Episode Transcript
[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 the roundtable is back there with us today. We have got Bitcoin mechanic, my brother Jeff, and Simple Steve. And we are getting into all of the news that happened in November. It is a pretty long list and we ended up diving so deep into some of the topics that we didn't actually get to the whole list. And I had horrible technical problems because Riverside and my MacBook hate each other. And so it took us like 45 minutes to sort out all of the technical issues. And because of that, I'm actually going to in the outro to this. So if you want to get the rest of the little news items that we had stashed away for the month, I'm actually going to do kind of a fast, super fast bullet point read of everything that we didn't cover in the show. So we can round out the whole month and get all of the news. And if you have anything that you really want us to expand on or that you want to hear about in a show, just hit me up. Shoot me a boost and a note on Fountain or just a response on Fountain. I think you can do it without a zap if I'm not mistaken. Or tag me on Nostr. Less likely to find it on X. But you can tag me on X too. I do try to stay up to date on that one just so you guys can get up with me. So let me know and we'll go ahead and get into the episode real quick. I just want to say thank you to Fold and thank you to everyone who supports this show who zaps and boosts. And if you have not checked out Fold yet, they are having a holiday signup special. 20,000 sats for free right now if you use my link. And it's actually a free way for you to support my show. So it's a way to get sats and then also get me sets. I will get 10,000 sats for the sign up. I mean, if you're not using Fold and if you're trying to be on a bitcoin standard or you're trying to integrate bitcoin into everything you do, it's really hard to beat Fold. I am a huge long time fan and user. I've been using them since they were just selling Starbucks gift cards and there was nothing else. That is how long I've been using Fold. So check them out. I highly Highly recommend it. And there's a link in the show notes that's great for both of us. With that, let's go ahead and get into. We got mechanic Jeff, Steve, and myself. The roundtable is assembled. Let's talk about everything that went down in Bitcoin in November 2024.
All right, what do you guys want to get into first? I feel like. I feel like we've got a lot of little things and then a couple of really big things to cover. And I kind of feel like Trump is the thing to start on because it happened right at the beginning of the month. And maybe we should go in chronological order.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Okay. All right, so, guys, guess what?
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Orange Man President.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Orange Man. Orange man won the presidential election.
And Orange man has a team of people who are Orange supporters, not only of Orange man, but also Orange Coin.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Sort of. Sort of. It's a mixed bag.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: There's a lot of crypto shit. So. So, you know.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: No, I'm not talking about the crypto shit. I'm talking about. It's a mixed bag. Like, the people he's appointing are a mixed bag.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. Well, he also. We also might get another Trump coin, which is really exciting in and of itself. And Charles Hoskinson might be. We might be solanaed and cardanoed and all sorts of like. We will be the tech innovation, the blockchain innovation of the world. Guys, tell me, how excited are you about this wonderful, wonderful development?
Steve, let's start with you since you're up in the upstairs basement.
[00:04:20] Speaker C: I think the tweet I like the best was, have fun with your politicians and all the other things you're playing with.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: That's a pretty good one.
[00:04:31] Speaker D: That's a pretty good one.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Let's leave it at that.
[00:04:35] Speaker E: Let's.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Jeff, let's move on to you, buddy.
[00:04:37] Speaker C: No. Well, I'll say one more thing. I'm really happy for the first day of Trump's presidency because either way, it's going to be great. Either he's going to pardon Russ.
[00:04:47] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:04:47] Speaker C: Klaus Ulbrich, or all the bitcoiners are going to realize why you should never listen to anything a politician says, ever. So either way, it's great.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Either way, it's great. Either way, it's great. I actually think he'll pardon. He's mentioned it enough that I actually. I mean, he even did it after he won and brought attention to.
[00:05:10] Speaker D: Oh, what was it that he tweeted? I forgot.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: But then he said, free Ross.
[00:05:16] Speaker D: Free Ross.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Day one. Hashtag FreeRoss Day one underneath it. So he hasn't forgotten. And I'll tell you, the Bitcoiners and the Libertarians will never, like, there will never be a post on any social media that does not have someone under it. It's like, you son of a bitch, you lying piece of crap. You did not free Ross. Why is Ross still in a cage?
So he will not. He will never live that one down.
[00:05:46] Speaker D: One way or the other.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: But, yeah, hopefully I'm. I'm very excited for Free Ross and.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: I kind of want to be there.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: I've already been in conversations with liberals that, like, are trying to blame the current escalation of the, of the Ukraine war on Trump somehow.
And I'm like, you know, he's like, he said. He said, well, he said that he could end the war and with one phone call before he was even inaugurated. And now the war's escalating. I'm like, you. You get that it's the people you were supporting that are escalating this war, right? Like, this.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: Is this, Is this a problem for you? Are you. Do you think that escalating the war is bad because you are supporting the.
[00:06:29] Speaker D: People who are doing it?
[00:06:30] Speaker E: The mental gymnastics.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, it's incredible. And he put out a video saying we should have an immediate ceasefire. You know, like, Like, I, like, that's the best rhetoric we've ever heard from Trump ever. You know, like, I don't, you know, so then. And that's part of the. I mean, like, because he was clearly, you know, not campaigning with Liz Cheney meant that he was the anti war candidate. And so, you know, that was like, half the reason for voting for him, you know, Ross being the other half. So the, the bitcoin stuff, I guess it's like, I'm still an agorist, I think. I don't think that politics solves anything, so. Anything. But I do think, like, as Tom Wood said, that it definitely matters who was in power. You know, like, Florida, you know, your life was measurably better in Florida than it was in New York.
And so, like, we're going to get heat from all sorts of people all the time anyway. If we can, you know, have the amount of attacks that we're getting be some sort of muddy, like, tolerable thing that we can fight and resist, then I think that's probably better.
And so having some halfway defense of free speech while, you know, while we're trying to finish building, you know, Keaton Noster and all these things is probably not a Bad thing. So friendly. Friendly, halfway friendly. You know, handling a bitcoin, you know, all that is okay.
[00:08:05] Speaker C: So I think I'm more excited about RFK and the health stuff than I am about Trump stuff. I've been thinking like, the. Just. I'm, I'm on board with like 95% of what RFK says. I mean. Yeah, our, our country is so unhealthy. It's so obvious.
[00:08:24] Speaker E: Yeah. It's bad.
Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm an RFK maxi. Like if you can make.
He's coming Bazak. He says coming back.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: I, the RFK stuff is. I mean, and the fact that he's like a. A legit bitcoiner is kind of impressive to me.
But being able to. I don't know. I mean, I don't know if anybody will be able to really go after. I mean, he's a lawyer. Maybe he'll be able to put a. Hurting on the pharmaceutical companies in some way.
But the healthcare system's so corrupt and so messed up that they've.
You. It's got to change somehow. So like, I can't imagine that they can really make it measurably worse. I mean, I should probably be careful what I say, but.
But it seems like he's, you know, aimed in the right direction. The only, my only worry is that he's not. He's not a.
He's not. He's definitely not a free market guy and well, hasn't been historically. So. So I worry that he'll put some sort of regulation. He'll try to fix things with regulation, which will then be.
What's the bootleggers and Baptist theory? Right.
They'll try to capture the regulatory agency or whatever they put in place.
[00:10:01] Speaker E: Yeah. They become the very thing that they're supposed to be preventing.
Well, I mean, I think I see three dots. Guy is attempting to. He's on life support at the moment, but, you know, pull the plug. Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I agree with you that.
I agree with you that politics doesn't solve anything. But I think the point is that politics makes bad. Politics can definitely make things worse. So if you can get politicians in that at least aren't going to make stuff worse, then that's better than not than having politicians that are going to actively sabotage every industry on the planet. You know, inject money with, you know, peak Cantillon effect, put money in the worst places possible and outcompete anyone that actually performs, you know, a service or creates a product that anyone would Actually buy. So you end up just with garbage everywhere because it's subsidized. Like, all food is made out of corn and soy, which is not food. So people are, you know, but it's. It's vegetable oil, right? Just because these things are subsidized by malicious politicians in the pockets of big pharmaceutical companies and, you know, fake fraudulent health agencies that are, you know, fronted by people with obvious mental health disorders and all that. Like, if I can vote in such a way that, you know, is going to at least just make it neutral again, then we get, like, algorithm doesn't make sense in a world where you don't have free markets. Markets won't solve the problem of market manipulation, right? And there is a fine line what's market manipulation and what's genuine. And this whole idea of rational consumers making informed decisions obviously isn't true, because crypto is just, like, the best demonstration of the fact that people are retards and will just invest in anything.
But some of that is also a symptom of fiat, right? So, yeah, I mean, the best we can do, like, I think when it comes to, like, generally, you know, video games are a good example, right? It was like, people will spend money on good video games, and it's relatively unregulated. Then the Karen showed up and ruined it, and now everyone has to be like, you know, transgender inside video games and stuff, and people starting to complain about this. But it was pretty free, right? It was like, wow, video games are amazing. They're made by really talented people. And like, half of my, like, childhood is spent remembering some great video game I played. And it was, like, really expensive, and I really wanted it, and I got it, and it was good. So. And that was, like, unregulated is my point. It just kind of did its thing.
And I think, yeah, I think you can return to that when it comes to electronics more widely and other wonderful things like food. I really would like to see food return to being just a reflection of what people want to eat in a natural state rather than just like, just, oh, you want.
You want a sandwich to you. Well, here's 9,000 things you don't want all put inside it that are just all toxic. And, you know, I would love.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: One of the things that kind of touches on. One of the things that concerns me a little bit about Trump is that he, like, is trying to combat the.
I mean, there's, like, a very real problem with stuff. Like, somehow it costs less. Like, my girlfriend in Canada is it costs her less to order some makeup from Australia than it does to order it from the US because there's some sort of tax on stuff that comes from the US that makes no sense.
And so there is some sort of subsidization that's happening on the shipping industry for the shipping industry, and whatever this causing stuff that ship from halfway around the world to be cheaper than stuff that is, you know, made right here. And. And it is. It. It's all in the shipping. Because, like, it is true that stuff that's made here is, you know, more expensive than it would be made in China or somewhere. But. But the shipping should, like, make that. Not, like, I. I don't know. It just doesn't make sense to me. And so I think that there are some, like, real problems, and the government is, like, subsidizing crazy, weird things and creating weird incentives. But then Trump's trying to combat it with, like, tariffs, which is adding more crap on top of, you know, like. Like, the problem is that we need to find the root of the thing that's already distorting the incentives, not try to, like, correct them with more government taxation. You know, you just. I don't know.
[00:14:48] Speaker E: Well, the root of that, I don't know isn't tariffs. Like, bear with me here. I haven't really put much thought into this, so I'll ask a dumb question. Aren't tariffs just kind of a crude way to combat the fact that Americans generally have a high standard of living or have an expectation of a high standard of living with, like, a good set of values to orient the whole country around? And when you compare that with, like, China, where it's just an expectation that, like, most people are kind of, you know, pros doing, like, you know, boring factory work for very low money with no health and safety or any of that stuff, or expectation of high quality of life on how do you level that playing field? Right? Like, how do you do it? It's even the same internally with, like, let's get a bunch of illegal immigrants to do all the work no one in America will do for respectable salaries. Like, how do you do that? Like, isn't that part of the same process, right? Like, get rid of illegal immigrants, and then people just, you know, your companies are gonna have to start paying more for stuff. Like, that's just like.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: I think, for the most part, like. Like, I mean, I've worked with a lot. I mean, I've worked in construction or whatever, and I've worked with a lot of people that may or may not be, you know, here Legally, I don't know. But.
But it's not so much like, I don't know anybody that cares about the people. Like, most of the immigration stuff really does seem to be. I think that the, the left is using things like the Voice of America to like, propagandize people in other countries into coming here and telling them they're going to get free stuff if they come here. And then they're actually funding like, convoys of people and then shipping them to major cities all over the country in order to like, pad. Like, they're like busing these people to voting booths and stuff like that. They're like. And again, like, the countries that went left this time were all. I mean, the states that went left this time were all states that don't have voting ID laws, you know, and that, that doesn't mean that, you know, like, correlation is not causation. But.
But there's definitely some serious, like, problems in a number of major cities in where like, it looks like third world criminals are actually being brought here. And what Bukele said, you know, from El Salvador, he like, he like, gave us talking about. He's like, he's like, no, these. Some of these countries are actually sending you criminals. They're unloading their prisons on you because you're like, your government is like, importing people, you know, and they don't care, you know, like, they're. They just want like, more bodies in. In these places and they don't care who it is. And so. So, like, why wouldn't these places, like, empty some of their prisons and lower their costs at your expense? You know, So I think there's really an immigration problem, but I don't think, I don't think the majority, like, I don't think that the, the thing that people are mad about has anything to do with the fact that there are people that want to come here and work. It's the people that like, like somebody I was listening to, like, like went to like one of the. Maybe it was. I don't know if it was either somewhere in Ohio. They was like. When there was the guys that like, you know, took over the apartment complex or whatever in. I think that one was in Colorado maybe, but, like, they literally held an apartment complex hostage. And like, we're extorting the members of the people in the apartment complex. And.
And so like, this is like, really happened, you know, like, as far as I can tell, like, even the main street, like, the corporate news had to report on it, but they were like, yeah, well, it's only one apartment building. And you know, it's not that big a deal. It's like, dude, you're talking about like an apartment building in a ua like in a first world country, supposedly being held hostage, like an entire, you know.
[00:18:48] Speaker E: Like it's an act of war in any other context. Like, it's just like, imagine if that was Russians in there, the kind of like noise they'd make about it.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And somebody like traveled to one of these places to see, like if it was. I can't remember if it was like podcasts or I was listening to or maybe it was, I don't know any. Somebody. And they like, they said, you know, we didn't see, we didn't see by eating cats or anything like that, but we.
[00:19:13] Speaker D: I.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: He said, I literally did see someone walking down the street like, like threatening people with a machete. He's like, like, there is a real problem. Like, this is not normal, you know, stuff going on.
So. Yeah, I don't know.
It's. I don't, I don't know that. Like, like, I don't think it makes any sense to try and balance out what people are willing to work for in any way, shape or form. Like, if you've got people that are willing to work for less, then that means your market for like, that's, that's a downward pressure. That means there's some natural deflation happening. Some natural source of deflation.
[00:19:54] Speaker E: Yeah. The trouble is it's, it's wages have to be congruent to the standard of living expected by the people in the country, you know, with a congruent quality of life. Like, it doesn't make any sense. Like, you can't get out of the, like, dynamic that's existed since the dawn of civilization, which is we get a bunch of people that don't speak the local language, that have a terrible time of it wherever they're from in the first place. And we get them to do the shit work. And what that does is it erodes the bottom of the local population and the middle class too. Like, it was the same in ancient Rome. Like it was. They just had a slave race which meant that actual Romans at the bottom of the rung just are on par with them because the slaves are just going to do all the work and that's it. Like, you come back from Gaul or whatever with a bunch of like, slaves from there, and then they do all the work in Rome and then no one else can do anything unless they're willing to accept the standard of living. That a slave has. So, like, how, how do you ever, like, how do you ever square that circle? There isn't really a way to do it. Like maybe something like tariffs, naively. I'm just saying maybe that's how you actually, you do that American isolationist thing where it's like, it's just us doing what we're doing. And like, if you want someone to like, just move stuff from a truck to the back of a supermarket or something that, like, sorry, that guy's an American that's going to have like, you know, two cars in his driveway and a mortgage he can afford and all that stuff.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: I still don't think that quite holds up because, I mean, you could argue the same thing that like your Starbucks barista is getting paid slave wages or whatever if you're on the same level of compensation. Right? And I think there are different levels of what people are willing to do and what they can work for. And so it's. These are like entry level. Like, I mean, like my mom was barning tobacco when she was, you know, in, in high school. And like when she was younger, that is what they bring people in. You know, that's the sort of labor that they, they bring people in to do. But, like, that was, that was just what people did in her community. Like, like that was just one of the jobs that was available. And so, like, she wouldn't do that anymore. But like, when you're young and you need a job and you're, you know, physically capable and whatever, it doesn't. Like, the problem is it's not like people move up based on, you know, like, their social, like their age and social standing and knowledge and everything else. And yes, you bring, if you bring in people that don't speak language very well and, you know, aren't well educated, they kind of fill up the bottom. But it's more or less like depriving high school students of jobs than it is anybody else. Like, because that is the sort of stuff that, like, we, we naturally do those things. Like, we cover most of those jobs anyway. Now maybe there's a bunch of privileged high school students that don't want to do those jobs anymore. You know, I don't know. Like, but, but like, that's not like, it's not abnormal for us to like, for a whole society to be able to fill all of those positions without importing people. It's, I mean, from what I've seen.
[00:23:20] Speaker E: You do have those rites of passage. Like, you know, like you say kids that are trying to, you Know, get their first summer job or whatever, like, and that is supposed to be a mook job. So I don't know. There's that too. I don't really know how you do it. I just think it's a scalability issue at the end of the day. Like if you have a small area, a small town where you do have like the new generation coming up and there isn't like a massive demographic imbalance or something where it's like, you know, 90% of people are, you know, old age pensioners and there's not enough kids and stuff. There's just, there's a lot of variables. Right? A lot of it is just. There are some economists that just look at demographics and they're like, I don't need to pay attention to anything else. It's just demographics. I can tell you this country is screwed, like, just based on the age disparity. So I don't know. I think there's too many things. But for some reason, I'm generally of the opinion that the tariffs will have a positive effect, even if they're, you know, ideologically unpalatable. And it's. And if he thought he's been talking about getting rid of income tax, which is like, I'm getting on the first plane to America if you do that.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: Like just if he did that, it wouldn't matter what he did with tariffs.
[00:24:34] Speaker C: Getting on that plane to North Carolina or like where in America.
[00:24:39] Speaker E: I don't know. I don't know what state I would choose. That is a very good question.
I think, I don't know. I think some just like non descript red state. Just one, you wouldn't really like Kansas or something. Just somewhere that doesn't get like obliterated by natural disasters would be good. Somewhere that doesn't like have 8ft of snow for multiple months a year.
[00:25:01] Speaker C: Like Kansas has a lot of snow actually.
[00:25:04] Speaker E: Yeah. I don't know what the perfect American state is, to be honest. The entire east coast is just getting wrecked. Like up north the weather is just freezing all winter. And further south you get these awful hurricanes and stuff.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Might be. Might be western Tennessee.
[00:25:19] Speaker C: Yeah, I was thinking Tennessee.
[00:25:22] Speaker E: Yeah, maybe Tennessee is a good one. I didn't like Nashville much when I was there for the bitcoin conference. That was just an absolute dump.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: You didn't like. I mean, what didn't you like about it?
[00:25:37] Speaker E: It was just like, I don't. I grew up in a big city and then for the last few years I've been living in a small city and when I go back to big cities, I'm just like, this is just. There's just drugs everywhere. And, like, you know, it's just kind of filthy, you know, Like, I live in this clean, British Columbian socialist old people's home in, like, off the west coast of Canada, and there's just. Everything's so clean here. Like, and you get used to that after a while when you got kids around. Like, when I have my kid in Vegas, I was just like, I don't want my kid in this city. It's just like, I don't want any of the stuff around that's going on.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Miami was like, Miami's a zoo.
[00:26:20] Speaker E: It's an actual zoo. There are like 40% of people walking down the street are, like, in a thong and nothing else.
And they'll just get in an Uber with like a hot, sweaty, naked ass and just like leave sweat all over the seat. And it's like, now I have to get there after you. This is really just, just.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: And we tried to walk to. We tried to walk to one of the, like, I don't know, one of the dinners or something, one of the venues, and. And we turned a corner and it was like, nope, we can't walk down this street. Like, I mean, like, it was like, we gotta go. We gotta go around this block or, like, call an Uber or something. It's just very clear that there was, like, like, I don't know, people, like, they were about to fight each other and, like, it was very, very, very bad.
[00:27:05] Speaker E: So, yeah, you can pick up when that kind of stuff is about to kick off. But I don't know, man, I really like America. I really do. And if it wasn't for the IRS I said it before, I would have just moved there by now. But the IRS is just such a bad institution when it comes to tax. It's much worse than it is in other countries.
And that, to me, just is enough to sort of counterbalance all the other things, like respect for, you know, self defense, second amendment, all that stuff that's just so unique to America.
[00:27:38] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:38] Speaker E: Like, it's enough to just like turn the seesaw all the way or move it to the other end. Just because they're just so over the top. Like Roger Veer and people like that, the kind of trouble he's in, that's so ridiculous. And that wouldn't happen. Like, when I left the UK and it wasn't my tax jurisdiction anymore, they were just like, oh, okay. Like, they sent me a letter like, we think you owe us some money. And I just sent them a letter back saying, I don't live there anymore and no, I don't. And they were like, oh, sorry about that. That was the end of it. Like, it wasn't just like, yeah, we're going to extradite you and put you in jail for 90 years because we think you might like, it wasn't something like that. Right. So I'm grateful for that, genuinely. So, like, as ironic as it is, like, it's gone full circle because the American Revolution was motivated by punitive treatment, you know, when it came to taxes. And now the Inland Revenue is nothing, like, as bad as the Internal Revenue Service.
[00:28:32] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:28:33] Speaker B: And I mean, they'll steal your money and then like, keep it and have you, like, prove your money's innocence. Because, like, this is like how they get around, like, innocent until proven guilty. Is that like, well, you're. That doesn't apply to your money and your stuff. It's like, well, it should apply to your property as extension of your, like basic human right. Like, it's just so. It's so fucking insane, like, the way things have, like the total corruption.
[00:29:01] Speaker D: I got part of what. And hopefully we can actually load back up some of that recording that y'all are talking about with the election and what it means for bitcoin and. Or what it doesn't mean for bitcoin.
But there was one little section that I caught when you were talking about tariffs and it's funny, I can't believe, like people were saying that Trump was saying that they do tariffs like day one, which I just seems so unbelievably stupid to me to do. To be like, oh, we're going to get rid of the income tax and we're going to cut $2 trillion from the budget. But then to make everything more expensive first, before you would do that, it just seems so backwards. Do you want to piss everybody off and make everybody think that you're not going to be of any use or this is going to be like, why tariffs first? But anyway, it's funny. The, you know, there's the, there's the element of capital controls and tariffs and everything. Could that even. Is that good for bitcoin or is Trump completely neutral? I do mean y'all don't. I missed if y'all had anything specific to talk on that. But I'm curious if y'all think this is positive or just not bad.
[00:30:26] Speaker E: I guess there's like, for anything that's like a non physical good or service.
The, you know, if you pay with a traditional payment network. There's the tariff because they're going to enforce it. If it's PayPal, they're going to enforce it. However, if I'm hiring some, you know, a web developer from India or something and they accept Bitcoin, then there's no tariff on that. Right. So I mean, that could be great for Bitcoin because it can't be deputized. You can't deputize the Bitcoin network to enforce jurisdictional taxation like you can with PayPal and Visa and all that crap. So anything red tape is always good for Bitcoin because it's just really annoying to do that on bitcoin for the authorities.
[00:31:10] Speaker D: Did you have any points on this, Steve?
[00:31:16] Speaker C: No, not really.
Tariffs, you know, seems kind of anti free market. I guess. It's like sometimes I think of a homeowners association and sure, a homeowners association could like decide to have a tariff on anything that comes in through its like gates or whatever. And I guess that's still okay if everybody volunteers in. But yeah, I mean short term, locally for the US maybe tariffs will be good, income tax goes away. But like generally long term, I don't know, seems weird.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: I think the disruption to supply chains is, I mean, when you've already got inflation and you're talking about adding a new cost in whatever supply chain that's going to shift and disrupt supply chains. If you increase the inputs for somebody's, if somebody's buying a bunch of Chinese inputs for something they're making here, that's going to change the cost of the final product, you know, and so, and I mean, you know, it, the fact that I can go buy cheap tools at Harbor Freight makes my life easier. So if all those things are going to go up in price, that's not a good thing. But I don't know, a lot of times like, you know, when he was targeting China specifically for tariffs, people were just like shipping it to other countries. They were shipping it to like like some other country first and calling it, you know, like, like it was coming from that country instead. And so it doesn't really, like, I don't know, we'll see. Maybe, maybe he'll just, it'll be some arbitrary thing that people can kind of get around.
[00:32:49] Speaker D: Yeah, you already have a situation where because of the, the monetary problem, the fact that we export paper more than anything else because of how trash fiat currencies are is you have, you have a situation where like it makes more like it's literally cheaper to ship something from halfway around the world than it is to make it here and we've exported our base in, like. So adding to that, like, if you shipped it to France first and then shipped it from France to the US just to get around the tariff, it just makes things. It makes things that should never have been economical to begin with make economic sense, which is really so much of the problem that we're dealing with anyway.
But yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens if he does that. Day one, I'm going to just be like, what the God? Doesn't make any sense to me. But whatever.
[00:33:46] Speaker E: It's not like, I'm not sure the ramifications, to be honest.
I really can't tell what's going to happen as a result of it.
I do think there's like an under. Like there is an ethical element to. Like, an undeniably ethical element to what you choose to spend your money on. Like, if there's two products that are the same and one of them I know is made in a death trap in a skyscraper in China and another one was made like, you know, in. In Canada or America or locally, for me, right. I'm going to prefer to buy the other one and I would even spend more money on it. So, I mean, at least when a law reflects, you know, an ethical principle, it's better than when the law reflects an unethical principle. So, you know, I don't. Like, there's something about it that makes me amenable to it, but I'm probably just being an idiot.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: Well, the thing is, like, China, I mean, like the China, the Chinese employment problem is a problem because, you know, China is an economic mess and authoritarian place, but people line up by the thousands for the Apple factory jobs and the Nike factory jobs and stuff in China. And so compared to what they've got, the options they have, these things are dramatically better. And that's the pro. Whose fault is that? It's the fault of the Chinese government. It's the fault. It may be the fault of Apple and Nike for lobbying for more control. I don't know what the fuck they're doing over there. Maybe they're doing the same thing there that they do here to try and increase their own advantage over other companies. I don't know.
[00:35:33] Speaker E: Yeah, but isn't this a bit like if a bunch of. If you manage to successfully educate people that shitcoins are awful and don't buy them and someone goes like, but what about all the people working at Coinbase? They'll lose their job.
Aren't you kind of making that argument like let's buy good things like that aren't.
[00:35:55] Speaker B: Well, like okay, so like Harbor Freight, I don't know where most of those tools, I mean they're made in China. Like I bought an excavator that's made in China. So I don't know what the working conditions are in the factories that are making these things. But I do know that when I follow the groups online that like somebody's like keeping up with people having problems with stuff and the products seem to be getting better. So like, so like at least the people running the company seem to be like aware of what's going on. And so. But I don't know what that means for the workers and you know, the conditions that are, you know, going on there. But at the same time, like I don't know, like, like is it like, I don't know, like I don't think, I don't think spending more on, I mean like the difference in cost and the difference in quality. So the Chinese excavator is lower quality. There are already things I've had to fix, but they're not major things and I would have had to pay.
I paid for a brand new excavator. I paid the same price that I was going to pay for one with over a thousand hours on it. Domestically that was like a rust bucket. They had all sorts of problems. So you know, it's like the difference in prices is incredibly like it's just really dramatic and you know, I don't, I mean maybe that's all just because they need, you know, like we're shipping fiat over there and you know, like I don't know what all of the things at play are but you know, it is good for me to buy things that make the most economic sense for me. And money is supposed to be the signal that things are flowing in the right way.
[00:37:39] Speaker D: I.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: When there's distortions, like I don't know how you really like it comes an.
[00:37:43] Speaker D: Interesting, like I guess kind of an ethical question is like is it going to make any difference if you change your. Like a good, a good example actually is like my buying a house on debt is, you know, when I bought the house, it was the house that we live in and without calculating for any of the stuff that we've put into it or the improvements we've made, like it made it like really serious financial sense because right now our debt is only, is only like a half of the value of the house. The price of the house has more than doubled in the span of time since we've bought it without calculating for the fact that we've put supports all the way downstairs and removed all the pillars and cemented in the basement, redone the kitchen. Like, I've done tons of improvements, you've.
[00:38:39] Speaker B: Done a lot of improvements.
[00:38:40] Speaker D: But I've basically gotten half the house for free because I just bet against inflation. But like, it's basically. I'm. I've basically allowed myself, because of how crappy our money is, to leverage against the dollar on a 4% interest mortgage. And I just never have to pay, repay the economy for what I've taken out of it. Like, that's essentially what's. What's happening. But I got it subsidized. I got it subsidized by everybody else.
[00:39:09] Speaker E: Got it subsidized by people who are working and had the value of their paycheck go down. Every. The purchasing power of their paycheck go down.
[00:39:17] Speaker D: But I'm a cantilian. Everybody who has a house is a cantillionaire, basically. And that's why it's a financial decision to do it. That's why it forces everybody into real estate and forces everybody to bloat the stock market and. Oh, I hate it. Pisses me off.
[00:39:30] Speaker E: Yeah, it's bullshit. I just did the same thing. I just had to renew my mortgage and, you know, I did the whole deal and it was just, you know, borrow a bunch of money. Here I'm. I have a house that costs more than it should, and I'm borrowing money to pay for it like everyone else does. And it's just complete bullshit. Like, at every level, this is a scam. Like every single person that, like the mortgage broker, the lender, the notary, like, you know, the old provider, the new provider. And I'm like, every single one of you is just in a complete scam industry. All you're doing is facilitating everyone to buy houses with money they don't have to collectively raise the price of it. And to make it so that, long story short, all of us are just working on behalf of banks.
[00:40:17] Speaker D: That's take out all the middle work.
[00:40:19] Speaker E: Like the bank makes a bunch of money. Yeah, yeah. It's just we're all working for an industry that does absolutely nothing. Like that old image of the octopus on the face of humanity that's labeled as Goldman Sachs. Just like to suck everything out of you. Like, you don't do anything. You didn't take any risk. They just printed a bunch of money and gave that to me. Now I have to give you thousands of dollars every month. And if I don't, you just have a house. Congratulations.
It's such a scam. And we all just participate in it. And then the most infuriating things and the boomers are all like, you know, you young people don't want to work anymore. It's like you bought a house for 40 grand that's now worth $800,000.
[00:41:00] Speaker D: We don't want to work for you.
[00:41:02] Speaker E: You seem a genius and you.
[00:41:04] Speaker D: That's where it's going, man.
[00:41:06] Speaker E: Yeah, it's just.
It's just such. It's just such a scam. And I'm just. I don't. I know my house isn't worth that. I know, like, the amount of work I would have to do to earn over a million Canadian dollars to buy this, like, quarter of an acre plot of land, like, just. It's just garbage. I know this is all garbage. You know it's garbage. But we all just play this stupid game.
[00:41:29] Speaker D: Works mechanic.
[00:41:31] Speaker A: That's how it. That's how it works.
Bitcoin fixes this.
[00:41:35] Speaker D: Bitcoin fixes this. This is the great.
[00:41:38] Speaker E: I'm in a good spot is the joke of it. Like, I'm doing really well because I've been a bitcoiner for years. So I can like, if they're like, oh, you got to take out 100 grand chunk of mortgage. I can actually do that thanks to bitcoin. But like, most people can't do that. And like, this is Canada, man. There's. There's like middle class people that just suddenly had the bottom fall out of their life over the last few years who are just like, yeah, I can't go to the dentist. That's like an $800 checkup. And I might not have the problem. I think I do. It might just go away. So I'm not going to go. Like, I get charged that even if I don't have a cavity or whatever. So I'm just not going to go. Like, there's people doing that now who are like, normally like middle class, affluent people, like in 2019 that like just actually have had the bottom fallout.
[00:42:21] Speaker D: Like, people don't understand how much it's been bled.
[00:42:25] Speaker C: I feel like I'm the person you guys are talking about. I don't own a house and I haven't gone to the dentist in 10 years. I'm like, Steve's destitute. I'm the sucker.
[00:42:35] Speaker B: I've been the dentist.
[00:42:37] Speaker D: I got nothing but bitcoin, you can't do anything. It's intangible.
[00:42:40] Speaker C: I don't even have any bitcoin either. Damn.
[00:42:43] Speaker D: I can't even, I can't even make, I can't build a house out of my bitcoin. I'm poor.
[00:42:48] Speaker B: Oh shit.
[00:42:50] Speaker D: It's gonna be crazy though, because bitcoin will fix it and it's, it's gonna be nuts to see what happens in this cycle specifically because I think like the whole idea is that like you shouldn't be sucking up resources out of society that you don't need just to park money, you know, like you shouldn't be buying a house if you don't need a house. And the house shouldn't have been made unaffordable because a whole bunch of people.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: Are printing money and buying like it.
[00:43:15] Speaker D: Just has, like we all just owe it to BlackRock, to Goldman Sachs and BlackRock because they're creating the money. They're holding all of our retirements and then they buy mortgage backed securities and then suck, like just suck up all of the houses.
[00:43:29] Speaker A: That's why everything stays on the market.
[00:43:30] Speaker D: For like 24 hours max because they just, they just print money, buy it up and then rent it back to us. We rent the whole country from a.
[00:43:40] Speaker A: Whole bunch of people who are just close to the spigot.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: They use everybody's retirements to make all the companies we buy from gay.
[00:43:49] Speaker D: But rainbows on everything.
So Mechanic, you brought something up. Let's get back on bitcoin. Let's get back on the bitcoin because this is a bitcoin news show and we're doing a roundup here.
[00:44:04] Speaker C: Oh no.
[00:44:05] Speaker D: Oh no.
[00:44:09] Speaker E: Normie News Network. Nnn. What?
[00:44:13] Speaker D: Steve Mechanic said that you had a perspective on covenants and I'm curious. And actually Mechanic, you said something on, I think it was like a Twitter thread or maybe Noster or something recently that it was funny because it's something I identify with. Like as I said in one of the recent episodes or whatever we did together is that I still like the primitive and I like the scope of ctv. But you're a hundred percent right on. What you posted on is that there is, there's no construction with it now. Like it seems useful in a lot of different ways and it seems like it could simplify some of the things that we already have. But there's like nothing super exciting to. Nothing to be super excited about. You know, it's not like it unleashes the holy grail of layer twos. It's really easy to build and doesn't change the risk assumptions a lot. It just kind of, it's kind of meh, I think, is what you, what you put in the thing, which I thought was a good argument.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: I think somebody, somebody ought to build whatever they, if they have something, some specific feature that they want that the covenants are required for, they ought to build a wallet that uses liquid to do it and show us. And then like, okay, yeah, we would love to have this on Bitcoin main chain.
[00:45:34] Speaker E: Yeah, I think it's. I wrote on Noster a little while ago, there's this phenomenon in any collaborative environment where there's like multiple people trying to do a thing, where everyone actually agrees that we want a thing, but no one can quite agree on the right way to do it. So it never happens. And I think a good example on that is like Segwit message signing, right? Like we have message signing with legacy addresses was never a problem. Like, we knew. We knew it was a thing and it worked a certain way. Whereas there's like a bunch of different ways for signing messages with Segwit addresses. And everyone hates all of them, but everyone wants them. Like, there's no, like, everyone has one that isn't as bad as the other. And so if you go and sparrow and try and sign a message with a Segwit address, there's like four different standards for doing it, or three, I can't remember. And that's just because no one can agree on how to do it. And it's the same with like bip 49, right? Like, we want to have a way where you can pay people, you know, they can give you information once and you can pay them multiple times without address reuse. That would be great. But no one can agree on a way to do it. And when someone does just YOLO it, like Samurai did with that, you know, people are like, no, this isn't the right way to do it. Core devs advise against it.
It's like, you just can't have it. All the core devs are like, yeah, don't use hardware wallets as well. And that's what most people do at this point. And they're like, no, that's not good enough. And then you're like, suggest something better. And they're like, no, there isn't any. We're trying to come up with internal ocean affairs. I'll mention I build a lot of just Intel Nook boxes that just run a Bitcoin node and datum and Luke's just like, well, we can't trust that. We can't recommend that. And I'm like, all right, fair enough. Intel's backdoored. We know that Debian doesn't satisfy him either. And I'm like, all right, so what are we recommending? He's like, I don't know. Okay, all right, if Ocean was to sell like a pre built data, like, what hardware would we use? He's like, I don't know. I'm like, all right, what RAM would we use? All right, it's got to have error correction, all right, in case the, you know, bits get flipped and you mine an invalid bot. Because that's the thing. Okay, all right, we can agree on that. What, what manufacturer though? I don't know. All right, so it just like in every step of the way, it's like, all right, we can't agree on an operating system, we can't agree on a manufacturer for the hardware. Like at this, at some point you just have to go, you have to hold the feet to the fire of like the big brains, like the developers and, you know, and go, if we don't do this, someone's going to make the most horrible product you can possibly imagine and just do it.
[00:48:17] Speaker D: The momentum will be against us.
[00:48:20] Speaker E: It's going to work. It's going to work. You're going to hate everything about it. So how about we just bite the bullet and build something that at least isn't as bad as that, right? So I think when it comes to Covenants, right, there's so many people that have issues with all of them because they want to do it a different way, right? And then you have like, APO can kind of be made to do what, you know, APO can kind of be made to do what Covenants does in a roundabout way. But it has six, you know, sig hashing modes, right? Or when it only really needs one. And the other five are kind of weird, but unlike, no one's demonstrated a use for any of them. And it's like, we shouldn't do something this broad in scope. And lenhance is like, we're going to pick apart the useful parts of APO and just do that. Which is like, counterintuitively, it's four opcodes instead of one, but it's supposed to only do one thing instead of a bunch of unnecessary stuff. Despite that. And, but like you were just describing what I said, Guy ctv is it doesn't do that alone. You need a bunch of other stuff with it. And when it comes down to what CTV itself does. It's like the fireworks just aren't there. It's not like Segwit. It's not like Taproot and Schnorr. You don't have this. Like, if we have this, we can do that, and we all want that, and it's great. Let's just go and fight about how to activate it maybe. But at least we all agree it's.
[00:49:47] Speaker D: It's basically more of a. If we have ctv, then we could also have this, and then we could do some really cool stuff.
[00:49:58] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need check sig from stack for it to be to. For. In order to have, like. Ln Symmetry is a huge thing. I can get behind that all day. Because it's every lightning node. If it's, you know, doing a reasonable amount of. If it's. If it's reasonably active node, it's got to store gigabytes of data of prior channel states, because that's the only way you can. That's the way the justice mechanism works in lightning. As it stands today. The minute you have symmetry, that's gone. You only need to keep the latest state. That's just. That is like dream scenario scaling for lightning, and it's just great. But CTV just doesn't enable it unless you add the annex to it, which Jeremy Rubin proposed with a modified version of cv, ctv, and no one liked it. So again, either you have to push, go back to the drawing board and push for CTV in a way that no one likes, or push for CTV in a way that doesn't give us what we want with LN symmetry, or you have to go to apo, which doesn't have anything like consensus, so you're not moving forward with any of that.
But anyway, like this. I've sort of gone into this. I really just want to hear what Steve was saying because. Yeah, just. If I can ask Steve to touch on one specific thing, obviously my concern is around unintended consequences of Segwit and Taproot, where we just have people storing mass amounts of arbitrary data and ignoring prior filters. That worked great, right? So we had data carrier size. You never saw OP returns bigger than 83 bytes, and you never saw data being stored in other ways. Then you suddenly have insanity after the soft forks made it possible to make an entire block one jpeg and just all these awful things that happened. And, you know, 90% of block space was just absolute bullshit for a couple of years, and now the chain is, like, unsinkable on hardware. That was previously fine. All that stuff happened. And the people that seem completely unfazed by all that even would advocate for it and champion it as an alternative use case for Bitcoin, sold the security budget, yada, yada, yada, all those people have been the ones that are pushing for the Covenants upgrades.
And that is a smoking gun. But at the same time, I can't demonstrably point to something that is done by CTV or CAT or any of the other proposals that would suddenly take some unknown break off the system right now and cause us to have yet another wave of a new kind of arbitrary data injection into, into Bitcoin that at the moment we're not aware of. But all of the politics would tell me that that's a risk. But I can't find the technical explanation for why that would be a thing. And something you wrote in our internal chat a few days ago makes me think, this is exactly what I'm concerned about. But where is the actual mechanism for how they would do it? So I hope that makes sense as a question.
[00:52:51] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes sense.
I don't know a specific mechanism by which it would happen. I think if there was an obvious mechanism by which it would happen, somebody would have already, you know, talked about it or whatever.
But, you know, nobody saw that spam would end up in the witness data.
You know, I mean, this is kind of like a black swan kind of thing. Like, I don't think anyone now can predict how CTV will be used five years after it's enabled, if it's enabled, like whatever you think CTV is going to be used for now, the chances that it's going to be used for that, just because your creativity isn't as good as a hundred thousand people thinking for five years.
I just think, I mean, who knows, maybe, maybe it'll all work out. And like, I would say improving lightning is definitely the thing that I'm attracted to most about the Covenant stuff.
But, you know, in the back of my mind, you know, remember those old Andreas Antonopoulos videos where he talks about scaling? He just talks about the history of scaling for like voiceover IP and for like, you know, the Internet can't do this, the Internet can't do that because you're always kind of like thinking about what it is now. And there will be people that say, like, hey, I've thought of every possible way and the only way to scale is my way to scale. And we gotta do it now because, like, if we wait too long, then, like all this shit's going to happen, and we won't have any time to fix it. So we gotta scale now and we gotta do it this way because no one else can have any other ideas.
And then, like, that doesn't happen. And then, like, somebody else comes up with another idea a couple years later, and then it scales on a different layer in a way that you never thought it was going to.
[00:54:58] Speaker E: Yeah, I.
[00:55:00] Speaker C: That's just my kind of feeling of what's going to happen.
[00:55:03] Speaker E: That's Jimmy Song's argument, and it's a very compelling one. And it's just these things are possible. And the. Without messing around with the base layer, like, you can do it. It requires a bit of intelligence. And adding soft forks to constantly come up with new ideas is just an incredibly childish way to do things. Like, just. You can figure out a way to do it without. It's not as fun. It might require years of work instead of just changing bitcoin every time you get a new smart idea. But the fact that they're not being done speaks to the fact that no one in this has, like, a serious approach about it. They're not. They're not prepared to work for years and grind something out. They just want to add a new soft fork and then have some fun and then, you know, maybe make a name for themselves in the process. Because getting a soft fork into bitcoin is career making. So that motivation's there. And when you keep messing around with the base layer, you always create risks and you just rug pull everyone. That's. That's the worst thing about it. Anyone that's like, grinding away, working on an arc that works without CTV or csfs gets rug pulled because they just changed the way the base layer works. And now there's this other way to do it. So I'm not even going to bother working on it now. If you tell people you are not changing bitcoin's base layer again, leave it alone. Nothing is changing. Then people go, all right, I'll build on that. And it might take them years to come up with something. But if you're like, oh, we got this new, you know, this new address type coming in eight months or something, no one's going to do any work.
[00:56:39] Speaker A: They know it's going to change because.
[00:56:40] Speaker E: They know that, like, the design space is going to change. Yeah. So you have to commit to saying, nope, we're never changing this, then everyone can orient themselves around that.
[00:56:49] Speaker D: Out of two.
[00:56:51] Speaker B: Well, and to Steve's point is that, like, if. If you add a new. I mean, like, I'm not, I'm not a dev. But like when I start when I'm working on something. The 3D printer was a good example. Like when you get a new tool you have to rethink all your every like the way you approach problems completely. Like yeah, like everything changes and you have to learn how to think in terms of what this new tool can do versus everything else that you've used. And so it does. Like that's part of the reason, I'm sure that it takes years and part of the reason that we don't know what's going to happen is that like when you've got somebody that learned the system after this tool was already made and saw what other people had done with it, then it's really easy to make some connection that other people haven't made because you didn't have the original improper framing to overcome, you know, so, so yeah, it just.
There's always going to be. There was a book unforeseen that I read.
[00:57:48] Speaker D: I don't remember which one this was in. It's been a few years now, but it was talking about technological change that's specifically like kind of technological primitives is like when you have like an entirely new.
A tool that's so useful that it really changes how you think about the problem. And was talking about how like yes, technological innovation and the speed of technology is changing drastically. It's, it's just ever accelerating. But he made an argument that what's actually going to happen isn't that we're going to just forever speed up as a civilization for we're just going to adopt the next technology in 10 days. He says, because what actually, when you actually see how people adjust to new technology and actually start taking advantage of it properly, that hasn't sped up, the time hasn't really shrunk. It still takes like 10 to 20 years to fully realize any new technology. And that he makes the argument that it's actually going to stretch out the dynamic where more people are on older technology and there are more people who are aggressively like, like the, the difference in technology from the people who are non tech to the people who are on the cutting edge is just going to keep getting wider and wider and the optionality and kind of the dynamism of the economy is just going to aggressively expand rather than the everybody's at the new technology and everybody knows how to use it immediately.
[00:59:20] Speaker E: I think it's like maybe there's a. This is not the best analogy. But it's like if you Invented the airplane and the car and the bicycle and the subway all in the same week.
[00:59:30] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:59:31] Speaker E: Like none of it would take off. Like no pun intended because it's like there's too many. Like it's like you need them all to come out one by one and develop their own use case. Like you know, it's the same with monitoring networks. There's another Andreas point. Like you don't pay a parking ticket with a check or something like or parking meter. You put coins in it. Like they're are different kinds of unit. Right. Or so it's like you don't come out with like everything at once. You have to do things one by one and then the use cases for them become clear.
[01:00:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:00:02] Speaker E: And you know, all the circumstances in which you'd use a specific iteration of a technology would become like obvious. And you don't. You just throw them all at everyone at once because they're just not appropriate for every use case or scenario I guess.
[01:00:16] Speaker D: Sorry. On something that Steve was saying is talking about how like we just don't know how people are going to use it. And just in the general concept is there's no limit to human ingenuity. There's actually something in our news list that's very relevant to the conversation about covenants because a couple of people, Andrew Polstra, Avi, Hugh Levy and Victor Kolabov have oh and Ethan Heilman have figured out how to do. They've got collider script and they figured out how to do covenants on bitcoin as is. And the way they've done it is actually by using the SHA1 algorithm hashing algorithm and RIPEMD160 is that you deliberately.
[01:01:07] Speaker E: Make, deliberately make solutions.
[01:01:09] Speaker D: Two different things will unlock the same script with the hash. And so one of those things can be a covenant along with like the normal. And so you just calculate it. And the quote unquote security of it is that you can create with those algorithms because they're old quote unquote broken algorithms. You can create a collision in about a day's worth of quote unquote bitcoin mining.
But you can't create three collisions because that's going to take. In fact the section I've got right here is that each covenant two to the 86 hash queries and two to the 56 bytes of space. So for security we rely on the assumption that regarding the hardness of finding a three way collision with short random inputs in 160 bit hash function, arguing that if the assumption holds, breaking a Covenant enforcement requires two to the 110 hash queries. So to put it in perspective, the work to spend our Covenant is about 33 hours of the bitcoin mining network, whereas breaking the covenant requires 450,000 years of the bitcoin mining network. So they've literally found the way a literally a route around by using a broken hash function and using it broken to create the same hash from two different pieces of information so that you can make a covenant, which is pretty nuts.
[01:02:41] Speaker E: This is what I mean. That stuff exists. You can figure stuff like this out, but if you keep rugging everyone by making other designs for it with unknown consequences, then people aren't going to put this kind of effort in. I mean, I think that's just. That's genius. That's incredible.
[01:02:58] Speaker C: It really was genius. Yeah, I guess a few weeks ago when I looked into that and my feeling when I was super complicated stuff, but my feeling when I was reading that was these guys have found a way to make like a proof of work style, difficulty, adjustment style, different levels of, you know, brute forcing to like make this whole system where it's kind of like you can only use this covenant if you really, really want to. Like computationally, like you're. You're willing to brute force try all combination of letters until you find out what the script was kind of thing. Like, I was like, dude, that is just wild. I mean I was just like, that kind of creativity is the stuff I'm talking about. Like, I would never agree on which covenant we want.
[01:03:51] Speaker D: And somebody figured that out, you know.
[01:03:55] Speaker E: Yeah, well, I think that like I'm a dumbass when it comes to these, like the depth of these protocols and stuff, how like there are, there are outputs in SHA2 that are not achievable with any input. It's not like there's not an even distribution of like all the numbers between 0 and 2 to the 256 minus 1 are achievable in a normal distribution. Like, because we know that there are multiple inputs that can give you the same output. That's what a collision is. But there are. It's known that there are numbers within that field or that finite field that are actually not achievable with any input. Which is actually kind of why bitcoin mining slowly breaks. As we start to have more than 50% of the block header be zeros at the beginning, you start to have all miners start dropping below 100% luckily, because just some of the stuff that some. A subset of the numbers that are acceptable that are below the target as required become a bigger and bigger percentage of the, you know, the achievable things that you'll get out of SHA256. So it's like, you know, if you can have. It's essentially saying, you know, you've got, you need to find A number below 10 with an A hundred sided dice, right? You've got a 1 in 10 side of 1 in a 1 in 10 chance of that being successful, right? But actually the number seven will never come no matter how many times you roll it because it just doesn't exist. So 7 is 1/10 of the acceptable numbers, right? And then if you go down to. It needs to be below 8. Now 7 is 1/8 of all the numbers, right? So it keeps getting worse and worse like that. So we know SHA256 does have that thing and it's probably going to be an issue like by 2040 or something. So I'm just given the sort of.
The fact that these things aren't mathematical perfection, that they have these issues, how do you like come up with this reliable con, you know, assertion that there's a. The chances of a collision are roughly one day of mining and the chances of, you know, a three way collision are, you know, require hundreds of thousands of years. Like how can that be like a. This is. I really should be asking like actual cryptographers like I'm not sure any of us know but this is just my question. I'm like how can you make that sort of assumption and be like yeah, this is a reliable covenant. Like am I going to lock my money in something that can only be spent if I can minor collision in 24 hours when I know that these algos have all these.
[01:06:29] Speaker B: Well, I think it's just because the.
[01:06:31] Speaker D: Likelihood of the collision is an exponential problem rather than a linear.
Is that the, the longer? Because, because it's the. The hash is still. It's literally just the space of the hash. It's not about like two different. We're talking about the, the collision between two different things having the same hash versus three completely different things having the same hash which is a multiple of the exponential to the exponent.
So they're on top of each other.
[01:07:06] Speaker B: Sort of the same as the value of a network, like the growth of a network.
[01:07:09] Speaker A: Remember you can't change the hashtag.
[01:07:13] Speaker D: Sure you could find two other pieces of information that collide into the same hash. But after you have a hash collision, now you have to find a third piece of information with the same hash collision so it's an exponentially bigger problem to, to the same. So it's the fact that you can't change the hash after you already have the destination that you're supposed to come up with. Whereas in the first it's kind of. It's the birthday problem. So like, the reason the first one's easy to do is because that you can, you can change both of them until you have a collision. But once you have a collision, trying to change a third, where you can only change half of it to get the same hash, like, is super difficult. It's why, like in a, you know, in a classroom or whatever, you only need 26 people to get a birthday collision.
So that's. Yeah, that's, that's the only. That's the level of understanding that I have as to why I think that's actually, there's actually something to why that is secure.
[01:08:11] Speaker E: Amazingly, I hadn't really understood that frankly, when it first came out. And I really wasn't sure whether it was a joke or I think everyone responding to the like, no, well, a lot of people are like, this is a joke, right in their response to the, to the thing. But it's actually not like from what you're saying, I'm looking at it and I'm like, this is, this is pretty genius. I've got a feeling.
[01:08:33] Speaker D: I think it works. I think there's something really interesting there. And it may just be one of those things where it's like, state chains are really cool, but nobody seems to be using them. You know, there may just be a big enough barrier that it doesn't do anything. But I think they've figured something out that's complete, that's unique.
[01:08:47] Speaker E: I'll be honest, the shit is hitting the fan with it and I've seen an opportunity of the last week and I'll be candid with you guys. So there's a lot of disillusionment around Bitcoin Core and a lot of the people pushing for Covenants are like, in a similar way to the way the filter advocates like me have been disillusioned with Core apparently just being negligent. They feel the same way but about something else. And it is at the end of the day aligned with the purpose of like maximizing bitcoin networks utility as, you know, as a monetary network. Right. And you know, in theory, the Covenants bros are aligned with us because they're of the perspective that if you can increase the economic density of your on chain footprint, it will outcompete Other use cases more easily, right? Like I can out compete your jpeg with an L1 transaction, or I can outcompete it with the fact that there was a lightning channel that did, you know, thousands of transactions, which makes, you know, gives me a disproportionate advantage. So that was the argument that they're making from a monetary maximalist point of view.
And I'm like, look, and you're also pissed off with Core. So Core aren't going to activate this stuff and you're not going to be able to activate it with a rogue client. Like, this isn't bip148segwit kind of thing. Again, if you have a CTV activation client out there in the wild, that doesn't activate a soft fork that exists inside Core anyway, that just doesn't have activation logic in it, or their activation isn't going to work, this just won't do anything. And you'll trigger a ursf, which is maybe that needs to happen. And for anyone listening, that's the opposite of uasf. That's like the Bitcoin community saying, we don't want this soft fork you're trying to put in and we're going to actively reject it.
So, you know, I looked at it and I thought, right, well, here's an opportunity then. Why don't the people that are trying to get the filters fixed in Bitcoin, which they have with knots, which is getting a lot more adoption, I'm happy to say. There's over a thousand knots nodes on the network now, which is like a record for it, which is awesome. Why don't the people that want that join forces with the people that want to activate ctv? Because they're all pulling towards the same ends for some reason. We've totally hated each other as two different communities, but it doesn't make any sense that we did. Let's just reconcile it and let's move forward that way. And Luke is basically the person whose weight behind in any initiative is what's needed to get a fork activated or not. And there's historical precedent for that. Luke activated, you know, Segwit was dead until Luke said bip148 is happening. And then it happened and we have SigWit. So and that was, you know, without.
[01:11:26] Speaker D: Core at all centralized. Luke.
[01:11:33] Speaker E: It is and it isn't because Luke 10 Luke isn't like a massive CTV guy. He just thinks this thing has consensus like people see, like most people that are against it, you know, aren't strongly against it. No one's found anything about it that's like, yeah, that will break something. But a lot of people want it. And it look, in his opinion, it looks like it has consensus. Therefore, bitcoin core are being negligent if they're not putting it in.
[01:11:57] Speaker D: I think the power behind Luke's opinion is that he's such an unbelievably disagree, agreeable person that if he agrees on something, everybody's like, oh, okay, okay, we might be onto something.
[01:12:10] Speaker E: I want to hear Steve's thoughts a little more because, like, Steve has. My perspective at the beginning was just, they're bad actors pushing for this thing. Don't mess with bitcoin. And even during this conversation here, I've become even more like, I don't want to do this. I just don't want to do it because of, you know, this. There are ingenious things that can happen with bitcoin as it exists today. Like, and, like, I find it so hard to not keep coming back to that position every time I start getting a little bit. Maybe you can Steel man ctv, Steve. Like, that's. That's maybe what I can ask you to do.
[01:12:44] Speaker C: The steel man of ctv, I would say.
Well, like you said there just. CTV itself isn't going to be the thing that makes lightning, like, a whole lot stronger. So that's. I guess it helps, but it might need something else to make lightning stronger. And then, you know, potentially there's some UTXO sharing opportunities that could come along with CTV if by some miracle some demand shows up and by some other miracle that the kind of developers that work on OP codes are going to transition to the kind of developers that actually make applications and, like, make the UX and stuff. So it's like, so that's the steel man is that like a lot of.
There's a very small percent chance that it's going to work out, that the effects of CTV are going to work out the way people think they do. But that that would be the steel man is. Those things are possible.
[01:13:44] Speaker E: You. You made. You made one point that you haven't made again here, which I really want. That I thought was brilliant and I hadn't heard before, again in our internal chat, where you just talked about who will work on it when we have it, who is going is it. The main people pushing for it are the taproot wizards. So if they're working on what is made possible by it, it's not going to be on ARC or other things that are about utxo. Sharing, it's going to be about spam because that's what they're interested in doing. So the fact that you just have that mind share that's going to use the resource a specific way means that's what it will manifest as being used as. Like, there aren't like, do we need Jamison Lopp and Ben Carmen and those guys working on a new kind of wallet that does UTXO sharing? They're not going to do that. They've made it obvious, abundantly clear that they're not interested in that. So activating the tool, it's only going.
[01:14:33] Speaker D: To be used by the people who are advocating for it and want it. And so that's what it'll be used for, whatever that thing is. Yeah, well.
[01:14:43] Speaker B: And finding people that want to build and maintain wallets is like. Yeah, that's really its own, like major problem.
[01:14:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:14:50] Speaker B: But I wonder if we can build. If you could build a wallet on liquid that has the lightning symmetry or whatever that you want to bring to Bitcoin and have you start growing because we have bridges now between liquid and lightning.
I'm assuming you have. You're basically just building a liquid token channel that has a bitcoin token channel on the other side. Right. Somebody's taking the risk of managing both those nodes and acting as a bridge. And so if you could start building a lightning network or a lightning wallets that use those bridges or whatever, but that are really lightweight and easy to run on mobile because. And you're actually interacting with the lightning network because you have symmetrical channels being built on liquid because of the covenants and the stuff that's already there, then you're literally building out the stuff that we want and you say, hey, it would be really good if we could bring this to Bitcoin and so you've at least got something that we can immediately port over. You know, when it like, you know, like for all people, like, like Segwit. Segwit happened on Bitcoin is in. No, I don't. I do think that Litecoin, adopting it first and implementing it first played a big role in that. Like, like, I think having a space.
[01:16:30] Speaker D: I do.
[01:16:31] Speaker B: You don't think so?
[01:16:31] Speaker E: I don't think so. I think that.
[01:16:33] Speaker A: I do.
[01:16:33] Speaker E: Yeah, you do.
[01:16:36] Speaker B: I think because people were so afraid of it not being safe and there was so much fud about, you know, that anyone can spend stuff and whatever.
[01:16:44] Speaker E: No one believed that.
[01:16:46] Speaker D: There were a lot of people who believed him and who just shut. Who just stopped. It's kind of like the left right now who they've been so anti crypto and bitcoin for a really long time. And then when it became apparent that that wasn't going to work anymore, they just shut up. They didn't become like pro bitcoin and crypto when Trump went pro and said.
[01:17:08] Speaker A: You know, all the cool stuff you're.
[01:17:10] Speaker D: Playing with, like they didn't mirror him, but they did shut up about it. They did, like somebody got a memo or an email to Elizabeth Warren and said, please shut your mouth, this is hurting us. And I really think that's what happened with litecoin is that it didn't convince anybody really in a sense, but it got them to stop saying that. And stop. Because a lot of people I think did believe Craig Wright and everybody and Roger Vera who was like, oh, they're just going to steal coins. And then literally somebody put like $20 million a litecoin on a segwit address and said steal it. And they just, they just sat it there and said steal it. And they're like, oh, you can steal it. It's like, okay, here it is. And it like just kept months and months. Another month, another month, another month went by and it was stay. It sat there and then that just became not part of this conversation anymore. I think it was, it wasn't everything. Like it wasn't the reason, but I think it was a big part of why they kept losing points.
[01:18:05] Speaker E: You know what? I think you guys are right. I think I'm making this mistake I keep trying not to make, which is stop thinking people are going to look at these things in a non stupid way so anyone can spend segwit fud was ridiculous. But you're right, maybe it's a factor because now I look at covenants and the main knee jerk reaction seems to be the government can force you to encumber your coins in, you know, in a like, right? And I every day someone comes up with that argument against covenants and I'm like, that does not apply here in a unique sense because you can do that with multisig. So if it's a worry, it's already a thing. And that's not like you can't put.
[01:18:44] Speaker D: A recursive covenant on somebody else's address. Like, and I don't think people realize that is that like even a recursive covenant just means that you're inside the keys that created it and you're just in like a sub key, which means that you don't have like you're, you don't have a wallet, you're just using somebody else's wallet. But as far as like a recursive covenant that like, is literally a blacklist, that you can't use it or you can't do something, if you make an address and give it to somebody, they can't add new stipulations to that. You have created that and that's it. That includes all the covenants, all the multisig, all the everything. Yeah, it still works the same way. You might it. Time locks have the same security profile as to somebody can force a time lock on your coins. No, they can't. Not unless you're using their wallet and they're telling you how to generate your stuff. But that's, that's a different problem than time locks can be forced on you.
[01:19:38] Speaker E: It's not immune to coercion. Like a government can say you must use an address that provably only has outputs that are on this approved list. But that's exactly the same as them saying you must send to an address that we generate together, that's a multisig address that I have one of the private keys for and it's a two of two. So you can't spend it without my permission. They can just as trivially do that. And if that's a problem, then it's a problem. Right. Like, but at the end of the day, this is like bitcoin. Can't. There's, it's as. It's almost as dumb as, like someone can come to me and hold a gun to my head and tell me to give them my. They can like bitcoin.
[01:20:18] Speaker A: That's just, that's just.
[01:20:21] Speaker E: There's nothing you can do. Well, it's, there's nothing you can do about it. Like, I mean, well, there are mitigates. It's just external to the network.
[01:20:29] Speaker D: It's got nothing to do with the rules, it's got nothing to do with the opcode. You know, like, it's just not relevant.
[01:20:36] Speaker E: Yeah. And it's just not unique to covenants. Right. But like you say, that does seem to be the main sticking point. And interestingly, Andreas, whose name keeps coming up today, was like the first to push that fud. Like he did a video on CTV and was like, like, oh, governments can force people to encumber coins. You know, government blacklists and all that stuff. And it's like that's, that's just not just. It's an amazingly bad argument to make. But it's so Terrifying that when you hear it, you go, oh, no, I don't like it. So that's it. But that's not. It's not an intelligent argument to make against it. Like, the three positions I've summarized against it are that one, which is grubles. They just don't. The people pushing for it don't really care about 8 billion people having UTXOs and access to the base layer for cheap and all that stuff, because if they did, they wouldn't be, you know, massively against making the filters work properly.
And Jimmy Song's position was what we've been talking about for the most part, which is, you can do it already. People just aren't bothered because it's not that compelling and because you keep rugging them by changing the design space. And Giacomo's position is the people pushing for it are assholes. And you can't let arseholes put upgrades into Bitcoin because that will. That is. He's. Like, we did with Segwit2.x. We did Segwit2.x.
We literally have two megabyte blocks and Segwit. That's literally what Segwit2.x was. It's just we didn't want to do it the way they told us to with the New York agreement. We didn't want to be like, yeah, Brian Armstrong and Jeff Garzick are now in charge of Bitcoin's code base. Like, we didn't want to do that for political reasons. We actually did the upgrade, though. Obviously it was a soft fork instead of a hard fork. But the point is, we basically have said GWT2.x, but we didn't want to let the New York agreement and Barry Silver and all these assholes come in and start throwing their weight around and telling us what's what.
[01:22:28] Speaker D: Because not only would it set an awful precedent, but they also wrote garbage code that never produced a block. Like, there's a. There's a reason why asshole and incompetent goes together.
[01:22:39] Speaker E: It wasn't that bad.
[01:22:41] Speaker D: It was an off by one error. But that's the thing, though, is that they made a naive mistake in the implementation and they were ready to go like this. Was ready to implement. People had downloaded it and were running it like it was a. It was a horrible bug at the advice, and it was a horrible bug specifically because of how naive it was.
[01:23:07] Speaker B: And while they were accusing everybody, like Bitcoin core people or whatever, of hijacking development and taking over Bitcoin or whatever, they were literally Trying to hijack fire the developers like the GitHub and they were trying to change.
That was like explicit.
[01:23:24] Speaker D: I think this actually goes all the way back to. In fact, let's hit news items because we're already way into this. But. And we've had a couple already. But this. The argument that has actually consumed me more recently and why I've been less about like it's super important to have covenants is just that the news item specifically is the Blockstream opens a research center in Lugano, Switzerland, focusing on Liquid and Lightning advancements, which is actually really cool block stream. I've, I've heard some things that they're making a pretty big push in 2025 and there's. I'm. I'm pretty excited to see what they're going to be doing. But here's the thing is that if.
[01:24:04] Speaker A: You have something cool to build with.
[01:24:06] Speaker D: Ctv, if you have something that's like revolutionary that you can build with opcat, like we. You have covenants on Liquid. Like, you just have them. Like, just build it, just build it. Like you will get all the fireworks you need. You will get all of the support if you build something awesome. And if you build it on Liquid, you will have extremely minimal porting problems to then put it on Bitcoin later. None of your work will be wasted and you'll have just shown everybody exactly.
[01:24:39] Speaker A: What a potent and critical tool that it is for all of us to get the future that we want where everybody can hold their own keys and.
[01:24:46] Speaker D: The whole 8 billion people on planet Earth can be sovereign and there's no government and there's privacy and all of that great stuff. Do it, do it. There's nothing holding anybody back from doing it. Lots, lots less bitching, lots more building done. Problem solved.
[01:25:06] Speaker B: And the privacy benefits, the privacy benefits of Liquid should not be like, understated when you're like mixing it with lightning. I think it's pretty great.
[01:25:15] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. Liquid's amazing. It's.
[01:25:18] Speaker D: It's incredibly under and it is the test bed that Litecoin was, I think for all of the things that are contentious right now.
Yeah.
[01:25:28] Speaker B: Times 10. Like it's way, way, way better than a shit. Just in general.
[01:25:32] Speaker D: Yes. But I mean it in the sense that, like, you have so much that you can do on Liquid and they've built tools that make it easy to work with. Like, there's just no reason not to build it there first. If it's something that you hope to bring to Bitcoin because it's usable on Liquid. And there's a lot of tools that, like, I, I love the Aqua Wallet. It's a really in bolts has become like a really critical piece of the whole stack. I've been onboarding people to Aqua. Like, Jan3 has built some really cool stuff. So, yeah, I think that's like. That's it. It's like, okay, like, I think there's. We're done with verbal arguments. Build something.
Like, just build something.
[01:26:15] Speaker E: That's a good point. I think after this conversation. And like a lot of it's just me thinking out loud, so I appreciate you indulging me on it, but it's just, I really do think that the nays have it. Like, it's just at this point there's upgrade fatigue. There's demonstrably no viable way to solve unintended consequences of, you know, of forks. And it just doesn't have the wow factor. There isn't a thing that CTV does that makes everyone go, yeah, I want that. Like, Segwit had it, Schnauzig's had it. And you know, like some of the multisig stuff that's going to come out with taproot is going to have been worth it. So. But I just don't see it for anything else. And I think the people pushing for it are all. They're all just young people. Like, in every case, they're always just younger people that are like, excited to build and they just want the new.
[01:27:14] Speaker D: Thing instead of making.
Realizing the actual tech that we have.
[01:27:19] Speaker C: Yeah, one thing mechanic you said to me or you said a long time ago, not really related to Covenants was, I think it was in an open source versus closed source debate or proprietary debate. And you were like, well, building good UX stuff is hard.
The kind of developers that work for Apple and stuff like that, these are guys that are doing kind of monotonous coding tasks.
The creative coding tasks are fun. These are the things, like we love to come up with new op codes and these new like brainiac stuff and we love to write the alpha software for it because that's fun. You know, that's like sitting at the bar drinking a beer, drawing a picture. You know, like, this is stuff we do in our free time. But like actually making a product, like a utxo sharing product, that's just going to be hard. Like you're gonna have to pay developers to do shit you don't want to do and you have to pay them. That means you have to have a business model. That means you have to have demand. Like that means like the whole business aspect comes from it. And so like, you know, with the spam stuff or the NFT stuff and stuff like that, like that has its own business model. So you're going to be able to pay developers to build those kind of wallets like really quickly.
But, but paying developers to do the hard UX stuff, like new wallets for UTXO sharing, where's the alpha coming from? Where is the income coming from? Who are the customers that are paying for that wallet to be developed? Because this would be different if we saw demand for UTXOs going through the roof right now. But it's just like actually if there was a lot of demand for this kind of stuff and granted there is some demand to fix lightning, definitely, I get that. But if there was more demand for UTXO ownership, I would probably have a different view. I'd be like, yeah, we probably need to do something.
[01:29:18] Speaker B: Yeah, we really don't need scammers and dumb money.
[01:29:20] Speaker E: Designing this is the biggest point ever which goes, which just destroys the covenants. Advocacy I think is that L1 is cheap and L1 is very, very simple to use. And I don't know the percentage, but it's not great. So many people are just still leaving their coins with third party custodians and the reason they're doing that is not because we don't have covenants, they're doing it because it's just natural to them. So you can come up with the best timeout trees and ark and all that stuff with covenants. In best case scenario you can come up with all that stuff and they still aren't going to do it.
That's just a fact. I'm looking at the blockchain now. Fees are 9sats a byte. All right, that's higher than it has been for a while, but I was.
[01:30:04] Speaker D: About to say it was four yesterday.
[01:30:07] Speaker E: Most of the time I look at it, it's two sats a byte. Which is just like for most people that can afford to be into bitcoin, even if they're not part of the west, they can afford a couple of transactions a month. If it's costing you under a dollar to open a lightning channel. Like, come on, there's nothing about adding covenants that's suddenly going to make another billion people hop on and suddenly have bitcoin in a sovereign way. It's just not realistic, man.
[01:30:33] Speaker D: There needs to be demand for it first before because the demand will probably end up being the thing that really informs what kind of solution we need anyway.
[01:30:42] Speaker C: Yeah, and it'll pay for the devs too. It'll pay for the devs to make the wallets.
[01:30:47] Speaker E: That point you were just highlighting Steve again is like, I'm glad you brought it up because I did say it before. I don't remember the context, but it's like Noster is like the best example ever of people that want to have fun creating stuff that basically works when everyone on it is just there for the mission and wants to have a good time. But then someone comes along, someone has to UX and like dealing with like DOS vectors and stuff like that is a paid job because no one wants to do it. It's not fun and it's boring. It's a grind. So this is why Start OS had to be approached the way it was, with people getting salaries and charging for products and stuff like that, and even starting out with license and product keys and stuff like that. Because it's just, yeah, all this stuff exists. Nextcloud exists, it's great. Bitcoin core exists, lightning nodes exist. But if you want to run it outside of being a tech informed technical enthusiast, your average normie can't run this stuff. It's too difficult. You need someone to come along and build Ubuntu, right? You can't just be like, hey, there's a GitHub with this thing called Linux on it. Like, you just need to spend four years learning how to use it all and put it all together and tweaking it endlessly. Like someone has to come along and go, all right, I'll make it actually usable. And that's a job because you just have to sit there in customer support all day going, oh, right, there's a foot gun there and there's a foot gun there. And I'm sorry, that's just. People are annoyed. They're emailing you saying, this doesn't work, I need it fixed, I want my money back. No one's going to do stuff like that for fun. That's not sitting at a bar with a, you know, a piece of paper sketching out a new protocol and having some fun.
It's sitting there, a laptop for nine hours for seven days a week just dealing with people complaining at you. And I'm just like, no one's going to do that for fun because it's not fun.
So I think it's just. Your point is, right?
Building shit with scam coins is also very compelling and a lot of fun. Like, so people are going to do that. It's high time preference. It's fun. You make a lot of money building like good UX wallets with no foot guns in them that take advantage of covenants. It will be fun for a minute until you start getting to the edge cases where you have to stop people from hurting themselves. And then it's just like, I'm moving on to another project. I let this.
[01:33:00] Speaker D: Then you super test netit it. You just.
[01:33:03] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. You super test. Net.
[01:33:06] Speaker D: Super test. Net just runs off to another project.
[01:33:08] Speaker C: I love super test whatever the hell.
[01:33:09] Speaker D: You want with this thing.
[01:33:10] Speaker C: Yeah, I love all these guys. I love all these opcode guys. But there's no chance that after one of these CTV stuff gets implemented that they're going to like, not think about another opcode, you know, like, they're not going to like, okay, now I'm going to transition into the sales, the tech support department, you know, like, they're just not going to do that.
[01:33:32] Speaker E: Even Satoshi had like, limited ability to sit around and make it just grind and make it work. Like a lot of people. Like, he had to do that for the good of the project. But another thing is just he wasn't that kind of guy. Like, he wanted to invent a new monetary paradigm and be like, here you go. And it's like, it does all this stuff and see you later. Have fun with it. And then you just get people like Luke that sit there for years being like, no, it has to do this and like, you know, slowly cataloging everything and making it work and having this ultra conservative attitude and it's, it's just necessary and someone's got to do it. And it's so thankless and no one wants to. It's not fun.
[01:34:08] Speaker D: Extremely thankless and so rare to have somebody who even cares.
[01:34:14] Speaker E: Yeah.
[01:34:15] Speaker B: And you know what? It takes all teams.
[01:34:19] Speaker C: No, but that's why we have, you know, capitalism and entrepreneurship. You know, it's like you got to pay people to do the boring stuff. And you know, Michael Saylor makes this point a lot. He's like, you guys aren't understanding, like when the open source idealistic stuff stops and when the entrepreneurial aspect kicks in. And you know, I think Saylor would say, like, this scaling second layer stuff, that needs to be an entrepreneurial activity. People need to fail, people need to lose money. Like that's, that's a free market thing, the scaling aspect. And I don't know if I totally believe that, but I think there's something to that.
[01:34:59] Speaker E: No, it's definitely a good point. It's I think again though, it's kind of bad in any direction. That's the ultimate conclusion of this debate I think is that if we don't scale with something like covenants being, you know, in the, in the best scenario that you can imagine with like ARK and all that stuff. If we don't do that then scaling bitcoin literally just means third party custodians because like it kind of by default it has to mean that.
[01:35:25] Speaker D: And the best case scenario is like e cash basically.
[01:35:30] Speaker E: Like which is not, it's not super bad. Like all liquid. Liquid is actually still leaves us with.
[01:35:35] Speaker D: A lot of potential benefits. But all it does is distribute the problem. Like because right now all of our third party is government. Like government is a third party for all money and it is the end all be all. So the idea would be that we could decentralize this down into like 150,000 entities spread all across the globe and you could connect to anyone. But it doesn't solve the third party problem. It just aggressively distributes it against the government and central bank as the only and end all third parties of all money, which is what we have now.
[01:36:09] Speaker E: Which is a lot better. We shouldn't turn our nose up at it.
[01:36:14] Speaker B: It would hopefully mean that competition keeps things mostly honest.
[01:36:19] Speaker D: It just means that the scale of problems is naturally going to be less. It won't be society destroying problems. It will be bank and community and talent. Like it will like the sides of the problem typically it will collapse before it gets to a systemic we're all effed problem, which is what we're all sitting on right now.
[01:36:41] Speaker B: If you look at the Internet like we're all on. I mean we. Well not, thankfully not as much anymore, but we, we've all been on very siloed social media networks. Right. And, and as the problem has gotten worse, we've looked for and people have been building alternative things. And so it may be that bitcoin adoption has to go a little bit in the wrong direction in order for there to be enough motivation to build the thing that people really need.
[01:37:15] Speaker D: Two steps forward, one step back or really want. Yeah, you know what, let's do a, let's do a bit of a lightning round here because I want to hit. There's a number of different like news items that don't require a whole lot of time, but I think they're important to bring up. One of them is just the strike has launched bitcoin auto withdrawals and basically going back to the whole UTXO thing is I really Think every, every. Every service that does bitcoin, especially that does dca, like, auto withdrawals should be a thing everywhere. And I guess it's. It. It's pretty common, but it seems to be only common in bitcoin circles.
But I don't know that. Like, I mean, kudos to them to finally doing it.
[01:38:04] Speaker B: But like, is it auto withdrawals over lightning?
[01:38:09] Speaker D: That's a good question.
[01:38:10] Speaker B: Does that work?
[01:38:11] Speaker D: I don't. With Bolt 12, you could technically do that now or with lightning address and stuff, you could do that now, but that requires somebody else to have a lightning address, which is usually what strike provides to people. So that's typically a custodial tool.
[01:38:26] Speaker E: I feel like lightning addresses suck anyway because DNS sucks. Bolt 12 doesn't suck. And I know Jack Mallors is like trying hard to push the envelope on that, but yeah, I didn't think about.
[01:38:40] Speaker D: Whether that was actually lightning or not.
I think it's just a bitcoin address. Like, I think it's just like you punch in a utxo.
[01:38:48] Speaker E: It'd be better if you could give them an X pub and they could iterate through the addresses.
[01:38:54] Speaker D: That would be cool. A whole lot of people talk about how that's like a huge privacy problem. But it's like, dude, you can make like a sub X pub.
And that gets into technical details, though. Somebody has to know, like how to do that to make it separate.
[01:39:07] Speaker E: It's strictly better than using the same address over and over again.
Bitcoin is not private, man.
If you want to work. I don't know, it's strictly better.
[01:39:20] Speaker B: Well, now that we have. So does this work? Okay, since we have. Yeah, I mean, it should work. You could give them. I don't know if they support this, but if you could give them like a liquid address and they could use the liquid to lightning bridge to send you. To send you liquid.
[01:39:40] Speaker E: Well, this is the way. This is the bull bitcoin method that I really want to champion. First off, they're not just auto withdrawal. You can't buy until we already have a method to pay you.
[01:39:55] Speaker D: I love that.
[01:39:56] Speaker E: It's amazing. And that also introduces way less regulatory risk, by the way, because it's kind.
[01:40:01] Speaker D: Of like robo sounds in that way is that you can't use.
You can't. You can't give it to somebody else. Like, you have to use your wallet or whatever.
[01:40:10] Speaker E: So, yeah, like, even with Fiat and bull bitcoin, if you put on like 100 grand to buy bitcoin, they'll take it but it's written there. If you don't spend this on bitcoin, we are going to send it back to you within X time period. Like, we do not want to become custodians, which is amazing because becoming a custodian means basically that's when it's all the, you know, the urine samples and the DNA samples and all that becomes required. Good.
[01:40:34] Speaker D: Dude. Sending in urine samples is the worst.
Oh, my God, I have so many of those little cups. I've had to do that so many times. It's unbelievable.
[01:40:45] Speaker E: 23 and me and P. 23 and.
[01:40:48] Speaker B: P. 23 and P.
[01:40:51] Speaker E: I don't know, man. It's a good thing. Well done to. I like Jack Mellor's generally. I think he's like, like a favorite bitcoin mainstream media news guy. Every time he goes on there, he's just so inappropriate. I just love it.
[01:41:05] Speaker C: Normie tv.
[01:41:07] Speaker E: I love.
[01:41:07] Speaker C: We have a normie TV division.
[01:41:10] Speaker D: And any complaints or whatever you have about strike, like, I don't. I don't understand somebody who could be like, he's not. He's not building something awesome and not trying to build what, like, exactly what bitcoin needs. Like, he, he seems to have put himself in a really good spot and like you said, always entertaining. Big shout out.
[01:41:29] Speaker E: He got El Salvador to adopt bitcoin as legal man legend.
[01:41:34] Speaker D: What's your standard here, guys? Come on.
[01:41:38] Speaker E: Yeah, and he's just, he's still humble bitcoiner, just hanging around, like having a beer, like, just absolutely, like, I love that guy. Honestly, I'm. I have so much time for Jack.
[01:41:47] Speaker D: Miller's next news item. We've got Cartwright in the UK has advised a new pension scheme to allocate 3% of portfolios of pension portfolios to bitcoin.
[01:42:04] Speaker E: Why so bearish?
[01:42:05] Speaker A: Why so bearish?
[01:42:06] Speaker D: Right?
[01:42:06] Speaker A: Three percent.
[01:42:07] Speaker D: Come on, man. But there's something really interesting here because I kind of thought that would start in the last cycle and it didn't really, like. I think everybody was still too nervous to get in and, you know, institutions are so slow moving. But it's going to be really interesting because I think it's going to get to a point very, very quickly where pension schemes, retirement things that don't allocate some percent are going to be the ones that are the. Should I work with you? And I think that shift is going to happen really quick and it's going to be interesting.
[01:42:44] Speaker B: Wasn't there a state that put pension funds or something? Just. I mean, before this last run up, like, so they should be sitting. Wasn't it, like, I could look through.
[01:42:52] Speaker D: My last set series of notes. Maybe there was one. There was like, it was like South Dakota or something.
Wasn't somebody talking about.
[01:43:01] Speaker B: Yeah, like Wyoming or maybe Ohio? Like there was something. Something like. I don't know why I want to say, say Ohio. I don't know why Ohio would be vague.
[01:43:09] Speaker D: I remember something vaguely in my mind, vaguely about that. I wonder if it was just a proposal and like, nothing concrete has surfaced with it.
[01:43:17] Speaker B: But I don't know, it'd be interesting because they've done really well if they. I mean, like, because it was. It's been months ago.
[01:43:22] Speaker D: Yeah, like, and it wasn't many months ago that the price was low. In fact, I posted in the audio not one of the, you know, I had a bunch of money set aside, a bunch of fiat set aside for the construction stuff. And I put an irresponsible amount of it into bitcoin. When it dipped down to 50 to 50k and I had almost forgotten about it. Like, I just kind of like move it to my. This is my stack wallet for this year kind of thing.
And somebody, I think it was like, I think it was bitcoin Pup maybe, I don't know, some of somebody in the audio knots went up and found it.
[01:43:59] Speaker A: It was just from August.
[01:44:00] Speaker D: This is like, it wasn't even that long ago.
And found the post and then reposted it, like down to the bottom of the channel. But you feel good about this now, don't you?
And I was like, I do, I do. I feel really good about it. Thank you. That made my day. That made my day because I'd totally forgotten about it.
[01:44:20] Speaker E: Another item maybe is a micro strategy. I ended up buying some because in Canada you have these retirement accounts and it's basically like if you earn money, government will take it all. Unless you put some of it in a retirement account and invest it, then you can just deduct that off the income you apparently made. So I'm like, all right, I'll just put a bunch of my income in microstrategy stock. And even if it goes to zero, it's better than it going to the Canadian government. So I'm like, this works. I'm going to do this. And maybe it goes up a bunch. And I'm a genius investor too. But I'm just like, I'm just going to do this. I can't buy bitcoin with it because it doesn't work that way. I have to buy some stupid Blue pilled version of Bitcoin, like Microstrategy. But maybe. And then I start thinking, maybe he's right though. Maybe we do get the whole infinite money glitch thing that he's doing, where you just keep borrowing worthless money and using it to buy Bitcoin while people still take fiat for it. Maybe it works.
[01:45:25] Speaker D: I legit think it ends when we start pricing stocks. Like when we start pricing the risk reward ratio to an investment in Bitcoin. When we compare against what the. The CAGR or whatever in bitcoin is going to be. What's our rate of return every year? Okay, that will be the basic.
[01:45:47] Speaker B: The government specifically targets it for being like some sort of financial scheming.
[01:45:53] Speaker D: Yeah, you're not allowed to borrow shitty.
[01:45:57] Speaker A: Money in order to buy good money. That's illegal.
[01:46:01] Speaker E: Wait, that's illegal?
Well, that's.
That was fun buying some micro strategy stock. And I love it because it's all tax free. So if I sell it at a profit, it's in a retirement account. I don't think I pay tax on it.
[01:46:16] Speaker D: So yeah, if it stays there.
[01:46:18] Speaker B: Nice.
[01:46:18] Speaker D: Yeah, you're good. That's awesome. I find this kind of funny. So Detroit plans to accept Bitcoin and crypto for taxes by mid-2025, supported by PayPal. And there's something really funny about like a city that's in such horrible condition being like, we'll take bitcoin.
[01:46:38] Speaker E: Yeah, we'll take.
What's the worst shitcoin? What's the worst shitcoin? We'll take bsv. We'll take. We'll take. At this point, we'll just take anything.
[01:46:50] Speaker D: Please just give us something.
It's funny because Lugano. The.
[01:46:57] Speaker E: The.
[01:46:58] Speaker D: Oh, man, what's the name?
The.
Not. It's not the mayor. Who was it?
[01:47:06] Speaker C: I can't.
[01:47:06] Speaker D: I can't remember. The guy from Lugana who has done like serious work in making it so that the whole city can accept Bitcoin for payments for, you know, permits, taxes, like basically everything. And they've like built this serious integration with their banking partner. And it's like super simple. It basically, it's. The process is zero difference from the normal process, except that you can just select and then send Bitcoin to an address or like pay, I think over lightning as well. I mean, he did this long presentation on it and he said this is basically everybody. Anybody in Switzerland, any municipality in Switzerland can basically plug into this with nothing because of all the work they've done. But then he was talking about how like almost they've received like $500 total, like since, since they started. Like it's like the almost no payments or whatever. Because I think just nobody wants to. Like you think about like the phase we are in, like who wants to pay the government Bitcoin, you know, like, why would you want to do that?
[01:48:13] Speaker A: In addition to the fact that you.
[01:48:15] Speaker D: Then basically announce to them that this is your address. Like even like with my accounting and stuff that I do, like, I don't, I don't tell everybody like what address. I don't list addresses. I list dollar amounts for what the value is to, you know, do do my taxes or whatever. But I'm not going to give them my. I'm not going to give them my wallet, you know. And if I pay them directly, that immediately becomes a problem.
[01:48:39] Speaker E: Wasn't that an EU thing for a while where they're like, you have to print all of your bitcoin addresses and tell us all of them.
[01:48:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:48:46] Speaker E: And those like immediately people like, all right, I'm going to send you my entire, every single generator, full address for this. 10 to the 40 numbers. I'm going to send you 10.
[01:48:57] Speaker B: Like go ahead.
[01:48:59] Speaker D: Brute force that start at the end and then start at the end and go backwards. Find them, work into rule.
[01:49:10] Speaker E: I'm enrolling forward state on a 4 gigabyte raspberry PI. I don't know if you've ever dealt with the misery of a bitcoin node in rolling forward state.
It's like when there's a glitch in the chain data and it has to reprocess the chain and it's like, it's.
[01:49:26] Speaker D: Basically worse from scratch.
[01:49:27] Speaker E: Ibd. Yeah, it's worse than that somehow. It's like one of these. It just goes on forever. It's like about seconds a block that.
[01:49:37] Speaker D: You can compare against and the role, the rollback or whatever the. It's like you now have the entire thing to check against. So the, the amount of data that you have to process against is just like that much larger as opposed to ibd is that you can just like, like inch forward and only reference the very last thing. Because you already did it.
Yeah, that's gross.
[01:50:00] Speaker E: Yeah, that's gross. Side sucks. And it's a pipe. I need this to work for a live stream. I'm doing on Monday.
[01:50:07] Speaker D: Good luck.
[01:50:08] Speaker E: And it's Wednesday.
[01:50:09] Speaker D: Good luck.
[01:50:09] Speaker E: So I'm on block 832,275.
[01:50:15] Speaker D: And you're going backwards.
[01:50:17] Speaker E: No, I'm going forwards.
But this is the thing. The bigger the DB cash you have, the worse it is if you accidentally interrupt the process. Like, if you ungracefully shut down Bitcoin when you had like an 8 gigabyte cache of UTXOs, you're screwed then. But the irony is you had the big cash to get through IBD faster. So it's just.
[01:50:40] Speaker D: Yeah, that's the funny thing about.
[01:50:43] Speaker C: The.
[01:50:44] Speaker D: Initial syncing or whatever is like the first 500,000 blocks take like 20 minutes, but then you get the block 600,000 and they start ticking one at a time, like.
And it hurts.
[01:50:57] Speaker E: Yeah, man. And I'm sinking on a pi5 on an umbrel that I've got to use for demonstration too. And I mean, I started that last night and I'm about to load it now. I bet it's probably almost finished. Actually, I'm 88% of the way through. Like, Pi5 with NVMe is so quick, it can do it in like 14 hours or something.
[01:51:16] Speaker D: Oh, wow. Wow. That's crazy.
This is a big one that I'm, I'm pretty stoked about. I don't think we know exactly what it means quite yet, but a judge has just ruled, not, not specifically in the tornado cash case, but in a sister partner case or something has just ruled that tornado cash is to be removed from the OFAC sanctions list, that it is basically not legal for them to have the code and the software be something that is censorable, that is restricted, and that you can't export it.
But. But what's crazy about this. So I'll read what Lola Leets and the Rage have said about this. This is usually good news for anyone developing privacy software and will likely have a positive impact on Roman Storm's trial where it's debated whether the court may criminally charge the developers of the software. So that's basically the foundation of the case itself is saying that because they have created. It's kind of like listing cryptography as munitions. And.
And then the people who created the crypto cryptography itself are arms dealers. But if you, if the judge says that, you know, cryptography is not munitions, well, then how, how, how's your trial against arms dealers gonna go? You know, so that's a big step in the right direction.
And hopefully, hopefully it means. I mean, there will probably still be a bunch of back and forth on this, but hopefully it means good things for basically the. Both the trial for tornado cash, but also just Samurai Wallet for basically all the privacy software in general, because it's kind of setting a precedent that well no, you can't do that. You've overstepped your authority and you cannot criminalize the software.
Which is a pretty good barrier for developers.
[01:53:24] Speaker B: What, where is this stuff being tried?
[01:53:28] Speaker D: Says 5th Circuit.
This is. I'm pretty sure this is all in the EU if I'm not mistaken.
I don't remember. Wait.
[01:53:39] Speaker A: Perhaps Congress will update ieepa.
[01:53:41] Speaker D: Maybe Tornado Cash is actually in the.
[01:53:43] Speaker C: US it feels to me like there needs to be a dramatic overhaul. No one, like, no one has any idea what a money transmitter is like. Oh yeah, a server that processes payments. Is that a money transmitter? Well, you know, where's Mercury in the sky these days? I mean it's like there we have absolutely no clear guidance over whether you are involved in monetary transactions.
We need like some RFK style, just huge overhaul of all of this framework.
[01:54:21] Speaker D: If there is a time to get it, it will probably be in this administration. Just because there's so many people fighting to try to get some sort of a concrete definition for this crap.
But like most of the rules and stuff are created in the 80s, like before the Internet was even like a thing. Like so of course it's going to sound analog and it's going to be vague when. Yeah, like it's not even built around the understanding of what the hell the Internet is.
[01:54:51] Speaker C: Right. You know, it reminds me.
[01:54:53] Speaker B: But even, even beyond that, even beyond that they, I mean like they passed the healthcare bill so that you could find out what was in it. I mean like, like they build stuff, you know, with all sorts of vagaries on purpose so that they can attach and build other structures, you know, on top of it. Like it's, it's there so they can stop you when they, when you're doing something they don't like or that threatens their.
[01:55:16] Speaker E: It's intentionally vague. And then precedent gets set in various legal cases that they just self ref. It becomes a self referential thing where they're like, well this guy wrote some code and he went to jail, but that guy wrote some code and he didn't. So he just sort of of like. I don't know, like to me it's just Adam Gibson and the Samurai and the Wasabi guys. All right. It seems to me that the Wasabi guys did get in some heat in America, but not anywhere else. Adam Gibson's just fine and the Samurai guys got in absolutely. Just buried under just the weight of, you know, tyranny. And it seemed to me basically that Samurai got in trouble mainly for the way they marketed rather than anything else. Because it doesn't, doesn't do anything that, that these other implementations don't.
[01:56:02] Speaker D: That's really what it was.
[01:56:03] Speaker E: Yeah, well, they were just saying stuff like, hey, if you're a Russian oligarch, you can come and wash your money through here and stuff. And it's just like. I think that's actually what provoked the authorities into going after them. I don't think it's about the design of the product or anything. I think it was about the marketing.
[01:56:18] Speaker D: It's about the intent. Or they're saying that that's the intent. But I think their defense is that it's just edgy marketing. Like we're just, we're just doing that because like anybody can use it. Like we can't control who or where any of this thing is. This is designed this way. And so we're just doing the thing that's politically edgy right now to get attention, which worked in the wrong way.
[01:56:46] Speaker E: Well, I don't know how to reconcile the whole thing and why some people are getting in trouble and others aren't. I don't know why that is. And I can only come up with that reason. Yeah.
[01:56:56] Speaker D: Or I think it's just because everything's illegal and they just have to pick and choose who they go after. Like, like it's the whole three felonies a day thing. Like we all commit three felonies a day. It's just about who they want to go after, who makes them, who embarrasses them, who looks like a criminal. And so we just find a thing that they're guilty of. And everything's so vague and there are so many hundreds of thousands of pages of law. Just, it's just find one. Just find a way that they're, that they're doing something illegal. They'll find it.
[01:57:30] Speaker C: You know, hey, I gotta run soon. But I did have one thing I thought about that I'm interested in you guys opinion on. I thought was funny. So I read that Cynthia Loomis bill about the U.S. strategic reserve or whatever. And I actually read the part where they talked about custody. And just like you were saying, it looked like this legislation was written in the 80s. It really looked like this bill was just copy paste of the gold reserve. It said the bitcoin will be stored in strategic diverse warehouses across the country. Like it. Did you guys read that? It said nothing about like.
[01:58:08] Speaker D: I think you posted it. I think you sent it to me in our group chat.
[01:58:11] Speaker C: Is that nothing about who will hold the Keys. Like, what will be the process for changing over key signatures? Like, it just said, like, well, it was stored in storage facilities. Like, I mean, okay, was that done on purpose to, like, get it.
[01:58:28] Speaker D: Bitcoin bricks will be stacked five high.
[01:58:31] Speaker E: Yeah.
[01:58:31] Speaker D: Like, and wide.
[01:58:32] Speaker C: But, I mean, Cynthia Loomis is smart. Like, but was it written in this way because she thought this is how she. She could get it passed. Like, if you start talking about key holders, you'll. You'll ruin everybody.
[01:58:44] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:58:44] Speaker C: Yeah. Do you think that's why she did it?
[01:58:47] Speaker B: Possible.
[01:58:47] Speaker D: That's. That's very possible. Is that there. They have to think about it in, like, which bank, like, which vault is it going to be in? And that the. The specificity of it being the keys is probably just that, you know, specificity and the details or whatever. Maybe. Maybe that's why it's funny, though.
[01:59:07] Speaker E: Are these bills typically. Typically written in a kind of, like, parallel English where it's, like, legalese, where nothing means what you think it means? Okay, like, so a warehouse, like a venue or something? Yeah, but, I mean, it's a. This is politicians, though. It's not law. But I don't know, maybe it's. Maybe it overlaps.
[01:59:23] Speaker D: It's all going to be on Windows xp.
[01:59:26] Speaker E: Oh, man. You know, it. The unpatched version. Like, just the one with all the exploits. I mean, the funny thing I found about that was, like, some Lola Leeds wrote some expose, like, the government's going to make a tax, and they're going to use that to build their strategic bitcoin reserve. And everyone's like, oh, my goodness, no. And I'm like, so I wrote this, like, sarcastic tweet that was just like, I just heard a rumor that the US Government plans to use extortion and taxation to get. Is to build its strategic reserve. And everyone responded to it. Like, what? Are you sure? And I'm like, wait a minute. Do you guys.
[02:00:01] Speaker D: What is.
[02:00:01] Speaker E: How fast do you think governments get anything? There is no other mechanism.
Like, and I remember just like, oh, yeah. No, it's not. It's not.
[02:00:09] Speaker B: Just.
[02:00:11] Speaker E: Did Donald Trump get paid for that shift he did at McDonald's? Like, is that how they're funding it? Like, they're all gonna go and get jobs?
[02:00:18] Speaker C: Are you gonna mine to the government's address? You put the government's address in your minor.
[02:00:23] Speaker E: I'll do it if they give me a green card.
Oh, my God.
[02:00:28] Speaker D: All right, guys, you know what?
[02:00:29] Speaker C: Yeah.
[02:00:30] Speaker D: I was about to say we should just end it here. I have a bunch of other news items, but I think I'm just gonna run through them in the outro to this. This just so we can bullet point if anybody is curious because there's some interesting things to mention but most of it's just kind of like general stuff like oh, more people are putting it in their strategic reserve and more people are allocating to it. So it's just kind of like it's a bullet point, you know. So I think we'll end it here. We had a pretty good one. Thank you guys for joining me. Thank you guys for coming on.
[02:01:02] Speaker B: Bitcoin audible started worse than any of.
[02:01:04] Speaker D: Yes, I'm. We're going to.
[02:01:06] Speaker A: I swear to God, if I just.
[02:01:07] Speaker D: Have to do this on the app for now, I don't even. I don't even care. I'm just so fed up with Riverside on this computer. I don't know what is happening. But we're going to have a different solution and I'm going to. I'm sorry. I'm probably going to make you all try it here in the next couple of weeks.
[02:01:24] Speaker B: Well, keep working. Good. What was wrong? Did you. Were you not able to get into.
[02:01:27] Speaker D: The keep after Riverside made my computer eat shit, I could not get into keep on my Mac.
[02:01:33] Speaker B: Couldn't do anything.
[02:01:34] Speaker D: So like it might just be key. I just need a good find a good way to just record and key. That might be the solution. But we'll talk.
Steve, thank you for joining me.
[02:01:45] Speaker C: Yeah, see ya.
[02:01:46] Speaker D: Mechanic Jeff.
[02:01:48] Speaker E: Great. Have a good day.
[02:01:50] Speaker D: Amen. Later, guys.
[02:01:56] Speaker A: All right, it is time for the lightning round. We are going to go through as many of these bullet points that we did not get to really quick. So first boom. Deutsche Telekom's MMS and Bankhouse Metzler pilot bitcoin mining to manage surplus energy in Germany. So anybody who's been keeping up on it, Germany's green plan and climate friendly plan is kind of falling apart and they're having an energy disaster, essentially. They're having huge spikes. One of the people who came on very recently who does a ton of the management on the grid said that they are literally on the edge of blackouts during normal days just because there's like a week of like no wind and not very good sun. So this is actually a really good sign for them having to basically bend the knee on the narrative and actually do something that matters, something that gives a practical real result and will actually balance out their grid over the long term. So this is really interesting and to see that become normalized in a country Or a location and culture that has been so vehemently trying to be virtue signaling at the cost of doing literally doing things that are damaging or stupid. To see them kind of have to backtrack or change their tune. And notice that bitcoin is actually an important piece of this puzzle.
[02:03:22] Speaker D: That's interesting.
[02:03:23] Speaker A: Bullet point Argentina's central bank hosts a live bitcoin mining art exhibit. A live art exhibit I didn't what and titled Artificial intelligence and the future of the economy. That's kind of cool. Milie seems super on board with the whole bitcoin thing. So interesting development that Argentina's central bank is showing off bitcoin mining as an at an art exhibit.
Who knew? Bullet point New market capital launches bitcoin collateralized loan strategy explained by their CEO on cnbc. It's just interesting seeing people starting to get into that market. And one thing that I have known personally with conversations that I've had with people who are in the bitcoin loan industry is one of the big problems wasn't actually about bitcoin. The problem was about getting liquidity on the fiat side because people were afraid the deal seemed too good to be true over collateralized loan. Great interest rate for them and really great time periods. And basically the security of the entire setup seemed too good to be true. And then when as soon as they hear the word bitcoin they pick up and run and they go buy their bonds for 4% they're losing money. So it's actually a really, really good thing to actually see more capital flow and see people start to de risk the idea of being associated with bitcoin in their minds. And that's something that this specific cycle probably will change dramatically which will be good because if you want to get a collateralized bitcoin loan, your interest rate may very likely go down in the near future because people will be less concerned, less associating the fact that bitcoin is just a nonsense thing that is only a scam and is dangerous and is scary. The more that that fades into the background, the more those sorts of financial instruments will be available to people. Bullet Shanghai Court affirms Bitcoin ownership legality under Chinese property laws The South China Morning Post reported on this. And that's interesting. Just because China has been a largely don't even know the rules or the setup is kind of like a hands off. They banned mining, they sort of stopped caring about it. It's kind of interesting to see it slowly make, you know, incremental steps back in the other direction. Bullet Polish presidential candidate Slawamir promises a strategic bitcoin reserve. That one was a Twitter post just kind of showing that, oh, I'm a different candidate, you should vote for me. Let me appeal to people. It's become a talking point to differentiate yourself. Doesn't mean that they're going to have a bitcoin reserve. But it is interesting nonetheless that it is entering itself into all of the presidential conversations. Bullet Pennsylvania proposes investing 10% of its 7 billion dollar treasury into Bitcoin via the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve act. Now not voted on. We do not know what the outcome of this is. But the interesting thing is this. Last October, the Pennsylvania House approved a related bill known as the Bitcoin Rights Bill, which protected the right to self custody and digital payments. So something to keep an eye on. And that will be big news if that actually goes through. Bullet SEC Chair Gary Gensler announces resignation, effective January 20, 2025. He's just running away because he doesn't want to get fired. Bullet Bitcoin hacker Ilya lichtenstein sentenced to five years for $3.6 billion Bitcoin theft.
Ross Ulbricht got two life sentences plus 40 years and he didn't steal anything from anybody. It's remarkable that just undermining the state's rules peacefully will get you a hundred times the sentence as stealing almost $4 billion from innocent people.
That shows you where their priorities are.
[02:07:40] Speaker D: Boom. Now let's get some bad news.
[02:07:42] Speaker A: Bullet Point Crypto CEO Dean Shirka was kidnapped in Toronto and released after a $1 million ransom payment. Stay safe out there guys.
Conceal carry. Bullet Russia bans winter crypto mining in Siberia, North Caucasus and occupied Ukraine due to energy shortages. Hmm, looks like that advertisement about how great their energy sources were, not so much. Bullet US Congress urges stricter regulations on crypto mixers like Tornado Cash, citing misuse for illicit activities. They're trying to squeeze this through with FinCEN and as the rage says, they still don't know how software works works. And they are appealing to Janet Yellen and the treasury, trying to say that mixers should have strict reporting requirements on exactly how everything is mixed, which is hilarious. Why would you want. What's the. What's the point? What, you're going to KYC to mix your coins? You're going to report everything to get privacy that you should have by default because it's a basic right. Not going to happen, guys.
Nobody's going to do that. And our wonderful members of Congress come with a couple of very expected members this is seven members of Congress who are pleading to Janet Yellen and FinCEN to do something about the awful, terrible criminals. Sean Kasten, Bill Foster, Stefan Lynch, David Scott, Emmanuel Cleaver ii. None of that guy, Joyce, Betty or B. Bd. Is that how you say that? And of course Brad Sherman's in the bunch.
[02:09:22] Speaker D: Of course he is.
[02:09:23] Speaker A: Bullet Block shifts focus to bitcoin mining and bitkey. So Block has shifted over to mining and the bitkey wallet, which I actually have not gotten to use yet, so they can't say much about it, but they have shut down title and the Web5 projects and that includes TBD, which we've mentioned recently. I think I talked about it in the episode with Mayan from Primal and I really kind of think it's because Jack Dorsey is super down the noster rabbit hole and doesn't really feel like it needs to be reinvented. I think it's because Nostr's winning. Just saying. Just saying. Bullet Point Block introduces Proto, a suite of bitcoin mining tools and products that's kind of the same Bullet Point. But it's really interesting, the idea of simplifying and and productizing really easy bitcoin mining tools and products. Basically doing what they did to bitkey to bitcoin mining.
That's a really interesting prospect. It's kind of like datum with Ocean is making it easy to use, making it simple to run, I think is a really valuable thing to have in the ecosystem. Bullet Bitcoin fog operator Roman sterlingov sentenced to 12.5 years for money laundering conspiracy. And they hit him with $395 million in forfeiture for money because the mixer mixed $400 million.
I don't think they understand how this thing works. I unfortunately don't know much about that case and I really hope they appeal because this sounds ridiculous. And another great example, the bitfinex hacker got five years for stealing $3.6 billion. And Roman who there is a strong evidence to suggest he didn't have anything to do with bitcoin fog and he simply used it. But even if he was the operator of bitcoin fog, doing nothing more than offering privacy as a service to other people got him 12.5 years longer than the person who stole $4 billion from a bunch of innocent people. Again, priorities. The government hates you. They do not care about your safety. They do not care if somebody steals something from you. They do not care if people kill or rape you. They care if you threaten their ability to be in charge and their control and the perception of their power and authority over everything else. That's what they care about. The government is not your friend.
[02:12:04] Speaker D: Bullet.
[02:12:04] Speaker A: The FBI raided poly market CEOs home. The DOJ investigates alleged platform violations, which is the betting market that bet that Trump was going to win. That's actually really funny. That whole thing is kind of interesting. That's something that might be worth doing a show about.
[02:12:22] Speaker D: I don't know.
[02:12:23] Speaker A: Bullet Pleb Lab launches Pleb Devs, an education platform for bitcoin developers. Really cool to see just more motivation like the Pleb Lab guys a lot and a stronger push for getting more development, getting more eyes and getting more people working on and in bitcoin. Pretty dope. That wraps it up, ladies and gentlemen. I told you there was a lot that we didn't get to but those are all the big ones for the month that I think were worth talking about and getting a little bit of reference on. The election was clearly the big one and I think it will have. I think it has had a big impact on the price and the perception of where bitcoin is going when it comes to jurisdictional safety, so to speak. A really big month. I really appreciate the roundtable guys joining me as always and going through what we could get through in the time we had available and fighting with the technical difficulties that we had for this episode. And I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. I hope you guys had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I guess this will come out after Thanksgiving so we'll you'll be hearing this in hindsight. Have a great holiday. Don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to check out fold. And thank you to everyone who supports the show and what I do. And I'll catch you on the next one. I am Guy Swan. This is Bitcoin Audible. And until next time, everybody. Take it easy, guys.
