Roundtable_003 - Oct 2024 - Elections, Faketoshi Sues Again, Taxess, and ECB Concerned about FaiRNeSs

[00:00:00] Speaker A: What is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. And we have got a roundtable. We are back with mechanic Steve and my good brother Jeff and we are digging into everything that October is over. It feels like that was yesterday and we didn't even have time to deal with everything that happened in September. We got a number of different things with the sec, with taxes, with capital gains, with the election, which we don't even get to until the very end. But everybody had some really fun input on that. We've got some new developments with a number of the privacy related court cases going on with tornado cash and Samurai Craig Wright is suing people again. Shocker. Some major updates have dropped for BTC pay server and there's a new L2 design. LightSpark has just announced an entirely new layer two design, a unique one called Spark. Plus a number of different things to wrap up after Lugano and so much like really cool stuff was both unveiled and I got to talk to and see a lot of people. Ah, I finally, I got my Keat hoodie. I'm really stoked about this thing. I've been loving. I've been wearing it ever since I got it. Got to sit down with the hole punch crew. Did a fireside chat with Math David and Andrew and that is being edited and should be released soon. That'll be both on our show as well as the YouTube channel and I assume their YouTube channel as well. And we also did a Q and A after we, we went for like three hours. Like it was a serious rundown of so many of the different issues and things that we've been talking about. And then the tech and the things that they're building and everything going on with Keat. Just seriously, it was a marathon of conversation and Q and A. So definitely stay tuned for that. Don't forget to check out the sponsors or excuse me, our affiliates. And for sharing this show out and boosting and streaming on Fountain. Thank you to everyone who does because that is how this show gets out there and it's a great way to support our work and you know what I'm doing over here at Bitcoin Audible. Although with that, let's get into the news. Quick rundown before we jump into it for the Bitcoin weather report. We are at the block height 868-868-8300. The entire size of the time chain is just shy of 700 gigabytes. Now my 1 terabyte umbrel node is going to be on the struggle bus here in a couple of years. Hash rate is way up again. 4% increase for the last difficulty change. Bitcoin price recently shot up to $73,000 yesterday and it's back down to about $70,000 headed for 58k forever. And then the Mempool has an infinite number of transactions in it with a huge 600 megabyte backlog. And fees are 5 sats per V byte. So you can get a typical transaction in for about 40 cent, maybe 50 cent. It is an excellent time to consolidate, open up new channels, close old channels. And of course, if you haven't set up Albie Hub, we will be talking about it in this episode because they've had some really cool new things and I finally got to use it, put my hands on it and do some lightning transactions with it. So you'll hear all about it. And with that, that's the Bitcoin weather report and we will get into today's episode of Guy's roundtable number three. October 2024. This is Guy's Roundtable. Everybody wants the round table round. Okay, so it's so round. So yeah, it's a couple of court things. Craig Wright, Tornado cash, some taxation, the Swan, Bitcoin thing. I think we pretty much talked about that last time, so might not do that again, but might be worth bringing up if we have time. Datum has a thing. I don't know if anybody knows how to talk knows anything about that. Bolts with the BTC pay plugin. Haven't gotten to use, but I'm pretty jazzed about that. Albie Hub. Boom. Fucking love Albie Hub. [00:04:49] Speaker B: It's working out a bunch of these. [00:04:51] Speaker A: Things last time bolts and the BTC pay. You talking about that? [00:04:56] Speaker B: We talked about that. And then we didn't talk about Albie. [00:04:58] Speaker A: Hub too, Did we talk about Albion? Well, I didn't get to use it. I hadn't used it. [00:05:04] Speaker B: I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. [00:05:08] Speaker A: Maybe it did come up. I don't remember. But Datum is just update new release, Brink donation. So just kind of talk about some bitcoin development stuff. Tor project kind of cool. Donations matching up to $300,000. Just. Just support for it now. Light Spark. This one is interesting and I haven't gotten to go into the details, but there's a new layer two called literally Spark and it's kind of like a combo between. It's a bit inspired by state chains and it's a. It's actually. It actually seems really wild. I haven't gotten the technical aspects. It's very much like service provider esque and, you know, do a FEDI service provider. But it also has unilateral exit just with, you know, time locks for the typical. A typical thing. But I think it probably just kind of Inspires discussion about L2 stuff in general and maybe about soft forks, ossification, that sort of thing. I felt that's probably good to bring up just because there's still, quote, unquote, totally new things that we keep dropping. Then I did want to talk about the quantum resistant thing. The quantum resistant hash address, P2QRH, and the qubit, just because. Holy God. I go back and forth on that so much. Like, quantum sounds like a scam 98% of the time, and then like, 2% of the time, like, there's some very reasonable things said about it. And I just don't. I don't. I don't know. [00:07:09] Speaker C: But have you spoken to Jimmy Song about it? Like, he sent me an article that was written in, like, 2019 that's just like, the whistleblow on quantum computing is like a bigger scam than blockchain technology. It's just like, dude, it seems like. [00:07:24] Speaker A: It is to me. [00:07:25] Speaker C: It's just such. It's such a bunch of bullshit. Like, every single. They always, like, there's like, a couple of ridiculously unsolved problems that they always just call, oh, it's just an engineering challenge. And it's like, yeah, you say you calculate, you prime factored. You, you know, you figured out the prime factors of 15 is 3 and 5. You started out knowing that was the answer, and you contrived everything about it to give you that. And then you acted like, now, like, it's just one more little leap where we can get that without knowing the outcome. And it's really just like, a lot of it is stuff I don't really understand. But. But a lot of it just rings so true from, like, experience and wisdom of clown world and, like, cowardly experts. Like, it's just, physicists can make a living off it. They can spin up ridiculous narratives and they can carry on getting funding, and no one that knows anything about it has any incentive to blow the whistle. Everyone can carry on making money and carrying on in this bullshit quackery. Like, I. I'm just. There's like one paragraph in it that says physicists used to be they used to torture nature into revealing its secrets. Now they're just a bunch of, like, ridiculous Cowards like, you know, chasing after government money, just telling complete nonsense stories and doing no real work like that just sounds like everything about the modern world. I'm like, yeah, I believe it's rings. [00:08:54] Speaker A: Rings very. Fusion is right around the corner. [00:08:57] Speaker D: Yeah, I did some of my postdoc work. We had, did this collaboration with some quantum physicists at Oxford. And it was like, I mean, the first quantum computer paper was written in 1972 and now we're at the point of maybe factorizing two digit numbers. Like the. If there is growth in quantum computing, it's not exponential. I mean, people think of all growth in computing as exponential just because that's computing. But most things don't grow exponentially. Most things grow linearly. Progress in quantum computing is just not growing fast at all. It's not on track at all. It grows like 5% a year and it's never going to get there. [00:09:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's the thing that I had somebody, I've had a couple of times where out on social, I've just been like, all right, somebody try to convince me, like, where am I wrong? Where am I just like kind of dismissing something. That's an important question. And I've heard really good arguments, but most of them, like Jameson Lott had a really great article about like, if quantum computing is a threat, we should figure out how it's a threat first. You know, like a lot of very simple, kind of like principles of how to deal with the unknown, I guess are the best examples of arguments for quantum computing being a concern. But I had a bunch of people say it's like, no, it's super real. You should check out this account and this account. And then they like tagged them. It's like, show guy that this is how it really is. And like what's going on? And then they linked to a bunch of papers like, oh no, it's very real. China did this and blah, blah, blah. And I went and digging into it and so many of the articles just don't tell you what happened. Like, they don't, they don't tell you what the supposed breakthrough was. They just say, you know, we factored a number or we did this thing and it was like huge and now we've got a thousand cubits. And it was a hundred cubits two years ago. So there's exponential growth, but then you kind of dig into it and it's like virtual qubits on like a, and it's like, okay, well, a simulated quantum. [00:11:09] Speaker D: Computer on a regular. [00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah, literally, literally Literally. And. [00:11:16] Speaker C: I am like, I have, like, I developed this heuristic, like, years ago. If someone has the name Quantum in the product that they make, it's a scam always. [00:11:25] Speaker A: Oh, in a product. [00:11:26] Speaker C: You remember that. Like, you remember that, like, Dan Penner guy. The guy that's like, bitcoin's going to fucking zero when it comes out zero. And I know who the guy is who made it. Like, you remember that guy. His thing's called Quantum Advantage or something. Like, definitely a scam. [00:11:43] Speaker A: Yep, there it is. There it is. [00:11:45] Speaker C: Like, here's the thing. Like, you know, George Orwell was in the Spanish Civil War, and that was when he learned his entire, like, political perspective. He was like, I would read articles about battles that literally never happened where we won and we're like, honorable, and there would be battles that we lost that never got mentioned at all that literally were erased from existence. He's like, the press just reports a narrative that they just will invent stuff to support a narrative they've been told they got to do, and it's got nothing to do with reality. And this was like, this is where my whole basis came around for judging sort of technological progress. It was blockchain technology. Like, I watched this thing develop and it just become a buzzword and all the money start getting invested into it, and it just be nonsense from beginning to end, like, completely using the wrong tool for the job. Like, everyone that knows what a blockchain is knows it's useless in almost all possible applications apart from Bitcoin, where you keep it minimal enough and then it can be distributed widely enough that it becomes this fantastically reliable redundancy where, like, if you keep the feature set primitive enough, it's worth it, having it. And for everything else, it's like, the worst thing ever because they're all centralized applications with, like, advanced features where the last thing you want is a blockchain. [00:13:04] Speaker B: Dentacoin is extremely revolutionary, okay? It's very important technology. [00:13:11] Speaker A: If you go to the dentist without using Denticoin, you're really missing out on the utility that is presented by the blockchain of dentistry. [00:13:20] Speaker B: I mean, your teeth just aren't getting any whiter. [00:13:23] Speaker C: The underlying nutritional technology of it all. To round off my point, I'm just saying that became like, my whole worldview that you can have bullshit tech just appear that no one ever clocks as being bullshit. So to this day, people are still like, blockchain technology. It's what powers Bitcoin. And we're going to use it to revolutionize whatever and it's, it just goes on forever because no one involved in it has any incentive to go. That's bullshit. Apart from like bitcoin maxis to have nothing better to do than like call out scammers all day. And it's even. That gets tiring after a while. So now I look at, I look at quantum computers and I'm like, that can happen. You can have an entire industry of hot air with nothing to show for it at all. And you can fall for it. Like Google will fall for it. Like the Chinese government, I was about. [00:14:13] Speaker A: To say governments, governments have fallen for it. And that's like kind of the big thing is that they're like the canary in the coal mine is that, you know, the NSA is switching to quantum resistant cryptography and the Chinese government is switching. And all this stuff is like, we should be really concerned. [00:14:29] Speaker C: And dude, like it's the government. Like if they used to walk around Iraq with these little sticks, you know where you hold. It was like a bit that broke off a tree with like, it's like a Y shape. And they were, they were told that they could detect bombs and explosives with these things. And they just had people walking around holding the two ends of the branch. [00:14:48] Speaker B: Serious pointed. [00:14:49] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:14:49] Speaker C: And they would walk around Iraq and stuff like that. They're very into woo, right, these intelligence agencies. They'll, they'll, they're like, look, man, metaphysical stuff is. I don't know what. [00:15:02] Speaker B: Okay for like two seconds. I don't know about a stick like dowsing, you know that there's like pointing toward like dowsing sticks or whatever to find water. But you can legit take one of those little metal flags that like people stick in the ground and bend it in half. Like bend it over into an L and loosely hold it and it will point to stuff. It'll point to power lines under the ground at a point to water running under the ground. You can't tell what. [00:15:29] Speaker A: Have you verified this? [00:15:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I've done this. [00:15:34] Speaker A: Oh cool. [00:15:35] Speaker B: We've, you've, you've seen me do this. [00:15:37] Speaker A: Have I? [00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't have construction sites 100%. You can do that now. I don't, I don't know why it would do it with a tree branch, but, but it, it legit works like and something it's doing. I don't know. Yeah, bombs. I don't know. Well, the thing is, is like it does work with like power lines under the ground, so. Or water pipes or whatever. [00:15:58] Speaker A: So electricity current moving through a wire does have an Electric field. I mean, a magnetic field created. [00:16:05] Speaker C: Yeah, it's called dousing. You're right. Maybe I dismissed this wrongly, but again. [00:16:11] Speaker B: I don't know what the hell. I mean, I've heard that tree branches, like there were. Maybe there was a certain kind of branch that would do it. But, you know, I don't know and I don't know why. Like, he's right. Like, I don't know if bombs makes any sense, you know, like, maybe you can find some sort of underground. If people have buried a bunch of stuff, maybe it's just disrupts the. Some sort of, you know, electromagnetic field in the Electromagnetic field in the earth. I don't know. And maybe that would do it. [00:16:39] Speaker A: Maybe. But since we spent 10 minutes talking about quantum already, I guess we'll just start with our first news item. That BIP 1670 has proposed Qubit, which is a quantum resistant soft fork with the new P2Q HR address format. And it renews the quantum resistant discussions after Quantum Computing between Hope and Hype by Scott Arison, which is also something I had intended to cover on the show, but I haven't really dug into. But it's one I'm. I'm interested in digging into just again to see if I can be proven, you know, dismissive about it. Like, I mean, I guess it's kind of cool that we have a formal BIP in case, you know, in case, like, it seems to appear that there is development, you know, especially when we're talking about computing just in general. Like, the fact that there could be a change in a computing paradigm is not too crazy to me, like, especially with the way this sort of technology moves in general. But going back to the thing I brought up about, I'm asking for someone to prove me wrong that like, this wasn't just overhyped nonsense, man. Somebody gave me a paper with like, like, it was like quantum satellite communication and there's like quantum, quantum networking. And so like, they just literally put quantum before like a bunch of different things and then said it was revolutionary. And this was like a proposal in like a government agency. I was like, this is the biggest bunch of like there is. I can pull nothing substantial from this. And that's one of the big problems is that you get people who have no idea what they're talking about, who have just bought into it, sending you stuff that's complete just horse crap, you know, just like nothing at all. But the. They had like a couple of like, experts jump in and be like, no guy. [00:18:37] Speaker C: You're. [00:18:37] Speaker A: You're missing it. You're, you're not seeing the writing on the wall. And sure, there's a lot of hype and all this stuff. And they sent me this, they sent me a couple of articles and a number of the articles failed to say what they did. They, they said like, oh, we succeeded in factoring a prime number. And I started clicking on all their sources and most of the links went to like Wikipedia definitions and stuff. And I'm like, that's not, you're not sourcing anything. You're just writing some stuff and then linking me to your dictionary, for Christ's sake. And that's like one of the biggest things is like quantum articles. Articles about quantum articles. Articles about quantum. Revolutionary articles. Guys. Articles about quantum. Inevitably have all of. I always try to find the source. Where the hell is this coming from? And it is shocking the number of times they'll have like 40 links in there and none of them go anywhere meaningful to back up what the actual argument is. And I finally, I like really, really dug and I finally found a paper that was talking about, I think it was Google's quantum computer and saying that they had successfully factored. And it was like kind of hidden because it was, it was, it was like around. It's like one of those things, like if you want to hide something in a story, you, you start like a list of things and you say there was a, you know, there's a paper on the desk, there was a small trash can, there was a gun on the mantle, there was a crack in the window. You put it in the middle so that people don't really think about it too hard. But they had factored a two digit number. [00:20:27] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:20:27] Speaker A: And this was supposedly revolutionary. This was the only thing that this guy could link me to. And the paper was from like 2016 and this was like 2020 when I did this post and there was nothing. This was apparently like the big thing to be concerned about that was like legitimate. And I'm just like, well, the only. [00:20:48] Speaker B: Other thing I've ever seen is like they just created a bunch of randomness, right? Like it's like, oh look, we set off. [00:20:53] Speaker A: It was a glorified random number generator. Yeah. [00:20:56] Speaker D: Quantum is just another boogeyman. It's just another one of these things like climate change and stuff that you're never going to be able to disprove. So it's just file it away in that part of your mind that you're never going to get until someone actually cracks something. It's just going to be A boogeyman. There's not a threat to bitcoin. It's crazy how people prioritize threats to bitcoin. To me, bitcoin core completely stops in the year 2106. The whole Bitcoin project as of now absolutely stops in 2106. And people want to talk about things like tail emissions in 2144 and quantum computing. That's never going to happen. The priorities are just like crazy. [00:21:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And in 2106 actually. Isn't it? Not that it stops, but the way. Won't it roll over? [00:21:49] Speaker D: No, you won't. [00:21:50] Speaker A: It technically go back to 50 bitcoin. [00:21:52] Speaker D: You cannot produce a timestamp block greater than that which occurs in 2106. It's 32 bits. Absolutely part of the consensus that bitcoin absolutely stops in 2106. [00:22:05] Speaker A: Right. [00:22:05] Speaker C: This is. It's pretty easy to fix though. [00:22:08] Speaker D: Yeah. But all bitcoin core nodes right now. Absolutely stop then. And it's like. Yeah, it's not easy to fix socially. [00:22:16] Speaker A: It's like a soft fork. I mean, a hard fork for that. Or maybe a soft fork. I think you can do a soft fork for that. [00:22:21] Speaker C: It's soft forkable. It's not that hard to fix. And everyone's motivated to fix it. That's why it's not worrying, like who's going to hold out. Where is the bitcoin cash crowd in that environment? [00:22:30] Speaker D: There's a huge crowd trying to make it into a hard fork and trying to pack other things into the hard fork. Because if you wait long enough, it's only a soft fork if you start early. If you wait until like right before it happens. Interesting. It is absolutely going to be hard fork. But if you start 50 years ahead of time, it can be a soft fork. Like any node running today, it will be a hard fork for that road node running today. The only way it's not going to be a hard fork is if all the nodes are. [00:22:59] Speaker B: You put it in the code dead. [00:23:01] Speaker D: By the time 2106 happens. And you know, running today. Absolutely hard forks in 2106. So our only hope at no hard fork is that all those nodes are no longer on the planet in 2106. [00:23:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Really? The sooner you get the code in there to fix it, the better. Because then every update it would only be the people that are not updated from now. [00:23:27] Speaker D: Right. [00:23:27] Speaker B: And there's only going to be more people running nodes from now, hopefully. So the problem gets harder. Like it more likely that there would be nodes that get kicked off the network if you. The longer you wait. So, yeah, yeah. [00:23:38] Speaker A: If you could have done IPv6 and solved that problem in 1994, it would have probably been a whole lot better on the uptake and we'd actually. It'd actually be useful today or usable. [00:23:53] Speaker D: Yeah. So it's just. [00:23:54] Speaker A: I don't know earlier than I guess I got. [00:23:56] Speaker D: There's so many things to worry about and quantum. Just not one of them. But it's always. [00:24:00] Speaker C: Yeah, the other ones are just not. The other ones are just not compelling for headlines. Like, the minute it's quantum, it's. It's an. It's a click. People will click on that. [00:24:09] Speaker B: It's some sort of new magical thing that we have to. [00:24:12] Speaker A: We're talking about it. [00:24:13] Speaker C: It's algorithmic. Like, I'm pretty sure once a year there is a mainstream media piece on how quantum computers break Bitcoin. Like, and I get it from my dad as a text. Like, do I need to sell like once a year? [00:24:24] Speaker A: Probably like once every quarter. Like, it's pretty frequent. If you're like searching for it. Maybe. Maybe. As far as like big media, there's like once a year. [00:24:36] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:24:37] Speaker A: But it comes up pretty, pretty often, actually. [00:24:39] Speaker C: I'm thoroughly bored of discussing it. It's not a thing. And. [00:24:43] Speaker A: Oh, I guess since mechanic says so, we're gonna change topics. Okay, let's go. I'm going to do a quantum episode just to piss you off. [00:24:58] Speaker B: Let's talk about how we all got quantum voting. [00:25:00] Speaker A: Yeah. How'd you guys get into bitcoin? Are you. Oh, God. Okay, let's hit some bad news. Let's be depressing first, since I'm still on the our room got broke into and I have no idea why train so two senior ECB researchers. Okay, this is. It's hard to call this bad news because this is part hilarious. ECB researchers so European Central bank publish the distributional consequences of Bitcoin, arguing Bitcoin's rising value benefits early adopters at the expense of non holders and late investors. I'm going to read the whole abstract because this is just. I could do a 3 hours guys take on just this abstract. Here we go. This is by Jorgen Schaff and Uric Ben Steel from the ecb. So super experts here. The original promise of Nakamoto to provide the world with a better global means of payment has not materialized. Instead, the focus has increasingly shifted to Bitcoin as an investment asset, promising high capital gains. Promoters of this investment vision put little effort relating Bitcoin to an economic function which would justify its valuation. Just little effort. While most. I just. Oh my God, the thousands of fucking episodes. While most economists argue that the bitcoin boom is a speculative bubble that will eventually burst, we analyze in this paper the impact of a bitcoin positive scenario in which its price continues to rise in the foreseeable future. What sounds intuitively promising, or at least not harmful is problematic. Since Bitcoin does not increase the productive potential of the economy, the consequences of the assumed continued increase in value are essentially redistributive. That is, the wealth effects on consumption of early bitcoin holders can only come at the expense of consumption of the rest of society if the price of Bitcoin rises for good. The existence of Bitcoin impoverishes both non holders and late comers. While previous discussions on the redistributive effects of Bitcoin assume assumed that badly timed trading was a necessary condition for losses, this paper shows that neither poor timing of trades nor holding Bitcoin at all are necessary for impoverishment under a bitcoin positive scenario. [00:27:33] Speaker B: This sounds like there's some projection going on here. [00:27:36] Speaker A: These motherfuckers print money. These people counterfeit money as a business. They suck wealth out of society. The only thing they do is create impoverishment. And they are saying that non holders and late comers who benefit from bitcoin going up less than people who got in early are getting poor because they're not getting as wealthy. And all of it cures their money printing disease. [00:28:05] Speaker D: I hope they have fun. [00:28:06] Speaker A: Literally three hours of a guy's take. Have fun staying poor, guys have fun staying poor. [00:28:13] Speaker C: Makes me sick, man. Makes me thoroughly sick to my stomach. It's reversing the Cantillon effect, which is undeniably the most ethical thing you can do. And the appeal of course, is that that's not fair somehow. And that's how they rile up the masses. And you know it's coming. You know that one day when the wheel comes totally off, when there's like a sudden acceleration, accelerationist moment where there's some real hardship for people that isn't just the boil frog thing. It's like really something broke and people are really struggling. You know what they're going to do? They're going to take that anger and point it at bitcoin and go, those freaking bitcoiners are why you're suffering right now. And everyone's going to believe it because that's what always happens. [00:28:56] Speaker B: We're all Economic terrorists. [00:28:58] Speaker C: They're going to say, we nuked the financial system and it's our fault that you can't afford, you know, anything anymore. They're going to do that, and people are going to believe it. Because angry people are stupid, even if they're clever. Normally, once you make someone angry, they don't think anymore. It was bitcoiners. Bitcoiners have ruined everything. It's not fair. They're rich. You're not rich. They got lucky. You didn't. And it's much easier to believe that. Say that Simpsons bit where, like, where Apu is, like, showering his wife with Valentine's gifts and, you know, and all the wives in the town are getting upset because, you know, there's this one guy that's so amazing to his wife and, you know, you know, Homer's like, who are we going to blame for this? And then they go, well, we should blame ourselves, really, like. And he's like, yeah, look, it's easy to blame ourselves, but it's even easier to blame Apu. [00:29:49] Speaker D: It's like that. [00:29:50] Speaker C: We told you about bitcoin for years. You didn't listen to us. You can either swallow the humble pill or you can sit there and go, screw these bitcoiners. Why should they be so rich? And it's just crap. But, you know, it's going to happen. They're going to blame us for everything, and we're going to have to sit there and deal with people trying to rob us, trying to break into our hotel rooms, whatever it comes to. [00:30:13] Speaker B: Well, hopefully we, like, like God's about to say, I'm going to steal your thunder. We do need to, like, be on top of it with the memes and, like, the. It's not that hard to tell. I mean, this is what. This is what the mainstream does. They try to inoculate people against the, like, ideas that will lead them to the truth. Right. So if we can inoculate people with memes against the narratives that we already know, they're going to say, like, that's, you know, I. I think it's doable. And we just. We need to be crafty about it. [00:30:44] Speaker A: We need to meme better and harder, and we need to be more paranoid crypto anarchists. [00:30:51] Speaker C: We got some good memes, I'll grant you that. But, you know, they've no, it's going to be rough. [00:30:57] Speaker D: Yeah, well, it's going to be a little harder with the ETFs now to make all the Wall street the bad guys. [00:31:05] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I Don't know. I mean, it's pretty easy to make Wall street seem like the bad guys, but. But they have a lot. There's a lot of financial incentive for them to like, like Dave Smith points out, is that, you know, in. In 2010, you had two movements. You had the Occupy Wall street and the Tea Party. They were both like, centered around hating the banks and hating the financial sector. And somehow they flipped that into, you know, like being angry about, you know, transgender bathrooms or something. You know, they became some sort of weird cultural thing instead of. Instead of the actual, you know, thing that we were both technically united against. [00:31:42] Speaker A: I increasingly think it's going to be really difficult because of the a, the access to information, but also the degree to which I think people will slowly exit and when how many people will likely already be connected to it in some way in the sense like having an allocation to an etf, having bought some on some exchange or whatever. When it gets to the point where they need, like they really need to attack it is that, you know, if more and more of the people are actually getting some sort of a positive result from it, like, you know, their investment is literally only. Their retirement is only up 2% because 4% of it is Bitcoin. And it, you know, 6, 6x in the, you know, the time that all this went on and then the banking sector blew up again or some. Because that'll be a thing that happens every two years now, probably for the foreseeable future. It will be a little bit like telling. Trying to tell the people that you're the problem. You know, it'll be like saying that it's those stupid homeowners is why the dollar is crashing. Look at all the prices of all these homes. But like, everybody has a mortgage and their home and like the whole middle class is like, it's my fault. You know, like, I, I kind of suspect, especially with the amount of cultural momentum going against the political class lately, I don't see that getting anything, but I see that going in one direction and it kind of appears that way globally. Like, they've the woke and the believe every single thing the government says mentality and culture, I feel like, peaked in 2020 and we're starting to roll downhill now. Doesn't mean that it can't turn around, but it's really hard to unwrap to. To undo a break in trust. I feel like to rebuild that back up. [00:33:51] Speaker B: It definitely is. There's. There's like a weird, like, I mean, it's a small subsection of the population, there's like a 20, 20% group that is like full in, full on, you know, like everything they say. And it would be, I mean it. [00:34:08] Speaker A: Will be not scary group of. [00:34:11] Speaker B: Right. [00:34:11] Speaker A: Super boot licking lunatics. [00:34:13] Speaker C: But yeah, I think like it depends. Like I wish I was that optimistic because on the one hand you have people that are like thinking and rational but also kind of naive and trusting and that's like the archetypal midwit. Right. They're not, they're not actually stupid but they just, you know, they're just unable to quite grasp how corrupt institutions can become. And the fact that you don't take scientific studies at face value, you do have actually, you know, you do have to actually take into consideration the motivation of what funded it and the people behind it and the way it might be reported. You have that and those people can come along and be like, oh, turns out, you know, the vaccines weren't safe and effective or you know, it was a result of gain of function research that the disease happened. But that is only one cause of it. The other one is just simple cowardice. Some people really just aren't prepared to think outside the box or think for themselves at all. And those, there's no redeeming those people, they're still out. [00:35:18] Speaker A: They're more afraid of going against the group than they are about like, like whether or not it's true is really kind of irrelevant. They just don't want to be ostracized. [00:35:25] Speaker C: Yeah, and that's. You don't. [00:35:26] Speaker A: That's most people. That's. [00:35:28] Speaker C: Those people are never going to be cured. Those people are always looking for, you know, they're just outsourcing every single opinion they have and they're just never going to stop doing that. Those people are, they're stuck that way. You can't cure cowardice. It's just going to go on forever. Those people are conditioned that way and they're never going to, you're never going to shake them out of that. [00:35:50] Speaker A: I want to hear what Jeff has to say real quick before I, but I want to say something on that inside. [00:35:55] Speaker B: Some of that though is there is like this is something I've kind of realizing recently is that there seems to be like this desire, like people just cannot allow themselves to entertain the idea that most people can be wrong about most things. And that has been the case throughout all of human history. But if you set that off limits, like if you will not allow yourself to like even consider that most people in a field could be completely wrong about that field of thought, then you can't follow the facts correctly. Right. Like, if the facts are going to lead you in that direction, then. But you've already set something out. This is just off limits. Like, there's no way. [00:36:45] Speaker A: You simply have to not trust any fact that doesn't come. Any fact that doesn't come straight from that trusted group. [00:36:52] Speaker B: Right? [00:36:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:36:53] Speaker B: And that's like a. It's like you've already made one of the possibilities just impossible for you to. You know, you've already set. Like, this is a legitimate possibility. Like, legitimately, everybody could be wrong in a field. Like it happens. [00:37:08] Speaker A: And so that's kind of the historical norm, I think. [00:37:11] Speaker B: I think not only is it a historical norm, I think it's the case in most fields today. [00:37:16] Speaker A: So I think it's actually kind of the case always ways in kind of a permanent sense. Because it's not until we have a new foundation that's like slightly more accurate than the previous one that we can have a new era of technology that then opens up this entire new area of information and data that we couldn't get before. And then we realize how stupid, naive, and simplistic the previous explanation was. That only allowed us to have the technology to get us the new data that allows us to modify the explanation, but that everything moves infinite and all directions, and it's only ever just going to be that we were wrong and we just find out a new way that we were wrong about it. [00:37:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And the problem is that you can be right while also being. You can be right about a lot of details while also being completely wrong. [00:38:04] Speaker A: With the story about the reason. [00:38:05] Speaker B: Right? [00:38:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:38:07] Speaker B: And so it's like in the same way that people were accurately mapping Mars's relationship to Earth when everybody thought that the Earth was the center of the universe and it's doing these loops like it moves really weird and they're like giving you these crazy calculations that Are accurate representations of Mars's relationship to Earth. [00:38:25] Speaker A: Factual. Yeah. [00:38:28] Speaker B: The problem is it's extremely complicated and hard to make sense of until you put the sun at the center and then. Oh, well, okay, we were accurately describing the relationship, but we were making lots of mistakes because we didn't understand how it all really moved. We weren't understanding what the center of gravity is. So it's. You get a lot of details right while also just being completely fucking wrong with your explanation. You know, like. [00:38:55] Speaker C: Well, even that, though, is unorthodoxy because have you seen the principle? Have you heard of it? It's A movie? No, it's just a. It's a science documentary that is like they accidentally. We accidentally geocentrism again. Like, and it's. They. They did a bunch of. I don't know, I don't understand it super well, but studying cosmic. [00:39:20] Speaker A: I'll link to it. [00:39:21] Speaker C: You know, they're just like, look. Looks like the Earth actually is in the center of the universe. Like, and it's not just a thing. It actually seems to be. I don't understand it well enough. But it's a mainstream physics documentary. It's not a. It's not. [00:39:35] Speaker A: Oh, I'm definitely gonna have to watch this one. [00:39:37] Speaker B: If our technology is limited in our ability to see out, you know, away from the Earth, then everything we can observe would be that we would be in the center of that. [00:39:47] Speaker C: I don't know what it's. It's more nuance. It's not the old. Like if you're in an explosion, every point looks like it's in the middle of the explosion. It's not that like trivial thing. It's like there's Michio Kaku and people in it like that are like, what on earth? Like why on this shouldn't have happened. And I don't know what exactly their study. I need to watch it exactly. [00:40:06] Speaker A: I need to see this. It sounds like a great rabbit hole. [00:40:10] Speaker D: I feel like. I feel like I've gotten to a better place with this stuff by just thinking of models. Like there's one grad school class where we did the Earth centered modeled and the sun centered model and we just looked at it as trade offs. [00:40:24] Speaker B: Okay. [00:40:25] Speaker D: The Earth centered model is better for this. The sun centered model is better for that. There's no perfect model. So it's just like what you think. [00:40:33] Speaker A: About it, it's kind of like measuring the speed of something, right? Like it's. It's relative, you know, it's. It's all about like what you're measuring it against that that kind of decides what your output is, right? [00:40:50] Speaker D: Like, you can't. You can't launch a satellite to Mars using the Earth centered centered model. But you can do a ton of great things with the Earth centered model. So it's just like, what are you using the model for? You know, it's not like reality was made for our mental models of it. Our mental models of reality are never going to be reality. They're always going to be a bazillion. [00:41:09] Speaker A: They're just dumb abstractions. They're simplified abstractions. [00:41:12] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. So it's like asking what model is true is just kind of like missing the point of using a map. No, ask which map is true. You're like, which map do you need to get where you're going? [00:41:23] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Yeah, I'll buy that. I'll buy that. [00:41:29] Speaker C: So, Bitcoin, what's going on with. [00:41:31] Speaker A: Yeah, so let's keep going on our news items here. So Craig Wright sues bitcoin core developers for 911 billion pounds in the UK High Court, alleging that Segwit and Taproot deviate from bitcoin's original design as a decentralized cash system. [00:41:57] Speaker C: Interesting. They always denied the decentralized intentions of it because BSV was so undeniably centralized. [00:42:04] Speaker A: Right. [00:42:05] Speaker C: But I mean, I hate playing gotcha with Craig because he's completely just inconsistent. He never, like, he doesn't remember what he said yesterday. He just makes it up. And. And what. I really just find it amazing that people fall for this stuff. It's just. He's like, again, he. Didn't he have a quantum computing scam at one point? [00:42:23] Speaker A: Yes. Yes, he did. Yes. [00:42:26] Speaker C: I'm 20 for 20. If it says quantum, it's a scam. [00:42:29] Speaker B: Like, we need some sort of reputation like. Like we really need, like, the fact that he's already been involved in multiple court cases where he's clearly just completely full of shit. Like, there ought to be some point where you can't create another court. He's like, no, you're not allowed to do this anymore. You lose. [00:42:48] Speaker A: That's the thing. [00:42:48] Speaker B: Goodbye. How is. [00:42:51] Speaker A: How is. How does this go to court? How does this waste people's time and money? Like, how is our court system so bad that somebody who is not uk. [00:43:00] Speaker C: It's not America. [00:43:01] Speaker A: I just mean. Well, I mean, America runs on suing people, so, like, it's extremely popular here as well. But I just don't understand how, Like, I don't understand it. It just blows my mind how unbelievably corrupt and bad it is that you can destroy years of somebody's life on and make them spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves from something that is blatantly and obviously untrue, pushed by someone who is blatantly a fraud and has done this numerous, numerous times before. How does this even go to court? How does this survive long enough to write an article about it? At this point, you know, I don't know. [00:43:50] Speaker C: They got money. That was Calvin there had a lot of money to throw at this. That helped a lot. [00:43:55] Speaker A: How does he. Where is his money coming? How does he. Does he hate his money? Is he mad at his money? Is. [00:44:02] Speaker C: I don't know. I think sunk cost fallacy is a very real phenomenon, and it would kind of be, you know, he made his money from gambling websites, right? And, you know, it would be kind of poetic if he lost it all with the same gambler's fallacy of, like, if I keep throwing money at it, eventually I win something, right? Like, and I've already spent billions or hundreds of millions. I don't know how much he spent, but I don't know. Like, since losing and having. And Craig having to write all that humiliating stuff on his Twitter and his website saying, I am not any of the following things. And, like, the guy who wrote the white paper. No, I'm not the guy who, who used the. The name Satoshi in the forum. I am not the inventor of any of this. Like, you know, screenshot of that. That was beautiful. It was. And everyone's like, yeah, the first time you've been honest about something, but, I mean, it's. It's definitely infuriating. And until a prosecutor in the UK takes it upon themselves to go after him, State versus Craig for committing perjury, you know, seek out maximum sentence for the whole thing, it needs to happen, but no one seems to be bothered. Like, if you commit a crime and no one's interested in pursuing you for it, then it goes unpunished and you just keep going. And it's an old biblical principle. You hear this phrase, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth all the time. But the context in which that's written in the Bible is specifically, if you go to court and lie in order to get someone to incur a penalty for a specific action, you are the one that has to suffer it. So if you're accusing someone of rape or something like that, and the penalty is death and you're lying, then you get put to death. So in Craig's case, it's. It's that. It's that old. It's not like, you know, someone punched me, so I punched them back. That's not what the principle was. It was always, he wanted me to go to jail for four years, so now he goes to jail for four years. It's that. [00:45:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:56] Speaker C: So in this case, I'm like, whatever it is he wants, the suffering, he wants to impose on other people, he needs to suffer all of it. That's. That's like the oldest concept of justice I Know that, you know, that relates to courts and all this stuff, and it needs to happen. [00:46:10] Speaker D: Yeah, I don't know that. [00:46:13] Speaker C: Yeah, it's. It's always taken out of context. Right. It's just used to justify revenge. It's not revenge. It's just. It's that specific principle, like considering the. [00:46:21] Speaker A: Amount that a court case can steal from your life, like, that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing that, you know, if you're trying to destroy somebody's life or steal a million dollars from them and, like, you get proven as totally full of, like, just completely making it up, like that you are a fraud and that you wasted three years of this person's life and a hundred thousand dollars in legal costs and everything is that you pay for it. Like, you pay for the punishment that you were trying to enact on them. Now, that's a rape principle. I like that. And it also, like, reveals a lot about, like, you know, the whole, like, accusing someone of rape to destroy their life or accusing someone of the. The many sort of things that are used in that kind of backstabbing way because you're. Because of the tendency to want to believe the supposed victim and the difficulty of proving, oh, my God, that is an adorable cat. And the difficulty of proving certain things so that you just get the benefit of the doubt of just saying that, like, they were there and they did this, and then everybody hates them. And it doesn't really matter if it's true or not. It's just over. You know, it's like dragging Ross Ulbricht through articles in the news for a year as a violent drug kingpin. [00:47:49] Speaker B: Right. [00:47:49] Speaker A: And. And it's just like, well, that was it. That was all they needed. That was only needed. Then they. He's a murderer. We charged him with murder. Oh. But we revoked that. We're not going to do that because we'll lose the case. But this doesn't matter because we got to talk about it in articles for a year before his court case, and now everybody knows that he's a murderer. [00:48:09] Speaker D: And bitcoin just brings out the maniacs out of society, you know, like it does. Right? And I guess I probably shouldn't list people, but you know what I'm talking about. [00:48:22] Speaker A: It probably shouldn't go down. [00:48:24] Speaker D: Or it's like, not even the good. [00:48:27] Speaker C: Psychopath because there's no consequences, like economic consequences. And bitcoin brings reality back. It's like if you make a bad decision, you don't just print more money and pretend it never happened. And slowly everyone suffers. Bitcoin is just brutal and that makes people just go, this is a, the stakes are just so high. So like people are going to do some insane stuff and it, you know, it's a transition. Yeah, like, yeah, it's going to be. [00:48:55] Speaker A: A big, long, messy, painful transition. [00:48:57] Speaker B: It's just, probably just no one takes. [00:48:59] Speaker C: Anything wrong, the fiat world. No one takes anything seriously. That's the problem. Like no one will do anything of any like quality or, you know, just low time preference means taking a game seriously. That's all. [00:49:12] Speaker A: It's like the fiat world is, was like the slow and gradual taking over of all thinking and culture and everything with a series of escalating white lies. It was like if you can get someone to censor themselves about something very shallow and simple and seemingly non consequential, then, okay, well let's, let's extend that just a little bit further and you know, boiling frog, let's make them admit to this other thing which is a little bit less easy to accept, but because you've already accepted the quote unquote easy thing, you're more likely to lean towards the. Yeah, I'll just let that slide too. And then it goes again, and it goes again. And then like 70 years later you believe women have penises and it's like, how did this happen and where the hell did this come from? And you're not only that, that to say something so simple, so innocuous, so completely harmless as that. No, that's not true. Like, could literally make someone want to physically stab you in the face and that like they're. Because. And to admit that is to like unravel this whole stack of like cultural and political white lies that are all built on each other. It's like, it's like poking the, poking the bottom of the, the teeter. What's the, what's the little block game? What's that? [00:50:49] Speaker D: Jenga. [00:50:49] Speaker A: What's that called? Jenga. Thank you. It's like poking the bottom of the Jenga tower. It's like, don't you dare. Don't you dare. But yeah, it's wild. [00:50:59] Speaker C: Yeah. I think like my, since our last show, my favorite thing has just been trying to figure out why I like accelerationism so much. And I think I like it because it's the only known cure for boiling frog syndrome. It's the antidote. It's the only way you can do it. So I'm like, definitely, yeah, Kamala wins. Or they. Even better. Like everyone votes for Trump and they say Kamala wins again. And they Arrest everyone that disagrees with it. Like, like it's the only way I know to like wake people up and go, that's it. Like, of course it's messy and like awful, but I would just love it otherwise. It's just, everything just gets slowly worse and worse. [00:51:37] Speaker A: And it's, yeah, slowly worse is like the, it's like taking a recession now in the short term or going into greater debt to kick the can down the road for 30 years. And that's really soft and easy. But you know, if we had just had like six recessions along, along the way, we'd have cleared them out really quick, the economy would be balanced. We wouldn't have a giant multi trillion dollar fraudulent banking system built on nothing. And you know, we'd actually have sustainable growth, we'd still have savings. You know, people could actually quit their jobs if they didn't like them and groceries would be affordable. You know, I just, it's really frustrating. [00:52:23] Speaker C: Because everything's getting better. Like technologically, like the better everything gets, the more the parasite class can steal and get away with. So it's like, you know, a few centuries ago a 1% tax is enough to start a new country. Now it's like, it's like, yeah, we're going to take everything. Just 50% of what you own is coming to us. Like, they just passed a new thing in Britain that if a farm is over 1 million pounds in value, which like all of them are, everything is inheritance tax. Like you cannot pass it down to your children. Like, and they just, they. What's so annoying about it is if they were as bad as this when technology wasn't as good as it is now, it would have sparked, it would. [00:53:06] Speaker A: Have been over already fury. [00:53:07] Speaker C: But like they can get away with it because people still have basically a reasonable quality of life despite the fact that almost everything they own is getting stolen from them. [00:53:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:16] Speaker B: And I, you know, even like Trump, like in, instead of like, there's like these decent ideas like, well, let's get rid of the income tax. Let's do like, or just taking taxes off of like overtime or whatever, you know, like taxes off of tips or whatever. Like those are. Okay, that sounds great. But then he's like, tariffs are the best thing in the whole world. It's like, what the fuck, man? Like, so you're just going to create a new layer of taxation that will disrupt all international supply chains. And what's going to happen when you're gone is that the establishment person, the other one comes back in and we're just going to have a whole new category of taxes on top of the ones we've already had. It's just fucking ridiculous. And you have conservatives that are just fully on board with it. Yeah, that's fine. Let's do that. Let's get rid of the income tax really going to happen. And, and it's just replace it with tariffs. And man, that's, it's always, you always get the worst of whatever they're saying they're going to do. You never get like, if there's a. [00:54:26] Speaker A: Good thing and a bad thing, you're going to get the bad thing. Good thing's probably not going to happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go to the next one because this one, it's, it's about courts and stuff again. But the judge in the Tornado Cash case ruled that and this is funny because this was just after ruling that chainalysis was protected by free speech for. Oh man, I can't remember exactly what the details were, but. So they used free speech to defend the liars in this case. But anyway, the Tornado Cache rules that code is not protected as free speech. And I'll just read you without reading the article from the Rage, by the way, by Lola Leets. I'll have the link to it in the show notes. In fact, let me go ahead and say this, so don't forget about it is this is the subtitle says in a oral statement issued on Thursday, Tornado Cash judge says that code is not speech. Non custodial service providers can be money service businesses and specific knowledge of criminal activity is not a prerequisite for charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering. So you do not have to know that criminal activity is going on in order to be laundering money for criminals. Which is like saying that you do not have to know that somebody is going to kill someone with a hammer to be guilty of conspiracy to kill someone with a hammer. If somebody buys a hammer from you and kills them, you non custodial service providers can be money services businesses, which means that even though you do not have control over the funds and all of the instructions sending and receiving details are being written by the users, you are still a money services business even though you never actually control any of the money. And code is not speech because apparently it's, it's a different kind of language. And you know, I, I think it was actually in the article Lola wrote about musical scores. That's a great one, is that music is a form of code. And because it is like musical notation is literally a Mathematical formula. So when you are broadcasting it, to say that this is functionally different from normal conversation is to say that a certain song that makes you feel or want to do something in a certain way is again, not protected by free speech. Because. Because it's functional, because it has some other purpose than merely speech. And that's what the argument is, is that there's some other communication other than the fact that you're just communicating information that is involved in this. So curious, curious your thoughts. [00:57:22] Speaker B: Is there a way we can, Is there a way we can like record the code into a book and like do the same thing, you know, like. Like what? Like how do you. [00:57:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, how do you. [00:57:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Play the game where we just. I don't know, it's such a fucked. [00:57:37] Speaker A: Up, like, put it on a shirt and get it. Everybody who's going into the tornado cache hearing. [00:57:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:57:44] Speaker C: Yeah. I don't know. I mean, they're ridiculously over the top, of course, they always do that. But I don't know, it's a pragmatic thing where your approach just has to be find loopholes, exploit them, find new ones when they come after those. And it's expansive because it means you just need lawyers all the time that know what they're doing. Like, without going too much into detail. Like, Ocean has to do what it does in a very careful way. Like, we want permissionless, non custodial mining to be a thing. And one of the three co founders is a lawyer and he knows every single way to do it in a way that, you know, you need someone that cares about it for a start. But more than that, it's not about being foolhardy or making yourself a martyr. It's just about carefully doing, you know, things that, you know, allow you to tell the story the way it needs to be told for it to be convincing. And if they, if they go, all right, I guess because you've done this, that and the other, you are non custodial and you are allowed to be permissionless and you don't have to, you know, ask for DNA samples of everyone that uses your service, but from now on, we require this. And then you get to go, all right, well, let's move ahead there. Like you, you can do it, right, if you have a lawyer, right? But if you're just some dev on GitHub, you're not going to think about all this stuff, right? You're just going to naively go xyz. Like, I'm sure when Samurai, when they came after Samurai, everyone Started guessing, like, wait a minute, did I break the law with that pull request I made? Like, you know, when I found a bug that. Did you know, a wallet would leak its IP address or something when you're supposed to be using Tor is closing that. Am I now in trouble? Like, everyone was suddenly asking themselves these questions, right? And like I say, like, you don't want. You don't want your legal counsel reviewing every line of code you write, but if you're in that position, you can do some amazing things, which has been part of the whole fun of Ocean just having this lawyer. Not. Not like a guy we have to hire and pay by the hour, but an actual founder of the company. Just be like, yeah, we can do this. We can't do that. And if we do this, we have to do it that way. And it doesn't make any sense to any of us because we don't think like that. But this guy knows. So, yeah, like, this may be one. [01:00:02] Speaker B: Of the arguments against accelerationism is that, you know, at what point does your lawyer not matter anymore because everything's a kangaroo court and you're just literally at war with, you know, the organization that is ruling over you. Right? Like, well, I mean, that's what. [01:00:22] Speaker C: That's what accelerationism is. It's the point where we're suddenly all at that point rather than one of us is and then another guy and then another guy, and it slowly stretches out, you know, but the thing is there at once, like, it sort of. [01:00:37] Speaker B: Is still one at a time, right? Like, I mean, well, I guess. I don't know. It depends on. I mean, like, right now it's one at a time. And. And we still, like. Like, we're very close to the point where it doesn't matter whether you have a lawyer or not. Like, they're just going to rule. Like, Like, I mean, these rulings are completely insane. Like, they're just going to rule, you know, against you no matter what. And so, I mean, you know, same thing with, like, Ross Ulbricht or, you know, a lot of these things that have gone on. And so, like, there's still, like a coordinate we need. What we need is, I guess acceleration doesn't make sense in. In a way. But, like, there also needs to be enough of a. Of a way for us to coordinate and to, like. Cause that's. That's really the problem, right? Like, the decent. The resistance is always a coordination problem. [01:01:30] Speaker C: Where centralized coordination is difficult without triggering events that cause spontaneous coordination is spontaneous. And it's based on absurd Actions like, you know, UK government gives 450 billion to banks in bailout. That was like a trigger. And suddenly it's like, Occupy London is a thing. You know, Arab Spring was triggered. Right. And this is why they hate mass protests so much and they want to disperse gatherings. Because when I see that you agree with me, and I see that you see that I agree with you, and that cascades and suddenly there's a million of us standing in Tahrir Square or something that's just like a trigger. And suddenly it's like the world was never the same after that day. That is the main goal, prevent things like that from happening. Like, we don't mind if like 80% of the population is sick of the government. We don't actually mind that because none of them know how anyone else feels. Right. So as long as that's the case, they can never coordinate. It's always going to be like splintered fringe groups and, you know, guilty pleasures, watching people, you know, that you agree with that are saying politically incorrect stuff on social media and all that. There's no trigger, there's no mass organization because that can only be triggered. That can only be triggered by, like, outrageous events. And it feels like Occupy and the Arab Spring were like, the last time they ever let that happen. Now it's just no way. [01:02:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I feel like I'm an ex. I go back and forth between accelerationism and optimistic incremental, like shifting kind of as a mentality totally based on my mood. Generally, if I'm in a bad mood, it's just like, just burn it all down. But the interesting thing, like, going to actually mechanic your point about, like, you know, Occupy Wall street and these things, is that there seems to be this sudden shocking moment in which lots of people wake up, but it also often just peters out or it's easy to break up the organization or the ability to get anything functional or meaningful done from that. And people just run out of time and capital to invest to it. And then it just kind of becomes. It's almost demoralizing, you know, a year or two down the road that nothing happened from it. And then to the other point of that, like, well, the overwhelming majority of people are followers. Like, there are countries that are run by like, crazy totalitarian regimes that got slowly voted into office with the whole boiling frog thing. 80 to 90% of the country absolutely hate them. Like, don't trust them, think they're total lunatics. They don't align with them culturally at all. And there's. There's Nothing. There's nothing. They're just stuck there. You know, South America is such a great example of so many times in which there was some apparent push towards freedom or like possible moving away from it. And then things got horrible and then there was just like, not like people just don't want to die. And when you have an enemy that's just willing to kill you, it almost doesn't even matter that everybody knows it and that everybody believes the same thing. So I don't know, I worry that accelerationism just produces that because most people are cowards. Ends without the right event at the right time, with the right tools to organize and to prevent dispersion of the. That organization. Does it even go. Does everybody just get tired, go home and try to get a nap and then we wake up and we're in this world where we don't have any power or freedom or anything, you know? [01:05:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's something about, there's something about. [01:05:24] Speaker A: Searching our houses for guns. [01:05:26] Speaker B: Our school systems, like, there's having such institutional like dominance in, in terms of, I mean, like, like we have a Prussian school system, right? I mean like this. Kindergarten is a, is a German word. Like school is a German word. Like, and so, so like we have this system of like training people to respond to bells and training people to worship the, you know, the teacher is the center of the class and breaking up everybody into age, you know, age groups and you know, and their intelligence levels and all of this stuff that like really like isolates people from, you know, like you, you get stuck in these little buckets, right? And so that is like, it so like colors everything about the way you see the world and function and how many people are like, I just don't know, like, what do we need to break first in order? I mean like the amount of homeschooling is increasing, the amount of Montessori schools and things like that is increasing. Like, is there like, do we need things to be muddy and slow for long enough that we've broken some of the, like the brainwash? I mean like the fact that so few people now believe the corporate media, you know, the government sponsored media is like a huge shift. And most of that has happened since 2020. And so maybe there has to be maybe before you. Accelerationism. I mean, 2020 was an accelerationist thing, but we walked all that back for at least the last year or two, Right. And so there's this. I don't know how much of that is bad because now people are going to get comfortable again and then they're going to do another one. It's going to be two steps forward, one step back toward authoritarianism or whether, I mean, because there's still a bunch of people invested in the 2020 narratives. 2021, yeah. [01:07:29] Speaker A: They do 20 bad things, they pull back on seven of them, give the appearance of success, and you're moving bad things. [01:07:36] Speaker B: You're still moving in the wrong direction. Right. And so I don't know. I don't know whether. Whether we. I mean, honestly, 2020, I think, revealed a lot of things to a lot of people and made my. I mean, like, I just look at. I'm kind of thankful for it in a way, because it made me start looking at, you know, what I would do to get out of the country if I need to. It made me start. It made me realize that there were a lot of people that I dated who, if I had been with them, like, I could have, like, my nightmare was ending up on. On the, like, opposite side of some issue like this with the person I'm supposed to spend the rest of my life with. Right. And so. So I've specifically, like, you know, crafted, you know, how am I going to find people that are, you know, girls? [01:08:27] Speaker A: How can community is different. [01:08:29] Speaker B: And no, it has, you know, I mean, like, you know, like, it's fantastic. [01:08:37] Speaker D: You got no shot trying to find a girl. That's the way I do. And then I was like, that's not gonna happen. [01:08:44] Speaker A: No, that's not gonna happen. [01:08:45] Speaker B: Dude. [01:08:46] Speaker A: Literally, Steve is giving up, man. [01:08:49] Speaker B: I'm gonna tell you what I did, but. Yeah, I'm gonna tell you what I did. I. I literally, my profile, like, the goal just became, well, I'm gonna scare away everybody that is not, like, compatible with what I'm looking for. And that means that there's a lot less matches. But the ones that I do are like, yeah, like, you just. The whole thing, the whole goal is just to filter out. [01:09:12] Speaker A: Like, like, stop wasting your own time. Like, the last thing you need is to accidentally catch. Your filter needs to be big. Like, you. [01:09:21] Speaker B: Huge, huge. [01:09:22] Speaker A: And I use massive filter. [01:09:23] Speaker B: I used to just try to be funny or something. If I attract as many people as I want, then I can just go and be picky. I can choose. But that's not how it works. You just end up going on a bunch of terrible first dates, you know, like, so. So like, and filtering people in, like, friend groups and everything else, it. It really does matter. Like, because there were people that I was friends with that I think would have just stabbed Me in the back. If, you know, like, if Covid happened again. Like, you just can't trust anything that, you know, some of these people believe. [01:09:52] Speaker C: So, yeah, it's. It comes down to trust, man. Like, if you're gonna fall for stupid narratives, I cannot trust you. And, like, have kids. It gets even worse. Like, I just. Nah, too important if you're in my. [01:10:07] Speaker A: Literally decisions about the kids. So the issue is a hundred times worse than if it was just between you and the. Your spouse. [01:10:14] Speaker C: Yeah, it's just like, you know, talk to certain people, and when I talk to. About Canadian mandatory vaccines, and they're just like, well, you're just an idiot for not getting it in the first place. I'm like, yeah, that's it. You're over. Like, I cannot. I cannot trust you. Like, that's just. That's never going to work ever again. Like, that should send off every red flag. Like, the fact that that's not. I'm being, you know, coerced into medical decisions I don't want to take that are demonstrably bad, by the way, even if they weren't. Just. That is a principle you cannot violate. You know, you're all worried about the Holocaust, and. And apparently, you adhere to the, you know, Nuremberg principles. No way. Like, that's. You're violating every Nuremberg principle there. Like, this is involuntary medical experimentation. The fact that you don't have that as a red flag tells me you're just. Absolutely. I'm done with it. Like a tonka. [01:11:07] Speaker B: Absolutely crazy. Like. Like, literally, if you're gonna, you know, invoke the evoke. The Holocaust, it's. It's the Jews. The first thing they did was treat them as sick and diseased, and they needed to be isolated. And, yeah, they were contagious. [01:11:25] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:11:26] Speaker B: And I was like. Somebody was like, well, yeah, they did. I was like, we're talking to some normie. And they were like, well, yeah, they did that, but it was not that. They actually were like, there wasn't a pandemic. They didn't fake a thing. I was like. I was like, okay, so they. They used Covid to scare all of you into believing that healthy people were the cause of the pandemic and that that justified them being turned away from hospitals, fired from their jobs, locked in their homes, not allowed to travel. Like. [01:11:56] Speaker A: Like, how do you not see the parallels here, my man? [01:12:00] Speaker B: It's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:12:04] Speaker A: Steve, are you. [01:12:05] Speaker C: Acceleration into. If you allow them to infringe on your rights in exceptional circumstances, they will create exceptional circumstances. Yeah. [01:12:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, 100%. [01:12:15] Speaker D: But I can't help thinking about one time I was ranting about people being sheep, and my wife and she says, I love sheep. And I was like, I kind of love sheep too. It makes me wonder, like, does it actually take all types? You know, I mean, I don't know. [01:12:37] Speaker B: There definitely is a difference. [01:12:38] Speaker A: There's a really good argument. [01:12:39] Speaker B: We need people that follow. Right? Like, I don't. But the thing is, is that how evolution worked? Yeah. [01:12:47] Speaker A: You know, like, there's. There's a reason why we have this intricate balance between, like, people who deviate from the group and people who conform to the group and people who go out to basically stand strongly enough on what they think to make a new group. You know, like, there's a really great book that kind of talks about this from the context of. Starts with the context of bacteria that literally have generational differences where we thought for a long time that they were completely different species of bacteria because they change based on their conditions and whether or not they are conformers and consumers versus explorers and individualists. Literally, like in the bacterial colony and then, like, goes all the way up the tree and, like, explains this in human civilization and culture and social dynamics and all this stuff is pretty bonkers. Howard Bloom. Howard Bloom is the author. But really cool. Really cool theory. But, Steve, did you have something to add? Because otherwise. [01:13:54] Speaker B: Well, the key. [01:13:55] Speaker A: We have news items. [01:13:55] Speaker D: That phrase that they saw type. It haunts me. You know, it's like, God damn it. [01:14:01] Speaker A: What about the. [01:14:02] Speaker B: It would just be nice. It would just be nice if some of the types didn't want to kill us. [01:14:07] Speaker A: Like, definitely doesn't allow. That would be really nice. [01:14:11] Speaker B: Allow the best. The best ideas. Just allow the best ideas to bubble to the surface and remember that individuals are still people. And you claim to have empathy, so let's, you know, pretend at least, you know, stop killing people. [01:14:26] Speaker A: That would be nice. [01:14:28] Speaker C: I can't, man. I can't with this shit. It just drives me so mad. Like, it's. I can't. Like, I'm still going around on airplanes and seeing, like, people wear three masks. Like, I know. Just get the fuck over it. [01:14:42] Speaker A: Like, while we're going. While we're going deep and dark here, let's talk about Denmark's taxation minister and how they have proposed. And this is increasingly. Seems to be getting closer and closer to reality because it keeps getting pushed by more and more different municipalities and. Or just governments or states of taxing unrealized gains on bitcoin. Accelerate, accelerate, accelerate. [01:15:10] Speaker C: I Should be a Dalek for my Halloween outfit and just walk around going, accelerate. [01:15:17] Speaker B: Wasn't it Denmark? Brad just got searched for bombs. What now that we at now the Netherlands. Okay. [01:15:24] Speaker A: We were in Amsterdam. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:15:27] Speaker B: We had a. We had a connection flight and I'm just. All these countries are psycho. Governments are crazy. [01:15:38] Speaker C: Don't like governments. [01:15:39] Speaker A: Yeah, he had a connection flight and they got. Pulled him. They pulled him out in a random search and then wiped some little piece. Took some little piece of paper out of a band aid wrapper and. And wiped it on his suitcase or wiped it on his bag. [01:15:55] Speaker B: And So I have a 20. Something came up with traces of explosives. Yeah, there's no telling what's on the book bag, but I have never built any bombs with it. [01:16:05] Speaker A: So I was, I was certain. I was like, this is it we're going to miss. So we've. We already been. [01:16:12] Speaker B: They ran it five reprogrammed and we've. [01:16:14] Speaker A: Already been reprogrammed to a whole bunch of new flights and missed our first one. Apparently. The guy broke into our room and just dusted explosives all over my brother's bag. And that's. That's the only thing he did. He's just trying to screw up our flight schedule. And now we're like stuck in this in between, just about to get on the plane and Jeffrey's like, head in hands or whatever's like, sorry, we found explosives in your bag. We have to. We're going to have to search you. I was like, so my brother's going to get some fingers up his butthole today. And it's only about 50%. Funny that it's about to happen. [01:16:46] Speaker B: Well, thankfully, I think the guy that was doing it didn't want to be. Didn't want to have to. Didn't want to be doing it any more than I wanted to be there. And so he like took. He's like, we're going to have to unpack your whole bag. And I, like, started unpacking. He's like, no, no, no, I'll do it. And he started taking stuff out of the bag and he like wiped a couple of things in there. And then it finally came up positive, like, like without the, you know, the failure, success. And it came up green. Yeah. And he was like, okay, you're fine. [01:17:10] Speaker A: Get out here, please. [01:17:10] Speaker B: Put three things back in there. Yeah. [01:17:14] Speaker D: We're still on the unrealized gains topic. [01:17:18] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. [01:17:19] Speaker A: And on that same topic, Italy has raised capital gains to 42% for next year. [01:17:26] Speaker C: Italians sure aren't known for doing things under the table. I'm sure everyone will be paying that. [01:17:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:17:33] Speaker C: And it won't just accelerate the P2P economy. [01:17:36] Speaker D: Yeah, acceleration for sure. I've been thinking about, I've been looking into kind of games you can play with lending to get around kind of, you know, capital gains and unrealized gains. Like, I think there's a lot of things you can do. Like if you set up a company and you lend the company bitcoin, the capital, the cost basis does not travel with that bitcoin. So the company gets it at like, you know, zero cost basis. [01:18:07] Speaker B: Right. [01:18:07] Speaker D: I think you can just keep lending bitcoin around in a circle between like you and your companies. And I think there's going to be a lot of creative stuff in that world to get around cap gains. [01:18:21] Speaker A: That sounds interesting. I'm on board with this. [01:18:23] Speaker D: Yeah. It definitely does not travel with the thing lent. But the thing is like, you can't have the lending terms be that you pay it back in fiat because then that's going to be considered a sale of bitcoin. So you just create these, I'll eventually pay you back in bitcoin things and then you never pay them back or something like that. [01:18:40] Speaker A: That are impossible anyway. Yeah. Because bitcoin is going to go up like crazy. [01:18:46] Speaker B: It's like the company would technically be losing money in terms of bitcoin forever and then you just restructure every five years or whatever. [01:18:52] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. [01:18:57] Speaker A: That kind of hits our bad news, which is good. But they're definitely going to tax the crap out of it. [01:19:04] Speaker C: And they can only do it so much. [01:19:06] Speaker A: Yeah, they can only do it so much before they just. [01:19:09] Speaker B: Yeah, oh, yeah. [01:19:10] Speaker A: You know, and this is actually something funny. In fact, I think mechanic, you talked about this in your talk because it was after Seth for privacy. And you know, something that gets me on the whole privacy issue in bitcoin is that so many people who talk about it a lot seem to forget that this is a transitional thing. That the number one loss of privacy avenue or the attack vector that everybody, the point that everybody's going through where they're losing it is the exchange. Like, it's finance, it's swan, it's river, it's any sort of KYC exchange where you have to give your information because they have a financial services obligation or whatever they have to report to the government. And, you know, then Coinbase sells it for, you know, extra money to print new coins and then dump it on their users. But when you actually like, I Talk about it. When we're actually in like a bitcoin economy, there really won't be exchanges, won't be like two steps away from every single bitcoin transaction. You know, like, I don't have like a shockingly small amount of the bitcoin that I use these days is attached to kyc, anything, because I get paid in bitcoin and I pay people in bitcoin. Like, I don't have, like, sure, there's quote unquote privacy concerns with UTXOs, and I have to just know how to do, like, simple separation between a lot of these things. But I don't have any big thing attaching, like, stuff to my identity outside of just like if I'm consolidating inside of a wallet or something. But I also have like 20 wallets that I break up based on what I'm using it for and all of this stuff, like. [01:21:05] Speaker C: But you're an advanced user, man. [01:21:06] Speaker A: Oh, 100%. 100%. I don't mean to dismiss it. I just mean to point out the fact that using bitcoin day to day and actually being on a bitcoin standard, a shocking number of the privacy concerns aren't really huge concerns anymore because you actually restore the pseudonymous nature of the transactions. If you've got five people between every kyc, if you got two hops between a kyc, two hops of actually using it, and then kyc, okay, you can basically tell who everybody is in that situation and then you can attach probably a lot of other stuff to it. But if you've got five, six or seven people that are just using bitcoin, you've probably got four hops in that that you just have no idea what the hell. You don't know. You don't know. And you're probably never going to know if you're on a bitcoin standard. The big problem of privacy is a transitional one. Bitcoin is pseudonymous. And if you're using just bitcoin and lightning, you can still get a lot of benefit from it. It's really the KYC transition where fiat is still the norm, that it's the biggest problem. [01:22:15] Speaker C: Yeah, I think these guys come in. Privacy is like a very unique, weird thing. That is not what bitcoin is about at all. Bitcoin goes for the sort of approximate approach of anonymity pseudonymity, which is just, you know, that's a much more realistic approach because it carries on with the assumption that you're going to be in public. It's Just try to not identify who you are. Don't try and operate privately where you know everything is known, but only to a controlled small group of people that know who you are, know how much bitcoin you have, but you trust them not to tell anyone else like it's money. So you necessarily are going to interact with other people no matter what you do. And privacy just assumes. It just basically always comes at the cost of centralization and completely unscalable methodology. So it's never been a thing as a part of bitcoin culture. It's always been this sort of enthusiastic fringe movement within it to try and have some sort of privacy there. But it's not against it either. You can have it. And I feel like I'm repeating what I might have said last show. Yeah, to be honest. But it's just like the privacy bros that come in. They never care about decentralization or scalability or anything like that. And Seth for privacy is a great example of it because there's a bunch of ideological positions he takes on everything that completely unrealistic. Always letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And that approach to me is not just. It's sabotage if I'm going to be like harsh about it because it's just not doable. I didn't actually watch the talk I was on after that panel and you're the one that introduced me anyway. But I didn't watch it because I just wanted to go and prepare myself what I was going to say for mine. What exactly were the high level points they made about privacy in bitcoin? Do you mind like running over them? [01:24:27] Speaker B: It was like basically the silent payment. I mean he just touted like silent payments and something else. [01:24:35] Speaker A: It was really focused on what, how you can get privacy. Like it was actually really good talk and it was less about. Even though he's seems to be a bit of a. He's partially a doomer on privacy but then also partially like we just have to do something about it and partially corner that we have to do something about it, you know, and that a lot of people just aren't. And silent payments is a huge like I, I love the fact that they're implementing silent payments and I totally agree with him that I wish that they were the norm that because one of the biggest quote unquote attack vectors is just that to publish a address publicly, it's kind of the same as publishing a lightning invoice publicly is that it has information on where your node is and what channel you're paying to is to just obfuscate that and like that should be the norm. And whether you were in a KYC two steps removed from every transaction or a Bitcoin standard like something like silent payments is such a huge improvement over the general mode of can you connect this address to this person? Like that's a really, really big like positive to the point that like you kind of have to send them bitcoin to try to see if you can get them to wrap it up with other UTXOs to start making connections between, you know, wallets and addresses because you just have nothing public to attach to. And there's really simple like kind of front end obfuscation that we can do. There's actually a massive benefit to it. He, he's a little less on. He doesn't really agree with the privacy of or that Lightning is as private as a lot of people say. And I kind of disagree with some of his argumentation there. Except that you do also. It's kind of like what you said earlier. You also have to know how to use it. If you open up a channel and a node to a bunch of decently connected nodes and then you do nothing but pay out. Lightning is a really, really private protocol to use. [01:26:47] Speaker B: Well if again you kind of have. [01:26:49] Speaker A: To know what you're doing. [01:26:50] Speaker C: Privacy is amazing on Lightning. The foundations are there because only me and you care about what we're doing. I don't need the entire world to know the history of it and agree on it, which is what layer one is. It's so that just by its own nature, if I have a channel with you and we just go back and forth for years in one like economic relationship that's no one else is going to know about what happened in that. [01:27:17] Speaker B: Well, okay, if I have, it's just using Aqua Wallet. I've received a relatively large amount of Bitcoin from Kraken into my, into the liquid, you know, second layer portion of my Aqua Wallet. Which means that there was a lightning swap for liquid and liquid has, I mean lightning has, you know, privacy things and then liquid has its own, you. [01:27:41] Speaker A: Know, extra privacy confidential transactions. [01:27:43] Speaker B: If I'm sending that from, if I move that from there on, you know, back onto the Lightning network or back, you know, like doesn't that. I mean like it seems like we've got a lot of exchanges that are paying people's on chain fees to withdraw right now and that's still cheap and doable but at some point it makes sense that they're going to need to integrate with something like this, with lightning or whatever, to reduce their own costs and maintain the same amount of benefit that they can provide to their customers. And so if this sort of thing becomes the default, don't we get a lot of privacy from KYC services? [01:28:21] Speaker A: You know, there's a, there was a really good article by the Simplex guys actually, which I should, I should go back and actually read that one on the show talking about the fact that privacy, anonymity and then like security, decentralization and censorship resistant is that these things are actually fundamentally at odds. And it's why Simplex is not trying to be decentralized, it's trying to be private and allow anonymity if someone wants it. But it was a really great just explanation of kind of like that being a fundamental, very often a fundamental trade off where those things are kind of at odds and lends itself to the idea of E Cash being the perfect privacy thing and just explicitly needing the decentralization trade off because both of those at the same time can so often be at odds with each other. What gives you privacy, gives you a problem with decentralization or security and then vice versa. [01:29:21] Speaker C: I'm scaling it. [01:29:23] Speaker A: Just it's scaling. [01:29:24] Speaker C: Yeah, trying to scaling. [01:29:25] Speaker A: That's what I mean when it comes to security is like yeah, Monero is. [01:29:29] Speaker C: A good example, right? It's, it has privacy tech like baked in. It works. But scaling it and keeping it decentralized is just completely impossible. And everyone knows that. So it's not going to work. And that's why you get the luxury of privacy at the small scale. But you never get it. Like that's why it was just not attempted in Bitcoin. [01:29:49] Speaker A: It's never going to work on with a billion people. Just for the same reason a blockchain isn't a payment network. Like sure there are, you make transactions on it. But it is not a global retail payment network. It just never was. It's an absurd thing. It's to suggest that the broadcast layer on your land can be a global billion user text messaging network. It's like, nah, that shit shit's not gonna work, man. [01:30:11] Speaker D: I can see Michael Saylor citing Mechanic as his reason for doing his like identity on the bitcoin blockchain thing being like just listen to Mechanic. He says privacy is impossible, therefore my identity product is like really important. [01:30:28] Speaker A: Just what about Mechanic thing. [01:30:33] Speaker D: Do you worry Saylor might use you as a support? [01:30:37] Speaker C: I don't know. He's like, we've met a few times and I very quickly Was like, please don't do what you're doing the way you're doing it. Like, it's, it's. I just hate it. Like, you've got Noster exists. [01:30:53] Speaker A: Don't do it. You're doing the way you're doing it. [01:30:57] Speaker D: Stop being you. [01:30:59] Speaker C: Just, like, what? There's nothing. Like, it's just the same old Oracle thing, right? Like, you know, I've got MicroStrategy, and we all created a digital identity within the organization and we hashed it into a tree and we uploaded that, you know, and now that does something that an email couldn't have. I don't know what that is. Like, like, somehow instead of something like Noster, which works fine for creating digital identities, for some reason, we needed to bake it into a blockchain to prove that it happened at a certain time. I get that, but there still needs to be an authority on the CEO of the company is going to be like, yeah, ignore that one. That's not the real. Someone spoofed MicroStrategy's employees and created a bunch of identities that aren't us. Ignore that. Just like on Noster, there's going to be hundreds of people called Lyn Alden or Guy Swan, there's going to be fake ones, and you just have to figure out who the real one is and baking it into the blockchain to be social. First one. [01:32:01] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:32:02] Speaker C: Doesn't do anything because it's not. Scammers can be. Before you in history, like, people go and squat, you know, when Blue sky came around, someone went and, you know, squatted all the names of famous bitcoiners because they're like, well, this might be the next thing. Just because they were first doesn't mean they're the real one. That's just part of it. And I'm being like, putting it in the blockchain. What is it you think that's doing? Because, like, Noster was actually made by clever enough people that they were like, yeah, trying to upload all the end pubs into OP returns on data doesn't do anything. [01:32:38] Speaker A: Not only does it not do anything, but it's suddenly, like tons of overhead, added complexity. It means that you have to have what, like a light client node or something in order to start using NOSTR and publishing this thing, and for what? And it's also trying to make one network where the whole idea of decentralization in the context of communication in that way, it's not a consensus protocol. Speaking is not a consensus protocol. English is not a consensus protocol. It's just a protocol so that anybody can communicate. We don't need to stamp this conversation somewhere in the public square in order for it to be better or worse or to prove it or anything. The conversation is just between us. [01:33:24] Speaker C: You know, it's fundamentally like we're trying to solve the double spend problem because that is an issue that is unique to money and needs to be solved. When you're dealing with money, identity does not have the double spend problem. It just. That's not how you establish that you're talking to the person you think you're talking to. Because you already established it in another context earlier. Right. I know that, like, you send money to point A and you send the same money to point B. We all agree that it didn't go to point B because it already went to point A. But they are both valid, right? Neither of them speaks to whether. Or not. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, when it comes to establishing an identity, I'm not going to say, well, I'm going to completely believe along with the rest of the world that you are who you say you are, because this identity happened first. That's not how you establish it. Right. Like, if I get a phone call from you saying you're a guy and I believe you're not, and then I phone the real guy and you're like, no, that's a different guy. Like, he's a fake guy. You know, I'm not going to sit there and go, well, the other guy was first. It doesn't work like that. But in the context of money, we all agree that what happened first is what happened. So it's just. It's not a correct application for the job at all. [01:34:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's. It's using a hammer with a screwdriver. It's just not. Not same problem, you know? Yeah, it drives me nuts. [01:34:49] Speaker C: But I mean, if I run into Sailor again, like, just use up return. Like, we kind of won the spam wars. I will say that we did because everything is just opera turns now. And that was the least harmful way to put spam in the chain. It was the olive branch. So if I'm like, if you want to do this silly thing with decentralized identities just. And you want to use opreturn, you can. It won't make any difference to it. You just put hashes of the thing in there and everyone has to refer to a centralized oracle for the data that makes up that hash. Sure. That's a trusted thing, but you can still verify yourself that, you know, there are 8,000 employees in this organization. Here are all their public keys. We hashed them into one, you know, digest of 40 bytes or whatever it is, and that's small enough for an opreturn. Put it in the chain and then when anyone wants to question it, they just go and look at that one op return. And then you say, this was my identity within that. You can rerun the calculation and you can go, yeah, that hash checks out. Like, that's fine to do. You don't need to upload the entire thing. You don't need to upload everyone's end. [01:35:50] Speaker A: Just need a Merkle root man. That's all you need to say to Sailor. [01:35:54] Speaker D: You're not going to say Sailor. You might want to consider self custody. [01:36:00] Speaker C: I don't know. Apparently that is genuinely 5D chess, but. Oh, yeah, you know, yeah, apparently. And at the same time, the trojan horse of it doesn't work if we keep making excuses for it. So we have to treat it like it's genuine. So yeah, it's like a really stupid thing where we have to be like, sailor's the worst guy ever because he's telling people not to self custody. We have to be outraged about it, even though we know he doesn't mean it. So I'm there. But otherwise it doesn't work because you can't play poker if you're telling everyone or if you're, you know, by the way, we're bluffing. Yes, I mean that, that, that is a tactic in poker. So it's a bad example, but you know what I mean, what are the. [01:36:42] Speaker D: Chances of serious hack at Coinbase in the next year? Do you think they're more like 0.1% or do you think they're more like 15%? [01:36:54] Speaker C: 33%. [01:36:54] Speaker A: 33%. [01:36:55] Speaker B: For a while, as all this ETF stuff was coming out and Coinbase is the center of everything, my thinking was just that, well, that's going to be the end of the next cycle, is that Coinbase is going to blow up. But I don't know, it might not be this cycle. It might be the one they're going to screw up at some point. I mean, the fact that they had to freeze a bunch of withdrawals already points to, yeah, they're going to screw up. I don't know. [01:37:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess, I guess in the context of hack versus just like something going terribly wrong and causing like a serious problem, I say it's like 33% over the next, the whole next cycle. Like it's pretty Likely next year specifically. [01:37:36] Speaker C: Have they ever been hacked though? They are one of the few exchanges that never got hacked that we know about. [01:37:42] Speaker A: Never in like a really, really big way. I think there was. [01:37:45] Speaker B: But if they're doing fractional surf problem, they don't have to be hacked. They can blow themselves up. That's, that's the thing. [01:37:50] Speaker A: It doesn't necessarily have to be a hack. It can just be like really dumb decisions and leveraging and that sort of thing. [01:37:55] Speaker C: I figure it was like every time someone successfully hacks in, their server just crashes. So like they had this. [01:38:02] Speaker A: That's what it's done. It's like they've been hacked like 20 times. Shut down, dude. So I'm not sure if anybody's used this. I haven't really gotten to play with my VTC Pay server recently because I had the one in the cloud and then switched it all over to Start nine and I really haven't set up my BTC Pay back on Start nine. Like I had it on Luna Node. [01:38:31] Speaker C: Oh nice. [01:38:32] Speaker A: But BTC Pay had a bunch of stuff around startos self hosting and BTC pay. So BTC pay 2.0 is here, which looks pretty awesome. They have like a ton of kind of back end changes to kind of streamline it. The interface looks a lot cleaner, like they've, they've switched everything. It's only the sidebar because they had this like really mixed. They originally had like that top bar thing and I hated the navigation originally of BTC Pay. Then things got a lot better with the sidebar update. But they still had some of it in the sidebar and some of it up at the top. But there were multiple times like in the early interfaces where I just ran into dead ends that I literally couldn't even get back to where it was. And it was a little frustrating because the software was super powerful but like really unintuitive. But they've really kind of completely overhauled their navigation. I have not tested this yet, but they said they have a totally new onboarding flow for like new users and to set up a point of sale that's supposedly much easier. And also this is another point that's like relevant to this is Bolts now has a plugin to accept lightning payments without setting up a lightning node. So basically what is going on with like Aqua Wallet and stuff where you get it straight to liquid even though you give lightning invoices is you can now just do a plugin and then accept Bitcoin or accept liquid straight into BTCPay and you don't even have to know. And your customers can select lightning and you just have this integration with bolts, which. That's a big hurdle that's overcome. So a bunch of really cool stuff with BTCPay. Very recently, in this past month, does Everybody here use BTCPay in some form or fashion? [01:40:33] Speaker C: I haven't used it for a while, but, I mean, it's fantastic software. Yeah. Like, I just. It's such a beautiful story for anyone that doesn't know. It's like tweet number two in history. [01:40:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:40:44] Speaker C: Like, this is lies. I will make you obsolete. Like, it was just. He did. He absolutely did. [01:40:51] Speaker B: He did, yeah. [01:40:52] Speaker C: It's just fantastic. [01:40:53] Speaker D: I love BTC pay, but I have. I have been having a thought about, you know, there's been a lot of momentum with zap, right? And like, companies need to keep bitcoin on their balance sheet and they need to do it properly. And they act as if bitcoiners that own companies just don't know that they can. And I think this is a little bit misleading because I think a lot of bitcoiners that own companies, their goal is to get their bitcoin off their books. It's like, well, what if I just pay myself some salary, buy some coin, take it off the grid, put it on my hardware wallet? It's like that. I feel like the phrasing of this movement is like, get all of your bitcoin on the books. Let the government see how much bitcoin you own. And you do realize that there's a whole kind of different movement going on where bitcoiners are trying to keep their bitcoin off their books, right? Why are you trying to convince bitcoiners who own companies to KYC all of their bitcoin? So I don't know, I just feel like that's a little bit disingenuous with some of the ZAP route. [01:42:07] Speaker C: Right. [01:42:07] Speaker D: Crowd and businesses get all your bitcoin. [01:42:12] Speaker A: Kind of. Do they make that argument? I'll just say I love Zapright as. [01:42:16] Speaker D: A tool just for. I don't say it's bad. [01:42:18] Speaker A: They're invoicing and stuff. And I love also just being able to integrate with like, because they're not a custodian or anything. Is that like, I'm just plugging in, Like, I can plug in my BTC pays server into my zap, right? To like, push it to that. It's just kind of like a universal invoicing thing. It's kind of like the, like, if I set up my website with zap, right? Then anything that I change on the back end, like if I want to take a credit card or cash app or strike or whatever, is that I don't have to change anything on the website is. I can just direct it to a different thing in zap, right? It's kind of like a obfuscator as to what I'm actually doing on the back end. But my invoicing and everything is universal. But I also agree that in the sense that like, getting it quote unquote on the books is like, I'd much rather just like, well, I'll shoot me. I'll shoot you an invoice over telegram or keat. I'll drop it in our key room and go ahead and pay it and I'll just drop it in the mail for you. Like, I'd also rather do that. [01:43:17] Speaker D: Yeah, it's just like an issue I struggle with, with my business because there's. There's always this thing in my head about, okay, I should be a bitcoin based business and I should have all my bitcoin on my balance sheet, or I should convert my business's treasury into bitcoin. And then I'm like, wait, why don't I just pay myself some salary out of that treasury and just buy bitcoin off the books? Like, why would I, Why would I want that? [01:43:43] Speaker A: It's almost like you could have a meetup and get people there and you could buy bitcoin from them. [01:43:47] Speaker D: But I mean, it makes sense for people, especially non Americans, that are accepting bitcoin as payment for their business. And like, yeah, I'm speaking as an entitled American right now, but I feel like they should at least address that. It might not be. You might, as a business owner want that bitcoin off your books instead of on it. Like, just to, you know, put the full discussion out there. [01:44:11] Speaker B: I just want to point out that while Uncle Rockstar was on stage, he was trying to prove how BTC pay had just completely decimated bit pay. And guy wasn't listening closely. And he's like, is anybody here use bit pay? And Guy's like, oh my. The only one in the room. [01:44:30] Speaker A: Only one in the room. I was like, yeah, what's up? I love B. Thanks for bringing that up, Jeff. [01:44:37] Speaker C: No, no, that's not. [01:44:40] Speaker A: That's not right. [01:44:41] Speaker B: But. But legit. Like, nobody uses bit. [01:44:44] Speaker A: Nobody does. [01:44:45] Speaker B: Except for Guy. [01:44:46] Speaker A: Except for guys be like, I see. [01:44:48] Speaker C: It from time to time. Like normies. The normies use bit pay. [01:44:52] Speaker B: Actually, I used to have the card I like, bit pay before. Before the block size stuff was great. I was, like, afraid that I was going to get charged for, like, when Obamacare got passed, I had, like, I legit had to drop my health insurance and I was afraid they were going to charge my bank account. So I just closed my bank account and I just bought Bitcoin with everything and was using the Bitpay card as my bank. And then they went nuts during the block size stuff and I was like, fuck this, I'm cutting this up and I find some other solution. And same. [01:45:29] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, no, I forgot. I forget. [01:45:34] Speaker A: Well, I actually want to go on to since. Since we have BTC pay, major upgrade. But Albie Hub finally came to start OS and I installed it and mechanic. So you had told me that L and D Connect was, like, amazing, and I set it up. I think it was through Lightning Terminal, I believe, was the one that was actually doing the LND Connect. And I think it was Sessions who said he was having a similar problem where he was getting, like, RPC errors and, like, things just wouldn't boot up and wouldn't load. But then I did this through. I don't know what magic sauce Albie Hub has for how they're running it, but dude is a million times better. I finally kind of feel like I got the feeling of like, oh, no, yo. Yeah, this. This totally does work. And my node can be my back end at Lugano. And I connected it to. It's almost weird because I'm used to. I'm used to having it jump over when I'm on Thomas. I'm used to having it jump over to the wallet and then I have to prove the transaction. But now I've just set, like, an allowance to Thomas and I have connected the app and so when I zap, it's just, like, done. And I always, like, have this moment where I'm like, okay, shift over to the wallet. And I'm like, waiting for, like, a confirmation. I'm like, oh, wait, no, I already zapped. Already zapped is done. And sometimes I'll just go over to Albigo, the mobile wallet, and I have to look at my transaction history to convince myself. No, yeah, I just zapped. There it is in my transaction history. [01:47:05] Speaker C: I'm checking it out. I'm installing it right now. Everyone's really excited about it, so I want to see what it does. [01:47:10] Speaker A: Dude, it's been great. I can connect individual apps and I can set. It's basically what I wanted to do. With Insect Bunker for lightning. With Insect Bunker where you can connect certain clients to your insec. But then you have a policy where you just say, oh, you can only do kind one events or you can only publish this amount. You can't read my DMS like this sort of thing because you're connecting to a central hub that you are setting instructions for so you can piecemeal it out. I can connect like highlighter.com and then say only do 100,000 sats on highlighter like for, you know, whatever reason, maybe I don't trust it very much or it's my first time using it or something. So I can have policies that are. That limit the exposure of my wallet to certain applications and I can just like run through this whole list and I can connect a whole bunch of stuff and just kind of give myself one taps apps all over the place. But it was fantastic. It was fantastic. I use it a couple of times at Lugano before of course, my power blinked off here and then my start 9 was shut down and so I lost it. The last two days I was there and I was very sad, but it was working flawlessly and I was super stoked about it. [01:48:31] Speaker C: Nice. I'm still in it now. I'm gonna check it out. [01:48:35] Speaker A: Has anybody else done Hobby Hub yet? [01:48:37] Speaker B: I have not. I've got to redo like my entire. My. I have not paid any attention to my start non node in a while. I've been just. I need to update everything and like actually set up some stuff because when I couldn't get. I haven't messed with it since. Basically I was not happy with my connection, my wallet connection to start 9 and I was just like, well, there's not the sort of solution. Like I was listening to what you were talking about. Like, there's just not the sort of solution I need right this minute. I'm just going to wait until you figure it out with. With wholesale or whatever and. And then, you know, and then once. Once is like obvious what I need to do. If Albie Hub, you know, it sounds like might be it. So. [01:49:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm surprised that lnc on Lightning Terminal didn't work for your sessions guy. I don't know why, because that's. [01:49:31] Speaker A: No, I know you were saying that like you had no problem at all with it. And I was like, oh, snap. Like, I don't know, it seemed. And the importantly the first day that I used it, I had no problems. Like I was fully on board. I was like, oh my God, this works. This is Fantastic. This is exactly what I've been waiting for for a long time. And then at some point, just like loading every time I booted up, like 20 seconds to open. Like I'm just like sitting there spinning. And then transactions wouldn't go through after. It was almost universally that after I did a transaction that worked or I did a zap that worked really, really well and really, really quick that the next one gave me an RPC error. Like it was like after I did something successfully, it would now throw back an error. [01:50:15] Speaker C: Interesting. [01:50:16] Speaker A: It's weird. Sh. Weird. Albigo is a great mobile wallet, though I don't know if you can connect other stuff to it, but if you got Albie Hub, dude, talk about minimalist. Send, receive button and a balance, dude, that's all I need to be, man. [01:50:35] Speaker B: When you showed me, it reminded me of Bread Wallet and that was like my favorite thing. [01:50:39] Speaker A: Those are the days. Bread Wallet day. That's right. [01:50:43] Speaker C: It's got a Hayek quote in the bottom of Albie Hub. [01:50:46] Speaker B: All right, that's fantastic. [01:50:47] Speaker A: That's what's up. You know your audience. Yeah, dude, I don't always retweet a quote on Noster, but when I do, it's usually Hayek. Brink receives donation of $250,000 from the Draper Foundation. So that's cool. Brink does solid work on development and all sorts of things there. Tor project also receiving donations and power up privacy is matching donations through 2024 up to $300,000. So that's cool. Tor project not dead and still very, very useful, especially for privacy. Bitcoin related wallets and such. Would not use it as a normal communication mechanism because it sucks and it's slow. But otherwise, if you're using it for privacy, it's very nice. Lightspark, okay, this is one that we briefly brought up before the show officially started. LightSpark has a new Bitcoin L2 and it is called Spark. And I've got a note, it says updates the universal money address standard, which I was meaning to look back into, but I never actually got to do before we started the show here. But this seems like some sort of a weird middle ground between ARK and State chains. Because what appears to be happening, and I'm going to have to do an episode like really deep diving into this, but what appears to be happening is it's. It's got a service provider just like arc or LSPs or anything like that. State chains, same, but whereas ARK has this like really big trade off of like every single time a Transaction happens, you have to update the connector. So you're just batching transactions, which means if you have like 100 users who are just doing a transaction once a day or once every two or three blocks or something, you have zero scaling benefit. Like none. Like, you have to have like 10,000 users who are using it a lot to get like a substantial scaling benefit. [01:52:58] Speaker B: Horrible bootstrapping problem. [01:53:03] Speaker A: Terrible uphill battle. I mean, granted, it's not like you have to make blocks, every single block for no reason. It's only when a transaction comes in. But you have to update it even if there's only one transaction, which means that you get no benefit whatsoever. But this, interestingly, is some sort of an atomic swap system with the. It kind of looks like this interesting middle road between channels and like a big pool. But your atomic swapping between you and the other user with the ssp, the Spark service provider. Yeah, ssp, which could also be a group. Like it's a threshold signature. So it's kind of like a fediment sort of thing with the user having unilateral exit with the time lock. But again, I don't know. I had no, not nearly enough time to actually learn how it works. But it's really interesting that we have a new, entirely new L2 with a different construction, very similar to a lot of the ones that are out there, but it actually looks really, really promising. [01:54:19] Speaker C: Does it require any soft forks? [01:54:21] Speaker A: No. [01:54:22] Speaker C: Well, see, this is what I want to see. Doesn't look like firmly in ossify camp. I give up with Covenants, actually. Yeah, yeah. I'm not, I'm not. [01:54:30] Speaker A: I'm curious where everybody is. I am still on the. I still like ctv. I still like ctv and I still like the idea of Covenants as a basic primitive. I think I know Steve. He and I have gone back and forth on this a couple of times. Steve, are you in the total. Who's. Raise your hand. Raise your hand on the roundtable. Are you for ossification? [01:54:50] Speaker D: Well, I mean, obviously is a strong word. I'm like. I think the most likely outcome is that covenants will kind of just be unused. I think there's a. There's an outcome where they get approved and the scammers find a way to. The spammers find a way to use it. There's outcome where they get approved and it does the things people want them to do. But I think the most likely outcomes is just they never happen or they like they happen, but nobody ever uses them for anything. I think that's the most likely outcome. [01:55:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I agree. Let me, let me riff off that. Um, the, the, the promise of what they can allow for is always in the context of doomsday scenario where we have 8 billion people all trying to make their own UTXOs and no one can. So everyone resorts to off chain stuff and there's no good solutions without covenants. That's basically the sort of Reardon Coal shinobi, you know, advocacy position. And it's, it's alarming for sure, but it's also just so unrealistic that like, you know, bringing around these unreasoned about changes that we know are being pushed for by malicious actors is going to have the desired effect. Like even if, even if, you know, lightning was 10 times better, it still doesn't mean anyone runs a node and doesn't use it in a custodial way. Like the desire just simply isn't there for people to be, you know, doing this stuff. I'm much more in the Mr. Hoddle camp where he's like just, bitcoin is not for everybody. Just accept that it's niche and accept that we are the small intolerant people that will insist on doing everything in a sovereign way. And when you bring on the masses and the normies, they're not going to run nodes and use covenants to have these sophisticated UTXO sharing mechanisms. And that's what's really holding them back. That's not it at all. It's just they don't care. And when they're finally forced to be bitcoiners, they're not going to want to use it in a sovereign way. They're just going to it. It's not the technological thing that's the main blocker. And like, sure, back in the block size wars I was advocating for small blocks just to make it easier for people to run nodes if they wanted to. And if that was one thing that was preventing them, well, we can try and minimize that. But I don't help myself if I pretend that the reason people don't run nodes or use their nodes if they run them is technological in, you know, in motivation. It's, the motivation is just simply not there. Regardless of how easy or cheap it is, people just don't want to take on the responsibility and messing around with bitcoin and adding opcodes in the, in the, in the hope that they will become so is, you know, and the degrees of complexity that they need. Like generating a secure bitcoin address and having all your bitcoins you know, sent there in one UTXO and managing 24 words or whatever. That's already like a big ask for 99% of the planet. Like coming being part of a UTXO sharing system where you're running a bunch of additional software that is relatively untested. It's just, it's, it's. In what universe is that ever going to happen? And I find myself making this awful argument that, you know, the Vitalik Buterin mountain man position of like, oh, this is just for nutcases or even Salo saying, you know, that's just for crypto anarchists. Any form of self custody. There's truth in both of those positions, right? And it's just, it's not going to happen. And unfortunately it's not without trade offs, especially things like opcat. Like that's ridiculous, right? And you have people up on stage at Lugano right now being like, yeah, I like cat and we know Cap VM is a thing and we know it's being pushed by the wizards and it's just, it's, it's unpleasant. But I'm just sitting there going, given all this and given what I know in my experience, I end up back at this position where I'm saying, yeah, ossify, but I don't, it's important to define that term. I don't mean get rid of all janitorial and housekeeping stuff that has to be done on Bitcoin. I don't mean that. But I do mean not adding new opcodes and acting like we know all the ramifications of adding them and that we have a hope in hell of the benefits their proponents will use to justify adding it. And another one little point I'll make is a chat I have with Jimmy Song in Lugano where he's saying every time we add these things, we rug all of the higher up layers that are trying to fully expand and utilize all of the design space that's permitted by prior upgrades like Segwit and Taproot. They're still barely being used when you think about what they permit. And if, when you add stuff, I mean, Lightning now has taproot channels or non taproot channels. And that's like, okay, we need three years to properly absorb the ramifications of adding that. And it's like if you're adding new soft forks and new address types and things constantly, it breeds the wrong mentality. It's just like what's happening in code where it's like new JavaScript framework and this, that and a new programming language. And it's like, look, what if I just told you you're only allowed to use C? And that's it. Have fun with that and see what you can actually do with it. [02:00:11] Speaker B: And as it turns out, you can do everything with it. You just have to. [02:00:15] Speaker C: Yeah, and it's just the efficiency that breeds, like, here's bitcoin, I'm only giving you Segwit, and you got Taproot as well. You have to figure out everything just based on that. And you can come out and tell me you need three more. Like, Riordan came up with a proposal that's like seven soft forks, like seven new opcodes added. And I'm like, I'm sorry, dude, you don't get that. Not with bitcoin. You just don't. Like, if you want to do that kind of stuff, you can prove it or go on Liquid or something like that. Like, it's. I'm sorry, it's just. [02:00:47] Speaker A: And I'll tell you, here's my case. [02:00:51] Speaker B: I would still love to see. I would still love to see something like, like cross input signature aggregation or, you know, like the. Any prev out or whatever. The, like, you know, like the things that we've been talking about forever that, I mean, still is probably not going to happen, but. But like, I think it would be awesome to get some of those things or one or two of those things and. But the opcast stuff scares the shit out of me. The like. And everybody's like, no, no, we can, like, we can prevent like the. It being used maliciously. We can like limit the amount of things you can do. [02:01:26] Speaker A: Sounds a little bit like adding gas, like trying to have some limit to the computation and like that sort of stuff. [02:01:32] Speaker B: Literally. Literally. If you take just like what makes a strong password is, you know, that 13th character or the 14th character. Like, if you're exponentially increasing the number of variable, like the number of possibilities. The same thing happens when you add more opcodes. Like, if you add another, especially something like opcat, which can be used with anything, you're now adding another layer of unknowns that exponentially increases the number of potential problems. And so I don't know why people won't think about it in that context. [02:02:08] Speaker A: There's an argument that Liquid has had opcat for a long time and nobody's done anything with it. But I also feel like there's not really much incentive and nobody's attacking Liquid, you know, like, right now it's not quite the best test case. I feel like in my opinion. [02:02:25] Speaker B: Well, this is the other thing is that Liquid has existed and has covenants and stuff. So if there is a use case for another thing, we need to add, fucking use it on Liquid and show that it works and show that there's demand for the thing and let's do that. [02:02:41] Speaker C: And then even if you take it from the position of there are no unintended consequences to adding OPC and it has consensus and there will be no drama around activation for it, even that is still saying to the people that work in Bitcoin, just don't bother building on top of Bitcoin because the design space is going to keep changing. Even that is bad. And then you add insult to all that by just saying the people pushing for CAT are trying to do a segwit2x hostile takeover. Giacomo makes the just fantastic point that segwit2.x is basically what happened. Sure, it happened via soft fork, not hard fork, but we have blocks that are 2 megabytes and we have SegWit. Right. The reason we didn't like SegWit2.x was because of who was proposing it. And we don't want to set the precedent that CEOs of Bitcoin exchanges tell us what the code is. That was like a political battle, it wasn't a technical battle. So the same thing happens here. If the people pushing for opcat are actively malicious attackers, then obviously we can't accept an upgrade from them. It would be stupid to do it. And that just adds to the first point, which is it's just immature to keep adding these things when we're not fully utilizing the design space we have available to us. It's immaturity and it's young rookie devs that just want to build stuff. And again, I've said it before, the. [02:04:01] Speaker A: New thing sounds cooler than actually doing the long term, slow, arduous work of the last thing. [02:04:09] Speaker C: Yeah, you can do so much with what Bitcoin is at the moment and. [02:04:13] Speaker A: Trying to add new features being a great example. [02:04:15] Speaker C: Yeah, I read it in Scott Adams book years ago. An engineer will tell you if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet. [02:04:27] Speaker D: I was doing a presentation on the meetup this week and I relearned that Satoshi disabled optimization op multiply. So it's like it's kind of understandable why you had disabled division, but op integer multiplication was disabled by Satoshi because he wasn't sure if it was secure. Yeah, now we're talking. [02:04:51] Speaker B: That's a completely different mindset. No, that's a completely different mindset than this shit that's being done right now. [02:04:58] Speaker A: I'll tell you, I don't agree with the like, I'm, I totally get your stance or whatever kind of the framing of like, oh, 8 billion people need their own UTXOs. And it's not really important in that context. I think most people won't do it. But I think about it in the context of like what would make, what would take lightning to the next level and kind of fulfill the vision of lightning in a really, in a much more simplified way, like basically decrease the complexity of it, like multiple times. I have actually used in practice a multisig wallet with multiple different people. And Nunchuck in particular is just awesome for it. It feels natural. You're just like in a chat and you're like, all right, I signed it guys, we need three more signatures. And everybody else jumps in and is like, whoa, sweet. Signed, signed. And it's like, it's pinged like messages. It works amazingly. And all I can think is that from the context of the cypherpunks who want to run their own nodes and want to be able to kind of like be offline at times and we want to build like with all the new peer to peer technologies, like with hole punch, Keat, now Pub Key and the stuff that they're doing with pcar, Picar and NOSTR is small groups of people. We still do not have a construction that makes sense and is simple enough to be safe with channel pools. And a very simplified limited covenant gives us the ability for the four of us to have a lightning channel where updating is very easy. Sharing that backup to what needs to be so that we all have unilateral exit between our devices in a simple decentralized way is very naive. It is not a complex setup. And we can basically run a collective lightning node where we kind of get that benefit of offloading. Like where the transaction and payment in lightning is not online or is not on chain. Well, neither is our individual relationship to the UTXO that is on the lightning payment, neither is that online. It's just that the very next step, the most naive way to make that happen, is a simple understandable covenant that is pre signed. I mean it's basically what lightning does. We, we make pre signed transactions and we give them to each other. That's it. This is just make pre signed transaction and then lock the, lock the UTXO to it. So that doesn't really matter if we give it each other or not. Like we just don't. It just simplifies it. And that's my reason for it. Because it feels like the natural next step of lightning, of extending the way that we are already developing with a primitive that's pretty damn basic and that we know exactly what locking it to a payment hash is and how it works to the point that we've created this roundabout two step function to do it in all of our L2s right now. Well, what if we could do it in one step? Like that's my case for something like ctv. But the fact that it's a soft fork, the fact that we already can kind of do it in certain regards and we don't have any, like, I think there's plenty of good arguments for why maybe it's unnecessary. We certainly have not fulfilled everything that we could build with bitcoin already. There's so many tools in the toolbox. But I also, it just feels like that natural next step. And it could be to the point that I don't think we would ever need anything else. Bitcoin doesn't need a lot in my opinion. [02:08:36] Speaker B: Since we can build bridges between liquid and lightning, or lightning on top of liquid and lightning on top of bitcoin, it means that we could still build a wallet that uses liquid to do exactly what you're just talking about. Right. [02:08:55] Speaker A: As far as it seems like, I would love to see that. That would be awesome. If I had the time and even slightly the expertise to do that, I would totally go for it. But yeah, and maybe if, maybe if one of my other projects takes off, it would be. It'll give me the capital to actually do it, but we'll see. [02:09:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, back to, back to like whether everybody's going to run a node or not. I still, I still, part of me still kind of holds out hope that there is, you know, the question is like I'm, I'm. You said there are a lot of people that run nodes that aren't using them. And I'm one of the. I mean like, I've used nodes off and on for a long time and I ran like bitcoin QT and I. [02:09:31] Speaker A: Actually use my mempool. I just want everybody to know that because I'm very proud of that. And you should think of me as better than you because I use my mempool, that space. [02:09:40] Speaker D: I use your meme. [02:09:41] Speaker B: Listen, I've used my own mempool. Using my mempool is actually one of the things that I've done More of on this than anything else. But I go back and forth. I don't have any money. I think on my start nine right now and I have had, I have, you know, I've used Bitcoin QT and swept addresses and did all sorts of techn. It's not that I'm not like capable of using this stuff, but the easier it gets. Like I like even though I know how to use a wallet that's more technical. I like Bread Wallet, you know, I like, I like Albie Hub or whatever. You know, like something that is just stupid simple. I don't have to think about makes life easier. Dude, Nunchuck is fantastic. Like, like so if we can get things to the point where a bunch of, you know, you can buy a device and just like, you know, it's the same sort of argument. Like it's that, you know, if you told everybody what you had to have to connect to the Internet, you know, like in the 80s or whatever, like and in the future you're going to have a thousand dollar computer and you're going to have a $200 router and you're going to have a two. You know, like if you told people that all these things, it sounds fucking ridiculous but there's so much value in like if you're a business, you want to control your own money, right? Like so my hope is that there will be enough incentives for people to and enough tools that make it easy that people will want some sort of sovereignty. And whether that's on liquid or on bitcoin or some mix of, you know, like spark chains and lightning, whatever, whether it's some mix of sidechain nodes and we just have software that kind of comes, you know, like you just click download and it kind of runs. And you know, like the easier we can make it, the more likely we have people doing things that actually, you know, improve their site. I mean it's like Keat, right? Like Keats, a perfect example. Like every. There's a lot of people that would like to be more private in their social media or like they like to have a better way to communicate with people and keep. Finally makes it easy enough to communicate with people in a pretty sovereign way, in a private way without having to have any sort of. You don't have to know how to run a server or anything else. Right? [02:12:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's one of the things that I feel like the, the goal or the kind of incremental improvements is just lowering the barrier entry to doing the next thing. And I Feel like. And this is, this is something that I'll talk with people about it be like, oh well whatever, you can always do this. You can always do peer to peer stuff. You could use FTP server, you can just punch it in the command line. And like it always drove me crazy because I was like, no dude, like you're talking about like, like just look at the technology that's actually made stuff happen. Like that's actually like moved the needle on stuff. You know, YouTube created an entirely new market with like hundreds of millions of content creators because of how vastly it lowered the barrier entry to publishing. Something like that. Was it just lowering the barrier to entry? And from the context of something like, like right now the barriers to entry in my opinion are like lightning service providers and running a node for you or your friends. And I feel, I actually feel like Noster and Key or the pair stack are kind of like the biggest technology. Not even bitcoin soft forks or anything. They're really kind of the big things to lowering the barrier entry today. Barrier to entry there because it allows you to run a server without servers, like without DNS and without like the complexity of setting up like website, you know, web hooks and like all of these different things and APIs and all of this stuff is. You can start like datum. Datum's a great example actually is, you know, what did you do? You made it so that people could just run it and it works, you know, like you just made it two steps to go from non sovereign to sovereign. [02:13:52] Speaker C: This is a good point, man, because I'm trying to like everyone's wants to know the comparisons with SV2 and I'm like, all right, how hard can it be? I'm going to set up SV2 and try and mine that way. Like first off, there's no pool. There's no pool out there that has SV2 that will allow you to make your templates locally. Like you have to lottery mine if you want to use the job declarator. And second off, I couldn't figure it out. Like I went, I installed Rust, I did all the things I have to do and I tried to get the thing running and it doesn't run. It just looks like every other abandonware experimental project that no one's actually seriously going to run. Like that works. You download the binary of GitHub, you compile it yourself if you want using CMake DatumGateway and it works and it sits on top of your bitcoin node. It works as well as a lightning node. Right. Like it's a thing you run. It needs RPC credentials and it grabs templates from a bitcoin node. And I figured it out really quick. It's just written in a way that people are actually going to use this. Right. And now 70% of the blocks ocean finds are datum blocks where the miner made the template and it's real. Like, I'm sorry, SV2 is just not going to get there. And I hate it when people say on paper this is all possible with multiple things on. In practice it's only going to be used by one the people that actually meant it. So that kind of comes against my anti covenants position right where I say you can do it all on bitcoin as it is right now. But the difference is we're asking devs to build stuff on bitcoin as it is right now. We're not asking normies, we're not asking normies to go ahead and develop these new interesting UTXO sharing things. We're asking devs to get interesting and creative and use the minimal resources they have and the minimal amount of primitives. [02:15:39] Speaker A: Thin it out even further for more things. [02:15:42] Speaker D: How long before the post from Blue Matt showing how easy it is to use SV2 to connect to your T? [02:15:49] Speaker A: Minus 30 seconds? [02:15:51] Speaker C: Well, it's just not for it, man. It's just like I want to do it, I want to run it and look like Frankly, Lucas said, SV2 is hopefully where we all converge. We needed dam and we needed it now, so we built it. It was quick and it works. I wouldn't call it quick and dirty because it's really sl, but it's doing what needs. It's doing what needs to be done. There are datum blocks getting found like every two days now, which is awesome. And that's been a radical improvement to things. If SV2 just gets better and better and better and becomes realistic, we're going to incorporate it when the firmware upgrades on miners to having it. [02:16:33] Speaker A: Yeah, there's no even trade off there. It's like, of course you would support the other option as well. [02:16:39] Speaker C: We'll start loosely incorporating SV2 once the wider ecosystem uses even that. But like at the moment, SV2 is demand pool, which only allows you to lottery mine. So calling it a pool doesn't make a lot of sense. Like pool is kind of being used as a euphemism for we'll run a stratum server for you. Whereas pooling really refers to the splitting of rewards. So if that's not happening Then you're not doing the primary function of what pool is, and it's being used by braiins. Because brains make their own aftermarket OS for ant miners that actually does use SV2, so they get the encrypted communications, they get improved centralized template construction. And the irony with brains is that they just use ant pools templates, as far as I can tell. Which means that they're doing the very opposite of what the decentralized everything with stratum v2 approach. It's only manifested on one pool. That not only doesn't allow minus side template construction, the pool doesn't even create templates. It gets Bitmain to do it, which is like the worst thing you could do ever. The whole point is to stop Bitmain. [02:17:45] Speaker A: Being decentralization theater rather than actually demonstrating the solution to the problem. [02:17:55] Speaker C: But still, if the iterate and SV2 gets good enough and it's just the open stand that we all use, then sure, datum becomes a thing. That was like, oh, well, that was a waste of time. That actually gave us a year of miners making their own templates and, you know, showed it could be done. Like, if that ends up being the case, so be it. I think we'd all be happy with it. It's not got to turn into like a long fight, but I just don't think the SV2 world really has it. And like then, interestingly, this is from in Lugano, there was an educational thing before the main conference. There was. I. I don't know if they call themselves plan B as well, but there's that guy, Alex, the French guy who like does teaching stuff in El Salvador and, and you know, and rings about. But yeah, that, you know, there was a presentation. I did one on Datum, SV2 guy did one and Braidpool guy did one. And like, this is just amazing to me because there's a lot of people that think braidpool is like, you know, the real solution here and that like ocean is still, in a sense is still a trusted third party and a central point of failure and all that. Even if we get minus braid pool. [02:19:07] Speaker A: Like peer to peer or something. [02:19:09] Speaker C: Well, yeah, but it's like it's. It's unbelievable on paper. It does everything. It's like, it's insanely complicated. And I don't think anyone's under any illusions that it's like an easy quick fix, but there are holes in it. And the one I didn't realize was that they hadn't taken into consideration that miners can make different templates. How do you deal with that. I was like, so right, all this looks great. What happens if I'm making a crappy template and someone else is making a really lucrative template? What do you do with the reward split? And they're like, oh, well, our assumption had always been that everyone would just make identical templates based on the mempool. And I'm like, all right, this is, that's, that's not how any of it works. Like you have to have like, this is the main issue, like Ocean right now is like what do we do with different templates? Like this miner wants to mine 300 kilobyte blocks. That guy is Mara Pool and he has a bunch of out out of band incredibly lucrative spam transactions that aren't even known to the wider network. How do you normalize shares? Like they can't be getting the same rate. Right, but what do you do? And that's just, that's like the fundamental problem to decentralizing template construction in a pooled context. How do you decide who is worth what? Because you can't just have people come along and mine empty blocks just to troll everyone else and get the same split for each of their shares. So how do you do it? We got a spreadsheet on here with the trade offs of each and every idea and it's uncharted territory, especially with. [02:20:41] Speaker A: A peer to peer pool. Like that's just going to have tons of problems, problems with that because somebody can go in just to cause like, just to be, just to be an ass, you know? [02:20:49] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean they do, they do leverage the proof of work that's already being done to like establish, you know, to prevent certain griefing attacks. So if that is the sort of low hanging fruit that they'll always appeal to. And that's a good approach of course, like if you're 70% of the pool, you don't get to it. This, that is Sybil resistance out of the gate. Right? Because you have to, you can't fake the proof of work you're doing as a minor. So it's a good idea. I actually like Braidpool, but it just when I was like, what do you do about different templates? And they're like, good question. I'm like, whoa, you didn't have an answer for that. That's like, this is all I've thought about for a year now. Like if your decentralization is messy so you have to put safeguards on it and all of them are bad in one way or another. And if you don't do it. That's the worst of everything. Because then, you know, the big centralized guy comes along and mines awful blocks and gets paid the same as everyone else. All your miners are making 50% of what they were expecting. The pool dies. Like that's, that's just out of the gate. You're dead. But every single solution to it sucks. So like, I mean, I was saying at the beginning of Ocean, I'm like, this is decentralized. And everyone's like, well, what about this? I'm like, yeah, you're going to hate it. You'd be surprised how much people like centralization when it means a parent controls everything and makes sure you all get the maximum amount of money. You'd be surprised how much, how used to that people can get. And like appeals to Bitcoin's old game theory, which is don't worry, every miner will seek to earn the most amount of pot must the most amount possible. So all their templates will be jam packed with transaction fees, no matter what. That's naive, man. It's only one share. At the end of the day, if someone mines an empty block deliberately, that's one share. Like it's no skin off their nose. Block withholding barely costs miners anything and it kills pools in seconds. Like, technically there is a financial incentive for a miner never to do that, but it's so little when it comes to the money they lose by doing it. And it's so damaging to the pool that it's that asymmetric, that asymmetry between the cost to the attacker and the cost to the, you know, the attacked is just, it's like a fundamentally unsolved problem. But people are going to use pools even though pools can be attacked, so what can you do? [02:23:05] Speaker A: Yeah, there's. [02:23:06] Speaker C: I don't know. [02:23:06] Speaker A: I actually talked about this with, I mean, it wasn't quite in this context, but the conversation in the Fireside chat, which I guess should be up sometime soon. I don't know when they're going to do the video of it. They're editing it and sending it to me, but I did with the hole punch guys, with MAF and Tosh, Andrew and Such a fun talk, man. It was, it was really good. And David. But one of the things we talked. [02:23:32] Speaker B: About was wait time out for one second. Aren't we supposed to talk about politics real quick? So that are we. [02:23:38] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, we have to. Steve specifically requested Steve comment on Trump and. [02:23:44] Speaker A: Oh, that's right, there's an election. [02:23:45] Speaker D: I was saying I gotta run soon, so I want you guys to start talking about politics. I can just rage quit and walk out. [02:23:51] Speaker A: Okay, well, let's rage quit. Okay, so what are we doing? There's an election year, there's an election and that's soon, I think. [02:24:01] Speaker D: I think elections are more damaging to societies than hurricanes. Actually. [02:24:08] Speaker A: That'S kind of worse than the worst silly version of climate change out there is. [02:24:18] Speaker B: Are the political system manipulating the hurricanes? I don't know. Like, you know this point. [02:24:23] Speaker A: I don't know. I think they have a bunch of antennas. What they got those antennas for? Otherwise it's kind of a hurricane weather. [02:24:30] Speaker D: Modification computer, I'm pretty sure. [02:24:34] Speaker A: Totally not a scam. [02:24:36] Speaker D: But you know what? It takes all types. [02:24:37] Speaker A: So what does. [02:24:41] Speaker B: It takes all types. [02:24:46] Speaker A: You know what the rest of the things that I have up here is another stupid thing about BlackRock and stuff. [02:24:52] Speaker B: I just, I just. [02:24:55] Speaker A: Ellen Hans, which we already talked about, soft fork and stuff. And that's basically covenants and CSFs and those sorts of things. So we can, we can. I think we hit major news items that like I was at least concerned about. So let's go to. Let me talk about first. The thing about the hole punch guys is they talked about that is how much we have to slowly etch away at that centralized framing that our mental frame is still to just centralize to solve the problem and how difficult it is to get out of that mindset. And also to realize when a tool does solve one of the problems is not even realizing how it can be used. I kind of liken it to my. The first time that I realized that I had like the first, like six months that I had a smartphone and I had the Internet in my pocket is how much I had to relearn how to. How to do things because suddenly I could look something up. Like we didn't have to have those questions anymore where, you know, you just, you're just off hand having some conversation or something and you're like, I wonder where the origin of button came from. I wonder what's the origin of that word. It's like, I don't know. And then like you have the Internet and you're like, wait a second, I can look it up. And then same thing with like maps and stuff. It's like I had to rethink what the tools actually enabled. Granted, now I just want to go back to the time where we couldn't look up stuff. [02:26:27] Speaker C: But computers were a mistake, man, where. [02:26:29] Speaker A: There were, where there were mysteries everywhere. [02:26:32] Speaker B: But it's like the same thing. Like if you get a 3D printer, like, and. And you have to actually learn. It's like, yeah, it's like, okay, I can solve. There's a new. A whole bunch of problems I can solve now. But you have to know when you can solve them, how easy it is. And like. And then you have to compare that to like. Well, it was. I mean like everybody wants to use that tool sometimes wrongly, like where it. Maybe it's just easier to bend a little piece of, you know, bend a coat hanger and to, you know, solve your problem rather than to go and draw something and 3D print it. Do you just like not only have to learn how to think with the tool, but you also have to learn how it relates to all the other tools you already have. And so you get a decentralized again. Like they said, you have a whole bunch of tech guys that have been brought up in this server centric world and they think that, well, you just can't do what you're talking about doing and just not. They can't break out of that thought process that framing. [02:27:33] Speaker C: Yeah. Luke has Covid. Sorry. He just sent me a positive. [02:27:37] Speaker A: Oh no. Oh no. [02:27:40] Speaker B: He doesn't worn his gas mask and works. But he should take it. [02:27:46] Speaker A: He's totally. He totally should. That actually works really well. [02:27:50] Speaker C: Didn't do anything when I took it. [02:27:52] Speaker A: Really? [02:27:53] Speaker B: Really. [02:27:53] Speaker C: That's interesting. That helped me know the big difference. For me, the only thing that helped me was like being really warm. Like I was, I was in Mexico and it was like kind of winter and I was like, no, I don't need a blanket. So I was sleeping with this like thin sheet every night and I realized I was like cold. And then I was like, yeah, it's Mexico. I need to actually stop telling myself that I'm not feeling cold because I'm in Mexico somehow. It's just freezing. So I got like a thick blanket, slept for like 12 hours and woke up like, ah, I'm like 40% better. Finally. [02:28:23] Speaker A: I'd had it like 40% better. [02:28:26] Speaker C: Yeah. And I was like, now I've turned a corner. I'm actually gonna like be able to recover from this thing. But. [02:28:32] Speaker D: Well, guys, I gotta let you guys finish on your own. I gotta head out. I got some hotel rooms I gotta break into. But. [02:28:38] Speaker A: What's your last words? What's your last words? [02:28:41] Speaker D: Before takes most. [02:28:43] Speaker A: Are you voting for Trump? [02:28:44] Speaker D: Yeah. [02:28:44] Speaker A: Or Ron Paul? Yeah. [02:28:45] Speaker D: I don't know. [02:28:46] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:28:47] Speaker D: I'm not never voting. Takes most types. [02:28:50] Speaker C: Right. [02:28:50] Speaker D: For Michael Sailor, I guess. [02:28:53] Speaker C: Takes. [02:28:53] Speaker A: Takes all kinds. [02:28:55] Speaker D: Yeah. But except for. Thanks, guys. See y'all next week. [02:29:00] Speaker A: Later, man. [02:29:01] Speaker B: All right, man. [02:29:03] Speaker A: All right, so we'll wrap this up with just a little talk on the election. Let's. Let's talk about politics. [02:29:09] Speaker B: Is that what we're going to talk about now? [02:29:11] Speaker C: I was thinking of driving down to Seattle and voting for just someone just for fun. Not an American, of course. Doesn't seem to matter much. [02:29:20] Speaker B: So, dude, if you could. If you could do that and record the process, it would be. It would be a wonderful. Like, I want. [02:29:28] Speaker A: That would actually be a great service. [02:29:30] Speaker C: Yeah, like, should I do it? Like, hey guys, I'm driving down to America today to vote. [02:29:35] Speaker A: Dude, that would be amazing. No, there was a. I think it was. Elon posted a map of those states that do not require any sort of voter id, not even a non picture id, like a library card with your name on it. And you can just go and you can just vote. And it's like, it was like five states were in the gray. There were like three different. It was like a color coding of like how what you had to have to vote. And it was funny because like all of the states that were gray were also blue states. In the context of voting here, you. [02:30:09] Speaker B: Haven'T had to have an ID previously, but you had to give your name and then they confirmed that. Okay, you're part of a county. [02:30:17] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [02:30:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And so is it. Is it just that they don't require anything in some of these places? Like you don't have to have a name or anything? I mean, like, you know, like we know that dead people have been voting too, but you know, like, so they have to like give like whatever, you know, invalid voter person, you know, a name of a dead person to say or, you know, I don't know, maybe. [02:30:43] Speaker A: I don't know. [02:30:44] Speaker C: I heard. Is it Pakistan or something? Or when you vote, they dip your finger in this like purple dye that like takes a few days to come off. [02:30:52] Speaker A: It's like just like purple eyes diet iodine or something. Just make sure. [02:30:57] Speaker C: Yeah, you just. [02:30:58] Speaker A: That's funny. [02:30:59] Speaker C: You try and vote again. No, sorry. You got purple finger. Like we know you voting is like the simpler the tech, the more reliable it is. Yeah, the minute, the minute there's voting machines, I'm like, I'm done. Like, even if it was open source, that wouldn't even fix it. How am I supposed to like stick. [02:31:15] Speaker A: In the U.S. oh my God. It's the idea of a closed source proprietary electronic voting machine drives me crazy. Like, no, dude, that's that's 100 bullshit. Like I would have a trouble trusting an open source one. Just like you said, like you call electronic voting machine. You, you cannot, you still just can't verify it. But regardless, the software, the whole machine is closed source and proprietary by a government contract company. Like. No, no, no, no, no. Are you insane? [02:31:54] Speaker B: Like the problem is that the digital counting machines suffer from this same fucking problem. If you have a thing where you're. [02:32:02] Speaker A: Feeding your voters, there's nothing wrong with paper ballots. There's nothing wrong with paper ballots. There's no, we don't need to fix paper ballots. [02:32:10] Speaker B: No, but that's what I'm saying is that you feed a paper ballot into a thing that counts them. That's also just as bad like because it can spawn except that you can. [02:32:19] Speaker A: At least check it later. That's the thing is that you can hand verify whether or not the machine is telling you the truth. And if you. But like using a closed source proprietary, punched in an electronic button as to who I was voting for is like literally, is literally like saying we are going to put all of the. We're gonna, let's say we do paper ballots. Let's do a paper ballots analogy. We're all going to do paper ballots. We're all going to put them in boxes. We're not going to look at them or count them beforehand. We're going to give it to one guy and then that guy is going to give us the number of votes that were there and then they are going to set every one of them on fire and then we know and we have verified because the guy is super trustworthy and he gave us the number. Number. That is what using a closed source proprietary electronic voting machine is. And if you don't get that, you're, you're either a liar or you're stupid and you don't know how computers work. [02:33:08] Speaker C: And when he goes in the room to count it all, he has an Internet connection too, by the way. [02:33:13] Speaker A: Yes. [02:33:15] Speaker C: They found a bug, right? And they shipped. They patched it. They hot patched it. I'm like, okay, so these machines are literally phoning home networked. [02:33:24] Speaker B: Fucking ridiculous. [02:33:27] Speaker C: I'm sorry man, I'm just. [02:33:29] Speaker A: But at this point I'm like, I just can't. [02:33:32] Speaker C: It's. I don't know, like it's. The theory is that you can only rig it so far and that if you like over the top rig it then somehow that triggers a mass, you know, civil disobedience event or something like that. [02:33:46] Speaker B: But yeah, I don't think that's gonna happen. Like, I literally think conservatives would just take it, and they'll just. They'll just be like, oh, yeah, they're. [02:33:54] Speaker C: All family men with kids, man. They don't want to rise up, like, at the end of the day, like, and, you know, there'll be something like Kamala's greatest rally ever, when It'll have, like, 40, 000 views, and then Joe Rogan will go on. Sorry, Trump will go on Joe Rogan and have, like, 40 million. [02:34:09] Speaker A: Yeah, like, to be fair, a lot. [02:34:11] Speaker C: Of that is the rest of the world. Sure. But, like, yeah, you know, it's. It's unpalatable and just completely unacceptable to me. And even speaking from, like, the perspective of someone that thinks it's all the show anyway, and there's no real, you know, competition. [02:34:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:34:28] Speaker C: I have no Trump to win because I don't like Kamala. [02:34:31] Speaker A: And I thought you were voting for Kamala. I was certain you were voting for Kamala. [02:34:36] Speaker C: Dude, Trump is way more entertaining. Like, he's actually, like, fun legit. Like, I want, like, Trump and Elon, Kamala's got zero sense of humor at all. Like, just these stupid, corny phrases. Like, if you just want entertainment value, Trump needs to win for sure. [02:34:55] Speaker B: Well. And, dude, I just can't. Like, Dick Cheney and Bush are supporting fucking Kamala. Like, what more evidence do you need that this is not. [02:35:08] Speaker A: Have less faith in liberals, principles of anything? Fuck these people. If for the. All the times that I had agreed with them and that, like, I saw, I was like, man, they're right. Like, the anti war stuff and all of these positions that the. You know, my body, my choice and how quickly and completely, they just trample on this shit when it isn't some specific issue or just when the political wins. Like, Kamala just has a totally different position on fracking and on immigration and on everything. She just completely changed it. And all the liberals are like, okay, sure, sure, whatever, sure, whatever. It's like, did you have. Did you believe any of the. Any of it that you were saying? [02:35:51] Speaker B: You know, like, the 90s or the. You know, the early 2000s? Like, Bush and Cheney were the. Like, the. They were. They were Hitler. [02:36:02] Speaker A: Right? [02:36:02] Speaker B: Like, they were the enemies of, Like, Yeah. Of the Democratic Party. And now they just. We're on the same team. [02:36:08] Speaker A: And the left used to be anti war. I just don't. Like, they literally used to be anti war. And that's when I was like, okay, yeah, this, like, that's when I. When they were right you know, and I was just like realizing what an absurdity, you know, the, my period of going Republican was and how absurd my, my framing of everything was. And then I was just like, these people are just bonkers. They're just, they're just bonkers with like a different coat of paint, you know? [02:36:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:36:41] Speaker C: They got no interest. Watching all the bands like Rage against the Machine and all that turn into like pro Biden people is weird. [02:36:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:36:48] Speaker C: You must be joking. [02:36:51] Speaker B: We're gonna be punk rock for the establishment. Like, what the. Like, I just. [02:36:57] Speaker C: You do what they tell you, it's awful. It's. Line them up and shoot them, as would say, like just. It does my head, man. Like, I don't know. I don't. I don't know if there's any. I think it is identity. Like, people will say I'm a Democrat or I'm a Republican, which is ridiculous. Like, you're not. That can't be an identity, a political party. [02:37:19] Speaker A: That's ridiculous. [02:37:20] Speaker C: That's just complete. You can't. I, like, they're going to change. The politicians that represent them are going to change. And your own self description is going to mean that you, you know, you rewire yourself and justify your own positions and try and reconcile everything to fit with your preconceived notion of who you are. This is like fundamental to hypnosis. Like, if you tell someone, I'm not a sm, if someone says I'm a smoker, like, that's, that's an identity. Right. So you can give up, but you're still a smoker that just gave up and you'll start again because you're a smoker. Like, it's. That identity thing is like rule number one in how you change your behavior. So if you're going to identify as a Republican, it doesn't matter what the party turns into, you're going to be that same with Democrats. Like, I'm a liberal, I'm a Democrat. That will completely reverse the definition of everything that those things once meant. And you'll just go with it because it's literally you that's changing. You're not staying congruent with any of the principles that made the thing what it was. And when someone comes along, some annoying kid like me, that's like, so you, you're. You're standing side by side with Bush and Blair and Cheney and whoever the heck. Like, these are people we marched in the streets against over the Iraq war. And these are the people. I'm like running out of ranch, totally fine. With. Because they're anti Trump, who is literally Hitler and a Nazi, even though there's just absolutely zero evidence of that whatsoever. It's literally, at this point, the connection is patriotism or any sort of element of, you know, national pride. It's all just racist to you and all completely unacceptable. He's a misogynist. He's a racist. He hates Mexicans. All of these things that are just made up, essentially. [02:39:07] Speaker B: It's so wild, is that they don't even know what policies were put in place, like his Arab or Muslim ban, like, travel ban. It's exactly the same policy that Obama had during one of the, like, bombing campaigns or something. And it's like, so. So wait a minute. It's only racist when Trump does it. Like, I don't. You know, like, they will just use anything. And. And the only time they were ever nice to Trump is that the one week that he was bombing, he dropped the. The mother of all bombs or whatever, the Moab on Afghanistan or whatever it was. And, like, then they were talking about, oh, he's so presidential. And it's like, does nobody fucking remember that? Like. Like what they were doing last week? And then, you know, and I don't know, even. The. The crazy thing about it is that even the Libertarian Party has tried to do this. Like, they've, like, Nick Sarwalk, who I think was just a fucking government plant anyway. Like, he was, like, the leader of the Libertarian Party for a while, but, like, he actually said something like, you know, we need to support whoever the Libertarian candidate is, even if they don't, like, match our principles or something. And. And Dave Smith was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. So if, like, if Hitler gets, like, somehow wins the Libertarian nomination, you. You think we should just support. He's like, well, yeah, I mean, like, we. We've got to get behind whoever it is. And, like, I can't remember who he was talking about at the time, but it just. It's like, okay, so we don't need to have any principles. We just need to align with the party. Like, we. We need to. Our identity needs to be the party. You know, it's just. I don't know what happened to Guy. He's gone. It's just me and you now. [02:40:41] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. [02:40:42] Speaker B: This is bitcoin audible. [02:40:44] Speaker C: Yeah. All right, well, let's jump off, because I'm starving anyway. It's always good to see you. Yeah, man, that was a lot of fun in Lagana, man. I enjoy those, dude. [02:40:54] Speaker B: I had a blast. The breakfasts Were my favorite part. I think every time coffee. [02:40:59] Speaker C: Coffee with bitcoiners in a hotel is like, that is literally my happy place, man. The scrambled eggs were good too. So it all adds. I'll speak to you soon, mate. Have a good night. [02:41:21] Speaker A: All right. Now, we had to cut that one off at our awkward place because I got disconnected because my computer had a seizure and everything shut down. And I spent like a good third. They waited around. I gotta tell you if we find any good stuff because we recorded the private conversation between mechanic and Jeff that was left over when I disconnected. And I'm pretty sure they had, like, really wonderful things to say about me. So we're gonna pull out the hits of when they probably thought they weren't being recorded and that we wouldn't publish it and we're gonna share it. You know what? I'm just gonna give it to the audio. Not I'm gonna give it the pre show and the after everything screwed up and we were trying to salvage the end of it. Show to the audio. Not. So keep an eye out for that. If you're in the key group or you're in the telegram group, I will have it published for you guys so that you can listen to the lovely rantings and all of. All of the things that we talked about before the show when we should have been talking about it on the show. But yeah, I feel like we wrapped it. Wrapped it up pretty good. Mechanic loves Kamala thinks she's a genius. Very consistent and has definable and reliable belief system also. Great laugh. Just a wonderful laugh. And Jeffrey is definitely voting for Trump because mostly just because of the overwhelming entertainment value that he can provide for our country. But also I know Jeffrey is very, very on board and very excited about his tariff policies. I really feel like it doesn't matter who gets elected. Bitcoin's going to go up because Trump seems very favorable towards bitcoin and it's likely to have a much better regulatory landscape with a Trump regime in office. Whereas Kamala, I think it would actually go up because people would be afraid of what the hell the banking system and rules are going to be and how bad inflation is going to be. And they would also be buying bitcoin out of fear of what the regime is going to do. So I don't think it matters a whole lot. You know, it's one thing interesting that I have learned in the bull bear market years, I guess we're three cycles, four cycles now in bitcoin. Been around for a long time. And one thing that I have noticed when you're in the bear market, like so much of this is really about liquidity and broader long term sentiment and how long it takes to shift from one or the other. So one thing that I've noticed and just this is just something to kind of keep in mind is that during a bear market, good news doesn't matter. It doesn't really do anything. It doesn't help if there's ever just a short term blip. Doesn't matter. It's just everything is negative. However, in the reverse, when we are in a hype cycle, when we're in a massive expansionary and growth phase for the network, bad news doesn't matter. In fact, bad news often helps it because it's like one of those things that people just realize that how external to the system it is or maybe it's not even got anything to do with that. Like I'm probably just projecting on what I think other people think about it. But it just doesn't matter. Bad news doesn't hurt it when we are in a massive bull market because it's been the last three years that put us in the bull market and its lack of its inability to just die and go away and it keeps growing that finally just kind of beats itself through people's heads. That man, maybe I should actually have a little piece of this. And we go through this over and over and over again and here we are, seems like back again, squeezing up through 73,000 or squeezing up into the 70 thousands and making its way back to all time high. And honestly I think we're just going to keep running. It's just going to be a slow and steady, we'll have some little spikes, like volatility will start to increase a little bit. But I still think it'll be a little while before it gets really serious. But I think it's really important to consider, consider the exponential, consider the size and era that we are in now. I think it's probably within the next year that we will see a 20 and maybe even 30,000 candle, $30,000 candle on maybe the daily, the weekly. Like it's, it's going to be, it's going to get wild, it's going to get really big and really crazy. And I think just important to prepare yourself because everyone is going to be talking about it. It's, you know, when this happened last in 2020 and 2021, there was still a lot that was overshadowed. And 2017 was kind of the days when bitcoin was still just seen as, like, kind of a joke. And I really think that something that has changed in the framing for where we are going to be this cycle, I believe, is that this will be the cycle where you start to look questionable, where your reputation and your legitimacy starts to just kind of wane a little bit. If you can't realize that bitcoin isn't a joke and that there is something very significant here, I think that's slowly just going to be the norm. People are going to realize that bitcoin is here. I think that's what this cycle is. It's. The bitcoin is here and it's not going anywhere cycle. And I don't know what that means, but it's certainly going to be really interesting. So that wraps up October and. Oh, man, we didn't talk about pub key. Oh, that sucks. All right, I'll have to do an episode on this, and then we'll use it as kind of a foundation roundtable, and we'll have a much better foundation on a lot of these things because there were a number of things that. That happened at Plan B and Lugano that we did not cover as far as just kind of like announcements and things that I learned about for the first time. So we'll kind of take the opportunity to explore those for the month and then come back with roundtable number four to wrap up November and get everybody's thoughts on the new tech. And I'll learn how Spark works and I'll let you know. But with that, let's get out of here. I'm done. I'm sick of this. What the. What are you still doing here, man? This is. Oh, my God, it's so long. Okay, check out the affiliates and links. God, you guys got to try hold a lot, man. Y'all really need to try that game. And there's a discount code. I think it's like 10%. I can't. I can't remember, but there's a discount code down in the show notes. We're trying. I'm actually working with Scott and Tali to. I hope. Should I say that? Should I? No, nevermind. Don't worry about it. You should check out the bitcoin games because they're really, really cool and you should play with them with your family, because it is a fantastic way to learn bitcoin. And no, they're not educational games. They're actually fun. But also, don't forget to check out, like, if you want to buy bitcoin, use my links. It's a great way to help out the show, and it doesn't cost anything. And I just literally put the links for the services that I like to buy Bitcoin with. Like, these are the ones that I use. Same with all the affiliates. I just kind of went around to the things that I like. I get a lot of questions about, hey, guy, do you know a thing that does this? The ones that were most fresh in my mind, those are the ones I went to get. So that you just kind of have a easy resource right down there in the description and also an easy way to support the show. So thank you, guys. Thank you so much. And I will catch you on Noster on Still an X every once in a while, and I'll catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin. Audible until next time, guys. Take it easy.