TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2020.03.02

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Coronavirus + Fed Rate Cut - Whirlpool volume PAMPING - VR Presentation by Adam Gibson on PayJoin - Nodl updated with new RTL - myNode updated with Dojo support - Casa adds Coldcard support - BlueWallet adds Coldcard support - BlockFi flagging wasabi deposits - Square Crypto announces two new grants - India Supreme Court strikes down bitcoin banking ban - South Korea passes amendment formalizing bitcoin regulation - Germany deems bitcoin a financial instrument - New York Power Plant mining $50K worth of bitcoin per day - Coinbase tested facial recognition software Clearview AI - EARN IT Act to be introduced in US Congress 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 check out their 2-of-3 multisig vaults.

Hey there freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this week's episode of Rabbit Hole Recap. Man, I had a quick, condensed, hour-long rip. Really good stuff today, as always. I hope you guys are enjoying your Thursday afternoon, morning, maybe your Friday morning, wherever you are in the world. It's a good time to learn about the news going around in the world and in Bitcoin. This episode of Rabbit Hole Recap was brought to you by the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. They're helping you do many things. They're helping you stack sats. They're helping you stack stocks. and they're helping you save money at your local merchants, all right? I've been using the Cash App to stack sats for quite some time now.

They're making it easier. They teased last week they're making sats a standard, and they're adding an auto-buy feature, so you're going to be able to DCA without even thinking soon. It appears Miles Suter works for the Cash App. He shared a screenshot of him buying 200 and some odd thousand sats on an auto-buy feature. I haven't gotten to my app yet.

I don't know if you have. If you have, shout it out. So you got that feature. now you can stack stonks if you want to stack slivers of stonks if you don't have enough money to buy a whole stonk of your favorite company cash apps letting you buy as little as one dollar and because uh it's hooked up to your bank account you don't have to wait four to five days you can start investing today all right cash app investing is a subsidiary of square and member sipc and as always make sure you don't forget to use the code stacking sats that's one word

s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're gonna get ten dollars ten dollars gonna go to our good friends at owls lacrosse stacking sats one word this episode of tales from the crypt is also brought to you by your great friends at unchained capital capital unchained capital they've been with us for quite a while now and that's because they're building dope financial services for bitcoiners financial and custody services i actually uh spun up a vault last week the process uh is easier than i remember it the last time i did it uh use caravan check my redeem scripts check my xpub keys make sure uh that all the information i was entering was correct on my own verifying it not trusting them verifying it on my own uh through my own devices uh particularly my computer

with caravan on it uh and what what do you get in a vault what is a vault you're maybe asking it is a multi-sig quorum that you enter in with unchained they hold a key if it's a two or three vault they hold one of the keys you hold two others you can use a ledger or trezor right now they're working on cold card you engage in that you can always move the funds out of your vault by yourself if you have the two keys if you ever want unchained to sign the other key because you don't have access to the other one they are there for you all right on top of that they're offering their loan service as well if you have bitcoin in the vault and you need a little cash liquidity you don't want to sell that bitcoin uh unchained is there to help you not sell your bitcoin friends

don't let friends sell their Bitcoin. Unchain helps you not sell your Bitcoin. You use your Bitcoin as collateral to get a US dollar loan. You put that Bitcoin up again in a multi-sig and then they send you US dollars to your bank account. You can not sell your Bitcoin as long as you're paying that loan back. You're going to be Gucci. All right, go to www.unchain-capital.com. Check out the vote, check out the loans, and then check out their blog. They're doing incredible stuff parker lewis particularly with gradually then suddenly drew again futuristic and analytical with the space series and his huddle waves series phil geiger has been writing some stuff on there as well and then on top of that beyond that they're doing some dope open source stuff caravan

which i mentioned earlier is open source if you want to do their multi-sig setup without unchained you can use caravan to do that they open source that working on slip 39 and hermit as well unchained-capital.com www.unchained-capital.com Enjoy this episode, freaks. I know Matt and I certainly did. Take care. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks?

Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. Welcome back to an edition of Rabbit Hole Recap. Really rushing into this one, Matt. Matt just walked in, sat down, and hit record. We gotta move. We gotta move. Marty's got an appointment after this. We've got to go. I had an appointment before this, appointment after this.

Busy week. Busy week. Busy life. Beautiful day out there. Gorgeous weather. Gorgeous weather. Panic has set in in New York City. Coronavirus panic is here, as evidenced by the Uber surge pricing this morning when I had to go.

How much was the surge? What should have been $20 was $62. So it was like 3x surge? At least, yeah. And somebody else responded to my tweet about it. an $8 ride across town turned into $44. So that was 5X for him at a certain point in time. And it was like not even rush hour, right?

It was like, what, 10 a.m. or something? It was like 10, 15, yeah. Unless people were just getting lazy going to work later. Because people just don't want to go on the subways, I guess, right? I think that's the theory. That's what I was assuming. So it took me 20 minutes to get one. At one point, the black cars were cheaper than the Uber X.

I tried to get a black car originally. That's weird. They just canceled it on me. Yeah, the black car was like $52. The UberX was $62. Was it just a glitch? No, I think just people weren't looking at the black car. And the UberX had just surged so much.

So should we be freaking out, Marty? Should we be freaking out about Corona? Still very confused. Not ready to freak out. I saw a video of two of the people on one of the cruises that got quarantined. They were young. And they're mid-20s, 25 and 24, I believe. Or 26 and 24.

and they were basically describing how they didn't even realize they had it and they they tested positive for it um so i think if you're young and healthy they just have like cold symptoms or something yeah not even she's the girl said she had a sore throat and the dude was like i was shocked to see that i i tested positive so like a bunch of us could have had it already and we didn't even realize that's what i imagine is actually happening because they're not testing anybody no like i think we've done 500 tests cdc's reported 500 tests china's at 300 000 south korea's at a hundred thousand south korea has been killing it with their drive-through testing i think that's the coolest thing yeah in australia for country 25 million has 10 000 uh we're a country of 300

10 000 tests yes 10 000 tests completed already wow and we're only at 500 that says a lot as a country that's almost or more than 10x the size of uh of australia we have uh what is that one one percent not one percent half a percent half marty mass ten percent or five percent excuse me of this that's my marty math of the day uh five hundred and ten thousand yeah yeah it's five percent i haven't been sleeping much all right give me a break uh a lot to talk about this week good amount of stuff to talk about nothing too crazy except what we're going to get to at the end it's pretty pisses me off i'm happy you put that on the list i saw that earlier this week bullish week very bullish week um before we get into the bullishness let's talk

about some cool shit uh i retweeted it over the weekend and i followed along via uh the periscope but unfortunately i do not have a vr goggle so i was not able to participate uh in this uh meetup i guess we will call it um but udie worthmeyer a few others have been doing uh weekend get togethers and virtual reality uh doing talking about bitcoin stuff and last weekend was the biggest meet up to date and it was a very organized well put together presentation by adam gibson on payjoin uh what was that it was so cool you like saw him in the front you had like a presentation uh screen you saw all the attendees like laser pointer yeah and it was like a theater setting so all the attendees were sitting down in seats watching uh raising hands

asking questions i noticed ben the car man our boy ben asked a question towards the end there um i think it was schnor related but yeah it's crazy uh i thought it was funny someone one of the attendants was like adam you need to speak into the mic so we can hear you better it's a weird uh like element to a vr presentation yeah i would like to have a video virtual mic you have to speak into like a virtual mic that's sitting on the stage do you have to or is he just away from his computer mic no it wasn't his like computer mic it was like the there was a mic at the front of the stage that if you spoke into that like all the participants could hear you better whoa yeah holy shit just seems unnecessary like the presentation person should just automatically be

getting all the audio yeah it is crazy that's a few i mean especially with coronavirus graphics are still kind of questionable right definitely but um they'll get there it's like nintendo 64 in the 90s i almost bought one did you look have you looked up the prices uh i have not looked at the prices but i do want to buy one because for like the longest time you needed one that was like connected to a gaming computer and you had all these wires and they were expensive and the gaming computer was expensive and the setup was complicated but like now um facebook you know bought oculus and they have the oculus i think the quest which is a completely standalone headset i believe it's like battery powered and it's got the

controllers so you just like install the software on the app store like the oculus app store and it's completely standalone how much is it i think it i think it retails like 400 but on amazon right now because they're sold out everywhere you have to pay like 550 there's a premium oh shit there's a premium on everything on amazon amazon's like completely out of all the corona stuff all the prep stuff i saw like purell was like 10x or something yeah i'm very happy i again uh i think we said this last week i'm not worried about corona killing me i'm worried about people freaking out about it i'm very happy that we prepped earlier than it seems that most people are deciding to prep i feel like amazon might be like a good stock right now definitely like

this quarter they're gonna do fucking amazing right well that's the interesting yeah yeah especially on their retail side where they usually don't make a lot of profits that they're able to gouge prices do this not gouge prices supply and demand comes into play demand increases precipitously the market has been freaking out in general over the last week since rabbit hole I saw the S&P was down another 2.5% today after a slight correction. Yeah, actually, we don't have that on the list. Bless you. I hope that's not the corona.

Me too. Yeah, and you don't have this on the list. You should have this on the list. With the emergency cut. Yeah, emergency cut. The Fed came out Tuesday, I believe. Was it Tuesday? I believe it was Tuesday, yeah.

And made an emergency 50 BIP half percentage point cut to their federal funds rate target, which is now between 1% and 1.25%, I believe. And again, they did this in a sort of abrupt fashion. People were expecting that when the FOMC meeting was going to take place, I believe, on the 16th or 18th, one of those two dates are in my mind for some reason,

consensus was that they were going to cut rates by 50 bps then, but it seems that they did not have enough time to wait until then. 10 days from now, right? Yeah, yeah, 10 days. They just did like a midday cut. Yeah, well, yeah, and I wrote about it in the bent on Tuesday.

They actually cut it while I was writing the bent, so I was able to write about it that day. The repo markets, overnight repo markets, where the Fed gives banks and primary dealers who have access to the Fed window short-term funding. uh it was the the highest funding uh to date so they uh believe a short term one day got a hundred billion in funding and then the two-week funding uh gave out 100 or excuse me 20 billion so in all a combination of one-day funding and two-week funding uh they injected 120 billion dollars

into the short-term markets. Seems like a lot of money. That's a lot of money. But even more telling is that it was oversubscribed. So they gave $120 billion to the primary dealers, and the primary dealers were actually asking for somewhere around $180 billion between the one-day and two-week funding. So they were 50% oversubscribed for that.

So to me, it means that a lot of people are looking for money. and uh obviously uh i think it's probably because of liquidity right for liquidity short-term liquidity it's a huge debate like what is it really liquidity is it just funding in my mind is liquidity they needed that or people think bitcoin's complicated yeah exactly um so people need money they need it fast they need it urgently some people didn't get the money they needed and then hours after that uh after that repo market closed the market's open fed cut rates by half a percent and then that night still tuesday and wednesday uh they did another at least one day i didn't check the two week one day funding got another hundred billion dollar

injection um which is two of the highest repo overnight repo days to the two highest overnight repo days we've seen to date in history yes i'm pretty sure meanwhile our bet is still in play the market went down and up but we're back where we're basically right where we were when we we're having a little recap we're at like 30 3020 on the s&p and 3000 is our over under yeah again close i'm actually getting more confident so that's what i wrote in the bent like a fed and that was on monday when consensus was that they're going to cut rates on the 16th in reaction to the slowdown of coronavirus eric the slowdown caused by coronavirus or some people like to say the fed cutting rates is not really going to help in

the situation this uh problem is more systemic than providing banks with liquidity this is coronavirus is really highlighting the inefficiency not inefficiencies the um that's the word i'm looking for where our supply chain falls short we we're heavily dependent on china and for everything for everything for everything that's why we don't have a lot of tests that's why we don't have a lot of medicine masks mask that's it's really highlighting that we've uh basically created a fragile supply chain heavily dependent on china um so that's not good i don't think and i think people are starting to wake up to this too like holy shit how could we uh get to this point and that's basically makes us super vulnerable super

vulnerable it's uh the search for low low cost labor uh centralizing the supply chain in china was advantageous for us for a while but you have something like the coronavirus come fuck that up and it leaves us fucking laying naked it's not a good situation i think we're going to start to see a lot of manufacturing shift actually to mexico it's interesting because like a lot of people have you know a nationalistic view on the world their perspective like for americans they have american-centric viewpoints but this case is like a perfect example where something's happening in china um and it has ripple effects to us because we have so much manufacturing over there it's not even a ripple effect it's a tsunami but it's like it's no different like if something

if there was like a major disaster or something in georgia um the the state like americans all around the country would immediately think that was a concern right but when something happens in china they're like oh well that's just china shit is happening it's unrelated to me but it's not but that's that's their perspective that's like how they frame it when they when they think about things yeah yeah no it uh it affects us pretty heavily as we're finding out like there um there was somebody on twitter horse whisperer h-o-a-r-s-e whisperer um i don't know what he or she does for a living but they just wrote a little tweet storm they were at a local pub on the west coast and they happen to be sitting down next to somebody in the shipping industry who explains

them how shipping works and and basically the way uh the shipping industry works in america is they get stuff shipped from china on these huge uh carriers and then they empty it on the west coast because of the jones act yes and then they they use those carriers in the um the uh what's the word i'm looking for domestic shipping after that yeah they what are the uh things that they put the stuff storage containers yes the containers they use the empty containers and fill it up with stuff that they then uh ship around the country and this person in the shipping industry said come mid-march uh there were going to be no more ships coming from china to unload and then use those carriers to to send around the country um so we may see the the full effect of this come next week

week after that and in preparation for that uh that absence of shipping uh shipping companies were cutting workforces by up to 40 which is pretty pretty insane so like don't go crazy freaks but get a little prepared cleaning products stuff like that fever medication yeah canned food frozen meat baby formula and it just it you'll you'll get stuff that you use anyway and you feel less panic because you you have um a safety net yeah meanwhile um the s&p is down three and a half percent today and bitcoin's up four and a four point three percent blasting through nine thousand dollars that's a safe haven it was completely correlated last week though uh it's uncorrelated right freaks and that's like i had a bunch of people texting me shout out lou shout

out buddy loveless he was texting me uh charts like it's not core it's not supposed to be correlated to equities it can happen a couple days doesn't make a whole uh a whole uh investment case like right it's not indicative of the the long-term correlation to these markets yes they may be correlated a couple days a couple data points may correlate but if you look at the overall trend bitcoin is very non-correlated to the rest of the markets it makes sense that in like market panic days everything gets hit yeah especially if people are if there's a flight for liquidity and people especially on the futures markets bitcoin futures markets like they've actually lost volume and what i imagine is people pulling out their money from those

markets which are probably on the riskier side of their portfolios to fund other um other trades that that may need may have needed some liquidity as the markets fell yeah i mean i would argue bitcoin futures aren't really a safe haven asset no no definitely like the key the key properties that make sats a safe haven to me involve self-custody the bearer asset that nature of it um yeah and then on top of that i wouldn't be a surprise if a lot of retailers are overextended in bitcoin and you see that fucking american hodl tweet how much i'm carrying like eighty thousand dollars of their credit card debt or something yeah yeah and then like did you read the comments underneath i i read so bad everyone's like oh i thought it was just me you know oh no i

didn't see that don't do don't go into debt stay humble i seriously and i i i'm very proud because we do practice what we preach like i don't feel overextended at all i feel very comfortable even with this market downturn um have enough cash on the sidelines uh do not go into debt to to get into this stuff again like we you don't know bitcoin price movements are pretty erratic have been throughout time and you never know what's going to happen and when you're going to need if you overextend yourself you're going to panic sell the bottom you're going to have to panic sell the bottom at some point yeah so um yeah be aware do not go into crazy amounts of debt just for anything credit card debt is so fucking high interest yeah yeah if you especially if you get

over a certain point if you get over like twenty thousand dollars that interest rate jumps like seventeen percent it's one thing if you're doing like the like the student loan bernie put or something and you're just banking on the fact that he's going to get elected and remove your student debt those are it's low interest you know that's not happening anymore pay your minimum payments we got out we got cnl joe in for the democrats it seems ftx called it at the time did it yeah um a low volume but still yeah um yeah that was a i didn't even luckily turns out the play on fdx was really to just short every single democratic candidate yeah yeah yeah i think i mean i don't see anybody i don't see joe biden winning against trump

probably not which would be bullish for bitcoin at least yeah why you were telling me this yesterday what's the uh trump's just inept he's got they got too many things on their plate like the last thing they're thinking about is bitcoin explain your bloomberg theory too i really like this theory well the bloomberg theory is the guy's worth 60 billion dollars so if he's worried about a wealth tax getting passed by warren or bernie and he at the time when he joined the race it looked like biden was i mean every week biden has another flub or something senile ridiculousness happening right so he's like i don't think they can handle it they're not going to be able to stop him i might as well spend 500 million dollars to make sure the wealth tax doesn't get passed

yeah sort of torpedo warren and sanders exactly not expecting to win just not pay the wealth tax yeah right because what 500 million of of uh 60 billion is is 1 120th so it's like less than right yeah 1 120th great math here at r1 120 it's less than a percent but no no it's like three percent or something right 600 million is one percent right oh yeah so you're right yeah yeah yeah um and it's like nothing it's the wealth tax the wealth tax would have been what 25 higher than that right yeah yeah way higher and it could have been yearly yeah exactly i think i nipped that one in the bud yeah so so maybe it wasn't a complete lost cause term even though it looked really lame like he's

Like, he spent... $500 million. People are shitting on him. He won American Samoa. Like, what the fuck? Yeah, that might be a... But that was some 4D chess he might have been playing. Exactly.

Let's spend this 500 mil, torpedo these campaigns, and I get to save some money in the long run. It's an investment. It's all bullshit. That's true. Zaps keep me sane. Yeah, it is bullshit. Like, just look at... How old are these fucking people running our country?

Super old. We need some younger blood in there. Trump's, what, 75? 76? He's the youngest one, right? Bernie... Or Joe Biden, 79? Biden and Bernie are more older.

Or older. Yeah, what the fuck is going on? People just think. Just look at what's going on. It doesn't look great to me. But what does look good is the stuff that's going on in Bitcoin. Dude, Whirlpool is fucking ripping it this week. Ripping.

I don't have that on the list, but it's just been dominating my week. On Saturday, when I sent that tweet, we set the SAT standard out. It had jumped 28%. By the time I tweeted that out, you were like, that's way too low. It's actually up another 10% from there. so it was at like 500 bitcoin volume uh at that point on saturday where is it now we're five days into march and we've already hit the same volume that was in january which was an all-time high when it hit in january boss and uh five days into march i saw td dev um or samurai dev excuse me i

think it was t dev are you talking about the four percent yeah four percent of the men pool world pool that's pretty crazy right fucking love that shit maybe we'll get to that threshold you know people talk about you know they concern troll about fees not rising um if you just have like steady coin joints happening all the time uh that creates a baseline fee pressure yeah and then i had somebody concern trolling that it's gonna like drive fees too high it's like what do you want like are their fees too low are they going to be too high the market will find an equilibrium if People think the cost of coin joining the fee at a certain point is worth it. They will do it.

If it gets too expensive, they won't do it. And then hopefully things like store signature with SIG aggregation, which will not come in BitTapRoot, but hopefully later, would help with that as well, aggregating signatures. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that tweet was very, that was a concerned troll. I think it was just a concern. You know, like, I think he was, like, honestly concerned about it, which is, like, fine. like fees will rise that's what i've been telling people i've been i've been anyone who says like oh i'm worried about fees not rising to the thing i was like just honestly just wait a year or so and no one will be worrying about that everyone will be complaining about high fees like this

whole idea that like the we're not going to have we're not going to have enough demand to drive fees up is i think completely short-sighted uh yeah fees are gonna gonna go up substantially especially if people care about their privacy all right coin join lightning like you're gonna need you know open closed channels on lightning that's gonna have a steady supply of a block space needed for steady block space demand and then coin joins is a constant process so um and they're big transactions yeah i'm bullish super super bullish price above 9 000 again we got any vagina memes where are we trying to probably right i missed that i did too we got to be we got to temper our bullishness because supposedly we dump whenever i'm super bullish

yeah you just got to be bearish from here on out i'm never bearish though so we're just going to go to zero um this is pretty cool not all updated it's got the new ride the lightning implementation dude art the new rtl is so fucking sexy rtl is like one of the most underappreciated projects in the space like all of lightning it is such an important aspect in in the lightning ecosystem to be able to run your routing node using rtl yeah so intuitive it gives you an incredible dashboard to know exactly what's going on especially now the new is fucking sexy um shout out to suhab and team building that out fucking crushing it guys major respect major respect another cool update my node updated with dojo support it's actually i think uh

i think this is finally the massive this is the impetus for me to to to get a raspi and set up a my node i think that's my node i think that's the next node i'm gonna make yeah i'm gonna do a my node within the next week so I will report back I've honestly just been waiting for my casa node 2 to come in so why buy a new raspi I'm just going to use that do what white rabbit

btc did yeah the casa node 2 is just a raspberry pi 4 with an ssd so it's exactly what you would use to build a my node so you just flash the you just use the sd card and you flash my node on it yeah and casa is deprecating their node support

deprecating the right word? I don't know. They're going to keep supporting their node. They're just not going to release a new one. Okay. That's what it is. And you can imagine like features will get reduced. But they don't have Dojo.

I just want to... Whirlpool, baby. Because I have Dojo. But I already have Dojo. But I just... The whole concept of my node that you can run Electrum really easily, that you can run your own block explorer,

all this different stuff, Dojo, Whirlpool, um makes it very much like a swiss army knife um and you can make them you can build them pretty cheaply so uh if the freaks are going to be setting them up and a lot of people are going to be using them like i gotta i gotta play with it and see uh how it works and stuff because people are dming me questions i'm like i've never used it it looks good yeah i think i think i'm to get on it too so i can start helping to answer questions as well um sticking with costa though they added support to cold card this week which is pretty huge um yeah so now in their multi-sig

you can use a cold card a ledger and a trezor uh so if you're in the three of five you could separate them between different hardware manufacturers um so you're less you trust each hardware manufacturer less if there's an issue with one device um your whole setup isn't compromised. Yeah. Um, so just making Casa just even stronger of a multi-sig service, obviously with the caveat that they can see your balances. Um, the other thing, uh, just, just two quick things. Uh, dojo is like awesome for uncle Jim, this idea that you can just scan a QR code. So if you do run a dojo, like consider hooking up your friends and family with your dojo QR code so that they can run all their transactions through your node and then

the other thing is I promised the ledger guys that last week I was going to mention that they supposedly on ledger live they don't send your ex pubs they send addresses individual addresses they query which is better in terms of privacy than doxing all your future and past transactions so that's a plus that everyone should know the other thing is it came to my attention that some people people didn't realize that you could use Ledger with Electrum in your own node. And yes, absolutely you can. You can also use Electrum with Coldcard and Trezor.

But make sure you're running your own node. The hard part is Electrum server is kind of a pain in the ass to run, but my node supposedly makes it really easy. So just another reason why my node is a nice little toolkit there. And of course, you could also use it with Wasabi, the hardware wallet integration in Wasabi, and not dox your addresses. Shout out to MyNode, man.

I can't wait to test it out this weekend. Or not this weekend. I've got to get all my shit first. And there's a big update to Ledger Live, too. What is that? Ledger software or whatever. They're supposedly going to release full node support, so we'll see what that means, but they haven't yet.

Interesting. Sticking on ColdCard and integrations with ColdCard, BlueWallet announced this week that they are now compatible with ColdCard after many iterations and a long time coming, according to them. so they uh their latest update adds cold card support and adds import export transaction files for future broadcasts which i assume it has to do yeah it has to do with the cold card so basically you can have like a watch only wallet on blue wallet where you can see your balances on your cold card and then you can build a transaction you transfer it to the cold card sign the

transaction transfer back to blue wallet on your phone and broadcast it from there um that's pretty that's that's that's awesome yeah more integrations the better yeah it's huge um and i believe you know blue wallet is a weird one because um it defaults to custodial on lightning um but i think you can do non-custodial it uses something called lnd hub which i also thing my node runs just keep coming back to that but the the the on-chain portion defaults to non-custodial and I'm pretty sure you can put in your own Electrum server for the on-chain but if you don't if you're not able to just you know keep in mind that if you're using their node once again you're doxing your addresses

and your transactions to in this case blue wallet but if you're not running your own node regardless of what wallet you're using if you're not running your own node you're using someone else's node and they can see your transaction so always keep that in mind yeah beware beware freaks um you gotta have to block block five this week put them on blast put them on blast i gotta i'm gonna push back explain why i put them on blast so they've been flagging wasabi deposits um in their defense they've been flagging them in the most friendly way possible so they're like send you an email like we know you deposited uh we know you used wasabi on the transaction you deposited don't do that again like it's against our terms of service

don't do that but they haven't like frozen accounts or anything um so plus on in that regard um you know block fi i already had issues the whole idea that you're you know you get interest on your bitcoin and you give up custody um and you kyc with them for that process uh always rubbed me the wrong way just like not your keys not your coins the whole stay humble thing like you know why do you want like how much bitcoin are you going to keep in there you know are you really willing to risk it you could lose at any moment um but this really cements it because you know i can't imagine the amount of interest someone would have to pay me to one take custody of my bitcoin and two basically force me to reveal all my past and

future transactions to them because i'm not allowed to use coin join if i use the service right yeah um like like i just would never use a service like that that would never even cross my mind um one one caveat to keep in mind is that pretty much every transaction i was sent that got flagged was when Wasabi was using the old fixed fee address, except for one, but it was part of a group of five UTXOs that four of them had used a fixed fee address and one was more recent.

So like a lot of these UTXOs were like deposits that people deposited like six months ago and they just got emails from BlockFi about. So it'll be interesting to see that now the fixed fee address is removed, now that people are using Whirlpool and stuff, are they still going to keep flagging things? like obviously you can still see coin joins on chain but it's not as rubbed in their face because

you don't have this immediate proximity to the fee address so it should be interesting to see how it plays out but like you know i mean you should operate under the assumption that if you if you do if you do coin join you might not be able to send it into certain kyc compliant entities but as far as i'm concerned like that i've never have any intention of like the only time i ever touch kyc is on the onboard and that's you know you just buy and withdraw um which is still not ideal but like the whole idea sending into like kyc services and stuff doesn't really appeal to me like i have no desire to to use those services and long term if we can't just spend bitcoin um without like doing like heavy chain analysis on everything like bitcoin's gonna have

a lot bigger issues on their hands um than than whether or not you individually can spend your coins yeah one thing i wonder about the flagging of this stuff too is whether or not um like they do flag it is it just like a check box that compliance has to check off they ask you like what are you doing and you can just be like hey i'm just using it for privacy yeah i think a lot of them like they just need a response from the user um you know we're also seeing cases where people pull from certain exchanges and on the withdrawal side they get a question you know where he was using wasabi why were you using it and they might just need need you on the record saying you know that you're using it for privacy but like you know that's also a concern of mine

like if I if you can't you should operate under that assumption that you could be cut off from these on-ramps at any point. Um, this is one of the reasons why I believe in dollar cost averaging and not short-term trading, because you can't, um, you never know when the time might come where, uh, you know, Mnuchin might do something or whatever, and then everything just gets cut off for you and you're not able to get back into Bitcoin. That'd be my biggest fear is that like, if I tried to make a short-term move and then the market started going crazy and I couldn't get back into bitcoin um and just that would huddle on comrades or just eat me up inside yeah no i'm very much in the same boat there yeah dca central uh coin joint send a coin join send a cold storage

there are some services that i will use um i do use unchained for some for some uh custody but not substantial not nothing too substantial but an amount that i'm comfortable with but unchained is an anti-coin joint so yeah that's true um and they don't take custody but they do uh i do know some shit about they know your transactions they do do kyc info yeah um so it's all like a balancing act there um yeah i look i uh it should be interesting to see how this all starts to play out like how do you where do you draw the line how many hops is uh like are Are these services going to block any UTXO that ever had a CoinJoin history? You know, like years ago, it's been CoinJoin.

Like, where do you draw the line, right? So it should be interesting to watch play out. And, you know, we expect there to be a fight. Like, there's going to be a fight here. Yeah, and hopefully developments at the protocol level make the fight less necessary and harder to fight for for those trying to combat privacy time will tell i'm confident uh things will get better i think things are getting better obviously with whirlpool uh going off like it has been and four percent of the memples pretty material it is pretty cool seeing the demand for

it yeah spiking yeah ux ux provided like make it easier people will come build it and people will come exactly it's all about the ux man you got to make that's what signal has showed us with like encrypted messaging versus something like pgp yeah um like people just want a nice easy ux yeah people are lazy um speaking of ux square crypto announced two new grants one of which is going to um uh somebody who's going to be focused on ux let me pull up his his uh name right now it's slipping my mind at the moment these are huge um tank tank red haste uh tankard haste is the recipient of one of the grants. They both have really cool names.

Yeah. And John Attack. John Attack. I mean, I wanted to get John Attack. I love John Attack. I think he's a freak. John Attack, particularly in the last year, between March 15th, 2019 and today,

is number eight on the list of contributors to the Bitcoin Core repository with merges. So he's had 68 merges. Excuse me. Yes, 68 merges. in the last year and he's really focused on uh code review which is a huge uh a huge thing in bitcoin we need the code to be reviewed that's something that john tends to focus on and square took notice of that and decide to uh to grant him uh some funds so that he could focus on that

worry-free and get paid for his hard work so i want to give a huge shout out to john and tankard haste for for the work you're doing tankard particularly uh was previously working at lightning uh and it seems that he's going to be focusing focusing on security privacy and ux well deserved um and a big thank you to square crypto yeah shout out to square crypto they now have four grants and they have the five devs that they have on payroll as well yeah fucking massive moving it forward um and it was a big uh big regulatory week across the world for bitcoins we had three big announcements uh india south korea and germany two of which were good and one that sounds good but it's actually pretty bad um india is the biggest best news they've if you freaks

don't know india has uh i think india is the only good news both like south korea and germany feel like the bit license yes that's right it's the other way around one is very good two are not so good so in india uh basically crypto exchanges were not allowed to get banking relationships it was a case that went to their supreme court and this is the first time their supreme court has turned it over a case against this particular banking entity ever and they struck down the bitcoin banking ban and so now crypto exchanges um like unicoin and others in india can zeb pay zeb pay can um can get back live and supporting uh indian citizens which uh just now they can have fiat connections again yes and that's a pretty big substantial amount of the world

even more than that i think like re-entering the bitcoin the bitcoin you gotta imagine if you're an indian right now you saw the writing on the wall you're like fuck they could just ban it again at any moment you know i gotta get in while you can yeah um so shout out to any indian freaks out there hope you're having a good week um but the south korean german stuff was like being parroted as super bullish but i don't think um you know they basically it adds a level of legitimacy in both those countries for bitcoin but it also adds a shit ton of regulatory burden which is what we saw with the BitLicense. So it's going to make the cost to run these businesses significantly higher,

the regulatory requirements significantly higher. Compliance burden's heavier. So in South Korea, they passed an amendment formalizing Bitcoin regulation in the Special Reporting Act, is what they're calling it, an amendment to the Special Reporting Act, which makes cryptocurrency trading now legal. But again, the company is allowing that trading and facilitating that trading will probably be burdened with some compliance and regulation that upstarts may not be able to afford. And then in Germany, talking to our friend Hasu in Germany, and he said that this is actually pretty bad.

It's definitely a lot like the BitLicense. It's like the BitLicense. Yeah, the BitLicense is a perfect example of it. This is not bullish. No. the india shit is really bullish though yes it is a lot more people too it affects a lot more people than south south korea and germany well the eu has just been you know this is you know first they had amld5 now they have this and it's just they're gonna have amld6 coming up um the europe

europe is getting worse and worse to run a bitcoin business in europe right now european freaks fight back i wonder how many of these guys are going to join the ripple board these unelected bureaucrats are are really stifling innovation in your what is your union um is this going to affect england amld6 we'll see well i don't know england's like just as bad if not worse so yeah even if they're not part of the eu i'm just not very bullish on regulation over there why i'm not very bullish on american regulation either you know yeah did you see that you don't have this unless either the the IRS met with CoinBase, Ripple, Chain Analysis, and CoinSquare, which is an ATM provider, I believe.

But Jack Dorsey was there too, right? I think that was a different meeting. I don't know if he was definitely there, but FinCEN met with, I think that was a meeting with FinCEN. FinCEN met with some power brokers in the industry, apparently. That's Steve Munch and Butts and Crow. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Trump administration, like, drives us into the fucking, into hiding.

I hope not. I still, I'm still going to go with, I think they're inept. The longer Bitcoin lasts without major crackdowns in big countries, the stronger it becomes and the harder it is to stop it in the future. Yeah, and... Providing our time. And the more people take their UTXOs into their own possession, the harder it is going to be enforced. So if you're sitting there at home with a bunch of Bitcoin on an exchange and just nervous about sending it to a personal wallet and you want to help the long-term survivability of Bitcoin, think about taking possession of your own keys, creating your own keys. Take custody, then learn how to use your own full node with your keys, and then consider CoinJoin.

Yeah. These are the steps, and it is a social thing. the more you know the more people that take these steps the stronger bitcoin becomes as a whole yeah and it doesn't just help you it helps bitcoin as a whole and if it helps bitcoin as a whole it should help number go up which also helps you yeah it's uh the beautiful feedback loop and as we've been talking about this whole episode the the tools for you to take the stuff in your possession and use it in a more private and uh more sovereign way are being built and they're they're getting better every week um and so this is another thing like talking about like seeping

bitcoin into american culture particularly uh came out in bloomberg and coindesk this morning that a new york power plant is mining fifty thousand dollars worth of bitcoin per day i believe they have seven thousand machines that can consume 14 megawatts of energy a day uh up in the fingerlings they said what like five and a half bitcoin a day yeah about five and a half bitcoin um and this is i think it's green greenage is the power plant they've been around green ridge green ridge it might be i think you spelled it wrong on the bent no i think i think it's green edge oh you're right it is green edge yeah green edge um and weird name weird name but they uh they have a power plant up in again the finger lakes uh in upstate new york nat gas was formerly coal

transitioned to nat gas and and is a a beaker plant a peaker plant excuse me i believe uh that services its local grid um and i think that the highest demands are in summer and winter when people need to cool and heat their houses would you call it a beaker plant uh peaker plant what is it what does that mean it's a special type of uh a plant for nat gas and not just nat glass it's It's very good at conserving energy, I believe, if you have excess energy. I think what's really cool about this one is that, you know, we've seen a lot of third-party companies come in and partner with power plants for harnessing their excess energy. This is one of the first big cases, at least in America, where we've seen them do it, where the power plant's doing it in-house. it's not like a partnership it's not like they're leasing out it's not like they're just selling a

contract for cheap excess electricity they're actually mining it themselves yes and huge step forward in that regard so the plant is getting there is like an upstream provider of the natural gas but the plant historically has provided and created the service to provide that gas to their local grid and what's beautiful about this this story um which coin desk highlighted is that the the plant would be shut down for most of the year um because there was just no one to consume this energy demand was so low so the fact that bitcoin mining exists and they're incorporating it into their plant allows them to uh keep the plant up and running year long which means people are still employed which means the the leveling out of the the grid and um and the energy distribution

is getting more efficient and it's just a win-win-win all around uh if greenage is able to uh hold on to their bitcoin some of their bitcoin um and doesn't have to liquidate everything they mine and they're able to hold on through a bull run it could be pretty lucrative for them richest power plant in the world possibly potentially we shall see um so shout out to i like to think they're huddling it i would like to think that too they definitely have to sell some i would imagine uh to cover expenses to pay for the gas that they're receiving but um uh it is beautiful to say like i said in the bet this morning do you hear the buzzing can you feel it in the air that's bitcoin mining coming to america and this is going to help

balkanize hash production and distribute mining more globally uh brad glaringhouse was is attempting to shit on bitcoin mining and like garlinghouse garlinghouse whatever his fucking name is mr ripple mr ripple um that's what he does he goes around the world just shit you know doing like alarmist climate stuff yeah so it's the dude that was fucking at the irs this week fuck this dude um yeah and people see you brad people are still very confused uh like the the quote in uh bloomberg was like uh the amount uh of energy be consumed by the bitcoin miners is enough to power 11 000 uh houses uh the equivalent of 11 000 houses and um christopher mims from the wall street journal came out i was like this is the best use of this energy it's like

well nobody else is using it like if you're paying for it it doesn't matter like if if there was better use for that energy people would buy it uh and price out bitcoin miners yeah you've become like uh i've noticed you've become like a bitcoin is bad for the climate change reply guy lately like every time i see a poor take on it i like scroll down like i'm like oh should i reply i'm like oh marty already replied keep up bitcoin is the real green new deal and then uh pierre made an interesting point too he's like also like fuck you uh there's eight million households in new york like you're gonna talk about 11 000 right and yeah that and again like bitcoin mining is allowing that uh that facility to stay up and running year year round keeping jobs um there

too i'm not sure how many jobs may not be too crazy but at least some people have some job security because of this um so yeah i expect more of this to happen throughout the country and it should be good if you care about america you should support bitcoin mining yes and so a lot of people like brad carlinghouse whatever his fucking name is uh they fought about china having a bunch of the hash power geographically located within their borders uh i'm not so worried about the geographic distribution of the hash power anymore i'm more worried about the the supply chain of the chip producers we need a foundry here in america here in north america that is what i'm going to be pushing for maybe corona will help with that i think so it seems

like again i said it earlier it seems like corona is really having people wake up in a lot of the supply chain i think mexico is having a huge boon because of the trade war and now corona american producers are are wisening up like hey maybe we should bring some of this closer to home within north america's boundaries i think we're not nationalists here we're just trying to be practical right this makes sense yeah um do love yeah i love america i do think it is uh falling into uh dystopian tendencies um but i do have hope that freedom will prevail and the idea that american was founded on that america was founded on will survive and will prevail at the end of the day but we do have to fight for it we have to stand up and speak up for it yeah talking

about uh dystopian tendencies as you so eloquently put it uh we have the earn it act that is being proposed in front of u.s congress um so it's another one of their fucked up names like you know like the patriot act or whatever yeah earn it stands for eliminating abusive and rampant neglect of interactive technologies how do they come up with this shit they had they like they they say earn it and they're like all right let's just form fit what we're trying to do they start with the acronym yeah um so this is brought up by uh lindsey graham and i don't know blim blumenthal's first name lindsey graham lindsey graham's trying to take your your encryption rights away freaks all right it's not just encryption so the internet's protected by

something in the united states called section 230 which means that internet uh service providers on the internet don't they're not liable for their user speech they should you know do a best effort but at the end of the day the user is liable for the speech so you see this in like comment sections on twitter stuff like that and they want to strip that protection away basically force these service providers to police the speech on their site and they have to follow like a a commission of like 15 commissioners that are all like law enforcement agencies. And of course in classic fashion,

they're saying, let's protect the kids. It's about kids and terrorism. Um, and, but this has just been a common thing. The war on encryption has been going on for two decades, three decades now.

and it's gonna, it's gonna keep escalating. Like it's gonna keep getting worse. Speak up freaks, eliminating abusive and rampant neglect of interactive technology so the encryption element these people the war on encryption element here comes from my understanding is that uh like if you run like whatsapp or something uh like an encrypted messenger used by people you know questionable probably how good it is but like let's say signal right if you if you

the signal foundation that runs signal could be liable for stuff that gets sent through signal even though it's encrypted so then the question is how do you handle that and what it looks like they're pushing for is basically client-side scanning so like your your app filters through whatever you're sending before you send it which clearly breaks encryption and has privacy issues hey lindsey graham you can go fuck yourself but look at the end of the day like even if they pass this thing how you know this is why free open source software is so important um how are they going to be able to enforce it it will hurt the average person um because the average person won't be able to be savvy enough to use encryption um but you're not going to be able to stop like

free open source software from proliferating yeah that's where things like urbit come into play to control your own data still think urbit's a shit coin get triggered every time you mention it Um, but staying on the dystopian, uh, tip here, we're going to end it on a dystopian tip. Coinbase, uh, came, came out in the open that they were testing that facial recognition software that we talked about before Clearview AI. They didn't admit it. No, Clearview got hacked.

I know it came out. Yeah. They didn't. Yeah. They just got caught in the act that Coinbase was, that Coinbase said they were testing it, that they don't use it. Yeah. Uh, so the same company that, uh, hired a whole, uh, what was their?

What was the name of that company? The company that helped jail dissidents. Neutrino, right? Yes. Is the chain analysis company. Yes. But it was started by... Hacking team or something?

Hacking team. Hacking team. That's what it was. Same guys then started Neutrino. Yeah. Not to be confused with client-side filters. If you didn't have reason enough to delete Coinbase, they're trying to face fuck you.

This is so fucked up because it's like, sits outside the purview of the law because it's a private company but meanwhile Clearview partners with all these law enforcement agencies and obviously they can't keep their information safe because their whole client list got hacked so all this data could easily fall in the wrong hands whether they're a customer or whether they get hacked it's fucked up and they and they they pulled all the all the photo information is all from like public profiles on Twitter and stuff and Facebook and Venmo is a big one which no

really thinks about because your profile picture is public and it's connected to your payment methods and stuff um so yeah slowly going down that path it it's it's here now and it's not going anywhere so you cats out of the bag we're gonna have intense facial recognition all all around us you're always gonna be watched and tracked and if you didn't have enough reason to get face masks face masks because of the coronavirus uh we're face fucked in many ways here can't even get a mask if you want a mask right now did you see brian armstrong's thread from yesterday did you see my comment to joe joe weisenthal yeah no what was it i didn't actually read brian's thread because you know fucking whatever i've been reading his bad takes for

way too many years um but uh joe is like it's pretty amazing that probably the most preeminent bitcoin company doesn't think that bitcoin will be the the chain that succeeds or the token that succeeds and i commented underneath i was like joe this is already priced in and they're not even a preeminent bitcoin i mean they're one of the most valuable bitcoin companies and and coinbase wouldn't exist if it wasn't for bitcoin like bitcoin is it's whether they want to admit it or not it's their golden goose yeah well the the and he was making a huge thread on analogies built on analogies with the expansion of the browser and the internet particularly and really didn't even touch on like the underlying protocols and again analogies

aren't ever the best way to make arguments and particularly with bitcoin comparing it to past technologies because again if this is a monetary good there are different network effects and dynamics come into play and um no it was like connor brown i retweeted him like if if you're really worried about bringing this stuff to bitcoin or to the space uh which he mentioned privacy uh scalability transaction throughput like bitcoin's working on all those things like you could put some of coinbase's resources towards helping uh the builders out in that in that endeavor look what square crypto is doing square crypto has done way more for bitcoin you have fucking gollum you have a civic token on your fucking platform like ox and shit it's like

all these garbage ass fucking tokens oh fuck yourself bottom of the barrel he hates bitcoin this is somebody this is somebody pushed for bitcoin xt bitcoin classic b b2x b cash bitcoin unlimited he pushed for everything launch a b cash ninja launch big cash he he i people yell at me when i call people enemies of bitcoin but i do earnestly like bitcoin hurt brian armstrong's feelings at one point and he he's like on an uh like a vendetta he's just a hater he is a big and it blows my mind dude like you you could profit from this into perpetuity with the position that your company's in but you you just like like to be all hand wavy like oh oh maybe the best hasn't come yet the good news is that we have companies like square cash app we have river

financial bull bitcoin that are like showing how it should be done yes um and they're nipping at their heels so uh you know coinbase isn't going to be long in this world if they keep it up the way they're going be aware brian be aware um just to wrap it up i mean we got to go right uh we got like three four minutes a couple things i wanted to touch on uh first of all we kind of butchered the explanation of shared bits is uh discrete log contracts uh so you had them in the studio this week so everyone should go listen to that definitely go listen to that they explain it way better than we do i'm like a half an hour in or 45 minutes and um so go listen to that um the other thing is uh i wanted to do a quick shout out we don't have any shout outs no shout outs this week

get on that freaks let's get some shout outs next week i love the shout outs um i wanted to give a Shout out to Sphinx Chat, which we've talked about in the past. It seems like they're rolling out more test access for users. So if you go to sphinx.chat, you can do that. And what's really interesting is now it's officially known each, you know, so it's a chat app where you can send lightning payments between users, and every message is actually a one-sat message. and not only can you send regular payments through it you can also subscribe and send

subscription payments through it and what's really cool about the implementation is usually for a lightning app like this to have basically seamless ux and like very user-friendly ux like it ends up being custodial but what they did is everything is is run in the noddle cloud so each user has their own noddle instance in the cloud that's running their own node that's running and it's just like a hosted node

instead of custodial which I think is really cool. You know, obviously it has its own trade-offs. There's still trust involved there but it's a pretty cool setup. It's badass. Yeah.

Shout out to Sphinx. Sphinx. Sphinx. I'm trying to think of it. Yeah. Things are getting frothy. uh coronavirus is a black swan you were skeptical if it was a black swan i think it's a very big black swan um it's priced in already marty isn't it everything's priced in keep an eye on the

markets added to the list of things that aren't effectively priced in um i mean a culmination of this virus shutting down the supply chains and the increase of subprime debt delinquencies that we talked about last week is going to be interesting especially if um if the the uh layoffs that were described earlier in the episode of the shipping company shipping companies hit first and then that'll ripple through the rest of the economy if those layoffs start and a lot of those people blue collar workers make up a lot of large percentage of that subprime delinquency um rate uh i would only expect those to continue to rise and then subprime is what started the last crisis and it could be a weird snowball effect freaks yeah i mean i i've thought we've just been sitting

on a house of cards the last five years so um eventually the cards will fall who knows when uh hopefully right after september so i win the bet uh but i don't know if we'll be able to wait that i don't think our 50 bet is really what matters here yeah um and the other thing is i was talking to rodolfo you know he's been fucking him and the coin kite team have just been killing it with the firmware updates like all the different features they're putting on this fucking thing is fucking awesome like i still am super bullish on ck bunker um i just want to be able to use it with my lightning node and with my coin joins like it'd be awesome if i could link it up to whirlpool and and then you have like a warm wallet um but he said to he wanted to do a shout

out to the freaks that if you guys have any ideas for like firmware updates that you would like to see um shout them out on twitter you know and and he'll do his best to implement them very easy to remember at mvk um and then i believe he actually released a blog post recently with all the uh upgrades from uh update to update just to to make sure that people know about the new functionalities that they have yeah i mean they have a full change log on the site too so They do a pretty good job with documentation. That was a quick wrap. Oh, and one more thing.

Watford FC, they use BTC Pay Server in their store. Fucking bullish. For their Bitcoin suite. The Bitcoin suite that costs 150 million sats for a game. 1.5 Bitcoin. They're stacking sats. Stacking sats. Pretty cool that they're using BTC Pay Server.

Very cool. I think it's probably cooler than them having it on their sleeve, having the Bitcoin logo on their sleeve. And they beat Liverpool 3-0 this week. Fuck yes. Not a huge football fan. But now we are. When you have Bitcoin FC out there dominating, how could they not be?

Yeah, they're not going to be Watford FC for a while. They'll be Bitcoin FC soon. Soon enough. We'll make it happen. I fucking love it. All right, freaks. That was a condensed hour and two minutes almost. Stay humble, stack sets.

Peace and love. Okay.