TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.12.02

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Bakkt weekly volume all time high - Bakkt ceo Kelly Loeffler tapped as new Georgia senator - The second Boltathon online lightning conference this weekend, tickets are 800k sats - easypaysy bitcoin accounts proposal - On The Brink podcast with former head of Circle OTC desk Dan Matuszewski - Bitfinex adds lightning deposits and withdrawals - A Look at Innovation in Bitcoin’s Technology Stack by Lucas Nuzzi - TFTC with Matt Ahlborg - Interesting reddit discussion about Confidential Transactions - Wasabi v1.1.10 RC1 released - go test it and earn sats - Badass BTCPay cleats by Russel Okung - Great Fold commercial by @bvbtc and @content_noir - BottlePay chat sats launched - Tails 4.1 released - Binance launches no fee Tezos staking undercutting all noncustodial options - Tron backed Poloniex flexes on DGB founder - OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY 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. GiveWell. Learn how much good your donation can do by visiting GiveWell.org/tftc. They accept traditional payment methods, Bitcoin, and several other cryptocurrencies

What is up freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent. I just startled our boy Matt O'Dell who's sitting across from me in person. We're here about to record Rabbit Hole Recap. What's going on Matt? We haven't been in person in a minute. It's been a while. You've been traveling the world. I was traveling home last week. Yeah, it has been a while. It's been like three weeks, four weeks. Yeah, last week you were recording in the cellar of your in-laws house. Yeah, they finally let me out. They let me come home. I was a good son-in-law this this thanksgiving so i made it out of the basement they gave me um they gave me a glass of water eventually grateful grateful for that very grateful for that grateful for you freaks i hope

you guys had a great thanksgiving weekend even though we already recorded after thanksgiving so no need to rehash the thankfulness that we have let's rehash the price the current price is seven thousand three hundred twenty six dollars and three cents according to the tftc.io ticker the Current block is 606,802, and the current hash rate is 99.96 extra hash per second, according to our node. Pretty volatile week this week. We had a jump up, jump down, a couple of BART charts. Is that what they're calling these days? BART's back.

Yeah. It's not really a chart. It's like a BART formation. It's a formation, yeah. Because it looks like Bart from The Simpsons' head goes up, goes flat, and then goes back down the same amount. Yeah. It's very odd. Very odd.

It seems a little unnatural, but who knows? Who knows what's going on? It's just like some big market maker fucking around. Yeah. And that's what they do when volatility is low and people are losing faith or complacent in the markets, especially if you're a trader. Just don't trade. It's not worth it buying hodl stack sets. They just, they're hunting like leveraged traders, right?

So they can knock them out. People that are too leveraged short, they can knock them out. And then people that are too leveraged long, they can knock them out when there's not that much liquidity. Yeah. So be careful. Yeah, it's not financial advice. I do not trade. I'm not a good trader.

This is why we stack sets. Yeah. The market makers are out there and they're hunting for you. So be careful. Speaking of hunting, if you're hunting for good stock deals, you can go to the Cash App now. Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by 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.

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that on the cash app you can stack sats you can sell sats you can send sats you can receive sats uh it's pretty dope uh still there on the cash app with the boost program and now cash app investing you can now get in on stocks if you so please i'm not forcing it because cash app is directly connected to your bank account there are no four to five waiting day periods for inbound transfers so you can start investing today uh right now all right broker services are provided by cash app investing a subsidiary of square and member sipc and as always when you sign up use the code stacking sats that's one word stacking sats and you're going to get ten dollars and cash app is going to send ten dollars to our good friends at owls the cross a charity very near and dear to our

heart and has no affiliation with that dirtbag al um so go download the cash app today at your local app store and start stacking sats or slivers of shares, whatever floats your fancy out there. New ad partner this week. Very excited for this one. Not very crypto related. Bitcoin related. Excuse me. What's crypto?

What the fuck is crypto? Cryptography. It's a very important technology that we have in the world today. Asymmetric leverage against the state for the individual since cryptography has gone mainstream. Shout out to the cypherpunks. This week's episode

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if they donate through givewell.org slash tftc so if you guys have any tax implications and you want to donate to reduce your tax burden you can donate with bitcoin at givewell.org slash tftc and Again, they're going to match up to $1,000 if you donate for the first time using GiveWell. GiveWell.org slash TFTC. Check them out. This episode is also brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. You freaks already know all about them. They're doing dope stuff throughout the Bitcoin space.

In particular, they had their Vaults program, which is a multi-sig setup. You can engage in a two or three quorum or more with Unchained. And Unchained will be one of the keys in the quorum. And if you ever need them to sign a transaction, you can bring them in. Or if you want to move money off their platform by yourself, you can do that as well. On top of that, they have the Bitcoin-backed collateralized U.S. dollar loans. If you are in a little pinch and you're thinking about selling your Bitcoin, don't do that. Unchained is here to let you keep your Bitcoin and will give you liquidity in the form of U.S. dollar-backed loan using Bitcoin as collateral.

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Massive hire. Congratulations to the Unchained team and to Will as well. Yeah, I've had the pleasure of meeting Will in person throughout the years. He's extremely smart and very product-focused. And again, coming from Stack Overflow, that team is a huge plus for Bitcoin. So this GiveWell site is interesting. I guess they're like a charity ETF. You donate through them and then they allocate it out?

I think so, yeah. i did some research we uh we do screen the advertisers here and they seem legit they do seem legit they they do have a frequently asked questions page you want to see how they make money they explain that pretty pretty well always good to support good causes it's that time of year freaks think about giving back we got a lot to talk about this week even though we only met six days ago a lot has happened a lot has happened and we'll start with news that dropped probably as we were recording we may have touched on it but we're not positive we did last week back backed uh saw the highest weekly volume uh that has since it launched earlier this year like

massive in comparison yeah pulling the chart it's pretty crazy yeah pulling it up right now they had 124 million dollars of volume uh the day before excuse me the highest highest trading volume day before that was 65.7 million week week excuse me week yeah um yeah so 124 million last week biggest week before that was 65.7 million so it was doubled slow and steady so instead i heard some chatter about rehypothecation on back to where they collateralizing it with 37 or something like that if you looked in the fine print i saw that dude alex cougar jumped into the fine print he was shitting on backed a little bit yeah no i think it's just not physically settled unless you physically settle it you get the call like the inter in intra day when the trading that

happens during before the futures expire uh i guess it because the main product that people use is the monthly futures pretty much no one's using the daily futures so it only settles once a month um so if you don't if you don't hold the trade you never actually settle out to physical bitcoin yeah i think this was about how the contracts are collateralized i'm not sure but anyway it's that's pretty similar to how cme works yeah um with like the slight benefit that you can take uh physical settlement in bitcoin uh at the end of expiration if you choose yeah yeah um so be aware those futures products are proliferating they're getting more mature and it seems like more people are using them um and while we're on the subject of back to their ceo

kelly lefleur has tapped uh has been tapped as the new george you just pronounced her name like dodgeball you think that's how you pronounce her name lefleur lefleur do you remember dodgeball yeah yeah lefleur lefleur kelly lefleur i thought loffler loffler lefleur i'm going french here i don't know but either way i think this is a big deal right that seems pretty big it seems uh we were just talking about uh the exchange which hit uh all-time high weekly volume last week and now i would assume that she is uh open and uh supportive of bitcoin if at least more so than the other 99 senators right yeah yeah well we don't know about davidson and mchenry they're the reps aren't they reps the reps this is a governor though or a senator the governor

appointed her as senator because the previous senator uh resigned over health reasons um so the governor has a power to appoint um and i guess trump had a recommendation and he disregarded trump's recommendation and uh nominated her instead yeah so she's going to join uh well the sociopaths on capitol hill in january of of next year um hopefully she's not uh she doesn't succumb to the sociopathic tendencies of the politicians in in our country look i don't know you know you don't have to have your hopes so high just hopefully she shills bitcoin a little bit while she's in there yeah you think she'll show lightly or heavily maybe a light show maybe a medium show medium show would be nice i guess it depends what

uh uh what the situation calls for in any given point in time but anyway it's good to have i think a bitcoin advocate uh in the senate so yeah shout out to kelly uh maybe maybe uh maybe georgia will be a we'll be a bitcoin haven in the future bit pays down there right i was like a little bit triggered because the block wrote in their synopsis uh that she's from crypto exchange backed they only offer bitcoin block guys like it's not a crypto exchange we know you're listening we know you're listening it's a bitcoin exchange right it's not a dirty word bitcoin is it yeah brian armstrong yeah i've been saying it more recently which i like to see um any of you freaks out there uh looking to learn more about lightning there is a online lightning conference the bolt

tickets are currently going for 800 000 sats per piece per ticket it's about 60 bucks yeah about 60 bucks but they did this last year cool it's like a video conference this is the second one yeah um you know bottle pay disclosure i'm an advisor for bottle pay uh they won this hackathon that's that was how they were born um and i think that was in in the springtime so it looks like they're trying to do it as a um a biannual thing every you know twice a year semi-annual semi-annual yeah yeah um and december 6th to 8th online uh again it looks pretty dope there's gonna be speakers alex bosworth i've seen christian decker this looks like rusty russell our boy rockstar dev and brick kelly from btc pay are going to be there um brandon curtis i've

actually been talking to from my own radar juice is going to be there a bunch of people lisa nugget i love the idea of the online conferences i mean not only is it better for privacy not only is it more accessible and cheap um but yeah those are the two reasons i fucking love it because it's just like anyone from anywhere around the world can can access this content and discuss and compete in the hackathon they're gonna have a hackathon again this this year with with prizes yeah i attended this year's uh baltic honey badger conference from right where you're sitting yeah but that's you know they just have a good really good live stream which is also good to see you know you want these conferences should have good live streams do you want to talk about

obsec at conferences obsec is like if you care about obsec you don't go to conferences yeah it's like almost do you remember the guy at uh bitcoin 2019 who's walking around with the he had like a beads in front of his face yeah he had like a a shade on glasses but like even that like then you're just drawing attention to yourself right yeah um i know people have gone in masks before especially if they're speakers um i think that's what janine did in berlin um i think that's what shinobi did in new hampshire yeah uh but yeah i mean like if you care about opsec you really shouldn't be going to conferences you also probably shouldn't be on twitter so yeah we failed both of those i was thinking more like uh the conference organizers

and how they should treat their guests oh i mean i think one of the big things is just random people filming uh filming and taking pictures like it's one of the reasons i love bit devs in new york is they have a strict no photo policy um obviously the organizers can their own filming can be really bad too for people's privacy and they should take note but on top of that they should be trying to limit the amount of photos that individuals are taking at least of the crowd and stuff like that like if you're a speaker your expectation of privacy is is pretty low uh but even taking like pictures of backs of heads and stuff uh can leak a lot of information about people who are attending these things and they should be discouraged uh you know we have our second uh workshop today

for bitcoin citadel and we have a super strict no photo policy yeah unfortunately not gonna make this one gotta head home for a wedding but uh you guys are holding it down again the chain code correct yes yeah but it's sold out do not reach out to them don't ever reach out to them um yeah we're very unless you want to join the residency we're very grateful that they're that they let us use the space and are hosting us yeah and if uh any of you freaks are out there uh thinking about getting into bitcoin development chain code is known for running a pretty good uh residency program from time to time so i'll look into them and we just finished the like we have a whole pamphlet that shows uh the whole process that we're teaching uh so i think we're going to

release that if other people want to take a look at it bang bang bang bang um yeah a lot of cool things a lot of privacy talk this week um what do you think was spurred on by peter wools yeah post on uh extension blocks confidential transactions via extension blocks yes very interesting reddit discussion around that yeah and then spilled over into twitter yeah so that's what i wrote about in the bent this morning yeah so for the freaks out there confidential transactions blinds the transaction amount so you can still see the sender and the receiver but you can't see the amount or in the case of liquid you can't see the asset type so if it's tether or if it's bitcoin being sent um or some other security token like you can't tell which

asset it is it is and and what the amount is so you combine that with something like coin join which without confidential transactions requires um equal amounts um and all of a sudden you don't need equal amounts so it makes coin join way more uh powerful and effective um with the main negative being that you're not able to easily audit this full supply of bitcoin or whatever chain the confidential transactions are running on yeah so that's basically the conversation that has uh been spurred in the the wake of peter i mean i think i've heard people talking more about these these issues a little bit more recently uh because of what like went soon peter had to answer this question because litecoin is adding uh confidential transactions via extension blocks

they're trying to yeah they're trying to that's what sparked the discussion and that's led to an overarching discussion about bitcoin privacy and auditability and the trade-offs that exist between the two uh not use cases but the two assurances right i mean monero already has confidential transactions too yeah and so the debate is for you freaks who may not know is is we have to weigh the trade-offs if we get confidential transactions at the protocol layer the ability or inability to audit the total supply may render bitcoin sort of worthless in the long run for people who believe it is a system that codifies a sound money but then for your hardcore cypherpunks who just want to transact privately they will say that is the most important thing

and something that should be shried for i am somebody who thinks uh this is definitely a gray subject and there's definitely a middle ground i think so much nuance yeah so much nuance uh i i'm not me personally again this is just me personally i'm not trying to imbue my my beliefs onto anybody listening right now but i think just observing what's been going on for the last six years that uh makes most sense to uh to try to push privacy to second layers or at least do everything we can before trying to implement that the protocol there well i mean i think just from you know there's a balance here uh you need the the token in this case bitcoin needs to accrue value uh otherwise the whole system is insecure and you don't have anything to send to someone

right um but at the same time obviously people want privacy and bitcoin leaves a lot in that regard. So there needs to be a balance in between there. Where, you know, I think in a big picture way, the way I like to look at it is you should be able to pay somebody without them seeing all your past, past and future transactions, like relatively easily, you should be able to pay someone without just giving up all your financial information. And that needs to be balanced with being able to actually verify the supply so you need to be able to verify the supply but at the same time you should be able to pay someone without showing all your transactions i think most people agree with that i think when you put it in a big picture

like a big picture like what's the end goal here um i think most people would agree with that yeah logic it would be hard not to right and but that is but on twitter and stuff it just goes to the extremes yeah it's just like you know people are like everything gets blinded and you can't audit the supply and people just start screaming past each other and there's there's a twitter's not very good with nuance yeah twitter's not a great uh forum for nuance for sure but no it is um yeah it's something that i'm very excited that the not excited but i'm happy that the conversation is going on because it is important when i've said this i haven't said it in a while on the podcast but i probably about a year or right after the yeah like about a year ago about

a year after the hard fork wars i started uh saying that the next fork war is my opinion going to be fungibility wars privacy wars uh and i think what peter's response to that post on reddit in particular highlights is again the amount of nuance that exists the the different approaches that we could take to try to attain privacy um that the one he described on that reddit post is just one way there's there's many other technologies that can be tested and other um combinations of tech that can be tested and stuff like that so it's there's a lot to take into consideration and i i think uh you know we also um i i also was getting shat on recently for saying that lightning is a privacy improvement

because that subject also has a lot of nuance. To say that Lightning is a privacy silver bullet is incorrect. To say that Lightning has no privacy improvement over on-chain transactions is also bullshit. It's really somewhere in the middle. And as Lightning gets built out, it should become more private. And when you mix it with certain on-chain improvements that we have in the pipeline, it should get pretty private, I think.

um and then then you know stuff like combining a coin join and then after you coin join you put it onto lightning you know on a node that runs through tor you go through multi hops you have um amps so you're able to split up the payment between multiple channels you have private channels and stuff like that it gets very interesting and and the reason i unequivocally say it's a privacy improvement is partly because it's so hard to use bitcoin privately to begin with. So there's a lot of nuance there. And then the other layer to right now that's functioning is Liquid, which doesn't have that much usage, but they do have confidential transactions. So it'd be interesting, I think, to see a CoinJoin implementation on Liquid, where you're able to

basically swap in with Bitcoin onto Liquid, run some CoinJoins, and then ideally swap out in a relatively trust-minimized fashion. And that might actually be swapping out to Lightning, which could be very interesting so there's a lot of paths that can go down here um without actually putting at risk the the verifiable supply yeah no and on the subject of liquid too i believe bitsy btsc that exchange i believe their derivatives exchange um announced this week that they are they've enabled liquid tether with confidential transactions and liquid btc on bit c the exchange so it seems that some exchanges this is something we've been covering too i asked it when we were in all or excuse me dallas for bit block boom that was what i uh sort of posited on stage like is what

like liquid seems to be the ugly stepchild product of block stream suite and will it ever green gain traction exchanges seem like the the first place that first place that uh it would gain traction because of liquid tether and confidential transaction that seems again this is one exchange and there might be uh bitfinex has liquid already yeah so you could at least move between bitfinex and bitsy yeah um you know high volumes of tether between the two without uh broadcasting without well without well about following you around yeah exactly so there's definitely i mean that's like the most obvious use case of something like liquid yeah and speaking on exchanges adopting these technologies bitfinex also adopted lightning this week too

huge absolutely huge which is actually really funny because uh john carvalho who we've had on the pod um posted a tweet uh like a week ago or two weeks ago about how his deadline for a major exchange adding uh lightning uh was coming soon uh like he had you know like six months ago he said in the next six months a major exchange is going to do it and i responded to him i was like it looks like the upstarts and like the new like stuff like escher hub spark swap zaps olympus like are going to be the ones leading the way with lightning and then the incumbents will come later and he was like super confident he was like no i i don't think that's the case and i just like left at that and it turns out that he was instrumental in bringing lightning to bitfinex and he's just

been working on it for the last couple of months so that was a little bit uh a little bit unfair information he had in regards to that twitter back and forth so shout out to uh bitcoin legend john carvalho and the bitfinex team bitcoin legends as well no matter what you uh think of their uh legal situations and tether uh they are building cypherpunk technology in my mind and Shout out for putting the teams on your back. Now Bitfinex users can send and receive via Lightning. Yeah, deposits and withdrawals. It looks like there's, I don't use Bitfinex,

but supposedly there's a limit right now, at least in testing phases. I think it's like $150, which makes sense. Like if you're sending more than that, you can just use on-chain anyway. But it seems like it's getting some decent usage. Like our friends who run the unaffiliated TFTC node opened a channel to Bitfinex and within a day

they had already routed 7.5 million sats through it. And there's a bunch of other channels already open to Bitfinex so it's not like all the volume goes through that node. So I think that's pretty high usage in 24 hours. But it could just be people testing it out, stuff like that. Yeah, no, it's good to see. I mean, a lot of Lightning has gotten a lot of flack throughout the years. A lot of skepticism has been thrown its way

in whether or not people would actually use it and adopt it. And slowly but surely, it seems like it's happening. It's obviously not fully fleshed out and adopted yet, but it seems like good things are happening. And you can also buy Bitrefill gift cards directly through your Bitfinex account now, and they just automatically pay Bitrefill with Lightning. Yeah, Mr. Hoddle, people are using Lightning.

I've seen it. a saint this is another subject where there's a lot of nuance you know it's like usage is happening it's growing um it's not some silver bullet that just automatically means a bunch of people are going to be using bitcoin for payments um but slow and steady and it'll be there when people are ready to actually start spending their bitcoin yeah we're going to come come back to this point right here but i want to circle back to the um the conversation about adding privacy tech to the base protocol and i just want to circle back because i want to share the tweet that i really agree with and it's by our friend at zender hashtag snore hashtag taproot at znd toshi on

twitter and he said i'd like for us to keep the same principle we did with scaling we try everything before increasing the block size so let's do the same for privacy let's first add snore and coin join schemes to all wallets and see where we can get with uh coin joins and then maybe we'll look into confidential transactions on chain or something like that yeah that's how i feel right like why uh throw the baby out with the bathwater like you can't come back from it if you move to something like confidential transactions and then there's undetected inflation and it just takes down the whole system um you try and slow and steady you know increase the privacy here yeah yeah and again now circling back to the point where we where we left off before that

circle around um lucas nuzzy good friend of the pod he uh dropped a piece this week that uh i wrote about earlier this week in the bent and it basically highlights all of the technologies being built around bitcoin's base protocol and so all the technologies that will enable the uh the use cases that we've been talking about for the first half hour of this episode and it's uh an incredible piece you guys got to go check it out it really lays out uh the stack that's building around bitcoin right now and it it's pretty impressive i really like the chart the chart is dope yeah so he breaks it down it's basically innovations in bitcoin and then he breaks it down by layer two side chains mining privacy smart contracts performance and usability and a lot of people

like to say bitcoin doesn't innovate it moves too slow but once you read this article and actually you look at this chart and see everything that's being worked on in one place it's actually very impressive mining things like stratum v2 coming out fiber which is the transaction relay protocol the maccarallo belt for the miners and mining derivatives are being built out privacy we just talked about we got coin joins coming people are talking about confidential transactions coin swaps bulletproofs smart contracts mass and taproot are being worked on which enables root and tap script simplicity um i wrote about earlier this week op check template verify i don't um which is by jeremy rubin op secure the bag op secure the bag renamed we'll talk about that later but

that's something that is also being worked on it's just bitcoin is innovating it seems and so go check out this this piece by lucas uh it's a good good uh one-stop shop to see what's being worked on throughout the space yeah damn right definitely definitely read it or at least look at the chart very good yeah um let's talk about op check template verify let's talk about secure the bag what do you what is your opinion on it well let's describe so 10 days ago jeremy rubin is a bitcoin core contributor um he has been uh talking about uh adding a new op code to bitcoin is it adding it back would it be adding it back or is it completely no it's completely no um so let's get into opcodes all right we got a story to go on all right so long story short jeremy has

been pushing for a new opcode to get included in bitcoin that would enable uh some cool things we'll talk about the cool things in a little bit step back opcodes in bitcoin what do they do an opcode basically uh allows you to run scripts in bitcoin transactions and in late 2010 after a core uh in the code and sort of figuring out what opcodes could do it became apparent that a lot of the opcodes that were enabled uh basically increased the attack surface of bitcoin if people are allowed to run certain scripts within transactions it could uh it could spam the network i believe one opcode is the reason for the 80 billion uh bitcoin overflow bug um and so in 2010 late 2010 satoshi turned off a bunch of opcodes and since then opcodes have been somewhat of a

contentious subject within bitcoin uh so whether or not to add new ones or take more away is always being talked about um a lot of people will say that's the reason ethereum was created because they wanted to do more functionality and scripting via opcodes and that's why vitalik will tell you you want to go build it that's what vitalik says yeah but it's bullshit um but yeah it's a money grab that's why yes ethereum was created yeah um so opcodes have again this very uh murky aurora aura around them as makes a lot of people uncomfortable but it seems like jeremy is very keen on getting this particular opcode that he's working on from what i can tell again i'm not a developer it seems very limited in the scope and it would enable cool things what cool things

would enable so it enable things like uh for exchanges that are doing transaction batching they'll be able to do uh congestion control i believe transaction congestion control we're able to create a certain script template that allows you to put a bunch of UTXOs in one transaction output, and then the opcode would give those individual UTXOs certain capabilities and dictate how they're spendable in the future.

I'm not exactly sure. I was talking through it with somebody yesterday. I still don't completely understand congestion control, but it seems like just a way to help reduce traffic when the Bitcoin blockchain is very busy. Yeah, I mean, I'm not well-versed on it at all. We didn't have it on the list, so I wasn't really prepared to speak about it.

So I will just hold it at that, and I hope that, you know, it's a very new proposal, so I hope we see a lot of good discussion around it in the next few weeks, and we will definitely cover it more. Yeah, this would help enable cool things like Bitcoin vaults that we've talked about before, where you can basically freeze a Bitcoin transaction

if it's set up in a certain way. After it's been set, if it's in nefarious transactions, it would help with that. On top of that, it would help with channel factories for Lightning, setting that up and recalibrating channels on the go. And so it seems like, to me, it would be beneficial. I don't know, though. The pushback I've heard is that it's a soft fork for a very niche use case,

so it may not be worth it in the long run. We'll see. I want to see more discussion about it, and I actually have to look into it. But I did like their earlier name better. I can give you freaks that. I think the – He switched it because people thought it was unprofessional. It was too childish, yeah.

I don't think Luke Dasher really liked it. What are you going to do? I liked it. Yeah. What do you think about Easy Peasy? Easy Paisy. Excuse me. So this seems pretty interesting.

It's like a Bitcoin account. It's an implementation of a way to do Bitcoin accounts instead of needing to give someone a new address every single time. They can have your account ID and, I guess, generate an address from that, right? Or generate addresses, yes. Yeah, because you don't want to reuse addresses. If you reuse addresses or if you post a tip address somewhere...

then it connects to you. Yeah, so that's actually one of the downfalls of Easy Paisy that we're referencing an article that Aaron Van Weeren wrote in Bitcoin Magazine, basically breaking it down. The drawbacks are, so it's an on-chain solution compared to something like PayNims, which is a client-side software solution. No, but PayNims also has an on-chain transaction.

Transaction, but this Easy Paisy runs via the op code, the op return code, which is a bit different than PayNims set up. And so that's people's knock on easy peasy would enable cool things like chargebacks. I believe somebody pointed out. Well, you could do like pull payments, right? Yeah, obviously.

It's a little bit more flexible and it doesn't require a fork. I mean, neither does PayNims. PayNims is in the wild right now. That's BIP 47 payment codes. It's in the wild Samurai wallet. Yeah, and this is very, very good piggyback on our conversation about opcodes.

Prior to this, that's the main pushback I've seen, is that people think using op return for this type of use case would, quote unquote, spam the blockchain, whether or not there is such thing as spam. You have to pay a fee regardless. Yeah, you're going to have to pay a fee. But the developer who created Easy Peasy, who I believe... There's like four different types of payments you can make with Easy Peasy with different trade-offs. One of them is basically reusing addresses, so you don't want that one. there's another one that requires interactivity so like you the receiver needs to be online it's a little bit over my head i would like to see some more discussion on this one as well

before i really comment on it further um but another great piece by iron he breaks down all these complicated things uh very well yeah so this uh easy peasy was dropped the white paper was dropped by Spanish developer Jose Feminas Canguelo. And so he, to get around like the blockchain spam argument, he's saying you can create a GUI and an interface

and just do two bulk transactions, batch it, make it worthwhile. Who knows though? Again, just dropped earlier this week. Like Matt said, I'm not completely educated on how exactly it works either, but it is something interesting

that we will try to keep up with we'll see if it um develops into anything material and speaking of developing into something material it seems like tether is material it's real at least uh some traders were definitely sending us dollars to bitfinex to create tether yes so uh nick carter uh and matt wallace uh had the former head of circles otc desk uh on their podcast on the brink i recommend everyone listen to it uh it's just a great podcast in general but definitely this episode you should listen to um and one of the he talked about two things that i thought uh were really worth mentioning uh the first thing is that uh he mentioned that he created and redeemed billions of dollars worth of tether while he was at billions with a b he said with a

b which is pretty crazy while they were at circle and they at the same time all this tether fud was going on about how um the tether were being created with no actual backing and the people at circle thought about making comments at the time and they just didn't want to get caught up in the whole thing you know the new york ag was going after them and stuff who's going after tether and they just didn't even want to be involved so they just kept their mouths shut i don't blame them yeah exactly but uh he said like the and this is what we've theorized for a while is that you know the actual flow of needing to arb uh with these different exchange pairs and stuff because they were also had their hands you know deep in a lot of the shit coins um but

specifically ethereum they were doing a lot of arbitrage with ethereum is like during high volatile like highly volatile times and stuff they had to move large amounts of money into tether right so that's why you see um tether issue and spike during those times it's the reverse you know correlation or you know causation or whatever yeah the the volume on the exchanges is inciting the creation of the tether exactly and then the other thing he mentioned which i thought was interesting was there's a lot of people who theorize that uh freshly mined coins tend to get a premium because they have less taint than a regular bitcoin transaction they don't have this history attached to it even though nick did mention correctly that you know

even freshly mined coins and if if the miner was taking transaction fees like it's got all those transaction fees in it as well it's a dirty coin so it's got a little bit of taint there regardless um but but dan um said that that's not what they've seen at the otc desk at circle that they actually um they actually got to pay a discount when they got freshly mined coins because miners just wanted to be able to get rid of their coins as quick as possible so instead of there being a premium it was actually a discount it was the opposite and then the third thing that i thought was interesting is that you know circle famously had their retail consumer app uh that was competing with coinbase and then they closed it down during uh the last bear cycle jeremy lair gave up on

Bitcoin. Well, that's what a lot of people said was that they were capitulated and then they brought it back during the last cycle, but they did it in a custodial fashion where you couldn't withdraw. And what Dan said was like actually behind the scenes, like their OTC desk was taking off and like the OTC desk originally was there to source coins for the retail app and it quickly outpaced the business of the retail app. So there was no reason for them to support the retail app when they were making way more money actually doing the otc side of things um so that whole narrative and i mean i was guilty of it too where i like shot on circle and jeremy lair and stuff for capitulation during the bear market is like kind of a bullshit narrative they actually

kept going full steam ahead they just got rid of the retail portion yeah that was very interesting to find out as well and um it's a really good episode really good episode dan is uh very charismatic very very bostonian yeah absolutely and they talked about their horrible poloniex acquisition too which is interesting oh let's just go right into it poloniex is in uh i mean i want to call it the news it's more like the the uh inquire uh section of bitcoin gossip this week well i wanted to put this at the end because it's like shitcoin related but we might as well just talk about it so poloniex famously got bought by circle at the top of last well let's back up a little bit and just talk about the nature of these shitcoin casinos

poloniex was binance at one point yeah yeah poloniex was the number one exchange in 2017 it got bought by circle for a huge multiple like very very expensive um then all of a sudden they had to implement kyc and everything and their whole market just completely fell out from underneath itself uh and uh binance rose because binance didn't have kyc which is what you see a lot with these shitcoin casinos as they get bigger they end up having to implement kyc and then circle recently just sold it to a bunch of asian investors who won't say who they are but it's rumored that you know it seems pretty obvious that it's justin sun led um the the founder of tron um so first he bought bit torrent added a token uh then he bought lunch with warren buffett

for a ridiculous price and now he bought poloniex a former major exchange but still a pretty big exchange even if the volume isn't really there um and he fucking is doing this with money printed out of thin air motherfuckers i mean look i fuck justin's son yeah he can fuck himself but i hate that fucking smiley face he always has the culmination of like he's what every shitcoin founder should shouldn't you know aspire to be right like he he like took it to another level he does his announcements after announcements he copy and pasted his white paper maybe remind the whole fucking supply he bought a major exchange you know now he's putting tron pairs all over it they're going to use tron tether um the the and there's what we were going to talk about was the

founder of dgb fucking digibyte which is another horrible shit coin digibyte but digibyte's an og shit coin i thought justin would show a little bit more respect it's a fucking garbage shit coin like the founder of that was talking shit about tron and about poloniex and poloniex just responds from their official twitter account to the thread and it's just like under careful review we've decided i'll read it um last last last tweet from jared tate was i am really pissed my personal data my friends and families data and other u.s digibyte customers most sensitive data is now in the hands of this circus that is now poloniacs or the tron shill factory as we should now call it thanks jared allaire poloniacs official response we don't own any u.s customers data as all them

are preserved by circle by the way btw from a corporate account after careful review we decided digibyte is not qualified for our listing standard we will delist digibyte soon details to be announced always an announcement so fucking hilarious they're just fucking flexed on him so just the shit coin wars uh have hit a new like a new level you've never seen anything like this before this is uh actually something i was singing about earlier this morning and thinking about writing about but i didn't really put myself out there yet on this subject like is there a point like we know why these shit coin casinos are spun up they're very profitable is there a point where bitcoin reaches such an appreciation such a market value where the opportunity cost of

servicing these shit coins even though very profitable now uh outweighs the profit that could be made doing that if you were to just focus on securing your exchange in a bitcoin fashion no i i think there's it's you know two unique businesses that don't really compete with each other right you'll have shit coin casinos and you'll have bitcoin focused uh exchanges and brokers you know and then you have like the middle ground where you have something like bitmex who only accepts bitcoin for deposits and withdrawals but then lets you bet on shit coins right so um you'll have those three unique businesses and they don't really compete with each other that much i mean i guess bitmex kind of competes with the shitcoin casinos but like then you have something

like cash app disclosure they're a sponsor or bull bitcoin um that's just bitcoin only um you just use it to to buy bitcoin and sell bitcoin and that's that right uh and i i don't think they really they really compete with each other and i don't i also don't think like the shitcoin casinos go away anytime soon because people are gamblers and people like fucking gambling it's like a major use case of bitcoin why do people put up with just the justin sons of the world dude he's just like he's like what vitalik wishes he was well yeah should we he's a winner you know he just like makes it fucking happen should we respect him more than vitalik just because he's like unabashed about it they can both like go fuck themselves but like i think he's like the pinnacle of what

a shitcoin founder like wishes to be right yeah he like takes everything to like the logical extreme yeah i mean the bittorrent flex was like ridiculous right i can't believe that happened yeah that's actually it's embarrassing yeah it's that bittorrent went to justin sun it really so like we have to there's bittorrent the company and bittorrent the protocol like obviously he by the protocol but he bought the company um it's just it's just shameful you know like imagine being the bittorrent guys and selling to him yeah and just watching him just destroy the brand yeah destroy i mean added a useless token on top is that is a pump announcement about it just remind that token as well second token is he some um it seemed like like uh what the

fuck's the actor's name borat ali g oh uh sasha barricone sasha barricone is he like a sasha barricone doing like no he's completely serious about he's ruining he's ruining bit tour he's ruining poloniacs uh wasn't the chinese poloniacs was already garbage at that point you know did he really ruin it i don't know if he ruined it no but that's like his mo it's just like i just think it's interesting a shitcoin buying a shitcoin casino right because that is the logical step right the next logical step is and then he makes everything tron pairs and like tron tether pairs uh yeah it's the next logical step well you have cz at binance he did the exchange first and then

the shit coin and then you have yeah and then you have ud who took his trolling to another level and he like uh late last week or early this week tweeted out that you can now buy tron on amazon and he linked to the tron movie um which i you know obviously isn't the tron cryptocurrency and the and tron price went up did it yeah it like it went up like three percent four percent because of fucking udie's tweet um udie you better be careful bro you gotta be careful with your trolling yeah man are you trolling or trying to move markets do you have any positions open this is what i need to know anyway tron's a complete joke um you know but that you know sometimes scams pump the hardest so what are you gonna do be aware be aware be aware be aware tell

your friends i can't believe we talked about charm that that long this early in the podcast but it is what it is dude we're 50 minutes in are we really 50 yeah we can keep ripping um i really enjoyed your interview with matt alberg about remittance and bitcoin and paxful and gift cards uh so you freaks that haven't listened to it you should definitely go listen to that one in full uh very very good episode yeah matt's a don um thank you for saying that we uh we put together a last minute interview monday night posted that tuesday morning i've written about him three times in the bent this year first covered it in february i mean we talked about his most recent piece last week basically we sat down and went over why he's doing what he's doing and how he's doing what

he's doing what interests me is the method to his data collection particularly the anecdotes on the ground from these traders he's a man uh going on these p2p exchanges paxful and local bitcoins uh finding the traders contacting them and having conversations with them saying hey how the hell are you using bitcoin and he ran through a number of different scenarios of in which people across the world are using bitcoin for very specific use cases and it's just infinitely fascinating and we're gonna have him on the podcast again uh in the next three to six months because after we hit record stop hit record we he told like 10 more stories listen to the episode freaks it's a fucking good one yeah um other things you don't have to rush you don't have to

feel you know we can be more concise you know i don't like when the when the rhrs go too long so i'm going to rattle off two things real quick uh wasabi just released their new release candidate um if you go test it and you find any issues they have bounties where you get paid so you can earn sats by testing it so go check out that link um tails 4.1 was released i fucking love tails that has built an electrum um it's it's automatically uses tor and it's it's a linux distro that you just you plug in with the usb drive and then when you pull the usb drive out uh everything gets wiped so it's a very privacy focused uh linux distro that is that is run by the tor project and i just highly recommend that so 4.1 is released how big of a usb stick should you get

if you want to uh because i mean i don't they have a uh you can do it with persistent storage so it keeps storage over time but i don't like that feature so like if you don't use that feature i think you can just like an eight gig stick is fine for it okay which is like no one even has that small of a stick anymore so you know you use a 16 or 32 whatever you should be good um highly recommend tails is tails is fucking great um the other thing is uh did you see fucking russ russ's btc pay cleats yeah they're fucking fire fucking awesome he's gonna i guess he's wearing him at the game this week yeah so uh uh russell okung wow he just changed his name on twitter to bitcoin cleats guy this is huge um so bitcoin cleats guy on twitter bcg i guess uh

in the nfl uh players are allowed to get a specialized pair of cleats and it's my cause my cleats i guess this year russell wants to bring attention and awareness to one of his favorite brickling projects which is btc pay and really uh excuse me the reason i really like his explanation is writing a readable we'll link to it um is because he he saw how btc pay works like he he spun up a website and it worked for him very quickly and that aha moment for him was like holy shit i need to be pontificating the software around the world because it is very powerful and basically wants to help uh enable people to get paid in bitcoin he he wasn't lying when he asked the nfl to pay him in bitcoin yeah i mean we love btc pay here so it's good to

see russell also loves it um you know if russell needs a hat to go along with his cleats we have this awesome btc pay hat where i think 25 of proceeds go to btc pay as a donation as well 25 are going and uh you freaks uh black friday extended into cyber monday which extended into wednesday so we had a we had a big sale this week because you just didn't you didn't switch it back i forgot to switch it back classic i told you freaks it was good i'm wearing the hat right now it's fucking dope hat and the sweatshirt the sweatshirt it's my favorite hat it is it's very clean the sweatshirt we got to get it embroidered yeah we're gonna get the sweatshirts embroidered sup freak sweatshirts go check it out tftc.io slash merch um did you see this fold commercial

that uh yeah shut up brekkie von bitcoin and uh content noir put out yeah it's fire it's a very good commercial i think it was brekkie at his best yeah um it's basically like an american express commercial but uh for fold with sat spec and i think sat spec is going to be fucking huge it's going to onboard uh millions of new users into bitcoin uh because who doesn't you know who doesn't want money back people love cash back rewards so sats back is uh even better money yeah yeah you're you're stacking harder rewards points for sats you look at them as money or rewards points um yeah so shout out to brekkie that is a dope commercial quick one uh straight to the point too really drives home what's going on that was a beautiful uh piece of art he had of

the fold uh logo as well it's just very good just it just seemed very professional yeah i dig it um one of your favorite topics staking on exchanges binance just launched no fee tezo staking undercutting all the non-custodial options literally the cheapest way to stake your tezos now which is something that i've been speculating on since december 2017 maybe even a little bit earlier than that uh but i have a thread from december 2017 where i've been tracking this shit and i think it's fucking hilarious that all of a sudden all the proof of stake proponents are like oh my god this is an issue um it was fucking obvious like like staking will naturally gravitate towards uh exchanges etfs and other custodians um because people first of all don't want to do it

themselves it's more difficult and second of all is because these exchanges and other custodians will offer incentives like tesla like catezos like binance is doing right now just to draw volume and usage to their exchange yeah this is uh one of my favorite threads on bitcoin twitter that's what i like the long threads that you that you keep track of over the course of years there's one of my favorite parts about twitter we've been warning you matt's been warning you pretty crazy so i think the cat's out of the bag on that one this is one of the reasons why i like proof of work so much um a proof of work was the innovation like people say blockchain that that wasn't the innovation the innovation was distributed verifiable proof of work proof of work with

the difficulty adjustment yeah and i i think also on top of that like i think the next realization people will have is that you want to embrace asics like there's a hard part with asics that you know in the beginning um it'll centralize between a couple manufacturers a couple miners but once you get past that point your chain is way more secure because you have this purpose-built hardware that can't be used anywhere else yeah and at least via observation it seems that that mining manufacturing space is becoming more distributed as you see the downfall of bitmain over the last year the rise of what's minor in canon and in silicons helping with layer one i believe in their miners um yeah so it seems like it is becoming more distributed and yeah the proof

of stake somebody came out with an article about proof of stake and how it might not be secure because using Ethereum as an example specifically because then you have users having to decide if they want to chase yield in DeFi apps or stake in the protocol. Yeah, I mean, and the other thing is Binance is quickly, I think they're already the top five validator in Tezos and they've only launched this like...

No, I think it was Tron, right? They're also in Tron. They're the number one in Tron. um definitely besides the tron foundation besides justin sun um but they're top five in tezos already in like a day for like two days uh and you have to ask yourself like these exchanges are the easiest to regulate they're the huge regulatory target um this is one of the reasons why we say don't keep your coins on exchanges to begin with you know besides exit scams and stuff like that so if they're the easiest to regulate and they're securing your chain like

you're gonna have a lot of issues do you really want um these like fly-by-night shitcoin casinos to be the main you know security element of your chain like i think that is just a fucking recipe for a disaster yeah you can't what if italic does a long threat against justin sun or cz and they just say you know what done remember that bullshit where cz was like talking about rolling back bitcoin transactions trying to roll that don't why would you even bring that up he can't do that because he couldn't he wasn't capable of doing it when he was talking about it and that fud alone caused a lot of uncertainty in the market imagine if he was the number one validator or like a top validator of the fucking chain in question then he might actually be able to pull it off that's true

very good point yeah so that's why it's relevant yeah um so be aware be aware this is something matt has been warning about for over two years now and um it'll be funny it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out in the long run um speaking of proof of stake while we're on the subject ethereum uh it seems like they're going to extend their ice age by four million blocks in january i don't understand what's the point of the difficulty bomb is uh this ice age where basically the blocks take longer to produce forcing a fork when you keep pushing it off like if you keep pushing it off like what and if i remember correctly so they in ethereum ethereum has it built into their protocol again like the difficulty bomb um and uh also known as the ice

age basically when they first launched ethereum they expected to transition to proof of stake pretty quickly i believe the first uh estimates of their transition to proof of stake like 18 months like pre-launch this is one of your threads yes and um so they haven't obviously transitioned to proof of stake and this difficulty bomb still there so what the way the difficulty bomb works is as block after a certain block the difficulty goes up just naturally and there's no difficulty adjustment for it unless you hard fork and so blocks are slowing down there i believe average block time supposed to be 13 seconds now approaching like 16 and we'll hit 20 eventually at some point by the end of the year so they have to hard fork and in the past they've done it twice

where they extended it by 2 million blocks this time they're going to extend it by 4 million blocks which is about 611 days i believe so almost two years next time they're going to do it by 8 million blocks yeah well that's well that's a funny thing it's like again the longer you wait this is the threat i'm talking about the threat i had that matt alluded to like and the longer you wait the longer you'll be expected to wait so the longer uh you wait for ethereum to transition the proof of stake the longer you'll be expected to wait for that transition because again the first estimate that i can remember was about 18 months and i believe the justification for the difficulty bomb was was like environmentalism as well i don't fucking get it it doesn't make

any sense like if you're gonna push it off anyway you might as well just fucking fork it out remove the difficulty bomb and like if you ever get to your theoretical bullshit prove a stake then you can just move to prove a stake at that point like because you just you just create you create this headache for everyone in the ethereum ecosystem and you create this attack surface like why it seems so fucking unnecessary and just goes to show like that the priorities are still so fucking misguided over at ethereum well and the the arbitrariness of it all like why four million blocks it makes no sense like in the thread that we're alluding to like last month november 1st somebody from the ethereum foundation tweeted out will probably extend it by another two million

blocks and only a month later like oh now it's four million so if their minds can change that quickly like are they really thinking about this adversarially like if you're gonna push it off anyway you might as well not have it i don't i don't get it and this has always been my thesis of the theorem too they've ruined themselves with precedent they've set the precedent that they'll never have a hard monetary policy by changing stuff like this on a whim like you can never say that the monetary policy will be set in the future based off your prior actions especially if you have centralized proof of stake chain yeah it'd be even easier to fork yeah yeah so beware apparently they launched a testnet for beacon eth 2.0 so some progress

there's a testnet um or testnet block explorer test not been following that i've had to for this thread um is that what we're gonna end it on we're gonna end it on that no i have very positive news all right good out of bottle pay uh disclosure part of that team uh this was a big feature that i teased i think last week prematurely i wasn't allowed to tease it and i tease it anyway but it is now live um you can send sats to any person with just a link you generate a gift link uh whichever amount you want you put a little message in there and then you copy and paste that link into any chat app so if that's facebook messenger you know instagram dms twitter dms signal telegram literally any chat app you can now send sats they can activate it with any

of their social media handles whichever one they feel most comfortable doing it and then they have a fully functioning uh custodial lightning wallet so they can then make lightning payments really easily it's a really cool way to gift bitcoin i think yeah um no i tested it out a couple weeks ago and it was so simple um it's crazy it's crazy they started out at a like you mentioned earlier at a hackathon this time last year no it was in like march march even less not even less times even earlier this year um pretty crazy yeah they just build build build build like i said to them i think like three months ago um i was like i just want to be able to send sats with the with the link just let me send sats to the link and they fucking built it and i don't put you in an

uncomfortable situation but these are uh shit coiners turn back to bitcoin correct yes yes they are they're very they're very aware of that and they've they've disclosed that that they they they were working on eos before um they they found the they found the light um but no shit coins will be added to bottle pay um before i started working with them i made them repent so um but but they they haven't been hiding that fact and and i'm not saying they are i'm more trying to highlight that people are actually realizing that you can build on bitcoin well one of the interesting things is like if you can run an eos node like you can definitely run high performance lightning nodes like es nodes are fucking ridiculous to run is yes well 21 validators

yeah yeah and you have to run like super specialized equipment and shit like they have to be like up and like making decisions wasn't there something like with the es validators where i don't know somebody wasn't there but running the nodes is insane like an average person can't run a node yeah but i wasn't trying to uh poke fun at the bottle pay team i was trying to highlight that uh some people can be wayward at times and actually realize that hey you can build cool stuff on bitcoin go check out lucas nuzzi's uh chart where everything cool that's being built is put in one spot i just love that you can send sats on whatsapp super easily now and you can't send libra still so take that david marcus no don't don't just throw it at sock not david all

right take that sock yeah fuck sock sorry david um got anything to riff on here excited for tonight yeah i'm super excited for this workshop uh i'm excited for doing many more of these workshops going forward so yeah uh yeah if you freaks are liking this let us know let us know you can buy a shout out get on air you can buy some merch um let us know there's any topics we missed any subjects you want covered in the future that was this week's episode of rabbit hole recap oh i have one more thing all right no it wasn't i uh i went to my friend's giving on friday last week uh and they fucking loved my btc pay hat uh so a couple of them are buying hats on our merch store and they don't even know what btc pay is you know and they're donating to btc pay

so i just thought that was fucking cool shout out to your friends shout out to you shout out to you freaks shout out to everybody out there doing cool shit peace and love