TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2020.03.23

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Bitcoin and Venezuela - Coinkite Coldpower - Zebedee releases bitcoin gaming SDK explainer video - Tails OS v4.4.1 - Graphene OS v2020.03.23.22 released - TFTC Guides: Graphene OS installation - BTCxZelko on Stephan Livera - $500M of US stimulus bill dedicated to increased surveillance capabilities - Disturbing video shows coronavirus phone tracking tool -Taiwan coronavirus surveillance escalates 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's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Rabbit Hole Recap. Matt and I just had a great rip. Alcohol-induced. I was drinking Pinot Noir. He was drinking whiskey. We talked about the topics that have happened. Topics that have happened. That's bad phrasing. We talked about a bunch of topics. New, fresh content since we last met and congregated on Monday. I think you guys are going to like it.

It gets very passionate towards the end. sorry if uh the the decibel levels of the sound get uh get increased towards the end from my mic particularly uh i got very passionate uh this episode of rabbit hole recap is brought to you by good friends at unchained capital they're creating financial services for bitcoiners with a focus on security so their their product that focuses on security most is their vault product actually all their products focus on security first none more than the other the Volt product specifically is a 2 of 3 multi-sig setup. You can actually do more N of M setups if you want to get more creative with them. And basically what happens is you hold, in the example

of 2 of 3, you hold two keys. Right now you can use a Ledger or a Trezor to create those keys, soon to be a cold card as well. And then Unchained holds the third key. You can always move your UTXOs out of a Volt with your two keys, but if you ever are in a pinch and need Unchained to sign that second key for you. They are there to do that. On top of that, they have their loan program. If you're ever in a pinch for US dollars, you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to get a same day loan sent right to your bank account. You put your Bitcoin up as collateral, they put US dollars in your bank account. And then on top of that, they're working on incredible open source technologies and open source education with their blog. The multi-sig setup that I described earlier

is open source with their caravan product you can create that multi-sig quorum by yourself without unchained if you so please on top of that they're working on hermit and slip 39 and mentioned the blog they've got parker lewis's gradually then suddenly and drew bensal joe kelly phil geiger will cole also putting out some incredible content on that blog as well this episode of tales from the crypt rabbit hole recap is also brought to you by our good friends at the Cash App. Shout out to the motherfucking Cash App. They've been doing an incredible job

trying to help people through this crisis. Are we calling it a crisis? Is it technically a crisis already? It might be. They did a random cash giveaway today. I saw Jack quote tweeted somebody asking how Cash App can help

get these stimulus payouts directly to people via Cash App because a lot of people that have Cash App don't have traditional bank accounts and they use Cash App as their bank account, basically. And it's incredible

what New Wave Banking is doing for usability and the ease of use and accessibility, that's the word I was looking for, to money and monetary services in the modern day. On top of that,

they are letting you guys stack sats. We already know all about this. You can stack sats, send sats, receive sats, sell sats, if you so please. they're making sats to standard as well if you have android right now you should be able to make sats to standard on your app ios we got to wait a little bit longer and i hear they're rolling out auto buys as well on top of that have cash app investing if you're buying these stock market

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use the code stacking sets download the cash app and enjoy this episode i fucking love you guys 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. What is up, freaks? welcome back to rabbit hole recap here for our thursday rip oh matt's got some whiskey i've got some wine i'm gonna relax here it's a sunny day where i am looks like it's a sunny day where you are it's beautiful over here been a crazy week we had a good rip on tuesday a lot a lot to talk about then there's still a lot to talk about now it was a lot of happening It was Monday, Marty. It was Monday.

Losing track of the days. I was a lot angrier earlier this week. I was a lot angrier until this afternoon, until I had a conversation with Michael Krieger from Liberty Blitzkrieg, that episode will be dropping in the morning. He's got me feeling a lot more optimistic and positive. So let's keep a positive, optimistic, forward-looking tone on this rabbit hole recap.

Oh, I'm always optimistic. There's no need for a reminder. Yeah. Though, I'm sure we will go on tangents where we do get a little angry. Right now, I guess we'll start. We don't have this on the list, but important to note, last night we had a difficulty adjustment, a pretty big downward difficulty adjustment, negative 16%, I believe, rounded.

That's rounded. It was negative 15.95%. um yeah block 622 944 i believe second largest in history right yeah and the second largest in the largest in the asic era if you were um yeah and if you're looking at block times is this period is still pretty slow hash rates falling pretty significantly um over the last week blocks are coming in still even after the negative 15 16 difficulty adjustment at 11 minutes and 50 seconds. So almost two minutes, um, uh, more than the 10 minute target. Uh, with that being said, uh, the price is still hovering around $6,724. Uh, the average fee or subsidy,

I think it's up a little bit more since we spoke on Monday, it's 3.54%. Uh, average fees are around, uh 0.44 bitcoin and that's uh over the last 2016 blocks so yeah it's a interesting uh era of hash rate right now there's a lot of confluence going on with the price falling obviously the last few weeks it has recovered well um s9s are at the tail end of their life cycle so i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are um are are being turned off and then hud 8 actually came out i don't know if you saw this did you see hud 8's announcement no they came out and they came out and announced that they shut down 35 percent of their their uh their miners recently so that's definitely contributed as well i wonder how

much of it is the price fall and how much of it is just like coronavirus logistics issues because how did its explanation was the price yeah but i i mean they don't control that much hash right so yeah how much nothing i think probably less than one half a percent to one percent right so i wonder how much of it was because i when you when you think about it when you're like when your employees are quarantining themselves and when you're like trying to move things around and deal with all this other shit um i could see how it could create a stoppage of operations so i wonder like how much of it is hash that won't come back online and how much of it is hash that regardless of price is going to come back online or come online for the first time

well that too of course but like for instance like my my lightning node was offline for almost a day while everything was going to shit you know and i had to like get it back up and like move it around and stuff my like noddle dojo i had to i had to go extract it like three days after i bugged out go pick it up because it had turned off um like shit like that you know like little like logistics things that people take for granted that in times of crisis like you have to deal with i wonder how much of it was that but either way difficulty adjustment working as designed um the miners that are still hashing now have better profitability than they did yesterday yeah it's the beauty of bitcoin's design and i and staying in that same vein of people being

home not being able to do stuff i mean this is playing out in the gold markets or at least that's what's being advertised is the uh refineries and gold dealers that are having to force their employees to stay home have really created a uh a conundrum in the the bullion delivery market and so and the mines too and the mines as well really more particularly that the refineries and in the in the the gold gold dealers um so roy sebag who has made some bad comments about bitcoin in the past but i think he's turning a leaf and becoming more supportive of bitcoin he's the founder of gold money gold money and mene uh mene is great yeah and he was saying that today we actually talked about this with michael krieger too that he's looking to buy a hundred

million or he has bought a hundred million dollars with the gold in the last day wanted to buy more and he's looking for uh physical dealers who are willing to sell outside of the uh comex lmbda uh or london roy is trying to buy a hundred million dollars worth of gold he already did he put an order for 100 million that got filled he wants to buy more for his company to resell to other people yes yeah for himself yeah no he's not like he's not like swinging that'd be crazy i was like i didn't think that highly of him that's pretty impressive if if he was just personally buying 100 million dollars worth of gold yeah so that's that's a big question going around a gold market's what i wrote about about yesterday has been that huge conspiracy in the

gold bug realm for years that the paper claims markets and futures markets and ETF markets have been used as a conduit to sort of suppress prices. And they've been able to do that because the physical bullion markets sort of always had steady flow. And this flow is being really messed up right now. And the uncertainty that's in the air is really driving individual consumers to demand physical so the question is is is this truly just a a hiccup in the market because of the inability for the refineries and the dealers to actually go to work and facilitate these trades or is the strong demand via consumers for the physical bullion beginning to show cracks in the paper claims markets and so that's something to pay attention to it's probably a mix of both

right like it's a pain in the ass to send gold around i mean it's a logistical nightmare uh like in times of crisis bitcoin's real liquidity is better than gold because of that i would say um you know you don't see that issue you don't see that issue with bitcoin that's the beauty of bitcoin i mean uh imagine buying 100 million dollars worth of gold and trying to have it delivered to you within a day that sounds like a fucking nightmare like with bitcoin you just paste a fucking address yeah make sure you triple check to triple check if it's a hundred million you should probably you should probably you should probably triple check that that's for sure yeah and use something like caravan uh on a on an air gap device so that you you know you're not getting

a copy swap there yeah yeah so i would check phone calls everything i don't know yeah that's something i would definitely pay attention to going in here it could be a nothing burger could truly be just the logistics uh are being uh messed up because of the coronavirus and people not actually being able to get to work but some people are surmising that it may be something else as well um so keep an eye out in that that's something that's been talked about for a while it'll be interesting to see how that plays out again could be a nothing burger i'd probably trend towards it being a nothing burger um this was cool something i wrote about today matt alborg who's put the team on his back uh particularly dissecting data about how bitcoin's

being used in emerging economies particularly in latin america he uh via his open money initiative dropped some new content yesterday highly recommend you guys go check it out i wrote about it today in the bend he basically dissected the effects of the rolling blackouts that venezuela went through last year around this time last year exactly actually and how that affected local bitcoin markets in venezuela and actually around the world in latin america in the u.s even the the blackouts which did not allow people to use the internet had an effect on local bitcoins markets in venezuela and colombia peru argentina and the u.s and the way they were able to prove this is they overlaid the average transactions that should have happened with the actual transactions and

the internet connectivity over time and it pretty uh pretty starkly proved that uh demand on local bitcoins across many markets dropped when the internet wasn't up in venezuela which led uh matt to conclude that uh bitcoins being used very heavily as a remittance rail for venezuelans and people try to get money in and out of that country yeah one side of the majority of trades is usually a venezuelan was basically where his analysis came out and he has great charts the charts are awesome yeah they're beautiful charts and now yeah he got some uh anecdotal evidence too with uh he did some interviews with traders uh venezuelan traders on local bitcoins and yes remittance and bitcoins being

used as an alternative alternative rail to move money in and out of uh venezuela and venezuelans are either converting that bitcoin quickly into bolivars or dollars uh as quickly as possible but uh via the anecdotes he was able to collect by talking to some of the traders uh some people venezuela are working for bitcoin some are uh believe in the technology and are stashing a bit away for long-term holds uh others are are using it to to pay u.s dollar invoices and it's just really interesting the way uh bitcoin's being leveraged in venezuela by venezuelans and people trying to interact with the venezuelan economy i mean i've seen a lot of haters say that because it's used as a rail um that that doesn't count as the safe haven narrative and i just want to say

that I feel like it all falls under safe haven because whether you're using it as a rail to get U.S. dollars or you're actually holding it yourself or you're earning it and then using it as a rail, it's providing safety in that capability of being able to obtain what you want to obtain. So I think it all falls under the same category there. No, that and it's getting people who are using it as a rail

more comfortable with it as a technology. And again, I say this a lot, there may be an order of operations to this thing and this may be uh one of the low level operations necessary for the people of venezuela and the people interacting with venezuela venezuelans to develop the confidence to to believe that bitcoin could be successful in the long term so very bullish i thought this article was yeah i love matt's work everyone to check it out yeah um obviously we will uh link to that in the show notes this is really cool you'll be able to describe this better than i can uh rodolfo sort of uh teased us with this

earlier this week but uh coin kite which is the creator of cold card and open dime has released a cold card adapter you can power your open dime or cold card uh from a standard nine volt battery now what's going on here dude yeah you can power basically so you know one of the things that a lot of people uh wanted to do with their cold card is so the way the cold card is designed you don't have to connect it to a computer you can use the sd card to shuttle your information back and forth so immediately what people wanted to do was connect it to battery packs and a lot and the cold card and the open dime are both very they're low they're low voltage so they don't draw that much power so a lot of battery banks and we saw this with the workshops we were

running with bitcoin citadel a lot of the battery packs don't they turn off like mid usage they just turn off because they they're like too smart for their own good they don't have like a power button they just think there's no power being drawn so i'm just going to turn off like it's supposed to know when there's power being drawn. So what he did was he just created a very simple board. It kind of looks like a cold card, um, that you can plug a regular nine volt battery in and it can power any kind of low voltage device that's connected to its USB port. And the reason there is, um, we have issues where you could get a compromised power brick or you could get a uncompromised cable um and and and those are attack vectors you know they make like little

cables that connect to wi-fi and they look like a regular iphone cable um so it's just one step closer to the ideal of of of being you know completely insulated from these these threats i mean you still have the cable issue um the trust to actual cold to the trust to coin kite is reduced because it's such a simple little board it's just this tiny little it's it's completely visible you can see everything on it um like the open dime um and you just connect a little nine volt battery to it i like i like the simplicity of it i like i think their designs are always sexy this is a very sexy design and i think the price point is reasonable fifteen dollars seems like a very reasonable price point and you know everyone has nine volt batteries and

you're good to go that seems very dope shout out to rodolfo and crew they're probably just because those battery packs could also be compromised you know if you go on to go down the rabbit hole um and the bigger the battery pack the the smarter in quotations the battery pack you know like who knows what's going on in there so it's just a i i like it i'm a fan yeah so if you're ultra paranoid you could take this in the woods where there's no wi-fi connection nearby if you're worried about your your cable plug this in create a psbt and you're good to go yeah i mean look i personally you know the cold card's designed so you should be able to plug it into a computer and not be compromised so i usually just use a

wall plug uh shame shame on me shame shame it's all about trade-offs and understanding your threat model and deciding for yourself based on the threat model um the other thing he mentioned i mean this is unverified there's no way for us to verify this but he mentioned that uh this last week was his highest sales for cold card ever um which goes along with my belief, which is why I've increased the amount of guides that I'm working on, is that in this period where everyone is home, in a time of crisis specifically, they're more likely to get their act together, to learn about better, you know, self-custody in the case of cold card, to learn about coin join, to run their own node. So hopefully we can turn what is otherwise a bad

situation into a very positive situation where bitcoin is concerned hey it's the theme of this episode positive vibes and i just one note i had my cell phone near the recorder for the first 13 and a half minutes i'm hoping to god it did not create feedback but in case it did thank god we have the zoom audio uh i will i will patchwork that together that's what uh that was the bane of our audio problems uh for like the first 110 episodes the good news is is that the freaks will be able to hear me nice and clean they will just it'll just be you who has the issue yes um but hopefully hopefully it didn't pick it up there was a message sent around the 13 minute 30 second mark and i have a feeling that will create some feedback hopefully that's it and you were talking

during that so hopefully i can mute it but i mean either way the freaks won't realize except for us talking about it right now because you'll just use the zoom audio for that part yeah um no positive vibes on that topic did you see that uh the sec stopped trading of uh zoom technologies which is which is not zoom video because zoom video is zm which has been a very hot stock all of a sudden because all the the boomers discovered it existed um but a lot of people have been accidentally trading zoom technologies which is completely unrelated so they stopped trading on it which just kind of brought you know it reminds me of the bitcoin cash bitcoin shit yeah i hope uh hope some of the executives at zoom technologies dumped took some profits there because they went up like

100 didn't they they were up more than real zoom they were for a while the actual best trade even if you were aware was to actually buy buy zoom technologies instead of zoom video conferencing even though zoom video conferencing was pumping too crazy crazy shit that's the efficient market hypothesis for you the the confusion was priced in yeah it was totally priced in market had to covered it's completely efficient had coronavirus the halvings priced in coronavirus is priced in stimulus bills priced in everything's priced in don't even try to don't even try to make uh speculative bets it's all priced in why even try did you see the zbd uh sdk explainer video i'm fucking hyped about it very great video high quality production uh and i like the way they

marketed their product they're saying hey uh game developers and just as you would spin up a aws cloud azure cloud if you want to form fit your game and make it so your users can get actual value out of the time they're putting in we're going to set up a similar service that allows you to connect to our nodes and facilitate these payments in game for you i mean not physically but you connect to our infrastructure and we'll help you facilitate that stuff and i think it's a great service and this is something that's been speculated a lot about with lightning particularly is like what type of services are going to be built on top of it they're obviously going to be service providers at some point and this seems like a great early example of that coming to

market yeah basically their sdk allows any game maker to easily add bitcoin as the well they kept saying bitcoin but really it's sats yeah to add sats as their in-game currency um we we we are going to link the video in the show notes you guys should check it out because i like that's shit's right up my alley i got super hyped when i watched that video i just freaked the fuck out i was very excited i think sats i i think we are going to see and a lot of people disagree with me here i think it's going to be a major use case uh is gaming i think uh and and you know part of what we've seen in this crisis is that uh is this move to e-sports a lot more esports a lot more live gaming type of things and i think people want to put money on the line

because they're fucking people and people like gambling gambling is good you know people like doing it's fun yeah hopefully it comes to market for dave port my sake have you seen what he's been doing best best trader best trader there is he bought he bought uh so dave port and i found our of uh barstool sports my old boss degenerate gambler uh the gamblers are searching searching for things to gamble on and dave has turned to the stock market at probably the worst time to become a day trader in the history of the markets um so hopefully for his sake gaming uh ad sats sats become the standard of gaming value of creation and then you can bet on that as well so you don't even actually have to game you can just bet on the games and like we're talking

on monday with nascar and f1 uh moving simulations uh to twitch it seems pretty possible like imagine if you get like a could you use zibity uh could you use their zd or sdk excuse me to uh build gambling functions like on twitch they they should totally call it the zdk first of all i did like that i did like that andre look free tip i i want i want to bet on formula one esports races with sats and then i want the winner to get a portion of the cut so the more people that are gambling on it the the more the winner gets like they'll still have a regular prize but they'll also get a bonus um hey lewis hamilton lewis hamilton if you're listening man if you're a bitcoin or let us know we'd love to have you on the pot

do it lewis i'm a huge f1 fan now by the way if you freeze to realize i know i know all the drivers it's been like seven days now he's huge fandom uh yeah i know everything uh hey update tails 4.4.1 is out it's an emergency release to fix uh security vulnerabilities in tor browser and tor what the fuck's going on that update i'm not sure i'm not sure what's going on if you you freaks we've talked about tails before tails is probably is i mean it is it's the best way to use tor it's put out by the tor foundation it's a live linux distro where you run it off a usb drive and when you pull out the usb drive it's supposed to wipe everything everything defaults through tor um so as a as a piece of software it is one of the most important things to keep updated

and it does so it doesn't seem like any of your data is at risk it seems like the tor it's a tor problem and the update is going to prevent a major denial of service vulnerability that affects tor relays and clients the attacker could cause tor to consume a huge amount of cpu disrupting operations for several seconds or minutes and creating patterns that could aid in traffic analysis all right so it is a data leak i mean tor in general has like tons of civil issues that are just like at the fundamental level it's just pretty much impossible to solve but they try their best and it's a very important piece of software so there hey and put this out there i've had talks with brian lockhart

uh in person and he some people believe that tour is just a huge honeypot we're like the deep state i'm like half half half i i i assume the nsa can figure out what you're doing especially if you're running a tour hidden service um maybe not if you're just like a regular tour user but like it depends on your threat model right like if you're if your threat model includes the u.s government man like you're fucked i it's a very that's very difficult to add them it becomes a lot easier if you remove them from your threat model um but you know that's the reality we live in so uh i i do think that tours is the the majority of tour contributors are very good

people that are trying their fucking best and i'm very supportive of the project and i think it's very important for bitcoin specifically the lightning network um so we should be supporting them but we shouldn't like have blinders we should be trying to um improve there and and and have have better alternatives going forward but right now it's like it's our best bet yeah no i mean weighing the options either you i mean use it in conjunction with a vpn and i think that gives you a pretty good shot and that's better than the just going naked on the internet going raw dogging it on chrome browser uh i mean yeah i mean look it's it's definitely look if you're running if you're like running on a mac and you have you're using tor

browser that's best case scenario on your mac like there's no there's like pretty there's no better scenario there um is it perfect no um when you add vpns into the mix there's all these other nuances involved you know are you using a hosted vpn provider is it your own vpn private this is your own vpn your own hosted vpn what is the server you're using it on are you using tor underneath are you using tor underneath the vpn are you using the vpn to connect to tor and what what's your threat model there's like a lot of different nuance there um but for most people uh if it's something super important and you're running tor browser you're probably in the best situation you'll be in but it just it's always important to remember it's not perfect i'm very happy we got

very happy we got into this discussion because it yes yes a lot of nuance to this nuance nuance nuance it's probably our favorite word on this podcast is nuance uh taking all this into consideration again we're on a we're on a a path we are striving for ideals here nothing is ideal out of the box it may never be ideal we just try to get close to those ideals but while we're on this conversation reminded me a shout out to bitcoin core dev carl dong who's been doing huge work with Bitcoin to create reproducible builds via geeks so that you can have more certainty and that the code that you're bootstrapping when you download and use Bitcoin is actually the code that you think it is. He also made a very dope service for our favorite

VPN, which is Mulvad. Here's the announcement tweet. Announcement, hi friends. If you know me, you know how much i love mulved mulved's vpn their account number system puts them at light years ahead of vpn providers so i made a service that lets you top up your mulved account using lightning vpn.sovereign.engineering so this is a really cool thing if you're using mulved and using bitcoin to create these tokens which is how they work or how mulved's account system works it seems that Carl has created a service that allows you to just top it up via Lightning on the go

which is pretty dope and he has a Tor hidden service that he's running for it which is important to use if you're going to use it otherwise you will dox your IP address to him with your MoVat account number so that's important you know I like to see it

I love MoVat I think I also agree that their account number system is the coolest fucking thing ever i modeled final message off of that system um because users aren't good at usernames and passwords and they leak a bunch of information by itself you know especially if you have an email address associated with it so movat doesn't even take that in terms of movat i mean i just do the yearly subscription i don't i don't really see the need for a lightning payment there you know i pay with coin joint and and once a year i do it i send them 80 dollars worth you know and that's there's no there's no reason for me to use lightning for it but it's it is a pretty

cool little little tool we built there especially if you're doing like month by month or something yeah yeah i mean different use cases for different people different strategies for different people i i do the same thing i buy the yearly yearly account and just top it off and it's worth i don't it's worth noting that mulvat has accepted bitcoin for the longest fucking time and they actually rolled their own they have their own uh you know they don't reuse addresses they have their own little implementation there um i remember someone was trying to like pitch them on btc pay and it's like they already got something going there it's working yeah and it's i'm i am very happy with mulvat as a vpn service sorry for doxing my vpn service but uh it's just very

user-friendly it's automatic works it lets me know when uh my internet connection's down doesn't let me surf when when the internet's down and closes all connections very happy as a customer of molded if any of you guys are listening we're open to sponsorships oh my god i would love a mold that if some of the guys on mold that were freaks that'd be dope it's worth mentioning that when you use these hosted vpn providers the main advantage they give you is that your isp or internet service provider can't see the traffic but you're you're moving that that trust over to movat instead so so if movat is acting in bad faith you know they say they don't keep logs and whatnot that could be an issue now you could run your own vpn you could host your own vpn in in

your own server that you control locally or in a virtual private server um you know that just some vps somewhere that is run by a service um the the benefit of using a hosted vpn is that you share your ip address with a bunch of people so like if you go to like bitfinex or something um it's not like one ip is one person when you when you if you access it for mold that they might have thousand different people accessing from the same ip address so you're able to hide in that anonymity set of the crowd there yeah yeah again a lot of nuance to all this um yes be aware be aware we we do not have all the answers we are we are giving you insight into how we view all this and when it comes to this vpn tour privacy stuff matt has thought a lot

harder than i have um but i'm happy to have some direction and matt's help yeah speaking we're just we're learning and taking you guys along with us yeah speaking of that speaking of direction from matt odell you dropped uh the latest tftc guide uh on graphene the graphene operating system installation on google phones particularly the pixel 3a correct yeah i they support the pixel 2 the 2xl the three the 3xl the 3a the 3a xl so the pixel twos and the threes they support now the jump up to to the 3a and the i think also the pixel three i'm not positive is that they have there's a secure chip in those phones so it's a step improvement in terms of physical uh you know like a physical threat model someone getting access to your phone in person so

really and and the 3a is is is nice because it's a it was supposed to be like a lower end model so like right now you can buy it for 300 um if you buy it uh refurbed it's like 220 so it's super it's it's it's super reasonable in price the hardware is pretty nice um it's like it's it's great hardware i could i am gonna i'm using this as my daily driver is well now i can but i had to do the guide first um so i will report back on the daily driver but the whole idea of graphene is it's a build of android it's a fork of android that has no google services whatsoever in it what do you mean by daily driver like i'm going to use it as my main phone okay um that's something i was not aware of yeah what happened just to give you freaks a a some insight into the process

yeah into the process i flashed graphene successfully about a week ago and i started playing around with it to see if it was first of all you know up to up to snuff if it was if people were were hyping it for no reason so i wanted to test it out so i i installed all these different apps and whatnot on it and made sure they worked and samurai worked well green wallet it worked well. Um, signal worked really well. Uh, and then once I got to that point, um, I was like, okay, time to make a guide. So I had to actually flash stock Android with Google shit back onto the phone so that I could do the guide complete through. Right. Cause you don't want, you need to show people like how it came out of the box. So I had to erase everything I had done

and then start fresh for the guide. So the guide shows you the whole installation process using Ubuntu from start to finish. It's 20 minutes. I got it down to 20 minutes. Nice and concise. And if you could run Linux, if you know how to get Ubuntu on a computer,

which to be frank is relatively easy. There's lots of guides out there. I might make a guide myself, but there are lots of guides out there. You put it on a USB drive, you install it on a computer. um, you, you can do this. There's like a, there's a little bit of command line. I list all the commands. You can see me do it in the video, in the show, in the notes underneath the guide,

list every single command. You can just copy and paste them in there. Um, and anyone can do this. And I think it's, you know, it's more important than ever because we see these surveillance apparatuses that have been built out by all these governments, um, get expanded even faster now. like they were already a problem but they're getting expanded even faster now with the crisis and and google and apple are complicit in all this shit they are partners in this surveillance apparatus so you know you got to take your privacy into your own hands and i think you know there's a lot of different options um there's you know you got the libram phone there's the purism phone there's a lot of specific uh models of phone the pine phone is one and they have like hardware

switches and they run linux but there's different trade-offs there the nice thing about this is you can buy a pixel 3a with cash at like any store they're all over the place you don't have to worry about supply chain issues you're not buying from some small privacy focused company you're buying it from google and you can flash this on and it it's it's relatively cheap at like 200 to 300 dollars um and the trade-offs are nice because you get pretty much every android app like as long as you can get an apk somewhere you know some some apps you can only get on the play store but if if you can get an apk somewhere if it's on f droid which is like an open source play play store competitor um and they have like this store in f droid called aurora store that you can then

download to get around some of the ones that are play store only um you can get by pretty well you know it's not you know obviously the best thing privacy wise would be what janine does which is no smartphone whatsoever um but as we always say here there's all these different trade-offs and i think this is a nice balance for someone who needs a smartphone or wants a smartphone um but doesn't want to just completely say fuck it for their privacy it's a nice it's a really nice balance and with samurai plus dojo plus whirlpool it's a really fucking nice stack yeah no it seems beautiful what was the one big warning you gave in the beginning where if you fuck this part up that sort of like bricks your phone oh no i mean you probably won't brick your phone if you're

using a pixel if you're using a pixel and you're following the steps that i laid out you're very doubtful you'll brick your phone but uh if you try and put it on a different type of phone it's like hit or miss um there is a possibility that you screw up a step and you could brick something uh so it's important for us to cover our ass so i put a little cover my ass thing there I also put when you unlock the bootloader, it's a security mechanism. When you install new software, it wipes the phone. So you need to back up the phone. I put that disclaimer there.

The Verizon branded Pixels do not work. I personally don't buy carrier branded phones in general. I think no one should buy carrier branded phones. But specifically the Verizon ones you can't unlock. So that doesn't work. I put that disclosure there. One other thing I wanted to mention is Graphene is a small project. and they do accept bitcoin donations so if you like what they're putting out there

you can go to grapheneos.org donate i think it's really important that we we support these privacy focused project products because you know if we don't i don't know who who who will do that so it's really important that we do so consider doing that and i know me personally with these kind of these kind of donations i like to use my toxic change from coin join you got some you know samurai the lowest is 0.01 1 million sat so you have like a 70 million sat utxo sitting there or 60 million sat uh oh it's not 600,000 600,000 yeah exactly thank you for my poor sat conversion if you have like a 600,000 sat uh utxo sitting there that's toxic change that you can't combine with other things because because of that toxicity just send it over to uh graphene

yeah think about that toxic change and matt i'm gonna tip my uh through the through the video cheers you uh you freaks don't these these videos take matt like seven to eight hours and he puts a lot of effort into this a lot of preparation and then a lot of patience and actually creating the videos so cheers to you thank you for your service it's my pleasure this is why yeah Yeah, I just, I think one by one, we can improve this situation. That's the only way we improve it. You know, we only improve it through, you know, running code and supporting code. Collective individual actions.

That's what's imperative. And that's the important part of that statement is individual actions. You need to take responsibility over your own self. And then the collective actions of many individuals will get us to a better spot. and a perfect segue of why or a perfect reason of why we should use graphene segues into our next topic which is this really scary video that got shared in a group with us earlier today it's a company called tectonics geo and they basically posted a video two days ago on twitter showing the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing so through a partnership with x

x mode social tectonics geo analyzed secondary locations of anonymized quote-unquote i mean they didn't put in quotes i'm putting in quotes anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single fort lauderdale beach during spring break so basically they posted a video it said hey via our technology we were able to pinpoint uh metadata of people congregating on a beach in fort lauderdale we were able to we were able to siphon that data off and did you see they those cell phones off yeah they just circled it yeah they just circled it they could just circle a protest the same exact way just circle a protest and track all the protesters yeah so they they circled the people on the beach spring breakers on the beach and then in an attempt to prove

how the virus could spread if somebody were to have it on that beach and then go home from spring break they basically followed everybody via their cell phones across the country and i mean it was pretty scary like yeah if somebody did have the virus was spreading it there and they all got it and it spread across the country pretty quick yeah but they should not have that fucking data there's no such thing as anonymous location data because you just well first of all they're pulling way more than just a location you know they have a unique identifier for the phone some of these companies pull like wi-fi uh networks they're connected to and stuff like that but then you just cross-reference it with where the location is moving and you know you you figure out where

they live and where they work and you know all these different things that make it not anonymous like this whole idea that you could have an anonymous fucking location data is the biggest crock of shit ever um and this already existed before corona um but now they're they're actually being very brazen about their capabilities like you could just circle like i said you could circle a protest instead of a beach full of beachgoers and see where all the protesters go that that have phones that are on um and that's very dangerous we're you know this is this is a fucking issue and it and it's important that i just want to go back to graphene for a second graphene helps you with a lot of the location tracking but when you you have cell tower

triangulation where they take three cell towers and see where you are in between them so even if have location tracking off they can get a pretty good idea of where you're located and graphene doesn't solve that like if you have a sim card you're you're susceptible to that and the only way you can really avoid that is is to is to use prepaid sims that aren't connected to your identity and to rotate them so that if they ever get connected to your identity that you don't like give up everything um and that's very hard to do in a lot of jurisdictions they make it very difficult to buy SIMs with cash without your identity. It's a very difficult process. It is still possible, fortunately. And New York actually is very easy. You just go into one of those phone

stores run by immigrants, pay them in cash, and they usually do not take your identity information. One other thing I wanted to mention with graphing that I forgot is they did release their new update yesterday, I think, which was really good timing on the guide. And the cool feature they added is we've talked about how iCloud doesn't, your backups aren't client-side encrypted. And the reason Apple says is because they say that users will forget their password and if they forget their password, they can't get their backup for their phone. So it's just to help users out. But really what it does is it provides a backdoor access to your phone where the government doesn't even have to get physical access to your phone. They can just go straight to iCloud and see

everything in iCloud. What Graphene just did was they added something called SeedVault, which is by the Cadillacs Institute. I want to get the spelling right for that institute. But the idea is, oh, it's the Cadillacs Institute, C-A-L-Y-X Institute. They make this piece of software called SeedVault. And what's really cool about it is it creates an encrypted local backup. and the encryption is a 12 word seed phrase which bitcoiners are very comfortable with so you can then take that backup you can put on usb drive you can put it in in cloud storage if you want or somewhere else depending on your threat model and they need you need the 12 word seed phrase to access it which i think is a very elegant way to have private backups because backups are important

you know it's you can't just say no backups uh people want backups and this is like a very i think is a very elegant way to handle it yeah see i mean graphing wasn't on my radar at all until you brought them up in the conversations leading up to this oh i can't speak right now and the conversations leading up to this tutorial um it seems like it's a dope software and again like the ideal is to strive for these open source softwares that that make things a lot easier and a lot better um for privacy and sovereignty particularly god there's so much nuance to take into uh to take into consideration with all this stuff like this the fort fort lauderdale spring break tracking is just like fuck how fucked are we already like is it even is it even worth fighting

back and i would argue yes sounds like a cuck mentality marty no the cuck mentality like no we're fucked uh uh just give up lay over let them try this i don't care i just i want uh it does seem daunting though it seems daunting right i i don't want people to feel overwhelmed because every little bit helps like as long as you realize that nothing is perfect you know especially for the average user that you'll never hit perfect that's fine incremental improvements are still a net benefit it's still important to improve your specific situation yes no and again highly recommend after listening to this go listen to liberty blitzkrieg episode i'm going to drop tomorrow and if you're listening to this after the 26th that i dropped at some point in the past

there is there's a lot of optimism and i think i think there's going to be a great awakening after this particular crisis. 2008, obviously we had Occupy Wall Street and there was a little bit of an awakening and I think that's what incited people like me and you to go seek out alternatives like Bitcoin and set down this path of creating content around self-sovereignty and freedom in the digital age.

I think this particular crisis, which is a combination, and we'll transition this conversation into what's going on with the stimulus bill and everything that comes with that, I think we're going to hit a tipping point now where this is a combination in my mind of like 9-11, 2008 financial crisis, and all wrapped into one. So 9-11, we had the Patriot Act where they did take civil liberties from us

leveraging our fear, 2008, just pure financial crisis. They used that to bail out the elite class. And now we have basically a similar crisis with the coronavirus where civil liberties are being taken. Like the CDC, if this stimulus bill does get signed by President Trump and passed by the House, it seems that the CDC will be getting $500 million to create an app within 30 days that tracks us and whether or not we have been sick, gotten the vaccine. etc etc etc then on top of that we're also bailing out yeah we're not getting the chip don't get the chip but on top of that they're bailing out the elite class again so it's a combination of those

two things rolled into one and i just think i'm maybe i'm maybe i'm too optimistic but i think this is the impetus for another great awakening probably with more uh more effect than the 2008 crisis but marty they're paying us all for the 1200 check that we have to pay taxes on taxes out ahead of time we have to pay taxes on that yeah you gotta file your income taxes based on it oh my god wow why even pay taxes they can just print the money dude it's basically basically it's like a handout to uh like all the tax preparation software and whatnot oh my god fuck all right now we're trying to keep a positive vibe here on this episode but uncle marty's a few glasses of wine deep fuck these people are you kidding me

like two weeks ago is everybody's getting two thousand dollars a month plus a thousand dollar per kid and now it's just one twelve hundred dollar payment they gotta pay taxes on go fuck yourself Yeah, you know, it's fucking bullshit. And then they want to take our civil liberties, too. They're going to start tracking us. They're going to start using metadata and making sure we got vaccine. And they're not going to roll it back. They're already doing a lot of that shit, to be fair,

but they're going to escalate it. But now it's written in the law, and we have less recourse if we want to fight back. If this gets passed, you take that to the Supreme Court, they're like, hey, it's a law. There's nothing you can do. And they are bailing out. It looks like, well, so the stimulus bill passed the Senate with flying colors.

I think it was like 97 to 0. 96 to 0. I think one withheld. So now it has to go through the House. So it hasn't gone through the House yet, but it does have a bailout for cruise lines and Boeing, right? Burn it the fuck down. We're taking Ben Hunt's words here. We know he's not a Bitcoin ally at this point, but burn it the fuck down.

Stay positive. we have the economy shut down um we have the government telling us that coronavirus is bad but we shouldn't wear face masks they're telling us that face masks don't work but standing six feet apart works um which okay bullshit um and meanwhile like if they actually if the virus is a fucking issue which it's uh to be honest it does seem like it is an issue we should be like people should be encouraged to wear any kind of face covering possible like even it's a net benefit it's like what we go back to what we were talking about before like are they perfect like if you wear like a cloth mask or a scarf or something like that no

but like people should be wearing face coverings we should be removing regulations so like the New York City garment district can be producing face masks of whatever efficacy there are just so people have face coverings on um and and and that's how you get the economy restarted quicker that's how you fix a lot of this bullshit i mean it's already a house of cards we talked about this before like they their perspective is that it was a perfectly good economy before this all happened which was not the fucking case but where's the where are the priorities what what everything we hear is bullshit it's just like it's it's fucking infuriating it's absolutely infuriating and this goes back to last episode i love this country i love americans okay but the government

can go fuck themselves they don't care about us and and and and there are so short-sighted they are extremely short-sighted they are they're not short-sighted they just don't give a fuck they're not short-sighted they don't give a fuck about us dude they do not care about us they care about the entrenched interests that get them well they're short-sighted not in their their power the short side in their policy implementations but not short-sighted and that they're actually reacting to try to help us they're trying to react to try to get themselves more real to get themselves re-elected like they do not care about us like their reactions to this crisis is simply uh in an aim to get re-elected not to protect the american people

re-elected and more money it's it's short-sighted greed is what it is it's not long-term you know for the best of the country no exactly they don't care that's what i was that's what i was trying to highlight last week that's what i'm concerned about you know i'm concerned about a political system that is doesn't isn't low time preference a political system that's high time preference and is fucking digging its own grave that's what's happening and that's the point i was reiterating and that's why you got to listen to the michael krieger episode and that's what i was trying to allude to earlier is that the awakening is going to happen where people are like all right we've been through this again three times in the

first 20 years of the 21st century and we were young when 9-11 happened we were in college high school going into college at least me you're in college already as the 2008 crisis and now we're considered adults and we've seen some shit in our lives, we've seen a lot of shit in our lives that's crazy the first 30 years of our life what we've seen, 9-11

dot com bubble 9-11, 2008 crisis and now this crisis we are pretty hardened warriors in the battle against the state and their fuckery, there is going to be a great awakening and couple that with the zoomers

who have never known a world without the internet the the pace at which the incumbent system moves is just not fast enough and that's being blatantly highlighted with the mass situation that you just why the fuck do people need to go hand hand out head up to the fda like can we please make some masks to get on people's faces so they don't spread the disease it's fucking it's so fucking stupid it's it's it's infuriating just the 2008 collapse was actually like the first three weeks of freshman year at business school for me that was uh it's a great way to get educated yeah yeah no i was a year behind you and i was like yeah you freaks have heard this story but

it's just like we've seen some shit and i looked my dad's a gen xer and this shit has fucked up his his career like many times like he's been very successful what he does and then like every eight years a little crisis comes around and throws a big wrench in it you know how about the market how about s the s&p going up over six percent at the same time that the news came out at 3.1 what 3.3 million people jobless it doesn't make any sense the height of the 2008 crisis was like 500 000 people or something oh my god see this is what's gonna wake up that's some dystopian bullshit that is but luckily it's because they scared people out of holding cash because of the

fucking stimulus and infinite qe it's like we're just gonna take your cash is gonna get devalued unless you plow it back into equities oh and and hey just buy the index don't try to pick stocks just buy the index passively invest passive investing is the way to go the stock market is historically going to go up from bottom left top right there may have a hiccup in between this is not a hiccup people this is a puke like this shit is not gonna like maybe it may recover but we'll have a Japanification. I don't think we're ever going to have, I don't think we'll ever go 100% to 200%

above the all-time high that we reached a couple months ago. Again, I don't think that's coming back. Demographics are not going to allow that. And then on top of that, even if it does do that, as has happened for the last decade, most of the people in the country

are not going to benefit from that appreciation as not the economy, as the stock market and the people that own those assets are much well off than your average american it makes more sense when you realize the dollar is losing value like we might hit all-time highs again uh but if you price it in gold there's this chart floating around uh where you price the s&p in gold like we didn't hit a new all-time high the last the last cycle was the all-time high we we were like half halfway there this time um because if you price it if you price your markets and shitty money you know this is what

happens like you hit new all-time highs all the time i thought we were gonna stay positive and i'm so pissed off fuck these people man we should price they don't give it in dogecoin then we'll hit all-time highs all the time yeah yeah doge uh yeah fuck these people man it's insanity but luckily turn it back positive we have tools in place thank god we have bitcoin this time around you have the opportunity to opt out thank god we have communication tools that are even though twitter is not great and it is censoring people i think it is still good enough that we can communicate with each other these net benefit net benefit and on top of that There's more open source software.

People are starting to build out mesh networks and stuff like that. We're starting to be able to send Bitcoin transactions via satellite waves, radio waves to satellites, excuse me. I think we're in a much better spot to create a bottom-up revolution this time around than any point in the last 30 years. We have tools that we can use and are using. We are using Bitcoin. I mean, this is why we do this fucking podcast, is to wake people up that these tools exist, and we can use them. We are using them. We will continue to use them.

They are only getting stronger, and more and more people are only waking up to the fact that the incumbent system does not work. It is not sustainable in the long run. I think we're going to see a renaissance, may not be in three months, may not be in a year, two years, three years out, three to 20 years from now. I think we're really going to see a strong pendulum swing towards people actually building shit that lasts and is actually anti-fragile, to use an inserto buzzword. bitcoin and bitcoiners give me hope you know i i'm able to communicate encrypted with friends from all around the world that share the same exact mission um and that just frankly was not possible before and it's super you know it's fantastic to see it makes me happy it's empowering yes the individual is getting empowered um but it just it's it's how i keep going on it's it's

it's my passion and i share that passion with people around the fucking world um and that's fucking cool you know that's really cool and i'm optimistic in that in that respect um but when it comes to you know nation states and and specifically our nation state very very pessimistic what is a nation state though who makes up a nation state we do again going back to the the comment earlier we're gonna you're gonna fix this with the collection of individual actions it just honestly takes speaking up standing up saying hey fuck you we're all humans on this earth uh who are you to tell me what to do uh especially after you fucked up the world to this extent like and the technology again the technologies now exist

where you can take that power and you can leverage technology like never before to protect yourself against these entrenched typically state powers like this is we have the opportunity here and again that's why i'm so optimistic and even though it may not sound like it there is a positive message here like i think we are going going to fix this because the technology exists it's there people are getting angrier and angrier and they're going to seek out alternatives and luckily for us this time around alternatives exist people are very much working on them they're very enthralled by them and i think again the the gene pandora's box has been open there's no shutting it at this point there's no forgetting about how bitcoin works once you know how bitcoin works you don't

forget that you don't you don't go back unless you're like a buck coiner and say ah bitcoin's gonna fail or not that bitcoin's gonna fail once you know how bitcoin works you understand it's distributed nature and how powerful it is you don't forget that like you it you don't revert to the incumbent system let me put it this way pre pre-2008 i was like a rah-rah american you know i was all the patriotic bullshit that i would i was completely in that in that realm i was you know diehard american citizen now i consider myself more a citizen of the world um where you know there's there's i have friends around the world from all different countries that i share very strong bonds with um and i feel like we're all in this together

and that is a it's a paradigm shift in the way my perspective is on how i view everything and i i hope that we see that happen and i think the internet really facilitates that right and i hope we see that happen more and more on an individual basis um to people everywhere i agree all right let's end it on on that positive note i have uh wait can we end it on a negative note because i kind of wanted to talk about a negative topic what taiwan i have some positive i have some positive shout outs as well um yeah the taiwan surveillance thing did you see this uh are you clicking the link now it's so bad dude you got to see the tracking they're doing in taiwan with the excuse of the coronavirus they are tracking phone location

and just to make sure you don't leave your phone at home they have someone from the government call you twice a day to make sure you pick up right away and if you don't pick up they send someone to your uh to your house to your home so this guy he had just gotten back to taiwan um so he was in an extra heightened quarantine uh than people that had been living there already uh so it was worth noting that uh his phone battery died at 7 30 a.m and they and and they sent they sent police over to his to his house to see what was going on and make sure that he was enforcing the quarantine i would have fucking punched the police in the face just kidding dude it's so fucked up that's fucked up probably okay you you probably would not punch the police in the face

in that situation i don't know but i would want to fuck you okay so i have some positive shout outs um well i guess this is kind of negative bitcoin 2020 was supposed to be going on right now and i was super excited for we had a bunch of workshops planned um it was we were going to play a big part in the conference. Uh, so that's just kind of sad. Like I, I see like all my calendar notifications are coming in. Um, and that like really, that, that hit me hard this week. Um, BTCXZelko on Twitter. Uh, one of the guys behind Ronan Dojo was on Stefan Levera's podcast. Everyone should go listen to that. Uh, he's a super inspiring dude. He had no tech background whatsoever um but saw a need and that need was making it easier to run samurai dojo your full

node and he fucking did it he like made it happen so he should be an inspiration for all you freaks he's an inspiration for me um i'm looking forward to running ronin dojo i'm gonna have a whole guide on it coming up so everyone should go check that out and then the other thing is uh crypto cloaks sent me a custom case for my raspberry pi 4 which i'm going to use in the guides and i told him to surprise me and he sent me this case and it says stay humble stack sats on the front and it says our sats our sats my safe haven on the bottom and it's fucking awesome i fucking love it i love it was a great surprise and i just wanted i wanted to to say thank you on the air for that because that was fucking fantastic yeah matt got me with the uh our states sats my safe haven

before we recorded i thought he was trying to correct or asking when i was asking him and it was a rhetorical question yes yeah it is our safety he asked me he asked me are you drinking on this episode and i responded our stats my safe haven and then i went and grabbed a bottle of wine i'm sorry if i got a little too tipsy a little too uh passionate there towards the end freaks again it feels like we're at a deflection point like i i hope my passion comes off as proverbial shaking not shaking but like hey we should pay attention to this and and you should care about this and uh thank you for listening if you guys are liking this we're gonna put out five uh five pieces of content on the podcast this week

yeah monday's episode we did episode with elizabeth prefontaine people really liking uh did that on tuesday controversial jw weatherman was on the podcast yesterday with uh giacomo zucco we did not talk about bitcoin we talked about statism and i thought that was actually a very good conversation today's episode tomorrow with michael uh krieger from liberty liberty blitz krieg um yeah we're pumping it out the the quarantines got me and matt the graphing guide yeah the graphing guide came out today uh bents are coming out as scheduled we'll have the sat standard on saturday as well um i'm more motivated than ever people are again going back to it i think people are going to be seeking alternatives after they smell the bullshit coming from the

incumbent system uh from the empire and that's what we're here for i'm happy that you freaks are here if you guys are liking it please subscribe wherever you are wherever you're listening uh if you guys want to give shout outs go to tftc.io slash contribute um and if you want to throw donations our way for any reason you can do that there as well i love you freaks donate to graphene through toxic change stay humble stack sets peace and love