[00:00:00] Speaker A: What is up, guys? We are back. This is episode two of guys Roundtable. We are wrapping up the month of September and we have back with us BTC mechanic Simple Steve and my brother Jeff. And we cover tons of stuff today from the capitulation of telegram, the censoring of signal out of Russia, the difference between privacy and anonymity, a little bit of drama in the bitcoin space, some kind of depressing news about the centralization of the mining ecosystem and some really exciting news about new tools for redecentralizing it. And then the entire paper bitcoin debacle between Coinbase and Blackrock that has surfaced, causing them to change their agreement and a little bit of wild card things that might be happening on the ETF side. We get into all of it with our awesome guests for guys Roundtable. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. This was a fantastic rip. We covered so many different things and I think you guys are going to like it. We have some great affiliates and some discount codes and links. There is bitcoin on ramp. We have swan bitcoin to buy bitcoin, we have river to buy bitcoin and we have the cold card for keeping your bitcoin safe. Lots of great things. These are resources that I use that I trust. You should check it out if you haven't, those links and details will be right in the show notes and they are also great ways to help support the show.
Lastly, before we jump into it, I also want to say that I'm still taking in donations for everything that has happened, for the disaster that has happened in western North Carolina and the recovery effort. We've pulled in a lot on Noster. Any zaps will go directly to anything that you zap me or my account or any of my posts for the next month or so. We'll go directly to this. I have a best friend who is working out there with search and rescue. A lot of the funds will be going to that as well, but he's also going to come back to me with a direct relief effort to just literally get funds to the people who have lost everything in this. So I will be staying on top of that and devoting a lot of time to making sure that that goes where it needs to go. And you can stay on top of that if you follow me on Noster pub key and details and links will be right in the show notes. So thank you all who have donated and thank you for anybody who has supported me in the past or is supporting me now. It makes a huge difference. Another great way that you can help out is literally just share this show out, not only just to support me, but also for the recovery effort. A lot of people still do not know that that is going on. And you can share my post on Noster. I've got the bitcoin address there and every, all the details that you need. And you can donate directly to the organization because I have links and details in that post as well. And with that, it is time to get into today's episode. I think you guys are really going to love this one. This is looking back in September of 2024 in the bitcoin space with combase, centralized control on the nature of privacy and redecentralizing bitcoin mining. This is guys, roundtable number two.
Guys, welcome. I'm surprised we all got back together. This was short notice, too. So thank you. Thank you for putting up with this.
This is roundtable number two wrapping up September. And what's funny is I actually have a number of things on my list that happened literally like the two days after we recorded the last roundtable because we were like a week before the end of August. Um, but, uh, real quick, let's do the. Just the weather report. Uh, I have the basics. Price is. What's really funny is 61,880 right now, which is almost the exact same price as it was the last time we had this conversation. And I said it was on the way to. It went back down to then came back up, and now it's on the way back to 58k. Somebody, somebody posted on Nastirt the other day said, oh, we're going back into the bull market. We're 66,000. Oh, bloody, bloody. Laying down on the ground. 58k gang. I heard no fucking bell.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: It's like, it's like moving in this downward, you know, like, channel on the weekly chart. And it's been so obvious that we're just, you know, it's not moving. Essentially.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: We're just sideways. We're not going anywhere. Nothing has happened.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Everybody, like, somebody was posting about the.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: The dip.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: You're like, oh, did, like, bitcoin sniff out the rally and the dip, the war problems or whatever is like, it dipped yesterday. And it's like, it didn't, it didn't dip. And I posted, you know, like the picture of the weekly chart. It's like this little tiny, like the beginning of a red candle after a Sunday close. I mean, you know, like, it's like, like, it didn't dip, it didn't do happening.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: So that's the. That's the news for the last month and the last six months is the bitcoin price has done nothing. And everybody's been talking about how it's rallying and dumping, but it has done nothing. Bitcoin is 58k forever.
What? Where's our block height? Oh, my God. Clark Moody's dashboard. I forget where all these things are.
[00:05:32] Speaker C: 3676.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. 863376.
Our average fee is nothing. Everything's free.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: That's a big difference.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Everything's free on bitcoin right now. Fees have been absolutely nothing. I've been doing all on chain.
[00:05:48] Speaker D: That's an all time high for block height, right?
[00:05:51] Speaker A: It is. It is an all time high.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: I'm trying to reorganize from always trying to reorganate to, you know, add some sanity to the market. Can't go up forever.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: We've got supposedly 30 new exahash. We went from 605 last month to 632, always up.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: Everyone's replacing old gen with s moment.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:15] Speaker C: And they're all doing so simultaneously, which is hilarious for obvious reasons.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: And that's the weather report. Those are the basic things. We covered it all time high for block height. That is excellent news. Price is doing nothing. Fees are nothing.
So, guys, the first thing I want to talk about, because this was at the end of last month that we did not get to do, is telegram. Telegram. And Paval Durav.
Twelve criminal charges in France.
All sorts of defending child pornography and holding up terrorists and giving them all the power that they could possibly have. Like real. Just the fact that he is not giving over information or is actually enabling some apparent legitimate encryption in telegram, which I never really believed, but they have at least changed their policy. But he was arrested and then the policy changed and I don't think I have. Does anybody know what has happened with that? Has there been like a plea or anything like that? I actually don't have an update here.
[00:07:31] Speaker C: I didn't.
Someone probably knows more than me. I thought it was just he had to agree to start doing some, like, handing over ip addresses and initial account creation time and that was it.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: It was just. It was just strong hand. Strong handing him. I don't know exactly if that's actually the case. That's ridiculous because then there's no criminal charges.
You know, it's like saying that, like, you're a rapist and you're. You murdered somebody, but if you, you know, if you give us all of your chat conversations with this person, then you're not. It's like, well, no, you either did or you didn't. And this is either a crime or it's not. You know, I just watched the.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: I don't know if this is. This is part of the news or not, but I just watched the Julian Assange speech, you know, his first talk since being released. And in that, he doesn't mention telegram, but he talks about how, you know, he was, like, basically the. The CIA chased him all over the world, pursued, like, wiki, his, his colleagues, they even had in writing that they were going to try and kill him, his wife and his kid and. Jesus. And they, they have, like, invaded all these other, like, you know, allied countries to, like, force, you know, these things to happen. You know, like, they've just, you know, gone in and basically, you know, forced these other things to, you know, to happen. And then, you know, I'm arguing with normies on Facebook, and they're like, like, what is France? Arresting the CEO of Telegram have to do with anything? It's like, dude, like, wake the fuck up. Like, what are you. Like, where have you been for the last fucking 30 years? Like, I don't. Like.
[00:09:28] Speaker D: They've been on Facebook.
[00:09:29] Speaker C: Yeah, I guess I enjoyed the. I enjoyed Assange's talk yesterday. I got to.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: I haven't seen it. I didn't even know.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: It was really good.
[00:09:37] Speaker C: Yeah, he did a. He was. He addressed the French. What was it?
He addressed the French.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: If he addressed the French, are you sure he's not gonna get arrested before.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: It'S, like, started with a P pan or some sort of international group that was, like, based in France to help get him out of, like, push for his release.
[00:09:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I quoted the thing, the most powerful thing he said, which is, I'm not free because the system works. I'm free because I pled guilty to journalism.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Oh, wow. That is a good line. Wow.
[00:10:11] Speaker C: It was an incredibly well written speech. But, man, does he sound rough. He's like, every sort of three or four sentences. He's, like, taking a break to just, like, clear his throat, painstakingly cough. He sounds like he's really got some respiratory issues. It sounds like. I hope it's like, I hope it clears up now that he's out of jail. But, yeah, I mean, he's been a solitary confinement for, like, ever. Right. And when he was in the embassy, that was even weirder. Right. Because it doesn't look like prison, and it wasn't presented as prison, but actually, he could never go outside, and prisoners actually get to go outside. Even the worst conditions, they'll take them outside for, like, half an hour a day. Right?
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:50] Speaker C: Assange never could.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Yeah. It is on YouTube. And I'll send guy the link so that he can put it in the show notes with the starts at, like, his part starts at, like, 19 minutes and 30 seconds or something like that.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll download. I'll download and put it on nostra, too, in case it gets removed from YouTube.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Because of, you know, reasons.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:10] Speaker C: Yeah.
For being incredibly dangerous to our democracy.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: It seems very. It sounded very dangerous. What you just said sounded really dangerous. So I imagine. I imagine we will be informed of that very soon.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: You know, the incredibly dangerous to our democracy thing is just so, like, like, trying to explain this to people that, like, that. Clearly, our intelligence agencies, I don't even like calling them that, but whatever you want to call them, our Alphabet agencies are, like, directly manipulating, you know, rooters and the AP to get every news organization to repeat the same stupid slogans and the same stuff over and over. Like, you know, it shouldn't be that hard for people to understand. I get that it is like that. It is a difficult thing to, like, to maybe accept whether there's pain in having to see it, but it just seems so obvious. I don't know how you can not see it.
I don't know. I don't know how to break that wall for people.
[00:12:18] Speaker C: Well, it's because most people very intentionally don't let you into that. That area. Right. They. They are very, very. They're like ninjas when it comes to avoiding uncomfortable truths. And there's a very good reason for that. It's because it's isolating. If you believe something that's true, that is not what most people's filter. And I know there's, like, four chan memes and stuff about this, but, like, maybe I can present it just slightly differently. Most people's filter is like, is what this guy is telling me believable to anyone else? Because if this guy is telling me that, you know, world, you know, World Trade center building seven is obviously a controlled demolition or something like that. If no one else believes this, all that's going to happen is, I believe it. I'm not even sure of my own ability to assess it. And now I have no friends, so this is just not a good idea for me. So I think that's just, that's the.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: I'm just not in the group anymore.
[00:13:11] Speaker C: It's.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Kicking themselves out.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: One of the key things you just said is that I don't even trust my own ability to assess this. And that is like, kind of at the core of all of it is that they don't want to take the responsibility for having to know what is or isn't a certain way. And you know it because it's always like, well, who are you to know these things? I'm like, well, dude, you have to decide. Even if you're abdicating the decision to someone else, you have to decide the decision not to decide.
[00:13:44] Speaker C: That's also the second level of it, though. It doesn't even need to come down to truth claims. It can just come down to, what do you believe? And if they're saying, I believe, you know, that climate change is destroying everything, I'm like, get rid of the belief. I'm not saying you have to say it's all like, I have some other explanation. I'm just saying, here's the person that decided that was going to be on the mainstream media rammed down your throat. You're afraid of COVID you're afraid of climate change, you're afraid of Donald Trump destroying democracy, whatever. I'm just saying that opinion was handed to you and it's false. I'm not saying you need to believe something else. I'm just saying, look upstream. Like, I'm not. I'm not trying to make another claim about Donald Trump. I'm not trying to make any other claim. Do I know the origins of COVID Do I know how dangerous it was? I don't actually know any of that, but I do know that what they wanted me to believe about it was definitely not true. And Project mockingbird was a thing, and we know it was a thing. So whatever they're talking about on the news, just go, that's bullshit. That's it. You don't need to say, and I know the truth. If you're worried about being arrogant or, you know, not being able to figure things out for yourself, like, that's legitimate, I get it. But just looking at what they're spouting and just saying, yeah, that's nonsense. Just, that's all you need to do. And that, I think, is reasonable.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds about right.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: I should probably, at the same time, do a little bit better job of saying, like, well, I don't know. I generally say what I think happened, you know, and I don't. Like, I mean, we do know that the US government was funding, like, the.
What's the gain of function research in the Wuhan lab, right? Like, you don't know exactly how everything went down. And who was consciously doing what.
But when enough pieces line up that it's like, it's like, okay, you know, like China had this, like these protests all across China in support of Hong Kong that they needed to squash and the US had a guy they needed to get rid of and controversy around, you know, a pedophamp that a bunch of people are connected to. And what better thing to distract from all of that at the same time than this joint program where the US and China have created a bio weapon that they can just, we can just accidentally release. You know, like, and never mind the fact that the sovereign individual has talked about the fact that governments would do this at some point. You know, know, like, I don't know.
[00:16:14] Speaker C: Where are we at?
How do we get on to this?
[00:16:17] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Telegram?
[00:16:18] Speaker B: News.
[00:16:19] Speaker C: Telegram?
[00:16:20] Speaker A: This is Telegram?
[00:16:21] Speaker C: Yeah. To me it's just about debunking the bullshit. Yeah, like, I just don't want to believe a bunch of lies. If you ask me anything about, you know, the countering claims of what's actually true, that's where I'm like, yeah, I don't actually know.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:38] Speaker C: That's all. I don't know what Covid actually was. I don't know whether it was even a real disease or not. And I don't know where it originated. I just know that when they said, if you're saying it come out of China, then you're racist. I'm like, well that's obviously not ridiculous, but people are genuinely afraid to think this stuff. That's all.
Climate change is the one that just kills me because there's nothing demonstrably, all of the exaggerated claims were bullshit. Nothing happened. Everything I was raised to believe in, this stupid religion, it all failed. And all of these cities that are supposed to be underwater by the year 2000, none of it happened. Al Gore's claims around, you know, the ice caps being completely melted by 2014 totally didn't happen. Antarctica actually got bigger and Al Gore.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Had a beachfront mansion the entire time, the entire 24 years that he was saying the world was going to end in twelve years.
[00:17:32] Speaker C: Yeah, it was all bullshit. And I'm not saying I'm a climate scientist, I'm just saying the climate scientist said XYz and none of it happened. So I no longer subscribe to this anymore. It's nonsense.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: That's the easiest thing to do because like the political and journalistic claims are always, they're always just as far.
There's this sense of like finality in all of their conclusions and they have to adhere to it, and then they just try to memory hole it. You know, like. Like, the. In twelve years is just like, yeah, it's. In twelve years it's like, well, that was 20 years ago. It's like, yeah, but it's still. In twelve years, it's like, that's just like how it is, you know? Like, it's just gonna be twelve years indefinitely. And so there's always this big, scary future where everything's falling apart. Like, a number of, like, I'm just trying to post about Helene and everything that's happening in west North Carolina and, like, the horrible. Like, the flood that they have.
The floods that they've had in Asheville. Yeah, Asheville. Chimney Rock. Like, chimney Rock is just decimated. Batcave, Boone, banner, elk, blowing rock. Like, all of these towns have just been just smashed by this. And it wasn't even because the storm was particularly bad. It's because it's an area that almost never gets massive amounts of rain, and they're in the mountains. So if they get too much rain, then there's a small creek that's running next to this main road in and out of town, and suddenly it's a rushing river that's 40 degree incline and moving at 50 miles an hour. And it just eats the highway. It just pulls whole sections out of the side of the mountain. And then you're trying to raise money and just bring attention to this because mainstream media is even talking about this, and the only place that you can find it is on Instagram and Twitter. And then somebody comes in, it's like, well, this is what happens when.
This is the weather, when climate change is destroying the planet. And it's like a basic. It took me, like, 6 seconds to go look up because, like, all I could think is like, you know, North Carolina and, like, eastern us has actually been, like, super mild, right? Had seemed to me that it was been super mild from the context of hurricanes and stuff. And the same is true of the whole United States. It's been kind of a mild 15 years.
[00:19:55] Speaker C: It's like that. It's like that Simpsons bit where lisa's like, I have a rock that will, you know, ward off tigers.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: There's no tigers.
[00:20:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: There's no tigers.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: Crap. Yeah.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: They are all something.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: The thing is, is that weather is the perfect. Like, I'm. I repeat it. I just always go back to the idea that I really think I. The government is a religion, and religions have to create large external boogeymen, and the weather is the perfect is one of the perfect examples because it's random. People are easily fooled by randomness and you can weaponize confirmation bias in your favor.
And so if something, maybe it's not consciously designed, I don't know. But if something was going to be like, you couldn't pick a better thing like this.
It's just the way it is.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: Well, on the topic of telegram, there's actually. So not only has Telegram changed its policy and now they're going to hand over at any request, any relevant information for their users, which I don't know if that means that paval is just like suddenly not a criminal anymore, which seems like a bit of a, like France just using the law to control people.
Shocker.
But signal messenger also has been blocked in Russia for non compliance with national regulations aimed at preventing extremist activities. It's almost comedic. How the playbook is the exact same everywhere and the excuse is the exact same everywhere. It's like the, actually, Jeffrey, I think you just came up with a really good way to explain it, is that it's this ultimate confirmation bias on something that is entirely uncontrollable is the existence of extremists.
Like to say that you can find somebody who has a quote unquote extreme view or is hateful about something and that this is justification for total control because somehow total control will make this go away. And this has never been the case. We're talking about a country that can't keep roads together and can't manage homelessness, but we're supposed to believe they can control the weather or that they can make extremists go away by just controlling everybody's chat app?
In what world?
Where's the superpower? Where's the magic, Wanda, that is supposed to be enacted by giving all of this power over to governments. But I bring both of these up just because kind of in the context of Nastir and Keith, we have our conversation on Keith, is there a solution in any sort of centralized or service run encrypted messenger? Is this a lost cause? I know signal is a great app. Like, I use it, you know, with a lot of people. And I supposedly get into, in encryption there's some degree of like, I don't know, maybe it's just ambiguity in the fact that, like, I haven't, you know, I'm just downloading an app and using it.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: But yeah, I can speak to this because it's something I've been thinking about a lot.
So I'll give some context, like indulge me for a minute, because, like, I've been thinking about this for so much lately because there's just something that goes against my worldview and I've been trying to reconcile it. So Whitney Webb did this, like, sensationalist hypey thing about how bitcoin is just Blackrock coin and none of us care and all we want to do is pump tether and just made a bunch of ridiculous claims about bitcoiners that are just, that don't bear any resemblance to reality. But they all sound kind of true. If you have that mentality of just not trusting stuff and everything is a psyop, nothing good can ever really the world.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: And if you just want to go to Twitter and find the people who say something stupid and believe that that's the thing to apply to everybody who is semi related to what they're talking about.
[00:24:13] Speaker C: Well, here's the thing that struck me about it. It's that bitcoin does have issues and there's no point pretending it doesn't. Though we do have to counter straw man arguments against it all the time, and a lot of people fall for the trap that, okay, that means everything Peter Schiff says about bitcoin is stupid. And he uses those as justification for his advocacy against it, if you like. But that doesn't mean if he wasn't a genuine person or a lot smarter, he wouldn't come up with some actual arguments against it. Sometimes people have some issues, and the one I've been trying to reconcile is the privacy thing, right. Because it doesn't fit in the box. It's like the laws of physics where you have gravity that just doesn't fit with the others and it feels like it's in the same category, but somehow it just works its own way. So you have noster and you have bitcoin, and they're censorship resistant and they're permissionless and they're open and decentralized and these great things. And people go, yeah, and private too, right? It should be at least. And I'm like, well, that's. It isn't. And there's a very good reason for that. Because privacy is on a shallow level. It's wonderful and desirable. Right? I'm not talking about, like an even shallower level where people are like, oh, if you've got nothing to hide, you never did anything. You know, I don't do anything wrong, so I've got nothing to hide. I'm not talking about that level of idiocy and ignorance. I'm just saying bitcoin isn't private, right? And there's a very good reason for that. It's because other characteristics are actually more important. And it's the same with. And people conflate anonymity and privacy all the time, which is a massive mistake because anonymousness is literally doing things publicly without your identity attached. It's not private by definition. Private usually means that your counterparty knows who you are, but you just keep it between you. And that's not scalable. There's basically nothing that you can do in a scalable fashion. Like, I want to use the bathroom and I want to be private, all right? So I go in and shut the door. Like, that's different. Like, 10 million of us all need to use a bathroom simultaneously in one area. Like, there's no, how do you do that? That privately, right? So you have a system like bitcoin. It's impossible to keep it private. And you always have this trade off, and people will be like, oh, no, you can have them all. And you can just invent Monero or zcash or something like that. And I'm like, yeah, but you just lost all the other characteristics when you did that, and you're just undermining it and sweeping under the rug. You're totally centralized. It's going to become permissioned because it doesn't scale at all. It only works in this niche scenario.
You cannot disrupt fiat with a privacy coin. It's never going to happen. Even if bitcoin didn't exist to take all that energy away from it, they just don't work. They don't fulfill that function. And I guess what I'm trying to round it off with, and the point I'm getting to is that privacy presupposes that you have something you need, there's an entity out there, a tyrannical thing that you need to hide your behavior from. And the problem is, when you're effective at doing that, it means everyone else also has to do it. What ultimately really helps change things is when everyone, it's martyrdom and people doing things that should be permitted, that aren't in public for everyone else to see. And my favorite example is the trucker rally. It's like millions of Canadians can be pissed off. But if we're all just complaining internally about stuff, nothing changes until we all go out there and flout the law together in public. Then the government goes psychopathically crazy and hysterical for a short while, and then they just back down and there's nothing private about that.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: And it's like publishing the cryptography on the shirts, right? That's what Adam back did. Or.
[00:28:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: You actually have to be bold. Like, you have to give permission for something that is clearly morally acceptable, like morally fine or morally obligated.
And if you do so in an anonymous way or you do it privately, it just lends its credence to the idea that it's something to hide, that it's something that you should be ashamed of.
[00:28:35] Speaker C: Yeah. And you'll perpetuate the unacceptableness of that behavior if you continue to hide the fact that you're doing it. I'm not saying it's immoral to be private. Right. I'm just. It totally isn't. It's fair enough. I'm just saying it doesn't scale. There's a reason it's not the priority. Number one for bitcoin is. Right.
Because it always represents a trade off. And people talk about this linkability in all of the systems you might use. Things like Nosta. Nostra is the most privacy disaster thing I've ever seen. It's awful, and that's inevitable. You can't make a system like Nostra be permissionless, and you can't have censorship, resistance, and privacy at the same time. Simplex, I think, wrote a tweet about this where they're like, we are just about privacy. If you want these other characteristics, like censorship, resistance and all that, we are not the right thing for you, because those things generally are at odds with one another in the kind of people that advocate for them always want both of them because there's a certain ethics, like, we get why both of those are important, but they always pull in opposite directions in their approach for trying to give us liberty, and you just generally can't have both. And that's just sheer pragmatism, like speaking. So I don't know, I'm not saying there's a solution or anything like that. It's just, it's just a sad fact. It's like a law of physics almost. You just can't, whenever you're trying to do anything, whenever you're trying to create privacy preserving technology, it never scales, it always trends towards centralization, and it's always a temporary phenomenon that, you know, you can just use as it works in its nation state kind of thing.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Well, the upside, the upside is that we are going to get both right. Like, if you got your priorities straight, then, then you can on, like, you know, it's the same, like bitcoin's going to be. It's going to have its, well, it.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: Will still exist in a trade off.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: Just a layered trade off rather than a fundamental trade off.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: So you get both by not compromising the censorship, resistance and permissionless and permissionlessness of bitcoin and then you can build privacy on top of it.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: You can take your own compromises in granularity.
[00:30:52] Speaker C: Yeah, I think privacy in bitcoin is like, I'm pretty black pilled on it actually. And I think I'd rather at this point just, you know, bite the bullet and accept it because I've tried hard. I love Max Hillebrand and you know, Nopara and Adam Gibson who made joinmarket. I love these people and I love what they're doing. But I think Adam Gibson is probably the most academic person in that sort of section of bitcoin. And I think he'll be the first to tell you, like, yeah, there's this problem with it. There's that problem like at the end of the day, you're breaking Utxos up smaller and smaller and smaller, which is increasingly unsustainable. If transaction fees do what we think they're going to do and you're just swimming upstream always you need everyone else in the coin join to know how to not undo the join by accidentally merging stuff. You need to rely on good practices from other random participants. Join market's great, but it's not super symbol resistant either. You can have 100 offers and they're all the same person offering them all. And that's one way you need. Again, Wasabi actually works better than joinmarket in one way, which is there's only, or at least there used to be only one coordinator. So that made it Sybil resistant as a result of being centralized. Like you can't do that with joint markets. So they brought about fidelity bonds, right, to try and at least create an economic cost to setting up each identity.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: Well, I specifically just mean like e cash and things. Like, I mean like, like I get what you're saying. Like that is not, that is not technically bitcoin. Right. And so bitcoin is not going to have privacy probably. And, but I mean, you can make those trade offs on a granular level, like personally to get privacy, you know, like where it is needed and, and not be like if you don't sacrifice the wrong things, you know, the important things to begin with, then your own individual trade offs and shut your bathroom door, you know.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that's basically what I was going to get at too, is that it's less about like you have because you still have permissionlessness and censorship resistance, because you have the open, like bitcoin is the trust layer, which allows us to do things like federations and broad multisig for provision of services that you cannot provide. That does not exist in fiat. You can't really have true multisig in fiat. It doesn't exist.
You can have it in some vague legal sense that is easy to just override when France decides that you're a criminal until you turn over x amount of data.
But you can always get transactional privacy as a feature while still holding your value in a permissionless, censorship resistant way through something like a serve like fediment is a great example.
Have a seven person federation of people or institutions that you trust or that have had a longstanding history, and you have ecash built on top of it, and you put whatever into that as you need, or you, to the degree that you trust them, and then you have transactional privacy within that network.
Privacy is a piecemeal thing that you can do through the constructions of individual bathrooms and how they create their doors and build their toilets and their stalls and all of that stuff.
But it's simply not at the trust layer, because the trust layer is all about.
It requires a sense of openness and publicness really punishing this, everything that happens. We're really killing the analogy. We took it a little bit too far.
[00:34:42] Speaker C: Yeah, I think another one I kind of think needs to be more out there in public is just how broken Tor is. Like, people's assumptions about.
I think people are getting in trouble at this point with using Tor, thinking it's like some perfect cloak of anonymity, and it just isn't.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: Like, there was an article I saved recently about that. Like, talking about, like, we. Why are we still assuming Tor is actually private and somebody, like, was breaking it down? I haven't actually gone through it yet, but somebody was doing basically a breakdown of that. That idea being like, Tor is not. Tour is not what we think it is. And there's a lot of evidence to suggest that unless they're just not going after you, it's not really giving you much.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: They kind of gave up on, there's a lot of holes when they were just, like, days long disruptions from governments attacking it. I was like, okay, this is, this is like. And I mean, and they were pushing out, like, for the longest time, they were pursuing anybody that was running an exit node. So, like, the idea that all exit nodes aren't captured is pretty slim, you know, so.
[00:35:48] Speaker D: Well, can we, can I feel like, can you almost break it down to like a lower level. Any Internet protocol that's widely distributed can't be private. And I think also maybe some people listening to this sounds like you guys have all split the whole privacy versus anonymity, like, very well in your head. But I think most people still wrap those, think of those two things as.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Those are the same.
[00:36:15] Speaker D: And I mean, I think Adam back is still kind of holding out some hope for some kind of zero compens, at least hiding of your bitcoin addresses and transactions and stuff like that. There might be a little bit of improvement there, but I think it's almost like we're saying privacy is gone the moment you are connected together online because you have to have an IP address.
And we can't even have, Tor isn't even hiding your IP addresses anymore. So it's kind of like the conversation is at like a lower level of the stack than bitcoin. You know, it's kind of, it's on like your Ethernet cord level. Yeah, that's where the conversations at almost. Not at the, like, cryptocurrency level. Is that fair or no?
[00:37:09] Speaker A: There's so many extra layers of like, you know, like, you could use Tor and you could use a hundred different things about your anonymity and then still just accidentally use a browser that can be footprinted and you're still just, oh, this is that person. And it's like 80% likelihood that you're the same person because they just did a, they just did a footprint of all your plugins and extensions and your fingerprint footprint. A fingerprint of all the things in your browser and your resolution and the computer. And, you know, the last thing that you did on the clear net versus when you clearly turned on tor and now you're using this, you know, there's so many layers to it.
[00:37:50] Speaker D: I mean, mechanic, when you were talking about nest or not being private, you're essentially talking about that, like the IP address thing, right? Or were you talking about something different.
[00:38:00] Speaker C: When I was talking about what, being private noster?
[00:38:02] Speaker D: Not being private noster.
[00:38:05] Speaker C: Well, everything is going, it's a kind of like a flood fill, peer to peer approach. Just like, you know, bitcoin nodes are when they propagate transactions. Like you want your post to spread out far and wide because you want the receivers to have a good chance, chance of getting it. And there's no, I mean, you can use noster privately, but it's not, I think, like, ultimately privacy, in most circumstances, most circumstances, privacy comes down to trust. Like I'm in an Airbnb. Like, did they put a camera in the toilet or something? Like, no, I trust that some, some hoops have been imposed on people doing that. And there's some sort of, you know what I mean?
[00:38:50] Speaker D: You always have a partner that you're giving the message to, so you're always trusting that partner to keep your privacy. And the more partners you have, the less you can expect to trust.
[00:38:58] Speaker C: Yeah, in almost every context when it comes to privacy, there's some centralization and there's some trust going on, like when we're building open Internet protocols, like you're talking about like all the way down to the bottom of the stack. The whole point is that anyone should be able to use these as long as they, you know, can work in accordance with a set of crudely defined hard rules. Which means if you can get around those rules, you can totally abuse the protocols and no one's going to be able to do anything about it. And that's a feature, not a bug, but that just means that you're wide open to abuse, basically. Like permissionlessness means there's abuse because anyone can figure out what the rules are and they can figure out how to circumvent them. There's no centralized entity that can kick them off. I'm not saying it always works. Twitter is still riddled with spam despite being centralized. But Nostra, the minute the spammers start going there, I'm like, what the heck even is the solution to this? Because you want Nostra to be permissionless, you don't want to have to impose stupid silly hoops like you need to upload government id somewhere to make a Nostra identity.
And furthermore, what I'm talking about with Nostra is with any anonymous system or pseudonymous system like bitcoin or Noster, that just relies on arbitrarily created key pair that anyone can create and there's no barrier to entry beyond that.
The problem is linkability.
That is the Achilles heel in this whole thing, because you can create an anonymous identity, you can have perfect tour best practices every time you interact with Noster. And let's ignore the foot guns there, let's say you succeed in it. You're incentivized to keep using the same identity because the account grows and you make more money in zaps as you go and you go and then you make one slip up. That's it. Everything you ever did is now completely there, all linking it together. This is why it's so hard to do anything privately. You can try all these good practices, VPN's, proxies and Tor, but you're using a device that isn't just doing that one application. You just got a push notification for your email, right? Linked. So everything you do in that new private, contrived entity you just tried to create is now linked to the one you had from before. Right. And I don't think this is just understood. Right. You don't have a Facebook account. You've never been on facebook.com, but you went on a couple of websites that had an f button on them and that was downloaded from a Facebook server that now knows this guy with this IP address that also went on all these websites. We have a profile for this guy now. He doesn't even have a Facebook account, but we've made one. Like, and we're going to start.
The linkability concept is what kills everything. Because if you're anonymous but you're a consistent identity, at some point, if you ever slip up, same with bitcoin on chain footprint, you can try and use bitcoin privately. Privately. Privately. But the minute something links on chain to something that was a KYC transaction, they know everything else. They can link to it in the blockchain. Sure, there's some heuristics involved, but linkability, I think, is the crux of what people don't get when trying to create temporary scenarios where they are private or anonymous.
I'm going to stick with anonymous for that one. Because once your anonymity is compromised with one identity and you need an identity to use these networks, at some point you have to have one, no matter how temporary they are. You need an identity when using a protocol.
Yeah, when.
Yeah. It's the minute that becomes linked through one slip up that you might not even know you've made, then immediately you're in the world of, I should have just been in public the whole time because then at least I would have watched what I said.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: This is basically why I decided to just use my name on everything from the get go. And there's still potentially some benefit to not using your name just to keep crazy normies from, you know, being able to find out where you live or something. But, yeah, but, but I. All I could, all I could conclude from, you know, I was. I knew that my Opsec is never going to be good enough to hide who I am or what I'm doing from the people that actually, I'm actually concerned about. And so if I'm me, at least then I can network with people that might be my allies and not have to, you know, like. Like, they will have some clue who I am in. In public or otherwise. And if something happens to me, you know, they might care enough to wonder, you know, and, like, if basically it's.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: Kind of like, the same problem as gun control is that a law to not carry guns only works for the people who aren't gonna shoot anybody. Like, they're the people who would literally follow the law. In the same context of, like, hiding in public is that you're not hiding from the people that you're worried about. You're hiding from the people that might be your friends.
Like, you're. You're hiding from the people that would help you. And then they don't know if, you know, if you just disappear. You just disappeared. But the government knew who you were the whole time.
[00:44:11] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:44:12] Speaker A: If they're worried about what you're saying.
[00:44:14] Speaker D: You know, people who want to find you are going to find you.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: Yeah. What happened to that nim that I really liked? Yeah, I don't know.
[00:44:19] Speaker A: Don't know. I wonder who he was.
[00:44:22] Speaker D: So I'm getting the sense that you guys think I should withdraw my bitcoin core merge request to put toilets into the protocol. Into the bitcoin protocol. You guys saying that's not gonna work.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: How did you build the stalls, though?
[00:44:37] Speaker C: Wasn't that. That was why we added up return, wasn't it?
[00:44:40] Speaker D: Yeah, well, I just need a few more bytes and opera covenants and then I can do it.
[00:44:45] Speaker B: You just need. And then the toad.
[00:44:51] Speaker C: So let's talk about bitcoin, eh?
[00:44:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, let's do that.
So, actually. Actually, let's go ahead and jump onto the coinbase stuff.
This has been a little bit interesting. So there was, like, a whole bunch of drama about coinbase on. I think it was like, tyler Durden and what's the account?
What's that stupid news place?
[00:45:21] Speaker C: Zero hedge.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: Zero hedge. Thank you. Thank you.
Zero hedge.
Zero hedge. I think kind of kicked this off and started, like, a big conversation, talking about how basically, Blackrock could buy bitcoin from Coinbase, and there was no settlement for, like, 30 days, and so they could just buy enormous amounts of paper bitcoin. And then they trade back and forth completely off balance sheet or off the bitcoin chain itself. And a whole bunch of people started to drum up a lot of. Oh, well, then they can just. They can literally just say, people bought this bitcoin and Coinbase can essentially just use. They can just, like, have stuff on their balance sheet that's allocated to a bunch of customers and just say, oh, this is blackrocks now. And then I. This doesn't have to settle. So Blackrock can just keep buying, and it has no buying pressure in the actual market. They're basically rehypothecating, and we have no proof that they aren't.
And Brian Armstrong came out and said, no, we're not doing that. That's ridiculous. And a whole bunch of people just kind of drummed up seemingly a bunch of fud about it. But then Blackrock changed their contract, and out of nowhere said, coinbase, you're going to have to settle within 12 hours. Every time that on chain, within 12 hours, every time that we make a purchase or we allocate. And very shortly after that, suddenly everybody is running into the. I found, like, 30 tweets with this image of. Let me go to it real quick. It says, crypto sins restricted. These are people trying to withdraw their bitcoin, both lightning and just on chain.
As a precautionary measure to protect you against potential loss, we have limited your ability to send crypto until October 28, 2024. Please try again after the same.
[00:47:21] Speaker D: It's always for your protection.
[00:47:22] Speaker A: And some people, like, some people's were listed in November and all of this stuff, and then at the exact same time being why, Mellon just got sec approval to do bitcoin custody. And now everybody's talking about rumors that Blackrock's trying to move all their bitcoin out of coinbase to be Nymelon.
[00:47:40] Speaker B: Oh, my God.
[00:47:42] Speaker A: So discuss.
[00:47:45] Speaker B: I didn't know this was happening. This is amazing.
[00:47:47] Speaker A: This all happened in, like, the last two weeks.
[00:47:50] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:47:51] Speaker C: So coinbase don't have your bitcoin?
[00:47:55] Speaker D: Well, we need. I mean, I've been worried about there being, like, hardly any transactions other than, like, consolidations and opera turns in the mempool right now. And I. I think we need another exchange hack. We need another rug just to get people more on chain. So I kind of love it.
[00:48:13] Speaker C: The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of tyrants. Right? And the impulse.
[00:48:24] Speaker A: Bitcoin is fueled by the death of shitty exchanges.
[00:48:29] Speaker C: Man, I made that meme. Like, great. Bitcoin creates djns. Djns create shitty bitcoin. Shitty bitcoin created, like, I can't remember. It works. It's. There's four stages to it.
Yeah. Like, centralized shitty bitcoin. You know, with exchanges dying, lots of stuff creates hodlers. Hodlers create, like, yeah, you know, strong.
[00:48:52] Speaker B: Bitcoin in this case, it's literally a four year cycle there, like, because the cycle, the speed with which the djins forget things like Celsius and FTX is amazing. That's amazing. It's just, it's like, dude, this just happened and you're doing the same thing again and I don't know.
[00:49:15] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:16] Speaker A: Coinbase holds like 2.8 million bitcoin.
[00:49:21] Speaker D: It's good. I would like to pay ourselves for Coinbase going down eventually.
[00:49:28] Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep, yep.
[00:49:31] Speaker B: I'm kind of sad that Blackrock isn't going to like my, my. I was betting on the idea that, that the blackrock one of the ETF's something, you know, ideally Blackrock would blow up because Coinbase wouldn't have their money and if they're moving their money then, then they'll be safer than some of the others.
[00:49:51] Speaker C: So no such luck, man. You know, he's. Blackrock are the bullet sponge final boss. We're not going to take them out to some. You can't underestimate your enemy like that. They just get rugged by. They're not like a Djen McDonald's working like crypto trader that gets their life right. Blackrock are going to. They're going to be like, right. You're going to steal from another exchange and make us whole. Like we are going to. We're going to Robin Hood this thing, like, you know, the ironically named thing where it's like, yes. We're going to make sure that we rescue a hedge fund by scamming a bunch of pleb traders on Reddit that figured out that they could. The idea that was called Robin Hood is just beautiful. To me. It was exactly upside down.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: So true.
[00:50:38] Speaker D: Is there any way FDIC would ever be involved? Let's say Blackrock did get all their ATF bitcoin stolen.
Would the FDIC ever get involved in that?
[00:50:48] Speaker A: Probably depends on whether or not Blackrock wants them to.
I imagine Blackrock. I imagine they probably just do what Blackrock says they own a lot.
[00:51:00] Speaker D: I guess it doesn't really matter.
[00:51:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it's whatever.
One thing I was have been really stoked about and I don't know how or when this will show up anywhere. I've been excited about it, but I just don't. I still don't see support for it in many places. Maybe a mechanic. You have something on this?
Bolt twelve is officially merged into the lightning specifications. So we have offers. This basically enables recurring the ability to post a lightning invoice or a lightning quote unquote key that people can just generate invoices for and pay you subscription stuff like ongoing. Like a bunch of piecemeal things that have just been kind of elusive, enlightening for a long time.
But I'm still just kind of surprised. It's a little bit like stratum v two, which we will get to momentarily because there's another news item here that I think mechanic can weigh in on.
[00:52:07] Speaker B: Well, mechanic has a better news item than stratum Vt. No, I'm.
[00:52:12] Speaker D: Shut up.
[00:52:12] Speaker A: We'll get there.
But I don't understand why it seems obvious to me that this would be adopted very quickly like bolt twelve.
[00:52:23] Speaker C: Because lnd. That's why.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: Because l and D. Yeah, they're just.
[00:52:28] Speaker C: Well, they, they already came up with a bunch of not as good as bolt twelve solutions years ago. Like, and you know, ln URL, like it's all like all of the things that bolt twelve does, minus, you know, minus, like the ideological components that make it more sovereign. Right. So you've got to deal with DNS for a start off to have ln URL we know DNS sucks. We know it's all centralized and, like, it's not native to the lightning network. Right. Like bolt twelve is.
And I think I forget the other elements to it, but they just came up with something quick and dirty and it works. And they did that with loop and pool as well, which is proprietary, I believe, and they actually make money off of. So when the core lightning guys are trying to come up with liquidity ads, which I think are broken at the moment, but they were kind of cool for a while when they sort of worked.
You want to be able to buy inbound liquidity to solve the inbound liquidity problem. You want to be able to make an on chain transaction and just have a lightning channel with capacity in it in your direction rather than away from you.
I don't remember which, whether it was loop or pool, I can't remember which. They work the opposite way. It's nicely named, but again, it was like a thing lnd offered in a very sort of Microsoft kind of fashion, like screw the browser standards. Like, we're just going to do this one thing with our Microsoft browser and we're going to race ahead and people are going to like us, but meanwhile, HTML five is 20 years away or something. We're going to do Java applets or whatever, the God awful solution they'll spin up in the short term.
I think that's basically the mentality. Bolt twelve was this slow and steady spec that gets ratified over time and is very, very forward thinking. And all the other interim solutions the LND had were kind of good enough for a lot of people. And that's like, Nostra is built on top of that, right? I want zaps to be using bolt twelve, but, you know, Chris Guida made a, made a, made a nip for it, and I don't think anyone's paid much attention to it. It's called like the Opcat Max or something like that. They called it a joke name. I don't know why they call it that. But yeah, bolt twelve zaps would be great. Instead, everyone's just using something like Albee and yeah, I'm just talking about Albie Hub because everyone's like, really excited about Albehub at the moment, and I don't actually know what it does. So maybe someone can albee hub pill me.
[00:55:10] Speaker A: I've been using their custodial for zaps, and then I use fountain, and then I did also use my
[email protected], but I was mostly just kind of like trying out a bunch of different things. So I bounced around a lot. But that's the one thing that I don't get, is that it seems like bolt twelve is the like, well, you don't have to have, like, it solves those problems without needing a huge. A lot of the trade off of custodial options.
But I'll be or Albie. I'm not sure which is the actual way to say it, but Ali Hub is specifically using noster wallet connect to connect to your node.
So it is, as I understand it, or the thing that I looked into, I still haven't even used it. I've just been using their custodial part, but it's just using noster to communicate. So you don't have to do any crazy port forwarding or anything. You can just connect to your node in your home. And it's just using noster to bounce information back and forth.
And so it just kind of, you punch in a key and it just kind of works, which is the whole idea of a lot of things. That's the whole point of the pair stack. And like, the stuff we're doing with wholesale trying to get that into start nine.
And it solves a lot of the complexity. If you can just have a link, essentially, that you punch in and then things can talk to each other.
A bunch of people have been raving about it, and Alby's released a number of different things. Now they have the alibi go app, which you just punch in that key. You just punch in your key, and then, boom, there's your wallet.
But, yeah, I have not gotten to play with it extensively. Has anybody else set it up or gotten to explore it?
[00:57:09] Speaker C: No. I will say, back when I was at start nine, I did some work with the all b guys, and I was really impressed with them as a team. Like, just how responsive they were and how quick they were and, like, awake. So I always like to shout out, like, competency when I see it, because they're really good.
[00:57:27] Speaker A: Yeah, they've been killing it. I've just been watching stuff drop from them for, like, the whole last month and just been waiting to have some damn time to actually plug it all in and try it out.
[00:57:41] Speaker D: That's another lightning wallet, Alpi.
[00:57:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where we got it. Where we got it. So the ashi gura, there's a new fork of samurai I don't think. I could not figure out when I looked into it.
It's a mobile, self custodial, mobile wallet. But I do not think there's a mixer. I guess you just probably plug into your. It has panim, so it has, like, the bit 47, but stonewall. I could not figure out exactly how they do their mixing. So I guess it's okay. You're just plugging it into your dojo. So you have to have a dojo.
But it's cool to see just, again, also something that I haven't gotten to actually use. I think I want to say BTC sessions just had, or he posted a picture of him. Like, I guess he's working on a video now to use it.
But that's a little bit. It's a little brave, considering the other guys just got arrested to fork and re release. But if they're not running a mixer, if you're running your own dojo, it's.
[00:59:05] Speaker B: Exactly the kind of bravery we need.
[00:59:07] Speaker A: Yeah. I can't decide. I can't decide if this is in a new.
I guess, kind of like a layer or like, a different way that it's happening such that they're not susceptible. They have to be. They have to even exaggerate the legal situation even further to put them in the same category. Or if they're kind of putting themselves at risk of this exact same thing. I don't know. Have y'all seen anything about the ashigar? Is Ashiguri. I was fucking ashi. Ashigaru. Ashigaru. That's probably not pronounced right, but I'm.
[00:59:43] Speaker C: So strongly biased against anything that comes near those guys that I probably wouldn't even give an objective opinion here, like, genuinely, I'm probably just gonna be more scathing than is warranted.
[00:59:55] Speaker A: So my big problem, and what bothered me so much with the whole samurai thing, I mean, of course, aside from the legal insanity, but I'm just talking about specifically with how samurai wallet worked, is that they had all the information for the users.
Like they had pub keys for everybody that was using it. Which kind of goes back to our original issue of what was, what was even the point of that?
[01:00:25] Speaker C: You know, what was, because unfortunately, I've learned the lesson that if good products and good marketing, they're very separate things. Samurai is one of the best marketing teams in the world.
Just making everyone feel like ninjas when they're using bitcoin. It makes people feel badass. And they have an amazingly dedicated bunch of defenders that couldn't care less that the thing was broken and they still defend it to this day. And you can defend on moral grounds because they don't belong in prison and they haven't done anything that should be considered illegal. But on a technical level, it was just never good.
The process of Chomian blinding is a genius process, and undoing that in the process of the mix by the coordinator being able to link inputs and outputs breaks the chomi and blind. So at that point, it's not blinded.
[01:01:20] Speaker A: It's just, it's just not blinded. Yeah.
[01:01:22] Speaker C: And the concern, like, I had a massive, like, Odell had me and Zelco on, Zelko makes, you know, Ronin Dojo, and we had a big argument the whole time. Right. And his point, and I'm not straw manning his point over and over again, was samurai are clearly well motivated, good actors that want to bring privacy to bitcoin. Why wouldn't you trust them with your Xpub? Because I shouldn't have to trust them because they can get arrested and their servers can end up in the hands of the DOJ, which is exactly what happened. And it was never me saying samurai are bad people. It was me saying they are putting themselves in a position that can hurt them and all of their users. And that happened. And it's so frustrating, and it's one.
[01:02:04] Speaker A: Of those things too, that it would be worth it to them to arrest them and not even succeed from the legal standpoint, simply because they could get all the data.
[01:02:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:02:16] Speaker A: Just because they can go after all of the users.
[01:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah. It's the same thing with like, the, the KYC laws in general is like, even if you have a service that you actually trust, the likelihood that they're not going to get compromised in some, at some point, in some form or fashion. Like, people that you really trust are going to leak your data even if they didn't mean to, you know, so.
[01:02:42] Speaker C: It'S tech accidents happen. Like the ocean went down for like 18 hours or something the other day. This was due to like the massive, like thousand year, once in a thousand year weather in North Carolina. Right? I mean, I'm not really supposed to discuss too much of this publicly, but we got struck by lightning in two different freaking locations. So that took out, yeah, in the space of like a couple hours. And that took out not only, you know, the, the main thing, but the backup thing without going into specifics. And I was, I wasn't even mad at that point. I'm like, yeah, obviously we're just supposed to be offline today. Like, I'm not.
[01:03:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
Around Ashfield, around Asheville, they were trying to get a cell service back up and running and they were putting generators at each tower. And then they did a few, and then they discovered that the data center that all the towers are connected to is gone. So. So like just, there's nothing you can do at that point.
[01:03:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw a bunch of people, um, that makes me want to get a Starlink. So I've been thinking about getting like a bunch of satellite.
[01:03:49] Speaker C: You know what? Our Starlink got struck by lightning as well. That was the backup to the backup to the backup. And this is how ocean got back up. And this is like, I was after the launch, I was all emotional and stuff, like, because, you know, you put so much into the launch and then you just crash, like, all the energy falls out. And I was just Jason who wrote down, which I guess we're going to talk about some point. He lives in north Carolina and he got the pool back up and running by manually soldering a redundant cable onto a Starlink dish and managed to get ocean up and running that way. And then we had to do a bunch of hacks to get the thing just about working. Like raise the minimum difficulty on the pool just to lower overall bandwidth. And grace of God, we weren't ddosed because we're always ddosed. And someone like that, that would have been like, just horrible for us, having to thwart a ddos with like one.
[01:04:39] Speaker A: Maybe they got hit with lightning too.
[01:04:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I guess you can't be ddosed if you can't connect to the Internet.
[01:04:50] Speaker A: Boom.
[01:04:51] Speaker C: But, yeah, but when, when we were doing the launch, man, like, it was just me and Mark and Robert out there. Doing the launch in the Minnesota. Jason was busy flying around North Carolina, bringing supplies to Asheville because he's a pilot and, you know, he missed the launch of his own protocol to be fucking, like, flying shit to people in his local area. And he was just telling me, like, air traffic control was all these, like, there was 150, like, pilots around North Carolina. All private guys just saying, like, you know, let's say a prayer together. Let's all like, thank God that we're in a position to be able to help people like this. And everyone's just saying amen on the headsets. Everyone's listening to flying around, and he's like, at the end of it, he's like, I am never leaving this state, ever. I'm just so moving. The fact that people all club together while Kamala Harris is pretending to write on a piece of paper with an iPhone that isn't plugged into anything she's saying, my thoughts and prayers are with the people in North Carolina after doing absolutely nothing. Right?
[01:05:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:05:55] Speaker C: Like, so it's just amazing watching people come together. Like, he had to chop down five trees in his driveway to rush to the, you know, you know, to just make everything work when ocean went down. It's unbelievable. And outside in North Carolina, it's just, you open the window and there's just chainsaws. And everyone is, like, working to rebuild the state. Just everyone is, like, dealing with all the block roads, all the water pumps, trying to clean everything out. It's amazing what people band together to do in a natural disaster.
[01:06:26] Speaker A: That's the thing about what's happened with North Carolina and just being in North Carolina is that there is still a super strong sense of community. When I went to, I waited in line. When we donated, we went to Walmart, and they were sending out. These are the things that we need most for the last people that went out there.
And we just went to Walmart and bought a, like, $600 worth of everything, basically 20 of everything on the list, basically, and then went to just a church that was pulling a lot of this stuff together. And we waited in line behind, like, four other people with just, like, just dumping out huge loads of stuff. And they had these huge cardboard, like, things on pallets. They were all going into a truck, and they're just filling the things up and putting them on a truck. And that was literally one area, one church at one place in our area. And then my wife's parents were doing the exact same thing all the way in Moorhead, which is like a seven hour drive to Asheville, and they were packing stuff up at a church and filling up an entire truck, and they were about to head out to Asheville. Like, the amount of people that are descending upon that place to help is just wild.
And it's funny that, like, where people, like, I feel like cities are kind of like the place you go to find places people aggregate that don't like people.
[01:08:01] Speaker C: Yeah, those are the best people.
[01:08:04] Speaker B: You should never bet again against appalachian rednecks either. It's just right. Just a bad bet.
[01:08:12] Speaker A: Speaking of so datum, I believe it is called. I've been calling it datum, but Datum is released. Tell me what Datum is. We will. We will go to mechanic on this one because this is relevant to your neck of the woods and give me the breakdown. And why am I excited about it? And why are there people giving you shit about it on Twitter?
[01:08:38] Speaker C: Oh, man, we got haters. So I try not to give them too much oxygen. If they come up with new hate, then sure. And that's Matt Corralo. I'll get into that. But, like, it's a brilliant thing. Amazingly. Like, bitcoin mining isn't working exactly the way Satoshi laid out in the white paper. I think that should be pretty obvious to everyone at this point. But pools aren't going anywhere. Miners want to collaborate and split rewards.
But I'll probably come back to that in a minute. I'll just start with the basics of what datum is. In the entire history of bitcoin. Originally there were just nodes, and you could mine with those. There was one thing called bitcoin QT, and there was no satoshi yet. No one even knew what the smallest divisible amount of bitcoin was, because all that you had was this graphic interface. There was no command line, there was no Linux. So all there was was 1.35 bitcoin or whatever. There was no decimal places below that. It was all in this one unified client. It did mining. It did, you know, wallet, it did all that. All this became separated.
Now, a bitcoin node doesn't really do everything and other things sit on top of it and do stuff. So for mining, what that means is you have to run a stratum server, because you can't point your ant miner at a bitcoin node. There's nothing. There's no way for them to communicate. You need something in between, which is a stratum server. Stratum is what became the main protocol everyone uses for work to be issued to a miner for it to start doing its work, and then it reports back the proof of work to the stratum server. And if it finds a block, obviously that gets broadcast through the node to the network. So since all that became standard, there was no standard stratum software out there for people to just run their own pool, because you have to be able to. Basically, it's not a pool, but people have to have a way to make their miner do work. And they always just pull it, point it at a third party, and the third party says, don't worry, I'll have the node, I'll run the server. And it became like total big data, like you'd expect. There's just a small group of people that run the servers. They issue all the work, they make the block templates, they take all the rewards out of the chain. They do everything. And you as a miner need their permission to do anything that you might want to do. So thanks. So obviously the intention was to break that up and make it so that miners would have more sovereignty and more control over what goes on.
And to that end, no one ever did anything. It was like 2011. This all became standard, that you just relied on pools to do everything for you. And the best we ever had as trying to bring sovereignty back to miners Washington, these things called solo pools, where all that would happen is they would just change the reward split so that you would get 98% of the reward if you found a block. And we called that solo mining. It isn't really lottery mining is a better definition because there's still a third party running the node, running the server, issuing the work, communicating with the blockchain. You still need a middleman. And no one ever came out with like, here you go. Here's a way for a pleb to just run a bit of software that sits between a bitcoin node and a miner and can issue stratum work on Stratum V one, which is what all the miners run anyway, with some notable exceptions. So that's what Datum is. It's basically a pool server for anyone to use so that they don't need to rely on a third party to mine. That's all it is. But it has some, it has the additional ability to work with a pool that supports it to split rewards as well. So you're a solo miner, you're doing everything a solo miner might, you know, would normally be doing. You're running a node, you're building a mempool, you're creating block templates, you're issuing work to all the miners connected to it and they're returning the work. And when you find blocks, you know, you're broadcasting to them, to the network. Datum allows this additional thing, aside from just being finally the over a decade, for miners to finally be able to mine without having to rely on a third party or build their own, Stratum servers roll their own. In addition to that, you have ocean, of course, which supports datum, which means if the datum server, you set it, and this is the default setting, by the way, it reaches out to a datum supporting pool and says, hey, can you give me the reward split for what's going on on this pool?
Because I'm going to use that in all my work, and I'll give you all my work back and you can verify it all. I want to be qualified for reward splits for what everyone else is doing on that pool. And that's what ocean is for datum users that want to still mine in a pool rather than just solo mine. So you connect up to ocean using Datum, you're doing all of your own work, you're running your node, you're doing everything in a sovereign capacity. But you're asking, hey, ocean, can I have the correct reward split? And I'll prove to you that I'm using it with all my work. It's all provable, and ocean can verify all. And we say, yeah, this guy's doing 20% of the work. He's mining his own blocks, he's constructing his own templates, but he wants cash flow, so we're going to provide that for him. And it's all done transparently. And it just makes ocean so much less powerful from the standpoint of what we might do if we wanted to be malicious and cause damage on the network, because all the miners at that point are making their own templates, and there's so little we can do to ever mess anything up. It's like the path to decentralizing mining. The major, major step is getting miners to make their own template, because then they're basically software at that point. They can do whatever they want. So that's basically the long and short of what datum is. It's just a stratum server that plebs can run, that anyone can run. It's incredibly lightweight, and it's just rock solid. I've been running it for weeks now. The source code is going to be out on the 18th. It's already MIT licensed. It's about as fast as you can get. We're still holding onto the code somewhat overzealously, because how developers are, they're precious over it and they want it to be just perfect before everyone sees it. There's no mal intent there. Of course we wouldn't ask anyone to run a binary if they don't want to, but that's the current thing with the private beta, and we've had a lot of people reach out that want to run it. If you want a binary, reach out. That's datumotion XYZ, just email that and say you want to be part of the private beta. If you'd prefer to wait until the source codes out and you can build it yourself, you've got another 17 days before. That's the thing. We might do it sooner as well. We gave him a wide berth, but that's what it is. The whole ecosystem has been crying out for miners to be able to just run their own, roll their own, basically, you know, the ability to generate your own work for your own miners. And. Yeah, like I said, someone already found a datum block on ocean, so that they, they ran a node, they constructed a template, they asked Ocean what the coinbase split should be to qualify for rewards. And then they found a block and they told the network about it. We didn't. They broadcast it straight there via the PT.
[01:15:56] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:15:57] Speaker C: So it is solo mining for people that want cash flow, and that's the opposite of what these terms have sort of come to mean when people talk about solo pools and stuff. So that's. I hope I do a reasonable job explaining it there. There's a lot more to it, of course, but that's pretty much the basics.
[01:16:15] Speaker D: Can I ask a technical question about. Yeah, so Bitcoin core has always had the git block template command.
I think that was in bitcoin D even before bitcoin. Qt is the datum essentially using that git block template command that's built into core and then obviously adding the coinbase transaction in there.
[01:16:40] Speaker C: Exactly, yeah. So when it's connected via RPC and it issues the RPC command, get block template, it does it roughly every 40 seconds by default. You can set that faster or slower if you want. It's totally up to you.
And what that means the bitcoin node does is it sends an order of transactions. It says, here's what's in my mempool as a result of whatever you've set for your mempool policies. Ultimately, what in the mempool policies of the node inform the contents of the block. Datum doesn't have anything to do with that, apart from the coinbase, which is what Datum does.
[01:17:17] Speaker D: But so two people running Datum, if they both have this generic, um, all the default settings for their bitcoin node and their bitcoin nodes been running for a few years, and they both say get block template at the same time, they're generally going to get the same thing in their block.
[01:17:34] Speaker C: Yeah, they're going to look pretty similar. Generally. You can prioritize transaction. Of course, that's another RPC where you're like, hey, I want to open this lightning channel and I want to pay zero sats per byte, and it's going to take me a month to find a block. You can just prioritize that channel open and get it for free if you want.
And if you're prepared to wait around for it, go for it. It's a lightning channel. You might have it open forever.
But yeah, so the get block template is just, it puts everything in the right order, right? Because there can be child pays for parent, and those need to be done in the right order within the structure of a block in order for it to be a valid block.
So that's what the bitcoin node does.
And as you say, getblock templates been around forever. So this datum can work on top of core v o six or something from 2013 or whatever.
And there's one other thing though, you need get block note, I think it's called block notify, which is a script that you can get the node to run because you want to be told about new network blocks as soon as possible. You want to be not doing stale work within tens of milliseconds because it's a waste of time.
[01:18:47] Speaker D: Yeah, that ZMQ thing.
[01:18:49] Speaker C: Yeah, well, ZMQ doesn't work. That's the problem. So we started using ZMQ. This is what LND uses to get new block updates. 95% of the time it works every time, and then the remaining 5% of the time it just sleeps. It just doesn't seem to just wake up. And initially I was like, because I packaged it up for start nine and I'm going to package it for umbral as well. And initially I'm like, how are we getting the new block things? Because if you don't use block notify as a script to update the datum node and tell it immediately, you need to issue new work. It can take up to a minute, which is crap. You can't be working on stalework forever. You need to use the bitcoin nodes ability to push out essentially a notification to stuff that needs to know about new blocks as soon as possible. ZMQ is not good enough, unfortunately. And that is what Lnd uses, and it's what we were going to use. And Luke was like, don't use ZMQ, it's shit. And we did for a bit, and then we found out, oh, this thing is. For some reason it just doesn't work that reliably. That was fun. It's just another one of those things that's like someone has really high standards and everyone else is like, oh, that doesn't matter. And then we really look into it and we're like, Luke was right again. So that was a bit of a pain in the butt. Making datum auto configure bitcoin on start OS to issue block notify. And the other one was making it work over local area networks, because start OS does everything using mdns and you can't put a local domain into your antminer. It doesn't know how to work with that. You need to put an IP address and a port into it and start OS doesn't work that way. I haven't started fiddling around with umbral yet, but either way, if any of you are home miners, if you have like an s nine or anything like that, and you have star OS and you want to run it, let me know, I'll send you the s nine pk and you can just. There's one hack you've got to do to make it accessible over IP and port. It's three lines you've got to paste into terminal once you're ssh in, and then that's it. You're solo mining at that point. And if you want, you can say, I want to use ocean. And then all your shares go there, they run straight through and Ocean will start crediting you for doing valid work and you'll start getting splits from other people's work. But you're totally making your own blocks at that point. You are a sovereign miner.
[01:21:08] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[01:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:21:10] Speaker D: So to make your node work with Datum, do you just have to copy paste a few lines into your bitcoin config file and restart your node, or do you have to. Is there other stuff involved?
[01:21:20] Speaker C: Yeah, you've got to give datum RPC credentials.
[01:21:23] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:21:24] Speaker C: So that's pretty much how to do that. Then you've. Well, there's a few other kind of default settings. Like I said, you need block notify to work, otherwise. Otherwise it will lazily go, oh, there's a new block. You can't have it. Just sort of realize there's a new block after 1020, 30 seconds. You need bitcoin to do something, to send out something when there is a new network block. Otherwise, as I said, you're wasting loads of work.
Let me see what those default.
[01:21:56] Speaker D: But these are all things that can just be done in the config file and then restarting the node. There's nothing really outside of the config file. Right.
[01:22:05] Speaker C: There's basically not a lot you have to do in your bitcoin node for datum to run on top of it. I'm looking at four things I've written in my config. Four. That's it. And they're all defaults anyway. I'm running knots. So actually, some of the, like, nots will make 300 kilobyte blocks if you don't change its conf, right. And that's not what most people want to do. That's obviously how Luke designed the defaults, because very simply put, he's like, if it's the defaults in knots, need to be what is the best for bitcoin? That's it. So. So they make 300 kilobyte blocks. And every time I have to set up a new test, Jason's always, like, kicking me. You've still left it making 300 kilobyte blocks. And again, I'm guessing you probably don't want to be doing that. Oh, yeah, sorry. So I've got, you know, max block. Block max size is 398500. And then blocks Mac weight is the same thing, because we have those two metrics for it. Now. I don't know what happens if you make them not the same number.
And then, yeah, you have block notify in the conf, and that's running a kill all command to the datum, to one of the processes within the datum process. So the minute bitcoin core or bitcoin not sees a new block, it sends out this command, and then datum immediately just restarts that one thread, I think it is, and then that's it. You're doing new work immediately.
[01:23:28] Speaker D: That's awesome, man.
[01:23:30] Speaker B: It sounds. It sounds amazing. But what are people. What are people arguing about?
[01:23:35] Speaker A: Everybody's saying, why didn't you use stratum v two?
[01:23:38] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, depending on, like. I don't want to be egregious, man, because a couple of the guys working on SV two are awesome guys, and they're just like, fuck, man, I've been putting in so much work into this thing. Like, we're. And we're on the same page, we're doing the same mission. We want a decentralized template construction and mining in general.
Like, can you, like, I genuinely want to know why you chose not to use our work. Those, like, Palvinex reached out to me in that capacity. Pleb Hash has been sort of similar in sentiment, and to those guys, I'm just like, yeah, I appreciate it. I'd love to get into the weeds with it. Like, there were a bunch of reasons we didn't use Sv two. Let's talk about it. For sure. Matt Corrallo was just personally offended that we didn't use it and was like, how dare you not use this thing I've written? And here's the straw man.
Apparently we didn't use it because we didn't understand how SV two worked.
He said that was the majority of your reasoning, apparently, was that you had a misunderstanding around how the job declarator worked and olive branch. I did extend an olive branch. Like, look, yeah, we did have a misunderstanding based because Stratton v two's documentation didn't match how it was actually written. And we just read the documentation, and we're like, oh, yeah, that's not going to work.
But it was one of a bunch of reasons. It wasn't just that. Right? And Jason at the time was like, this thing about SV two isn't going to work. And then over the last few months, they've basically upgraded it a lot, and it's really good now. So there's no reason for me to be attacking SV two. And the reasons, as I said to Matt Carallo, that we would still have gone the route we went to even if the reason he cited hadn't been a factor. And other things were also where it is now was where it was six months ago when we made the choice to make Datum. Instead, we still would have gone this route because we needed to be super lean. There's a bunch of factors here, and I'm above my pay grade, really talking about the subtleties of it. But the one I do understand is leanness. Datum is just unbelievably lightweight. It's like 200 kb. That's it. It's absolutely tiny. It's written from the ground up in sea. There is zero technical debt.
Datum is a big, clunky mess that's been around for over a decade that's trying to do a whole load of things at once. And to be fair, I'm pretty sure it's going to do everything quite well at this point. But it's bulky, it's not.
Sorry, you said stratum?
[01:26:11] Speaker B: Yeah, stratum is a bulky mess.
[01:26:14] Speaker C: Yeah, I think. I'm not gonna. I don't want to call it a mess because I don't want to. I really don't want to get into some sort of flame war. Like, I really respect the people that have been working on it and we are on the same team. But datum, just like I said, stratum V two, where it came from was we need to encrypt communication between centralized mining pools and their miners because they're unencrypted and that's an attack vector. Like, your ISP knows everything about what you're doing. All that stuff, they can change stuff on route. That's a vulnerability. And we need to make everything binary because that's just more efficient.
And Sv one just needed those upgrades. But that was all about centralized mining. It was just making centralized mining a bit better. It was totally valid then block template creation happening miners side.
It wasn't the initial goal of the project, but that's been added on. And to be fair, that was the misunderstanding Matt Corella was talking about. Initially it was just pools still make the templates, but miners can request substitutions and that was certainly a thing where that's not good enough. The miner has to be running a node and has to be making the template and they reach out to the pool for the coinbase split, not the reverse.
Again, that's not how SV two is now. SV two has.
The miner can just totally make the template themselves. But it comes down to, I think the primary factor is leannesse, and our ability to like ocean, needed this thing and we needed it yesterday. The network needs it. And SV two has just been around forever. It's been supposed to be fixing these problems forever, and it's just, it wasn't going to work out that way. We needed to just implement something that really did it and started not from the approach of we need to encrypt communications or we need to make it more efficient with using binaries. It was, we need miners making templates in a way that they can collaborate with other miners, using a coordinator, like a pool, like ocean. And it just started from the ground up like that. And it only does that. But one of the weirdest and most unintuitive things to understand in the comparison is that Datum does less than stratum V two. So. And that's deliberate because we don't want to drive users into doing behavior that we don't want. The fact that SV two supports centralized mining and decentralized mining, even if we say they're of equivalent, you know, quality, that's a negative. We only want datum to work. If you're running a node, we don't want it to be able to do the sort of half assed version of it where the pool still makes the template and you reach out to it. Datum deliberately doesn't do that. It only supports miners doing what miners should be doing. And that's unintuitive because that's just a feature that's missing. So Corallo described it as, this is a simplified, you know, version of SV two with some features missing, right? And I'm like, yes, deliberately so. Like, it definitely simplified because it's, I don't know, it's probably only like 40,000 lines of c code, right? And it's just, I don't. I don't know if you're all C Maxis, but like, when it comes down to rust versus c, you know, it's just, it was just a no brainer, right? Like it's so lean, it's so efficient, and I'm running it on a raspberry PI four, and ultimately it's the bitcoin node that's the resource hog, not the datum server. You can connect over 1000 miners to a raspberry PI three if it was capable of having a bitcoin node run on it. It isn't. And there's also just another element to comment on, which is you're never going to have an antminer that's able to run a bitcoin node on its control board. So you always need that extra. You always need that one extra box in your setup.
So, you know, having stratum V two released firmware like brains Os, or if Antminer or ant, you know, ant pool released native SV two firmware that was stock antminer, it still can't do anything. Like, it can communicate with the pool in an encrypted fashion. True. But you can't make a block template on your antminer because you can't run a bitcoin node on your ant miner. So you still have to have the node on another piece of hardware, and you need the datum server or the SV two to reach out to it and get block template and issue work to the antminers. And here's the fun part, is that if SV two becomes more ubiquitous and it's not just brains OS. Datum will support it, because at the moment when datum is talking to your antminers or whatever miners, it's using Sv one because that's what the miners, by and large, support. Well, they all support Sv one. We can just support SV two as well. So the datum server can use SV two to communicate with all the miners on the land. But it's just like, why? It's not really that important because you're no longer communicating with a pool and using the public Internet. You're just using your lan. So I don't really. If you're like, a $10 million mining operation and you're running a datum server and it's communicating over Sv one in plain text to all the miners in the facility, you need to. Are you telling me you don't trust your lan and you need that to be encrypted? Because if you don't trust your land and you've got millions of dollars of mining equipment, you need to figure out why you don't trust your land. You don't need SV two to come and encrypt all the communications. It's strictly better. But it also barely matters. So I just think it will be kind of fun if this turns into a real beef and there's just endless feuds about us not using SV two, and then datum supports SV two for the communications aspect. That will just be really funny to me because they'll be like, wait, stratum supports SV two? I thought they were an either or thing, because, as I said, SV two does lots of aspects of it. And I'll round off with one point, which is the communication between the pool datum prime server, which is the one that operates our end and verifies everything.
Miners running their datum servers, that is all encrypted. Right. We didn't fall behind SV two in that. In that capacity. Right. We're not asking people to communicate with the pool in plain text. We're just allowing them to use what's available at moment, which is predominantly Sv one.
[01:32:27] Speaker A: I don't understand the anger at having, like, a different option.
You know, like, that seems to be that I got two things.
There are a handful of major things out of this. One is you build something to do a very specific thing, even if it's what SV two does. Okay, so what we agree that that's a good thing to build. You implemented it. Whether you implemented SV two or datum, that's what we want, is people using it and then three, if this is easier for me to boot up and actually use.
That's the whole point. We don't care if somebody doesn't use l and D and they use core lightning. Are we angry that core lightning exists?
The whole idea is to figure out wouldn't options even be a good thing? I didn't even know it supported Sv two. So that's actually kind of funny that it doesn't even take away if you're trying to use SV two.
[01:33:34] Speaker C: It doesn't support it yet, but it's trivial for us to.
[01:33:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:33:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's like, let's steal, man. It. Like the opposition here, I think they're just, they've been working hard and they would rather we collaborated with them rather than just go off on our own. I can relate to that.
[01:33:51] Speaker A: And I don't feels like reinventing the wheel for no reason. Yeah.
[01:33:55] Speaker C: Like they want us to take part in the community effort and we didn't. And I get why that can be frustrating. I do. And also like, straight up, Luke and Jason are amazing developers. So like, I would want the opportunity to collaborate with them on something. And if they're like, no, I'm going to go and do my own thing. Sorry, that's just disappointing. Right? The guys working on SV two are like younger generation, super switched on intelligent. And I think it would be nice to have the opportunity to collaborate with some of the older guard. Right? Like, you know, Jason, like, and Luke have run a mining pool for six years, right? Like the initial protocols, all of this stuff, you know that all of the stuff bitmain used for all of their mining firmware is all just ripped off from Luke's open source code that they just took and closed. And, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of history like that. So these guys are legends.
And I think, you know, I think it's like to some degree what Matt Corello did went over the top because it became entitled, right? It was like, you have to use our thing. And I'm like, of course we don't have to use your thing. That's ridiculous. And that was sort of personal offense and all that, but I still would rather be gracious about it. He was up there before Trump speaking to a room like probably one of the biggest audiences in bitcoin's history and did like an hour long presentation on decentralization issues in mining. I really appreciate it. Like, someone needs to bang that drum and he's been doing it. And that was one of the best you know, oh, he's one of the.
[01:35:24] Speaker A: Best resources on that, like, far and away.
[01:35:27] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I'm happy he did it. I still appreciate the dude. I don't think he's not happy with me, but I don't. I can't be bothered, like, with having some animosity there. So I think, like, I think we.
[01:35:39] Speaker B: We have to cut the colored hair people some slack, because they all seem to have emotional issues.
[01:35:44] Speaker C: Hey, he's gone blonde again.
[01:35:49] Speaker A: Let's do it. Let's do it.
[01:35:51] Speaker D: Coming at this from, like, a slightly different angle, I've always thought that the problem with stratum v two was an incentive problem, because in order for it to work, you would have to have the mining pools actually want it instead of trying to push it on the mining pools. And if the mining pools actually want it, they're going to tell you exactly what they want, and they're gonna. You're either gonna do exactly what the mining pool tells you to do, or it's not gonna work. So this is just a situation where it seems like they were kind of holding out hope that you were gonna be the one mining pool that actually wanted it, but you just did what every mining pool would do, which is.
Right. Exactly what you want to have. So it's like, you know, it's like they always thought there was an incentive problem, and this is just like a. A natural outcome of that same problem.
[01:36:43] Speaker C: This is exactly right. I'm really glad you said that, because I almost forgot to make the point that was the critique forever is why would a miner take on additional complexity altruistically to help the decentralization of the network? How are we going to rely on that? So Ocean's fees are half for people that make their own blocks. That was built in from the off. We announced that Ocean's launch way before dam was even a thing. We said, right, 2% fees across the board. If you're making your own blocks, 1% fees. So that should be enough to actually incentivize miners to do it. And it comes down to a pool wanting decentralization and mining, and none of them do. They don't care.
[01:37:21] Speaker D: Exactly.
[01:37:22] Speaker C: They can support SV two as a virtue signal, and there are pools that do that, but they're never going to start moving heavy furniture around to actually push their miners into using that aspect of Sv two. None of them do. So brains supports SV two, and they'll have it proudly, like, we are the first pool to support SV two. But is your intention to decentralize templates fuck no. Couldn't be further from the truth. They're basically just white labeled ant pool blocks. Now they have all the transaction like. People have analyzed the stratum work they're getting from brains, and it's basically identical to what comes out of ant pool to the point where you're seeing matching Merkel routes. And it's like, yeah, there's a one in 800 trillion chance that that's a coincidence.
So they're moving in the opposite direction. They don't care about trying to make miners, empower miners and take away power from the pool. It's completely the opposite.
Even as a pool, we don't want to be sovereign in a template construction. We just want to have our parent company do it bitmain. And in exchange for that, we can continue to operate as a pool and continue to be able to afford to pay out miners in the FPPS fashion, which is really hard for tiny pools. And brains is a very small pool. It's only a couple of percent. FPPS is horrible at that size because any run of bad luck, you're still on the hook for millions of dollars. But it just gets the fact that that's the intention of the pool means you can call yourself stratum v two all you want. People have conflated stratum v two with decentralization of mining. And that's not the same thing right at heart. Remember, it was conceived as encrypting communications between centralized pools and their miners, which is strictly better than sv one, but it has nothing to do with decentralization. It's a security fix. So if that's all sv two is to you, but you're branding yourself as an sv two pool. But your actions show that you have no interest in decentralizing template construction. In fact, you're posing, you are really acting as a front, as a white label for the second biggest pool out there and helping it obfuscate its true size. You're making everything worse. Like, demonstrably so. So that that connotation between sv two, like, at one point it was like, should we just use sv two, change the necessary elements of it, and just not call it sv two because it's been so bastardized and people are so wrong. Like, you know, that was a genuine conversation at one point. And regardless of where it ended up and what we ended up doing, you're right. We built a bespoke thing that does the exact thing ocean needs it to do. But it all is downstream from the intentions of the people that run ocean as a pool. We want miners making templates. That's the end of the story. And we built something specifically to do that. But even if we used SV two, we'd be using it in a way that none of the Sv two people at the moment actually are. And it comes down to just that. What is it that the people that run this thing want? And then when you get into the nuance and you dig into it, what programming language is it written in? Like all this stuff? Okay, fine, but none of that really matters that much. It really just comes down to like, what's the intention here? What are people trying to do? And then you can infer all the ways that manifests through the choices. Like there's default settings, there's a million settings in datum. The defaults all make sense. If you want what we want in SV two, is it going to just naturally out of the box, be conducive to the kind of thing you might want to see? It'll be totally different. It will on paper be capable of identical stuff, but in the way it gets used is going to reflect the intentions of the people behind the project. The way SV two is being used right now is to encrypt communications between pools and miners. That doesn't decentralize templates. It can decentralize templates, but that was never the initial goal of it. That was an afterthought. And even if it's being well executed now, it's indicative of how the thing actually is being used. Right. So the way datum is going to be used is by people that want to actually solo mine or people that want to mine collaboratively but actually want to construct their own blocks, if just for altruism. Or maybe they're a pretty big miner and actually they have a big on chain footprint and they really do want to be defining their own block space. And they have like a good shot of finding a block or two a week, right. That you can have that too, and that datum is totally appropriate for them.
[01:41:49] Speaker A: Well, I'll tell you, the big thing for me is always like, it's one of those things. It's like the peer to peer stuff for me for a long time is how many times I've found something that's just really cool and seems to solve the problem and accomplish the thing that I'm going after. But then I never have a version of it that I can use or that I could show to somebody else. And purely in the context of me being a user and a miner in my home, something that I can just install, I can just download and have it running on my start nine and then I can connect to it and change like a couple of settings and then it will work for me.
That's just a huge deal. And you know, like sure there's probably some other option out there, but is it in front of me? It's like Keat and all the peer to peer stuff and I've been doing with wholesale or whatever, it's just like, it's just something that I can use and every time I try to use it, it works.
That's really all I care about. Can I mine with my node and can I install this and plug it in so that it works? And if it does, then that's the one I'm going to use. Even if it is the slower one or it's not optimal or it's written in a code language that some developer has some very incredibly informed opinion as to why they shouldn't have done that. Well, that's the one that I got.
That's what's in front of me, that's all I care about.
[01:43:22] Speaker C: I think the comparisons will be made around the features. I think probably at this point there is no feature that datum has that SV two doesn't also have. But it's going to be like I can edit a video in final cut or something that 99% of people would use, or I can use FFmpeg in Linux.
I'm sure there's someone out there will tell me that FFmpeg has every single.
[01:43:47] Speaker A: Feature, so many more. FFmpeg is serious, but at the end.
[01:43:52] Speaker C: Of the day, no one's going to use that because it's not written by people. Ffmpeg is written by people with a different intention than Apple making final cut. Like it's, so it's not about features, it's just about approach and intention of the people behind it. And then, so this is where I'm like, I don't want to get into arguments with you, Carallo, because you're just going to keep playing gotcha. Like we can do that with SV two. Oh, you think that's unique? We can do that as well. I'm like, yeah, but no one is. And the reason for that is basically social and psychological. It's not a technical debate, so I don't want to get sucked into that. And also, there's no need, right? There's no monetary thing. Like no one's getting rich off of sv two. So it shouldn't go into that level of like samurai wasabi. Beef where it's like every customer, like.
[01:44:38] Speaker A: Every time you use us to pay.
[01:44:39] Speaker C: Yeah, like it's people making a lot of money. Coordinating coin joins. Right. But like no one's, no one's getting rich every time someone uses datum instead of sv two. It's not, it's an open protocol. Right. So hopefully there'll be another datum pool spin up. But yeah, it just, I think it's that it just comes down to open, you know, intentions of the people behind the project, making it conducive to a specific use case. But there's only three things you need to put into your datum server when you plug it in out of the box. Just three things.
The secondary coin based text, which is where you would write guy swan. And then if and when, you know, you've been mining on ocean for two years or whatever, and then finally you find a block on mempool space. It will say Guy Swan on the actual block, which is freaking amazing.
[01:45:26] Speaker A: I want to do that.
I want to do that.
[01:45:30] Speaker C: But the point is you can do it whilst getting reward splits the whole time from other people's blocks. You don't need to actually solo mine it. So that to me is cool. That's one of my favorite features about it. But I mean, that was memple working with us because they support the mission mempool space. So really appreciate them for doing that. They haven't pushed it to prod yet, but the code has been merged into their GitHub.
[01:45:53] Speaker A: Guy Swan was here, you heard it here first. One day. One day.
[01:45:57] Speaker C: So those are the, there are three required fields. That's it. So required field number one is RPC user. Number two is RPC password. Right. That is so that you can log in. That's so that your datum server can communicate with bitcoin. If you can't do that, then it will just, it won't. When you start it up, it will panic and quit.
[01:46:17] Speaker A: Nothing happens.
[01:46:18] Speaker C: You can't find a bitcoin node. RPC URL as well is required for the same reason. Then the only other required thing in the entire config is what's your bitcoin address? That's it. That's the only other thing you have to put in.
[01:46:31] Speaker D: That's awesome.
[01:46:33] Speaker C: So out of the box it will just connect to ocean and all your shares will go there. And that's it. And it's, and like I said, it's 200 kb, man. So you can just run it on anything. Like I got, I set up a datum box for someone last week. That's the guy who just found the last. The last ocean block, which was the first atom block. It was like a $500 intel nook or something, 32 gig of ram. That guy's got like 8000 miners connected to that one box.
And it's like running a 2% cpu or something. It's unbelievable. And I just don't think there's going to be benchmarking, but I don't think SV two is going to do that. I think if you try to hook up 10,000 miners to an SV two like stratum server written in rust, I just feel like it's going to be an order of magnitude more hungry. But the benchmarking hasn't been done yet. But they just. Luke and Jason were going to use simpler heuristics. They're like, nah, that's not the right way to do it. We need it to be, like, unbelievably lean from the beginning. The benchmarks will be revealing, but I don't. There's one thing I'm pretty confident in is SV two is not going to be leaner, having been written in rust, than what datum is.
[01:47:46] Speaker A: Well, we'll find out. We'll cover it on the next episode of the Roundtable.
[01:47:50] Speaker C: Yes, yes.
[01:47:52] Speaker D: Kind of like, you know why you send somebody to river or swan instead of the coinbase? You know, if you just want them to buy bitcoin, you don't send them to the place that has like a million other things.
[01:48:02] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[01:48:02] Speaker C: I. Yeah, that's the best example. Thank you. Like, I send you to bull bitcoin because they don't sell f. Like if I send you to another exchange, you're gonna start asking me what ETH is, what XRP is and all this. And I don't want to. I tell you to buy a cold card, not a trezor, for the same reason. Do they both sell bitcoin? Yes. So. But that's not the point, is it? The point is, what are these other things that they do that is gonna lead you down dark path? That's such a good point. That's exactly.
[01:48:28] Speaker A: Sometimes the lack of features is a really important feature.
[01:48:33] Speaker D: It's also similar to how me and mechanic both like Spectre a little bit over Sparrow, because Spectre, you have to connect to your own node, whereas Sparrow, you kind of have the choice not to.
Dude, one of the things I love about this, other than the decent, obviously the decentralized template construction is the most important, but just getting more active economic nodes on the network.
It gets people more involved with their node and it gets the network more happy to listen to everyone's node, because now, practically, how many different nodes do new blocks come from? 30 or whatever. But now we could have new blocks coming from 100 or 200 more different nodes. Everyone has to be way more connected to other nodes.
[01:49:25] Speaker A: And that's a great point.
[01:49:27] Speaker D: Anything that gets people more listening or more connected to their node and they're known more economically involved in the network, I think is awesome.
[01:49:35] Speaker C: Yeah, and the numbers are so bad and so small, the ocean can make a big impact. So, like, I think since the beginning of the year, 180 bitcoin addresses have gotten coins out of the coinbase.
[01:49:48] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:49:48] Speaker C: So that's it.
[01:49:49] Speaker A: Like 180?
[01:49:51] Speaker C: Yeah, that's it.
[01:49:52] Speaker A: That's basically a days worth of blocks in a whole year.
[01:49:55] Speaker C: So, yeah, 180 bitcoin addresses or something.
[01:49:58] Speaker A: And one a days worth of blocks in a year.
[01:50:01] Speaker C: Yeah. And a lot of them were mining pools paying themselves ordinals, by the way. So, like, you can scrap like 20 of them off. And one, the Peter pool found a block this year, which happens like once every five years, and that was like another 20 addresses or something. So really there's like, you know, like probably like 30 bitcoin addresses getting 90% of everything that comes out of the chain. So, like, then ocean finds a block with 70 outputs in the coinbase, and we like more than half of it that's been found this year. Are ocean miners getting paid directly from the coinbase.
[01:50:38] Speaker A: Wow. And how much of you, how much of the quote unquote percent hash rate is ocean?
[01:50:43] Speaker C: 0.3%.
[01:50:45] Speaker A: No, no, 3%. And like a majority of the coin.
[01:50:49] Speaker C: We are the majority of bitcoin addresses getting paid fresh bitcoin.
[01:50:54] Speaker A: You know, that's a really hard thing to argue with. Like, that's a really difficult thing to argue with.
[01:50:59] Speaker C: It's because the numbers are so bad. Like, if one pool can come along and pay out another 70 new addresses that no one's seen before, or freshly mined bitcoins, that shouldn't be that significant. But it was just because of how ridiculous, and I'm being generous when I say it's 170.
If you forget the ordinals things, if you forget a couple of mining pool switching addresses, and if you forget that we found out that ten pools all pay out to the same pair of hands with this kobo custodian mononaut published that. Or is it ox ten BTC, that guy, they found out like, oh yeah, f two pool and bitmain Antpool. Sorry, and brains and btC.com and pool in. And I think Luxor and like four other pools all use the same custodian for everything that comes out the chain. I'm not even taking that into account. If you do like, oceans paying out 70 people when we find a big coinbase template and, you know, the rest of the pools combined are like 40. So that was, it was really decentralizing for sure. And then what Steve said about the nodes, that's relevant too, because what's in the mempools of this tiny cartel of template makers is the de facto what goes in the chain. They are the super nodes. Right. And you remember that issue with lightning, with that attack that everyone was worried about. I can't remember what it was. It was like a year ago.
[01:52:28] Speaker A: Yeah, you're talking about the transaction replacement attack.
[01:52:33] Speaker C: I can't remember actually what it was.
[01:52:34] Speaker A: The one where they try to force.
There was one where they can take in a unrelated output or unrelated input and basically pay a higher fee and replace the proper settlement transaction in the mempool for certain nodes. And then you would have to rebroadcast again and you'd be fighting this fight of rebroadcasting. And I guess it's a good point that if these, if this one group of like 90% decides to just ignore the rebroadcaster, like, hold on. If they make a decision about it, your ability to rebroadcast and get it in there is now permissioned by them.
[01:53:18] Speaker C: Yeah. You can't have super nodes that have this sort of closed club around what can go in the blockchain and what can't.
That's not.
[01:53:29] Speaker D: What's the minimum. I mean, obviously you're not trying to create a bunch of tiny utxos. What's the minimum payout in your coinbases.
[01:53:37] Speaker C: That you can get a million sats? Well, it's ten tonal bitcoins, because Luke does things in base 16 instead of ten.
[01:53:46] Speaker D: Of course it does.
[01:53:48] Speaker C: If you, if you. Whatever the power of two is, that's near a million. It's like 1,040,000 and something, you know, like a power of two is very close to a million. I can't remember exactly. Yeah, the number is. Yeah, that's.
Yeah, I know. It drives me nuts.
Can we just use a decimal system like everyone else does? No. Basic steam.
[01:54:11] Speaker D: It's more efficient, it's lighter weights. Quite a way to do it in power too.
[01:54:15] Speaker C: Yeah, decimals. A shit coin.
[01:54:22] Speaker A: 300 bit.
[01:54:28] Speaker B: So basically, giga hash gigahash IO or whatever still exists and has just been laundered under many names. And ocean is gonna kill it.
[01:54:38] Speaker C: That's. I hope so, man. That was the thing. Like, everyone is just, you know, if Gigahash IO happens again, don't worry, all the miners will just leave like they did with Gigash IO.
[01:54:49] Speaker B: They did.
[01:54:50] Speaker C: They won't. They are not cypherpunks anymore. They're publicly traded us blue pilled fox. That was if foundry started censoring transactions. They probably like it, like, Michael Saylor and those guys aren't gonna have an issue with that. I just don't. They'd be like, yeah, cool. Well, they were all drug related transactions anyway, so.
[01:55:09] Speaker A: And then in addition, though, is that they already learned from the playbook. You just make it not look. That's how you, this is the game of politics is you just make it not look like it's 51%, which is exactly what they did. They made a pool and then sub pools and sub pools so it looks decentralized and you've caught everybody that mattered. You've killed the social environment of everybody who just doesn't understand it well enough to know that. No, yeah, we have the exact same problem. We probably have the same problem worse than we did then, but nobody's outraged because, look, it's 20 pools.
[01:55:43] Speaker C: I just can't believe the cynicism of that being effective. Like, well, if ant pool gets to 40%, we'll get crushed. So we need to stay below 30% and then just have a bunch of smaller pools that aren't called Antpool and that are obviously just Antpool because they're doing the same work and using the same custodian, that should be fine, right? And also, by the way, with a company that makes 90% of the hardware and it's all closed source and backdoor should be fine, right? And everyone's like, yeah, don't worry, bitcoin is totally secure. 21 million forever. I'm like, you can't be serious, man. This is so centralized. Like, it's powerfully, powerfully broken. And I don't even know what's going to happen with the hardware element. It's not like oceans are out to fix that. And we suffer from how bad the hardware is. Like, 90% of the annoying things we have to do as pool operators is to work around the limitations of ant miners and Lux Os.
[01:56:39] Speaker B: By the way, on that front we do have there is. It does look better, right? Like, isn't blockstream and block and like, a couple other companies actually working on their own chip manufacturing stuff.
[01:56:53] Speaker C: I feel like that's just always been, that's like stratum v two again. It's like, don't worry, help is coming and it just never seems to arrive.
[01:57:01] Speaker B: Yeah, it does take years to, I mean, like, I get what you're saying, but I think, like, I don't know from what I read that like, these things are really happening. It just, it just takes like literally five years to even begin to, you know.
[01:57:18] Speaker C: Yeah, you got to get your foot, you got to stand in line at the semiconductor manufacturing thing and you always have to get behind Bitmain because they're so big that they always get to the front of the line. So you've got to raise millions of dollars. You've got to have a very sound thesis and then you've got to say, hey, I need all this to be, you know, I need all this chip fabrication to happen in April of 2027 and I'll be ready at that point. And you have to commit, right, to even keep your foot in the door and it's precarious and scary. Right. And you can just get bullied out by bitmain in five minutes. Right. They've got so much money. So I don't know, like, I hope you're right, man.
[01:57:57] Speaker A: I think it's one of those things too, though, is that you have to do it ten times for one of them to work and. Yes, and, you know, like there's not, there's never one solution. Nothing ever solves it the way that you think it is or it doesn't implement the right way or something. It, the whole game is just beat your face against it until something falls out that's useful. And it seems that the problems lie entirely in the technical landscape. None of them are unsolvable.
They literally just need a built solution that catches or that has things line up at the right time or in the right way. None of them are fundamental problems in my opinion. Just like you being a good example is, or datum being a good example is that if it catches and a couple of big miners recognize the benefit of lower fees and running their own node, there could be a lot of momentum against something very, very quickly. Things change really, really quickly just in a general market sentiment. Two years ago, the AI market was non existent for all intents and purposes, from like, things can change really, really quick. They just can.
And it's just keep building stuff and seeing what works, keep trying to solve problems in a different way. And that's why I just can't possibly be upset that the other potential solution didn't get used and somebody else built a different way. Because I think that's how it works. That's how we'll get privacy things. It'll be how ark. It's like, oh, is it ark? I don't know. Is it coin join? I don't know. Is it ecash? I don't know. You have to build all 20 of them, and then suddenly it's fediment or it's something else.
[01:59:50] Speaker B: Some improvement on lightning makes lightning the winner.
[01:59:53] Speaker C: Yeah, I think all twelve. I think the product developer in me wants to just like, we already said it, but it's kind of blown my mind because I hadn't realized it before how much I like it. There's nothing better than a product that does one thing and does it really well. There's nothing more annoying than, like, a product that does a hundred things and none of it all that well.
[02:00:12] Speaker A: Like, it's just thousand percent.
[02:00:15] Speaker C: It's just so. It's so refreshing, the simplicity of it. Like the hammer, right? Or the spear.
[02:00:20] Speaker A: Like, nobody's found a replacement for the hammer in a really, really long time. I still use that shit all the time.
[02:00:27] Speaker C: Right? And how dumb is the guy? That's like, yeah, I made a screwdriver that doubles as a hammer. It's like, just don't just dump.
[02:00:34] Speaker D: I got a. Another technical question.
Isn't there some super fast communication protocol that some of the major mining pools used to communicate with each other to get blocks as fast as possible? Like fiber or something like that?
You know what I'm talking about?
[02:00:52] Speaker C: That was a Corallo thing, right?
[02:00:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:00:55] Speaker D: Yeah.
[02:00:55] Speaker A: There's a couple that's a separate network between major miners.
[02:01:00] Speaker C: Yeah. An intra. An intranet wanted to set up.
[02:01:03] Speaker D: Right.
[02:01:04] Speaker C: I do know something that was told in confidence that I probably shouldn't share, but I'll try and just abstract it.
One entity, a big entity in the mining space, tried to create a closed club where they would just tell each other about blocks before they told the wider network because they have enough hashrate amongst themselves to not suffer from delaying a bit. So between themselves, they can give themselves a 32nd head start or whatever on their new block, and then any small pool, like trying to keep its head above water now has to deal with the fact that it has a 32nd lag before it can even start doing useful work. Like, the person that was approached, the entity that was approached about this told the other actor to fuck off. So that's a relief. But if they hadn't it would be just totally broken.
[02:01:56] Speaker D: This is a public thing like that. If there is something like that, it's private. And you guys aren't going to join anything like that.
[02:02:03] Speaker C: No, we wouldn't. Of course not. That's, that's just completely immoral.
[02:02:08] Speaker D: Yeah, I love that. It just goes out. Just regular node communication. Just.
[02:02:14] Speaker C: I think they do have thick cables sound between each other.
[02:02:17] Speaker D: Yeah, sure.
[02:02:18] Speaker C: Like, you'd assume so, like, the big pools need to know about this stuff fast.
[02:02:22] Speaker D: Chad said something called falcon.
[02:02:26] Speaker C: That's it.
[02:02:27] Speaker A: I think Chad chibi t is making something.
[02:02:28] Speaker D: Yeah, I think Chad chibi is making. Well, it did say fiber, but then it said Falcon was another fiber, was.
[02:02:34] Speaker C: A macarella thing that he was trying to set up, I believe. But I might be misremembering it. But I think, like, at the same time, these, there's a lot of, like, sloppy behavior in the big mining pools where you're like, whoa, you have 30% of the network hash rate, and you, there's like a pigeon living inside, like, like the ethernet switch.
There's a lot of that going on. Like, foundry don't do the empty block speed up still, which is just absolute fact. If you don't do the empty block speed up, you will never, ever find a block, like 2 seconds after the last network block. And that's just a fact, right? And you can look at the chart and be like, here's like the, you know, 80,000 blocks or something. That foundry found in the last few years, all of them are at least five or 6 seconds after the last network block. Ocean has found like 80 blocks, and three of them were in like 2 seconds, and that's why they were empty. So if you don't do the mp block speed up, you just don't find those blocks. That's all. So that's literally just your miners are spending longer doing useless work, and the only advantage you can have is if you're the biggest pool, you can actually afford to not do the empty block speed up because you can build on top of your own stales and you can actually out compete the chain sometimes. But foundry never do. Every time there's a race condition where there's two competing best chains, foundry always build on top of the one that wasn't the one they found. They always graciously build on top of, like, supposing they find a, like, supposing foundry finds a block at, like, t zero, and then ant pool finds a block at, you know, 20 milliseconds after that, they will ditch their block and start building on top of the ant pool, one which is like an incredibly good natured thing to do. And that's, you know, because they're in a position. Foundry are so big that they could build on top of their stale. And in this case, it's not a stale. They actually found their block first, but they still discard it when there's that condition.
So I generally speak well of foundry because they're the one fpps exception.
They're the biggest entity that's capable of not being bitmain and being genuinely independent. And I don't like the KYC, and I don't like the, you know, if you're a miner mining on foundry, I think that it's monthly inspections and all of this stuff that they need to do to satisfy regulators. Obviously, I don't like all that, but I believe they don't want to be doing it. They're just trying to survive as a business. I genuinely like them as people. They're not part of the whole ant pool cartel. They're meaningfully separate.
[02:05:12] Speaker A: Well, you know what? I think that's a good note to close this out on, but I am curious. I want to go around and get everybody's thing. For the last month, either what they've been thinking about, I mean, mechanic, we may have just been talking about that for 45 minutes, but what they've been thinking about or what they've been focused on or what they're excited about in the bitcoin space. And mechanic will go to you if you have something other than datum.
[02:05:40] Speaker C: I got nothing else.
[02:05:41] Speaker A: Got nothing else. All right, we'll go to Steve.
[02:05:45] Speaker D: Um, well, Datum's my favorite thing for sure. Um, before Datum, though, I got really into the, um, inspecting the mempools out there to see what was in there, and this image kept came in my mind of a bag of chips where, like, all the good doritos are on the top and then, like, at the bottom, just a bunch of crumbs. And, um, I've been thinking about making this meme because that's exactly the situation in the mempool right now. Mempool space, um, they're the Google lens. Whatever visualizer of the upcoming blocks is just amazing. You can see exactly, like, what's real transactions and what's right.
[02:06:24] Speaker C: Google goggles.
[02:06:25] Speaker D: Goggle, right, sorry.
[02:06:27] Speaker C: Not Google goggle.
[02:06:28] Speaker A: No. Dude, I love nimble that space, man. It's such a cool.
[02:06:32] Speaker D: But, yeah, I mean, we're getting into, I mean, this last few days, we saw a little bit more. But, like, the trend of the last week was such that pretty much all blocks were going to be operations consolidations. And I liked that for consolidations. But I thought we were getting to the point where it was going to be all op returns. And I was a little worried about that.
[02:06:53] Speaker A: I had transactions in there. Been doing a lot of them.
I've been doing a bunch of on chain lately.
[02:06:59] Speaker C: Can you share screen at all or this is an audio only thing?
[02:07:03] Speaker A: No, you can see our screen. That's video.
[02:07:05] Speaker C: Do you want to bring up the last block foundry just found? It's like, it's seven giant opera turns. I haven't seen that before.
[02:07:13] Speaker D: Like a consolidation plus oper turn.
[02:07:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[02:07:16] Speaker D: Or a batch payment plus oper turn.
[02:07:19] Speaker C: Let's do batch plus op.
[02:07:23] Speaker D: Yeah.
[02:07:23] Speaker C: 2000 2200 outputs.
[02:07:27] Speaker A: One input mempool goggles. Is that. Is that this one you're talking about? The last one.
[02:07:33] Speaker C: So now click on the last block. Okay. They just found another one. Click on that one. Yeah. And then if you scroll down to actual block, hover over that whole area where it says, yeah. Now click on the goggles in the top left, like the ski mask thing, and then change it to any at the top, and then scroll down to op return. It's like. Yeah, there you go.
Now you can see the op returns in there. So.
[02:07:58] Speaker A: Wow.
[02:07:59] Speaker C: As usual, like 70 or 80% of the block space is used by op returns.
But they tend to be tiny because most of it's been runes.
[02:08:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that's about to say it's been the really little stuff. Yeah.
[02:08:13] Speaker C: So I haven't seen giant ones like that before. But clicking on one of those transactions, they're all dust outputs made from one input of a million sats.
[02:08:23] Speaker D: Something like that is normally an exchange distribution. Right. Like exchange payout.
[02:08:29] Speaker C: But why would an exchange. No, an exchange isn't making hundreds of unspendable outputs.
[02:08:35] Speaker D: They're all unspendable outputs.
[02:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah. This is all 330 sats. It's all 330. And then there's a 546.
[02:08:43] Speaker C: Well, it depends on what it is. Like, the dust limit isn't like a fixed number, and it isn't even a consistent number within one block because it depends what the crap is that's being paid. So 330 can be the dust limit.
[02:08:58] Speaker D: That's a little bit segue. Dust limit.
[02:09:01] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes sense. So 330 is the is. I don't know. I think 330 isn't unspendable in that context. I would assume not.
Otherwise.
[02:09:11] Speaker A: This is what I'm used to seeing. With all the. You said these are the stamps or something?
[02:09:19] Speaker C: Yeah, usually. Probably that'll just be. And this is why, like, we kind of won the spam wars. Like, I'm gonna be honest, like, I can't believe I'm saying it, but all of the spam basically died except the least harmful form of it, which is one input, one output. Op return doesn't attack fungibility like ordinals, doesn't create Utxo bloat, because it's just one input, one output doesn't take advantage of the witness discount like inscriptions did. It's just op return. So I'm looking at it, and I'm like, if that's all that's left of spam right now, and transaction fees are two sets per byte, is it too soon to declare victory?
[02:09:57] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I think it's really just the incentives. Like, I just. I don't. I just don't think there's a long term market.
Like, it's like, it always seems to just exist in this big, explosive hype, and then it dies down in no time. Every single time one of these things launches, it's the same thing.
Just the whole shitcoin market is they talk about, oh, we've got all these decentralized exchanges and all of this stuff, and we're building all this cool tech, and I'm like, well, what does your decentralized exchange do? It's like, well, it lets you trade between a bunch of utility tokens. And what do those utility tokens do? Well, you build decentralized exchanges on them. And I'm like, well, you realize that this exists entirely for the degree that there is some sort of apparent excuse why some utility token is going to moon, so that people can gamble, so that people can just trade it is trading systems for the sake of trading without anything actually underlying all of it.
I've just always thought it's just going to. It will go through hype cycles, but it's just going to keep bleeding until it kind of dies, because there's just not a. There's not going to be a vast long term market for trading shit that nobody can explain why it's worth anything.
[02:11:19] Speaker B: Well, you got to hold your shit coins so you can. You can collect the yield. And then what's the yield? Another shit to trade shit coins.
[02:11:27] Speaker A: It's yield trading shit coins. Like, people trade shitcoins and they pay you yield for the whole shitcoins that you hold, which is governance tokens in the decentralized exchange. That trade shitcoins I get literally.
And I kind of feel. I've always kind of felt the same way. As much as turtles. There's a lot of things to talk about or complain about or talk about how it's pooping in the park. I've also just thought it was just going to kill itself.
[02:11:54] Speaker C: What did you think of Sayla going full bitcoin needs yield.
[02:11:59] Speaker B: When did he say that? Oh.
[02:12:03] Speaker C: He said it was safer, Dean.
[02:12:04] Speaker B: Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. Cuz he was saying that the credit markets or whatever wouldn't work or whatever without. Yeah, I don't know.
[02:12:11] Speaker C: I haven't.
[02:12:12] Speaker B: Weirdly, I haven't been able to listen to safety podcasts because found it's the only podcast that will not play on my fountain app.
[02:12:19] Speaker D: Weird.
[02:12:19] Speaker B: It, like it'll. Some episodes will play, but then they stop at the commercials and I can't, like once it does an ad read, I can't listen.
[02:12:28] Speaker C: Yeah.
[02:12:29] Speaker A: Well, on that note, is that the thing you've been thinking about for the man?
[02:12:33] Speaker B: I've been thinking, I don't know, I've been like, felt like crap the last few days and arguing with normies for no reason. I shouldn't do it.
[02:12:42] Speaker A: Dude, you're wasting your time. That's probably why you feel like crap.
[02:12:45] Speaker B: Well, no, no, it didn't make me sick.
[02:12:48] Speaker A: You call, you caught Omicron through Facebook.
[02:12:52] Speaker B: Arguing street Fighter om Prime.
[02:12:54] Speaker C: There are a few people I know like you, Jeff. There's Chris Guida and this guy Konza. Like, I see them and they will just engage anyone. Like, someone has a wrong opinion with two followers on Twitter and I'll watch them go back and forth in public for like five days.
[02:13:10] Speaker B: Just honestly, I'm trying to work. Trying to work things out for myself. Like, I'm trying to figure out what it is that, like, I've been.
[02:13:19] Speaker A: I'm not addicted. I can quit anytime I want.
[02:13:23] Speaker B: Listen, that's definitely part of it. But there is a. I genuinely am trying to, like, I mean, or whatever, this is what I've been telling myself. I'm trying to write a book and I'm trying to figure out how, what it is that has got, at a fundamental level that separates my worldview from the Normie worldview. And there are a couple, there are a handful of things. Like, you know, it's the trust in your own ability to make a decision about something is a big one. There is some sort of weird, I mean, like, I guess this is the same. Looks like it's a similar sort of insecurity. There's some sort of weird self loathing that, like, is like, deeply tied to all of this. I mean, like, I don't think it's like a coincidence that, like, when you look at the political landscape, the people that are promoting all of the worst policies all think the world is overpopulated. They all think people are having too many kids. They celebrate abortion. They celebrate, they celebrate all of the most destructive, like, death to human industrialization.
[02:14:22] Speaker A: Yeah, whatever.
[02:14:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Green energy, which destabilizes everything and, you know, doesn't work. You know, like, everything is like, anti human and, you know, to some degree, you can't, like, obviously you can't have write a book or like, craft a video that's going to make people like themselves. If there's something that deep like that, that's, you know, at play, but, but just trying to figure out, like, what it is that is, that is like, really, like, are there things that we can address that, like help people not, you know, like, they help wake people up? I mean, yeah, I don't know.
[02:15:02] Speaker C: I think it's fundamentally, it's disassociation from people's own intuitions and senses of their own health.
This is like the psychological wisdom that the flat earthers sort of point out that I really appreciate, despite not believing it. But the point is, if you can.
[02:15:22] Speaker A: This is where we clip the.
This is where we clip. BTC mechanic thinks flat earthers are really good people.
[02:15:30] Speaker C: Well, actually, there's great people on both sides.
Usually they're not. I find them really annoying generally. But there is like, there is wisdom in the fact that whether it's true or not, you know, the, the unintuitive perspective of what the universe is and how it works, that you're sort of taught as a child that separates you from your own intuition. Like, you know, your intuition when you're born is that you're standing on solid ground that isn't moving, that's flat. I like, that's how you feel as like a two year old or whatever. And then, you know, you're shown globes and you're shown that, well, actually, you're hurling through space right now and, you know, we're going around the sun, not the other way and all that stuff. And regardless of the truth or not, it just kind of ingrains into you this idea that I can't intuitively figure out the nature of anything. I just need to listen to Neil degrasse Tyson and he'll tell me what's true and what isn't.
[02:16:28] Speaker B: And everybody, everybody wants me to listen to Neil degrasse Tyson. Like, the normies love, they worship this man.
[02:16:36] Speaker C: Dude, listen, in my downtime, I will watch a lot of YouTube shorts. Like, if I've just got to kill time and I'm just too tired to be productive, I'll just scroll. YouTube shorts? That's my vice. Right, and I know how the algorithm works. If you skip something the minute you see it, the algo's supposed to go, yeah, he doesn't like that content. Every single day. It's trying to get me to watch Neil degrasse Tyson. I hate this guy. Every time I see him. I even want to make a YouTube account just so I can dislike them. Now, just like, stop showing me this. I don't like this guy. He's a Covid Nazi. Like, he's just an ignorant fool. And, you know, I digress. I'm just saying, like, when you condition people into thinking, look, I know, me, sticking this sharp needle of glass into your arm to inject a bunch of chemicals that's going to make you feel crap, intuitively, seems like something you should be afraid of and not trust, but don't worry, it's fine. And you end up with the phenomenon of the, what's it called? The Milgram experiment. What's the one where they just, like, people will press the button that says they're going to kill someone because the doctor says to do it again? When you get people into that much of a state of, look, man, I don't even know what shape the ground I'm standing on is and I don't know anything. Like, people just get afraid and they get a.
It's terrifying, right? Because you keep telling people you can't understand anything. Like, you can't be trusted with your own health, you can't be trusted to think. And to be fair, that is just how we've been conditioned. We've been conditioned to think that the universe is unintelligible to us. We need to defer to the experts on everything that's not really a psychological state or a conditioning that's conducive to people that can look at stuff and go, no, I'm not taking the vaccine, or no, I don't think climate change is real or any of that. You're conditioning people in the opposite direction, which is, I'm going to trust the experts because I can't figure this stuff out.
[02:18:30] Speaker A: And how could you disagree? Because the expert said this. Who the hell?
[02:18:33] Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah, and the trouble is, experts lie. That's the problem.
[02:18:38] Speaker A: Experts are easily purchased they're easily purchased.
[02:18:41] Speaker B: You don't even. This is the thing that I keep coming up against too, is that everything's not a conspiracy. I agree, but there are like massive conspiracies of ignorance, because if the system is set up in such a way that it only funds one viewpoint and it punishes financially and socially and otherwise, every other viewpoint, then everybody.
[02:19:02] Speaker A: It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. Yeah, yeah. It'll just end up one way.
[02:19:06] Speaker B: Yeah. The thing is, even during COVID there were.
Head of the CDC was fired for disagreeing with the direction that things were going. And a whole bunch of. There were major, like, people who had been celebrated and put in these positions and they were the experts until they went against the agenda that was being forced. And now all of a sudden, they're gone and we don't even, like, we.
[02:19:32] Speaker A: Pretend these are not the experts you want to listen to.
[02:19:36] Speaker B: These are not the experts you were looking for.
[02:19:38] Speaker C: Dude, historic. Historic memple just pushed the code. So can you share screen again and just go on memple space and look up block eight? 6347-186-3471 yeah, this is it. This is the first. This is what I wanted to see.
[02:19:56] Speaker B: Like, what did they push?
[02:20:00] Speaker C: So this is an. You'll see in a sec.
[02:20:03] Speaker A: 863471.
[02:20:07] Speaker C: Yep.
So this is an ocean block. But look at the name of the block. Look at the name of the miner at the top where the blue actual block is just for crypto in the actual timeline, just for ocean block. But that's the name of the miner that put that in their datum config. They made that block. Ocean did.
[02:20:28] Speaker A: So you just. So we just got a new datum or datum block.
[02:20:31] Speaker C: No, that isn't 47 hours ago. But Mempool finally merged the code that allows them to introspect the coinbase text. So if you go down to the coinbase text in the first transaction, you can see the primary and secondary field. There it is just at the bottom left there. Now go down to the actual. There it is, the first transaction where it says Coinbase. So ocean is written in the primary field, just for crypto in the second field, which is the name of that miner. Thats what they call themselves.
[02:21:02] Speaker A: Nice.
[02:21:05] Speaker C: We wrote code for memple to look at that text in the coinbase and use that to label blocks on the timeline at the top. And that's what they've, they finally pushed it to prod.
[02:21:15] Speaker A: So while we were recording historic moment, guys, this is.
[02:21:20] Speaker C: They just merged.
[02:21:21] Speaker A: Where were you?
Hell yeah, dude. That's awesome.
[02:21:25] Speaker C: Well, that. Because you see the ocean logo there. It's an ocean block, but we didn't make it. The miner did. That's just. That changes everything, man. Like, yeah, it's. Honestly, this is, like, the. The moment.
[02:21:38] Speaker A: I need a guy swan block so bad.
[02:21:40] Speaker B: I'm gonna remember this forever.
[02:21:42] Speaker A: I need one so bad.
[02:21:43] Speaker B: It's just like where you were on 911 and when Trump said, grab him by the pussy.
[02:21:49] Speaker A: This two great events of my life.
[02:21:52] Speaker D: And were banned from YouTube.
[02:21:58] Speaker B: That is really awesome.
[02:21:59] Speaker C: You guys have at least a bit axe, right? If not more.
[02:22:03] Speaker A: I have two. What's. Miners.
M 30.
[02:22:06] Speaker B: Have an s nine right now.
[02:22:08] Speaker A: And I have an s nine, too.
[02:22:10] Speaker C: Space heater, run datum. And in the secondary coinbase, text. Write whatever you want. Bitcoin, audible. Guy swan. Yes. Just write. Write it in there.
[02:22:19] Speaker A: Yes. I'm gonna write Steve in my blocks.
[02:22:22] Speaker D: I'm gonna write my. My noster handle, which is reply guy.
[02:22:28] Speaker B: Oh, my God.
[02:22:31] Speaker C: I'm just. I'm looking forward to the trolling. Like, someone is gonna make a block called Hitler was right. And I'm just looking forward. I'm looking forward to that.
[02:22:39] Speaker B: It's gonna be so much fun.
[02:22:41] Speaker A: The troll blocks will start rolling in.
[02:22:43] Speaker C: I mean, the amount. You have to do 90 trillion rounds of double Sha 256 on average to get it. So if you have that much commitment to the troll respect, you deserve it.
[02:22:55] Speaker A: You deserve that. Hitler was right.
[02:22:58] Speaker C: Yeah. He could really deny it at that point, right?
[02:23:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:23:01] Speaker A: I mean, that's a proof of work right there, man.
Oh, Jesus. Okay, well, guys, I think this is a good place to wrap it up. Thank you. Thank you for joining me. We had 2 hours and 27 amazing minutes. Best minutes of my life right here. Really? All month long, I wait. I wait for these minutes. And I appreciate it. All right, guys, plug where. Where you are and where and why people should find you. I'm bitcoin audible. I'm guy Swan. Something. Okay, Jeff, what's up? What you got?
[02:23:32] Speaker B: Just noster this Agris view, and I don't even know what the rest of it like.
[02:23:38] Speaker A: And you argue with people on Facebook?
[02:23:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. I need to just delete Facebook. I don't know.
[02:23:46] Speaker A: You should need to take a hiatus. You shouldn't take it. Take a three month. I mean, three week break. You're gonna love it. And then you can ease back in and get addicted again. And then you can take three months. Three week break in six months again.
[02:23:57] Speaker B: That's not a bad plan.
Yeah.
[02:24:00] Speaker A: So Agris view link will be in the show. Notes mechanic call to action run datum.
[02:24:09] Speaker C: Even if you're running a bit x and you can print your name in the blockchain forever.
[02:24:14] Speaker A: Hell yeah.
[02:24:14] Speaker C: In a location where you're supposed to store arbitrary data, I might add.
[02:24:21] Speaker D: Steve yeah, mempools will be cleared by the end of this year. And hit me up at reply guy noster.
[02:24:29] Speaker B: That's terrible.
[02:24:31] Speaker A: Utxo live. That'll be in the show.
[02:24:36] Speaker B: I will send you the link to the Julian Assange speech too.
[02:24:40] Speaker A: Yes, yes, do that. I'll post it on Nastir. I'll put it on Noster Dot build so it doesn't get taken down off YouTube so that when it does, it'll still be around.
[02:24:48] Speaker C: All right, cool.
[02:24:50] Speaker A: Thanks, guys. Catch you on the next one.
[02:24:51] Speaker D: See ya.
[02:24:57] Speaker A: And that wraps up September with guys roundtable. I wanted to give a shout out, I mean, obviously just give a shout out to everybody who joins me. BTC mechanic, simple Steve and my brother Jeff. I really love this group and I have a lot of fun getting together with them links and details for if you want to follow them. If you're not following them, you should absolutely be doing so on Noster and or any other social media.
But also, I want to give a call out to anybody who has links or details or events or news items from the month. If you would send it to me, that is. I still don't hear about everything. I try to aggregate as much as I can, but I actually lean on my network a lot. It's a lot of what you guys are talking about or what gets shared with the audio knots group or what makes it into my feed, and I don't catch everything. And I would like to cover as much relevant news for the month so that this can kind of be a one stop shop for the people who don't really get the time to keep up with all of this stuff. That's the whole point of the roundtable, and it's just a huge help for anybody who catches something. If you just keep this in the back of your mind and you think about it, the next time something comes up and you're kind of excited to tell somebody else about it or you want to share it, think about, oh, guy, guy might be interested in this and shoot it my way. And that includes any news items or any articles, because that helps me filter things quite a bit to know what you are interested in. In order for me to decide and or filter through things, curate to know what to cover on the show. So just another reminder of that and thank you to everyone who has done that, to everyone who supports the show, to everyone who boosts and stream sats on fountain and does value for value.
To our amazing sponsors in the past who have supported this show. I have links and affiliate links to a lot of other services and things that I use right down in the description of the show and of course one last call out to everybody who has donated and helped out with the NC recovery effort after Hurricane Helene. I'm trying to post pretty regularly updates about what is going on and what I'm getting out of the area so if you follow me over there you can see that and if you ever want to feel like zapping or donating a little bit I will do what I can to make sure it goes to where it needs to go.
Again, thank you guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Guys Roundtable and until next time everybody take it easy guys.
