes right like people say you know like it's always like the straw man like oh like what is your what is your rifle going to do against a tank or something but like one rifle at these protests would fucking it would just throw everything up in the air everything would be completely different yeah somebody started shooting at the triads and like fighting back fighting those guys back a couple weeks ago what would that have looked like i don't know and i'm we're not trying to incite violence please please yeah it's such a weird fucked up world we live in this is a situation a bit handed though we will keep paying attention to it it is escalating pretty quickly bitcoin is a global escape hatch if i was in hong kong i would

only keep my money in real money not in hong kong dollars um fortnight world cup onto onto more interesting topics we are in the future freaks we are in the future that was fucking it was that was something else 18 000 people in authorized stadium the tennis stadium where they do the u.s open um 200 contestants 100 singles 100 doubles youngest were 13 they didn't let anyone in younger than 13 that was their age limit and the oldest were 24 and there's only two 24 year old guys so all youngsters this is a young man's game it seems so we're talking about fortnight had their annual is an annual championship it's the first one ever first one ever yeah it's insane 13 year old from right outside of

philadelphia won three million 16 year old 16 year old excuse me 16 year old fucking dominated you you watched some of this and you won the single yeah dude it's it's fucking cool i i don't know i i never watched esports or anything but i just i knew it was on i turned it on you can watch it you know fortnite what's really interesting with fortnite is they they they control the whole the whole vertical you know they their app is available on every single platform from like iphone to xbox computer and it's free and they operate on this freemium model right where you like buy these skins that are just completely aesthetic and don't do anything for skill and people just spend you know millions of dollars on this shit um but they control the streaming

everything the tournament this like there was it wasn't on a channel it was like streamed through their apps right live in hd they don't have to pay nbc you know a cut or whatever they don't need to they control the whole ad experience everything that's insane from a business perspective that's pretty crazy and people were throwing charts out after this uh after this tournament whatever you want to call it tournament and world cup world cup there we go uh like money spent or hours spent on gaming and money spent on gaming is skyrocketing compared to video and audio like video and audio are becoming like a blip on the radar. We're missing out, dude.

We need to get a Twitch account. We're too old already. I know. We're too old, but... How crazy is that? But we'll get a young gun and bring him into TFTC and he'll be our... Age range, 16-year-old one.

Our Fortnite god. A 13-year-old came in second, right? No, no. Okay, so what was really cool is they had $30 million in prizes, right? And to qualify, all qualifiers were online. So you could be any kid in the world and you could do the qualifiers top 100 and doubles top 100 and singles qualified and they got paid 50 000 just for getting in flown to new york right so they needed to get money to be able

to go to new york and compete in this shit and then this kid an argentinian kid who's 13 years old came in fifth place brought home 900k well that's what it was and this was hilarious because an argentinian tweeted out on twitter like wait till that kid goes home and has to pay like the conversion taxes and then the capital gains taxes he's going to become a bitcoin fan real quick i mean even the american kid has to right he's gonna have to pay big taxes i mean the problem with the argentinian kid is like now he's like a bigger target right because he's like a rich kid in argentina argentina as opposed to being a rich kid in philly but uh i mean bitcoin doesn't solve that even though i see a future where all the prizes are paid out in sats uh the argentinian

government knows who this kid is would know that he just made 900k worth of bitcoin right and they would be like well where's our due like well matthew i thought you would be more imaginative than this like imagine a world where this does not happen at a central location and it's in vr and everybody's everybody's pseudonym and it's automatic payouts in bitcoin like that seems well yeah but there's then you have like latency issues and stuff i don't know so i'm not sure i don't mean like streaming payments like tournament payments no yeah i mean there's a reason they have all 100 in the same place for the finals is because everyone's twitching around with their hands right and if you have like the little bit of internet uh latency then

they could have issues but they did all the qualifiers through that so yeah absolutely they'll be those as well and i think that'll be really cool that's a very good point we need to get fiber across the world yeah i mean we'll get there eventually i i think what's also really cool is that these kids all operate under nims already right like the winner was buga you know like so that's cool they live in like a digital world and uh yeah i yeah exactly like bitcoin is is if you want to do you can't do the anonymous tournaments without bitcoin let's put it that way right yeah like to do it this way they did kyc and all the contestants i wouldn't be surprised there's underground bitcoin tournaments already

how do we get the gamers in the bitcoin i feel like that's what we need to do there might be some sites i think i think i remember looking into it and there was some sites that like you played counter-strike and there was like bitcoin betting on the side or whatever but like really which like that's what i said is so cool about fortnite is that they have this vertical integration um like you want it to be nice and seamless right like in the interface You don't want to go to a separate site and make bets. Right. Maybe that's who we need to reach out to is the creators of Fortnite.

Well, they have their own shit coin. They have the V-Bucks. But it's like an overt. Yeah, I mean, you can just use it to buy aesthetic items. Yeah. And there's no conversion back. It doesn't have a float, does it? No float.

Yeah. Last topic. Well, actually, sticking on gaming, it's pretty cool. It's pretty crazy to see how big it is. and young people are going to fucking rule the world. People were tweeting, like, I'm going to be 36, my wife's going to leave me for a 21-year-old who's selling skins online and stuff like that.

There's, like, poor families around the world that are, like, telling their kids, like, they had some spare money on the side, they just bought them some kind of gaming computer and they were like, you're going to dig this family out of this hole by the time you're 16. Like, imagine, like, in high school, is like like does does like the the opportunity qb now like is he a robe lower than the than the

guys who are playing fortnite or whatever and they're good at it yeah are those dynamics going to change these kids are winning money young it's not like when we were in high school and and the the software development quote-unquote nerds uh weren't making money while we're in high school and wound up making a lot once we got into the professional world now they can make money in high school and be like fuck you i don't care if you could throw a spiral yeah and i feel like you're way more likely to become like an esports champion that it's like way more in reach than becoming like one of the 32 best qbs it's a very good point the world is changing fast that's old dogs are we gonna be able to learn new

tricks are we going to be gaming pretty pretty intensely our whole lives what humans i mean like our generation are we gonna like get back into gaming no i mean our generation i mean i enjoy playing games like but we're never going to be able to play them competitively again you know like you have to be i bet you there would have been 12 year olds in this tournament if they didn't uh restrict them from being in it well that was uh drone racing like the the lead drone racer of the world's a 12 year old girl remember that that's pretty badass yeah i didn't know that from cambodia i'm pretty sure i want when the drone racing will get good when they start like i want the like we can't have for ethical reasons we can't have gladiator

fights and stuff but like as far as drone stuff goes there should be lots of explosions and you never watch robo wars yeah but that wasn't like they didn't take it it wasn't big enough you know I want to see flying drone races where they're shooting at each other. I'm not even positive that's what that show was called. What, Robo Wars? Is that what it was called? I think that's what it was called, yeah. Dope show.

But it was short. It left short. There wasn't enough destruction. And the tech kind of wasn't there yet either, right? But I want to see explosions and shit. That's true. That'd be cool. Then the other thing I would say is-

Are robots people too? What? Are robots people too? No, robots aren't people. I think it'll be interesting. they're definitely not people marty i i think it should be interesting like do we hit a point with vr where it gets so good that like people only stay in vr right like that could be an issue definitely vr's like for as much hype as vr's had in the last five to ten years it's been all

hump and no red rocket like i've never seen i haven't seen like a mainstream vr app yet yeah I think we just like hit the point where like at some point it will be easy enough and like immersive enough. Like there's got to be there's a threshold there where it feels better than real life. Right. And we're pretty far from that threshold. But it should be able just like air conditioning is dope. Like it should be like relatively easy to manufacture some kind of like pod system where like you like go to a place and like you get in a pod and it's just. Do we want that?

No, that's what I'm saying. we probably don't because the incentives would be that everyone would just try and get to to the point where they could afford a pod and then just check out is that the uh yeah the picture of mark zuckerberg walking down the aisle is everybody in the presentation where is the oculus vr that's a a precursor to a future that may come where you have his smirking ass being like these idiots are all living in a world that i created and they're not even enjoying the real world i'm on my private beach out here now if you were in that situation though it'd be really important to have a digital bearer asset that you could bring with you into that other world this is a

very good point so enter bitcoin yes you don't need a shit coin for that either uh the last topic we have here i just want to put this argument to rest roy say bag the uh the founder of gold money and mene roy sabag excuse me so disappointing i kind of liked mene so explain mene mene is a cool service actually well gold money is a service where you basically they hold gold for you and then you can send it to other gold money users uh through their platform or whatever and then mene is like an uh an add-on to that as a separate company where you can buy gold jewelry that's 24 karat gold and it's weighed out and their premium is 20 percent uh just a straight 20 premium on on the cost of the underlying gold and at any point you

can trade it back so you it's like a it's like a jewelry monetary item where you can there's like it's liquid because they just promise to always buy it back from you at whatever the market price is plus their vig i forget what the vig is i think the buyback vig is like 15 or something shit 15 yeah i think it's maybe it's 10 but it's 20 in the beginning when you first purchase it there's a 20 margin and then there's a cost when you return it if you return it it was a pretty cool service and they accepted bitcoin probably to disincentivize people from trying to trade them yeah you know but if and and also it's because like there is a cost for them right like they have to you know melt it down or do whatever they want to do with it

and as it has designs and stuff but it's like pretty cool because you could do like a chain and like they have like little one gram blocks like you can put as many one gram blocks on i don't know it's like it's a kind of cool concept like jewelry as a monetary item yeah and they accept bitcoin but this guy it's like peter schiff you know peter schiff accepts bitcoin but he this guy's a gold bug and he just doesn't he can't grok the trusted third parties yeah so the the argument in particular we want to point out here from roy he tweeted out last week that he thinks bitcoin developers are extremely smart but they're extremely frustrating because they should be trying to figure out a way to digitize physical gold and create a monetary system that

way and tokenize gold tokenize gold basically bit gold which existed from 1997 to 2006 i believe and i think there's a couple that exist now that are like basically tethered but with gold yes and so let's just put this concept to rest bitcoin exists because you cannot do this because of gold's physical nature like you can't do it without a trusted third party exactly and trust third party as we all know are security holes and gold in particular has been proven throughout time you get executive order 6102 from 1933 when fdr confiscated gold from people and made people turn gold in it is physical they can take it from you if it's centralized in bank vaults the government can go to those bank vaults and take it from them they will have the power at the end of the day

the company could be committing fraud and not have all the gold is that as well as layers and layers of third-party risks that come with this and that is why bitcoin in its non-physical form needs to exist i would argue yeah because you need something to pay the miners without a trusted third party yes you need that token and it is more divisible portable it's a lot harder for the government to go one by one to individual bitcoin users uh number one prove they own bitcoin and then to extract all of their bitcoin if they do find out they have bitcoin and there's no way roy doesn't realize this right it's like how do you not realize this i think they realize they just yeah incentives yeah they just choose not to sunk cost of capital

and reputation clinging to a system that may not be possible to attain i mean if you ask Peter Schiff, he says, that's why you have auditors and, you know, the legal system and all this and all the reputation systems and stuff like that. Bitcoin takes all that overhead cost and turns it into math. Exactly. It makes it way cheaper. Yeah. You can verify

your transactions yourself. Yeah. So we just wanted to end it on that. Roy, I think you'll be looked upon better in history if you just concede that this is a better system when it comes to

being unconfiscatable and more secure and more decentralized and actually more pure. Yeah, and his businesses accept Bitcoin, so he's kind of proving the point. Always keep that in mind. Alright, exactly an hour and almost one minute in.

Got anything you want to end it on here? It's a beautiful day here. Hope you have a great weekend, freaks. Same to you, Marty. You as well. Stay humble, stack sets. Peace and love, freaks. Peek-a-boo!