TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2020.03.09

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - macro and price talk - mining death spiral FUD - Bitcoin Core v0.19.1 - bluewallet node issue - payjoin support should be added to btcpay soon - Samourai Wallet Whirlpool hits new monthly ATH - Specter-Desktop multisig release - OXT Research PlusToken Report Issue 2 - Electrum v4 release still delayed - MKR/DAI liquidation crisis 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.

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Rabbit Hole Recap. Intense episode. Intense thing is going on. Seems like the world is going to shit. Matt and I talked about the markets, the Bitcoin price, for the first 30 minutes. Talked about everything that's going on right now. And then tried to end it on some positive Bitcoin development stuff.

So I think you freaks are going to like it. This episode of Rabbit Hole Recap is brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. You guys already know all about them. They're creating financial services for Bitcoiners. They're helping Bitcoiners not sell their Bitcoiners because friends don't let their friends sell Bitcoin. And the way they're doing that is with their collateralized loan product. All right. If you need cash, if you need some liquidity and you don't want to sell your Bitcoin,

what you can do is put some collateral up in the form of Bitcoin. And Unchained will help you with the USD loan in as little, excuse me, not as little. It'll be a same-day loan if you pass all the checks and the profile checks and all that. You get the money right away into your bank account. On top of that, they're helping with security. They come from a security-first mindset, and they're doing that mainly with their multisig products. They have their vaults where you can engage in a multisig quorum with Unchained. You can use a Ledger or a Trezor right now, and I know they're working on Coldcard.

What you do is you enter in a two-at-three multisig. you hold two keys so you can always move the coins out of their vault by yourself if you want to and then unchained will hold the third key for you and they will be there to sign if you don't have the two keys on you and you need their help on top of that they're doing a bunch of open source stuff around multi-sig quorum they have caravan which you can download and create the multi-sig quorum yourself without unchained if you don't trust them then they're working on slip 39 and hermit as well which are incredible open source bitcoin projects and then they have their incredible blog with drew parker joe phil putting out some incredible content now will cole as well

actually let's go to www.unchained-capital.com check out all this stuff www.unchained-capital.com this episode is also brought to you by our good friends at the cash app you already know all about them all right they're letting you stack sets they're letting you stack stonks and they're helping you save money at merchants with their boost program. With the boost program, you get a personalized debit card. I just used it at the deli down the road. You put your signature on it, and then I didn't use boost. I didn't have a boost for this particular merchant. But if it was a partner merchant, I would hit the boost, use my boost card, and save some money. You can stack sats, like I said. You can stack sats, sell sats, send sats, receive sats, and then you can stack

slivers of stonks if you want to buy stonks today might not be the best day unless you're a dip buyer um you can buy as little as one dollar if your favorite stock's a little too expensive you just buy a sliver of that stonk uh and cash app investing is a subsidiary uh of square and member sipc as always use the code stacking sats that's one word stacking sats you're gonna get $10 and $10 is going to go to our good friends at Owl's Lacrosse. That's Owl's Lacrosse. Go to your local app store and download the cash app today and enjoy this rip of Rabbit Hole Recap. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If 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. You probably should be. well hey there freaks it's your boy marty bent here to introduce how we doing matt i like that i like that what's up freaks what is up freaks it's your boy marty

bent here with matt adele we're recording remotely today uh just the uh the conflation of events that's happened this week is force us away from each other. We're looking at each other through a computer screen right now. Through computer screens, excuse me. Yeah. Has the big one happened? There's a lot to talk about. We'll get to the

big one, Bitcoin stuff at the end. But it seems that we're having a global market meltdown right now. Marty and I evacuated the city so we can bring you rabbit hole recaps going forward. Yes, it's true.

got the fuck out of there it feels good it feels good to be uh be out of there for anybody in there i hope you're hope you're safe hope you're stocked up don't panic um but yeah practice safe self-distancing and uh wash your hands just be careful it seems like there's a pandemic sweeping the world right now yeah last few weeks i've been saying it's been confusing to me don't know if it's new spanish flu or media hysteria it seems to be pretty legit uh my mind was sort of convinced this week after all the news coming out of italy all the all the threads of how overburdened their icu units are particularly and uh they're having to um revert to war triage like uh decision making where they have to decide who gets to live and who gets to die

it seems like a pretty fucked up situation and as some of you may be able to tell it seems to be coming to america in mass we have what's going on in seattle there's cases in new york earlier this week the national guard came into new rochelle right above new york and create a quarantine camp um it seems like people are starting to react trump came out last night tried to quell markets um with a bunch of stuff we're going to talk about all of it You did the opposite. Right? What are your thoughts?

You know, this is fucking, it's a little bit unreal. You know, us in the Bitcoin space, we've been watching this for a while now. But it feels like people are just starting to wake up. You know, the NBA canceling their season, I think, was a massive one for people that they realized it's actually serious. Especially when our president doesn't really take it serious. like last night was the first time he seemed to kind of take it seriously uh do you think he's taking it seriously because he has the virus what they they said bolsonaro of brazil has it right and you just met him i think that was fake news but uh who definitely has it is bolsonaro's

spokesperson who was pictured with trump just five days ago and they ate dinner together yes so people are beginning to surmise that that donnie might have the virus and some are saying i didn't watch the speech last night i just followed along on twitter um and some are saying he sounded a little sick last night too well it kind of it kind of sounded like he was like they told him like you have to put on your like solemn fatherly voice and he like tried to do it uh but he was really you know it's the markets the markets we're in the middle of a global market crisis um markets around the world are suffering huge losses and he hates to see that right so he went out there trying to quell the fears with a he like it was more professional

than we're used to from him but um it was a lot of hyperbole you know we have the best medical care system in the world we're the best doctors in the world we're america we're the best um So I don't think I think and the market responded immediately, you know, the futures market, at least, because stock markets are closed the majority of the day. Yeah. So let's get into the nitty gritty of why this is happening. Obviously, the virus is sweeping the world. And so the virus is sort of the match that is falling on the fuel that has been laid by federal government policy, federal reserve policy for the last few decades, last decade particularly. So, yeah, it's so the Titanic has basically hit the iceberg called COVID-19. I wrote about it this morning.

We're in a pretty fucked up situation here in the United States. I'm not going to mince words here. Over the course of the last few decades, we've shifted our supply chain from the homeland to foreign lands, mainly China. China produces a bunch of the medicines that we use on a daily basis and the medicines we may need to fight this virus going forward. On top of that, we've had a hollowing out of the middle class over the last few decades, too. This is why we have this podcast, this is why we talk about Bitcoin. We think we need to fix the money, and over the course of the last five decades, we have fucked up the money, which has not allowed people to accumulate capital and save wealth. And so you have most common men living paycheck to paycheck with not many savings.

And the market crash this week is really catching us with our pants down, I think, in a very vulnerable state where, again, we don't have the capability to make the things that we need to fix this problem right now. and we don't have the individual accumulation of capital needed to weather this storm, I don't think at least. So this is a pretty scary situation and that's really what I took away yesterday. I mean, Munchen came out in the morning and I had a tweet storm about it because it really pissed me off.

While we have this virus spreading, they come out and they say, we are going to protect the markets. That's our first goal is to protect the markets as this coronavirus spreads so right there they're not really worried about the health and safety of american citizens they're worried about the health and safety of the quote-unquote american economy most importantly the stock market so that growth at all costs mindset really came out of the woodwork yesterday and they really showed their cards of hey we need to save the stock market and

the markets or this is going to go to shit at least that's how i read everything what really concerns me is the systemic issues that we've built up over the last couple of decades um it puts us in a specifically a very vulnerable position um i'm looking at things like the middle class the lower middle class um they're they're not in a situation where they can take Gulf work, the busboys, the waiters, stuff like that. If they're feeling sick, they're not going to immediately stop going to work. We're going to see like lots of medical bankruptcies I'm concerned about going forward. So all these systemic things that have that have built up over the years puts us in this in this situation right now in in in way worse position than we

should be otherwise and then you add to that that even though the fed does have less ammo it still has ammo but every time they do these emergency cuts and stuff in this situation i feel like it just fuels the panic more because they you look at them and you're like they're worried they're concerned they have no idea what they're doing you know and it's it doesn't have a calming effect like you know we saw it today with the repo announcements um the the market stopped dumping a little bit you know it had already hit its first uh centralized uh circuit breaker to pause all trading but now it's going back down again um yeah yeah so the fed the fed came out this afternoon and said uh they're going to conduct a one trillion dollar repo over the two days

the next two days uh so overnight tonight and then uh overnight wouldn't that be sunday night maybe maybe maybe friday night who knows i don't know the exact details but they're gonna conduct a trillion dollar repo to stabilize treasury financing markets they're going to buy things other than treasury bills and they're most uh the thing that's being most highlighted is they're offering 500 billion dollars over a three-month period of short-term funding or medium-term funding in today's world um so yeah it seems like they're panicking again like like you mentioned like the lower middle class me personally like my family like my parents are very blue collar they're not very well off and they are those type of people who feel the need to

to go to work i've had to beg them luckily they they started listening to me last two days but i've had to beg them to just stop going to work batten down buy months worth of food supply and really try to try to avoid this thing because my parents particularly they're not in the best health and nor the best financial situation to get out of this so personally i've been scared shitless for them and it's it's fucking scary man uh and again this is what happens when you fuck up the money this is why we believe bitcoin is very important um it is imperative in my mind and we fucked up the money and we do need to fix it and that's what i wrote about earlier this week even though bitcoin is crashing so our boy yasin our boy yasin uh tweeted out

uh an hour ago if bitcoin closes below uh 61 61 20 so 6 120 down 23 today will be the largest daily drawdown in six years so even as bitcoin is having an incredible drawdown uh historic drawdown one that we haven't seen in quite a while i still have no problem finding safety in sats because it does not bitcoin does not have the systemic risks that the traditional financial system does like i think i think the crisis of confidence i've been talking about in the bent uh for the last few weeks is is coming i find it hard to believe that people can have any certainty that the powers that be mainly the federal reserve and the federal government will be able to fix this problem, especially since it's so close to 2008. Those scars are

still raw for a lot of people. And just, I mean, look, when an everything bubble pops, it's like, where can you find safety? Where can you go? Where can the average person go to protect their wealth? And I don't trust banks right now. I think we will see bank failures. We will see bail-ins throughout the world where depositors get haircuts off their money um like we saw in cyprus a lot of these bail-in laws got put on the books only recently you know and they haven't actually been put in practice yet and when we start seeing that happen people will realize what it means to be able to actually self-custody your wealth what that advantage gives you um i also think it's pretty crazy that i'm like

you know i don't i right now i have i have no equity positions on the stock market but i'm more panicked about the stock market being down eight nine percent than i am waking up to bitcoin being down 25 and that's just kind of weird but that's that that's that's the truth of the matter and the other thing that i like to mention here is i think people in our age group um that are in the finance industry they've just been in this roaring bull market uh for the last 10 years, 12 years. But meanwhile, Bitcoiners, we've been through so many bear markets already. We have this experience. We've been through this before. We just recently saw 20k to 3.5k. So we're particularly well suited to weather this kind of turbulence. And this is exactly

what we should expect in times of global crises, especially when you have a pandemic at the same exact time that is fueling all of this. People will want to de-risk into cash. They will want to have money that they can spend right away. You can't spend Bitcoin in a lot of places. Most people can't sell their stocks on weekends. They can't sell them at night. They can sell Bitcoin. So that's the first thing they'll go to to be able to sell. We saw this 25% drawdown. meanwhile the new york stock exchange wasn't open yet right people people couldn't trade could it most people the average person couldn't trade um those assets until the stock market open we see circuit breakers in the traditional stock market we don't see that in bitcoin it's a true

free market it's got real access to liquidity even though the liquidity is way less um in like nominal terms it's it's real liquidity you can sell when you want you can buy when you want yes and now i mean i was uh physically jarred when i looked at when i checked the prices i saw tweets i checked i saw that i had notifications i checked those it's just people like oh my god like are you holding strong and i was like what and i checked the price i was like oh my god that was uh that was a hefty dump over the overnight but like you said yeah people are searching for liquidity hitting the sidelines for cash uh and on top of that i imagine uh As futures markets were falling after Trump's speech last night that a lot of major hedge funds with big positions were scrambling to either add some funding to their margin positions or they were getting liquidated and needed to pull cash from other areas to fund that stuff.

and excuse me not hedge funds personal uh in individual traders with big pig positions they probably needed to um to cover their their margins there uh and then on top of that um yeah you have you have a panic going on there's there's so much uncertainty in the air right now it's not surprising that bitcoin dumped with the markets and not bitcoin only all the cryptocurrency markets took a took a hefty beating over the course of today well i mean the altcoins got hit even harder yeah bitcoin is down 25 all coins are down 30 to 40 across the board yeah i should be expected yeah i believe we hit 5500 on some exchange at some point um 5800 i think was uh where it settled for a little bit right now we're sitting at 6041 according to clark moody's

Bitcoin dashboard. So it seems to have settled down a little bit, but who knows what will happen going forward. Tomorrow will be a very interesting day. And then we headed to the weekend and we have the Fed meeting in five days. And then we'll hear what they said on the 18th. So it looks like after the emergency cut last week, after increasing repo earlier this week, twice, i believe already they had to do it a third time so the fed uh usually doesn't like to make any moves between meetings and they've been forced to make many uh the week leading up to to their meeting so it'll be very interesting to see what they do next week once they meet and and make some policy changes but a lot of people are saying and i've been saying it too you're not going to fix

this problem with uh cutting interest rates and printing uh or expanding the monetary base a lot of people are looking at the federal government right now and saying we need uh some fiscal stimulus we need to basically enact mmt uh and and sort of stimulate the economy with with infrastructure programs and stuff like that it sure it sure feels like the big one it feels like every man for himself it really does no and that's that's the crazy thing like so so go back to the virus like if this virus starts taking down politicians it's already done so in iran it seems like it could do so in brazil if trump somehow contracted the disease imagine so let's just hypothetically imagine if trump contracted the disease from this brazilian

government spokesperson and i'm not saying like anybody who's wishing that the coronavirus takes out trump uh and kills him is pretty terrible i'm not the biggest trump fan i i don't love the guy but uh and i would not like to see this virus take him out but it seems that it could be a possibility he is of old age i believe he drinks like dirty diet cokes a day uh and he's basically in that golden age group of people this virus is killing just hypothetically if it were to take him out like what kind of chaos would rain on the world after that like the u.s president taken out by this virus yeah then we got the guy who oversaw the the largest aids epidemic we've had in the states in decades in charge and taking over did nobody this virus does not discriminate

there's a tom hanks got it and i believe there was a very popular soccer or football player sorry I know we have an international audience who got it. There's rumors of one of the college basketball coaches had to leave a game because they thought he had it. An NBA player was jokingly coughing on mics, and then it came out that he had it. They canceled an NBA game. The Oklahoma City, I forget who they were playing,

but in Oklahoma City they canceled the game like right before the game because they were worried that it was going to spread there. And then they canceled the season. there's like four NBA teams under quarantine right now yeah it's like that scene from Space Jam yeah I mean look I think if you can get out of the city if you live in a city you should get out if you can take off work or work from home you should do it um if you're not in that position then I really feel for you um that's my biggest concern um and we look you you have to watch out for yourself you have to be prepared you shouldn't panic you should be prepared you should be

concerned you should be aware um and and there's a lot of fake news going around you know you got to try and confirm your sources as much as possible um and and watch out for your fellow american or human wherever you live you know people we're in this together but also not but you have to be a good person um to a degree watch out for your own watch out for your friends and family but also um don't be a complete dipshit definitely don't be a complete dipshit and yeah definitely turn to your neighbor and try to help out this is the everything bubble popping if society at large does lose confidence in these pillar these institutions that have been believed to be ironclad for for decades if not centuries if they if confidence

starts to erode in them like we're gonna have to rebuild in some way or fashion and we're gonna have to get along uh you're gonna have to turn to your local community that's what i said in the bent today be nice to each other stay safe turn say hi to your neighbor and and that's really another post i wrote last week on friday about the world is filled with weak men that's what one thing that pissed me off about the virus especially here in the states and really like embarrassed me as an american was all everybody's like looking to the cdc for the test uh like hand out like tell us what to do tell us what to do and you're they're basically like waiting for marching orders from above when really if we're going to tackle this thing we need to work from

our local communities up and we you got to stop asking permission we're going to have to do this ourselves like the pull yourself up from your bootstrap mentality is more important than ever right now um a couple things first of all marty stop touching your fucking eyes this is the second time you touched your eye uh you're i washed my hands right before this you're wigging me out you're wigging me out i got my purell right next to me um the other thing is uh now you're freaking me out now i just want to touch my eyes the the c you got to get eye drops the cdc went it's it's actually even worse than that because the cdc was telling people that they couldn't do it locally that they had to listen to them and they were slowing down the whole process

it appears um which is just another case of regulation top-down approach just being completely counterintuitive and failing the people these institutions are failing it's fucking insane like just like when like what the fuck is the cdc for if not to tell us what to do during a pandemic and they can't even get fucking 5,000 tests out to people. Like, look around. Look what's going on. This shit is not okay. Shit is fucked up.

And I don't think the same people that got us into this mess are going to get us out. They really don't. All I know is this is not going to be over so quickly. You know? This is not, there's not going to be, there's no V bottom here. There's no, like, everything goes away in a week or two weeks or something like that.

No, we still have the virus to deal with. Like, first and foremost, let's try to slow down the spread of this thing. Which, actually, I'm actually sort of happy with what I've seen out of Philadelphia, my hometown. It seems like they're shutting down schools. They're stopping lacrosse games from going on. They're stopping sports from going on. uh people are have been slowly bunkering down over the course of the last week um and i think people are starting to get it i mean you saw it this morning in brooklyn what

was the whole foods like i was fucking insane i was freaking out i was already i didn't need the only reason was on my way out of the city i had to make an amazon return so i like went to the customer service counter real quick but it was fucking insane like lines out the door i think it's just starting to hit people but i i would say that in new york state it does seem like they're handling it better than you would expect um we have the prisoners we got slave labor making hand sanitizer now new york state clean 65 cents an hour they're paying them to make the hand sanitizer cuomo's very proud about that yeah so like you know i'm against prison labor but uh that's you know pretty in this case they canceled the saint paddy's day parade for the

first time ever i think um yeah so it seems like they're taking it seriously i'm i'm really curious you know if you asked me i think we talked about on the pod two months ago i was like imagine them closing manhattan and was like that's never gonna happen um it really does seem like it could happen now not to like cause undue panic or alarm but uh yeah it should be it should be interesting to see play out and the the one the one solace i have here in terms of uh assets and money and whatnot is my bitcoin you know um and that's really where that that that safe haven comes from like bitcoin is a safe haven to me even without it being designed to pump forever like that's just an extra nice bonus yeah no this is again this is

the deep safety that bitcoin provides it doesn't need liquidity injections from uh the fed doesn't need huge spending uh policies from the federal government as long as people have downloaded the software are running full nodes as long as you have miners who are economically driven to mine the coin and are doing so in a distributed fashion uh around the globe bitcoin's going to survive um it's it's beautiful and it is it does give me during these trying times a very good sense of security like it gives me a sense of security and i don't think there's a lot more mining death spiral fuds come out this week um so something we should probably touch on too a lot of people are are trying to to get spin that foot up again

this is fun that's been brought out first two halvings uh ari paul likes to bring it up randomly in the middle between havings and then ari pretends he didn't after the fact that's what's frustrating about this is that we hear the mining death spiral flood every fucking cycle and then they never stand behind it you know and they and there's no way to prove them wrong because when it's you know when the having happens and the mining death spiral doesn't happen and the difficulty adjustment works as designed and the the loose game theory works as designed they'll just move on and bring it up again in two years yeah it's yeah it's all hand wavy like it could happen it could happen i mean it's not gonna happen let me pull up the numbers um they just

delete their tweets and pretend they never fucking said it i didn't say that i was joking i was just kidding it was satire it was satire um yeah so but if we like if you look at the numbers At the time of the last halving, when it went from 25 Bitcoin to 12.5 Bitcoin per block, the price was around $650, which provided a subsidy of $16,250. And then after the last halving, the price even fell 15% after that. It fell from $650 to $540, I believe, over the course of a month. And hash rate plateaued after that. And when I wrote this yesterday, it's different now.

With the 12.5 Bitcoin subsidy per block, the subsidy is worth $16,250. Cut 25% off of that now, so it's probably like $12,050 right now. And that's still... Or excuse me. the subsidy today yesterday was worth 96 000 cut that um cut that in a quarter cut a quarter off the top of that you're at what like 70k 70 yeah like 70 000 that's still five six times more than the subsidy was at the time of the last halving and then on top of that you have the commodification

of the hardware of the mining of the a6 happening at the same time so these machines are lasting longer they're more efficient uh and then you have more competition at that hardware level too so the price for those gets driven down um at a good rate and then obviously the miners who are plugging these things in haven't stopped their mad dash for the cheapest energy source sources in the world so that's definitely still continued since the last having so it's okay i believe i mean i'm not even assuming i know that there are much cheaper energy prices out there than at the last halving as well and people there's some people out there that can mine for free forever like yeah i don't and i don't see oil prices oil prices fell 25 this weekend which brings energy

prices down across the world as well yeah we didn't even talk about that we didn't talk about that um so yeah last saturday russia came into it so this is a crazy thing um obviously markets are in turmoil before last weekend uh and then over the weekend i believe it was saturday russia walked into an opec meeting russia is not part of opec but they've been opec friendly for the last six years i believe and saudi arabia asked them to cut production and putin and cruz said no we're not going to cut production we're going to keep it steady and that alone that was enough to cause chaos in the oil markets so saudi arabia came back to them and we're like all right you don't want to cut production we're going to jack our production up

and cut our prices down to and try to like squeeze you out and then russia came out and said hey we It can last between $25 and $30 a barrel of oil for six to nine years, I believe they said. And that's what's really, if you look at that, maybe Saudi and Russia are doing a two-step, and it's really like a fake war between those two just to come at U.S. shale because U.S. shale production has a much higher cost than Russia and Saudi production is. Um, so that's another thing to take into consideration speculative attack. Like if, if you want it to strike a, strike a blow when U S economy was, was woozy looking like wilder in the last fight, um, that was the perfect opportunity.

It looks like Russia and Saudi Arabia did fund the terrorists that, that killed that did nine 11. And so as much as we are friendly with them in the oil, uh, industry, I don't think they really like us that much. And what we stand for at the end of the day, like maybe that was a blow by those two, um, to sort of strike us while we were down. I'm torn because, you know, I'm, I'm really somber because people are hurting, you know, I hate to see people hurting.

Um, you know, my net worth has been slashed tremendously as well. uh but this geopolitics shit is right up my alley it's super fucking exciting to watch it all fucking unfold um it's really like you don't see this often in your life especially uh so fast and so condensed it's happening um you know i've said on this podcast many times you know i've been a bear for like five years just watching this house of cards uh but just watching it all unfold is so unreal it's it's it's some you can't you i can't put a point on it you know it's just uh it's just unreal yeah no i said it like freaks if you're listening out there take a deep breath take this moment in this is like a once people will be

talking about this i think centuries from now like these last couple weeks particularly with the with the uh virus and in the market's reaction to it like this is once in a lifetime maybe like once in a century type thing um where were you when bitcoin proved itself i was in the car getting the fuck out of new york city um on more positive note i got my vr headset yesterday i haven't opened the box yet pretty excited to give that a spin they have waiting for your review review before i pull the trigger on one ud has a meetup scheduled for saturday i think i'm not sure if i can make that but there's a socratic seminar on tuesday which is kind of cool i'm excited for that because uh bit devs is awesome

which is socratic style um so it should be interesting to see how that um translates into a vr style experience yeah i i've been following along on twitter in the periscopes live periscopes when i can and it seems like an incredible way to do stuff if you're a freak out there and you know how to make skins for vr i literally haven't opened the box yet so i i assume this is possible but if you can make me a dope ass skin i'd be all about that so just keep that in mind it seems like you could be whatever you want in this vr world i've seen hot dogs i've seen woody isn't that what uddy is he's woody from toy story yeah i've seen naked flying men i've seen tacos pickles aliens zn znd toshi looks exactly like he looks uh on his twitter avi

yeah it's probably a custom skin that's why i i would like a custom skin but i don't even know where to begin so yeah if a freak is in quarantine and he is trying to help out i would appreciate it there's a lot a lot i feel like a lot of people are gonna have a lot of time on their hands it's a good time to learn how to run your own node and use your own node to to play with coin join uh we see samurai wallet whirlpool hit a new monthly all-time high and it's only what the 12th of march so we have over a half month left and it's already passed its previous monthly all time high so that's what three monthly all-time highs in a row uh yeah what really really great to see what's it at right now i am loading it um we are currently at 663 bitcoin worth of volume

um last month was 529 the month before that was 356 um it seems the pool that everyone the the fan favorite pool seems to be that 5 million sat pool 0.05 uh bitcoin um which is currently sitting at 345 bitcoin worth of volume hell yeah whirlpoolstats.com um yeah it's uh it's crazy to see how quickly this is skyrocketed and all from ux the mobile mobile mixing has really helped this and i think the matt odell pump has helped us as well the tails from the crypt pump i can't i can't wait to get you on it you're gonna love it it's i think it's a game changer

like you said it's all about ux um and they make it very very user-friendly and and this whole idea that you can just scan a qr code to connect your node like that's got to become the standard i want to see every mobile wallet allow you to um to connect your own node by just scanning a qr code and it and it really helps the uncle jims of the world because you can just give out that qr code and people can just scan it and it automatically connects to a tour and you're all set to go so i i would really love to see more more wallets do that and i would love to see more wallets add whirlpool because they're open to it so uh let's see who's going to be the first iphone wallet to add whirlpool i think uh i think during my bunker down i'm gonna i'm gonna order

the raspi and an android phone and get that set up and rolling uh it's it's time and i'm i think i'm gonna have a lot of time on my hands in the coming weeks here if you're feeling tight because of you want to buy the dip um you can also just you can for now you can just buy an android phone i'll uncle jim your ass it's up to you you have to trust matt though yeah i trust uncle jim i trust you uncle jim um staying on bitcoin we'll get to the bitcoin topics now uh we had a Difficulty adjustment upwards this week. This wasn't on the list, but I thought I'd bring it up anyway. As mining death spiral chatter heats up,

it seems that more hash rate is joining the network. So again, there was an upward difficulty adjustment this week, 7%, which is pretty big, around 7%. I believe it was 6.88 when it actually came down to it. And right now there's 119.2 exahash per second, according to Clark Moody's dashboard. And blocks are coming in roughly every nine minutes and 27 seconds. So last week when we met, it was right around the target of 10 minutes.

And it seems like even after the difficulty target adjustment upwards, that more miners have joined the network since then and are mining blocks faster than 10 minutes. I mean, that's one of the most frustrating parts of this mining death spiral FUD that we hear all the fucking time. Because it either comes from no corners or alt corners. And no corners, it's whatever. they're always looking for an excuse to talk shit about bitcoin and and maybe the majority of them don't even understand what they're talking about so it can be forgiven to a degree i mean i guess but with alt corners like they're throwing stones from glass houses because bitcoin is sitting at all-time high hash rates miners are throwing money into tons of money and worth of investment

into this equipment into the facilities all this shit um they're not doing it to turn off at halving they're doing it because they they see long-term long-term potential here and meanwhile you have ethereum which is nowhere near all-time high hash rate why because they talk about proof of stake because they talk about changing the algorithm to to brick miners hardware like when you fuck with the guys who are investing money into securing your network that's what you get in return when you give them a slow steady projected easy to project out stability where they know what they're going to make going forward it's it's it's all the difference yeah and then sticking on ethereum like you want to talk about mining about mining death spiral

like their hash rate seems to be exhibiting that and you talked about mining producers not even making uh the hardware because they're being dissuaded because of the transition to proof of stake and the potential for prog pal uh the asics that are already out there the rumors are that they're going to be brick soon because of the chain state there's going to be too much ram data that these miners need to or dag data i forget what it is whatever it is um that they need to store and it's going to get to a point where the hardware can't store it physically anymore so the rumors are out there that even some of the hash rate that's on ethereum right now is going to be bricked because of their poor design decisions at the protocol level

i mean i haven't heard that and i'm not gonna i feel a little bit hypocritical throwing mining death spiral back at ethereum so i'm not gonna do that either um but they are definitely throwing stones from glass houses and uh they're they're aware that they're doing that so they can go fuck themselves on that oh i wonder how defy held up today dude fucking make or die is gonna have issues i feel you know we've been calling this for a while there was a ton of liquidations um ethereum fell more than bitcoin how much what is ethereum down right now trading view removed it from their website the top bar it used to be up there on the top bar it's not anymore now it's just bitcoin is up there with gold and everything else

that's a that's a that's a sign gold is down four percent and trade block yeah it's another rumor that people have had to liquidate gold to fund positions elsewhere um holy shit yeah ethereum fell from yeah it's down 29 right now 195 to 138 today not that we care um yeah so be aware be aware i don't understand i like i tried to learn about the make or die situation that was going on and i don't understand it so i'm not really going to talk about it but it seems like shenanigans are happening over there there was like collateral sales and all the liquidations like they were having issues they're having issues i don't know i don't understand it it's too complicated um which is a negative in

itself but you know i i i know i would much prefer holding bitcoin over die and someone who's has no position in ethereum and is like against like pretty much everything all their priorities i would probably hold ethereum over die you know like it just seems too risky like it doesn't seem like something that and and it's pitched as the less risky option for ethereum users which is is absolutely crazy to me but meanwhile it's trading at a premium on coinbase so i don't really uh i don't really comprehend what's going on there i don't either and i'm not gonna pretend to but let's pivot this back to Bitcoin, another good fundamental.

And that's why I'm happy to find safety in sats because we talked about hash rate going up, difficulty, target adjusting upwards or further down, right? If the difficulty adjusts down, that's right. That's better, right? It's a lower difficulty. No, doesn't it go,

doesn't the difficulty go up? Difficulty goes up, but the target falls. That's what it is. Right, correct, correct. Yes. getting uh getting technical here uh bitcoin core version 0.19.1 uh was released this week as well um so going back to fundamentals it seems that the people working on bitcoin core which is just one implementation of implementation full node implementation of bitcoin uh they seem to still

be interested in the project still be writing lines of code still cleaning it up making it more robust, compatible, and upgradable. Fundamentals are still there. So the changelog... It's like a minor maintenance release. Yeah, it's nothing crazy. But it was released. We'll put the

release notes in the show notes. You guys should go check that out and test it out if you're running a full node and you feel comfortable upgrading to this version. The other thing that I'm really bullish about that we missed last week is Spectre Desktop, their app release,

which makes it very user-friendly to use your own node and multisig. It's like an interface between your full node and your hardware wallet devices. You can make your own hardware wallet, which they have specs for, I believe, for like a build-your-own version. And you can also use all the top ones,

Trezor, Ledger, Coldcard. and this is what I'm really hopeful for this year I want to see you know we have caravan which already made great strides in this direction we have justin moon's project which is slipping my mind what what is it called again junction and then we have this specter desktop so basically what I want to see is I want to see you able to just install core um install whatever one of those apps you want to install and then be able to use multisig very user-friendly without any kind of third party in between there so you can just do it yourself yeah it's uh it seems like the tooling is getting more improved again the

fundamentals are improving it's getting easier to do multisig the competition for uh handling and managing these multi-sig setups is is heating up and the options are are increasing this is very good to see especially in a bear market officially back in a bear market aren't we it's just one big ass bull market with hills and valleys that's what i think good call yeah uh but speaking of fundamentals it seems like there is a pr uh in the works for btc pay server to enable uh pay join which would be huge pay join massive it's a natural coin join

implementation you basically coin join with a merchant when you go to pay for a good with that merchant and it's would be a huge step forward and help us get above that threshold that Matt and I talk about a lot

which we don't know what the threshold is but it seems like it would get us closer to that we know it's higher than where it is now uh a threshold of enough people coin joining to make it basically impossible for these chain analysis companies to uh track you on the blockchain and it increases the cost it blows up their heuristics yeah impossible we don't we don't like to use absolutes um i've two things about pay join first of all pay join um doesn't look like a like a typical coin join what you would expect it looks like a regular transaction which is very interesting right yeah it's first

of all it's not equal amounts um you have two inputs but one of the inputs is the receiver of the payment so we have this common input heuristic where chain analysis companies and other people who watch the chain assume that any inputs belong to the same owner in a case of a pay join that's not the case the other thing is it makes it very difficult to see how much was paid to the merchant or whoever you're paying because you have two outputs on the opposite side. Which one is the change? Which one is the pay is not clear at all. So it actually provides cover for every single regular Bitcoin transaction because you don't know if it's a pay join transaction or if it's a regular Bitcoin transaction where the person owns the same inputs. Currently, JoinMarket

has a pay join implementation. Samurai has a pay join implementation. But the problem is you need to use it with another join market user or another samurai user you're paying a samurai user it's called stowaway with samurai you can pay them in this pay join manner so what we really want to see and the other thing is with pay join is is is the receiver needs to be online to basically contribute their input onto you know contribute their utxo for the input side of that transaction they need to be online so that's why btc pay is uniquely situated here because btc pay server is already online like yes it will force the merchant to keep a portion in a hot wallet instead of just sending it all to a hardware wallet or something like that so there is that

negative there um but they're particularly well suited so hopefully we see a bunch of btc pay merchants add pay join support check the little box when it gets merged um and i i think that could be a major game changer for bitcoin privacy and as i said earlier like it just destroys the heuristics for everyone even if even if you're not ever using pay join um there'll always be the doubt in in the chain analysis mind um or an outside observer that is this a pay join transaction or is this a regular transaction yeah and then even with the trade-off of some of those utxos being in a hot wallet i imagine there will be best practices of sweeping funds on a on a either bitcoin amount threshold or time threshold so that that trade-off the negative effects of that

trade-off can easily be limited just with better user practices of sweeping funds every once in a while you know the big issue here basically the next issue we face is actually getting merchants to flip the switch because you know it goes to reason that the larger merchants won't want to put their neck on the line to add a privacy improvement. But my answer to that is one step at a time. Let's get this merged into BTC Pay. Shout out to Mr. Kooks, who's been working on it. He just got a grant from Bitsy Exchange, which is great to fucking see. I think it's the first grant to a BTC Pay dev directly. They're paying him $80,000. So it's well-deserved, fantastic to see so let's get this merged and then let's start the social pressure to get

merchants to add it i know we'll add pay joint support on our btc pay server um so yeah let's fucking let's fucking go yeah we'll flip that switch as soon as it's available um if we have to lead the way with our little merch store and shout out purchasing donation page by god we'll do it it'll be us if we have to lead the charge the other thing i wanted to fucking touch on is that there's been a lot of conflation here between coin join and centralized mixers uh custodial mixers specifically uh because you know these chami and coin join implementations they are centralized but the coordinator cannot cannot track you or steal your funds because of the way TOR is implemented.

So this is wholeheartedly different than a custodial mixer where you're literally just sending them funds and then they're sending you different Bitcoin. With either a coordinated CoinJoin or a person-to-person CoinJoin, a two-person CoinJoin without a coordinator, this is not mixing. It's a batched Bitcoin transaction

with extra privacy benefits taken into account. So I think it's really important for people to start making this distinction. I know me personally, I am not going to refer to CoinJoin as mixing anymore. I think that's the first step. We can never expect regulators to understand this distinction if we don't make that distinction clear now on our side. And I think it's very important for us to do that. Yes. and I believe 6102 sent a tweet out yesterday

trying to find the correct verbiage for this. Synchronized transactions. Oh, I like... There's a spitball in it. I like what Samurai Wallet, their suggestion was collaborative transactions. And I like that one. I like that too.

The real CT. The real CT. Hell yeah. um speaking of the need for privacy uh the lack of privacy on at the protocol level has allowed uh samurai team to basically track the plus token scandal so we got an update on that this week from ergo btc uh it seems that uh the upper estimate for the amount of coins left from the plus token scan is about 61 000 is that correct matt uh yeah that sounds right to me yeah um so and the the big thing i think the big takeaway here

is well first of all they've been selling um so that's probably part of the reason for the downward price pressure it's not the only reason let's be clear here but i think the big takeaway is that the majority of bitcoin they've sold um it's been on huobi yeah huobi and i think okay coin was the other one and they're both kyc regulate regulatory compliant exchanges so this whole idea that kyc we it's just like we come back again to this idea that you know kyc is supposed to protect people and stop money laundering but meanwhile hsbc has the special teller windows right for the briefcases full of cash it's like here's the same exact thing you have huobi and okay coin kyc all their fucking users and meanwhile they're the ones who are who are

facilitating the you know this scam the liquidation of these coins how are they not getting taken down for this you know maybe government moves slowly government moves very very slowly so maybe they will that or Huobi's got

Chinese government insiders that's what I would you know maybe that seems like the go to strategy whichever jurisdiction you reside in you grease some pockets yeah fuck man no it is it is egregious and that's actually i think nick carter said it and ergo bdc said it this week like how are we not chastising quobi and okay coin they're just

blatantly allowing uh these criminals to to make money from scamming people so the plus token was basically just you're running the mill ponzi scheme they got a million or i don't know the exact extent of the number of people who fell for it but a lot of people fell for it and gave uh gave plus token a considerable amount of bitcoin they're also trying to the sixth largest holder of eth known holder of eth known holder of eth yeah so they so so far 139 000 bitcoin have been distributed aka sold and 61 000 remain so they had a total of 200 000 bitcoin massive that they they scanned from people so we're still still waiting for that scam to liquidate and just disperse so yeah like matt said could be a factor

to lower prices or price falls excuse me uh going forward may have contributed in the past as well so just be aware be aware these things are out there in general oxt research is fantastic so go subscribe to that i think it's research.oxt.me um yes you know that's part of the samurai team and their block explorer is fantastic they have two block explorers they have oxt.me and they have kycp.org and they're both both fucking fantastic um the other thing i wanted to touch on was we did like a light show of blue wallet last week because i you know i never really used BlueWallet, but they added the cold card setup. And I mentioned that you could set up a watch-only cold card wallet with BlueWallet and your own full node and use PSBTs to sign and send

transactions through it without actually putting your keys on the phone. A key here is when you connected to your full node it does it unencrypted through the clear net they don't use tls uh they don't use any kind of encryption so it's just up clear net there's no tor um so be very careful if you use if you if you use their full node connection you got to be using a vpn at the same time and that's not even a great solution as it is um so i i really hope that we can see them It should default to Tor. Really, when you connect to a full node, I want to see all these apps,

just let you scan a QR code, connect the whole thing through Tor, and let's take out that foot gun issue here where people are just broadcasting their transaction data out and don't realize. They have no idea. So be very careful

if you are using Blue Wallet in that situation. Yeah. And shout out OpenNoms who brought that to my attention. Love that dude. Yeah. he's a great one i always get him confused with uh somebody else who's got like a very similar avatar there's like robot avatars are popular it's the it's the samurai paynims uh automatically

generated avatars which paynims are fantastic by the way i have a paynim up on whirlpoolstats.com I don't know why more wallets don't add BIP-47. It's a fantastic... I forget why everyone was against it, or the powers to be that were against it, but it's a key use case that we need, which is someone being able to post a donation address without doxing all their addresses.

Yeah. Yeah, I think the consternation comes from the samurai server serving the addresses or something like that no but they the samurai server doesn't serve your addresses uh with the pain of implementation that they use is all on chain all the data you need is in a bitcoin transaction if you are using samurai in light mode then yes you're looking up your balances through their their server but if you use it with dojo that's not the case yeah i was wrong that's what it is um the late mode they do samurai hosts the little qr code payment code for you online which you need to share for someone to be able to uh receive through that paynim uh

but but but they they can't tell the addresses that are generated in that process yeah i forgot that was uh an on-chain solution um maybe we can end it on that not pay names but the the fud around uh non-dojo runner or people not running dojo basically trusting samurai holding their xpubs on their servers it's been i know mr hodl talks about that a lot and others get pissed off about it what's your what's your view on this matt well so there's a couple of things here um first of all every mobile wallet defaults to this model where your x pubs uh go to a centralized server to query balances right so if if you're not running your own node someone else um is is looking up your balances for you and you are trusting them with that um samurai does a good

job in that it defaults to Tor. So, uh, we see this, uh, green wallet doesn't default to Tor, but they have it as a very easy to enable option. If you're using green wallet, you should enable it. Um, but Samurai defaults to Tor when they do it. So they don't have your IP address. They don't have any personal identifiable information, but they do have your X pubs. So they know all your addresses. And if you use it with Whirlpool, they can connect through the mix, through the mix not the mix through the coin join round they can connect uh which address is yours it is important to delineate here first of all that there have two different servers running they have the server that's serving light clients uh you know using the xpubs to serve them their

balances and then they have a separate server that's whirlpool server so if we see other wallets add it, like Ledger Live, other wallets add Whirlpool, those wallets will be doing the XPUB querying themselves. The Whirlpool server can't connect those. So we'll have further division there, which should help the situation. The second thing is the overwhelming majority of people that are running Whirlpool seem to be using Dojo. The Samurai team says it's about 60%. We have to trust them on that number because they're basically subtracting the number of XPUBs that they have minus the ones they don't have. So there's no way for us to verify that. But it goes to reason for me that the majority of people who are running 24-7 the Whirlpool CLI and providing the majority

of liquidity are also the same exact type of people who are going to be running Dojo, especially as it gets simpler to run because they want to use their own full node. So it should trend to the majority of the liquidity using dojo if you have more people running dojo the quality of those rounds and that that negative effect of having those xpubs known um goes up substantially uh and then and then the other thing here is you know at the end of the day samurai shouldn't be really treated as your adversary when you're using this you know if you use stonewall times two after the fact or stowaway which is their pay join implementation stonewall is their two-person coin join you can alleviate that to a degree because they're not the coordinator but the

coordinator has to the coordinator doesn't have to pay that fee that mining that that the the fee to join the coin join round they don't have to pay that fee because it goes to themselves so they could actually sybil the rounds if they wanted to sybil the rounds and it's the same situation With Wasabi, it's almost even worse because with Wasabi, they actually get more fees if they Sybil the round because it's based on the number of people that join the round. So I actually, I think at the end of the day, you know, the fact that these people, if they're not running in their own node, especially with Dojo becoming easier to run and you just scan a QR code, they weren't going to do it anyway. They should be able to get that additional privacy improvement from

Whirlpool from Coinjoins that they wouldn't have got otherwise. I personally think that if Ledger Live, for instance, which I don't think anyone should use because you can't connect your own full node to it, is for privacy reasons. It's not great for privacy. That's just how it is. It's very user-friendly though. If those people had Coinjoin access, if they had the ability to go into Whirlpool, that's a net benefit for them. They're still trusting Ledger to a degree in that situation. Hopefully Ledger is supposed to add full node integration soon, which will make it even better in that regard. But it's still a net benefit. Outside observers aren't going to be able to see it. And this is where we get back to trade-offs, right? And you have

trade-offs with everything. If you talked to a privacy hardcore person, you should have self custody of your pgp keys and you should do everything through pgp but meanwhile we have keybase which generates a pgp key for you by default in your browser we have signal that connects to your phone and it's got auto updates on play store and stuff that handles all that shit in the background there are different levels of trade-offs here and those are all privacy improvements still though right they're not you know they're not raw pgp uh and in this regard i would say something like maybe join market where you have no coordinator involved whatsoever would be that raw PGP trade-off level. And you're going to have things along the scale

there. And I think it's unquestionably a net benefit for people that they're able to coin join even if they don't have their own node. They can easily add their own node. They can easily add a friend's node and use that instead. And that's what it is. At the end of the day, you have trade-offs and as long as people are aware of these trade-offs and they're they're and then they make the decision accordingly i think this this is all this is all a net benefit yeah i think so too and again it's order of operations like it's trending towards better privacy it's you're not going to get all all this out of the box at once samurai has meticulously been building out these products for years and the the emergence of dojo in the last

last six months has been amazing and as we've seen with mobile mixing uh as the ux improves so will the use of their products and i think them taking the meticulous steps and time to do it the right way and and step by step is just what we have to put up with they only have so much mental uh bandwidth and so much engineering bandwidth it's it's got it's going to take time i'm not gonna get all this out of the box freaks and i know it was a long rant but i actually missed two things there too uh if how if if you're running dojo um you know you you get more insulation from that the more remixes you do uh the more rounds you participate in and those are free because they're paid by new liquidity so they're incentivized um so we so you naturally

see people doing that more and more um and then and then the other thing is um i don't know i forgot what the fuck i forgot what the other thing was but it was good it was good uh i know i know it was good i'm sure it was good dojo yeah i don't know i but i i just i love to see it if if you don't want if you don't if if if you don't want a coordinator we're gonna say dojo only oh yeah dojo only thank you thank you if we split up the pools if you make a dojo dojo only pool you're just completely fucking all the light wallet users because you're splitting up the anonymity set there's going to be no you'll you'll split the liquidity between the two pools and everyone will get a worse

situation out of it so i don't i don't really think that's a tenable situation i think you know you try and slowly improve light wallet it wallet the light wallet situation and but i i do i you know they're going after other wallets so i think as you have these xpubs separated between the different companies that add whirlpool to their product um it will it will lessen that effect as well thank you thank you for that inspiration yeah i agree i agree no it's something that needs to be fleshed out a lot of people are confused about it um we're an hour and five minutes in now we're at six minutes it now it's been a rip it's been a hell of a week stay safe out there freaks again stay civil say hi to your neighbors turn to your community don't turn to the cdc

donald trump the fed this is really going to be trying times potentially i just saw a tweet that china is threatening uh threatening not to send us medicine if we don't end the a travel ban so we're going to need to turn into our communities strengthen our communities and build this from the ground up this uh fix this from the ground up excuse me um don't depend on the institutions that have failed you work locally that's all i gotta say here yeah and the chinese meanwhile are sending masks and experts and stuff to italy and other places in iran uh using it to further extend their influence grab um where the u.s has been dominant in the past so it should be interesting to see how that plays out one other thing is um i i wanted

to mention that electrum v4 still hasn't been released um that's what will enable like all these different features that cold card is got on electrum so that's why people are having issues right now trying to use cold card with electrum um it'll open up the gates for being able to use multi-sig across hardware wallets so hopefully we will see them release that soon uh they're like being held up because they're trying to because of that python lightning implementation they're doing so it'd be nice if they could just focus um on the on-chain stuff and just get this out out of the bot you know out out for release that would be great to see um and just you know guys stay safe out there stay humble and just you know keep your head on the swivel and be a good

person you know yeah yeah take care of each other out there freaks peace and love