TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.10.07

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Real Vision upcoming show with Saif - Coldcard adds offline address explorer with new update thanks to @hodlwave https://blog.coinkite.com/address-explorer/ - Zap Android app update https://twitter.com/ln_zap/status/1181618068096724994?s=20 - Upcoming Zap desktop update to include node pubkey signing https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-588/ - New KYCP update - kycp.org - https://mempool.observer/monitor/ by @0xB10C - Nodl Samourai announced - https://shop.nodl.it/en/home/38-nodl-samourai-edition.html - Casa Node 2 announced - https://blog.keys.casa/announcing-casa-node-2/ - ACINQ raises $8M in series A - https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/acinq-startup-behind-eclair-lightning-implementation-raises-8m - Tor removes ~800 old relays - https://www.zdnet.com/article/tor-project-removes-13-5-of-current-servers-for-running-eol-versions/ - Adobe and others cut off Venezuelan users from cloud services - https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20904030/adobe-venezuela-photoshop-behance-us-sanctions - Multiple corporations bend the knee to China - https://ibb.co/album/eSSKDv - Hong Kong Free Press switches to BTCPay - https://twitter.com/HongKongFP/status/1182196845511987200?s=20 - City of Miami to vote on 30 year contract for cameras and flood sensors on light poles to private company with no data protection https://twitter.com/TooMuchMe/status/1181947359753904130?s=20 - Surveillance partnerships with Amazon's Ring door cameras -https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2019-10-07-open-letter-calling-on-elected-officials-to-stop/ - Bitcoin2020 tickets for $50, Szabo is keynote - https://www.bitcoin2020conference.com/ Cash App. 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 to check out their collaborative custody and loan products as well as their open source contributions. 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. Casa. Use promo code “TFTC” to get up to $250 off your Casa membership … or hit their team up [e-mail] for a free demo, or to put them to the test with your hardest OpSec questions! Check out www.youtube.com/tftc21

What is up freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here. Coming to you from Charleston, South Carolina. Matt and I are away from each other yet again. We had a couple weeks there. Were we together? A couple or just one? I think two. Well, we had one with the new mics at least. And next week we'll be reunited again. We will be reunited. We'll be back on the good mics. um yeah big week big list this week uh let's jump right into it this week's episode of rabbit hole recaps brought to you by the cash app you'll know all about them use the code stacking sats when you

download the cash app you're gonna get five dollars five dollars gonna go to alice across and you get all their uh the beauty of the cash app you get to buy and sell bitcoin you get the stack sats you can send sats from the app to your personal wallet from a personal wallet to the app and then you get their boost program uh you get a specialized boost card it's accepted anywhere visas accepted uh you go use it at partner merchants and you save money use the code stacking sats get that five dollars download the cash app today this episode's also also alto this episode's alto this episode's also brought to you by unchained capital we talk a lot about multi-sig security and unchained offers multi-sig vaults for both individuals and

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Go to unchained-capital.com. That's unchained-capital.com. Halfway there, freaks. This episode's also brought to you by bullbitcoin.com. You Canadian freaks out there, if you're looking to stack sats, bull bitcoin is there for you and it's got a beast team as well uh they're you can set it up with uh the many different wiring systems in canada they're going to coin join your coins for you

so they're working on your privacy and then on top of that there will never be any shit coins on bull bitcoin they're a bitcoin only company focused on building out infrastructure so that bitcoiners can take over the world uh if you are not in canada and you cannot use bull bitcoin to stack stats in your native country do not fret you can go to bitcoinoutlet.com and get some of their swick their swick their swick swag their sick swag okay bullbitcoin.com if you're in canada go check them out if you're out of canada bitcoinoutlet.com last but not least we got our friends at casa uh you probably have heard all about them this week they dropped their casa node two which is a big upgrade i believe it's a raspberry pi 4 with one terabyte ssd um it's

got four gigabytes of ram is that correct matt we're going to talk about this in the episode but yes it looks pretty dope yes well beyond the node uh how confident are you in your key security what keeps you up at night our friends at casa have drummed out one of the smartest and most secure ways to hodl your bitcoin no kyc no all coins no fees on your bitcoin no one standing between you and your keys uh so get that peace of mind for your stash with the world's one of the world's most secure multi-sigs use the promo code tftc to get up to 250 off your casa membership or hit their team up directly at membership at team.casa for a free demo or put them to the test with your hardest upset questions as well you can ask them whatever you want so if you want

to email them membership at team.casa if you want to check out their website keys.casa slash key master if you want to check out their multi-sig stuff matt what the hell is going on in brooklyn what am i missing today is it raining still congrats on that ad read well done it's never it's never easy in the morning um two things to rip off that ad read uh the the first thing is you know a lot of people say it's hard to be a bitcoin only company but meanwhile we found four fucking awesome bitcoin only companies to sponsor this podcast so it's not that difficult guys um the second thing is you had a, you misspoke and you said all two instead of also,

um, I forgot Alto. Yeah. I forgot to bring them up, but Alto dot financial is coming out really soon. And that looks pretty promising. So I, it rung a bell when you said,

let's start out with that. That actually did ring a bell in my head too. I think subconsciously I've had Alto found financial on my mind. Uh, Alex last name Leishman, right? Um, I'm not sure.

he runs ssf bitcoin devs right yeah i met him in regal last year really good dude um so this is a one-stop uh bitcoin shop for your higher end bitcoiner if you will like somebody wants to buy more bitcoin and custody it in one spot with like a white glove service is that correct but they also support self-custody yes it's like what coinbase used to be it's going to be like it seems like it's going to be bitcoin only reoccurring buys so you can easily stack sets lightning network support self-custody or they can custody for you yeah and these guys are on twitter too so if you want to check them out at alto financial on twitter yeah that's alto.financial is their website anyway they're coming soon and you can join their uh like waiting list so just

something to keep an eye on yeah totally um what else do we got here again we got a packed list a lot going on this week dude let's start let's give them the price let's give it what's what's the current price current price according to the tftc.io ticker is waiting for a refresh waiting for a refresh refreshed it is currently eight thousand five hundred forty dollars and forty cents a little bump yesterday right yeah we got a nice little pump the current block height is 598 764 bang bang getting closer only a thousand all right here comes some marty math 1236 blocks until we get to block 200 or excuse me 600 000 it's coming it's coming quick boys but hey we got some lady listeners too it's coming quick freaks yeah boys is more of a metaphor

Uh, so, uh, you recorded with safe yesterday for real vision, huh? I did. That was an experience. It was fun. Uh, yeah. So after I interviewed Ralph a few weeks ago, we had, uh, we chatted for a while after our conversation, a recorded conversation, and he, uh, made me abreast of the fact that real vision is doing a gold verse Bitcoin, what will save you a series and, uh, asked if I

knew anybody that would be good for uh the series and obviously safe was the first person to come to my mind and they didn't have him book yet and i said yo i can reach out to safe and we can talk about the differences between the gold standard and the bitcoin standard and rao was very receptive to that and invited us to and invited me to conduct an interview with safe on his uh platform so i was very gracious for that um safe and i had an incredible conversation i think that's going to be some great uh fodder for the traditional finance world a great introduction to bitcoin for them and then on top of that i also recorded an episode for tftc with safe that will be up next week uh it wasn't too much overlap with our real vision real vision conversation more talking about

his new website his course um his thoughts on academia and a bunch of other things awesome i've only heard good things about the course uh i mean it's just fucking badass that you that you uh recorded for real vision i've been a subscriber since they started and uh it's kind of unreal yeah that was not i mean it was unreal for me i've same i've been a subscriber for a while now too and just a huge fan of their content and i think uh for financial focus content in today's day and age they are uh at the top of my list just the the long form conversations are are the best type of content to have right and you get five minute blurbs on cnbc you can't really dive into topics and get really good uh you can't get a really good lay of the land yeah i mean i

think the i love the idea of the yearly subscription too you know i just feel like it aligns the incentives really well it's like here you know you're paying for the content you're the customer we're gonna do everything to to help you understand things better yeah and it's only 180 a year so that's like 50 cents a day less than that um so if you're looking to get into it and you have 180 bucks to spare if you want some quality uh financial journalism or coverage i would check out real vision and then yeah if you guys are real vision subscribers uh safe and my interview is safe should be out either next week or the week after I imagine that would be one of the first release

because we did a pretty thorough coverage of the gold standard and the Bitcoin standard. I'm going to be like a proud mom watching you on video. I'm going to be a nervous wreck. I probably have my fat face, like, cleanly shaven. We got stuck in the rain before we started recording, so I was, like, a little wet and, like, frazzled. I love it.

Yeah. No, it was a lot of fun, though. So, on to Bitcoin news. you saw the bitcoin news well before we even get to bitcoin i think like the biggest story this week is like the china stuff like china and the nba and all that stuff i want to talk about that now i wanted to i figured we start on a positive note there's actually been a lot of big bitcoin developments so we stay happy we stay happy then we go to like why we're actually fighting this fight i like that let's do that okay so let's start with the cold card update

um we love the cold card here at tftc we have the guide up on our our youtube channel um the the biggest issue with the cold card up until this point uh like really the only glaring issue was that uh it was you couldn't verify receiving addresses on the cold card screen uh if you use the sd card to shuttle your transactions with psbt partially signed bitcoin transactions now you can so and that's important because if your computer is compromised that you're using to view the receive address then the receive address can be changed but if you view it on the device um you know it's you're viewing it offline you know through this secure element on the cold card uh so that's really fucking dope and that was made possible by at hodlwave

uh so shout out to him because it's a really it's a really slick implementation you could either view it on the screen or you can load it on load the addresses into a txt file on the sd card and view it on your computer yeah it's uh again shout out to hodlwave uh they announced that he made this pr like a couple weeks ago right so this is a pretty quick turnaround yeah it's fucking fantastic yeah and so like a other um a few minor changes for very specific multi-sig situations that also come with this update and improves error message that is shown when depth of your xpub of multi-sig cosigner conflicts with path details provided in psbt or usb show address and then when you don't know the derivation pass for a multi-sig wallet or when

all do not share common path prefix it's not going to show anything so lead to less confusion hopefully one of the cool things about this implementation is so depending on you know what software you're using your cold card with it uses like different derivation paths so the way the user-friendly way that cold card handles that for the address explorer is when you first go to open it it asks you which address is the first address that was shown so like not only you're confirming that address you're using that address to to basically state the derivation path which i thought was pretty fucking slick yeah it's pretty creative um and then more good more big bitcoin news or good bitcoin news i don't know how big it is but i thought it was pretty

big i wrote about it this morning in the bent uh you have the there's a new zap android app update available right now with some really cool features but they're also um releasing a desktop update later this week uh first off the android update comes with full channel management invoice expiry option setting improved qr code scanning italian translation for all you italian freaks out there bug fixes uh so the android app's just getting better and then zach announced zach i can't speak today jack announced yesterday that zap will um the desktop app will allow you to sign and verify messages from the app, which is pretty cool.

It may be a quote-unquote primitive for identity and reputation systems on the Lightning network. It's obviously not fully fleshed out yet, but you can see how this may be a building block towards building a reputation-like market between Lightning nodes. Yeah, basically every Lightning node

is a public key, private key pair, so you can sign messages with those keys to prove that you own the node. So we can tie reputation to individual nodes. It's very intriguing. I'm excited about the prospects of this. Especially, I mean, people should be running their nodes through Tor

so it doesn't tie you to an IP address at the same time. The Zap Android app update, I know you don't have an Android phone, so you're not as excited as I am. but it finally brings us up to feature parity with the iOS app. So for the longest time, the Zap Android app, you couldn't even manage channels. You couldn't add channels.

You couldn't remove channels. It was just like a watch or wallet. You can just view. So this is really big for us Android users. Welcome to the club. We're glad to have you. It's a lot of fun. zap was the first time ios people had a app superiority over android bitcoin users so

glad to see that getting minimized again if you uh i was using my zap ios app this morning checking our channel someone opened up a channel with us thinking about reciprocating it and following all the invoices we're getting it's again we talked i believe we talked about this with american hodl on monday um but it is crazy seeing how how many lightning transactions people are using over on-chain transactions for our contribute page like even the 50 45 the 50 shout out contributions like people buying a bottle of whiskey for 45 most of them are paying in lightning now which is pretty crazy to see yeah i just i i i much prefer the flow of a lightning payment than a traditional on-chain bitcoin transaction so whenever possible i'd

prefer to pay that way yeah and again that's the lightning network is still in its nation stage it's almost what 24 months old um yeah it's still very young super young two-year birthday and again like yeah it had it has bugs and it's a little finicky at times but it does seem to be improving pretty constantly um over time and and teams like zap are are doing incredible things to just push the envelope push the ball forward and for his mount for the amount of shit that the lightning network gets from a lot of people um you wouldn't know by the developments that are that are happening on it yeah i mean it's beaten all my expectations so far so constantly surprised yeah and then um staying in line with the privacy tip here uh really cool um

tool that i found earlier this week uh did the guys from samurai build this or did somebody just take oxt.me and build this uh no the samurai guys built this kycp.org it's been out for a couple months a month and a half two months but they just updated it and improved it made it even better yeah and it's uh basically an explorer where you can use to uh basically audit your utxo privacy and do a chain analysis on your own utxos essentially to see how how linked your utxos are in the blockchain and the degree of anonymity you may have at any given point in time um yeah exactly so i thought the name was clever to uh know your coin privacy kycp uh so it's a play on kyc and it's a nice acronym uh and the other thing just to keep in mind is if you are doing

it to view your um transactions you should at least use a vpn if if not tor and if you use tor you can keep switching identities which is a good idea if you're gonna look up multiple transactions um just in case any kind of log is going on or anything like that yeah and luckily for you freaks the uh team at samurai has checked all the boxes and they have that warning uh right by the the bar which you would put your transaction id in so they're they're trying to make you aware that you should use tor vpn switch identically frequently for your privacy it is a bit of a hassle but it's worth it right exactly and it kind of reminds me of what we were talking to janine about um where it's it's great to see more tools that allow us to analyze the chain um instead what

she said chain analysis versus chain surveillance or what was it chain uh but chain analytics first chance yeah maybe that's what it was she made a distinction and and that's that's what tools like this provide us so it's i think it's really important for people to be able to actually look at their transactions um and and see what kind of information they're leaking you know how they're connected to each other and it'll make all bitcoin users um better bitcoin users yeah um so go check that out kycp.org shout out to the samurai team for putting that together it's a really cool resource check out your privacy check out your utx is this next tool i'm pretty excited about um i met this guy at bit devs i think he was

i think he might have been chain code residency uh his his twitter tag is at zero x b one zero c and he just came out with a new tool uh mempool dot observer uh it's really fucking badass it basically it's monitoring all transactions and showing you uh the time um it gets broadcasted to the nodes and their the fee rate yeah it's a pretty cool visualization um the best mempool visualizer i've seen to date at least it's got a very um very granular um filtering too if you want to filter between segwit spends It's replaced by fee transactions, multi-sig transactions, BIP69, whatever it may be. You can sort of filter that out.

And just scrolling across the chart, just seeing where the average fees fall based on how red the chart is and being able to look at individual transactions is really cool. So, yeah, shout out to 0xB10C on Twitter. and uh beat b10c.me if you want to go check out his website and then uh you can also see yeah go on you should also shout out the name of the website it's mempool.observer yeah i think i did earlier but either way um i it's also interesting when you look at it you can see that there's certain wallets and services that use hard-coded fees because there's like thick lines on round numbers.

I see it on 30 sats per byte, 80, 70, 20, which is interesting. Like round number, if you're using, if your wallet or service is actually using a fee estimator, it should not really ever hit round numbers like that. Yeah, no, that is funny. You can see that pretty clearly too on the chart. But yeah, so go check it out, mempool.observer.

Do you think these visualizations help with understanding how to transact better? Do you think this will lead to better transacting on the network? Is this a site that you would go check before transacting? Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, people are visual people, right? So seeing, you know, readouts in a command line don't really do it justice. but actually seeing the data nicely visually presented makes it very clear for people where they stand how they're using the network how other people are using the network you know

he has another tool there that lets you actually you know see view the current mempool or view his current mempool because everyone technically has a different slightly different mempool and you could actually put in your transaction and you can see where you rank among the the fee rates of other people live what they're paying and what what they're you know of transactions that are in the mempool so stuff like that i mean will make us all uh more efficient bitcoin users right and especially especially when wallets support the easy ability to boost transaction fees and stuff like that people feel more comfortable paying low fees because it won't be the end of the world they can easily just boost it after the fact yeah um so dope tool

is being created dope stuff coming out and we're not even done we're not even halfway through the dopeness of this week in bitcoin uh hardware and software developments we got two new nodes on the market as well so noddle uh the noddle and samurai collab has finally hit the market um so their their new red provably faster uh node is uh is out um a little bit of consternation with the price point it's 849 but as matt will tell you it is probably justified due to the hardware so if you want to jump into the hardware specs i can explain i'm super excited about both these nodes uh we've got the casa node 2 and we have the noddle samurai addiction i can safely recommend both of them uh very very happy they both have major spec bumps compared to their previous models um the samurai

noddle has is going to have dojo fully out of the box which is samurais um the way samurai interacts with a full node so you're able to just run you're just able to plug in your noddle dojo's running you compare it to your phone with samurai app on it and you'll be able to just do mobile mixing on the fly from your phone super easy so they're giving you a full stack there that's just really easy to use but powerful and as as with previous noddles you you get all the the other features they have such as electro max support you get lightning support you get btc pay support and what's really cool about the noddle is they they went with a rock pie chip cpu so it's a six core cpu that's neither they used to use a rock 64 the casa is using a raspberry pi this is

a different chip even though it's called a rock pie so it's a little bit confusing but it's six cores four gigs of ram and what's really fucking cool i think is that it has two one terabyte ssds on it so so it's they're running in a in a raid uh formation so so they're constantly backing up each other you do an update or something one of the drives fails you have all your channels you have everything is already backed up in the device um you know if there's some other kind of unforeseen error or something like that you you got that redundant drive so i think that's fucking huge um the casa note 2 they've upgraded from the raspi 3 to the raspi 4 which is way more powerful and they switched from that spinning disc that they had a regular hard drive on the last one

to a full one terabyte ssd so this thing's going to be a powerhouse compared to the previous casa note and the price points are both very good price points you have the 850 for the noddle which is like more for a power user and then with the casa i think it's a 400 after this like pre-order phase it's going to be 400 and if you have a subscription uh you get it included if you have one of their key master uh subscriptions and all current subscribers uh to the to the higher plans uh to the platinum and diamond plans are going to get this this new casa node for free shipped to them um which is really badass and they also included btc pay support which is fucking dope so on both sides we have nodes that are full stack experiences where you're able to

plug in the node you know you're just a regular user you plug in the node at home it syncs and then you're able to pair it up with the individual apps whether that's a samurai app or whether that's a sats app on casa um and and receive and send transactions to your own node which is pretty fucking badass i think no it's incredibly badass and again uh that seems to be the theme this week is slow and steady progress uh in bitcoin on both the software and hardware uh sides so yeah both these nodes i like the redundancy of the the two drives that the noddle uh samurai collab has that redundancy is huge for for businesses and stuff like that and then kasa yeah um upgrading and integrating btc pay it's just the the explosion of functionality and ability that you

can utility that you can leverage off these devices is is growing exponentially in my mind and that's the crazy thing like once you freaks out there don't run full nodes yet or haven't run full nodes it doesn't even need to be a dedicated hardware device that's the most calming thing uh in the bitcoin world for me over the last six months is just seeing how once you have this stuff set up like we've been running our node and our btc pay server for our site pretty much non-stop without any hiccups other than like one update one or two updates i believe um that we had to do pretty quickly but other than that just it's been set it and forget it which has been incredible yeah and i mean our noddle is one of the largest routing nodes on the network

and that's been running since january-ish i think uh without a problem through tor i mean people are are rightfully concerned that routing nodes on the Lightning network might become more centralized. But I think things like both these nodes are powerful enough to run a high-performance routing node through Tor anonymously. So I don't really think it'll be that much of an issue because we will have that. We'll have the capability that any normal person,

whether they're running it on their own hardware or whether they're running it on one of these purpose-built nodes, can can have a high performance lightning node and help and help routing on the network yeah it's um slowly but surely freaks is happening we're gonna wake up one day and bitcoin's just gonna have taken over the world and that's again i talked about this before on the podcast but i think a lot of the the alt coiners and the people trying to build the world are really approaching the the uh the space in the wrong way and a lot of people think a lot of money and innovation is going to be made from protocols but i really think it's just going to be

a big push to form fit uh existing businesses and business models with bitcoin functionality and things like these nodes and btc pay server really make that a lot easier and i think that where maybe where a lot of the money to be made in the future is especially if you um aren't technical and building on these protocols you can certainly learn how to leverage these systems and help other people uh again form fit their businesses to be bitcoin compatible and then the all right good news keeps rolling async uh which is a startup behind uh the eclair wallet which is a lightning wallet uh different implementation than lnd uh they just got an eight million dollar raise um who was part of that raise yeah the third largest implementation of

lightning you know you have lnd you have c lightning by blockstream and then you have async uh and their implementation is a mobile mobile first implementation and uh they use it to run their their mobile wallet eclair which is a great mobile wallet i think it runs it runs a full lightning node on your phone i think it's android only right now but i'm not positive on that um But either way, they raised $8 million in their Series A, which is huge. And seeing raises like that for integral Bitcoin companies is always a good sign. Yeah. Shout out to the Async team.

Congrats on your raise. And looking forward to seeing what you guys do with that money, what you build, and what we can play with. This story's got Matt O'Dell all over it. Tor removes about 800 old relays. About 5,200 updated nodes. So they removed about 800 old relay nodes and about 5,200 updated nodes remain. Correct. I'm assuming this is a good story.

So it's about 13.5% of the old relays have been removed. The majority of them were middle relays, which go in between different Tor relays. And then a few of them were actually exit relays, which allow you to connect to the wider internet. um yeah i mean i don't know if it's it's good news in that in that the old the old tor software was you know had a bunch of issues in it so they want to remove it for you know privacy and security reasons um i thought it was particularly interesting because you know you have this large distributed project that needs to update and they've discovered that a lot of people running nodes are just you know they're running it on some server somewhere and they forget about it

and they don't update it and they don't pay attention to any um you know they they try to reach out to as many node operators as possible telling them to upgrade originally it was like 1300 were too old uh and now it was only 800 when they actually they haven't actually even done the update yet they blacklisted them from their like semi-centralized name servers uh so like that that's always been a complaint that a lot of people have had with Tor is that there are some aspects there that are, are pretty centralized and you're kind of relying on Tor to act in good faith. But I just, you know, I, I, from a Bitcoiner's perspective, I thought it was interesting, uh, how they're handling this upgrade where they blacklist the old nodes

that are going to be incompatible. And then, um, hopefully that'll encourage some of those people to update and then in a month or so they're going to actually push the update that will um like hard code the you know that won't be compatible with with the older with the older nodes anyway i mean around 87 of the nodes being updated up to date seems like a pretty pretty strong network no no i agree absolutely agree i think it's definitely you know overall it's a positive news um and it's a good time to remind you guys that uh if you feel so inclined you should run a tor relay as long as it's a middle relay you shouldn't have any issues legally speaking the exit relays have a lot more issues because some countries will hold you liable for

what comes out of your exit relay even though it wasn't your traffic so go run a tor relay guys it helps bitcoin and it helps it helps free speech around around the world do your part do your part um here's where we take a a negative turn in this week's episode um here's where we get to civil liberties and civil rights and the right to free speech and and freedom of association and movement we're going to start with adobe uh so adobe and other software providers have cut off venezuelan users from cloud services due to u.s sanctions So we see corporate America being forced by the long dick of the U.S. government to cut off Venezuelans from designing services, which is pretty ridiculous in my mind. Yeah, I mean, and this is particularly fucked up because Adobe and others don't offer offline physical versions of their software anymore, right?

They pushed everyone into these subscription cloud models. And now we're seeing the negative effects of that because at the end of the day, the cloud is just someone else's computer and they can block you off. So now all these people, all these Venezuelans who have done nothing wrong are losing, you know, whether if their work is involved with using Adobe and stuff like that, all their saved work, like they have to get it all off the platform within 20 by October 28th. So short warning and they don't really have good alternatives. So it's, you know, this sucks to see. This is why this is why open source is important. This is why distributed networks are important, because at any moment, these services can be turned off from you. And that's not something we should be OK with.

Yeah, and just throwing salt on the wound of the Venezuelan situation here. I would imagine that some of the smarter individuals within Venezuela that have held off or stayed in Venezuela in a hope to rebuild the country and stuff like that, a lot of them may be designers and workers that are working for people abroad using these softwares for their livelihood. and just to have Adobe straight up cut off those people from the ability to make money given their current situation just seems like poor for it. But also we should probably note that Adobe, their hand was probably forced in this situation.

There's nothing they can do. The government probably stepped in here. Yeah, it's U.S. sanctions. They had no choice. They're a U.S. company. The solution here, though, is that we shouldn't be in a situation where American companies have the ability to shut you out.

Because they will inevitably, if there's a centralized authority, they will inevitably have to shut you out. Yes. Yes, this is becoming more and more apparent by the week as the world seems to be going crazy, dude. So, again, the next topic is the fact that multiple corporations this week have bent the knee to China. Let's just list off some names right now. so vans espn nba uh blizzard was another um so you have four huge corporations there espn even went so far as to post like an image of china with the the south china sea uh dotted line like showing that that's their territory which is very controversial it's technically not their territory

uh right now it's still supposed to be like international waters but you have all these u.s corporations the nba in particular is kicking people out of games for holding up signs that say google uger which is the the muslim minority that is being euthanized or excuse me it's being sent to concentration camps and some of them are being euthanized as well and sterilized and their organs are being sold to the highest bidder uh in countries like saudi arabia um and you have corporations like the nba kicking american citizens out of stadiums for uh exercising the right to free speech to say hey we're we stand with hong kong in america do not accept yes in america in washington dc in the capital philly too fucked up shit man right and i so you

said espn but espn's parent company is disney it's important that yes people realize disney's involved here that's very important like disney's involved and there's like especially with the movies like disney's so involved that in china has invested so much money in disney and all these in hollywood basically that you cannot say bad things about china and movies anymore like it is it is blasphemous to the investors of disney and hollywood in disney's uh recent movie doctor strange there's a tibetan monk in it and they changed it into a white woman because china disapproved yeah so you american freaks out there listen up like we have a country it's basically infiltrated our or the corporate level of has infiltrated corporations excuse me within our

country and now they are uh exerting their policy on these companies and making sure that these companies uh sort of fall in line with china's way of thinking which i think is is not uh not a good thing at all especially considering the human rights violations that china is egregiously uh guilty of did you see the south park episode i have not been waiting to watch it did you watch those guys fucking killed it as usual fucking right on point everyone should watch it uh they made it available free but and it's not behind like a subscription wall or anything it's they're not checking ip addresses so people in china can view it with vpn and whatnot which i i thought was pretty badass um look at the end of the day these companies are acting um from a

profit motive as they should uh they're you know they're being greedy as is expected and they they want access to this huge market which is china's uh billion people um what is our solution here our solution here is is to be aware as consumers be aware as citizens um you should be boycotting their products you should be supporting free open source software you should be supporting distributed networks where this is impossible in the first place um and and yeah and let's let's make their let's let's make their influence uh less relevant well we'd love to say that right but these these companies disney vans blizzard the nba are like cornerstone companies in this country are people really going to stop going like but i don't know i don't know if boycott's

going to happen i do think the uh the public is forcing the hand of these corporations to pick a side though so you have blizzard came out and they basically uh there was a player i believe on a live stream that held up a sign that said free hong kong or something like that immediately yeah and then they not only did they kick him out of the league uh and they confiscated all of his pay all of his prize winnings that he got this year but they fired the two guys who were giving the interview like the sportscasters who were giving the interview um and right now you know you don't fuck with gamers man blizzard has a huge fucking pr problem on their hand people are uninstalling the game people are protesting in all these different ways

um so i mean i do think protest works uh i i as i i think we both support free markets you know so if you support free markets like regulation doesn't solve this is what i'm saying like a lot of people are saying you know let's stop these companies from from bending the knee to china through you know let's have politicians stop them and i i wholeheartedly disagree with that like i don't think regulation solves anything here i do as well yeah no no i think but i do think yeah public maybe i'll take that back maybe protests will work because you see uh specifically what blizzard their situation you had epic games the creators is that epic the creators of uh fortnite yeah yeah they came out we're like hey you guys can talk about whatever you want on our

platform and so you have that sort of yeah all the competing ones did pretty much they all jumped on on the chance to do it. And that's why competition is important. I mean, NBA has a major fucking issue on their hands here because it seems like we're going to hit a situation. You know, the season hasn't even started yet, and it seems like we're going to hit a situation here where people are just every random NBA game,

there's going to be signs about it now. And so it should be interesting. Well, the NBA has been making a huge push into China ever since Yao Ming. Like, AI's big over in China. Harden's big. Houston Rockets in general is huge. I'm talking about, like, old NBA players.

Like, Stefan Marbury is, like, huge. He's got, like, statues in China. Yeah, he was, like, a nobody here, and then he went there, and he's, like, a Macon bank. Yeah, but apparently the Chinese are just as angry at the NBA as the Americans are at the NBA, too, because they feel like the NBA is not being loyal to them. What's the word?

where the hell was i going with this oh oh where i was going with this is so like if the chinese are mad at the nba as well and they pull out investments there's rumors that the salary cap in two years can be cut by like 15 so like all these huge contracts that are being signed right now with projections of revenue growth and salary cap rising over the next few years could be severely impacted by this this instance well i mean all their growth is in china right now they're Even this preseason, not only did they invite Chinese teams to play in America, that's what that Philly game was, that's what that D.C. game was, but we have NBA teams going to China to play.

So it really couldn't have been worse timing for them in that respect, and it should be interesting to watch it play out. Yeah, so Donald Trump, Donnie, is meeting with the Chinese officials tomorrow for another round of trade talks. we'll see how that goes i'm not holding my breath for for world peace but we'll see so on our we we talked about this i think two weeks ago but the hong kong free press uh had their bitpay account blocked um and i i think i mentioned there that like bitpay was like the the new paypal and that every time they pull one of these shenanigans where they freeze people's

funds um or block people from using the platform which in this case this is what they did they actually took their funds that they that they had already received as donations becomes an advertisement for bitcoin and for btc pay so hong kong free press has has switched to btc pay it's live now um self-hosted and you know there's no centralized company there that can block them from receiving these bitcoin donations yeah shout out to the hong kong free press for a quick uh cucking of bitpay and getting on the right right team and downloading btc pay server again this like you said the uh the slip up of the bitpays of the world the paypals of the world just acutely highlights the need for bitcoin and the power of bitcoin like i was saying earlier we

set up our btc pay server six months ago and we've just been receiving anonymous donations without a hitch no problem uh and i would also like to say like consider donating to hong kong free press i have donated um i someone on twitter mentioned that he he donates using uh bottle pay uh to like any like any journalist on the ground he sees who's recording and posting good video content from the protest support protests over there um and also consider opening a channel to their to their node so they have liquidity we already did it with the tftc node and and you should consider doing it as well help out people we're all in this together decentralized finance defy defy defy i've said for a while the only thing that's defying this

space is bitcoin okay that's true i mean the the ability to provide some random stranger on the internet with liquidity and the ability to send and receive sats sounds like decentralized finance I mean, the key part of the DeFi acronym is that, is it an acronym? The key part of DeFi is the D, you know, you need the decentralization. Otherwise, it's fucking just finance. And, you know, I think Bitcoin could be more decentralized. It's still not decentralized enough, in my opinion, but it's by far the most decentralized. So there you go. yes and we fight for we fight for decentralization because the world is going crazy and uh we have to fight against orwellian despotic laws in the modern age one of which is starting to to unfold you have the the combination of state and corporations again, this time with Amazon and police stations and their ring surveillance service.

So we talked about that probably about a month ago now at this point, but it seems that 400 police departments have signed up for this. More than 400 now. More than 400. And so there is a petition on Fight for the Future. Is it a petition or just a letter? It's an open letter to local, state, and federal officials basically saying this is probably not a good idea.

Yeah, I mean, they're basically creating these mini surveillance networks in residential neighborhoods powered by the Ring doorbell cameras. And because you have this partnership between Amazon and the police departments, Amazon is basically shilling it to the police departments. They're like, you can have this awesome surveillance network and it won't cost you that much. And then the police departments are going out and basically advertising Ring for the residents. i mean for amazon to the residents uh saying i'll make your community safer and here's a discount code uh and you end up in this really sticky situation where residents that aren't doing it even though they're not forced to their neighbors look at them like why you know why don't you want our neighborhood to be safe why are you the pariah in the neighborhood um so we're slowly seeing the

surveillance state creep forward uh especially in situations here where where our constitution you know might not allow uh this type of surveillance network to get rolled out very easily but because it's a private company doing it because it's technically private individuals installing the cameras um they're able to roll it out super quick and as we've seen with these earlier stories that we covered today is that these corporations they're centralized actors and at a switch they can be flipped to to work against the people um so we got to be very concerned you know don't install these cameras, exercise your rights, tell your local politicians you want nothing to do with this fucking shit, and support organizations that are trying to fight this in courts and try and

stop it. In addition to this, we also see the city of Miami today is voting on a 30-year contract for cameras, both regular cameras, license plate reader cameras, and flood sensors on all the light polls in miami city um and they want to give this 30-year contract as a grant to a company for free and that company in return gets full rights to all the data that they collect uh so it's a what yeah it's really it's really really fucked up and it'll probably pass today uh in miami uh so just another thing to keep in mind here um as corporations partner uh with our government to, uh, infringe on our rights and surveil us all the fucking time. Are you optimistic that we can get away from this? Is it inevitable? Like how many of your

family members have, have rings or friends? Like I know so many people that have the ring system. Really? I guess, I guess I don't have, I don't have many like friends my age who have like houses everyone you know there's a lot of people in apartments uh and i guess ring is more of something you would install in your house yeah yeah i guess philly maybe i'm missing out living up in new york a lot of a lot of people our age in philly have already bought houses and yeah i know a ton of people that have them and it is convenient like you can see when people are walking up to your door and you can talk to them and say hey get the fuck away from my door you're not supposed to be here but uh as we've seen with not even just uh outward home surveillance

systems more particularly with uh with baby monitors and stuff this stuff has been hacked many times before you have live streams of baby monitors available on the dark net so these systems are inherently not secure it's been proven throughout time and then again And couple that with the fact that all that data and information may be used against you in the future via the state is something to be aware of. Yeah, I mean, it's not promising. I do want to be an optimist about this stuff. um i i think through more education through uh this data being used against us and being used against people around the world that people will wake up and that we will have you know

more options that are open and privacy preserving uh going forward so people can get some of these features at least um without completely destroying their privacy and their sovereignty i'm worried matt i'm worried this week in particular dude it just seems like everything's going fucking nuts right now it feels like the shit is tearing at the seams are we just reading too much news are we just reading too much twitter should we walk away i uh i try and i try and you know at least with certain current events and stuff like that i try and take a step back um because, you know, fear does sell. And Bitcoin gives me hope.

So I, right now I'm optimistic and, you know, we know so many smart people that care about this shit and that are passionate. And I have faith. I mean, because look, we lose this fight, we're fucked. So, you know, you got to fight and you got to be hopeful. What does the world look like if China's surveillance state It's just exported to the whole world because that's the slow, slippery slope that we're on right now.

Like these ring bells, these Amazon rings in the future could be used to not allow you into a house party because your social credit score is pretty bad. You've known to puke at a party in the past, so this ring doorbell is going to let you in. Well, that's pretty scary when you go down that route. i i mean like and you'll see stuff like uh i think marriott just fired an employee because he like liked a tweet that was the chinese government disagreed with um so you'll see like a lot of self-censorship you'll see people move into more private circles where they discuss things uh where they're afraid to talk in public uh you know public discourse will take a hit

mass incarcerations even though we already have one of the i think we have the biggest prison population in the world that'll go up you know not good things and and this is why we bitcoin this is why you know we support free and open source software and yeah and it'll always be a fight you know i think there's a lot of progress is being made at the same exact time right so it's important to focus on the positives yes as you tweeted a couple hours ago there are few things more powerful than free speech and sound money that's what we're fighting for here freaks damn right um we're gonna end it on we're gonna end it on a happy note bitcoin 2020 last day last day to get 50 i think tomorrow's the last day and you only get it's a hundred dollars if you pay with

30 fiat and it's it's 50 if you pay with bitcoin get that 50 off fucking deal spend some step spend some sats and replenish and that's the way you should do it this isn't this is not an advertisement they didn't pay for this shit uh me and marty went last year we'll we will be there again this year uh they announced zabo is going to be nick nick is going to be a keynote speaker which is fucking huge um and i think they're going to be throwing like last conference was fantastic and i think they're going to be throwing a really great one this year probably better than the last one they're targeting 4 000 people um you know 50 is an absolute steal for a conference of this quality i hope to see more conferences offer uh accessible ticket prices

like this going forward because i think we need more of that i agree i agree um so go check that out i don't have the website right in front of it's bitcoin 2020 bitcoin 2020 conference.com yep yep bitcoin 2020 conference.com if you want to go buy those tickets those are all the topics we have you have anything you want to rip on rip on riff on why can i speak today what's going on we wanted to give a shout out to that guy who does bitcoin walking yes we do do you know thank you for reminding me yeah i have the like the forgotten topics list open right now what uh what else is on there um well i wanted to talk about taxi medallions and new york city rent regs uh just real quickly but let's give this guy a shout out yeah yeah before we do that i pulled up as a so

at bitcoin walking on twitter bruce stewart i thought he was i thought he was just some a non-bot account trolling people but he's been taking selfies recently he's just a nice man who likes to take long walks and listen to bitcoin podcasts in australia so i want to give a shout out to bruce thank you for listening i hope we're good uh good walking companions with you i love it i love that our our podcasts are helping making people more healthy you know it's uh it's good he's not the first person who said that he's not the first person who said bitcoin podcast have have increased his uh his exercise as many people fuck yes to all you freaks listening in the gym cheers to you get one more rep out you got one more rep in you you got it don't be a little

bitch so when are we going to release like the the tftc uh workout companion where we just like yell bitcoin memes and encouragement to them uh when we when we completely sell out we'll get to that i do not look forward to it um so anyway i wanted to talk about taxi medallions and new york city rent regs i've been meaning to talk about it for a while and i keep forgetting uh both new york City buildings and New York City taxi medallions were considered top tier store of value candidates in the last few years. With the medallions, they were actually relying on the government enforced monopoly. Basically, the New York City government said that there could only be so many

yellow cabs on the road and you needed this taxi medallion to be one of them. So they hit like an all-time high of like 1.1 million dollars right before uber came in and now they're they've just completely plummeted no one wants to buy them why the fuck would you buy them you could just drive for uber uh so now they're selling like in foreclosure auctions and shit like that for 120k um and then at the same time you have new york city real estate which is uh some of the most premier real estate in the world uh and is used as a store of value by by people worldwide whether they're Americans, whether they're New Yorkers, whether they're Russians, whether they're Chinese, all around the world, people use New York City real estate as a store of value. They just passed

two new laws that have completely destroyed the market here, has slashed valuations and just liquidity has dried up because no one wants to buy. And those two laws is one is a transfer tax, an increase to the existing transfer tax. So if you do sales over a million dollars, that includes condos and buildings you get charged a higher tax rate so that you know obviously put a damper on sales and then they change the rent regulations so that they make it very hard for you to evict tenants they make it very hard for you to raise rents it makes it very hard for you to put improvements into your building and get an increased rent out of it so the incentives are all fucked up and it creates this regulatory

environment where people aren't sure uh what's going to be happening in a year what's going to be happening in two years you know regardless of this whole macro landscape that seems like a complete clusterfuck in terms of the economy they now have this additional uncertainty of the local regulations uh and we see that on even a more extreme level in in places like hong kong where people have like 100 million dollar buildings uh that their valuations and the liquidity there just got slashed overnight uh as these protests continue uh so it's just something to keep in mind here that you know when you rely on your government to protect your store of value uh that shit can change in a heartbeat and uh this is this is why bitcoin is strictly superior as a store of

value yeah the government's never going to be able to tell you uh that you should do something with your bitcoin they'll never be able to take it from you they can try to tell you to do something with it but they'll never be able to change the protocol to such a way that that bastardizes the assurances that you have today hopefully those assurances will be set in stone into perpetuity that's a great rip dude yeah i've enjoyed it as usual and i look forward to uh i look forward to seeing you in person again soon good luck out there i'm excited for your uh your interview uh with uh jared uh he's got a yes yeah continue jared dillian yeah jared dillian taking a taking a trip up to myrtle beach tonight uh to sit down and record with jared dillian who's the

author of the daily dirt nap which is a financial markets and macro newsletter that goes out to a lot of traders and fund managers jared has been uh slowly but surely becoming more interested in bitcoin and more recently he's been gone as far as to say that if you don't own bitcoin you're you're an idiot i don't think he said that exactly but basically paraphrasing that um so yeah i'm gonna go have a conversation with him tonight hopefully um it'll be a good one yeah i mean his newsletter is fucking fantastic uh and it's uh it's it's been an absolute pleasure watching him turn into a bitcoiner so i'm really excited to listen to the conversation i think it should be pretty insightful yeah i feel like he's a caterpillar in a cocoon right now and i'm gonna

go have this conversation help him bloom into a beautiful butterfly and just just become a shameless bitcoin uh chill i love it i love it all right freaks that's all we got this week shout out to our sponsors uh cash app unshamed bull bitcoin casa shout out to you freaks for listening special shout out to bruce stewart for walking keep it up bro stay humble stack sets peace and love freaks