TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.11.25

Episode Date: November 29, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Bitcoin Core 0.19.0 released - https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-core-0-19-0-released-heres-whats-new - ColdCard firmware 3.0.5 released - Bakkt daily volume - https://twitter.com/BakktBot/status/1200417914744135680?s=20 - Bitmex research analyzes IBD - https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-initial-block-download/ - Telegram's Durov issues scathing statement - https://t.me/durov/109 - Two great pieces from Coindesk's Leigh Cuen https://www.coindesk.com/global-protests-reveal-bitcoins-limitations - https://www.coindesk.com/lebanese-bitcoiners-show-how-to-talk-about-crypto-at-thanksgiving - Nigerians + Bitcoin - https://medium.com/dlabvc/paxful-is-the-most-important-bitcoin-company-you-arent-paying-attention-to-4e699db0c5ca - Great presentation by Alex Gladstein - https://vimeo.com/375118500 - Venezuelans using RuneScape for additional income - https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/11/21/venezuelas-paper-currency-is-worthless-so-its-people-seek-virtual-gold - South Korean exchange UPbit allegedly hacked: https://etherscan.io/address/0xa09871AEadF4994Ca12f5c0b6056BBd1d343c029 - Eric Wall write up of "stablecoins" - https://medium.com/human-rights-foundation-hrf/privacy-and-cryptocurrency-part-iv-stablecoins-for-human-rights-blacklists-and-traceability-6d74ee17c25d - DMVs are selling your info https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjekz/the-california-dmv-is-making-dollar50m-a-year-selling-drivers-personal-information - Jameson Lopp’s IBD research https://blog.lopp.net/bitcoin-node-performance-sync-tests/ Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 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? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent, coming from his in-law's basement the day after Thanksgiving. Matthew, how are we? How was your Thanksgiving? The view over there is quite nice behind you. Yeah, looks like a little bit of a rape dungeon. But, uh, it's just a basement. It's just an old basement, you know. It's very comfortable down here. I have a space heater to my right, keeping my legs warm. My father-in-law will bring food down here every once in a while when I get hungry. uh i'm not allowed upstairs so this is my little lair here at the in-laws and very happy to be

recording the first episode of rabbit hole record rabbit hole recap from this place uh yep i've definitely uh a recipe to build a strong relationship between you and your in-laws i love it uh how was your thanksgiving you had a good one it's a good one low-key this year not a lot of travel um lucky that uh my wife and I our parents are within very short distance of each other so we can go hop from house to house uh very low-key I was in bed by 10 30 last night how about you feeling real grateful had delicious uh food I spent it with uh my lady's family as well so that was that was a really good time and uh I really enjoyed it and also your your shout out on the bent uh your your pre-thanksgiving day shout out really appreciate that uh brought a tear

to my eye i am thankful for you well i'm thankful for you you uh it produced a lot of great content here at tftc in uh the show just over a year old now very thankful that we decided to do this it's been fun hasn't it fuck yes it feels like an eternity it does it does all right uh before we get into the meat of the topics i thought it was going to be a light week um considering the holidays but the list is pretty robust so we got a lot to talk about a lot going on right now the current price of bitcoin according to the tftc.io ticker is waiting seven thousand seven hundred sixty three dollars and nine cents the current block height is six hundred five thousand nine hundred sixteen and the current hash rate it's a lot higher than what it dipped

down to like uh 70 in the high 60s earlier this week right now it's currently standing at 92.87 and X a hash per second. Price and hash rate have been pretty volatile this week, if you guys have been following it wrong. Yeah, I mean, price pumped and then hash pumped. Yeah. But the price dumped, too. The hash dumped.

Right, exactly. It's been up and down all week. Yeah. All right, before we get into the meat of everything, this episode of Rabbit Hole Recap is brought to you by Casa Freaks. How confident are you in your key security? What keeps you up at night with your personal op sec? Do you even have a fucking plan for your Bitcoin?

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24 7 vip service dedicated client advisor and custom onboarding and opsec plan no matter what package you're in all members uh all memberships come with a full set of hardware wallets for your multi-sig plus the casa node plus faraday bags and early access to early casa products go use the code tftc go to keys.casa slash keymaster check out their multi-sig setups and then tell them we sent you. Get up to $250 off with the code TFTC. Email them to membership at team.casa. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is also brought to you by our friends at the Cash App. As you know, Cash App is the simplest way to send and save money, and now it's the simplest way to try to grow your money. You guys have already been introduced to this. You've been listening

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dollars when you sign up and then the cash app is going to send ten dollars to our good friends at Owl's the cross. Not that dirtbag Owl. So download the Cash App today from the App Store or the Google Play Store today. And speaking of Owl, our friend Owl, just shout out ad for the tftc.io merch store here. Official free ad read for the tftc merch store. We just put up a bunch of new merch. Cut prices by 20%.

We are not, as you can tell if you've been listening and reading for a while and you go to our site, We are doing the best that we can with as little as possible. So even small things like slashing the full price and showing the 20% off price is something we're still working on. So trust me, the prices are 20% off, even though it may not be easy to tell from the page. But we have an Owls Lacrosse shirt that Dirtbag Owl sent us a design, and he's actually not being a dirtbag. We're going to send 20% of the profits that we make on that shirt and sweatshirt in particular to the true Owls Lacrosse. Owls, O-W-L-S. It literally sounds the same, regardless of what you say.

Yeah, I can hear my father-in-law being disappointed about my poor pronunciation from upstairs. But the new designs look dope. They're up 20% off. One thing is the white stacking satch long sleeve will be back up on the store shortly. We're going to handle that after this episode. Yeah.

And thank you for your support. I'm going to put that up after this episode. Because buying merch is a great way to support us. You know, every sat counts. Every sat does count. We're stacking sats here. And when you're stacking sats, make sure you have a security plan in play too.

If you're stacking sats and you don't want to sell your sats, our friends at Unchained Capital are here to give you a U.S. dollar loan that's collateralized with Bitcoin. So you guys know all about them. Unchained-Capital.com. they're been good friends of ours for a while they have two incredible they have more than two products they have incredible product suite they have a multi-sig setup their vault program

you can engage in a multi-sig quorum with Unchained they will be that they will be that to that second signer in a two is free setup or a different nfm setup for you if you need them you can also just do it directly without them with their multi-sig setups and then they have Again, like I mentioned earlier, they're loan products, so if you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, you want to get cash, you need to get access to cash, Unchained will let you use your Bitcoin to get a Bitcoin collateralized, excuse me, a US dollar loan that's collateralized by Bitcoin, so you don't have to sell your sats on top of that. They're badass Bitcoiners working on dope open source projects. We talked about Caravan last week, which is their most recent desktop app that will allow you to set up a multi-sig setup by yourself without them. There are other things like Slip39, Hermit, and a bunch of other shit.

Dhruv, Joe, Parker, and Crew at Unchained are killing it. Go to unchained-capital.com and check them out today. Through the ad reads. We're done. We do have a shout-out, though. Fuck yes. This is a funny shout-out. Warning you freaks, I'm going to have to get loud at the end. So this is a message from Relevant Peter, your favorite maximalist.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy Havening. How lucky we are to be so early in the rise of such an important technology surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world. Stay humble and stack sats. Pre-season is almost over. all right holy shit i dug i dug deep for you there relevant peter okay how did you know it had to be loud did he did he put it in caps or something in parentheses he said marty i need you to dig deep on this one there you go all right so i'm not gonna the man paid for a shout

out who am i to deny uh deny the product that he asked for i'm i'm a fan of relevant peter on twitter so it's appreciated grateful for all you freaks out there that that listen and support the pot yeah and we're also grateful for the people working on bitcoin because without them uh we would not be here we would have nothing to talk about and the people working on bitcoin pushed through uh the official bitcoin core 0.19.0 release but isn't the most recent one 0.19.1 didn't they do like a quick push right after sure but i like the the write-up by bitcoin magazine yeah yeah so i think i i think they might have done a quick push after the major version upgrade at 19.0 i think it might be 19.1 not positive no it definitely is it

definitely is they definitely released a quick release right after okay um and with this new update back 32 addresses are by default in the gui and the bitcoin core gui um two block only outbound connections uh no extra is now default it's extra it's just they added two more yeah yeah yeah they added two more outbound connections by default um bloom filters have been deprecated uh more support for compact client side block filtering payment protocol support disabled from gooey and a bunch of other stuff yeah so the the default now is 10 instead of 8 so it just adds more connections for your node um and then and this is this is the help against like the arabus attack correct yeah just any kind of partitioning attacks like not partitioning

attacks uh uh when you surround it eclipse attacks when you surround the node no i think i think partitions uh correct eclipse is more of like a sybil where you like surround it and then you partition it yeah um and then bloom filters uh is what the older light wallets used to use like the mobile wallets and stuff and some of them still use it uh so nodes have historically been serving those filters it's a very not good privacy way of um handling it uh so they they deprecated it in core which means if you run a newer core node it's not on by default but it's the option is still there you can still enable it if you if you so please yeah and this is actually uh the news of this major release is good uh good to pair with something else we have on the list here which

is something that bitmex research dropped this morning which is they uh did a test of a bunch of versions of bitcoin core going back to 2012 i believe to see uh what the initial block download is for each version um and basically they came to the conclusion that bitcoin if it had not been improved since 2012 at the code level uh specifically with libsec um what's the number Let me find it. The addition of LibsSecP256K, which has made the IBD extremely more efficient. So it's good to see that Bitcoin is becoming more efficient over time. So this, Matt, you want to talk more about BitMEX's research? I mean, it's a dramatic difference. I mean, they have charts and stuff. It's a major difference. I mean, I think their comment there about Bitcoin would have died without these efficiency improvements is a little bit provocative and clickbaity. But, you know, Bitcoin could have died for various reasons.

But, yeah, these efficiency improvements are a really big deal. And, you know, that's where the priority should be, not just blindly increasing the bandwidth required by nodes, you know, by increasing the block weight or the block size. You go for efficiency first, and you try and make the most out of what we have. Yeah, and that's why we here at TFTC like to focus on what some would deem as boring and probably not exciting upgrades,

But things like Erlay, which would help with bandwidth, and Assume UTXO, which would help with IBD times for people running full nodes for the first time. It's stuff like that that really we should be focusing on first, like you said, efficiency gains before doing anything critical to the consensus protocol. The other thing is, just for the freaks out there, IBD, initial block download, it refers to the sync time when you first launch a node. It needs to sync all the historical blocks. So that is the most time-consuming process of running your own nodes. So it's always good to get that down. Yeah. And so just looking at the numbers here,

they went all the way back to version 0.8.6, and that running on Linux VPS, it took 4.1 days to download, whereas core version 19.0 took less than a day, less than half a day on a MacBook Pro. So it's very encouraging. Indeed it is. Also encouraging, cold card released new firmware, 3.0.5. The big thing that came with this update is that it can now display QR codes directly on the cold card screen. so you can theoretically have your cold card completely offline um you know plugged into a

power bank uh and you can toggle through your addresses show the qr code and just deposit right in which i think is pretty fucking slick yeah shout out to rodolfo that news dropped i believe wednesday night or yesterday maybe even um so it might have got lost in the fray of of the holiday season but yeah huge upgrade shout i mean we talk about cold card every week they've been pushing out upgrades pretty pretty frequently these days my favorite wallet um yeah favorite wallet now you have a favorite bot on twitter now i recently uh noticed you love responding to this bot the backed bot the backed volume bot one of the best bots on twitter right now that volume is your fascination that volume is taking off man it's taking off

yeah so in case you missed it thursday's back bitcoin monthly futures volume on uh thanksgiving no less uh traded contracts were down uh at 2832 but um they hit an all-time high trade economy wait i'm trying to how am i reading this i don't know what you're reading but uh wednesday was the all-time high right because ah that's what it was wednesday was yes yes excuse yes that's what it is they reported um okay so wednesday there was five thousand six hundred seventy one uh contract volume which is all-time high and then thursday yesterday during thanksgiving that was cut in half at $2,832. It'd be interesting to see what it is today.

So the open interest right now is $4.31 million, which is 4% growth from the day before. Yeah, so on Wednesday, $42 million worth of Bitcoin was traded on Bakkt, which is the new physically settled Bitcoin futures exchange that was launched by ICE, which is an extremely established financial player. So these are, you know, I'm not going to say it's not necessarily institutional money, as some people like to say, but this is more a professional operation, right? The people that are trading there are, you know, theoretically should be like a more sophisticated trader than our regular retail Bitcoin exchanges, right?

So watching that volume increase, especially as the price has been going down recently, is just very, I think it's a very important number to watch. Let me put it that way. Yeah. So go follow the bot. If you're not following it, don't worry. Matt will be responding to it at least once a day. So you'll get those tweets in your timeline. My two little eyes.

I feel like it's like a nice balance between retweeting it, right? and just not doing anything with it. I'm just like, oh, just keeping an eye on it. Just checking this out, checking this out. So that's, yeah, so backed, like you were saying, a lot of people associate institutional investors and more sophisticated investors with those products. But if you go to the other end of the spectrum

of people using Bitcoin, there's been some great pieces this week on people in developing countries and other places around the world and how they use Bitcoin in particular. I wrote about this on Monday. Our boy Matt Alborg, who's been writing all the great research pieces

on how people are using Bitcoin on these P2P exchanges, local Bitcoin, and Paxful in particular. On Monday, he dove deep into Paxful's volume, particularly in Nigeria, and really dove into how Nigerians are using Bitcoin and gift cards, online gift cards, as a sort of remittance flow. And it was just a fascinating article. It's crazy to see how people are leveraging Bitcoin

and it's truly being used to route around sanctions and over-expensive remittance products like Western Union. Matt fucking killed it with that analysis. Everyone should go read it. He's got some nice charts, some nice pictures. What's really interesting is that two things are— so this was specifically Nigerians with remittance that he focused on. And there's two interesting things, or there's a couple interesting things

that have led this to be one of the preferred ways of handling remittance, or a growing way at least. The first is that their currency fucking sucks. the second thing is that i there's like a 30 overhead if you use the traditional system if you use like western union or something like that um so as long as because the way paxful works is like people are nigerians in america are buying gift cards then they're selling the gift cards on paxful for bitcoin and they take a cut there they're usually sold at a discount so you sell like an Amazon gift card, and it's sold for like 60% of the price. And then that Bitcoin is sent

to a Nigerian, and then the Nigerian converts it into local currency. And that whole process takes them about like 30 minutes. So it's a lot quicker. But there is that discount, they have to pay that cut. And the reason it's still competitive is because Western Union is at like a 33% cut, all said and done. When you factor in everything that they don't use the black market exchange rate. They're using the official exchange rate, which is more of a bullshit number. All said and done, it comes out to about 33%. And then the other thing is Western unions in Nigeria are only located in banks. So those banks are often closed, as banks are. And then the last thing is, I guess some Western union outlets have blocked Nigeria specifically because of

uh carding scams and stuff like that or money laundering concerns yeah it's um it's so fascinating how creative people are getting right so the gift card remittance like the flow you were describing so crazy like somebody here in america will go to a 7-eleven buy a gift card get the receipt with the promo numbers and that's basically how they get the gift cards and remit it to nigeria they take a picture of the receipt with the codes and they send it to their family members who then redeem it and sell it for go through the whole flow that matt was describing and again it's just humans are very creative and bitcoin is a tool that can enable that creativity as we're seeing it's uh people are using it in creative ways and he even showed like there's

different discounts depending on which type of gift card you get like people like amazon and walmart because you can like get anything at those places like it's you know it's close to cash was another big one yeah digital stuff is is big because it's digital so you don't have to ship anything so you can sell it globally um yeah and they were another interesting thing they were using this this flow to to bootstrap uh to bootstrap like e-com sites and supply chains for e-com sites like globally because they were allowed to drop shippers use amazon gift cards yeah yeah drop they're using it to drop ship too um it's fascinating again and that's people want to hate on bitcoin and call it inefficient or whatever but it is again a tool that is

enabling creative uh ways of moving money across the world yeah i mean and one of the things that like bitcoin haters love to talk about is that they say like volatility um is too big of an issue uh you know and and you know it's a scarce asset like it's going to be volatile now that volatility should decrease over time as liquidity increases um but they they use volatility as an argument and they use fees as an argument um but when you compare it to some of these incumbent systems with the overhead of 33%, you know, it doesn't really take that much to be a market improvement over that. Yeah. Yeah. We also had two great posts by Lee Kuhn of Coindesk. She's definitely the best reporter at Coindesk. All of her pieces are worth reading, in my opinion. But both of these

focused on using bitcoin in crisis areas whether that's political crisis economic crisis um and and both and i i really like that she covers the nuance you know there's there's a lot of nuance to these subjects you know the best time to buy bitcoin the best if you need bitcoin in a crisis like you should have it beforehand um is is it's the unfortunate reality especially you know until we have like full circular bitcoin economies in a lot of these places um and so she covers all of that and but at the same time she covers how uh they're using it in lebanon um to get through their financial blockade yeah so the the one article popped around the world and really highlighted how bitcoin isn't uh isn't a panacea or isn't a an end-all be-all for these people but

It's helping, but maybe not in every way that art and Bitcoiners think it can, at least yet. Again, this will take time with network effect and liquidity and all that stuff. But then the Lebanese article was very interesting, too, because it seems like as the banking crisis in Lebanon continues and their banks are closed, people are using Bitcoin to buy goods. One guy talked about sending $100,000 to Saudi Arabia for energy drinks. Yeah, I mean, that was the big one for me. uh they talked about families and they talked about uh you know families with remittance and stuff sending it from abroad but they talked about this one businessman who that's how he gets this got his supplies in um because of the so lebanon's banks have been closed for weeks now

i think they might have reopened with limits on in place like very low limits uh so so he needed to get a large shipment in uh and bitcoin is uniquely uh suited to to sending larger payments right i mean so it's just really good to see um but the other thing she mentioned in the other one is like iran like they cut they cut the internet for everybody right right so like if you don't have shut it down if you don't have like bitcoin and you know mesh nets and satellite links and stuff in place already before that happens like you're out of luck like this there's not much i could you know bitcoin doesn't fix that yet yet being the key word no yeah and uh again these alternative transaction relay uh systems are very important mesh networking

satellites we need to make bitcoin as robust as possible because as we saw in iran uh the the government exercised their force to shut down the internet and just literally flipped a switch and turned off the internet for their whole goddamn country. It's pretty fucking crazy. It could happen to you, even here in America. Don't worry. I mean, do worry.

Be aware. Prepare. Be aware. Prepare now, regret later. Be prepared. Prepare now, regret later. And you might want to do this with WhatsApp, too, because Telegram's Dharav, he's one of the founders of Telegram,

came out with a pretty scathing indictment of whatsapp they seem to be a front for the state and facebook is basically allowing back doors into the app since they've acquired it and it's the latest one that was exploited somebody just had to send you a video and if you watched it they were able to access not only all the information on your whatsapp but your whole goddamn phone all your data all your pictures um pretty insane yeah that's fucked up um and i mean And the other big one is they push you to back up into the cloud, and when they back up, it's unencrypted. So even if you know not to do that, no one should be using the backup feature on WhatsApp

if you have to use WhatsApp. The person you're speaking to, you have to trust that they're not doing it as well, otherwise it's backing up unencrypted to American cloud providers. One thing to keep in mind here is that, you know, Telegram is a competitor to WhatsApp, so obviously he's going to shit on them. You know, Telegram might be, you know, with Telegram, Telegram is not, so I thought this would be a good moment to talk about messaging options, because a lot of people are curious when I posted it, they were like, what is, you know, what is the best option for me?

And there's no perfect option. You know, PGP is fucking great. It's not very UX-friendly, and you can send PGP messages over any of these, you know, any kind of messaging client. Then you have iMessage, which is super popular in America. It's, like, mildly encrypted. It is encrypted, though, end-to-end. So it's better than, like, a text message. Then you have Signal, which is encrypted better, but it has a phone number requirement, which I don't love.

So, like, you kind of want to use that with a burner if possible. Telegram is not encrypted by default, so group chats aren't encrypted at all, but you can do the secret chat, but they're using some kind of proprietary encryption there, which isn't the best, you know. And then you have Wire, which recently got acquired by an American company,

and they were being really sketchy about it. Or they didn't get acquired by an American company, they moved their jurisdiction to America, and they were acting kind of sketchy about it, but that doesn't require a phone number. um that's also end-to-end encrypted and then keybase which is my favorite doesn't require a phone number uh group chats are default encrypted uh they do have you know the stellar shitcoin integration which so fuck them for that but besides that it's a it's a very great platform

um and uh yeah it's it's a good platform base is open source too yeah it's open source uh so signal I think signal servers might be closed but so that so that's obviously good to see no one should be using whatsapp but it does have a network effect so I understand why some people use it still yeah and I think that's like oh and the nice thing is key base also like for group chats like we have a Bitcoin group on key base if you search Bitcoin BTC we have over 400 people in there you can set in the group chat you can set the message explosion default and then individual users can set their explosion uh shorter or shorter if they want um so basically

the message self-destructs and one of the things here to keep in mind with group chats is even if they're encrypted all it takes is one person uh to either be a mole or compromise like if a person's computer is compromised and they're in the key base chat then all their messages could be you know seen so it's nice to have the the explosion so the messages disappear over time reduces your risk long term and just in general when you're using any kind of messaging service you know assume it's compromised act accordingly yes yes um now it's crazy everything has to take into consideration with this stuff with uh ideally these um these chat apps in their final form will be dissident tech you'll be able to

Chat encrypted without back doors and basically plan stuff and in privacy, privacy freaks. It's not it's not a bad thing. Don't worry. They want to make you think that privacy is terrible and they need to know everything you're doing your goddamn life. Tell them to leave you the fuck alone. I dream for the day that this shit won't be filled with fucking nuance. Let me tell you, Marty. Let me tell you.

Oh, well, we we have many discussions about that. i'm dreaming for that day as well um speaking of dissident tech or good friend alex gladstein from the human rights foundation um and just an incredible bitcoiner he gave a dope uh speech i i forget where but it was on bitcoin verse big brother and we're going to link to that in the show notes alex is just doing an incredible job getting in front of very important normies and telling them that bitcoin is essential for our future it was at something called slush hq which is not related to the the mining company yes uh alex is not only awesome but uh i think he might be the best bitcoin show we have um he's extremely convincing arguments i i always i like to i like

to use his videos um and his interview his interview with you on on tales from the crypt was really great i love to use those um to send to newcomers who are asking you know why bitcoin yeah no that's actually alex's first human rights foundation talk that was on youtube i believe like eight months ago was my uh most effective pre-coiner uh conversion tool um into a coiner he's extremely convincing i watch it i'm like okay matt be more like alex you got this yes yes and we're all trying to help people that have fucked up money problems people in venezuela are using runescape for additional income they're literally playing this video game and mining gold in this game that they can then sell in a secondary market as a job like

that is what venezuela has been deduced to people playing a game and mine doing one of the most monotonous uh actions in the game but for hours on end it's it's pretty crazy because well first of all they're selling it for bitcoin um because they you know they need a digital uh censorship resistant currency there because it's not a approved use of runescape gold you're not like allowed to do that they don't support it um one thing to keep in mind here is that i the article said the average income in Venezuela or the minimum wage in Venezuela is like seven dollars a month someone in my comments said it's like 350 or something so maybe it's like official rate versus unofficial rate but these guys are bringing in up to 40 a month so it's a massive difference

and so there's basically global arbitrage is going on there's other people it's not worth their time you know I'm not going to do that for 40 a month for them it's worth it and the other thing I'd like to highlight here is this is a perfect example of why we should just have sats in games like why are we dealing with this you know secondary market where you're selling it why not have real money as the as the unit and I think gamers will demand it I think the incumbents will be resistant to it but you know upstarts and smaller publishers will be the ones who lead the way and as gamers start demanding it then the then the bigger publishers will have to follow suit and if if regulators you know decide to try and slow them down and stop them

then then the great old american lobby system will will jump in there and and will eventually they'll join the fray old reliable old reliable yeah good old american regulatory capture system um yeah there's a this week there was a lot of like exchange hacks and exit scams this week actually two in particular uh south korea had an exchange up bit that was allegedly hacked 342,000 eth uh were stolen and sent to an address that is being tracked right now they've tried to send some of the eth to hobie and a couple i think binance as well so that's like 50 million dollars about um we actually dumped on that news which is hilarious because uh they didn't steal bitcoin they stole eth but we dumped around like 6800 6700 before this most recent upswing so it was like one

last hurrah uh to to scare out some some bears uh from their position uh up it is a more known exchange i've known about it i think they're a pretty big south korean exchange uh they locked everything down afterwards it looks like shit will be okay there um you know this is why you have hot wallets and cold wallets they just pulled from the hot wallet so it was segregated funds um but it's a good time to remember you remind everyone not your keys not your coins like expect i they're making everyone whole too but you know expect to lose your money um if you put your money on an exchange and act accordingly right proceed accordingly but this other exchange that like announced today like idax or whatever that yeah dude just dude just woke up and ran

away with the trezor yeah i've never heard of idax before like have you heard did you yeah this is the first so like when these like little fly by night bullshit exchanges like shit happens to them like it's it's it's not really news my opinion yeah and so if you are out there using one of these fly the night bullshit exchanges and it's not very popular just be aware be aware try out bisque or something like that our good friends cash app they're pretty reputable as well i don't think jack's gonna run away with the trezor um just be aware and there was actually going back to upbit the korean exchange there was a interesting theory i saw on twitter uh they had another hack about two years ago and the hack amount uh is strikingly

similar to the amount they owe in taxes and they're allowed to write the that amount off as a loss if they are stolen funds um so that was just interesting interesting well i'm theory theory i'm not corroborated at all i'm sure the the authorities will do some good old-fashioned police work to figure it out um i didn't know that that's interesting that that does make that does make a lot of sense to me uh just some for some free shout outs right cash app is is uh us only um we love bisque here bisque is global um hodl hodl is global but america very good exchange um bull bitcoin in canada is really good get bitter in europe is awesome um and and the nice thing about hodl the all all i everyone i just uh everyone i just listed there is non-custodial

uh except for cash app but cash app is very quick to withdraw yes and they're they're very bitcoin focused as well um so yeah go check them out again be aware with these like quadriga x i know a lot of people that are on quadriga and that had problems for for a few years so again these exchanges this is the story throughout bitcoin's history like people were talking about mount gox potentially being unsolvent for like a year and a half before shit finally hit the fan if you ever start hearing rumors or if your exchange just doesn't allow you to take money off for some reason for any period of time it should have alarm bells ringing in your head well i mean if they're not letting you take money off then what are you gonna do about it

But yeah, no, just always be suspicious and, and prefer like these non-custodial services are even better because you don't even have to worry about it. But even if you use a custodial service, just pull your money off right away. If, if you're using it for buying Bitcoin, just, just, you know, only keep on exchanges what you can afford to lose. Yes. And make sure while we're giving it to the vice mayor, that's why the nuance, the nuance is so hard in this space. It's like, make sure you are able to secure and custody your keys to test it out, set up a bunch of wallets and little amounts, develop confidence, develop a strategy. But yeah, once you do take those UTXOs into your possession, there's extreme ownership

that comes with it. So be responsible. Yeah. I mean, one of the simplest things you can do there, you know, we have some guides on TFDC. We're doing our second Citadel workshop. It's coming up on December 5th. it is sold out already but we're going to release a whole guide process uh with it's going to like

step by step with pictures and stuff about how to use the cold card uh with your own node uh which will be helpful to people so stay tuned for that but the simplest thing you can do is to use multiple methods like if you're storing your bitcoin in in multiple ways two or three different ways um then if one if you fuck up one then at least you didn't lose the whole uh the whole stash yes yes diversify your risk freaks in all areas of life not just bitcoin you know diversify that risk everywhere and there's there's really nice discounts on the top two hardware wallets right now cold card and treasure t so if you need more hardware wallets consider that yep and use the code tftc for cold card um we'll get five percent off of the mk3 yeah maybe type it in and you'll

see what you'll get yeah yeah um yeah so did you read eric wall's write-up on stable coins i have not yet i'm not to be completely honest so it's a 19 minute read i'm not doving into yet so actually you know i'm a big hater uh i say sats are my stable coin uh very frequently here because sats are my stable coin uh and but because stable coins have trusted third-party risk right so so it's the same thing we were talking about with exchanges where you know not your keys not your coins like at any moment you can lose that money but Eric does a really good job of explaining the nuances to all these different stable coin platforms and the privacy

implications and and the reason these are important is we've talked about this on the pod before is is like places like Venezuela and Nigeria and stuff that might not have nice you know easy fiat integration and especially to get access to usd uh these do provide uh some utility to those people there but as long as they understand the risks and and and appreciate them so i actually surprisingly enough i i met when i met eric and riga i told him i'd be happy to look this over so i actually like i looked it over gave him feedback read the whole thing um and it's it's very good uh i think he did a really good job of explaining the different nuances of it yeah eric is uh doing some very good research he's he's fucking a beast with this

shit because lightning he did a presentation on lightning privacy um at it wasn't rego where was it it was in berlin at the lightning conference berlin yeah that's an incredible we've talked about that in the past but that's an incredible uh speech that you should look up and he eric's just doing a really good job of trying to shine a light on where these technologies are underserving the user's needs particularly around privacy yeah this is his this is part of his work with the human rights foundation um so definitely give that give that a read uh if you're interested if you're if you have any intention of using stable coins which i don't but if you do give this a read before you use them um it does it does really highlight all of them and one thing really worth

mentioning i think is i think the value prop of us you know tether on uh liquid is going to become very interesting because they have confidential transactions so the amounts um and asset type are blinded so they don't even know you're sending tether they don't know how much tether you're sending and then you combine that with coin join and all of a sudden it's a very private stable coin it does have the third party risks you know and trust third parties or security holes um but But even that third-party risk is a federated risk, right? Well, not even that risk. I mean, I don't think—I think the federation comes second to the actual tether risk, which is you have to trust tether.

you know that's one of the things um that he made very clear in the in the article that a lot of people some people gave him shit in the comments without reading it um is that at the end of the day like what chain these these you know fiat backed uh stable coins run on doesn't really matter that much in terms of security because who you're really trusting is the ultimate issuer on the other side whether that's gemini or tether or whatever um if there's some kind of issue with the underlying chain they can just you know they can move to another chain or something they can do a snapshot and just move to another chain you have to trust them they're the ultimate ones they're arbiters they're the ones you're trusting yeah yeah um but keep following eric's work it's

uh he's doing again he's doing an incredible job really helping educate about the shortcomings of these technologies around privacy and how people are using them that's what i think uh was great about this week especially going back to matt alborg's piece like doing that kind of research and actually figuring out how people on the ground are using bitcoin is huge because then that allows us to design better products for these people right so more hands-on research and rolling the sleeves up and talking to people figuring out how they're using this stuff uh is is a net positive in the long run and eric is one of the soldiers really really pushing that forward yeah i mean what's great about both uh matt's matt's analysis and lee's articles is that they both heavily

relied on on the ground you know you know first party um quotes and testimony and whatnot interviews yes yes um important work good journalism good journalism by these guys um are we journalists matt no we're just dedicated bitcoiners that's true yes we are not sure that are grateful to be at this time and place i don't want to i don't want that epithet thrown at me i think i think it goes both ways i think journalists would be offended for us calling ourselves journalists and uh that's true you know i don't want to why pigeonhole ourselves we're bitcoiners that's true yeah we're bitcoiners um this is this is something that you highlighted earlier this week and really pissed me off the dmv just straight up this was particularly about california's dmv

they found out that they've been selling uh everybody's information to third parties uh and it's uh becoming people are becoming more aware that this seems to be a common practice across dmvs across the country so you go to the dmv you get your license you get your driver's license you get whatever you need to get uh you gave you them all your information your social security number where you live how many kids you have your family members and then they're just taking that data and selling it to marketers it's such fucking bullshit because you basically need an id to live in this country you know they've all but required it it's like basically a requirement and then they go and they sell it to private companies they're making 50 million dollars a year

fuck you man like if you're gonna like then you know why are we paying taxes then so you're gonna you're gonna double dip on us and it's just there's so many elements of our society that are just not private by design it's the exact opposite of privacy it's so ass backwards too like what the fuck the government is making you take this information and then they're selling it to people like you said their taxes not enough like what the how can you engage in that profit are they allowed to like engage in that clearly advice didn't say anything about it being illegal um i bet when you get your license there's like a little portion on the bottom where you sign when you sign that says like we might you know sell or give this to third parties um like this

is like the one time where i'd be like yeah just raise my taxes a little bit you know you need that 50 million extra a year like you get so much tax money do you add two cents to my taxes and get you know get rid of this bullshit matt the tax money isn't enough it'll never be you know that's that's the dirty that's the dirty truth it doesn't matter how much they raise it'll never be enough right so be aware be aware you're going to the dmv uh you're getting fucked they're selling your data um let's like the morals in this country people in america and all over the world wake up people fight for privacy you got wake the fuck up you got to get a burner house and then list that address that's the key go to jameson lop he he's got this down pat he's got the uh the recipe

for for getting off you know the other thing is his vote registration i have a feeling they do that for that shit too which is fucked up yeah exactly like you have to dodge yourself for that yeah while i while i have jameson on top of my mind i don't know if we talked about this on rabbit hole recap i definitely wrote about it in the bent but uh just association here with the bitmex piece we were talking about earlier uh where they were bitmex did all of bit or not all of but a lot of bitcoin core versions going back to 2012 jameson um did a test of different bitcoin implementation so core the bitcoin bcoin gocoin all that stuff and compared them and their their ibd process with their latest versions um i'll find that link and throw that in the show notes

too that's an interesting piece bitcoin core is the most efficient implementation right now the fastest ibd but uh just thinking that next piece we were talking about earlier this is a good pairing with that yeah that's a good idea also on a more positive note um did you see this i guess this bot was an older bot that got resurrected uh at fiat health on twitter did you see this thing yeah yeah it's given a sats per dollar sats per dollar and sats per like one unit you're a bunch of other currencies which is awesome yeah um so go check it out at fiat health on twitter it's a bot uh how often is it tweeting once an hour once a day it's definitely not once an hour

so far it looks like every two days we'll see I'm not so convinced that it's going to last this time but if you give them some love or him her they then maybe we'll see the bot continue

we're closest to JPY parity slow and steady yen coming for that yen ass baby one sap per yen Yeah, so go check out Fiat Health. Damn, dude, what a week. What a week.

A lot of vitriol on Twitter. Lots of salt. I've opted out of the salt. I try to give positive things, too. A lot of people like to say Bitcoiners aren't innovative and aren't working on good tech. And as you freaks know, if you've been listening to Rabbit Hole Recap,

it's far from the truth. So I made a little mini thread of things that we've covered in the bent over the last few months of very, very exciting developments and efficiency gains within Bitcoin. So if you guys want to check that out, we'll link to that, too. Positive, positive vibes. Yeah. And as always, the bench will be in the SAT standard as well. So if you subscribe to the newsletter, you can see it there. I haven't told you this yet. People are loving the SAT standard. You don't see the replies to the emails when they go out, but we've gotten at least five replies every Saturday.

Oh, fuck yes. I've had people DM me and say they like it, so that's good. I'm glad you guys find it helpful. That's why we do everything we do here, and it sort of makes me happy. How about at Thanksgiving? Was there any Bitcoin conversations at Thanksgiving? Did Uncle John tell you it was a Ponzi scheme? I actually did have an Uncle John that I talked to at Bitcoin

uh about my wife's he's technically not an uncle he's a boyfriend of my wife's aunt i'm doxing my family here everyone has an uncle john marty yeah um not combative at all it was just genuinely curious he didn't um say whether or not he agreed with it or thought it would be successful or fail just genuinely wanted to learn and about what we're doing here and what the fuck bitcoin is but I my in-laws have been inundated with so much Bitcoin information over the years that I spare them these days

we don't really talk about it that much I mean they're like one of the reasons you started writing the bent right I think this was my first Thanksgiving in four or five years or something like that where Bitcoin didn't come up once which was kind of nice it was just I was incognito

how'd that feel I felt stealthy yeah um yeah no again shill lightly shill lightly yeah i mean my my lady's family has like really good uh table ethics there was no politics there was there was no economics no no one was asking what you were doing it was good i appreciated it yeah no very very similar and uh at our dinner too spared all that that nonsense thank god thank god thank you thank god we had a good thanksgiving um yeah that's all we got you got anything to riff on this week no i mean it was kind of a

quiet week uh it was less quiet than i thought it was before i started making the list up but uh you know holidays in general these next couple months should be a little bit quieter i think um so there's no reason really in my i think one of the beauties of rhr is that um we don't feel the need to add fluff and bullshit to to your recap yeah yeah we are not gonna feed you bullshit that we don't think you need to be fed only the bullshit that's gonna make you stronger stay humble stack stats freaks no we're not done i got some i got some riffing here uh go check out the merch store go check out the merch store we got all that good merch coming out um i'm gonna add a sweatshirt and a long sleeve shirt after i publish this episode

what kind of sweatshirt then yeah um owls or we have owls up already we're gonna put us i'm adding a stacking stats fuck yes that's what i want i'll be ordering one i want a stacking so you do not have to order one you should not even order that hat and sweatshirt that you're wearing now you should be getting that stuff for free i know but i get so excited that i don't feel like waiting For my free swag to come So I just buy it This hat is dope The BTC pay hat is fucking slick man

I love it My favorite hat Check out tftc.io Slash merch And during this week of thanks Again I said it in the bed on Wednesday But truly thankful for you freaks For listening, reading

Engaging in dialogue importantly Keeping us in check We love when you guys keep us in check And stuff like that It feels like there's a little community developing around whatever the hell this is that we're building and we're just very thankful for you freaks and all the support you've shown us throughout the years pretty crazy say we can say throughout the years now um and uh yeah keep bitcoining we fucking love you guys i love that

because once once you hit over a year you're allowed to say once you had two years you're allowed to say it it's like those restaurants that are like established 2016 it's like okay dude like i don't like you don't have to list your establishment year if it's that recent yeah you put that up at year 20 but anyway i fucking love you all i feel extremely lucky to be here and be a part of this so thank you guys yeah me as well and that was this week's rabbit hole recap stay humble stack sets peace and love peace and love freaks I think that came out really good I'm still recording