TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2020.04.13

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

This week Marty & Matt discuss: - Bryan Bishop releases bitcoin vaults prototype - Ransomware operator now defaults to monero payments - Utreexo explainer - Trezor Model T v2.3.0 - Samourai Wallet v0.99.93 - Whirlpool CLI v0.10.5 released - Apple and Google bluetooth based tracking system integrated at the mobile OS level - Graphene OS guide - Protesting is a "non essential activity" - Masks now required in NYC lol - Surveillance programs escalate worldwide using coronavirus as an excuse - Most popular ethereum chain explorer has added a blacklist tool - Maker foundation lawsuit - Central banks recommend global stablecoin ban, notable ethereum stakeholders caught off guard but they shouldn't be - Libra pivots to simple single currency stablecoin model - 9th anniversary of online poker Black Friday - Mullvad.net VPN releases mobile wireguard compatible apps - SLP Rafael Yakobi 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 ripped it. Good hour and ten minute rip. I think you guys are going to love it. This episode is brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. You freaks already know all about them. They're helping us Bitcoiners with Bitcoin-focused financial services. They have a security-first mindset. Sorry for the Slack notifications coming in here. back to Unchained. They have a security-first mindset, particularly around multi-sig. They want to make sure your UTXOs are secure, so they have their Vault product, which allows you to

engage in a two or three multi-sig quorum with Unchained, in which you hold two keys on a ledger or a treasure, and soon-to-be cold card as well. And then Unchained holds one of the keys as well, so you can always move your UTXOs out of the Vault by yourself with the two keys that you possess. But if you ever want Unchained to come in and be the second key in the two-in-three signature, you can go to more NMVM schemes as well. They are there for you. On top of that, they've open-sourced this product. If you don't want Unchained involved, they've open-sourced a desktop app, Caravan,

in which you can create these multi-sig setups by yourself without Unchained at all. And then on top of that, they have their USD lending product, our product which allows you to use bitcoin as collateral so that you can get usd liquidity same day usd liquidity to be uh more specific friends don't let friends sell bitcoin so if you're in a pinch you need some cash and you want to hold on to your bitcoin as long as possible you can engage in a bitcoin collateralized loan with unchained capital and speaking of open source we mentioned caravan already they're working on products like slip 39 hermit and a bunch of other stuff including their blog series which has gradually then suddenly i was texting parker last

night he's got a very interesting piece coming soon so be on the lookout for that they usually drop on fridays hopefully tomorrow maybe it's a masterpiece it'll come out next week we shall see go to www.unchained-capital.com to check out all this the vault program the collateralized loans and the open source projects are working on plus their blog series www.unchained-capital.com Also, this episode was brought to you by our good friends at the Cash App. You freaks know all about them already. They're helping us stack sats. They're helping us stack slivers of stonks, if you so please.

And if you can hear my niece, she's screaming. She's very rambunctious. She's got a lot of energy. Where was I at the Cash App read? They're helping us stack sats. They're helping us stack slivers of stonks, if you so please. And they have their boost program. I love their boost program.

And on top of that, I've been very, very on top of this. uh, stimulus paycheck program. Uh, I've gotten multiple, uh, notifications of, Hey, we're going to help you get your, get your Trump bucks. If you need them, here's how you do it. Go to the IRS. Here's a banking, uh, here's a bank account number. Here's a wiring information. If you don't have a bank account, uh, go to the IRS, put this information in, we'll get it directly sent to your cash app so that you can get the money, uh, that you need right now. Um, it's It's been very cool to see how quickly they've implemented this and the UX behind their messaging and communication of how they can help their users.

It's been really, really surprising and cool to see, in my opinion. Very encouraging. Use the code StackingSats if you're going to download this app. When you download this app, if, excuse me, if you're able to download this app. I hope you are living in a place where you can download it because I love it so much. Use the code StackingSats, that's one word, S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S. You're going to get $10, and $10 is going to go to our good friends at Owl's Lacrosse. Owl's Lacrosse, not that dirtbag Owl who's trying to take our thunder

and pretend like he's an actual lacrosse coach and not some dirtbag. Owl's Lacrosse. Use the code STACKINGSTATS and enjoy this rip of Rabbit Hole Recap. Take care. each day i'm closer to being cash of the future not in your wallet i'm in your computer oh i'm the consensus of shared and synchronized digital data Where they cross multiple platforms from Shanghai to Grenada Each day I'm closer to being cash of the future

Not in your wallet, I'm in your computer What is up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, and your boy, Matt O'Dell, here for a Rabbit Hole Recap. Sorry we didn't get a stimulus package in this week. I was terribly busy on Monday. Matt, how we doing? You've been dropping bombs, though, on the podcast feed, so I don't think the freaks will be too upset. I hope you're not upset, freaks.

We're going to get a stimulus package in next week. I think there's going to be a lot to talk about, too. I mean, well, we're going to get into it, but obviously there was 5.25 million unemployment claims last week that were announced today. So it seems like this crisis is persisting. And I think we're going to start to see more and more fallout and unrest from these shutdowns coming to the head this weekend, especially as the weather gets better. But we'll get into that. Before we get into all that, the price of Bitcoin right now, according to Clark Moody's Bitcoin dashboard, is $7,003 on the dot. We are currently 678 blocks away from the next difficulty retarget,

which is looking like it's going to be an upwards difficulty adjustment of 11.4% right now. Blocks are coming in at 9 minutes and 1 second, so almost a complete minute. Under the 10-minute target, we got 42.2% of the Lightning Network is Tor capacity, so that is holding pretty steady sorry if you can hear my niece screaming downstairs right now she's very loud very enthusiastic the very enthusiastic fees versus subsidy 1.62 percent pretty depressed compared to the highs they reached a few weeks ago yeah we've uh we've been pretty choppy here price wise up down sideways i like that i like sideways i've been noticing uh steady growth in like the smaller tor routing nodes on lightning which is good to see

yeah yeah it's uh it's uh very good to see i think i mean that when we've talked about this last few weeks people are starting to tinker people starting to experiment this isn't on the list but yesterday alone when the trump bucks got dropped into everybody's uh bank account or people who were eligible into their bank accounts i got an email uh a whatsapp message sorry i'm using whatsapp my college friends demand that we use that uh and a text being like hey one was i'm taking the time of quarantine to learn more about bitcoin and take the sats that i have seriously um so i want to learn how to take them into my own possession that was one text the next was i just got my stimulus check uh stacking sats with that right

away and the third was hey uh i haven't bought bitcoin in a while but use my stimulus check to buy bitcoin what's your favorite wild these days so uh those are three examples just for me obviously uh maybe my view is a bit biased because i talk about bitcoin and shill bitcoin more than most individuals but three of my friends that have been listening uh what i found most fascinating was they haven't been paying attention but the stimulus check and the quarantine uh sort of compelling them to pay more attention and learn more uh and and think about bitcoin which has been cool to see well i mean a lot of people got their helicopter money directly into cash app too so then they were just like two clicks away from bitcoin

yeah yeah it was funny seeing all the uh the uh people were taking videos of like showing their bank accounts with the stimulus money getting dropped in and going over the coin base and buying all the major banks were down like if you went on down detector yesterday they were all down and including cash app cash app completely like froze up for a bit there yeah i mean you gotta imagine it's probably the biggest stress test all these banks have experienced uh one day the government's just gonna helicopter drop money into people's bank accounts you gotta imagine people were rushing to check um whether or not they got the money and if they got the money people were freaking out that they got the money it was funny to see the reactions on twitter

of uh of people reacting to getting their trump bucks yeah i mean i didn't qualify but i stacked in solidarity such a humble brag it wasn't you got a lot of humble brag comments it wasn't meant as a humble brag it just it was what it was but uh um yeah i uh if you're waiting for a check though it's gonna take another like week and a half or something like that because trump wants his signature on every check yeah they had to get they had to get that that signature on the check if you're hungry and you can only get it via check hey sorry you gotta wait donnie's gotta get a signature on there no i mean because the thing is is you know 99k is the hard cutoff and in new york city 99k isn't you know that doesn't make you rich you're not

a rich person at 99k especially if you're unemployed right now you know fortunately i'm not unfortunately i'm a very conservative person and i'm i'm fine all things considered so i can't really complain um and also like obviously it's our fault for living in new york we can move somewhere else and i'm not so i'm not saying i mean you know i'm not trying to like complain about it um but i don't think it's a coincidence that the the states the biggest democratic states are the ones that got the short stick on this one and i i'm also i'm not you know it's kind of fucked up when new york is the hardest hit place uh and disproportionately the relief that people in new york got was was way less than the rest of the country um but you know it's

government it's centrally planned so you really shouldn't expect much you should you know this should just this should not be a surprise to people it shouldn't and well to a lot of people it is a surprise should it be a surprise but it is becoming a surprise to a lot of people um again like i mentioned let's just jump into it uh in the in the intro spiel people like unrest is starting to to firmer to to to ferment to the to the top of the consciousness right they had in michigan where their governor she decided to make it so you can't even buy seeds uh like to plant in your garden uh getting very like and that's the one thing trump's been saying like hey we're gonna let the states handle it and some states are reacting terrible compared to others

michigan being one how about rally north carolina they uh yeah they said how to peacefully assemble protesting is a non-essential activity this is exactly what i was talking this is what we mentioned in the alex gladstein pod like you can't i didn't think it was going to come to this as this quickly right but uh it's a natural progression uh for these governments to then move in on on making protesting illegal using these measures that they're passing yeah and i mean it's everywhere too like we we uh we shared that video uh in the uk with each other where they're throwing people in vans for being outside and not being in their houses.

The draconian measures that are really coming to the fore right now are pretty scary, actually. I mean, let's talk about others looking for the tweet right now, but there was one governor, yeah, the governor of New Jersey, the state I'm in right now, Phil Murphy, when he got asked where he got the authority to nullify the Bill of Rights when he banned religious services in his state. He said, I wasn't thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this.

The science says people have to stay away from each other. So the science is dictating the science, the science freaks. It's dictating what we can and cannot do right now, not the natural rights that come with life. You want to talk about science? two weeks ago the new york government was saying that masks don't help and in a lot of ways they make it worse if you wear a mask and now they're required in new york city uh so and cuomo himself said this nothing has changed from day one we've said masks help uh and it's just it's like who do

they think we are who do they think we're all fucking idiots do they think we haven't been watching we haven't been paying attention it's like it's fucking infuriating but i mean at the same time like i want everyone to wear masks i just don't think they should be forced to wear masks i'm i'm all about mask life it is it's been liberating it's fantastic i went to the store this week i got i got a an extra prepaid sim card just for the fuck of it because you could just walk in with gloves and a mask on and paying cash and no one batted an eye um like i could get used to that I could get used to mask life. Yeah, no, I can as well.

But like you said, it should not be mandatory. People don't want to wear a mask. They shouldn't. And people can avoid those people or at least try to. Yeah, it's getting getting really weird. And like I said, so obviously there's protests in Raleigh. I was mentioning the governor of Michigan, Michigan, a bunch of people in Michigan were protesting in their cars yesterday uh i think there's a couple that's the other interesting

thing too not in favor of the states but it's just interesting observation california has a council to decide when they're going to go back i believe the west coast i believe california oregon the west coast maybe washington they're calling it yeah the west coast pack and then here on the east coast we have delaware pennsylvania new jersey new york and connecticut with a council to try and decide when they're going back. We may be seeing, like, the balkanization of the United States. Yeah, little citadels start to pop up. The word is, it's not a dirty word.

Yeah. I bent a knee on citadels. I'm going to bend a knee on something else at some point in this podcast. Tudy Freaks will find out. Bend it. Hey, it's always important to not bend the knee, but realize when you may have made a mistake. Citadels are becoming more popular,

and I can sort of see the benefits they provide, especially given the condition that we find ourselves in right now. When do you think we get back to work? Do you think we're going back sooner rather than later? It seems like things are calming down. I don't have any numbers in front of me, but hasn't New York's number of new cases peaked? Deaths are starting to fall.

I mean, it didn't come anywhere near the projections that people thought we were going to hit in regards to the ICU beds that would be occupied. I believe the first projection at Cuomo was saying two weeks ago that by April 14th, we would have 40,000 people in the ICU. It's at like 5,000. The science has been very much confusing people, and it's been very wrong up to this point, which is interesting to see. And that's why I don't think we should be giving up our rights, right? Because you're basing this erosion of civil liberties off of what I would deem scare tactics based on models. And we talk about models a lot in other contexts, particularly economic contexts, trying to model out inflation or the way QE will affect the economy has proven over time to be completely wrong. And why would these models be any different?

i'm just ranting here just basically talking to myself but um it is interesting to see i'm just like constantly thinking of that it's always sunny episode where mac is just slapping bitch on scientists who are proven wrong in the long run i mean i have a couple comments here i the first of all to be fair you know we don't know like this lockdown is unprecedented like they like fucking locked everything down so presumably the numbers are lower part of the reason is because of of of the lockdown measures right like i'm not saying that it but yes some of the models were were factoring in lockdown yeah but especially the most recent ones from two weeks ago unfortunately it's very hard to prove either way whether or not the lockdown was affected um i mean we if if we

get out if we open up the economy completely and then we get hit like massively hard then you could maybe but short of that there's like no way to prove it the second thing is um you know i personally think we should you know be focusing on flattening the unemployment curve uh right now you know we got 20 over 20 million people unemployed just in america it's probably over 100 million worldwide and i think that at the end of the day if if any government is is to decide that it should be the most local government possible and it really should come down to individual business owners whether or not they want to open up and everyone should we we should the supply of masks needs to we need as many people being able to wear good masks as possible the ones who can't can wear

homemade masks um and and and leave it up leave it up to individuals to decide how that's going happen and then third of all we should never give up our rights no matter what and don't let fear fucking dictate any of that shit because that's what it always comes down to and it never gets rolled back none of whenever you give up your rights they never get rolled back you have to keep fighting for them no matter what no that was the uh i forget when it was either yesterday or the day before the bent that i read it was the exact same thing like you don't let fear overtake and that's been that's what i think is like the worst part about this uh situation is that you have terrible yeah we we've witnessed two ends the of the spectrum right you have the complete

uh lack of preparedness and lack of action early on and now you have a complete overreaction like as it seems that we're coming uh coming back down and things are getting better governments are overreacting whereas in the beginning a lot would argue they were under reacting and as and that's another thing i said in that pen was there's data coming out now like we know who is most at risk to get this disease if we're going to be smart about it now that we have data let's use that data and open up the economy maybe don't let anybody over 65 years old or not don't let them but encourage them to stay indoors and away from big crowds until we know that we at least have

herd immunity or something similar to it we know that people who are obese are more susceptible to it and males as well so using that data that's good we don't have many obese people in America

right that's fucked well that's it I was talking about it last night with my wife and brother and sister-in-law at the dinner table last night like if anything this this uh pandemic or this hysteria has really highlighted the need for people to stay in shape right like everybody's talking about let's get bill gates to create a vaccine and based on his

track record i'm not very excited about the prospects of that how about we focus on taking vitamin c vitamin d exercising getting healthy not eating junk food we could avoid a lot of this and People are curious why California isn't having a huge outbreak like a lot of other parts of the country. They live healthier lifestyles there. No, they don't. That may be something we should look into. Yes, they do. California is always outside.

Sorry, freaks from California. Fuck you guys. You guys aren't extra healthy people. I push back on that narrative. There's definitely unhealthy. I want to see the data. New Yorkers are healthier than Californians. fuck no they aren't are you kidding me we we walk more more more steps well new yorkers are healthier

yeah well just from a vitamin d perspective it is definitely sunnier longer uh in the during the year i mean i in california i agree people should be healthier that was one of the first things we said like a couple months ago when the virus first started coming up um you know people should just live healthier lifestyles lower your time preference you know uh that that's like the number one precaution you can do yeah yeah we've had a lot of uh workout classes at our quarantine house here but the mass thing is the perfect example because they literally went from two weeks ago being like masks don't work and there even could be in effect they could do the opposite they make it worse to masks are now required and like we have people all around

you know like you see in canada and and parts of america where they're like snitching out people for not wearing masks you know and and shaming them we had in what in philly in philly right so that guy got pulled off of the bus for not wearing a mask um and yeah pulled off philly cops yeah bus driver wasn't wearing one then the cop had his mask down at his fucking chin like what are you doing like if you want people to socially distance don't send 10 individuals to breathe on one without a mask and forcibly pull them off a bus it's hypocrisy and it's gaslighting they're trying to gaslight us freaks don't let them gaslight you don't forget what the world health organization did don't forget what our governments did how people reacted

trump calling it the flu don't forget any of that shit like i just want to put one more thing on the record uh and i'll own it if i'm wrong i don't think there's i don't think there'll be a vaccine so all the vaccine talk i think is just a waste of time because i don't think that it'll ever materialize that they'll even be able to do a vaccine everyone in the vaccine supply line is incentivized just like they're incentivized the government is incentivized to say like oh lockdown will only be for two weeks they're all incentivized to say a vaccine is coming and it come at this point uh you know the the researchers that are are trying to get investment the investors that have paid those researchers that are trying to get a return and the government

that's trying to calm everyone fucking down it's like all all those people are just incentivized to give us feed us bullshit about vaccines so i i really do not think uh there'll be like a usable vaccine for this shit in any and in any kind of meaningful way if one does come to market and it's from bill gates i'm waiting till half the world takes it before i get that shit in my body if i ever do i i don't trust that look at what he did in india dude i was we were talking about this like off record the other day like what the fuck like he went into india and brought back polio via his vaccines i don't trust that motherfucker sorry sorry if people can't accept that but i just don't trust him don't trust verify uh and be healthier be healthier uh

Like, staying on this tip, though, like, I saw a headline, like, some Saudi airline is going to blood test people before they get on the plane to make sure they don't have this. It was Dubai, right? Christopher Allen. Dubai, yeah, it might have been Dubai. It's like Emirates Airline. Yeah. So, like, you're seeing the beginning of vaccination passports come to play, which I'm not a fan of in any capacity. So this may affect international travel in the perpetuity.

If they try to pull this shit off, like I will not be getting a, a vaccination passport. Well, two comments here. I mean, it'll probably come with the chip too, uh,

to, to, uh, first of all, I've, I've said many times on this podcast that I've been trying to travel as much as possible because I thought it was going to be harder to travel in the future.

Did not think it was going to be this quick. Um, so I mean, I'm glad I traveled a lot, but i did not travel enough so hopefully uh it won't get locked down too much and then the second thing is passports originally were supposed to be a temporary measure that just stuck around forever where are they really i never knew this yeah there's a whole story behind it i'm not well versed enough in it uh it was after one of the world wars i believe uh but you freaks can go

duck duck go it and and search it just type in uh passport temporary then permanent or something yeah DuckDuckGo speaking of DuckDuckGo a little tangent here it's been my go-to browser for or on my phone

I'm still addicted to Chrome on the desktop for some reason I need to get away from it actually I've been using Brave a lot more Google gives you better search results

but DuckDuckGo on the phone has been incredible I sometimes big fan I've been using it for like six months now if I use Google I go into Tor browser

and then I search on Google but it does give you better search results yeah surveillance pays and i wanted to loop yeah i wanted to loop back to your comment about uh leaving the decisions whether or not whether or not to shut down uh to smaller municipalities our boy brian harrington at brain harrington i didn't realize this i'm looking at his twitter

handle now it's at brain harrington on twitter i didn't realize his name's brian though his name's brian um uh he tagged me in a post yesterday of a county or a town doing exactly that a strong town if you will they repurposed uh some of their uh linen factories to create mask on top of that uh this guy runs he this guy had his gym closed by the state so he started building weight racks and delivering them to people's homes and then he turned his gym into a mass factory yeah i mean so he that's a success of a local business making lemons out of lemonades that's not like a that's not like i don't think the local government gets credit there like that's that's this dude who was running the gym he repurposed it and started making masks and

employing people and setting up like new supply chains and shit like that it's a very good point but that's an example of a strong town of somebody taking initiative and making lemons out of lemonade here or lemonade out of lemons excuse me um could you make lemons out of lemonade do you think you could put that back together only the true hustlers maybe we'll try one day yeah no this is cool i'll link to that too and put that in the show notes right now it's like cool to see ex-marine living in in california and just completely repurposed everything and created like just repurposed many parts of their local economy to create a supply chain of mask and at home uh gym equipment cool to see um all right let's get to some bitcoin stuff this is a bitcoin

podcast we should probably talk about it at some point uh brian bishop released a prototype for bitcoin vaults this week he hit up the uh bitcoin mailing list and basically now say i talked about vaults last november or august i believe it may have been here as a prototype that i finally put together and so for you freaks that don't remember vaults around the concept of sharding pre-signed and pre-signed transactions covenants if you will and so basically it allows you to set up a transaction in a way or set your utx up utxos up in a way that if they want to be spent there's different relative time locks that come into play and somebody's trying to steal your utxos you have the ability to sign another transaction that steals them back

and puts them into an address of your choice. So adding to Bitcoin security, he announced in that email that there's also a prototype with OpCheckTemplateVerify, which obviously has not been implemented into the core code base yet, but it seems that that would help make this even better if it does get implemented in the future. my understanding is in a theft scenario you would lose some

bitcoin but the majority you would save yes pretty cool yeah I think you have to pay a higher fee so I think you'd lose that right I think the idea is that you lose a little bit in the beginning just as

like that's when you realize it's stolen right without losing 100 of the funds i don't know i have to look into it better i've been kind of overwhelmed over here just with life yeah no i think you're right i think you're right um this is just a prototype it's not working code brian's looking for people to review to test it out to give them feedback so if you're willing and able to do that go check it out we're going to post to post to that github page in the show notes

and this is matt and i were talking about i did not again i didn't have time on monday to do a stimulus package but matt was and i was like is there even anything to talk about and i was like yeah i could riff on one subject for quite a while my favorite topic of the week yeah so let's dive into it so there's a ransomware operator out there uh sodin sodin okibi i probably butchered that uh pronunciation uh they have decided to uh stop taking bitcoin or they're not stopping to take bitcoin they're charging a premium for bitcoin on their ransomware when they lock somebody's files up they're going to make them pay more a 10 premium what they pay bitcoin as opposed to monero so let's jump into this what are your thoughts just a reminder freaks

ransomware is this new breed of computer virus that was born out of uh only became really possible because we have censorship resistant digital money in bitcoin um so the idea is instead of like deleting your files or infecting your computer and taking the information what they do is they just encrypt it locally on your machine so you can't access any of your files and then when you pay them the ransom usually paid in bitcoin um they will give you the key to unlock your files uh so it's it's like basically a way of holding it hostage and then taking a money payment um these ransomware providers have had a lot of issues with their bitcoin being tracked and and frozen and exchanges and stuff like that um and it's been a weak point

of their you know bitcoin privacy being where it is has been a weak point for their operations so this ransomware provider has taken the next step and then now they're they default to monero but you can still pay in bitcoin there's a 10 premium if you pay in bitcoin and their goal is to make it monero only in the future so this is like a stepping stone for them and what i thought was interesting here is that 10 premium is basically them saying that if they accept it in bitcoin for them to be able to achieve the the proper level of privacy that they want while using bitcoin it's going to cost them about 10 of of what they what they bring in on bitcoin right like that's the price that they're setting maybe they're putting a little bit more of a percentage

there just to discourage it a little bit but that premium is basically dictating this is the the privacy premium um and this idea of a privacy premium is something that i've been trying to get across uh for for a while now and it's why i think that you know there's a lot of there's a there's a lot of uh drama between the the censorship resistant privacy crowd the the street money bitcoin crowd and the number go up crowd there's a perceived uh issue there right you have a compliance bros number go up and then you have street money on the other side and i think they're more united than they realize because i think that if it becomes easier to use bitcoin privately if the tools we have at our disposal become easier more accessible more

people use them they become more normalized um i think that helps the number go up i think they're they're they're interlinked and people don't really realize that um so this is i think a perfect example of that no i mean i agree i think again the value of bitcoin is dictated by its utility correct so and this is why we harp on privacy quite quite a lot on this podcast because i speak for myself i believe that more fun or not that bitcoin's not fungible at this point but more private bitcoin uh is is better in the long run it makes it more valuable gives it more utility and again it's just a simple concept of hey i don't want people knowing how much is in my bank account whenever i make a transaction um so tools like that's why we pump coin join that's why we're

um talk about snort tap root when we can uh these things help bring more privacy assurances to bitcoin users they provide bitcoiner bitcoiners with better tools that help them achieve privacy uh and yeah no i mean you can't deny what's in the wild i don't think and this is not and let's not beat around the bush monero is not perfect privacy either it has proven to have bugs in the past and there's still questions around ring signatures and whether or not they're perfectly private and you can have processes uh you can sort of de-anonymize people via process of elimination in some instances there um at least the last time i looked in the mirror it has been a while so maybe they uh fixed fix those bugs but

um now privacy is important we focus on it i think it's getting better too and that's the one thing like it's a it's a spectrum an ideal you strive for excuse me it's not a spectrum you have privacy or you don't um and uh we're striving for an ideal of privacy and has gotten better over time and we'll continue to get better it's actually a good uh segue into let's not say well let's bring it let's bring it into the conversation what um rafael yacobi was talking about on stefan's podcast there's such a good episode everyone should go listen to it yeah yeah we're gonna have rafael on here soon i'm actually talking to him he's gonna write a piece for dig about ofec i need to respond to the comments you just made marty

respond there's no first of all the perfect privacy doesn't exist there's no such thing as perfect privacy monero offers users practical privacy today at the sacrifice of auditability and auditable auditability is important because you need to know if there's the scarceness of bitcoin the ability to audit the supply and know how much bitcoin there is is fundamental to the value of bitcoin and if and if if the the actual token in this case bitcoin doesn't have value and that value you know doesn't accrue then you have nothing to send so you have no there even if you have privacy, there's no ability to send value because you have to pay the miners. And so the token needs to have value. At its core, Monero is basically confidential transactions and every

spend is a coin join. The confidential transactions part is very controversial in Bitcoin land. um it's it's newer cryptography it it comes with a lot of trade-offs there in terms of auditability um the the coin join part though every bitcoiner can do their part on the coin join part uh we can make we can normalize coin join usage you we can make most of our spends coin joins at the individual level so i would like to see you know i would like to i distill that as i think if you coin join you make bitcoin stronger and if you make bitcoin stronger i i think it'll it'll it'll help with adoption and it'll help them it'll help number go up i think it's all connected no i agree i agree there sort of i agree i think uh i think it's happening too like and it's just

going to take time like a lot of this um but no if anything this headline in this of this ransomware company. Is it a company? Or do we consider it like a ransomware syndicate? Syndicate's a good word. Should light a fire under people's ass. Like, hey, we need to this is something we should probably focus on.

And people are focusing on it. And I'm bullish on privacy on Bitcoin. And I think, again, going back to Raphael, that's why I brought him up. It's important that we have people like him. Lawyers and people in his position that are talking to these companies and advising them in a legal sense to stand up for privacy and individuals rights to privacy and we should not be letting

chain analysis companies and exchanges dictate whether or not coin joins are legal like they are legal bitcoin is a messaging protocol privacy is is a human right and you can't have people throwing that out because they're worried about aml kyc laws i absolutely love that podcast uh everyone should go listen to it uh my favorite point that he brought up was that these these uh chains by companies have essentially what they create problems yeah yeah what they do is they they lobby government and they lobby the exchanges to basically require them to solve the problem the perceived problem that they've created so they've like nestled themselves in there it's just complete rent-seeking behavior

and they're not even that effective well so this is the man in the middle attack i think roy sabag was talking about that we've been debating like that seems like the these chain analysis companies are trying to man in the middle attack bitcoin and it is completely like you said it's completely rent sinking seeking and self-indulgent and where they want to make a profit and build these tools and so like you said they're lobbying government and the exchanges just to make themselves useful with that being said and as we've been hinting at over the last five to ten minutes like it is possible to do that unfortunately epic with bitcoin at the moment so we should work as quickly as possible to build the tools and

update the protocol as need be to make it impossible which again i think is happening so just keeping everybody up to date on what's going on in this realm so so didn't so didn't okibi so didn't okibi so maybe i'm pronouncing that right um yeah they seem to be Sodin Kobe no it's not Sodin Kobe Sodin Okibi whatever

it's not meant to be pronounced it's just meant to be read you never when you get a ransomware request it comes it comes in text form on to something else something more uh positive uh this is a cool little explain it like i'm five u3xo uh to or uh explainer by a man named calvin kim uh u3xo for you freaks that don't remember is a hash accumulator for bitcoin proposed by taj jaija who was one of the co-authors of the

lightning network paper um and so it basically helps reduce the chain state so people can easily download the blockchain and you get the full node distribution uh increased what was your favorite part about this matt no i just thought he did a really good job of just cutting out the bullshit and just going straight to the point um so i think people should read it i mean the main the main trade-off uh the the the main pro of utrixio is i don't know if i pronounce that right uh is the main benefit is less storage uh space requirement uh the main negative is it requires more bandwidth it requires about 20 more bandwidth so that's cut straight to the point but people should just give it a quick read if you couple utrixio with early though is the bandwidth

requirement lower than it would be now without early that's it well it requires it requires it doesn't require a fork but it requires these special archival nodes that serve you the data i believe um what do we think about that i gotta think about that i don't know i still don't really have a strong opinion one way or the other just thought it was interesting what's more interesting is this new trezor upgrade yes it's very interesting we were riffing on this for quite a bit before we hit record so the coolest thing they added was actually there's i think there's two cool things so they added three things they added the ability to if you have multiple passphrase wallets you don't have to turn off the trezor and turn it back on to switch wallets you

can just toggle between multiple open passphrase wallets like if you so if you use a passphrase you get a completely different wallet. And if you have multiple of them, you can toggle through them. The next thing is they have a white pin. So if you're in duress, you can put in this white pin and it wipes the device. That's also useful because if you've doxed your keys to wallet.trezor.io, you can actually use the white pin to erase it and reinitialize without connecting it to a So you can erase it, reinitialize, and then from that point, just use Electrum with your own personal server and not worry about it. So that's a really nice way of doing that. I think that's even more useful in terms of doing that, generating new keys, than it is as a duress ability. And then the third thing is they're using the SD card slot as basically two-factor authentication. So the issue is the Trezor, because it doesn't have a secure chip, it's pretty easy to pull the seed off of the Trezor if you have physical access to it.

It's only encrypted by the PIN, and once you pull that data off, you can basically brute force it with all the PIN attempts you want and get in. But if you use this SD card feature, the SD card also holds a key that encrypts the seed. So the seed becomes encrypted by the PIN and the SD card. So if you don't have the SD card, you take it out of the device, you store it somewhere else, it becomes way, way more difficult for an attacker to actually decrypt your seed if they have access to your treasure, physical access to your treasure. It seems like a very creative way of handling this, what is a hardware issue. And, and from my, from my perspective, I was looking at this hardware issue.

I was like, there's no way that they can mitigate this issue short of saying, use a strong pass raise, which is basically what they've been saying, uh, without, without releasing new hardware. But this is a very creative way. So I'm curious to see if, see people try and attack it and see if they can break it. Yeah. Now shout out to the Satoshi's labs team, uh, treasure team. I'm figuring this out.

it's been the biggest knock on them they've they've putting their head down and getting shit done that's been they've been getting attacked by their competitors pretty pretty aggressively mainly ledger just call them out um attacking their hardware doing presentations about it and that's another topic that comes up from time to time are these hardware wallets sort of eating each other alive and eroding trust and just the the product overall in the long run should they work together obviously we do need to know where these these products have weak points so that we can fix over them like trezor just did but should they be as adversarial yes attacks are good yes adversary responsible disclosure is important

yes exactly that's the point i was trying to make let me put it this way make it responsible we would never have gotten this trezor sd card feature if they hadn't gotten attacked so many times they were forced they were forced to innovate there and it's good to see everyone do you worry about do you worry about the adversarial nature or not the adversarial is the wrong way they should be adversarial um is it anti-competitive the word i'm looking for i don't think it's anti-competitive it's super competitive no yeah it's very competitive no i think i think it's not the word i'm looking for either i think this you know uh penetration testing of all these devices is super important it's like one of the most

productive things that can be done in this space sure there's all this there's twitter drama and shit involved but like that's just a twitter issue like there's just there's always twitter drama about everything like you go into like anime twitter and there's drama so i i just think that's that's that's a product of social media um but i think at the end of the day like i want to see all these devices get ripped to shreds i want to see i want to and i want to see more threat modeling on the nodes now that you know fortunately we have way more people running nodes i want to see more of that as well i just i think it all should just be uh and like network level everything just attack attack attack uh you know one of the beauties of bitcoin one of the reasons i love

bitcoin is because it's this open permissionless network so literally you can and it's worth billions of dollars so you can count on the fact that there's teams around the world short of any bug bounty programs or responsible disclosure agreements that are trying to break this shit all the time that's why bitcoin has lindy is because we know everyone's trying to attack it all the time so as it goes on it gets stronger and that's awesome no i agree i agree i'm sorry freaks i'm a i'm a bit uh exhausted here today i'm not being as uh i think we all are man as eloquent eloquent and clear-minded as i as i usually am am i even get a beer i just want to get a beer at a bar with my boys and i'm super restless and i just i i just my mind my mind has

just been off lately me as well not me as well um especially cooped up with three kids under four and four adults yeah it's uh no kids in my citadel so i got that going for me eventually there will be hopefully um one day one more bull run all right we'll run through we're gonna run through a couple updates quick here because i've got something to do in 50 minutes and i'm trying to get this out before i have to do that samurai wallet version 0.99.93 is out if you are running samurai wallet make sure you update that sticking on samurai updates whirlpool cli version 0.10.5 has been released make sure you update that our graphene os guide matt's guide is out there people are using it people are liking it how are you liking graphene

or your android running graphene as your go-to device these days graphene is fucking awesome i love it uh all the good app developers provide apks directly uh f droid has all a ton of open source apps available um the biggest so that's the biggest issue is like paid apps on google play and stuff you do not have access to you should petition uh i think you just petition your app developers to release APKs for them. Those are direct downloads. F-Droid does have Aurora Store on it, which is a mirrored version of Google Play that uses anonymous account credentials. That's why you can't use it with paid apps. That's not ideal, but if for some reason you absolutely need an app that's only on Play Store, that is open to you. My biggest drawback is the

camera uh open source camera just doesn't uh it's just not great you know like i might go back to just carrying it like a point and shoot camera around with me because i use camera a lot of my day job um the reason i put the graphene os guide here is because most of the freaks have heard us talk about this for the last couple weeks um i put it here for convenience because of the other story that we're going to talk about which is apple and google baking in bluetooth tracking directly into the os and graphene obviously the ideal is to not carry a phone with you at all so like if you could be janine about it we had janine on the podcast she doesn't carry a phone with her that's the ideal i can't do that i admit it um graphene is like the next best option and

and the beauty of graphene is it it doesn't have any of google services in it so you will not have this this baked into the os this this bluetooth tracking which they're claiming is going to be private. But when you look at the spec, I don't know how they can handle denial of service issues and prank issues and people claiming that they have coronavirus that don't without including personal identifiable information. So I see them adding this. And yes, the surveillance state already exists globally, but this is them furthering their capability, the ability to tell if two people are within immediate contact of each other because of open Bluetooth connections

and they're normalizing that surveillance. They're getting people used to it. We're gonna bake it into the OS. And if you have Apple and Google on board partnering on this, that's like what? Like 95% of phones or something like that. So like that's fucked up and we need to push back on that. And the most practical way to push back on that

is not lobbying your politicians, which you should by all means do it. it's not signing a a petition on change.org it's installing graphene that's how you do it or not carry a phone yeah definitely yeah it's fucking insane dude they're really lifting the veil they're not hiding it anymore like hey we want to track to track you and that's going back to the hysteria and the models the models the models were used to scare us and now our fear is enabling them to basically institute these technologies that are leading to the digital panopticon.

They're cattle herding us. They're using our fear. They got the fear of that model. Those models, they're like little cattle prods with the electrocution shocks at the end. They're shocking us in the ass. They're saying, hey, hey, hey, we're scaring you. We're scaring you.

You're scared. Now that you're scared, hey, come over here. Come over here. Install your Bluetooth. We're going to track you and make sure you don't get this virus. It's fucked up, man. so fucked no it's one step away from the chip people don't realize we carry the chip in our pocket uh but we can take it out so that we have that benefit the next step is is is a is a

bracelet that you can't take off uh right we see that happening with with people in kentucky right they're using the the house arrest bracelets on people and then this it's a very slight step from that house that bracelet that you can't take off to the chip uh we're very very close so we're living in the pods already uh the chip is close um bugs are next and you just got to be vigilant you got to fight back bugs are coming soon they're going to create like a i saw a cartoon somebody in a vr a vr helmet uh they're linked up to like an iv and they had like a jerk off tool jerking them off that's what they want you to do they want you in the chair in your pod with your vr camera on they're gonna give you a jerk off tool where you can get yanked without doing any

work they're gonna hook you up with ivs of bug injections and uh they don't want you to do anything again they're cattle hurting you they're prodding you with that that that fear-based electric cattle prod you're getting prodded into a digital panopticon wake up wake the fuck up i bet you i bet you if you ranked um bug protein eden per capita in the united states california would be number one i will agree with you on that so maybe they aren't as healthy as i thought otherwise well you know bugs aren't necessarily unhealthy i'm just i have no intention of eating them and neither do i and i don't think they're a good source of protein the other update the The other update I wanted to talk about was our favorite, my favorite VPN.

I got Mariana, too. It's his favorite now. Movad.net just released mobile apps, two new mobile apps for Android and iPhone. They already supported both of them through the open VPN app on Android and just like the shitty built-in VPN thing on iPhone. But now they have standalone apps that use WireGuard, which is a superior protocol. So it's just good to see them adding that there. It's just a nice step in the right direction. Yeah, shout out Mulvad.

Really like the product. Sponsorships are open if you're listening, Mulvad. This was interesting. Central banks recommend global stablecoin bands. And this is the biggest use case of DeFi right now. you had been on the pov crypto podcast and you basically called this and they want to ban this stuff i did um and this is the part of the podcast where i where i think i'm gonna i'm gonna bend the knee in some regard so uh what what were you saying when you were on that podcast what was

the debate and then how did it come to fruition first of all we linked the podcast in uh the show notes you should go listen to it i think that was my quite possibly one of my favorite episodes that recorded outside of tales from the crypt um it was a very good episode um you said that it is that that stable coins are one of one of the main use case it is the main use case of ethereum right now the majority of transactions are stable coins by by volume i believe um by the amount of money cent um i said that the major difference between um ethereum holders and bitcoin holders is how much they how much we you know value censorship resistance and how much censorship resistance how important it is um and where you are in the threat model of that how much is enough

um and ethereum is quite short on that you know it's not state resistant and at the end of the day um if you're not state resistant uh you're gonna have a ton of fucking issues and we see that happening already we see ethereum centralizing um and actually on on on that the the host uh david hoffman uh he he was saying like the u.s government isn't a threat like they're never going to come down on us it'll never happen and actually while we were recording that was when trump tweeted out his tweets like his anti-bitcoin tweets um so that was that was pretty ironic um and i i just this idea that they're surprised that they're going after die and the other stable coins uh is is fucking infuriating like you shouldn't be surprised that should be the

expectation the whole time uh states have a monopoly on money they strictly control it they strictly regulate it this is why bitcoin is important this is the whole point uh so for them to be surprised at this point uh is like it just it just proves everything that bitcoiners have been saying this whole fucking time uh and then on top of that uh we have we have the maker foundation getting sued right now uh for for money loss right like this is the whole thing like guys like there's decentralization isn't something to slap on your marketing budget you know it's it's absolutely integral to the whole fucking system because you create central points of failure that can be sued that can be regulated that can be thrown in jail uh you know it i i i

That's all I got for you. Yeah, so I loved it. I love it. I mean, we've been saying this for years now at this point. State is not the final boss. It is the only boss. That is who we are fighting. That's why I love Eric Voskule, even though he may be extreme in some cases.

He has a very clear definition of Bitcoin is that if it can't route around the state, it doesn't matter. It doesn't work. it's not fulfilling its use case with maker so there's a proposed class action lawsuit seeking more than 28 million dollars from maker foundation and several of its affiliates set to be filed in the u.s federal court so i wouldn't be surprised if the new york department of financial services gets this one and they are particularly pretty piss poor when it comes to uh being beneficial for cryptocurrency in general um it was so funny in a draft complaint the maker foundation a non-profit organization supporting the development of maker dial

decentralized finance protocol so they're coming out the foundation that's supporting the decentralized finance protocol i wouldn't be surprised the other week there's there's two other weak points of maker it's the price oracles that determine what the current eth price is because on chain you can never an admin key too doesn't it yeah it has well it has there's a governance system and it's controlled by like seven known holders have like the majority of stake they're like vcs and shit he hasn't so you hit them wasn't a16z have like 80 or 60 i wouldn't be surprised if they get sued or pinched as well uh that that's like the main thing and here's the thing it's like they're marketing all the ethereum guys defy defy defy like the d part is the most

important part we have finance already it's all kyc'd and regulated and controlled and surveilled the d part is the important part and that's the part that's been neglected this whole fucking time and you can't just get that after the fact you have to build it in in in the in a proper way to You're trying to achieve that. Yes, things like U-Tree XO, Erle, things that allow you to download the full state of the blockchain with low bandwidth internet. Distributed proof of work.

So you can decentralize the ledger. Yeah. Distributed proof of work is very important. Running your own full node. Coin joining. All this stuff, it comes together. Provides utility to Bitcoin. Staying on the stablecoin tip, Libra is back announcing they're going to have many simple single currency stablecoins in their suite.

It's funny that they announced that as soon as the central banks recommend a global stablecoin ban. And again, let's make this clear. Stablecoins may be a huge use case right now, but the whole goddamn point of Bitcoin is to replace the U.S. dollar and to replace the fiat money, easy money, central banking system that the dollar is the reserve currency now. yes it may have ultimate utility now but if we're talking 10 20 30 50 100 years out like bitcoin is supposed to replace these the underlying currencies that these stable coins are are representing and attempting to peg at a one-to-one ratio they're cool to some people and are very useful for some people in venezuela and other parts of the world at the moment but if we're thinking long term if you're really adopting a low time preference view on bitcoin and how it will progress i mean it was

created to replace this stuff so yeah just keep that in mind you can't do a peg stable coin without a trusted third party and if you have a trusted third party there's security holes and and and you don't have censorship resistance because that third party can be pressured they can steal money from you they could fuck shit up um so that's the inherent problem with all this stuff i do want to say that we did call this this libra thing um my whole they were way too ambitious in the beginning uh they wanted to basically become a their own quasi central bank and they wanted to have a basket of all this shit and make their own currency um if you're gonna try and play by the rules and do this whole corrupt bullshit political lobbying thing

the clear play has always been you just do a very basic stable coin you just peg it to the us dollars you follow all regulations you do you submit to full kyc aml give them more surveillance powers than they already have over a lot of their current traditional finance uh instruments um and then if once that's out of the gate then you slowly start creating a basket if you want to create a basket you don't just come out of the gate and just like oh we're creating a new currency um but it seems like they they figure that out but i would still like to you know i actually fuck them i don't want them to implement bitcoin uh they would become talk about chain analysis i said this from the beginning as well like they just added a bitcoin wallet to whatsapp

and combined it with all the data that facebook has and this open ledger and then you combine with kyc data they would be the preeminent chain analysis fucking company and that they can make a ton of money doing that uh hopefully none of them are listening to my ideas matt um no and this i guess this last topic is a perfect example of why these are bad design choices for from a user perspective and why you shouldn't choose these stable coins as products yesterday was the ninth anniversary of the famous black friday for online poker which the domains for poker stars full tilt poker and absolute slash ub poker got seized by u.s authorities and players woke up one morning and all their funds had been seized and they were not

able to access them because these poker sites and the payment processors that they use to process the funds that their users put on the sites were trusted third parties that got pressured by governments the u.s government particularly to shut down and people again we had friends we know many friends that woke up one morning and substantial substantial amounts of money on these uh sites and they just did not get access to it were you aware of it when it happened at the time it was nine years ago so i would have been in college i probably had heard about it i was in college yeah i remember it clear as day i actually this is what originally sold me on bitcoin my original bitcoin thesis was if it just was used for u.s gambling uh you know like when i

discovered it in like late 2012 early 2013 i was like if it's just used for u.s gambling this thing is is worth it just that just at that alone um and it really opened my eyes to basically the issue here is exactly the issue with the stable coin providers um and other so-called d5 products and most of the shit coins is that you have a trusted third party and if you have a trusted third party you can seize their stuff you can throw them in jail

you can pressure them and that's exactly what happened and in this case what they did was they went after the payment providers specifically they went for Visa, Mastercard, Bankrails because that's what was in reach and without Bitcoin

you can't have a BitMEX situation right? because bitmex you know technically doesn't allow u.s customers uh and and checks ips but you could use a vpn and then it's like don't don't ask don't tell right but the actual money transfer into bitmex could never work because they just close down all the the on ramps and off ramps but when you have bitcoin all of a sudden you're able to do this regulatory arbitrage move around the world and operate your business from a different part of the world than the regulations in question as long as you have that censorship resistant money that can can move between these

systems yes it i mean wake up people especially the defy people wake up here and the whole defy thing's confusing why the fuck you're gonna take your bitcoin or eth and like leverage it up on one app go to another dap and loan it out and blah blah blah there's just like too much too much user interaction with that whole thing it doesn't make any fucking sense to me we're trying to make everything simpler yeah and it's yeah it's it's like the opposite of staying humble it's like lever up all your money why yeah i don't know it seems unnecessary laughing at it if you have a scarce asset like bitcoin the idea is as more people adopt it the price should go up you know everyone gets caught up in the s2f model and is it having priced in and all this shit there's only

so many bitcoin as more people adopted the price should go up when should the price go up eventually you know it's it's just it's basic logic um and if that's the case then then you don't need to go searching for all these outsized returns you don't have to make risky investments you don't have to go try and invest in index funds and lend your money out and and collect interest and do all this shit because the actual money should appreciate with everything else right and and and that's the beauty that's the fucking beauty of bitcoin one of the main beauties of bitcoin yeah we're keeping it simple stupid freaks it's like i mean it's hard but people don't like there was somebody on twitter yesterday like he's been he said he's been in it and focused on

defy actually let me find who it was he was in portugal and said only like this week had he actually come to the realization of why bitcoin is important i'm gonna find this thread give me a couple seconds here um and he shouted out pierre and bitstein um for it but no it's it's it's uh the whole defy again it's confusing it's and just from a design perspective from a ux perspective you're you're depending on too much user interaction people don't want to fucking do all that work they just want to fucking have money that they know is secure they know is sound they know is insensible and they want to be able to use it and your average joe doesn't think about levering up and loaning out and fucking doing a lottery with his money found the found the thread

rival voices at no silver v on twitter finally got the bitcoin value thesis check this out bitcoin is basically hard money what does that mean the supply of dollars can be artificially inflated the supply of bitcoin cannot there's just a finite supply once it is mined it is mined forever there was a recent bitcoin sell-off a few large holders in need of liquidity sold too many small buyers what effectively happened what effectively has been happening is that bitcoin is getting transferred from people with high time preference to people with low time preference okay and it goes on i'm not going to read the whole thread but yeah like matt just said it's pretty simple there's 21 million bitcoin there's close to 8 billion people on this planet they're all eventually

they'll notice the benefits of a peer-to-peer distributed cash system that cannot be shut down and has no trust in third parties, and they're going to want to get some of that. They're going to want to get some of that, and there's only so much to go around, and it's better to get in early. You should get some before it catches on. Might be a good idea.

Shutdown resistant, but I 100% agree. Yeah, what'd I say? Seizure. Cannot be shut down. And you also said uncensorable. No absolutes, Marty. I'm sorry. Very hard to censor.

Very hard to shut down. There we go. Very hard to seize. Make nearly every spend a coin joint. Try your hardest. PDEP. Let's hurry up with that. Is PTC Pay Server close to getting PDEP?

And PayJoin? I think so. I think so. Yeah. Shout out to our friends at PTC Pay Server. That would be awesome to see. All right. We've got to wrap it up here so I can get this posted before my next recording.

Any final parting notes? No, I just wish all you freaks the best. Stay sane out there. Work out. Figure out ways to work out in your situation. Try and get light in the air. Don't snitch on your neighbors. uh maybe you know go buy a prepaid card while you can wear a mask and gloves without anyone

you know note in caring uh normalize mask usage in general after everything is done we just gotta just keep wearing masks all the time and stay humble and stack sets peace and love freaks keep it real