Roundtable_005 - 21 MIL NOT GUARANTEED!, Blackrock, Saylor, El Salvador, SBR, and more

[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 this show is brought to you by fold and the fold debit card and their gift cards and their roundups and their auto DCA and their auto conversion from ach. Literally, if you were looking to get as much bitcoin as possible in as little as work, just set things up and then have them all automatically stack sats on a regular basis. The best all in one package for that is fold. Literally make fold the center of your banking and fiat life. And there will be ample passive sats stacked. We are back with another episode of guys Roundtable. Mechanic Steve and also my brother Jeffrey who doesn't jump in for like 20 or 30 minutes all join us today. And there's a lot of interesting stuff to break down for December. Oh my God. BlackRock says that 21 million Bitcoin is not guaranteed. What are we gonna do? Saylor is going crazy and he's just, he's just issuing debt and buying bitcoin every single week. Some new news from El Salvador and the imf. Lots happening on the strategic bitcoin reserve. So much wonderful, wonderful fud has returned that I've missed so dearly and so much more. And the roundtable is your one stop shop for hearing all about the important and events and getting the take of some really long time bitcoiners who've been around the block a few times. So let's go ahead and jump in. We are wrapping up December of 2024 with Guy's Roundtable. We are here with mechanic and Steve and myself. We are starting round table number five, wrapping up December which isn't wrapped up yet, but we've got a lot of COVID a lot to cover. Anyway, welcome to the show, guys. Welcome back. It's been a minute. How y'all doing? [00:02:16] Speaker B: Thank you. Amazing. Thank you. [00:02:19] Speaker A: Amazing. [00:02:20] Speaker B: Happy to be here. [00:02:22] Speaker A: Steve, can you show everybody your. Your huge head? [00:02:25] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. So for my wedding, people made huge cutouts of me and my wife. This is mine. [00:02:36] Speaker A: I was about to ask why that happened. You know, your expression is the best part of that. [00:02:45] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a little blue steel for you. [00:02:48] Speaker C: You look like someone from the World Wrestling Federation. Like that's. That's what. [00:02:52] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:02:54] Speaker C: That's the vibe I get from that. [00:02:57] Speaker B: Cream rises to the top. [00:03:00] Speaker A: Oh, man. Mechanic, how you doing, man? [00:03:04] Speaker C: Yeah, pretty good. [00:03:05] Speaker A: All right. [00:03:05] Speaker C: Yeah, can't complain. Yeah, I think my general state at the moment Is like, it feels exactly like 2016 where the bull market is back. We survived another bear market, the energy's fresh and the most stupid people are making the most noise. And like from 20, because 2016 was big blockers, right? And all I did and it was peak Reddit. So all I did was sit on, on Reddit all day arguing with big blockers. This astroturfing going on and it was like a job. And I've spoken about this before. Like when, when the bcash hard fork happened and I dumped all that, I was like, right, this is my payment for arguing with you idiots as a basic, as a self employed, self appointed job. Like that I did for the last two years arguing with you idiots. That feels exactly what's going on now. So all I do all day, like the blackrock fud, right? Like we had to write an Ocean rebuttal for that on LinkedIn and it's like, oh my God, I get tasked with this stuff. Like so BlackRock are going to come along, buy all the coins and then they're going to destroy the 21 million bitcoin limit. And people don't realize this and just you know, that level of argument. And I'm like, my goodness, like we haven't thought of that in 2011. Like, you know, we've had, we've discussed this, we've been there. Yes, it is possible but here's, here's the kind of thing that would actually mean, right? And let's reason about it and. But everything's all sensationalist. Like we've been. The quantum FUD keeps coming back and it's just dealing with that over and over again. The blackrock are here and they're going to destroy everything and you're not going to do anything with your stupid raspberry PI. When BlackRock say there's going to be more than 21 million and then there's all the just actual Ocean FUD as well. Like people just complaining about ocean all day or just not understanding it. Like, you know, the payout system on Ocean is quite complicated and explaining how that works to people is like I will spend hours on like meetings with miners just being like, no, no. Every time they think they understand it, they're like, right, so if I do this, then that will happen. I go, no. So it's just, it's like, is really, really hard. Like it's, it's some of the hardest stuff ever to do is like. But just to round off the point in, in bear markets you don't have any of that because you're just left with people that have got it. They're here for the long run. They're not panicking every five seconds because they haven't over leveraged themselves to the tits. Like they just know what they're doing. And so like they're not panicking because quantum computers are around. Like you just don't have that in bear market. [00:05:38] Speaker A: Yeah, bear markets are the best from a mentality standpoint. I've always felt, felt like. And the thing that gets me about bull markets and the, the people I, I think who are, you know, just kind of really going through the beginnings of their first, you know, maybe they got in in the last bull market and they've just bared market this this whole time is to recognize that the overwhelming majority of hate attacks fud like it is like it started and it will be permanent basically until the next bear market has set in. And it's only going to get louder and more annoying and more insane. Like everything. Like yes, there's like exuberance and great but almost universe. I feel like it was, you know, pretty much like there's this weird dichotomy where during the bull markets there's nothing but bad news and attacks and people screaming Ponzi and all of that stuff and they're screaming it louder than they've ever screamed it because now they're butt hurt. They're not in it, you know. And then in the bull, in the bear markets, so it's nothing but bad news and people screaming and hating it during the bull market and the price just rockets up. And then during the bear markets it's practically nothing but good news and building and new implementations and new services and everything and everybody just, it just the, the price is just like dead. It's just like sideways and nothing is happening. But yeah, yeah, that's kind of, that's kind of what I feel like. I really feel like the bull market this past couple of weeks, I feel like the, the feeling, the where the mentality is the fact that everybody's having a comment on it. It's finally feeling like the bull market's starting. And it's funny, I've had conversations with a number of people who be like, so, so this was a crazy bull market and now it's peaked and stuff. I'm like, no, dude, you have no idea. You've clearly never done this before or you have a short memory because this is not, this is not the end of anything. This is, this is, we're, we're walking through the first chapter here, setting up our, setting up this era also, like. [00:07:57] Speaker C: What happens with this idiocy and this influx of normies is that they over leverage and then they become a catalyst for making the next bear market worse. So that's what happened with 2021 and the sailor hype and all that is people bought on leverage and Core Scientific went crazy and FTX blew up. Like none of that would really happen if it was just this slow growth of like boring cypherpunks that just slowly like, you know, stashed and hodl and hodl and slowly grow the stack. It's just we get over exuberant, we blow off top and then everything completely falls apart and then we rebuild from the ashes again. Yeah. [00:08:33] Speaker A: And speaking of that, since you brought up Sailor, do you think Sailor's making this way worse by the strategy that he's basically blasting out there to everybody? [00:08:50] Speaker C: You mean with this like infinite money glitch? [00:08:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Just basically kind of encouraging people, because of the apparent success of it, to go into leverage. [00:09:02] Speaker C: To be honest, I don't blame him and I don't really. If you can get cheap credit and you can buy bitcoin with it, like, why wouldn't you buy bitcoin and why wouldn't you tell other people to do the same thing? Because it just, you know, it just gives you a return faster. So I don't know, I can't really hold it against him, to be honest. [00:09:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it's kind of the same thing with the US Strategic Reserve. It's just kind of like, well, if they can do it, they will do it. Bitcoin's for everybody. Bitcoin's for anybody. You can't really stop anybody from getting bitcoin. My worry about Sailor is the Coinbase worry. Eventually I feel like something's going to happen at Coinbase. They're going to get hacked, they're going to be found to have rehypothecated a bunch of stuff. And the bigger that they get, the bigger of a meltdown that's going to be in terms of like price for a little while. Of course bitcoin will be fine. But yeah, my, my issue with Sailor is just wrapped up in the whole Coinbase thing. I don't, of course, like people are going to do the speculative attack and borrow cheap money and buy bitcoin. Like, of course that's going to happen. You can't stop that. [00:10:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Talking about the strategic reserve and then talking about what Sailor is doing and talking about and wrapping kind of blackrock into this as well is the people who are saying, I mean, sure, you can have opinion about whether or not you should applaud this or you should be super stoked about one thing or the other, but the idea that somehow we were supposed to get here and, like, governments weren't supposed to buy it, or we were supposed to stop an ETF from happening, or that somehow bitcoin is screwed because an ETF happened, or because a government might be purchasing it for a reserve. Like, I don't understand how. Like, what is going main. Like, did you just think that we were going to succeed and take over the world and anybody with wealth wasn't going to get involved? I don't quite see the. What's the vision that they had for it? How were strategic reserves not a part of the inevitable outcome of bitcoin's success? How did they intend to prevent it? You know what I mean? [00:11:31] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good point. I do take issue with the fact that anyone's surprised by the fact that rich and powerful people are going to own a lot of bitcoin. Like, there's nothing you can do to stop the world's worst people, but they come up with that trope. Bitcoin is for enemies. Right? And that's usually the retort to that. But there are some implications from it. But what's annoying is the people that are worried about it never have a sensible impression of what that really is. I don't see BlackRock pushing for an inflationary fork. And if they do, I mean, we did this, guys. That's what 2017 literally was. It was throwing money at people to use UTXO forks. And all we did was just pocket the money and carry on on the real bitcoin. And they got tired of it. And every single fork was less and less lucrative. So we've done it. Like, segwit2x was a lot of money. Like, you could sell every bitcoin you had for 0.2 of the of the hostile takeover coin, and then that would be 0.2 bitcoins, which you then sold for even more. [00:12:35] Speaker A: You mean bitcoin cash? [00:12:37] Speaker C: No, I mean SegWit2x on the futures market. SegWit2x never launched the futures market. [00:12:42] Speaker A: It existed before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, I didn't play that one, but I wish I had. [00:12:48] Speaker C: Yeah, well, you. It was a risk because you had to put bitcoins on Bitfinex custodial. This is. But this is why people hate Tether. And no other Stablecoin. This is why they get trash for it. Because all the big blockers and their dreams got lost, ruined because of how Bitfinex provided that market and allowed us to dump their coin before it even existed. That was genius move. But I mean it was just free money, right? You got basically on average, once you sold and then resold the new coins, you just kept cycling it around. You got 0.3 Bitcoin for every bitcoin you had. And you know those. That was all the money they had. Millions of dollars were just handed to bitcoiners, you know, in the stroke of a few hours. And it was honestly one of the most surreal nights of my life. But yeah, that was. [00:13:35] Speaker A: We're gonna have to come back to the BlackRock 21 million, not guaranteed. Because I know my brother, even though he kind of deserves it because he's not here, I know he will be very, very upset. And it's Christmas, so I can't do that to him. If we talk about it too much while he is not here. [00:13:52] Speaker C: All right, let's come back to it. [00:13:54] Speaker A: So we will wrap back around to that. [00:13:56] Speaker B: I was going to add, it's not specific to BlackRock, but in my mind when we talk about these things, like, oh, how come you guys didn't learn lesson the first time? Or like we've been this before. We know what happens, we know they can't change consensus. I wonder to what extent is this. People need to learn and to what extent is this. Is this eternal September where if we zoom out and we think about bitcoin being forever money, there's going to have to be a new class every year. And it's like it's freshmen coming to college and it's just like it's not like this lesson can be learned once. It has to be learned afresh every few years or something. If bitcoin is going to be forever money, I don't know. Need patience, I guess. [00:14:45] Speaker A: Yep, that's a good point. That's a good point. Is that, you know, the reason the same FUD comes back is because there's people who think. Who have no foundation for how or why the FUD failed last time. You know, for millions of people, every having is brand new and so minor death spiral. [00:15:05] Speaker C: I think you. You'd say you need to reinvent the wheel every four years, basically. [00:15:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:15:09] Speaker C: Like, it's like this is a. Everyone has to have that same eureka moment, you know, and they. But they have to experience it and go through it. I do think like FTX doesn't happen in a world where everyone experienced Mount Gox. So FTX happened because everyone on it didn't learn the lesson from Mount Gox or moreover, they just didn't know anything about it. It's not like they fell for it twice. They just were never there. Back in 2014, I guess. [00:15:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd like a simulation. You know, like, there's flight simulators for pilots and stuff so they don't have to actually crash. Like, we need like a bitcoin fork simulation environment where you can see these dynamics play out. [00:15:54] Speaker C: Well, they have those like, trading simulators, right. Where they swap the buy and the sell button and then everyone makes money. But I mean, that's trading, right? Psychological, your emotions just, they panic and they want you to sell when it's down and they make you exuberant and, you know, overconfident when the price is up. [00:16:17] Speaker A: So that's so funny. I don't think I've ever heard of that. [00:16:21] Speaker C: No. It's a thing like most, almost everyone loses money trading because your emotions are just your absolute enemy. Like, and the only way you can master that is not by being like some robot. It's by being a billionaire that doesn't mind playing around with a couple hundred grand. Then you have no emotion. So that's why, like, take it out. [00:16:38] Speaker D: Of the equation or whatever. [00:16:41] Speaker C: If you're broke and you've invested everything you have in bitcoin and the price has just tanked 50%, no. Who is going to deal with that? Like, if you have family and stuff and you're like, yeah, babe, sorry I can't make a car payment now or something, like, that's not reasonable to expect anyone to deal with that. So I guess that's why you got to stay humble. [00:17:00] Speaker A: Yep. So one thing that I wanted to hit on, I'm not going to go on these in entirely in order, but I thought this was really cool because I did not know it until, like, Johnny pulled this into the list. I didn't catch this one was rumble allocated up to $20 million of excess cash to bitcoin, which, I don't know. Did anybody else even see this in the news? Nope, because that's actually pretty awesome. And I know they've been like, kind of interested in it and stuff, but in the terms of people who are, or companies or whatever that are getting into bitcoin, I like to see groups or companies that are kind of more philosophically aligned to or recognizing. Recognizing the same problems that I think a lot of bitcoiners recognize whether or not they are a permanent or a temporary solution or whatever. You know, just ideologically aligned in some context allocate to Bitcoin because that was one of the things that always gave me hope for the future is that there was an ideological alignment to why you might want to invest in bitcoin that was very anti state, anti tyranny, anti, you know, essentially the surveillance and control system that we are stuck in. It's a. It's a one foot out the door kind of thing. So I'm not sure anybody saw that, if you have any thoughts on it. But I thought that was pretty cool. [00:18:36] Speaker B: How much was it? [00:18:37] Speaker A: $20 million of excess cash reserves. [00:18:41] Speaker B: And then they're going to hold it just on their like corporate balance sheet or something. [00:18:45] Speaker A: That's what it seems like. I didn't go into the full statement to say see exactly what they were going to do with it or what their time span was. [00:18:58] Speaker B: I think maybe I've brought this up before but I'm going to be. Maybe get a lot of hate for this or whatever. Take the minority opinion here. I'm not sure I like companies holding bitcoin on their balance sheet. It's kind of like the most kyc you can get. [00:19:16] Speaker A: Like it's just as far as like just visibility and what do you mean like in the context that it's like the Prime 6102 target or. [00:19:28] Speaker B: Well, that. But also just kind of. Now if you're a company and you have a treasury and you want that to be in bitcoin. I mean if you have control over this company, you can either keep it on your balance sheet or you can just pay yourself a big salary or take a distribution and then buy it personally. And I would just prefer the person to have that coin individually rather than the corporation have it. I mean I know this is just my opinion. [00:20:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's less about the company doing it in lieu of the. The person like, you know, you know, like what's in the company treasury. It's basically just the company saying we're not going to get murdered by inflation either. You know, like what we do business in will be held in like a decent. Like I think about in the context like the corporation needs to be on a sound money standard for us to end up on a sound money standard. You know, I guess that's. [00:20:32] Speaker C: Yeah, it would be nice if there was a way around it though. Like yeah, officially my company like a sort of Latin American, you know, under the table kind of vibe about it. Where it's like, look, officially all our Treasuries are in the United States dollar, but for some reason our Fortune 500 company only has $3 to our name. All of our money really is in bitcoin. But that's all. It's not off the books exactly, but it's just done in a way where it doesn't look like what it is. That would be nice. And also like, there's one, there's one. I don't know how you would even do that. But there's also the additional, like, assumption you can make that if a board of executives has decided we're going to own bitcoin as a company, every single one of them individually presumably owns a lot of bitcoin as well, because they understand it, they've got an orange pill. So on net it probably works out. For every bitcoin in a company's treasury, there's going to be some ratio of equivalence where like Michael Saylor owns a lot of personal coins as well and so does like the only guy I would think that doesn't is Brian Armstrong because he's just managed to, you know, what's that, what's that thing like wisdom has been chasing you, but you have always been faster like bitcoin has been. [00:21:43] Speaker B: Or Brian Armstrong is the only person with private keys to all of the bitcoin of the ETFs. He's the only person that owns bitcoin. [00:21:52] Speaker A: Oh, no. [00:21:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that's like, I'm a little bit of a purist in the sense that I, I think bitcoin, the way it's designed, has this property that it's for people instead of for. I mean, it's for individuals instead of for groups of people. Like, the idea of a group of people owning bitcoin is a very difficult concept. I mean, sure, you could have like a multi sig and then it's like it's owned by 5 of 7 of the people or something like that. Like, I guess that makes sense. But the idea of a board of executives owning bitcoin, I mean, let's be like practically we're just talking about some legal contract they have with Coinbase. It's just like, okay, I guess they kind of own it. The concept of ownership just kind of goes away as soon as you get away from the individual. It goes into some state. [00:22:43] Speaker C: Doesn't that want to go up my multisig? Yeah, exactly. [00:22:48] Speaker B: No, I agree. It can be done. [00:22:50] Speaker C: There are no organizations really that haven't done it that way. [00:22:53] Speaker A: It's more concrete in the individual instance. But I think it's also the only thing that can actually be owned in a group sense legitimately. Like, you know, from the context of like dollars in a bank account, like that boardroom doesn't own that, can't control that. You know, like they're subject to like the entirety of control and value proposition of multiple third parties. So the boardroom kind of has this. They play this game of they control it, but they're still completely subject to somebody else. Whereas in a multi sig setup, you actually can have a group essentially own it, even though you could argue that it's still a. An unoptimal setup. You know, like maybe, maybe you would want it to be split up as something better. But I would say that Bitcoin is the only thing a group can technically own. [00:23:50] Speaker B: That is true. Yeah. If they do it right with the multisig, it is the only true group ownership. But I just think practically that's never really going to happen. I mean, not even MicroStrategy can do it. Right. [00:24:01] Speaker A: It just seems they're not doing it, you know, they're all just. Like you said, it just seems like they're not doing it. Like you said, they're just holding it with Coinbase, which is just doing the exact same thing in the fiat system that. That they're doing in Bitcoin, which just kind of defeats the purpose. [00:24:17] Speaker C: Yeah, Coinbase at least. [00:24:18] Speaker A: My fault. [00:24:19] Speaker C: How many UTXOs have Coinbase got control of at this point? [00:24:23] Speaker A: I don't know. Probably. Probably a lot, man. [00:24:27] Speaker B: It's interesting that they don't do the proof of reserves and everyone on Twitter thinks that these stupid metrics from Glassnode, like coins on exchanges, are somehow officially reported numbers or something. Because I don't think anyone has an estimate that's 50% correct about what Coinbase has. [00:24:49] Speaker A: Probably. [00:24:49] Speaker B: I think it's a complete mystery. It's all snake on chain. Yeah. Like the exchange held and exchange inflows, exchange outflows. People need to know that this is a giant estimate and a very fuzzy thing. And this is not on chain data. Exchange inflows are off chain data. It's just like an estimate from clusters. And there's no way to know if these are anywhere close to anything accurate. [00:25:18] Speaker C: A fun one for people into trading is just watching new blocks. Like every time a new block comes in, the price on Coinbase drops, because that's just new Bitcoin, really. It's very consistent if the price is flying up and up and up and Then new block it goes. Then like for 10 minutes it will keep flying up. And then new block, it's like, it's pretty predictable, especially around 100. Like the first time we were running up to 100k and we didn't hit it. Like I admitted I was glued to the price for that whole period of time. It was exciting. [00:25:49] Speaker B: Do you think that has to do with some kind of algorithmic trading based on new information coming out in the block? [00:25:55] Speaker C: Yeah, because I mean it's, it's. There's two orders there, right. So primarily it's because new bitcoins arrive at the exchange to be sold and then there's other people speculating on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:26:07] Speaker B: All right. Yeah, it makes sense. [00:26:09] Speaker A: And it also makes sense that it would only be one way that it would largely move to sell. Yeah, the sell side. Because you don't. Confirmation of withdrawals don't change the price. They're not on the order. [00:26:21] Speaker C: Exactly. [00:26:21] Speaker A: So they don't have a 10, they don't have a 10 minute relationship at all, whereas deposits do. And I think that we saw that with. There was some specific thing. I think it was. Oh, it was. Oh, it's during the whole fork wars that, that I'm picturing and I think it was with bitcoin. Cash is they were saying, look, people aren't selling and the price isn't, you know, whatever, and like the price isn't dumping and it shows that this thing has legs. But it was during the time when they were having like two hour blocks and like four hour blocks because of the eda. And every single time a block came in, there'd be this sharp thing down. And I was like seeing that and I was posting on Reddit, I was like, nah, dude, people just can't get their bitcoin. Like you're, you're super. Your super better chain can't make transactions and deposits and people having to wait like six confirmations. So when blocks aren't coming in, it's literally just the, the la. You've already killed all of the capacity to sell and you're just waiting for blocks. Like, yeah, you, you're watching the crash in slow motion, but you know, whatever. [00:27:27] Speaker C: And you know, a phone call got made too, because it's such a small centralized thing. They're like, look, phone the three miners we have on this thing and tell them not if someone's sending 40,000 bcash, just don't include that transaction in the block. All right? They're trying to sell, don't let them. [00:27:41] Speaker A: Move it to an exchange, it's going to coinbase. Don't let it go. Oh, that's hilarious. [00:27:47] Speaker B: Another reason that might be happening with the new blocks lately is because there's a lot of old coins on the move lately. I mean, the correlation of old UTXOs coming out from hiding with price increases, like, pretty well known, but it's just. It's just amazing. [00:28:05] Speaker A: You have any fun data from UTXO Live? [00:28:08] Speaker B: I look at this shit every day, dude. I was writing an algorithm two days ago that was trying to basically make a chart based out of spent coin ages. So I think I can like, I'm pretty sure I can find a multiplier and I'm just going to like multiply the median age of coins spent yesterday by some number and that'll show you pretty much what the price is. Like, the correlation between that is just amazing. [00:28:36] Speaker A: But you have to post it. You have to post it. [00:28:37] Speaker C: I'll try to get it in the. [00:28:38] Speaker A: Show notes if you can get it. [00:28:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, now you know. I got so much shit for UTX Oracle, like screwing up when the spam came. I'm like, hesitant to. [00:28:45] Speaker C: My biggest gripe with Saylor is over the arbitrary data thing. Like, he wants to do this decentralized identity thing using this. [00:28:52] Speaker B: Yeah, that's his worst. [00:28:53] Speaker C: That's the same inscript, the same hack as the inscriptions. Right. Not even using OPreturn. So that was my like, what are you doing? [00:29:00] Speaker B: I wonder if Sailor Saylor doesn't seem the type to ever admit mistakes, but I wonder if, you know, if he's talking to his therapist or something. Oh, okay. Yeah, I was pretending to be Michael Saylor at his therapist, talking to his therapist, and he would. Because he would never admit this publicly, but I think he'd be like, you know, actually looking back, kind of screwed up with that whole mining climate energy thing that Marty got on him about. And also kind of screwed up with the did thing. I think that's him looking back, but not in public thing. [00:29:41] Speaker A: I totally forgot about that. [00:29:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I was dumb with Sayloft to that. That's just unacceptable, man. It's also just like it's peak hypocrisy when he's saying, never do any upgrades on Bitcoin because you'll break it. And I'm like, well, we did actually once break it and you're using the thing that happened when we broke it. So, like, what are you talking about? Like, is this to punish us for it? To like, really show us never do another upgrade? Because I'll use it. The, the unintended consequence of it. Yeah, I mean he is a 5D chess kind of guy, so. And loads of people have told me this whole, you know, what is it? Paranoid crypto anarchist thing that he likes to, you know, that, that thing he said. [00:30:26] Speaker A: Oh man. News items. So we saved it. We did talk a little bit about it, but we saved the black rock thing. [00:30:33] Speaker D: Okay. [00:30:33] Speaker A: For when, for when you got here. Merry Christmas. [00:30:36] Speaker D: Thank you. [00:30:37] Speaker A: Because we definitely should have gone down that entire tangent already. But one thing that I wanted to hit, and I'm not sure if you guys have dug into this, but I thought this was a really, really cool. You know, I felt like there has been a inability or a lack of interest in building things that, that kind of take a trade off to the time that you have to trust someone. Like everybody's just like it's either fully trustless or it's not worth building on or it's like fully doing one thing and there's like, there's like we're having a hard time with the middle ground. And I thought this was a really, really cool proposal by Luke Childs. It's non custodial ecash, a trust minimized payment system. And it is built on. It's Spillman payment channels. So it's the one way payment channels. You only go, you only pay out. And it is ecash. And essentially what it does is it does these updates periodically and only basically while payments are in flight like going from one person to the next and the transaction is occurring. Do you have a trust a trusted situation and if the mint disappears in the middle of that or there's an uncooperative exit or something, then you run into some sort of a conflict but that the update of the process just ends up changing the channel and you basically have a unilateral withdrawal. And it just, it essentially creates a, a pending versus confirmed situation with funds that are being transacted. And it creates a trust minimized credit system on top of Bitcoin built with channels and it does not require a soft fork. And also it seems to be pretty simple like, like from the context of like how ridiculously complex and how many moving parts are there and how easy is it to implement the that trust trade off for the time in question for the transactions basically makes it able. [00:32:57] Speaker C: To. [00:33:00] Speaker A: To make it easier or to make it simpler to implement. And I have not dug enough into like really technical details, but the proposal itself from just kind of a naive like running through the thing once just seems really cool. It just seems like a really good middle of the road. Like this is just a way to vastly improve the idea of custodians and the credit system and what we think of as credit and transact and payments and stuff while still basically getting the benefit of both. And then it's E cash, so you still get, you get enormous privacy and the benefits of E cash at the exact same time in the day to day operation. Which I just, I just thought it was really, really cool. And I've been hoping somebody would kind of build this thing. Like just the idea of Covenants and CTV always had me thinking it's just like, well, what if you just had like a three hour update and like everything was temporary until the third hour and then you just, you just have like settlement times and then everything else is guaranteed after that because you, you have the ability to utxo out of the situation. But anyway, just, just thoughts on that and. Or if anybody had dug into it or explored it all. [00:34:22] Speaker D: I knew nothing about it, but it sounds good. [00:34:25] Speaker C: I knew nothing about it either. If Steve, if Steve is an expert. [00:34:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean either you're alone on this guy, but it sounds awesome. Somebody without update. [00:34:36] Speaker C: Let me ask some questions then. So that's Luke Childs. You said the umbrella guy. Okay. And I missed some of the description there. So Spillman channels were like, if I recall, that was what lightning could have been before we fixed transaction malleability. Right. So that's why it's one way instead of bidirectional. And it was always like seen as inferior. But it seems like, I mean, so you're opening a channel with a third party essentially. Or is it with you? And you're just, you're provably move out. You pre allocate an amount that you want to spend and. Or that might ultimately be spent in one touch of the blockchain. Right. So you got that one footprint and then you just move over and over again. And this was like, this is the subscription model like to a T, right. So you subscribe to whatever it is, like home insurance or streaming service or something. You're like, all right, I'm going to be buying crap off these guys for the next five years. And it's 20 bucks a month. Every month you just sign a new thing that says, all right, 20, 20 bucks worth of bitcoin more. And now on your side of the channel and you just keep moving it and moving it and moving it until eventually you just close the channel and then they have all their money or they close it because they need it. Is that basically the concept? [00:35:54] Speaker A: Basically, yes. As I understand it, that's essentially what it sounds like. And everything outside of that is basically a trusted E cash credit. And then there are periodic shifts to essentially channel rebalancing or whatever, to essentially confirmations of getting a new exit utxo. And then you can just deal with your degree of trust and what you're willing to pay to get what degree of trust for how you're doing it. And in this case you can just. You can just use it as a purely spending wallet. And the only time that the those transactions are fully trusted is just while they are in transit. [00:36:35] Speaker C: Right, so I missed that bit. Sorry. That. Just. Just for my own benefit, I'll be the dumb guy here. So it's like they're issuing you some sort of E cash based on whatever it is you sent to them in the Spillman channel. [00:36:47] Speaker A: In the channel, right, yes. [00:36:48] Speaker C: So how does what, how does the E cash they issue to you become trustless and non custodial? [00:36:55] Speaker A: There is some sort of a update that occurs. I can't remember at what frequency, but it is a two of two music between the user and the mint. So everybody connects to the mint. And one that E cache. I think basically the ecash is just used as the way to designate what the updates will be. I don't know. I don't know the time frame well enough. I. I don't know specifics. I was planning on doing a episode on this. I did an episode today on ecash. Actually it was more about the overall idea and. But the general sense of this I think is just ecash until you get a signed utxo. [00:37:45] Speaker C: This stuff like this, it's crude and it works. It's just why I'm so annoyed with the people like pushing for these emergency soft forks all the time with like bitcoin screwed. If we don't have this soft fork, I'm like, there's just so much that can be done. And this was like Steve was the one that made this point and we've already done it on this podcast in the past. But it's just such a good point that if thinking about who it is that focuses on, you know, I was asking this morning, the people in the internal chat, we have Ocean like just discussing upgrades and it's like for everybody developer that wants to build coin pools using covenants, there's 10 guys that want to do something with cat jpegs and that's going to be how these things get used and not just that, but then there's Jimmy Song's point as well, which is anyone that's working on what proposals, like what Luke Charles just said, or people doing liquid or people doing like Federmint or anything like that, if you add new opcodes, then they have to change their whole design to take advantage of them, so they're less inclined to build their things out. Like the more you change bitcoin's foundation, the less incentivized people are to figure out everything you can do with it as it stands because it's going to change. So people just kind of stand around watching instead while we just bike shed around which covenant to add. So it really does. It's just against bitcoin's progress to keep changing it at this point. There are trade offs, but that's almost never acknowledged. It's like if we add new primitives, we'll be able to do more. I'm like, it's not that simple. [00:39:19] Speaker D: Yeah, I definitely think the only, I mean it makes sense to me that the only. We should only do targeted sort of upgrades or changes. And so if, if we, if there's a way to, you know, get lightning symmetry or something like that, you know, if we have. I still think, I still think something I know about, nobody's like really working on it anymore, I don't think. But, but if you could get cross input signature aggregation or something in combination with you know, like APO or something, you know, something like that, it would be fantastic. Like that would be like the ideal. But, but if we can get something that specifically makes the stuff we're using work, like you know, a lightning symmetry or whatever, makes stuff that we actually have and need to improve better, that's one thing. But then the rest of it, like these, like abstract, like, well, we could build stuff that's better if we had this and like, okay, build it on, build it on liquid or something and show us that we need it, you. [00:40:20] Speaker C: Know, like, well, cross input signature aggregation is dead as far as I can tell. I was super hyped about that for years, but it's just not happening. [00:40:27] Speaker A: Yeah, me too, man. It's like nobody wants to deal with the responsibility of working on it or something. [00:40:32] Speaker C: Or just basic buy in, isn't there. [00:40:35] Speaker D: Like maybe you start a GoFundMe and, and, or like a crowdfunding and pay Peter Weller to build it? [00:40:43] Speaker C: It ain't that though, it's that it's not really desired like in the specific world in which it was supposed to be. Like a game changer was coinjoin, like equal output coinjoins for privacy. Right. And Adam Gibson, who made join market, which is my favorite coinjoin implementation, is like, it ain't all that. Like, it plateaus around 20% the efficiency you add by adding more and more inputs. Like, and he's like, I'm not, I'm not doing it. And he like, like we were sitting in a restaurant and he wrote it all literally on a napkin. Like, here's the maths of it. I didn't understand any of it. But he's like, right, you don't understand. But conclusion, it ain't all that good. [00:41:20] Speaker D: What, Caesar, is it? [00:41:22] Speaker C: Yeah. And then Max, Max Hillebrand from Wasabi similarly is just, he's like, look, they all have to be this, you can't, you can't do cross input signature with like, this one's a Taproot address and that one's a segwit address and that one's nested. Like, they all have to be the same address type. And in practice that's not going to happen. So we're just going to like, we'll just carry on doing coinjoins the way we are now he's much more interested in zero knowledge proofs and all that stuff. So if I can't get those guys interested in it, and they're basically the tent poles of the whole coinjoin privacy world, then it's dead, as far as I can tell. Like, you need interest from people that are in the relevant areas and they're like, nah, we're not into it. And then there's also, there is a cost to cross input signature, which is like you can do. The transactions involved are expensive computationally for a node to run through. Right. If there's a very sophisticated transaction in a block that is, you know, thousands of signatures all condensed into a small amount of data. You can fill up a block with that without much footprint, but that takes a long time for a node to verify and that's, that has its own risks. [00:42:29] Speaker D: The trade off is computation rather than black space. [00:42:32] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. [00:42:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. All good points. [00:42:37] Speaker D: I don't know, I guess I didn't think about the fact that the signatures all had to be the same or whatever, you know, like, I mean, that makes sense, but I don't, I mean, like, since we have different signature types, isn't that like, if you add cross out input signature aggregation, isn't that like the incentive to use the, like the, the ones that. That work for that? Or, like, is that. [00:43:03] Speaker C: Yeah. You think so? But, yeah, I don't know. It's. It's contagious. Once I see the people working on the. These projects just be like, nah, It's. It's almost impossible for me to devote any mental energy to it. I don't see, like, even all these. [00:43:18] Speaker A: Like, proposals have to have builders excited about it first. Like, they. Because if nothing gets built with, it just doesn't matter. [00:43:26] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:43:28] Speaker A: There were two items just about the. Even though all of this, like, I think one of these got pushed back again. But Ocean pool, we know somebody there is donate or allows miners to donate rewards to the P2P Rights Fund for the Samurai Wallets legal defense. And then, good news. Fifth Circuit lifted the tornado cash sanctions, citing that it was overreached by ofac that they did not have the authority to do that. And that is. I mean, that seems to me like a huge win for their court case, because it's kind of that designation that suggests that what they did was wrong. You know what I mean? As far as producing the software, if the software isn't even something that can be sanctioned, then I think it suggests the designation that I think this is good for both cases. On top of the fact that you can donate your rewards, which is pretty cool. Shout out mechanic. That's awesome that y'all did that. [00:44:33] Speaker C: Oh, thanks, man. Let's see how much people are mining with them at the moment. Oh, I don't have it up, but, yeah, like, it's probably still not even exceeded 100 bucks yet. But it's only bit X guys that are actually doing it right. Someone was like, I want to see one Xash pointed at this address. I'm like, have you any idea how much effort it takes for Ocean to get an Xash to come over to our pool? It's like I have to fly to Europe multiple times to convince people to do it. The idea that we can write a tweet, like, here, donate to Samurai, and someone would send an XASH to it would just be like, I don't know. I don't think people know how much an Xash really is. It's like millions of dollars in electricity a month. [00:45:15] Speaker A: That's crazy. That's so crazy to think about. And I'm. Oh, we're. We're actually trying to. The H vac guy for downstairs will be here soon, and we're gonna finally put in ducting and figure out what the heck we can do with that so I can get my miners Back up downstairs. [00:45:31] Speaker C: Dude. Get a Watts miner over. An ant miner for sure. And if you. [00:45:35] Speaker A: I have. I have two Watts miners. I mean they're not, they're not great. They use a lot of energy for. Especially for what their payout will be now. It's M. 30s. [00:45:43] Speaker C: Oh that's. That's a really old generation. [00:45:45] Speaker A: That's old. It's old. Um, and in fact I might. The. Are all the. The newer still 220? Because if I just run the lines for them. [00:45:55] Speaker C: Yeah, nothing should be pretty simple. Nothing's been 110. And you can get like Zach Bomster does these Loki boards or Nord boards that he's got two products. [00:46:06] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:46:06] Speaker C: You know about all that stuff you can, you can make. Oh no. [00:46:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I've been super jazzed about it. [00:46:10] Speaker B: I've got. [00:46:10] Speaker A: I've got Nord boards. [00:46:11] Speaker C: Right. Okay. So he's. He's working on Watts miners now to make. Have the ability to run on 110 as well. But it's just. I just don't like doing it because like that doubles the current through the wires and I'm already like. I hate like North American stuff. Like you can't electrocute yourself on a plug in the uk. Like it's impossible the way they're designed. If I'm like, if I got a sticky plug in America and I like wrap my hand around it wrong, I'll literally electrocute myself. You get used to not doing it. But when I was first in America I was like, ah. Like I can't electrocute myself. You just wrap your hand around it like oh man, I used to. You can't do that in the uk. And also yeah, the double current really worries me because that will you do see miners post pictures like Austin Barnhill posted one yesterday of just a melted power cable that just. Oof. Like scary. Every miner's got a horror story about a fire. And I'm just like, I really want to heat my house with this stuff. But it's bit main. It's all like corner cut cheap junk. Like the power supply. Like I really want to heat my house, but I want to burn it down. [00:47:19] Speaker A: Like dude, I've got a. I don't. [00:47:21] Speaker C: Want to heat it that much. [00:47:22] Speaker A: I'm going to order in my new setup. I'm going to order a. There's a fire extinguisher or whatever. It's like basically like a canister that you can just put in the ceiling or whatever. I'm just going to stick it in the sound box or Whatnot and it's just heat sensitive and it breaks the, breaks the seal and just dumps, dumps the thing into it. So I'm going to have mult. I mean I already had Poor Man's Fire Protection, which was a python script that requested every 30 seconds the temperature of the miner. And if it ever got out of a certain range, it would just send a sleep signal. And if it never got a response for the sleep signal, it just pushed kill signals indefinitely. So that was, that was my poor man's fire protection. But definitely, definitely just in case, going with the heat activated fire extinguisher right in the box. [00:48:20] Speaker C: Where do you get one of those? All the products I was trying to, I was trying to get this ball that if there was a fire it just exploded foam everywhere. But they don't make them anymore. So that tells me they were like. [00:48:31] Speaker A: The one I saved, I'm pretty sure was on Amazon. [00:48:33] Speaker C: Yeah, literally just look on the Amazon for that product and like click on it and it will be like shipping unavailable, like current product currently not available. Yeah, they just don't exist anymore. Like I really, really, really want one because that's. I'm going to burn my house down with an S9 or something. [00:48:47] Speaker D: That's weird. I've definitely seen There were some 3D printer people that were, you know, like worried about 3D printers being left unattended and getting clogs and something catching fire. And so they, they were rigging up the same thing. Like just what he's talking about. It's like a little canister and once it gets over like a certain, you know, temperature that indicates fire, like it just, it just sprays, it dumps its full contents or whatever. So I, but I mean this, it's been a few years ago that I was watching people suggesting this, but I, it didn't seem like they were like a problem to get hold of. [00:49:24] Speaker A: Yeah, if you want to save in better money and you want 20,000 sats for free, right now it's about 20 bucks at $100,000 of Bitcoin. Check out fold. Every time I swipe this card, I get 0.5%. Sometimes one, sometimes even one and a half percent. I can get two, three, five, even 10% on gift cards with major merchants. Between the roundups, the gift cards, the auto stacking, the sats back on, every single swipe fold literally does all of the work for me. And it is denominated in bitcoin and I have more savings just by using this card than like 90% of the United States. Normal consumer. I've got a referral link for you right here. Shout out to fold for sponsoring my work and honestly, being the most important service for my being on a bitcoin standard. Well, uh, I'm definitely jazzed about plugging it back in, but I Def. [00:50:20] Speaker B: I. [00:50:21] Speaker A: The M30s don't make any sense now on anything other than low power just because they're most efficient there. But I still think I'd be losing money just because it costs way more to run the miner than it does. Oh, gas, heat. [00:50:32] Speaker C: Let me give a shout out to a friend. Like, he's. He's called Toyn or he's. He's Twitter is at Tronmon. Gone. Like T R o N M o N G o N e. But he does this for a living. He just goes to people's houses and installs miners in their H VAC system. And like. [00:50:48] Speaker D: And he has awesome. [00:50:49] Speaker C: He has every, like, trick and trade in the book for, like, what firmware to use and how to make it sensible. [00:50:55] Speaker A: I need to talk to this person. [00:50:57] Speaker D: Yes, you need to do an episode on it. [00:50:59] Speaker C: He got me to buy this, like, $60 thermometer. Oh, my gosh. [00:51:01] Speaker A: That would be great. [00:51:02] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a thermometer I got that just. That will dynamically make the fan adjust so you can. Rather than set it so that you have a consistent chip temperature. It can be like, I want the house to be this temperature. And if the house is dropping in temperature, the miner will, you know, bump itself up 400 watts or something. And so, yeah, it's really. And also. But additionally, you can still have it so that if the miner is overheating, it will drop its, you know, its power consumption down. Because usually that's how you regulate them with power rather than clock speed or whatever. But, yeah, there's just a lot of cool tricks in the trade. And he's like, you know, he's doing a good job. And he's, like, always just sending me updates, like, with, you know, data sheets and just measuring power consumption and stuff and just dialing. [00:51:50] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. Send me the link because I would love to get in touch with him. [00:51:55] Speaker C: Yeah, all right. I'm sending it to you. [00:51:56] Speaker A: That would be cool. I know my setup was, like, crazy ghetto. It was basically just the naive thing like, okay, well, let me just put this into my ducting. Let me get a new return. Let me stick a Infinity. What's that? What's it called? [00:52:13] Speaker C: Infinity.ac. cloud line? Infinity fan. [00:52:16] Speaker A: Yeah, Cloudline. Infinity fan on it. And that was that. And I just had a Python script that arcerus put together for me, control it from my computer. And I just like watched my, my terminal just be running with temperatures and all that stuff and it got hot. If it got hot in the house, I'd be like, go to sleep. Literally. There's no thermostat or anything. It's just manual shit. [00:52:39] Speaker D: Okay, well, guy got me a bit X for Christmas, so yeah, I will soon be playing the lottery. I'm very excited about it. [00:52:47] Speaker C: Are you going to make your own blocks? [00:52:49] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, I'm going to try and. [00:52:51] Speaker A: Get it all Datum will start nine. [00:52:53] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, man. [00:52:55] Speaker C: I set my datum to have. Well, it requires a difficulty of 67 million per share or whatever the nearest power of 2 is. It takes about a week to find a share and when it does, I get like 200 sats from that share rather than like 1 sat per share, but they're every couple of minutes. So this is like custom lotto, so. Right. People only have the two thresholds. They have like submit whatever the minimum pool difficulty is, which is usually like 16,000 or something. So it will find a few shares a minute, but they barely earn anything. Or go complete lotto Mode and spend 500 years trying to find a block. And if you find one, great. But that's either pool's minimum difficulty, which is nothing, or network difficulty, which is at current 108 trillion, but you can go in between. That's what datum allows. So you can set your network difficult to be like 100 billion or something, which is not crazy. And you might find a share in eight months or something on average. But maybe you find it on the first day, you turn it on, in which case your bitax has just mined eight months worth of work in one day and you can you. And it will be rewarded as such because that's awesome. [00:54:09] Speaker A: I didn't even know you could do that. [00:54:10] Speaker C: Yeah, it's all about the difficulty that you, that you require of a miner. Right. So that's what miners do. They solve blocks when they're submitting shares to a pool. And the. You can say, I want an. You've got to find me a minimum difficulty of, you know, whatever it is, 65536, which is like two to the something. It's always the nearest power of two. Every. Every role it does that's lower than that is like a very, you know, network difficulty. Five or whatever. That's useless. Right. So that doesn't do anything. But if you meet that Difficulty or exceed it, that gets normalized to be that many shares, right? So if you find a share that is, you know, if your target is a million and you find one that's at a million or higher than that, when you submit that to the pool, the pool gives you a million shares rather than one share. So everything gets normalized. Right. So all that is to say, you know, if you find a share, that's 1 trillion difficulty, but the difficulty you were set as a target was only a million, you still only get credited a million. Right? So if you find a block, like at 108 trillion, you're still only credited for whatever the actual difficulty of the pool was. So that's why, like, the miner on a pool that finds a block was only submitting one normal share. It wasn't like they submitted a special share. But the minimum difficulty sets the normalization value. So if you just keep bumping that up. [00:55:35] Speaker A: So you can basically set your lottery odds and play whichever degree of lottery you want to play. [00:55:41] Speaker C: Yeah. So my thing is, do once a year, make it so that, like, on average, with this difficulty, my axe should find one share a year. Then every day, when you're checking the dashboard on it, if it finds a share, that was like the best day ever to me. That is. That is the peak bit Axe experience. [00:55:57] Speaker A: The best day of the year. [00:55:58] Speaker C: Yeah, that is the. That's the peak bit Axe experience, in my opinion. Like, because you don't just go with what the lottery is. You go with what you want the lottery to be. Right. Like, what's your tolerance for variance? Just set it as something that works for you. [00:56:11] Speaker D: That's very interesting. [00:56:13] Speaker C: Custom lotto mining, man. It's the future. [00:56:18] Speaker A: That's so funny. Okay, I want to go into. I want to talk about reserves, because for El Salvador, you know. [00:56:30] Speaker D: All right, time out while we're on. Real quick. While we're on mining. Did anybody. Somebody. I just saw somebody posted on Facebook, of all places, in one of the bitcoin groups about somebody just mined, like, paid a. Paid like an 8.0.13 Bitcoin fee or something? [00:56:48] Speaker C: Yeah, it was a shitcoin mint. [00:56:51] Speaker D: It was what? [00:56:52] Speaker C: A shitcoin mint. Someone was like moving wrapped eth to tether USDT or some crap like that, and it was genuinely a mistake. [00:57:03] Speaker D: Oh, it was a mistake. [00:57:05] Speaker C: I'm sure Foundry already gave it back. [00:57:08] Speaker D: I was actually wondering. We had talked about smelting or whatever at some point before, but I got to thinking about it. It's like, could you not create your Own transaction, put it in your own block and then if you find a, like put it in your own mempool and then when you find the block, you include it. Like, if you were mining, could you actually pay yourself like a, an 8 bitcoin fee or whatever and essentially like. [00:57:37] Speaker C: Like yes, yeah, you can, but it's completely pointless because the transaction that paid that fee and then the fresh coins that came out in the coinbase transaction are obviously from the same entity. So you're not fooling anyone. Second, you have fee sniping which is where if, if your, if your block gets orphaned for whatever reason, which happens like once a day, then it competes, then it slides back into the mempool and someone else can grab it. This is actually a massive security concern for bitcoin in the future. Like, yeah, so yeah, don't do that. [00:58:10] Speaker B: Do we know whether that transaction was broadcasted through the mempool or was it just snuck in there out of band style? [00:58:18] Speaker C: I don't know. None of my nodes picked it up because it was spam, so my nodes never saw it in the first place. [00:58:24] Speaker D: Well, that's what I was thinking is that if you did it out of band, if somebody didn't know that you were mining. I don't know, I don't know how hard it is to who you are as a miner or whatever, but if you can just sneak a transaction in there out of band so it's not in there until you mine a block. But you're if there's feast, not if you've put it into the, you know, into the network or whatever with a block that's, you know, not that gets orphaned. That is a. That definitely could be a problem. [00:58:53] Speaker C: Yeah, well, you could make it less risky by making it non standard. So you could make it like have op return of a thousand bytes or something and then it's less likely that someone will fee snipe it. But then it just goes back to being pointless rather than dangerous and pointless. So like why? [00:59:08] Speaker B: Well, I mean it might not be pointless if you have a bunch of coins that are from the Dark Web or something and you're trying to clean. [00:59:13] Speaker C: Them, but you can still link them because there's the block where this transaction in it where a guy spent five bitcoins on a transaction fee and there's the miner that mined that block who's paying themselves all those fees. Whoever mined that block is the same owner. Like it's not a. That's not a difficult heuristic to, to. [00:59:32] Speaker B: Right, but that heuristic isn't implemented in current chain analysis stuff. [00:59:38] Speaker D: But it might depend on how big the transaction fee was too. If you're able to do it, the more you. It's a dollar each, it's a dollar two each time. If the chain is. [00:59:49] Speaker C: You could hide it, but remember then you could hide it by breaking it up into loads of transactions and loads of blocks. [00:59:55] Speaker D: But then you have to be have the mining power to do that. And there's a lot of. [00:59:59] Speaker C: You have to have like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of mining to be able to actually find that many blocks. And it's like I just don't see it. Like there are other ways of doing it. [01:00:08] Speaker B: How did you say that the risk was minimized by. What'd you say? Putting a bunch of operator and stuff? [01:00:15] Speaker C: Yeah, just make it non standard so it's still consensus valid. Obviously because you need your block to be accepted by the network. [01:00:20] Speaker D: That's something other people wouldn't mind. [01:00:22] Speaker C: Yeah, like something other. Like make it below the dust limit for example. Like make. Make it have a bunch of 1sat outputs in it so that just every node on the network is going to see it and go no thanks. So then it's not. It's less likely to end up in the mempools of other miners. But if, if you publish a. If there's an orphaned block with it, they'll all know about it. I don't think any of them have the tech sophistication to be doing this yet. But if and when we're in an environment where there's like 0.000 bitcoins every block in subsidy and like 1 bitcoin in transaction fees. I think pools are going to get it together and start figuring out how to to fee snipe if the opportunity comes around. Because that's the only revenue they're going to be able to earn at that point is from transaction fee revenue. [01:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:05] Speaker C: So like now it doesn't matter because you get three bitcoins a block from subsidy. The transaction fees are still a rounding error. [01:01:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting too. It's that like you know, the, the fee market will create this weird incentive for the potential of fee sniping. But then at the exact same time it will fix the incentive for censorship in a lot of ways because it is the subsidy that allows them to make money even though they don't include transactions. So it's like there's still even this weird balance in where we are in Bitcoin's eras, so to speak. For what the trade offs and the optimums are for its different characteristics. So it's interesting. [01:01:53] Speaker C: This is a very good point. Like paying the sensor. I didn't understand this point. Like subsidy. If someone wants to be a bitcoin miner but censor transactions, they still get a lot of money from subsidy. When that dries up, then as you say, the financial cost to censorship goes up relative to their overall earnings, which is like it's kind of another one of those free miracles. We've gotten through basically this whole phase of bitcoin with enormous subsidy and no transaction fees pretty pretty much free at the moment. But now is like when we're at peak risk in my opinion, like because we've got so much heat on us right now. Like now is. And we got so much centralization in pools and mining with just the worst people mining like that couldn't care less about cypherpunk stuff. So like right now is like the time to pay attention. I'm just glad Ocean exists. [01:02:42] Speaker D: Well, honestly, this is why, this is why I think, I think if, if I agree the blackrock, you know, the, the rumor that the 21 million is not, you know, like him saying that the 21 million is not. Not set in stone or whatever or could be changed like that actually kind of excites me because I think, I think the idea that they're going that they might try to fork bitcoin will. I think, I think it's inevitable that it goes against them. I think they could, they have enough bitcoin, enough, you know, control over enough bitcoin, they could definitely pump the price of their shitcoin. But the thing is, is that they, they don't, they aren't, they aren't using bit like they don't have enough to pay all the miners to continue to mine their shitcoin. So if bitcoiners who have built this thing and you know, are the ones that use it every day say no, we're going to use this chain, then the miners will eventually come back. No matter how much they've temporarily pumped the price, we just end up getting to double or triple our stack. If they're able to pump it up higher than our bitcoin, the fixed supply bitcoin. And so when we all move our new coins back to the solid chain or the scarce chain, then it seems like miners have to follow. And it means that you might end up with a situation where people that are mining in their homes and you know, whatever much more decentralized mining are successful for A while, you know, it just, it just seems like it could have really positive effects because I would imagine that if BlackRock's going to do something like that, they would also try to use some sort of legal attack where, you know, you're not allowed to mine, you know, the, the like scarce chain or something like that, you know, like. And so you would have some. The incentives to use the better bitcoin would be. The economic incentives would be there, the legal incentives would be against it. And so all of the institutionalized stuff would be like half trapped and we would try to. It might take a long time and that would make it scary. But. But I think it might actually end up if, if that were to happen and you know, things were to play out the way I think they would, then I think it'd ultimately be good for bitcoin. I mean, it's one of those situations where like, what, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. [01:05:19] Speaker A: I think it'd be great for bitcoin. [01:05:21] Speaker D: And it would potentially kill blackrock, which is. Would be great. [01:05:26] Speaker C: Yeah, man, if bitcoin kills Blackrock as like a little mini boss on the way to central banks. I've just been like, yeah, Lord of the Rings. [01:05:35] Speaker A: So glorious. Yeah, so glorious. But I think it also lends itself to like when I. What I see is it, it informs me, I think with more clarity of the perspective of kind of the shitcoiners and the people who are in bitcoin cash is that, you know, I saw people tweeting and talking about this, is that BlackRock said this as if this meant that bitcoin was inevitably going to have inflation. As if somehow. And because Saylor tweeted it is like the two most influential people in bitcoin. And I'm like, so you literally, you genuinely think that the loudest people in the public sphere somehow have control over this? Like, so of course you thought like democracy bitcoin was hijacked. Yeah. Because your entire idea of consensus is who's got the most likes on Reddit. You know, I mean like, that's so stupid and I don't mean that insultingly. It's just so unbelievably ignorant of how it works. Like nobody. It's just like Peter Todd talking about there's going to be inflation and Luke talking about how we need 300 kilobyte blocks. And like everybody has their own proposal and their own thing. And what we should, what anybody who honestly looked at it should have learned from the block size war is that all of These proposals and all of these plans and everybody's opinion doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's not what runs bitcoin. There is a far more complex set of dynamics that, that actually are at play. And the whole idea that like BlackRock, because look at all these coins they have, they have these coins on behalf of other people and all I can think is that like so this is the scenario in your mind is that they're holding these for millions of other people. Like they didn't buy these coins. They are not, they're not the buyers of them. Normal people in retirement and in your brokerage accounts and exchanges are buying this etf. They hold this on behalf of millions of other people. [01:07:47] Speaker D: BlackRock though from using it. [01:07:49] Speaker A: No, it wouldn't. No it wouldn't. I'm talking about, I'm not saying that that's like black blackrock's not going to make this decision. I'm saying thinking about the dynamics of all of the people involved in this and they have no presence on the network. I bet they don't run a node. [01:08:05] Speaker D: Right. [01:08:05] Speaker A: I bet, I highly doubt they do anything of significance when it comes to the bitcoin network. [01:08:10] Speaker C: Agreed. [01:08:10] Speaker A: So supposedly the scenario is that BlackRock owns all of these coins on behalf of everybody else and they are going to propose a fork to blackrock coin. And this, this doesn't instantly get memed to hell as BlackRock coin for months in advance and they don't get absolutely lambasted with everything under the sun and DDoS for weeks leaving leading up to this by a bunch of autistic people who just love how, how much they get to troll this company and destroy all of their ability to do normal communications day to day. And they are going to take all of these people's coins and they are going to steal them, withdraw them without any show, without any issue. They're going to dump, they're going to fork the coin, they're going to dump it on traditional, on real bitcoin in a massive sell off on how many different markets, how many? What exchange are they going to use? Where are they going to get the liquidity to dump this? They're going to dump all of this. They're going to crash the price. Nobody's going to do anything except go, oh well, real bitcoin's price is lower right now. I guess we're done. I this was such a great experiment but now we all we have, our only option is to download blackrock coin and update my start 9 to the one that's inflated and over a long period of time, the one that's literally inflating its currency is somehow going to maintain a higher value than the one that's running on my start 9. And if I just don't fucking do anything and just wait for a couple of months, something tells me we're going to win. Something tells me we're going to win again. [01:09:43] Speaker C: You know, the essential difference, right, is like the idea that you can like take, hey, guys, you know all those dollars you own, we're going to make them worth less to go and fund a war in Ukraine like the like. That is an en masse, unpopular idea and you need it to be popular and in order for it to work. And the only reason they can do it, despite its unpopularity, is the fact that they have control over how much of it they can print. So like you're asking everyone to do what's done to fund wars completely coercively, voluntarily. So, like every single person or the majority of bitcoiners have to agree to all make their bitcoins worth less to satisfy BlackRock. It's just, it's so vanishingly unlikely. But let's also not kid ourselves. Let's also not kid ourselves, though they will do. They're going to be a lot more competent than Bitcoin X and Bitcoin super and Bitcoin Faith and Bitcoin diamond and all these crap coins that came out in 2017. They're going to do better than that, right? Because those were all easily. [01:10:42] Speaker A: They'll take a legal approach, right? [01:10:44] Speaker C: Those were all dumpable KYC free for the most part. BlackRock coin is not going to be dumpable without KYC, so. And they're going to get a lot of support from regulatory bodies and stuff like that, that none of that existed in 2017. You didn't have like a Trump in office that might work with these people and push against us. So it's definitely going to be a bit more meticulously planned. It's not going to be Roger Vere having a temper tantrum and Barry Silbert and Brian Armstrong. It's not going to be people like that. They're going to be a lot more careful with how they do it. They'll still lose and I don't want to give them ideas, but let's also just like gear up for it. It's going to be a bit more interesting than that. [01:11:25] Speaker A: I think the interesting thing to me is that I think in that situation, Lightning Network could be the ultimate decider because you're going to choose which one the lightning network is on and one of those lightning networks is going to completely break and be completely inaccessible to whatever the network is. [01:11:43] Speaker C: Why? Because you can use lightning to move between the two, can't you? Like that's sort of the point of Lightning is that you could do like. [01:11:49] Speaker A: An atomic swap, but your node, like your node determines which network you're on. [01:11:55] Speaker C: Oh, good point. [01:11:56] Speaker A: So everybody has to download blackrock Coin node and connect it to their L and D and C. Lightning has to be. The entire implementation structure is different on BlackRock coin, which means the entire Lightning network will probably just vanish on BlackRock coin. And they're like, what LSP is going to be like, yeah, we're going to Lightning NOSTR is going to switch all over to blackrock Coin. [01:12:21] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a very good, it's a very good point. That's like all the infrastructure, all the wallets, even the on chain wallets and all that stuff. Stuff sidechains, like liquid. All of them have to, you know, offer a parallel like, you know, world of infrastructure that would work on top of it. And we're kind of entrenched at this point. So we do have. [01:12:42] Speaker A: And if they try to make it so that you can't sell it unless it's kyc, they have to control who can download and use the node, the node software. Which means that none of the wat, like every bitcoin app will just not talk to it. [01:12:54] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:12:54] Speaker A: By default. Because they have to control it so that you can't dump it. Which means that you can't spin up your own node and send it. You can't allow peer to peer markets to dump the coin. [01:13:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean if, if they do do a fork and you know, you have to upgrade or start a new node to do this, I don't see any exchange like Bitfinex or you know, outside exchanges changing the ticker symbol BTC for the original Bitcoin. So the BlackRock coin would end up with a different ticker symbol. Right. [01:13:30] Speaker A: And will Fidelity go along with it? Because they're not, they're actually custodying their own and they're the third largest etf. It's just the fight would be such a mess. It would be such an overplay of the hand of blackrock and I think it would be glorious because of that. I think it would be a disaster. [01:13:48] Speaker B: For them and it would only work if. So they do this fork or whatever and then they convince all of a huge majority of mining hash power to Switch to that. And then that hash power also takes a break to attack the old coin, the old chain. Right. Because as long as then, like, then we have both coins, as long as both coins are still going and still healthy, like, that's just a win for us too. You know, we just got free coins. So it's just the attack part that we're worried about. [01:14:26] Speaker C: Right? [01:14:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:14:26] Speaker C: I think, like, the more they try and control it, the worse it gets and the harder it is to get people in the system so that it's catch 22s for them all over the place. Like, I don't see how they do it. [01:14:37] Speaker B: And we'll have to teach this lesson every four years. [01:14:41] Speaker A: That's okay. [01:14:43] Speaker C: You know, I don't think this is the attack, and I've said this before, like, the attack on bitcoin is just every normies and blackrock and Michael Saylor and all that don't have custody of their coins. And they're inside a walled garden. And if you want to be part of the modern bitcoin economy, you have to be in that walled garden too. That's it. Like, you don't need to fork SMTP to make it suck and to make Google have control over everyone's life. You don't need to do that. You just build a system on top of it that everyone's happy to be inside. That's it. So it's the KYC matrix and everyone is voluntarily going to walk into it and you don't even need to touch the protocol. You don't need to fork it. So if they try and fork it as free money for us, or it's completely dead in the water because of KYC making it impossible. That's not what they do. They're just like, here are all these businesses accepting bitcoin now, but all of them require you to use some sort of wallet that has insane KYC stuff. And again, we have a case study, like, we should talk about El Salvador a bit, but they're shutting down Chivo. Right. But Chivo, as it manifested was just more and more and more kyc. If you wanted to withdraw money, it was photographs of your face while you did it. For converting dollars to bitcoin, it was things like that, which are just, if everyone is using bitcoin in that capacity, it's not cipher funk tech anymore and there's no fork required. [01:16:02] Speaker D: Yeah. My first thought, honestly when I saw that was like, okay, they're trying to create some more liquidity, the same way that the Chinese central bank said that they were banning Bitcoin 15 times in 2017. My first thought was like, oh, this is just this year's FUD or whatever, or this cycle's version of fud. But, you know, like, if we can use the fear around blackrock and Michael Saylor or whatever, having too many coins to motivate people to run nodes, like, there's nothing wrong with that. [01:16:40] Speaker A: So, yeah, that, that would be the really beautiful thing about it is that became a legitimate discussion, is I bet you would see the node count, like, really, really spike for the first time in a long time, because there's not really been any strong motivation to do it. I feel like most. Most of the history of, like, aggressively running nodes is a history of defensive measures, you know, and so it would. It would be interesting to see. For that reason, I think it'd be overall healthy for. [01:17:14] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, what happened to the node count during 2016 or 2017 when. When the classic and XT and. And unlimited and all those things were. I mean, like, they were running a bunch of Amazon nodes, but which was funny because somebody. It was like multiple occasions where somebody. [01:17:33] Speaker A: Hacked them and thousands and thousands of Amazon nodes. [01:17:37] Speaker D: Well, they, they. But they proved it by like, dos, like, attacking those nodes. And they all, like, you could send them all offline, you know, like, temporarily. And so like, oh, look, this is the same. This is all one. [01:17:51] Speaker C: Again, it was kind of catch 22, because on the one hand, I had a conversation with Greg Maxwell around this. This is like the one friendly chat I've ever had with him where we were sort of developing an understanding of how the network was structuring itself, trying to figure out. Because nodes have a user agent where they'll tell each other what node they are, whether it's like Bitcoin Core 25 or Bitcoin, not 27 or, you know, but you had all these Bitcoin unlimited nodes on the network and all that stuff start to show up. And then we were like, but wait a minute, people can lie in this stuff. And then we started trying to just change the tag. [01:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah, you can. It's still core. [01:18:30] Speaker C: But they also. They released a fork of it or just, you know, a version of Bitcoin Unlimited that lied and said it was core. And they started doing that. And I remember telling Greg about that and he was like, ah, that changes the game a bit, actually, because then we don't know how many of these people are actually, like, lining up and ready to pounce on us. So, like, on the one hand, you want to Signal strength and be like, there's loads of us on the other. You kind of want to keep your trump card up your sleeve. So, like, I don't know, you just have. I don't remember the original point I was making with that, but there was. There was just some. Some interesting context to it. I don't know why that ties back into what you guys were talking about. Sorry. [01:19:13] Speaker A: No, the whole node thing is just really interesting. And actually, you know what? There was a question. We had a. We had a bullet point about that. Yeah, Steve's. Steve had a question. What does a world of decentralized node implementations look like? [01:19:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think about this all the time, especially with Knots becoming more popular. We had that Libit coin a while ago that never really took off. There's a few other ones. We've never really had anything dominant. Bitcoin Core is still obviously the reference client. It makes me mad when people say that Bitcoin Core is the protocol, because it's not. But yeah, what does it look like if we actually have five or six or ten different healthy open source communities making different projects, is that going to make changes to Bitcoin harder? Is it going to make it easier? Is it going to be chaos? Because there's going to be these tiny little edge case differences between the node implementations that makes blocks come invalid. Are we going to have major fights about what the protocol is? If there's. [01:20:23] Speaker C: Let me, let me, let me get on this, because this is something. I was just like, Luke just threw a cold glass of water in my face yesterday over this stuff and I'm like. He's like, not only is there's a reason Knots is just like one to one porting stuff over and rebasing from Core because every, like, if you want to do anything, like not use the same database or not the same version of the C libraries or any of that stuff, even if anything in the blockchain gets interpreted differently, that's it. That's divergence, that's a fork. That's. Everything changes based on that. So if Core has like a bug in it that interprets something from like block 80,000 differently to what a newer version of the C library would make, the level DB. You can't use it. So if you come up with like a new version, like, what's that guy's name? I can't remember. Libitcoin. That's like way faster at staking and all that. Sorry. If you use a different database language, even if all the data in it matches Just something about the quirks of how those things work mean split in the network. So everything has to work in exactly the same way. And it's so unbelievably limited that you can't just look at the consensus rules and go, I'll spin up an identical node that you know, a node that does all the same things the same way, but using a different database language or something to make IBD 9 times faster or something. If you do it and lots of people run it, suddenly you're just going to find yourself forked off. [01:21:54] Speaker A: And it's like, without a bug, without a consensus bug, you could literally just have the computation end up different. [01:22:02] Speaker C: Yeah. This is why you have this like absolute pain in the butt with BerkeleyDB with this old incompatible vers vs level db. Like the fact that we changed database language at some point in Bitcoin's history is like a pain in the butt when you're trying to compile stuff and you have to take it into account and there's no workaround. Like, that stuff is just. I'm out of my depth a little bit here, but I should. I'm going to go back and reread the conversation between Jason and Luke because Jason's like, look, I can come up with Level DB just sucks, right? Like, there's a. It shouldn't take this long to read and write all this data. Why is it taking multiple days to sync a node and looks like if you come up with something else. It's not that it's like a one in a million chance that it all matches, is that it just never will. Like something, there's going to be discrepancies in how this stuff goes. Something's going to get read and write differently. And then, you know, you fall out of consensus necessarily when you do that. Even if, you know, I just find that insane to me. But that's some of these things we think. [01:23:03] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I definitely agree with that. I mean, I think that's probably true. I haven't done it myself. Just as tiny little differences you can never replicate. But there's another side of that too, where if there was a bug in core, let's say the CVE inflation bug or something, if something happened and then there was another version of Bitcoin where the bug didn't happen in, then all of a sudden that new version of Bitcoin, that new different core software would be the right software because, you know, the protocol is stored in your mind. Otherwise you'd have to say that bitcoin ends in 2106. Because right now core ends in 2106. And there's other things about the protocol that are. The protocol that are not in core. Yeah, it's a tricky thing. Kind of works both ways. [01:23:49] Speaker C: Yeah. The whole POS EWID purpose of software is what it does. I disagree fundamentally with that. Bitcoin is not what Bitcoin does. Bitcoin is what we want it to be. And we try and make the software reflect that as best we can, which is why it changes. And this, the former concept just means if there's a bug, then it's never a bug, which is just stupid. Like. Yeah, like we try and make it conform to our expectations along with what's technically feasible and politically possible. [01:24:17] Speaker A: The code is defense for a social layer to prevent in misuse and abuse arbitrary change and misuse of it. Yeah, like it's, it's a, it's a dynamic of defending a momentum of a standard, so to speak. [01:24:36] Speaker C: Yeah. This is why if someone says something like really bad and you know they didn't mean it, you don't take the words literally. You, you look at it and go, yeah, I understand. You just used the word wrong. I understand that's not what you meant. Right. So like we look at intentions behind things because they're what's relevant. Not, you know. [01:24:55] Speaker B: Right. Like the, the, the protocol is not that the date can only be 32 bits. The protocol is about like the date going forever. But bitcoin core is only in 32 bits. The protocol has nothing to do with 32 bits. So it's. There's a difference. [01:25:11] Speaker D: So if we have to have, we have to have a hard fork for the, the date thing. [01:25:16] Speaker C: We don't. It can be a soft fork. [01:25:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:25:19] Speaker D: Well, okay, but is it actually a soft fork or is it just like we do it the way like you, you build it into the software far enough ahead of time, do a hard. [01:25:30] Speaker A: Fork so early that it doesn't matter. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can actually do it as a software. [01:25:35] Speaker D: Really? [01:25:36] Speaker C: There's benefits to both. No, you can do it as a software, but there's benefits to doing a hard fork and clearing up technical debt at some point anyway. But my. That's never going to work. The, the amount of politicization, a hard fork, the wish list for that goes on forever. Everyone got something they want to do if we hard fork Bitcoin. And the only real acceptable way to do it would be we only fix the timestamp because everyone's got an opinion on all the other things. [01:26:00] Speaker A: Don't try to fix anything else because then you've immediately politicized. [01:26:04] Speaker D: That was my question was if we need a database change, can we build it into a hard work that's just planned that many years in advance? [01:26:13] Speaker C: No, but that's a different point. It's. You can. Yeah. Bitcoin Core can have whatever database language you want in it. The point is everyone uses the same one and even with different versions of. [01:26:21] Speaker D: That means you can't change it though, Right? Because if you don't, if you change it, then how do you get the ones that aren't updated to not split the. I mean like if you have a new change that is has to be compatible with the old change, how do you square that circle? Yeah. So you can't change the database. [01:26:42] Speaker A: It just becomes incredibly difficult. And a hard fork doesn't fix it that way. Is that like a hard fork doesn't help the situation? [01:26:48] Speaker C: No, hard fork doesn't. Because the ultimate problem we're getting at here is that everyone has to be doing exactly the same thing for Bitcoin not to fall out of consensus. And it doesn't. That thing can change. It's just. It always has to change together. So you know the accidental hard Fork in 2013 was something of this trivial nature. Right. You know, it was just. [01:27:08] Speaker D: That was Mike Hearns. Right. [01:27:11] Speaker C: I don't remember who was responsible for it. Probably that rings a bell. [01:27:15] Speaker D: I think it was ours. [01:27:17] Speaker A: And this is just me yank pulling something out of my ass. It becomes kind of arbitrary. But is what if you did a kind of light client like pruned node for the old database and created a new database and ran it for five years as a fallback. If there's a disconnect and basically tried to make the slowest possible thing where the. There was always a. It basically didn't break the node, it just shifted back and you just doubled up the resources essentially. [01:27:53] Speaker C: We've done many things of that nature anyway. That's kind of the Neutrino concept for LND or the Folgore concept for CLN where you can just run in light in SPV mode until you have things sync. That's. That's not bad. I guess the concern trolling around that is just if people spoof and just act like halfway solutions end up getting used as the full solution is the problem. So. And then if you're like that becomes a systemic thing where it's like look, every single LND user is just running a neutrino like no one actually has the blockchain anymore and no one is actually using it that way. Then it's like, we should never have made this tool because now that it's there, everyone's just using it as a shortcut and we're screwed. So I think that's probably why you wouldn't do that. And that's why obvious things that should exist never do. Because someone was like, ah, we can create a weakness here if we do that. [01:28:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:28:49] Speaker B: When you mentioned the soft fork for the 2106 bug, do you have a specific solution in mind or were you just saying you think there is one? [01:28:57] Speaker C: It's just. I don't know what it is specifically. Luke has told me repeatedly you can just do it as a soft fork if you want. I think it's just annexing, adding data to something that just sticks the extra. So you run out of room in one field and then you just add another field. Right. And that field has to. Right. [01:29:16] Speaker B: But like nodes that are running right now, how would they know to look for that extra field without updating? [01:29:24] Speaker C: That's a good point. I don't know. [01:29:27] Speaker B: I've looked into this a lot and my solution is that like you can do this if you have like a 30 year period of, you know, non updating nodes interacting with the new nodes. But at some, no, at some point the old nodes just stop. No matter what. They don't continue on their own course, but they, they'll just stop. But it's still kind of a soft word. [01:29:50] Speaker C: Well, yeah, I don't know because all blocks to them at that point would look, would look weird and in the wrong time. So I don't know how you get around the fact that blocks time starts to be wrong. But, but if Luke says it could be done as a soft fork, I mean he said segwit could be done as a soft fork and he was the only guy that realized that. So I mean, I'm sure he's right. [01:30:09] Speaker B: I never. Yeah, I never. [01:30:11] Speaker A: Don't bet against Luke. [01:30:12] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I won't bet against Luke, that's for sure. [01:30:15] Speaker A: We're actually. I actually have kind of a hard stop here. [01:30:18] Speaker C: Me too. [01:30:19] Speaker A: So let's actually hit a couple. We. We don't have a huge set of other news items. The other really big thing that I just wanted to get to in a general sense was basically all the reserve stuff. I don't mean just, just United States Bitcoin reserve, but El Salvador. A Brazilian congressman has institute or pushed a proposal Japanese government Official has pushed a proposal. Obviously it's looking like it in the US like, what. What is your. I want to. I want the full take. I want to know, like, how do you think about people saying, this is it. Bitcoin is sold out, and everybody's clamoring for. Everybody's like, states buy bitcoin. Yay. As. As if this is now. This is a state thing, or is this inevitable? Does. Does this matter for anything other than, you know, this is the era in which we move into that. That landscape and things get crazy. I. I just want to hear your thoughts on all the whole reserve stuff, because I feel like it's. Things are buzzing all over the place. Yeah. [01:31:35] Speaker D: I don't know how you get to, you know, global monetary reserve without governments getting involved. So, I mean, it just seemed like this is a step that's got to happen. I'm not super excited about the fact that, you know, I don't want the US Government to have money that will save it from, you know, economic disaster, but at the same time, I don't. [01:31:57] Speaker A: Want to save the dollar. Right. Yeah. I don't want to save. [01:31:59] Speaker D: That's the thing is I don't want, you know, like, I don't want dollars backed by bitcoin or whatever. If. But. But at the same time, you know, I don't know if. If it. If it makes a smoother transition possible. I mean, again, you know, we've talked about this a bunch, but if. If, you know, a crypto dollar or whatever, the. The stablecoin, whatever is spreads and basically displaces most other currencies and all we have left is the crypto dollar and bitcoin, well, then they can't print anymore. Like, you know, they. They lose. They lose anyway. So. So, like, we still. [01:32:36] Speaker A: We win. [01:32:37] Speaker D: It's like heads. Heads, we win. Tells you lose. Like, it doesn't. You know, we. We still, like. I feel like this. It all goes in one direction. The question is just how bumpy is the ride going to be on the way there? So, I don't know. I mean, it. [01:32:48] Speaker A: It. [01:32:48] Speaker D: It's all good. You know, numbers. Numbers gonna go up. So this. It's gonna be. It's gonna be interesting. [01:32:55] Speaker A: Yeah. The thing that gets me on this is that, like, the idea of all of them holding reserves and whether or not it helps the dollar or whatever, fiat currency, I think, is a little bit moot. [01:33:10] Speaker C: It just. [01:33:11] Speaker A: It really just matters for timing is who benefits more than everyone else. Yeah. But ultimately that is the only way to actually rein in government spending is for the value of your currency to be seen based on your bitcoin reserves, like how much bitcoin you're holding. Like, that's how you actually institute, like government fiat isn't going to go away. They're still going to print their own unit, to have their own network and their own level of control. The question is, does the price of their unit get reflected if there are more of them in relation to bitcoin? You know, like it, it ultimately just matters when bitcoin is liquid enough. Is what is its price related to bitcoin? How many sats can you get for the unit of that fiat? And I think a bitcoin standard means that every fiat is ultimately backed by bitcoin and every government has to freak out about whether or not they're getting rid of their bitcoin reserves this year or they're adding to it. And that's how you reprice the world in bitcoin. And that's. I don't know that that's how that looks to me. It's like, you know, the, an age where the Internet is, the media isn't an age where NBC and CNN doesn't exist. It's where CNN fails at launching CNN plus streaming service. And you know, Peacock is the only thing. You know, it's, it, it's, it's, it's when they are weak and they don't have the power that they think they have because the, the shift of where the equilibrium lies and what's valuable and what the dominant thing is just moves into the new landscape like the Internet. And what the Internet thinks about NBC is now seems to be the reality. Like, like the Internet is the new media. And in the same way, it will not be the dollar price in bitcoin. And you know what the government, the US government says about Bitcoin? When you have 20 countries fighting for bitcoin reserves and trying to be the fiat that's the most backed by bitcoin, it will literally just create their own obsolescence. It will be their price in bitcoin that will determine whether or not people want their fiat, because somebody will do it better. So. Or they'll just withdraw bitcoin. They'll literally just use bitcoin. [01:35:30] Speaker C: I think that's a great point, man. I hadn't really looked at it that way. It's really compelling. [01:35:36] Speaker A: It just means that your bitcoin reserve is what your value of fiat is. Yeah, like, that's it. [01:35:41] Speaker C: And also, you've got to rely on this like countries hate each other and don't trust each other so they'll insist on the reserves existing. [01:35:48] Speaker D: Exactly. [01:35:48] Speaker C: A lot of my, like, it's going to be okay. Self comfort and cope I have for how awful the world is falling apart is that I need countries to actually be genuinely hating each other. Like the scariest conspiracy theory to me is like Russia and China and America all actually get on just fine and it's all just for show. That's the, the thing that terrifies me. [01:36:07] Speaker D: If all governments collude, we're in trouble. Like the five eyes are like literally the worst thing right now, that they all cooperate to spy on everybody. I mean, you know, it's like the Catholic Church fell out of power. Like they lost political power. They didn't go away. They still exist, they're still there. [01:36:24] Speaker A: They're just not the de facto government. Like, if the Pope comes out and says something, the whole world doesn't just immediately start murdering everybody who doesn't follow their rule, you know, like, like they're just, they're so powerful, they're just largely irrelevant. Yeah. [01:36:37] Speaker D: If you have the same sort of devaluation of government power, that'd be great. [01:36:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:42] Speaker B: I was going to be a bigger fan of the reserves. If there was some kind of proof of reserves or they had to show their addresses or something, that they actually had these coins on chain. Like I, I'd really like that. But I mean, other than that, I agree with Jeff. Like you can't, can't stop anybody from getting bitcoin. [01:36:56] Speaker C: Yeah. I think it's like the, the, my, my take on it, hopefully I can do it in like one minute, is when it came along as a proposal like the government will own loads of money. The, the sort of normie take on it was like normie who likes bitcoin a bit or something was like, oh, that'll make the price go up a lot. And then today, wait a minute, that's bad because if they own loads of bitcoin, they might start pushing for changes to the protocol and there's nothing you can do about it. And I'm like that. Yeah, that was not. So you've gone through like a bunch of stages of like processing the information that were not how anyone that's been in bitcoin for a long time looked at it. The way we look at it when the US Government says, all right, we're going to buy loads of bitcoin is right. This is going to make number go up a lot and it's going to create A bunch of problems. Can we defend against those problems? And for the most part, all of the problems they might talk about or they might present to us have not just already been sort of countered in theory, but have actually happened in practice. And we've dealt with them in the past. So, like, we've already addressed it for a long time on this show, which is pushing for changes to consensus, hostile takeover, that sort of thing. We've seen it happen before, we know what to do to defend against it, and we've literally got a track record and case studies of how we've survived these kinds of attacks. So it's amazing to me that anyone would present that as a concern. But saying there are no concerns is also not accurate, too. Right. So we weren't all exuberant that the US government was going to buy loads of bitcoin, but at the same time, it's just pragmatic. We knew that it was always a possibility. There's nothing inherent in bitcoin that stops powerful, evil people owning lots of it. We know they're going to buy it if it's as good as we think it is. And we've been thinking since day zero, how do we make sure we're protected if and when they do it? The only real way you can do it is to make sure you own as much of it as possible before they do, which is what the majority of us have been doing and which is why we basically feel pretty fine right now. So, like, there was some sensible. Like, there was some OPSEC and things involved in that. Like, maybe don't be too public about it. Maybe keep your identity private. Like, who set a precedent for having lots of bitcoin and keeping their identity not well known? The guy who invented the whole system. Right. So it's like, we know what we're doing here. We've been thinking about these things. It's time to look at this thing and just go, yeah, there's some intelligent minds in this community. We're not naive. And it's a practical thing. It's not just ideologues going like, yeah, bitcoin's going to save and fix everything. Oh, no, a quantum computer. Just please give us a. Please give us a bit of credit for having planned all this out. [01:39:39] Speaker D: What are you gonna do when the Internet goes down? I mean, you know, yeah, what. [01:39:44] Speaker C: What are you gonna do when there's no more Internet? I bet you didn't think of that. What are you gonna do when someone makes it? [01:39:49] Speaker B: Think about that one. [01:39:51] Speaker C: Checkmate Bitcoiners. [01:39:53] Speaker B: Got us checkmate. [01:39:55] Speaker C: Man, I got three minutes. I wanted to do El Salvador too, but I just don't think we got time. [01:40:00] Speaker D: Is he gonna buy? Like, he's gonna sell chivo and then. And then buy. Buy bitcoin with the money? [01:40:06] Speaker A: Well, he. They did just buy, like, 10 bitcoin instead of one bitcoin. [01:40:10] Speaker C: That was a million bucks, man. He spent. He yielded 0.1% of his new stash. Do you understand the meme? The legend? He would have become, like, he's already, like, very popular, right? But imagine bukele if he just yoloed the entire stash of $3 billion on Bitcoin the minute that IMF send him the vote. [01:40:29] Speaker D: Can you imagine, like, just so many. [01:40:33] Speaker C: Things that would have been, like, I would have made a statue to him and put it in, like, the middle of Vancouver or something. Like, just. He should have done it for the memes. [01:40:44] Speaker A: He should have done it for the meme. He still has an opportunity. [01:40:48] Speaker C: Yeah, maybe the cash hasn't changed. [01:40:49] Speaker A: I know you listened the guy's roundtable. I know you listen to the roundtable, and it's very important for you to consider this because you would be a legend. [01:40:57] Speaker C: Maybe the check hasn't cleared yet, and yesterday was just a dip. So he was like, I'm buying the dip. Bought more coins than usual. Like, what is the process of getting. [01:41:05] Speaker A: In his bank account? [01:41:06] Speaker C: How do you get $3 billion? Like, what's the transfer process of that? Does someone from the IMF have to go to a bank with two forms of ID or something? [01:41:14] Speaker A: Like, no, they just ach. They sell it. They sell it to it. [01:41:19] Speaker B: Zell, his cell phone number. [01:41:22] Speaker A: They got those big Zel limits. It's just straight to his email address. [01:41:27] Speaker C: Guys, I gotta go, man. [01:41:29] Speaker A: Come in. All right, we will close it out here. Thank you, guys. This was a good one. Jeffrey, you suck for being late. What an embarrassment. Can't believe I'm related to you. [01:41:37] Speaker D: I had to get a car battery for our wonderful mother. [01:41:41] Speaker A: I was being a hero. [01:41:43] Speaker D: What is happening? [01:41:46] Speaker A: See, he missed all the best stuff. [01:41:48] Speaker D: That was amazing. [01:41:51] Speaker B: See y'all later. [01:41:52] Speaker A: Thank you, guys. Later. [01:41:53] Speaker C: See y'all later. [01:41:59] Speaker A: All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. There was actually a number of things we did not get to as this is usually the case with these. So I want to close this out by hitting all of the bullet points that we missed and just kind of give you a rough rundown of the few other things that happen that I feel like are worth mentioning. And our first Bullet goes to Casa. They have released Praetorian. Casa is the multisig wallet. I have had the gold membership for a long time. I actually don't have a ton in it just because I build my own multisig now. But I've still been using it and I am still a fan. I love trying out and having all of the multisig services. But they have released and announced Praetorian which is literally designed to safeguard government reserves. This is about building state level self custody with military grade encryption and best in class support and all of that good stuff. There's a bunch of cool features and stuff that they push like a deep fake protection and they have a 24, 7 emergency line. The stuff that you would think for like a really high class, like super professional multisig. But I think the key takeaway here is that there is a market for this. Now this is going to become a thing. And holding reserves in like enormous amounts of value in bitcoin with large institutions, with corporations, with governments and with extremely high security tolerance or low tolerance when it comes to edge cases and the desire for incredibly professional and deep state level adversary security is going to become a normal market. And I think it is unwise to dismiss how powerful that could be and how much could actually happen in that market for designing incredibly fault tolerant cold storage security systems. That's just, that's just kind of cool. BULLET the Czech Republic has now removed capital gains on any Bitcoin held for longer than three years. I might move to the Czech Republic. BULLET Canton of Bern, Switzerland approves a feasibility study on bitcoin mining for grid stability. Basically a breakdown of the impact on dealing with or monetizing surplus energy and balancing out the grid. And this is totally expected to see this kind of research and assessment starting to get in full swing. And there's also interesting, there was a company, I can't remember the name of the company, but they've been targeting California more often because California in their effort to go super green and everything has overly incentivized solar power. And in doing so it's actually dumping so much solar power back onto the grid and it's making the utilities mad because they're paying for it, that they've literally now stopped. They've lobbied to stop having to pay and deal with the load back on the grid. So now suddenly California has kind of shot itself in the foot in regards to properly incentivizing the solar because now a whole bunch of solar people kind of got screwed and the economics are getting Completely thrown out of whack. So the company now is trying to fill in the gap by deploying miners to eat up everybody's excess solar power rather than them being able to get money back from the grid or whatever the cut is that happened in relation to that. Bullet Morocco has actually lifted their ban. They've had cryptocurrencies and bitcoin and everything banned for a while and now they're looking to set in regulation and lift the ban. Kind of cool. Bullet a Chinese car company, Kango Kengo has just randomly announced or quietly released and it's become known now, but they're the third largest public miner in China. It's just a car company. Who'da thunk1 I'm really sad that we didn't get to was Hawk to a coin. I put specifically put it in the list and I added it in the key chat so we could definitely get back to it. And we didn't talk about Hawk Hawk to a coin but and I guess this is more of a shitcoin insider sort of episode but Hawk to a girl decided to make a token and had a whole bunch of the tokens for herself and a whole bunch of really really dumb people apparently or just complete and utter degens put tons of money into this token and then she absolutely hella rug pulled all of them and the price was absolutely obliterated. She made a ton of money. Whole bunch of people are calling for her to go to jail and threatening to sue and all of this stuff. And honestly, if you bought Hawk to a coin you deserve to lose the money. And if she actually everybody got scammed with Hawk to a coin she deserved. I don't know. [01:46:55] Speaker C: She. [01:46:56] Speaker A: I don't care. She deserves it. That's ridiculous. It's 2024. It's your fault if you lose money on Hawk to a coin. I just can't. I can't. I can't care anymore. Bullet Roger Ver went on Tucker Carlson and talked all about how bitcoin was hijacked by the and Blockstream was run by Bilderbergs and stuff. Oh God, so annoying. Like we said, the FUD is all coming back. All the stupid arguments and all the ignorant people are buying into it again. But it is what it is. Bitcoin was destined to be the most hated. I'm probably going to do a guy's take rebuttal to a lot of the things that he said. I still don't believe he should go to prison for 100 and whatever years for tax fraud even if that's exactly what he did was tax fraud, he should just kind of owe the money and you know, they can get over it. But still, it's just so annoying. He just lies and he just makes. I. I honestly just can't even help but wonder if it's just pure dishonesty. Like he doesn't care if he's saying things that he knows aren't true. I mean, he has a history of that. Bullet. There was a really big and really bad bug in Bitcoin Core not too long ago. Actually this happened back in late 2022 and it was just made public. This actually was made public like a month or two ago. I just didn't know about it until December, so I figured it was fair to mention it. But there was a feature added to Bitcoin Core that would enable you to download or find blocks quicker and to get the information necessary in a more compact way. Pun not intended. This is referred to as compact blocks. However, in late 2022 it was discovered that there was a bug that you could manipulate the message for requesting these compact blocks which would actually crash the node. Just so you understand, that's a really bad bug. Crashing the node is an extremely serious concern. This would mean that you could broadcast this out and shut down the whole network. Well, if everyone was on the same version of Bitcoin Core that had this, and it's interesting to point out that this was a Bitcoin core feature that was added that wasn't necessary, that then had this potential very, very bad consequence. Something to think about when it comes to what should be nuclear grade software. But it was fixed and merged in 2023, right around May, I believe, and it was only recently disclosed a couple of months ago so that we had the proper history and we could hopefully learn from what could have been a kind of scary mistake Bullet. Wasabi Wallet, their coinjoin protocol had a bit of a vulnerability that could potentially de anonymize a lot of users. This was specifically a flaw that allowed a malicious coordinator to connect inputs and outputs. I have the link in the show notes to the vulnerability report that they released and which versions of Wasabi Wallet, Ginger Wallet and then the BTC pay server Coinjoin that are affected. But the newest ones, if you're updated then it's already been fixed and you it shouldn't be a problem. And again, specifically it's only with a malicious coordinator. So if you trust your coordinator or whoever you're using, or if you're using the Wasabi official coordinator Basically all the same concerns and trade offs should be considered that nothing is perfect. Everything is a spectrum. There's always going to be edge cases. And just be careful with your privacy. Privacy is a difficult problem. It's a difficult issue to solve. Another bullet fold finally ads authorized users. My wife is finally on the account. I did immediately. As soon as I got it, I filled that mess out and we got her a card and boom. We now have basically joint accounts and multiple users in an account and she can log in and she has her own card. And I'm very, I'm. I've wanted that for a really long time. It's a little bit frustrating having only one card with only your name on it. So now literally you can have a family account and everybody can earn sats into one fold account. That's cool. Another bullet. Uganda confirms that they got their central bank got hacked for 62 billion shillings, which is actually only $16.8 million. And over half of it apparently, or right around half of it so far has been recovered or at least according to the the source that I have. I also just don't understand. How do you steal from a central bank? I mean they sent it abroad so I guess they have to like the other bank could just be like, no, I'm not going to give it back to you. And depending on how quickly they could get it out in cash or something that's, you know, irredeemable or, or irreversible or if they bought bitcoin with it somewhere, you know, so. But it's just still just funny that a central bank can be hacked of a currency that they can just print at will. I don't know. That amuses me for some reason. And our last bullet today is that the Russian President and Mr. Putin signed a law making digital currencies and bitcoin taxed as property. Okay, I don't know if that changes much, but it's interesting. It's interesting seeing things be formalized and how different states will treat it differently. So that's the main lineup. That's the news. Those are the important things and those are the important opinions and takes on those things that you got with guy in his round table. I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to check out fold. You can stack sats like mad, especially with the holidays, especially with gift cards. I you not. It is the best way to passively stack sats that I know of. I use it for every, literally everything almost. And there's a referral code you can get 20,000. 20,000 sats for free just for signing up. Check it out. It's right down there in the description, along with a bunch of different links and sources for all this stuff. And to follow everybody and to check everything out, because you should, you should, that's what you should do, and you should subscribe and all that good stuff. And I will catch you on the next episode of bitcoin. Audible. I am. Guys 1 and until next time, everybody. Take it easy. Guys, it.