TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #88: Richard Myers

Episode Date: July 30, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Richard Myers, who is working on "Bitcoin's last mile" via mesh networks at GoTenna and Global Mesh Labs, to discuss: - ByteABit, Richard's P2P mobile Bitcoin exchange - Mesh networks, GoTenn, LOT49, and Global Mesh Labs - Cashless societies - Deflation - much more Follow Richard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/remyers_ Follow Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/matt_odell Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Shoutout to our sponsor: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty, here to introduce our sponsor, Cash App. You already know all about them. They're helping us stack sats. They're helping us save money at merchants. And they just rolled out a new UI. I don't know if you freaks have it yet, but they updated their UI last week. Bitcoin is now a first-class citizen in the app, and it is just very sleek, easy to use. Let's go over the details of what you have on the Cash App. Again, you can stack sats. You have the ability to buy, sell, deposit, and withdraw Bitcoin on the Cash App. On top of that, they have their boost program, which lets you go to merchants like Whole Foods, DoorDash, any coffee shop, Taco Bell's on the list. There's too many

more in the name. And you get the special boost card with that. You get to sign your signature, personalize it. It's all good and dandy. On top of that, if you have not downloaded the Cash App yet who've been listening to this podcast and have yet to download cash app and you decide to download it in the future make sure you use the promo code stacking sats that's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s one word you're going to get five dollars then five dollars going to go to our partner al's lacrosse based in chicago a very good charity doing great things in the west and south side of chicago that we're honored to support here at tftc i hope you guys enjoy this conversation that Matt and I had with Richard Myers from Gotenna and Global Mesh Labs.

Incredibly far-ranging conversation. Everything from P2P, Bitcoin exchanges, to mesh networks, to deflation, to cashless societies. It was a great, long-ranging, long conversation. Hope you freaks enjoy. what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here in one of our relegation studios in brooklyn sitting down with a couple of great gentlemen we've been having a a beautiful conversation with our with our guests tonight matt odell's and with with us in the studio and we've got Richard Myers from Gotenna and Global Mesh Labs.

Richard, welcome to the podcast. Thanks. Been looking forward to it for a long time. Pumped you're here. Pumped you're here because, I mean, Gotenna and what you're working on at TX10 has fascinated me for over a year now. I think the first time I wrote about TX10 was June of last year. We were talking about this around consensus, and it's been crazy to see the progress you've

made over the last year. but we've been talking for like the last 45 minutes matt uh forgot his mic and had to run home so richard and i had a great pre-interview chat you've got a very fascinating story of before you got to bitcoin and yeah your career before go tenna and now working on lot 49 and the chanko labs residency so let's just first talk about what you're doing with the microscopes and developing for uh microscopes basically in the community around that and how it prepared you for bitcoin Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think working in software development is really, you know, the primary thing I got from my last job.

But what I was saying, you know, as I'm here at Chaincode sort of learning about the core development process, I see a lot of similarities when you've got a, you know, it's going on 10-year code base, more than 10-year code base. And the project I was working on before was also a long single code base that had evolved over time. And it maybe wasn't as mission critical, you know, from a financial standpoint, but we were still pretty resistant to make big changes. So that that kind of it was a small team. And I think, you know, still with with Bitcoin, it's a little larger team than we had at this this microscope company. But same same attitude that you're not making changes that are unnecessary. You're really very conservative because, you know, every change introduces a bug potentially. So that that that way that development process seems pretty familiar.

So I'm excited, actually, you know, I have been a developer for a long time, but it's only like very recently and mostly due to the chain code residency that I've started to try to get deep into Bitcoin, you know, from a development standpoint, it's, it's really, you know, it's exciting, but it's also sort of scary, you know, because it's a lot to a lot to learn. And you're saying your C++ experience has helped you out, right? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I didn't realize that that would be so rare. But I mean, one of the, I guess one of the advantages of being kind of an oldster here is that, you know, that's what I learned. That's what I've been programming. And so it's not intimidating. I think, you know, the other people at the Chaincode residency maybe have also had some C++ experience. But I think it's, yeah, I think generally, it's not as popular a language nowadays. So yeah, it's good. It's like those guys in 2000 who had the Fortran experience. You know, we're like they were they were tapped when that Y2K issue came around. So I kind of feel like if you're if you've been doing C++ for a while, you know, it's good prep for for working on the course core software for Bitcoin, too. Oh, yeah. So how did you become introduced to Bitcoin? Like we were I mean, I've heard this story, but for the first time there. Yeah. I mean, I think my story is very typical.

I saw it on Slashdot. I actually think my brother might have seen it first and sort of tapped me and said, hey, take a look at this. yeah I mean I've heard a lot of people give their origin story for Bitcoin and I think the only way mine may be very it may be a little bit different is I didn't like immediately think oh shit this will never work I mean I wasn't a cypherpunk I didn't know the whole history of cryptocurrency when I first saw it I just thought like shit this is gonna you know this is gonna give us state-free money and I was totally in you know I had no doubts I was only you know my I think another common theme that I think I also fell into is you know your first thought is isn't will it work? It's like, how can we make sure this works? You know, where is it going to be

attacked? What, what, you know, what can we do to make this work? One other thought though on that is just that my, my biggest surprise I would say is just how quickly it has happened. And I shouldn't have been surprised, but, but I feel like, like that anybody who's been around like Bitcoin for a while, I think is a little bit surprised that it's actually, you know, taken off the way it has. What, what were your expectations? Were you thinking this would just trudge along for a decade or two and yeah i i thought it would be a small niche thing for a long time i didn't think it would go away but i didn't think it would go mainstream i thought it was just you know pretty niche you know it's my i always like to draw the analogy with email if

you know you guys maybe aren't quite old enough to remember to land before email but email was like that for a long time you know like the only people who used email were you know dudes in the cs department you know i yeah i don't want to maybe i don't want to get in talk talk about this topic but you know there were no women basically in those departments so I remember when it would became common for women you know for girls when you're in college you know you want to send an email to a girl there weren't that many so you know a lot of the sort of similar feelings around bitcoin you know that sausage fest feeling yeah I don't think that's going to be forever I think that's just a I think that's just a momentary thing that's going to pass as it becomes more

mainstream generally basically yeah my wife's a hardcore hodler now see yeah I don't think there's any you know it's just about knowledge you know just about finding out about it and what uh what was your sort of path that you took so you approach this more from a computer science uh thinking it's more of like a breakthrough a breakthrough in computer science or you're telling me before your dad had this very uh fuck the man mentality was it more of that the dream yeah i mean i definitely was raised you know in that individualistic philosophy um my dad you know he subscribed to the Objectivist newsletter and we had those sitting around the house, you know, Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, all that stuff.

And, you know, so I think I was, that sort of lays the groundwork. You sometimes hear people say that they were, you know, they were raised one way or the other, but Bitcoin got them into Austrian economics. And I don't feel like, in my case, it was sort of like the opposite. I really started with that already. And I think a lot of people have that history, you know, and so that resonated immediately. And I've maybe gotten deeper into it now, you know, with Bitcoin. but uh yeah definitely fuck the man was was was the household word so

you're saying your dad was a fireman too yeah he was a fireman but i could tell you some stories about that he was not uh yeah he was he was a state employee but he was he was not exactly down with the full program i feel like firemen of all the state employees are some of the most admirable running into some of the most dangerous situations out there yeah yeah although i gotta I say he, you know, as his career sort of went on, he said that it was a lot less about fires and a lot more about, like, emergencies and things like that. Oh, really? Yeah, it was more about medical emergencies than fires, you know, just the way things

go. But there was fires, yeah. Is the life of a fireman odd hours? There's a lot of odd hours, right? That's true. Odd hours and no suits. So I think being a programmer is kind of similar in that way. You work some weird hours and you don't wear a suit to work.

So I guess I'm following in the footsteps that way. How did you and your brother get into software development? Yeah, we were just talking about this. My brother was here in New York over the weekend Yeah, I mean we picked up a book on basic. I think you know actually if you really want to go back There was a computer store and they so this was like before PCs So so like just as the Apple was coming out and there was this computer store And we ride our bikes to this computer store to play I think the game was called Star Trek and it was a total text cursor based game

And we would we would ride our bikes just to go and sort of hang out at this computer store And this was like a computer with like woodgrain on the side. This is sort of that era Yeah, I kind of missed that that that look um Eventually got one at home, and yeah, and just sort of went from there So I've been programming since we were you know in our early teens, so it's crazy I actually met your brother in San Francisco. Yeah, you never told me you had an identical twin brother Well, we're not identical, but yeah. Are you really not identical?

We're fraternal twins. Yeah, we're not identical. It's not identical? No, but if you don't see us side by side, it's a common, commonly people think we look alike. Steve's got a bit of a beard. I don't know. Even the mannerisms are similar. You know, you have very similar mannerisms.

He came up to me. I swear to God, I thought it was you playing a practical joke on me. I even like checked his name tag and everything. Yeah, I was worried about that. I told him, you know, if anybody comes up to you, you've got to explain it. they gonna think i'm like the rudest sob well i figured it out on twitter because he started following me on twitter and i was like steve myers myers it's m-y-e-r-s i've never seen it spelled that way um so i put that i was like yeah these two look a lot alike yeah yeah and i guess

before we get into the crux of our conversation tonight what we really want to talk about just goten uh lot 49 and tx10 and all that let's talk about what you and your brother are building i don't know if matt knows much about this but um bite a bit uh which is a p2p mobile exchange we were talking about this before it's yeah it seems pretty fascinating yeah i mean sort of back to my history you know the first thing i did when i really you know saw that bitcoin was cool and was working is i just sort of like iterated in my head like what kind of project i'm a software developer i got to do something in bitcoin uh and the one that sort of stuck out is like this that was like around the time of mount gox and the fact that exchanges you know were the central

point of failure we weren't even thinking about mining centralization this was just thinking about you know the big issue of the day was was centralization of exchanges we had like one major exchange. So that sort of put me on this thought about a decentralized exchanges and that's about like that's when PDSH was coming out and 203 multisig was the taproot of its day you know like that was the hot technology and basically been tinkering on that with my brother ever since you know we've gone through a lot of iterations we worked with the BISC project and try to support them because we thought they were on the right track and it's just taken until now to basically you know get something that we think is is worth testing so hopefully we'll get something this year

so i'll let you know no you said you're starting in sweden correct yeah so i'm living in sweden so we're going to start in sweden they got nice uh non uh charge backable payment instant sort of bank to bank payments so we think that's a good place to start and they don't have a lot of other good options so we think sweden might be a good place to sort of test this stuff out and get the shake out the bugs no we were uh talking about it before i didn't know like sweden has one of the top like population to Bitcoin holding. Yeah I mean I don't think they're probably not the top but they're

pretty high when you consider you know how relatively stable the economy is. They're always in the top 20 or so I think you know so the per capita it's a very small population so if you just look in volume they don't show up but you do the math and you divide by population it's pretty high. They're

very like technologically forward there too. I mean everything is on the cell phone you probably heard they don't carry cash you know very cashless over there yeah so i think the idea of a cashless uh non-state money maybe also appeals to some too uh because it's definitely a pretty big state out there is the uh almost cashless society scary at all yeah it's uh it's pretty scary it's pretty scary for sure i mean there is no gray market in sweden i'll tell you that and a lot of that is on purpose you know you've got to everything's got to go through your phone and you know people if you spend with cash

Like if you go to this place and you pay with cash, you get a little weird look. Really? Oh, yeah. I mean, being back here in New York, I realized that, you know, not only don't you get a weird look paying in cash, like, you know, merchants appreciate that. But not in Sweden. And I don't know the full sort of psychology behind it. That's what I was just going to ask. Do you find yourself self-censoring at all?

That's a good question. Not you, but maybe other people. Yeah. I mean, I guess, yeah, you would self-censor for sure. I mean, you know, that's maybe a whole other topic, but Sweden is a homogeneous society, and, you know, you worry about what people think, and there's a lot of transparency in that society. For instance, you can find out what other people pay in taxes. That's part of the law. Really?

Yeah, you can request that information. And it's because, you know, you're your brother's keeper. Is he paying his taxes? Can you do that here? Let's go check. Can you only do that for businesses? I mean, I assume you can't, right? We don't know Trump's tax returns.

Yeah, that's true, right? right right yeah because that's the thing presidential candidates that's why i got confused presidential candidates will typically review their tax returns they voluntarily yes yes exactly yeah yeah yeah no that's i mean it's good and it's bad i mean i'm all for transparency but it definitely is uh it can be put to other uses too and i mean the state is more transparent at least in theory so that's also good um but um but yeah financial privacy is not kind of considered a high high thing is it is it uncouth in sweden to ask how much someone makes it's probably still a little rude i mean people that's more like socially maybe rude but

uh in some in some professions it's not uncommon to like if you think somebody's making more than you you just go and ask hr and they'll tell you how much they make yeah i mean because you can just well yeah if you just pretty messed up you can go backwards on the taxes and just know exactly how much yeah i've never done it so i don't know the details but i just think like generally that's not considered private information so i want to give a shout out to matt here if you're using the word uncouth haven't heard it in a while very good word thank you i didn't even stumble when i used it i haven't heard that one in a while um no it's fascinating uh obviously because bitcoin somebody living in sweden uh which is basically going cashless it seems like a very peaceful

conformist society is building one of the most or working on one of the building yes one of the sort of uh overtly uh basically middle finger to the state and let's hope they don't see it that way initially but yeah yeah well so let's jump into it how did you like find gotenna what what like you you alluded to it earlier uh in the conversation that uh bitcoin mount goxtop realized bitcoin centralization in one aspect and that's why you're building bite a bit and It feels like internet service providers being the main conduit for transaction relay. Yeah, those are both. I mean, when you're a software developer and you're thinking about Bitcoin, you know, you look for ways that it could be attacked.

That's, I think, common for many people that get into Bitcoin. And you think about these things. And for me, initially, it was the centralized exchanges, but also had been thinking about just the other communication, you know, attacks that could be happening. So I think I initially just randomly ran across Gotenna. I wasn't as early as Matt here with the Gotenna crowdsourcing. OG. You're an OG, yeah. I wish Kickstarter gave you equity.

Yeah, that sucks. But I think I saw a Twitter post about it or something. And at that same time, I think the Blockstream satellite was being talked about. And I got to look up the exact post, but something Nick Szabo had said about it. And I responded, and it kind of, there was a nice little conversation about, like, wireless alternatives and how radio could be used. And I kind of, those things kind of clicked together, and I started to post on the Gotenna forum and doing research into, like, how that could be done. And that, say, one thing led to another, and I was posting on the forums, and then I was sort of consulting for them, trying to give them some advice. And I was telling you earlier that Daniela, you know, they were, Gotenna was taking Bitcoin from 2015.

I don't know if you remember that, but some pretty early, they were taking Bitcoin on their website from pretty early. Yes, yes. It was BitPay, unfortunately, which we've fixed. But, yeah, I hope they're not a sponsor. No, they would never be a sponsor. Yeah, I didn't think so. We are BTC Pay server users.

They're not a sponsor. Nor would we want them to sponsor us. The stuff that they build for free is awesome. We help sponsor them. Yes, exactly. That's great. That's the way it should be. Yeah.

Yeah, so I was posting on the forums, and Daniela, I want to say was 16. I got to look it up, but she gave a talk at that Blockstack summit of some sort, and she just was basically putting out a call like, okay, here are the problems with Mesh, and you've got a decentralized network. How do you kickstart a –

or how do you fix this sort of zero-start problem? If nobody's got one, then who's going to get one? It's like the first telephone. If there was nobody to call, it wasn't very useful, so you had to build up that network, effect. And I think very early on, so Daniela Perdomo is the co-founder of Gotenna, and she very early on saw the parallels with cryptocurrency also being a protocol. And that's really what Gotenna makes. I mean, they make these devices, but they really just make them as a way to run

the mesh protocol, which is really their sort of technological innovation, is the way to route messages over this mesh. So they looked at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies generally as this like protocol incentivizing its own use that was something she she talked about and and looking like what can we learn from cryptocurrencies basically we're looking for Bitcoin this was you know starting to get into 2017 where there was a you know mad sort of flourishing of different altcoins but but just sort of the idea that you can incentivize protocols with some system and that's that that was in her talk so they had sort of started posting on that and

eventually also worked with the put her in touch basically with the Samurai wallet guys so TX Tena you guys have talked about yeah and it's a it's crazy seeing the demos of them sending Bitcoin transactions through a mesh network but to take a step back in general it's like as someone who considers himself someone of adult and is not not an adult adult it's like you never think of the attack vectors or the centralization of the information uh highways if you will go back to a to a old 90s phrase but like the internet as an internet service providers is the main uh sort of vehicles of transmitting most of the data that i send and use other than on top of that telecoms as well

you don't really think of oh crap like these companies have an immense control over the the basically transfer of data in the world and mesh network had never even come into my consciousness until i read what you wrote over a year ago a year and a month ago i believe and it's crazy to think that there are different ways you can do it in radio waves you can do it via mesh network so but these these alternative networks seem pretty nation right now is that is that correct and assuming or yeah i mean it's there are different projects going for different things i mean what we're focused on at Gotenna is what we would call a mobile mesh network. There's some other projects that have been around a while where it's more point to point. I think you've got one here

in New York, so the New York mesh. Yeah, Matt Corral is helping with that one. Oh yeah, right, right. Yep, that's totally his thing too. And that's like rooftop receivers on buildings. Yeah, you know, the difference there from a routing standpoint, you don't have too much issues because everything is fixed you just have a fixed network um but but getting but that's also hard to jump start you know it's true for all mesh networks and it's really you know you can really look at bitcoin is also a mesh network from a standpoint of if nobody's got bitcoin then nobody's going to use bitcoin and if nobody's relaying have relay nodes then you know you can't run the network but but i guess sort of the observation about mesh there is that all of

these networks if you look at torrents if you look at bit torrent you look at bitcoin all of these are overlay networks on a centralized network of of you know isps and service providers like mobile service providers so even though they're structured protocol wise as being these meshes of peer-to-peer nodes that what they're running on is is really centralized and and it's centralized here in the u.s and getting more centralized i suppose as we get more consolidation But you go to some countries and it's really like the national carrier. So you're really talking about one ISP that runs everything China For example, I mean that's a state-based system there where and and they do shut it off I mean you've heard about Turkey. I think was one of the big big examples. We have the Great Firewall of China

We saw the war on BitTorrent here Yep, where they were tracking they were tracking all your packets and sending you cease and desist and yep you know doing some test cases where they threw people in jail through kids in jail and gave you big ass fines yeah and then we have like the vertical integration of the media companies that also own the lines as well and then they they're presumably like in the future going to start charging us to to gain access to stuff that isn't in their portfolio like you can see the writing on the wall is this why you got into mesh networking the war on bittorrent was really obvious for me in the beginning because i may or may not have used bit torrent but uh that is where

i learned like what a vpn was uh how internet censorship could be enforced in america fairly easily um and just like privacy in general and so you let's shift now asking questions to you matt why were you initially like kick-starting go tenna like what what piqued your interest with So when was Gotenna, was I already a Bitcoiner at that point? When was the Kickstarter? Was it 2013, 2014? Yeah, about then. Yeah, it was five years ago or so.

When was Snowden? Late 2012, I believe it was. It was post-Snowden was the Gotenna. So they had basically, you know all Kickstarters, they oversell, right? So basically I saw this non-centralized communication medium, basically just text messages on your phone that presumably would be encrypted and and and not centralized so it hit the two main things that we basically needed um in terms of like private communications on like a local basis like even if it wasn't successful on on a nationwide or global

basis like presumably we could get 10 000 people in new york to run it and and we could have like pretty private chats if if there was any kind of protest stuff like that and then when i received it in the mail they weren't able to do the encryption on gen one so it was completely worthless everything was just oh and there was no hops you couldn't it just had to be point to point so you had to be like within a mile of someone and there was no encryption and it literally just crushed my dream so i sent them like the angriest email ever and they said don't worry we're working on encryption and hops it's like yeah bullshit there's no way they're gonna do it and then they came out with the gen 2 that supports both of those and that's what the

transaction tenant and all this is built on top of uh for an idiot like me what's the difference between endpoint and uh in hops well like now point to point was like now we can go what seven hops i think is the max yeah it's limited by software it might be 10 actually yeah so you can if there's like especially if there's relay nodes people just like plug in Gotenas and just leave them places in fixed places if you're like you could be like 10 15 miles away and I can hop off of intermediary Gotenas until it ultimately reaches you but which is like compared to so I guess like for a lot of these use cases one of the competitors that they're competing with are like the

the little walkie-talkies the consumer radios right and they do they say they do like seven 14 miles or whatever they really do like two miles point to point but they can't hop off of each other right so once you start adding that capability to the hops you have like there's really something you can build off of there that you can work off of there you can get some like pretty crazy distance going and then you can ultimately add like bridge nodes and stuff like that where you're way less limited as long as there's like a bridge node within eight hops of me then it can go out to the wider internet and then and then connect that way yeah and um i just lost my train of thought here what uh the um the actual device that's where i wanted to go

so the actual gotenna device it seems like a very like apocalyptic apocalyptic survival tool right how long can it last like let's talk about the actual device what does it do how durable is it and and and how long can it go without like a battery charge or something like that Yeah, I mean, I can talk about that. Matt's probably got a lot more of the history, but like the current device, the mesh device, when it's charged, it can go about a day. So it's rated for about a day of use. It'll be more or less depending on how much use you get. The range, I think on our website, we say four miles, but that's very dependent on where you're at. So if you're in the open, if you're out on the water, for example, you know, you got nothing

between you and the other guy, it can go much further. If you're in a concrete jungle like New York it's going to be limited it's not going to go through big buildings and the thing is this this is on the ISM band that's a radio frequency that's given for these sort of uses to to people who want to build devices and it's it's the same for basically everybody in on this is a UHF band but it you know it it that's why the meshing with the hops is so important because if you're in a dense area you can turn that density into better capacity into better range by hopping from node to node to node and getting around corners getting over obstacles things like that um you just need to create and then range is important too because the longer your range um then the more people are

you're going to have within your area that you can hop through uh so that's why things like bluetooth for instance so i think it's called fire chat was that the one in china so this was like an early example of how mesh could be used in really um sort of the situations you talk about like protests where the government shuts down the internet or is monitoring the internet but the problem with with something like bluetooth is it's very short range and even wi-fi is super short range and and you need so many more devices to get a full mesh network whereas if you've got a longer range device you need a lot fewer so whatever happened to fire chat i i looked into it for a while i think there's still some company there and they might be still be working

on something but it didn't seem like it was that active i don't think it was even encrypted though right good question i don't remember it may not have been and it doesn't matter it was mostly based on group chats and then it's like if you're using group chats like there's always you just always assume there's a mole in there yeah yeah yeah i mean it was it was great because the idea of just being able to communicate when everything is down i mean that idea i think you know and that that's where a lot of when you know we look at gotenna what we're looking at just something that you can use um when when nothing else works you know and whether that's after a disaster because the government shuts it down i mean we saw that here after september 11th like one of the one of

the main uh infrastructure points was the world trade center so like and also all this everything was overloaded because everyone was trying to call you couldn't make like any calls whatsoever and that was like the time when everyone needed to do it right yeah well so i guess that provides a natural segue into the next topic like how do you incentivize mesh networking how do you get more devices and more people's hands and make it more of a common practice yeah so we're you know we're we're working on that that's that's like I was talking about Daniela's talk so the idea is how can you incentivize people not just to use them when they you know if you're hiking you know you're you know your buddy's down at the trailhead and you're going to talk back

that's sort of a that's probably the most common use today people aren't just walking out on the street and just being able to connect like they would with their cell phone they're using it in like a walkie-talkie way. They know somebody's there to pick it up. And the reason is, you know, no matter how big a fan you are, you're not going to remember to always have one turned on and just have it out there for everybody to use. And we think, you know, adding just a little bit of incentive is the solution, but we don't want to add a centralized incentive. You know, you don't want to do it in a way that basically creates a new point of failure. This is the same story with Bitcoin. I mean, you could do PayPal. PayPal is also a, you know, person-to-person money. It's

just there's one big centralized point of failure and that's paypal um so that's that's like there's two two sort of lessons you can get from bitcoin and apply here to mesh one is that people will respond to incentives i mean the lightning network is is really i think a good example of that how many people got their first couple of sats you know for relaying on the lightning network and you're like okay it's worth you know de minimis amounts you know it's worth like nothing but boy do you feel good when you get that it's it's not just the money it's the feeling of i'm part of the network and this is like proof that I'm actually working it. So that's what we're working on is basically to take that incentive idea and bring it to mesh. And also the second

idea is to bring the idea of a decentralized incentive, you know, not just make it something that only Gotenna operates, but is a protocol like Bitcoin that can be used by anybody who wants to build hardware. And that maybe segues into this idea of, you know, why do we have this new entity called global mesh labs um that was that was founded very recently um and the the thought there is that we want to make something that isn't a gotenna protocol we want to make something that is used by other hardware manufacturers and is built on as an open source project by the community uh and you know gotenna is definitely the sponsor of this and they're they are our patron for doing it but we don't want it to be a gotenna only protocol i

think then it's again a centralized you know centralized system yeah and you don't want to have like five companies like all working on independent like proprietary like networks like then we'll never get anywhere right yeah and just take a step back the protocol we're talking about is lot 49 correct right so we call it lot 49 if you know the reference uh there's a book called lot 49 about a shady uh secret underground postal delivery service i didn't know this yeah so what's the story behind lot 49 well i yeah that's just the name i mean that's just the name, but I just blanked on the author's name, but it's a guy you would have heard of. But I can't think of the name of the author now. Freaks will look it up and let us know. Freaks will look it

up. Yeah, I blanked. I'm drinking too much here. But that's sort of the idea is that you've got, you know, the way, so lot 49 is what we call it. And if you're familiar with lightning, which I think most of your listenership here probably is, you know that as nodes relay value from peer to peer they collect a small fee and there's also something in lightning called well it's got various names but it it's you can also include data potentially in that so what lot 49 is is really focusing on the data part of it with a small so less value more data and nodes that relay the data collect a small piece of the fee so in that way it's really it's really maps well on the

lightning. And the real technical hurdle we have to, I mean, the protocol of lightning is really well suited for this, we think. But where we have some, you know, technical hurdles, it's mostly about the fact that mesh networks are low bandwidth. I mean, like Matt was saying, it's for some, you know, at least the Gotenny unit, and really anything that's gonna, you always get this sort of trilemma, I think is the right term. You know, you've got, you want to optimize for both power range and bandwidth and it's impossible to optimize for all of them if you want to go long range you're gonna have to use more power if you want to go high bandwidth you're gonna have to use more power and yeah like yeah but

power and and then also the frequencies you use are going to be limited so so we try to make this lower band and work on a low bandwidth system and goten is one example of a pretty low bandwidth radio but something you can carry around in pocket there's other systems like hf radio so elaine elaine ow and nick sabo in 2017 announced the high frequency radio which can go hundreds of miles yeah hundreds of miles i think they went like um rodolfo novak he was able to send data from he sent it to adam carey they have the uh oh yeah the father of podcasting runs the no agenda podcast did it via ham radio right and but the way they did it they sent private keys right it wasn't a transaction yeah but the point

is it's very low bandwidth yeah they send private keys also because hams well there's a whole story there i mean ham you can't send encrypted information over amateur radio in the u.s and maybe other places illegal or yeah is it just technically not possible no it's illegal it's totally possible but you're not supposed to do it i mean even what they did was illegal like you read elaine's post about it right no actually post yeah wired wired wrote it up and like there was a bunch of people like oh it's illegal you shouldn't be doing it or whatever and she just was like you're all being a bunch of bitches elaine elaine is great she's incredible but my point was mostly just that there are a lot of systems where low bandwidth is important and you

really just like and this is where it really meshes nice with bitcoin because bitcoin's all about running on the least hardware or the last least bandwidth it's all about minimal system i mean we're not infura nodes we want to have it as decentralized as possible so so that and that mesh that goes meshes sorry I was going to use that as a pun but you know it goes well well with the idea of mesh networks where also you got to optimize for low bandwidth small resource usage so yeah so that so lot 49 is really about taking lightning as it is and adapting it for low bandwidth systems so it could run over hf it could run over you know these these mesh radios or even something like satellite uplinks i mean that's something that's coming around too so matt mentioned

you talked about gateways so you build out a network and as long as you can reach a gateway then you can a common question we get with mesh is well how do you get over the rockies how do you get over the ocean gateways i mean it's just like the internet so what is a gateway a gateway would just be something that can both talk to the mesh it has a mesh radio and also has something else either a satellite uplink or maybe a fiber optic cable maybe it's on the internet or maybe it's got a hf radio anything that just moves you from sort of one mode of communicating to some other longer range mode or just you know just so you don't think of meshing the world being everybody's connected on the same mesh it's like the internet where you really it's a network

of networks it's almost like uh it reminds me of like the caddyshack groundhog where you can just like come up out of nowhere you just like patch it everywhere's just patches yeah different things and I imagine that just makes it easier to route around centralization like hey maybe if this gateway is connected to the ISP and they they deny it maybe this other gateway will not or something like that what mesh really helps with on like a day-to-day basis is like that last mile that last five miles you know that's where you see like a lot of the major centralization happen where you only have you know two internet providers that go into your apartment building or something like that so if we can get if we can route around that aspect and then then you

plug into the real internet you know the the global internet then they could solve a lot of issues for us so the bandwidth issues that you were talking about earlier what's the how do we come uh how do we get over that hurdle is it more getting more hardware and more people's hands is it um there's yeah there's different approaches i mean you can do quite a lot of interesting things with low bandwidth that's the great thing about cryptocurrencies bitcoin in particular is it doesn't take a lot of data i mean a couple of sms messages and you send a transaction you know we're looking at more what do you do to negotiate a lightning transaction it's really not much more data than sending a transaction it just it doesn't even have to go to the internet

because you're just updating a channel between two people you need you do need internet because you got to kind of like anchor these things on the internet and close them on the internet so there there are other issues around that for anybody you know who's kind of got that question but um so that one one answer is you don't need much bandwidth honestly and just like you know the lower your resource usage is the more decentralized it can be and that's like just the fact that you want to be able to run your bitcoin node as like a raspberry pi you also want your device to be as cheap and low you know and easy to run as as possible um if you make it low cost like people will plug more in yeah they won't care they can if they're 30 devices 20

dollar devices they don't use that much power they don't use that much bandwidth and you can there's no loss to just plugging them in everywhere i guess that's the question i have and like this is why i'm like optimistic about bitcoin long term because i think there will be dual purpose hardware do you see like mesh networks and build into dual purpose stuff absolutely i was going to say that next so that was one answer is we don't need a lot of bandwidth the other answer is you're carrying around in your pocket i mean everybody is carrying around in their pocket a two-way digital radio that can go, you know, super high bandwidth. It's just that isn't going to be unlocked by the cell phone carriers. They have no financial interest. They pay for that bandwidth,

like, I don't know, millions, billions of dollars for that bandwidth or for that spectrum. They're not going to willingly give up that ability to sort of, you know, be the gatekeeper of that. But if you can bootstrap on whatever frequencies we are allocated by our government to do mesh radio and it isn't every frequency like the mesh that you started with the the first gotenna that was using a frequency where you're not allowed to mesh it has a little longer range but they just arbitrarily say you can't mesh that's why there's no hops right so there was no encryption so yeah if you did hops without encryption it might have been the same miserable right and it might have been the same like some frequencies you can encrypt and some you can't so and then meanwhile

you guys have like the police version that's like way more powerful yeah there's also oh i mean way more way more i mean there's there are licensed spectrum and unlicensed spectrum and if you're a like a first responder to like fighting forest fires you can use you're allowed to use other spectrum and so we have another pro model which we use for that and that that has a good advantage that these are already teams of people like we were talking about who are out you know hiking you know they're out fighting forest fires or doing whatever you know they're doing so they already you know they've solved that zero star problem because they all have to use it but but it's a good point there are other frequencies and other we're limited to a certain wattage for these

things too some of it is to keep the battery from dying but some of it is just by law it's crazy to think of like how this like different like just even the concept of different frequencies like commuting on different sound waves and stuff like that it's uh for somebody who's again a adult uh it it when you try to comprehend all this it's like ah there's so many layers to it like so So there's so many fail-safes, it seems, in mesh network, especially if you can go to different frequencies. Am I correct in assuming that? Yeah, I mean, what I was really trying to make the point of

is that your phone already is capable of mesh communication. It's just the people who make it have no incentive to actually make that possible. So you're talking, you know, when I send you a text message, we're sitting right here, it's going to go to some base station, however far away the base station is, you know, And the higher bandwidth ones, you notice like 5G, you're hearing about 5G, they're going to need more base stations. It's higher bandwidth, so you need to have less range.

That's the tradeoff with range, power, bandwidth. But why does it go to the base station? Why doesn't it just go to your phone? You're sitting right here. You know, that's not a functionality you're allowed to have on your phone, but it's capable of it. It's really just a protocol change. so we're just waiting on wily uh entrepreneurs who want to give a finger to apple and other cell phone provider or not even apple it would be like sprint and verizon it's a regulatory issue

right it's the same i mean you know like skype used to be p2p now it all runs through a centralized server did not know that microsoft bought it now runs all through a centralized server and it's just like the way the world goes like bitcoin is an outlier that's one of the reasons bitcoin so beautiful is because we're 10 years in and that hasn't happened yet boss i mean bitcoin is a good example of like you're saying it's one of the rare examples where fundamentally the technology doesn't permit gatekeepers this seems so inefficient though like why wouldn't we why wouldn't we just go straight to this if it's more like why can i not just send a message to your cell phone instead have to go how like this seems like a human right issue yeah it isn't necessarily

more efficient i mean centralizations like banks are more you know centralizing telecom is more efficient because they know where to put their base stations they like central plan we're going to get coverage i mean when we were rolling out cell phones until they cell phone got in there and they got their whatever you know their license to do that area there was really you know there wasn't the density where people would actually buy a cell phone so they had that chicken and egg problem they solved with centralization so it's more of an economies of scale problem than Yeah, you could say that I mean it's it's like there is advantages things are more efficiently centrally planned But they're only more efficient to sort of like jumpstart. They aren't more resistant to attack. They're not more. They're more. They're more easy to attack

We've got a recorder recorder tumble here Yeah, I mean you see that all the time in the Bitcoin land too I mean, it's much easier to run a centralized exchange You can just you know kick start some liquidity and we're a shit coin essentially shit right sure It's much easier than than trying to really ground up sort of bootstrap something and I think that's really it's the bootstrapping is is the Hard part it is more efficient if you have like now that everybody has cell phones bootstrapping a mesh network on your cell phone I would think would be pretty easy because but if you think of a world without centralized, you know centralized communication That might have been harder to jumpstart if you just imagine like there's no

Cellphones and now you're gonna do like a mesh cell phone that probably would have been hard to kick start you know not kickstart from the company standpoint but just to like get a get a critical mass of people but now we've got it now we've got this critical mass now the problem is control right well now the people who are yeah that people that are the gatekeepers of that centralized system are not gonna give it up so how do you route around them well i mean we have a frequency so we have what the goten and mesh that's that's a i see that as sort of a little wedge in there you know If you can create a system where people start to experience mesh networking and experience being able to communicate without the centralized provider, we hope that you can expand that wedge. I mean, part of it is getting people to start using it.

And then once people are using it, they're going to start asking, well, why can't I have a faster mesh network? Why can't I have more spectrum allocated to mesh networks? Because what you really now, people don't just become consumers of communication. They become providers of communication. like you and you and you know everybody becomes their own cell phone company it seems like i'm hive mind almost at that point right like uh yeah and just and again i gotta always bring it back to bitcoin of course and you know bitcoin we're all our own little mini bank and we've all got these relationships through our nodes with other little mini banks anonymously you know there's an

analogy there too and of course the banks that are you know big centralized banks don't want to acknowledge that but it's it's a viable way to do things and i think it will become a viable way for communication and i mean that's what global mesh network labs you know that's what we're trying to push is that idea that everybody can just can be their own provider and consumer of communication and so with lot 49 in particular how are you guys how does the mechanics of it work like when you're sending a lightning transaction through a mesh network you have to communicate like hey i'm sending this through a lot 49 protocol therefore i had to set aside a fee to pay this routing node yeah yeah it's you know the simplest way to start thinking about it is

um if you you know in lightning you have to establish a channel so you'll have to establish channels with people with whom you're in radio communication range um and that that would have to go somehow there are different ways to think about it we can talk about like the more advanced cases but initially it'll go through a gateway it'll go through some sort of internet gateway to set up that channel and when I want to send a message now I'm gonna attach I'm gonna pay some to my next hop and they're gonna forward that payment on to the next hop the next hop till it gets to the destination and then when the destination of that message so think of it like a SMS don't think of it like IP

you know traffic think of it I'm sending you a SMS message or a signal message an encrypted message I don't even know how that works yeah well it probably works in a similar way without the incentives you know it's just hopping over internet nodes instead of mesh nodes but then when it gets there the person who receives that message is going to return a secret this is the same as the lightning network and that secret is going to come back over the mesh and as each node gets it now they have some evidence that would allow them if they wanted to to go to the full book bitcoin network and collect some very small payment but because they want to keep talking they don't do that they don't drop the payment on the on the

on the internet over our gateway they just keep it in their pocket because maybe you're going to send more value and more messages and this is again same as same as the lightning network and that goes on until you either you know decide to break down the communication or somebody goes out of range um and then you know at some point maybe you do drop it on the internet and get your payment or or you keep it open and you just keep making those payments as they come up um yeah is that enough of an explanation i don't know if i was clear but no that makes sense to me um and it's oh there was one thing i was going to say sorry there was one there was one other thing you asked about is this like compatible with the lightning network i think you were wondering

like yeah like so if would i be able like that's what i guess what i'm trying to visualize and conceptualize in my mind like i'm working from my let's just use our our ptc pay server node if I'm trying to send, communicate with somebody or send a Lightning transaction to somebody who's receiving it via Gotenna? Like, would I be able to send it from my node through a Gotenna mesh network or? Yeah, I mean, there would be some protocol changes.

And the nice thing about Lightning versus sort of base Bitcoin is they have this idea of feature bits. So nodes can sort of support or not support certain features. So they would have to be a feature bit for whether or not it's, you know, your Lightning payment has also got data basically going along with it. There's some, what do they call it?

There's something already that's been sort of proposed for Lightning, not Lot 49 version, but Lightning generally. I mean, Lot 49 isn't primarily to send Lightning payments. To send Gotenna messages, right? You're using a Lightning-esque system to incentivize nodes to relay your GoTenna messages. Yeah, but it's important to know

that this isn't a different network. I mean, what makes up the Lightning Network? Really, the thing that ties together payments both on the Lightning Network and on something like the Lot49 is the fact that the receiver of the payment slash message reveals a secret. So you could imagine, for example, like maybe your gateway is the block set,

is the Blockstream block set. And how do you pay for data on the Blockstream block set is you make a lightning payment and you give it some data. I mean, the protocol, of course, isn't the same, but the idea is that it could go over the internet also. It doesn't have to just go over the mesh. The mesh parts would be optimized in a way.

They would use a different sort of messaging system, but the thing that would tie it together would be the fact that you're revealing a secret and that flows backwards. And those contracts that you're essentially updating contracts with each payment or each message. That part would all be sort of compatible with Lightning. Yeah, I temporarily got confused between TX10 and Lot49.

Lot49 is just an incentive network to incentivize people to relay GoTenna messages. And TX10 relays Bitcoin transactions via the mesh network. I mean, there is a little way you can sort of think of those things together is, what if your message was a Bitcoin transaction? Yes. So that would be a nice way to tie that all together.

That's what I was trying to visualize there. yeah that lighting experience but then in that case it would just be probably the data like the package of data that goes along through the mesh and eventually gets to a gateway and then gets onto the internet could be a very high value message you know if you think of it it's not just you know shooting the shit it's a bitcoin transaction is the data that is your payload so but going back to like sat note it's been crazy seeing that like the messages people have been sending to the sat node yeah i love that twitter feed they've got yeah it's like mr hoddle said it's it's a boon for free speech you don't have no idea who's sending those messages at all

i mean like look at uh i mean that's what i thought was so powerful about wiki leaks right was that i would watch movies and 50 of the movie was irrelevant because the protagonist like right in the beginning could just dump it on wiki leaks like you didn't have to go through like all the bullshit right and it's like the same thing with sat node like you could just dump it on on the satellite and anyone who's running the satellite can get it um you know obviously the twitterbot isn't censorship resistant but anyone who's who's got the satellite and is listening will receive it and then if you couple that with something like pgp then the leaker or whoever it is can develop a reputation where people start to believe if if he says things that turn out to be

true they start to believe that key and then he has a captive audience like around the world with no middleman really except you know block stream to a degree but ideally we'll have more than just Blockstream running these things right so you'll have multiple different venues where you can go through are you kidding me sending a message through satellite and Blockstream runs it freaks it's a Bilderberg satellite they paved the way thank god they launched that satellite to prove the use case the use case is proving to be pretty crazy there's one guy who sends out the news every day for for different areas of the world and he he signs the whole thing with his pgp key and i thought that was just really cool just like you're you know like your daily news

you know just from like some random dude and there's been some people sending uh pay spins of of uh paywalled content as well so like routing around that as well wow i can't i never heard of these things i can't even keep up but it's it is it is the idea of you know decentralized communication now sure maybe you say the satellites are centralized or the blocks sat company is centralized but there is nothing stopping somebody else from doing this i mean that's key that's what that's why i love blockstream because they prove the way like holy crap and and i mean they could also you can send an encrypted payload to the box set but then you have to encrypt or decrypt it on the other end yeah you need to get the key just

to people another way but you could presumably uh send an encrypted one this is like james bond x yeah that was where i was thinking too we were at the spy museum not too long ago and it's like a dead drop you could totally do dead drop information anywhere in the world like spies used to do this they would leave a message or you know whatever you know the bench at the park or something yeah and then the next guy would come so they wouldn't know you know but this is it totally makes that redundant you can do it digitally because the thing about the satellite is that it's passive right like it's just broadcasting data so if you have a satellite somewhere you're receiving it no one knows you're receiving it no one you're not pinging for

specific information there's no identical identifiable information there right so it's it's dramatically different than like for instance like if you run a full node and you're getting your block information from the from the sat node like no one knows you're pulling that block information you do it through the internet everyone knows like you're pulling bitcoin blocks let's do uh a hypothetical uh live in the boonies cypherpunk dream house what are you gonna have so you're gonna have a satellite set up of course the block sat right you're gonna have the block sat set up you're gonna have a go 10a you should probably have some sort of you know hydro power you know that's all you need to hydro and solar you need to have a little stream that runs through

my uh i have family friends who live in upstate new york and he like dammed up a little stream that runs through his property and just put a pvc pipe and he just pulls some he's pulled some energy from the stream that no no for for energy he pulls some energy from the stream he put a little he dammed it up with concrete and just put put a couple pvc pipes with turbines in them boss just gets a little bit of free constant energy and this is where things like like the fact that you can run though this is recently they've announced like that you can run the block set doesn't have to be a pc it could be running on i think arm 64 they had it running yeah the rock 64 that's what it was so so you don't need a lot of power you know maybe your

hydro is plenty uh you know rain or you know like whether it's day or night you can still run that little thing on you know pretty paltry amount of data of energy but if we're talking of course we're talking about mesh today of course you can download your blocks but if you want to pay somebody you need a way to get it out there so maybe mesh you know maybe you got a mesh note up in a tree and maybe you've even breadcrumbed it back to civilization and that's your way to get your transactions out so that's yeah one of the nice things i like about gotenna is so there's all these different projects that are working on mesh the nice thing about gotenna is that it's just any old average user can buy it and to set up power for it it's a micro usb port which there's

like a million peripherals that can go into a micro usb port so you can set up external battery packs that have micro usb solar panels that have micro usb ports strap them to trees and stuff really easily who was the guy in new zealand was a coin sure yeah coin sure yeah coin sure that's what i was curious like how because he put them in bags and put them in trees and you were saying They put it in socks. In socks. But you said they had like an hour of battery time, so you would have to...

A day. A day, actually. A day. Excuse me, a day. Yeah, but you put it in an enclosure, you throw an external battery pack in there, then you throw a solar panel. The solar panel charges the battery pack through micro USB,

which is a standard, right? And then the battery pack charges the Gotenna through micro USB, and then you have perpetual power with some layaway through the external battery, just in case there's... Cloudy, cloudy week. or whatever yeah yeah and that's super easy like any schmuck can do that right like you can just strap that to a tree and that's crazy to think about yeah like how do we get this all in a box like your your satellite your mesh network with the solar panel and external what's really fun

is if you go to the gotenna forums there's like all these guys that are like basically breaking the warranty like like completely breaking the terms of service yeah of gotenna but it's awesome Yeah, there's a great builder community and, you know, our engineers have been supportive and they'll tell you, you know, solder on this wire, solder on that wire. And, you know, there are things that we can't do as a FCC licensed company. But, you know, if somebody wants to break open their case, they can get pretty creative. In fact, there's even a company, I just blanked on their name in California, I think, who is selling modified Gotenas. They put them in a Pelican case with a solar panel and give you the full thing with the battery. And people have put those up there.

Do you two consider this an absolute necessity going forward, like these alternative networks? Well, I mean, I think it's a necessity to have some sort of decentralized communication. I mean, maybe in the U.S. we don't need it right away, but there are some countries where I think it's, you know, obviously Venezuela is showing what can happen. A lot of these countries, I think, you know, you always got to think outside the U.S. we need it as kind of a convenience I would say but there are some places China for example where you know this is going to become something you really need to survive

if things go south are you seeing it being adopted in these areas I don't think there's huge adoption of any of this sort of mesh stuff right now but there's a huge interest there's a few other projects BTC Venn is on Twitter

they're building another I saw the devices at Bitcoin 2019 their devices are like these little tiny yeah yeah they're using low-cost devices yeah yeah they've got a cool idea uh and it shows that you know they obviously are living there and they know what people need um and and decentralized communication i mean it's it's the poster child for why you need that a because the power is going out and b because the government's corrupt you know and and is you know shutting people down i i was one thing i was going to mention about the satellite if you were like mining in venezuela

you don't want people to know that you're receiving bitcoin data and you maybe want you may not have you know reliable internet or low-cost internet that's a good use for something like a satellite receiver right but you still need to transmit yeah but the cool thing is there you don't need to transmit very much if you're mining you just got to send out a block header when you get a block use a vpn or yeah or use it yeah you could use a vpn but if you if you could also use mesh nobody's doing that right now but in theory you could go the other way with mesh and you could always if it was high value enough for you you can like basically right do like the least decentralized mesh ever and like wire you know like set it up yourself to get to some other

housing development somewhere else we don't see anybody doing this but i could see from a minor perspective you might you might have your low bandwidth you know isdn or something but you might also have a mesh backup you know that could be it's it's a lot of these things work well together if you're worried about being really resilient um i mean i think as far as necessity goes like in america we can probably get away with encrypting our traffic through the regular isps and the only way they'd be able to enforce anything would be to just ban encrypted traffic which would just take down the whole internet basically like the whole internet well they want to be able to right because of the well like your banking sites and stuff like you just can't

like use the internet if if they just block all encryption but again wasn't there a supreme court case in which encryption was deemed a basically free speech yeah that's the you know the pgp on a t-shirt that was like this old school cypherpunk stuff basically i mean i think a cypherpunk would tell you that we shouldn't rely on that right like the supreme court shouldn't protect that you know for us yeah there's a whole debate too about i mean you could talk about it's a right you know right to communicate or right to privacy you know whatever but rights you know i I think the cypherpunk philosophy is that really the rights are the ones that you enable for yourself.

Exactly. This is reminding me of my conversation with Connor Brown that I dropped today. That's really the power of Bitcoin and the beauty of Bitcoin is it helps you realize this need for individual sovereignty and no tool on earth, I would argue, enables this more than Bitcoin at the moment.

For sure. How do you wake people up? like people are so dependent on the state apparatus and people don't care about this shit how do we get people to care they will they will we put we put more and more of our lives before their boots on the neck though no they won't until the boots on their neck and the boot will be on their neck soon so it will happen like that everyone has their moment for me right we were talking about it earlier it was bid torrent it was um i saw throttling with video games uh it was snowed the snowed in leaks uh we saw like the equifax leak right you know all these things the

facebook leak all these things you see this data leak you see your rights get infringed on you see something that you enjoyed doing or that you've you found the powerful that gets blocked and then you start trying as a human you're curious and you try and figure out like how to get around it i had a i have like a free credit karma account they give you my credit card report each month and the first time I checked the list of companies that I've had data breaches on. For some reason, ClassPass was on there. I'm pretty sure I might have

applied to a job at ClassPass at one point in my life for a product manager job or something like that, but I never signed up for their service and somehow ClassPass leaked my data. ClassPass was like a bundle workout program, right? Yes.

I think they're burning a shit ton of money though, right? I would imagine. but I was just like what the fuck how did my data get to them and how did they leak it already like I haven't even used their services I mean my cousin is a musician everyone should listen to

Odell Fox search for it on Spotify Odell Fox he's doing the name proud I went to one of his concerts in the city I signed up for some it was like some random ticket selling AXS? No I think it was Ticketfly and

And my billing address, my shipping address, everything, my email, my phone number, everything, just for this one. Like, I go to see my cousin's fucking show, and that's, you know, it's like, there goes your OPSEC. It's just all gone. And this happened to me when I went to go interview Jack Dorsey in San Francisco. I landed and go to get cash out at the ATM. And, yeah, a merchant leaked my data, so Bank of America cut my card down. and i literally was like thank god i had the cash app shout out the cash app sponsor the pod i was able to transfer money and use that but i would have been shit out of luck i had to go get

a new debit card i would have sent you some marty marty you could just let me know no i didn't have access to my bank account like it wasn't i had money i could have sent you some bitcoin bro oh there you go that's true there's definitely a big problem or a big difference between this idea of sort of push and pull too, right? It's a pull system. So they, you know, I travel from different places, you know, from all over the country. And when I, when I get somewhere, if I didn't give them that notice, there's always the chance that you go to pump gas or something and denied because their system is relying on surveilling you and knowing where you're at and knowing if that's a legit purchase. Cause I mean, you got your private key on your credit card. You're

walking around with that. Anybody who's got your name can basically clone your card and pump gas. So the whole system is just surveillance is built in. That's the way it is. And I think it's important to remember that what the, you know, 80s, 90s cypherpunks were against, that's what they were against. They saw credit cards. People weren't using credit cards, you know, like before the 70s. And they were looking at, well, you know, that was sort of the privacy problem they were worried about. And it all came to pass.

It's all true. Everything they were worried about, censorship, surveillance, now we just live with it. We don't even think about it. i mean that's that's when people um when we talk about privacy on bitcoin for instance right um it could be better like i'm major proponent of trying to make this as as as good as it could be the alternative that we currently live in is horrible right the thing that everyone uses for payments right now is absolutely horrible they can tell so much by your buying patterns it's crazy Well, that, and then you have services like Venmo

where people just openly say what they're spending on. Yeah, well, those people are just dead to me. There's no saving those people. They know exactly what they're doing. Fortunately, Venmo has since switched to default private. Good. But it's like the OG Venmo users that are still on public are the ones who broadcast it.

I was one of those idiots before, but then I was like, what am I doing? Why doesn't everybody need to know I'm buying or sending? I hated it. It pissed me off so much. Every time I went on the Venmo app, it just triggered me. Think about cell phones, bringing it back to communication. That's metadata that's really important.

It's what you're buying, where you're shopping. But now we've got literally our GPS phone tracking this all through a centralized place and everybody you communicate with. If you want to know, this is what people who look at terrorism, they want to know the metadata. They don't really care, you know, who you're, what you're saying. If they know who you're talking to, they know you're, they know enough about you that they shut, they can shut you down.

A lot of what our, what Snowden revealed was like our drone program was based off of metadata and metadata we're finding is not always as accurate as the, the analysts proclaim it is, right? You have people, you have, uh, drones bombing wedding parties of innocent people and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, they were maybe 90% right. Yeah.

But yeah, that's, it's tragic. And I mean, you're right. That's what Snowden revealed is that this metadata, the metadata that's tied to your communication. I mean, why should your phone be tied to a single number? Like, why can't you just tell somebody, you know, my number with you is going to be this, you know, like a public private key system. That's probably the worst one, right? Is the phone numbers. Yeah, because, you know, nowadays they carry with us for like basically our life and people treat them like I mean, Social Security numbers also are horrible. They should not be treated as private information. They are not private at all anymore. But they're basically treated as identifiers right they're treated as almost like a social security number on a global scale

And that's really bad. That's why I was actually very impressed and happy to see Apple with their Random email generator, but part of me. I like I'm very happy about it, and I'm caught off guard and and pleasantly surprised But then part of me is like is this like the Trojan horse is this like you know like oh? like if you want privacy you go with this closed source company that you know is running proprietary everything um but even so like the merchants aren't able to connect your data between each other did you see what happened with zoom yeah okay but did you see what apple did after the zoom thing no apple forced oh an upgrade to stop the what zoom was doing the vulnerability that zoom is doing but what if they did it for something else right yeah like everyone thanked

them for flexing there but they could have flexed on on bitcoin core right in what way they could have just said stop you're not allowed to download this qt stop bitcoin core for running on on osx but instead they stopped zoom's background web server application right so we're basically depending on a benevolent dictator and apple exactly yes i mean there was a long time when you couldn't put bitcoin apps on your ios phone right yeah it's still hard to get them no but we have we have like fifth pillar elements and uh in apple so we're good shout out to the apple pay team they're listening we got you thank you guys keep stacking sets um no but it is is it too far gone the centralization of all these services internet service providers

cell phone providers we hope not yeah i mean we hope people will will go to decentralized options for communication for money i i mean one of the things that i find a i find is sort of the compelling reason people have asked us why did you build on bitcoin like why did you do this lot 49 stuff on bitcoin i mean there's you know we started in 2017 there was kind of a lot of you know alternatives you might say a lot of pressure to do an ico yeah we never had that pressure but but of course it's got to be considered because there's different technological trade-offs you take when you go with bitcoin uh and um but my i think my argument and what i think is a really compelling argument is that the bitcoin community is is a very unique community and that they see

the need for decentralized communication and and the zero star problem doesn't mean how do you get the world to use something it's how do you get enough people that it's useful and you don't need a whole world to do it you just need a community of people who are motivated to do it and i think the bitcoin community is that like wedge community who's gonna be growing i mean they'll be growing because bitcoin is going to be growing but they're also sort of educated about why you want decentralized communication you know you want to be able to send this high value communication my bitcoin transaction and you want to do it anonymously everything is built around anonymity so i think that's um yeah i mean that's it's not just the technology of bitcoin which is compelling

for decentralized communication but the community of bitcoin that that is motivated to actually be that early adopter of that technology it helps you like jump start you need to get to that critical mass point yeah no but again go back to like i've said this for a long time that i think hardware is like the trojan horse in in being profitable in this this space people yell at me and tell me i'm an idiot but rodolfo is doing pretty well he's doing pretty well but again going back to this is the theme for marty for this podcast i am adult and but i bought a lot of hardware and tested a lot of hardware and run a lot of hardware and it is forced me as someone who considers himself a low information user to experiment with this stuff and learn more and

and again learn about the importance of why to run this stuff and why you should contribute and again bitcoin has these natural forces that force you this way marty you're not a low information user just fyi okay if you're a low information user then we're set we're like we're so good it's i mean low information user in the subset of the 0.1 percent of bitcoin there you go okay yeah we are all early adopters still this is true no but it's um it's fascinating it's crazy that we all find ourselves here let's go back to your childhood so like what what growing up with your dad and your brother in particular like what were the messages that you try to view because that's what we're talking about you're trying to figure out how to view these messages in your

Yeah, we were talking before the pot about I you know, I think back now I've got kids I'm thinking like how did my dad make me into a libertarian, you know a Liberty for freedom minded guy How can I brainwash my own kids that way and there's nothing I can think of really unfortunately, I draw a blank It was he was very subtle and I don't think he was trying I mean, it's not like he was pushing us to read this stuff but you know, I think I don't know I've got no answer to that but But Bitcoin is kind of that for society in a way. It's giving people a reason to think about it.

So I hope Bitcoin will like open the eyes of, I mean, I've got like, my wife's got some nephews that, well, you know, I've given them their, you know, they have a birthday, I give them a little Bitcoin and that's got a powerful effect. Really? Oh yeah, I mean. How did you give it to them?

Did you give them a paper wallet? Did you tie it down? Yeah, paper wallets generally is how I've done it. I think my brother actually just gave some to one of one of the nephews and i think he actually opened a wallet and transferred it to like he got the mobile wallet uh kids i mean that's the great thing about the the youth of today they all have mobile phones they're all you know they don't they have never stepped foot in a bank they're never going to step foot in the bank if they can help it so the idea is a lot less you

know it's not a big hurdle for them to think about i i send my 13 year old cousin uh birthday present $250 worth of Bitcoin on OpenDime and in the gift card it's in the in the card it said there's $250 worth of Bitcoin on here parentheses the amount of sats because you got a denominated sats for the you and I was like figure it out and I don't know if it's gonna if he's if it's just gonna go in the garbage and I'll never go or whatever but I think like that's the strategy you give them you let them just dive the hell into it you know how old are they 13 boss yeah he'll figure it out dude for our youtube channel um the dude that created the app that allowed me to basically backlog all the episodes and upload them at once the back catalog is 16 years old

that's badass he emailed me talk about like a an ambitious 16 year old i don't know remember his name off the top of my head right now but he emailed his name's riley forget his last name riley wars maybe maybe i do remember his name he cold emailed cold emailed me he's like yo i noticed you have a podcast and you're not my mom my mom listens to podcasts on youtube you're missing like a big market like i've created this app so to allow you to download all your your how much do we pay for that nine bucks a month it's not that bad that's not bad to download so like what we don't you're not gonna manually upload no he's just gonna pull the rss and downloads it automatically to youtube yeah i mean it's the entrepreneur you know that's all

yeah 16 well my favorite was uh spudio or war war or whatever what's his name uh yeah rashid rashid yeah who's been hacking the hardware you like hack the treasure at like 14 or whatever yeah these kids are on it man gen z we uh we discount them they're on tiktok and all that stuff i have faith in the youth i do too you don't have to have faith in like all 400 million youth you know like there'll be a solid 50 mil of them you know that's the those are the guys who will lead us the intolerant minority yeah that's how it is in every generation you know the majority of people are just whatever yeah normies if you will sorry i didn't want to be disparaging there But your point is also, like in Bitcoin, a lot of people talk,

how are we going to make this something that everybody can use? We actually don't need everybody. We need enough, but we don't need everybody. But what I think of is, so like, for instance, we have Signal, right? I'm an Android user. I love Signal. It's a step up above text messaging, right? It's the closest we have to iMessage.

but the the most used encrypted messenger in america is imessage right because it was default on a bunch of people's phones that they already had and have no idea that they're using encryption if i get that green bar on my iphone i'm like you heathen so that's my issue right my issue is especially someone that's so so i'm privacy focused i like running android because it's open I've always run Android I've never had an iPhone but I have pangs of I realize

especially in my fiat job if I switch to iPhone the majority of my communications will be automatically encrypted because I will have everyone who's on iMessage by default and then most of the Android users have switched over to Signal

at this point so I can hit them up on Signal and so when i when i start to think about bitcoin i i do have some small concerns there in terms of um can we can we get people to actually like adopt this thing because i've tried to get i basically i've been for the last two years or three however long signal has been strong been trying to get iphone users to install signal and 95 of the time they install it once they link their phone number and then they uninstall it and then i accidentally don't message them for six months because it goes to their signal and they don't check it and it's

a fucking mess i love signal signal is one of my uh but you don't check it often right yes i do okay i got notifications on so i check it whenever i get a notification but then on the bright side is something like telegram which has like somehow masked a huge network effect in a matter of like four years and is not a default app in any kind of way. I mean, it could have better encryption, obviously. It's not by default and all these other issues, but that is pretty impressive that they

could do something like that. Yeah, it's the odd question for these apps and UI and UX in general. Is it luck of the draw? Is it word of mouth? What is it? Is it experience? Because Telegram and Signal seem like pretty

similar experiences, in my opinion, as a user. i mean well signal requires a phone number telegram doesn't which is a major i think a major difference i mean i think that's why i took off in crypto right was because i don't want to give you my fucking phone number if i don't know who you are like you have it we communicate on signal sometimes yeah that's true but like in the beginning it was telegram right because i don't want to give you my phone number i think one is open source like signal is open source but i don't think telegram is right no it is yeah i think that the encryption is proprietary too telegram

launched an ICO as well. Aren't they supposed to start implementing that? Yeah, the ton token or whatever. Yeah. We'll see how that works out. But Telegram is more useful for group chats where Signal doesn't compete with that. Signal's group chats are weak and Telegram has like channels with

like 400 people in them that are like communicating pseudonymously. Pseudonymously, yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, we've, I don't want to say derailed. We're on a big tangent here about like decentralized systems and and again how do i i like the point that you brought up we don't

need to make a vogue we only need a critical mass of people who use it to to make it work well yeah i mean it's not that we wouldn't you benefit from having more people i mean that that was the point i think that again and that's they always go back to the cypherpunk manifesto they they're sort of saying we can't have privacy unless everyone has privacy you know if you're the only guy with the mask on you're not really that private there was somebody like that at bitcoin 2000 oh really do Do you remember that dude walking around with beads coming out? Yeah, we all knew who he was. But I didn't see his face.

You never saw his face. No, but I was like, you're drawing more attention than you are talking about. We didn't know who he was. But for Bitcoin, you also, I mean, there's this philosophy, too, that you want the system, you know, who is the enemy? Who's going to shut down Bitcoin? It's going to be a state government. It's going to be something like that.

And you want it to be harder to attack than defend. That's cryptography in a nutshell. That's what I don't get when I, like, argue with shitcoiners. I'm like, it's state resistance. like that's what we're going for they're like no the state's never going to go after us then i'm like what the fuck are we doing here we might as well just be doing paypal because like oh paypal is just voluntarily blocking people's transactions right how yeah how ass backwards is that and then the other thing i'd like to touch zcash did you see it came out that zcash has had one to three

shielded transactions per day like if you have one two three yeah one one out of how many overall transactions like three transactions per day were private transactions no but like how many transactions happen on the zcash i don't know like probably a couple thousand or something i don't know for sure absurd but still i'm gonna say now i'm a little whiskey drunk i think zcash is a honeypot i think zcash is uh i've said that two years ago or whatever i got into the front page r slash monero is the easiest fucking thing in the world but uh i mean yeah i mean how do you run a privacy focused business not be inherently private in america with american investors with JP Morgan is one of your main investors.

It's a little sketchy. I was saying that earlier, too. I mean, this is an interesting meta question. How do you fund a Bitcoin business when the whole thing is based on getting rid of gatekeepers? Exactly. I think that that is not really... Nobody's cracked that.

If you look at who's making money in Bitcoin, it's the exchanges, totally centralized, totally, you know, they're kowtowing to every KYC AML they can. Not necessarily. What about, like, I guess, like, so, like, Binance is now bending the knee, But I like Bitfinex and BitMEX are like cowboy companies, right? Yeah, so far.

Let's give a shout out to them. I mean, so far, I mean, I think BitMEX will probably be more resilient in the end because they're Bitcoin only. I think the first principle design of being Bitcoin only closed loop system. No fiat. No fiat was genius. It's not shit coins that we're talking about. It's no fiat is the key. I mean, shit coins, the ultimate shit coin.

No, but you can only, from what I understand, deposit and withdraw Bitcoin. Bitcoin, that's what I'm saying. You can trade other things. No fiat is the key. Yeah, but they have like shitcoin swaps. Yeah, you can short a long tron. But you're not going to withdraw tron from Bitback, sorry. No, you're not allowed to.

You can't. Yeah. That's genius. That sort of creates that resilience that you need just by being Bitcoin only. And that's hard for people. I mean, the allure to, that's actually what I'm interested in. Like, how does Arthur liquidate some of his holdings? Well, he's not Bitcoin only.

No, he's not. He has, like, OTC dealers and shit like that where he sells. But you look at, like, Kim.com. I mean, he, you know, the U.S. can go after you anywhere in the world if they know who to go after. Yeah, what did they do? They had helicopters. Yeah, and that was the MPAA. That was just, you know, that was really motivated.

That was Hollywood. It was the BitTorrent wars, basically. Yeah, that was the BitTorrent wars. But, I mean, we haven't seen this level of attack for Bitcoin, but we know that's how they roll. You know, like if that's what they want to do, they just send in the helicopters and, you know, your mansion is invaded and you go to jail.

You know, you get an illegal... Even if you don't go to jail, you're tied up for years in legal wranglings. And wait till the autonomous drones, then it gets interesting. Off-the-shelf autonomous drones, you don't even know who sent them. They're already here.

But you don't even know... The key is when you give them the kill decision and you're not like right now most of the drones you're operating them through satellite you have a human controller on the other side that's deciding when to you know do anything when you start sending them out and they're just making their own decisions and you just have a swarm of of just chinese parts and and no one knows where they came from like you can do some crazy fucking shit ah scary as fuck that that cabin out in the woods is sounding better and better right i don't know you need to have some anti-air you just got to be like off the grid to the point that nobody

knows where to send those drones yeah you shouldn't have like a podcast yeah too late yeah no definitely not if especially if you're not trying to get deep faked in an audio world no the deep fakes will be good for us i'm excited for the deep fakes because then it gives us plausible deniability i like that yeah but it's like coin joint for speech are we again it's like i didn't say that this is this is a question we haven't asked in a while on this podcast uh utopia or dystopia what are we headed towards like because this is very dystopian like this scares the shit out of me will this be good but we only be like radar droning bad people or well good people get droned as well it's a good person or a bad that's a good question right i think the problem with

you know utopia dystopia is that one man's utopia is the next man's dystopia very good i mean you've got still people who are lamenting the fall of the soviet union they like that lifestyle really oh yeah sure you'll i mean you'll find people who grew up in that system i mean i don't think it's a lot of them but you know it was a comfortable life you didn't have to worry about anything you hear you hear people say that every every dystopia had somebody who after the fact sort of misses it so i think when we go to our fully you know sovereign individual style society it'll be the utopia for some but it'll be the dystopia for others so bankers not not bankers central bankers it'll be a dystopia for sure i'm gonna go is for them

they can't handle it i'm gonna go with utopia because like why the fuck not might as well just be optimistic i i am i i love to err on the side of optimism like i hope the the goodwill of the human spirit shines through because i do believe 99.9 of people are good people right yeah since we're getting philosophical i think it's an interesting to think of like this period of time too as we're kind of faced with two alternatives you know and one alternatives is the social credit turnkey totalitarianism and you you could say that technology enables a level of of dystopian society that we haven't really had maybe we're already living in dystopia like me scrolling down refreshing twitter every day yeah yeah maybe but i like to think we're we're at we're

at a crux you know like we're at a turning point we can go we have the technology to enable both outcomes and it's being decided you know it's being decided which way wins yeah i mean i'd be careful about that because i i mean i think that we are probably living in the the best time in in the history of the world right now so um i you know i i i wouldn't say i like to call a dystopia would be incorrect and i i mean i think that i i did not have would it though bitcoiners give me hope maybe that's what a dystopia is though where you think you're living in a paradise but you're like so i think i think if you look back in like human history like the majority of human history has just been like violence and death yes and like we are living

in like a time period especially in america where there's an absence of that so to to say that like so there's an absence there's an absence of that in a violent sense but you also have opioid addiction at all-time highs you have heart disease at all-time highs you have the things like obesity at all-time highs suicide rate at all-time highs yeah but compare that to like the feudal system yeah it's right so or like world war one or like world war two yes we're ratcheting up i mean i think i i would agree with you matt that i mean utopia i'm trying to play devil's advocate i agree with you guys i know but but you know i would still maintain that even though we're we're ratcheting up you you have this you at least have this glimpse in different

countries like china where of a way it could go and it would be hard to recover from i mean nothing is forever but it would be hard to recover from we haven't talked about this yet what happened in hong kong like the triads going and attacking the protesters oh my god that's so fucked up so crazy but on the flip side we saw it live through a live stream on twitter that's pretty crazy right that that is the beauty of twitter the ultimate empathy provider is like holy shit these people should not be just like communication right communications on like a whole nother level i mean there's definitely a path we go here where it could be horrible um but especially what we surround ourselves with the three of us i think there's a lot of hope right there's a lot of hope

there there's a lot of very smart people very dedicated people very hopeful that are like i just want to hash us out you know you know we talk about like OPSEC and stuff right like why are we here today recording this podcast and we're here because you know we're dedicated to this mission we think it's very important um and and we're willing to push it on the line for that right so and I think there's like millions of people around the world willing to do that as well and that gives that's what gives me hope absolutely and what you said earlier too I think is also worth remembering like in the context you you said that there are more good people than bad people and i do think that's true i mean some technology can kind of give leveraged power to

a small minority of bad people you know but but overall the majority of people are good and are going to vote for you know vote in the way of i don't mean like at the polls but act by action they're going to act in a in a way that sort of takes advantage of of uh i mean we saw it in the blackout here in new york city a couple weeks ago where you have the upper west side completely lose power you know the people carnegie hall come out midtown midtown yeah midtown times and you have like it was probably the best time to ever be in times like literally one of the most busy epicenters of any city across the world and all the power goes out you think there would be chaos but yet you have people directing traffic you have card people and carnegie hall coming

out and giving a live concert for free to the people on the streets and and stuff like that and one of the most despotic and dirty and old infrastructure cities in the world where you have this calamity happen it wasn't a calamity but it was a pretty big shit show for for new york mayor wasn't even in town yeah he wasn't even in town i mean and then you look at the 70s and it was just all looting and just a complete fucking clusterfuck right so progress is up and to the right i think also you know a lot of a lot of bitcoiners you know sort of you know you think of anarchy and and and you know that has a negative connotation but if you are optimistic generally about human nature that that's sort of the that's the argument for you know decentralization is that people will

self-organize positively if if that's given the opportunity um the way i look at anarchy is it's it's uh the right to to choose who you associate with right it's it's it's i choose my relationships because like if you look at bitcoin for instance like i feel like in most situations i feel like we're one big ass fucking family like around the world right no um so like anarchy doesn't mean chaos necessarily well that's that's the whole sort of orwellian propaganda around anarchy is that we've been taught to believe that anarchy is chaos like when you're when you're learning about roman and greek history i feel like and whenever anarchy is brought up it's everything was crazy people are killing each other and i don't want to get in the conspiracies about like the american

education system but that's the connotation i was taught when i when i was taught about anarchy when we grew up specifically in like roman and greek culture and i thought it was like oh anarchy avoided at all costs but at the end of the day our anarchy is just individuals making decisions for themselves in their best interest yeah i mean i know some people who live out in the country and you know whenever i hear somebody making the argument but who's going to build the roads well you know they live they live in a place that they have to build their own roads you know what they got a road society they all pay into it and they build the roads it's you know i'm sure people argue against you know that as being generalizable but i think generally people organize themselves

when when there's no other alternative you know and do a better job i mean to play devil's advocate it like we never would have gotten our nationwide highway system if we weren't trying to move nukes around right yeah i mean that was it wasn't you can argue it was during fdr did it no no it was world war one so planes could land no it was later no i don't think so man i'm fdr did the highway i'm like i'm like 95 sure that that we expanded the highway system during the cold war to move our nukes around very easily well we definitely we may have expanded it but the highway system in its original inception was okay fdr i'm pretty sure but either way they're both centrally planned government initiatives yes i mean take it one step further would we have gone

to the moon without a centralized government no absolutely not we didn't even really do anything what do you mean like what did we do yeah i mean what did we do we like landed there for kicks right right and and when i think about that of course you know like right now it's the anniversary or the moon landing. And, you know, what I think of when I think of that nowadays, I'm thinking, like, maybe we shouldn't have, honestly. I mean, really, it was really a PR stunt. That's what I'm saying, right?

It was a bit of flex. It was a little bit ahead of time. It was ahead of time. I mean, I would have liked to see, you know, us learn about science and space and all the good things, but it's, I mean, you guys are familiar with this idea of the seen and the unseen. What's seen is you go to the moon.

What's unseen is all the other uses that money could have been put to by the people who earned it. I mean, this is an old story. You should have more money than less money, but i guess that's besides the point um space it's crazy that we haven't been back there in 50 years well look that's why i like i like bezos is i'm a bezos guy over a musk guy when it comes to space because i think bezos actually makes a lot of sense where we should actually go to the moon and make a base on the moon because if you want to send rockets further into space there's

so much less gravity on the moon that it takes so much less kinetic energy to do that well and then what's elon's go straight to mars uh i mean i mean i have to go from earth to mars and bezos is like let's go make a moon base it'll be a lot easier to get back to and from mars the difference between bezos and musk is bezos is thinking earth centric and musk is like we need to save earthlings by leaving earth right like i feel like he's trying to again i tend to more towards i'm not as alarmist as musk i'm pretty sure i'm like didn't he get kicked out he got kicked out of paypal because he was thinking too big and they couldn't monetize off of what he was what he wanted to do really that's his playbook every time it's like he just

has these huge visions and then he like does things to try and make those visions a reality and i'm like i respect that shit like we need more of that elon blows my i mean the the controversy around elon blows my mind people are either really pro elon or like tesla q type people um and i don't know where i fall i know i just know he's sending rockets to space and landing on small squares in the ocean which i think is incredible but a tesla car ran over a pedestrian yesterday so i mean i mean i'm a big i'm a big believer that we see we're going to see development in these things when there's a profit motive to do it right not when we just spend a bunch of money in time and lives to just like land on the moon and take some pictures right but when when you

can actually like make money doing it then we will like look at like exploring the americas like it was all done by private companies that wanted to make fucking bank explain that dive into that wasn't it all done by private companies that wanted to make bank like all those expeditions sugar trade the rum trade all that stuff like christopher columbus christopher columbus was like a private expedition that he did have government government help i mean let's also recognize a lot of the private entities back there were probably slave or like the east the east india company right like stuff like that first ever company to have a stock these are all companies that want to they wanted to make a profit motive and and the profit motive was going to these lands

that hadn't been developed yet right that they could lay their they lay their claim in this is actually a great uh great argument for capitalism here because they help bring the prices of everything down by going on these adventures and being able to to uh transport these goods to and from these these far away areas that have never been explored before uh which were slow steps towards the crazy community or community crazy world we have now we have some camera videotaping us like remotely we're talking through microphones here we're going to record this on the internet later that's where it started was uh enterprising individuals and companies uh saying hey i'm gonna fucking do this myself i mean that's where like lob 49 comes in right is that it's not just taking

a picture on the moon like you can make money running a node right and like more people will do it because there's money to be made that's just how things are yeah i mean that's that's the reason that we're making a protocol too i mean we have a device that we want to you know use this protocol with but you know it's going to be open for anybody to think of some better way to do it you know some better way to earn so earn value for communication um and we'll see i mean that's like i mean who could imagine all the crazy things that got built for bitcoin i mean like the cold card you know the digital the hardware wallets i love the do you have a cold card yet i do i have to still set it up but i love that i love the idea it's very easy to set it up we got i love the

fact that it's programmable too i mean that's that's pretty awesome the fact that it's open source i mean open source i mean that's the whole open source community is also you know it's it's great you don't have to develop everything in-house now you can let your community basically develop cool stuff uh you you know protocols are really just a pre-negotiated contract where you know people are going to follow the same rules but you know what you do past that anybody you know can sort of innovate and bitcoin you know you got bitcoin miners you know you got a whole ecosystem that's incentivized by this protocol to build different types of hardware um you know we got the noddle we got all these cool things coming out and that you know we're talking about

capitalism but you know you set some sort of rules and then you just let let people innovate you let people do it you know do what they can to make to to increase the value of the system i think that's where bitcoin is successful is it's kind of it because it has no gatekeepers you don't you know you don't just have one company doing you know patenting hardware wallets you've got everybody and it you know it and it changes over time is if you don't keep up you lose you know they viciously compete as we're finding out in the last like six months and whether it's hardware wallets or coin join uh implementations it is uh is people putting that on the market and competing heavily which is again like that's uh i like i haven't harped on this on a while

i haven't harped on this in a while on this podcast but again a phrase that i learned when I was playing high school lacrosse I had a very we were a very good team and we had very good coaches particularly my freshman through junior year who really instilled very good lessons into me and my brother and everybody who played on those teams but with the one message was you're only as strong as your weakest link and I think in Bitcoin that that message is is accentuated and very true it's like you are only as strong as you're like if internet service providers can stop you from relaying message that's your weakest link you may have a lot of mind share on this network you may have a lot of distribution you may have in a lot of hands of people but if the

weakest link is internet service providers and they can just flip a switch and shut it down we're fucked like none of nothing else matters at that point and that's why i love bitcoiners They're always trying to find the weakest link and make it stronger. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's why when you look at projects that are more centralized, you know, they might get stuff done quickly initially, but they can't really compete against a decentralized, like, ground-up innovation because you just can't be everywhere.

You can't be looking at every problem. So, you know, a large decentralized community is going to maybe get slower for the uptake, but in the end it's going to have legs to survive. I mean, that's what we're all here for is to see it survive. I mean, I don't think Bitcoin has to go up in price. It doesn't have to do anything. It just has to survive. And that's the strength.

Orange coin, good. Number go up. That too. But I mean, the funny thing is there's a weird phenomenon with Bitcoin was when, you know, orange coin goes up, it maybe unlocks development talent. It unlocks people who maybe had to work a day job, and now they work for Bitcoin.

You talked about the fifth column. I think there's a strong fifth column in Bitcoin in not just technology companies like Apple. It's governments, you know. it's Patrick McHenry he listens to this podcast I hope you know Patrick I'm listening come on the pod dude we'd like to talk to you what's the name of the shitcoin congressman uh Davidson maybe William Davidson is that right I could be wrong I feel like he listens he might even comment as a nym you know we got yeah he listens I'm just gonna say he listens that's why I mean we've

said hi to Vitalik on this podcast which is no way Vitalik listens so we might as well pretend he listens to this he's a huge fan have you seen the narratives that have been been adopted in ethereum sound money all that stuff he definitely listens we should we should run ads just vitalik's favorite pod tftc oh for you freaks out there this is vitalik's favorite favorite podcast he's uh he's been adapting all the narratives we've been talking about for the last two years actually hasn't even been him it's been other no but i mean that's why i'm here right like bitcoin went up in price and i foresee that one more bull run and i can do this full time and i really want to do that that would be fucking dope yes yes we are not doing this full time yet

for you freaks that don't right but but because bitcoin price went up i'm willing to do it part time right yeah um i i think the price going up is like more important than people realize and but it doesn't matter like you don't have to harp on it because i think the price will continue to go up which people give me shit for i remember like the bottom of the market um uh udi who i really respect was like it's really irresponsible for people to assume that the price will just keep going up forever and i responded underneath him uh the bitcoin's designed to pump forever with like shrug face or whatever and i really believe it like i believe that bitcoin is designed to pump forever it might sound irresponsible to you i think the pumps will reduce

over time the volatility will shrink but like if you have a fixed supply asset that's being adopted by a growing number of people like the price is is going to keep going up like that's how it's designed supply and demand works that way and it's the ultimate way to drag people in because you can't keep ignoring something when your buddy is is going when his value keeps going up and he keeps shilling it to you over and over again right i was the uh the terrible bitcoin friend on the bachelor party last weekend as soon as they had like three drinks on me i was like who who's gonna buy bitcoin next we were chilling with your buddy on on air he was like he was like asking me the questions that i always answer at like every single party and yeah i answered a

lot of those this weekend it's funny because i mean for me i'm in a little different age group i guess but you know at family gatherings i the whole family gathering i i can remember a few years ago it's just like holding it in the whole time you know like i can't talk i want to talk about i can't talk about because you're a meme right you're a meme like everyone's like oh richard's just gonna show us bitcoin right yeah i mean not even show but just like that's all i wanted to talk about but now that's the thing it's not like yeah it's not that i don't care about what other people have to say it's like this is all i want to talk about yeah i don't care if they buy it i just that's all i want to talk about but now we're like you know now i've

got like nephews who want to talk about it now because they have a little and they're watching you know so it's sort of like there's it's like not i don't want the i don't care as much about the price as just having a community of people that you know so i'm not the like the only guy talking about it of course price is always important but um but it isn't you know it you know socially it's nice to just have it be you know president trump is tweeting about it now i can talk to people about it now and it's like yeah you can think this isn't important but i mean it's at least a national topic now it's on the stage it's on the stage you know what has worked not even worked for me but i haven't i haven't um actively like pitched it in this way it was

actually yesterday the newsletter i wrote on upstream data their new ohm uh data center which is like a mini little data center that you can put on place at an oil or natural mining rig yeah mining rig they call it data center my mom texts me people my mom texted me after reading that was like oh my god i finally get bitcoin like this really makes a lot of sense like yeah my father and lol i i i because ohm got announced on friday or excuse me yeah it got announced like last week but even before that i was talking about upstream data at dinner with him like down the shore a couple weekends ago and that was the aha moment for him was the the creating efficiency in oil and gas fields yeah i mean if you're not pro bitcoin you hate the environment right like is

that that's the meme we're going with that's a great way to shut down the whole you know like boil the oceans with mining too it's like there is a lot of trapped energy and this is what you do with it exactly and because the alternative is you flared into the atmosphere and it's 30 to 40 times worse and like once you have that framing i have this and these two anecdotes with my mother and my father-in-law well they're they both were like oh like this is interesting but i mean not even that right like you have a direct you have a direct uh value on the waste energy right like you know everyone has a dad who told you how to turn the lights off right like now imagine if you turn the lights off like you made money right like that's what bitcoin unlocks right it's a it's a

natural market-based price for energy usage around the world and it creates an additional incentive there to not just like fuck around with your energy uh i mean like we look at like water for instance water is one of the things that i'm really worried about um as as an individual who wants to survive uh as all individuals fortunately i know that my bitcoin will be able to purchase me water into the future but uh the main issue with water is that the cost is not equivalent to the real cost on society when you use it so when you take a shower it costs you cents but really you're wasting dollars worth of water do you know how much water it takes to make almonds no it's something like to make one almond it costs like 300 gallons so my almond milk is bad

it was bad for the if you're drinking almond i'm not drinking i'm just i'm just playing devil's but apparently like almonds are are very water intensive just specifically as a as a good that's produced like that's interesting the amount of water i mean so are cows and we love cows though right yeah yeah that's that's that was like the scariest part of the big short was the ending of the big short when they're like Michael Berry's next next big trade is water yeah when I saw that I just wanted to buy like barrels of water and put it in my my parents basement having grown up in California I mean I think it's gonna hit places like that first but it's it's not it's it's a local problem too it's

gonna be different in different places well the main issue is we need to price it appropriately and that's the point I was trying to get at is that is that Bitcoin creates a price for energy around the world that's market based and and permissionless right like anyone can plug in a miner no one can stop you and and you get basically the equivalent market price for your bitcoin based on on energy cost right so so that is like a really really insane concept that just blows my mind is one of the reasons like like people you know they call us bitcoin maximalists just because we hate ethereum um and and really like i i think of myself as like a proof of work maximalist right like i think the real innovation

here wasn't blockchain it was it was distributed proof of work and it's like really mind-blowing when you start going down that that fucking rabbit hole oh and my day job we're working on these type of efficiencies and in the energy markets and it it is real it exists it is crazy how how many efficiencies proof of work mining in particular creates and that's the first incentive of outside of supercomputers where this trapped energy can be useful and people don't realize that like people love to hate on energy companies and oil companies and but if you think we're not going to need fossil fuels in the future like you're you're not thinking like we might not though well if we have nuclear and stuff like that well i think i think do you think fossil fuels will be

the cheapest form of energy to mine bitcoin well up to this point no i mean and 75 is renewable i think it'll go even cheaper but i agree with that but like you should also work to make those efficiencies in the oil markets oh absolutely of course of course and but that's oh fuck i just lost my train of thought i apologize that's um i lost it it's gone yeah what way you're talking fossil fuels you were talking about fossil fuels and oh and oh here's what i want the point i wanted to make there was i forget exactly where it was i think it would have been germany so germany's been trying to transition to renewables pretty hardcore and specifically with solar and wind you depend on the weather so if you have like like my freshman year at depaul university

there was 60 straight days where the sun did not break the clouds like it is the windy city and it's the windy city not because of the wind because of the politics many people don't know that so like there was like 60 days in chicago my freshman year in college where the sun did not come out and it probably wasn't that windy so like if you're depending on straight up solar and wind in that city at that particular time you're not going to have enough energy and energy costs are going to go up and things are going to get crazy so you need a mix of renewables and fossil fuels you're gonna have nuclear and nuclear i mean wait it's not actually a windy city no windy the windy city is because it's politics because it's like i always thought you guys just had like

i mean 20 mile an hour winds no they're no chicago the windy it's called the windy city because the politics are so corrupt and quote unquote windy i never knew that yeah i mean the one i like i mean you've got this this whole idea of upstream data but i like the idea i mean i live in a place that's pretty cold most of the year uh and also is powered you know the heat heat is basically electrical power they don't have fossil fuels um i think you know i i at least i'm hoping for a decentralization of mining into heating systems i know people have sort of taken i think we'll see that we've seen that in siberia right we've seen the direction there but i mean that's the great that's a great way to decentralize mining and you know you only have to be as efficient

as a heat pump you know you don't have to be 100 paid for with mining well i think that happens when it like asic development like plateaus right like right now the asics go out of profitability way too quickly um i think we'll hit a point where like you'd be an idiot not to put it in your building wide boiler for instance stuff like that it is really interesting i've noticed traveling which by the way everyone should do i've always reminded people europe tends to have a ton of electric heat we don't do that in america we have no electric heat here we have Cheap oil and gas. And a lot of places in Europe don't.

But still, it's all electric heat, right? There's like, you have electric heaters in every room. Yeah, and a space heater in Paris when I went there in December. We don't have that here, right? Like if you rented an apartment and the heater was an electric thing on the wall, you'd be like, I'm not renting this apartment. Yeah, it's going to burn down. Yeah.

That's interesting. Of course, they see it the other way. Talking to my relatives out there, they're like, so you, wait, let me get this straight. you pump flammable gas into your home and then you light it on a thermostat in the middle of the night while you sleep is that is that what you do well no the natural gas thing just on a tangent just like i mean i mean the whole idea that you have people with gas stoves like in apartment buildings who you just like or you're trusting your neighbor like not to leave their

gas on overnight is like the most crazy thing in the world to me we both live in those type apartment yeah that that pretty much blows my mind that that happened yeah if you have a fight club like uh scenario happen yeah but like at the same time like if you put electric heaters in apartments like people will freak the fuck out they're not happy for it sorry to my wife but we're watching it tonight what fight club yeah um no but yeah it is crazy yeah yeah the energy the energy conversation gets heated and pun intended and uh but it is the it's very nuanced though right it depends where you are depends how how much a certain type of electricity is where you are and the the supply and demand of it and it's a very nuanced conversation everybody's

uh is obviously a very diversive conversation as well but i think we have to to realize there's going to be a mix and and it's very again contextual for where you are and what part of the world you're in yeah i mean that's and it's it's strange having something like bitcoin it's not just a world currency but like you're saying it's like a world currency for energy so that's like two fundamental things that that now becomes global both energy prices and just prices in general really everything can be you know you when you take out the controls like why should it be more expensive to buy i don't know i mean you know something that's price controlled for example can't be price controlled if you can buy it anonymously with bitcoin you know it's

harder so um yeah you you you flatten you know flatten the world a bit which would be interesting it's a permissionless petrodollar right sure i mean it's funny when you think i was thinking of that earlier when you were talking that we say petrodollar we're literally talking about a monetary system tied to energy so how strange is it now that bitcoin is is a you know it's an Now it's not just energy manifestation of it. Yeah, it's but we're tying now three things. It's not just energy and money It's energy money and information Sort of like we're getting sort of an internet money now not a physical money So it's it's like you see an evolution there, which is pretty tantalizing

And meanwhile, we have some idiots that are trying to break that tie like they think that's a benefit Yeah, dude, we got to go proof-of-stake is better for the environment We're gonna look back on this in a few years and laugh I think we're already laughing I'm looking at tweets from 2017 where I'm like, the exchanges are all going to be the stakers. And meanwhile, Binance just announces every day they announce a new coin that they're staking and that they're going to give special rewards to people

and everyone's just bringing their coins in. Yeah, what was it? They're sixth or eighth? Yeah, they added Komodo. Yeah. Which is not a prop. Like, I got shit a little bit on Twitter. It's not a proper proof of stake coin.

But this made me think of something right now. there seems like there's a like for education a bit become to become an educated big coiner it's not just reading books you actually have to experience certain phases exactly because i know if you've talked about this but the idea like you got to be you got to you know get excited about a shit coin at some point you should drop it early but you should do that like you should have that experience you should mine even though it's a stupid idea to personally mine download the wallets download the hard or yeah download the wallets mine if you can it that's that's what made me realize proof of stake was was stupid like i had like a small amount of a proof of

stake coin it was just like staking i was like this doesn't make any sense i'm not doing anything like why am i making interest on this yeah i mean but it's all these things like there's certain certain lessons you got to learn by trying you know and that so i i can't really like when i meet somebody who's just into bitcoin or into cryptocurrency usually not bitcoin they're they're gonna they're gonna say i want to mine you know like we all wanted to mine you know we all that mining there's always cloud money or yeah I mean cloud mining came a little later but that you know like why did you know when lightning litecoin came out you know like people were excited oh I can mine at home again because like a

six had taken off and that just gets repeated every you know new wave has to go through those cycles like new wave of people who are like brought into a Bitcoin they they get seduced and they and it's just a question of you know do they learn the lesson or do they not learn the lesson what is that next wave Yeah, because it was ICOs last time around. People were saying maybe IEOs, initial exchange offerings. IEOs are just ICOs. They're just ICOs.

I know, but like... I think we're going to go back to proof-of-work altcoins. To like pure proof-of-work launches? Yeah. Pre-mines? Well, maybe not like a pure pre-mine. It'll be like they know the algo ahead of time. They basically do like a kind of pre-mine

where they're just the main dominant miners in the beginning. Stuff like that. Don't you think, like, it's sort of been shown that you've got to have ASICs? I mean, I know that's still being— No, yeah, you have to get to—I think you have to get to ASICs, and that threshold from when you're not at ASICs to getting to ASICs is, like, super important. And then once you hit ASICs, you're going to be in, like, a super centralized ASICs mode, and you have to get past that point to get to a more distributed ASIC.

And that's the key with the POW lifecycle is that you have to get past that whole point. and this whole idea that you can have like something that's asic resistant is really just you have centralization that decides to change the algo because that's the only way because like ultimately specialized hardware will always be more efficient than general purpose hardware right so like you have to have a centralized factor that changes it and you're just holding yourself back and i think getting past that threshold is going to become harder and harder over time right so like that's going to be a major um issue for new proof of work networks but i i think we'll see them just you know just pop up and die and pop up and die and yeah no

that's been the uh crazy is it red herring that like a6 are bad like a6 are great a6 are great like you want for home specialization like if you're a home miner like you can order a purpose build machine and plug it in dude like it's way easier going back to upstream data general purpose upstream released a tweet today their first customer who's running that ohm data center they mined a block within the first week granted they were they were contributing to a pool yeah they were in a pool but one of their miners found a block like they didn't get the whole 12 and a half bitcoin but wow the block reward so small now interesting to see if you ever get it like some place where they subsidize natural gas if you get people putting these into their homes or

something you know all college students were like mining doge back every college is gonna have to stop offering electricity with the rent any kind of landlord that offers it is gonna have to stop we saw cases in germany where they had the um free ev plugging for the for the cars and some guy was just running miners in his trunk you know like like they have to stop that like any kind and that's what i was talking about earlier where there's a cost to waste right all of a sudden you have this this this free market decided cost to your waste and all these places where energy is subsidized and essentially wasted because they're subsidized will have to stop otherwise they'll just run out of money yeah it's great ah it's beautiful it's beautiful just like the incentives

of it all and and it's beautiful it's multifaceted too because it creates these incentives and energy efficiency and then when you're holding the token and low time preference and and not selling it and combining all those together and to figure out how to be as efficient as possible and then how to save as much as possible for the long term i think it's overall good for humanity like and i whole heartedly believe this and people are like oh you never want a deflationary currency or depreciation like or deflation you never want deflation like deflation is evil but i think that is i truly believe that the deflation is evil meme is some orwellian bullshit that people for some reason cannot get over like why would you not want to pay less for something in the future yeah i mean

that's like something about that word deflation sounds bad but if you also ask people would you like things to get cheaper over time i mean they're not going to answer no are they yeah i I like that meme. Cheaper over time. Cheaper over time. Like, why is that crazy? Orange Coin. It gets crazy.

Cheaper over time. But, like, I'll play devil's advocate here. It gets crazy when you, like, bring crazy creditors in the mix and you have, like, a bunch of creditors that are out there. And, yes, deflation is bad for them, but it's just, like, contain your risk. Yeah. Time preference. What helps here is that because it's code, like, we can divide it infinitely.

right like one of the issues right with a deflationary currency in like man like pre bitcoin times would be that we can't divide it infinitely so so you would have issues where you you know you when it comes time to spend you'd have some issues right well let's be completely honest here like bitcoin at the protocol level that's probably not true with fees so like this why we depend on like second layer uh tools or protocols like lightning network now state chains and stuff goes subset on lightning you go subset and so richard i guess we could end i feel like we've been here for what time or like it's been two hours it's been two hours like are you optimistic about the the future of the lightning network the future of these transaction layers

are you i mean of course i mean and that's why lot 49 is built on lightning we think we think that I mean I think a lot of people who actually got into Lightning also had been thinking about Mesh I mean I've heard that from other Lightning developers that that actually was like Mesh that brought them to Lightning sort of thinking about Mesh and the idea you hear micropayments I mean we we have some kind of cool like fun cases for micropayments but that's Mesh is sort of like the quintessentialist like this textbook micropayment system so yeah I'm totally optimistic about about that and about you know Lightning and and and I see what we're trying to do is really just a great application of lightning i mean it's really that's all it is and we're

going to see other applications but this is just you know this is one we think that can really unlock a lot of communication you know ground up communication systems but we're going to see others and that's that's why another reason i'm optimistic about both bitcoin and what lightning can do for bitcoin absolutely well you're somebody makes me extremely optimistic thank you for doing what you do it's seriously so cool like what you're doing with gotenna and in lot 49 again as adult it has uh it's been crazy to see uh how much i've learned from the things you've built like mesh networking and was never on my conscious before you explained tx tenor for the first time last year i was like holy shit this is crazy um and thank you for what you're doing thanks i mean

i really appreciate what you and matt you know have been talking about it on on air and everything you talk about is great but i really you know it's like i feel like i'm really the avatar for this idea you know i didn't invent it i'm just pushing it but it's resonating really well with people and that that really pushes me forward just to try to make it the thing that everybody wants you know yeah i mean richard is both a freak and a friend right he listens to the podcast you listen to the podcast absolutely i was a long time listener before and yeah i i consider you a close friend you know and uh it's just i'm like i'm glad that we finally got you on you know like it's been a long time coming yeah all right i'm sorry for for letting you know this was happening

last night richard and i confirmed yesterday i told matt last night i was like oh dude we've got go tenor i was like oh fuck yes i'm there um this has been the quickest two hour plus episode this has been a lot of fun um thank you thank you for coming thank you for doing what you're doing any last words for the freaks out there anything we could do any call to action that you can put out there that we can help push go 10 or tx10 or lot 49 forward yeah thanks i mean i would just say go to global mesh labs we have a link to the white paper you know we're still looking for feedback this is still in the protocol development phase we're working on simulation so there's plenty it's all open source you know if you're a developer or if you're a developer get

in the code. You can help with the simulation. We've got a guy, Will, who's one of our he's an intern who's working on the simulation, but we can always use more help with that. TX10 is all open source. This stuff is still proof of concept, but we need people

trying it and giving us ideas. Please contribute. If you're not a developer, read the white paper and give us your thoughts. We'd love to hear what you think. Thanks. Bye, man. Matthew? Stay humble, stack sets. Peace and love, freaks. Maybe we should clap.