TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2020.01.06

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - River financial only 8 states - https://sphinx.chat/ - Samourai whirlpool dynamics, whirlpool CLI 0.10.2 released - Clark Moody adds sats per dollar and lightning Tor stats to his dashboard - zeus beta2 released, c-lightning support and iOS - Polar v0.2.0 released, c-lightning support added - RTL releases a major UX upgrade - lnd v0.9.0-beta-rc1 released with multi-path payment support - South Korean government committee recommends adding bitcoin product to national exchange - Neil Woodfine on how to keep bitcoin running in offline environments: video, slides, & thread - Tessercube PGP on mobile, recommended by @coinsureNZ - Kraken releases yearly government request transparency report - Cloud extraction report by privacy international - Russian state energy company courting bitcoin mining ops - Elaine makes the case for censorship resistant money - Video of gold accumulation over the last 20 years overlayed with bitcoin market cap - Debrief creative video by @CreativeLandRun mentions Marty 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

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty Bent here on another Thursday afternoon ripping Rabbit Hole Recap with our boy Matt O'Dell. What's up, Matt? What is up, freaks? Excited to be here today. Yeah, we got a quick rip. We got Andrew Chow coming in the studio after this to talk about pre-signed Bitcoin, partially signed Bitcoin transactions. Wow, you figured out a new way to fuck it up. God damn it. Partially signed Bitcoin transactions. But before we get to that, today we're using clark moody's uh bitcoin dashboard bitcoin.clarkmoody.com slash dashboard for our stats

according to clark's site according to his dashboard the current price of bitcoin is seven thousand eight hundred twenty dollars uh currently twelve thousand seven hundred eighty eight sats per dollar um we're at block height six hundred twelve thousand seventy three um how how far away are we from the next halving he has a list there we're seventeen thousand 927 blocks can i jump in here real quick jump in um first of all clark awesome fucking dashboard uh really happy to see stats per dollar up there one thing he just added today which i think we should shout out every episode going forward because i think it's a really important stat and uh it's part it's partially because i was poking him to add it so i'm like really excited

about it as well is he lists the the capacity the lightning lightning channel capacity um lightning network channel capacity for tor nodes on this site um which is right now it's sitting at 348 bitcoin out of 858 total bitcoin in public channels 340.64 out of 858 i read zeros eight from because i don't want to like look down on my computer too much um my bad guys but anyway what we should shout out every week is the percentage that it makes up which is 39.7 percent and i think the importance there is because you know a lot of people that critique lightning and me included even as someone who is bullish on lightning um you know we worry about the idea that you have these large uh nodes that are run by regulated companies that are operating the lightning network

where you like have to connect to like bit refill or something in order to get liquidity um so it's really important i think to see a lot of tor capacity because the tor nodes can be run um without a known identity without doxing your ip address um so people can run them from around the world and help provide routing liquidity to the network so hopefully we see that percentage go up almost 40 is pretty damn good i would say so far i'd say it's pretty material it's not too shabby yeah it's uh pretty it's way more than i would actually have have guessed i know i was actually yeah i was really i was excited to see that yeah um so shout out to clark he i think i tweeted this out over the weekend and some freaks were like i need this i want this i want that and then like

three days later he's got a bunch of new stats up on the dashboard so again bitcoin.clarkmoody.com slash dashboard and clark maybe stealing your idea it's such a nice fucking dashboard it's so perfect i've been i said it as uh like on i said it as a shortcut on my phone and my computer yeah So I don't have many bookmark tabs. Yeah. And then you just click it and you just get everything you need to know right away. Yeah. Concise.

It's fantastic. Check it out. And is Clark's co-host of Bitcoin Matters, correct? I don't know. I know he did. He created that one of the first, not charting websites, but stats websites with Dan Held. What do they call it? Zero something.

It was a zero block. Zero block. and then they were purchased by someone else. So this is very similar to the vein of ZeroBlock, but it has way more information. I like how clean it is. It's just very concise, but gives you a lot of information,

like everything you could really want. That's Shane Kennedy, who's Bitcoin Matters, not Clark, Mindy Clark. Yeah, I didn't think Clark. Shane and Clark, I'm sorry for getting you guys confused. Clark has a blog, though, that's pretty good. Yes, yes. Yeah, Bitcoin Matters, good podcast with Beauty on it,

and Shane Kennedy as well. Sorry for that slight confusion there. Before we jump into the topics, we've got a heartfelt shout-out this week. Let's just read it. We don't know who it's from. This read is for AvidBitcoiner, at AverageJoePunter, that's at A-V-G-J-O-E-P-U-N-T-E-R. I personally know with the fires in Australia, he's been hit hard. I won't dox him in any way, but he's a small business owner, works seven days a week, and loves the Bitcoin community.

Chin up, buddy. All will be all right in the future. Yeah, AverageJoePunter, we're thinking of you, man. This one really, this one hits home. Yeah. I love Average Joe. He's great. Yeah, he's got the spacesuit avatar. Yeah.

Average Joe, if you're listening, we're thinking of you, man. Tragic stuff, what's going on over there. And I'm looking on his Twitter right now, like insurance fucked him and shit like that. Really? It's just fucked up, man. Yeah. We have an update on the fire situation over there. I saw it was raining in a certain part.

I have no idea. Yeah. I have no idea. It's fucking tragic what's been going on. But yeah, Average Joe, we're thinking of you. And shout out to that anonymous person who thought of Average Joe punter. We have no idea who sent that. That's so cool, by the way.

So cheers to whoever sent that. Cheers to you as well. Cheers to you. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is also 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 grow your money. Introducing Cash App Investing. Unlike investing tools that only let you buy entire shares of stock,

Cash App lets you instantly invest as little or as much as you want. This way, when your favorite company's stock is just a little too expensive, you can still own a piece or as little as $1. We're stacking slivers of shares. You don't have to if you don't want to. You can still stack sats and sats receive sats. Because Cash App is directly connected to your bank account, there are no four- to five-day waiting periods for transfers,

so you can start investing today. Brokerage services are provided by Cash App Investing, subsidiary of square and member sipc and as always when you sign up use the code stacking sats uh you're going to get ten dollars and ten dollars going to go to owls lacrosse download cash app from the app store today week i apologize continue i'll give you a better one next week um this episode is also brought to you by our good friends at unchained capital you freaks already know all about them uh they're a bitcoin financial services firm really focusing on multi-sig and collaborative custody they have their vault program where you

can engage in a multi-sig quorum with unchained and if you ever need them to sign off on a multi-sig transaction they are there for you on top of that they have their their loan programs if you don't want to sell your bitcoin if you're thinking about selling your bitcoin unchained is there to help you not sell your bitcoin you can use your bitcoin as collateral get a us dollar back loan so you don't have to sell as long as you're paying back the loan you get to keep your bitcoin on top of that they're working on a bunch of open source stuff including caravan which is their open source multi-sig quorum which if you don't want to engage in the multi-sig quorum with unchained you can do it yourself they've open sourced the tools that allow you to do that

slip 39 hermit or other open source projects they're working on and then parker lewis guest multi multi-time guest multi-time guest what the hell is that repeat guest on this podcast writes an incredible blog called gradually then suddenly all at unchained-capital.com that's unchained-capital.com and thank you for letting me spring the ads on you there just had to fit them in there real quick got it done got it done got it done um yeah and we have to make a correction from last week i forgot to correct you the day after speaking with alex river financial um which is formerly alto financial and is the new exchange helping you guys dca into bitcoin very easily is only in eight states not 48 i said 49 actually did you say 49 i said 49 i was that

wrong apologies freaks um uh he was also uh alex leishman was also on the pod with marty you should listen that episode it's a great episode um the reason i said 49 states is because so many so many of these bitcoin apps including like escher hub and stuff are 49 states except for new york thanks to ben losky so actually that kind of makes me feel a little bit better uh at least we're not the only state that it's not accepted in yes you know yeah usually it burns slowly but surely don't get there i uh like i was talking about escher hub like they're they're new yorkers they created a product they can't even use 49 states can use it but they can't use it themselves right so fucked up fuck you ben losky ridiculous had to get that one in and then the

other correction i wanted to do was we spoke we spoke about fink's chat and i wasn't sure if i there's a lot to talk about it uh did i not pronounce it well i think you just said finks sphinx sphinx sphinx it's sphinx it's like the cat the egyptian cat statue um and the website is sphinx sphinx.chat um and you can i now you can you can get invited to the beta if you put in your email address there um the correction that i wanted to say is i said i wasn't sure if it was like whatsapp where you could where the payments were actually being sent over the lightning network they are in fact being sent over the lightning network the messages yeah it's it's one it's one sat every message is one sat it's uh not a bad price it's interesting yeah i mean i don't think

you're paying them one sat that's that's just like it's a one sat payment that's routing yeah with a message on it well no more but it's very interesting flow i've downloaded the the beta and the flow is very clean you can pay in line um yeah it's just it's basically it's p2p encrypted messaging through the lightning network with built-in lightning payments as well so you can request and send money to your contacts in the in the chat app i have uh yet to test it out i'm going to download that and test it out this weekend but that sounds dope dude like imagine if that's like a little trojan horse right there some little niche app but it's like end-to-end encrypted and running on this completely different network yeah it's interesting i'm not

completely sold on it yet but keto miner is like super bullish on it and i'm bullish on keto so yeah shout out to keto i'll tell you the interface is fucking slick the interface is like absolutely fucking slick so i'm excited i am excited about it yeah i need to uh get a fire lit under my ass and get on downloading that and using it. Yeah, I think to invite someone, you have to pay 250 sats, and it expires in 24 hours. So when I invited you,

and you didn't accept the invitation, I lost 250 sats. So you could put that on my tab. Put that in my pipe and smoke it? I'm sorry. I'll repay you the 250 sats. What's that? I appreciate that.

It's less than a penny. I don't even know what it is, right? It'd be like... I feel like it's $1,200 for a dime. It's two cents, right? I'm thinking of the dime bag right now. I think we got 1,200 sats. That's $0.02.

It's $0.02. Yeah, something like that. Don't worry, it's on me. Yeah, so sphinx, S-P-H-I-N-X, dot chat. Go check it out. Whirlpool, we talked about it last week. They already released a new version. Whirlpool CLI 0.10.2 has been released.

Yeah, this was not as much a correction as a further explanation. I wanted to dive a little bit deeper in here. Well, first of all, they did release a new Whirlpool CLI. uh which is it makes it way more stable it's the performance it just seems like it's performing like significantly better the tor connection like everything uh just seems more much more smooth um so if you're using whirlpool definitely go download that um what i want to talk about a little bit more in detail was i was discussing how cheap fees are on whirlpool because i actually didn't realize myself even though i've been using it um the the way i meant i the reason fees

so the way world the whole point of fees for these coin join coordination services are twofold obviously the coordinators want to make some money for actually operating the coordinator server whether that's samurai or wasabi this the second reason is because of sybil resistance basically like the way you attack uh these coin join services is by putting in a ton of transactions and since they're all your transactions you can do process of elimination of of who the rest are right so you just send in a bunch and you try and be like all the participants in a round except for one or two people and you can isolate them yeah and we've seen this happen accidentally with like the huobi plus token hacker right or robber not hacker right the plus the and and well yeah so

that's not really necessarily a simple attack but if if one big player is putting a lot of transactions in and they're not doing good privacy then it's an unintentional civil attack yeah exactly but anyway so you have the fee there and the reason you have the fee there is because it costs them money as they keep trying to add more attack transactions into the mix um it costs them an increasing amount of money and as more people are using these services that cost gets higher and higher and higher and higher and becomes untenable that's the idea but you want to keep it you want a balance there where the fee is not too high to dissuade people from using it but you want it to be high enough to dissuade civil attackers so what's interesting about whirlpool is that

because whirlpool has this tx0 setup which we've talked about before on the pod it's one of the things i really really love about whirlpool compared to wasabi where they when you enter a train when you enter the whirlpool um it creates all these equal these these equal output equal amount outputs and you pay the fee there and then you never pay a fee again. So by doing that, by charging the fee at that point at the transaction zero and basing it on whichever pool you're going into, not the amount you're sending in. So whether you send four Bitcoin into the point one, the point zero one, the one million sat pool, or if you send two Bitcoin into the one million sad pool it's the same fee uh so the reason that is is because none of those outputs

from a single transaction zero whether that's 20 outputs or 40 outputs or 60 outputs are operating on different clients so from a simple situation they're all grouped under the same user because whirlpool software the coordinator is automatically not allowing you know uh you to have multiple multiple inputs in each in each whirlpool transaction so it handles the civil resistance but if you're if you're an actual honest user you end up paying low fees it it's not it's really elegant how they handle that yes is there are they avoiding like a fee taint if you will um after tx0 i wouldn't say taint's not really the right word but with wasabi you have the issue where the Sybil attacker and the Honest user

are paying the same fee. In this case, the Sybil attacker is paying a higher fee and the Honest user is paying a lower fee. And you also have the issue with Wasabi that because the fee is taken out every single round, that all the amounts aren't the same across the board, right? The cool thing about Whirlpool's transaction zero is that you have this almost infinitely growing

a non a non-set because you have every world pool transaction has to have remixes built in and new mixes so there's this chain of exactly equal outputs that keeps growing with wasabi they're all different amounts it gets a little chopped off each re each remix yeah every round it's just a slightly different amount yeah it either gets made smaller or you have to combine it with some change exactly now wasabi does have that additional fee taint that they have a fixed fee address and that's when we saw with binance um when they were blocking when they they blocked that guy's withdrawals it was because there was a connection to that fee address um you know there's ways for chain analysis companies to detect wasabi without that but the fee address makes it easier

they just put the fee address in the software and if it comes up that it paid the fee address then they know it was a wasabi transaction now what's the uh site that helps you visualize this kycp.org yeah and that's made by the samurai guys yeah so you can like plug in your uh transaction use tor vpn when you do that you know try not to like put all of your addresses in there if you're using tor keep doing a new circuit you can click new circuit and then it it looks like you're coming from a new place um i don't think they're logging but if they were presumably logging you don't want to like put all your transactions in there okay how's the um dojo been running do the dojos fucking great i'm like super bullish on samurai i think it's gonna uh i i they're coming out with

mobile mixing soon i think it's going to change the game in terms of using bitcoin privately it just makes it so much easier um to connect vqr code and then just go on the go yeah and so you're using a full node and i i don't i even like just the whole transaction zero concept and the way their fee structure works as we just went over um it's just really fucking cool uh and then of course then they have the post mix spend and stuff like that so the idea is like samurai's philosophy is try and automate best practices from privacy perspective at the wallet level and i think that's where we basically have to go if we want people to be using bitcoin in more private way um try and automate as much of it as possible because you know it's um you know we've been on the front

lines of trying to help people use bitcoin more privately and it's very convoluted and difficult it's been getting easier every day but with the upcoming samurai updates i think it's gonna like hit a point where overwhelming you think beauty on futures upon us where people don't even realize they're using bitcoin no realize that they're coin joining we're still far from that and even that point they'll probably the first people like that are going to be using horrible services for your privacy right because it's like the first the easiest way to make this shit easier is to like take the trade-off where you destroy privacy and security and stuff like that you can make it really easy right like look at something like bottle pay bottle pay was the

ux was beautiful it was super easy to use right but it wasn't private and it wasn't it was custodial So you didn't have the R.I.P. Maybe I could see Sphinx making it pretty easy with lightning. Yeah. Well, the Sphinx stock has my sphincter a little bit. So I got to take a dump. I can just continue the pod if you want to go take a break. Nah, that would be too long.

I can hold it. This is good practice. Doesn't sound healthy, Marty. Doesn't sound healthy. You got to train your colon. Yeah, a lot of lightning. Lightning apps upgrading this week. I think it's because everyone didn't want to release during the holidays.

The dead of the holidays. So as soon as the holidays came out, they all released. Yeah, so we have Zeus, Polar, and RTL, all with the new releases, Beta 2 for Zeus, which adds sea lightning support and iOS, which is pretty big. Yeah, I don't think Zeus was on iOS before, right? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they were Android.

So now they're on TestFlight if you want to test it. I've used it on Android. Zeus is made by Evan Kaloudis, our friend. He was on the pod as well. He runs Bitcoin Citadel with me. His app is great. it's for controlling your node at home yeah yeah pretty much that simple um now this new york like the new york squad came out with a lot of updates this week polar which is another uh new york-based

bitcoin or jamal um release version 0.2.0 uh add sea lightning support uh i'll actually be sitting down with jamal on monday to record an episode with him and talk about polar i'm so fucking bummed i'm gonna be missing that i know let's have a good reason i got uh the pleasure of having a nice pre-interview chat with jamal over the weekend and uh it's gonna be a fun conversation i'm bummed you're gonna miss but you are missing it for good reasons it's yeah exactly it's important that the new yorkers step up here because the when you were talking to jamal was that pierre's going away party on friday right yes yeah we were all celebrating pierre leaving which is a huge loss for us uh we weren't celebrating him leaving no no we were celebrating

him before he leaves before he leaves yeah and uh i already miss him and i all of the new yorkers have to you know we have to step up to to make sure that we well if this week's any indication big shoes to ready to because uh our other new york friend sue had came out with the rtl release a major ux upgrade it looks beautiful i've been so excited for this one i fucking love rtl it's like a must piece of software for managing your lightning node especially if it's routing a lot of payment yes you know i don't is that public information oh i don't know i will um where are we 21 20 i'll take that out there you go yeah i don't want to dox it um and yeah so yeah rtl is great polar is great polar is the dev tool where you're able to simulate the lightning network

it's fucking awesome and zeus so check all those out oh and lnd released uh 0.90 uh beta rc1 yes and the big thing here is the multi-payment uh multi-path payment support otherwise known as amp amp and amp uh who is alex bosworth was he talking about amp or submarine swaps amp and submarine swaps combined together will help uh with like multi-channel closing out so it'll only be one fee correct or something like that i'm not sure one of the cool things about amp is from well both from a liquidity and a privacy point of view right so you have right now your largest payment that you can send is based on your largest channel capacity when you can go through multiple paths instead of a single channel path obviously you'll be able to send use

your liquidity better to send bigger payments and then the other thing is from a privacy point of you because right now all the nodes on your route can spy on you especially if they have a group of them but if you have multiple paths that you're taking it becomes even more difficult for them to track your transactions so it's really good from a privacy point of view the other thing lnd added was this thing that was called um i think it's called circular send which is pretty cool it's uh the idea is that you can send a circular payments to self is what they're calling it the idea is that you can send a payment through the lightning network that comes back through one of your other channels so you can using that you can rebalance two channels uh without ever leaving

the lightning network right that concept seems makes a lot of sense to me that seems pretty cool yeah um so you basically just send a payment to yourself that allows you to rebalance yeah it goes through a bunch of other channels and then comes back in through a different channel of yours so then those two channels of yours have just been balanced balanced out it's almost like a submarine swap but a different yeah i mean i think same end achieved by different means exactly that's what it is yeah yeah uh or like a swap in swap out stuff like that yeah and we talked about this last week that one of the hardest parts about lightning is getting inbound liquidity so that's a really nice way i think a clean way for people to get again man like actually you can't

get inbound liquidity your original inbound liquidity from it but once you have inbound liquidity you can keep all everything balanced up yeah it's uh again the uh the creative ways in which people are finding ways to make uh i almost said liquid the lightning network uh uh more efficient better better uh a better user experience and just better overall infrastructure it's again it's the pace is uh far beyond we've said this many times far beyond where where i expected it to be um i was saying i bought a i bought a a book that was just like the the first version of the bitcoin uh quote the bitcoin source code i bought it via lightning was 60 bucks uh payment routed in less than two seconds oh that's from our boy pedro is that pedro yeah

that's his website i didn't realize that was him what is that website you probably used the tfdc channel to to did you pay with lightning or with yeah i pay with lightning yeah you probably used our channel to do it i opened a bunch of liquidity for him yeah um yeah but he just opened it it's brand new site yeah i did that like a week a week ago what's the website it's a really good name i forget it was a really good name i was uh i was like ah you know as a domain hoarder i was well it was like hash something and uh while you're looking that up i was doing some some data crunching pirate hash pirate hash such a fucking domain good domain name while you were um looking that up yesterday i was doing some data crunching on our 2019

at least may on from when we started the site and started our btc pay server instance just breaking down all the usage on our site it's crazy micro transactions are people are using people the dime bag so the dime bag uh out of all the payments that were accepted on our btc pay server in 2019 the dime bag which was 10 cents per um 10 cents worth of sats per call was 60.75 percent of all the transactions that we received the payments that went through and made up less than one percent of the value that we that we accepted which is a pretty crazy stat to me that is pretty crazy i guess the dime bag brings it a lot down you think or uh well yeah i mean it's just i mean it just i mean people are using micro transactions that's

what i got from it um that's what i'm saying that like it is i mean the use case seems there I mean, I think sending a Lightning payment, it's just a cleaner UX. Yeah, and let's keep in mind this is one particular use case. Obviously, a shout-out is going to go a lot further than a dime bag purchase. Right, but most of our shout-outs are Lightning, right? I think it's like half and half on the shout-outs. Once you get above $20, it's actually an interesting breakdown between Lightning and on-chain. The merch sales really prove that point.

yeah i mean fees are still really cheap yeah um and then also some people have a problem finding lightning payment on on the uh checkout flow pay yeah because you got to click the lightning you have to click the bitcoin logo on the top right yeah um many things to work through it's getting some use at least yes absolutely yeah i mean i just like when i send a lightning payment that the check mark uh just pops up right away like the payment just you know it's just like fucking clean yeah i uh i just wanted to do a correction someone tweeted on me um that this multi-path payments is is it's basically basic multi-path payments it's not full amp um stepping stone yeah okay i'm not sure what that distinction is but i guess it was worth shouting out yeah

um i i remember seeing this but didn't really jump into the topic i thought it was one of those uh clickbaity headlines is it clickbaity south korean government committee recommends adding bitcoin product to the national exchange i don't know it sounds bullish right is it clickbaity i mean they actually did recommend it like what what committee is it like what uh they're not gonna add like it's like a president's committee like they were like created to decide whether or not this was gonna happen is my understanding so a mandated committee like sent to research cryptocurrency and bitcoin bitcoin specific it's it's bitcoin specifically and like let's be clear here it's not going to be you know like self-custody uh bitcoin they want to like an

exchange traded product um where there's a custodian but traded on their their actual exchange the the name of the committee is the presidential committee on the fourth industrial revolution boss south korea is based yeah you know sounds legit to me why why can't we have any committees like that here in america we need that i i agree i agree i so so even if they don't actually list it you know like alluding to the fourth turning in that in that committee yeah it is a pretty ridiculous name i uh it just shows legitimacy right even though even if they're thinking about it so that's why i don't consider it clickbaity yeah no it was um i mean i mean yeah it's bitcoin is on the main stage we saw that this week um with do we even have that

on the list what iran and everything that went on this week no i figured we were just gonna riff on that like i i felt like it would be a ridiculous bullet point to have like just iran yeah no i mean but like this week if people are really uh looking for the bitcoin as a safe haven narrative to come to fruition bitcoin did move in lockstep with uh risk off assets like oil and gold this week both uh when the tensions were high and we were uh bombing each other quote unquote and then when peace uh seemed to uh prevail uh it moved down in lockstep with gold right after trump's speech yeah yeah um so it was reacting at least it seems i don't we've learned in the past not to really attribute uh price movements of specific narratives um but it seems at least especially

since like whales could be using the narrative exactly go along the narrative yeah but if you want to latch on to that narrative this week it uh you can you can use um some correlation uh anecdotes there i mean look anecdotally stats are my fucking safe haven you know you know i'm not going to speak for everyone else but when everything was going down and people were just like refreshing twitter to see like if we were at war which like by the way everyone all of a sudden was um a war expert like a middle east expert i had no idea who that solemny guy that was the first time we really had like major u.s ongoings like like happening like military ongoings happening in real time on twitter i think right the latin i've talked about this a lot on the

podcast last time was 2012 syria after the gas the sarin quote-unquote that was a while ago yeah but that was like the first time twitter really showed to me that like it is a part of the the geopolitical conversation and if people scream loud enough on twitter that politicians will hear it was definitely a lot bigger now no doubt and like we had like a lot of fake news coming around and stuff like all different casualty numbers and like meanwhile no one died supposedly old videos it was yeah so let's talk about that it was one second but while all this was going down all this uncertainty and everything the one thing like i knew bitcoin was just being bitcoin you know i knew i still had my sats you know that that's it's a safe haven just in that innate

you know there's so much uncertainty and then you just you have you have bitcoin yeah it's there find safety in sats for exactly and yeah especially if you self-custody it gives you even more no yeah only if you're self-custody only if you yeah yes only if you're self-custody not especially only if you're self-custody that's certainty that you get does definitely come with some anxiety but uh the i think the overwhelming feeling is is security uh but back to the topic at hand the events of the week between the u.s and iran and uh i know that was like it just seemed like puppet masters manipulating the masses and like doing a waltz on the on the global stage like pre like we were warning each other they were going to bomb each other and you bomb

each other in places where nobody's going to get killed and what the fuck was all like very too symbolic and very choreographed and yeah and then like trump tweeted out like all as well like we're getting like missiles are being fired at our bases and like we don't know what the casualty numbers or anything so far so good everybody's freaking out on twitter yeah so they supposedly i mean this is not really in our purview but might as well talk about it because everyone's freaking out they like supposedly the iranians supposedly like called up the iraqis and told them we're gonna bomb this joint u.s iraqi base and then they like evacuated and took precautions and that's why no one died right yeah and they droned like the they bombed like the drone

area where there was no nobody going to be getting in there no personnel going to be it's where we launched where we launched the drone that killed solomony right yeah i guess um but yeah it's just weird it was just a very weird um i feel like we don't know everything let me put it no that's why i actually made a concerted effort not to write about it or tweet about it much because i honestly was like i've never heard of this guy no it seems like the only thing i was retweeting about it was Michael Krieger at Liberty Blitzkrieg on Twitter. He just basically, before we even started bombing each other, called it out in the beginning of the week,

like, be prepared. You're about to be onslaughted with more propaganda more heavily than you've ever experienced. You're just going to be very confused. And that's actually how the week played out. The important thing is that Bitcoin just kept marching on, just block after block. And that's just safe haven, you know?

yeah yeah um it was there and this is a good segue into the next topic which i wrote about in the bend today neil wood fine put together a great uh thread of how uh bitcoin can still run in an offline environment today um something that we talk about a lot here at tftc and neil just did a monster thread i believe it was 50 tweets going through all the technology and hardware that exist in in the within the bitcoin ecosystem i know people hate that word but whatever um today and again the bitcoin i think bitcoin as a project has its priority street like we're going to need this hardware um in the future if shit ever does hit the fan it was actually like a presentation he gave a presentation so we're going to link to the video for the

presentation and his slides and then he made a baller s thread highlighting it all which actually as like a twitter user i really appreciate the thread the thread well i see as a twitter i only knew about the thread and i wrote about today it was actually like a video uh not like it was actually a live presentation he gave um but yeah you should all check it out um it's super important yeah it is and it's important to work on this stuff today and have it ready like we say you want bitcoin before you need it and you want this infrastructure in place before you really need it yeah i mean you can't you're not you're not like setting up a sat node when shit hits the fan like you have to be prepared ahead of time yeah and the technology to do so is not that

expensive he i believe tweet 15 of that thread uh he showed a picture of 150 dollars worth of hardware that could have you accepting bitcoin transactions from the satellite node uh within a within a couple hours the harder part is broadcasting what was really cool because you can't broadcast through the node you can only receive um but what's also really nice is when you receive through the satellite it's more privacy because it's passive like no one can tell like you're actually running a bitcoin node and then the other thing you mentioned which is i think often overlooked is like everyone in a community doesn't have to that's like off the grid doesn't have to run um like a satellite connected node uh one person can do that and then they can have

like wi-fi repeaters that operate around that um that's extend the connection that's one of the key phrase i liked of the presentation is internet minimized it's never going to be internet free but internet minimized because we still need to like get the transactions to miners and get the blocks from miners and yeah and um it's something else i wanted to add it's more like the last mile the last 10 miles yeah what the fuck is that note i guess it could be like the last 50 miles 100 miles if you wanted to the broadcast is more difficult as you said but stuff like transaction intent to make it easier because you can go through you know mesh and then do a sms hop at the end and stuff like that yeah i remember what i wanted to say get a little cosmic another thing

that neil mentioned in his in his presentation and thread bitcoin is literally flowing through you at all times via these satellite waves like if you are in the area in which uh the satellite is is covered everywhere basically basically everywhere like you literally have bitcoin data streaming through you via radio waves at all time because it's multiple satellites and they just to be clear blockstream doesn't own these satellites they're renting space on commercial yeah they own channels and yeah it's again it is an alternative and it is a centralized alternative it's absolutely centralized but you can verify the transactions with your own node to make sure that they are according to the rule set that your node enforces yes um so you can verify yeah but it

is absolutely centralized i imagine with uh people like elon launching starlink and stuff like that though there will be competition for satellite nodes in the future um hopefully hopefully hopefully we have tons and tons of different providers i think uh i think that that may be the case um i don't know about this tester qpgp this is you well you know coin sure right yeah coin sure nz he's in new zealand right yeah um he did the have you ever met him i've never met him in person but he did the uh he did the gotenna demonstrations about a year ago right i met him in riga um awesome fucking dude really good dude so he actually recommended tester cube to me uh like in november or something and it was one of those situations where someone liked the tweet

from november and it popped up in my notifications and i missed it like in november i didn't even see the when he had replied um so i was like we should mention it now tester cube is interesting because it's pgp on mobile um and it's both on iphone and android and it's extremely it i've downloaded it it seems extremely easy to use coin sure recommended it um i you know respect coin sure so i was passing on passing along the recommendation i haven't used it like for you know i've just downloaded and tested it out i haven't actually like used it for a while it doesn't appear you can verify you know one of the things we talk about here is verifying pgp signatures of your downloads to make sure they haven't been changed from whoever created the

software distribution um i don't think you can verify downloads with this i think it's only for pgp messaging but i might be wrong like i played with it for like 15 20 minutes basically just trying to figure out if i could verify uh signatures that you know of downloads yeah this is tester cube t-e-s-s-e-r cube.com it's good checking out looks like i haven't played around with it at all yet um you know uncle marty's a late adopter um this is something i like the cranking does every year they release their yearly government request transparency report and it seems like they're getting more and more requests as the years go on this is scary as fuck i mean we all should know that this is happening all right so here are the stats 2019

global law enforcement requests they're up 49 from last year this is cracking all alone uh mind you uh and they're and think about where they are located globally they're pretty no one else releases this shit yeah yeah they're all getting hit with tons and tons of requests so anyone who does KYC? The increase in requests from 2018 is up about 50 percent. There's 710 total information requests that were received in 2019. There were 1,222 impacted accounts. 62 percent of all requests resulted in data provided. It's a pretty high hit rate. And then 28 percent of requests were non-valid, meaning the law enforcement agency reached out and they really didn't have any uh authority or or what's the word i'm looking for um they didn't have any rights to the to the

data wonder what happened to the other 10 percent um subpoenas summons uh production order european investigation order and other valid requests in the little bar underneath yes um so total requests annually uh last year's up from 472 2,710 from 475. That's pretty big. And then the U.S. leads all countries of requested agencies by far, 432 of the total 710, so way over. With the FBI being the main agency asking for information.

Yeah, FBI, the DEA, number two, ICE, number three. So should we talk about what kind of information they can get from Kraken? Yeah, what information have you given up to Kraken so they can get that, right? Yeah. So let's talk about that. It's deposits, addresses you've deposited from, addresses you've withdrawn to, Bitcoin addresses, home address, all this information you gave them for KYC, purchase history, bank account information, all your fiat transfers and stuff. Yeah. And that's, I think is a very good point to make the point that Kraken puts out this report because they don't want to do this stuff. Jesse Powell puts this out to be like, Hey, look, this is what the governments are making us do. And I know a lot of you hate on KYC AML there out there as much as we do. And I would caution you not to come at these companies as hard as people have in the past and come at the policies themselves. The companies don't like these regulations or policies. That's why Kraken puts out this report to sort of highlight how arduous it is for them. It costs them millions of dollars, let alone the time to comply.

Yeah, I'm trying to find it. And it hurts the privacy of their users. I mean, so this is one of the reasons why using CoinJoin is so important, right? Because if you have a request here and Kraken has to comply and give, let's say, a withdrawal address, um with that withdrawal address like if you don't use coin join all all future transactions can be can be tracked um you know for varying degrees of probability depending on how you're sending it but if you're just um if you're just completely disregarding the privacy aspect then all all future and past transactions can can be tracked relatively easily so it's you know something you

got to consider definitely consider it and then definitely consider it because you can actually make these efforts fruitless at the end of the day another piece i've heard about this week was a blog post that elaine uh oh posted um over the weekend and she basically repackaged a presentation she gave at the magical crypto conference last year and put in a blog post for him and explained that we we need to get bitcoin to a point where the rules the laws that are currently in place are just too dumb to enforce like if you are trying to track these transactions in a world where a majority of bitcoiners are coin joining it just doesn't make any sense and the the cost to um to enforce is is too much um we talk about

this a lot i love uh lane's blog is great everyone should be following that blog um she doesn't post it on twitter so you have to actually follow the blog um we do have a link to it in the list already uh one thing to keep in mind there is that we are very far away from the majority of people using coin join yes um that was apparent in the sat standard over the weekend yeah i'm not sure if we can ever get to a majority but i think if we get to like a like a critical mass um that might be enough uh like mixed with things like pay join and stuff that make these because when you're tracking transactions through the bitcoin network um it's all a probability game um you know some some transactions are higher probability that it's the same person

like if you send all of your funds with no change from one address to another address that's like 99 of the time that's a self-transfer um because why would you be paying someone uh with no change like what situation is like oh give me everything in your pocket you know like that just doesn't happen in real life um so things like pay join and stuff that break down those probabilities and make it really hard to guess where you know bitcoin changes hands but yeah just at the most basic level you send one transaction then all of a sudden the probability of it being you while still high you could be sending it to someone else just like one hop you know um but coin join breaks those links a lot better if you do it appropriately if you do

it properly which is difficult but things like samurai making it easier so no and i really cautiously optimistic yeah and that's why i like the framing of elaine's blog post it was like hey the technology exists today to make these laws too dumb to enforce you just have to act you have to act yeah and i want to be absolutely clear here um like don't break the law we're not telling anybody to break the law um it's what these are the what the one we're not insinuating yeah these these leaks these these links um is isn't just for like government requests and stuff right like if if kraken's database gets leaked or hacked and stuff like that then they can also be used against you by tons of tons of bad people this is about

financial privacy like the most basic level of financial privacy um and then the other thing is like i get a lot of shit about this um because lightning is very new but i do think lightning is going to help a lot here in the privacy realm. Things like it doesn't have any toxic change when you pay people, that the transactions aren't recorded on chain. So a combination with CoinJoin techniques plus then funding Lightning channels

with those post-CoinJoin UTXOs could end up being very powerful here for just very user-friendly privacy. So I'm cautiously optimistic about that and it's definitely something to watch. I mean, you shouldn't be opening channels without CoinJoin first, in my opinion. um whether you even if you fuck up the coin joint is better than not doing it yeah um i've made that

mistake in the past i will i will try to be better going forward though matthew be better marty i'll try um but staying on that privacy tip uh another thing they got rid of out of the bent this week um i don't know how much uh how much weight we should put into this movement but i noticed yesterday morning was it yesterday morning or two days ago i forget at this point uh yesterday are we talking about gold no no it was two days ago i'm talking about two days ago it was two days ago i'm talking about liquid tether um so two days ago there was a whale alert that a trader had moved 15 or converted 15 million tether from the erc20 version to the liquid tether version um and bitfinex who converted it right well palo from bitfinex um

replied to the whale alert it might have been bitfinex maybe because it was going to bitfinex's treasury wallet right i don't know or it was going from bitfinex to tether's wallet and he said i don't know i'm not positive i know palo from uh bitfinex pointed out that it was uh transmuted it was just erc20 tether was being removed and it was they were adding liquid tether tokens yes yes the point i'm trying to get him over the point i'm trying to get here is that this is a privacy gain might be a privacy well it definitely is a privacy gain for this trader and that's a trend that we've been looking at since at least bit block boom when we did the live show we brought this up something i've been wondering uh liquid uh block streams federated

side chain has i've said it before to me at least uh just observing how people react to it it seems like this ugly stepchild of the block stream product suite and people have sort of been like oh he's going to use that he's going to use that and i've always been like that makes sense uh with confidential transactions and a liquid tether coin that the traders would want that because you can't track the movement of their funds from exchange to exchange and because confidential transactions uh blinds the transaction amount you can't see how much or what assets being sense you can't see if it's tether or bitcoin or tether gold some other asset some shitty equity token or something yeah um so well or it's not gonna be able to track that that those particular

15 million tether unless they're unless they come out of that that side chain um so that was something a trend uh to stay on top of i don't know if that's going to be a big trend among traders it could dissipate pretty quickly but at least somebody 15 million dollars is nothing to to scale out i believe that's 100 i mean it's negligible in terms of tether outstanding supply yes what did nick say like 800 million on tron there's like 800 million tether on tron it's like hard to verify though but that's because because tron owns polonius now right so they need a tether pair and they're they're making like tron their exchange token yeah um which is but anyway i just so just a little backstory here tether obviously requires a

third party i would never use it um it's you know you have to trust that third party it's basically custodial they're supposedly holding the dollars uh so you have to just assume that they're you have to trust them that they're holding the dollars um first they were using omni which was colored coins on on bitcoin um then they switched to erc20 pretty much in mass relatively recently and that's because it's just like pretty easy to to there's more wallet tokens yeah it's just an ethereum wallet to receive tokens you know the omni doesn't have i think it's only got one wallet um but now maybe and and then you started seeing them go to like tron and eos and shit now maybe they'll move over to liquid uh it's yet to be seen the thing is liquid itself is basically

semi-custodial because it's got this federated uh security model so there's no miners or anything it's it's a bunch of it's basically a bunch of regulated entities um that are all sharing a multi-sig key um so you when you use liquid you have to trust those entities um and even though you have like something like confidential transactions i'm pretty sure to get out of liquid you have to go through kyc and if you go from exchange to exchange um if you go from exchange to exchange like you're going from like bitfinex to kraken and you're sending 15 million tether 7 million tether like you're protected from like whalebot seeing it but obviously like bitfinex and and kraken see it right yeah i mean you're sending from their exchange to their

exchange it's just uh an improvement in ux and the fact that traders that are in the competition to trade against you cannot see that you're moving funds yeah it's just a different trust model with different trade-offs and it's nice that big corners have options right exactly um yeah like matt said tether could one day just not work stable coins are inherently unstable at the end of the day they are susceptible to black swans but if you are using them and you want to get the most utility out of them in my opinion again i think uh liquid tether with confidential transactions makes the most sense and we'll we'll continue following uh this story as it's not a story this trend if it develops who knows it could be uh bitfenix just trying to to to get some

hype going or something like that sats are my stable coin same well you they need to they need to have the tether ready on the different chains if they're going to support it that's you know that's the same reason why tron has like 800 million on it it doesn't mean that actual 800 million dollars worth of use is happening on tron it just means they want to have that fiat ready uh if people trade with it yeah exactly yeah um yeah another a lot of bent topics this week i wrote about gold accumulation by central banks yesterday uh last year 2019 was the year in which central banks accumulated the most gold uh since the 1970s which was interesting and they have uh central banks collectively around the world have old olded have added to their

their gold holdings uh since two every year since 2010 um so i wrote that and then some uh some freak out there at uh mining stacks on twitter at mining stacks m-i-n-i-n-g-s-t-a-c-k-s he's been making a bunch of cool videos and basically he created a video that tracks the gold accumulation of central bankers over the last 20 years and then uh pins that against when bitcoin came to be in bitcoin's market cap so this video is awesome video is awesome and it's scary it up a little bit though yeah speed it up a little bit you see uh you see the the jockeying for gold reserves you see china come on the scene russia come on the scene then in 2010 which scared the shit out of me uh the imf was already on the scene for a while and the bis comes out

of nowhere and they take up a good portion that was weird yeah so they hop in and out like in the early 2000s they come back in the late 2000s so the bis the bank of international settlements the imf is in there too the imf is in there as well the imf is a little underling of the bis but the bis is the big the big bank that uh really nobody knows too much about it's a super national unelected entity that holds a top 10 amount of gold in the world pretty crazy well at the end they weren't on the top 10 anymore probably they had just fallen off again yeah they've been in the top 10 multiple times throughout the last decade which was a little funny to me but on top of that it was crazy to see how quickly bitcoin uh hopped on the chart and then stayed on it uh after 2017

yeah yeah it was it was in second place for a little bit yeah that was pretty exciting to watch when i watched that part of the video the u.s has been just massively accumulating russia made a lot of strides so russia go up a lot yeah well that's i started following that trend early in the summer because i noticed that the biggest accumulators of gold between central banks over the last 20 years have been russia and china like it looks like they've been playing catch up um so it seems like the and it's funny like all these central like again 2019 was the year in which central banks around the world accumulated the most gold on record uh in metric tons since the 70s and it's like all the mainstream media and the central bankers

like to paint gold bugs as as crazy preppers but it seems that the central banks are prepping themselves yeah right so are they like the crazy mountain men preppers or is something going on here yeah are we allowed to are we allowed to call them out and call them crazy i don't know it's i would say it's a pretty a lot like if you don't own any gold or bitcoin like that's a pretty alarming video to watch yeah and it's pretty alarming trend i mean and if you don't see your country up high on that list too it's gotta be like extra alarming yeah um we have we have the reserve currency of the world and we have a massive stockpile that's bigger than anyone else right yeah it's like 530 what does that say yeah yeah and and this this trend of buying heavily

uh is all post 2008 when last you see it we were actually going down a little bit everyone was going down down and then all of a sudden you see the collapse and then just everything's well they went down for a little bit while longer after probably because they needed to sell some shit to finance operations or something right well yeah you had the crash and then all of a sudden right after the crash they just start accelerating insane amounts yeah yeah um cool video shout out to mining stacks at mining stacks on twitter we'll put that link in the in the show notes um and then another shout out to uh some user generated content this video is hilarious this is the weirdest thing that happened to me in a while i had to put this one in there you you go

with it but uncle marty got a shout out right it was like uh it was supposed to be they were like fund managers right yeah and they were discussing bitcoin somebody made a video vignette um discussing bitcoin and it's just like a 45 or a minute and 45 second video dramatization dramatization uncle marty gets a shout out it was that was plan b gets a shout out hodl not gets a shout out clint safe it was super fun it was just a fun video yeah i like that shit I love that stuff, too. Did we give the guy a shout-out? What is creative L and run on Twitter?

Yes, at creative... Oh, land run? Land run. Land run. Wow, I've been reading that creative L and run. But yeah, you're right, land run. The other thing we missed here was this Russian state energy company. Oh, yes, we don't want to miss this.

I think Marty didn't want to... He just intentionally ignored it because he thinks America will be the number one mining. He's very bullish on American mining. so he he wanted to disregard uh the russian mining ops no no i am a uh i'm a lover of all mining operations especially if they're pushing it forward and say yeah russia is this is a an article by anna by duck excuse me oh my god bydakova bydakova i don't know i wasn't going to try and pronounce her name it's pretty hilarious and i'm sorry if i'm butchering your name but uh this is crazy because it's a state it's the state energy company yeah it's a state

run nuclear plant it's renting space to energy hungry bitcoin miners they're not going to mine themselves but they're they're making it as easy as possible for miners to move in and and take it they're going to give them cheap energy contracts um and basically uh you know these these nuclear energy plants have the same issue as like hydro where the power is just constantly getting generated and it's not always getting consumed right so it's really nice to have whether it's mining or whether it's traditional data centers be able to have a constant energy there's like an interesting uh unrelated to mining sort of theme to this this story too which we should really point out and which really um if you're an american uh make you think about what we're

doing in this country so they they want the miners to come in and use this excess nuclear because it's already being used for personal data centers to store Russians' personal data. They don't want to store that in any servers outside of Russia. So they're forcing the data centers to do it on-site at these nuclear power plants, which is just interesting to me. They don't want Russia's making a move to take control of their digital infrastructure, which actually,

that shouldn't surprise you. They're pretty despotic. Well, they're pretending. I mean, because the EU has made similar overtures. I think they're already enforcing it. They're pretending it's for the privacy of their citizens, right? Like, why do you want to trust? You don't want the Americans or the Chinese to be able to look at this data. But really, what Russia, it's twofold for Russia. Like, they'd prefer if they weren't looking at the data, but they really want to look at it themselves, right? So that's why they want to keep it domestic. And we talked about, recently we talked about how they're having all the ISPs install black boxes so that they can both monitor and shut down the internet on demand if they need to. Going back to Neil's talk, that's why it's so important to build out this infrastructure. Yeah, so start building your satellite nodes if you're a Russian listener. I'm sure you guys are way ahead of it.

Everywhere. Doesn't matter where you are. Yeah, that's true. American too. Definitely, it's on my list of projects. I gotta get that shit done. Me as well. Me as well. Well, that's all for our list here. You got anything to riff on? We have a podcast coming up. What's our time check here?

We've got to go. We've got to post this. Okay. Well, we love you, freaks. Yeah. Keep crushing. Peace and love. Okay.