TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.09.09

Episode Date: September 13, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Lightning CVE exploited in the wild, lnd 0.7.0 vulnerable, update! https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2019-September/002148.html - Digg from the dead https://digg.com/channel/bitcoin - NY payroll company MyPayrollHR exit scam $35M https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/09/ny-payroll-company-vanishes-with-35-million/ - French Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire says Libra will not be allowed in the EU https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-libra-cryptocurrency-bitcoin-europe-france-ban-block-latest-a9102171.html - Premier League Club Watford Bitcoin logo on jerseys due to sportsbet.io sponsorship https://www.watfordfc.com/club/bitcoin-confirmed-new-sleeve-partner - Keybase airdrops shitcoin, bitcoiners donate to Tor, almost 17000 XLM donated(~$1020) https://stellar.expert/explorer/public/account/GABWGQEQESRX5TKDTPIYJFPKGJDMEW6VLOOLBTIFPJIN7XT6KAFXJQPJ?filter=payments - Bitcoin as a nonviolent rebellion by Nic Carter https://medium.com/@nic__carter/a-most-peaceful-revolution-8b63b64c203e?sk=c70e2e688cb3c15dfe68f4d2627b1059 - ColdCard firmware update 2.1.4 for multi-sig change outputs https://coldcardwallet.com/docs/upgrade - Bittr adds xpub support https://twitter.com/GetBittr/status/1172171274791116801?s=19 - Spencer Dinwiddie of NJ Nets is a bitcoiner and is tokenizing his ~$34 million extension https://theathletic.com/1199912/2019/09/12/sources-spencer-dinwiddie-to-convert-his-nba-contract-into-a-secured-digital-investment-heres-what-that-means/ - ECB cuts rates and announces a new round of QE "Negative rates will not provoke the collapse of the financial system" - Draghi https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-12/ecb-cuts-rates-restarts-qe-to-fight-slowdown-as-draghi-era-ends 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. Bull Bitcoin. Canadian freaks need to check out Bull Bitcoin (https://bullbitcoin.com/). Canada's only Bitcoin maximalist brokerage. Also, check out BitcoinOutlet.com for some of their dope swag if you're outside of Canada.

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here on a friday morning early in the morning here for a tftc uh session it's actually a rabbit hole recap episode matt is in latvia right now in riga what's going on matt how are your travels how's it going freaks how's it going marty it's uh it's 5 47 here in the afternoon so um i've already started drinking nice how's your day been what's been what's been going on out there it's it's great here it's great here you're you're sorely missed everyone is everyone's looking for you they're asking where my my podcast husband is um it's just we've met a lot of great people already uh chilled with uh rodolfo a lot fucking love that dude uh yeah it's great i met

coinshare for the first time that was awesome just a really beautiful city send everybody my love i had an incredible time last year i'm sad i can't be there this year but i'm all traveled out right now um but yeah i don't want to interrupt your night so we're gonna try to keep this at a tight hour right now i'm checking the price of bitcoin uh using the new tftc.io ticker current price is $10,317.20 and the current block height is $594,686. Before we jump into the topics,

we've got a lot of topics to talk about. Got to give a shout out to our sponsors, the Cash App. You already know all about them. If you haven't downloaded the Cash App yet and you're living in America and you're trying to buy Bitcoin, what the hell are you waiting for?

Use the code STACKINGSATS, one word, S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S. you're going to get five dollars five dollars going to go to owls lacrosse charity very near endear to our hearts then you're going to get the functionalities of the cash app buy sell bitcoin send bitcoin receive bitcoin and then the boost go save a dollar buying coffee at a local coffee shop five percent of whole foods a bunch of other boosts download the cash app use the code stacking sats today go to your local app shop and do that uh we got to give a shout out to unchained capital as well uh they've got their two of three multi-sig volt program uh where they're allowing

you to use a trezor ledger hardware wallet you hold two keys they hold one you can always move your bitcoin out of their vaults without them but if you ever need their help you can say hey unshamed i need you to sign this message for us and help us move this bitcoin on top of that they have their loan program on the other side where you can use your bitcoin as collateral to get U.S. dollar loans that you can then spend freely. So go to www.unchained-capital.com slash volts to check out their volts program today. And the last sponsor, relatively new sponsor,

huge fan of these boys. We had them on the podcast over the summer, the Bull Bitcoin team. It's Canada's only Bitcoin maximalist brokerage. It has some of the lowest rates in Canada. All you Canadian freaks out there, we know you're out there. thank you for coming out last week on twitter um if you use bull bitcoin you can fund it via

e-transfer wire flex pin voucher it's non-custodial you send uh the money they send bitcoin straight to your wallet you provide an address they're always running wasabi they're very privacy conscious uh you can pay nearly any canadian bill with bitcoin and they're never going to support shit coins so find them at bullbitcoin.com and if you're not in canada and you just want to support them buy some merch go to bitcoin outlet.com it's a pretty cool merch and if you actually bought some and you're in rega now you can probably pick it up there so shout out to bull bitcoin bull bitcoin.com if you're in canada looking to buy bitcoin have you seen those guys out there yet matt no i think they just landed so i'm gonna find them

after this podcast have you seen any freaks out there yeah yeah i uh i met a met a guy tom from poland who listens to the podcast and recognize me by my voice which is always gonna be weird but it's still pretty cool shout out to tom what's up tom um and speaking of shout outs we got a shout out uh from a freak this week a very good one uh from from a burt mcroy hi tftc your podcast marketing is just fine thank you burt uh whatever your marketing budget is it's bigger than the budget of bitcoin two years in i don't know but did bitcoin have a budget exactly if you're hearing complaints about marketing you're getting the same feedback bitcoin did thanks burt uh i'd say that means you're doing something right you can read this on the air

but only while drinking islay malt i'm sorry i'm not drinking islay malt uh maybe i'm breaking the conditions of this shout out right now uh i'd love to hear more about bitcoin as a long-term force for wealth equality over the long haul the health of human freedom depends upon a fair economic system which can reward entrepreneurs without concentrating the power of wealth in a few unjust hands the bitcoin network is such a system but an outsider would never find it out from media coverage are you open to building an amateur top three bitcoiners on the topic i've put together a short argument that bitcoin's intrinsic properties discourage long-term wealth inequality uh where to share with like-minded in-groupers stay humble burt mcroy burt shout

out to you bruh that was that was a long one he got his money's worth he did get his money's worth we might have to put a put a character cap on these on these shout outs at some point no i like the long network uh yeah there well i think we should should state that there there It could still be with some wealth concentration in the Bitcoin world, but it is a much fairer system in the long run. It's not as easy to concentrate wealth as it is in the current system. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's going to magically fix inequality, but it does provide a fair money that doesn't inherently disadvantage people, right? Disenfranchise people. i think it's like it's actually i have nick carter's recent post in our show notes which

i think does a really he did a really good job uh highlighting that um bitcoin as a non-violent rebellion yeah no it's a great segue at post nick dropped that last saturday i believe so almost a week from when we're recording this and uh yeah it's really nick has an incredible way with words. If you haven't read the piece yet, definitely go check it out. It really sets the stage and goes through a number of things. The way no-coiners look at Bitcoin, the way altcoin and the ICO boom sort of had no soul. And the reason that altcoins are probably not going to survive in the long term is because they don't have a principled user base. And Bitcoiners are really principled and and because i think they understand the gravity of the situation and

the the gravity of the technology and and what it means to the incumbent system yeah i mean and this post was uh nick at its best at his best uh just really really fantastic all around and and everyone should read it i don't think we can really do it justice talking about it neither do i neither do i uh one thing we should talk about i believe we touched on it last week is there's a lightning cve bug that is being exploited in the wild and there was a bit of confusion earlier this week as to what version to upgrade to is believed that if you're on lnd 0.7.0 you would have been okay on the beginning of the at the beginning of the week but apparently if you're not on 0.7.1 you're vulnerable to this cve bug and it still hasn't been disclosed yet

right correct hasn't been disclosed update asap uh that means that the casa nodes were vulnerable uh so if you haven't updated your casa node within the last two days three days make sure you um log on and and the update will pop up so make sure you you do update that as soon as possible um yes what's great was uh keto miner who i also saw uh and i met his wife she's fantastic uh he had the noddle was updated to 0.7.1 very very like a couple weeks ago if not longer so that that was that was pretty awesome so shout out to the noddle team shout out to noddle tell those guys i said what's up uh miss them but yeah no the cv back to the cve bug though like have no idea what it is but it is being exploited apparently so something to be aware of

I mean, they said it's been exploited, but we also, we don't have, I don't think they actually, as part of, you know, it not being fully disclosed yet, what it entails, I don't think they've shown the examples of it being exploited yet. They just told us it's been exploited, so it's something we'll keep watching and we'll definitely discuss next week. Yeah, maybe it's something where the researchers have found the exploit and have exploited it, but nobody else has found it yet. It could be a situation. I think I saw in passing it also had something to do with nodes that allowed remote connections. So it might be a little bit more limited, but I'm not positive. Yeah, so we'll see.

I think they're disclosing next week, so hopefully by next episode we'll have more details. Standby, freaks. We'll be keeping you abreast of the situation as it unravels here. Next up, Dig from the Dead. yeah so uh i don't know if you freak salt last night on twitter i announced i started curating a bitcoin channel on dig.com uh a lot of you are saying right now dig.com what the fuck i haven't heard about that in like 10 years uh but fuck it they reached out to me i have a actually close

connection to dig via via my job uh my wage cuck job and they reached out and said hey would you want to curate this bitcoin channel i said why not joe rogan is still a big fan of dig he was talking about it on his podcast on monday so uh if uh able to help the dig audience uh learn about bitcoin get good information in front of them then why not that's uh seems like a win-win it's pretty easy curation process i mean i'm already basically curating a lot of information via the bent in this podcast so it's a lot of recycled material from what we talk about but uh i think just getting it out to a bigger audience a bigger distribution is is all the better for bitcoin yeah i mean i think it's great that we have a smart bitcoiner in control of the account

um i think what you say there's like there's over three million impressive impressions per month is that it was that the step yeah yeah so believe it or not there still is yeah yeah so it's not for nothing that's that's pretty that's pretty big we might as well control it right someone's got to do it and just a disclosure here you're not getting paid or anything uh there was like some accusations thrown around there's this is not like a sponsorship deal no dig is not paying me though they they as a platform are working on ways to help uh channel curators and content traders monetize via the platform but it would not be like dig paying you directly um but again and they're and that's the other thing the dig is open to experimenting with bitcoin and like

bitcoin and lightning network payments as well uh at some point in the future so um yeah oh and there's there's a bitcoin tab on their home page now that links to it right that's pretty badass yeah yeah so that uh something i'll have to keep up with that's one thing i'm gonna have to get used to in the new workflow is it's lining content content up for that site so if any of freaks have interesting content i've put like the bit boy and uh that uh raspberry pi blitz pos system uh your your demo to the to the lightning network cool things like that um any old timeless writings about bitcoin i'm trying to trying to get pieces that have stood the test of time uh in front of people that may not know much about bitcoin um so yeah it'll be it'll be fun

we'll see how long uh how long you keep it up i love it i love it so did you see this uh this new york payroll company exit scam incredible exit scam it's so fucked up it's uh it's very fucked up so but wow how is this even possible so do you want to break it down yeah i mean so there's this cloud payroll company right so like uh all these like smaller companies outsource their payroll to this this new york-based company um and instead of the employees getting paid uh at the end of the week as they usually do where they get direct deposited their their you know their fiat salary through you know through the banking system um they actually got debited two weeks pay from the company and then all the money moved

and the ceo fucking disappeared yeah classic exit scam yeah we see this all the time in the bitcoin world and everyone always says you know oh this is an issue with bitcoin um but the u.s dollar it's not the u.s dollar is tainted with criminal activity you cannot you cannot associate yourself with it it's the currency of criminals absolutely no but i uh i also think it's interesting here is that you know bitcoin is a push system right so if you're doing uh bitcoin payrolls in the future uh you can't it actually bitcoin fixes this you can't you can't have a situation where where a company would then you know pull out that's like almost the most fucked up part not only do these people not get paid uh their salary for the week um but they they got

debited they they lost previous salary that's crazy yeah so on top of it being a push system too like i can imagine that like these payroll flows will just be structures on top of bitcoin wallets that are built uis on top of bitcoin wallets that are built similar to what btc pay server is doing just for like a payroll it'll be open sourced and you won't have to rely on a third party so like another classic classic another classic example of uh third parties are security holes libra did you see so the french economy and uh finance minister bruno lemare said libra will not be allowed in the eu uh fatal blow for libra pre-launch any thoughts on this i haven't been following libra since uh since the first flare-up of libra a couple months ago

what uh have they have they progressed uh the product at all are they testing it i have the the uh partnering companies is an r3 like situation where they're they're not uh agreeing with each other yet i mean i i think they're in like a holding pattern for u.s approval and EU approval, but clearly it looks like EU approval is not going to happen. I don't think, you know, U.S. approval seems unlikely unless they completely bend the knee. You know, maybe they'll make some compromises here for the EU, but what we say our earlier guess was 30% likelihood of launching. I would say that's even lower. I kind of wanted to couple this with an announcement slash disclosure that i i am now advising bottle pay that's bottle.li um which is a

we're basically trying to make like the easiest to use lightning wallet um you know for especially for beginners and it integrates directly with social media handles um so so they actually announced um instagram integration uh yesterday so meanwhile libra is stalled but sats are quickly going to become the currency of facebook's platforms sats is sats sats the standard yes well congrats man that's huge and uh uh, they're, they're lucky to have you. So what you're, you were telling me last week, you're just going to tell them, make it non-custodial. Uh, what, what is your goal with bottle pay in particular as an advisor? So, I mean, I actually, I've been talking to

them since before the launch. Uh, I, I guess like they, they were about to like soft launch and then I tweeted it out and kind of blew up their spot. This was, you know, a couple months ago. And I've been talking with them ever since. So this is more, it's become, you know, official finally. And they are giving me a small amount of equity, full disclosure for that advisorship. You know, I told them, I told them three main things in the beginning. I said, you know, we needed to be non-custodial, no shit coins, no tokens, you know, no ICO or anything like that. and basically try everything possible to insulate ourselves from ever needing to do KYC. So those are like the three big tenets.

And just to make a really easy Lightning wallet that can, you know, there's so many complaints people have with using Lightning right now, and I think they've already addressed a lot of those complaints. I mean, if you use it on Twitter, for instance, there's no invoices necessary. you go to their web app you don't even you just put in a username of any of their

integrated social platforms they also are doing messaging apps you know they have telegram integrated and you can just send payments with no invoices required so it is extremely user friendly lightning wallet and that's the goal that's the goal here

boss mass adoption baby it's on the way congrats again dude that's awesome um looking very much looking forward to seeing you guys get on the fucking list of uh rhr week in a week out in the future i'm kidding that's yeah i'm looking i'm looking forward to uh you know some of my favorite podcasts uh i there's like there's this one podcast i listen to a non bitcoin podcast and his wife works for facebook and it's a tech it's a tech podcast um so literally every single time they talk about facebook he has to start off with disclosure my wife works

for facebook and so i i look forward to to saying the disclosure over and over again we will disclose here at tftc no yeah that's what i got accused of last night it was like not disclosing if i was getting paid by dick i was like uh i'm not getting paid by dick uh but people yeah people are uh anal about disclosure so thank you for disclosing that's good they should be they should be don't trust verify i'm happy about that um next up on the list huge huge news just for bitcoin in the mainstream in the psyche of the masses uh premier league club watford has a bitcoin logo on their jersey uh sportsbet.io uh is is a sponsor that's doing this they want to bring awareness uh of bitcoin to the world and they're trying to up

the awareness game i believe sportsbet.io is a platform where you can gamble using bitcoin yeah yeah bitcoins is one of their you know funding and withdrawal mechanisms it's it's particularly well suited for online gambling um especially you know in america for instance you can't it's you know it's very hard a lot of times it's very hard to get your money in and out of these these websites and and with bitcoin you could do it really quickly did you see the jersey it's pretty fucking badass they put a big ass bitcoin logo on on the sleeve yeah no like it almost looks like a captain stripe uh just on the sleeve uh but no it's bitcoin everybody's gonna be like is that the captain no no that's bitcoin i kind of want to buy a jersey just just because

it's badass so i might do that we'll see they do not accept bitcoin for the jerseys yet but honestly like i would buy with fiat so i don't even it doesn't really matter my body's not really well suited for soccer jerseys i don't think i'd be able to wear them yeah i mean i don't really think any ones are at least like the authentic ones like they're they're designed for performance over um looks but you know maybe maybe i'll get one and just put it on the wall i i think they they are they are jerseys are well suited as as wall adornments i agree with that probably have to get a frame get a frame so it doesn't get too dusty and dirty you want to show respect to the bitcoin emblem you know it's not a shit coin you know the shit

coin the shit coin jerseys can go up on the wall without a frame but the bitcoin ones have to they need to be framed yeah well speaking of shit coins uh maybe you can use your your airdrop shit coin from stellar on their keybase airdrop and maybe put that towards buying a jersey so did you did you get are you on keybase i am i'm not even going to claim it i don't is it worth it how many stats is it so i wasn't going to claim it um i i actually love keybase besides their stellar integration which so stellar's funding keybase they've been funding them for a while hence uh so so keybase added a stellar wallet um onto keybase you know keybase allows you to um link a pgp key uh and it also works as a chat app uh it's it's probably one of the

best encrypted chat apps that are available you know we have we have a group uh bitcoin btc if you look it up on keybase i think it's over 200 members now so it's just a really it's great app besides their shitcoin integration and they dropped they airdropped stellar onto the community there um which is i think in really poor taste and against their their goals and the way the way the press release was they just were shilling the shit out of stellar which really really pissed me off so you know i'm thinking about moving to an alternative but in the meantime i realized uh someone mentioned on twitter i realized that that tour accepts the tour project accepts stellar donations so i decided that i was going to accept my airdrop which was worth about twenty dollars

at the time i think it was like 350 uh stellar tokens per person uh which yeah about twenty dollars and then i immediately donated it to tour and i i tweeted it out and it got a lot of traction and since then uh 17 000 stellar have been donated to tour so that's a little bit over a thousand dollars at current prices you know stellar is like six cents a token uh so that's pretty good you know it's like you may let's make stellar pay for our privacy project like that's let's support tor with free money all right all right maybe i won't claim mine though is it easy to claim yeah they made it really easy to claim which actually kind of worse i don't know and now i can't remove the stellar address from my from my account which is kind of kind of sucks

But it does mean I will get the future airdrops every month. So every month when they send me about $20 worth, I can then donate it to Tor. And I've been watching Tor's address. They just immediately dumped that shit on Kraken. So it's decreasing the price of Stellar. It's funding an important privacy project. And Stellar has support for a little memo when you send a Stellar transaction. So I made sure to shill Bitcoin in the memo as well to just get another benefit there.

I'm proud of you, Matt. What a spin. Way to take a bad situation and turn it into a good one. It's a perfect example of turning the tables on the people who thought they're going to airdrop this shit coin on us. Yeah, I mean, I think it sends a message, you know. I think it's important to be, like, positively toxic, you know, to a degree. And it was actually kind of funny. At first, the tour, like, people at tour were thanking the stellar community because they were like,

holy shit we never receive any stellar donations and all of a sudden we're getting all this stellar donations and uh you know bitcoiners were really quick to point out to them on twitter that it was actually bitcoiners doing it and that there is no such thing as a stellar community they do not exist they like to pretend they do uh and it should be noted that stellar uh has a man behind the project jed mccaleb who was also the original owner of mount gox and one of the creators of ripple as well uh so just keep that in mind yeah he's like a disenfranchised creator of ripple and he also dumped gox to uh carpolis uh before all this shit completely hit the fan i think they were already a bit insolvent when he did that so just questionable all around uh one of the funny

stories about jeb is uh he when he decided to leave the ripple project and start stellar which is just a fork of ripple uh he had a shit ton of ripple because they pre-mined the whole supply and they forced him to not i think they took him to court and they forced him to not dump it all at once so he has like a certain amount he's allowed to dump every week and like clockwork every week he just dumps a shit ton of ripple i think it's millions of dollars worth of ripple a week or something like that yeah it's pretty crazy whatever the limit is but i remember when he that was like the one ethical thing he did do or like semi-ethical i guess is that the reason they were able to stop him was he did pre-announce that he was about to dump his his entire ripple

stash so the price crashed before he could even start dumping it uh which you know it's like i give him a little bit of credit i guess for that right yeah so it's not like charlie who got out and then announced on cnbc that uh it would probably hit it all time high like when yeah yeah you know charlie was a little bit all right i guess about it too i guess he kind of told people beforehand a little bit they had a little bit of time at the top to get out after he said it but uh we the freaks know how we feel about the the litecoin situation that was just that reeked of of just lack of ethics all around especially you know he was he was a coin base cto at the time people don't forget people don't forget freaks um speaking of don't forgetting

don't forget uh coldware firmware update has been or excuse me coldware cold card firmware update is at the market 2.1.4 uh and this is for multi-sig change outputs have you been talking Rodolfo about this while you're out there or Matt's getting a phone call right now or a message yeah so we actually got our cold card

demonstration here in New York on the 26 we're going to be doing that at Chain Coat Labs it is sold out unfortunately but we're looking forward to doing that very much Matt are you good now What's going on?

I'm finally back. You can't hear me. I'm finally back. I'm sorry about that, dude. You know, my phone was also connected to my headphones by Bluetooth, and someone just called me, and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Welcome back. I just went on some random rant.

It probably made no sense to the freaks. But the cold card. Have you talked to Rodolfo about the latest cold card firmware update? No, I haven't. But, you know, update. It's a simple bug fix. There was some issue with multi-sig change outputs that some were showing up as incorrect

even though they were correct. So there's a firmware update if you want to go update that. Bang, bang. No, I was going on about our demonstration here in a couple weeks. What's going through your mind planning this? Are you nervous about teaching 30 people at once how to use a cold card?

So, first of all, the important thing here is do not email chain code about this event, guys. Everyone keeps emailing them, you know, don't do that. They're just being nice and host, like, allowing us to use their space for it. It is very much our event that we are throwing, not them. And it is all filled up because we're trying to keep it small for the first one. I think we have 33 people are coming, so it should be good. I am extremely nervous about it this is the first time we're doing a workshop um Evan Kaloudis who I'm doing it with and is is just a fucking really great dude and you know really smart so I'm

excited to be doing it with him uh and you know it's just been a whirlwind because I'm in Riga right now uh and then I get I get back and I go to a wedding across the country and then I get back from that and then like a couple days later uh we have the workshop so I'm I'm gonna meet up with him and i'm going to meet up with uh with josh beefsteak josh who is uh is helping us you know coordinate the whole thing and i think he's going to give like a little presentation in the beginning uh so we'll do like a full walkthrough and and figure out exactly how we're going to do this and hopefully we should have a couple other new york city bitcoiners who are our close friends you know walking around and helping us uh you know if people have questions i expect you to

be doing that as well i actually haven't asked you yet but but i just assumed you would be helping so there you go oh i'm always around to help don't worry i don't know how much of a help i'll be but i'll be there to try to help there you go hopefully maybe if you can if you have time we have we still have to figure out when we're doing it but if you have time like a couple days before when we do the the test walkthrough of how we're going to actually structure the course like maybe maybe you should come and meet up with us too at the same time. That'd be great. We'll figure it out.

Yeah. Me and Matt coordinating plans here on the episode of rabbit hole recap. You know, yeah. If you came to Rigo, we could coordinate it here, but since, since that's not the case,

we're going to do it live on, on air. Um, no, but yeah, so chain code is not, not hosting this event. Um,

so yeah, do not email them, email us, reach out or twitter dm us uh but on uh on the while we're on the note of chain code make sure you go check out uh the episodes i did with the with the summer residents they're lesser known bitcoiners if like a lot of people myself included sort of go on twitter and you look to see how many followers somebody has and decide whether or not they're worth listening to based off that but a lot of the the residents that i interviewed from chain code are not that big on twitter but

they have incredible points of view on bitcoin and and are doing some pretty incredible stuff so it's pretty cool to see chain code supporting these people a lot and that was the other thing i was amazed at is how young some of these residents were and how talented they they are and how lucky we are to have them focused on bitcoin at this point in their lives and it's great how they come from all around the world which is it's just pretty inspiring um and you did yeah like gleb from ukraine uh elikai from israel fabian from germany um i'll release an episode uh with this woman carla kirk uh from south africa next week and yeah it's just it's crazy how uh so many like-minded young minds from all over the world are are coalescing on

bitcoin like we're lucky how many how many in total was it has it has four chain code episodes been released um so james chang fabian elikai uh richard myers um i know i'm forgetting one another one right now as we speak somebody um but richard myers was a separate one right that was the one with me yeah but he was a resident this summer yeah but yeah i just meant yeah i in the recent series and you you did uh you did the interviews at their at their new offices right uh james i did at the office the others uh i had them selfishly come to the studio i like uh home field advantage you know it's it's better that way i get a chain code and i i put the uh put the seat the the chair leg on on the mic line it fucks up the audio yeah you got you got

scarred and then you're like okay we're doing in the studio from now on yeah but anyway i haven't seen the new offices yet they're pretty fucking dope right that's i mean that's where we're hosting this workshop so i'm looking forward to that yeah they're uh they're pretty insane right in right by grand central um great views of the city uh it looks like a great place to to focus and work um so yeah anybody going to the event you're you're in for a treat um but yeah just uh and tie up the the chain code section here with the residents and the other good thing about the interviews too it's like a wide range of topics from lightning to snore signatures to uh the p2p network and how to protect that from attacks um so definitely go check those out and be on the

lookout for for the last one dropping next week bitter finally uh released their xpub support we've been talking about that for since we first had ruben on the podcast i think when was that like a year ago half a year ago or something like that no it wasn't a year ago it was yeah it was earlier earlier this year but that's uh that's one thing i'm interested to see so he was worried about having everybody's x pub how's he how's he doing this in a in a privacy conscious way yeah actually it definitely wasn't a year bitcoin is ridiculous time wise you know i feel like i've known ruben my whole life we met him like four months ago i'm about to see him in uh like an hour right after this podcast.

We're getting dinner. Pretty excited. Yeah, so they added XPUB support. Bitter is a European service that makes it very easy to stack sats. You set up your account, and you keep... That's Bitter, B-I-T-T-R.

When you send them a bank transfer, they just automatically send you the equivalent amount of Bitcoin. Previously, that was to a fixed address, just a single reused address which obviously has some major privacy implications because if someone figures out your address and they're watching the chain they can they can see every single bidder transaction you were doing so now he added xpub support and that means that every time this every time you know you send them a bank transfer which also is really convenient because you can

just set up your bank to auto um do reoccurring buys by keep you know sending it every every day or every week or every month send them a transfer and and they'll buy it for you um it allows them to use a new address every time so yes this doesn't solve anything privacy wise from bidders perspective they still know all your addresses but if someone's watching the chain outside of a bidder just some you know random person or a chain analysis company or something like that they can't tell which purchases are your bidder purchases very easily. If you end up merging outputs or combining transactions, then they might be able to figure it out, but it's a lot more difficult.

Now, the privacy issue here is if you upload an XPUB that has already been used, then he can see all your past and future transactions. uh this is actually that's how shapeshift implemented their xpub uh support for their new kyc platform so basically shapeshift is like doxing people's past and future transactions and connecting it to their real life identity through their shitty ass implementation but with ruben with bitter he is he's actually he checks the xpub ahead of time to make sure like when you go to upload it it checks to make sure that uh it hasn't been used before and if it if it yeah if it's been used before he won't allow you to upload it to their servers uh so that's great and and he

he made sure you know that there's a lot of uh there's an education element there where he made sure to you know tell people uh that that bidder can see those transactions they can see you know anything you use with that XPUB. And I think like the, the ideal way here to use it is, you know, you like have like a hardware wallet or something that is your bidder hardware wallet. And, and you just know that all your bid, all your, all your bidder purchases go to that, that specific hardware wallet. And then when it comes time to, you know, clean up your privacy a bit from, from bidder, then you can, you know, send it to Wasabi or Samurai, um, and then to cold storage from there. yeah shout out to bitter for for getting that um getting that shipped but it also brings up

where we're going on that uh explanation sort of just popped up my mind like the conversation of how we may have fucked up the vernacular of of particularly bitcoin addresses in the first decade uh it's better to think of a public address as an invoice so you so you don't send it to the same or two different people the same invoice to two different people uh just sort of the the mental uh framing of bitcoin addresses more as invoices than than uh static wallets that you send money to or tip jars that you send money to um just a random thought that popped in my head yeah i mean i think you know well first of all hd wallets did a uh really good job at discouraging address reuse uh which is great you know i remember people used to just generate a

single key um a single address and just keep reusing it which was horrible and then the other thing is you know lightning is by default uses one-time use invoices so that should as more people use lightning that should you know kind of kind of help in education and that in that you know people visualize it more as a one-time thing hopefully yeah no but it is um no and to get a little heady here it is a perfect example of of uh how something is what we might deem as innocuous as calling these things addresses and and wallets in particular or tip jars that we think are static and then people should be sending bitcoin to um really sort of muddies the water and creates a bad sort of uh mental framework which can which

can cause setbacks i mean we saw it with the with the uh selling as bitcoin as something that you can buy coffee with at the protocol level or should be able to buy coffee with at the protocol level should be fast free and frictionless uh bitcoin was marketed as that for a while and we've learned uh that due to the limitations of the system if we want to keep it distributed uh it should not be marketed that way yeah it's none of those things and also instant instant was the other one they would couple in there um and i you know i think a lot of it also is like we need to have the right tools so people can use it properly i mean for the longest time um the go-to way to you know take donations online was to post a you know a single address a public address

and basically not only are you reusing that address but that address is forever tied to you online because you posted it online under your identity so it becomes this huge privacy hole for you that becomes very hard to clean up but now on the other hand we have stuff like btc pay server which allows you to take donations um in a trust minimized way without without involving third parties while not reusing addresses you can even take lightning uh that way so so it's pretty huge i mean look at tftc like the way we we take our donations is through btc pay we don't reuse addresses and and people can do one-time lightning invoices as well yeah no shout out btc pay it makes it really easy and it is an incredible privacy boost like

nobody knows what invoices are being uh produced except for us on that topic you were pretty you were pretty mad at bitpay this uh not btc pay you were mad at bitpay this week you want to talk about that a little bit uh yeah so actually i did i found this sort of independent uh media outlet within hong kong following the protest so i followed i think the guy who's running it i forget his name off the top of my head um but he made the world aware via twitter that uh p bit pay they were using bit pay for their uh payment processor for for accepting bitcoin transactions and bit pay froze their account as they were receiving donations from across the world so yeah that ticked me off a little bit you have uh uh a people within a

country fighting for freedom and bitcoin supposed to be this freedom enabling tool and uh you have some stupid third party that has been an enemy of bitcoin for uh for a while now uh basically giving bitcoin a bad name by shutting off uh this this outfits uh access to their money yeah i mean it's it's even worse than just shutting them off i mean they they're withholding a ton of money that they already have on the on the platform uh and not allowing them withdraw which is is super fucked up and i mean your tweet really you you hit the nail on the head i think it was fuck bit pay use btc pay server and uh you know this is why btc pay is is one of the most important projects in the space you know if they use btc pay that that can't that can't happen to

them. And I'd like to add that, you know, I mean, you say it's a bad, it's a bad advertisement for Bitcoin. You know, BitPay famously paid for, I forget which bowl game they sponsored, and they called it the Bitcoin Bowl for college football. That ad was a huge waste of money. But every day BitPay fucks over people, I think it is almost the best advertisement BitPay has given to bitcoin you know it's it's almost like every time we dunk on paypal and say this is why we bitcoin you know every every time bitpay decides to to fuck someone over you know this is why we bitcoin this is why we don't bitpay well this also brings up a a good point too because i think while we shit on bitpay a lot maybe they are proving that just like the nature of regulations

and maybe let's just play devil's advocate here maybe steven spare is uh is a true bitcoiner at heart but he he just runs a company that has to play uh within the rules of international law because of the fact that he's a he's a private company let's just say that's the fact uh and he's had to posture his company and his actions in this fashion due to trying to play ball in the traditional system um has been neutered and that sort of proves the rest of the market like all right if bitpay can be forced to cut off and freeze donations to this outfit in hong kong like btc pay server can like they nobody nicholas doria cannot freeze uh the bitcoin in my xpub keys within my btc pay server i have control of those and so that actually and we actually

talked about this with rockstar dev in dallas and when i think people when they talk about like a quote-unquote bitcoin industry i think a lot of them are thinking of and i think this is going to happen building products on top of bitcoin and stuff like that but i think maybe the first wave of the bitcoin industry is sort of expanding uh and and really accruing economic value is going to be using services like btc pay server to form fit bitcoin functionalities on traditional companies um so it's basically saying hey we have this tool btc pay server uh you have a company that needs to be bitcoinized basically and that's where a lot of industry jobs may come from a software development standpoint is developers basically making companies btc pay

server friendly yeah i mean something like it well first of all i'm going to btc pay day the I think it's the first ever BTC Pay Day on Monday in Riga. I'm super excited about that. Almost more excited than the actual conference. So that's, you know, going to be awesome. The second thing is Stephen Pear can go fuck himself. He's not a true Bitcoiner at heart. There are, yes, there's regulatory pressure on these centralized companies.

And that's why BTC Pay is such an important project. And they're doing it right. You know, it's open source. You run it yourself. You run your own BTC Pay instance yourself. But Stephen Pear has done so many things as a tax on Bitcoin. I mean, even their whole invoice system currently, I think you can only pay for it using BitPay's own wallet. You can't use other wallets to use it.

Their whole integration is broken. I mean, if you look at someone like OpenNote, who now has to implement KYC and follow U.S. FATFA regulations and stuff, they mean well. They're a centralized company. They have to comply. uh they're trying their best to service bitcoiners in the wider community as best as they can but they're hamstrung and that's why btc pay has an advantage over them um but no steven pair can go fuck himself i'm pretty pretty sure about i mean i you know i would agree i was just trying to play devil's advocate there no i i know i know i'm not calling you out i'm just i'm calling

steven pair out that's what i'm doing no that's a good it is a good way not my boy it's a good way to steal a man the fact that the open source is probably the better way um because even if you were a good bitcoiner he probably couldn't act in a way we would see fit um final topic here something i talked about earlier this morning well not in particular but was the theme of the bent this morning um we got two topics left excuse me um but we'll talk about the last topic first and then go back to the other one because the other one will end it on a good note. The ECB, European Central Bank, Draghi came out.

He cut rates, announced a new round of QE. They're negative rates. I believe it's negative 50 bps now at this point. So they've instituted NERP in Europe and they're going further below zero, it seems. And this caused the shitstorm in the White House. Trump came out basically pointing out what the ECB is doing and saying that it's not fair that that pal and the fed are not moving as quickly because the ecb

easing policy as the u.s sort of uh is a little bit more hawkish strengthens the dollar against competing currencies which is bad for exports which is not advantageous for a country in the middle of a trade war and trying to to wean themselves off the the uh the chinese economy basically uh which is trump's economic plan um and then so on top of that what i tweeted about excuse me uh wrote about this morning was charlie ballello good follow on twitter i forget where he works for but um he's got he's always got great uh macro finance and basically data tweets and there's he basically had a tweet uh there's 18 central banks around the world right now 18 to 20 all easing policy at the same time so you have like a monoculture of thought across the the

mainstream economic landscape and central banking in particular and basically what you have when you have 18 countries 18 central banks excuse me easing policy what easing policy means is they're lowering interest rates and printing money they're all actively working to devalue their currencies against each other in hopes to raise their exports uh to badden the the balance sheet of their given countries but again what i said this morning it's sort of a pyrrhic victory because yes your balance sheet may be bolstered uh on the like and it may look good on paper but you destroy the purchasing power of the people who are already working paycheck to paycheck and just getting by and creates a lot of angry people at the end of the day.

That's what I think it could lead to. So we live in some weird times. Yeah, I mean, I think something that's really worth mentioning here is that Draghi, the head of the ECB, himself said nine months ago that they were done, that they weren't going to cut rates any further. The Fed said that they were going to start raising rates. Instead, they've gone the opposite way. So these guys, you know, they say one thing, they do another thing.

They don't really even know what's going on themselves. You know, I think, like, a big takeaway here is that no one really knows what to do. They're just stuck in this super shitty situation that they created for themselves. And there was this interesting quote from Draghi. He said, negative rates will not provoke the collapse of the financial system, which is, yeah. It's telling. What are you trying to hide, bruh? Are you that worried?

Someone said on Twitter, they're like, don't believe anything unless there's an official denial. That would have been, I mean, no, again, just what I try to get through in the newsletter this morning is just use the simple heuristic of complacency and conformity of thought and monoculture of action. It hasn't been good.

Like, people thinking Hillary can never lose against Trump. People thinking housing prices can never fall before 08. Thinking that Amazon and Netflix cannot replace Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster. Like, to think that you can print yourself out of this alongside the rest of the world is just stupid in my mind. And it's complacent and the conformity of action that has presented itself because of a monoculture of sort of economic thought across the world right now is, yeah, again, this is why we Bitcoin. It's why we Bitcoin. That's basically the point I'm trying to make. Yeah, I mean, look, as rates go further and further negative, which they seem like they're inevitably going to, that's what's going to happen around the world.

you had trump call for negative rates this week like as somebody who's been following this for a while like i never thought it would happen that like he literally said we should probably go below zero uh in a tweet and to think that the president of the united states is openly calling number one that he's even like openly posturing towards the federal reserve which historically the fed it was just hilarious it's supposed to be an apolitical entity separate of the government and the politicians are supposed to have no influence over their policy like the thought of a president saying something towards the fed in a press conference let alone over twitter uh 10 years ago would would be like blasphemy but it's like it's happening every week now like trump's yelling

at pal to take the interest rates below zero it's insane and and as rates go lower they're gonna to have to restrict cash further and further because um people will pull their cash out of the banks and they will either put it under their mattress or put it in a warehouse with guards and whatnot so um you know bitcoin fixes this right it does and this is why we bitcoin and but again like we we talked about it last week and that's another thing like it happens gradually then suddenly i'm not saying i'm not trying to call uh I'm not trying to call an imminent crisis or anything, but I think just use Argentina as a good example.

We talked about it last week. They had a crazy devaluation after an opposition party unexpectedly won an election. Their currency got cut in half overnight, and then the government then instituted capital controls, And so they can only move $10,000 worth of pesos in the U.S. dollars a month, I'm pretty sure, right now. And that's why we always say it here. You got to get Bitcoin before you need it.

Because it seems like people who need it the most are being constricted from getting access to it. Absolutely. Be prepared and be aware. Be aware. All right. Ended on the good note. Is it a good note, though? Well, I mean, it's a good note that he's shilling Bitcoin on his Twitter and on interviews and stuff.

We'll take that. Yes. So Spencer Dinwiddie of the Brooklyn Nets. You have the New Jersey Nets, Matt, in the notes. You got to correct that. You got to get with the times. I know they were the New Jersey Nets for a while. They are now the Brooklyn Nets.

Oops. So, yes, Spencer Dinwiddie. He's a Bitcoiner. He tweeted out last night, cash tag BTC, and it came out he's tokenizing his $34 million contract extension. This came out of The Athletic. So it looks like he's trying to tokenize his future earnings and share them with token holders. How do we feel about this, Matthew? Yeah, do you remember Phanteks?

fantex.com had a similar concept but with like no blockchain involved um no token involved yeah i mean you refresh my memory before we uh record it yeah yeah so basically he's he's tokenizing future revenue uh so that people can then so he can get the money right up front from investors and then people um are speculating you know on on getting more revenue than is currently uh secured is my is my understanding that's at least how fantex worked so the way fantex worked was if you if you bought a stake in someone and then you know they they finished their nfl contract and they signed a new contract you you had rights to that new contract and even if they became like an announcer or something or like a car wash spokesman you got

a portion of that as well um which is you know i as far as you know these tokens are censorship resistant there's no um yeah it's nothing like bitcoin uh there there's there's a use case there you know i i personally i think it could be kind of interesting you know with like college athletes and stuff who aren't allowed to get paid and then people are like how how much should they get paid you know you know do you pay a volleyball player the same as like a star a star football player and if you do some kind of like free market tokenization there the market can decide how much their future revenue could be worth right and and the player gets the advantage of like 10 percent of their of their revenue they could get some of that ahead

of time you know with Phanteks I don't know how Spencer's doing it but with Phanteks it was it was never the full it was never the full amount they would take like a portion you know 10 percent future revenue and they would tokenize that that that portion I've been interested to learn if the token holders get access to investment returns from investments he would make uh with that upfront cash like what do we took that upfront cash bought bitcoin would they have uh would they have a rip of his his profit on that investment i mean the way fantex had it set up it was just everything you know like if he if he became like a lawyer afterwards he would get a portion of that salary i'm not sure how this is set up it's

behind a paywall so i don't really know the full details and he just announced it so i have a feeling that the full details aren't really out yet uh you know so maybe we'll come back to it i i do think this kind of goes to our i want to see i want to see nba players versus nfl players who can stack the most sats uh so maybe we'll get some friendly rivalry between uh him and and russ russ okung yeah no if again we talked about her earlier in the episode too with uh watford getting bitcoin on the sleeve slowly but surely bitcoin is seeping itself into the pop culture and i mean at least here in america uh sports are sports are right up there with with uh music artists and and uh movie stars as uh kings of culture so to see the kings of culture getting

into the bitcoin game uh is is awesome so i think we have a little surprise to let the freaks know about huh yeah speaking of culture um there's a way that you can expand the free culture we got two t-shirts that were dropping uh a sub freaks t-shirt similar to the hat black on white uh embroidered sub freaks on the left breast uh and a stacking sats shirt we finally got a stacking stats sorry it took us so long we wanted to do it right we wanted to be careful of your op sex so we try to make it as low-key as possible matt has been chomping at the bit to get the stacking stats shirt out how does it feel to finally launch it i've been just poking you like every day for like the last couple of weeks uh yeah well i had to i had to make sure the quality was good i had

to make sure so the other thing is this is in uh in uh an effort to make it as seamless as possible and as the least amount of energy to make it so I don't have to ship shirts one by one to everybody. I partnered with a processing company, so I'm not going to be able to write personal letters to everybody. But I did want to make sure the quality of the product was good, so that's why we delayed a little bit. It took a few days for the shirts to arrive. I'm wearing the Subfree shirt now. it's extremely comfortable very fits very well to my size i'm an excel it's a perfect excel shirt for me um yeah i mean it looks great quality's good looks great from over here so we're we can

pull the trigger so we're pulling the trigger trigger has been pulled i mean it also took us it took us a fucking long time to nail down the design of the stacking sad shirt uh we really don't want to ruin your opsec so much of this so much of this bitcoin merch is just it's like absolutely horrible for your opsec. I, you know, I, I see people coming to this conference in Riga and, you know, they're on the plane, they're, they're wearing all their Bitcoin merch. Like you're just screaming to everyone, like, look at me, I own a ton of Bitcoin, uh, or I own Bitcoin, not even, you know, maybe not a ton, but people always assume you own more than you do anyway. Um, so I, I really do think that if someone looks at this shirt, they won't know it has,

if they're, if they're not a Bitcoiner, they will not know it has anything to do with Bitcoin. And if they are a Bitcoiner, they will absolutely know that it has to do with stacking sats. So it's super exciting. I'm just excited to finally get it out there to the freaks. And it's just a great way to contribute to the pod while also looking fresh. Yeah. No, we aim for quality and good aesthetics here at TFTC and OPSEC. We talk about it a lot.

But yeah, so you'll see the design. It's a Honey Badger stacking sats. And you'll see it. I think you guys are going to enjoy it. And yeah, if you like the podcast and you want to contribute, this is a great way to do so. And we're giving,

the freaks who listen to this podcast in a timely fashion are going to get, you know, they have a little bit of a heads up here. We're not going to publicly announce on Twitter for a couple of hours after the pod. So thanks for listening on time. Yeah, thank you. We're going to, yeah, so go to tftc.io slash merch.

That's where you can purchase these. And if you want to pay in Bitcoin, it it's not uh obvious right away via the the shopify extension we had to to uh sort of create a a plug-in to to make it work with shopify so you have to go to other payment options if you want to pay with bitcoin uh so if you want to do so that way you certainly can if not paypal credit card whatever is accepted as well and that that's both on chain and lightning correct yes yes pretty positive i think the lightning is also a little bit hidden you have to like click the tab it like defaults to on chain so if you want to pay with lightning just

click the tab and it should switch over yep so yeah um we're fucking pumped to finally get this out this has been uh a process we've been working on the design and getting the shipping set up so again this is a ragtag team this is just us uh behind our desk in brooklyn trying to trying to build this up for you freaks and uh i think you guys are going to like the shirts so go check it out and we have a lot more coming as well so uh stay tuned and and also marty marty like kind of mentioned at the beginning of the pod when he like pulled up the price and the block height but uh we just pushed live a change to the site that that has you know live stats uh scrolling on the top of the site so let us know how what you think of that you know if you think that there

should be anything else up there marty do we add do we add price per sats yet so you know sats per dollar sats percent yet yes we got a lot of great feedback earlier this week dj and i have sidebar dj is uh the developer is working with me on the site and um he he can only work on weekends this weekend yeah he's going to push uh i think we're going to have a countdown to the happening uh either cent per set or dollar per set or maybe dime per set just for the dime bag um to stay on brand there um and uh we're gonna fix the home page as well it's not gonna be the letter that i wrote six months ago uh it's gonna have all of our content in sort of layered fashion uh newsletter podcast youtube uh nothing nothing revolutionary but uh i do like the ticker

ticker has been great for me this week it's actually cool to watch the the hash rate oscillate uh via the ticker over over the course of a day um it's it's it really uh sort of drives the amount of computing power entering and leaving the market at any point in the day that's actually i'm glad you said uh the hash rate thing because that would have been one of the topics that i was like oh shit we should have talked about uh the hash rate continues to hit all time highs um and you know through through some what we've heard uh on you know through side channels and stuff is that it's it's mostly due to new hardware that's being deployed uh you know more efficient chips so it's just you know really good to see just the the bitcoin network getting

stronger and stronger every day more investment coming in to secure it yeah we i think we touched on it last week or a couple weeks ago the what's miners uh the m i believe the m20 series of the m5 series i forget um m20s maybe uh they started shipping last month and going online this month and hash rate like it hit hit over 100x a hash at some point earlier this week and so that means it's it's gone up like two and a half x since the beginning of the year which is pretty crazy but specifically since then you know we've talked to a couple people i don't think we can say any specifics but uh there's a there's a quite large company that is deploying a lot of new hardware um yes right so so so we do have like a soft confirmation there that uh it seems like i mean

most of this bump is is is that new hardware coming online so that's awesome to see yeah it is awesome to see um yeah we're gonna keep trucking week and week week in a week out dude we might be approaching our year anniversary rabbit hole recap i gotta go back and look when the first one was let me see let me see if i can pull it up real quick it's beautiful i'm looking forward to our anniversary marty um podcast husband who's calling us podcast husbands i'm i'm calling i'm calling you my podcast husband that was that was my wording feel free to put me a new one on that let me figure this out when was our first rabbit hole recap but literally one of the first things people say to me is they're like where's barbie it's like i'm the we miss we've missed our

anniversary but we missed our anniversary by like three weeks it was august 22nd are you kidding me you didn't even get me anything but i got no gifts i you didn't even get the stacking sat shirt in before the anniversary happy anniversary man time flies yeah um all right i think this is a perfect place to end it if you guys are liking the shit and want us to have more anniversaries in the future please subscribe leave a review uh go buy some merch let us know what you're thinking um matt you got any uh parting words from riga stay humble stack sats be a good person peace and love freaks