C (3:30)

Bitcoin babies.

A (3:31)

Bitcoin babies. Bitcoin babies. They say there's not enough. They say there's not enough women in bitcoin. I'm fixing that one baby at a time.

B (3:40)

You know how we have all these like Mount Gox is going to sell FUD or like, you know, you have these perennial things where it's like there's going to be a big sell event. I was thinking, you know how people keep talking about making more bitcoiners by having kids and then those kids are sort of what happens when all the like bitcoins we put aside for our little kids when they turn 20 and they don't understand or respect it at all and they just sell it.

C (4:04)

Oh, no. It's going to be like, it's going to be like a baby boom.

A (4:08)

Like 2.0.

C (4:10)

That was gonna be.

D (4:11)

I have this, by the way.

A (4:15)

Boomer.

D (4:15)

Can you guys hear me?

B (4:17)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

D (4:17)

I have this theory that there's a male version of the helicopter mom and it's the helicopter dead dad who like, wants to dictate how his inheritance money is going to be spent for like decades after he's dead.

A (4:34)

Leaves a set of instructions and a bunch of time locks. I'm totally doing that. I'm doing that for both of my kids. You thought you were getting bitcoin.

B (4:45)

This would be.

A (4:46)

We're gonna covenant this to. To infinity. Oh, man. So. So baby has basically taken up all of my focus and thinking, but there has been a lot that has happened this month. And I'm just curious, what have you guys been. I mean, I don't think any of you guys had. So not super relevant to y', all, but what have you all been up to? What's. What's happened in your world in the month of February? Mechanic, if you want to kick us off.

B (5:21)

Oh. So last time we spoke, I was in El Salvador and there was that big announcement from tether saying they're Going to use taproot assets to move, you know, dollars around on top of bitcoin. And there's been a bunch of analysis and, you know, we even. We spoke about it a lot, even though they hadn't made the announcement yet. So we did kind of COVID it. And I think I sort of tether pilled myself in then in that time thinking like, you know, there's just so little use of bitcoin, the payment network, and so much use of it as Bitcoin, the Gold 2.0, that it's kind of gone out of whack and you can't have one without the other. We know that. But yeah, the announcement followed like two days after we recorded last time and everyone's trying to figure out what it means and stuff. And to me, I think ultimately my conclusion is it's basically from a raw bitcoin standard point of view. It's basically a nothing burger. I don't think it really makes that much difference to anything from someone that's just stacking sats and just, you know, using bitcoin to pay for stuff as bitcoin as. And when they can find a merchant that actually accepts it, which is almost never. So basically that. And then other than that, I went to an amazing conference, the Heat Punk Conference.

A (6:42)

Oh, did you?

B (6:43)

Yeah, that was.

A (6:44)

I got invited that one. But I was like, I'm gonna have a baby.

B (6:47)

So that's. Man, those. Those are. Those are my favorite kinds of events because there's only ever like 100 people at them and they're all just the best bitcoin ever is the complete opposite of like Bitcoin 2025 in Vegas or whatever, where it's just going to be 90,000 people that are all just like complete shitcoiners and just, you know, and that's just awful and depressing. So it's the opposite. You can't stand the like large corporate bitcoin space with all these politicians getting involved. The opposite kind of conference exists and it's one where you just have like a hundred people and everyone kind of knows everyone else and everyone is just at the front of what it is. So this one was just about mining.

C (7:28)

Were you at the Bitcoin Standard Podcast in Mexico? In Ensenada? The first. The year we went.

B (7:34)

I think so. I mean, I've been to it. I don't. I. Yeah, 2021 was the year I went.

C (7:40)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that we. That was a blast.

A (7:43)

How did we not hang out that much then?

C (7:45)

I. I kind of felt bad because I feel like he didn't make. I feel like he lost money on that event. He did, but.

A (7:52)

Yeah, he for sure did. Yeah.

C (7:54)

Yeah. But. But it was so much fun because it just. It was basically just the speakers there.

A (8:00)

Talking to each other.

B (8:02)

Yeah, it was basically like, okay, you go on stage for a bit. All right, now I'll go on stage for a bit. And then we just. One of us has the mic to talk at the other bitcoin.

A (8:10)

Yes. We just swapped in and out of the audience. Yeah, I was just there watching other people and there was like one time when like we were just casually. It was really unorganized. Yeah.

B (8:24)

He.

A (8:25)

And I remember there's this one point that there was like this, this. We just made this makeshift panel from the group of speakers in the audience to do just get up on stage because like we. There was like a gap and like we had nothing set up or something.

C (8:39)

I was supposed to go. There was supposed to be some sort of bitcoin event here in Montreal. And um, which I'm. I was supposed to be back home now, but I messed up my flight and so. So I'm here. I was here for an extra week, but. But I was supposed to be go to this bitcoin event here and they like postponed it until June and they changed the name. It's not even like they're. I think they're trying to get more normies or something and they changed it to some sort of like kind of financial name. It's still. I think it's sponsored by Bull, Bitcoin and some other people, but I don't know, it's kind of sad. Yeah, I wanted to go, but the weather's been terrible here, so that's probably.

A (9:21)

It's interesting you brought up the whole tethered on coming back to bitcoin thing just because that is one of our big news items. And you know, I don't think it's totally a nothing burger for two reasons. One is just generally for bitcoin is it's a. It is a positive use as bitcoin for a time stamp and ownership system. And I think that's at least relevant to the discussion of like how bitcoin is used and kind of in the vein of what we talked about. Yes. That's the other thing is that it will benefit the liquidity and movement over lightning really, really well because it will mean that I'm fulfilling dollar based payments through my lightning channels without having to do anything because it's an auto swap at the ends. So all of the liquidity that is already there. It's literally using Bitcoin as a settlement instrument for fiat payments, which I. Which I have always thought was intuitively the first way it would get built out. Like, it would start in the exact same way.

C (10:36)

That thesis. Right?

A (10:38)

Yeah, the. The potato chip or peanuts thesis. Whatever, you know, whatever you're allergic to.

C (10:43)

Peanuts, but you want.

A (10:45)

Exactly, exactly. It's that. And then it's also like the analogy I always like to use was the Internet was that, you know, your grandmother, who still insisted on using your analog phone was. Started using the Internet for years without realizing it because her credit card payment that used to, you know, shunk. Shunk to the bank and her checks and all that started happening over the Internet. And then her analog phone went to a local hub that converted it into packets and, you know, went to California, then reconverted at the other end. And so she's still using her corded phone. But 99 of that communication is not analog anymore.

B (11:23)

I agree with. It's Pete Rizzo's argument, but genuine. It's the argument that if, if you scam People with JPEGs and NFTs and stuff on Bitcoin, they will get scammed, but then they'll become bitcoiners after that. It's. It's that argument, but actually genuine. Like, people are going to use tether because they need the dollar. Yeah, yeah, like, and then they'll stay. Yeah.

A (11:43)

Then the other reason I think it's significant is largely a investment perspective. One is that it really. It's another huge nail in the coffin of shitcoins that you need some other blockchain and some other token in order because. Oh, well, because you've got to do stable coins and you can't do stable coins on Bitcoin. And it's like, well, yeah, you can. And like you can batch them in a taproot tree so that it doesn't matter. You can do. You can issue hundreds of thousands, millions of transactions and units inside of a single transaction and then do hundreds of thousands of millions of transactions from one UTXO to the next because of how taproot works. And it basically just proves that anything that actually becomes useful will migrate back to Bitcoin, whatever utility that Bitcoin for the settlement utility that Bitcoin can provide.

B (12:46)

I'll say something that's like uncharacteristically bitchy, but there's kind of uncharacteristically like, you don't. Well, I feel like this is a little out of character, genuinely. LND is what LND Taproot Assets is an LND thing. And that's true. I've seen just the amount of hotfixes and disasters I've seen happen as a result of Lightning Labs is just beyond the pale. Right. Like it's shitcoin level, like Solana level of how often does this thing go down and break. And that doesn't really matter for this use case, right. Because it's just middleware. Like wherever the tether end up is where they are. And that's kind of all that matters, right? Like that's why they've been able to use broken things like Ethereum and Tron for ages. Because it doesn't really matter if those networks die. Doesn't matter. We still know where they just bounce.

A (13:45)

From one to the next. It's like it's been so completely arbitrary and I think it will reinforce the separation because this market cycle, the last like four or five months with the run to 100,000 market cap of Bitcoin has divorced from crypto and I think this is going to accelerate and continue that trend. And then with the dilution of the meme coin space and like one blowed up two week scam after the next to the point, like the longevity of these things has shrunk. So I mean like just chopped down to nothing. Like days. Days.

C (14:29)

What's the exchange Just got hacked.

A (14:31)

I know.

B (14:32)

Bybit.

A (14:33)

Yes. We actually have a bunch of hacks to talk about, so we'll bring that up in just a second. But if you wanted to.

C (14:38)

What I was going to say is that does that does like since it was through Ethereum, smart contract or whatever, in this kind of like proof that what the bitcoiners have been saying, surface attack surface and all that is like it matters massively important and yeah. And then of course they're going to like they were talking about reversing things. Did that happen or is that.

A (15:01)

I don't know, like right now the Ethereum foundation is debating it because it's like Korea.

C (15:06)

The fact that it's a debate is pretty much a proof that like that it's all.

A (15:11)

And it's all proof of stake anyway. So like they can just kind of arbitrarily do it. They don't even have to. It's not like they have to mine for 10 days or something like that and get, you know, a ton of.

B (15:24)

Organization sum up for me the difference between proof of work and proof of stake because I have some conjecture to offer in that regard.

A (15:32)

Okay. Like you omit not as if you don't know like what is for the general audience.

B (15:38)

Because I have like a perspective on this and I just feel like, well no, it's not a trap. I just feel like am I defining in a way that makes my point sound good when it isn't really good? So I'm asking for like, like what do you think it is? And then I'll ask you my follow up question.

C (15:54)

It's essentially just political consensus of the, the people that are designated as having enough to, to be the ones making the decision. Right.

A (16:04)

And it's why they also have to go through so many hoops to have like secondary and like oh, you have to do this and this because you know the keys don't go anywhere. Like If I own 80% of Ethereum today and then in 10 minutes I sell it all for Bitcoin, I still have the keys to 80% of Ethereum. It's just two blocks in the past. So you can have these, I can't remember what they call it. It's not like dead keys, but it's something like that. These old key attacks where you don't even have any stake anymore, but you could still make a totally alternative blockchain using those keys in which.

C (16:46)

Essentially a double spend.

A (16:48)

It's essentially a double spend. So that's why they have checkpoints is so that you have trusted checkpoints that say well this is the official. So you can't roll back past this. And it's like you have like these layers of trust and like pretend decentralization on top of it. But it is essentially the amount of Ethereum you own is what allows you to determine what the history of Ethereum is or the history of your proof of stake coin. You are the one that gets to sign based on your 10% stake that this is the next block. And then you have a randomized thing that determines whether or not it's you that gets it or somebody else which causes them to have to do another kind of like duct tape band aided thing. Because if you can fake the randomization, you can actually turn it back into proof of work by brute forcing the randomization until the random is in your favor by doing it over and over again. And then you have this back door like not even public proof of work that's going on that makes your 10% behave like 30% on the network which was like a problem during a whole course of the. The creating of this brilliant proof of stake system that they have is like, well how do you Mitigate it turning into proof of work again. So, yeah, it's a bunch of mess like that. But the, the general idea is that the more you own, the higher likelihood that your version of history is accepted. And then you have to have the majority of the keys agree to change it. But that means that if you have 60% of the keys and you have a trusted signer who's signing checkpoints, you can just jump back five days, resign it, resign the checkpoints and republish it like rebroadcast, and everybody has to accept it. Whereas in the case of proof of work is that if you don't like the nodes, just care about the proof of work, they don't care about anything else. So checkpoints, whatever, suck a dick, get the most proof of work.

B (18:56)

Let me jump forward to what I'm even trying to say with all this is there's a theory that a company's proof of stake, which is why would someone that owns all that stuff do anything that would ever undermine the value of what it is they're holding? And that includes rollbacks and things of that nature. And then they go and look at all the energy we save by not having to do proof of work, right? And that's the philosophical argument, right? Whether you agree with it or not, why would someone that owns 95% of Ethereum do something that makes Ethereum worthless? And of course, like, that's naive, right? Because if you own 95% of Ethereum, you're, you're very visible on the world stage and someone's going to come and hold a gun to your head. And we know that. But let's say that wasn't even possible. There's the argument, right? Why would a big stakeholder undermine the thing in which they own a large stake of. And I'm saying I've noticed it creep in as a coping mechanism into the bitcoin ecosystem where you have these giant miners who are not. It's not that a giant miner owns a lot of bitcoin, but they still are, they still have this influence over one element of the ecosystem, which amounts to the same thing. So if you're 40% of the hash rate or you're responsible for creating 40% of the templates, everyone's response either they're worried about it, but the proof of work perspective on the current scenario says you need thousands of blocks to be actually sure that you have confirmation that's proof of work. But everyone's current situation is, well, I got in the last block and no one's Unless that gets orphaned, it's not a problem. Okay, we just found another block building on top of it. Now I'm two blocks deep. I trust it. It's not going to get rewritten. And the reason you can make that assumption is a proof of stake argument. You're saying why would Foundry, or Bitmain for that matter, why would they undermine the very network on which they operate? And it's to me it's just the exact same argument.

A (20:54)

I would say it's not exactly the same because there's no cost. The undermining it and the perception that it's lost its value in proof of stake is the only cost. The other cost, there's no cost.

C (21:05)

Trying to undermine the proof of the.

A (21:08)

Miner still has to redo the blocks in order to make a new valid chain. So it's yes, they're still spending electricity. You're hoping that they don't try because of the apparent undermining of the blocks. But if they do try, they still have to work really, really hard for a really, really long time to succeed. And a subset of miners that you know, defect from this could cause a huge, huge problem and a staggering increase in that cost. If even if it's just 48% because it's really, it could very easily get out of hand depending on how deep into the chain they're trying to go. And it's literally the surface, you know, 51% of the network when they start is like, yeah, maybe the last block, they have a slightly higher chance of re catching that one before the next one. But if you're 10 blocks deep, like it has to really kind of work in your favor a lot over and over again, which probability we've, we know what, you know, there's one minute and two minute blocks. There's, we don't find a block for a month, we find 10 blocks in a month. You know, like, like you have to be able to outrun painfully at the same time. So partially it's true. Partially it's true.

B (22:24)

I do think it's impractical to do it based on what you're saying because the proof of work component of what they're doing remains regardless. And I think you're completely right about that. But I don't think anyone has that perspective on it. I don't think it's always a case of why would they even try.

A (22:44)

No, I totally agree. A lot of people don't quite get the argument. You know, at least generally speaking, a lot of people don't get a lot of the reasons, yeah, it's.

B (22:53)

I guess I'm just, I'm saying it's a mentality thing. If you're ever saying why would Bitmain do XYZ if they were suddenly in a position to be able to do it just because they have that much proof of work under their belt. Like proof of work doesn't, doesn't save you if someone's above 51% like that is part of Bitcoin's and it doesn't need to be 51%. But ignoring that sort of technicality, everyone knows that proof of work doesn't save you if one actor has too much of the hash rate because they can do whatever they like that yes, they still need to prove their work, but their proof of work is no longer prohibitive to just, I don't know, it doesn't all magically. They need to do the work you want them to do. Right. Like you can prove you've done work in a malicious capacity and it will be accepted by the network because it's valid work. But the point is you need to be competing with other people doing the same thing and that competition genuinely needs to exist. If it doesn't, then the proof of work remains but it doesn't serve any purpose at that point because it becomes trust based. It becomes Foundry are just fund. They haven't been put in a position where they need to do something nuclear. I was thinking what happens when North Korea dumps all their ethereum for Bitcoin and we know exactly what the transactions are on the chain. At some point the narrative is going to flip away from pure ideological Bitcoin neutral money to why do you hate America? Why would you possibly want to include a bunch of transactions in the blockchain foundry and every North American publicly traded company, mining company that's with them, that can't go anywhere else anyway. Literally don't include these transactions in blocks and don't build on top of blocks that do. And that's not a 51% attack because they don't quite have it, but they're about 40%. And the argument against that being actually carried out in the space, I think all the people that are all excited about the strategic reserve and all that would only welcome it. I don't think they'd have any problem with it. And the argument against it's just so difficult rhetorically, which is why do you hate America? Why do you want, you know, this evil country, North Korea? Why do you want to permit that? Why do you want to mine blocks that have Their activity in it. You know, it's all, you know, it's all theft, it's all bad, it's all serving a foreign dictatorship that's undeniably cruel. And it's. That's impossible to argue from an ideological standpoint to your normie American like. And everyone is so far up Trump's butthole at the moment that just, you know, if that, if that became a narrative once you just have enough normies in bitcoin, it becomes just really hard to push back against. With this ancient cypherpunk thing that spawned the movement over a decade ago, those people are just drowned out. So that, that became basically my concern with it.

A (25:56)

I think the difference the. Because you're right from a social layer standpoint, but the difference is that the longer it's. Look how long it's taking the Ethereum foundation to make a decision on this because it's contentious. Even in a group that doesn't really care about that element, like the whole.

C (26:14)

Design of it, you got like 20 minutes to make that decision.

A (26:18)

Whereas in bitcoin every hour that goes by it gets exponentially more difficult to actually pull it off. The fact that it is contentious means that the time factor weighs heavily in the cypherpunk favor in the node running wins the game. And it's very much similar to the whole block size war conditions where nodes can wait as long as they want. Miners have to act now and the shitcoin has to win now or every day that goes by that the shitcoin fork isn't winning. The more and more it costs them and the greater the damage and social value income cost is to their operation.

C (27:04)

More and more that the independent cypherpunk miners are making on the fork. That's going to win.

A (27:11)

Yeah. My actually being convicted about it. Yeah. And the more it. Again, I'm curious Steve's take.

D (27:21)

Oh no. I was going to ask a question actually. Can I just tell you my general understanding of this mining pool breakdown and mechanic tell me if this is right. So Foundry obviously has a ton of hash rate, almost 40 or whatever. And then you have ant pool and via btc which claim to be different pools but really are sharing the same block templates and maybe payout mechanism. But Foundry and Mara are us based and do they. Are they sharing block template stuff with ample and via BTC or so it seems like there's two concerns, right. One is that Foundry is too big and the other one is that too many people are sharing antpool's block template. Is that right?

B (28:14)

Yeah. The concern is mainly that a bunch of smaller alternative pools that have a lot of the market for. We're decentralizing mining are all just Bitmain under the hood.

D (28:24)

Yeah.

B (28:25)

And you can see the like, but.

D (28:26)

Not Foundry or Mora.

B (28:28)

The. The overlap of Foundry is its own thing somewhat. I mean, there's a bit of nepotism because they are a big reseller of Bitmain equipment, or at least they used to be. There's been a bunch of change of like, border tariff stuff, so I don't know if that's still the case. But yeah, Foundry. Foundry do their own work and Mara do their own work as well. Mara is totally independent. Not from, you know, US State stuff, but still just nothing to do with Bitmain as far as I can tell.

D (29:00)

So you're like, you're still more concerned about the block template thing than you are about, like Foundry being too big. Are you like, sharing in those concerns?

B (29:11)

Well, if. No, not, no, because they're overlapped. If you got rid. If Foundry used Atom and let their miners make their own templates, I wouldn't care as much about how big Foundry actually was. That's. That's sort of the point here. Like, it's not the size of the pool, it's what the pool does. If a pool is just a transparent way for miners to split rewards amongst themselves, and miners are already running all their infrastructure to solo mine locally, then I'm a lot less worried. But right now, like, if Foundry pull off an attack, like, and this is. It's such a stupid thing for it to come down to this, but if Foundry turned malicious and all the ecosystem actually were like, this isn't good enough. Miners need to move. This is the truth of it. And it's horrifying. Most of the miners on Foundry wouldn't know how to do anything else. They. They've never run nodes and there's nothing that will scare you quite. Like, go into a, you know, a conference in Colorado where you've got plebs running umbrells and start nines and they know how to use this stuff and they've got lightning channels and then speaking to a miner with a few exahash that only knows how to use Windows and has never, ever, ever touched Linux or run a bitcoin node or anything like that. Like, they've no idea how to do it. And then you. They're like, all right, we want to do it, we want to run datum.

C (30:24)

And then how are they making money? Like, if you've only used Windows and you don't have the technical knowledge. Like isn't mining enough of a competitive thing? Is it just because they're getting like fiat funded or so much package software.

A (30:40)

That they can just plug in and.

B (30:44)

Typically the software is a Windows laptop somewhere in the facility with foreman running on it. That's the typical setup.

C (30:53)

But I mean. Well, what I'm saying is that in order to make money mining you have to be you. I mean it looks to me like, I guess, I guess you could understand that. I guess we need very cheap energy and that's all that they, you know, have been focused on. But it seems like you have to be, you have to have some knowledge of technical things to be in a position to like, like, I don't know, like what, what's the upstream data or whatever. Like, like how do you, you know, like you can't, you can't. It seems weird that you would be a miner and not be capable of a minor that would be profitable and not be capable of understanding all of this stuff.

A (31:38)

All you need to make the miner work is the level of. I set up a router in my house and you can easily hire somebody to like. It's as far as like the software and like the technical side of it. The like the real skill set is power and data center. Like how do you get enough machines hooked up and don't blow fuses and how many amp like do you know how much amps that's going to need and you know where's your power source coming from? So like it's, it's, it's very much. It's, it's closer to blue collar than it is.

C (32:11)

Okay.

A (32:12)

It, well that's what I was thinking.

C (32:14)

Is it's kind of like, so it's kind of like the guy that asked what are friend Skyler, you know who's running miners and to, to dry his, his slack, his lumber for the furniture he makes and, and the power guy that comes to replace his or to upgrade his transformer was like wait, so you're telling me I could buy one of these machines and hook it up here and it'll pay me money that my wife doesn't know about. He's like, yeah, yeah, we could do that. You know. So I mean I guess if you know that guy knows, you know what the power setup is needed, but he doesn't have the technical knowledge to run a node. So I guess that's.

B (32:58)

Yeah, I guess the important point is it's on the, on a giant scale. You can't hide an elephant among ants, right? To quote Max Hillebrand. And it's on a giant level. You can't use bitcoin permissionlessly if you're consuming multiple megawatts of power, because you just. You exist. Like, it's not like running a node, which you can do pretty invisibly. So these guys aren't interested in interacting with bitcoin permissionlessly because everything they do is at the leisure of the state that they're in. So if you're a massive miner, if you're Michael Saylor, you own bitcoin because you're allowed to, not because you did it without anyone knowing. You can't buy hundreds of thousands of bitcoins without needing permission from the state that you're in. It's just the reality of being that large. And so the permissionless elements of bitcoin are of no interest to these people because they need permission to do what they're doing. Like, they might have a side operation, but ultimately, like, who. Who cares? Like, if from that. From their perspective, who really cares? Like.

C (34:04)

Well, the flip side is that that creates the incentive for the political incentive to, like, keep things open too.

A (34:12)

I think it's. That's why kind of the state enters the game. Game theory and the jurisdictional arbitrage is actually. And distributing among different jurisdictions is actually where the. The game theory is most interesting. And also most. Like, we don't really know exactly how it plays out because it's about any one jurisdiction having too much influence, such that other jurisdictions have to do what they say or have to basically fall in line. And that division among different states in what, like, if. If there is no exact consensus on what every state or individual jurisdiction should do with their miners or with their bitcoin holders, and there is enough disagreement at a global scale about it, and bitcoin is global, globally distributed enough. Well, then nothing that any one jurisdiction will do will matter enough. Like Michael Saylor could, even though with permission of his jurisdiction, quote, unquote. Specifically, anybody with over $30 million doesn't really have a jurisdiction. They can go to a different place in the world and live under a different set of rules and under somebody who is like the number of people who could just move to El Salvador if El Salvador just ended up being the most beneficial and friendly place for bitcoiners.

C (35:41)

Well, even just on paper.

A (35:43)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, even just on paper. Like, there's a lot of people. There was a. I think it was Chamath or. Or maybe it's Balaji or whatever was talking about like, like once you're like a certain amount wealthy, like countries don't really matter anymore. Like you're not really, you can just kind of go or be on paper wherever it is that's best for you. And so, but so much of the political argument is from the perspective of people who are trapped where they are. So they think they can apply that same thinking to the rich and say, oh, the rich here have to do this and they have to do this and it's like they're not going to care and they're not going to do those things. You're just going to lose them as being on paper where, where it is that you think they are. And so there's some interesting dynamic there that I don't think it's really complicated and multifaceted for like okay, well how does it play out? What's, what becomes the most important factor? Can the US still just say something? And if 40% of the hash power is there, 50% of the hash power is there, how big of a problem is that versus kind of the other, the pushback of the other elements of the ecosystem of exchanges of holders of node runners and all of that stuff. I don't think it's so simple that we could just apply the block size war to be like, oh well now this is how it works when the states get involved. But I also don't think it's so simple that the state and any particular, particular jurisdiction has any, anything close to the same type of power or control over, over it as you usually think of as jurisdictions with wealth inside of them. So it's different from both. It's this weird middle ground that we just don't, we'll learn the playbook as there are clashes.

C (37:35)

I feel like, yeah, I still have this sort of hopefully thinking that, that it's very, it's, it's entirely plausible that the reason we've seen this like shift to you know, all the stuff that's happening right now, I mean like obviously it's maybe we're never going to get the Epstein files or whatever else, but, but there's clearly, there are clearly things that are happening that are pissing off people that were previously in power. Right? Like a new faction has taken control and the new faction is less pro censorship. You know, there's is definitely some, some difference and I think it's possible that that is actually the result of the fact that Bitcoin has already provided, has created enough of a wealth transfer and created enough of a visible exit for a lot of people who were unhappy with the way things were before, but that were playing along, but they had no, like, they were kind of afraid of what was happening. And now that they see an exit and they can put some of their wealth there, they feel a little more comfortable to like, speak up and say, nah, we're not doing this anymore. And so do you have Michael Saylor and all these people that are already have amassed a lot of wealth lobbying for things that are pro bitcoin. And you have probably a lot of libertarians and ancaps that are interested in anybody that might be pro bitcoin too. And then maybe you have some big players, like, you know, I don't know, what's his name? Peter Thiel or whatever. Like who. You know, I don't like a lot of these people. But, but if they can see they've had some libertarian ideas in the past, you know, they've communicated some libertarian ideas in the past, and if they can see that there's now an exit and they don't have to play along with this liberal, then they won't fund, they won't help pretend to be socialists anymore. If, if they can, you know, see some, some way for things to move forward in a different fashion. You know, that doesn't mean they don't want control, they don't want power. That, you know, it doesn't mean it doesn't change anything about human nature and the fact that they're still, you know, want to be important. But, but if they can already see where the tides turn, you know, the tide's turning or where the, you know, the wind's blowing, and they can be like, hey, you know, I'll buy bitcoin and we'll have sound money that the government can't take. From me, it seems like that's, that's a, that's an argument that things. This, this shift might actually be the beginning of something that's more sustainable and not just some sort of new political volatility. And, and that would mean that a lot more jurisdictions are going to be bitcoin friendly just because bitcoin is such a strong economic force that it, it basically fee. I mean, it's it's just like, you know, police seizing minors in Venezuela and then turning them on themselves. Like, like bitcoin is. Has such gravity that, that it doesn't matter. Like, you can say it's illegal, but the government's still going to participate. Like, everybody, everybody wants bitcoin.

A (41:03)

Yeah, it was banned in China, but 20% of the hash Power is still coming from China.

B (41:09)

Well, that's. That's nuts, man, that that's even the case. Yeah, I do appreciate the perspectives you guys are offering here. And Guy, what you said, it is genuinely. It undermines some of the paranoia I've sort of developed around it. And I appreciate that because it's true. It's not as easy as you might think to come along. Even if Bitcoin becomes really centralized in some aspects, you have these horrible things creep in, like centralization of templates and obviously two massive pools responsible for like 70 or 80% of the hash rate and jurisdictional capture and regulatory moats and all that. And like masses of KYC purchases, all this stuff. Bitcoin does surprisingly well even in that kind of environment. It's just that that's sort of its own problem, I guess, because you do eventually end up with it being so bad that it really does start to weaken the system overall because everyone just gets too comfortable and I guess.

C (42:11)

Are datum blocks still growing? Is increasing?

B (42:15)

Yeah, they're rolling in since. I mean, since the beginning of the month. How many have we had? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 13 Datin blocks in the chain this month.

C (42:25)

Which is the slowest, the slowest amount of increase in datum blocks is still creeping in the right direction. Like, as long as. As long as the trend is up, then I mean, you got to assume that Bitcoin's shift is going to be.

A (42:40)

Slow for as long as I delayed, I was kind of shocked at how easy it was to just point it at Ocean, because I didn't want to. I'd plugged everything back in. I ran a new Ethernet line to where the miners and stuff are going to be hooked up downstairs. But I was just like, man, I just don't want to get into it right now. We're going to have a baby. Trying to get the house in order to. And then when I finally did it, like, it was easier to do it than literally trying to figure out, trying to remember what my password of my router was, because you don't even have to log in, it's local. So I just punch in the IP address, which I've already got saved in my password manager. So I basically just begin to type it in and then I just click go. And then when I realized I didn't even have to make an account and I just punched in, I just put in an address for my username and then just paste it in the normal URL and then reboot it. And I was like, oh shit, I'm on Ocean now. I guess. So like it was, I was like, oh well, Jesus Christ. I, I like didn't do this for two months and I just kind of like did it on a whim while I was eating a snack like in front of my Linux machine, you know. And I was like, this was so stupid. Yeah, I'm still not running Datum, but it was, it was a lot easier than I had suspected it was going to be.

B (44:02)

You could run Datum in one minute because the default settings, it basically mirrors Ocean. So from your miners perspective you just change the pool host to your to like 192168, whatever, that's it. And then you literally leave the work.

A (44:15)

I mean it's just like something I have to do terminal wise on Start nine, right?

B (44:18)

Because you have to, you have to make it, you have to make the service accessible by a port. Because they didn't do that.

A (44:25)

That's the one little kick, the, the little caveat that I just had.

B (44:29)

I, I might turn those six things you have to copy and paste into one script that you can just pipe in from like GitHub or something.

A (44:36)

That would be great. I might probably, I might even do that myself because that's the only thing that I can do with AI is I can be like, can you make these six things something that I can double click on? I do that all day with AI.

B (44:45)

Say yeah, I think it just needs to be put on the Ocean GitHub as something you can just curl in the raw gith or whatever it is and then you pipe it into SH and then it will just do it all as one. But actually I still don't think so because you have to go into this mode inside Start OS where it will let you make changes that persist upon restart and that can't be part of a script because you're, you're going from one user to another user basically. But anyway, that's way off the deep end of technical discussion. It's really, it's really easy to use it. The lack of account makes, does make things nice. Like we don't need to worry about paying people or figuring out who people are. I did write that on Noster in response to. It was like a buried comment in a response I made to someone that blew up on the Ocean Noster account where someone, where I just said, look, other pools pay people, Ocean pays Bitcoin addresses. It doesn't matter who mines to those addresses. So if there's a charity you like, or you want to donate to Samurai, all you need is a bitcoin address and you put that in your miners and then they will get bitcoins and that's the end of it. So that's fun and it's a good new concept and it has deep ramifications because it means as an entity we don't have to start conducting invasive things. I hesitate to use the three letter acronym we all know about because it invites problems. But frankly, we don't know who our miners are and we're not obligated to know who they are. And we don't know if two people are using the same address or the thing is an AI mining to some address, like, we have no idea and we don't want to know. And that means we get to operate permissionlessly and no other pool set up. That way. If you email another pool like, hey, I want my money, they'll be like, okay, log in and press a button. There is nowhere to log in on Ocean. There's no account. Yeah, that's, that's got to be the way it works. But people don't understand that. And then they're like, look, I want my money. I only mined three sats and I want you to pay them. And I'm like, well, we can't and we don't. How do we know that's you? And they're like, it's my address. I'm like, I don't. What do you mean it's your address? Like, I don't know who you are. And like. And people are just like, well, I switched from this address to the other address. I'm like, you could be anyone right now. You really could. Like, you could be trying to troll someone on Ocean who's mining to an address and you just grab their address and you're telling us you want to get paid out right now. How do we know it's you? Like, obviously they can sign a message and that's how you set up lightning. But again, that's the only thing we allow you to do because it has a. Like, we were thinking about having people set up noster stuff and then they could have sort of a kind of account within an endpub. But again, the problem is there's no failover. We have to be able to pay you if something goes wrong. We need a bitcoin address ultimately. So if you configure lightning and you just never have a channel, or your channel, it just never has any liquidity or you're just always offline. Eventually you're going to get paid out to the bitcoin address that you use to set up lightning. Because we just have to legally, that's how we're structured. It's kind of like bull bitcoin. You can't buy any bitcoins until you give them a bitcoin address because they don't ever want to get stuck with it and then have the resulting legal headache. Like that's how you become a custodian and that's how you. That's exactly what we want to avoid. So we are not accepting any shares unless you, you actually give us a bitcoin address. I just, I really love this design.

A (48:11)

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D (49:00)

Do you have a way of measuring block template construction diversity? Like, I know that mempool space has their expected block thing and I've always wondered what template they were using with the expected block and like. But I know that miners that are just getting work are just getting the block header and I guess if you could maybe look at the merkle root of the block headers, then maybe you could do some kind of matching there. But how do you, how do you go about measuring the diversity of block templates and like, do you guys publish some kind of metric on that?

B (49:41)

We don't. I mean there's stratum dot work and there's also mempool space slash stratum now. So people are starting to pay attention to this, but it hasn't really permeated the community much. Like some people are starting to become a bit concerned that all the small pools are really just bit main. No one is really monitoring the work. But it basically it comes down to plausibility. It's very easy to break the heuristics we use to match all these pools, but they don't even bother to do that. That's how little anyone's paying attention essentially. So what it comes down to is how deep in the merkle tree. Yeah, they just don't bother. So like you're looking at how far down the merkle tree you have to go. Because when you're sending a miner work, you're sending a merkle tree of transactions. And when the network finds another block, first off, pools that know what they're doing, I mean I'm not going to say Foundry doesn't know what they're doing, but they don't do the empty block speed up. But every other pool pretty much sends a merkle treeless bunch of work because that's how you get miners off stale work quickly is you send them an empty block to work on with no merkle tree in it and then they're just, they're working on stuff a few hundred milliseconds faster, which is definitely worth it. That's the M2 block speed up. And that's pretty much there's no merkle tree to compare in that instance. But then like in under a second you have a bunch of very similar looking work because you know, mempools become a lot more similar after a pool finds a block because a bunch of transactions get dumped and there's just a smaller pool to pick from of transactions that are out there in the P2P network. But after, you know, the deeper you have to go in the tree to find differences, the more likely they are to be different nodes. So someone posted yesterday this great fun. They called it Cesspool. That is now the name they have dubbed for all of the, the pretend fake proxy pools. You know, they're calling this giant pools. I always called it Ant Main. That was my name for the collective just thing that pretended to be a bunch of diverse pools. But they're calling it Cesspool, which is actually better than Ant Main. So I like that. And it's not cesspools, right? It's cesspool because it is one thing.

A (52:05)

It's just one. It's just one.

B (52:07)

Right. And yeah. So the point is how deep do you have to go? I think the picture he posted was seven. Seven Merkle leafs were the same. And if you're going, if you're going that far, that's not unheard of. Right? With new network block happening, that's quite likely to happen. But I mean if I look at Mempool space Let me just go to Stratum dot work and see what the state of things are right now. Stratum.

A (52:30)

I don't think I've checked this one out.

B (52:31)

Yeah, so yeah, it's really good. So you basically have like Ocean always looks way different, right? Because we. We have 43 bytes of return instead of 83. So that makes that just Ocean is always like the different or it differs its merkle tree diverges from the others. Only like one layer down or two layers down or something like that. Let me see, where is Ocean here? And this list. Okay. They actually include Ocean's different templates. That's really cool.

A (53:00)

Data free default. Yeah, I was just looking at them. Ocean Core.

B (53:04)

Yeah.

A (53:05)

So Core plus Anti Spam.

B (53:08)

Core plus anti Spam should basically be the same as core at this point. Maybe not, but yeah, it's just when it comes like you can see at the moment, I guess you're looking at the site, the top six there just. They have 11. It's. It goes all 11 steps.

A (53:27)

Oh, you can see it. Oh yeah. No, yeah, they're all exactly the same.

B (53:31)

Yeah. So but I mean it diverges and then it doesn't. So basically the ones that are like always identical is Ant Pool Pooling. Luxor sometimes is, sometimes isn't. Binance is just Ant Pool. EMCD is just antpool. Brains is usually just Ant pool and there's like four or five more that are, you know, like White pool. And I think Ultimus is often the same but occasionally diversity creeps in because every pool has a whole bunch of nodes too. So it depends what part of their infrastructure they're using to generate this work. Like Foundry doesn't just have one node, it has like probably tens of nodes. And if they're making templates for other pools, then even all the nodes are going to be slightly different. Like you see it with eftapool mining these half empty blocks sometimes that's because some of their nodes are broken, but not all of them. Which is ridiculous situation for the like the fourth biggest mining pool in the space is that their nodes are broken. But that's what it is. So I mean, yeah, like at the moment those top, the top four things you see them, Clover Pool and Rawpool, which I've never heard of, are just the same again as Ant pool and all that stuff.

A (54:42)

That's basically like a whole bunch of like you'll see it's. It's AWS resellers, right Is or resellers is you, you go and you, you buy from Some hosting service that's got storage or one that does this. It's like, oh, I've got. I've got like 10 different hosts and you go. And like all IP addresses point back to. And they're just buying like a big batch of Amazon and reselling it on a website.

B (55:07)

Yeah, I mean, I made a meme yesterday with the Winnie the Pooh just saying, pools, making pools, making templates for other pools. That's just complete. That's just embarrassing level of like, just. It would be like, you know, if all the downloads for Ubuntu and Fedora and stuff were just on Microsoft.com it's like, this is. Why do I have to go here to download this? This is completely against the whole ethos, the thing. Yeah, well, that's embrace, extend, extinguish, right? That's what like wsl, man. Like Microsoft is trying to eat Linux. Like they really are. They've eaten.

D (55:46)

I've been working on something to help motivate people to run nodes. It's okay if I talk about what I've been doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds like radical. The absolute only bitcoin price that matters in the entire world. The bigger and better version I released like a couple weeks ago and it's working like a champ now. And so you have to be running a bitcoin node for this program to work. And I mean, I guess you could just ask your friend to tell you what the price is. But so yeah, UTX Oracle, just little Python script you run in the command window on the same machine as your node and it asks your node for a bunch of block data and it does some kind of magic math and gets the price out of, out of the transactions.

A (56:46)

Magic math. So, dude, it's funny, it's funny since when you talk about like UTX Oracle. I have literally, even though I kind of already did this just because it's intuitive, that's why it works. But I've actually made a point that even if I'm sending a bizarre, like an odd amount of bitcoin, I actually break it up into sections. It would be best for UTX Oracle. So if I'm moving like $17,500, I will literally do it in 10,000, 5,000, 1,000. And then like the change just you're like, I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make UTXO Oracle even better.

D (57:23)

I mean, there's no way, like you think, like it's like a force of nature. Like if you just think about, you know, there's like what? 50, 000 people every day that are sending around amounts of US dollars. You can't stop that. Like, there's nothing you can do to stop that.

B (57:41)

Yeah.

D (57:42)

Instead.

A (57:42)

Yeah.

D (57:43)

Unless you want.

A (57:44)

Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy.

B (57:46)

I know.

A (57:46)

It's so funny that it works as.

D (57:47)

Well as it, it's wild, dude. It, like, it's really wild. Like, I guess we're recording this on February 28th and we had like some 10 drops. Handled those drops like a champ. I was a little worried because when the price in the beginning of the day is much different than the price at the end of the day, then like round amounts of US Dollars are a wide range of bitcoin amounts. And so that I, you know, the, the algorithm obviously likes it better if it's the same amount the entire day. But yeah, I've been handling those daily drops like a champ.

C (58:26)

What's the sampling like? Like, what is it? How quickly does it respond to the jobs?

A (58:35)

Does it. Does it update per month?

D (58:37)

Keep things simple. I'm just providing a daily price. And yeah, there's no way it could work on one block. Okay, what I could do.

C (58:49)

Well, that's what I was curious about. Can you do it in like, like hourly blocks or, like, you know, I didn't know. You know, I didn't know what the.

B (58:59)

If you need that hourly bitcoin price.

D (59:01)

Then you've got a lot of work to do on your preference, and you're probably not a good candidate to run the Oracle. I, I should maybe just make a monthly. Actually, maybe I should go the opposite direction. That way it would absolutely be.

B (59:16)

Sure.

D (59:17)

No, I, I could do a rolling block thing where just updated every block and did the last 144 blocks or that'd probably work with the last 100 blocks or something like that. But yeah, it definitely needs. It needs to call in quite a few blocks from your node. So it takes like four or five minutes to sometimes turn on.

B (59:37)

Right.

A (59:38)

Well, it would. It's actually really cool because the fact that it works better over the longer time period. It, it kind of works like this little. Almost like this pseudo futures contract for the time period so that you, you're kind of incentivized if you use this, like, let's say you programmatically used UTXO Oracle to. Or UTX Oracle to. To like connect to a smart contract and you just did like a hash of the output of the software or whatnot to pay something out. And like, Jeff and I are gambling on something or betting what the price is. Going to be next month is that you're actually kind of incentivized to do a larger time period and like a longer term contract. And it would be a great way to actually get around, you know, if you're like overseas or you don't know who or what it is that you're doing, it's like, well if you use UTX Oracle, it doesn't matter matter. It doesn't matter what anybody is doing or where they're from or whatnot because like we can just use our own nodes and we're going to come to the same conclusion because we're using the same.

D (60:45)

One day people are going to realize this. There is only one price of bitcoin and that's the UTX Oracle price. Every other price is a third party price. It's, I mean, so you know, you know who had a price of Bitcoin ftx? Guess how much Bitcoin FTX had.

A (61:04)

How well did that work?

D (61:05)

What was that a price? What was even being exchanged? Like when you say like these exchanges have a price, what's that a price of? It's not a price of an on chain transaction. I mean it's like it's a price of paper or something. I mean Oracle's the only price.

B (61:21)

When we talk about the peak of the 2013 Bull Run, I'm always just like, well on Gox it was 1,250. On Bitstamp it was 11. And something like there was a massive premium on Gox because you could withdraw bitcoins, you couldn't withdraw Fiat, so everyone had to buy bitcoins. And I'm like, well but it was also way bigger than Stamp. So I still go by Stamp for the price even though it's like a no liquidity average.

D (61:47)

Nothing like averaging exchanges isn't another problem. That's kind of, I mean I'm, you know, it's partly being kidding. I know that UTX Oracle tool has got a lot of maturing to do and stuff and it's going to be a while before it's really in the mainstream. But if you think about averaging exchanges, of course exchanges are going to have different prices. What is the right way to average them? I mean if you're saying, oh I do a volume weighted average, it's like, okay, and you're just trusting that that's the volume that the exchanges told you. So I mean like there is an obvious exact way to average and that is all of the price information from every exchange all around the world. The extent to which that price information went into making an on chain transaction is the weighted weight that that price should get. And even better.

A (62:37)

Yes, because it's a clear, obvious settlement. You can't fake. Yes settlement if it's a Bitcoin to.

D (62:42)

Which all price information from all exchanges went into making a bitcoin transaction is what UTX Oracle averages. So it's. It's like the naturally perfect average and it's decentralized and everybody gets the same price.

A (63:00)

It's the only genuine bitcoin settled price aggregator.

B (63:06)

I think it is. Like you can't go by. You can't exchange. Trying to wait by volume is ridiculous because then you have to use some heuristic for like if it's an exchange with 0%, some exchanges will charge you for deposits and withdrawals, but then charge no fee on transactions and they have like a hundred times the volume of exchanges that charge you a commission on the trades. So that's not a reliable thing to use at all. You can't wait by volume.

C (63:33)

And there's way too many jurisdictional problems that cause prices to be higher. And like it just. That doesn't work.

A (63:41)

Let's hit a couple of news items actually, because this, there's like five here. They're all like in line with the exact same discussion that I.

B (63:49)

Before we wrap that one up, I want to say I really like it, Steve. And what have you spoken to Nicholas Doriere or anything? Because they have a bunch of options for how merchants can have an Oracle for the price and they usually use CoinGecko by default. I think imagine without an API server.

A (64:09)

Is my dude, here's the really cool thing is I made a price ticker. One of the things we did for devs who can't code while I was still making that an official series is we built a bitcoin price ticker, like kind of as like one of the first things. And we had to use a tool that had an API. So we can only ask for so long, like for so. For so many like a period of time. And. And then like it would throttle us and like I would kept. It took us a bit to like sort it out because I didn't even realize what the error was that I was getting. But it's so funny is that like if I was using my node, like I don't have like it's one of those things that you don't have to think about, like, do I have API access? Does Coingecko let me do five calls per minute? And like all of that stuff Is like, well, I'm just. No, I'm just using my node to determine what the price is. There's not. I'm not asking a third party what the price is. I'm asking myself.

B (65:04)

It's huge, actually.

A (65:06)

Is a really big deal. Like it seems funny to joke about, but dude, look man, people are hosting.

B (65:13)

Their own instances of Mempool space on their own things, querying their own nodes, but there's still a price. There's still a US dollar price thing in that. And I think that's phone in home essentially. Like if you're looking up your coin join in your own self hosted mempool space, you don't want that to be like, oh, and the US dollar price super secret coin join you did, which I just pulled from coinbase.com is $43. Like no, you don't want that. So like, yes, it makes perfect sense to, to do something like this.

A (65:41)

That's. I didn't even think about that. Is that literally integrating it into Mempool space is the best place to do it. I did not even think about that. But like that's, that's perfect. You can have it. Like I have the option of asking Coinbase or whatever stupid shit, but like here's my UTX Oracle price right here.

B (65:59)

Love it.

A (65:59)

That's a great idea.

C (66:01)

And if you could do, if you could really, if you could really do the rolling price with. With like, you know, the last so many blocks, have it indicate when it's like, ooh, the price. Like put a warning like, oh, the price may be falling based on like the la. Like some subset of that.

A (66:18)

You say it's like the daily price. Like this is the.

C (66:21)

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, but I'm just saying if you can put like, it should be possible to detect with like some subsection of the total blocks that you're using that. Oh, the, the price may be volatile right now or something. You know, it might be falling, might be up. You know, if you can detect some sort of disparity between the total and the subset, you know, just to have a flag. And then outside of that you have a daily price.

A (66:50)

It would also be really cool to be able to utilize that. If that became more widespread and you had that available in Mempool space, it would actually be really cool to be able to make a business contract for using that as the price because it would actually even out volatility the more settlement that actually occurred like that. Because there will be times where I'm about to pay Johnny or Hope or Producer dev or somebody that I'm working with. And then bitcoin price plummets by like three grand. And now I'm paying them a whole different amount or it goes up by five grand. And then like, I feel bad because I was about to pay them this amount. That's why I just got a discount, you know, on like the amount that I'm paying them. And literally what we usually do is I'll send them a message and be like, dude, I'm sorry I was a day late. I, I, you know, I just delayed for two days because I was busy. And you know, the price is like hugely difference. Do you want to split the difference? And like, we'll pay at like this, this marker or something like that. And everybody, you know, we've done this multiple times back and forth just so that we can settle in what seems like fair, a fair way. But what's funny is that like the UTX Oracle would be the perfect way to kind of sort that out is like, well, let's just do the daily UTX Oracle price. So if it falls $3,000 today, it's fine because the UTX Oracle price is still $2,000 higher.

B (68:17)

What is the website?

D (68:18)

GTXO Live Oracle, man.

B (68:21)

I'm going to suggest we use this at Ocean because people have like, we don't have the US dollar mentioned anywhere on the website. That's another part of the whole, you know, leave us alone element of what we do. But obviously it's requested all the time. And I think, Ian, our legal department's figured out a way that we can at least put it in the CSV downloads for people that want to get like worker history and payout history.

A (68:45)

The current UTX Oracle price is 84,552 on the website and the one according to my unchained thing is 84, 600. So it's off. It's right.

D (69:00)

See, like I have all these different platforms wanting me to write the integration for their platform. Like I guess start 9 hasn't, but like umbrell. And so right now it's like, do I really want to start working on this for other people? So right now it's just that Python script. You just literally just Python 3, you know, Utex, Oracle Py and it runs. I haven't really set up any APIs or anything. So just so you know, like that's where the, the state of it it's in right now.

A (69:32)

You know, post about it on Nostra More and I'll zap you and I'll tell everybody to zap you for it. Okay. On news items. So there have been a crap ton of hacks and I really wanted to get yalls take on just kind of the general idea of what's kind of happening in that realm. So Coinbase for those of you if you might not even heard about this because there were other big things, but there's $65 million was basically siphoned off of accounts from December to January because of Coinbase spoofing. So basically convincing people that Coinbase was contacting them or whatnot and then just emptying accounts. Then there's some Femex. Femex Exchange had an 85 million dollar hack and the halted withdrawals and everything. And there's we're going to compensate and investigate and all that good stuff. No one's platform $8 million via a Solana Bridge vulnerability. There was. There's another one around here somewhere. And then of course Bybit got, you know, 1.4 billion at the largest, the largest hack ever in crypto. Like one point the Dow hack. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Not obviously in Ethereum amount, not in like the amount of tokens, but the amount of like fiat value.

B (71:03)

Well, it's Ethereum. Did anyone tweet at them? Congrats on this. Seriously. Yet that's what we say to Ethereum people when they have good days like this.

C (71:13)

Beautiful.

A (71:14)

Congrats on this. Seriously. But it's $1.4 billion. This was out of a cold storage wallet and this was this smart contract. Crazy smart contract. Now I thought it was actually the smart contract was exploited, but it wasn't. It's actually dumber like and it doesn't really matter that. I mean of course the introduced complexity is always going to cause it's always an attack vector. That was kind of a cypherpunk theme through all of this and why Bitcoin is designed the way it is. But I had never even thought that just being able to look at the details of the smart contract or not is such an important factor into its security. Because they were. It was on a ledger. This was on a ledger in cold storage with a smart contract. Because the smart contract is so big and convoluted and has so much data. When they signed, the little ledger says this is the hash, the hash of the transaction you're signing. And so like it tells them all of nothing. And so that's your confirmation on the ledger. And the software was malicious. It just changed the contract and changed the output. But they had no way to check it on their hardware wallet because there's just too much data. So all they're showing is this, like, looks like kind of like an MD5 looking hash, you know, on the. On the ledger screen. So it's. Somebody put the meme of the dude, like sweating bullets and like, press the button sign, don't sign. It's like, here's the hash is like, I don't even know what this means. Like, I can't confirm any of this. And they signed it and sent $1.4 billion to North Korea. So it's like, okay. The hardware thing basically served no great purpose.

C (73:04)

The North Korea thing. Like, North Korea is always the North Korea.

A (73:09)

How are they doing over there?

C (73:11)

It's not really North Korea, right? Like, it's just somebody that's pretending to be from North Korea. Like, is there a VPN running in North Korea somewhere?

A (73:20)

Yeah, see, I don't know. I don't even know if it's like. Like, you know, a bunch of mafia enterprises just kind of have like their North Korean department and that's where they do. That's where they do all their IT. But yeah, I. I don't even know if that's like. Like how confirmed that is. I just saw it. People kept saying it, you know, but I feel like every single time, it's almost like a trope that.

C (73:44)

See the. Russia or North Korea?

A (73:46)

Russia or North Korea. It's a Russian propaganda or it's North Korean hack. So I don't. I don't know.

B (73:52)

That hadn't occurred to me that it was. That was like, cover. I assumed it was actually North Korea.

C (73:58)

And I just always assumed it was fake. North Korea's this good at everything. Like, they don't even have. Do they even have the Internet? I don't know. I mean, I know the government does.

A (74:09)

But it's just power out in North Korea.

C (74:12)

It is. I've seen the aerial photo. Like the, the space photos.

B (74:17)

Well, that's the thing. The. The. It's communist, right? So that means it's all about inequality and like one class of people having everything while no one else has anything. So that's. That's the point of communism, right?

A (74:29)

Equality?

B (74:30)

Yeah.

C (74:31)

Everybody's equality and poverty.

B (74:33)

Yeah. The government class is definitely a lot more equal than everyone else, right?

A (74:37)

Yeah. So much more orders of magnitude more equal, man.

C (74:43)

I'm convinced at this point that communism is literally just a philosophy built to sell slavery to the slaves. Like, like, consciously, I feel like that is just what it is. Like the goal.

A (74:55)

It's just excellent. Pr. It's beautiful. PR for slavery.

B (74:59)

You know what's really funny? If you go back to Marx's statements, he was all trust the science. This I find so funny. He's saying current social scientists at the top of their field are telling us this is the perfect system for human beings to live in. And every like, leading indicator of, you know, and it basically is, it's, it's like almost. You could put what Fauci has been saying during COVID right back. Yeah, it almost fits one on one. I love it. They've been saying to trust the science. There are people that know more than you. This is how you need to live. And just shut up and stop trying to think for yourself. That's been a thing since Marx and it's always been the npc. It's always been the unthinking blue pilled normie that's the enemy of liberty everywhere because they just are unable and refuse to take responsibility for anything.

A (75:43)

I've actually got a personal anecdote that hadn't even thought about until just now that's related to the Bybit thing and like how they got hacked with Ethereum and that's kind of, it's kind of awesome actually. So Nunchuck and I didn't even realize they apparently fixed it really quick and. But they had like a, they had a bug which was a completely non functional problem bug, but it was a really painful visible like a UI bug. Is that after they implemented Taproot is the address that you were sending to would actually just duplicate your. At your Taproot and your change address. So I would, when I had signed to send a transaction, I was looking at the address and it was not the address that I was sending to. And, and at first I was like, oh my God, what is going on right now? Like, and I had even. I had signed it with the tap signer, which there's not a screen on the tap signer. But I hadn't broadcast it or anything. And I was double checking the details and that's when I noticed that the address was not right. And it took me a bit. I deleted and resigned. And like I kept messing with it, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, why is this address not showing up? Right. And. But then it struck me, it made me realize that it was actually the change address that I was looking at because I could go in and look at the details. So it looked like I was signing the transaction was going to the change address and the change address was going to the Change address. And I was like, okay, well at least it looks like it's mine. But like this is super suspicious that I'm sin. It looks like I'm sending all of this bitcoin to one address that I don't really. I don't really know. So what did I do? I said, well, I'm not going to sign it with my type signer. I just break out my cold card. And so I broke out my cold card and then just looked at what I was signing and it wasn't what was on the screen and it was exact, it was what I was expecting it to be. And I was like, oh, okay. And so I signed in broadcast and then I proceeded to forget and then I just ignored the problem for two months and proceeded to continue to forget to tell Hugo about it for like literally two months. But apparently it was fixed. Almost like they caught it like really quickly and updated and I just hadn't updated, but it was just funny is that like I have better security than Bybit who is holding like billions and billions of dollars in Ethereum because I can just ch of my hardware wallet and I actually bothered to check and, and I didn't even have a problem. You know, like it just, it's just so wild. Like 1.4.

D (78:18)

We need more of a man.

A (78:19)

Billion dollars.

D (78:21)

We need more hacks.

A (78:22)

Poof.

D (78:23)

Things get better.

C (78:26)

More hacks.

A (78:27)

That's the, that's the lesson. More hacks.

B (78:30)

I really just want Coinbase and the ETF guys to just get absolutely rugged to pieces. I want hacks to be so common that when. That the ETFs could steal everything and blame it on a hack and for everyone to think, yeah, it probably was a hack just because of how many hacks happen. That's. That's how much it needs to happen.

A (78:48)

You'd have so much good self custody. Yeah.

C (78:52)

If 65 million was, was basically phished from Coinbase is what's being said.

A (78:58)

Yeah, yeah. This is all just social pocket change.

B (79:01)

For them though, man.

C (79:02)

So I mean, are they covering it though? Or like, are they. Are they.

A (79:06)

No, I don't think they covered anything.

C (79:08)

So they're just. Well, that's just. That was not user.

A (79:11)

Sorry.

C (79:12)

Yeah, that's. Geez.

B (79:13)

Okay.

A (79:14)

Better luck next year.

B (79:16)

No, no, it's better when they put out some press statement that's like, we'll give you a, a packet of chips if you, if you return these stolen money. Like that was the blockfi thing, right? Remember the, the market trade meme? I give you $750. You give us back all the bitcoin you stole because they sent out 750 bitcoins instead of dollars, right? And they're like, look, we'll reverse this. And, you know, please, come on, I'll be your friend. But, like, I mean, I'm just getting, like. I'm just getting so tired of, like, just people not running, not using Bitcoin permissionlessly, because if you don't, then other people have a harder time when they do. And like, this. This is kind of a non sequitur. I apologize, but I've just been. There's been like. John Cavallo yesterday wrote this big letter, right, to Michael Saylor that I basically agree with it. Like, I don't particularly get on with John or anything and think he's a bit fragile, but, like, I. I basically agree with a lot of his takes. Sometimes he's just like, way off the mark, but around 70% of the time I'm like, yeah, spot on. And this is one of the times when he's on and he was just saying, like, look, Saylor, you need to be funding all this stuff, like, privacy coin projects and, well, all just like, privacy stuff within Bitcoin, not privacy coins and alternative node implementations, like the Bitcoin and stuff like that. And I just. I don't think throwing money at stuff fixes anything ever. I think it's like the. It's the same as the Covenants guys. And adding more opcodes doesn't fix anything either. What you have is basic will, and the culture has not gone far enough. Like, I think bitcoin really has a culture and people are allergic to admitting such a thing, but we have this thing where newbies are like, I know I gotta buy a hardware wallet and I know I gotta run a node, and that's such a good thing. And like, if Saylor was to just do a stream where he's like, today I'm gonna be setting up my own node and I'm gonna be connecting my hardware wallet to it. Can you imagine, like, the tens of thousands of people that would follow straight on and be like, whoa, he did that and it didn't look that hard. I'm gonna do it. That thing is what. But instead, he calls them paranoid crypto anarchists. And everyone's just like, oh, okay, 5D chess. And that's such a disservice to this whole space. Bitcoin only wins when you have, like a few thousand. The square root of the total number of users in bitcoin space needs to be Hardcore cypherpunks. And as long as you keep that core, you're fine. But the minute you have like just 500 million normies and only 50,000 cypherpunks, I don't think even bitcoin survives that. It just becomes a captured protocol. So I'm just like, can't he do that cultural thing? It's totally free. Like, imagine Saylor with a Raspberry PI being like, here's my bitcoin node. I'm really excited about it. Just like a hundred thousand people would follow him immediately and do it and just get so mad when he would call us paranoid crypto anarchists and stuff. It just reminds me of Vitalik saying, people that run nodes are just weird mountain men and like that, that. Only that's not a good thing to. To say at all. And people just keep going, oh, 5D chess, Trojan horse, all this stuff. I just think, wouldn't it be great if he did that?

A (82:37)

Dude, that would be. We should. I feel like it's time. I feel like it's time for another push. And maybe it's like, you know, the block size war was really the last, like, huge push of like, no nodes matter. Yeah.

B (82:49)

And permissionless use. You can't use bitcoin if you're going to always use someone else as a third party permissioned layer between you and the network.

A (83:00)

It's time for another campaign of like, bitch, run a node.

B (83:06)

I just think, again, it's what I said 45 minutes ago here. If everything he does is permissioned. Right. He owns bitcoin because bitcoin's legal in America. America. It's not like, if they make bitcoin illegal in Canada, I just pretend I don't use it anymore. But I still would. I would still go to El Salvador and pay for everything with bitcoin and I would still like. But he can't do that. Apart from his little stash that's low enough to fly under the radar. So what does he care about permissionlessness? He can't use it that way anyway. But I'm like, he still needs to lead people that way. He's so influential.

C (83:40)

Well, you know, I made. I don't remember how much reach it actually had, but I made a meme at one point, like many years ago about like, the levels of bitcoiner you are. And, and I still think that, like, the general idea is kind of like, useful, is if you can. If you can create some sort of like, idea of like, how serious of a bitcoiner are you. Are you just a holder who, you know, like, like, I don't know, maybe holder needs to be a higher, you know, category or whatever. But like, are you just a, you know, a newbie and you know, you have your bitcoin on exchange? Are you a holder that, you know, you actually self custody? Are you a super user that has, you know, a node and you're mining or whatever, you know, like, like giving people some. Because I mean, I think there's a lot of people that get into it don't even know that there's something else. Like they don't even know where the. The next step is.

A (84:44)

A social meme for how good of a bitcoiner you are, I think can have a. An effect that is super discounted. Like, I completely agree with. And we like joke back and forth. We had like multiple conversations about like, what are the levels and what do you call them? You know, But I actually totally. I'm like, not even slightly against that. I think that's actually a good idea of having some explicit. It's kind of like never referring to non Kyc coins as non Kyc coins. Referring to Kyc coins as compromised coins.

C (85:21)

Compromise.

A (85:22)

It gives your privacy. Compromise coins or identity, whatever the hell. But what it does is it puts the framing of the default in your favor. And when you can show or when you have something to point to from a. A linguistic tool, you know, to say that you're not as good of a. You're not really a bitcoiner. You're not getting any of the benefits of bitcoin.

C (85:46)

Oh, you're just a.

A (85:46)

You're layers, you know, you're not even kok. You know, like, you're just Kame. You're just. It was like, I'm Kamehameha Super Saiyan, you know.

C (86:01)

But calling people paper bitcoiners instead of. Because you've got an E.T. you don't have bitcoin. It's not real.

B (86:11)

I think referring to treating there as being two categories of coins is already an undermining of fungibility. Fundamentally, if you buy a million bucks worth of bitcoin on an exchange and that goes to this address, and then you move them to another address, that's already an assumption that chain analysts have to make to say they still belong to you. And you can say, no, they don't. I immediately sent them to someone else, or they were hacked and they're nothing to do with me. And they can come along and say, we don't believe you. We don't find that plausible. But at the end of the day chain analysis is just assumptions. It's not proved. Because if bitcoin doesn't. Bitcoin is actually fungible. Like it's, it's. They can impose non fungible values on top of it, but at the end of the day they don't know which ones to change address and they don't know which one's your address or the merchant. They, they have to assume all this stuff. That's why I tell people, never ever charge round numbers for anything in, in the bitcoin space. If you want to mess up chain analysis charge every product needs to be like $14.32.

A (87:15)

Come on.

C (87:16)

Then you gotta mess up Steve's.

D (87:20)

You know what round round dollars are.

A (87:22)

Okay. Right?

B (87:23)

Well no, because they can still use that for. Look, if, if I paid some that everyone records the price at the, when you go on mempool space, if you look at a transaction from five years ago, it tells you when you change it to dollars, it tells you the price of dollars back then. It doesn't tell you it right now. And that's, that's quite advanced for them to do that. But it sucks because if you have a utxo with like 10 grand worth of bitcoin on it and you know, you buy something that costs 100 bucks exactly and then the rest of it's all change. I mean it's so easy to. The change will be. Well not in that example but the change is typically a random amount. But the, the thing you bought was like 14.99. Like everyone knows which ones you're buying something. So yeah, they, they can typically the change output will be second. It will be UTXO1 instead of UTXO0 and it won't be a round number. And the thing you bought that went.

D (88:20)

Well just make all of your UTXOs round amount of dollars to begin with. Then all your change will be.

A (88:26)

I was about to say no. Like that's actually an easy fix that I think is actually, is actually superior. You know, because I've been using wasabi to, to pay out people and then receives to for that, that obfuscation. You know, so like somebody else can't just like look and be like oh, these are your wallets connecting to this and this is what who you just sent money to. But, and, and one of the things I love about it is that like, you know, if I'm for what I leave in there that I'm doing month to month is that it mixes again as soon as, as soon as it's not mixed, you know, for the change address but it would actually be really cool is that if I sent out a payment it literally mixed for, you know, relevant amounts. So like if I was sending out like a thousand dollar payment to somebody then it created three change addresses each of a thousand dollars and then the change address or something so that, you know, I'm using it in round dollar amounts. Well then I can also treat my ex like everything that's left over in the same round dollar amounts. And then it kind of looks like I just did another coin join even though I didn't. I'm just making it really hard to tell what address is, is what or what's the payment.

D (89:39)

I appreciate your service and what isn't. Guy, I got to.

A (89:43)

Yeah, yeah.

D (89:46)

I gotta get going guys but I'll let you continue. I'm off to wedding weekend so see y' all later.

A (89:55)

Dude, have fun. Thanks for joining us man.

C (89:57)

All right, man.

A (89:59)

So this is in line with. Because there's like a number of different news items in relation to this and this is something I want to talk about because I think this is another really big thing for where we're going and I feel smart because this is the way I've been thinking that it was going to go and it looks, I'm seeing it more and more but Blockstream has launched asset management and now includes bitcoin funds and specifically includes bitcoin backed lending. Stoneridge in their newsletter or their report basically in no uncertain terms said they were going to be doing bitcoin backed lending with in partnership with bakkt. Galloy has just which they do. Lightning Infrastructure has just launched Lana, which is a bitcoin backed lending company and I believe there is actually another one in this that I cannot find right now. But there is another one that is doing bitcoin backed lending and so interest.

C (91:05)

Rates are coming down.

A (91:07)

There's two, there's a couple of different interesting. Oh, onramp just did them. Just did bitcoin backed lending and so that was actually an additional one that was in addition to the other one that I can't remember. But this is happening kind of across the like this is becoming widespread and I think this is really in line with, I really think the beauty of multisig and non custodial or shared custody financial services is a really, really big deal. And it's also another reason why I think when we create, when we have Bitcoin as a payments network, we are going to be using quote unquote, bitcoin Backed credit notes that are like I still just cannot discount how great of a scaling tool it is actually to be able to say I have a cashew token or an E cash token that corresponds to this part of the Merkle tree of the unchained. One key on ramp, one key guy swan, one key bitcoin balance in this, on, in this you know bitcoin backed UTXO or this, this, this basically proof of reserves for my E cash and then you can have a payment network built on top of it which is basically just provable one to one to a balance of Bitcoin that is a multi sig like like not totally run by some explicit custodian service that just makes all credit instruments in Bitcoin proof of like 100% proof of reserve like very very easily and done so in a way that you don't need KYC and you can have privacy still. You wouldn't have it for the people who are publicly like putting up their their Bitcoin to back this. But you could do this in a really interesting way in a system like Pear Credit where you have like a time lock and each E cash unit literally expires at a certain time so that people know when the, you know when the balance is at quote unquote at risk or up for. You know your guarantee now has a period of like oh you're not, you're not 100% sure. You still have to trust this party. But I really think there's going to be some clever and highly utilized things because bitcoin backed lending is a huge, is slowly going to become a really really big market I think because people don't want to sell their Bitcoin and interest rates are that you can get are lower than what people expect the CAGR on bitcoin to be. And then what it also happens to do is it levels out the price is that it smooths out the growth in liquidity and the mature. Like I think it's going to smooth out the cycles because people to buy dips it allows people to buy dips. I just bought a dip short the dollar, it allows you to short the dollar and it allows me to postpone when the price has gone up and then I can basically put extra buying pressure when it's low, when I think it's undervalued and I can put extra selling pressure to prevent a blow off top like because I just do it when it's specifically most val opportune for me to basically clear out out clear out the debt instead of holding onto it. If I was expecting to spend 2 bitcoin on a house or something and then I do it as a loan instead and then the bitcoin triples in price and now it was only 0.6 Bitcoin that I have to pay out for the house, that looks like a great deal for me. I've put myself in a great position and I can close that loan out and put selling pressure that prevents the volatility of that basically new liquidity in. Because I'm in a futures contract for selling that I can push off for as long as I need to or as long as I can maintain it backed by bitcoin. And I am explicitly creating a market that is over collateralized so the interest rate is never going to be fake. I think this is a extremely fucking robust foundation for a financial system that could expand globally and have a credit market that actually is not, is not manipulated. And I don't, I think people totally discount how powerful that is. Like that is an alternative financial system. That is a totally alternative financial system that can scale globally and works literally on basic multi sig on top of bitcoin.

C (95:42)

And has there been anything?

A (95:43)

Clearly there's a bunch of different caveats. There's, there's still risks involved, but the risks are night and day different from the risk of current fiat, you know.

C (95:52)

So is there anything else about the fold credit card?

A (95:56)

Yeah, that's, that's actually part of why I did a loan. Not only to be able to buy a little bit of bitcoin right now because it dipped, but also because like we're just kind of getting rid of all of our credit card debt and getting rid of all of our other credit cards and then I'm just going to get a bitcoin, a fold credit card and then that's just going to be our only one.

C (96:14)

Is it, is it out now or does it mean it like what's it is not out.

A (96:18)

I'm still, I'm still in line for it and I'm, I'm pretty, I'm pretty high up there. So I'll, I'll know probably within like a day or two of when they're being sent out.

B (96:26)

You know this is, is if this is available to Canadians yet?

A (96:31)

I do not know. I know it's not in the eu. Canadians, I'm not sure.

B (96:36)

They like I was into fold like five years ago and they kept being like we'll have Canada this quarter. And I just, they kept thinking EU.

A (96:42)

Was like right around the corner.

B (96:44)

But yeah, no, Strike did something in Europe now, right?

A (96:48)

Yeah.

B (96:51)

I don't know, it's weird to me because like a lot of companies can do everything in anywhere except the U.S. so when places start in the U.S. i'm like, well, surely the rest of the world is really easy at this point then like bull. Bitcoin is like Europe, Costa Rica, Canada and France is like, I'm never touching America. No way. Anyway, yeah, I should probably drop off. I should probably drop off too. I didn't, I didn't really have anything else on my plate really. If there's like one last topic that's that we didn't do then like we can touch on it quick. Let's see.

A (97:24)

You know, we hit the, the tether usdt. I don't know if y' all want to talk about the, the IMF loan with El Salvador and like bitcoin restrictions. I. I don't really.

C (97:35)

Did something happen?

B (97:37)

They stopped buying for a while, they stopped buying bitcoin and now they started again. And I think it's not naive. Right. The IMF aren't stupid. They didn't lend it and then just let Bukele do whatever he wants. So they're gonna have him on a leash now, it looks like. And that sucks. Like if he's gonna buy bitcoin more as a country, I think he has to be able to demonstrate that it has nothing to do with the loan. It can't be the funds from the loan. And it also can't be like. It probably goes further than that. It's probably. If it's. If you're making a bunch of money from some venture financed by the loan, none of that can go into bitcoin either. So I don't know.

A (98:15)

I'm sure there's plenty of strings attached. And I wonder if they like, I don't know. See, they didn't do. They tried to sell the bonds and I don't think that went really well. So I don't know if it's just they need the capital for some of their plans or if they're getting strong armed, you know, Like, I wonder what the.

C (98:36)

Because.

A (98:39)

You know, it would seem like the whole idea of bitcoin is to get out from underneath the strings that are attached to all that. And IMF is just playing there. Here are, here are our strings game again.

B (98:52)

But yeah, it's not Nothing. Unfortunately. The IMF definitely got something in exchange for the $3 billion or whatever it was.

A (99:01)

Yeah.

B (99:01)

And it was a marketing hit against bitcoin and it looked like they were, they were like this country is doing too well without us and with bitcoin. So we need to put a stop to this. And this is a $3 billion expense, but it needs to be money well spent. So it's, it's the height of all evil. And it really sucks that I don't think Bukele is able to really credibly say, you know, it doesn't really affect anything and it gives us a bunch of money. I don't think it's, I don't think he's able to make that claim, unfortunately. It's. And it's, I feel so bad for people like John Attack and you know, bitcoiners like Adam Gibson and people like that, the great bitcoiners doing great development work and stuff that moved there that now have to basically watch like they've invested a few years of their life into getting set up down there and getting citizenship or whatever. Now they're just like, I don't know, I'd hate to be in that position, man.

A (99:58)

That's one of the reasons why. And I had conversations with people and a couple of them said listen, this is Latin America. Like the people from Latin America were telling me like this is Latin America. Like don't, don't rely on one regimes or one leaders like conditions or rules that they set up because the whole, the next one could night and day.

B (100:19)

It and as opposed to like America where we have a very trustworthy political establishment.

A (100:26)

Well see it's, it's non volatile shitty persistently. So like it doesn't get super wild shitty worse or any better. It just, it's got, it's a lot more stable.

B (100:41)

I'm just being stability facetious. It's a lot more stable.

A (100:45)

You're. I, I completely agree and I would like and retweet your meme on the fact but there is a degree of like volatility that the US doesn't quite have.

B (100:55)

Yeah, I agree.

C (100:57)

The 2020 stuff was the craziest shift in volatility.

A (101:01)

Like. Oh yeah. Ever.

C (101:04)

Like, I mean it's really wild to think about what has happened. I mean that's my worry too is that this is not a if. If Trump and what's happening now is not any sort of sustainable shift shift. It's just a reaction to 2020 that will be short lived and we get more volatility, we get back and forth more and more back and forth. Then we just end up with more. I mean what's funny is that like Maine just came out and said that they're not going to send in their federal taxes if Trump doesn't send them the, like, some sort of subsidy or something. I'm like, well, we're already getting the civil war. This is great. It's, you know, I don't know. Like, it's. It's interesting that the, like, it's interesting how stupid some of the resistance to what is trying to be done is, but that it's still kind of. Still kind of producing, like, a potential, like, grounds for breakup, which would be probably better in the long run in terms of like, having somewhere that it's, you know, decent to go or live. So I don't know.

A (102:13)

Yeah, but it's totally why. It's why I never, like, I wanted to. And I seriously considered and, like, seriously looked at and had a lot of different conversations with people about, like, going to El Salvador and, like. But I. I basically couldn't pull the trigger because I'm just like, what happens when he's out of all. Like, how. How stable is this really? Like, yes, this is a huge shift, and yes, it looks great, but longevity.

B (102:39)

It's like jumping from a cruise ship to, like, a little speedboat with a cool guy and a captain that's like, I've found an island I'm gonna drive us all to. It's got pineapples and stuff. It's like, yeah, I like that. I like the energy, dude. I really do. Like, and I know that this cruise ship I'm on is gonna be completely submerged in the next 40 years, but.

C (103:00)

Like, your Hawaiian shirt is great, but.

B (103:04)

Yeah.

A (103:05)

Oh, man. Oh, yeah, that's. That.

B (103:08)

It's too risky, man. Like, I think anyone without kids could. Could take the gamble because they can get out again if they really need to. But, like, just me, like, like shifting my kids and, like, by grandparents and all that stuff, that's just too much. That's too much to do. Like, maybe in five years. I was saying, like, I'll look back at it in five years and if it's. If it manages to do a sort of, I don't know, controversial, but whatever. Germany managed outside of the Weimar Republic to sort of making their country viable again, like, before it all went quite wrong. Like, I'm just saying, like, something of that nature where I'm like, wow, you really pulled yourself out of the rubble quick. Like, or. Or Singapore, I guess, is the more politically correct example to give. But anyway, I gotta jump off now that I've advocated for the Nazis. So.

A (103:55)

Okay, this is really the time to cut this one off.

B (104:00)

Yeah.

A (104:00)

All right, guys, let's close it out. Thank y' all so much for listening. We will hit. I'm gonna wrap up the rest of the little news items that we just didn't really bother with. But there's some. There's some good stuff that's worth. Worth hitting in the. The. The follow up. So thank you, guys.

C (104:15)

Later.

B (104:16)

Bye.

A (104:21)

All right, let's wrap up the news items we were not able to cover in the round table. So first, alongside all the hacks, we also had a kidnapping and an attempted kidnapping for people in the bitcoin or the crypto space. This is another big one that Jameson Lopp does a fantastic job of keeping track of, and I really think should be sobering to realize. Imagine if you had tons of people who were going around and it was very clear that they were holding enormous amounts of money in cash, like pallets and pallets of cash. But there was an interesting element that there was like a USB stick that just had this magic property that it could just suck up all that cash like a vacuum cleaner, and it would disappear into just this tiny little thing, and they could put it in their pocket and they could run away with it. There's a reason why mafia bosses who deal in a lot of cash also have a lot of people walking around their homes and places of business with military weaponry. A crypto entrepreneur was kidnapped near Troyes, France, and held hostage for, interestingly, just 20,000 Euro ransom. But then Tim Heath, who in Tallinn, Estonia, fought off potential kidnappers who were disguised as painters and were targeting him before the opening of a casino where he has made tons of money in crypto gambling online. Just another reminder. Get your concealed carry train. Know how to use it, know how to protect yourself and your family, because we obviously wish and hope that it never happens. But if you do need it, it would be horrible to be unprepared. Another big news item that we kind of talked about but kind of didn't was that bitcoin mining pools have consolidated. And there's more just explicit data about what that was and essentially how it looks. And bitcoin mechanic did, in fact, bring this up, but essentially that pools are sharing stratum jobs and they have accounted for over 35% of the hash rate with Ant pool in the lead. And there was a Twitter post breaking down a lot of this, which I will have the link in the show notes so that you can go investigate it yourself. But just in line with what we had already talked about and what mechanic has said and tried to bring a lot of attention to. Which is one of the reasons I really value having him on the show because that is his focus and is very knowledgeable about that side of things. This is a problem. It is a problem that is fixable. It is a problem that is transient. If we make the right decisions and we adopt the right technology and massive like like just kudos to mechanic to Luke and them for what they have built over there by making this so much easier and making this accessible. If you own hash power, if you own a minor, make use of it. This is one I wish we had gotten to, but maybe we will bring this up or I'll be doing a guy's take on it the US government has argued that money isn't property. In the justification for its seizure, the Department of Justice claims that confiscating $50,000 from you does not violate your property rights. That is insane. I'll give the link to the article at Reason about this situation, but I just want to take a moment and iterate how unbelievably insane that is because the entire purpose of money is its ability to obtain resources. It is the attempt to crystallize the work and the property that we have contributed and the resources we have contributed to other people and are owed back in society. It is a record keeping system for society to crystallize and uphold what we have given them. The idea that not until you turn it into shittier property does money suddenly become yours or what it represents becomes something that you actually own. It is the suggestion that if you don't consume the resources then you are default a slave to whatever the government dictates or whatever authority decides that your time was devoted to them instead of to yourself, which is literally making you a slave in retrospect to someone else because of their arbitrary authority. When you have explicitly only contributed resources into the economy and you have not consumed it, and that somehow it is morally superior, or there is a greater obligation to you if you take those resources back out of the economy and maintain some sort of a net zero or a deficit with the economic system, with society around you, that somehow that makes you better and you obtain more rights by being a greater drain on society and consuming and destroying resources rather than creating it. The incentives and the basic moral premise for what money is and why property rights exist have been so utterly lost. Like the the sheer incapacity to think to understand the basics. Like the dumb simple I'm a retarded 5 year old, I know nothing about the world but I understand what is mine. I understand that this is my time and you are stealing it from me. That you have forced me to do something for you. Like the utter simplistic reality of I own my time and I own me. Only with a PhD and decades of propaganda and brainwashing could you be so fucking stupid to think that that actually makes sense. That having worked for money, because it's money, it's not your property yet. I just, just got a couple of news items on the pilot for the digital rupee. So bunch more fintech. We're going to create a CBDC and this is what it's going to look like. Proposals and test runs and all that crap. Nothing new. I feel like those are monthly France bans crypto mixers to combat money laundering. They didn't ban USAID though. Doesn't seem like they care a lot about money laundering. Unfortunately, there is likely to be continued regulation and push in this direction towards the eu. I am very sorry for anybody who is out there in the EU because that sucks. But we have a couple of cases that hopefully we have made leaps in the right direction and it's one of those interesting things that this fight is always like, it gets worse in one path and it gets better in another path and there's this kind of clash over which has the most momentum and which way are we leaning at any one particular time. And hopefully, fingers crossed, hopefully, there is a couple of major decisions or significant pushes in the right direction could lead to a lot of momentum and can potentially reverse or obsolete a lot of these really terrible and stupid laws and practices. So if you are in a position to help, if you're in a position to call a representative or put pressure on it or contribute to somebody's, you know, the Samurai case or tornado cash, please do so. I think it's really important that we put up this fight. The Cypherpunks have won this war and have won the legal battle multiple times in the past. Prior to even Bitcoin's existence, there were multiple legal cases and lawsuits brought against regulators and authority institutions that the cypherpunks won throughout the 90s. And it is very, very likely that had that pressure not been put, we would have lost those. And we may have never really had fundamental encryption on the Internet and decentralized protocols may have been even an order of magnitude more difficult, not only to just implement but, but certainly to make popular. This is a very, very fundamental battle and a very important one and also one of the best things you can actually do is install, implement and use things like Nostr, Wasabi Wallet, Tor, peer to peer tech like the pair Runtime, Stack and Keat and hopefully one day very very soon a project that I have been working on. The more people these things and the more people who are by default affected in their daily lives by the attempts to make basic software and simple obvious human rights criminal act, the harder it is for them to keep it up. Let's build and adopt before they get the laws in place. DARPA is launching a pre crime anti money laundering program. That's right. The A3ML is going to try to predict that people will commit crimes with money that they will commit crimes with. Hmm, sounds like dystopia. Apple has removed Data Security, an end to end encryption tool in the UK specifically for all UK customers because the government has demanded a backdoor into the encryption provided by Apple and instead of Apple providing that backdoor they have just canceled encryption for everyone in that jurisdiction. That sucks. That sucks. It makes sense. It's. I actually think it's better to just be. To just say UK customers, you don't get jack and you don't get the encryption than it is to give the UK government a backdoor. If that is exact, if that is actually what has happened. It's at least being more open about the conditions and about the situation itself. If you're given a back door, they build in a back door for the UK government. Not only does it just make the entire system weak and the encryption itself arbitrary or irrelevant, but it gives this facade. We don't know what they are sharing with this with the government. We don't know what they are doing behind the scenes. We do not know what power or privacy or sovereignty we have lost. It becomes ambiguous and sinister and I just think they actually made the right move. Aside from the fact that they haven't put up a fight and they haven't sued them, but in the context of quote fine, will comply. I think it was better to end it and the users may hopefully realize how important this issue is and seek alternative situations or seek an alternative option that does provide encryption, something that that is built into the app or does not have a centralized platform in which a bagdoor can be provided at all to the government and makes them think differently or think twice about what they install and the privacy they have with their software. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it does. I don't know. We'll see. Most normies are hard to convince of anything of use anyway. Here's a good one. Mulvad has added Lightning payments with a 10% discount. That's pretty cool. Breeze has secured $5 million to expand Bitcoin lightning payment integration which is really cool. Gallo launches Lana oh, we already talked a bitcoin about Bitcoin backed lending which is just really cool to see all of these, the successful and kind of slow growing foundational tools and not only payment and lightning infrastructure, but also just the general financial and multisig infrastructure start to look, start to layer on to the guarantees and the security that they have in their kind of foundational tools, layer on new things on top of it. And I think that's going to be a really interesting way to watch things grow and expand. What can you get after you have a multi sig fully reserve lending platform? What can you do after you have a highly liquid and adaptable lightning payment infrastructure, et cetera? We're gonna there's gonna be a really fascinating maturation of the ecosystem in the next couple of years. Braiins Mining has introduced the Braiins Solo pool, which is really cool, designed for independent miners. So if you have your solo satoshi or your Bitax or something like that, definitely something to check out. And I haven't really dug into it yet, but I've got it saved to do some digging and maybe we'll cover it and talk about it on the show at some point. Rumble has announced a Bitcoin and tether wallet for creators. Another thing I really want to dive into. I'm really excited to see Rumble begin to embrace this and potentially embrace Zaps and go the NOSTR way. Not necessarily that they're integrating nostr but that they are seeing what the capacity and the potential of this technology is to integrate payments that cannot be stopped and what their platform could provide that could really, really make them a differentiator from something like YouTube or the more censored and more quote unquote mainstream platforms. Another one on Brains actually is they are open sourcing the BCB 100 mining control board. This was for the design for the Bitmain S19 series and the Mini Miner, which I didn't even know about, I don't know about the Mini Miner but that's just really cool to see more hardware again, open sourcing of hardware and the more availability in alternative builders and manufacturers. It's a really big deal. And yes, it's just the control board, but that's a really important piece of the puzzle. The more open source we have, the more available and visible everything is into the mining stack. The hardware, the manufacturing, the software all of it. The better, the more decentralized, the more robust and the more competitive the entire market is. And that should wrap us up. That should wrap us up. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. We had a couple more little items, but I don't really care some shit about taproot wizards Trump since this and I don't have time to talk about it so I could say all sorts of stuff about the quote unquote shitcoin reserve that Trump just tweeted about, but we don't really have the time to get into it. And I would also like to discuss this with Mechanic, with Steve and with Jeff. So that will have to go into the next episode because we had already recorded literally a day before that announcement happened. So don't forget to subscribe to Bitcoin Audible and catch the next roundtable episode. If you want to hear all about it, check out blockstream and the Jade plus hardware wallet 10% off with with code guy that is my name. Do wear it out. You can't wear it out, it's just that. And of course a non custodial on chain and lightning wallet that just works, is intuitive and has a wonderful UX in the bitkit Lightning Wallet. Links and details to both of them are right down in the show notes and thank you all for listening to the show. Thank you all for subscribing. Shout out to the audionauts and everybody who zaps on Nostr and boosts and shares on Fountain and streamsat you guys. I love you most because because sats. The sats are the way to my heart. Very special to me and I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. Share it out with everybody you know because everybody wants to learn about Bitcoin and this is the place to do it. I am the guy to teach it and I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. Until then guys, take it easy.

B (119:51)

Sa.