TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2020.09.21

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

This week Marty and Matt discuss: - Lightning node firewall circuitbreaker - Iran power plants making mining moves - Timeline of bitmain power struggle - Bisq v1.3.9 - BlueWallet v5.5.9 - Tails v4.11 - nix-bitcoin v0.0.17 - Dojo v1.8.0 released - Specter v0.8.0 - Smartcard support for Specter DIY HWW - Square Crypto $100k grant to btcpay server and launches a proper portal for their work squarecrypto.org - Namecheap adds btcpay server! - Unchained Capital adds advanced multisig business accounts - Russian gov wants full wallet disclosures - Venezuelan government to require use of national mining pool - FinCen Files leak - Over 170 arrests and over $6.5M seized in global DOJ lead operation against dark markets - whirlpool fee calculator and portal for his other links by bitcoinqna https://getbitcoin.help/ - Umbrel wallet support Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital. Check out their white glove vault concierge service that will take you from zero to secure multisig setup in no time. Use the code TFTC and receive $50 off that package that includes 2 Trezor Model Ts and $1,000 in your vault. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

what is up freaks welcome back to rabbit hole recap we're here on Thursday early rip for us Matthew is traveling the southern part of the United States so we're gonna road trip how's your road trip been what's the South like these days it's fucking gorgeous man

it's the South is alive and well yes it is how how many guns have you seen so far no i mean i haven't it's not like yeah in the south people just like you know they just walk around with their guns all over the place you just walk into the starbucks they got guns i'm kidding freaks i would never go to starbucks um i uh you know i fucking love traveling right and it seems like international travel is at least going to be a pain in the ass for a little bit longer at least um so it seems good time as ever to get the road tripping in and first time in south carolina uh first time in georgia i really like i georgia savannah is fucking dope

as fuck i've never been to savannah before it is a really underrated city yes that's what we were talking about before we hit record uh open container laws don't exist there you can walk islands gets all the credit no one ever talks about that in savannah are there other cities that have open container laws uh or don't have open container laws i guess i would imagine there are i don't know shout it out freaks if you know a city where you can walk down the street drinking a beer ideally looking at water i like looking at water while i'm drinking the beer yeah the breeze in my hair but open container in general is a huge plus another little uh known fact about savannah i don't think it's number one i said it was number one

saint patty's day celebration but now thinking in my mind i think chicago may have that that uh that mantle uh but savannah's definitely top two or three saint patrick's day celebrations of the country which is interesting considering it's in georgia where'd you stop in south carolina um in south carolina we stopped in columbia oh oh so you ripped it through the middle of the state uh yeah because we were in charlotte north carolina and greensboro um i'm like there's something careful with the cities i say i'm i'm kind of i have friends in places where i'm going to meet friends and stuff yeah um but uh yeah this is like my first time in all these states i never i don't i had never gotten this i i think i have never been in like the southeast

besides like florida and uh texas is south just completely south right yeah i guess i this this country is so fucking huge people just don't really appreciate how big it is it's massive that's actually uh i could spend decades just driving around this country and not see the same thing over again it really hit me uh in high school i was doing a driver's ed class you got to take driver's ed classes here uh not actually in the car but like a class for you you learn about the road and best practices to get your insurance down and yeah the driver's ed teacher came and taught us that class i really drove it home the fact that you could drive for like three days in europe across like 20 countries or something like that in here you can barely get

like coast to coast in this one country america's vast it's beautiful that'd be a pretty intense three-day coast to coast drive right now exactly um americans take for granted how big and beautiful this country is go see it if you're if you're an american like airbnbs and hotels right now are cheap as fuck guys really fucking cheap I'm actually looking I'm looking to hit wine country

in January and things are very cheap right now hoping that we can make that happen I think we might just get rid of the apartment and just do like 4 or 5 months of road tripping and just like stay at Airbnbs for 3 weeks here 3 weeks there

it's not a bad idea we're just getting cheaper cheaper than new york city just get an rv stay in the rv i don't know about the rv idea i'm like i go back and forth why is too daunting to handle or it's like first of all it's definitely annoying more annoying to drive right um yes i think there's i think there's two types of people i think there's people that usually go over the speed limit and then there's people that are always dutifully five miles an hour below the speed limit i'm not gonna say specifically which category i'm in i'm in the former i'm always 15 to 20 miles an rv for extended periods of time would could be annoying to that type of person um and then the other

thing is i hear like there's like a lot of maintenance like a lot of maintenance headaches can come up you gotta yeah the septic tank alone is something i'd probably want to stay away from i had i have uh friends this couple who right at the beginning of uh rona realized like what the fuck was going on and they got out of their seattle lease and they bought an rv and they've just been driving around working remote from the rv um which i thought was pretty badass but then like week three uh like in the the middle of the work day just their toilet started overflowing into the rv like their home and their car is like all in the same place just filled with fucking sewage at least it was their own yeah at least it was their own for them but yeah i think with

airbnb so cheap might as well just go airbnb to airbnb i like that move i do i am uh getting a little stir crazy myself i haven't been and we went home to philadelphia for a couple days this week that was a nice little reprieve uh really disgruntled like a lot of people walking outside by themselves a mask philadelphians come on it's weird the outside thing is weird it's very weird it's uh it's a lot of it's a virtue signal but uh speaking of signals i don't know if it's a virtue i think for most people it's not i think it's just a like a fear thing it is a fear thing all right and so if you are out there and you're fearful uh some some stats came out earlier today i don't know if this globally or just here in the u.s i'm going to read them out loud

this comes from dr david samadi md at dr david samadi s-a-m-a-d-i on twitter new covid 19 survival rates per the cdc so this is probably uh united states only age range is 0 to 19 you're gonna have a 99.997 survival rate ages 20 to 49 you're gonna have a 99.98 survival rate ages 50 to 69 you're gonna have a 99.5 survival rate numbers and if you're 70 or over your survival rate is gonna be 94.6 percent uh which is if you're 70 or over that's a 3.4 percent chance of death or excuse me 5.4 percent chance of death is nothing to scoff at but uh i think for the younger age is 70 and under survival rate is 99.5 and above so uh should we be fearful i don't know this is amazing news but people may look at this we don't know is that uh

that's it's and it's already that's only if you get it right so it's even it's even less likely yes i guess that's only if you get it and test positive um so there's right because if you're if you only have like a 1% chance of getting it in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yes. Right.

Yeah. So is that factoring that in already? Probably not. No, it's not. It's survival rates. So you have to have had it first in the first place. There you go.

Um, take that data as you wish. Decide to be fearful or not. I personally am not as afraid of this as I was when it first came. Um, But this isn't a COVID podcast. This is a Bitcoin podcast. And the price of Bitcoin right now, according to Clark Moody's dashboard, is $10,650. If you're buying a dollar's worth of sats, you're going to get 9,390 sats. Bitcoin's market cap is still hovering around $200 billion,

slightly under it at $196.9 billion. You're going to get 5.7 ounces of gold per Bitcoin. Thank you for fixing the percentage there, Clark. That's 1.64% of the total gold market cap. And and you're going to get 261 barrels of oil with one Bitcoin right now. Right now we're at Blockite 649,811. We had a difficulty adjustment since our last episode, and it was a pretty significant one. We have a difficulty all-time high, 19.3 trillion. I believe it's trillion.

It actually could be a lot higher. I just have trillion in my mind for some reason. We're at difficulty epoch 323, a nice, I forget what it's called, it's the same backwards and forwards uh and so the last difficulty adjustment was over the weekend it was 11.3 percent upwards uh blocks were coming in around nine minutes and 18 seconds during the last epoch currently we are scheduled to have another retarget on october 3rd so that is uh nine days from now right now it's estimated to be a downward difficulty adjustment of 1.3 percent and blocks are currently coming in around 10 minutes and 10 seconds obviously

we are not too far into this difficulty epoch so that is subject to change we will keep you freaks updated obviously uh fees we're looking at pretty low still getting that one set fee in actually they have raised since last week if you're ready if you need to get your transaction confirmed the next block you should be sending a transaction with a 75 sat per byte fee if you're willing to wait an hour it drops down to 62 sats per byte if you're willing to wait a day that drops all the way down to two sats per right last week it was one sat per byte so uh that that that's the last time we're ever going to see one separate bite that time preference is rising and yeah if you're if you're willing to wait a week you can get it in for one sap per bite we had a

until you won't be able to yes we had a material increase in the unspent capacity i'm was uh excuse me samurai last week 1633.04 bitcoin i believe we're at around 1500 less first time we broke 1600 we were at 1500 on september 10th i like calling it we're calling it liquidity pool now that's what all the kids that's what all the kids like okay the liquidity pool has increased uh there's been 9 769 cycles in the last 30 days uh right now 20.7 percent of all bitcoin nodes that are reachable are version 0.20.0 version 0.20.1 is catching up at 15.8 percent and then behind that we have version 19.1 version

0.19.1 version 0.18.1 and version 0.18.0 rounding that out we see those updates happening more frequently now that people now there's more people running these like node packages on these single board computers like the raspis and stuff yeah it wouldn't surprise me right like the updating is easier right it's like more i don't know they're updating other things so they update bitcoin at the same time yeah it's less manual too yeah which could be a good or a bad thing yeah depending on your your risk appetite for your node software uh so that's these stats any other stats you want to look at today anything interesting i'm going to look around i guess from like the thought of if you're running it that way you're less

likely to be actually keeping your keys hot you're just using bitcoin core as a or bitcoin d as a way to look up your balances on your hardware wallet or something then updating it isn't as you know updating frequently isn't as much of a risk because you're not worried about coin loss or not worried nearly as much about coin loss no but at some point you're gonna have to move those but you understand what i'm saying like if you're storing your bitcoin hot in bitcoin core and every time you update it could be a possibility that you lose your coins like you actually get them stolen from you but if you but if you're just using bitcoin you know as if you're just using bitcoin d or bitcoin core to look up your balances and not actually store

your keys then you know maybe you have like some kind of consensus bug or failure or something but you don't actually lose your funds yeah if you're using it as a watch only that makes a lot of sense right yeah um yes so be aware freaks uh this episode of rabbit hole recap is brought to you by good friends the motherfucking cash they're helping you stack sats send sats receive sats and sell sats if you so please we're saying sats sats sats sats because sats are the standard all right we're not buying fractions of bitcoins we're stacking whole sats uh on top of this you can stack slivers of stonks if you so please stonk market been getting crushed if you're looking to buy that dip um not personally you

can uh and again if you're buying the dip you don't have to stack a whole slot stonk you can buy a sliver of a stonk as little as one dollar because all this is connected to your bank account there's no four to five day waiting periods you can start uh stacking sats today or slivers of stonks if you so please uh cash app investing is a subsidiary square remember sipc as always make sure you use the code stacking sass that's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s s-a-t-s you're gonna get ten dollars and ten dollars gonna go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse my dad taught me this this week and marty's owl made me aware that that's what horny owls say so there's a horny owl on my block uh download the cash app use the code stacking sats and then

go check out our good friends at Unchained Capital. Huge announcement this week. Unchained Capital is creating financial services for Bitcoiners with a security-first mindset. They're trying to stay true to Bitcoin's ethos, and this was not in the adry, but I'm adding it to the adry this week. They released a business application

for businesses who want to engage in multi-sig custody with Unchained and have granular control over who has access to keys, who can construct transactions, who can broadcast transactions, who can sign transactions, who can see balances in wallets. So if you're a business who's looking to take self-custody of their Bitcoin and do that in a multi-sig fashion, Unchained is building out a business tool suite for you. Very cool. On top of that, they have their concierge service, their white glove concierge service if you're out there and you want to go from zero to multisig. Unchained has

a $1,500 package. If you guys use the code TFTC, if you tell them we sent you, you're going to get $50 off. $1,500 package includes $1,450 for you freaks, includes one-on-one Skype calls to go over what multisig is to teach you how to use it, to answer any questions you may have. They're going to send you hardware wallets if you need them. And then on top of that, they're going to put thousand dollars into your vault once you set that up. Again, they're going to have multiple calls with you. They're going to get you as comfortable as possible and as you need to be before you set up your vault. They're going to help you set it up. They're going to send you the hardware wallets. They're really going to walk you through this. So go check them out at

www.unchained-capital.com. That's www.unchained-capital.com. We'll put a link in the show notes too the concierge white glove service and on top of that they have an otc desk that is adding more states by the week does that say skype in the ad read i didn't say no i mean i don't think it says skype they don't use skype no they don't use skype it's a video conference i think it might be proprietary actually no i think don't they use google meet they may i don't know for sure i don't have it triggered by skype who uses skype skype's like a verb for me um yeah that's what i figured and then the other thing is that advanced multi-sig for business we actually have that in the list i don't know if you realized um i do that uh that's you know i i think that's a

big deal like this is uh they're going for and and i guess i mean we're just like continuing me hear from the ad read but disclosure their response to the podcast i think this was a big deal to begin with regardless of the ad read uh they they're basically targeting like the michael sailors of the world right instead of so so last week we mentioned or i maybe alluded to the fact that i i thought that maybe they'd be self-custodying based on the way he he spoke about on twitter they are not self-custodying they are keeping with a major custodian i can't say the name but they are keeping with a major custodian it has come to my attention so this idea is basically a way to try and appeal to those types of companies instead of them using a custodian

maybe they'll come and do multi-sig where where unchained maybe holds a key maybe another institution also holds a key maybe neither of them holds a key but like they have this whole setup process for you yeah and it was funny that they dropped this product this week considering the uh the conversation that ensued in that thread where you corrected yourselves about their custody it was a really good conversation uh who was part of that rodolfo parker phil geiger justin moon jeff andrew hopped in and just discussing the trade-offs of that was a great threat yeah of self-custody for um corporate entities and it's interesting publicly traded companies with big boards and more decision makers along the hierarchy i guess you could say

it may be a little bit more difficult for them but small businesses that own and don't have their whole operations their own stack and don't have to answer to any boards may have may have it better off and an easier way to self-custody i mean absolutely it's definitely more difficult in a public company environment yeah um but no I think Rodolfo and Jeff Vandrew specifically highlighted some pain points for the publicly traded companies. Can you trust the employees? How will you ever get past the board? You need to get the risk of the Bitcoin custody outside of your company because it may be too risky of an activity.

You need to focus on your core competency as a business. i think i forget who it was but someone was like rather than protect the keys you just want someone to sue yes but i think it's a little bit different in the bitcoin land because it's so hard to get real insurance um like we see like like the prime trusts of the world and the coin bases of the world and the gemini's they get like some kind of insurance it's like one percent of their hot wallets or something yeah it's it's got so much fine print there and like insurance companies like they're just known to just fuck you at every fucking turn even in like non-bitcoin kind of things so it's really just a veiled protect like it gives you like some kind of plausible

liability that it wasn't your fault that bitcoin gets lost but but if one of these major custodians has like some kind of major hack or bug and a good serious amount of coin loss like they're going out of business and you're not gonna i don't think you're gonna get that much if you sue them like i i don't know what you're gonna get pennies yeah and parker highlighted in that thread counterparty risk exists it was proven out with aig um it's yeah and again it's it's it depends on your risk appetite your comfort your state of it's comfortability a word your comfort your comfort with uh holding it with a another custodian like is if they just up and run away with your bitcoin are you gonna be okay with that obviously you have to be 400 million dollars worth

of bitcoin man right i think that's what you said like is that do you want to trust that with somebody else 400 million someone was like someone was like would you would you trust yourself with 400 million dollars worth of big keys for bitcoin i was like i would you i was like would you trust someone else with 400 million dollars worth of your bitcoin like i like no especially if that 400 million can turn into 4 billion pretty quickly here. Yeah, especially if that's the fucking thesis. Right. It's one thing if your thesis is like

oh, it's just going to be stable and it's not going to go up. Yeah. Trade-offs, isn't it? Hey, this is some uncharted territory that Bitcoin is venturing into and these conversations need to begin to happen and

it'll be interesting to see who pioneers these corporate structure key custody practices so we have unchained capital obviously uh another person who hopped in that's right actually with some very good points was our was our friend thib from knox custody they do similar stuff um for companies uh via knox custody they will help set up multi-sig and be a key signer in those quorums as well too um so yeah these service providers are coming to market it'll be interesting to see the other thing is like you can do a multi-sig sorry for cutting you off marty

you can do a multi-sig where the providers have more keys than you you know where where like unchained capital or knox or like a combination of a bunch of institutions let's say like four like let's say that it's a five key setup and four of the keys are held by outside institutions and you'll hold one key like at least you have more audibility right like you know you know the funds aren't being rehypothecated you know they're actually there that they that they that they're it's a nice proof of proof of funds proof of custody yeah that was another thing that was brought up in that that thread like giving keys to multiple institutions which still to me i'm dumb i'm like trying to figure out how and why that would work and how you'd be

able to trust everybody in that quorum you don't have to that's the beauty of it you just have to trust that like three or five of them don't fuck you yeah it's still it's still it it's still superior obviously from a trust model than if you just have a single custodian and it's only possible because of bitcoin and you can put you can put each each of those key signers can be in like different jurisdictions you know you can have like a singaporean bank you can have a german bank you can have a u.s bank you know you can have some like lawyer in the caymans and then like you control a key i like that so you can do like crazy fucking shit right oh it's exciting on the cutting edge here uh yeah and i i think this subject is going to be more and more prominent

as companies like MicroStrategy, Snappa, Tahini. What was it? I forget. Tahini. What's the name of that company? It's Tahini's, right? Tahini's, yeah.

I think they listen to the show. Shout out to Tahini's. Tahini's Restaurant in Ontario. Next time I'm in Ontario, I'm going to definitely go try it. I love me some gyro and some falafel. I'm a sucker for the chicken shawarma. yeah shawarma huge fan um the other thing with unchained is you can even go crazier because they

they have their shamirs set up too so then you could take one of those keys and you could shamir the fuck out of it and you can and you can basically make it so you need a threshold to activate that single key in the first place so like if you're listening and you're running like a major business that's considering you know allocating a portion of to bitcoin i'm not saying like i'm not saying to michael saylor like he should put his whole 400 million in you know but these are things you should explore and at least maybe consider it for his personal stash i assume i assume the guy bought some before he bought it with his company um but you know this this is something you dip your toes in you get used to but it it seems strictly superior to me in the

long term yeah what is the strategy for a 425 million dollar custody that you break it up in multiple different hardware or excuse me um hd wallets as many ut like how many utxos do you break that up into like how many private keys do you break that you do like one utxo per wallet first of all because obviously there's no privacy no you're not the privacy isn't a goal it's a publicly traded company right so you're gonna have to everything's gonna have to be disclosed and super on the up and up anyway but yeah you split it up based on your risk profile right but i mean i would split it up into at least like 100 million dollar chunks it just feels good right like why a hard asset to insure that's like pretty nascent like why i mean you got to

realize there's not how many different methods of storing it do you trust right but you can set it up into uh you know three or four different uh wallets then that are all secured in in slightly different ways so that you're not all in one one basket right now that the single custodian something happens to them um i mean and and i'm saying this partially from a greed point of view because if marty loses his keys like you know like bitcoin is is is completely fine no one's gonna care the me or marty lose their keys like no one's gonna care everyone's bitcoin becomes slightly more valuable but there's like a couple custodians that no one talks about that they do like they're they're doing the wallets for like all the major exchanges and like all the major

players and if something happens there like bitcoin will be fine long term and especially if the funds are lost forever then yeah like all of our bitcoin becomes worth some more but there's it's going to be term turbulent times. Like a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money and it's going to be fucking chaos. If there's like a couple of you could hit that, it would just be, it'd be pretty bad.

Considerably worse than Gox. I would imagine. Yeah, I think so. I mean, Gox was such a big part though, right? Gox was the exchange.

Well, so maybe not. Well, the custodians that you're referring to are a big part, just under the radar behind the scenes. it would be more apparent of how integral they are to the exchange infrastructure

but know the risk know the trade-offs know the optionality that you have freaks especially if you're running a business and explore this that's the beauty of Bitcoin there's so much to be built out so much to experiment with so many ways in which this

can go it's just like infinitely fascinating to play out the game theory like we did just there let's get to shout outs matt i'm sorry about this first shout out love you marty you're the best this is only for you fuck you matt i don't know who wrote that love you freak anonymous i love you appreciate you i love you matt uh marty they're trying to cause strife between us yes yes that's what uh that's what i warned matt before somebody trying to divide us we will not be divided freaks no matter how hard you fucking try uh second and last shout out of the week a good one marty and matt y'all don't know me but you

should know this i will not eat bugs i will not live in a pod i will not follow to spotify here's fifty dollars to ensure i'm not tempted thanks for your work and as long as i have the mic dear freaks few of you know me but let's divine collaborate collaborativism i've been like working on this i fucked it up collaborativism type it out c-o-l-l-a-b-o-r-a-t-i-v-i-s-m notice the red underline if collaboration is working together especially in a joint intellectual effort then collaborativism is a model by which sufficiently well-coordinated entities behaving self-interestedly work towards a particular goal it's neither collectivism or communism it's depolarizing it's a single memorable word it's not hard to say though

this is my input uh a meme brought into this world competing for survival if you like it spread it tell your friends bitcoin is our means collaborativism is our model the goals are peace love unity and respect use bitcoin obviate the state let's fucking go kiss face up uh real this is from real uh at real fake bitcoin uh p.s it's a cult hail eris um collaborativism collaborativism i think that's first off like i like i love you freak but i promise you we're never going to go spotify exclusive but i don't think i don't think that collaborative ism is ever going to stick it's too hard to say it's very hard to say it right i think i think so i don't know collaborativism collaborativism never gonna stick we need it

needs to be easy to say yes and you're talking to a me master uh across from me right now yes and i can assure you we're not gonna go to spotify they've already tried to coax us over uh you should see the deal they offered us it was massive yeah we uh we left a lot of money on the table for you freaks but like 25 million bitcoin so they're gonna give us more than the existing supply of bitcoin yeah they were just getting into the bitcoin space take that joe joe doesn't even know what he's missing out on in the bitcoin payouts uh no but with that being said only i think only like five percent of you freaks listen via spotify i think 50 percent listen via android devices uh and android apps um i know you can get spotify on android devices

android specific apps we would not leave you in the dust and we would not expect you to follow either if we went to spotify it is known yes uh thank you for listening if you are here no matter what and the the person who did the the jack mauler's uh shadow hasn't reached out yet for this right he has not we're not saying who the if if you're the freak you don't have to dox yourself to us you know you can do it through some private medium if you want you can hit us on keybase or or something like that or like create a fake twitter and hit us that way yeah or fake email address at marty's or marty's bent at gmail.com there you go sign them up for all the newsletters please don't uh please don't please uh why'd you why'd you accept that idea

i don't know you you you blasted the email address that's what happened american huddle's gonna be blasting me on porn fucking newsletters please don't uh this uh i don't want to say controversial but this uh sparked some for the eth sign them up for all the eth newsletters oh god defy news god damn it um sorry let's call some conversation earlier this week uh uh, Joost, Joost Jager, I hope I'm pronouncing his Joost Jager is probably how you pronounce it from the Netherlands. Uh, he left lightning labs, uh, earlier this week and then, um, announced a project that he's working on firewall circuit breaker for lightning, uh, nodes and

basically highlighted a griefing attack that is, uh, possible, uh, where you basically, uh, set what is it 43 transit 43 transactions can lock up the htlcs it's basically a it's a ddos it's a milo service uh but with lightning you just send like a lot of small payments right and but you like hold them right and you don't actually send them through yeah you basically stuff up the htlcs in some way so you take many routes to the same end and uh end node and sort of lock the node up and the funds uh they can't steal the funds but they can make it so you can't send them for an extended period of time but it seems that's what i liked about his thread is well before we get to his thread number one yeah so you send you you're you're sending them

to yourself right you control nodes on both sides of the node you're attacking and you send the payment to yourself by doing like an invoice but you never actually fucking send the payment so it doesn't even cost you any fees to do the attack yeah yeah exactly and so it's a griefing attack at ddos um it's been well known among the lightning community for a while and there have been resolution solutions proposed and just is proposing circuit breaker which basically allows you to set a limit on the amount of uh htlcs that can be in in route at any given point in time and again it's not 43 it's 483 htlcs uh the current maximum htlc slots is 483 so they can theoretically an attacker could

clog those up and prevent you from sending funds Circuit Breaker would limit the amount of in-route HTLCs at any given point in time so it mitigates that risk It's 483 HTLCs but

because there can be up to Because you can split up your payments, right? Because you can just keep adding hops you might only be able you might only require 54 payments to do it yes because it gets split up into um the point is the attack is very cheap to do and easy yes right yes and and the idea is you would hit i guess large routing nodes

for either two reasons i i mean i guess three reasons either because you hate bitcoin and you just want to like piss people off uh the second reason is if you're competing with another routing node for fees right let's say you're ln big and you're making a lot of fees and you knock bit refill off so then the the actual payments come to you and you take the fees um i don't think lightning fees are that high enough really for that to be a thing but it could be presumably in the future and then maybe surveillance like if you know uh if if you know that if you're trying to surveil a particular node then maybe cutting off certain you get kind of can choose where the route goes if you cut off if you cut off certain nodes from them yeah another way this this attack

can be mitigated is private channels opened up between counterparties that you trust well because Because they can't use private channels. Strangers can't use private channels. Yes, exactly. So, be aware. It was interesting. If you are interested in the Lightning Network and make it more robust and less susceptible to these types of attacks, Jost has started a GitHub page, github.com slash lightning equipment slash circuit breaker.

Obviously, we will link to that in the show notes if you're a developer working on Lightning interested in this. why don't you give us some review feedback whatever you think is necessary in this context i am too dumb to offer any of those one of the interesting things here is i i i and correct me if i'm wrong in the in the tweets freaks but i i think this is on a per channel basis so it's actually could be a negative of having big ass wombo channels right like if you have that's what he calls out specifically in the thread yeah yeah the cost is a lot cheaper if it's if you have five i mean the cost it costs a lot more if you have five one bitcoin channels than if you have one five bitcoin channel yeah and i guess the effect of the attack

is better is larger on wombo channels than right if you can hit like a mass you hit like a massive channel between bit refill and bitfinex and you can cause all sorts of of of issues if if on the network as a whole rather than if you if there's like a bunch of little channels they're going to all different places so if you're opening up wombo channels maybe do it privately with people that you trust uh this has been making the rounds iran power plants iranian power plants uh plan to sell electricity to bitcoin miners says crypto miners but i imagine i think it's like mostly bitcoin miners yeah predominantly mining bitcoin so thermal power plant holding company uh which owns and operates a bunch of plants across iran uh said bitcoin miners are now able to buy

electricity from three of its power stations and this is according to the tehran times and this is being doubly reported by patty baker at coindesk so it'll be interesting to see um what the the price per kilowatt hour is being offered to the these miners uh whether or not they have to uh register with the government which i assume they will have to if they don't already and they do yeah one of the things i thought was interesting with this article is that and there's like no way for us to easily verify it uh the iranians know better than us and and you have to kind of take their word for it um their share of bitcoin mining output is four percent now which seems like way higher than you than most people i think would expect

no i think yeah that's been pretty pretty well they said it's double percentage is double from september 2019 yeah yeah so they went from two to four which is a pretty big jump yeah and with this I mean, the power plants that are being made available to Bitcoin miners have an available capacity of 5,485 megawatts, which is pretty considerable. That would be a huge chunk of the hash rate today. If they were to consume all that with Bitcoin mining, we'll see what percentage of that total available megawatt hours gets consumed by Bitcoin miners. But yeah, be on the lookout. for that and that actually something that's not on the list and i have not gone into detail yet uh i have not read uh yet i haven't had time today but cambridge um

what's the the full name of this the cambridge judge business school uh they released their annual report uh about a bunch of data in the bitcoin world their third global crypto asset uh benchmark report shout out to apolline blandon uh dr gina peters you woo uh i gotta hit except cookies here thomas esserman anton deck sean taylor and damars nozuki uh i have not read the report but i've seen a lot of people tweeting about it uh and they're saying according to them i gotta dive in i saw nick carter tweeting about this 39 of bitcoin mining is renewable energy is being sourced by renewable or powered by renewable energy and that's down considerably uh from what coin shares estimated only a couple years ago

on top of that i believe they increased their estimate of total bitcoin holders in the world to 101 million people and i believe it was something like 39 million people last year so that if true uh is a significant increase in bitcoin holders around the world who's reporting this yeah the cambridge judge university cambridge 100 million seems really high right i don't know man that's why let me find nick's tweet here because that's where i'm pulling again i had to read the report i haven't had time to dive into it and the renewable energy is worse now less renewables are being used percentage-wise right yes i believe so um i think that's partially uh because of flare gas uh no i don't think the flared gas mining historically it's it's the hydro

hydro is the main power source right yeah yeah but i think that's been getting priced out in recent years um it's been getting more expensive in china um again i gotta jump into the report i just want to make you freaks aware of it maybe we'll dive into it in more detail yesterday but Yeah, Nick tweeted out, they estimate the number of crypto asset users worldwide is at 101 million, up from 35 million to 2018, so not from last year. Crypto asset. Yeah, I can see, that makes more sense to me. Why would that make more sense?

Like, what, you think people would have? You think there's people that own shit coins that are not Bitcoin? No. Do you? What about, like, security tokens and shit? is that i don't i mean how many security tokens are there i don't know there might be people that just own like tether they just own that makes sense yeah that makes sense there's probably at least some people that only hold eth they're probably a strong minority but they're like

there's this new breed of like really crazy eth heads that are only eth god bless the og the og shit corners always held the majority of their funds in bitcoin yes and good luck if you're holding a majority of your funds in ethereum oh we didn't have that on the list what'd you think of the uh the few controversy did you follow that my guess is like 30 to 30 to 50 million bitcoiners and most of them you know if you go back to the clark moody episode they aren't real bitcoiners because they're not controlling their own keys they're not real bitcoiners because they don't eat meat a lot of them they're not real bitcoiners because they're not using their own note yeah um the fuse stuff is is uh i mean fuck them right i think it's just hilarious the the

sanctimonious backpedal like it was just a joke and so if it was just a joke i pause it what would you have done if those screenshots weren't leaked so i explain it to the freaks because you know if if they're a smart freak they're not aware of any of this yeah so defy land had a bit of a controversy this week some screenshots leaked from a personal chat of 50 people and in the the chat room of 50 people they were uh conspiring to launch a defy token known as few it was like 50 like semi-prominent twitter eth twitterati you know like yes um and so they were planning on uh spinning this token up distributing supply amongst each other launching it on uniswap I imagine getting it launched on Uniswap, having it traded.

Pre-mining. Yeah, pre-mining and dumping. Screenshots leaked of the conversation in which some of the quote-unquote influencers were talking about dumping on retail or people who will come to this token after them. Literally said, like, don't invite too many people. We need people to dump on. Yes, exactly. And even alluding to previous insider trading action with other tokens. And so the screenshots leaked, a lot of drama on Twitter,

and the people involved came out and said, oh, it was all a joke. It was all a joke. But again, I posit, if it were all a joke and those screenshots, what would happen if those screenshots were never leaked? Would few token be floating right now? Would you have made money from it? I would imagine so. i mean one of the people involved wrote like like a 10 10 tweet thread make culpa

like apologizing about it so didn't sound like much of a joke there right um you know i think we've talked about it on this pod a bunch of times like like reputation is a long game and especially in this space if you lose it like there should be no forgiveness like you lose that for good um and in in particular in the in the world of illiquid shit tokens um there's a lot of room to be unethical and make a lot of money you can make a lot of fucking money and people have in the past many people have people are easier to make money that way than try and making it ethically um so you know if you think that's wrong like you need to you need to keep calling them out because especially in the bull runs it gets fucking horrible like egregious yeah yeah this

is this is not the first time something like this has happened this is like basically this the story of shit coins this is the history of shit coins existence you can go back to bitcoin talk that or go go through uh that's crazy how the evolution of these shit queen launches pre minds has evolved because remember it was like back in the day it was like proof of work launch or nothing and then well look at you know if you want to be really provocative about it um few is just a more illiquid less successful version of eth like yes like east was like what they had like their 20 people you know maybe they weren't in a chat room they were like in a in a bar in like outside of bitcoin miami but like that like that's it's there's the same idea it's like let's we'll

take the full pre-mine we can sell some to the public and then we'll fucking pump the shit out of this thing world computer world computer it's going to version 2.0 maybe they're already talking about 3.0 but hey that narrative is always going to be that there's always a new narrative carrot on a stick that you guys can follow defy is the carrot narrative uh and in this case particularly it seems that defy is a bunch of assholes just trying to screw retail which is what i've assumed it has been up to this point uh actually have an episode dropping tomorrow look out for it with matthew black from atomic loans uh soon to be atomic finance they're moving off ethereum and he talked about the uh the stress that comes with building on ethereum and then he the allure like

they were they were getting pressured to spin up a token he just consciously couldn't do it um and I think it's a very interesting perspective on the state of Ethereum, the intentions of that project, and the tokens being spun up on top of it, particularly. Very smart. Kit is 22. Whipper smart. Fucking. I'm very bullish on the use, Matt. Very bullish on the use.

Awesome. Looking forward to giving it a listen. i'm bullish on the idea of uh so what are they like born again bitcoiners they've always been bitcoiners but they wanted to build a non-custodial no but the idea that like if someone has a project built on ethereum and then they they decide to leave ethereum and then they come on tails of the crypt yes i would like if that became a stereotype if you're out there and you're thinking about it our lines are open uh no and it's like so this is another thing like bitcoin twitter crypto twitter

i guess it's not really focused on bitcoin twitter the traders they'll like they'll make fun of you for being poor and yell at you for not making money uh but at the end of the day they don't care about any of this shit they only care about is making money they're not going to hold wifey or tendies for the next 30 years where i can say pretty confidently that most bitcoiners are in for for the longer term and yeah but no one is admitting no there's i mean i don't think you think there's like uh there might be like some small tiny subsect that thinks yiffy or whatever is going to last 30 years but i i think at least the overwhelming majority of people that are involved there know it's bullshit right like they know it's not like five years more than five years

it's not more than like five months usually yeah i was being conservative yeah be aware signal over noise bringing it to you here at Tales of the Crimson that is true the ultimate TLDR yes good friends at Hashrate Hashrate

H-A-S-H-R-8 dot com put out a blog this week about the internal struggles of Bitmain they particularly put it on a timeline so John Quigley John Lee Quigley from Hashrate did a very comprehensive timeline of the Bitmain saga.

It's been some of the juiciest drama in the Bitcoin world to date. I've said on this podcast many times that I believe Bitmain will go down as the Icarus story of early Bitcoin. They had a lot of potential to dominate the Bitcoin mining market in particular, and they squandered it in a pretty grandiose way. Is there anything on this timeline that stuck out to you, Matt? no it's just a really good well done timeline so um fuck bit main very interesting story and if you weren't here for it you should go check out the timeline because he goes all the way back

to 2013 yeah yeah um because like to me like i mean 2017 they were the juggernaut in the room man they were the juggernaut they went balls to the wall and you know it was a successful strategy for them for a while but but it didn't it didn't work out and most important i mean from my perspective the big thing was the was the bitcoin cash bet and it was just almost like they they went with the gamble every single time and then when the time came like when the time came when they when they needed to commit to bitcoin cash and like go bitcoin cash over over the real bitcoin uh yeah they they just bitched out and then that was the end of that yeah and writing was on the wall at that point on you know what good riddance good

riddance uh amen the uh amp lead alone should be enough to piss people off the fact that they they had a back door that could shut down their miners remotely if they wanted to whether or not that was exploited. I don't think that ever has been. At least no one even accused them of exploiting it. But then

there's arguments they held up Segwit because of ASIC boost covert ASIC boost specifically. They definitely were mining on their own chips before they were shipping them out. Yeah, that as well. Quality control testing. so good riddance a we'll do software update dive right here in the middle of this just to get it

over with bisque version 1.3.9 has been released and i know bisque has made it a point to to make marty um marty friendly release notes so uh here they are this release brings auto confirmation from NarrowTrades makes usernames required for Revolt payments to reduce disputes based on mediator feedback and improves connectivity within the network and also improves reliability. Please update to this version to avoid network

issues. That's what they're asking. Thank you for the Marty-friendly release notes there. BlueWallet version 5.5.9 has been released. A bunch of fixes in there. Not going to read every release note of all these updates. Somebody actually

the big the big thing for blue wallet was uh the ui around fees is much better yeah this update we should talk about because actually a freak reached out to me in dms i don't know if you reach out to you as well or actually no i got an email about this over the weekend uh a response to the sat standard tales version 4.11 is out um and apparently there's some important updates in this tales uh tour has been updated thunderbird's been updated and i believe they did something with electrum as well let me pull up yeah they brought electrum up so that um i think it was trezor uh but they brought it up to the most recent electrum release which is a big deal let me um let me see if i have it here let me find this email to make sure i didn't miss anything

But it was definitely, yeah, the Trezor Model T is supported again on Electrum. Okay. Oh, it was an Electrum update. The last Tails brought Electrum up to V4.0.2. It was Trezor's Python driver. Yes. So that you don't have to separately install the driver. You can just boot up Tails and plug in the Trezor.

yes that is uh which is fucking key like you don't want like the whole beauty of tails is that it's like all built in and like ready to go like you don't want to have to and like every every time it's it's amnesiac so it loses all of its settings when you when you pull the drive out of it so you don't want to have to reinstall the driver every time it's a pain in the ass yeah here's the message from the freak before version 4.11 there were several steps a privacy freak had to make to take to make the setup work as a 4.11 all support is built in and asterisks between asterisks just works tails is hugely resistant to malware hacking tracking etc as i'm sure you're aware and this makes it a natural place to securely access your wallet coupled with the secure

storage of the trezor yeah we love tails here and it's uh got election built in yes everything defaults to tor yes even though now i am purely a specter maximalist and i just i'm fucking loving the bitcoin core plus specter combination should we just jump to the smart card support for specter this looks so cool the next software updated specter right uh it's next bitcoin is the next one oh there you go well we got nix bitcoin has been updated version 0.0.17 the big thing for that is is that they made being a joint market maker much easier uh which is this which is when you run joint market server with constant liquidity and you're able to to make make fees off of that by providing liquidity um so that's really good to see i mean they're joining raspi blitz and

trying to make that process easier for people um and i the the way raspi blitz does it with join inbox is fucking fantastic i haven't tried it with nick's bitcoin yet but it's fantastic to see then spectre v 0.8.0 has been released um and i guess they made some changes with the prune node they made some changes with how the ui is displaying um the ui is more mobile friendly the qr codes can be resized there's this new wallet setup wizard when you're setting up just a single sig wallet with like cold card or ledger or trezor or something or or their do your own hardware wallet where it like brings you through the wizard to make it as like easy as possible and this is what i'm really bullish on like i feel like we're getting to the point where it's

going to be almost as easy if not easier to to have spectre installed have bitcoin core installed even prune mode fine and then just use your hardware wallet with that instead of using ledger live or using you know wallet.treasure.io and leaking your addresses to their central server so that's fucking huge shout out to the spectra team uh looking at those release notes right now ben kaufman uh steppen sneegerev uh and k9ert uh and michael flaxman's in there as well uh really contributing and pulp cattle and more more eats uh dennis raymond's in there shout out to all these people simone working on uh specter it is really cool and uh again i was alluding to it earlier mentioned it earlier right before matt described the latest update the the

smart card implementation looks really cool is that so what am i looking at there i just what's in the video and i don't completely understand it so specter is two parts we have we have specter the software uh application um that you run your computer alongside bitcoin core and that allows that that provides an interface between bitcoin core and your hardware wallets um where it gives you coin control labeling and all this great stuff that you that you'd want there and then we have their their own do-it-yourself hardware wallet that they're calling Spectre, and that costs about $100. It comes with all off-the-shelf parts, and it's completely open source. So this wallet doesn't have a secure element though, right? So the idea

is because it doesn't have a secure element, it doesn't remember any of your private keys. It's just as soon as it gets powered off, it's supposed to completely wipe. That's obviously not foolproof though so it's actually really useful in a multi-sig setup where you have like a cold card um a trezor and uh and this the specter a cold card and a ledger and the specter like you can use it as one of the keys um and you have the benefit of off-the-shelf parts and completely open source um with this you can keep the keys on a smart card that you insert in the back side of the device um where do you get these smart cards it looks like a debit card like how do you get these are these just freely available i think you either insert or tap it might be rfid

i'm not sure because he like kind of puts it on the behind right yeah it looks rfid ish but he says insert on the tweet right yes which is confusing but either way like i think you can just buy the smart cards at like an electronic store or online yeah and you can reprogram them like this is what like they use i mean if it's an rfid version it's like what they use for hotel keys yeah maybe like slightly more secure secured up than like a hotel key uh but like are those like those those thicker like rfid badges you see like when you're like entering an office building yeah but so the smart card each smart card is associated with a different private key correct yeah that's what it looked like yeah it was really cool it's like your seed is on

the smart card yeah but to sign it you need the specter hardware well you if you you can mix it with a passphrase that you enter yes on the device right so you you scan the smart card and then you enter the passphrase on this on the device and then you can sign and if it's just one key of multiple keys then you also have that advantage right because then you're signing with that do do it yourself device and then you also still need to sign with a cold card or something yeah pretty dope shout again shout out to the specter team you guys are putting out some dope software and hardware or you're not you're allowing people to pick hardware off the shelf and build some pretty dope tools i'm super bullish on it i mean i actually it's funny right

but like they should i think they should at least release a kit if not uh it's not just a pre-built they can they can release a pre-built version too i know crypto cloaks they're working in partnership with crypto cloaks who's gonna release like a case for it as well so you can make it more of a i mean like the question here right is like i love the team i love that it's completely open source i think it's a fucking game changer of a product both sides and both the software and this do-it-yourself hardware um the real concern is like how can they can can they monetize and make this a sustainable thing so we get updates so it's you know it stays it stays top top of class you know like people are storing a lot of money on it so we'll see we'll see where they go with

this it looks like right now their goal is is maybe like try and get the enterprise side to fund some of it or um at least small businesses maybe that are looking for like a non-custodial way of storing funds but while still having tech support hey grant grant issuers out there that may be listening to this give give specter a look at the team inspector look again they're putting out some dope stuff speaking of dope stuff uh samurai announced a couple hours ago the release of dojo 1.8.0 and tweet that came with that announced the improvements that should result better performance on low spec devices updated to bitcoin core version 0.20.1 they consolidate three previous api endpoints into one and totally revamped the dojo maintenance tool ui

and a couple of comments i saw in the um in the replies to that suite uh one from bitcoin q and a uh was looks like the need for re-scanning uh x pubs using dojo maintenance tools unnecessary now which is huge because that could be a cause for panic for some people who don't realize when you recover a wallet or when you open a wallet and it's pulling block headers if it uses a prune node or whatever, it may look like there's no UTXOs in your wallet, but you just have to re-scan it. If you do that manually, it can cause a panic.

So if they're doing that automatically now. Like it'll show zero balance. Yeah, yeah. And people get scared like fucking hell. Yeah. naturally you know take a deep breath rescan your wallet if you ever see the zero it looks like this is going to go a long way to solving that that particular issue and just like make that whole process easier and this is also very useful for the uncle jims of the world um because when when

you add when you add someone onto your um like when if someone if someone is using your dojo then you have to be tracking their XPUB as well. So to make that process easier is welcome. Yes. So shout out to the Samurai team for getting that out there. The other thing in Samurai Land that isn't quite out, but I've been part of the group testing it, is they already have these two-person coin joins.

They're calling them Stonewall times two, where you have two people that do the coin joins. and they have stowaway where if i pay you then we do a coin join together so like a pay join between the two of us um and right now that that uses a qr code for passing the the messages qr code or copy and paste uh so you can either like copy and paste it into like a secure messaging app like a signal or something or a wire or you can scan qr codes of you standing next to each other well they came up with a messaging layer for tor that is drop-in and app agnostic and coin agnostic so it doesn't know that bitcoin is involved it doesn't know it's not samurai specific it's just

a messaging layer for tor that allows two people to use uh tor to communicate with each other two devices uh in their implementation they're using paynims to communicate with each other because they already have paynims to pay each other. But it isn't necessary. And the idea here is that within just a couple clicks through Tor, with not much user interaction, you'll be able to do a two-person coin join, whether that's that pay join model

or whether it's just basically like a mini coin join round where you have two people do it. And I think that's fucking huge. Especially if we could get that kind of any kind of cross-app support, it like it just starts killing heuristics and one of the nice things here is because there's not there's no coordinator involved um the coordinator is not getting a fee um and and and you're not um there's no you're not you're not coin joining with strangers so the the negative is you don't have to worry about any kind of sybil attack the positive is you don't have to worry

about any kind of civil attacks because you're not coin joining with strangers the the negative is that you do have to trust the person you're coin joining with because they obviously know which transaction is yours or which transaction is theirs um but it could be extremely powerful um at any kind of scale because it just completely breaks the heuristic of uh of both both inputs on on the input side are owned by the same person hell yeah fuck yeah i'm really bullish on that that should come out pretty soon so you're beta testing that yeah it's pretty fucking cool and are you doing that on the mobile app or using like a no no it's it's all they they have like a testing mobile app okay sweet um yeah it's it's it'll all just it'll just be like in the mobile app and the

beauty is is like every spend in samurai after you do whirlpool is a simulated two-person coin join so it looks like it's a two-person coin join but it's just one person doing it so if we have more of these people doing real two-person coin joins then it completely breaks the heuristic you don't know which one is a one person and which one's a two person they look the same so we don't even need that many people doing the two person if we have like you know three thousand people four thousand people doing the the two person like maybe that's enough to like completely break the heuristic yeah i'm just waiting for the day when uh some government agency attempts to use one of these heuristics to to prove that somebody committed what they need to be a crime

and it comes out that they were completely wrong and the owner of one of the inputs was somebody completely different than they expected is that what it will take to prove that these heuristics are i mean see like that's the problem with with like heuristic breaking uh because like tracking bitcoin is a probability game uh so by breaking the heuristics you reduce the probabilities you reduce the likelihood that that that bitcoin can be tracked you you make their guesses more more more guesses rather than educated but the issue is is like governments have thrown plenty of people in jail for things they didn't do in the past you know it's taken it's you know the people have been put in jail for murdering someone for life and like

25 years later like there's dna evidence that absconds them and they get off like kamala harris yeah like i prefer if like i don't know you know it could they could throw people in jail for bad heuristics for a while yeah right before like it and in some countries they may never admit that they were wrong yeah so it's an ongoing battle it definitely would be interesting to have like some of these like chain surveillance companies like in court like trying to make a case that you know this is this person because we haven't really seen that we haven't one of the things that's so sketchy about these firms is that everything they do is like behind closed

doors. You don't get to see the tools. You don't get to see the analysis. You don't get to see what they're using. Yeah. And this highlights something you tweeted about today. You quote tweeted, no bullshit Bitcoin and making the world aware that the Russian government wants full wallet disclosures, addresses.

If you own Bitcoin, own enough Bitcoin in a single address that's worth more than $1,300, the Russian government wants its citizens to report those addresses to the government and this highlights a single address that's what mr hoddle tried to say it was i don't i i think it's a wallet that's over 1300 like i think if they cluster your well i don't think like if you're not reusing if you're let's say you're not reusing addresses but you buy like once the crypto users do have to report

their digital wallet address transaction transaction history and balance if the wallet receives more than a hundred thousand rubles around thirteen hundred dollars wallet not the address it says the digital wallet address but then it says the wallet well the wallet i don't know but the thing is even if it's just specifically an address like that loophole will last like what a year or so right and then they'll be like they'll just see everyone like structuring their their address is under 1300 like they'll have like a bunch of addresses that are 1200 and they'll be like okay wallets full wallets yeah they're uh they're also the distinction doesn't really matter because it's just it's just a matter of time yeah and so anybody who fails to report

that is subjected to up to three years in prison and they're also asking otc dealers uh they're obliging them they're not asking them they're forcing them to report all transactions involving rubles in russian ip address addresses to the tax authorities so if you're in russia make sure you're using a vpn or tor i'm sure many russians are are uh wise on that already but just a case bitcoin privacy pitfalls and techniques you know yeah yeah the good the one good news here is that it looks like this is a proposed plan it's not been enacted yet so maybe it doesn't happen but i do think this happens in lots lots of places around the world yeah at least over the short term and then maybe it gets pulled back but like a lot of people will get

are in for a surprise yeah we're delving into the uh the news that makes us mad section we haven't finished uh all the good news yet uh so we'll we'll mix in the good news in the bad here uh two points of good news square crypto uh granted btc pay server with another hundred thousand dollar grant uh and launches a proper proper a proper portal for their work which is squarecrypto.org so you can follow what they're contributing to there um i believe the btc pay grant was the first recurring grant they've uh offered to a grant recipient which is good to see them re-upping that uh getting skin in the game i think we mentioned this last week i think we have this on the list because of squarecrypto.org but again can't be said enough times btc pay

server is one of our favorite projects in the space doing god's work to contribute to the self-sovereignty sovereign nature of bitcoin and and the closed loop bitcoin economy and this was really cool to see name cheap actually the dns provider of tftc.io is now accepting bitcoin via btc pay server they were accepting it through bitpay before for what it's worth yeah they're one of the first but now they've they haven't dropped bitpay yet so it's a it's bittersweet they've just added btc pay as an option so if you're using namecheap and paying in bitcoin make sure you go out of your way to use the btc pay server option i imagine bitpay is short for this for them because like they have to pay fees to bitpay so why would they continue once they

realize that btcpa works great yeah i agree um all right and back to uh news that makes us mad uh venezuela government is requiring the use of national mining pools if you're a miner in venezuela the medora regime is attempting to require uh miners to point their hash at a national mining pool that i believe the venezuelan government is thinking about spinning up a few things here number one i would not trust this mining pool they're definitely going to charge exorbitant fees number two um i uh hope that if you're in venezuela mining you're mining off grid and hopefully using a vpn or any services that you can i think vpn may slow it down too much so you gotta sort of hide how you're delivering your hash um i think you could

probably get away with the vpn you're just gonna lose some profitability yeah um but i mean you're gonna lose profit like if the venezuelan government is not only kyc-ing you but controlling your reward payouts um it's probably worth that like you're gonna lose some profitability there too i would say yeah um i did see i forget god i wish i had the tweet where this i think it was no bullshit, Bickwin. Let me pull up the tweet from NoBullshitBickwin because there was a Venezuelan miner that hopped in that thread

and said they're not worried particularly. They actually think individual miners within Venezuela are going to create their own pool. Why would they create their own pool instead of just using one of the established ones? That's a good point.

Let me find this. um give me a second here you know i mean it comes down to enforcement right and they're not going to be able to fully enforce it but on the bigger operations they'll be able to enforce it and they'll make an example out of some people who don't comply we already know that venezuelans has seized the minors um in the past if you don't play ball with them um so it's not that much of a surprise but this should be a concern to people um the another thing i didn't have on the list was the was the attempted WeChat TikTok ban and I think when you look at combination of this

the the Russian disclosures and the WeChat TikTok ban you're kind of starting to see what the framework what what the play the playbook would be to try and attack Bitcoin um it'd be way more effective on some of these shit coins if you wanted to use it to attack something like ETH I mean, in the WeChat TikTok executive order from Trump, like he's explicitly called out like using AWS to host WeChat messages and WeChat transactions that were happening. So like you hit the servers, you tell people that they need to disclose their addresses, you tell the miners they have to use your mining pool, and then you try enforcement. You know, enforcement is going to be hit or miss, but you're going to get some people and you're going to scare a large amount of people into complying. Yes. I go back and forth.

I agree with your tweet about it, or your thought of the week last week in the stat standard. But I do not like those apps. And I don't think you do either. That is an interesting tradeoff. trade-off do you allow the spyware within your borders especially considering they don't reciprocate uh within their borders are you just turning into your enemy at that point if you ban them it's interesting to me look i think i think we should live in a world where the apps you don't like can't be banned so yeah exactly i agree with that don't download the

spyware people tiktok's got like it was hilarious that uh if you watch the nfl this week tiktok's got like a huge uh ad campaign going on right now i mean that's got to be the strategy right you got to go for hearts and minds yeah yeah it's uh i mean it's interesting too because you also have on the side you have the tim apple fight um where they're trying to you know keep their app store restricted so they get the 30 cut um and i don't know if you saw but like epic games just got they were the ones who put their neck out at first but they just got joined by proton mail spotify and a couple others a couple other big dogs that are all like trying to push for um the ability to make their own app store so that they don't have to pay apple a 30

cut yeah how much of apple's revenue does that make up a shit ton yeah you're trying you know it's this whole new idea like become a service business rather than a hardware business what would steve jobs think of this um i mean i think he loved his uh his paywalls and his his closed systems he was a big fan of it right all the value in it yeah um it should be an interesting fight but it definitely does make their platforms more susceptible to these government interventions i mean um the on the wechat side it's it's really interesting that they're going after servers because this is exactly like the type of playbook that people have theorized with shitcoins before,

which is like you go after Infura, right? You go after, you know, there's like four or five providers of Ethereum nodes as a service. Like you go after them and you go after the people that they host with. So you go after Microsoft Azure, you go after AWS.

And that's what they're doing with WeChat. But with TikTok, it's much simpler. With TikTok, they just say, it's not allowed on the app stores. um so with with iphone you're shit out of luck you can't get the updates anymore for tiktok but on android at least you you could either install your own app store if you want or you can sideload an apk so it's a different censorship resistance model because of their of the way those two companies are are handling their app stores handling their platforms yeah more freedom on

android who would have thunk it google yeah well it's always been more open it's just you know run by a surveillance company so right um all right continuing on subjects that make us angry vincen uh buzzfeed a blog that i usually don't hold in high regard i actually put out some good investigative journalism uh every once in a while they hit us with some random investigative journalism piece that's like really top-notch yeah this is one of them uh so the finsen files they uh did this in conjunction with a bunch of other uh media companies around the world and the the international journalists something something they got their hands on uh i believe something like 2100 uh what are they called sars the uh suspicious activity suspicious yes suspicious

activity reports that have been uh that have been uh sent to fincen by the major banks of the world these suspicious activity reports basically uh are reports to the bank saying hey there's people that are doing some suspicious activity moving large amounts of money potentially money laundering or supporting drug dealers uh kleptocrats uh corrupt regimes around the world uh yet these transactions still get through the banks deal with these customers uh and the the suspicious activity reports uh we're coming to find are basically just a a way for these banks to wash their hands clean uh of any uh any culpability in this so they they send the reports and then they facilitate the transactions anyway it just highlights the two-tiered justice system that we

live that we live under these large banks that have been screwing over the world for some time now are able to service large drug cartels, again, corrupt regimes and other nefarious activities while the common man is getting the whole book of the law thrown at him for very minor infractions, especially when you compare them to the amount of fraud that's enabled at this level, which is trillions of dollars over the last 12 years. Yeah, I mean, I think it highlights a bunch of things that are really interesting that we've discussed on this pod one coin got called out a lot a lot which is yeah one coin was in it which is well first of all is that these big bureaucracies are inefficient and they lack

accountability um so they end up being very ineffective um they each like just create plausible viability for themselves so it's like there's no one for it to actually fall on the second thing is that the overwhelming majority of money laundering is happening in traditional finance systems they're not happening in bitcoin um that the third thing is is that the collection of this information in kyc is extremely dangerous um if fincen cannot protect this information which they cannot clearly um then they should not collect it and then the fourth thing is is is absolutely bullshit because they're letting the overwhelming majority of money laundering go through while they're putting their citizens at risk by by forcing the collection of the

information and in a lot of times they're they're putting businesses out of business because of the overbearing regulations that that prevent them being competitive in america versus in other countries yeah and that's exactly the point i was just about to bring up like it's so ironic the fact that the solutions to these uh problems of money laundering and facilitating fraud on a scale that make many of the criminals throughout history blush, the solutions to these problems basically consolidate more power into the people that are facilitating this. And so they make more regulation.

Like Matt said, it makes it burdensome for smaller businesses to comply, so they fall out of favor. And as we've seen throughout history, these nefarious actors don't care about laws. They don't care about laws. they're breaking the law and they know it and to think that they're not going to continue doing that because you make more regulations is just asinine where there's a will there's a way and as we've seen throughout history these banks have a price point at which they will facilitate this

crime and to think it'll be any different moving forward because of these leaks is naive to say the least i'm into that yeah screw fatfa a lot of this has to do with uh appeasing fatfa a super national unelected uh regulatory body that you didn't vote for and they control the way we send money around the world fuck fatfa it's just been like a fucking crazy week for confirming my biases just like and like in the worst ways ever it's like they're like the worst told you so's to be happening right but uh it has it has been a crazy week in in regard to that yeah um last eric's actually

i threw something at the end of the list i don't know if you saw that i just want to mention that but first before we get to that uh the doj announced uh tuesday of this week september 22nd the international law enforcement operation targeting opioid traffickers on the darknet has resulted in over 170 arrests worldwide in the seizure of weapons, drugs, and over $6.5 million. Worth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Yes.

So they're calling this operation... In cash, I guess. Some cash. Let me see. Let me type in crypto. It's a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency. 11 pounds of methamphetamine.

Allegedly accepted payment. cryptocurrency primarily bitcoin over 6.5 million in both cash and virtual currencies yeah 500 kilos of drugs one person what dark net was it 170 people it was multiple dark nets yeah did you see disruptor it was the name of the operation there's clever names sabotor s-a-b-o-t-o-r um operation saboteur oh what is disruptor oh they they have two names there i don't know yeah oh yeah oh disruptor builds on the success saboteur and this year's was disruptor such clever names hey they're getting creative they have some creative minds in the department of justice yeah but anyway this is well and so

I read about the FinCEN leaks and the bent I believe it was Monday might have been Tuesday today is Thursday but yeah like I said if you haven't read that I said in that issue like is this

drug war really worth it like why are we making criminals out of these people like again the FinCEN leaks are highlighting the fact that it's becoming extremely hard to focus on the crimes they're worth focusing on like all these regulations and wars on abstract objects like drugs and the war on drugs they just create a bunch of criminals that they really should start considering like do we want to create the headache

around this stuff and just make a bunch of people criminals for stuff that many people myself included would argue is like hey if you want to do that if you're an individual of free will and you want to engage in those activities you should be able to it would probably reduce crime it would reduce the um the draw to do that stuff because when you make things illegal it makes people with certain mindsets want to do it more uh if you're if it's made legal or decriminalized um at least you you make it uh more um more probable that people will create services that that service addicts in better ways and and make it publicly acceptable to admit that you have a problem and solve that problem it's just really infuriating i just went on a weird rant there

but whatever uh one interesting take was our our boy dark dot fail uh said on twitter was he's like this isn't the war on drugs this is the war on privacy um which i thought was very interesting disruptor saboteur yeah like they're going they're going after these private marketplaces right and these message boards and these private communities and and they want to make a point uh and and they don't they don't want people working outside of the system um the other thing that i think is important here is that a lot of people myself included think it's very unlikely for uh countries especially in this current geopolitical climate, to come together, work together for a common goal. And a lot of times that is in discussion of Bitcoin and state threats on Bitcoin and that threat model.

It turns out that if they're sufficiently motivated in something they don't like, they can work together. you know and this this this uh operation specifically was like a ton of european countries u.s and canada that they all work together and they hit people all in these different countries at the same time so they wouldn't get spooked yeah they'll come together to uh to inhibit uh privacy and sovereign sovereignty of individuals they don't want you to be free freaks they hate you they all fucking hate you um but we're going to end on a good note unless you have anything to add to that matt um well i saw what you added but we actually have two things left what's the other thing uh bitcoin q a released his whirlpool fee

calculator at whirlpoolfees.com oh yeah oh i didn't see that on the list he i put it in at the end and he uh he has a portal that just like lists all of his great uh his great guides and all the different content he's done and that's get bitcoin.help um so it's it's whirlpoolfees.com is is the whirlpool fee calculator and it's really nice because it includes the mining fees um which is is important if if i'm right about mining fees going up um that you're able to get a clear calculation there and his his portal for all of his content is get bitcoin.help yes uh shout out to bitcoin q a putting out incredible content trying to help people we're trying to help themselves via bitcoin so go check that out and then lastly what i had

the list is uh i just thought it was pretty cool luke childs uh teased it uh umbrella wallet support they're supporting a bunch of different wallets wasabi blue wallet um uh let me pull up the tweet and it's just green wallet electrum yeah i think that was a phoenix wallet for now oh phoenix a lot of them are just electrum wallet but like electrum wallet backend but what's cool about this is that he it's once again it's like umbral like making the ux very nice you know and for a lot of these wallets right now you're still gonna have to copy and paste the string in but they're providing the qr code so those devs of those wallets can make it so you can just scan the qr code and that's what we want we want to

be able to just easily connect your node through tor with your wallet by scanning the qr code that's fucking beautiful yes make that the standard shout out to the umbral team uh really incredible ux and yeah go check this out we'll link to the uh the demo or the uh demo i guess you can say the gif that shows how it works it's really sleek to be clear here like my node and Noddle and RazPi Blitz, they have this same capability. What's really cool here is that it's all in the same spot.

The UX is nice. It shows the QR code. It's not just a copy string. Yes. But I love it. I'm a huge fan. Shout out to you guys. Do you have anything else

we got to riff on here before we wrap up? I still have to write the bent. I haven't had time to write the bent yet today. That's the beauty of the bent is that they never know what time they're going to get it.

You're getting a late one today, freaks. It's always 8 a.m. somewhere, freaks. That's actually the mentality I've adopted. That's the beauty of having a global audience. It is crazy. Somebody asked me that the other day. Like, do you have a global audience? I was like, it seems so.

So shout out to you, Freeze. When you send it, you should look up, like, where it's 8 o'clock in the morning, and you should just start off your bed, like, good morning, like, Nicaragua. Good morning, Australia. Yeah. Good morning, Hawaii. Yeah. No, I mean, life's good.

you know i love you freaks i miss you marty uh go on a road trip enjoy uh enjoy your country i co-sign that uh yeah no again just want to reiterate love to you guys tune in and join us every week for this we love doing it we love you uh if you're liking it uh tell your friends give us a review give us a review share be good to your family subscribe

engage peace and love