TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.08.12 LIVE w/ Pierre Rochard & Michael Goldstein

Episode Date: August 19, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they're joined by the hosts of the Noded Podcast, Pierre Rochard and Michael Goldstein to discuss: - Bakkt Futures - Binance KYC - Liquid Tether - Hong Kong - India - Samsung + Bitcoin - Coinbase negligence - 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. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdbWsnfA08KhSUO4amVLaQ?view_as=subscriber

What's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty here to introduce this week's sponsor for this week's episode of Rabbit Hole Recap. We're not doing this as a mid-roll read because we did this live and that would be very rude to the live guests to do ad reads mid-show. So this week's episode is brought to you by Unchained Capital. You guys know all about them. they've got their two or three multi-sig vault service that are allowing you freaks to use trezor ledger and you can engage with unchained in a multi-sig solution where they hold one key you hold two or three you can do many different key schemes you can always move your bitcoin out of the vaults into the vaults by yourself but if you ever need the help of unchained to sign that second key of that two or three or some another key in another scheme they're there

to help you out um so go to www.unchained-capital.com slash vaults and go check out their vault program they've also got uh loans where you can use your bitcoin to get usd loans by using the bitcoin as collateral so again www.unchained-capital.com slash vaults uh our second sponsor you guys already know all about them cash app they're fucking crushing it uh they've got an incredible app they allows you to buy bitcoin allows you to stack sats uh allows you to send bitcoin to the app uh and send off the app uh hopefully you're not sending to sell but if you have to you can on top of that they have their boost program i know we're all very sad about the the recent coffee boost uh change um but guess what they're adding new boosts all the time so the the ability

to save money at different merchants is is growing uh so make sure you go download the cash out from your local Google App Store or Apple App Store. Use the code stacking sats when you download. That's one word, stacking sats. You're going to get $5. Then $5 is going to go to Al's Lacrosse, a charity very near and dear to our heart here at TFTC. I hope you guys enjoyed this live episode.

We recorded it over the weekend on Saturday. I'm sorry, just getting up. It took a little bit of time to get the audio. And so, yeah, this is the recap of the week. We had Pierre Rochard and Michael Goldstein join us, a little noted slash TFTC cross episode. It was a lot of fun. Hope you freaks enjoyed and sorry about the audio when we were in the Q&A part of the episode. You're not going to be able to hear the questions, but you'll be able to hear our answers.

And hopefully the context of our answers allows you to sort of ream out the question. we'll do better at repeating the question during live episodes in the future hope you freaks enjoy peace and love sales from the crib thank you it's a crossover

testing All right. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. We're in a very foreign studio here in Dallas. We're at block height, 590,571, getting closer and closer to having every block. That's a lot of blocks. We're almost at 600K. We're almost at 600K. Anybody have a price out there? I don't have the price in front of me. It dumped on us a little bit. And while you're checking the price, buy a little bit and help set that floor. Yeah, it's been a fun week. Michael, this is the first time we're recording together. This is a very big honor for me. This is how powerful my memes are. Instead of me having to go to

New York, I got you to Texas. It's incredible. Well, that's the breaking news of the day, and that's what we're going to start with. Our friend Michael here has triggered the internet. How does it feel? It's a pleasure. I love it. Every time. Maximum butthurt is what I live for. Pierre, how are you doing today? Good. I had a very diplomatic talk compared to Michael's. Yours was really low-key compared. Yeah. Yeah, so the way we do these live shows,

our third live show, thank you for coming. Actually, you didn't come for the show, you came for the conference, but we're happy to be here. We've got to give a shout-out to Gary for throwing this together, getting everybody together. Incredible. I just pointed in that direction thinking he was there. I don't know if he's over there.

I don't even see Gary. Let's give him a shout-out. Let me get the list up here. We've got a lot to talk about, a lot going on, but we'll open it up to Q&A towards the end of the episode. What we're going to start with, just keep it a little light here, BAT, they announced they're officially going to launch their Bitcoin futures on September 23rd. I believe they have daily and monthly contracts.

What do we think of this, gentlemen? More liquidity, always better. So I'm all for it. Now we'll see if they're going to actually compete very well with kind of the Bitcoin native derivatives platform, LedgerX, which has also been making progress. Yeah, and these are physically settled contracts, if I believe, if I'm correct. Yeah, so a huge step up from the cash-settled CME nonsense, but physical settled already existed with Ledger X.

Yeah. So it's good that there's competition. Yeah. Do we think it's going to actually launch? Yeah, I think they've passed the point of no return at this point. I believe it when I see it. Also happened this week, Binance KYC hack has escalated. If you guys don't know, Binance has been hacked.

Everybody's, I don't know, everybody, a certain portion of their users' passports and selfies have been taken. I don't know the details of the further. And driver's licenses. And driver's licenses. But are funds SAFU? Yeah, but apparently the hacker, yeah, the funds were not SAFU, but the hacker, the data was not SAFU,

but the hacker said he's got more info. So we're going to keep paying attention to that. it's just another example of kyc being dangerous and not effective because now when you have these leaks uh criminals and whatnot can use the leaked data to to fool other kyc procedures so honest users end up being compromised and criminals are able to get through it anyway and it puts completely unnecessary liability on the company and what's really messed up is that binance specifically has a non-kyc account option and what they've been doing is they've been like ninja kyc people and if you don't comply with the kyc you can't withdraw so people have funds on the

exchange and they're basically compelled into uh doing the kyc so they can get their bitcoin back hello yeah it's almost like a weird form of exit scam almost like hey we're gonna lock your funds on here and then hope you just never KYC yourself and take those eventually. How do we meme KYC AML is evil and it shouldn't be done? The only way to really get rid of it

is to be using BTC pay server and using no KYC AML by selling ends and services for Bitcoin. This is an incredible segue to the next topic. It is the two year anniversary, Nicholas's tweet at BitPay

where he told them he's going to make them obsolete and I think after two years the product that he rockstar dev is here in the crowd somewhere as well and the rest of the team thank you for doing what you guys do, this is lies, my trust in you is broken, I will make you obsolete

I think, what do we think John is BitPay officially obsolete yet because of BTC Pay Server or we still have some ways to go occasionally I see BitPay in the news and I'm always surprised I actually forget that they exist. Yeah.

Yeah, they did raise funding during the last bull market. So that's one of the disadvantages of Bitcoin bull markets is that some of the lower quality companies do get the opportunity to raise funding from unsophisticated investors. But look, I mean, I think that they don't have the fundamentals needed to become a great Bitcoin company. we wish them luck hopefully they will reform and adopt btc pay server on their back end so that

they can have an open source back end that can keep up with modern technology that would probably be the the most intelligent approach for improving their business i want to actually just make their software better anyway is the uh are they still saying that like the bitcoin feed network is is congested still? Fees are too high? Yeah, whenever you're using their service, they always inflate the network fee to make it look like Bitcoin is a lot more expensive

than the alternatives. So, they're also not really interested in implementing Lightning, so again, just another argument to whether it's BTC Pay Server or OpenNode, which is more comparable to the service that

BitPay provides, there's healthy competition out there. Yeah, honestly, just from experience using BTC Pay Server for our site, it's been incredible, and we set it up. I think I've only had to update something once in the four months it's been running, and it's crazy to be able to watch from my phone people creating invoices and sending sats. It's crazy. We're in the future. I think it's important to remember the context of Nicholas's tweet, which was that BitPay was trying to gaslight and essentially trick their users into using an implementation that was essentially an altcoin because it changed Bitcoin's, it was a hard fork that didn't have any consensus behind it. So it's a reminder for Bitcoin companies that they are building on Bitcoin, but they are not Bitcoin. And so they need to be humble, right, when they're stacking stats and not let it get to their heads that, hey, we're doing so much for Bitcoin. Now we get to force what we think Bitcoin should be on the rest of the network. Bitcoin doesn't work that way.

And if Bitcoin was centralized that way, it wouldn't have the value that it has. So they need to recognize that it's important for them to protect Bitcoin's decentralization and to be humble with regards to protocol changes. Yeah. Matt, any thoughts? Damn right. Next topic, liquid tether. This is something that has piqued my interest recently. And Blockstream gets a lot of snark on the internet for not having produced anything on Liquid. But I think Liquid Tether with confidential transactions may be the killer app that Liquid needs.

A huge problem traders have is when they move Bitcoin between exchanges, you can have bots like whale reports basically tweeting out that you're moving Bitcoin to a wallet. And you can see how much has moved, where it came from, so on and so forth. And I don't know what you guys think about this. But to me, the concept of Tether on Liquid moving funds between exchanges in a confidential way seems like that could be the thing that drives traction to Liquid. I just think that it's funny that the amount of Tether conspiracy theory is just based on the fact that Tether's is more transparent than other forms of fiat on exchanges. And so they'll look at the fact that, oh, some tethers got printed, but the only reason

they know that happened is because of the public blockchain that information is being broadcasted on. They don't see that dollars got printed at every other exchange where someone deposited dollars. So it's kind of a cognitive bias that folks have due to the transparency. So maybe if we remove that transparency and we have the confidentiality, then it'll get rid of that cognitive bias that the tether fudsters have but also like let's remember that usd is a shit coin whether it's in the form of tethers or it's in the form of a chase bank account

so don't be surprised if these things are fractional reserve and run away with your money you know you should be buying and holding bitcoin not buying and holding tethers yeah i mean the important disclosure is that if you hold tether it could go to zero at any time i think the another Another issue that people have with Tether is they conflate the fact that Tether's whole value prop is to end around regulations, specifically KYC and banking regulations. That's why all these other stable coins that are more regulated haven't really been able to take any market share from them. So people who lack nuance see that and they're like, it's illegal.

It's a fraud. Yeah. People get really triggered by Tether for some reason. The Ethereum crew thought Tether was going to be their killer app. Is Liquid going to take liquidity from them? I just thought it was funny that they were all on Bitfinex's side until it got added as an ERC-20 token. Now it's like the bee's knees.

Michael, any thoughts? Use Bitcoin. Stats are my stable coin. Find safety in stats, people. I know you guys aren't big fans of mainstream blogs and following the news, but shit has been going down in Hong Kong. It's a story we've been following here on this podcast in particular.

Seems that things are escalating. Looks like the Chinese government has tanks on the border of Hong Kong. And I don't want to say, like, what's the word I'm looking for? I don't want to say they're going to bash into Hong Kong and start killing people. It seems like things are getting a little hectic there. Well, it's not tanks. It's, like, armored people carriers. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, hopefully it's just a flex, you know, but it's a real shame seeing what's going on over there. The struggle seems real, and it's inspiring, but it's also very brutal. It's hard to see a positive way out here because the Chinese are stuck where they can't look weak. They can't back off, and the Hong Kongers are stuck where if they let this extradition bill go through, all the leaders and all the people that participate in the protests are all going to get extradited and sent to prisons and camps and stuff. Yeah. And even earlier this week, since last time we met, we had Trump sort of goading President Xi with a tweet telling him to address Hong Kong. And I don't think Xi took that very kindly. So that's something we're paying attention here.

Freedom is imperative to talk about when talking about Bitcoin. And this is something I think we should care about. And didn't they, they were planning a bank run? Yeah, they were planning a bank run. I heard about that on Monday. I didn't want to spread the rumor. Zero Hedge wrote about it, but it doesn't look like anything came of that. I still think we should be doing a bank run. Naruto run all of us on the Dallas Fed right now. Get all the cash out of the ATMs, deposit all into Bitcoin. I think that the situation in Hong Kong just highlights

why we think decentralization is so important. And meanwhile, in China, the Communist Party has a completely opposite view of this needs to all be highly centralized in Beijing, and, you know, they should, like, control the whole world, apparently. But, yeah, I've studied abroad in Hong Kong. It's a beautiful city, so I hope the best for them. We do as well. All right, to lighten things up a bit,

this is something that's been fascinating to me in New York. Actually sad that we're about to lose Pierre from our little hub in Brooklyn. Fantastic news. It's fantastic news for you. But one thing, actually, core dev Matt Corral has been working on in New York, and Matt O'Dell sitting next to me has been contributing to is the NYC Mesh.net, which

is basically an alternative internet provider in the city created by individuals. You know more about this than me, so I'll let you take it from here. They've been killing it. By contribute, he means I literally have donated. I haven't actually participated in any way. But yeah, it's an actual working mesh net. It's growing faster every day. It's growing bigger every day.

I think right now they're getting like 4,000 requests. They've gotten 4,000 total install requests. They're averaging about 22 a day. And it's cheaper. It's cheaper than regular internet. They ask you to just give a $20 a month donation. And it's faster too, right? Especially since they don't throttle, right?

So when you mix in the fact that a lot of these internet providers throttle you, it provides you better service. And they're literally just expanding this building by building. And and you really see we're really gonna see tools like this expand when you have a monetary incentive to do it So so not only do people have more free internet access here. It's also cheaper and that's the key I think is that it's cheaper. It's crazy. You can just route around the ISPs like that pretty overtly in the biggest city in the country You think I think like the city would fight back against that. I mean, I don't think the city cares

I think the ISP's care more. Okay. Yeah, that's my thought there No, it's it's a cool project and decentralization. Like I was looking at the chart and there's a hub close enough to my apartment I'm seriously considering using that as my internet now because my internet sucks because it's throttled. Yeah, and that's fantastic. I mean ISP's are Terrible, I really like they're they're really awful. Just how much doubt it that they're sucking up about every single user on their service And, you know, most people, they think of various cryptographic tools, like, say, like a VPN, as some kind of, you know, paranoid anti-NSA thing. And quite frankly, if the NSA wants you, they'll get you. The real reason to use things like VPNs is the fact that it hides data from the ISPs so that they don't know everything about you when they also, like, you know, have you right there.

they're going to sell your data to third parties and then those people can make use of that data for all kinds of stuff um that that's like the the real issue yeah and the key is that the vpns you use can then see all that data but like at least you have the choice to pick from 50 60 100 different vpn providers while most people have like one or two isps that they can choose from i'd rather you know like a private internet access or proton vpn or any of those than like comcast Agreed. And it also highlights the imperative that we create alternative transaction relay networks to Internet service providers. But don't use private Internet access because I think they're either a front for the government, but it doesn't even matter because Roger Ver is on the board, so you shouldn't use it for that reason alone.

That's definitely a front for the government if Roger Ver is on the board. Well, staying on the alternative transaction relay tip here, did I see the blue mat? Did I see Matt tweet that somebody successfully did a channel running attack? I think it was like an Eclipse attack, right? Eclipse attack, yes, that's what it was, yeah. Just, again, highlighting the need

for alternative transaction relay networks like support, global mesh network, the satellite, stuff like that. Yeah, so an Eclipse attack is when your node is surrounded by malicious nodes and it feeds it bad data i think uh coinbase got double spent on the ethereum classic chain because uh their node got eclipsed so especially if you're like a major service and people know what your node is uh you're a bigger target and and the way you get around that is you have alternate ways of getting the block data to try and to confirm that what

you're seeing is is the correct data yeah um i don't know where we're gonna go with this matt Matt made the list today, and this next bullet point just says every Bitcoin wallet sucks. Hardware wallets. Oh, I wanted to talk to our listeners. I wanted them to listen to the Michael Flaxman, Stefan Levera podcast. I thought that was really good. Incredible podcast. Shout out to Michael.

He's in the room here somewhere. There he is, back there, doing some incredible things. No, it's like one thing, hardware wallets, you have to be hyper aware of the ways in which they can be attacked and mostly physical at this point but you can also have side channel attacks and the ways to protect yourself against any future attacks i do want to congratulate rodolfo novak and cold card for being named by flaxman as the least bad hardware wallet true honor shout out rodolfo no we sat down with rodolfo earlier this morning we uh got the history of cold card open dime coin kite incredible conversation look for that next week um and

yeah just be aware of the hardware wallet uh situation make sure you have your stuff physically locked down and uh just be aware and the other thing is it's important to note that the first thing michael says in that podcast is don't you know be absolute don't like get scared out of using hardware wallets in the first place like it's still for most people it's going to be way better than using a custodian or like a coinbase cash app something like that yep um speaking of coinbase a company that pierre probably should be ceo of a negligence lawsuit has been launched against them for their bcash ninja launch so i don't know if you guys remember after the hard fork when bitcoin cash uh went to go die uh coinbase waited a few months to actually launch

it on their uh exchange and they did it on a random like i believe east coast time was like 2 p.m on a tuesday like december 22nd during the holidays or something like that it was just the price pumped right away there was uh rumors of insider trading and stuff and just highlighted another instance in which coinbase has been irresponsible and pretty dumb throwing out things it hit four thousand dollars i think at one point yeah and then we had everyone was like dming us and texting us and being like oh am i on the wrong side what's gonna happen so so basically the judge said that anyone who bought on coinbase during that that situation if they they bought bitcoin cash they have a case for negligence

as they should yeah so i hope you bought bitcoin on coinbase that day take some money from them bleed uh bleed that company dry uh and then buy more bitcoins on cash app shout out um of the pod. It's a big one for you, Matt. You're a big Android guy. I am not. Samsung adds Bitcoin support to the S10. It's pretty big news.

It's extra important because they already had Ethereum support, so that was really disappointing. But yeah, that's huge. I think Samsung's the number one phone seller now in the world, so they have some kind of secure chip in their

phones, and it's like quasi-hardware wallet-ish situation going on there with both Bitcoin and Ethereum support. Are you ever going to hold your Bitcoin on that wallet? No, never. But it's still, you know, it's good. It's good to see stuff like that, right? Yeah, it's good socially as a signal

that Samsung's willing to put this in their phone. Maybe Bitcoin is a thing. Maybe it's here to stay. Any thoughts, gentlemen? Well, I do think that it is great when different aspects of Bitcoin or just cryptocurrency in general continue to bleed into every nook and cranny in the universe

because people always worry about the government shutting Bitcoin down or something like that. The United States, I think they're all going to become Bitcoin maximalists if they're not already. But just generally speaking, the more that we find it in every nook and cranny, whether it's like, I think Google had something in their keyboard a while back, just little things like that, that's more that would need

to be rolled back in order to actually make that effective and it's just it becomes more and more difficult to even imagine being able to roll it back um you know imagine like trying to roll back you know english you know words and stuff it takes a lot of work to do yeah as soon as uh the b symbols in unicode i don't think there's any going back right um it's the law yeah so you probably wouldn't put your life savings on your phone uh but if your example you're you know you've got a a wallet for your walking around money that you want to be spending while you're out that is really nice that you've

got a better security than on past phones and then the other thing too is that I hope this gets repurposed for other private keys that you'd want to be using so it just generally improves your privacy and your security

because I think that private keys are woefully underutilized in day to day life you know we're still using physical keys to open doors It's crazy. Yeah, slowly but shortly, Bitcoin... We could have been using Slockit. If only the DAO had not been hacked,

we would be in a much better world. Stephen Toole's misunderstood. Yeah, but slowly but surely, Bitcoin, the roots get deeper and deeper into the minds and psyche of the masses, if you will. This is the last topic we have, and then we'll open up to questions here. um india india has a bill on the table uh to to make the hoarding of bitcoin illegal

right now i believe the situation is speaking with anon is here um uh and he's got the multi-sig wallet out out there definitely check that out i'm speaking with him apparently uh banks right now are not allowing uh exchanges to create banking relationships so therefore exchanges are basically defunct, but P2P purchasing and selling of Bitcoin is still alive and legal, but there's a bill to make hoarding and selling in P2P illegal.

Obviously, we're against this, but thoughts? I have a bill out to make India illegal. It's a real shame that the Indian government is trying to impoverish its people in this way, so hopefully they do recognize, the people of India do recognize

that their government does not have their best interests at heart and uh they peacefully uh as they're so well known to do peacefully overthrow uh these authoritarian dictators it's a pretty big chunk of the world that they'd be cutting off from big bitcoin if you think about it um yes it's just something to be aware out and something to be vocal about i think you know we've got um well former bitcoin jesus we need bitcoin gandhi who does a non-violent protest of the indian government and gets them uh on board with hyper-Bitcoinization. Maybe it's just sending Bitcoin back and forth

to each other because there's nothing they can really do to stop it. It's non-violent, right? It's like, hey. Yeah, so that's all we have for the topics, unless you want to touch on anything else in particular. This is the same country that banned large cash bills, so it shouldn't really come as a surprise. Well, it is surprising considering their history

with gold and the culture around gold in India. For a lot of jewelry, I actually don't know enough about the history of gold and stuff in India, but You know, it's an authoritarian government that, you know, learned a lot from the Fabian Socialists of Britain. You know, we would expect this kind of thing to happen. Yeah.

All right. This is where we open it up to questions. If any freaks have any questions for us, this is where we open it up. Yeah, so I might be able to look into it a little bit easier, but if you're running a service or a platform and you're not going to do any of this, I don't know if that's a solvable problem right now. I think you have to solve identity first, right? But even if you did KYC, couldn't you just, like, couldn't me and Michael collude and just be sitting at the same table?

I think just online poker is always going to have that flaw. That's what's nice about sitting at a table, right, because isn't that like a major issue with online poker in general? They have reputations and stuff, right? In the bigger tables, they all have reputations. Poker players love Bitcoin. Yeah, I'd like to ask Hasu about this. Yeah, we'll ask Hasu about this, ex-poker player.

In the back? Yes, sir. We were talking about now, you know, like, Sam Chunkville is still in a dedicated long time law thing. There was a lot of talk about the backdoor, I think that might have turned out to be fake news yeah that did turn out to I think it was Bloomberg that reported

on that but I think that in general it's not fake news in the sense that that has happened in the past of hardware getting tampered with so it definitely could be the case that a phone would get tampered with so that's where really you want to you want to mitigate the the risk by minimizing the amount of bitcoin that you're holding on the phone

and then you for your cold storage use a different solution that has less risk of supply chain attacks like that and it's actually a great reminder of something we did not put on the list but something that was revealed to the market this week apparently is a huge bug in Bluetooth. All Bluetooth enabled devices are pretty much wrecked if you're connected. I feel like they were already wrecked even without this bug. I was on the airplane

and I turned on my Bluetooth headphones and then started listening to someone else's music. Really? Yeah. Yeah, so that's something to be aware of. The topic of Ledger Nano X or the Ledger X.

They said it's not affected. Yeah, everything's signed on the machine. They assume it's compromised to begin with. I'm still kind of sketched out having Bluetooth in a hardware wallet. Yeah, it doesn't seem smart for some reason. Any other questions? One byte. Yeah, that's pretty scary.

It's like all Bluetooth-enabled devices are affected, so just be aware. Be aware. as far as people are willing to put up with them i guess right is that yeah there's there's no uh there's no lower bound on how negative they could go in theory um so we'll see and really if you think about um the value of a bond let's say it's got a face value of a hundred thousand dollars if we have hyperinflation where the dollar is worth zero then that that bond would have a infinite negative interest rate so that's uh that's the future we've got to look forward to i was uh i was in the gym watching a mainstream blog on tv cnbc earlier this week and uh

it's the first time i've done it in a while cnbc cnbc um cnbc Meme was just born It was Great meme factory right here Michael Goldstein Except for Joe But this is the first time I've listened to CNBC in a while and I don't know if this idea is being floated around

for a bit now but there was at least three analysts throughout the hour that I was in the gym who brought up the US government offering 50 and 100 year bonds as a way to help with the inversion of the 10 and 30 year or excuse me the 10 and 2 year Yeah, they're very low time reference.

Can't say it with a straight face. But I think that they're always going to try to find ways of scamming investors, and they've got a good track record of it. Yeah, I mean, look at Argentina and what's happened to their 100-year bond. I mean, obviously their economy is not the U.S. economy, but 100-year bonds don't make a lot of sense to me. Okay, so I have a question on the meeting. Welcome.

Welcome. Thank you. Three words, number go up. Don't do that. Don't do that. I've already figured this out. I got you. No.

No. I think that Bitcoin is the best money we've ever had. And as more people buy it, the price should go up. And I think to answer that I think we're born at inflection point predicated by technology particularly the internet And we're moving into a digital age and just it makes sense that in the digital age. We have a digital money. This is Sort of how I break it the people who are first getting in and then have them ask questions from there One thing also to consider You know the other three words Bitcoin fixes this

Which means that any problem that they're having in their life? you can use that as a jump-off point for how Bitcoin will fix it so I I would say that hmm you guys covered a lot of ground there yeah so if anything it's a form of insurance so we've got a long history of monies coming and going and here's one that is digital cash that's native to the internet and so it's a pretty good bet you know no matter what you think the odds are given its current value yeah thank you and actually just a public service announcement a framing that's been working for me with my pre corner friends is the the energy

efficiency that bitcoin may provide uh with mining particularly capping flared gas and uh driving the innovation renewable energy production bitcoin is the money for environmentalists it really is though like that's if everybody's worried about the climate i was talking to uh to josh about this earlier on the bottom shelf podcast but um it like everybody's screaming about climate right now it's just asking politicians to print money to to fix the problem bitcoin is literally right in front of us it is an actionable thing that you can do today to help make energy consumption more efficient so if you want to help the environment start taking bitcoin miners to oil fields and capping that flare and eat more meat and eat more meat it's important that as well um

So if Bitcoin is everything, would you say it's sort of like snake oil, but it's real and actually working? Bitcoin is real snake oil. Anyone up there? Yeah. Going back to the topic of negative interest rates, doesn't it seem like that's a stable stablecoins, which now they're not going to be getting money from all of the buses, but their debtors are bleeding.

So how do you think? The current state of stablecoins? Well, it's a... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that the stable coins, you know, they've got this collateral that they're sitting in a bank account earning interest. So if that's negative, they're going to have to start doing what the central banks want them to do, which is go out and make risky

investments so we know how that ends where that the investments will not do so well and then they will be in the insolvent category of fractional reserve banking and then they'll have to get bailed out and we'll pay for it but thankfully Bitcoin fixes this and just a note on stable coins in general in my mind stable coins are inherently unstable because they're very susceptible to black swan events yeah yeah it's uh we've we talk about this a lot on this podcast don't hold your money in stable coins if you're not willing to lose it no

oh it takes care of that believe me I like that legal advice any more Tabula rasa. We're going to start with the blank slate. Let's do it. Yeah, so I saw this. Satoshi's going to reveal himself in a three-part series of articles distributed by a PR firm. So we're going to find out who he is in a few weeks here. It sounds like Satoshi to use a PR firm. Yes. Yeah. And tabula rasa. What do you guys think about starting out with a clean slate?

Hey, he did it once, he can do it again. Maybe Craig Wright hired a PR firm. That kook. Do you think, I wonder if Craig Wright is sweating bullets? How did, alright. Well, Craig Wright's... Like all the competing Satoshis. I don't like feeding this dude's ego,

but how the hell does Cheddar have that asshole on their show earlier this week. Oh, they had this guy on, too. Yeah, they had this guy on. Craig Wright and I use the same PR agency, so that's how... That Jimmy Doody always brings with him is a little creepy.

It's a little weird. My appearance got more views, got more engagement, so I'm very happy with that. And then I gracefully offered to Cheddar that I come on to rebut the nonsense that Craig Wright put out, and they were not interested so i think that it's just another example of quote-unquote journalists

who are incompetent and fail to do their job of informing the public i just want to say that you absolutely killed those cheddar interviews thank you man you've been a little quiet this episode man we got an all-star cast up here i get to just sit here and smile any more questions how we doing on time never no why it's not worth it that's like my my big like if i have one knock on some bitcoiners is that they they perpetuate these people by paying them any attention like do not engage just like i'm pissed that we're talking about this right now do not engage the and the noted podcast is a hermetically sealed echo chamber we would never allow uh outsiders in Who would you like to have on the pod?

Ooh, that's a good question. Damn. I want Kanye on the pod. That's my big goal. I've invited him on Noted. He still hasn't responded. Yeah. In Bitcoin world, I'd like to talk to Greg Maxwell one day.

Nick Szabo's the one that got away, too. Yeah. Szabo politely declined. What about you guys? Yeah, we got the Szabo decline as well. Yeah, you're in good company. We fanboyed over the decline a little bit, too, because it was so nice.

Who would you guys like to have on? Anybody in particular? Mike Schmidt. After seeing the presentation today, we want to have him on and talk about Taproot if he'll entertain us. He could be our first Austin guest. Yeah, in-person interview.

Looking forward to that. Highly recommend the in-person. Highly recommend the Node podcast in general for all our listeners back home, too. How do you guys pick the cold open? It's always impeccable. So Barry Silbert, also known as Barry Shilbert, because he shills shit coins.

It's really hard to say, like Sally Seashell, Seashore thing, but Barry Shilbert shills shit coins. And he, again, an example of a lack of humble stacking stats. he was the lead person trying to perpetrate the Segwit2x fraud back in 2017 and in a Twitter exchange with

someone who might be in this room right now Ragnar Ragnar he is here and Shilbert asked so Ragnar is very toxic and so he was you know sending some

toxic vibes Shilbert's way and and shilbert asked ragnar who are you um and so actually no that was not the case of noted uh that was eric lombroso who is not here um and uh eric was pushing back on shilbert's nonsense and uh shilbert replied hashtag noted n-o-t-e-d um and then we we used that hashtag a lot because it's just kind of a bizarre thing to tweet at someone kind of that you're keeping score but nobody cares about your score keeping

and yeah just organically we were trying to come up with a podcast name so when we were starting our podcast and we are fans of running a Bitcoin full node so node-age just made sense yeah and that was also like our target audience it wasn't necessarily new people although they're welcome to listen.

It was really like getting the word out to our hermetically sealed echo chamber and the people in that echo chamber are people who run full nodes. That's, I think, like the lower level bound of who we're targeting. So get noted. I listen and I run a full node.

This is true. We've got less than a minute here. Do we do one more question or we just wrap it up? Do we have any more questions? Yeah. no i think michael described pretty pretty eloquently why we have adopted bitcoin maximalist as a term bitcoin standard bearer it doesn't ring a ring you need the punch you need people to know that you can take a punch and that you can give a punch

yeah i personally just like bitcoiner way better i mean vitalik can kind of go screw himself for the term in my opinion i agree i mean i don't i don't think that it's like good to really like latch on to any label specifically it's just that bitcoin maximalist the reason that i call myself a bitcoin maximalist is not because um i think it's this like brilliant piece of linguistic magic that purpose perfectly encapsulates some definition it's that it has uh emerged as the description of what I am just because of how the memes have worked themselves out and I roll with it yeah I like big corner as well just in terms of saving Twitter characters and then taking maximalists and calling out the fiat

maxis who are the real evil people in the world trying to impose violence on all of us this is one good thing about the maximalist you can start just like take everyone and determine what is the thing that they maximize on and that really sets the stage for the gang fights. It's like Gangs of New York,

you got the fiat maxis over there, the bitcoin maxis, the shitcoin maxis, the payment maxis. There's maximalists everywhere. Everywhere. And I think that's where we have to end it. Do you have any parting notes? I just want to say thanks to everyone who came out thanks to the BitBlockBoom team

thanks to Gary Leland and obviously stay humble StackSats peace and love freaks