The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - MrRGnome, Fighting Off Bitcoin Misinformation and Disinformation

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES This week we welcome MrRGnome, a longtime member in the Bitcoin community, former moderator of the r/Bitcoin on Reddit, current moderator of the Bitcoin Discord channel, and staunch defender of Bitcoin. Sources for the stats and figures from tonight's show: https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2022/banque-bank-canada/FB3-5-2022-44-eng.pdf https://helpfull.com/blog/survey-us-voters-party-affiliation-cryptocurrency https://assets.ctfassets.net/c5bd0wqjc7v0/WvuOkBwNXZsqhd6EWtkEL/7f94f8b6fbb222f3faf4d0346e473012/Morning_Consult_Cryptocurrency_Perception_Study_Feb2023_Memo__1_.pdf From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. #Bitcoin #BitcoinMining #BitcoinScaling Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠ Discord: ⁠ ⁠⁠https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

The Canadian Bitcoiners podcast is just two guys and maybe a guest or two discussing Bitcoin, Bitcoin equities, and the related macroeconomic space. It's not meant to be financial advice, so please, if you're doing any investing, after listening to our program, do your own research, do your own due diligence, and understand that any money you invest can be lost. The show is meant for entertainment purposes only, and we hope you enjoy the program. Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast, the mighty CBP. And today you're in for a treat. Mr. Arnome will be joining us. He's a nim's a nim so with you know we'll learn a little bit about him what he is willing to share what i'm willing to ask as well this is going to be a fun one it'll be very educational we'll be talking about what's wrong in the world of bitcoin what

is right in the world of bitcoin and a heck of a lot in between as well but before we go any further i have to do a couple of things a couple of ad reads and well number one let's talk about easy dns and easy dns i talk about it all the time how they helped us the canadian bitcoiners podcast get our own website canadian bitcoiners.com shameless plug so they helped us get a site so they have hosting services but say you already have a website well they could help migrate your website over to their services you get domain names you can migrate your domain name over there renew your domain name there's lots of different things you could do over there including emails email hosting or if you already have your email system set up somewhere you can

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price of bitcoin go up with down a little bit, a few percent. You could buy on-chain. You could sell on-chain. You could buy through Lightning. You could sell through Lightning. So if the fees are high, you're good. If the fees are low, well, you have options. Not just that. If you want to buy gift cards, say you want to buy a Home Depot gift card

or, say, a Starbucks gift card, you could do that with your Bitcoin. So indirectly, you could be spending your Bitcoin in the real world. And you're living on a Bitcoin standard just the way Satoshi wanted you to do. You can also pay your bills with your Bitcoin. So the price of Bitcoin has gone up quite a bit. You might have a large stack and you made massive gains. So you could start spending it. You know, you have a electricity bill you got to pay. Well, you can pay your Bitcoin with your Bitcoin through Bull Bitcoin. Check them out. A lot of know, you have a electricity bill you got to pay. Well, you can pay your Bitcoin with your Bitcoin through bull Bitcoin. Check them out. A lot of different options you have over there,

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Mr. R. Gnome. Hey, thank you for coming on here so before we go any further your name i respect that we'll try to maintain that type of privacy as much as possible love the graphic by the way you can thank uh ph dub of our Bitcoin, Bitcoin CA, and the Bitcoin Discord for this one. He does great work with the little AI tools. And he's also known as Bitcoin All Caps on Twitter. Yes, he is.

And he's got the Bitcoin YouTube channel with the O in there, or the zero, I think, in there. Yes, he does. So I want to thank you very much for coming on from what i gathered this is your first podcast you're coming on am i correct in that yeah so i i've kind of avoided all of this for the longest time and let me tell you why i i don't believe in paid commentary i think that we're part of a free and open source software protocol. We're part of an open community. I think that introducing paid commentary distorts narratives.

And that's kind of what I'd like to talk about a little bit today. And, you know, like, for example, as much as I support Bull Bitcoin, I think they're one of the best exchanges in the world, honestly. I think they also do a lot wrong. And when they're paying your bills, it becomes a lot more difficult to be critical of. And as much as they are probably the best exchange in the world right now, those are the people that we need to hold to the highest standard. The people that are willing to listen, that willing to to try and be the best and and exert you know bitcoin or values are the ones that we need to be critical of because these shitcoin casinos they don't care but like bull bitcoin for example their current foray into

custodial liquid is is a big problem and i think that people should be talking about that. I don't believe that having what 11, 12 unknown signers in a multi-sig protocol is an acceptable alternative to self-custodial Bitcoin and Bitcoin consensus. I think pretending like it is like it's some kind of stopgap is kind of crazy. It's as bad as any other custodian. And the only reason I think that Liquid even gets talked about in this community is because Blockstream. If it wasn't because of Blockstream, Liquid would just be treated like any other shitcoin, because quite frankly, that's what the architecture is. You don't know who those signers are. You don't know

who you're trusting. I don't know who you're trusting. It's unverifiable because they want to keep it secret. I think that that's a problem. And I think that Francis, who I have a lot of respect for, despite disagreeing about any number of things, like I said, he's built one of the best exchanges in the world. And I use it all the time. Bills is great for taking care of Bitcoiners that are living on Bitcoin like I am. I live on Bitcoin. It's my native currency and bank account. I need it to pay my bills. I think he's doing great work.

But these stopgaps are horrible. There's no other way to say it. They're just very, very bad. They're a huge departure from his stated values. And I'd like to see more people ringing his bell over it. Yeah. I have been critical of liquid in the past and i'm just going to rhyme off something from the liquid federation this is straight from their website it's comprised of infrastructure companies trading desks exchanges game developers and more so those are the people that that's the group of individuals that are managing your keys

when you send over your bitcoin and get a token one-to-one in return so that's what i i said that if this was tied to some somebody named by name of vitalik we would be holding this to a different standard but unfortunately people tend to like it they see adam backs behind it so they tend to give it all the respect in the world for adam back all the respect for the code that is being written by a lot of these folks at blockstream but code stands aside from business model if your business model is garbage it deserves to get called out it is not bitcoin it's not a replacement for bitcoin it's not an acceptable temporary stop gap for for Bitcoin any more than Coinbase is, any more than any of these other shit coins are. And it's totally inappropriate that we as a community and the broader community is promoting

it. And this is one of the things that happens when you have paid commentary. Paid commentary and influencer culture is the reason we're talking about feddiment. It's the reason we're talking about liquid. Those things wouldn't be even on the radar or in the conversation of any Bitcoiner if it weren't for the huge sums of money that these companies are spending in the social spaces to promote those discussions and narratives. And that's totally inappropriate. And that's why I've been avoided. I don't want to be an influencer.

I have no interest in influencing anybody to do anything except for verify stuff. But I'm looking at the community around me and I'm ready to pull my hair out. The stuff that the community is doing is insane. We're going to shitcoin custodians. We're engaging in politically ideological narratives that just aren't reflected in reality. And I'd like to talk about that a little bit more, too. And I don't know. I don't know what else to do other than to try and speak louder about it and get people thinking about these things, because I think that it needs to be discussed. That's what we have to do. Everybody has their own opinion, right?

This is Bitcoin. There's no one set idea one set opinion but the ones that encourage you to verify to hold on to your keys the ones that give you the ability to control and manage your wealth moving forward those are the ones we should be promoting best or promoting the most because they're the ones that you're least likely to get rugged unless you fuck up the onus is on you and get rugged right like it is like you say you have to make a huge mistake yourself it is personal responsibility and i admit that that's not for everything everyone but the goal of bitcoin isn't to make the number go up it isn't to onboard everyone at the cost of their own personal

security or the security of the network as a whole, that's incredibly dangerous. And for example, that's what we're seeing with a lot of this ETF promotion right now. ETFs are just another custodial shitcoin casino. And that is who holds most of those ETF coins is shitcoin casinos. That's whose node is deciding what those Bitcoin are. If you're somebody who holds Bitcoin in an ETF, I want you to really question for yourself, what happens if Bitcoin forks? What happens if there's a contested fork? For example, around an anonymity tool set. Let's say that like Atomback wants, like Nopera wants, we introduce bulletproofs on-chain. These are an

anonymity tool, the same anonymity tool that's been stolen by some shit coins, but it's developed on Bitcoin in layers. It exists in elements protocols. Let's pretend that we decided to fork in bulletproofs into Bitcoin. Do you for a second believe that any regulator, any government or any corporation is going to allow that fork to go through? Absolutely not. Why would the regulator allow that? That's crazy. That goes against all of their interests. Their interests aren't your interests as a node runner. And these people in the CTF, let's say fork like this happens, they could very easily find themselves with a shit coin, a coin controlled by someone else.

Being a consensus and bearer asset, Bitcoin uniquely, unlike gold, unlike oil, they can redefine it at will. If you're not running a node, you don't get to define what Bitcoin is. They can rug pull you without stealing a single coin, without triggering any kind of insurance clause in a way that you can't in any other asset or class.

It is not a traditional asset. It has risks that aren't being covered by the terms and services and conditions of these tools. And in fact, if you do read the terms and conditions of these ETFs, they explicitly say, the fund manager or the custodian arbitrarily gets to decide what Bitcoin is in the event of a fork. Not you, not the community.

It's not majority rules. It's whatever their node says. And that scares the hell out of me, Len. That could very easily be used to attack the protocol in the next block size wars like event. And like, it's sad enough for the people that are foolish enough to trust these custodians and their nodes and whatnot, but it could actually represent a risk to the broader protocol. Can you imagine a situation where all these OFAC-controlled miners, they're already being censored in ways about what kind of transactions they can publish in many instances? What happens when all those miners, all the sums that are in these ETFs say, uh-uh, we aren't supporting Bitcoin anymore. We're supporting a Bitcoin fork that we're going to call Bitcoin,

but it's in fact controlled entirely by us and nodes don't matter anymore. That's just another shit coin. That's Bcash 2.0. And these people that are stuck in the ETFs, they have a vested interest in supporting that because if they don't, there goes all their money. This can be used to attack the protocol.

And in the worst case, you could end up with a situation where Bitcoin itself is a minority hash power fork. And that would be an extreme existential crisis for us. So this is bigger than even just like, oh, you know what? I've got a little bit of my coin in an ETF, let's say. I don't. But some people do say this. Oh, I've got a little bit of coin in an ETF. So it's fine because I control all my other coins. It's not fine. You're empowering potential attackers, people that have a reputation for attacking us, who currently are doing things like censoring transactions and miners and don't have the same

goals or objectives for Bitcoin as we do as users. I think it's extremely dangerous. And the same is true for all the controlled things, whether it's the shitcoin casinos, whether it's liquid, whether it's Fediment, whatever it is, if it's not Bitcoin and it's not something you control in a layer like lightning lightning is bitcoin you control so long as you run a node so long as you control the channels and that's the distinction we need to be looking for we need to be teaching people how to verify so that they don't run into these traps into these shit coin and custodial traps i couldn't i can't begin to tell you how dangerous i think that this is in the long run.

They dangle that carrot in front of people. That's the unfortunate thing. And people buy it. People go ahead and keep chasing it because they're using tax-advantaged accounts in order to buy the ETF. That's number one. The second one, it's just so easy. The click of a button, they could buy it rather than going through alternative methods, learning how to use a cold card, for instance, and setting up Sparrow. That takes a little bit more time and effort. And it seems people are less apt to do that, and they're just more apt to buy the ETF.

Now, with that being said, I'm wondering, then, does the probability of an attack increase? Now, what happened today with Donald Trump, when he was talking about he wants to make the United States the hub of the world for Bitcoin mining. So with that being said, then does then the potential attack with the ETF become just more probable by today? I think that it does become more probable by the day. I think Donald Trump is simply, as many politicians are, he's simply celebrating his nation and being like oh you know we want all the manufacturing in america we want all the whatever xyz in america i don't think he even understands what he's saying about really anything but definitely this uh but if he did if you were a more competent individual i would say oh this is malicious they want all the

minors in one country because they have the ability to exert more regulatory control over what they're doing say in regards to sanctioned states and publishing transactions and things like that i don't think that's what's happening here i think what's happening here is donald trump is a is a fucking idiot and is on twitter and someone let him have a keyboard and that's that's its own separate problem but i don't it yeah if if if someone more competent was saying this i would maybe have a different take now i know you want to you have a presentation or sorry a bunch of slides and so forth you want to bring up but i just want to ask you really quick ocean mining then what are your thoughts on that because i'm looking at that it seems like a it has the bitcoin

ethos built into it but i'm wondering if there's something i'm missing here so i want to hear your thoughts about what you think about you're missing that they're pandering to you i mean they like they're telling everybody what they want to hear they tell me what i want to hear and then they're not doing it. How long have they been singing the song of stratum V2 block templates? Where the hell are they? They aren't anywhere. I mean, we've been waiting for I can't even tell you how many years now for stratum V2 block templates to be implemented a pool.

And then Ocean comes along and is like, hey, guys, we're going to do this. We're different. We're going to make this happen. We're going to once again decentralize mining by empowering individual miners through our pool. And then they don't. So until they do it, I don't have a whole lot of positive things to say about ocean mining. I hope that they do it i hope that their their words and their actions meet in some way in the future but right now they're they're basically just pandering they're talking the talk and not walking the walk which is pretty common swan is another company that does this they do a lot of talk in the talk but when you actually get down to it like they were using custodians like prime trust like and just putting their users at extreme risk through through these

shitcoin custodians that's not walking the walk uh you see you see it in block stream as we've already discussed that liquid ain't walking the walk all of these companies have an interest in talking the talk but there isn't actually a huge financial incentive in walking the walk in fact it's usually the other way around there's usually a huge financial incentive in pandering to bitcoiners like sailor is doing for example and then in fact not doing anything that you should be doing like custodying his own coins or like in sailor's case he also spreads a lot of misinformation. Like, Bitcoin isn't a currency, he asserts. And, like, we can prove it's a currency because we can see that people use Bitcoin to pay for goods and services. And I can, like, here right here is a little graphic.

It shows you. The source of this is from the Canadian Bitcoin Om bitcoin omnibus survey uh tracking 2016 to 2021 and as you can see many people myself included do use bitcoin to pay for goods and services um michael saylor is a liar when he says that bitcoin isn't a currency and you can prove it as easily as seeing all the people that do use it as a currency. And that's certainly not the only thing that he's, you know, promoted a lot of the environmental misinformation as part of his mining council, which is completely antithetical to Bitcoin. The last thing you want to do in Bitcoin is organize the miners.

That's just not a good plan. We've seen how that goes when over 80% of them attacked us in the block size wars. He's using Bitcoin and pandering to Bitcoiners as a way to pump his stock. He's speaking the language of newbies because he is a newbie and it's attracting a huge bulk of new users that don't know any better. They hear, you know, cyber hornets and they're like, yeah, that's awesome. We're cyber hornets. We're going to get them. And that's all fine and dandy.

But as soon as you get down to the nitty gritty of what he's actually saying, it's platitudes and misinformation at best. We don't need Bitcoin influencers that have an agenda to pump their company. We don't need Bitcoin influencers. We don't need corporately sponsored podcasts. We don't need anything except for informed Bitcoiners and their opinions. Each individual opinion, like nobody's paying me, nobody's sponsoring me. I'm just a jerk on the internet with a big mouth now i think we need more jerks on the internet with big mouths so in then in your case then there should be an organic way of an organic growth um and by having some money behind it having some sponsorship type

situation where there's there's pandering to um to whatever narrative they want you to push, that kind of distorts the whole message. Is that what you're trying to say? Yes. As soon as you introduce money to a narrative, it changes the narrative. Look at Peter McCormick. He was promoting BlockFi as one of his sponsors for the longest time, right? And we talked about these ETFs. That's just yield chasing in another form right that's short term thinking about the tax advantages they're chasing that yield without thinking about the custody or anything else that's exactly what happened with block fi peter mccormick you know never said you know don't don't go into block fi in fact he said the opposite constantly

and then when it all came tumbling down on everyone else's head but him all he had to say is my family comes first and i'm sure it does good for him i'm glad his family comes first but what about all the people that he's misled for money when you introduce financing of commentary you bias the commentary unavoidably even the most unbiased person, if they're getting paid, is going to think twice about being critical of the person that's paying them. So what is the path forward? Because money itself is a very powerful tool, and it could buy eyeballs, it could buy listeners, it could buy quite a bit. So with that being said, then what is the

alternative and what should we be striving to achieve be a jerk on the internet just go out there have an opinion be ready to be wrong and communicate share over at um so i moderate a community in the the bitcoin discord community uh it's at bitcointech.help. I moderate with a lot of other really useful people. And we just as a community, like use our commentary to learn together. We're going through BIPs together. We're having, you know, conversations about what's going on in the development community, just trying to grok and wrap our head around things as they happen. And that's the kind of engagement I want to see. And when we're bringing on new users, I think the commentary should be about onboarding them as public communities, because that's where, you know, you get all of this fact checking and people, if you want to

find out if you're wrong, just be loud in public, somebody will tell you if you're wrong, right? It doesn't need this closed echo chamber of financially incentivized opinion. It doesn't need growth in the form of a select number of voices getting disproportionate numbers of ears. What the growth that we need is just more tiny ad hoc conversations all happening simultaneously and growing numbers of them. I'm of the opinion too, that is, I agree with that. And I actually, that's something I've told you off the air. I did something like that just this past weekend.

But another way to really raise attention is for Bitcoiners to eventually start driving Lambos. So once people start seeing people you know their lives got not to drive a lambo but people's bitcoiners lives that they have been elevated just because they simply bought in and they held on to it for a great deal of time like granted it's not a number go up situation but it kind of is in a way you know because it's just it's far outpacing just about every other asset. So based on that, there's potential gains for a lot of people if they get in. And when you see somebody else, their life's vastly improved. People are going to ask, how did you do it?

What did you do it? Oh, you did this? How do I get in? And I think that's another thing. Just by looking at people's successes and you try to emulate that, that's another way I think people are going to look at and come into Bitcoin. The greed inevitably drives adoption. Absolutely it does.

Is it particularly healthy? No, not really. And it leads to a lot of people hurting themselves. This is why they get into shit coins in the first place, right? They think that it's all equal and they're like, well, where do I get rich quick? What button do I press to start making Where, where, where do I, what button do I press to start making money in two months? In fact, somebody asked me that today,

that that's a common occurrence. We get people that are naive and greedy. And for me personally, I view my contributions to the Bitcoin community that I participate in as trying to take that greed and transform it into awareness, knowledge. Like, okay, yeah, you're greedy. Let's put that aside. Like, the best way to be greedy and to benefit yourself is to realize that this isn't a get-rich-quick scheme. It's a don't-go-poor-slowly scheme. And if you have a long time frame, yeah, you know, you might make a lot of money in terms of fiat. I know that a lot of us have been very fortunate that have been in the community for a long time to have really seen our net worth increase through Bitcoin. And that's fantastic. But that's not its fundamental purpose. It's a

trust machine, a trust eliminating machine. It's a power logistics revolution. It's a green energy consumer. It is all of these things and tools. It's programmable money. And most importantly, it's a consensus network. And it can be, as we just said, redefined at will by the people that are running it at an individual level. So you want to make sure you're one of those people running it at an individual level. Run a node. Because otherwise, somebody could tell you that your Bitcoin are something that they're not.

They could be completely, quote unquote, rug pulled from you at will. You don't actually control your Bitcoin. You're not verifying anything. You don't know what you have. And that's just fundamental to Bitcoin's design. So I like to try and onboard by transforming that greed into almost a little bit of fear. Like, yeah, this is great. This can change your life. But like, be a little bit afraid. Like, there's some stuff you need to know here in order to be safe. A significant number of people do continue to lose their Bitcoin due to lack of backups, due to trusting custodians, due to all kinds of things. And to me, the first

mission is like preparing somebody for Bitcoin before they even buy it. It's like, let's talk about whether this is even right for you. And maybe it won't be. Maybe they're not ready yet. I think that that's perfectly okay. We don't need to onboard everybody today. Some people aren't going to be ready for Bitcoin right now. And that's okay. And other people still, maybe they're ready for Bitcoin, but in a form where their actual relationships of trust, say their grandkids or their lawyer or their best friends, they can delegate trust across those mechanisms using things like time locks and multi-sigs and that's what bitcoin's for not trusting some blind company you've never heard

of that set up shop five years ago that's nuts bitcoin allows you to delineate trust around explicit programmatic terms and that's a revolution all on its own and and just trying to open people's eyes to this. Like, yeah, it's great. Maybe you'll be rich someday. But you could be free now. You could be free today. And not only free, but have all of these advanced functionalities.

You want to have a will, a last will and testament that doesn't require a lawyer or anything like that and just executes by not itself but with the help of the people that are going to actually receive the funds all they got to do is get together after you're dead wait to the time lock to expire and execute a multi-sig boom programmable money programmable will i didn't have to involve third parties that's amazing and i want to open up people's eyes to what Bitcoin is beyond just a store of wealth, which it is. And that's a great use case. I use it as that. It's my bank account. But that's not all it is.

It's so much more. Now, I just want to double back because the one thing for me is when I figured out how to use a node, when I figured out how to do self custody, it became very liberating. And I would imagine the same is going to apply for other people as well once they go down there, they go down to Bitcoin rabbit hole. the process of verifying, you know, running a node, for instance. I'm curious, what are your thoughts? Which is the which is a good node for somebody that is just jumping in? Do you recommend core Bitcoin core? Do you recommend Bitcoin knots? Do you recommend something else? I'm curious for somebody that's been in the game for a long time will be your recommendation for newbie. I don't think that it's appropriate for me to tell anyone what node that they should run. I think that they should be choosing their code themselves based on the features that they're

looking for. Some people will choose Bitcoin Core. Some people will choose BTCD. Some people will choose Bitcoin Knots. I've chosen Bitcoin Knots because it represents the tooling and consensus that I'm interested in. Specifically, it allows me to run data carrier true. Like I can accept op return transactions in my mempool and I can propagate them, but I can simultaneously block spam transactions. And I think that that's an incredibly powerful tool set that core is sleeping on quite intentionally, and I would almost say maliciously. And so like, that's what's informed my choice, what your priorities are as a user, like, to me, the whole conversation is about like, let's have a discussion about why people are making the choices they are

what choices are available, and then you come to your own conclusion about what software you want or want, whether it's a wallet, whether it's a node, whatever it is, you should be making these decisions, not me, not recommendations. Let's just talk about the costs and benefits of each. Okay, that's fair. Now, then, I guess the second part of that question is, is there any faith that is lost? Or is there any anger towards the Bitcoin developers, based on some recent revelation? So it seems that there may be some vulnerabilities in some older versions of core, I'm looking at version 21. And younger or older than that,

so 21 2019 everything before that and they're going to be revealing this it looks like in the next couple of weeks so there's a gap between the time in which they're announcing it that there is vulnerabilities to when the vulnerabilities are going to be known by the greater community so does this take away from some of the faith that we have in the Bitcoin developers, specifically ones that are developing Bitcoin Core? Don't ever have faith. Faith is misplaced in Bitcoin.

You don't need it. You can verify. I'll start by saying that I think that the vast majority of Bitcoin Core contributors are good faith actors doing what they think is best. I may disagree with them about all manner of things, but I don't think that they're evil or malicious. I might think that some of them have dubious funding. And again, we talked about the influence of money and how that changes things, but I don't think that they're evil.

And I've spent a lot of my time defending them, especially in the block size wars. That said, every software has policies about responsible disclosure. They aren't uniform. There is no like one size fits all for responsible disclosure. it makes sense that there are going to be times when there is a significant delay between software coming out that patches a bug and the disclosures of those bugs. We saw, for example, with Blue Mat's inflation bug, you know, a full timeline of how that went down. And using that example, the timeline was actually quite quick. Several days, if I recall correctly? Several days, yes.

And that's about as serious a bug as there can be. So with that context, I am somewhat flummoxed as to this current delay in disclosure. I'm not sure entirely what the nature of the bug is. I've seen some speculation that it might be related to uh denial of service attacks but i honestly don't know i'd like to get a better picture of what all of the vulnerabilities are before i cast any kind of judgment but i am i am quite suspect of the extreme length of time like we talking years. 21 came out in like what? January 2021?

It's old. It's old. It's old. So like if that was the patched version, why has it taken years for a disclosure to be even discussed? So I want to hear justifications for that. I want to hear the arguments. I want to hear justifications for that. I want to hear the arguments. I want to see the code.

And until I do, I'm not willing to pass judgment. But I'm definitely suspicious and ready to have a very loud, angry opinion. That you always have. And that's why you're here. I love chatting with you. So those core developers, those Bitcoin developers developers they've been in this game for a long time so any of them some of them are new some of them are quite new some are and that's the beauty of it anybody can contribute right like they and they aren't one monolithic group

like they don't all think the same thing um there are a couple of clicks that have developed that are a bit concerning but anyway sorry to cut you off. No, no. So what I'm trying to get at is the ones that are expecting compensation for their time. What are your thoughts on that? Expecting compensation? I don't think that they should expect compensation for anything. A lot of them have received compensation. Good for them.

I think some of the compensation comes from dubious sources uh like like i said um block streams whole the reason block stream exists is as an argument of we must pay bitcoin developers so we're going to shit coin to do it we're going to sell blockchain as a service to corporations and i don't agree that those means justify the ends i don't agree that those means justify the ends. I don't agree that we are so hard up for contributors to Bitcoin that you need to shitcoin in order to pay for it. That doesn't make sense to me. I feel like Bitcoin is at its best as a free and open source software project run by volunteers with multiple implementations. And this is another point that I disagree with many contributors on. Many of them believe that multiple implementations are deeply dangerous.

And they're not wrong for identifying the danger. Where they're wrong is that the danger is preventable in any way, shape, or form. It's not. There will be alternative implementations. They will have issues, just like BTCD did on that taproot transaction with whatever 9,999 signers. And it broke a lot of lightning implementations that were relying on BTCD. That's going to happen. We, I think, as a network and node runners, need to have a better tooling to identify when those kinds of things are happening and mitigate the dangers of them

and just accept the danger as inherent to our architecture and ecosystem instead of hand waving it away of well if everybody just used core this wouldn't be a problem i think that that's naive and frankly stupid that's fair now i've asked you several questions and i know you have some slides you want to bring forward forth and talk about them that's yeah a slightly different subject the slides are are kind of about the culture and and addressing some of the narrative problems but like we we can talk about whatever we want we don't need to go through the slides no i do i want to talk about the culture i want

to talk about what's going on because this everyday Bitcoin becomes more prominent, becomes bigger and capturing people. We want to make sure that the right message is being conveyed. And perhaps, you know, given the fact that there's some dirty money being thrown around or people are willing to sell their souls, it kind of, it jeopardizes in terms of how people are going to be adopting Bitcoin and maybe people will go down the wrong path. So I, I'd like to talk about this a little bit more, especially because I know you have a lot of backup,

a lot of information you want to share. I don't like to go anywhere unarmed. And I've certainly come loaded for this conversation. Go ahead. I mean, where do you want to go next? Yeah. I mean, where do you want to go next? Yeah, I think a huge problem

in this influencer space that isn't necessarily part of the corporate driven part of it, but is a little bit of it. And I'm going to talk about that too, is the ideological blinders that a lot of influencers have in this space. There is a predominant narrative in North America that Bitcoin is for the right and it is not for the left. And I saw this really on display at the Simply Bitcoin coverage of the recent Canadian Bitcoin conference. And I was somewhat appalled by it. There is a belief in many of these circles that the right are the only people using Bitcoin. And quite frankly, that's just not true. If you can see on the screen here, this is the result of a study commissioned by Coinbase

with 2202 participants just examining in America the political leanings of cryptocurrency owners. And as you can see, it is, in fact, fairly balanced with Democrats actually having more than Republicans. And they're not the only source that will say this. We can also see that this other source, this was a study done by Helpful.com of a much smaller study, 300 registered voters, 100 of each demographic. And as you can see, more Democrats are using Bitcoin than Republicans. And in fact, it's Republicans are shit coiners. That's what Republicans are. They're into the Binance coin and the ethereum and all this other shit

and predominantly when we when we look at what the wealth is and like what the investment is of of these by the same demographics we also see that for example, Democrats are predominantly in at values of, you know, 100 to 10,000 and Republicans are in for like $100,000 plus. I don't know how many people have $100,000 in change laying around waiting for investment. very wealthy individuals that are influencing the narratives that are trying to create the perception that they are victims, ideological victims, as is really common in our political space right now. And that Bitcoin is their Lord and savior. And you know what? Good for them. I love, I love, love, love that Bitcoin is for everybody. Everybody's using it. It's a tool. Hammers don't care what your politics are and neither does Bitcoin. Bitcoin, hard money is useful to everybody. Programmable money is useful to everybody. But there's a narrative right now

in the space that that's not the case, that the right are the only one using it. And it just simply couldn't be further from the truth. And it's a narrative that I saw on that stage of the Bitcoin conference constantly. It's a narrative I saw in the commentary booth of that conference and on podcasts like Simply Bitcoin constantly. And it's wrong.

It's just factually wrong. So I want to come out and kind of like address that kind of narrative misinformation that, that kind of narrative misinformation that's happening there. Majority of Bitcoiners in America are Democrats. And I guarantee you that the same is true in Canada. The left has just as much claim to Bitcoin as the right does. I'm a lefty. I love Bitcoin. I want my government to be better. And it's not. And I see Bitcoin as a way of, well, I'm going to extract the money from the ecosystem and incentivize them to be better. And they can choose to be better or they can choose to see their economy leak.

And if they choose to see it leak, the money will go to better economies. It's an optimization of governments and their resources. And I think that it's a fundamentally phenomenal tool for anybody, regardless of their political leanings. We don't need to bring specific political ideology into our framing of what Bitcoin is or how it works. And I see that way, way, way too often. So, okay, Bitcoin has a broad appeal, according to the stats that you're presenting us and you're right hard money is for anybody you don't have to be leaning a particular way politically to figure out hard money and the advantages of having it so then aside from just coming on our show and maybe reaching out to simply bitcoin and others how is the best what's the best approach

to try to rectify this narrative and to correct it to show that, look, everybody's using it from both ends, the left, the right, the center, independence, you name it. So what is the best approach here? Well, as you can see, the users themselves don't share this ideological narrative. So that ideological narrative is coming from somewhere, and it's the influencers. You get rid of the influencers, you get rid of this narrative the influencers are a harm on the whole ecosystem from all the reasons we've discussed this isn't directly related to the fact that they're being paid that's its own harm but every influencer every bitcoin it seems, only sees their use case. It's very difficult to get a Bitcoiner to widen their perspective and see.

This is why Saylor doesn't think it's money. It's because he doesn't use this money. He doesn't get that it can be money. And all these other people using it are kind of in his blinders. So I think that that's probably true. I don't think that these influencers are bad people. I think that they're normal biased people. And they see Bitcoin as their use cases. And I'm very happy for them and their use cases. I think it's great that they have these use cases that they can distance themselves from governmental

abuse. I love that. It's just, that's not all that Bitcoin is. And unfortunately, so many of them, that's all they see. Now, the problem is those influencers, they're still going to have the ears and eyeballs of individuals. So the way to disconnect them,

I'm not sure what is the best approach. I mean, a ground, a grassroots effort to try to, sorry. No, I'm sorry. sorry i said they need to be deplatformed they need to be taken off of the internet they're a harm to themselves and others and like i like i hate to say it on one of these platforms but quite frankly this is what i'm

setting out to do i'm going i want to go on these platforms including this one be like it doesn't need to be this way we don't we can just have ad hoc conversations, it doesn't need to be this way. We can just have ad hoc conversations and they don't need to be sponsored by anybody. And you can have your ideology and it doesn't need to be about growing your number of listeners. We don't need evangelicals. We just need people being people. You don't need to be elevated. I don't want to be elevated. I resent myself so much for having to be here and have my name here because I don't want to be this. I don't want to be elevated. I resent myself so much for having to be here and have my name here because I don't want to be this. I don't want people listening to me. I want them thinking for themselves. And this culture of how many people can I get to listen to me is fundamentally

cancerous. I mean, across everything, but especially Bitcoin, which by its nature should abhor authority figures and trust. And instead, we're introducing trust and authority figures at every turn. And it's wrong. Get off the internet, you guys. Shut it down. End CBP. End Simply Bitcoin. End what Bitcoin did.

End it. Just stop. That's all you need. Just stop. That's all that's necessary. But it's more than just the shows that like CBP and those others. It's now entered into the realm of politics. Now you have Donald Trump talking about Bitcoin mining.

We touched upon it earlier. So it kind of now seems that in terms of American politics, the Republican Party, at least, is trying to hang their hat on Bitcoin in one way or shape or another. And then by virtue, I suspect the Democrats are going to take the opposite approach and say, look, we're going to, you know, obviously because they want to try to track the opposition or people that don't like the Republican. They'll say Bitcoin mining, you know, either they're neutral or they'll say it's bad, something along those lines.

So based on that, it's now entered in the world of politics. And I think now, unfortunately, this narrative of it being tied to the right wing or right wing individuals is going to be, I don't want to say cemented. It's perception, Len. like if you go to uh track the voting records of u.s congress people um and senators and there are a couple lobbying groups that do this i don't unfortunately don't have any images off of the top here for them but you'll find that 50 of the people that support quote unquote pro crypto legislation which just to be clear is pro-shitcoin legislation. It is not pro-Bitcoin legislation. But those that support pro-crypto legislation are pretty much half and half down the middle in terms of Democrats and Republicans. This elevating Trump's voice,

elevating Elizabeth Warren's voice, this is a function of our political narratives and constant division seeking and us versus them of our modern politics. It doesn't actually reflect voting records and it doesn't reflect reality. There are plenty of leftist Bitcoiners out here. I haven't seen any actually pro-Bitcoin politicians from any party ever anywhere in North America. I have yet to see one. I haven't seen a single pro-Bitcoin policy. I've seen a lot of pandering. I think right now what we're seeing is that the pandering happening in the American and Canadian right towards Bitcoiners is more successful than any pandering

happening in the left. And I think that the left is less keen to pander to Bitcoiners because they're afraid of being labeled anti-environment and being tagged with environmental FUD and all of these other things. I don't think that there's any evidence that the right is using Bitcoin more than the left, either at a political level or at an individual level. This is a narrative that has been constructed, and it exists for political and ideological purposes. Do you follow Canadian politics at all? I do. I like politics quite a bit. So what are your thoughts on Pierre Poliev in the fact that he was talking a lot of Bitcoin,

at least, I mean, much more than he's talking about it now, at a time when the price was doing very well and then once it tanked he he and his party didn't mention it all at all and now the price is back up and he's still not talking about it so i'm curious what are your thoughts about that it seems to me like it's uh pandering to voters maybe maybe it is right like i mean once again he hasn't proposed a single pro bitcoin policy nobody that i'm aware of has uh most of his pandering is pro pro crypto um and pro shitcoin he names a lot of shit coins that he's he supports as well um and again the only policies that he's proposed that i'm aware of that have anything to do with Bitcoiners is his current opposition to the 16% capital gains inclusion, which, quite frankly, doesn't affect Bitcoiners really at all either. There's such a small, small number of people that are cashing in more than a quarter of a million dollars of Bitcoin at once. I've done that, Let me tell you, I just this year,

for the first time, was like, I'm going to buy a house. You know, buying a house in Canada, it's Bitcoin is the only reason I can do it. Bitcoin has empowered me to buy a house in Canada. And let me tell you, I regret it. I regret it so deeply, the loss of freedom and having to deal with the banks. But if I had to take my million dollar house that I just bought with Bitcoin and I had to pay this extra 16% capital gains on it, I would end up paying, again, no mortgage, just the whole thing in full. I would end up paying like $50,000 extra, $60,000 extra. And quite frankly, if you're in a position as a Canadian where you can pull out a million dollars and buy a house with it, good. You should be paying $50,000, $60,000 extra. You absolutely should be. You rich fuck. You're one of such a select few in that position that you should be paying for the infrastructure of your peers because you need them. You need everybody to succeed for your business to have customers, for you to have running water and roads. This isn't a, you know, I've got mine,

forget everybody else. Yeah, Canada's fought Bitcoin. Yeah, they've done everything in their power to make the price go down. They've tried to prevent you from having these gains. Absolutely. But your neighbor hasn't. The guy down the street just wants to be able to afford a house and raise his kids. And if you're paying that tiny little percent more, it comes out to like 8% more on amounts over $250,000. If that's all it takes to have a functioning society, do it. Take my money, please.

Unfortunately, that's not what our government's doing with the money. Our government isn't empowering the Canadian Housing Mortgage Corporation to, for example, go build houses like it was the 70s. That's what they should be doing with that money. But I don't get to agree with everything that my tax dollars get used for. That's part of being a citizen in the world. Doesn't matter where you are. I am not the emperor of Nomeville. You know, I think that it's incredibly immature to think that, you know, you shouldn't have to pay taxes on your Bitcoin or that if you're taking out literally over a quarter million dollars of it,

the tax shouldn't be a tiny little bit higher. That's nuts. I have no sympathy at all for the people crying about this tax increase. And they're not the ones affected by it. I am. I mean, I don't want to speak on behalf of other people, but I think it's the people that are businesses any business now any corporation is going to be impacted by this regardless of

what the what you're selling what you're earning um and if it's going to be like one of those investment type things you're going to be and then impacted at a you'd be taxed at a higher rate and um so that's one of the people and so it's not just simply people that make a lot it could be even small businesses that are impacted by this too and good good on a tiny amount on amounts of profit in capital gains over a quarter of a million dollars if your business is capital gains that's like saying your business is sitting on your ass how much sympathy am i like why should you be getting taxed so much less than people that are working three jobs no that makes no sense to me well it's not 250 000 it's zero dollars

for corporations that's the the threshold it's starting at zero oh is it for corpse yes uh any anything at all you know what good correct let let the corpse pay a little bit more uh and i'm like i'll be one of them my my corporation is a bitcoin treasury that's how it works but i'm so fortunate that i'm pulling in that kind of profit a year right i'll pay a little bit more that's just paying my fair share bitcoin has given so much to me and yes the the Canadian government has tried to prevent me from realizing those benefits at every turn. But the Canadian government isn't the Canadian people. And they're the ones that are suffering right now.

If you're an incredibly fortunate person, as I am, as everybody I believe that is earning that kind of money is, or you're a business that's operating on capital gains in this way. The conservatives are saying stuff like, oh, but the doctor's offices, they're going to have to pay so much more. What doctor's office do you know that is earning its money through capital gains? I have no, I don't know what their business model is like, so i can't answer i would assume very little to nothing but what are they doing gambling on asthma inhalers like makes no sense no pay your fair share this isn't even a fair share this is a tiny tiny tiny tax increase for most people and most companies i I'm for it.

Yeah, that's how I feel about this one issue. Okay. Well, you said you're left-leaning, so this is your belief and this is you. But I want to go back a little bit, and you're saying that in North america you haven't seen a pro bitcoin policy from any politician no i haven't what what would you like what would be an example of one that obviously has a ton of examples so like here's a pro bitcoin policy how about making bitcoin a foreign currency ineligible for the foreign currency tax exemptions that i mean it's only currently 250 dollars i think it should be significantly more but that it is a foreign currency el salvador has adopted it formally it's a foreign currency

it should be by definition included i think the exit taxes on bitcoin are absolutely freaking insane what are they right now i'm not familiar with what that is exit taxes in canada basically say if you want to go live somewhere where there isn't a tax treaty, like El Salvador. If you want to go live in El Salvador, you are going to get taxed twice. You're going to get taxed in El Salvador and you're going to get taxed in Canada just because there's no treaty. The only way to avoid that is actually to renounce your citizenship in Canada and divorce yourself from Canada, kind of. And that process involves liquidating notionally all of your capital gains. So for somebody like me, whose primary bank account is Bitcoin, it would mean that in one year, I sold everything that I've ever owned and earned, and it became income.

So I would lose, I mean, at 250k, the tax rate hits about 50%, like 46%, 47%. I would lose about half of my net worth over 250k, like everything I've ever earned, simply because I don't want to get taxed by two governments at the same time. That's crazy. It basically makes me feel trapped, like I can't leave. And I think that's incredibly unethical and an unethical way to tax. I think that they should allow me to be taxed as I would if I were still living in Canada. And even though there's no tax treaty, like offset the government of El Salvador taxes, I'll pay whatever remains and I can live on Bitcoin, you know, for the rest of my life and not as if my entire net worth is one year's earnings. Treating your entire net worth as one year's earnings is crazy. So that's nuts. I'd like to see that reformed. How about using Bitcoin as a treasury asset?

That's a pro-Bitcoin policy. We don't see that at all. Nobody's proposed that for Canada. We don't propose backing our debt or our treasury bonds with Bitcoin. Nobody's proposed that. Nobody's proposed formally adopting Bitcoin as a currency the way El Salvador has. Not even on anybody's lips. So has anybody, like I can't name a pro-Bitcoin policy. How about shutting down the shitcoin casinos? Mandating non-custodial exchanges like bull Bitcoin. that's a pro-bitcoin policy that protects consumers from

all these shit coins it relies on bitcoin's inherent strengths how about organizing government spending using bitcoin and multi-sig and time locks in a way that we can have publicly audible budgets for what's appropriate and publicly audible let's get rid of situations where this arrive can app can happen because there's an unlimited spigot of funds that could be abused by a contractor that happens to work for the Canadian government and instead have a limit of those funds that are directed through Bitcoin. And when you need more funds, it comes down the chain of multi-sig. We can create accountability in both our public and private organizations by organizing them around

bitcoin and multi-sig and other tools of the protocol programmable money and we don't nobody even talks about it it's so yeah no there there are no pro-bitcoin policies that i've seen but there are a lot of pro-bitcoin policies out there just nobody's advocating for them so the last few you mentioned it's going to take i think a monumental effort to even propose that never mind adopt it because it would entail giving up a lot of power because right now the money is controlled by the central bank and because of that it gives whoever controls that all the power alongside with it so if you're going to somehow have bonds that are tied to bitcoin or anything that's tied to bitcoin it takes that power away from them and this potentially may happen in the future but right now

just because of the amount of power that they have as a result of controlling that i can't see that even being on a table somebody may propose it but i don't i can't see that even being on a table. Somebody may propose it, but I can't see that being accepted by a lot of the politicians. You're absolutely right. And that's why nobody would propose it is because it robs them of the power that they hold over us. But the reality is that's Canadians power. We gave it to them. If ever we choose, we can take it back. We can mandate reform, whether it's electoral reform, whether it's processes reform in our parliamentary system, in our crown corporations.

We can mandate reform as citizens simply by standing up and saying, this is what you're going to do. Unfortunately, we live in kind of a society where consent is manufactured, as Chomsky would say. We live in a world where this false debate and framing of ideas is created, and there's a box, and everything that's acceptable is in the box, and we'll have this incredibly lively debate about all those things inside the box, but nobody's allowed to step outside the box. And these ideas, they're outside the box. So they're just non-starters. You can't even discuss them. Everything outside the box is taboo. And reforming the box, defining a different box, that's not allowed. It's outside the range of acceptable ideas.

So it just seems to me that it's not going to happen anytime soon. So then, this is the way i see it countries like el salvador that are on the fringe and i don't mean to to shit on the money but in reality the fringe it's true they're emerging economies developing economy however you want to describe it but they have the most to gain and the least to lose by thumbing their nose to the imf and doing anything to do with bitcoin so i i'm just shocked that we haven't seen somebody else follow the el salvador method because they they announced this i think in 20 2021 so it's been three years and change since this was announced and it was officially adopted i think the day after labor day on that year so you know a lot of water has passed into the bridge.

The country hasn't collapsed. The economy still is doing its thing. So I'm just shocked that you bring up another stat there. I've just decided that the background needed some changing. Okay, got it. Just people who own Bitcoin and some demographic breakdowns. And I completely agree with what you're saying. I mean, Argentina has kind of dipped its toes in the water a little bit.

They're flirting with the idea of telling the IMF to go poundstand. And that's actually, again, another right-wing politician. And I think that's great. I'm really glad that the right has these tools and can realize many of their ideological goals through Bitcoin. It's just, it's bigger than that. You can do more than that with it. I'm very excited for the next Bitcoin nation. You're absolutely right. These are the countries that have the least to lose. The next couple of decades are going to be the story of the countries that have the most to lose. And a lot of them are going to hang on with everything that they've got. And it's going to get messy. Bitcoin, due to its nature of allowing people to escape abusive financial policy,

whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Australia, whether it's in South America, is going to result in bad economies failing faster. When people can just be pulling their money out in an uncensorable way, you're going to see economies that have made abusive decisions against their citizens collapse much faster. It's a catalyst to that collapse. And that money is going to go

and participate in Bitcoin friendly economies like El Salvador's. I see Bitcoin as this tool that one of its functions is going to be to incentivize economies that aren't abusive and disincentivize economies that are. And I think we're going to see some very hard failures of economies before that really sinks in and economic policy writers kind of clue into the fact that the context has changed here. And it's actually a lot more dangerous to be pushing economic policies that are hazardous to the average citizen. And we kind of see that happening in Canada right now. As lefty as I am, I'm seeing a lot of abuses of our spending. Just because a government is more on the left than you are or that I'd like like doesn't doesn't mean it's a good government there

are tons of very very corrupt leftist governments and i look forward to bitcoin encouraging their failure it's gonna happen and that the ones that still have their own currency it just seems like doesn't it make sense for them just to print until there's nothing like until it's absolutely worthless yeah and then debase the currency and have another one we'll call it the real and but with that buy a bitcoin in the meantime so with the last breath of that currency they use that to to uh get some bitcoin on their balance sheet and so they could just kind of follow the el salvador method without you know debasing their currency el salvador didn't do that i don't know it just seems that no you're absolutely right and like fiat fiat is a tool and it can be used very very

abusively as can most tools bitcoin included like if you've got a Bitcoin nation state, like say, like El Salvador, and let's pretend that El Salvador's key structure is that the president holds everything. He has the keys. He's the only one with the keys. There's no constitutionally enshrined key delegations. There's no processes programmatically through Bitcoin to manage those keys, to recover those keys, to hand them over to the next government. There is nothing stopping such an entity from simply walking away with all the Bitcoin when the government fails. They can be like, okay, I'm taking the national treasury with me. See you guys later. That can be incredibly abusive. Bitcoin, much as fiat, can be used as a tool of abuse against the population yeah and we see that in places where they're for example confiscating miners from people and then the state's mining with them like in iran like in venezuela um like in china and like fiat itself is a tool that is

very much used to abuse people does it have to be used to abuse people no it doesn't it can be used to actually protect them and unfortunately there aren't a lot of incentives for the government to use it like that. Bitcoin helps realign the incentives by causing this potential economic collapse or hastening it. You encourage better monetary policy in the long run. I think this is a phenomena that we're going to see develop over the next like 50 years. It's not going to be a short term thing. But it is going to happen, especially as more people realize that, oh, I don't like what's happening to me, the government isn't protecting me, there aren't protections in place to protect me from the abuses of my employer, from the abuses of the marketplace, or they're straight out, you know,

just debasing my currency and I can't afford bread anymore without a wheelbarrow. Like I'm going to leave. And Bitcoin enables that. And that's one of the most beautiful things. Everybody of every political ideology should be able to agree on. Let's talk a little bit. Let's bring it back closer to home to Canada, because you put on that graphic as the percentage of canadians who own bitcoin from 2016 to 2021 i think that was a bank of canada statistic that the bank of canada released this in one of their financial reports i could be wrong this is the result of multiple of the bitcoin omnibus studies by the bank of canada so this is an aggregation of those studies by the Bank of Canada. So you can see for the audio side, I'll try to describe it.

The overall trend for people that own Bitcoin has gone up to the right and from 3.2% in 2016 to 13.1% in 2021. And we don't have any statistics, anything newer than that. So that goes to show me that at least in canada that there's there's a lot of people that have viewed bitcoin and are viewing bitcoin in a positive light at least as an asset they could hold and uh do whatever they want with it either just you know use it to buy a house or whatever so because you have this stat you brought it up i'm curious if you could elaborate a little bit on this.

What are your thoughts on it? And what do you think this is? What is it telling us, really? Well, I think it's very interesting. We see that predominantly it is the 18 to 34 demographic that is most interested in Bitcoin. That's something that we already do. We see a lot of lagging uptake in the 55 year old and older demographic. But that's something that's changing as well. You see, in 2021, that number takes a nice big jump.

In fact, all the numbers do. Across the board, Bitcoin is reaching people. And it's not because they're hearing about it for the first time. As you can see in the second chart here, awareness of Bitcoin hasn't changed. It's sitting at about 90%. It's people are suddenly waking up to what it is and what it means. They're learning more about it. And they're feeling, I think, more disenfranchised by the economic policies of their government, whether they're provincial or federal. Canadians, I don't feel like they feel like they're being taken care of. And Bitcoin is a way feel like they're being taken care of and bitcoin is a way for them to attempt to take care of themselves i'm wondering how many of these people are going

to end up at a conference and maybe end up getting the wrong advice or you know something i don't like about conferences and i think that there's a lot of bad advice at conferences is that they charge so much money for information that's free, like 300 to $600 to go hear things that you could learn in an afternoon by yourself on the internet. That makes no sense to me. That's a cash grab by somebody. I don't like that, that, that gets back into, you know, these sponsors and their narratives and promoting their companies and stuff. And yeah, maybe there are some good companies out there. Like I said, I like bull Bitcoin. I like Bitcoin well, to a degree, I wish they'd stop shit coining and saying that they don't,

but they're non-custodial. So there's that i've got good things to say we have in canada we're incredibly privileged in terms of bitcoin companies we have some of the best in the world that said our government prevents us from opening more and more robust and more complicated bitcoin companies um and some of that has to do with the regulatory requirements against FinTrack and FinCEN in North America. And it has to do with a lot of the fear. Like, I'm personally afraid to open. For example, I want to open a Lightning Exchange, but I'm afraid to do so, especially in this post-Samurai wallet prosecution era, where it seems you can be claimed as a money launderer even if you don't ever have keys to the money. Like you're conspiring to money launder

even without ever touching any of the money yourself. That's crazy to me. And Lightning, far more than a coin join, has actual access to keys. Like you are in fact moving money. So I'm terribly concerned about what happens to Lightning businesses in the future.

When all those like async pulled out Phoenix wallet, a whole bunch of businesses started pulling out after that samurai dev fiasco and their prosecution. I think that that's entirely appropriate. Like I think that they should leave. And that's part of the drain I'm talking about when there's abusive policies, it is appropriate that Bitcoiners bitcoin businesses bitcoin users get out of dodge

they take their money and they leave and they starve the beast what are you even considering to do with lightning i you piqued my interest when you're saying that you wanted to do something with it i would love to make a lightning service provider that acted as an exchange where instead of just being like a typical Lightning exchange, I want to sell channels themselves. I want you to send me an e-transfer and I send you a straight up channel. And I do it for really cheap, knowing that I can make fees off of that channel when you're transacting on it. And in that way, we can kind of onboard people directly onto Lightning. Right now, if you want to use a Lightning exchange, the expectation is you already have to have channels and incoming capacity so that you can even receive the Bitcoin

you just bought. And I think that that's a failing. I think that we should be selling channels directly and splicing in and out of them. So kind of like what Phoenix does, but more using instead of paying with Bitcoin, paying with fiat. Is that kind of the difference? Yeah, and selling it as a service. Yeah, absolutely. I want to see a Lightning exchange that sells channels and routing as a service. And since you talked about Lightning, I just wanted to dive deep quickly into this. We don't have that much time. So Lightning, I'm looking at it, a lot of people looking at it,

as an alternative to obviously on-chain. And it's a great alternative, but it's not the solution because right now it doesn't scale out to the rest of the globe. We need channel factories and virtual UTXOs. Is this a reality, you think? Because it's still in the drawing room stages, right?

Nothing has been rolled out yet, to the best of my knowledge. We're waiting on a Covenants proposal. I mean, we've got a lot of Covenants proposals from Chexig from Stack, Opcat, OpcTV. Those are ones that I support. I would support any of those being brought into Bitcoin. There's stuff like MAT, Merkleize, all the things that I still need to do a little bit more research on before I can pull a concrete position position one of the confounding factors here is there's so many different proposals for ways that you can bring uh more significant covenants to

bitcoin that would enable things like channel factories and for those that don't know a channel factory is basically you and all your buddies get together and you share transactions to go in and out of lightning so one transaction can represent a whole bunch of you moving in and out of Lightning instead of you each having to have your own individual transactions. It's a kind of batching. And that's the kind of batching that will allow us to scale layers like Lightning. And I don't think Lightning is the be-all, end-all. It's not. We're going to see all kinds of layers on Bitcoin.

And we already do. And most of them frankly are shit coins whether it's you know rsk or even little rgb layers like they're going to be used to shit coin and we just have to accept that that's an inevitability and that's a reason that a lot of people don't support covenants is they're like well this is we're already under spam attack by shit coins why are we inviting more shit coins to the party and the reality is is because we always have been under attack by shit coins like forever always have been always will be so that that doesn't really change

and giving ourselves these tools which can be abused by shitcoins and are going to be used by shitcoins, doesn't really change the status quo in any way, shape or form. Trying to block shitcoins at a protocol level is trying to stop people from using Bitcoin. And unfortunately, or fortunately, I suppose, you know, you can't stop people from using Bitcoin. That's a feature, not a bug. Permissionless. Exactly. And this is why I run knots. Knots allows me to filter all those transactions from entering my mempool, from propagating.

It doesn't stop them from using Bitcoin. It stops them from abusing my node resources. And that's what I can control. And I think that that's the appropriate place to be seeking this control. If you don't want to run RGB, don't run RGB. If you don't want to run RSK, don't run RSK. Like, I don't. I don't like them. They're shit coins. But they're there. And they're always going to be there. And the appropriate response is to attack them socially by educating people about why these things are scams, and how to avoid them and how to identify

a scam basically you identify a scam do you fully control those coins is there some kind of ico is there some permissioned mechanism where 11 out of 15 guys get to decide whether you get your money or not if there is that's shit coin. Always has been, always will be. Doesn't matter what you call it. There's also one other thing. Maybe a lot of people don't look at this too much, but because my face is here and I have to talk about it, is that anytime you transfer Bitcoin into something that's not named Bitcoin,

that is a taxable event. And in Canada, at least, I don't know what other jurisdictions, but in Canada, at least, that is something that needs to be reported to CRA. So every time you use one of these shit coins, you move Bitcoin into something else. And if you're doing it with the intention of having it easier and cheaper to move around Bitcoin, that's taxable. So just be careful, especially if you're using kyc bitcoin to do this

you never know what's going to happen if you don't report it if cra comes after you which is our uh version of the irs in canada that could be a very very troubling time and they you know you don't want to give them an opportunity to do that just stick into bitcoin um when you're using lightning and i'm going into the weeds here, you're still in Bitcoin. It's just, you know, so you're not obligated to report to the CRA once you sell some Bitcoin for either good services or fiat. Of course, that is reportable at that time. But that's just another thing. People, I think, overlook that part, that there is a reporting requirement.

They really do. And like you said, there's a huge difference between swapping for some other token and just using Bitcoin in a different way, which is what you're doing with Lightning. Lightning is just you put Bitcoin in a contract that you control, a multi-sig contract you control. That's a channel. That's all it is. And then you are taking your proofs of your spending off-chain, and you're just publishing them later if you have to. That's still using Bitcoin. It's using whatever the underlying chain is, and that's the security you're just publishing them later if you have to. That's still using Bitcoin. It's using whatever the underlying chain is.

And that's the security you're relying on, the security of the underlying chain, a past confirmation and a future confirmation and your ability to publish whatever the state is that happened off chain. And that's that's not changing assets. That's not taxable, nor should it be. I mean, I wouldn't put it past. This is a big problem with the government right is because they don't seem to have any awareness of any of the technology they seem eager to impose their will and misinterpretations of the technology without

really validating whether that's even how it works and again we saw this like for example with the samurai devs like going after the samurai devs was nuts. They didn't have any money. You can't money launder without money. That's not how money laundering works. You can't conspire. Making a cheeky post on Twitter is not conspiring to launder money. That's just the government deciding that they want to come down on someone because they're doing something they don't like, and not one government, like a lot of governments simultaneously were involved in that. And Canada is absolutely a place where that can happen in a government that will be involved in that. And this is where I go back to the point, like when your government is acting in abusive ways, Bitcoin can protect you. If you don't want to pay your tax, you should,

you should, it should take something incredibly extreme for you to choose to be a tax criminal and say, I don't want to support my country. I will not pay my taxes. I'd rather be a criminal. Bitcoin empowers you to make that choice. And that is really important because there are times and places where that choice is appropriate, where you say have to escape abuse. Is that the current context in Canada? I don't think so. But if you do and you're willing to risk those things, that is your choice. And Bitcoin empowers you in that way. And I think that that's,

again, phenomenal. That is liberty at its finest. And as an anarcho-socialist, I support liberty. I want to be able to defund abusive governments. I want to be able to protect myself and I want people out in the world to be able to protect themselves. If your government goes to war and enables conscription and you say, I don't support this. I don't want to kill people for what I feel is an unjust war. You now have the tools to leave. Legally, you'll be a criminal for the rest of your life. But is that not better than being a murderer for the rest of your life but is that not better than being a murderer for the rest of your life it could be that's up to you and having that choice is everything just don't take it lightly that kind of responsibility is huge it's not a flippant

thing to be like oh i've got bitcoin i don't gotta pay taxes anymore that is don't do that pay your taxes yeah we still live in a society so i mean i've said in the past you know you got to do your part but mr arnome we're at an hour 20 in i think it's a good time to and i appreciate you coming on and spending the time to talk about bitcoin and and politics and a little bit of everything else so before we sign off i just want to hand over the baton to you just in case anybody wants to reach out to you uh you know you're on the discord i just want you know you can talk about whatever you want if in case you know we missed anything or just in case anybody wants to reach out where they can reach you so yeah the

floor is yours buddy you can reach me on red or Discord under this handle. You should be aware there are countless people pretending to be me both on Twitter and Discord who will try and scam you. Don't accept any DMs. I don't DM people. But what I really want to encourage people to do is go join a community like our Bitcoin Beginners or the Bitcoin Discord that I just described.

You can find it at Bitcoin tech help and go learn with a community, go engage with a community and go over bits and go over like air gap storage procedures, go over how to do a backup drill, go over wallets. Liana wallet is a wallet that doesn't get enough attention, allows you to like through their gui program all kinds of things into bitcoin use bitcoin as programmable money like explore a use case that you never explored read a bit you've never read participate in a discussion that you've never had in the core irc or in github or that the mailing list wherever it is just expand your boundary just a little bit. That's what I

want to challenge Bitcoiners to do. Grow your knowledge just a little bit. Push that boundary. It's so rewarding. And the freedom and liberty you get through that knowledge, like knowledge is power. We learned that. That's how that works. The more you know, the more you can do. And the more you can liberate yourself from abuse and protect yourself. And yeah, I want to see more of that. I just have to say that the Discord, the Bitcoin Discord is the highest signal that I have ever experienced. It's an awesome place to go there, ask questions. Or just even sit there and gawk.

And just soak in the discussion that's going on. And all the knowledge that's being passed on. It's a great place. So I just want to pump that for anybody who wants to go check it out. If you're not on. You're doing yourself a disservice. I want to say one more thing. Look at this table here.

Table 2. Percentage of Canadians own Bitcoin. Demographic information. The bottom rows their financial literacy you see this stark contrast between low financial literacy and high financial literacy and medium the mediums are basically like there's much less people at medium financial literacy there are so many people at low financial literacy and unfortunately a lot of many people at low financial literacy. And unfortunately, a lot of those people at low financial literacy are some of the most impassioned and giving advice. There's some of the most passionate traders. They're the T.A.ers.

You got to be really careful who you're listening to in Bitcoin because some of these people, in fact, a significant percentage of these people have no freaking clue what they're talking about. 100 percent. of these people have no freaking clue what they're talking about 100 really the best thing is at least in my opinion do your own research not financial advice just buy hold do it uh air gap passphrase maybe you know just something like that and sleep sleep well at night any other situation create your own entropy start doing corrected coin flips corrected coin flips are a really easy way to make entropy uh you basically just flip it until it you get the same thing or if you flip it and if you get the same thing twice you uh you ignore it i forget just google corrected coin flips and um yeah great way to make entropy dice

casino dice are a great way to make entropy. If you're making your own entropy, then you don't have to worry so much about some of the hardware wallets messing up on you and their secure stuff not being secure or the software being poorly written. It protects you in a lot of ways. AirGap protects you in a lot of ways.

It's about eliminating attack vectors. 100%. Well, Mr. Arnold, thanks for coming on. This has been a blast, and we should have you back on again. Yeah, we should do this again sometime, Len. I want to do this with Joey. I want to talk to Joey. Joey, you've been doing some stuff.

We've got to talk about it. Why ain't you running a node, Joey? Why ain't you running a node? We're trying. We're trying. Let's see if we got somebody else. We'll see what we can do. We could have you hook up with Joey next time.

All right. With that being said, thanks so much. And we'll be back at this again on Monday. Thanks a lot for having me, Len. Take care, buddy. Thanks so much. Goodbye. Are you a fan of the old school NHL 94 game

on the Genesis or SNES? Why not check out my show, the NHL 94 podcast, from tournaments and tactics to the people who make up this community. Check it out wherever you listen to podcasts or find it on YouTube.