TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2020.07.06

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Square crypto provides grant to steve myers - IRS is seeking surveillance tools to track lightning network transactions - Coldcard 101 by bitcoinqna - Coldcard guides by kisbitcoin - myNode v0.2.11 - Samourai Whirlpool CLI v0.10.7 - Electrum v4.0.2 - Eclair v0.4.1 - RTL v0.8.0 - Raspiblitz v1.6 RC2 - @getumbrel teases new dedicated node software suite - UK FCA bitcoin research report - hardmoneyfilm.com - Iran gives bitcoin miners one month to register with the state - Venezuelan military seize 315 ASICs - PSBT signing in fully noded - PSBT Toolkit by benthecarman - Coincenter bitcoin privacy explainer - Crowdfunded distributed bitcoin awareness project - Coinbase trying to IPO - Signal downloads surge in HK as new draconian laws go into effect - USDC blacklists address with $100k USD - Tether has blacklisted $5.5 million in USDT this year - Marty's favorite app Tiktok pumps doge - Boltz Channel Creation Swap 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 when 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 Bent, here to introduce this episode of Rabbit Hole Recap. Matt and I just had an incredible hour and a half rip. I think you guys are really going to like it. I think you guys are really like our good friends at Unchained Capital. I think you're going to like them because they're helping Bitcoiners by providing financial services for Bitcoin users with a security-first mindset. And they really show this with their products. First, 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 or three keys. You can use a treasure or a ledger, soon to be a cold card as well, to create two keys that you control at all times. So you can always move your UTXOs in and out of the vault without the need.

You can always move them in the vault without the need of anybody's help. You can just send it to any vault, let alone your own. But if you need to move the UTXOs out of the vault, you can do so by yourself without the help of Unchained. But if you only have one key at hand and you need Unchain to sign that second of three to move the UTXO out of the vault, they are there to do that for you. On top of that, they have their Bitcoin collateralized loan product in which you put Bitcoin up as collateral and you're able to get same day U.S. dollar liquidity. As long as you're keeping your Bitcoin margin in check and paying back that loan, you do not have to sell your Bitcoin. This is tax beneficial and allows you to keep your Bitcoin. Friends don't let friends sell Bitcoin.

on top of that they're rolling out their otc desk which is available in texas and one other state at the moment i can't maybe more states at the moment i can't recall off the top of my head but they're rolling that product out as well and that's going to roll into a full suite of exchange to custody so you're going to be able to buy bitcoin in bulk via unchained send it right to a multi-sig address which you have full control over on top of that they're doing amazing stuff in regards to open source projects they've open sourced the multi-sig wallet constructor behind their vault program via caravan and caravans getting better and better by the day on top of that they've they're contributing to protocols like hermit and slip 39

which help uh bitcoin or self-sovereignty and uh granularity with the movement of utxos and multisig quorums and they have their incredible blog series parker lewis putting out great orange pill material with gradually then suddenly drew bansal doing so with his hodl waves content and um and uh bitcoin sci-fi works talking about bitcoin space center of hash uh buck presley is also doing some incredible work on the content side wrote something great about how lightning could be used lsat particularly for a anonymous tracking service over the lightning network if you did want to do covid tracking not that i'm a fan of it but it's pretty cool uh thought experiment buck explained there so go to www.unchained-capital.com to check all this out

that's www.unchained-capital.com to check this out this episode is also brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking cash app all right i think you freaks may know about them but if you don't know about them let me tell you about them they're working hard for bitcoiners helping you stack sats send sats receive sats and sell sats if you so please and they're making sats a standard we're not buying fractions of a bitcoin you're stacking whole sats tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of sats via the cash app and did you know that a doge is worth 50 sats it's very expensive for one doge coin apparently those freaks on tiktok are pumping doge and they really have a bad unit bias it's

it's expensive when priced in sats 50 sats is a lot uh make sats a standard on the cash app on top of that they have cash app investing if you're into stonks not that i am but i know some of you freaks are into stonks uh you can use cash app investing to stack slivers of stonks you don't need to buy a whole stonk. If it's too expensive, you can buy as little as $1 via Cash App Investing. Because this is all connected to your bank account, there's no four to five day waiting periods. You can start stacking sats and slivers of stonks today. Cash App Investing is a subsidiary square and member SIPC. And guess what? Cash App may be your bank account soon, if it isn't already. It is for many people out there, but they're offering account number and routing numbers

for individuals who want to direct deposit checks into the Cash App. New, bank, better tech. As always, use the code STACKINGSATS. That's S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S. When you download the app, you're going to get $10, and $10 is going to go to our good friends at Owl's Lacrosse. Here we go. We got a good hoot, this one.

Owl's Lacrosse. Not that dirtbag owl who started his own podcast. Owl's Lacrosse. Woo! Woo! Enjoy this rep. Check out the Cash App. Check out Unchained.

Just love one another. You know, we need more love in the world. Exude love wherever you go. Good love, not cheesy love. Good love. Take care. you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting

like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to rabbit hole recap it's almost 2 p.m on a thursday matt's pouring himself some obon uh you know what do you have a clark moody's dashboard up no i thought you did didn't you tell me you were doing it i have it up i have it up it's seeing you pour that whisk me whisk me whiskey makes me want to go get a glass i go i can i can walk the freaks through it

okay let's do this i mean we've had a little price dump i'm gonna go get what's up freaks uh some blant i'm gonna get some blantons and uh and a glass i'm happy you're joining me okay freaks the current price is nine thousand two hundred and six dollars sats per dollar that's ten thousand eight hundred and sixty two sats for each dollar you can get with the recent pump and doge you can get 50 sats for every doge doge is expensive sats are cheap the gbtc premium is 17 right now that's like the boomer normies shows that there's interest there when we watch that premium current block height 638 491 let's see what else do we have here tor capacity on the lightning network is 441 bitcoin 444 bitcoin even more

that percent is 45% I think that's a little bit higher than last week I think we said it was 42% last week let's see what else do we have the hash rate 122 exahash difficulty retarget happens in 580 blocks

the mempool is currently sitting at 12,079 I'm going to pull up mempool.space real quick ah mempool.space is showing a median transaction fee of about 38 sats per byte right now obviously if you lower your time preference you can pay a lot less than that always pay two sats per byte if you want to get into a block before katan who says he only does one sat per byte uh samurai whirlpool is currently sitting at 1144 unspent bitcoin presumably those are sitting in the remix pool their current tx zero volume for the last 30 days

is 398 bitcoin so a little bit less than what we've been seeing um we are in the summer doldrum months we shall see how that plays out use whirlpool freaks it is it is a summer doldrum months going over uh some more uh samurai hiccups and graphene hiccups for me i had the was in that initialized tour loop again and realized i did fix the clock on my graphene phone had to do that manually so be aware of that did you not have it set on auto I was pretty sure I did had it on auto east coast time maybe because I let it die

my phone died when I rebooted it if it wasn't connected to the internet immediately because I don't have a sim card for it I'm just using the internet well anyway freaks if you run into SSL errors you know where an HTTPS site isn't loading

or if you run into tor errors it could be your system clock that's important for both those things yes they got a line um another big week of updates it's a long list a lot going on here what um i'm going to start with news fresh news just announced this afternoon square crypto giving out another grant to a good friend steve myers brother of richard myers and this grant is so that steve could focus on building a bitcoin development kit which is similar to

the lightning development kit that uh the square crypto team is building out uh except that it's focused on on bitcoin wallets and it would help uh make the creation of mobile wallets particularly a lot easier to build from scratch as uh developers would have a development kit that uh could be leveraged and used by many people um to to build bitcoin functionalities into a mobile wallet which is pretty big deal square has been killing it with these grants love to see it uh steve is the twin brother of richard myers who has been on the pod and the freaks know from gotenna um who's been working on on the mesh project over there global mesh labs absolute boss both of them so this is definitely very well deserved just a little story when i

met steve i met him at bitcoin 2019 and he came up to me and his name tag was reversed and he said to me huge fan of the pod and he introduced himself and i like i thought at first i thought richard was just playing fucking games with me because he never mentioned that he had a twin fucking identical twin brother or maybe they i think they told me they're not identical but that's bullshit they they look very similar if they're not next to each other i've never seen them next to each other yeah i've never seen them in the same room either um but they are together richard and richard and steve have uh they've built like a p2p bitcoin exchange too what's it called bite a bit is that what it's called it's bite a bit or um i think it was called

was it bite a bit or is it like btc acb or something like that um i don't know why bite a bit came in my head let's check github hopping on the github uh hopping on the twitter i think it's bite a bit i think i was correct at bite a bit ab they're located in sweden peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange focused on security and privacy and non-mobile devices so shout out to steve shout out to square crypto beast in these grants speaking of grants had a great conversation with randy brito from the locha mesh project and i think it's a project very deserving of a grant if any of you grant givers are listening to this episode right great episode go check that episode randy check out their building

we missed you i was super bummed you had to bail on that one i was super bummed i'm glad that they're doing they're offering a tom shoes model because yes they are i would love to buy one give one you know it's uh and it's going to be much needed in uh venezuela i don't even know if we have this on the list but it just came out i saw it in the noble bullshit bitcoin group uh the venezuela government just sees more miners from bitcoin miners they actually seized them on a truck so they like stopped at a checkpoint or something like that yeah there was i thought i put it on the list but yeah anyway we can talk about it now they seized 315 asics and then they announced it

on twitter in spanish and then cointest translated it which is funny how that works out i don't know But we have the Coindesk link there for English. But in Venezuela, mining is legal, but you have to register with the government. And we actually have a tangent there is Iran just said that they're giving Bitcoin miners one month to register accordingly there as well. So unfortunately, I think we'll probably start seeing this around the world. and hopefully what we have going for us is smaller miners could probably get away with that not registering and secondly hopefully you know governments world governments don't have good track record of coordinating with each other so hopefully they're not able to coordinate on this

as well yeah it's an interesting attack vector having to register your miners because miners do come with um serial numbers and stuff like that well more importantly they use a lot of power right so if you have a big if you have a big mine like that power draw i mean that's what we saw during the war on drugs i mean that's still going on right that they use like thermal imaging and shit and power draw calculations to see where like there's a shit ton of power going to some kind of residential warehouse neighborhood that they don't know what the source is yeah that's how venezuela has been identifying the um the warehouse miners behind the grid that's why at great american mining it's one of the reasons why we think off-grid mining

needs to become more popular uh it's harder to sort of detect that which is yeah i mean that's yeah like that's a government attack right using their insider knowledge of the grid system to identify and uh separate and attack if you will bitcoin miners that has always been i think one of the ultimate state attack vector theories um or scenarios right where they seizing the minor first you register you make the miners register and then you tell them you know you blacklist certain transactions on the minor side and they have to you tell them they have to comply otherwise you seize their equipment right you say if you can't include transactions from these blocks uh and just hopefully this is where that

global coordination comes in right and then the fact that you do have some miners that are mining on a much lower scale, smaller scale that are harder to detect, that are using VPNs and whatnot to connect. And those miners will presumably still mine the transactions that might end up on one of those blacklists. And I think when Eric was on the podcast, this is one of the things he talked about uh is that the the fee pressure from those blacklisted transactions is is beautiful be so high because you you just if if if like the majority miners let's say 70 of miners aren't mining your transaction because they're they're all under whatever government's control or you know de facto control then you raise your fee and the independent miners that aren't under the

controller directly incentivized to include it in their blocks yeah bringing up like another attack or mining pools that's one thing here in north america that i want to be more vocal about on this podcast because i do think there should be heated debate around this topic particularly with mining pools and especially as institutions get more involved with mining the need for wait-listed mining pools and sort of uh mining pools that are okayed by the government like contributing to slush pool how do you know you're not accepting transactions from somebody from iran or venezuela and um like do will they try attempt to force like wait-listed mining pools on the industry and is that an attack vector that

leads to a sort of partitioned network in a way yeah i mean unless we see i kind of did a big picture when i was explaining it earlier i mean unless we see the better hash component of stratum v2 get implemented the mining pools are the ones that are actually constructing the blocks and including the different transactions in right not the individual miners so if you were to try and pressure someone to do it you would be pressuring the mining pools and i guess by design there like if you were trying to pressure certain miners into following that compliance rule you would you would be saying you have to use this pool or these groups of pools if you want to be legal in america or some other country uh and and that's where a different game theory element comes in

right which is the fact that these miners can switch pools relatively easily for low cost so hopefully we do have pools that are are are not necessarily even freedom oriented they're just profit oriented right and they see that they can make more money if they accept these transactions that are paying higher fees that that these other mining pools aren't putting in their blocks yeah i mean good for those i mean and that's better that's the shitty part about all this if that comes to fruition is it really uh diminishes the potential profit of those miners that are forced to use those government mandated pools and so i think we should get ahead of this as as a mining industry specifically and

I asked Preston Byrne about this. I was a little disappointed in his answer, but I think there's more to dig in. Yeah, it's very lawyery. But I think there's more conversation around Bitcoin as a legitimate messaging protocol. That's what it is. And just sending these messages as free speech,

that should be allowed, no matter who you're sending it to. In this case, a pool. That was a good episode, by the way. um yeah i mean look i think at the end of the day these countries that implement these kind of policies will be shooting themselves in the foot and that's part of the game theory that that helps secure the bitcoin network uh but this is it that's going to play out on a longer term time scale right like these politicians they they are super high time preference they aren't they

don't care about 15-year repercussions of what they implement. They don't care about 20-year, 30-year implications. They are purely focused on the next re-election cycle and what, you know, will make them look good in the short term and what will get them as many lobbying dollars as possible. So there might be a messy period here for certain countries, like if they do decide to shoot themselves in the foot. But in the long term, Bitcoin should be able to weather that storm. And And it should play out, you know, in Bitcoin's favor long term. Yeah, no, and I want to be perfectly clear. I'm not worried about Bitcoin.

I'm worried about the mining industry here in the United States specifically, because I think we may be a first mover in that regulatory direction. And again, like you just mentioned, I think it would hinder the mining industry here in America and Bitcoin would be unaffected in the long term. but it could set some some capitalists back here to the home but i mean we can home state we could easily end up in a situation where like let's say like 40 of mining is in the united states and like 40 of mining is in china and then 20 is scattered around the globe and the 40 in america are implementing some level of blacklists and white listed pools that are implementing those blacklists

for them and then in china they're implementing a completely different blacklist than in in america and then the 20 independent aren't doing either of those right and so you end up in a situation where unless there's like global coordination the it the impact on the actual bitcoin network shouldn't be too severe uh that's that's the theory Yeah, but is Bitcoin too hard to use? So it wouldn't be hard to use for a user, right? Because you could run a VPN or run your nodes through Tor, and they wouldn't be able to tell that you're sending a transaction

from inside the borders. And that could get picked up by the Kazakh pool or whatever. Well, look, it's not a coincidence that I talk about privacy things so often. You know, the users do need to be educated here, especially if they're all coming in through KYC. All the newcomers are all coming in through KYC. they're leaking a ton of private information uh you know it is a step in the right direction is using your own node through tor but that is not the only thing right and this is why we talk about

it so often on on this here podcast no it is fun to play through these game theoretical situations like are the incentives of bitcoin such that actually game theoretically would disincentivize governments from even trying this maybe it's something that's um tested for for a few months to maybe a year and the the uh severely decreased profitability sort of forces miners out of america and then the u.s misses that tax revenue it's like all right we'll be more uh we'll be easier on on the bitcoin miners or something i mean i just think it i i i think you are correct in direction i just think it's longer time scales right i think i mean like if you look at a example that's closer to home that's completely on bitcoin related um new york

governance process has completely shot our economy in the foot um and eroded a lot of the a lot of the facets of new york city that made it such a valuable tax harvest center for such a long time right and that took you know that took like eight years 10 years 15 years of bad policy to start seeing the effects before they might inevitably turn it around but then we're talking like another 10 years for them to turn it around right like these things take a while to play out unfortunately and as i said earlier like these politicians they're straight high time preference and like the incentives are broken like you can't even really blame them too much uh even though we blame them all the time as we should uh because their incentives are broken

right like their incentives aren't set up to care long term what what the what the fuck do they care what happens in 20 years they don't they don't care that's why we need term limits this is why we need to take as much power away from the government as possible because like matt is alluding to or actually directly saying their incentives are all fucked so has new york city regressed to 1970s new york city once again we got to increase our time scales like not yet you know but it could happen right uh if if we don't turn the boat around quickly it could happen eventually and it and then once that happens it's going to take a while to turn the boat around again yeah we've got uh we've got military planes flying overhead they're on to us i'm not i dude i

don't know i know you you were mad at me the other week because i'm a new yorker who left and i'm talking shit on it i'm not talking shit i'm just being uh descriptive you're being a no corner about it you sold your bitcoin you're being bitfinex you sold your bitcoin at nine hundred dollars and now you're being now you're being anti-bitcoin about it that's my time that's my my frame of reference uh i hope it gets hey here's me buying some sats stacking some new york sats right now like i hope it gets back to where it was because it was pretty dope when like the city's hopping and bustling and things are are peachy in new york city it's one of the most incredible vibes i've been around in the world yeah i just hope that you know we'll see we'll

see look i'm i'm bearish as well i'm bearish as well i just think uh i have more right to be bearish than you do that's all i'm saying yeah i mean no you have uh you have more skin in the game up there than i than i ever did but i also want to get the fuck out so we'll see but then i can't talk as much shit see that's my i just gotta hold myself to the same standard no don't self-censor don't self-censor be true let's be honest like as a new yorker maybe you actually have a greater responsibility to be as honest as possible yeah i mean we'll see we'll see what happens this election cycle uh yeah we shall see is andrew yang gonna run the priority i you know i think you i think that's

you know there's a lot worse options than than having yang as mayor we'll see i mean it can't get much worse than de blasio so look all i can say is like imagine being a presidential candidate and dropping out before all of this shit went down like that shows me a lack of conviction you know so we'll see what the fuck happens like the whole democratic primary pool dropped out before before fucking any of this shit went down like like pre-lockdowns pre-rona panic pre all this stuff they were like oh well nothing can change between now and the dnc and they just fucking all dropped out like little bitches like no conviction whatsoever but can you blame them you know they took people's money they didn't take my money but they i in my mind that's a

bad it's a bad look that's all that's all i'm saying it's the bad look that's uh how do we treat bitcoiners that disappear in the bear market you know yeah they're starting to come back exactly no conviction is it just me or does it feel like we were getting uh some more mainstream uh eyes not on bitcoin particularly unfortunately but this whole tiktok doge your favorite app has been pumping dogecoin this is the last uh uh last line on our list we're going to move it up because it just came up naturally but yeah the fucking tiktokers are pumping doge it's up what like 35 last week we need a bitcoiner to take one for the team create a tiktok account and start shilling sats on tiktok we appreciate your sacrifice i'm not gonna do it fuck that app

you know get a burner phone use it with tiktok i guess you know but don't use any bitcoin applications on the same phone that you use that app they're logging everything get a tiktok specific phone but we need someone on there to show sats to the zoomers yeah i mean i noticed because i just saw like the barstool guys are getting in on it um it's got got some uh some tinglings of early 2017 and i said this on the swan bitcoin podcast yesterday like i think this time around i'm just like gonna just not get as mad at the shit coin pumping and dumping as i did last cycle yes it's terrible but it's inevitable dude people are going to touch the stove but this is what i've always said um i don't think shit coins are a threat to bitcoin but they are a

threat to the users who speculate on them right so i'm going to continue to try my best to help users avoid you know burning themselves too bad on the stove but for a lot of users yes that's what that's what's going to have to happen they're going to have to get burned and then they learn like that is the unfortunate reality of the situation but i think people should realize that these aren't it's not a threat to bitcoin that's like the number one thing that i think people a lot of times lose sight of um it is a threat to the specific users that choose to speculate on them completely agreed and like just be aware and if you're trading all this stuff that actually rolls into our next topic just

be aware the like short-term capital games is taxes income uh you're not making like like-kind transfers is that the correct term uh when you when you trade in now these cryptocurrencies and the irs is actively looking to find ways to de-anonymize lightning and we already know that they're teamed up with exchanges like coinbase to um to get data on on their users so be aware i got an in at uh one of the major surveillance firms after i did my call out to the freaks um how so and i know this specific platform does not there they have they do not have any tools to try and unwind coin joins and they have zero to they just flag coin joins they have a tool that can flag coin joins and they they do not have any lightning capabilities yet

so we may be in like but like we said on this pod there are there are a bunch of different ways for them to be tracking lightning transactions so it's not a panacea but yeah privacy wise particularly yeah particularly where your nodes touch beat space like make sure they're running through tour but like the other thing people don't realize and i just want to mention this because someone actually uh reached out on twitter and asked for to be brought up on the podcast and i misread the question at first and it was about strike um our boy jack maller's new app uh which is you know from a ux perspective seems seems awesome uh i have not used it uh so those are my two disclosures uh jack is a good friend that's my third disclosure um two things

privacy related to this app first of all you're paying lightning invoices so strike does know strike strike knows the pub key for the node that you're paying okay and from that pub key they can see if it's if it's not connected through tour they can see the IP address so they have a location of where that note is located um and they if let's say you're running from your home and you're not running a vpn on your other stuff like your ip address is all over the internet all the different sites you've gone to and stuff like that so it's it's it's it's a very revealing piece of information they also know your public channels that you have that you're broadcasting and the balances that are related

to that as well so so some people are using strike which is not its advertised purpose to stack sats to themselves they send an invoice to strike that pays their own node this is not as private as you think it is you're leaking a ton of information to strike which we just mentioned which i just mentioned so it's just it's it's important to keep that of mind unless you're using like a custodial lightning wallet which is like a weird little nuance there where if you're using like wallet of satoshi or blue wallet custodial it's a shared it's a shared node so it isn't linked to you but then you run into custodial risk not your keys not your coins so this is just something to keep in mind uh lightning provides much better privacy

to the sender than the receiver so if you are putting your own lightning invoices in there you are giving up a bunch of information if you want to see which information you're specifically giving up go to lightningdecoder.com you can paste an invoice in there and it will show all the information that is in that invoice so would it be good to hop strike wild a satoshi node you know uh i'm not going to give any specific advice here but this is something that people should keep in mind the other thing is I think he's using Plaid for the bank account integration and we've been very very uh critical of Plaid's business model in the past and we should be here as well to be consistent like Plaid is man in the middle by design uh they take your your bank

account login information to connect the service it's not a it's not a privacy first service by any means so just I I like the UX flow that it's just a phone number and a debit card and whatnot to sign up but just people should realize that this is still KYC you are giving up a ton of information here and just don't make any mistakes you might regret in the future just be very careful with it be aware freaks be aware and there's two um my list isn't loading perfectly right now so i'm not certain if the one thing is not on the list but i am certain the other isn't um two things i want to bring up here uh talking about usability of lightning and then privacy uh coin swap privacy particularly

the bolts team i wrote about it earlier this week came out um with uh an app that i think that you can call and be an api that automatically sets up channels for you both uh inbound and outbound and with you see so you basically send bitcoin to a wallet and you have a balanced channel that you can then send and receive sats from and this is just a huge ux um improvement in the sense that a user would simply be sending a UTXO to an address either in the Bolts wallet or somebody's implementing the tech that they have, and it would automatically open a balance channel for you. So it's basically the same UX as moving from a Cash App wallet to Samurai

or something like that. And then instead of spending at the base layer, you can spend on Lightning, which I just think is a huge step up from a UX perspective. I missed this. Who released this? The Bolts team, B-O-L-T-Z. So what's the flow? You pay them fiat, and then they set up the channel? No, it's completely non-custodial.

So you pay them Bitcoin on-chain, and then they set it up for you? By using a walleter app that integrates Bolt's channel creation service, end users can now send the on-chain funds to Bolt's, and in return, Bolt's opens a fully balanced, ready-to-transact lightning channel to user's node with inbound liquidity. This adheres to the ubiquitous intuitive deposit flow in Bitcoin wallets that users are already familiar with, making the whole experience of going from installing the wallet to doing the first transaction as seamless as possible. And from what I understand, these wallets are completely non-custodial to connect them to your node.

And then they just have this service within it that sets up these channels for you. That sounds pretty awesome. Definitely throw that link in the show notes. I got to read more on it. Yeah. That sounds fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

it's a huge step up in ux it was yeah i wrote about it on monday that could be really big there's tuesday if it's an open api that's really big for wallet developers that want to add non-custodial lightning without destroying ux because non-custodial lightning right now is very difficult to do in a ux friendly way yeah they um they it's an open api and then they're also rounding everything through tour as well um the api calls uh so yeah the bolts team underrated i think it came across my uh radar this week um actually reached out so we're gonna get an episode with them so we can hop on and ask them a bunch of questions about what they're building awesome looking forward to that um so the second tangent i want to go on just because

this caught my eye right before we started to hit record was bob macklerath uh who's pretty great mind in the space very underappreciated uh in some circles that he's very appreciated and in a lot of circles within the bitcoin space uh big he helped start the bitcoin where was one of the first regulars of the bit devs new york meet up the white paper series in new york and he has an argument for combining coin swap and state chains with more traditional on-chain mixers and he gets into taint and the question that was posed to him is what are some of the challenges with implementing coin swap and bob had to say i'm going to give you my utxo you're going to give me yours some of the other proposals state chains have the same property where i'm going to

get a new utxo if there is a pool of utxos out there one of them came from a dark net and is blacklisted somehow somebody's going to get that utxo they're going to get the full utxo it's going to be a bad one this is a strong disincentive to use such a system whereas with coin join i have 100 inputs and 100 outputs and i don't know which is which so each one is tainted one percent the coin swap proposal one utxo that somebody's going to get and it may maybe you is tainted at the 100 level and the others are not tainted at all and then he sort of quote tweeted uh that tweet from bitcoin transcripts um and elaborate he said that wasn't like the the clearest explanation but i'm trying to argue for combining coin swaps and

um and coin joins basically no that makes a shit ton of sense um if we had chris on the pod right now he would say i think he would say i'm going to try to speak for him but he's a legend so don't hold me to it uh i think he would say that that is more of a uh a growing pains type of thing uh in the beginning it will be absolutely necessary to use both uh but long term when you have these swap protocols in place you're destroying that heuristic that allows them to automatically blacklist things identify it right because they can't assume they can't assume that that utxo any utxo transaction has been uh is from is just one person sending to themselves over and over again right so so the the common ownership the common input ownership heuristic

gets gets completely destroyed now will will regulatory bodies um understand that right away like no absolutely fucking not like this goes back to our previous conversation like that it they it's going to take a while and so in the beginning it's you know it's definitely going to be very advantageous to have to have both and like the more tools the better like at the end of the day the more tools the better we just um let's have a lot of options let's have a lot of options for bitcoiners let's combine all the options no i thought agreed agreed and i thought this was a very nice uh steel man from bob i like that uh that uh sort of rigorous debate around this right now as it gets built out all right we got a lot a lot of updates again it feels like all these

software projects have like a push a week now at this point uh but before we get to that our boy bitcoin q and a uh bitcoin q and a.com is where he's posting all this stuff he has a cold card 101 uh post that you guys should go through very thorough um go through what is a cold card why use it all the features how does it work create your own wallet blah blah blah the whole gamut you can imagine blah blah blah if you've been listening i mean if you've been if you've been i mean i say blah blah blah because it'd be so long to get through the minute detail that our boy bitcoin q a goes through that blah blah blah was meant to say like you know how thorough this is thank you bitcoin q a we appreciate you um and then on that note we also have the cold card guides that keep

it simple bitcoin has been commissioned to do from coin kite um and he does a very professional job as usual and that includes a full setup and spending process of using electrum and multi-sig with cold card uh so those are worth checking out we linked to the youtube playlist um in the show notes and they have more videos coming out they i think they have at least 10 more videos coming out um and they already have like 12 or 11 videos out so very very useful little videos like and and it's you can watch the whole playlist or you can it's all broken down which i really like that format where it's broken down so you can see the individual things in like five minute videos six been in videos yeah um they've been pumping those out shout out to keep it simple bitcoin and the

coin quite team for putting out such dope products whether it be the actual hardware wallet or the tutorials that teach you how to use the hardware wallet speaking of hardware uh if you're running a my node version 0.2.11 has been released and this comes i was about to read release notes but there are are not in front of me yeah they don't put their release notes on github um but no bullshit bitcoin has them uh the big thing so there was actually two updates since the last rhr there was v 0.2.1 and then that had a couple bugs in it so then they released v 0.2.11 um while this is all in between our two rhrs which is i mean that's good to see updates the big one the absolute huge one in my mind and i've been sitting on this because i've been

talking to taylor about it behind the scenes i didn't want to like blow up the spot uh is now when they do the key checks and the upgrades right like you have a my node you have a premium key option um but for both versions of my node it was pinging his server for the key checks every 24 hours so now it goes through tor the whole process goes to tor so you're not exposing your ip to his server and to his isp which is a huge massive upgrade in terms of privacy for my node users so definitely go upgrade to that they also added https support for caravan they upgraded btc rpc explorer the the blockchain explorer that they have that they use as your own node they upgraded lnd they added spectre desktop they added ln bits um huge upgrades really good to see my

note is becoming a much stronger project yeah somebody's been using my note too just a word to the wise um i wouldn't run all the applications at once uh just be selective with what you're running at any given point in time because that will sort of heat it up slow it down and you'll have a hard time catching up to the chain tip because it'll be sucking up so much cpu I think in general, especially if you're using the CoinJoin features and the Lightning features where you have your keys actually on the nodes, you know, these Raspberry Pi 4s are 70 bucks, 50 bucks. The SSD, which is historically the most expensive part, is like a little over $100. um if you have like any kind of substantial amount of bitcoin you can afford to run multiple of them so like split up split up what you run on each you know compartmentalize and it it increases your

both your privacy and your security i i think it improves it tremendously and it doesn't have to all be you know you can you can run a my note and a raspi blitz you can run a raspi blitz and a ronin dojo you know like a noddle and and a ras by blitz like all these things you can you can combine and choose uh and i i think like it does it does help you in that regard like you you want to split it up you don't want to run it all on a single box i agree i agree just for security purposes and functionality purposes and ideally different locations if you can even pull that one off you can run one in an office running one in a home you know that's even better if there's a if there's physical entry then they're not all in the same place yeah um be aware and be cognizant

of this and just experiment with this stuff you learn a lot by doing it it's it's fun to to actually use bitcoin in a self-sovereign way and confirm everything for yourself do not trust verify um yeah it really is legitimate when you do play around don't play around with your whole stash don't be too right no no no um you may be running whirlpool through your my node and if you are uh version 0.10.7 of the cli so this isn't good this is cli um has been released so you guys can upgrade that and i don't think it's pushed to my node yet i think my node's on 10.6 i know noddle's on 10.6 um but yeah whirlpool cli 10.7 has been released uh good to see they they fixed a bunch of bugs yeah a couple fixes now it shows UTXO counts deposit pre-mix and post-mix plus the

total balance so you know how many UTXOs you have in each stage of this process yeah I've been messing around with the the Whirlpool GUI quite a bit very impressed with the with the interface and the ability to just hit mix or queue or stop so just one of the things about Whirlpool is that You can run it directly from your mobile device. The CLI is gorgeous in that it runs 24-7. So if you're trying to take advantage of the fact that you only pay an entrance fee, which, by the way, people are still confused about, which is completely fair because I was confused about it at first as well. It takes a little bit to wrap your head around their fee structure. but the the the pool fee is a fixed pool fee if you go into each pool it's five percent of the

pool size you go into the million sats pool it's five percent of a million sats regardless of how much you send in and regardless of how many times you remix but if you want to really take advantage of that ability to remix at no cost to yourself indefinitely then the cli really comes into play because you can run it 24 seven. The GUI can run standalone and it doesn't run 24 seven though. It's still like if your computer goes to sleep or something, it will stop running. Uh, but it runs, you know, more constant than if you just did mobile. If you do run the CLI, then you can use the GUI to connect into the CLI, um, just to, as an interface. But really the CLI is doing all the legwork the cli's thing running 24 7 that's where it runs on your my note that's where it runs on

your ronin dojo that's where it runs on your your noddle or whatever dedicated box you decide to set up your cli on yeah um it's getting better it's gotten better uh since i started using it earlier this year you know they brought zero leak on board and zero leaks fucking hustler he's just making shit happen so that's really good to see shout out to you zero leak um speaking of releases and getting better uh electrum had two upgrades since july 3rd well they had one on july 3rd and another on july 8th and the most recent version version 4.0.2 removes some old corrupted non-BIP-70 invoices and other minor fixes after the major release a week ago on July 3rd. I remember seeing some tweets about the non-BIP-70 invoices. What was going on with those?

I'm not sure exactly. I think they're the old format invoices. The key here is that this was already released. We talked about V4.0.2 last episode but it was the beta now it's in the main channel now it's in the stable channel it's a proper release uh but i mean that the big thing here just in general is that you have their python lightning client which i still think i'm pretty sure no one corrected me on twitter so i'm still pretty sure that it's the only lightning client with coin control it's a massive thing uh that no one really talks about in terms of privacy like every wallet should have coin control with labeling um but they also have multi-sig support for cold cards which i do want to reiterate

we're we're a little bit ahead of the game here in terms of like super user-friendly multi-sig with your own node yeah you told somebody to wait six months wait six months all right six months we'll reassess in six months you know i think we're on the verge here we have specter which is looks fucking awesome in terms of user friendliness we have caravan that they've been iterating very quickly electrum is now in the game here with the with the cold card and the psbt support like we're very close but like you also have to think you know one of the reasons one of the main ways people lose their coins is their own mistakes or if they if something happens to them and their their heirs are trying to recover their bitcoin they have trouble recovering their

bitcoin right so complexity is the devil in those things so you have to be very careful you know like if something happens to you or is your wife and children going to be able to to get this Bitcoin. And I, people shouldn't, you know, with cold storage, like, you got to be low time preference with your cold storage, you know, and you're not, you shouldn't be trying to move to the latest and greatest, and then seven months, eight months down the line, try and move to the next latest and the greatest. Like, in my mind, that's not how cold storage should, that's not have cold shorts should be approached right so you need to be very careful here i don't get ahead of yourself absolutely experiment with it uh the integration is is is fantastic but it is still

very complex and and there's a lot of ways you could shoot yourself in the foot so i just think that um people shouldn't be rushing into these things and i i also just want to reiterate and like i didn't like call them out directly but it's still like grinding my gear so i might i might call them out directly right now um i'm like i'm not so sure about the trade-off like the trade-off balance isn't very clear that necessarily like if you use one of these hosted multi-sigs solutions where they're a cosigner and they have a key if that is necessarily a benefit over using, you know, multiple different types of single SIG, where you still have compartmentalization, where it's not all your eggs are in one basket,

but, you know, you don't have multi-SIG. So, like, I, like, like, for instance, something like CASA, like, you do have, like, a closed source app is giving you your receive addresses. I don't know if that is, for some people, that might be desirable in terms of recovery is easier they can call casa you know they can talk to someone they can be like there's a legal there's a legal document the person died they left me these things in their will you have someone to talk to that's you know obviously an improvement in terms of heirs we know unchained does does similar with you know we when we spoke to will cole he talked about that um but you know multisig itself is in the panacea as well right so like we're still a little bit

away but i feel like we're very close we're we're very we're very close feel free to experiment feel free to fucking do whatever the fuck you want i'm just an idiot on the fucking podcast but i just this is my opinion this is my opinion on the matter i think we're like six to eight months away from like truly very user-friendly self-sovereign multi-sig where you can do it all open source all with your own node and you you minimize your trust as much as possible all right freaks marketing your calendars july 9th 2020 or excuse me january 9th 2021 we get to ask matt if six months has has proved to be the uh i look forward to the correct amount of time to wait i look forward to it mark your calendars set your reminders i want to i want

twitter to blow up if we're still on twitter on january 9th 2021 about matt's promise of six months and the other thing is that's not a promise i wish to reassess in six months the other thing is i behind the scenes justin moon i'm pretty sure is also working on junction uh so like these those four projects electrum junction specter caravan uh we're gonna see so much improvement over the next six months like lily can't can't leave lily out of there you know there you go when are we dropping that podcast tomorrow tomorrow or monday or monday we'll see lower your time preference it will come when marty's ready to drop it let us know let us know on twitter if you want it tomorrow or or monday we did drop two episodes already this week and this

rabbit will recap will be the third so i don't want to inundate you with too much content if you can't drink from the tftc spigot with uh with as much speed as the markets can take the money from the fed spigot uh staying on updates eclair version 0.4.1 has been released this comes with improved path and improved pathfinding algorithm brand new flow inspired mpp split algorithm support for uh posture sql db i don't know how to say that support for static remote key and better on-chain fee management. So if you're running Eclair, Async has launched version 0.4.1.

So if you're looking to upgrade, you can do so. And then RTL upgraded. Yeah, big upgrade. This is compatible with every Lightning implementation now, correct? Yeah, the big one is Eclair. That's why it's fantastic following your previous announcement. uh is yeah now it supports eclair so it already supported c lightning it already supported lnd now it supports eclair uh i wouldn't say every lightning implementation because it doesn't

support electrum electrum's python implementation and i think there's one other implement is there he said he said every major implementation in his tweet uh suhab did i believe wow suhab our boys suhab just throwing darts at uh electrum um no i mean he is correct like electrum is not a major lightning implementation yet if it will be we will see it's yet to be seen but this is awesome i fucking love rtl uh sue hebb and his wife do amazing work uh as lead maintainers of that project so uh power to them this is fucking awesome shout out to that power couple and we got to get them on the pod soon we do we got i want to do it in person but me too i want to do them all in person i know it felt good being in person with jeff yesterday it's just uh and then antoine

a couple weeks ago it's just it's we gotta we gotta get a rendezvous in brooklyn officially lined up at some point i'm down we can use my backyard i love that um it's sitting there i'm paying rent on it might as well get our money's worth right um we'll make it happen soon the staying on upgrades for as by blitz version 1.6 rc2 don't know what that rc2 stands for what's release candidate 2 so it's beta uh the big thing here in my opinion is open arms project joining box that he's been working on since january um is about is so now it's implemented in rc2 and you know so it's it's on the verge of getting put into the stable release and this is a proper gui for uh join market join market yeah so this this can make it a lot easier to use join

market so i'm very excited about it um i am currently testing the ux seems it's it's it's very solid the ux improves the ux improves and speaking of ux improvements umbrell uh teased a new layout or a new app that has a very sleek design uh to to manage your node you pointed this one out matt i haven't heard of these guys until you put this on the list i didn't hear about them until i saw it on twitter um it's so it's a new software package uh that will be presumably competing with the RazPi Blitzes and the MyNodes and the Ronin Dojos of the world where you can run it on your own hardware. I assume they're also going to release their own hardware as well, right? So you run it on a RazPi that you build yourself or you buy a pre-built from them.

The UX looks fucking gorgeous. So all of our UX freaks out there would be excited about that. I I know a lot of you guys out there have been talking about UX a lot recently. So this could be very exciting for you. Myself included. For me, the reason I really want to highlight it is because I know these motherfuckers are red-pilled because in their tees, they show join market integration, right? And that's basically, once you start delving into the world of privacy and coin join, like that's when i know like you mean business and that's when i you know i really want to

highlight it so i'm pretty excited we'll see what they have we really have no idea whatsoever but the teaser shots are cool and and more options are better once again more options for bitcoiners absolutely better optionality you guys can go check this out at getumbrell.com that's umbrl get umbrl.com we'll throw it in the show notes of course but if you want to get early access they're allowing you to put your email address in and beyond join market looks like they're teasing they have btc pay server and tor compatibility as well do not put your main email address in there freaks whenever an unreleased service is asking for emails there's always the possibility that they're harvesting data on big corners so do not just

go rush and do that i don't do you remember what was it uh project q or something do you remember what i'm talking about that that stupid shit coin that uh larry white is that his name was an advisor on lawrence white yeah yeah i know exactly what you're talking initiative q don't remember the initiative and they promised that they were going to airdrop coins to the world which we've already debunked as like a that's a bullshit there's no such thing as like fair airdrop uh like a fair distribution uh we've talked about that a million times but my point is is that they had you put in email addresses and then they had like a ref link system where if you got like five other people to sign up with their email addresses they did it like these can always

be information harvesting things let's get the the bitcoin curious people the the crypto curious i did quotation marks for the freaks who can't see me right now to to sign up and then they get a harvest of email lists right so you want to you want to use burner emails for these things you want to don't use your main email address you shouldn't have a main email address but if you do do not use it line those burners up freaks line those burners up um damn we have a lot to get through we gotta we gotta wrap it up i got i got a hard stop in 35 minutes so let's rip through this uk fca came out the bitcoin research report uh i dove into like the first few pages it seems pretty milquetoast nothing too crazy right i love that i love that term you used it in the

vanju pod too yeah it's my word of the week milquetoast um yeah i mean they the big thing is they estimate that a little under four percent of the uk population owns cryptocurrencies which sounds about right if I was going to go off my gut but we'll link to it in the show notes if you guys want to go through it they asked 3,085 respondents

if they heard of cryptocurrencies and if they said yes then they gave them the rest of the survey so the actual sample size is 2,258 British people shout out to you Brits holding bitcoin out there um cooperating with the uk fca we'll see you we'll see how that plays out uh hardmoneyfilm.com came out over the weekend humbled uh about this i read about it in the event on monday but they pulled some clips from tftc over the years uh it's a really good 35 minute

documentary on on hard money why it's important how it was bastardized and how bitcoin can help us get back to a hard money standard i think it was very well done and that was done by um i don't want to butcher his name if you click it it says his name because i also forgot um james richard james richard james r james under dash btc i just have to say like it was just very professionally done uh and the length was great you know what is it like 35 minutes 34 minutes yep perfect length like great i love how he's like all old school clips and cartoons just to really drive home that this uh debate around hard money and has been um been around for quite some time people have been talking about it for for quite a while and and pointing

out that when money is easily printed out of thin air um it's not really good for most people so shout out to uh r james underscore bitcoin rj underscore bitcoin or r james underscore bitcoin r james underscore btc and also i would just like to say that that would be hilarious you know how like the film the film posters always have like the quotes uh like you know saying from the new York Times saying like how good they are or whatever like your quote that you just said it was like we're hard money just like not good for some people or like whatever you that would be great for a film poster hey think about it Jim James Richard out of Richard James Richard James um we dm'd earlier this week too and I feel like an asshole I'm sorry Richard

i'm sorry um out of australia crushing he's coming out with a part two it's going to be more focused on bitcoin's technical aspects so be on the lookout for that as well we already hit on iran and venezuela psbt signing is now officially supported in fully noted which is pretty huge and psbt toolkit was released by our good friend ben the car man And over the weekend, he did a little hackathon over the weekend, create a PSBT toolkit so that you can easily construct, broadcast, and move your PSBT transactions. What's really cool about the combination of those two announcements is that you can do PSBT signing in fully noted, and then with PSBT toolkit, you can do everything but sign. So I just thought they were funny next to each other. hey ben the car man and uh our friends have fully noted get together let's let's bridge this gap

here speaking of bridging gaps coin center is hard at work trying to bridge the gap between the lack of knowledge that exists on capitol hill and uh everything that goes on in bitcoin particularly privacy so they wrote a nice explainer on the difference between mixers coin join implementations and privacy coins uh it's pretty well done i like the graphics nice graphics yeah yeah the graphics are really good they earned their donation this year i will be giving them my annual donation very good job mirage dm me it personally i did like it a lot it was very well done they did a good job as usual extremely well done yes um this is pretty cool it crowdfunded distributed bitcoin awareness project uh ideas are like flames.com i saw the

stickers somebody sent me a picture of a fix the money fix the world bitcoins sticker and i believe frankfurt germany a month ago and now it seemed yeah now it seems like that uh or it might have been munich i'm not positive which which city was but um they sort of open sourced the design for 18 stickers with slogans similar to that um and they are offering sats if you download a sticker a pdf create a sticker and post it somewhere 615 615 sets uh a um a a photo of of a distributed marketing campaign a little hat top it's another big little hat tip to american hodl right there shout out hodl and they also have uh so they have a so they set up the fund but then they have a crowd fund page running through btc pay that you can crowd you can contribute if you know so they

have more money to to give because they they they dedicated 615 000 sets so that's a thousand stickers um worth of proof like if you if you post proof that you that you did it you get paid out um yeah fucking cool we need to pump those stats let's pump those stats freaks uh coinbase big news today coinbase trying to ipo has uh went around the wires today that they're getting their shit in order to prepare for a initial public offering coinbase going public that naked mole rat trying to get that public money what are your thoughts on this fuck them are my thoughts always um i wonder if this had something to do with them selling surveillance software to the IRS and DEA to try and build good favor with the SEC who has

to ultimately approve their IPO. So will the SEC approve the IPO of a company that has been clearly selling unregistered securities to retail, which is the SEC's purview? This might be a way for them to kind of curry favor with them so we will see how this plays out um obviously you know we've seen the markets lately i i do not blame them now is a great time to ipo it seems like everything is just fucking banging on the ipo look at nicola fucking electric car company that has never produced a single car and took millions of dollars in ppp money uh has like a 28 billion dollars is it higher than that now 28 i said 4 billion you said 20 it was 28 billion at one point so i'm not sure maybe it fell back down but it hit 28 billion off the backs of robin hood

traders tick tock tick tock pump the shit out of that before they pump doge we need our tick tock satchelers you know use a burner but we need them we don't need them but like hopefully that will help people avoid the shit coins if they just i don't know but is i mean is what we're doing even worthwhile are the tiktokers just gonna pump doge you make that the reserve currency of the world hey where's the tftc fan account on tiktok you know i'm not gonna do it marty's al al's across you freaks get out there we also don't forget btc pay hat we also have that account I think Marty's owl has an enemy now too That came real quick

Who's the enemy? My favorite is the rivalry that they have with Swan The owl versus the swan It's a friendly rivalry Shout out to all of our owls out there You freaks are I love you freaks You're the best

It's funny to see those pop up um hopefully the tiktokers don't ruin it for all of us just make all this for not which i don't think is going to happen but i think it's pretty funny um it is crazy how that uh that herd mentality really persists over there at tiktok and they can pump the herd mentality persists on all the social media platforms they're just the latest and greatest and this you know yes there are massive privacy concerns with tiktok but there's massive privacy concerns with all these social media apps um tiktok is just particularly egregious and they do it's the first one that's really blown up that's not an american technology company right so usually they're arms of the

american intelligence services and this one's an arm of the chinese intelligence service uh just distributing the spyware around the globe yes great transition to the next topic which is signal downloads have surged in hong kong because they're trying to get away from the draconian laws that went into effect hong kong has officially fallen beijing has complete control over over the law in hong kong extremely sad to see and if you're paying attention to this they're looking at taiwan next they're trying to taiwan basically just uh they're they're looking at taiwan and saying hey you're gonna get what hong kong just got some might call it a cuck mentality but u.s is not going to step in they're not going to step

in we're not going to step in it's not going to happen no one's gonna i don't know it's gonna stop it feels like we might be in a cold war china it's not official yet i think with uh pulling out of the world health organization um pompeo coming out against tiktok particularly which we just talked about and um i think trump's starting to talk more about oogers as well you know you know what's interesting uh tiktok's not not uh tiktok's banned in china they don't they don't you can't access it in china which i thought was interesting it's like specifically an international spyware they have jesus christ stop using tiktok free anyway but this signal story the reason i put it there is twofold uh first of all uh on the back of this new legislation

that basically allows the hong kong police to access all of your data on these different platforms um telegram came out and said they will not comply with any hong kong requests which means they'll probably get banned soon then after that twitter and facebook also followed suit and facebook subsidiaries you know instagram and whatsapp um signal grandstanded on twitter they were like uh we don't have to make this statement because we have no data to give over which i thought was a funny little grandstand. But the main reason I put it here is because I think there are a lot of corollaries between encryption and Bitcoin. And I think the people that think that we need to market Bitcoin to pre-coiners, they're off base. It's not a necessity. It obviously

would speed up a hyper-Bitcoinization process, and it does create less pain for the individuals that might not otherwise discover Bitcoin until later. But I think with both encryption and Bitcoin, they're both defensive technologies. They're both things that allow individuals to defend themselves from their states if their state is becoming more authoritarian and oppressing them.

And when people realize that they have a need for this defensive technology, they will seek it out. And that is what we have seen with encryption. We are seeing it with Signal right now in Hong Kong. i i was i was just on satoshi in venezuela podcast and i was discussing this like i don't think you have to explain to venezuelans why they need privacy why they need better money they live this firsthand and when that happens when they realize the need is when they will seek it out and when they will commit themselves to learning about this stuff because it is you know once again

it's the privacy versus convenience trade-off is the sovereignty versus convenience trade-off it is always more difficult and you you need to have that implicit need to to really to really grasp it for most people i would say completely agree yeah i mean i said this yesterday on the swan bitcoin podcast like bitcoin markets itself it enables peer-to-peer distributed transactions for anybody who needs them and when they need them bitcoin will be there for them and it's it sells itself the whole infatuation over the marketing shit it's like getting nauseating it's it's i mean yes more better marketing and shilling to pre-coiners can definitely help but i don't think it's it's completely necessary to make bitcoin succeed in the long term bitcoin speaks

for itself and those who want to make bitcoin adoption happen faster like hey i do as well but you can't force people into this you personally other circumstances will do that and like signal isn't marketing to hong kongers they built a good product that defends hong kongers rights and when hong kongers realized they needed it they came in swarms right that's the result yes very good observation there matthew um stable coins tough week for them bitcoin is my stable coin the last topic on the list is uh came out yesterday jeremy allure and circle our black listing an address with a hundred thousand dollar uh of tether or excuse me usdc held in it so something we talked a lot about in the podcast like these stable coins will eventually have

whitelist full kyc and i like how everyone's surprised distributed yeah we've been talking about this for years literally um and trusted third parties or security holes people get it through your heads they can be pressured by governments they will be pressured by governments yes so the news of usdc came out which is circles um uh stable coin that came out yesterday then today apparently tether is blacklisting list too it's just news to me i thought tether tether was pretty base but they blacklisted 5.5 million in tether this year alone and the entity that pointing this out it's called center it's basically run by uh coinbase and circle too so no so coinbase and circle center is the foundation that runs usdc

right so they're the ones who blacklisted the usdc stuff and i yeah it's like a consortium of circle coinbase and a couple others but tether is like bitfinex the same people who own Bitfinex, own Tether. And yes, they've been blacklisting for the last, this year, they blacklisted $5.5 million worth of Tether. Look, this is where censorship resistance comes in, right? And the reason Tether has been this popular to begin with is because they've been skirting US laws and other laws around the world. So it should be interesting to see how this holds up if they can still maintain their popularity if they are blacklisting so much um this still is a drop in the bucket compared to the total usdt but you know it's just a matter of time

it's just a matter of time where either they're going to blacklist your coins or uh the whole thing just implodes in itself right yeah yeah it's you could death by many ways pick your pick your route with these stable coins it'll be interesting to see i mean die is marketed as a trustless stable coin but obviously the maker foundation has a lot of power over the maker dow which distributes die from what i understand so it'll be interested if that um maker dow entity gets pressured by uh authorities to to initiate similar blacklist and We know, I'm pretty sure, A16Z holds a lot of, or a very big portion of Maker, so that's a centralizing factor with that particularly. Yeah, I mean, Maker is way more centralized than people realize.

And it's got a bunch of other risks in terms of being super complicated in terms of their incentive model. so that's another thing what didn't come out that there was like something like 300 million more die than uh in compound whatever that defy app is then the maker foundation was reporting or something like that well no i don't really understand it completely but compound is like derivatives and leverage and shit right so it's like die is completely emotional compound is my understanding i mean i i tweet i tweeted this out and i'm keeping updates on it uh d5 just looks like a huge expedited cdo bubble to me i think you're just gonna what took uh eight years for the credit uh excuse me collateralized debt obligation market

credit default swap markets as well to collapse in the traditional financial system i think we'll see something similar happen in the DeFi space in a much shorter time frame. Tweet stamps. Sats are my staple coin. Yeah. That's all we got. We can riff here for a few

minutes. What's on the top of your mind? So, I love the Vandrew pod. I was kind of called out on my mass statements. And I'm a gambler. I'm a gambler, marty so i i want to propose something to you at the end of this rhr um i think people look i i will start off every statement because i wholeheartedly believe this that mandatory masks are absolutely bullshit any kind of mandatory mask ordinances or or rulings or orders uh because

they aren't laws um they should be fought and they're complete bullshit this idea and i do agree that it reduces like the human element right which you guys discussed on the podcast the one thing i want to say here is that authoritarians and governments that want to oppress their people hate masks, okay? And we've had anti-mask laws on the books in most of the developed world for hundreds of years, okay? In New York, it's been illegal to wear a mask since the mid-1800s, okay? Practically illegal. When they decide to enforce it, they can enforce it. It's selective enforcement. They used it in Occupy Wall Street. A lot of the laws in America are based around the Ku Klux Klan when they were bigger in like the mid-1900s. Some of them got

struck down as unconstitutional because we do have a constitution in America. But if you look around, Canada has anti-mask laws, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Great Britain, Hong Kong. these places they don't like masks so we should absolutely fight against mandatory mass laws but i just wanted to i thought an interesting actionable bet because we had something similar it wasn't a bet but we were discussing it on the pod when we were not sure what the actual implications of corona was and we said what 25 000 deaths in the u.s right which is interesting to look back on because it's a lot more than 25 000 deaths uh

in two years i think masks mask usage in new york city is going to be illegal again would you bet me that that won't be the case no i wouldn't i don't i i don't i think that would be the case right yeah that's what i'm thinking so i think that we should absolutely fight back against this but in terms of like devoting how much time we devote to it is like there's there's no grand conspiracy to get us all to wear masks like that i i don't think i think they were very reluctant to have people wear masks to begin with that's why they said they didn't fucking work or anything in the beginning yeah i mean we were talking about the mask mandate because particularly here

yesterday governor murphy mandated everybody wear a mask outside yeah and our canadian friends are saying because they just got the mandate yeah but it doesn't make any sense like just from my perspective like yeah masks are good for privacy but we should fight back against the state snooping on us like that it is an uphill battle obviously and that's why we bitcoin and talk about privacy and how we can improve that a lot but at the end of the day we should fight to get our system to a place where we don't need to fight for this privacy as hard like it should just be a given but i agree giving given the uh the circumstances that we currently find ourselves under that's not the case um yeah no i hope you didn't think i was calling you out we were literally talking

about no i love when my name gets mentioned i stay humble matt you know but i i i i smiled when my name got mentioned but i i just wanted to like what i'm trying to say is like i i i'm completely against the mandatory masks right and i i i don't think you i don't think we should need masks to protect our privacy and protect our speech and but i and i also think that it depends where you live right like if you live in like you know rural america like whatever like you definitely do not need masks for any kind of privacy right but in new york city remember think about our commutes in new york city right we were walking past a thousand fifteen hundred cameras on on the way to anywhere we went so you could have like the best privacy ever and you were getting tracked

all you could get tracked all around the city maybe not yet maybe the face of recognition isn't there yet it's there in china and stuff like that maybe it's a 10-year thing or something like that um but like just as i think that mandatory masks shouldn't be a thing i think illegal being it being illegal that you wear masks shouldn't be a thing and i know it's gonna be a fucking illegal again it's been illegal for so long and they're gonna go right back to it um so i do i i look forward to when they're illegal again so we don't have this controversy then when people just accept that it is obviously a privacy tool no it definitely is and i think people should be able to decide it should be able to wear a mask if they want to exactly that's all i'm saying that's

that's the point i'm trying to get across i completely agree with that don't try to make me wear a mask absolutely not you don't have to wear a mask you can use tiktok if you want i'm not saying you i don't think we should ban tiktok talking to governor murphy do you think we should ban tiktok i yeah it is a slippery slope i don't think we should be on the side of yeah is it one of those things we have to touch the stove hey you're you're downloading an app that's literally sending every keystroke and copy to your clipboard to the chinese government servers i mean do you think china should ban i don't think people should use tiktok but i don't think we should ban it do you think china should ban facebook

no do you think facebook's sending every keystroke to the nsa yeah no probably right i'm on your side of the chinese citizens no i said i i was on the side of like just get it out of here but now it's like it's a slippery slope like if people want to make that stupid decision of downloading that app i have a buddy i think we talked about last week i have a buddy who went viral on tiktok right did we talk about this last week and i meant to send you the link i haven't sent you the link yet i'll send it to you after this i promise uh don't send me malware i convinced no one thing tiktok got right in terms of virality is that you can view the things through a browser right which was smart they

don't make you sign in or anything they might lock that down eventually but that's like a smart virality play that just allows you to easily share it with people who don't have the app but i convinced him to use a burner phone for it at least right it's like slow steady actionable steps like you know i'm not going to convince him to to give up his dopamine rush of his virality but i convinced him to at least use a fucking burner phone for it well thank god he has you thank god we have you matt it's a scary world out there mask tiktok stable coins thank god we have bitcoin thank god we have matt odell i want to push back on that but i'm just a dude well and i i'm grateful for you i'm grateful for all the freaks and i also wanted to uh

we shouldn't call them stable coins anymore they're not stable coins right we why are we using their vernacular unstable coins fiat pegged coins how about that that's kind of good peg coins let's just call them peg coins and we should uh one of you freaks out there can can create this graphically designed inclined freaks uh peg coin it's just a coin with somebody getting pegged on it um and if you don't know what pegging is pierre rochard and i talked about it uh on the first three-part episode of tales from the crypt if you want to go back and listen to that ah that was a good rip almost an hour and a half in

I'll add that link to Bolt to the list and I got a call here in 7 minutes so I'll post this hopefully by 4.30 Eastern if not you freaks can make fun of me stay humble Saksats peace and love