TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.11.11

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Update firmware before using coldcard SD card feature to send transactions https://blog.coinkite.com/troublesome-change/ - Unchained Capital announces Caravan multisig GUI https://www.unchained-capital.com/blog/the-caravan-arrives/ - Stratum V2 initial specs released https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/with-stratum-v2-braiins-plans-big-overhaul-in-pooled-bitcoin-mining - Unknown fund announces $75M bitcoin investment towards privacy https://www.unknown.fund/press-release - Digital Garage provides third grant to BTCPay Foundation worth $30k https://blog.btcpayserver.org/dg-grant-2019/ - Easily create regtest lightning networks with Polar https://github.com/jamaljsr/polar - Boltathon 2 online lightning conference announced Dec. 6-8 https://twitter.com/Boltathon/status/1193935341914226689?s=20 - Zap iOS 0.5.0 adds Tor support https://twitter.com/ln_zap/status/1192841623421542401?s=20 - HUT8 quarterly figures https://web.tmxmoney.com/article.php?newsid=5330196128175970&qm_symbol=HUT - Suspicion-less searches of travelers' devices rule unconstitutional https://www.eff.org/press/releases/federal-court-rules-suspicionless-searches-travelers-phones-and-laptops - Fed Chair Powell: "The federal budget is on an unsustainable path with high and rising debt." https://twitter.com/breaking911/status/1194689974387576838?s=21 Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App. 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. 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

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Ben here for Take 4. I've been messing up this intro for some reason. I got the jitters today. I think it's the Block Height jitters. I think you're stressed because I'm traveling later today. Yeah, this is true. I'm stressed because Matt's traveling. We're at Block Height, 600, 3,777. We got the Lucky 7s. We got the Lucky 7s. I should be able to do this. Okay, the current price, according to the tftc.io ticker, is waiting, waiting. And DJ listened to the podcast last week and did speed up the ticker, so we're not going to have to wait as long as we did last week.

I fucking love that. Yeah, this is how we do stand-up here, stand-up meetings here at Tales from the Crypt. We just scream at our developer from our podcast to make tweaks. DJ, thank you for listening. Current price is $8,643.39. Again, the block height is $603,777. Current hash rate is 110 exahash. And we're rolling here.

We've got a week of bullish news, a lot to talk about. First, before we get started, this episode of Tales from Recrypt is brought to you by the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. They started Cash App investing recently. I actually just got access to the stocks yesterday. And so if you want to buy a sliver, what are we? A sliver of a share. There you go, a sliver of a share.

We're stacking slivers of shares in the seashells. So you can invest. if you don't have enough money to buy a whole stock of your favorite company, buy a sliver of a share using the Cash App. You can buy as little as a dollar. And then on top of that, they still have their Bitcoin buying, obviously. So you can stack sats with the Cash App. You can send sats to a personal wallet from personal wallet to the app and all that cool stuff. The Boost program as well. Go shop at your favorite merchants with the Boost on. You're going to save money. Use the code stacking sats uh you're gonna get ten dollars off and ten dollars is gonna go to owls lacrosse

owls owls lacrosse not that dirty dirty dirty al al al he's he's a scammer all right i gotta warn you freaks about the scammer he's saying that he was my my lacrosse coach growing up that's not true at all uh al was actually the creepy dude in the parking lot that our coach has called uncle bad touch and told us to stay away from so he's been he's been he's been uh excommunicated not excommunicated he's just he's been stalking all right he's been he's he's known in the neighborhood as a as a bad actor all right well shout out to al i fucking love it so i did too um yeah al all right keep an eye on you all right that use the code stacking stats to help out al's lacrosse an incredible charity near and dear to our hearts all right hand to god it's an incredible charity

this episode is also brought to you by unchained capital unchain just dropped some great news today with their uh open sourcing their caravan project uh this is uh one of the few badass projects that their open source projects excuse me that they're working for uh working on in bitcoin uh including other projects are like slip 39 uh hermit and then they have their vault program on top of that if you want to engage in a multi-sig setup with unchained they are there to be a quorum in your multi-sig setup. So you can tap them on the shoulder, say, hey, I want to move some funds from my vaults

to this address. They're there for you. You can also move the funds by yourself at any time. And again, they're open sourcing their solution. So if you don't want Unchained in the mix, you can use their tech by yourself. We're going to talk a lot about Caravan going forward. On top of that, they have the loan side.

If you're ever in a pinch and you're thinking about selling your Bitcoin, we are friends with Bitcoiners. We do not let our Bitcoiner friends sell Bitcoin. So Unchained is giving you the ability to use your Bitcoin as collateral for U.S. dollar loans. You can set that up in a multi-sig setup where you'll have one key and your funds will never be re-hypothecated. And you can always, again, you have a key to move those funds. So check out Unchained at unchained-capital.com.

This episode of Tales from the Crypts is also brought to you by our friends at Casa, dropping great shit as well. um again another great multi-sig setup like are you guys thinking about this this is something that you should be thinking about you yourself are your biggest danger when it comes to custodying your bitcoin are you comfortable with your setup cost is also here to help you do this no kyc no all coins 100 bitcoin and they have different packages so depending on how much bitcoin you're looking to hold with them you can get into different tiers gold diamond platinum diamond platinum get 24 vip service 24 7 vip service excuse me you get a dedicated client advisor custom onboarding and opsec plan and if you want to check them out you can email them

directly at membership at team.casa email them say hey i want to learn more about your product to walk you through the product you ask them about uh your hardest opsec questions they'll answer those they want you to really get comfortable with the product before you engage with it so reach out to them at membership at team.casa if you just want to check out the deep breaths gotta breathe during this gotta breathe during this if you just want to check out the multi-sig setups they have go to keys.casa slash keymaster and if you are going to use their services use the code tftc to get up to 250 off well done i don't envy you no al if i hear you saying shit after that ad read i don't know what i'm gonna do we got a big week let's talk about

um you want to start with the cold card yeah if you guys we're big cold card fans here but pumping it uh make sure you upgrade your firmware as is tradition we like to front load uh security vulnerabilities and disclosures um this week uh it came to our attention uh shift crypto uh the makers of the bit box and upcoming bit base uh found a vulnerability in the cold card wallet But they responsibly disclosed it to the cold card team who fixed it in the two firmware updates ago. And so we linked the firmware, we linked the disclosure. Basically the idea here with this vulnerability is that if an attacker has your pub key, which

you move by SD card, it affects the SD card sends, if you're using your SD card with partially signed bitcoin transactions um if an attacker has your pub public key and they have so they have your x pub and then they are able to intercept the partially signed bitcoin transaction they can modify it so the change address goes to a different derivation path and you have to jump forward to go check and stuff like that but they can do like such an obscure derivation path that it'd be very difficult for you to ever find where it is even though you still have the private keys for those funds. And presumably the monetization here would be, then they could ransom what that derivation path is to you. So they could be like, if you want to get those Bitcoin, you have to pay us 10%

and we'll tell you what the derivation path is. So the fix that was implemented here is basically just to heavily restrict the approved derivation paths that can be chosen. And if it's outside of those paths, the cold card now shows you a warning. Yeah. Very, it's highlights the, the very nuanced nature of Bitcoin and the intricate ways in which your Bitcoin can get attacked. And the nascency of the space in general. It's just really good to see.

This is one of the benefits of open source and it's really good to see responsible disclosures like this. It's another reminder as well that you really need to keep that XPUB safe. Not only for security reasons, but for privacy reasons right so if you're if you're putting an xpub on a computer that's connected to the internet

you should pretty much operate under the assumption that someone can access that right so you have to be very careful uh and if someone does have access to that they can see all your addresses both past and future so yeah um be aware be aware update your cold card to uh not the latest well Latest firmware is recommended make sure at least pass version. I think it's three point zero point two I want to say off the top of my head That's looking that up No, so this is a yeah three point zero point two and that's yeah And that's the beauty of the cold card right because you can do all this stuff offline

Right, you just you download download the firmware Drag it to an SD card put on your cold card your cold card will verify that the signature matches up um and then it'll install the the firmware upgrade yeah um so be aware go update your firmware if you're using cold card and then um check out caravan really cool thing that we we this is fucking dope we uh we teased it in the in the ad we've been unchained friends and unchained dropped a caravan which is a multi-signature cold uh storage uh excuse me um it's multi-sig GUI that you can run with your own node or you can use it with blockstream.info's node if you don't have your own node but obviously it's better to use it with your own node and your own hardware

wallets and one of the beauties here is one of the issues we love the teams at Kasa and Unchained and they offer very user-friendly products but one of the advantages of their product offerings is that they offer a co-signer they act as a co-signer and that means they know your balances they know they know your transactions right so by using caravan you're able to do a multi-sig setup relatively easily without any third party knowing your balance and one of the nice other advantages here is that we've discussed previously how it's possible there's a there's a small attack vector with unchained and other websites that if they show you a receive address you don't know if it's been manipulated and you can verify that but it's always been more difficult to verify now with

caravan you'll be able to verify it uh offline if you if you you know so you can confirm that the address that's shown on screen is the correct address yeah so this is their uh in-house app that they built for themselves that they're open sourcing it's technically called like a dedicated multi-sig coordinator and it's made it very easy to sort of plug and play and and uh the there's a video in the blog post that we'll link to yeah i haven't tried it yet that walks you through everything but the video is sexy yeah it looks like the interface is really nice and easy to use i gotta play around with it this week it's been it's been tight yeah shout out to the team at unchained it seems like they collabed with uh with a few people as well including bitstein um

i think uh who else i was looking for drew shut up i can't find it but a bunch of people helped That is the cool thing about Bitcoin. Like these companies working to help you secure and building companies on top of Bitcoin, the incentive is there to make this stuff better. So even though these companies have financial incentives to get customers using their in-house stuff, the fact that they're open sourcing is incredible.

Yeah, they're growing the pie. They're making Bitcoin easier to use and more secure. And I just want to say that I really feel like this is going to be the year of multi-sig and I'm really excited for it. A lot of these issues we see that pertain to individual hardware wallets can be mitigated substantially if you combine them all into a multi-sig setup. The main issue there is it's really hard to set up a multi-sig securely, so this is a major step in the right direction. And then we have other stuff like Junction, Spectre coming out, which will make it even easier, so I'm pretty excited.

Yeah, I was being dead-ass serious when I said that I think this is the most bullish week in Bitcoin in a while. So going in that same vein of if you are building a business on Bitcoin, you have an incentive to make Bitcoin stronger and contribute to the feedback loop. The team that's been doing that since 2010. When did Slush launch? 2010 or 2011? The first mining pool. Yeah, their very first mining pool, Slush pool, announced today Stratum V2, the initial specs. And this is something we've been talking about for a while.

They worked with Matt Corallo for this. it's similar to better hash but different uh same concept it's a it's a mining pool protocol that big mining operations can use to connect to slush and now they have the ability to decide how block templates are created uh individual individual miners so it makes pool mining more like individual mining uh from a block template perspective yeah instead of well the first time the freaks heard about better hash was like episode 31 or something in my corolla so That was right in the early days of TFTC, too. So basically, the concept here is right now mining pool operators,

you know, we have a handful of mining pools, and there's a handful of mining pool operators that operate those pools, and miners are sending their work to those pools. But the individual miners don't get to choose which transactions go in a block, so it gives the pool operators this power over them that basically the only way the mining operators can veto how the pool operators work is to leave the pool and go somewhere else so with this with stratum v2 the actual miners will be able to choose which transactions go in the block which was the main

idea behind better hash but but stratum v2 they made a key distinction where there's an attack vector with how better hash was set up in that the individual miners might choose like invalid transactions so in this case the miners are sending a block template to like a preliminary block template to the pool operator ahead of time as soon as they start mining the block and then the pool operator can asynchronous they can just check all the different block templates at will whenever they want uh to to confirm that the miners are actually working on valid valid work yeah that was when i sat down with jan and pavel um uh and during consensus earlier this year that's that's what they said their biggest worry was that uh individual miners would not uh fine-tune

for fee collection in particular so you could have individual miners in a better hash like setup basically again uh invalid transactions is one attack or just not uh be efficient in the fee accumulation that could be altruistic and trying to um to contribute to the pool and get as many fees as possible but not uh great at it and i think stratum v2 solves that problem as well right yeah so like the first idea was they were going to just send the block template and the block template had to be approved before the miner could start mining but that would put too much burden on both the pool operators uh internet connection and uh it would delay the miners from starting to mine so it wouldn't be competitive so now the way they have it set up

is that this this block template uh can be approved at will over time and basically it's It's more of a soft, punitive measure, and it incentivizes the individual miners to act in good faith. Otherwise, they will be penalized in terms of rewards distributed. And just to be clear, this is not in operation yet. They're testing it. They want feedback. So we linked to the Bitcoin Magazine article, which does a really good job, I think, explaining it. Shout out Aaron Van Weyden.

Yeah, and then in that magazine article, there's also the actual release. yeah so on top of the the block template stuff i mean that's that's only one of the benefits right it's also helping uh become more efficient i believe the the data that will be the bandwidth that will be consumed excuse me will be cut in half uh if it's not encrypted if it's excuse me if it is encrypted it'll be cut in half if it's not encrypted it'll be cut by more than 50 percent and then uh the way this protocol is set up it'll uh it'll make it so there's less uh infrastructure sure sunk cost for for these big mining operations too they're helping uh lessen the burden for for overhead and stuff like that yeah there's a bunch of efficiency gains that are bundled in there

that are a little over my pay grade but are good to see yeah and um now again like going back to the point during the segue like if you are building on bitcoin you have a direct incentive to make this better and if this protocol proves uh to work in the wild like this is a huge upgrade again looking massive massive the pool operators are one of our biggest uh at least like short-term threats yes um and and if you were going to try and censor bitcoin transactions like that's who you would go to yeah try and pressure the pool operators yeah and again just it's the beauty of the incentive system of bitcoin like again slush has been mining since 2011 i believe they were the first uh bitcoin mining pool they've been uh some people say they're they're altruistic miners and

just have always had what they believe of bitcoin's best interests at heart and are just down for the cause too so when a lot of people talk about hypothetical mining attacks in the future and stuff like that i think people like slush are discounted in those arguments i i think like smart pool operators understand that there's well i hope that smart pool operators will understand that there's a benefit here to not having that power like you don't want to be able to be coerced in the first place no one man should have all that power i mean we obviously like people like antpool will disagree with that because they the power is a benefit to them but yeah um you know as long as we can get like a decent sizable amount of the hash over that's it's a big win

we don't need everyone it's opt-in yeah so again very bullish i think and this is like so that's something do you think there's enough hype around it like do you think people were as excited of this as they should be like or is this something that just goes underscored and it's one of those things that looks boring to people it's one of those things that you get super hyped if you've been paying attention like we've been talking about non-stop right um but it's not as glamorous it's not like a glamorous hype line yeah um i feel like more people are talking about like pornhub getting banned from paypal than strata b2 this is true this is correct exactly yeah so pornhub got uh how are they not already banned by paypal i was so surprised i was like i just

assumed that they were already banned yeah i don't know i don't know so anyway now now pornhub can't pay their uh their their actors yeah i guess their actors i didn't realize they were even paying people uh i haven't been on pornhub in a while i don't know but anyway anytime paypal blocks someone it's uh an advertisement for bitcoin yeah yeah it's true i mean that's this is why we bitcoin bitcoin enables you to receive uh money that you may not otherwise be able to receive using the traditional uh money avenues that we have in the world and as i said in the arbed out podcast um the killer use case of bitcoin is going to be vr prostitutes sex workers that's a that's too despotic it's too dystopian excuse me not despotic um i don't know if i

anyway let's stay on that for a little bit and like you just had like minor i just had minority report flashbacks uh or a flash to minority report when he's like walking through that that vr thing and they were the advertisements and stuff no that was in the train station but when he's got to meet the guy who i think hooks him up with the guy who changes his face his eyes right yeah because the ads can view your eyes yeah um which is actually a good segue when i report there's talking about it here in the u.s like facial recognition for subway station i'm not sure exactly which one but um our subway station is in new york they added it they definitely added cameras over all the turnstiles because they're trying to enforce the turnstile

jumping yeah yeah somebody actually did tweet a picture of that and uh it was pretty bad last week yeah wear your hat wear your hat the good thing about winters in new york is you can get away with wearing a face mask and people don't think you're gonna i guess at least if you're white and people don't think you're gonna rob the place yeah i don't know it's whatever i haven't noticed that too big of a difference i was on the subway this morning i mean there's cameras everywhere yeah in just in new york in general yeah we are very surveilled here i don't know how i feel about it how do you feel about it horrible do you though you don't move it's necessary evil right now wouldn't have met you if i didn't live here that's true that is the

wouldn't have meant a lot of bitcoiners if i didn't live here the love hate relationship with new york grows stronger um speaking grown stronger maybe some bitcoin developer is going to grow stronger because a 75 million dollar bitcoin development fund just apparently hopped out of the blue unknown fund it's called it's not specifically for bitcoin projects it's specific Oh, excuse me, for anonymity. Yeah, it's for privacy projects, but they're paying out in Bitcoin. Supposedly, they have $75 million. Supposedly, it's a group of 4chaners.

What's the, like, Redditors? What is it, 4chaners? Is that what we call them? 4chaners, I guess. 4chan. The power of 4chan. But supposedly, they're going to be investing up to $75 million into a bunch of different privacy projects.

Just, you know, this is fucking awesome to see. uh there is no they have not provided proof of funds uh or anything of that sort um so take it with a grain of salt but like what's the worst thing that could happen here like they don't give any money so i just really good to see yeah yeah no it's um they released a press release today on that yeah it came out of nowhere uh shout out to these to these four channels putting the team on the back 75 million dollars it's not a it's not a small amount of money one one thing that's funny is like the html header on the someone mentioned this on twitter the html header on their website says 100 million dollar donation and they were like what happened like where did the 25 million

go between drafting the website and actually publishing it's like i don't know maybe they thought about doing it at like 12k that's a good point yeah if they're paying out in bitcoin that number could grow exactly yeah so you should uh create a long roadmap at least a six month roadmap i would argue and that's 75 million dollar bounty might get a little higher um speaking of good things all around funding again very bullish week for bitcoin btc pay server announced their partnership with dg lab digital garage inc um and this is a a shop out of japan correct this is where nicola doria lives uh works um and they've been big supporters of btc pay uh he you know he's the head maintainer of the btc pay project he was the one who did the famous

tweet against bitpay said i will make you obsolete yeah um so this is their third grant uh just thirty thousand dollars fantastic to see uh they joined you know they were actually there from the beginning but you know we also have square crypto and uh async acinq contributing as well so that's just great to see everyone all the freaks know that we fucking love btc pay very very very very important project in this space um so it's fantastic to see that they're not short on funding no yeah and huge shout out to digital garage it's like a cool check out their site if you uh they link to it in the btc pay uh announcement it's again this dg lab excuse me digital garage lab out of japan it's basically just investing in good bitcoiners they support bitcoiners outside of

btc pay um and then they support people working on ai vr security biohealth and they're working on liquid too they're they're working with blockstream on i think uh a japanese yen project on uh liquid interesting what type of just do you see tether announced tether gold i did we didn't have bitfinex bitfinex announced it yeah um so tether bitfinex is the same thing Yeah, so Tether gold is coming. As with all these gold tokens, and as with Tether itself, you have to rely on the trust of third party. Yeah, so they're going to back this digital currency with gold, right?

One-to-one? Yeah, it's like Tether, but it's just going to be gold instead of U.S. dollars. The interesting part isn't that, because I don't think gold-backed, I don't even think USD-backed stablecoins are interesting, but the the interesting thing about that is that tether feels you know tether's had his back against the wall for the last four years it's interesting that they feel that comfortable enough to expand here doesn't it make sense though they're getting all like if they're somehow able to get their hands on a hoard of gold um while they can't access their u.s dollars and banks like crypto

capital isn't that the next logical step it's like all right we can't get any bank accounts let's just fucking buy a vault and get some fucking gold yeah yeah maybe i i wondered like is it easier to hold billions of dollars in gold or u.s dollars it's probably pretty hard to do both right yeah and i'm not they could easily just be um using brinks or something some brinks around the world and i would imagine that seems like it may be easier to shut down than than a bank account yeah i don't know it should be interesting to watch i don't think it's really it's just it was just tangential to the jpy uh stable coin yeah um yeah so bitfinex i mean again yeah it is interesting there you got the long dick of the law chasing them down and they're

not not stopping not slowing down at all it seems at least um oh yeah we talked about that that tetherfud last week too what oh yeah the recycled tetherfud again dude this is definitely this might be the most bullish week of the year like i wrote about this uh it's like secretly bullish yeah because it's not really as you were saying it's not mainstream hype stuff yeah and this so what i'm alluding to here is something i wrote about in the bent uh i believe on monday is polar uh jamal james who i believe is a new york city bitcoiner right or he did the chain code labs this summer yeah uh chain code residency this summer excuse me um he came out with this uh this app polar which allows you to create lightning

network reg test setups and basically test out uh create your own lightning networks and test out how it would work if you're building on lightning um really really good uh gui it was uh click and drag all the major implementations you know c lightning lnd yeah uh eclair yeah so and you can just drag and drop it's pretty fucking cool yeah it's gonna make it's gonna make it way easier to develop on lightning yeah i saw carla kirk cohen shout to carla i officially announced her job at lightning i believe today or yesterday um but she quote tweeted jamal's announcement and said like i just threw out like three things i was working on separately because polar just made this a lot easier so it seems to have be having an immediate impact which is fully open source like seeing

developer tooling like this is extremely important um and just in general i've noticed that the developer community seems like very excited about building on top of lightning yeah um it's a easier environment to build on than than uh than the bitcoin protocol seems and again going back to the feedback loop and the incentives to provide this stuff like now that this tooling exists it will expedite development on that and then that'll again so people worry about bitcoin's fee market let's just have a little tangent on jevin's paradox right so people worry about the fee market uh coming to fruition uh on at the bitcoin protocol level obviously the reward is getting halved every 210 000 blocks and as many of you freaks out there listening to this right there

know. There's a lot of FUD about future fee markets developing and seeing this development happening on Lightning right now and these tools being built on Lightning right now while we have this block reward, I'm not worried about it at all because if Lightning does, well, I shouldn't

say it at all. The FUDsters are afraid that all the transactions move to Lightning, right? And then the FUDster, that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? Because then you have to still open and close channels. So if Lightning is creating this, this is me explaining Jevin's paradox, if Lightning is creating this utility and people are using it, it creates demand for the underlying product that enables that, which is block space.

You've got to settle on chain. The opening and closing of channels. So it's the utility of the Lightning network works will drive demand for the underlying product that it uses, which is block space. And also, as our boy CK likes to point out, even though the block reward keeps halving in Bitcoin terms, it keeps going up in USD terms. So there's that as well. Yes. Very, very, very important to remember. So, yeah, again, dude, very bullish week.

This is, yo, Boltathon. Two online lightning conferences this weekend. No, no, no. It's December 6th to December 8th. It's their second Boltathon. So the first Boltathon happened, I think, in April. That's actually where BottlePay was born out of because they have a hackathon.

Disclosure, I'm an advisor for BottlePay. But a lot of dope projects came out of the first one. What's really cool is this fully online conference, and it has this hackathon component, so anyone around the world can participate. They can participate anonymously or pseudonymously. That's fucking dope. I want to see more online conferences, right?

like that is more online conferences less meet space conferences yeah definitely 100 and uh just for the sole fact that i hate traveling and um and from a privacy perspective and an accessibility perspective it's insane right because you can do this uh i think they charge a price but it's a minimal price compared to airfare or something to that effect airbnb or hotel and yada yada yada Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's also more efficient. Like you said, like that's, if anything, like we don't need to go travel to all these centralized locations and meet up. We can meet on the internet. Like we do when we build Bitcoin. And it, it,

it allows you to announce your conference less than a month ahead of time. Right. Um, yeah. So go check that out. We'll link to that, uh, December 5th. I don't know why I said it was this weekend. Six through eight. Six through eight. But there will be a link. Yeah. Um, and if you're a zap iOS user, Version 0.5.0 has been released, and it's got Tor support,

improved UI, UX, and bug fixes. I have upgraded to that, and it is beautiful. It's huge. It's only three pages now, too, so you just swipe. It's swiping functionality, and there's three screens. The channel management looks a lot smoother now. Tor is obviously... The Tor support is fucking huge.

Yeah, Tor support is huge. Everyone should be running their nodes through Tor. It's been very difficult to get Tor prepackaged in apps. on iOS and fully noted really pushed away here. I think that helped out the Zap team as well. So it's really fucking good to see. So now you're able to just run Zap, it has Tor built in, connect back to your Tor node at home

or your office or wherever it is, and because of that, you don't have to forward any ports or run a VPN or anything to access your node from home. So that's pretty fucking, and all in a beautiful UX package as we've come to expect with Zap. Yes. So shout out to Jack Mallers and team. Keep putting the team on your back. And this is something I wanted to talk about because mining is infinitely fascinating to me. HUD 8, which is a Canadian company, more importantly, a publicly traded Canadian company.

And they released their third quarter numbers last week and pretty impressive. They've got a team of 11 people, I believe. They're a mining firm. a mining firm yeah they're a mining company they so they have big mining operations up in canada and uh again they released a quarterly report from the third quarter and it's pretty insane what they're doing for a small team of 11 and mining is uh deride or excuse me derided by a lot of the investors in the space is something you don't want to get into but it seems like this small team has uh found something out they their third quarter ebita was something like 15 million

close to 15 million dollars which is pretty crazy bringing the margins were way better than i expected martin had a 58 margin profit margin on mining that's crazy yeah and uh and they're adding to their bitcoin stash too so they have like their how many bitcoin they're accumulating and they're in there it shows it publicly yeah so they're like kind of like a quasi they're a way to get bitcoin exposure to publicly on yeah if you i actually looked it up i can't i gonna buy it uh i tried on robin hood i have not tried on cash app yet i will i wonder i bet you td ameritrade offers it uh td ameritrade you can get it you think yeah that makes sense yeah uh yeah i'll take a look i just took a report back on next rhr that's who i use no so shout

out to hud 8 um it seems to be profitable for them they added to their stash i believe they their stash was like 3 000 bitcoin or something because i've definitely bought canadian stocks before on td um yeah i bought many many is a canadian stock yeah so if you're on td that lost me a ton of money fucking thank you nick carter for showing that one to me shout out was he showing the stock or the product both i the product is pretty nice even though they accept bitcoin it's like gold jewelry i think we've talked about it on the podcast uh but but it turns out the ceo like hates bitcoin he's like a peter shift type yeah royce the bag yeah he uh big gold yeah he's a entrenched gold bug and you can't run a profitable company apparently

matthew matthew let's be nice to roy you want to be a bitcoin or one day one day one day right i'm thinking about picking up a pinky ring would that be too too much i think picking rings are pretty cool i really the jewelry is dope yeah um it's like what the bitcoin rabbi said right is that We should be using gold for jewelry. Yeah, yeah. We should be flowing. We should be flowing. It's an incredible, it's an incredible medal.

Oh, so this was fucking huge. Was this on your radar, the court case, the federal court case? It was not until people started tweeting about it. Actually, somebody sent it, somebody that I work with sent it to me in Slack yesterday. So this will make my travel a little bit less stressful, even though you have to assume it's going to happen anyway. the EFF won a court case that they were helping to fund that ruled it's unconstitutional to search travelers' devices at U.S. borders without any suspicion. So that's become much more frequent of a thing that's been happening both in the U.S. and abroad, basically to the point where

when you travel, you should assume all your devices will either be taken and attempted to be compromised and and used and and they might not even give it to you and give it back to you uh it's one of the reasons why you shouldn't never travel with hardware wallets um yeah so this is a huge court case let's see if you know it it's it's good to see uh but they can obviously they can create suspicion whenever they want to create suspicion you know um the famous oh i smell weed yeah i smell some smells yeah i smell some smells i smell some smells actually this is this is important freaks know your rights one time i was down in uh in st louis missouri while in college for a lacrosse road trip um without without no that dirtbag owl

was not with us um we were we were driving down uh to st louis from chicago and the blackhawks were in the stanley cup finals and so before we went to bed in our hotel we were down there for a lacrosse tournament we went to a buffalo wild wings to watch a game over the course of three hours i had one beer and i was tasked with i was coaching at that point because i had too many concussions to play so being a responsible coach had one beer um and we were literally driving a quarter mile down the road to uh our hotel and we got i got siphoned into a dui checkpoint and uh the officer smelled some smells that's actually exactly what he said he's like i smell some smells i was driving my buddy's car um and he wanted to do a breathalyzer and the thing you

know about a breathalyzer if you blow anything they're gonna or like if you say so i told him i wasn't drinking i was like ah no because if you say you had one beer then they assume you had more than one yes exactly um so i said i wasn't drinking and he was like all right i want to give you a breathalyzer and know your rights they cannot make you give a breathalyzer in most states I'm pretty sure and this was one of them so I was like no I know since I at least could have to bring you back to the station yes exactly um well this is actually it's funny how it worked out uh so I refused the breathalyzer they made me do a sobriety test like ABCs did you have to do the ABCs backwards ABCs backwards I can't do that counting on my fingers I just I

had torn my acl like less than six months earlier never got it fixed i'd like stand on one leg with my uh my other leg like six inches in the air while i was doing like the the eye flashlight test this dude was trying to get me so bad pass with flying colors you told him you had you had torn your acl yeah but he didn't care um and so i passed and then he like still tried to make me do the breathalyzer i was like dude we're going to that hotel now and he was like i'm not giving you the keys back i was like i'll fucking walk to the hotel it's right there like i'll come pick up the keys tomorrow and then he was like if any of these guys they told me how they were drinking if they blow below 0.08 i'll let them go my buddy just stepped up blew like a 0.02 or

something like that and gave him the keys we went away know your rights with a 0.02 he blew right yeah yeah 0.2 no no 0.02 now you'd be blacked out okay um but know your rights know your rights don't be afraid to talk back wait so he ended up breathalyzing my friend who yeah who admitted to drinking and he blew below 0.08 and he let him drive shit's whack man right it's insane it's a police state uh exactly like dui checkpoints we were literally just walking right driving our car a quarter mile down the road to our hotel and these these cones just come out of nowhere and and like cattle herd us into the right lane i'm like what the fuck's going on and it's like hey you gotta fucking blow into this thing i was like what the fuck

same with like immigration checkpoints and shit like that yeah know your rights am i being detained and you see like hong kong is spiraling out of control in regards to police state yeah i saw i saw a video of like riot cops intimidating like fucking middle school girls like lining them up checking their bags and shit like that in full full like military gear all the universities closed i think they're like a bunch of universities are getting barricaded now there's three tunnels that go to hong kong and two of them are closed for service the subways are delayed or closed in a bunch of stations fucked up shit yeah yeah it's um power to to all those fighting in hong kong and around the world we got there's something going on there's

like a coup going on in bolivia yeah apparently a lithium deal did not get signed and there was a coincidental coup not too long after it and there's their president u.s led yeah their president's getting docs of porn videos on on twitter and she's like a heavy christian president yeah yeah um yeah it's gonna be like a christian hardline president like you should do sex tapes yeah it's not good um uh chile chile actually i'm dropping an episode on chile on saturday we're gonna have a special saturday episode this week i checked in with uh with patrick dugan uh who's been living down in chile for six years we sort of went over the history of chile and how it's gotten to the point it is but i caught up with him on dms yesterday and he said

it's calmed down quite a bit there because he himself was uh subjected to like curfew and police state like shit and you'll hear it in the podcast as an american who has moved to chile and lived there for six years it was startling to him to see how how rapid it devolved into like a police state i saw some videos some really moving videos of the protests oh did you see the drone yeah the laser drone they were shooting it with green lasers to take down that's crazy so what what does that do is that just confuse the camera i think it just screws up the camera yeah yeah um it's like the operator not able to see where he's going doesn't know he's going to the ground like or is it just like the whole screen is green yeah and possibly damages the camera and then it

just doesn't even work yeah no that was crazy you're just you're flying blind right yeah but it's like it's like it's literally like a fucking uh like harry potter like it looked like a wand like catching it and and hong kong was the guys who led the way on that one yeah yeah the really so it's the the vast this information travel where you could get broadcast around the world so easily uh is is helping all of these protest movements arm each other uh through their tactics which is really powerful to see is 2019 the year of the protester you know uh didn't time put like the year of the protests or during the Arab Spring?

When was the Arab Spring? Like five years ago? That was... No idea. No, I feel like that was... Yeah, it was like 2011, 2000. I think protests... I heard a spring around like...

Was that around the financial crisis too? Yeah, you know, we just see inequality continue to increase around the world and the global communications get better and better. I think we'll see more and more protest movements

and they'll be better more they'll be more successful it's easier to mobilize people now than ever before without a central authority yeah the arab spring technically started on uh december 18 2010 yeah like time magazine person of the year that year was like arab spring protester yeah keep fighting out there freaks and know your rights stand up for your rights and more importantly know your rights and then when tasked with a confrontation with authority apply your rights know them and have the confidence to apply them um we're gonna end it on this maybe a little short rip today after a really long one last week uh fed chairman powell was uh giving testimony in front of congress or is it the house of representatives yesterday not

sure um crazy speech though yeah he said the federal budget is on an unsustainable path with high and rising debt uh basically ringing the warning bells of you guys uh cannot keep this up for too much you know and he took the further stance of saying that they might not be they're not prepared or equipped to do anything uh in the case of a recession yeah which is pretty fucking crazy and then you had trump this week too at a speech begging for negative interest rates literally did you see like that intro video of him oh my god fucking crazy he's well it's crazy but it's a democracy right well right remind you of it oh god damn it was but like that's what they have to cater to right it was like a pump-up speech of him walking in it was

like a wedding or a bar mitzvah video or something no it looked no it looked like a uh it looked like a college recruit video announcement video that's exactly what it looked like craziness um i had two quick shout outs i wanted to do uh there was uh citizen bitcoin uh brady at citizen bitcoin recommended this new bbc podcast it's like a like chernobyl it's like a special series so it's an independent podcast you can search it by going by searching crypto queen um in your podcast app of choice uh it's pretty crazy it's like eight part episode on the one coin scam um and i'm like on episode three shit is fucking insane i hadn't like i really had i had no idea like how big this shit was yeah billions of dollars people lost everything they shielded to their friends

and family lost everything and it just reminds us like uh like why it's so important to call out scams in this space uh because people get hurt at the end of the day and they're like uninspect you know unsuspected naive investors uh who don't know any better and like even in the episode she talks about like they talked to one of the victims and she talks about this guy like this bitcoiner reached out to her and they have a recording of their first conversation and he's telling her it's a scam and she's just defending it or whatever and he is so emotional about it it just reminded me it reminded me of bitcoiners in general he's so emotional he's like it's a fucking scam i've been researching it i'm telling you this i'm telling

you that there's no blockchain um i don't know you guys you should definitely listen to it yeah i've got to check it out and then the other shout out was this uh this nice lightning proof of concept we saw this week called kumo.chat uh which is a self-destructing chat room uh that you pay for with bitcoin with lightning 10 000 sats gets you to 24 hour chat room and then you can send the invite link to anyone uh it is it's not encrypted or anything so you know don't use it for anything mission critical but it's just a really cool proof of concept it's just cool that you don't have to sign in or give any kind of personal information especially if you use like a vpn or tour yeah it's pretty dope um and then thank you for reminding me we actually have a

shout out this week uh would have been remiss if i forgot to do this so nothing to shill just love and support support for my boys pod is always thought provoking and provocatively entertaining you guys are entertained by this hope to throw back some whiskey with you fellas soon once my fiat job stops being so fiat ben at mr cool bp at mr cool ben thank you yes it was a pleasure i mean you do have to come back to new york we have to drink more whiskey eat more burgers a lot of fun our first time meeting her thank you ben yeah we appreciate it we appreciate you too i'm flattered that you guys are entertained by this al does we're not entertaining al at all al loves us does he al should we make up do we need to get al on the

podcast time will tell he's i hope his voice is uh what it sounds like in my head what does his voice sound like in your head i mean i sounds like al it's i feel like i've known him my whole life yeah uncle bad touch we used to call him on lacrosse field we're gonna end it there freaks stay humble stack sets peace and love