Roundtable_008 - Just a Little Misinformation

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Wow. [00:00:02] Speaker B: Welcome back guys. I am Guy Swan. This is Bitcoin Audible. I'm the guy who's read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. And this we have got an awesome, awesome roundtable today. We had a blast. It's always great catching up with the guys. I barely even get to chat with them until we get to sit down for roundtable. So if you were looking for real bitcoiners giving their takes on all of the major news that happened in the past month, you found the right place. Because that's exactly what Guy's Roundtable is. We hit the Bitax phenomenon. The strategic bitcoin reserve from Mr. Trump El Salvador throwing in the towel, the IMF taking a deliberate fight against bitcoin, a bunch of moves on CBDCs around the world, Bitcoin investment from the first one from a university, new developments on what banking regulations will allow, and then only a little bit of misinformation. Maybe like 5%, 10%. So let's get into it really quick. This episode is brought to you by the Blockstream Jade plus Hardware Wallet I've been using this guy. I've made a couple of different videos about this and I've got a fantastic video. Like most people are really intimidated by hardware wallets or I'm surprised by the number of people who are. This is not hard to use. I made a really easy fast video just showing what it's like to just have hardware the hardware wallet be your signing device for your phone. It's dumb simple, it's really stupid easy. It is stupid easy and you can get 10% off with code guy gui. Then check out the bitkit bit kit mobile wallet for a seamless and incredibly intuitive on chain and lightning experience that just works. I love this wallet and I'm super stoked. The company is building so much cool stuff. They just released the beta for Pub Key which I was very happy to be a part of and I've gotten to play around with that. So there will be stuff happening on that front very soon. 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Notes and a shout out to all of them for supporting my work. And with that, let's get into today's episode. We have got returning bitcoin mechanic, Simple Steve, my brother Jeff, and of course myself, Guy Swan, the guy who's read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. This is Guy's roundtable number eight. Just a little bit of misinformation. What is up? [00:04:05] Speaker C: Welcome. [00:04:05] Speaker B: This is round. This is roundtable number eight. We've done eight of these already, which seems kind of crazy because we're almost at a year. Keeps getting better. Oh, welcome. It does. It keeps getting better. It does. [00:04:19] Speaker A: Wait, have we done 12 of these? [00:04:21] Speaker B: No, eight. Eight. Were you not listening? Six seconds ago I heard the word. [00:04:29] Speaker A: Year and then I was like, this is monthly. There's 12 of those in a year. [00:04:37] Speaker B: Welcome. Welcome to the show. I hope you guys are doing good. Lots of news for the last month. First off, introductions. How. How's everybody been doing for a month? We haven't really caught up. Jeff, how you been, buddy? [00:04:53] Speaker C: I mean, I'm good. [00:04:54] Speaker B: I've got good. [00:04:58] Speaker C: I don't know, I'm working, working on. Working on my house and trying to save enough money to go back to see my fiance every. Every few. Every few weeks. But I don't know. I wish. I wish. [00:05:16] Speaker B: Are you coming up tomorrow? Are you driving me to the airport? [00:05:20] Speaker C: Yes, I think so. [00:05:21] Speaker B: Okay, good. [00:05:22] Speaker C: I wish. I wish there was some way to prevent this potential war with Iran and. And stop the, like. Dude, the immigration system is absolutely insane. It's like. Like, it feels like. I don't know if we talked about this before, but it just feels like a. A toothpaste tube that they're trying to squeeze you through. And there's no way to like, get any sort of, like, you. If you don't fit in their. They're like, forms, then you just get no service whatsoever and you. You have to file and be rejected and whatever and then appeal and. And so, you know, very efficient process. [00:06:09] Speaker B: Of, like, knowing that it's not going to work and still having to Go through and wait for all of it to. Not years. [00:06:15] Speaker C: Like it's not going to take years. [00:06:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:17] Speaker C: And so I don't know. We're hoping that an H1B visa will, will be a possibility and we're begging and applying to. She's, I'm helping, trying to help her find jobs to apply to and, and yeah, I don't know. We'll see. [00:06:37] Speaker A: Good luck, man. Yeah, I've had to do a bunch of Canadian immigration stuff multiple times now. And it's always funny to me, the, the job thing is a drop down menu. It's not, it's not an empty field for any string. Like so. And there aren't many options. It's like you have to have one of these 10 jobs because there are no other jobs by the way. These are the jobs. Okay. [00:07:05] Speaker B: These are jobs of economy. [00:07:07] Speaker A: Yeah, they're like really? It's like yoga teacher and stuff. How is that one of the only 10 jobs? But I just want something to do with computers and I'm like, right, there we go. Computers, that's my job. [00:07:21] Speaker B: Computers are my job. The Internet, I'm on the Internet. [00:07:28] Speaker C: She's still dealing with service Canada like all the time, which is like a headache in and of itself. So. Yeah, I don't know, I mean like she can't technically right now she can't leave Canada. If she left Canada, she would not be able to go back. So there's, even though she has a work permit, so there you have to apply for some sort of re entry like visa separate from your work permit. And so she's kind of trapped. Like it's weird, it's just a weird, a whole weird thing. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, worst case scenario we have to like figure out how to get to Antigua and we'll just live there for a few years. That's like a very first world problem. So it'll be all right. [00:08:16] Speaker B: It'll be all right. Steve, how's it going man? [00:08:21] Speaker D: Oh, I'm doing great, man. Life's good. Bar business is doing great. I'm fucking killing it with my UTX Oracle updates. Yeah, life's pretty good, man. No complaints. [00:08:33] Speaker B: Hell yeah. That's awesome. Hell yeah. [00:08:37] Speaker A: I think ocean We've always had an aversion to having any fiat price listing or anything with any payouts because it just attracts the wrong kind of attention and you know, it's all about narratives and you know, when dealing with regulators and stuff. So having a US dollar price does not help the narrative that ocean has around what we do. But I think Ian, who's the guy that has to deal with all this stuff, was like, all right, I think we can figure out a way to do this at least with the like, API reporting and stuff like that. And we would use utx, Oracle, like no brainer to use that. It's unbelievable that you can use your node to tell you what the bitcoin price is. Without. [00:09:25] Speaker D: Bitcoin, more than anybody, I hate the US dollar price. I used to get so mad at people at the meetup for talking about the price. I'd be like, the price is the least interesting thing about bitcoin. And that's all you want to talk about. And here I am like making this only just like price. [00:09:43] Speaker A: What is true, man? Whenever I'm. I haven't really paid attention to the price for the last two years because I've been too busy with ocean. [00:09:49] Speaker D: Me neither. [00:09:50] Speaker A: And it's like, it really is just if I'm looking at the price, it's an artifact of me not having anything better to do. Like, unless it's like one of those nuts days like March 12, 2020, where we're just watching and like just amazed. [00:10:05] Speaker B: Like, and it's just entertainment. [00:10:07] Speaker A: Well, there's always that moment where horror turns into opportunity. You're like, well, this is just free bitcoins now. So like, you know, so like March 12th, I'm like, that's it. I'll transfer everything I have. And I still had a British bank account which allows you to move up to a hundred grand immediately, which is just amazing. So I just like moved everything I had to a British bitcoin exchange and bought a bunch at like, you know, four grand a coin or something. [00:10:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I helped Guy sell his car. [00:10:36] Speaker A: Nice. [00:10:36] Speaker B: Yeah, we, we did. It was really funny. Somebody actually brought it up the other day in the Audionauts. The other day like two months ago in the Audionauts is. I don't remember who it was, but I wish I could shout out to him. But they were talking about how, hey guys, y'all remember when the price crashed like $3,000 and there was like a full on panic in this room for everybody, just trying to figure out how anyone could find any fiat possible and stack bitcoin. And then Guy sold his car. That was a trip, man. [00:11:14] Speaker A: Well done, man. That was a no brainer buy. There's two times I've ever bought no brainer that day. And back in 2017 when the ETF got denied, we tanked from like 1300 bucks to 900 bucks. I remember just being like no brainer. Like I sold the minute I saw the news and then I bought back like an hour later and was just like great. Just got like a 30% discount on some coins. [00:11:41] Speaker B: That's hilarious. No, yeah, I remember the, on the, the March one because it was such a sharp and fast drop. I remember like I had, I had a moment of panic, you know, and I usually don't worry that much about the price, but I had this moment of panic where I was like, what the hell happened? And I literally went looking for cryptography broken. Like ecdsa, Some major wallet has just been, is vulnerable and coins are being wiped out. I just searched anything that I could find for bitcoin disaster and there was nothing. There was absolutely nothing. Not even like an exchange hack. And I was just like my panic immediately turned like my what's going on Panic immediately turned into how do I buy? I'm broke, I have no fiat panic. And thus the audionauts room got really exciting. [00:12:47] Speaker A: Well, here's the way you don't buy. You leverage the bitcoin you already have. That's the way you don't do it. Like take on any other debt before you take on bitcoin based debt. [00:12:58] Speaker B: Guys sweating in the corner. I've never done that. [00:13:03] Speaker A: Don't do it, man. I speak from experience only a little. [00:13:06] Speaker D: A Little bit's all right. [00:13:08] Speaker B: 16. A little bit's all right. Steve. [00:13:11] Speaker D: Well, especially all right if you don't have like income, if you don't have like non bitcoin related income to like pay the interest on your loans. Definitely don't do it. [00:13:23] Speaker A: Yeah, you have to be able to. [00:13:24] Speaker D: I only did it now that I have. You got to make those payments, man. [00:13:29] Speaker B: And you'll get to be able to maintain it and you have to have room for it to fall 80%. Like if you, if you don't have that, then yes, you're, you're in a bad, bad situation. But if you do have that, then it's, it's like, it's like the lowest leverage options con. It's of course there's a risk, it's an options contract basically, but it's the lowest risk options contract you can get if you have stuff to back it up. So but it is an options contract more or less. Like you can get margin called. [00:14:05] Speaker A: So and if you do, you'll be forced to sell your bitcoin at the. [00:14:09] Speaker B: Worst, at the worst price, the worst time necessarily so because like it would be the point at which you couldn't have, like, it would be at the lowest. [00:14:22] Speaker C: If you're going to do it. If you're going to do it, it must be the smallest fraction of what you're. This should be trading, this is trading rules anyway, is that if you are going to trade, you should be trading with a tiny fraction of your savings, like 10% or less. [00:14:40] Speaker B: Because 5% probably is really. [00:14:43] Speaker C: It depends on where you're starting. [00:14:44] Speaker D: Right. [00:14:45] Speaker C: It depends on where you are. But, but the more money you have, it should be, the smaller the percentage should be. And because you, you want to get money, the goal is to get money out of harm's way and you are the harm. [00:14:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:14:59] Speaker A: But also you have an environment where other people are doing what you're doing. Means, like if the price is like, look at house prices, right? House prices are high because everyone is buying on leverage. That's, that's an unstable, an unsustainable thing. If, if the price has tanked 80% and you buy, you know, you're just there with a bunch of other strong hands that are going to sell, like, are going to hold no matter what. If the price is like way up because everyone's buying on leverage. Those are all people that ultimately have to sell because they own bitcoins with money they don't have. So they are going to sell and it will just cascade downwards, which is like, that is 2022 in a nutshell. It was a bunch of people buying bitcoin with money they didn't have, including people like Michael Saylor, but they just have such good rates that they can handle anything. But other people are like, you know. [00:15:48] Speaker B: You don't get good rates. [00:15:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Once someone else fails and has to sell, then you are in a position where you have to add another like, five bitcoins to make sure you don't get liquidated. Or you just have to sell too. [00:16:00] Speaker B: So you're stacking risk instead of like risk off, like, like getting off of risk. You're, you're stacking it and you're, you're susceptible to somebody else's risk while they stack it. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. [00:16:18] Speaker A: Don't do it, man. Like, it's, it's, it's rigging, Right. I said it in the meme chat yesterday. It's people all buying houses on leverage. Sucks for everyone because everyone then ends up. The entire economy gets owned by the money lenders instead of anyone. Like the. It should be. It's just, it's how you buy a whole country. You just start lending everyone money to inflate all the asset prices and then you own all the assets de facto anyway. Like we don't have houses anymore. Banks own all of the houses. Like that's, that's ridiculous. And it, and it. No one moves forward. We all just stand where we are. [00:16:56] Speaker B: End up renting what we used to own. So, Mechanic, how you been doing? [00:17:03] Speaker A: Yeah, good. Been busy first couple of months of the year with El Salvador and, and what? Did I just get back from Mining Disrupt down in Fort Lauderdale. [00:17:14] Speaker B: Was there a conference in El Salvador recently? [00:17:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you were there, weren't you? [00:17:19] Speaker B: Not El Salvador, no. [00:17:21] Speaker A: There was plan B and there was adopting bitcoin. They kind of overlapped back in January. Oh yeah, Tether announced. [00:17:27] Speaker B: No, I did get invited, but I didn't. I couldn't make that one. [00:17:30] Speaker A: Yeah, the, the last one was mining disruption in Fort Lauderdale, which was a mess as usual. I don't know why that one is always such a mess. I feel really bad for the crew at Ocean who have to arrive like the day before I do and then like get TV screens and carpets and electricity and stuff. And it's always like there were literally two different companies this year, like with booths that were fighting over a TV and trying to like both of them were pulling it at the same time. Like just. It's that kind of thing for some reason. And I don't know why they feel the, the organizers just. They always like that and they know they can get away with it because everyone's got to come to network with everyone else that will definitely be going. So, you know, they can kind of just get away with it. But like I said, I don't have raving review. Well, it was a, you know, the conference is as good as the people that go to it. And there were lot of miners there and a lot of love for Ocean. And we put on this, you know, event after the conference and Luke had this like, sailor's hat on that. And a lot of people are like, oh, I, you know, I was not aware of your game, Luke. I apologize. Like, just, you know, so this was fun. Ocean is now over 6x a hash. So I'm. I'm getting progressively more and more relaxed as the blocks become more and more frequent and Ocean becomes a more and more effective way for miners to reduce variance. [00:19:03] Speaker B: That's right. Two blocks in a row. [00:19:05] Speaker A: Yeah, Two blocks in a row. [00:19:08] Speaker B: Big moment. Big moment. [00:19:12] Speaker A: That was a big deal. That was very unlikely and it happened so we're in a good spot. They weren't datum blocks, sadly. So they were just, you know, regular old. The pool makes the template. But actually out of the Last was this 4, 6. Out of the last nine blocks, only two of them were made by the pool rather than the miner themselves. And those two were the back to back blocks. [00:19:37] Speaker B: Were the back to back ones. That's funny. [00:19:39] Speaker A: So most of our blocks are datum blocks. Now we have 89 minor made blocks within a pooled context, which is. [00:19:45] Speaker B: That's awesome. [00:19:46] Speaker A: That was what Ocean set out to do and we've done it. So people are just now playing catch up and figuring out, I can't believe how. [00:19:56] Speaker B: How bad. And you know, we talk about this every time and we'll get into it a little bit later, but it just surprises me. It's crazy how bad the mining pool centralization problem is and how easy it is from a technical standpoint, like how low the barrier is to actually fix it, you know, like. [00:20:19] Speaker A: Yeah, it's not a difficult problem. It's. The bootstrap is hard. A new pool launched last night, right? And people were like, who's this new guy? I think they're called Mining Squared. And I like this because within like a minute, Borst tweeted, don't worry, it's just another ant pool proxy. Like, nothing to see here at all. Because there's just been this thing around for a while, like, oh, we have a bunch of other pools, like sec. What is it called? Sec pool. Yeah. And Binance Pool and Brains and White Pool. And they're all just Antpool, like, and they don't even hide it because all the stratum work is identical. They all change exactly the same time. Like, not just at network heights, new network blocks and stuff. So the fact that that's. Now everyone knows to look for that. They're like, new pool. Wait a minute, is it just Antpool? Yeah, it's just Antpool. The fact that people watch that now, like, thank you for like, at least being mechanic. [00:21:14] Speaker D: Do you know the guy that made what's this called? [00:21:17] Speaker A: Stratum. [00:21:17] Speaker D: Do you know the guy that runs that, that super cool Stratum? Yeah, that tool he's using to analyze the stratum stuff. Do you know him? [00:21:27] Speaker A: I don't know him, no. [00:21:30] Speaker D: That tool's awesome. [00:21:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And also Mempool Space came out with one as well. It's just Mempool Space Stratum. [00:21:38] Speaker D: Oh, really? [00:21:38] Speaker A: And that shows you a similar. [00:21:40] Speaker D: Oh, sweet. [00:21:43] Speaker B: Dude. I tell you what, we had a thread On Noster last like a couple weeks ago, I was. I'm trying to do just like a short. I'm actually think I'm going to do a completely different project about it because I got such a great, like, turnout from the thread. But I was like, I'm just going to po. I'll just zap you a thousand sats for a video of your. Of any sort of mining setup. And I wasn't even asking people. I think they. Because the list started, it was like, are you heating some your house with a miner? Do you have a bid ax? Like, I was going with the things that were very like, I'm mining at home. And so that was like 90% of the posts. But I was actually just looking for any. Like, if somebody went to YouTube and just grabbed a thing from Riot and then posted it, that's enough too, because I can just download it off Noster and that just saves me having to go find it. So I was looking for anything, but almost all of it, like, almost the entire thread was just people doing bit axes start nine I mean S9s. I mean, like, had somebody. [00:22:48] Speaker C: There were some S19s in there too. [00:22:51] Speaker B: A couple S19s. Like, like tons of people, like heating houses. One person posted a thing heating a greenhouse. Like, I mean, just the coolest thread. And then I posted the same thing on X or Twitter or whatever. And. And of course, you know, maybe it's just because, like Twitter doesn't. If you don't post something about politics now, Twitter just does not. The Twitter algorithm doesn't give a crap. And so that might have had something to do with it. But I also have a supposedly much bigger network on Twitter too. But I got like two people posted something and I think one of them was not their video. It was just like some video from something else. And all I could think was like, what a great example of like the dichotomy. Like all the real bitcoiners went over to notice everybody who has like a actually knows how to plug in a miner and do something and actually like produce some hashes and cares enough to install datum or use a start 9. It feels like they're all basically on Noster or at least that thread certainly indicates that there's a lot more of that mentality. Like people who actually are doing bitcoin and are actually building stuff. But that's like the most bullish thread. I was just like, holy, this is awesome. Like all day, for two days I was just watching stuff come in. So when I showed up there's like a wall of bit axes. They had like eight of the things. Bunch of bit axes, man. [00:24:23] Speaker A: And we also got Amazing, man. [00:24:25] Speaker B: Oh God. Yeah. [00:24:27] Speaker A: Now that they're finding blocks, like there. [00:24:29] Speaker B: Were two box last two, two last month with bit axes. Solo mining. [00:24:34] Speaker A: They got like 25 pet ash. They're extrapolating now. It's a very noisy stat, but that's what Scott reckons. There's out in the wild now around 25 PETA that will find a block every couple of months. [00:24:45] Speaker B: That's so cool. [00:24:47] Speaker D: Yeah, that's awesome. I have this crazy idea about bitaxes that no one takes me seriously, but I just want to throw it out there because I don't think it's completely retarded if people are manufacturing. Yeah, you're going to think it's crazy for sure. But if you are literally taking apart your miners and your control boards and you're reconfiguring them with the chips from other miners or whatever, I don't think it's impossible to make something and this is theoretical. That would be some kind of switch which would completely fuck up the proof of work and it would no longer be valid proof of work in bitcoin. But if all bitaxes did the same fucked up proof of work. Sorry, screwed up proof of work and they could switch it on and off then this whole nuclear option, we can always change the proof of work algorithm if we wanted to. Would actually be like a USAF style nuclear option that actually had a little bit of credibility to it. [00:26:00] Speaker B: We could just run the whole. [00:26:01] Speaker D: Because you know how people always say like, oh, we can change the proof of work if we have to. We can't actually change the proof of work because if you change the proof of work algorithm, the attacker is going to be able to make chips faster than you can. The only way that is a credible threat of changing the proof of work algorithm is if you already have that stuff in hardware and you can just throw a switch and fire it up immediately. [00:26:24] Speaker B: So you're saying you could basically put a. Because you're touching the hardware again, the bitax, like solo Satoshi or whatever could put in a backup plan for a different algorithm for a slightly different algorithm with the same chip that's just different enough that it won't work, that it's not ever so slightly accurate enough or it's not compatible and then we would actually have a backup network in the case of disastrous scenario. [00:26:57] Speaker A: Yeah, this, this happened guys. [00:27:00] Speaker D: It's crazy idea. [00:27:02] Speaker A: This is not crazy. So the butterfly Lab stuff had an alternative pow Algo. [00:27:08] Speaker D: Are you serious? [00:27:09] Speaker B: No, I did not know that. [00:27:11] Speaker A: And so did bip 148. You know, Shaolin Fry's client activated segwit, that had a different power as well. So, like anything that Luke has had anything to do with, he's always made sure this has been a thing because for the. You're not crazy at all. This has been a thing forever, Steve. It's like, if we're gonna. If we're going to have any credibility of treating the miners like the employees they are, even if we do insist on occasionally making the boss of the whole network, we have to be able to say, if you don't do what we want you to do, you are fired. If that isn't ever a credible threat, Bitcoin falls apart immediately. They are not the boss of the network, and it creates awkwardness and division and unpleasantness. [00:27:55] Speaker B: The minute awkward. [00:27:57] Speaker A: Well, it's. [00:27:58] Speaker B: You don't like. [00:27:59] Speaker A: Look, I'm sorry if the CEO and the C suite is walking into the building and the security guards are not, like, aware of the fact that those guys run the company. That's where my paycheck comes from. I. I don't ask questions. I do what I'm told. Like, if. If sudden, if, like, the C suite are looking at you like, hey, security guards, we don't know what product name to use and stuff like that. If they're asking you that, everyone just starts scratching their head, like, I don't know. That's not really my job. Like, it's. It's not. [00:28:27] Speaker B: Like, it's not a. [00:28:28] Speaker C: It's. [00:28:29] Speaker A: It's a. It's a voluntary hierarchy that exists for a reason, and you don't flip it upside down. So when we're like, hey, miners, do you think we could have Segwit and the Lightning Network? What the fuck are you like, that's not. The way you run the network is so awkward and unpleasant. And it. It literally is bad for the price. It's bad for everything. So it's literally just got to be there for everyone's benefit, including the miners. Oh, it's not up to us. And if we decide that it is up to us, by the way, then we get fired and all of our miners become paperweights. So, yeah, I think. [00:29:00] Speaker B: I think from that. From that context, actually, it's really interesting because I remembered this from the block size war is there were actually a lot of miners who hated the idea that they were making the decision, like, they did not want the Responsibility of like going one way or the other. And that part of the user activated solve fork was actually a relief for them to like let go because they were being hounded from both directions to say yes or no or do whatever. And now if they just did nothing and stayed out of it, something happened, you know what I mean? Like it wasn't on them, on them to do it. And I really wish there was a, a more obvious or clearer way to signal for softworks that didn't. Because the mining is the thing that determines whether the softwork is ready to use like, whether or not it's secure. From the context of like, is my transaction settled? [00:29:57] Speaker A: You know, you need, you need minus the signal for it so that it can happen objectively at a height. Because there's no way to be like this Many people are running different nodes now. No one knows that you need to leverage proof of work for it to begin an objective height. But it's always supposed to be, it will activate. It's just a case of when you guys can accelerate it or you can leave it till the flag height, which would be less graceful. So don't do that. Um, instead I think it ultimately, this was the first talk I ever gave. Like Bitcoin magazine got me to the 2021 conference. This was the first talk I ever gave which was on this dynamic. And it was like this. Basically the way it works is this. You don't want to establish it too much because then it becomes an attack vector. But basically the, the principle of getting an upgrade into Bitcoin is this. The core developers work on it, they get the logic inside and then when we fight about activation for a while and they wimp out of it and go, all right, we'll hand it over miners, because this isn't Ethereum and we're not doing dev activated soft forks, okay, it's up to the miners. Then the miners get put in this awkward position where the buck's been passed to them and it's not their job. They suddenly have two sets of executives with two different products, both pulling them in either direction and they don't know who they work for. That's not what they're supposed to be doing, but what. They sort of end up on the side of inertia because they just, that's, you know, inertia is inertia. And then the users, should the thing be sufficiently desired, start forcing the miners to go in a certain direction. And that's what bit 1:48 was. And then the miners acquiesce. To that and go, well, you're going to orphan our blocks if we don't activate it. So we'll activate it, then the users are in control. There's no dev activated soft fork. There's no miner activated soft fork. It's technically miner activated, but it's miner coordinated. The miners had no choice in whether it actually activated or not. They just decided when and then the users are back in control. And that's basically how everything ends up happening, regardless if the miners can get in front of the users in order to maintain, in order to posture. So that's what happened with Taproot. They're like, nope, the miners activated that. And that was my argument with Matt Corallo at the time when he was tried to revise all of 2017. It was like, no, the miners just decided to activate Segwit. They were in charge. Like, no, they didn't. Because we said it's not a coincidence that a day before we would decide to start offending their blocks if they didn't activate it, they activated it. That was us. We forced them to do it. [00:32:28] Speaker B: No, no, it was just, it was voluntary. It was. They had nothing to do with each other. Like that's. I got that argument in a couple times with like some big blockers or whatever. He said, no, they just, there just was. They just decided not to. And it's just like, why? Like there's nothing. The fact that they gave up like that they threw in the towel like literally a week or two weeks before they, they abandoned the other project and then act then rushed to activate. You know, we talk about like six months, one year timelines on all of this stuff and then a period of two weeks. They abandoned the old project and completely adopted the one that was, that was compatible. And you think that, that, that two week period after four years of screaming at each other is a coincidence? Like, come on. You know, like, seriously, come on. [00:33:23] Speaker A: It's a posturing. It's all posturing. At the end of the day, Someone. It's because SegWit2.x even was never about having two megabyte blocks in Segwit, because we have that anyway. It was just about who's in charge of this shit. Is it Brian Armstrong and Barry Silbert? [00:33:38] Speaker B: It was, which repository are we going to? [00:33:40] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Is it Bitmain or is it the users with this silly fork that Jihan says looks stupid and all this? Like, everyone was just trying to posture and be in control. And that's, that's why I was so annoyed with Roger Ver and his whole hijacking bitcoin thing because it was just literally, we have bigger blocks than your stupid chain. And you failed to hijack bitcoin. Like, you failed to do it. That's what you wanted to do. We literally have bigger blocks anyway. But it was never about the olive branch of, you know, saying, taking you at your word. Oh, you want slightly bigger blocks? Okay, we'll do that. There was never actually what it was about. It was about, I want to be in control of this thing. And then they had the gall to turn around and be like, oh, it was hijacked. Like, what? [00:34:22] Speaker B: It was the feds. [00:34:23] Speaker A: You were the hijacker, dude. [00:34:25] Speaker B: Peter Todd emailed with somebody who said that they used to work for the government. Feds took it over. [00:34:31] Speaker C: Well, and it's so amazing how Roger. It's literally like some sort of cartoon version of Atlas Shrugged where he was trying to demand that bitcoin be a certain way, but he was incapable of building it to be that way. And he was paying devs to do something which then completely destroyed his version. Their version of bitcoin was just a complete disaster and required, you know, multiple hard forks and whatever. And then. And like, the whole. Their narrative never made any sense. Like, the. The big blockers constantly said that nodes don't matter, but in order to switch their network over, they literally had to turn on nodes and then wait for the miners to make the first block. Like. Like, it's. It's just laugh. [00:35:21] Speaker B: Well, do you remember. Do you remember when Craig Wright. And wait, no. This was bitcoin abc. This was the bitcoin ABC for they. [00:35:30] Speaker C: Said, run your node in order to prevent the Satoshi's vision version from fucking up. [00:35:36] Speaker B: No, it wasn't Craig Wright. It was when they had an internal battle. It was after Craig Wright went off to bitcoin sv, there was another internal struggle, which was the whole. Live by the fork, die by the fork. Because the developer. And I cannot remember. I cannot remember the name right now, sir. Something that's, like, right on the tip of my tongue. But he decided that, like, no, he. He was bitcoin cash. Like, this is. This is my client. And. And we're forking to this. And then there was suddenly our BTC was going nuts about, like, everybody run your note to stop the thing. And just like, guys, guys, hold on a second. Let's rewind it a little bit. And why don't. Why don't you use that and think about things? Because holy crap. [00:36:27] Speaker A: Live by the fork, die by the fork. [00:36:29] Speaker C: Yeah, well. And the whole time they were trying to spoof, like the number of nodes that were actually running their software before 2017 for every client did that. [00:36:38] Speaker B: Like Bitcoin Classic did it and it shot up to like a. Like 2000 or something in like a day. And then like, it was like every single one of them was like that. That was. That was like a. It was like watching football stats in the Reddit forums when we were doing that. [00:36:50] Speaker C: That's hilarious. [00:36:51] Speaker A: What's funny is there's no jokes. Like, if you make a joke, it becomes serious in crypto. Like, Dogecoin was definitely a joke and it's serious. And I remember in response, maybe the thing you were talking about that guy was this fork called Bitcoin Classic, which was. Someone took the Bitcoin Classic meme and objected to Bitcoin cash doing what it was doing. So they called it Bitcoin Classic. And the mascot was Sean Connery just with a cigarette. [00:37:21] Speaker B: Bitcoin Classic. [00:37:22] Speaker A: I only thought about this yesterday. This is the real bitcoin. Yeah, this is a real bitcoin money funny. No, I only thought about it for the first time. [00:37:33] Speaker B: My son is rolling crayons underneath the door right now. Daddy, pay attention to me. [00:37:38] Speaker A: They do that, man. But what I was amazed by is there's still a ticker. There's on gate IO you can still buy Bitcoin Classic. It's still. Even the jokes. The jokes are real. That's the thing. Clown world persists. And I just looked at. It was like, really? This. This was only ever a joke. It was a literally Bitcoin Cash plus Bitcoin Classic with a picture of Sean Connery. And it's still there at half a cent. Half a cent per coin. It still exists. [00:38:07] Speaker B: Oh, my God, that's amazing. [00:38:08] Speaker A: It's still better than the dollar market capital. [00:38:11] Speaker B: Like a hundred million dollars. [00:38:12] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, BSV is still around. Like, they never go away. [00:38:17] Speaker C: Somebody shared some interview recently on, I think it was on Facebook or somewhere. I don't know that, like, it's like an interview with these guys wearing stupid masks, talking about how they're rug pulling everybody with these like, shitcoins. And she's like. She was like, you don't feel bad about the people that you're stealing money from. He's like, well, it's not theft. They don't have to buy it. And he's like. He's like, well, you know, like, why don't. Why are you wearing a mask? He said, well, well, because I'M a, I'm a well known person. If I, if I reveal my face, then I wouldn't be able to do it anymore. Like, you got to get that money or whatever. Like, it's just, it's just like, it's like, like, seriously, like, this is, this is like, how is this real life? Like, they're just, they're openly talking about the pump and dumps that they're doing. And I just, I don't know. [00:39:04] Speaker A: This is what I hate about these people. Like the tapu wizards and all that. They always talk about the one without the other. Like, I should be free to scam people. Yes, you should. But you only get that freedom if you're responsible with it. And if you're not prepared to be responsible with it, then you're the reason for the stupid crap. Like the sec. Like, the reason someone has to come along and start regulating all this stuff is because of assholes like you. You can act like it's a joke if you want. Like the taproot wizards today, they tweeted something like, because it's April 1st, they're tweeting like, Luke Jr. Has a taproot wizard or something like that. And they're going to be like, it's just a prank, bro, about it. But the reality is half the people they're selling to, there's a language barrier. Like a bunch of people in South Korea or Singapore are going to fall for it. And they're like, hey, we're just joking, we're just kidding around. But they actually pull in money out of this stuff and trying to involve other people in that and soil their names. It's disgraceful. Dude. There's no class to that at all. Like, you can fuck around on April 1st, right? Have a joke. But once you start. I hate it. I hate this, like, it was just a prank thing when you know exactly what you're doing. Like, there's no way they didn't go ahead. [00:40:15] Speaker C: Obviously, Roger didn't come out. It's just a prank. But I mean, if you listen to some of his rhetoric, like, like he, I genuinely think he, like, he said, you know, like, well, the market liked two Ethereums more than it liked one because both, like, the collective total value of both of them was higher than, than it was before there was, you know, when there was only one Ethereum. And so, like, part of me is just like, you know, if you look at his, like, he, he's been, he's had arguably questionable ethics for, you know, a long. I wonder if like, how much of it wasn. I mean, he's pretty stubborn and seems pretty ideological, so maybe, you know, he's stuck to his lie really well, if it's, you know. But I just. I just wondered like, you know, does he just think this is fine? Like, you know, this is not. Like he doesn't have any problem, you know, with. If people fall for a scam, then that's their problem, you know, like, and he doesn't mind being at the head of that scam, like, so I just. I don't know. It's. It's really. It's really messed up, honestly. [00:41:22] Speaker A: Yeah, man. You can't handle it if you can't handle the freedom. You don't get it. [00:41:29] Speaker C: When he had, was it Bitcoin.com or whatever, and he was literally directing people to buy bcash as though it was bitcoin. [00:41:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And he called actual Bitcoin Bitcoin Core, as though the name of the implementation was the name of the currency, which is just. That's just such a. Come on, man. You could have come with a different name entirely, but I mean, as if there aren't other clients. Like, I mean, knots is at 2% now, which is. [00:41:59] Speaker B: Knots is at 2%. Oh, that's pretty. [00:42:01] Speaker D: Yeah, that's great, man. You know, so actually I wanted to ask you about that. When I saw that, I was like, so do you have a group of people, like, kind of unrelated to Ocean and Datum that are running knots? Like, just a few people here and there, or is there kind of like a. A specific subgroup that's doing it? [00:42:19] Speaker A: I think it's mostly datum related because it was only like 4 or 500 of them before Ocean was a thing. But there's always been a reason to use Knots because it's just a superset of core. It just is core with more configurability, that's all. So it's. No, it's not its own parallel. It's not a complete reimplementation. So it's much less risky than other alt clients. But it's. Yeah, to answer your question, it's mostly just Ocean miners as far as I can tell. But there are other projects that used it. Wasabi Wallet was one that would. That had knots underneath it rather than Core. And again, the reasons for that are obvious. It's just more options, like, you can have more permissive spam filters on Knots than Core if you want, because it just lets you do what you want with your mempool rather than sort of say, you can do it this way, like we have 83 bytes. And to be honest, you can change that in Core as well, but you can just change what that pertains to more exquisitely. [00:43:20] Speaker B: Just a lot more optionality and anything that's not consensus. [00:43:24] Speaker D: Yeah. Do you guys think in 10 years from now there might be significant variation in node implementations? I know you're saying Knots is basically Core, but libitcoin or whatever the other ones are. Do you guys see that in the future of Bitcoin? [00:43:42] Speaker A: Not really. I think the main impediment to it is the fact that level DB has bugs in it and you see the whole Berkeley DB fiasco, right? The thing that makes Bitcoin a pain in the ass to compile every time is because it switched db and that caused an accidental hard fork at one point when you re implement Bitcoin like li Bitcoin is going to be its own database, right? It doesn't match, the bugs don't line up and that creates unbelievable. Like Core has forked within itself due to database inconsistencies. Right? So the fact that Knots mirrors that Bitcoin is the bugs in Bitcoin core is the sort of high level point here. And so you can't just re implement it trivially. You actually have to stay in sync with bugs inside level DB and stuff like that. And if there's ever like an unknown unknown inside level db, if all the nodes on the network, all the core and not nodes treat it the same way, that's a lot more relaxing of an environment than one where you have a bunch of lbitcoin nodes or BTCD nodes that don't go that way. And you've seen what happens with that. Because remember when LND broke for like the 40th time in one year or something, and it was because all the brock broke all of the LND nodes because they all run on btcd and BTCD had some different way of interpreting something. So this transaction, this 998 of 999 multisig taproot transaction he did broke everything in BTCD because that could only handle 500 and Bitcoin Core didn't care about that. So it caused an accidental fork that broke the lightning network basically because some people run LND that can happen if you have a whole bunch of parallel implementations that all use different database languages and stuff. At that point Bitcoin just becomes fundamentally less stable because unknown unknowns happen and then different nodes react in different ways. So it's only really safe to to keep it very Very similar. Like knots is just Core with a bunch of rebasing that happens. It's not ground up because I just don't. Some of our sort of assumptions around security, if Core ever goes malicious, is that we could just reimplement something completely fresh. But the reality of doing that is terrifying and basically it needs to not happen. Like, you don't really want to go further away from Core than not, is my conjecture. [00:46:11] Speaker B: Yeah, Theory would say that, you know, a bunch of different varied clients and stuff is better because you don't have, you know, you're not susceptible to a bug in one implementation, but something that isn't even a bug, but just an, like an inconsistency in consensus. Like, like the fact that, you know, maybe still everything kind of behaves like the, the, the spirit of the rules suggest, but it just behaves differently than a different one. Like the, the level, the level of risk in changing that code base is just huge because of those. In like consensus. Consensus trumps works perfectly every time, you know, so. [00:46:55] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, I mean, but there's, there's still. I would like to see more like, people maybe that are doing stuff that I'm like, I'm doing, like I run five or six different nodes just for, like, research purposes or whatever and, you know, I don't have my cold wallets on any of these other implementations. But let's say the reverse happens and there's an inflation bug, or we do one of these stupid updates that people want to do and it has a bug in it, or let's say it's a bug that affected all past versions of Core and it's a clear bug. The only way we're going to have a record of what should have happened and not have to roll back the blockchain is if we do have one of these creative implementations that did not have the bug in it, otherwise we're going to have to roll back the chain. So I don't know, I'd like to see more node implementations, even if they're not used for serious money. [00:47:59] Speaker A: But that did happen. [00:48:00] Speaker D: But I mean, if it happened again, yeah, back in the very early days, but rolling back the chain now would be. I don't know, I'd sell a lot of my Bitcoin if we had to roll back the chain. [00:48:14] Speaker A: I think I would too, but only to buy back later once everyone realized that we managed to get around it. And again, that's precedent. That's what happened in March 2013. There was an orange sign in my Bitcoin core That said, there's a problem, and then a bunch of people started freaking out on bitcoin talk. And, you know, a couple of hours later, the price had recovered and we were fine. Like, that was the end of it. I mean, if. If we can have problems and get around them, that does ultimately increase confidence. Like, no one's telling you bitcoin's not got any bugs. [00:48:50] Speaker D: Yeah, let's say this did happen and all bitcoin core and bitcoin knots were affected and libitcoin. Right now, the 10 people that run libitcoin were the only one that had the obviously corre blockchain. Do you think that we would repair bitcoin core to try to reflect what the bitcoin saw, or do you think we'd try to roll back the chain? [00:49:14] Speaker A: No, if precedent is anything, it's. If the majority of people are wrong, that becomes the truth. That's what happened with BerkeleyDB back in 20. I hope I'm not conflating two different events, but I think the Berkeley DB thing, where Bitcoin Core 8 or 0.8 allowed like 64 bits and Bitcoin Core 7 point whatever allowed only 32 bits, it was something like that. So a bunch of stuff broke, and Luke just called up a few people and was like, all right, we're ditching these 10 blocks that were on Core 8. The few miners that have actually upgraded to the latest and found this bug. Sorry, can we just roll back to what the database expected for version 7? Because that's what everyone's running. And then we did it, and that was it. So I do think it comes down to, you know, if 99% of the world is wrong, that, like, it depends how wrong exactly, but I do think we'd converge on that. Like, yeah, sure, the new guys were right, but there's only 15 of them or one pool or something. I think ultimately that's the least disruptive approach. [00:50:24] Speaker B: I had a question, and I don't want to go down this thread too much, unfortunately, I have a time limit today. Um, but I'm actually just curious because, like, Steve, you bring up a really good point. Is there a way to actually run them in tandem and lower the amount of resources? Like, basically have the blocks, you know, in binary and then build your two separate databases. Like, basically have like, a bitcoin node at the same time, but it's only using like, 10% of what a node does because it's trying to leverage as much as it can from the data set and everything that you Already have, and then literally run a core and like an insurance policy, and then straight up just like fund the creation, like the development of basically just an insurance policy, which is a dual node system where 90% of the resources is your main Bitcoin core and you have another implementation that's totally different, but you minimize the amount of resources as possible that it takes, and then you literally have the option of switching to it in, like, what you're. What you're looking at. Is that. Is that ridiculous in the context of how, like, databases work, or is that actually a potentially viable idea or does anybody know? [00:51:52] Speaker D: I think it'd be a lot of work, sure. Ton of work to make a hybrid system like that, I think. [00:51:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Just a thought. Let's. Y'all ready to get into some news? Let's hit some bullets. Some of these, I don't think I have, like, a whole lot of things to say on, but they're interesting and just for people who are trying to keep up with what happened in the month. Y'all good? Y'all ready to do this? [00:52:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm good. You mean start the podcast? [00:52:20] Speaker B: Start the podcast. Let's start the podcast, guys. [00:52:22] Speaker C: Yeah, we said. We said we don't want to talk away. It's this so boring when people talk about the price and we talk about that, talk about all the price changes like. Like 10 minutes. [00:52:32] Speaker A: So that was really helpful info, actually. I'm glad. We just went over a bunch of that stuff. That was. That's some good context. [00:52:40] Speaker D: Yeah, I like that kind of stuff. [00:52:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's why we do the round table, man. So got some news. Proton Wallet, which I actually had, was happy to get into the beta of, is now launched on iOS, Android and web for all users. Now I will say I love this idea and I love the idea of just being able to easily send bitcoin, you know, over email and like with a contacts list and like, this is like the beginning of making things, just making the UX what people. Kind of what a normal person, like a normie type person would expect. But I gotta say, as much as I went in and looked at it and I sent something to an audionaut, sent me some bitcoin and I think I sent it back, just playing around with it. But I also realized that I have nobody to send bitcoin to over email for any reason. And so I didn't use it at all. [00:53:36] Speaker A: Was there an on chain footprint when you did that? [00:53:38] Speaker B: Yes, it's entirely on chain. It's just basically like creating addresses from the key that's like built into the wallet because they, they, I had the CEO on because it's a hundred percent like they wanted to make sure that there was no involvement with them and that they could do it entirely sovereignly and with the UX that someone was expecting and that's why they were like lightning's just not ready for that. We don't, there's, there's too much involved so that's just not going to happen yet. But maybe in the future. [00:54:13] Speaker A: Kudos to them man. Like I will sing Protons praises. I think they're doing. They're, they're pragmatists. They're trying to make a shitty protocol that is email better. I know. [00:54:25] Speaker B: I love Proton man. I've been using the shit out of Proton. They're, they're the only ones I use anymore. [00:54:29] Speaker A: I've seen plenty of evidence that they are not a honeypot because I know that they make law enforcement jump through hoops and do things like get subpoenas and stuff like that. Everyone's like oh my God. Like Proton complied with the subpoena. I'm like they made the government serve them one. They made them do annoying stuff. Nobody else does that. Like email just hands it all to them. So there's no. [00:54:53] Speaker B: Do you want the password over clearnet or you want to just read it to you over the phone? [00:54:59] Speaker A: I think I trust them basically. I wouldn't use them for like really, really critical security stuff. Obviously there's better tech for that. But if someone is emailing me from their ProtonMail and we're going back and forth within ProtonMail emails, I'm very confident that ProtonMail is not reading any of that stuff and can't so I'm basically, I'm happy with them and they're big enough as well that they can be inside the, the permissioned walled garden. That email became like if you email from protonmail it's going to show up in a Gmail inbox. If you email from your own hosted email server it's a lot less likely. [00:55:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. [00:55:40] Speaker D: Were your experiments with Proton Wallet they were all with round us dollar amounts, right? [00:55:48] Speaker B: They were, they were, yes. Okay, good. Of course. [00:55:52] Speaker A: Thank you for your service to UTX Oracle. [00:55:55] Speaker B: You're welcome. [00:55:55] Speaker A: And thank you for always be a. [00:55:57] Speaker B: Benefit to UTX Oracle whenever I can. [00:56:00] Speaker A: Hey, what if. Hey, I never thought about this because last time we spoke about it and I spoke about breaking heuristics around change and you know, you know payment to the external and payment back to the internal what if we just made it so that the change output was always around number amount then UTX Oracle would still be fine and or 50% of the time the change output was around number we could do. [00:56:26] Speaker B: Well you could do multiple change just to make sure that you get one in around a round amount. [00:56:31] Speaker A: Yeah, that's like so we don't break UTX Oracle but we do break chain analysis. Ability to know who the merchant was and who the, the, the the buyer was I guess. [00:56:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Customer sent one for 50 and $1,000 and then 732. Which one, which one was it? It's kind of like a pay join. It's just a little bit of a tiny amount of obfuscation except it has a secondary benefit of making UTX Oracle better. [00:57:05] Speaker D: Yeah, recently I was experimenting with like okay, I really am only interested in P to P transactions. I know maybe I could get some more round numbers if I included these extra exchange payouts and all this like random stuff. But I was like okay, how about this? Just only four inputs or less and literally only two outputs or less. No, no op return, no big witness data, no nothing. I'm literally looking for like the simplest P2P transactions and there was a ton of them. There was 25,000 round USD transactions per day just using simple P2P and I'm like hell yeah. Like that's, that makes me like feel so much better that there's still that many like regular normal payments out there. [00:57:56] Speaker B: 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 2, 3, 5, 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. I've still seen increased movement with the Lightning network like the. Was it River Report or was it Ark? Ark Invest? Yes. So their lightning report this past year for 2024 showed it was really interesting because there was a 1,200% increase in the number of transactions for 2023 over, over lightning. Which again is not a perfect stat. You know, like they, they basically have to infer some things because they're basically just asking big nodes and big services like how many, what's the change in your transactions? So they have like real data to back it up but they, they're not, they don't have a full picture. And then as a news item related to this, Transfero is partnered with LightSpark and I've been seeing LightSpark pop up a lot which, which is really cool but to just implement Lightning Network. But in the case of the, of what happened last year on the Lightning Lightning network transaction, the number of transactions fell back to like, it fell like by half or something. Like I can't remember exactly how much. So it was a pretty significant fall in the number of transactions but there was a huge jump in how much like how much was actually moved. So people are basically doing like 2023 was the year of many, many tiny transactions and 2024 was like the year of real money on Lightning. Like you know, rather than ten cent and a dollar transactions, it's fifty dollars and a hundred dollars and two hundred dollar transactions on Lightning. So it's been really interesting to kind of see like how things are slowly moving in that network. [01:00:42] Speaker A: Well, Lightning pulls itself in a bunch of directions because like there's no naive description of what it's for. Like initially I just thought all right, this is for hot wallets, it's less secure so you move smaller amounts. But it's for like purchases where you know, no one has time to wait around for confirmations. So it's necessarily like, you know, you're paid to put gas in your car or buy a box of cigarettes or whatever, but it's not buying a house. You do it on chain and no one cares if you wait 6 hours for confirmations in that context. Right, it's a house. But unfortunately it's not a watertight assumption because you can have massive things benefit from speed. There's obviously times where you need to move a large amount of money and. [01:01:25] Speaker B: You need it to move now between exchanges. [01:01:29] Speaker A: Right. Like settlement, final settlement, you know. Well, we sort of saw a lot of the big mining, sorry the big lightning node operators, like all of the big people like river and all the big exchanges that allow withdrawal over Lightning and companies like Bitfinex and stuff like that, all of them start enforcing, started enforcing high minimum channel sizes. So that changed the nature of the game a little Bit like you had before. It was all like plebnet, right? And everyone opening a channel that was like 80,000 SATs to each other. And like every time you try and make a payment over eight bucks, it fails. So it's like because none of your network is, you know, got the liquidity. But I think people have quickly realized lightning doesn't really work that well that way. And we do need some girthy channels. And so, you know, but all of the ones I've seen when I'm setting up a lightning node in a low fee environment and I'm opening some channels, pretty much all of them want 10 million sats. So that's wallet Satoshi, that's Olympus, which is what Zeus runs, what Evan Kaludis does. That's lnd. Sorry, that's Bitfinex's two LND nodes. They are sick and tired of having people open tiny channels to them and try and scam them for not inconsequential amounts, but it would make it totally unsustainable en masse. So they're like, look, if you want to open a channel to our incredibly well connected girthy node, you must commit, you know, well, 100k. 10 million sats is $10,000. And that's a lot to keep in a hot wallet for 99% of people. And given how precarious backups and recoveries are and stuff like that, in lightning you can just lose money and not even realize it if you don't know what you're doing. So I think it's sort of like Chris Guida was the one who kind of blew my mind with his reinterpretation of the whole purpose of it. He's like, look, lightning should be more expensive than on chain because it's faster. And I'm like, huh? That was never how I saw this thing. It was always supposed to be very cheap, but for very small payments and doesn't benefit from being in a block. He's like, nope, if you want to pay someone 2 bucks worth of Bitcoin immediately rather than 2 bucks worth of bitcoin sometime in the next hour or so, then, sorry, that carries a premium. And if you're paying LSPs for the privilege of that and leveraging how well connected they are and all that, to be able to do it, there's a cost to that. So I think both. [01:04:01] Speaker B: I actually think it's not entirely the right framing because it now depends on. Because you're paying for two different things on bitcoin, you're paying for data on Lightning, you're paying for settlement of value. [01:04:17] Speaker C: So, so the higher value things might cost more because you're getting. [01:04:23] Speaker B: It makes sense for a percentage to be the fee over Lightning, like, so When I send $2, I pay 1%, but when I send a hundred thousand dollars, I also pay 1%, you know. [01:04:36] Speaker A: Very true. [01:04:36] Speaker B: Whereas on Bitcoin I send $2, I pay 50 cent because I'm getting in a block, and if I send a hundred thousand dollars, I pay 50 cent because I'm getting in a block. Like, like it's the amount of data that I'm putting on the chain versus the amount of value that I'm moving. [01:04:52] Speaker A: That's a very good point. [01:04:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it makes sense. But what's funny is that that actually aligns incentives properly for liquidity on the Lightning network is that the more money you are trying to move, you are paying for the speed of settling that amount of money and thus a percentage fee. It's a payment network. Bitcoin is an auction for data stamping. Lightning Network is a payment, a network for payment liquidity network for retail payments, basically, or any kind of payment really. [01:05:24] Speaker A: That's a very interesting point and the perfect way to frame it. And Lightning itself tries to distinguish between. Give you an option to weight the way you charge the sale of your liquidity by saying you can charge a base routing fee, which means, doesn't matter how much you're moving, this is how much I charge and you can charge. Well, I don't know what the other thing is actually called off the top of my head, but it's a percentage like you want to move a million sats, that'll be, you know, 200 sats in fee, plus one sat for just basic routing fee. And typically everyone just charges one sat for the base fee I think is the default. Just to be like, you can't just annoy me. You have to at least commit the bare minimum, which is a sat. But you can go below a sat, right? Lightning has all this. Everything's millisats in Lightning with no commas in any of the logs. So it's just.000,000. [01:06:22] Speaker B: Very easy, very easy to deal with visually. [01:06:27] Speaker A: Why can't they just make the logs like output stuff with commas between the threes? Or is it one of those. Europeans use dots instead of commas and commas instead of dots so no one could agree on it. So now we just have to read endless zeros. [01:06:42] Speaker B: Oh my God. [01:06:43] Speaker C: Well, couldn't you just. You could just do it with spaces. Just, just give me a space. So they're grouped and easy to see. [01:06:50] Speaker A: No, spaces do things. [01:06:52] Speaker C: You have to escape. [01:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah, spaces. Spaces are things in code. Can't do that. Yeah, yeah. You just broke my underscore, underscore, underscore comma, underscore, comma, that's what it is. Every three, underscore comma, that fixes everything. [01:07:09] Speaker A: Data for readable logs. Why can't we have nice things, guys? [01:07:15] Speaker B: We can't. We can't. So there's actually a bunch of news about like investing in bitcoin or bitcoin investors. We've got Gamestop has like totally broadcasted that they post a picture with Sailor. Apparently they've been working on this for a while. They are literally trying to play the micro strategy game of selling, of leveraging their stock to buy bitcoin. And it looks like they're actually in line to start buying like $6 billion worth or something bonkers. The University of Austin invested $5 million in Bitcoin and they're holding it in a multi sig with unchained. We got the. Trump did an executive order on the strategic bitcoin reserve which was really funny. And I haven't done the guys take on this one yet because I just haven't had time. But I really want to unpack this a little bit more concretely. More precisely I guess is the word. But he shilled a bunch of crypto and he's talking about like Solana and XRP and crap on Truth Truth Social. And then it was hilarious to watch because. And a whole bunch of people like were like the art of the deal, man. Have you, have you not seen this? And I, I actually wonder if this is just Trump's stupid strategy. It's just so dumb and it's. And it works. He can just say something so ridiculous. But because he's such a ridiculous person, people just believe that it's, it's going to happen. Like I'm going to buy Greenland. And then he's like, you know, he's not going to buy Greenland. It's like, no, we're, we're really going to buy Greenland. It's the, it's the Gulf of America, bitches. And so like when he says we're going to stack Solana and xrp, everybody freaks out. And even like a bunch of like peak crypto people. Brian, I refuse to say the word bitcoin. Armstrong went out and tweeted and said, this is not a good idea. It needs to be bitcoin only this is going to become a mess. Like, everybody was immediately like, bitcoin only. And then he's just like, all right, sign an executive order. Bitcoin is special. Everything else is kind of an equity and Congress can sort that shit out. [01:09:36] Speaker A: You know, you know why that is? And it just occurred to me when you said it. It's because Brian Armstrong and all those guys do not care about scamming nobodies, but they don't want to scam the fucking president because they're going to get themselves in a shitload of trouble if they do. So that's why they're doing this. That's why they're like, wait, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. You know this crypto thing I've been pushing for 12 years or whatever, saying it does a bunch of things bitcoin doesn't. Yeah, please don't actually pay any attention to that. I was just, I was, I was on a payroll. I was having fun, I was making lots of money. You guys weren't really paying attention. Donald Trump. Yeah. You are going to come after us if we like, he bought a bunch of WBTC right. When he, when he realizes like that's not actually bitcoin, by the way, like coinbase points. Yeah, just. Man, this is what. It's fear based. It's not. They know they've been selling crap for years, but now they're like, we, we can't have Trump buying a bunch of crap. It's gonna. Absolutely. [01:10:34] Speaker B: It's gonna backfire. [01:10:35] Speaker A: Hard. Terrified. It's gotta be that. [01:10:38] Speaker D: Yeah, that's great. Don't we have like. I don't know if this is still a thing, but a while ago we had a bunch of corporate entities saying that they were not allowed to self custody and they were forced to use the custodian through some kind of something. [01:10:57] Speaker B: Like some fiduciary sort of regulation thing. Yeah. [01:11:02] Speaker D: We have the University of Austin which is pretty much self custodying their own stash. So the University of Austin can self custody but MicroStrategy can't. [01:11:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I have no idea. I don't know anything and I don't pretend to know anything about how like supposedly regulatory things land for banks, corporations and like how they're supposed to do stuff like that. Seems crazy. [01:11:34] Speaker C: Did you find anything about what I was talking about, the, the headline? [01:11:37] Speaker B: No, I have not. I haven't had two seconds to get into it and actually if I can. [01:11:43] Speaker C: Find it for, I guess for next time or I'll send it to you and you can talk about it on the next show or something. [01:11:48] Speaker B: But let's talk about it as if it's true. And then when we're wrong, we'll just establish a correction. But let's just go ahead and spread the misinformation. Now, the thing that I read later. [01:12:00] Speaker C: Like, very quietly, like, just a. Like a few days ago or a week ago, that it was now completely legal for banks to hold bitcoin, which it's been talked about that this was going to happen. Michael Saylor was talking about it. But it's now completely legal for banks to hold bitcoin, and they don't have to seek permission from anybody. So it is now fully arbitrarily now fully open. And so I would assume that that kind of opens pretty much any institution up. [01:12:30] Speaker B: I don't understand how. I mean, this is. That's stupid. I do know exactly how we got here, because there's a million other things that are just as stupid. But I don't understand how there's a. Like a bank has to ask for what they invest in. You know, like, think about how crazy that is that, like, regulations have just basically become a set of instructions for exactly how you have to do a thing. And if you don't do it that way, you can't do it. [01:12:59] Speaker C: You wouldn't want the government running your business. We don't. We don't want to tell you how to do things, but you can't do any of these things. [01:13:06] Speaker B: Yeah, but you can't. But you can't do. These are the instructions. Like. Like, compliance is basically a list of instructions now. Like, we've created a bunch. Like the. A huge portion of the economy is now just instruction followers for, like, bad business practices that don't even apply anymore. You know, like, the economy and our systems and everything has changed so much that you can't innovate if you're being regulatory. Like, if you're actually complying. [01:13:34] Speaker C: During COVID the entire problem. The entire problem was the health. Health and human services offices or whatever going around and like, issuing like. Like citations and stuff to grocery stores and local businesses and stuff that didn't have people wearing masks or that were trying to stay open anyway. And. And so under the guise of regulation, they're just telling you you can't operate your business this way. I mean, like, it's. It's just straight up, like the government controls everything. You know, it's perfectly. Like, I tried to. Like. Like, this is. You know, I shouldn't say this on a public thing, but, like, my My thinking was that go ahead and do it. If we were going to get out of the COVID craziness, the people shouldn't be protesting in front of anything other than, like, if you're going to violently target something, target the health, like your local health department. Like, because it's the local health department that is sending the officials out to, you know, to like, actually enforce these things. So, you know, it's just. It's just crazy. And never. The. All the problems, all the anger and the ire is never aimed at the right institution, of course. [01:14:47] Speaker B: No, no. And that's probably by. [01:14:51] Speaker C: By design. [01:14:52] Speaker B: There's probably a lot of defense running, you know, on, like, don't. Don't point it in the right direction. Just be mad. [01:14:59] Speaker C: Just. [01:14:59] Speaker B: Just be generally mad at somebody else. Go burn down a Hardee's, please. [01:15:04] Speaker A: Or a church. They like burning down churches. [01:15:07] Speaker D: Nobody knows what Hardee's means other than dust. [01:15:14] Speaker B: Go burn down an in and out Burger McDonald's. [01:15:20] Speaker A: To be fair, I've never heard of Hardy's North Carolina thing. [01:15:25] Speaker B: You know, Carl Juniors on the West Coast. You know, Carl Juniors. Okay, It. That's like, somehow it's like the. It's like the gross cousin of Hardee's. Hardee's is gross too, but the Hardee's is like the southern version of it. I remember when. When I went to. When I was living in la, I. I was like, that is a Hardee's, and it says Carl Junior's on the front of the building. What's happening right now? [01:15:48] Speaker A: That was like, this is it. [01:15:51] Speaker B: Bojangles. [01:15:52] Speaker A: In the UK, we have TK Maxx. And when I got to America, it was T.J. maxx. Like, is that. Oh, shit. Why did they do that? [01:16:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I remember that in Canada. I mean, of course, it could be that it's not the same store, but. But Ross is. I swear to God, Winners is the same. I mean, like, so technically, like, TJ Maxx is a lot like Ross. So maybe it's just a different company with the same business model, but, like. But like, Winners. It's called Winners in. In. In Canada. [01:16:22] Speaker A: Yeah, right. That's. I'm allergic to that store. It's like my girl's favorite place to go in the world. Every time I go in there, just start sneezing. I don't know what they've done. [01:16:31] Speaker B: But we can't go in, babe. I don't. I have a podcast later. I can't be sneezing. [01:16:38] Speaker D: The funniest thing is when, like, a brand Or a store goes into a different completely. Like they're a luxury brand in one country and they're a low rung brand another. Like when I was living in England, you had to make reservations to eat at a Pizza Hut. And like people dressed up, oh, that's the same. Go to a Pizza Hut. Swear to God. [01:17:00] Speaker B: That was. That's exactly what I did at Pizza Hut. [01:17:02] Speaker D: Yeah, right. And like H and M clothing over here, H and M clothing is like the cheapest clothing you can find. Over there, H and M was like pretty high end. Clothing is like. It's weird how they just. They decide different markets to go after in different countries. [01:17:20] Speaker B: Well then it becomes foreign food, you know, then it's. It's a fancy. Yeah, it's like, it's fancy foreign American food. You know, it's like a French place here. It's like, would you like. It's like, it's like, yeah, you wanna, you wanna come to Pizza Hut? That's. They see the same thing. They see sophisticated French. [01:17:43] Speaker A: French pizza. [01:17:43] Speaker D: Oh yeah. They think American Pizza Hut. [01:17:47] Speaker B: The Zipizza Hut. Okay, news items. Let's see what we got. Oh, Arc. [01:17:54] Speaker C: Oh, wait, wait, hold on. So Palo Paolo just bought like 8888 Bitcoin for tether. Like. [01:18:02] Speaker B: Oh, did he? [01:18:03] Speaker C: That one? Yeah. [01:18:03] Speaker B: Didn't even see that. I didn't even have it in my list. [01:18:06] Speaker A: That's pretty boss phone lying in bed. [01:18:12] Speaker D: I know. I wonder what percentage of Oracle transactions. [01:18:19] Speaker B: That's a fun number. [01:18:21] Speaker D: Do you all think all these round USD transactions I'm finding are actually like somehow Tether transactions? [01:18:29] Speaker B: How would they be transactions? You mean like, like I've always thought. [01:18:34] Speaker D: They were like ATM withdrawals or P2P transactions. I don't know. It's just sometimes it just doesn't make sense. Like why there's so many around USD. And then, you know, at the same time this round USD signal appeared so strongly. Like at the same time that this signal appeared so strongly for me is the exact same time Tether took off like it did. I mean, it might just be a coincidence. [01:18:59] Speaker B: I honestly think like it's about the frame of reference. Like I'm on a bitcoin standard, but when I move, my costs are in dollars. You know, like my bills are still in dollars. Like everything about my frame of reference for consumption is pretty much in dollars. Even when I'm buying stuff with sats, it's priced in dollars because it has the largest network. It just. That's completely unavoidable. And so when I Am moving stuff to my, like to fold or whatever to do bank or. I'm moving stuff to my business. I do it in set. I do. Like I'm moving $10,000 to the business. I'm moving $3,000 out. [01:19:39] Speaker D: Still the unit of account. [01:19:39] Speaker B: It's still the unit of account. I just think that's all it is. Like I don't, I do not think about UTX Oracle. I wish I did and I wish I could lie and say that I'm always thinking about you when, when I do a dollar value stable dollar transaction or whatever. Consciously, subconsciously you have, you have been Oracle. [01:20:01] Speaker D: That's what I'm saying. UTX Oracle relies on the subconscious man. You can't, you can't mess, can't fight that. It's just going to be there and fight it. But I do wonder if it's tether related somehow. [01:20:15] Speaker B: I mean it should, maybe not. I wouldn't be surprised if it was helping in some. I doubt it. [01:20:19] Speaker A: I think, I think most of the times that I'm trying to buy something with crypto and then the only option they give me is tether, I find that when I click through to it, it's never Bitcoin or liquid even as an option. It's always Ethereum or Tron or the other one. I can't remember what it is. So a lot of the tether use isn't bitcoin yet. And I even think that El Salvador Taproot assets announcement is years before anything actually happens there. I think Tether like tether like Bitcoin. They are bitcoiners and they own a lot of Bitcoin and they want to use Bitcoin because they think it's better to use Bitcoin than Ethereum. And there's actually some argument for that but at the same time I just. [01:21:04] Speaker C: A lot of argument for that. [01:21:06] Speaker A: Well, no, because it's always been a shitcode argument which is if we scam people using Bitcoin, that's better than if we scam people using Ethereum. And I'm like, no, it isn't that. [01:21:15] Speaker C: No, I just mean the interaction using Ethereum in any form or fashion is just horrible. You can't even pay fees from your Ethereum balance. What the fuck is that? Like you have to buy something else to make a transaction. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's the dumbest thing I've ever had to use. Like I've never used it. It's. [01:21:40] Speaker B: Yeah, he. So he had to use Tether once. [01:21:46] Speaker C: I think it was USDC or something. I had to receive it with, with like Cake Wallet or something. But then I couldn't. I had like to buy. I don't know, I had to buy. I can't remember what I had to buy. Ethereum maybe. Maybe that was it. I had to buy some Ethereum in order to move the USDC that moves on Ethereum or something. [01:22:07] Speaker A: I don't know. [01:22:08] Speaker C: It was really, really stupid though. And then I couldn't. I mean, of course this is a Cake Wallet thing. Well, I don't know, it may be an Ethereum thing, but I couldn't, I couldn't clean the last fractions of you know, whatever out of the wallet to like swap to Bitcoin or whatever because there was no like max Send or something that worked with it. Just everything about the whole process felt absolutely stupid and I just, I hated having to do it. But, but I mean, you know, whatever it, it was moving using USD or. Yeah, using USD tokens was still way easier than going through the bank. So, you know, it was still. Even with as shitty as it was, it was still better, man. [01:22:52] Speaker A: Ethereum is just the perfect overlap of decentralized when you need the advantage of centralized and centralized when you need the advantage of decentralized. Like it really overlaps. It's like. [01:23:07] Speaker C: In this special place where. [01:23:09] Speaker B: It'S so wonderful but that's an artifact way. That's funny. [01:23:15] Speaker A: It's just, it's the perfect. It's so much more complicated than anything else that could ever conceivably justify using a blockchain that that's inevitably where it would end up. So Vitalik went that triangle, right? But it's even that is being too kind. It's just, it's just a joke. Sorry. [01:23:34] Speaker B: Now it's better. Now it's all Solana man. [01:23:37] Speaker A: And Cardano, well, at least that's centralized when you need something to be centralized. That's the point. So like if you. [01:23:44] Speaker B: But it was funny. It was always the case. Like, you know, I remember God like a million years ago. It feels like having these conversations like, dude, if, if your whole thing is just like you have the utility of smart contracts and like, like if you think you're going to be a utility token for bullshit, somebody is just going to out bullshit you. Like, you're going, you are going to be fighting. He was like, oh, Cardano is going to take it all. It's like, no, Cardano is going to take a Ethereum's launch. Bitcoin is not going to give A flying about Cardano. It's not going to do anything to Bitcoin. But Ethereum. Yes. You guys have to worry because your claim to fame is that you're the best for building shitcoin systems and token things. And if they do it better, what the hell are you? Other than a complicated, bloated, semi centralized, semi decentralized version of what bitcoin does without any problem, you know, like just. It's ridiculous. [01:24:37] Speaker A: Greg Maxwell, man. What we do is better make a bold prediction computation. That was it. [01:24:43] Speaker B: That's it. That is it. That's one penetrable wall of bold prediction. [01:24:51] Speaker D: Crazy prediction. This year, Vitalik steps down. [01:24:58] Speaker B: I like that. That kind of feels. [01:25:00] Speaker D: I've just been feeling it. [01:25:01] Speaker A: I feel like kind of move like, I'm out of here. [01:25:05] Speaker B: I had to step away. The project's mature. [01:25:07] Speaker D: He found somebody new. [01:25:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:25:11] Speaker D: You know, it's time for somebody to take Ethereum in a different direction. [01:25:16] Speaker A: Yeah, they're definitely doing very badly. I like the meme guy posted, which is when the NFT isn't worth 1F anymore and the 1F isn't worth 4K anymore and 4K isn't worth 4K anymore. [01:25:28] Speaker C: That is the best. The best meme. [01:25:36] Speaker B: Shit. Dude, this is kind of cool. On the political. Yeah. [01:25:46] Speaker D: Oh, I was just going to say I have Ethereum pre mine. Send all your hate to me. Like I'm the Ethereum pre mine guy. [01:25:55] Speaker B: Is that, Is that, Is that real? Do you have that? You don't? [01:26:00] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I don't anymore. I actually sold it. Well, I lost all my everything, but yeah, dude, I. I sent Vitalik. I sent Vitalik some Bitcoin in 2012 or 2013 to get some of that pre mine before it even launched. [01:26:17] Speaker B: Yeah, scam, son. [01:26:18] Speaker D: I'm the bad guy. [01:26:19] Speaker B: It's me. It's me. Dude, you are out of the round table. [01:26:24] Speaker D: I just wanted. It feels good to get that off my chest. [01:26:26] Speaker B: Honestly, that is pretty amazing. [01:26:28] Speaker C: I'm impressed. [01:26:28] Speaker B: I don't. [01:26:29] Speaker A: It feels great. [01:26:30] Speaker B: You are a king scammer. You were scamming before. It was cool to scam. [01:26:33] Speaker D: I bet mechanic does too. [01:26:35] Speaker A: No, man, I. I was. I admit I was interested in it. [01:26:38] Speaker B: For the record, because, like, there were moments I considered. [01:26:41] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I looked. I never considered. I never considered buying any. But I was interested in some of the functionality and I thought we could, you know, it's. Maybe we can do some sophisticated things. As a blockchain, like, I wasn't that jaded yet. I thought, like, everyone Maybe had some interesting ideas and. But I remember, like, I remember just. I was like, hi. I was smoking a lot of weed back then and I wrote a post on bitcoin talk. Like, wow, if Ethereum can do this and that and the other, then bitcoin's right. I remember writing this and a bunch of bitcoin maxis back then just responded like, dude, give me some of what you're smoking. And I was like, how did they know I was high? How did they know? [01:27:24] Speaker B: It's like, I don't have enough. [01:27:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And then that was just, you know, I was. I never really followed it up. I just thought, well, maybe I just blew my own mind with my intoxication and this is just kind of boring and now. But I watched it from the sidelines and then I watched the dao hack happened. And I remember being in the Ethereum Core Slack being like, you guys, you can't. You can't fork out. Like, bitcoin didn't fork the Mt. Gox theft out. Like, we were just like, yeah, that's what happens if you. If your bitcoins get stolen, they are gone. [01:27:57] Speaker B: I like, pseudo pleaded with people. I was like, listen, like. And I was already, like, kind of getting past my crypto has, like a purpose phase. Even though I still had, you know, like, at the beginning there. There was. Everybody goes through their crypto trading phase, right? [01:28:18] Speaker A: I didn't. [01:28:19] Speaker B: And the. Oh, I did. I totally did. [01:28:21] Speaker A: I never tried it. [01:28:22] Speaker B: Jeff too. [01:28:25] Speaker C: What was the coin that had. It was like, the first one that had, like, they advertised. They talked about supernodes that was like, maybe supposed to have some sort of privacy or something. [01:28:33] Speaker D: Dash. [01:28:34] Speaker A: Dash. [01:28:34] Speaker C: That was it. Yeah, I was interested. I did. I never had some. [01:28:40] Speaker B: I ran a note. [01:28:42] Speaker C: I don't know if I ever bought any Dash or if I. I don't know. It seems like I was interested in that. And then. And then litecoin was really the only. Like. Like, litecoin was one of the only ones that I ever actually owned that was like, you know, like, I made a decent trade on litecoin a couple times, but it was such a stupid. [01:29:01] Speaker B: But, like, sounds like intuitive argument. Like, silver to bitcoin's gold. [01:29:09] Speaker A: Silver. They kept. They kept themselves in their own lane. When you think about it, silver is just the worst version of gold in every way, except it's more practical as a medium of exchange because you can have silver coins. There is no equivalent in bitcoin versus something with faster blocks. It's not better for any possible reason. You just have to wait more blocks for confirmation so it works out the same. It's not ASIC resistant like it says it is, because that's not a thing. And, like. But it stayed in its lane. It always was like, no, bitcoin's better than us. Like, they always tried to do that. [01:29:44] Speaker B: We're silver. It's okay. We're silver. But by us. [01:29:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we're good. No, forget all that stuff, man. Like, I. I never make the first. Sorry, go ahead, Steve. [01:29:57] Speaker D: Oh, no, I was just. Didn't mean to interrupt. I was just. Sometimes I think about a full ASIC for core. Like, all the bugs in level db, all of it. Just a full ASIC for the whole freaking node. [01:30:10] Speaker B: Just hardware. [01:30:11] Speaker D: Is that a dream? [01:30:12] Speaker C: Just like. [01:30:12] Speaker A: Then we get straight hardware that's very sticky and we can't. That's. That's ossification on steroids, brother. [01:30:23] Speaker B: Very next update. Well, there goes my asic. [01:30:27] Speaker A: I mean, there might be a way to do it without that, but I don't know. I'm pretty much on. I'm kind of on Team Ossify. But let's not go down that rabbit hole now. Let's. Is there another news item we should cover before. [01:30:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So the Fair Act. This is actually cool because it's good to finally see things happening on this front now that I think everybody's like, okay, whatever strategic reserve is done or it happened and, you know, now you can just complain about it, but I'll complain about it. Yeah. The Fair act aims to protect Bitcoin holders from civil asset forfeiture. So outside of digging into the specifics of this, it's actually really, really encouraging to finally see people start thinking about, like, okay, Bitcoin users, how do we protect Bitcoin users? How do we have a way to establish the rights of ownership for Bitcoin in the political environment? Because you don't. [01:31:22] Speaker A: You don't. I'm sorry to interrupt, but that is. That is the mistake of the space is getting these guys in any way, shape or form defining what it means. Like, so when RFK said, I will write into American law the right for an American to run a bitcoin node, I'm like, don't. You do not want the US Government saying what a bitcoin node is and what a bitcoin node isn't. Leave it the heck alone. Because that's all that does is create just the worst kind of captcha imaginable. So they just need to leave it alone. Like the Bitcoin network Tells me whether I own my coins or not. And that's all that. That's all that's needed. Anything external to that is capturable. [01:32:03] Speaker B: I think there's a gray area there. I mean, I think you're. I think you're right from a. From a concrete position when it comes to like the Bitcoin network tells me what, What I own and it. And that. That's it. But in the context of how things are used, in the absence of some sort of a definition, this is why I read. Was it Nicholas Doria? Yeah, I think it was. Nicholas Doria's piece on custody, on defining what custody means, like, very, very concretely for the, for the context of layer two, is that you have the ability to take by yourself. You can remove it. You can remove funds. So ARK is not custodial because you can always exit from ark. If ARK disappears, if everybody else disappears, you have enough information to take it a chain practically. [01:32:53] Speaker A: You might be limited, but technically you're right. [01:32:55] Speaker B: Here's the thing though, is that if you don't have concrete language, you. Now obviously it could go against us. It could work not in our favor if they are defining something that they want to find. But if you don't have concrete language, they're just going to use the precedent of some stupid court case that has nothing to do with it, where it was like, what do you do about somebody's beanie babies or some like. It just something that's totally irrelevant, that doesn't even really apply to anything in cryptography or the Internet or something from the freaking 1800s. And then that's going to be applied and then that's going to be the precedent. And then it's going to be that you can't own Bitcoin because you just have a piece of information and you know, it's not about the fourth Amendment because of, you know, Bobby versus the state of California. And you know, like, they're. They are just going to take the broadest. It's like the commerce clause. If you do not give explicit, like if you do not lay it out hard, this is exactly what it means. And defend the fact that like, no, Bitcoin is property people or, or Bitcoin is money or whatever it is, you know, like custody is this. Then you have. You're going to have. No. I know, but you're going to have the tornado cash situations where they're going to be like, is this a. Is this a facilitator of payment? You know, like. And I even think that bad Definition, like not, not the best of the best, but iffy, that has a clear line is actually better for a general economic system. Like, like, you know, whether or not it's red, yellow or green, like maybe there's a better way to do that, but it's more important that everybody's on the same page about what the hell to do when you get to the intersection. And because of that, I actually think it's really important that we do define the simplest version of it. The simplest, like it needs to fit on half a page, but we need to define certain things about Bitcoin because it's not the same as fiat. Well, it's just not the same tool. And otherwise fiat rules will get applied to it and it will make no fucking sense. [01:35:11] Speaker C: Yeah, and not to suggest that any politician is like intelligent or forward looking or anything like that, but I'm already offended. [01:35:18] Speaker A: I'm already offended. [01:35:21] Speaker B: How dare you? [01:35:21] Speaker A: How dare you say that? [01:35:22] Speaker C: I think that there is, you know, the government is essentially a morally bankrupt institution that is always striving for legitimacy. And if you were intelligent enough to understand that, you know, about your position as a government oligarch or whatever, it would actually be in your favor to have a well defined thing that says that you can't take bitcoin as part of the rules, that you have to like that limit your power. Because bitcoin already says that you can't take Bitcoin. So you don't want to be in a situation where you are trying to do something which reality will not let you do it. It makes you look weak. And so, so like this actually is, is, is something that would be in the favor of just government legitimacy in general. Because they're going to bump up against this at some point. If, if they think that they can just do anything they want, they're going to bump up against this at some point and it's going to make them look absolutely ridiculous, which I would actually maybe prefer. But I don't, you know, I just, I don't know. It's, it's not, it's not unreasonable to, for them to actually embrace this and put a rule in place because it, it will actually save them from looking really stupid at some point in the future. [01:36:38] Speaker B: Any other, any other comments on politically defining ownership, regulations, all that bullshit? [01:36:47] Speaker A: I like the way they redefined their own bitcoin stash as a strategic bitcoin reserve. Right. They didn't actually buy any. They just, no, they just. [01:36:58] Speaker B: This. Is this silk. It was Silk Road confiscation. Coins. A strategic bitcoin reserve. Strategic bitcoin reserve, yes. [01:37:05] Speaker A: I like how it became a strategy at one point. [01:37:08] Speaker D: Do we know where that story. [01:37:09] Speaker A: It was not a strategy before. We just had them. Now it's a strategy. [01:37:12] Speaker B: Guys, it was happenstance. [01:37:14] Speaker A: Like, this is. Maybe that's what. [01:37:16] Speaker D: Michael, coins on Coinbase. What do we have? Like, do we know the custodian for those coins that the government has or do we have addresses or. [01:37:29] Speaker B: I don't know. Off the top of my head. You want to hear some really good news, though? [01:37:34] Speaker D: I don't know either. [01:37:34] Speaker B: Chainalysis is getting sued and that's just fun. [01:37:39] Speaker D: Hell yeah. [01:37:40] Speaker B: It's for allegedly facilitating fraud and the whole Celsius network crap. But I don't really care why. This is kind of great. [01:37:49] Speaker A: Fantastic. Every bitcoin has an incumbent responsibility on them to figure out the heuristics chain analysis firms use and deliberately do the opposite thing. And then get arrested, I guess, and then have all that. Just create as many problems for these guys as possible. It is your duty as a bitcoiner. [01:38:08] Speaker C: Well, and this is the fact that was. It was like Jeff Garzick was involved with chainalysis, right? Like, like the fact that Jeff. And Jeff Garzick is like friends with Steve Patterson or Steve Patterson's older brother and Roger Ver. Like all these people are like, kind of like in the same. They're all in caps supposedly, but they're. They're in, like. This is, this is what I'm talking about is that like, there's this like, group of libertarians and I think Roger falls into that group that just have like no ethics whatsoever. Like, like, if you can fucking, oh, well, somebody's going to do this, you know, regulatory stuff and, and help the government collect information, so it might as well be us and so we can make money on it and whatever else. And, and like, maybe they tell themselves that, like, well, if we're the gatekeepers of this information to the government, maybe we can stop it from being as bad as it was, you know. You know, maybe that's part of what they're telling themselves, but it's just all, you know, like to have an caps that are building the very tools that, you know, like, it's just gross irresponsible. [01:39:12] Speaker A: Libertarians do the biggest disservice to the entire thing. It's like, you can't. If you can't demonstrate that, like, you need to be extra hyper vigilant about the fact that you can take responsibility for your actions and how they impact Other people. If you demonstrate to the world that you can't do that, then you are everything statists need to justify the existence of a state. And you know, because that's the first argument everyone always makes is, well, you know, what are you going to do about all these nut jobs and awful people without a government? Then you're like, well, the government is these awful people. So what are you. Yeah, right. Psychopaths. Like, you see that meme Joyce posted? It was like, someone's like, IRS goes up to the guy and just goes, you owe me loads of money. And the guy's like, I don't have any money anymore. I just trade bottle caps now. And the IRS is like, that won't work. Those aren't worth anything. Good. And then they just stare at each other for a while. Just psychopaths. Actual straight up psychopaths. Like, I want your stuff. Give it to me. [01:40:26] Speaker C: Was it like they just were. They just bombed an apartment complex and like, everybody was like, yay. Yeah, we, like the one guy we were going after went into an apartment complex where lots of people live. We just leveled the place. We got him. Yay. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Like, if. If like a us. If somebody, if a U.S. official walked into an apartment complex and another country leveled that apartment complex because they've been trying to get him, like, like, can you imagine, like, that's just, I don't. [01:40:57] Speaker B: Know, the blinders on, like the utter failure of perspective for stuff like that. It's like, oh, well, they shouldn't have started a war. It's like, can you imagine if, like, let's say your neighbor, you know, raped somebody or went on like a mass killing spree and went off and like, killed 20 people and then I just burned down your house, along with everybody else's house, like on your street and killed everybody to get this guy. And then my. And when somebody tried to defend you, or let's say you weren't there and it was just your family, it's just your kids and your wife, no big deal. And you said, how could you do this? It's like, well, you shouldn't have, you shouldn't have started a mass. Like, you shouldn't have let your neighbor go and massacre a whole bunch of people. What's wrong with you? You're, you're, you're in the same neighborhood as this guy. How could you do this? You are, you are guilty alongside this. You have allowed this to happen. Like, it's just bonkers. [01:42:02] Speaker A: UK show, peep show. It's a funny show. You hear what people are thinking. And there's some guy like messes something up and his friend. Everyone just looks at his friend like, this is all your fault. And he's like, how's this my fault? And one guy just goes, well, you know him. You shouldn't know him. [01:42:20] Speaker B: Why did you bring him to this party? All right, now we got a bunch of bad news. We can. [01:42:28] Speaker D: I've got some breaking news. You got breaking news now I've got breaking news. Yeah. [01:42:35] Speaker B: Live on the round. [01:42:37] Speaker D: I'm excited about. Related to Time. It's not that big a deal. Let me get back to it real quick. You know that guy Sani Time Chain Index. He claims to know how much coins everybody has. Coinbase and everything. Apparently he just sold his database to Mempool Space. [01:42:57] Speaker A: Interesting. [01:42:59] Speaker B: Oh, that is breaking news. [01:43:01] Speaker D: He just announced that on Twitter. [01:43:02] Speaker C: So that's pretty interesting. [01:43:04] Speaker B: Steve doing the Lord's work and staying on. That'd be interesting if people's updated. [01:43:08] Speaker A: That's ocean just found the floor. [01:43:10] Speaker D: You know about me. [01:43:11] Speaker A: I'm all about some breaking news anymore. [01:43:14] Speaker B: He's trying to get the news out quick. [01:43:20] Speaker D: So that's interesting. If Mempool Space is going to show like, you know, all of Coinbase's addresses and stuff like that and I don't know, I would. Never mind. That seems like an impossible job. [01:43:34] Speaker B: I would love to see them. [01:43:35] Speaker D: Yeah, they might like. [01:43:36] Speaker B: I would. I would love to see it and then see like, how could you. How could you. How could you really get in trouble though, for just like posting public stuff from. This is my new public ledger. [01:43:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:43:48] Speaker B: You know, that'd be an interesting battle. [01:43:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:43:52] Speaker B: Not that I'm like on the Mempool guys, but I think they should always. [01:43:58] Speaker A: I'm waiting for. [01:43:59] Speaker D: Yeah, but I mean, it's kind of an art. Like, I've always wondered how the people that claim to know like glassnode and stuff. It's just like these clustering statistical algorithms. They think they know some addresses. They think this address is related to that address. I mean it's like chain analysis type probabilistic stuff. I just. I don't know. But it's cool that Mempool thinks it's legitimate enough to buy it. [01:44:24] Speaker A: Well, Mempool is also like, they are the best designers in the space and. But they use some of the. Every heuristic they use almost is broken like. And all of the information and stuff. I've been in so many. I love those guys. I have a love hate relationship because Half of the stuff on the website's wrong. So there was the empty block explainer. You know, if there's an empty block, there's a little button that comes up that says, why is this block empty? And it takes you through to their knowledge database. And it was completely wrong, what was written there. And I wrote the correct explanation, and then Matt Corallo corrected it to being wrong again. And now. Now it's. It was wrong at the time and it's become correct because actually, it turns out a bunch of miners now do mine on top of blocks they haven't validated yet, which is insane. And that wasn't the reason for why blocks are empty, but apparently that's a practice. Now. Mine is a pool will send out a bunch of work based on a block it hasn't verified yet, which is nuts to me. But, you know, some pools actually do that. Foundry still doesn't do the empty block speed up at all, which is also crazy. [01:45:35] Speaker B: Let's hit bad news now. I think we can. I can hit. We can machine gun some of this. So IMF requests, which. This is funny because it doesn't seem to have done anything, but IMF has requested that El Salvador halt bitcoin purchases as part of their loan agreement, which I think this happened right at the end of the last month, but you can still see their address. And he's still bragging about it on Twitter, and he's still just buying every day. So I don't even know. I. I, like, I don't. I don't even know if that's relevant, if there's like, a day that this starts. And so he's just like, buying all the way up until then. I don't know. It's. It's funny if that is actually part of the agreement and he's just violating, like, he's just like, I don't care. Whatever. [01:46:24] Speaker C: Maybe he agreed to Paul's to halt buying after, like, August or October of 2025. And he's just thinking he's going to play the. Play the cycle a little bit. [01:46:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it seems to be, like, wasn't one of the stipulations. It doesn't kick in till June, I think. [01:46:42] Speaker B: Oh, is that right? [01:46:43] Speaker A: Yeah, someone told me that and I believed them. So it's definitely true. [01:46:49] Speaker B: Let's spread the misinformation. Let's just go ahead and get the misinformation out there and then we'll. You know what? We won't verify it later. We'll just. We'll just wait for Someone to tell us that we're wrong. And angrily. We're very defensively and angrily tell us we're wrong on Twitter. And then I'll double down and be like, no, we verified this. You suck a dick. And then I'll block them. [01:47:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds good. Remember, take things personally and get in fights with strangers online. The Dalai Lama is absolute most. So anyway, it did seem like they wrote. They wrote in some solid stuff, like, for their intention of, like, undermining bitcoin. It wasn't just like, it wasn't. You can get around this. If you think about it for five minutes, it was like, we are going to give you the money in chunks. And the minute you start buying bitcoin in any capacity, even if it's with, you know, separate funds from somewhere, that's when you stop getting the money. So don't even think about it. So somehow he's managed to get around it for now during the run up to it. But I think. And he wrote. Bukele wrote this really passive aggressive tweet where he's like, we're still buying all of you. Quote, bitcoiners that are doubting us. I couldn't believe he got, like, so bitchy about it. I'm like, look, man, a lot of bitcoiners moved to your country to, like, who are very impressed with you in 2021. They're pretty disappointed right now, which is fair enough. You know, I know lots of bitcoins personally that have, like, bought real estate there and lived there, learned Spanish and all that stuff. So, yeah, let them be annoyed because this is pretty annoying. And we understand that you have other things to do. Not just buy, you know, buy bitcoin and make. Make this a new tourist hotspot for a bunch of rich bitcoiners. But still, the passive aggression felt a bit psychopathic to me. Like, this guy takes things quite personally and, you know, it's offended a little bit. [01:48:41] Speaker B: Huge word. [01:48:42] Speaker C: Yeah, well, he's the leader of a minority. I'm. I'm not sure that that's, you know, out of character for, you know, someone in his position. [01:48:51] Speaker B: Yeah, we already talked about, like, not. Let's not. Let's avoid saying good things about politicians if we can. [01:48:57] Speaker A: Yeah, fair enough. So I think probably what ends up happening is by June, El Salvador does just genuinely stop buying bitcoins. I don't if. Unless they can find a workaround, and if they do find a workaround, I'll be very, very impressed because the IMF is. [01:49:13] Speaker B: Maybe they're Going to mine it with their volcano. [01:49:15] Speaker A: They also. [01:49:16] Speaker B: That would be part of the rules. [01:49:17] Speaker C: That was part of the rules. [01:49:18] Speaker A: That was mine. [01:49:19] Speaker B: It. [01:49:19] Speaker A: You can't no government infrastructure. You cannot have cheap be owned by the government. Everything about it was like, you cannot do anything to do with bitcoin. [01:49:29] Speaker B: Bad news for El Salvador. But this is actually really kind of cool news for bitcoin. [01:49:36] Speaker A: I agree. [01:49:37] Speaker B: Because it shows that they're sweating like they don't know what to. They see this as a threat. [01:49:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:49:44] Speaker B: There's no other way to. [01:49:46] Speaker A: Yeah, they don't like it. I completely agree. And all of the rules show that they put time and effort into trying to do as much damage to bitcoin as possible here and to undermine it. But guess what? This is like, perfect demonstration of antifragility here. Bitcoin only benefits from this because all of the people down on the ground in El Salvador have to basically go, all right, we had it comfy for a while. But bitcoin is bottom up. It is grassroots. The merchants, we've got to accept this stuff. Bitcoin beach, it's still here. No one was using chivo anyway. They were all using wallet satoshi or blink or whatever. We will just carry on pushing for adoption. Because the government went, bitcoin's legal tender here. Everything's changed. Doesn't mean anyone actually used it. And actually in most cases, they didn't. So all the grassroots bitcoiners on the ground still just have to carry on doing what they were doing anyway in a country that is run by someone that clearly likes it and isn't going to throw them in jail over it anytime soon, but can't formally endorse it anymore. So ultimately, this is genuinely good for bitcoin. And that's not cope to say that most, like hardcore principled bitcoiners were never super stoked about the, you know, the appearance of legal tender laws in favor of bitcoin, because why are we forcing people to use this thing in practice? We know no one was forced, but no one really celebrated a government saying you have to use bitcoin. That was not a good thing. That was not what we're here to do. And it's congruent. [01:51:10] Speaker C: Historic thing, but not a good thing, really. [01:51:13] Speaker B: No, it was wild when it happened, like, and I was. I was blown away by the fact that it happened because it was such a show of legitimacy. But absolutely, from the context of is this good for bitcoin and is this the way you would want, like, forcing it as legal tender the notion of that or like partnering with governments. Like well, no, you know, but it was a big deal and it was awesome. But still no for it's kind. It's a little bit like the strategic Bitcoin reserve. The United States government lending legitimacy saying that this is an important. And actually the IMF saying El Salvador don't. That's actually a big deal to its legitimacy saying this is something to be concerned about. This is now something on our radar is actually in. In kind of the same realm. [01:52:05] Speaker A: But you know, domino theory. Remember domino theory? [01:52:09] Speaker C: Brain bug meme. It's afraid. [01:52:12] Speaker B: It's afraid. [01:52:13] Speaker A: Do you remember domino theory? It was like if one country's communist and it works, they all will be. [01:52:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:52:21] Speaker A: So we have to go in there and bomb Vietnam forever. [01:52:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:52:24] Speaker A: So this is like their same kind of fear here. Or at least you know, I don't really. I'm weird with communism because like McCarthy era was like government saying communism is bad, but communism is bad. So I don't really, I don't know how that works. But I think that they're very much like El Salvador can't be a success story and we need to prevent that from being the case no matter how many billions of dollars it costs us which we can just print anyway, so who cares. But you know, they had to pull. [01:52:51] Speaker B: Their finger out and do something here that's pretty good. That could go in the, that could go in the. Good news, good news for bitcoin, bad news for I'm very sorry for all. All of my El Salvador bitcoin brothers. Sad news. We've got a bunch of. And in fact the last like 2 or 3 HRF newsletter have been like I've been following a bunch of these. There are so many countries right now trying to. They're working on CBDDC stuff. The ECB is expanding some euro system initiative. They are going to finish their digital euro testing by October of this year. There were like four or five other countries in the last financial freedom report that were doing this. The Federal Reserve. And this is kind of funny because of their wording. The Federal Reserve has released this paper about Heraclius, whatever the, I don't know some stupid ass name but it's a byzantine fault tolerant database system for payments. And all I can think is that they're posturing like they're trying to use Bitcoin language in their CBDC shit which is so hilarious that like it's such a. We're winning like the, the culture game or the, the perspective game that bitcoin is seen as the thing to copy and everybody sees the CBDC is like the obvious like bullshit play to just backdoor the whole world financial system, you know And I'm, I'm curious how any of this like I've been hearing about CBDCs and there's a bunch of like, I think Nigeria has the cbdc. Like China is trying to push it in certain areas and I know there are certain places where it supposedly has uptake but I don't know a lot of it and I don't want to be, I don't want to be naive about this either but it kind of feels like is there going to be uptake for any of this? Like, like don't they still kind of have to get adoption? You know and I guess we could just assume that maybe the, the government just goes full on you're going to adopt this and you know you have to have this available in your store and a lot of them will. But I don't, I don't know some. [01:55:22] Speaker C: Other country like in the EU or Canada or whatever. Well, whatever. I support some other country going like full on authoritarian and enforcing that on people so that we can see how much of a disaster it is and. [01:55:37] Speaker A: Thanks bro. [01:55:38] Speaker C: Make a huge stink around the world. [01:55:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Where do you live, Mechanic? [01:55:42] Speaker A: Listen, I live where your girlfriend, so maybe I know it. [01:55:46] Speaker C: Dude, it's so bad, it's so bad how like Yalls political system has gone insane and they're important. They're now like sort of electing, appointing this like new complete authoritarian. [01:55:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's. You know what really makes me laugh is that the, the unwinnable like populist candidate that's like the thing we'd never get but that could at least afford to make some outlandish policies like abolishing income taxes, stuff like that. They offered us a 900 discount on our taxes. That was the, that's the like good option that you wouldn't dare dream of. That's, that's our Donald Trump. That's like, you know, so just like, dude, I pay like 68 grand a year in taxes. The idea that would be like 67,100 and that would motivate Canada to switch from red to blue. Oh my, like the colors are flipped. Right. Red here is the, is the, the communists and blue is the slightly less communist. But it should be like they're just. [01:56:46] Speaker B: Communist versus the slightly less communist. [01:56:49] Speaker A: Yeah, but I mean they're still all like, they're all mad Zionists and they're all like Just completely ridiculous. So I'm just. It's an embarrassing country. I genuinely am very embarrassed about just the kind. Like, back in the day, a Canadian flag was. I support the trucker protest against the COVID tyranny. And it became a hate crime to wave a Canadian flag for like a year. Then Trump talked about Canada becoming the 51st state, and everyone started waving them again and saying they would take up arms to defend Canada, which is the most ironic thing ever because there is no respect for gun rights or any. [01:57:28] Speaker C: Sort of equivalent have guns there. I just. [01:57:30] Speaker A: Not even people will illegally take up guns in order to righteously defend Canada from becoming a country that would respect your right to take up guns. That's how confused and enslaved the population here is. [01:57:44] Speaker C: We will happily accept a delivery from the United States of guns so that we can fight you. [01:57:50] Speaker A: You know what they said my rifle got made illegal by Trudeau a few months ago. And they said not to worry. All of the confiscated rifles will be donated to Ukraine. Which was just like. I feel like they were just trying to annoy me personally with that one. [01:58:11] Speaker C: Oh, my God. [01:58:12] Speaker B: Oh, my God. That's a wonderful positive note. Canada is dying and there is no patriotism. Let's end on that note. I actually do. I'm hitting my time here. [01:58:26] Speaker A: It's a pleasure, guys. [01:58:28] Speaker B: Always a pleasure, man. Good catching up. And, you know, for the people in the video, I'm going to show you guys how awesome shout out to Bitcoin Pup for making us all orcs, except for Jeff. Jeff is a human. [01:58:42] Speaker C: Well, it's Steve. Not really an orc, is he? [01:58:45] Speaker B: He's got ear. He's got the ears. He's got orc ears. He's like half and half. He's like. You're. [01:58:50] Speaker D: I liked that. [01:58:51] Speaker B: You. You had sex with an orc. Steve is your child. [01:58:57] Speaker C: Steve is my love child. [01:58:58] Speaker B: I thought about your bastard son. [01:59:00] Speaker D: I thought about making it my profile picture, actually. [01:59:04] Speaker C: Great picture of me. [01:59:07] Speaker B: So everybody who watches the video will get to see the picture. We're gonna put it up. [01:59:11] Speaker A: Boom. [01:59:11] Speaker B: Bitcoin. [01:59:12] Speaker C: Ocean found another block. [01:59:14] Speaker A: We found one block during this podcast. [01:59:16] Speaker C: One block in the pipe. [01:59:17] Speaker A: A great podcast, but it's like you. [01:59:20] Speaker B: Did that last time. That's great. We've been live breaking News. [01:59:25] Speaker A: Ocean is over 6x ash. So, like, anyone that wants to mine with us is going to have a good time now. It's not like the bigger we get, the better it gets. So we're in a good spot now. We should be at escape velocity like other People can join now without having to wait ages for a block. And that. [01:59:41] Speaker C: That's awesome. [01:59:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:59:43] Speaker B: Hell yeah. [01:59:44] Speaker A: We have bootstrapped. Gentlemen, that is. [01:59:47] Speaker C: That is the best news because that is a sign that mining is being decentralized. [01:59:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:59:54] Speaker B: Hell yeah. [01:59:55] Speaker A: It's working well. Miners are liking making their own blocks. They're making more money doing it and they realize it's not that difficult to do. I'm going to make some tutorials soon but I'm really hoping some. You know, it's on Ubuntu. It's really easy. You can just sudo apt install knots and then sudo apt install datum and that's basically it. [02:00:15] Speaker C: Like hell yeah. [02:00:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:00:17] Speaker B: That's awesome. Well, wow guys, it's been a good one. I'll catch you on the next round table later. [02:00:25] Speaker C: Later. [02:00:25] Speaker D: See y'all later. [02:00:31] Speaker B: And I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. There was actually a major topic that I thought we would break into that we did not get to talk about. And I'll let we're actually going to save it because there will be a point where we cross that boundary on the hash power and Steve just had a really great take on it and he was the one who brought it up. So I'm going to, I'm going to leave it to him because it's, it's an evergreen thing. It's only something that's going to get more and more relevant. So not necessarily a had to be covered this month but it would be a really cool topic. So stay tuned, don't forget to subscribe and don't miss roundtable number nine because that's when it might come back. But there were just a few news items that we did not get to hit. So I want to go through those really quick so that we don't miss the major things for the month of. What's the month? March. It's March. I just had a baby. She's a month old so. And this was our second kid. So I've got an almost three year old too. So forgive me that I don't know what month it is. It's April 1st. Today. Boom. Bullet number one. US President brokers a prisoner swap releasing the BTCE founder Alexander Vinick. So what's interesting about this is that this was actually basically a political move to garner a little bit of favor or to improve US and Russia relationship, which the absolute reckless and just insanity of people trying to push for a war between the two largest nuclear powers in the world who just have no comprehension of what that would actually Mean, if you're talking about a hot war between the US And Russia. But it's also just interesting that, you know, a bitcoin, a cryptocurrency exchange is kind of playing a part in this because Vinneck was arrested back in 2017 and moved around a bit. This was all in relation to, well, part of it was in relation to quote, unquote, laundering, Mt. Gox Bitcoin back into circulation. And this was done knowingly. And then he confessed and he pled guilty to committing this, the conspiracy to commit money laundering. But he was in exchange for Mark Fogel, who was imprisoned in Russia for drug use. So Vinnick got sent back to Russia and we got Mark Fogel, which, especially for drug use, just. I don't know. I don't have. I don't have this. Like, I don't understand why we're putting people in cages for things they do for themselves. I just don't understand why we put people in cages for things they do to themselves. Like, you have the right to screw up your life and do stupid things. You don't have the right to force it on somebody else. But anyway, I'm curious if he ends up in the US in prison in the US because he still committed a crime in the US as well as Russia, even though I'm sure Russian prison and sentences regarding drugs are probably worse. But I don't know. I don't know. Hard to assume a lot of these things these days. You would also think that the UK imprisons fewer people for tweeting than Russia. You'd be wrong. Be wrong by a long shot, actually. Number two, the Bitcoin Humanitarian Alliance, a global initiative leveraging bitcoin for freedom and humanitarian causes. This is a group, a new initiative focusing on outreach, on education, on very grassroots adoption and use cases. And it's good to see, you know, this is actually in line with, you know, the IMF kind of going after El Salvador. I like to see things pulling back from the state and then a refocus on the grassroots, just like bitcoin mechanics had. Because this is ultimately a subversive technology. And it can only really. The revolution can only happen from the bottom up. And that is what this is. This is a technological revolution, and it has to be with people using Bitcoin. And I just love to see more initiatives and time, energy and capital being committed to that cause. Good news. Number three, ARC Protocol implementation has been launched on signet for developer testing. This is really cool. Ark is one of the most promising second layer, like Non custodial systems that I've seen in a really long time. And I still think we need CTV and CSFs. But the idea of just seeing this in development, seeing this kind of get, you know, beat against and you know, continuing stair stepping development in that direction. This is one of the coolest, like kind of pooled transactions and pooled ownership systems that essentially extends the concept of the Lightning channel pool. It's not quite like that because it has a quote unquote service provider, somebody that's basically operating the Ark itself. But it serves essentially the same purpose in pooling together large groups of people that can then quote unquote separate out all of these balances. But then these balances can be lightning channels that are presumed open open because anybody can open them non custodially like by themselves. And then those can be used for liquidity on the Lightning Network. And then you can have these giant kind of decentralized non custodial hubs all over the Lightning Network that just add massive amounts of liquidity. And then Lightning Network is this kind of this large payment, decentralized payment network tapestry and system of liquidity that just connects it all together. I just see a pretty wild future and ARC is such a great example of how this can be extended. And I love to see continued development on this because I think this could be a really big one in my opinion. Number four, the first public pool block was mined by a self hosted user. So this is something. I noticed it specifically on Umbrel. Like you can download it for Umbrel but it is a solo mining pool. So this is just another example which also on which we did talk about in the show but a bit Axe Miner also mined a bitcoin block. I think there were two bitaxes this past month. That's what I thought. I only have one listed down down here so maybe the other one was a little bit older than I remember and I put it down in a different month. But regardless it's just, it's really cool. I feel like there's there's some really awesome things happening in the solo mining and in the gorilla mining front and. And I love to see development in that because that is another step back towards the grassroots and the real heart of what bitcoin is in my opinion. DMND, which I don't know them launches the Stratum V2 mining pool. It's number five. Number five. DMND who I do not know launches the stratum a stratum V2 mining pool. So this is Stratum's updated one that allows you to do templates. And I don't know exactly how they do that in their pool. I don't know if it actually is meaningful in that sense, but it's really cool to see. Even if. Even if it's not as simplistic as an implementation, it's good to see competition and the idea of pools and decentralizing block templates and giving the power back to the miners themselves, because I think that is the lowest hanging fruit by far for things that would massively, massively decentralize and benefit the resilience and robustness of the Bitcoin network. That is not at all a difficult technical problem. It's a difficult network bootstrap problem, but it is not a hard technical problem. So the more the merrier. I would love everybody, everybody, make your own freaking protocol. Don't care. Let's do this. 6. The U.S. treasury has removed tornado cash from the sanctions list. Big step in the right direction for the tornado cash stuff. Still in custody, still going on, but a big step in the right direction. The UK orders Apple to give them a backdoor into icloud accounts. And Apple, instead of giving them a backdoor, apparently is just removing the encryption for everybody in the UK first. God just. The government just sucks. Just awful, arrogant authoritarian assholes like put literally no more perfect example of put everybody at risk. Cause immense harm to as many people as possible for something. For literally. So that you don't have to actually do your job, so that you don't actually have to investigate, you don't actually have to have any barriers. Put the entire system, the entire population at your whim. Give them no protection, give them no sovereignty so that you can just go after whoever the hell you want to go after. Government is a mental disorder. It's literally a cult. It is legit a cult. That's stupid. That's absolutely absurd. But thank God I don't live in the UK and maybe it gives a little bit of market to Pear Drive when we get that out. So, sure, subsidize the value of the app that I'm building. Not gonna bother me none. 7. Kraken's 2024 transparency report. Data requests increased by. That's a hard thing to say. By 38.6% from 2023. All your trades are belong to government. So enjoy that number. Eight foundry mines nine blocks in a row two days ago on the 29th block. 889982 to 88999. That is. It just goes to show exactly what bitcoin mechanic has been talking about. Why ocean mining is so freaking important, why datum is so important, why Stratum v2 is so important and it actually needs to be used. But why? Honestly, you should probably just switch to Ocean if you're mining right now. Come on, guys. Mine on ocean. I did it. It's not that hard. Number eight, THOLD introduces its bitcoin rewards credit card. I am still, I'm waiting on mine. I'm pretty close in line, like right near the front. So you'll hear about it when I get it. And I think my brother's actually, we were talking about it yesterday that I think he's going to finally go full on with fold if he can get a credit card that has, you know, basically make it so that like without. You don't even have the limitations of the anything you have the debit card, the prepaid debit card because of the way that is set up, there are some subscription services that you can't use it with. And then having the credit card, it's just like why would I do, why would I use anything else? It just makes, it makes a bitcoin standard so much easier. And then fold just becomes kind of like my front end for dealing with Fiat. And importantly, I get sats back on everything on my debit card stuff, on my gift card stuff and now all my credit card stuff. And now I can rent a car and I can do all the stupid things that you can't do with a debit card and I don't have to have an Amazon credit card or an Apple credit card or any bullshit. I could just get rid of all of those and have a. My only banking is my integration with bitcoin. It's sweet. It's sweet. I'm very excited about it. Bitcoin only, bitches. Argentina's president. This is number one. Number nine, Argentina's President Milie faces backlash over failed Libra meme coin launch. Dude, politicians getting into meme coins and cryptoing so hard is so ridiculous. I mean I guess everybody gets, everybody goes through their real stupid phase when they get into this ecosystem. But he probably got scammed into this but he pushed it and then it just like dumped same stupid crap with President Trump's stupid meme coin stuff which they've done this like five times. I don't even know. So unbelievably stupid. But the good thing, the silver lining to all of this is all of them are dying faster and faster and faster. It's like being desensitized to something like, like we're immunizing the market against them because they just obviously they're going to die. They're going to die. Hock to a coin. The meme, like the whole meme coin thing is literally days from launch to dead every single time. And at this point, if you get burned on them, I don't feel sorry for you at all. Just the tiniest bit of research and you would know exactly what was going to happen. It's the same thing that happens every single time. And then ironically on that front, number 10, the SEC states that meme coins are collectibles, not securities. So I don't know if that's good or bad. I mean, I guess the government just being like, whatever, it doesn't matter is probably the best thing because then it can die of its own accord, earned all by itself for the reality and truth of exactly what it is rather than because the government went after it. But it deserves to die and it deserves to be the big stupid money losing thing that it is. And so meme coins are collectibles and you're going to lose all your money if you're spending a fortune on collectibles that get printed every single. They just do a collectible that doesn't even take anything to make. Like think about that, think about how stupid that is. It's one thing to collect art because it's hard to make and it's beautiful. It's another thing to collect baseball cards which are at least kind of unique and interesting. But for someone to run a piece of software and then stick a JPEG that isn't even related to the software, just they, that's what they just stick on the Twitter account or the website and then say this meme coin, like you realize Doge and Trump coin, fundamentally like from a technical standpoint are no different. They're just points. They're just points. There's no actual dog on a Doge. There's no actual like trump gold on a trump token. It's just nothing. It is the purest and kind of most elegant creation of the emptiness that basically all of crypto is. It is the end game of utility tokens. So guess what? Nobody's coming to save you. You're not going to get your money back. You're just going to lose it all. The SEC isn't even going to going to attack them. They're all just going to die of their own accord. So enjoy. Good times. All right, good catching up with the crew. Love this episode. Don't forget to check out our amazing sponsors. Grab yourself a Jade plus hardware wallet. I love this guy. Again, my favorite setup is bluetooth with the green wallet with the same blockstream green. It just works so seamlessly. It's so easy I just turn it on, punch in a pin, check details. Done like it's it really is that simple. I've got the video to show it or to prove it to you. And then of course the HRF their amazing work. Don't forget to follow them. Check them out on social follow their financial freedom report if you were looking for tools for if you want to keep up on the arc stuff on Fediment on the CBDC developments they are the best resource in the space for it. And then lastly you want an on chain lightning experience that just freaking works. Check out Bitkit B I T K I T Love that wallet. That company is building awesome things so stay tuned. Check the notes, check them out. Don't forget the discount code for your Jade plus. All of that is right there in the description of this show. And that'll do it. That'll wrap us up. Thank you guys so much for listening. I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Freaking Audible. Until then, I am Guy Swan and that is my two sets.