B (5:30)

Yeah. I'm tired of the cold. Cold is not fun.

C (5:36)

It.

B (5:37)

It's like. The worst thing is that, like, it gets slightly above zero once in a while, slightly above freezing once in a while. And then all of the snow that's, like, pushed up along the streets and the sidewalks melts into a river that becomes ice the. That night. And so for, like, then days after, it's just. There's just ice. Um, so that terrifying, like, And. And there's, like, places where the ice is, like, broken up and it's easy to walk, and then all of a sudden, you know, like, there's a scary sheet of black ice that you can't really, like. You have to just be very, very vigilant, like, while you're walking.

A (6:25)

But how many times have you or Shea busted your asses yet?

B (6:31)

No, don't. Let's not. Let's not talk about, like, listen, we. Nobody's. Nobody's fallen.

A (6:36)

But.

B (6:37)

But there have just been some extremely, like, you know, terrifying moments. And. But it's a, like, real problem. Like, the. There's a. A friend of. Of hers who was out of work for, like, almost. She's a physical trainer, but out of work for almost a year because she fell and, like, got a serious concussion and, like, brain damage.

A (7:05)

Oh, my God.

B (7:08)

And, dude, the ice here is just no joke.

A (7:11)

It's.

B (7:12)

It's really. Nobody should live.

A (7:15)

These places are just not. Not meant to live here.

B (7:19)

I don't.

A (7:19)

I don't understand. It wasn't inhabitable before.

B (7:22)

No.

A (7:22)

Like, technology. The technology's taken us to places we shouldn't be.

B (7:27)

Well, there's, like. There's, like, beauty. Like, it's.

A (7:30)

It's.

B (7:30)

It's interesting because, like, the nicest days are always the coldest. I don't know. Like, the sun comes out and it gets 10 degrees colder, but. But, like, you. You walk around outside, and there'll be, like. Like, literally ice blowing in the wind. Like, it's. It's, like, sparkly like this. The sky is beautiful, and the. The. The air is literally sparkling, and it's just beautiful death all around you. I don't. I don't understand. Like. Like, it's the weirdest thing. Um, and then most days it's just.

C (7:58)

Ugly and crappy and windy, but.

A (8:02)

Well, we appreciate that. Yeah, we appreciate that. And I hope you get to Brazil sooner rather than later.

B (8:08)

Yeah, our, our Brazil trip got. Did we talk about this last time it got delayed? Yeah, I think we did.

C (8:13)

Yeah.

B (8:13)

Yeah, I think we did.

A (8:14)

That was. I was like just right when it happened.

B (8:16)

Yeah, hopefully. Dude, it's not looking, it's not looking great. They're so slow to respond that it could be delayed again. So I, I don't know. We'll see.

A (8:33)

This is like the first step before you can start the step of getting to the US too. That's what's so about this is, this is the pre. Step to starting the process.

B (8:44)

Yeah. Because we've got a lot of the stuff filled out for the US but we can't actually file until we know the consulate that's going to handle the.

A (8:53)

The actual like the, the case. So you have to know the. And that will be in Brazil.

B (9:00)

Yeah. And so if we tried to. They won't approve the consulate. They, they won't just automatically approve it. So you kind of have to be in the place.

A (9:09)

In the place. Yeah.

B (9:11)

And so, so like if we filed it now, they would probably say there's a good chance that they would just reject the request to handle it in Brazil because we're in Canada and the Canadian consulate is, you know, like, like a two year waiting list on top of the paperwork. So I don't know, are you going.

A (9:36)

To be a liberal now and just vote for Democrats and amnesty and I think just free immigration?

B (9:44)

Honestly, I don't see what difference it makes. It's not really. They're not, they're not helping us. Like they, they don't want somebody with a PhD. Like this has been a, they don't want useful people. No. Canada's been a crazy liberal country for how long and they, she. How, how has they didn't approve her citizenship here?

A (10:02)

Gosh, she's still been there for eight years. Yeah.

B (10:05)

No, nine. Nine.

A (10:07)

Good lord.

B (10:08)

Nine as of January.

A (10:09)

Mechanic, how are you doing? You're in the butthole of.

B (10:14)

Was. You're in a better part of the butthole of the world.

A (10:17)

Yeah.

C (10:18)

Like we've had this chat. I mean no offense, like, like I don't know Canada somehow for me, I never get affected by anything except the taxes are at least like 20, 30% higher than they are in some of the worst states. But really like nothing seems to matter out in BC the way it does in the Toronto area. It feels like another world. Completely. Because, like, I'm closer to Mexico than I am to Toronto.

A (10:48)

Right.

C (10:49)

And people in Newfoundland, which is east Canada, are closer to the UK than where I live in Canada, like, literally across the Atlantic. So it's not just distance, though. It just genuinely feels like nothing really. Like, I don't know, nothing really happens out here, you know? You know, the meme nothing ever happens? That's kind of how it feels in Canada. I. I really don't pay attention to the politics here at all.

A (11:14)

Sessions is out your side.

C (11:16)

No, she's in Alberta, which is. That's like. That's a continental middle state or province and that's. That's based. They always call it the Texas of Canada for a bunch of reasons, because it's like, it's more right wing and there's also a lot of old oil stuff going on, so. In more ways than one. But I've still never been there, except going through Calgary, you know, and layovers and stuff like that. It's a big airport, but that's got that inhuman level of cold as well. Like late October hits and it's like you go outside for 10 minutes without a jacket and you end up in hospital. It's like, just ridiculous.

A (11:57)

How's the month been? I feel like everything on the. The soft work and all that debate side of thing is, has been super quiet, which I think honestly is probably a good thing just because, like, everybody's slowly figuring out what's actually gonna. What actually might happen and, like, where consensus might lie on actually making a decision on things.

C (12:18)

Yeah, I think BIP 110 as it's now numbered, is starting to look like the reasonable thing to do rather than the, you know, an insane thing like disabling OP if in Taproot, which is like, just. There shouldn't have been a massive issue at all and people overreacted to it.

A (12:38)

Wait, which one's 110 again?

C (12:40)

So it started 4, 4, 4, and then so now it's 110. Luke still calls it 4, 4, 4. I couldn't care, whatever anyone wants to call it, but that's the one that, you know, makes limits. Script pub keys. It builds off the back of Portland Hodl's thing that just, you know, limits them across the board. But it means op returns 83 bytes, a consensus, not policy for a whole year, along with a bunch of other limits. It kills OP if, which kills the Taproot wizard inscription envelope thing. That's, you know, the one we've spoken about a few times on the show. You can confiscate your own UTXOs. If I could put it that way. If you want to be silly and send like, you only have 128 tap leaves, right? So people that have done more than that would be unable to spend their stuff if they don't have the key path and if they don't spend it before the thing activates on September 1st, and, you know, some other crazy contrived scenario if they have more than 128 conditions. So, you know, no one's losing their coins over this unless they're experimenting. And if you're experimenting, you're not locking up significant amounts of money. So that's Data Gnome. You know, that's that whole fork thing that's been going on for a while. It's got minor activation built in now, but it's still September 1st activates no matter what. Um, I think release candidate two is almost out. Fanquake found a few issues with RC1, and those have been fixed. There was some error in the logs. It worked, but there was a bunch of, like, CI failures and, and, you know, ugliness in the logs. As far as I know, all that's been addressed. So that's in a very good spot now. A very professional thing then. The thing I alluded to last time was the cat, which was this. I was like, something's coming soon. It's not me, obviously, but I was aware of it before Claire released it publicly. She announced it on the mailing list. Greg has been melting down on the mailing list, and that's been, you know, sad and just ridiculous. He suggested banning anyone that would propose anything like that, along with everyone from the company they work with, which was just crazy, right? So, but I mean, that's basically because this was really nothing to do with Ocean the cat fork. Like, there are legitimately a lot of Bitcoiners that don't like spam. It's not just me and Luke. So, like, someone came up with the cat, it's proposed on the mailing list and people are like, look, this is, you know, we're not obligated to respond to you or even allow your content through. But unfortunately the mailing list is part of the bureaucratic process of ever having a pull request or a bip discussed on GitHub. It has to. Well, maybe not pull requests, but definitely bip. If you submit a BIP that hasn't been discussed on the mailing list, it will be removed, saying, you need to discuss this on the mailing list first.

A (15:47)

Which is exactly what happened.

C (15:49)

Right?

A (15:50)

Yeah.

C (15:50)

So, I mean, it got posted on the mailing list, but Claire hasn't been allowed to respond to anything Greg said, which is really silly because it's Claire's proposal. So I don't know. They did let one of my comments through, but they didn't let my other one through where I told Greg, like, look, you can't, you can't be banning people and everyone from their company if they make proposals that annoy you.

A (16:13)

Like.

C (16:14)

But Anyway, so the cat, real quick summary. It, it indexes all of the UTXOs that are, you know, generated and indexed or, you know, according to the heuristics used by all the spammers. So if it's a stamp, if it's an inscription, if it's a BRC20 token, et cetera, it's getting categorized as a non monetary UTXO and removed from the UTXO set, essentially making them all the same as OP returns. Right. The benefit of OPERA returns that we were sold was at least they're not UTXOs. So we're taking a bunch of things that aren't UTXOs. Really. They are UTXOs by definition, but we're defining them as non UTXOs. And that means none of the spammers can spend their thing anymore except stamps, which are dead UTXOs anyway because they're fake pub keys. So it's basically to kill all incentive for spamming on bitcoin because anyone that would spam on bitcoin would be like, the network might actually respond to what we're doing here and delete what it is we're doing. So would should probably use another network. Obviously it's controversial and I left my comments on the mailing list. I'm not dying on the hill to activate the cat, but I also think most of the objections to it are naive and ideological. They're not practical at all. We know there's 20 million outputs of 546sats that are all obviously and publicly part of these scammy schemes to try and sell NFTs to people and stuff. I have no issue deleting that. We're very capable of discerning the difference between that and someone with a genuine utxo. It's like, so where do you draw the line? Slippery slope arguments like that to me, and just, I'm finding myself very tired with ideological arguments lately because they look like people talking from a position of principle and they're just not. They're really just people like weaponizing our own scruples against us and making us unable to defend ourselves by invoking these over the top principles. Like, no. Like, and you go really far with the inflation bug. Like, you know, it was code is law, it's a valid transaction, yada yada. Yeah, but he just broke 21 million because of a bug and obviously we're going to fix that. Like, I really just increasingly just want to be a pragmatist about this stuff. And like I said, I'm not dying on the cat hill, but if it activated, there's nothing in me that's like, oh my UTXOs are going to be gone next. Like, bitcoiners are never going to do that and they're the ones in charge here. This is not being done because the government wanted to put a blacklist on us. So that's my spiel on the cat.

A (18:53)

I had a really good episode. I'm not sure if you saw it, but we brought the shitcoin insider back on because I was talking to him in the chat and he was like, he had gotten really deep into that after it had been published and, and so I was like asking him a whole bunch of questions like, do we need to do a show about that? And we, we really, we really went pretty deep. And the interesting thing though to me was like, how inconsistent. Because, because it literally is just like a. This one feels wrong and then you come up with a bunch of technical sounding arguments against it. But then so many other things like literally. And the conversation at the very other hand that completely, completely contradict what the supposed reason is. Um, and this is like the thing that gets me. It's like, why are you afraid to have a conversation about this? You know, like, like, why are you, why are you censor this? And like, like you're afraid Claire is going to come in and, and say, and say what? Like, you're literally just putting fuel on the fire if you think this is like a bad thing. You're making yourself look like you're on your. You're scared to have a conversation about what is a proposal or that the cat might actually like. I don't think the cat has a, any real chance of getting implemented honestly, because it is a little aggressive and it's kind of, you could call it like kind of subjective in its determination, but it's not at all the, like, I'm like right alongside conversations where they're like, how, how dare you confiscate all these coins? It's like a whole bunch of 546 sat transactions that are obviously just NFTs like nobody want. You're not confiscating actual funds, clearly, because they're denoting them as JPEGs. They're denoting them as, as the spam transaction explicitly. And so we're just saying, okay, well we're going to take you at your word. This is a spam transaction and we're just going to lock this up. And the cap is a thousand sats. And so and it costs like, you know, 300 sats to 400 sats to make a transaction. So it's basically a dust limit fork. And they're worried about all this confiscation. And then not to like, 10 seconds later we're like, we should freeze millions of bitcoin because quantum is going to be here any day now. And I'm like, I'm like, dude, you just said it was a slippery slope and this was crazy. And you can't confiscate coins. How dare you. You're going to freeze millions of sats. He's like, I'm going to freeze millions of bitcoin because somebody at some point in the future might have it a threat to quantum computing. And I'm just like, dude, like there has to be some sort of argumentative like, like logical consistency. Like it can't just be like this is the bad one and this is the good. It's all because they don't, they can't.

C (21:44)

Let me jump in as well, the context. If you took all of these spam non monetary UTXOs and added up all of the sats that you were deleting, it's about 250 bitcoins, which is spread out over millions of people.

A (21:59)

And it's capped at a thousand stats apiece.

C (22:01)

Right? So the collective cost of spending those 250 bitcoins would be like 150 bitcoins in transaction fees. So it's completely and utterly negligible. I guess people just want to make arguments about precedent. But for me, slippery slope and precedent arguments are just saying, all right, well I can't fault your idea, so I'm going to fault something similar to your idea, which is a fallacy. It's called the slippery slope fallacy for a reason. Cause it's fallacious as a means of argumentation. It needs to be wrong in its own right.

B (22:34)

I don't know if there's a difference there. But calling it a confiscation, they're not going to anybody.

C (22:43)

Yeah, that was my point to Greg. I said it's not theft. And he said, this is outright theft. I said, it's not. It's destruction of property. If someone else's property was on your lawn and you asked them not to put it there and they refused to move it, that's like the most reasonable thing ever. Like, I'm not going to respect your property rights if you're blocking my garage with your car because you couldn't find parking at the airport, so you stuck it in my driveway and disappeared to fricking Mexico for three weeks. Like, I'm going to destroy your car.

A (23:14)

If you do that to me.

C (23:15)

Like, you could call it theft if you want, but it's, it all comes down to property rights for me, man. Like, it's my computer. I get to do what I want with it. If you're like, oh, I can store a bunch of junk data on everyone's computer and there's nothing they can do about it, I'm very happy to teach people that that is not how the world works. Like, I'm delighted to teach them that lesson.

A (23:36)

So something I've stood by since the beginning of this is that I've, I've always thought that minpool policy and just soft barriers were always the way to deal with this. And I think the, the painful, the frustrating part of this is that we had the perfect risk to reward solution to this is if we just continued to put soft barriers in and did minor adjustments that were low risk and low, like low impact to keep it, you know, costing three times as much or taking three times as many blocks to get your transaction in if it was spam versus if it was not. And we've lost that opportunity now because they've decided to roll this all back and beat their chest about like jpegs are good. Jpegs are the same bitcoins as, as actual transactions. And it's like all bytes are equal, you know, like, what a ridiculous hill to die on. But. But I still think the soft work is, is a significant risk for problem that I don't. It's. It's also why I think a temporary move is actually intriguing because.

D (24:49)

Because it.

A (24:49)

Gives a chance to decide like to, to make a note or see something play out as to what the possible risk or the outcome of this is. Like, I don't think if like the worst comes to pass of the spam, the worst case possible of the spam route of like put people putting CSAM or whatever and like this big bloated mess on the chain, I don't think any of it is Irreparable. And I think it's, it lends itself to the possibility of like, okay, maybe, maybe I'm wrong and this isn't going to be an issue, or maybe I'm right and we get to show people that we were right. Um, and, and then we can do something about it. But one of the interesting proposals that I actually really like, and I think it is actually a soft fork, but it's one that doesn't actually, I, Part of the reason I'm against the CAT is the same reason I'm against the QC freezing of coins is because I, I, I don't like that precedent, whether or not one of I'm actually more for the CAT than I am for freezing coins at quantum risk, because the CAT seems like an insignificant of, you know, whatever that is. It's a, like you said, 250 bitcoin that cost 150 bitcoin to move because it's all garbage. It's a dust limit block, essentially. But I forgotten who the proposal was, but it's one that's basically like, that is it lets us delete all those UTXOs in a very similar fashion and require them to have a pointer to where it is in the chain, put in extra data to spend those coins later. And I think, I actually thought it was a pretty great proposal because it lets us completely clear up the UTXO set from what is essentially a DUST perspective. But we catch like 80% of the spam at the exact same time and then the onus is on them to provide this extra set of bytes in the transaction, which is a pointer for them to have to be able to spend it. If they just like natively just like spit it out and spend it again, it's going to look like it doesn't exist because everybody else clears it out and we're not going to broadcast the transaction, which I love because it's basically like a, a means to continually enforce the MEMPO policy with a, with a fork, but basically use the network again as a way to prevent them or to add that marginal cost, add a disincentive into the, into the system. So I actually really like that proposal, but again, I, I can't remember who it is off the top of my head. I'll have to look it up. But anyway, we got into it. Steve, how you doing, brother?

D (27:37)

Oh, I'm doing good, man. Yeah, I told you guys. Oh, I decided so I've been like a journaler all my life. I've got it out of the habit Recently. But I'm trying this new thing where I'm gonna do a new goal in.

A (27:51)

Life is to get access to journals.

D (27:55)

I gotta combine. Oh yeah, dude, my journals are crazy because I don't write about personal shit. Literally it's just philosophy and bitcoin. Like I don't, I don't write about my life, which is probably not what you're supposed to do in the journal. But like those are the thoughts that go through my head 24 7. You know, I gotta get them out somewhere. But I'm gonna start just recording them by audio while I walk to the gym in the morning. So I'm gonna have like a really terrible podcast of just me. 10 minute episodes, out of breath, cars running by, random thoughts about bitcoin and philosophy. So yeah, look forward to that.

C (28:31)

Is this like morning gym thing, like an Arch Linux thing, like where you have to just mention it like, like casually every five minutes. Oh, I use Arch, by the way. Like I go to the gym at.

D (28:41)

6:00Am no, I'm just, I'm just starting it. I'm trying to put myself up for it.

C (28:47)

I'm proud of you, man. I'm just, I'm just being at the.

D (28:51)

No, I'm probably going to be able to do it because I, I've both been a journaler and a gym guy my whole life. Like every day. I'm just trying to combine those two.

A (28:58)

I'm not proud of you. It actually, it actually just creates resentment because all I see is a reflection of my lack of going to the gym. And so you represent everything that's wrong with me.

D (29:10)

I have never driven to a gym. I have always picked where I live based on location to a gym. I don't pick on any other location.

C (29:20)

But yeah, it's just getting worse and worse. Guy, this is just.

A (29:24)

It's so bad. I won't drive to my nearby gym.

D (29:28)

No, no, I would drive anyway.

A (29:30)

Did you?

D (29:33)

No, I've been good. Utx, Oracle stuff's just awesome. I mean, it's just. I can't believe how accurate it is and I haven't touched it. And the mempool just. My program just lives in the mempool and just cranks out the perfect price every minute for like three months now. And I haven't even touched it, hasn't even called home and hasn't sent me a postcard. It's just like living in the mempool on a cloud server and just sends me the right price every minute and I haven't done anything with it. It's pretty crazy.

A (30:00)

That's so amazing.

D (30:02)

I love that I know the spam stuff. Yeah, I like 110 the cat made me think of a lot of interesting thoughts. As you guys have been discussing. It reminded me that no matter what bitcoin is ultimately what the node runners decide bitcoin is like. No matter if you're for and against it. The confiscation stuff definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I did. I did like the point where these people who have done these dust transactions have essentially told us already that they have no intentions of using these sats as sats as bitcoin money. I think that's probably the strongest point that I like. But it's still a little bit. Still feels a little bit weird. Yeah. Oh. I have a question for mechanic. I had always thought that a long time ago when Portland Hodl introduced that original bip, I always thought that was kind of like a tongue in cheek joke as him being like, oh, you guys hate spam so much. Here you go. I just go ahead and create a bit for you. Was that like kind of a joke when you did that originally?

C (31:21)

I don't think so. He's been going on about poison blocks for a while and it's supposed to fix the poison block attack, which is pretty nasty. Initially I. Someone corrected me and pointed out a scenario where it can be pretty bad. So I'm not super confident on it yet, but I'm pretty sure poison block would be a horrible thing like you really, if you're a big miner. I think the way it works is you just generate a block that takes forever for other nodes to verify. So you just create an advantage for yourself mining on top of a block that the rest of the network chokes on basically. And that's has an advantage over just not telling them about it because if they're a mining pool node, they're. They're kind of just grinding away. The nodes kind of freeze as opposed to like carry on like normal operation. Jeff, looks like you're curious about something there.

B (32:15)

Yeah, I was. And just what would it not be? Would there not be a higher risk of a.

C (32:21)

Of an.

B (32:22)

A poison block being rejected?

D (32:25)

Yeah, I mean there's a. There's a higher risk of it being rejected. But like the bigger issue is just whenever you stall out nodes for an unnecessarily long amount of time, it just presents kind of a health risk to the network.

C (32:38)

Yeah. Like you don't want to be able to do something that makes all the raspberry PI Nodes grind their gears for like two hours on a block. They just can't figure out that's. That's really unhealthy for the network.

D (32:50)

Do you know if the mechanism for that, the CPU resource hogging was. I mean, usually that mechanism is a multisig. Multisig takes a lot of processing time if you don't do it through Schnorr. Do you know the mechanism?

C (33:07)

No.

D (33:07)

Powers that.

C (33:08)

No.

A (33:08)

Yeah. Actually, as. Yeah, I could be wrong about this. Lawrence will probably correct me if I am, but I want to say V30 actually had a fix for that, because it was either that or there was a different bug that was actually kind of. Kind of, kind of serious. Which. Part of me was like, oh, well, that's great. There's, you know, a good bug fix. But then another part of me was like, well, why are you. Why are you pushing this spam stuff at the same time and, and literally making something way more important be attached to this, like, really political problem? You know, like, like, like, why are you. Why are you. Why are you putting these two together? Like, if you actually are genuinely concerned about the network, you. You wouldn't want to risk the spam issue determining whether or not your fix for poison blocks got adopted. Like, that's. That. That feels like caring more about spam than you do about Bitcoin rather than the other way around to me. But, but I want to say. I want to say that was what it was that he was talking about in just our side chat was.

D (34:21)

It was.

A (34:22)

It was the poison block thing and the ability to make a computationally horrible block that has kind of been around for. You have to construct it pretty carefully, and it's not like, super likely, but if an attacker wanted to do that, they definitely couldn't. They could cause a huge problem. You know, it's the equivalent of basically mimicking the problems of 1 gigabyte blocks for some subset of nodes without. Without actually increasing the block size but increasing the burden in the same way.

C (34:58)

Yeah. It just seems. It seems so vanishingly unlikely that a block producer would ever maliciously create something like that, because people that are capable of producing blocks are very invested in Bitcoin. It's the same reason that foundry don't 51% attack. Even though they can. They're just, why would they do it? They're going to land themselves in so much hot water.

D (35:22)

If they did, it's not going to do them much. I mean, bitcoin's going recovers from these kind of attacks so quickly.

C (35:28)

Yeah. And like all of the people pointing their hash rate to your pool are going to have the value of the thing they're mining and invested in fall a lot and they're going to be mad at you if you do and you're definitely going to get a lawsuit. So like, I don't know, I think these, like Bitcoin's kind of got like this protection of, you know, it's not what we want, but people don't want to open themselves up to lawsuits and stuff by attacking the network.

A (35:57)

So there's so many different layers of the, so many of the incentives to protect that there's just like, like the protocol layer is essentially already protected because of the reaction to, to all the nodes or whatnot. But see, the thing is, is that like, what bugs me is that like, I think something like that would do 10 times as much damage as it needs to because we're not, we're not building our own block templates. Like, it just couldn't happen if 70% of miners on the network were all building their own templates and running their own nodes.

C (36:35)

Well, doesn't that make weird blocks more likely?

D (36:37)

Yeah, I think that makes it more likely. Just have more people at the create that have the ability to create that kind of template, right?

A (36:44)

Yeah, I think so. Oh, I guess this would be, this would. So my thinking was, I guess in the context of like a 51% attack is that like Foundry, Foundry wouldn't want to do it. But if Foundry actually did it, it could cause a huge problem because you've got 60. You could, you could do every block this way and you could just like flood it with this until everybody pulled their, pulled their things away. But I guess in the context of like, what's the likelihood of a poison block showing up? It would technically, technically be worse. I was thinking about in the context of like a sustained attack of trying.

C (37:17)

To like really bitcoin is like, it's like everything else in this regard. If, if it becomes legit, legitimized in the eyes of the state and allowed to operate, and then you enjoy a false sense of security for a while because everyone has to operate within the law and doesn't do silly things that look like obvious attacks. And all the game theory stuff about Bitcoin is you ignore it because it's not relevant anymore. It's not like If Foundry had 51%, they wouldn't do anything malicious with it because of their position. But the reason they wouldn't do that is a corruptible thing. It's governments and lawyers and things like that that would come after them, who eventually end up coercing them into doing something that's bad for bitcoin. That's why it's not sustainable, right? It's the same as everything else. Like someone needs to do something, pass a law against this mo, this thing we don't like. You end up with a nanny state and then the nanny state does more harm than the initial thing you were trying to prevent. So that's why bitcoin has to always resort to self regulation. And it's not self regulating at the moment because it's not being kept in check by its own rules. It's being kept in check by an external system that says don't do naughty things. And everyone says, all right, we won't do naughty things. Even though like Foundry can totally. Antpool can definitely wreak havoc on the network right now and find a way to do it for their own benefit. And it's, it's just a case of when the CCP says, oh, all right, now is the time, time to disrupt everything. But the fact that they haven't is. It's not. That's not bitcoin being amazing. It's just the honeymoon period where the state is like, all right, we'll let this thing exist and we're not going to flex our muscles just yet. But at some point, like you can't, that becomes a thing that just inevitably becomes corrupted. All the institutions keeping Bitcoin in check become told, look, you have to implement OFAC compliance. And to be honest, that is already like becoming a thing. It looked like we dodged a bullet with Mara doing OFAC compliance and then saying, all right, we're not going to.

A (39:22)

Do it anymore, but it's coming back.

C (39:26)

It's a thing. There are transactions getting left out of blocks now that governments don't like and there is zero noise about it, zero concern. And that was always going to be a thing. And that's the ugliness that comes as a result of saying, well, no one's going to 51% attack it because they get sued. All right, well you really want a bitcoin where people can 51% attack it and would if they were big enough, but. And their reason not to doesn't exist because no one knows who they are. Like, that's strong, resilient Bitcoin, right? But we're just not there. And ocean's the only way to get there. But it gets worse before it gets better because you open it up to anonymous attacks and then you have to actually deal with them at the network level rather than just say, oh, well, you have 30% of the hash rate. It doesn't matter because we'll just sue you if you mess with us. We need to not be able to do that, so we have to open ourselves up to attack so we'd come up with a proper defense.

D (40:21)

You said Mara, right? That's gotta be on Mara's personal decision to not include those transactions instead of somebody.

C (40:29)

There's plenty like US entities and stuff like that. I'm not pointing the finger at Mara.

D (40:34)

Oh, sorry. Okay.

C (40:36)

Mara is the one that did it years ago and they didn't actually go back comply. They just labeled their blocks as OFAT compliant. And before they ever actually implemented that in their templates, they stopped. So.

A (40:48)

Right.

C (40:48)

That was.

D (40:49)

Yeah, but we're definitely going to have a situation where people just personally are not going to include transactions in their block template, you know, so it's like that's kind of the future we expect is that everyone will be kind of censoring which transactions they put in their blocks.

B (41:07)

Right?

C (41:08)

Yeah. And it's meant to mean nothing. It's meant to be. The Bitcoin in its ideal state just means, who cares? Then you just get in the next block with your transaction because there's enough miners and block producers out there with the charts. But now it's like, if, of course, if Antpool and Foundry don't like it, there's only like, you've only got a dozen entities in the world that can actually put your transaction in the chain. And yeah, you know, and your money isn't really relevant. They don't care if they miss a dollar in transaction fees because. Because they censored it.

A (41:37)

Yeah, that's, that's what I was about to get at is that the problem is that, like, if there's only seven entities in the world or whatever that are deciding what gets into blocks, then it does make a huge difference and it's a huge concern over, you know, which ones, which ones get to decide. But if, if you have a hundred thousand people running nodes and mining and they're all making decisions as to what to put into their block templates, then basically any individual decision is of no consequence because it's one block that you wait for and you're inevitably going to have, you have a decentralization of what to put into blocks, and thus you basically have censorship resistance. But if there's, you know, there's seven or 10 entities that produce 98% of blocks, that's really easy to go knock on 10 doors and. And say you're just not going to put them in the blocks whether or not. Whether you care or not. And the. There was one thing that in Brain's Bitcoin mining guide and they talk about datum and stratum v2 which the book is fantastic by the way. A really, really good primer on like the whole, the whole breakdown.

C (42:54)

But.

A (42:55)

But I will say they.

C (42:57)

The.

A (42:57)

There is a. There is a little section in it that actually this chapter is really good too but it's the, it's the one on. I can't remember the name of the chapter but it. One of the things they talk about is that miners have no incentive to basically attack the network which is why Stratum V2 and Datum aren't being prioritized or the block template construction or distribution side of it isn't being super distributed because people can respond to it so quickly. And I do kind of agree in the context of like a direct and violent 51% attack on the network is that yeah people would just log out super fast. But I think the risk and the greater concern is the quiet one is the one where OFAC non compliant transactions just quietly don't get put in. Nobody even knows it's an attack. Which Mechanic. I haven't, I haven't looked at this but Mechanic may be suggesting and there may be evidence that this is literally going on right now and just nobody knows because it's just, has just happened and if nobody's building their own blocks and you know, 50% of the hash power is quietly just deciding that these transactions don't included. Don't get included then they don't get included. And thousands, million tens of millions, maybe a billion dollars worth of mining infrastructure that has no intention to censor anything in Bitcoin will be censoring without their knowledge. And like that is a huge problem to me.

D (44:40)

So I, I think there's like an intermediate step here maybe that's where. So it's not the flag that something's going on. That's like worrisome is not so much seeing blocks from these guys where they fail to put transactions in it's seeing that they've intentionally decided not to build on a block that did have the transactions in them. So I. Yeah that's a good point. That's kind of. That's what I think we should kind of be on the lookout for. Have you seen any evidence of that Mechanic?

C (45:12)

No. And that's. That's unbelievably. Expensive to do.

A (45:16)

Yeah.

C (45:17)

In most circumstances you really have to be. You have, you have to just put. That's literally a 51% attack. And it's. Unless you have 51%, you're taking a massive gamble doing that.

A (45:28)

Yeah.

D (45:28)

I was talking about the coordinated thing, like Guy was saying if like, you know, ant colon, friends and foundry all get together.

B (45:36)

Yeah. It seems to me that all of this becomes much more scary when you put it in context of, you know, like the great taking and whatever else is going on. If you've got these sort of centralized entities that are subject to political pressure and you've got this machinery of politics that is trying to say, oh yeah, we like Bitcoin, trying to, you know, like, kind of embrace it at the same time as they are building a trap for literally everything else in the world. Like you, you're not going to own shit. And so, so one day, I can't remember, I was listening to somebody recently, like, when they spring this trap, like, this is the ultimate way to usher in a CBDC is that, oh, you know, in order to save the economy and you, you know, call it whatever you want, they don't have to call it a cbdc, but in order to save the economy, all these major institutions are, are, you know, now insolvent. We're just going to have to seize all of your assets and everything. But we'll give it back to you in, you know, a Fed Federal Reserve account or what, you know, whatever you want to call it. Right. And, and so everybody that has a mortgage, everybody that has, you know, like literally every house, every, every bank account, everything is insured by this centrally controlled thing now. And if at the same time they can disrupt and make Bitcoin like look like some sort of unreliable thing, then there's no more flight, there's no flight to safety. There's no, there's no exit valve. If they can, if they can, you know, pressure people and control things at the same, you know, disrupt things at the same time.

A (47:25)

Yeah, yeah. In fact, on that, one of our news items is actually Christine Lagarde talking about. She did a video, a Merry Christmas video. So 2025 has been. There's a lot of challenges and hard work, but I want you to say Merry Christmas and we are full on our way to having a digital euro for you. It's on December 24th and we're, we're pushing hard to get it, like anybody's asking for this, to post this on X, which was so like the tone deafness of these people is so bizarre because I didn't, I mean, maybe it's my algorithm, but I read nothing but comments like, you stupid tyrant. Like it was nothing but just people throwing tomatoes at this lady and she's like, merry Christmas. Hope everybody has a great time. We're going to go for a digital euro. We're going to push it really hard. We're going to get it through. And they're talking about like their pilot program and full implementation coming any day now. And it's like, Jesus, man.

B (48:38)

Since people can be targeted with censorship, I wonder how much of this. Like, like if you can control what the king hears, then, then it doesn't matter what people think, right? Like, like if everybody's surrounding Trump, if, if all of the filters that, like somebody's able to actually filter Trump speed specifically so that he gets no contact with anything that is like against, you know, the, the Israel's war or bombing Iran or whatever. And they literally killed Charlie Kirk who's like the major guy that was lobbying for this, you know, against the war in Iran or whatever. Like if they can literally just isolate the individual people that are critical to supporting and promoting these things because there are people that have massive control over what you see and have access to on the Internet. Like, are these people getting special algorithms? Is she just really like if the tone deafness, like by design, like, and she just has no idea. Like, I don't know.

A (49:39)

It's like, that's a good question. Is, does she actually get any of those comments? Like, you know, it's like, is it just invisible to her?

B (49:49)

Because otherwise why wouldn't, why, I mean, why wouldn't she be terrified? Like the, the comments are so crazy. Like the string of comments under most of these things are so bad. Why wouldn't somebody like that just be.

A (50:02)

Like, oh my God. What?

B (50:04)

You know, like, like these are the sort of like approval seeking people.

A (50:09)

This is what the algorithm shows me. Simon Dixon, 2026 gift from the European Central Bank. A CBDC. Enjoy. Laffy face some, some random person. Hard work to destroy Europe. Thanks. It's Merry Christmas, Christine. Come on, say the words. Then a picture of a chart of the inflation of the value, the plummeting value of €1. You suck at your job. A hopeful 2026 is Christine Lagarde and the other, the other lady behind bars. F off you corrupt globalist. F your digital id. And CBDC is called Christmas. Merry Christmas. It's a Christian holiday for God's sake. Euro like dudes stepping on a boot. A Euro with two people. Two, two brothers in chains. A euro with a camera on it and a euro with somebody behind bars. This is the whole good vibes and it's, it's the emperor. Like it's not horror and ridiculous.

C (51:16)

I mean there's gotta be some naivete on your part, Jeff. It's all performative, like puppetry. I'm here to do a job which is to be the fall guy for an agenda that is anti populist that most people don't want, that serves the people that got me in this position. Whether it's, you know, my privilege that I want to maintain and do their bidding or whether I'm under blackmail. But their job is to get up there and be hated. Like, which is why when they do it with like Greta Thunberg and people. This is unfair because now we all have to hate a frigging 14 year old girl. This is, this is unfair. Like I don't, I don't appreciate being put in this position where I have to attack, you know, when they make the figure hit. This is why they always use female press secretaries and stuff. Because it's like you just can't, you can't go nuts at these people, like and they're put there specifically for that reason.

A (52:11)

I want to say something that's really, really funny to me is that the first comment I just kept scrolling just reading the first comment. That is nice. It says Merry Christmas with a Christmas tree and it's an XRP supporter.

D (52:26)

Of course it is.

A (52:28)

I just thought that was great.

D (52:31)

Something I think about when it seems like the normal person has an understanding, general understanding of inflation, like printing money causes inflation. But in the general person's mind they think of printing money physically, right? They think of like physically printing dollars. And they also know that like copy paste is a problem with anything digital. Yet this really strange things happens in their mind is they think by going from printed money to digital money you've taken away the ability to print the money. But I don't know if you guys noticed this or not, but it's like.

A (53:12)

There is some sort of a disconnect there. It's weird.

D (53:16)

It's like they're like, oh, because it's a computer, it won't be able to be printed as easily. Like they, they think it's harder to like make, make more of if it's not physical. And it's almost like, you know what, Bitcoin works exactly how you think digital money should work. But like, but do you notice that too people think some for some reason, digital money is harder to print for the government than physical money.

C (53:44)

No, I've never noticed that.

D (53:46)

You haven't noticed that?

C (53:47)

Is it just too stupid for me to have ever caught up on like. I'm sure it's really stupid so.

D (53:52)

Because people are like, how are they going to print, how are they going to print it if it's digital? Like that's what people usually say.

B (54:00)

No, you know, I, I, I think.

A (54:02)

I know at least I have a thing that feels, that feels like that, that, that I pick up on. And I think it's not that they don't think you can print it, it's that it's so obscure in the digital environment because they don't see it being printed. You know, like when, when they move anything it's like, well, clearly it got deducted from this guy's account and it went to my account and then when it gets deducted from my account it goes to this other person's account. So it's so, so abstract like and they just don't understand how or where it's created. When I tell people that that money is created as debt out of thin air, they, most people don't believe it. Most people just don't think that that's how it works.

C (54:43)

What's the actual stats for how many people still think the US dollar is backed by gold?

A (54:48)

That's a good question.

C (54:49)

I'm sure that's like 40% of people actually think that. Like my, when I grew up, my dad was like this 20 pound note means you can go to the bank of England and pull out £20 worth of silver. He told me that, raised me that way and probably still thinks that. And I'm like, you know, that hasn't been true for like your life a long time.

A (55:09)

60 years.

D (55:09)

Long time or not 60, I guess what, 55.

A (55:15)

Yeah, I remember back before the Great Depression also. Okay, a 2019 study by Genesis Mining, that's interesting, said 30%, 29%, 29 to 30 thought the dollar is still backed by gold.

C (55:35)

Left the gold standard 29 to 30%.

A (55:38)

So just 30%.

C (55:39)

2019, 30%. Yeah, but this is intentional, right? I'm not blaming the people. Economic illiteracy is very much intentional.

A (55:48)

Intentional.

C (55:49)

And what was that quote from someone hundreds of years ago? If people understood how our banking works, the politicians will be hanging by their.

A (55:55)

Neck within 24 hours.

D (55:57)

So 30% leaves thinks it's still backed by gold. That leaves a 70%. I would bet 60% or I would bet of that 70% 90% of that thinks it's backed by paper. They think there's a dollar bill for every checking account dollar in the bank.

A (56:18)

Yeah, it's probably. It's at least. We bet it's at least twice that. Yeah. Yeah.

C (56:22)

So this isn't the midwit meme. This is literally the left of bell curve is even stupider than the midwit.

A (56:27)

Yeah.

D (56:27)

And that's. And that's probably why they think you literally have to print the money physically in order for there to be inflation. Because they think there's paper one to one backing numbers and checking accounts.

A (56:39)

Yeah. Because technically you can go to the bank and you can get paper out. So obviously there's paper in the bank that corresponds to obviously to the dollar, obviously.

D (56:47)

And there's trucks running paper around nonstop.

A (56:52)

Half those mag trucks are just full of paper notes, man.

B (56:56)

The algorithms have been showing me people who truly, like, in the weirdest. Like, they truly believe that there's no biological difference between sexes or races. And. And then they're having conversations with like actual, like, biologists and stuff, and they're like, ah, yeah, well, you know, the, the world's moved beyond your, you know, racist beliefs and. And like, they're just like this straight gaslighting, like, insanity. And so with that, I, you know, like, yep, they might believe anything about money and not.

A (57:33)

I just.

B (57:33)

I don't know anymore. Like, stuff so crazy.

A (57:36)

I think that's the way we should frame it from now on. I really like how you. The. The algorithms are showing me that's how. That's how all of our. Not. Don't describe the world as it is. Don't be like, like, this is what, you know, this is what's happening in the news or whatever. Well, the algorithms are showing me this happened.

B (57:54)

Well, it's.

A (57:55)

It.

B (57:55)

But it does come in waves. Like, it's not.

A (57:57)

Oh, it totally does.

B (57:59)

Like, this is not. It's not real life. Like, I don't. This is just, you know, what I've seen a number of. A handful of times lately.

A (58:07)

It's.

B (58:07)

But I mean, they are real interviews, so it's like a. It's just weird. Like, you know, like it's in some corner of the world that, you know, is hopefully and extreme.

C (58:20)

This is hilarious. Dude. I just tweeted the AI response about what percentage of Americans think the dollar is backed by gold. That's just. It's just unfathomable to me that everyone, such a large group of people, could be so wrong about something so central to their lives. Like this is money. All anyone thinks about is money.

A (58:42)

And you don't even know what the hell you have in your pocket. And for people who say that bitcoin, nobody's ever going to use bitcoin or Bitcoin's not going to work because nobody understands how it works. It's like, dude, 30% of people still think the gold dollars back my gold. You don't have to. It's success clearly has nothing to do with whether or not you understand it.

C (59:05)

That's the contradiction, isn't it? Because you can say 30% of Americans have the most false belief possible about what the dollar is. And 99% of Americans also think bitcoin is nonsense in a Ponzi scheme. So when you juxtapose these two stats, it's just horrific. Like, you know, it's, it's Morpheus. Like, most of the people are not ready to have their minds freed. Like, it's just, how do we do it?

B (59:32)

Yeah, well, if you, you put money at the center of the political universe, all the policies start to make sense. Right? Because now the tariffs are in a way to temporarily address the trip and dilemma. Like you can, you can create temporary strength in the dollar by leveraging the Triffin dilemma and by implementing tariffs. And so they've just lost a handful of, like Saudi Arabia is no longer selling oil exclusively for dollars. And so this is why they have to attack Russia and Venezuela. Because if you can break Russia and overthrow Russia, now you have a major, the brics, major BRICS participant that provides oil. No longer selling oil outside of the dollar regime. You could break the entire BRICS regime. Right? So, so like everything they're doing is monetary related. And it's actually, what's funny is this actually explains Israel's influence over the US Too, is because Israel needs, They're. They're a nanny. Like, they, they are a socialist, like ethnostate. And their socialist government cannot exist. Greater Israel. Socialist.

A (60:42)

Greater.

B (60:43)

Greater Israel cannot exist if they don't have the dollar strong enough to pay for all of their crap. And so they need to manipulate in, in order to escape the Trinfin dilemma themselves. They want an outside currency to subsidize what they're doing. And then they need to go and break up all these regimes that are not selling oil for dollars. You know, so to me, like, if you understand the monetary thing, just everything falls into place and makes perfect sense. It's, it's a, it's a mafia organization trying to maintain a monetary dominance.

A (61:20)

You don't actually have to sell your bitcoin to access its value. You can actually borrow against it very easily without selling it. But when you do this, you need to be careful. You need to do this with a company that is trusted, one that has survived a bear market and one that will literally show you that they have the coins, that they have proof of reserves or some mechanism where you can look at your balance and know that it is safe. This is why I've been a huge fan and a customer of Leden for a few years, years now. So one of the bitcoin backed loans that I got a few years ago to finish renovations and the basement and studio in my house, I would have paid three times as much bitcoin had I just sold it as it now takes me to just pay off the loan. And that's if I sell the bitcoin to pay it off, which I think I'm going to be able to get equity out of the house and pay off the loan and get all of my bitcoin back. This especially makes sense if you're making an investment. If you're doing something that is going to pay you income in the future, or if you're investing in bitcoin mining, it's a whole lot easier to beat the interest rate if you loan against the bitcoin and keep the bitcoin. Leden also makes this like crazy easy. Like if you went to do this right now, you could probably get the money by tomorrow. They do proof of reserves twice a year and I check it's a very easy process. And you don't have to do monthly payments if you don't want to. You can just accrue the interest and pay off in chunks whenever it makes sense. And best of all, they just recently got rid of all the noise. They had some other features. They had Ethereum loans. They're like, nope, chop it. They had a yield product. Nope, chop it. They had loans where you could get a lower interest rate and they didn't have it on their books. They lent it out. Nope, chop that. Now it's just custodied, fully backed bitcoin loans doesn't work for every single situation or every person. But there are some times where this is an incredibly valuable tool to have. Don't overextend or remember Bitcoin is volatile and read the details. But if you need access to your bitcoin's value and you just don't want to sell, Leden is a brilliant and simple tool for doing exactly that. And I've been A happy customer for a couple of years now. You can check out the links right down in the show notes. It's L E D N Leden IO So US lawmakers. So there's. There's been all this push to do what? The de minimis thing where small transactions are not subject to capital gains and stuff. And the. Slowly the dialogue is changing and they are trying to push that this only applies. The tax exemption only applies to stablecoins based in dollars. And because nothing else should be money or a currency, you will have to pay taxes and report every single transaction of every amount in, you know, Bitcoin or, you know, whatever, whatever quote, unquote crypto you're using. And I just gotta say, I'm still zapping at everybody I report is. There's no way. There's no way I'm record. They can, you know what, it's public. They can go. They can fill out that paperwork if they want to. Good luck. So. So 21 Sat. 21 Sat.

D (64:53)

How much.

A (64:53)

How many taxes do I have on that?

D (64:57)

Hey, guy, have we ever. Have we even talked about the thing you wanted to start with, which was the UK cryptography stuff?

A (65:04)

No, we hadn't started yet.

C (65:05)

We're making maths illegal, right?

D (65:08)

Oh, we haven't started recording yet.

A (65:09)

Okay, y', all, let's kick this off. Let's kick this off. All right, so there's actually two UK news items. So first is that. So there was the crypto reporting framework that they had, or actually I think this is a derivative of it. But there was originally a, like overseas, like a foreign exchange reporting requirement system that they set up. And starting in 2026, it will be for all domestic transfers as well. But basically it not only forces KYC and reporting of everybody sending money overseas in any bitcoin or crypto or anything like that, but it requires them to KYC and know the other institutions that they are working with and reporting who they are to the UK government. And it appears to require them, if they are working, if they have any UK people to your citizens or whatever, to also report to those governments. And then this exact same thing applies to any domestic transfer from an institution to an institution is that basically all of the police work, all of the reporting work, all of the, you know, quote, the UK irs, whatever the hell they call it, the. The going to take all your money institution is offloading every bit of the work to making businesses and service providers enemies of their customers. And it's basically going to be blanket now. So that was one great Wonderful news item. The other one is that a UK watchdog warns that developers of end to end encrypted apps could be defined as hostile actors under the UK law. And this is coming from multiple different directions now. And considering there's like 10,000 people in prison now, arrested and in prison over Facebook posts and tweets, I, I put this one as just this is going to happen because the UK is in a shit way right now.

B (67:16)

They're also getting rid of jury trials.

A (67:18)

Okay, we'll hold that thought. We're coming back to that. Good God. Okay, hold on a second. An independent reviewer of terrorism legislation reviewed the Counterterrorism and Border Security act and the newly implemented National Security Act. You know that one's going to be good. You know that one's just going to be totally above board and great for all of the people and their freedoms, warns developers of apps like signal and WhatsApp technically fall within the legal definition of quote, hostile activity simply because their technology, quote, makes it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor communications. It is a reasonable assumption that this would be in the interest of a foreign state, even if the foreign state has never contemplated this potential advantage. So this is so similar to actually Kione and Burroughs is that one of the things that they were supposedly guilty of was knowing. Not that, not that they specifically spoke with and organized like doing like quote unquote, laundering funds with a bad entity, but that they, they were aware that bad entities existed who could have used their service and therefore they are guilty of, of, of money laundering. Um, and like this, like the, the stretch of just. Oh my God, this kind of shit just like blows my mind that like somebody could say this like out loud. And this is the one, this is the one that just fascinates me. The report also notes that journalists, quote, carrying confidential information, end quote, or material, quote, personally embarrassing to the Prime Minister on the eve of important treaty negotiations, end quote, could face similar scrutiny. So the concern is that nobody in the entire uk, really nobody philosophically deserves any privacy at all. And they should have the right to, to surveil and intrude on everybody by default be given a back door. And that people who make end to end encrypted software would be seen as enemies of the state because otherwise the privacy of the Prime Minister might be invaded and personally embedded embarrassing information might be communicated between two other people in a completely different conversation and thus be made public. So not only is the Prime Minister get privacy, but privacy to the point that anything personally embarrassing is worth Invading fundamentally, the privacy of everyone in society to ensure that no one is talking about it. Holy shit balls. How does somebody say that with a straight face? How can somebody be so broken in the head to think that that's. That's not insane? Oh, God. I just. I read that, and I was just like, are you kidding me right now?

C (70:48)

The UK is a cruel. Like, I read some, like, 4chan green text that was like, all this is. The whole purpose of everything is humiliation. It's just. Yeah, that's the point. Because a humiliated populace cannot possibly, you know, ever get together anything that might resemble, you know, the resistance that comes from standing up and having some sort of integrity and backbone and all that. It just rots it all out to the point where everyone is just walking. Walking around with their head pointed at their feet. Like, it's just mockery and utter disgust and contempt. They. They hate us. That is the main thing to realize about them. They just detest us. They're sick to the back teeth of us. And the ultimate irony is they have to pretend to be working for us and to be deferential to our whips.

B (71:41)

I totally agree with that because it's a very Machiavellian, like, how do we break people? Like, the masks, the mask mandates the, oh, you have to double mask now. Oh, you can't go outside now. Oh, now you have, like, they. They changed their tone.

A (71:55)

You know, like, you're out on the beach by yourself. We're gonna send five cops to chase after you.

B (72:02)

Well, and. And the. The TSA like it. There's nothing more clearly a humiliation ritual than, like, oh, you have to take off your shoes and you have to, like, like these things. It's just. I. I don't know. I'm. I'm just convinced that that is a huge part. I mean, like, there are people making money off of it. There are people doing all, like. There's all sorts of other, like, things at the same time. Interests that align, but 100% like that. There is a clear effort to just demoralize people.

C (72:34)

It is man power. Drunk maniacs like Jacinda Arden was like, the best example of it. Like, in New Zealand during COVID it was just like, she couldn't wipe the smile off her face.

A (72:45)

Yeah.

C (72:46)

You know, when announcing these disgusting things they were forcing their populations to do, like, occasionally it sneaks through, and you're like, they're getting off on this, like, and we don't get it because we're not in that kind of position. We're just like, oh, they're worried about getting reelected.

B (73:01)

They don't care.

C (73:02)

Like, they just. They just want to be like, you know, because for a start, like, to get anywhere, they have to develop some popularity and they have to play the game, and they have to deny themselves just in order to play the political game and get anywhere. And eventually that naturally turns into resent of the people you depend on who you know. And then it's very easy to see how a person could just be like, well, I hate these people.

A (73:30)

I can't wait to punish these people that made me give these speeches.

B (73:35)

Dude.

A (73:36)

It's.

C (73:36)

It's so sick. Like, I will dedicate my life to making technology that undermines what they can do. And when they come after attacking it by saying, all right, well, you're not allowed to use that anymore, I'm gonna be like, well, good. Bring it. I'm glad, you know, that we're fighting you and we're going. I hope you just push us underground further. Like, I, I. This was the problem with the samurai thing, like, which has been a thing we might want to touch on. Um. Cause I made a couple of videos on it.

A (74:02)

That's one of our news items.

D (74:03)

Because Trump.

C (74:06)

Maybe we can segue into that from this just because one of the problems I see with getting them out of jail is they didn't go very hard on them. They only gave them five years or something. And the reason they got Ross out of jail is because they went so over the top by giving them a double life sentence in 40 years.

D (74:22)

That.

C (74:22)

That's the premise on which we can say, this is an injustice and we'll fight to get you out. With samurai, they kind of were quite measured in their response, so that makes it harder to find a rationale to get them out. So I, I like it when the state goes far too hard, far too fast, and then goes, all right, and, like, Canada did that, and that's how they triggered the trucker protest, and then they had to give up. So I do, like, there was an old anecdote I knew of, like, some, you know, political prisoner in a torture, you know, regime where they torture people and stuff. And he said they would always piss off the guards to make sure the guards couldn't torture them properly and keep knocking them out by mistake. He's like, that's like, you think we'd be scared of the gods. But the actual survival tactic was always, like, really annoy them, like, be infuriate the guards so that when they come and torture you, they can't do it. Because they're so angry with you. Like, so this is kind of the way to go with the state. Like keep really annoying them I guess, like just so that they go so overboard with all their measures that they break their own processes too conspicuously. There is a tactic I'm not there could be a lot of casualties in such a tactic, but it is interesting.

B (75:32)

Meme them until they're meme them into a blind rage. The the UK government specifically for England and Wales is implementing significant reforms to reduce the use of jury trials, though not eliminating them entirely. They're scrapping jury trials.

A (75:49)

Oh well, that's a relief for most.

B (75:52)

Criminal offenses that carry a light prison sentence. So if the prison sentence is less than three years or the potential prison sentence is less than three years. We're just trying to make things more efficient guys.

C (76:05)

Yeah, we'll save you money. Think how much of your tax dollars will be saved if we don't need to pay.

B (76:12)

Like if cases will instead be heard by in new.

A (76:16)

Why don't we just stop paying for.

B (76:17)

Daycares by a single judge? Change expected to reduce trial times by 20% compared to jury trials. Jury trials will still be guaranteed.

A (76:29)

There's nothing quite like our service is so shitty. That's like saying that like, okay, like let's say Netflix is that anytime you click on the watch something it puts you in a queue and said this will be available to you in an hour. And then, then when too many people clicked on it they came out with an announcement and they said, you know what, we're going to lower your resolution to 180p and you're going to get your, your, your what? Your wait time is going to drop from an hour to 40 minutes. And you're supposed to be, you're supposed to be pleased by this. So your 4k TV has 6 giant ass pixels on it and you're supposed to discern what the, what the fucking image is and the movie that you're watching. Our service, our service just got substantially shittier. And the service we are supposed to provide for you because we were shitty at it, we're going to have to make it shittier to make it a little bit better. That doesn't, that doesn't quite quite square that circle in my opinion.

B (77:34)

Well, the Soviet Union gave you know, there's like in Gulag Archipelago he talks about like everybody gets a tenor, everybody gets 10 years or whatever. And, and so it's sort of like they're, they're not to the 10 year point yet but like now everybody gets three years.

A (77:51)

Like there's, there's like everybody gets three years.

B (77:54)

You're, you're going to jail. Like, are you innocent?

A (77:57)

There's no fair trials below. Three years is just default, just, you're just going to prison.

B (78:03)

Well, and that's exactly the hate crime.

A (78:05)

I guarantee you if you make every, everybody a criminal and everything a crime, then you can't possibly actually enforce anything. And so the only things that get enforced are the things the stater is unhappy with. They just, they, they, they ignore crime, they ignore victims, they ignore actual crimes. Cost to society and they worry about cost to government and perception and embarrassment of the prime minister. And then that's what ends up happening is everybody's a criminal. There's nothing legitimate and the state just selectively goes after whoever the hell they want. And the only people that get ushered in are the Rodriguez's and the old bricks and the people who the, the, the pirate bays while. And this is the thing that gets me is that like they like sure, they didn't do an overreach like Ross Ulbrich, like you know, two life sentences plus 40 years, which was absolutely bonkers. But this is exactly why they got away with something so horrible is that they can, they can put on this facade like they're, it's just three years, just five years. And like the, just the insanity of that. When, when one dude with a mic can stroll around town in Minnesota and find $140 million of explicit fraud, that's 2,500 people's yearly income just eviscerated in resources. It's like stuff that would make somebody not homeless, stuff that would give somebody a job instead of not having a job, who would feed a family 2500 yearly incomes in 24 hours of a dude riding around in his car knocking on daycares with signs that are spelled wrong, he found $140 million worth of fraud. Nobody's gonna go to prison for that. Nobody's gonna get their money back. I use Samurai Wallet. I don't remember a single jd I don't remember a single victim. I don't remember anybody that lost money. They never custodied anybody money, anybody's money. And, and now not only, not only are you paying for the fucking daycare, but now we got to pay for prison to put him in jail for three to five years. Like what the fuck? How did we get here?

B (80:25)

And you know that the three year, the three year sentence or like the three year aim or whatever removal of jury trials is, is a Goal to prevent nullification of hate speech laws. Like 100%. Like, because.

A (80:38)

Yeah, it's because the jury would protect people against stupid under three years, Right? Yeah, right.

C (80:45)

That's depressingly true. And it's also like you say, just volume and efficiency. They want to churn so many people through the, the process that endless getting 12 to 15 people in a room and then vetting them and all that, it's just, it's not efficient.

A (81:00)

I mean this is, this is basically Keone and Burroughs don't get a jury trial. Like that's what we're talking about. And they got a sham trial already. You know, like how, how much worse would it be if you didn't even have to explain it to like normal.

C (81:15)

Can you explain the samurai stuff from scratch? Because I made some mistakes in my not. I thought they got pled guilty to money laundering and unlicensed money transmission, but it was just the latter. And I'm wondering what the implications are. Some people have said, you know, even if they get a presidential pardon, it doesn't undo the precedent. But also guilty pleas don't really create much of a precedent either. So I'm kind of wondering what's the implications for other people working on coinjoin stuff in America? Have you dug into that much?

A (81:48)

Man? I don't. I've.

C (81:50)

I'm.

A (81:50)

I'm a little on the fence as to what the outcome of that is. I will tell you this is the more ambiguous it is, the more dangerous it is because it just makes anybody who's entrepreneur afraid to build stuff, which is that's how you kill a country, is you make people afraid to do things. You make people afraid to adapt. Especially when you have a status quo where the increasing consequences of it are so much. They get worse and worse and worse every single year. And they were non custodial. And the thing that got me about this, that, that I just can't like, not even without even digging into any more of the details. The, the absurdity of it is that the actual regulator that would determine whether or not they were facilitating like they were a money transmitter literally made a statement like they, they said, it's FinCEN. FinCEN. I think it was specifically said, no, they did not take custody. They, they would not fall under this category. And the prosecution ignored it and continued forward and got it removed from the case that they were not allowed to bring that up in court. So they are guilty of something that the very regulator said. No, they are not guilty of this because they do not fall under the category, but they got it. It inadmissible to court so that they could not use that in their defense. And I think that's why they pled is because they. They ran a. The. I say this with not having a much deeper details on it, but that they ran a huge risk of they couldn't defend themselves. You know, like, how many. How many other things would you bring up other than the fact that, like, you're not a money transmitter because it's not custodial to defend yourself against being a money transmitter? You know, and if that's. If you cannot use that, that's insane like that.

C (83:42)

That would be the main argument they would use.

A (83:44)

That would be the argument, are they.

C (83:46)

Going to appeal or is that is. Can you appeal?

A (83:49)

When you say I suspect. But. But I'm sure they're straining for money and it costs. I mean, you know, half the. Half of these cases are just. Let's just bleed them of money and we'll destroy their life whether or not we put them in prison.

C (84:00)

I heard that was the main rationale for the plead is that they just didn't have the money to carry on fighting.

B (84:06)

So what actually happens? Why isn't it. It would seem to me that we're in such a point where everything's a kangaroo court, everything's so corrupt. It would seem to me it would make more sense to just go completely.

A (84:17)

Public with all of it.

B (84:18)

To. To continue with the court case, like, continue into the court case, defy all the rules and somehow make some sort of. I mean, you have to make some sort of media thing so that it is. It is publicly available to enough people that like, look at what. How ridiculous this fraud is. The thing about, like, Ross Ulbricht apologizing on. At the. At the conference like a few years back, like, all I could think is, like, man, he still got. He's still got like a couple of months in solitary confinement for the call anyway. And he apolog like, you shouldn't have done that. You should have. You should have said, I'm not sorry for anything that I did. I think I was making the world a better place.

D (85:02)

Yeah, that's easier said than done.

B (85:05)

Yeah, but man, he got. He got completely like, trying to walk some middle line does not work. They punish.

D (85:13)

Stockholm syndrome, dude. He probably is in love with his guards. I'm serious. There's probably some of that stuff going on.

A (85:26)

You got to remember that there's an ideological stance and then there's a personal stance and there's immediate and explicit Huge personal cost. Like I'm sure. Yeah, I bet he suspected that there would be some pushback, but you know, he got in the hole for like a month. Like, how, how long would he been. Like, that's what he's thinking is like, I'm not gonna see, I'm not gonna see the sun. Like, I'm, I'm not gonna see the sun for how long if I, depending on how I frame this. Because everybody who has complete and total power over me is gonna make a decision on exactly any, any and everything that I, what I eat, how long if I get to piss or not, and whether or not I see the sun based on what I say here. So it makes sense that from a personal position he's extremely measured and trying to, you know, make an appeasement. And there's a, there's, there's logic I think, in what you're saying is that, is that you, but it take like, think about the balls that it takes, especially when you have a lawyer or whatever that's like, maybe we can win this. You know, some of these cases are one, some of these cases are one. And you kind of kill your chance of being a. Maybe we won't press the scale, you know, like, maybe, maybe we won't push hard on this one. You were definitely going to be the one that they're going to push hard on if you make it very explicit and very verbal. And I think that's part of the reason why they went after them originally is because they were, they, the, they made it edgy. Like everything about Samurai, while it was like Russian oligarchs, you can use us, you know, like, like, like the, this idea that Samurai, Samurai was open source software and anybody could use it. And there was nothing anybody could say. They went for being abrasive and explicitly challenging. And I think that's all they cared about is that it was embarrassing. I think they're cowards and I think the, the state got their panties in a wad and so they were like, we're going to whip you to, to put you back in your place because you challenged us verbally out in front of everybody. And that's, that's against the rules.

C (87:30)

I do think that was a big part of the motivation.

B (87:32)

No, I, I agree with that. But I still think, and maybe this is, this is anecdotal, right? But, but if you look at who is more mealy mouthed in, in US Politics, like Rand Paul is not, he's not Ron Paul and he's not Thomas. I mean, he's not Thomas Massey.

A (87:50)

He's.

B (87:51)

He's, like, trying to. He tried.

C (87:53)

He.

B (87:53)

He's really good on most things, but he tries to walk this middle line. They. He's been beat up. He's had his home office, his. His, like, hometown office burned down when he was going after Fauci. Thomas Massey on the other. I mean, and you could say that, okay, Thomas Massey has his life. You know, he's off grid and all, you know, like, he's. He's got his life set up in a slightly different.

A (88:16)

Every member of his family has an M16.

B (88:20)

Well, the thing is, though, is that they were not as hard on Ron Paul. They were like, they're hard on Ron Paul and on Thomas Massie. But I think there is something about the people that are, like, trying to walk the line that they want to go after more aggressively. It's the same thing with, like, who are they going after most aggressively right now?

A (88:40)

It's. It's.

B (88:41)

You know, what's. Megyn Kelly and, like, the people that are not. That haven't, like, Matt Walsh. Like, the people that haven't, like, taken aside.

A (88:50)

No, no, there. There's definitely logic in that because, like, you know, who do they force to apologize? It's the. It's the. It's the football player, the. The whatever, who's, like, still, like, trying to walk the line. If they say something, like, a little bit out of line, they go hard at him to apologize, but they don't do it. Dave Chappelle. They just say that Dave Chappelle is. Because they know Dave Chappelle is not going to do it. So there is. There is, like, a psychological game there.

D (89:13)

The.

A (89:14)

I think the caveat or the. The flip side of that coin is is that, sure, you make everything public, but what if nobody listens? And, like, everybody has an attention span, you know, like. Like, not every case can be a national emergency. There's thousands of these every day, probably.

B (89:31)

But the more egregious it is, and the more you stand on principle, the more people want to hear, like, people are starving for somebody that didn't cave.

A (89:40)

Yeah, that's true.

B (89:42)

The bitcoin community is very, like, annoying online. So, like, you know, if you can. If you can, you can weaponize that If.

C (89:51)

If.

B (89:51)

In your favor, if. If you actually, you know, stand up for what you believe in. I, you know, I don't know. It's. It's still. It's a gamble for sure, but I just. I don't know. I, like, I can't bring myself to, to like, it just feels like there's. You don't, you don't negotiate with terrorists or something. Some sort of like, like. Yeah, I don't know. It's just, it's just weird.

A (90:17)

But there is at least, like, it was brought up to the. Apparently or the way it was said. I think Trump. No, maybe. Maybe he didn't, he didn't know, but I can't remember. But the reporter brought it up, which is, which is really cool. And it's also interesting just that like, the bitcoin community can make a big enough stink about it and it's kind of, it's taken seriously, like at least gets up, you know, up the ladder, so to speak. And that's, that's at least promising. I don't have a lot of high hopes that, I mean, I, I do hope, but I don't. I'm. I, I would doubt that, that it actually happens. But he did indicate to Pam Bondi to, to look into the case that is, that is hope if there's, if there's anything to, to get a presidential pardon. But I think honestly, is that like writing software and like, if you, if we actually want to. If the US actually cares, gives a shit about being like in the forefront of anything, is this. There is so much political upheaval. There is so much monetary upheaval. There is. And financial upheaval. With the debt crisis around the world, there was so much technological upheaval. I think the most dangerous thing you could do is make entrepreneurs feel afraid to provide services or build tools in your country, especially ones that are outside of the status quo, because the status quo is not going to hold up. The way things work now is shit is not going to keep working that way for 10 years. That's why we have a big fork in the road of multiple alternative systems popping up at the same time. And I'm actually shocked. I think there's two things, because this relates back to what we were talking about earlier is I think bitcoin, the protocol, because we've leaned so much on like, oh, it's legitimate now, we can sue people. And so the, the protocol, the network, the nodes become kind of stagnant because we, we just become reliant on the fact that we can do normal social and political means to protect it. Bitcoin needs more state enemies, I think, to get strong. One, and then two, I am surprised no states have yet really taken advantage of the fact that the west is cracking down on things and making it harder to do business and harder to innovate and harder to build and provide services. I'm surprised. I mean, maybe Bukele is kind of an example, but I'm surprised there aren't multiple smaller countries saying, listen, I don't care what you build your build your coin join, build your, build your software, like whatever it is, like come build in our country, because this is the time. Maybe they're just stupid and they don't realize that the next 10 to 15 years are going to determine who is in power in 50.

B (93:19)

How many of them have policies that are determined by foreign aid.

D (93:24)

Right, yeah. Like El Salvador is kind of doing that. And if, and if a country did do that, they wouldn't, they wouldn't do it loudly. They do it quietly. Like we probably wouldn't hear about it.

A (93:34)

Very true. Yeah.

D (93:36)

A couple of things that are related. When you were talking about like kind of the press issue and kind of related to my thought earlier this year about what the press should be just investigating the government, something kind of clicked in my head this morning about a simple way to think about what has happened to the press. It's not really that anything happened to the press. It's that the people went from kind of distrusting government to seeing government as the savior, in a way. And so now people just aren't interested in a press that investigates the government. Like, like in the early days when people knew the US Constitution was something to restrict the powers of the government and protect the natural rights of the people. Now no one believes that anymore. Right now, now people believe that the government is the thing that hands out the rights to the people. The pre. The prior culture is very open and very in needing of like a good strong press to investigate this government, to keep it honest. But now we're in a position where most of the people think the government is the grantor of rights and therefore, like doesn't need to be investigated.

A (94:59)

Well, they're the ones, they're the ones that we go to if we want the investigation.

D (95:05)

Right.

A (95:06)

Yeah.

B (95:07)

I think it's downstream of fiat policies.

D (95:10)

Oh, for sure.

A (95:10)

Yeah.

B (95:11)

The government determines who's rich or who's successful. They pick winners and losers. Then the winners go and buy the media companies and, and, or influence the media companies. So you have, you know how many donate, how many commercials are like Pfizer, sponsored by Pfizer, you know, how many programs or whatever. Like, so you had all these in show commercials for Pfizer's products during COVID Right. Like, it's all just like, it's, it's all downstream with money. Like, even the culture is downstream with the money, right? Like, is it. Like, because if everybody is. The money's flowing to education, education systems and into new news and, you know, all of these, like, Orwellian sort of organizations and those determine the shape of society in some form or fashion, then. Then you. The only thing you're going to have is the small subset of people that are just aware enough to, you know, see through all the nonsense.

D (96:16)

Yeah, I'd be really interested in the answer to that question. Like, at what point did it flip when people's understanding of the bill, people's general understanding of the Bill of Rights flip from it's a restriction on government to this is how government gives people rights. Like, what was that? Was that 1930 or was that literally 1971?

B (96:39)

I think it was. It was probably earlier than. Than later. I mean, like, there's been a lot of yellow journalism for so long, and the education system was. Reconstruction, you know, was. Was a huge part of the shift in. In destroying the. The common person's understanding of politics or whatever. So.

A (97:01)

Yeah. Yeah.

D (97:02)

Interesting. The thing about the samurai obviously sucks. It just breaks my heart when somebody gets to sit in prison like that. But I also can't find it in me ever to beg the President for anything, like, including a pardon. Like, I will just never. I will never ask the President to do anything on my behalf ever. Like, sorry, I can't do it.

C (97:22)

I trust you guys. Look, I came out, like, not particularly sympathetic with samurai, saying they have to be freed anyway. Obviously got a lot of flack for it. They're very, like, hostile, you know, angry community anyway, and I got in a back and forth with Keon's wife a couple of weeks ago on Twitter, and we wrote some long, you know, tweets to each other in a public conversation. I definitely feel like, yeah, begging Trump for anything is kind of gross. But I. I also just feel like the premise of saying, you know, we wrote privacy software, so we're in jail. Is that obtuse or am I being a dick by saying that's, you know, when I'm saying, well, kind of the reason they went after you is because you. You ran a honeypot, intentionally or otherwise, and that's maybe one of the motivations for it. Like, you don't hear of similar scandals with a decentralized implementation, like Join Market, but this is never any. You never hear anything about it. And I've watched coin join rounds happen on Join Market where there'll be like, you know, 10 bitcoins with, like, 20 participants. And you're like, that's. That's 200 bitcoins. That's, you know, that's tens of millions of dollars flowing through. No one knows anything about it. Like, unless you're unmasking the toy users, where's the drama? It doesn't seem to exist. So I'm just like, genuinely. I guess I'm finding it hard to find my own bearing on the situation because I think it's a little disingenuous to say we're in jail for writing privacy software that worked too well, which is what Keon's bio reads at the moment, when I considered it the weakest of the coinjoin things. And it actually created problems for their users that we said would be problems for them if that server ever fell into bad hands, and it did. And I don't see, like, any admission of this in the community there, but is it irrelevant? Is the point. Is it actually relevant for me to bring this up?

B (99:20)

I. I actually. I mean, that's a valid point. I think I'm very sympathetic to the problem.

A (99:27)

The.

B (99:27)

I completely agree. They should not be where they are. I. I actually don't have that big of a problem with begging Trump for a pardon, because it's just like, well, if Trump was anything like what he ran, if he was anything like what he says he is, then he ought to pardon somebody. You know, he. And he pardoned Bruce Ulberg. So all credit, you know, credit where credit is due. There's a chance that that might work. I don't think appealing to the legal system as a whole is worth a shit. So. I mean. Because it just doesn't. It doesn't work, you know, But. But as far as, like, I think you're right. If they're not going after people that have written better software, then probably the reason is that they. There was something to gain, you know, by going after them, and that should be pointed out to people so that the problem doesn't repeat itself. But I don't think it's necessary to frame it as an attack on them or to, like, I would even, like, say, you know, I'm sorry that I have to say this, but, like, you know, it's probably because your software was shit that this happened. You know, like, it doesn't. It doesn't have to be like, you're right, you should not be in prison, but, you know, other people in the future should just try to write better privacy, you know, more private software.

A (100:55)

I would say. So part of the issue Is because I remember talking about this well before any of this happened was that the Samurai service exposed public keys, right. Of the, of the user to the service provider. Is that, is that, is that correct? In what I understood?

C (101:19)

Yeah. The default Android wallet thing would mean that you uploaded the XPub, which I found is worse than even Electrum. Like, if you use an Electrum Wallet or anything that uses Electrum, you don't upload your whole XPub, you just upload chunks of your addresses, which is bad for privacy, but it's not as bad as uploading your whole XPub. So something that advertises itself as a privacy wallet, engaging in the worst possible practice, which is making your XPub public, which is, despite the name, the worst thing you could ever do. Because I mean, that is the worst. Like bitcoin is pseudonymous, unless someone knows your ex pub and then, well, unless the minute one of your addresses becomes doxed, all of them are none. It's, it's the worst possible thing you could do from a privacy perspective is leak your XPub. That's just a fact of how bitcoin works.

A (102:09)

So, so you asked, was this relevant? I'll give you my thoughts in a couple different directions here.

C (102:16)

Yeah. Is it. Is it relevant to getting them out of jail and invo. Invoking all this? Am I just being a dick because I have personal history with Samurai?

A (102:24)

Well, see, here's the thing is that from, from the context of that and the fact that like, there were all these arguments and stuff that I tried to keep up with at the time and like people going back and forth and that was always one that stood out to me. Like, wait, what? Like that, that, that always like really weirded me out. That didn't seem to make sense and I never even got the time to like go verify it. But under the assumption that that was true, I don't understand why anybody would now change their opinion on that or think that that's incorrect when obviously this is something that was widely talked about and argued about for a long time before any of this happened and that now that this has happened that any of that has changed. Like, I still think that's a terrible idea and a bad way to implement the service. However, from the context of like, is this relevant? Is that I don't think it's relevant to whether or not they should be in prison. And it's a little bit like if Roger is being put in prison, like, I could bring up every time that like, well, he was a dick and I didn't like that guy, somebody's like, roger should be out of prison. He's like, he. I mean, sure, but like, you remember the stupid that he said with the block size war? You know, like, there, there is, there is from at least from my personal perspective, is that, like, I don't really feel like there's any reason to, to bring it up. But I, There is a part that, you know, makes me want to go. It's like, okay, well, you. If somebody says they've built perfect private privacy software and that's why they're in prison, there is an inclination, a caveat. It's like, well, no, like, they didn't build perfect privacy software. There's a lot of great things, a phenomenal tool in a lot of different ways. The pay names that they implemented were great. You run in your own whirlpool. It was great. But the, the service, like, you remember this argument that we used to have? Like, this is still something that, you know, we see as wrong, but that doesn't change. That doesn't change the nature of this situ of this situation or whether or not they should be in prison at all, in my opinion. But like, I haven't changed my opinion about that argument. Like, if that did in fact stand and that was in fact a fact, then yeah, that's still, I still disagree with that. I don't think that's the right way to implement it. But also, the Tornado Cash guys, I think, I, I think suggest this might be a. We have openly and explicitly made privacy software and they're coming after us because they were conspiracy to commit money laundering. Um, like, like. And this, that was in New York, Sturmanoff. What is his freaking name?

C (104:58)

Is that distinct from Salmon Samurai? Were they just money laundering instead of conspiracy?

A (105:04)

Oh, man, I don't have the specifics.

D (105:06)

In front of me.

A (105:07)

I can't tell you what the exact, exact charges on those. I just know that Tornado Cash because I got into a conversation with somebody about it not too long ago. But, but I do think, I think there is an explicit crackdown on, like, people who build privacy software. And I think people who are building and running privacy software should be cautious, but I don't think they should stop doing it.

C (105:31)

But isn't it the centralized coordination?

A (105:33)

I think we should be building things with decentralized coordination. Yes. Like, like, I, I think, I think being in that place puts a big, a big laser on your back, like a big target on you. So I think that's the solution to this is figure out how to get around that.

C (105:54)

Well, That's. But Join Market is already that solution. Join. Join Market is that solution.

A (105:59)

Sure, sure. Join Market is fantastic software. I love Join Market.

D (106:04)

Yeah, you guys, you guys all like this. I've had some meetings with some. Some Defi projects are getting more interested in using utx, Oracle Price. And so I've had some phone calls with these guys and I'm so bad at these meetings because I just can't resist. I'm just like, they're just like, yeah, we got decentralized self custody defi. And I'm just like, I gotta know where are the operations taking place. They're like, oh yeah, your phone, your app, your keys. And I'm like, okay. And then where does the transaction go to? And eventually it's always like, oh yeah, that part's done on Amazon server. Like your one Amazon CPU is doing that like every time. I know, I know the answer is always going to get there. And I know I shouldn't do this because I'm just providing a price, but I just can't freaking resist. It's always the same, dude. There's always a centralized Amazon server and all of these Defi projects somewhere.

A (107:05)

You're bad at those meetings in the best way, Steve.

D (107:08)

I'm so bad, dude.

C (107:09)

Did you see Samson tweeted that once it was. Someone was trying to justify Liquid as being defi, and he said it's not centralized enough to qualify as defi.

D (107:21)

That's such a great quote. Liquid is so much more decentralized than any of these other projects. I mean, it's only 16 people, it's only 16 nodes, and it's still so much more decentralized than anything else. Defi.

C (107:36)

Yeah, Decentralization theater is a very frustrating thing to come up against in this, in this world. I mean, Join Market depends entirely on Tor and Tor is centralized with the directory nodes. So it's privacy I kind of maintain is like necessarily a centralized thing. So maybe that silver lining with Samurai isn't even valid because maybe you have to have centralized coordinators for things to work properly. And if that's true, then that's even more of a death sentence for privacy in the space. But so far, as far as I know, Join Market works relatively well. But I don't know if you can do it on something like Tor that doesn't have centralized directory nodes to try and bootstrap stuff.

B (108:22)

Okay, so Bitcoin has decentralized coordination, right? Like, I mean, we're all participating in some sort of.

C (108:27)

Yeah, but it's not privacy software, right?

B (108:30)

But what I'm saying is if you can achieve coordination in a decentralized fashion in any sort of like system like this, isn't there a way to apply a similar functionality to the coordination of like a privacy tool? Like maybe you have to come up then with some sort of incentive to have people mining for a privacy tool or something.

C (108:52)

I don't know.

B (108:53)

But like, is there a way to, to create some sort of. I don't know it like you get what I'm saying? Like, I think, I think it's possible. It's just another, it's a, it's such a, it's a bigger technical challenge to do the thing the right way, which is always the case. Right.

D (109:15)

I think, I think what mechanic's saying is that like it's one of these trade off problems where you can for a long time get decentralized and more private, but then you kind of get to a point where you're trading off and then you'll find that like the more privacy focused coins are actually going to be more centralized in some way. I mean, is that, what is that fair, Mechanic? Like at some point you get a trade off? I mean it's similar trade off as the being able to see the total amount of Bitcoin being spent versus having like dark zero knowledge transactions. Like eventually there's a trade off that.

C (109:52)

Does bolster my heuristic. The centralization goes hand in hand with privacy generally. But it's kind of a coincidence with regard to things like Monero. I think, I think the reason Monero is less decentralized than Bitcoin is not because it's a privacy thing, it's because it's just not Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is where you go if decentralization is your priority and Monero is where you go if privacy is your priority. And that only further entrenches itself and cascades. But in other instances, I think privacy in general is just a result of minimizing the ability to verify stuff publicly. Like that's just like you can talk about advanced cryptographic, you know, techniques all you want, but if you want anything reliable like Bitcoin and you need publicly auditable stuff, it's going to be very difficult to shoehorn privacy into that. So I've, I've basically been contending for ages that in some cases you don't even want privacy because kind of the only way we have any rights is that there are too many people doing things for and flouting laws for the state to be able to crack down on them and privacy. Like I find this is true, that every Monero head I meet and privacy advocate that is primarily concerned with privacy is just living in a V for Vendetta, like fantasy, where I'm not that. I'm not saying we don't live in that kind of like almost. We don't live in a society that tyrannical. It's that that assumes that the state just goes on forever and there's nothing you could do about it and you must live in the shadows permanently. But at some point I don't want to do that. I want to do the things that I think are okay in public and I want other people to do that. And I want us all to signal that those things are okay to one another. And this is why mass protest is banned in tyrannical regimes, because they need people not to signal to other people that things are okay no matter what the law says. So there's an element of privacy advocacy that is defeatist and assumes that we will never win against a tyrannical state and instead we must continuously hide our activities from them. Bitcoin kind of takes the optimistic approach and says, well, let's just succeed and win so hard that they have nothing left. We completely deprive them all of all the resources of enforcement so that we're just free that way. Which is crazy naive, but also sunshine and rainbows rather than V for Vendetta. You know, sneaking around with a cloak over your, you know, your.

D (112:35)

It's pretty cool though, wearing that, wearing that mask with a cloak.

C (112:40)

It. It was like 17 year old me loved wearing that mask and going around central London and sticking up middle fingers to the police. But I grew up a little bit and I realized that that's an unrealistic way to live a life. So, you know, it's. I just think that's an element of privacy that is under talked about. Right. Is that like nosta is the same right. Noster is a privacy disaster. And that's kind of the point is it's like I want to flout all the censorship and information control that happens on other social media platforms with this ridiculously open platform. And that's again the same principle as bitcoin. Just rip the band aid off, do everything in public, let them come after us, but let there be so many of us that we're too powerful for them to take down. Like if everyone's using, like how if bitcoin had been Monero from the beginning, how would you have gotten it? Like, I know most of them. You know, that. That joke. How do you know someone uses a privacy coin? Don't worry, they'll tell you. But imagine if everyone was like an actual privacy walker. Walker, not just the talker. And there was lots of Monero adoption, but no one used it. And it kind of bootstrapped invisibly, and everyone was using it, but no one talked about it. How would it ever really. How would you get there? How would you bootstrap that? You kind of need public information about it.

B (114:00)

The government even, like, signals how valuable the. These sort of protests, like, active protests are like. Like protests. I think the general gathering in the street and shouting about nothing is debatable, whether that means anything. But. But when people are not wearing masks or. I mean, it was. So the trucker protests, they gathered in the street and, you know, were really stopping things.

C (114:28)

Right.

B (114:28)

And that was when the Canadian government capitulated. Like, they still seized people's bank accounts and did, you know, some pretty terrible things. But, like, the trucker protest sort of symbolized a sort of capitulation for the Canadian government. They kind of walked back a bunch of the policies and stuff. Well, not a bunch, but they. They changed some things because everybody finally was just like, no, we're not doing this anymore. In the US it was sort of the same thing. The policy still, like, they tried. They said it's going to be another murder Christmas or whatever because of unvaccinated people, but nobody really cared. And then they finally were like, okay, we're not doing this anymore. You know, like. Like it just sort of, like, fizzled out because nobody was. Was complying. And. And so if everybody had been on the beach during COVID there would have been no cops chasing people down on the beach. So there is a degree to which you just go about your life and. And there's not enough of them to stop us. But that's also why they crack down so hard on the political dissidents at the beginning, is because they want everybody.

A (115:36)

To be afraid to do that. They want everybody to be afraid to stand up. Yeah.

C (115:40)

Which is another reason why you don't poke the bear. And that's another reason I was mad at Samurai is it's like, look, if we get enough people doing stuff like this, then they have to come after all of us. But don't be. Don't. Don't build technology that annoys the state and then. And poke them repeatedly and be like, come after me. Come after me. You can't. Because of freedom of speech, things like that. You're going to get yourself in trouble and you're going to help them mount a defense against, like, you're going to spook it and strangle it before it's had time to prosper. Like, I do, I do think that's true. So people like Bram Cohen is a great example. Like, that's how you build disruptive tech. He made BitTorrent. And you don't need to go to jail. You don't need to be an idiot about it. You just kind of work on it and chill out and don't, don't make them come after you. And then BitTorrent one so hard, right? Because GCHQ, our favorite, you know, the, the UK version of the NSA, they didn't monitor BitTorrent traffic. Cause they were like, there's too much of this. Like, it's just, it's, it's just insane. So I'm like, great. Like that. That's basically an unpoliced thing now. So they started making all these examples of like, users of it. Like in France. I think if you got caught torrenting, they would like blackball you. So you couldn't have an account with an ISP anymore and stuff like that. But they've given up on BitTorrent. Like, you don't hear about those cases anymore. Use BitTorrent, nothing's gonna happen. Like, and that's because the people that went about it were kind of clever and the people got in trouble were like Peter Sunday from the Pirate Bay and stuff like that. There were some examples made of people, but not the actual protocol designer, which is interesting. So I think there are ways to be clever. Like bitcoin is. Remember, it's a sly, roundabout way. We're not just trying to be like, screw you, aim a bazooka at them and pull the trigger. It's not that kind of stuff. Like, we can do things in ways where it's like, they've got enough to be paying attention to. Let's just build this little thing here and not be stupid about it. And Satoshi felt it too, with saying, you know, WikiLeaks is bringing us too much attention at the wrong time in the wrong way. Like, let's just like kick each other under the table and pretend we're just doing something else. Like, coin joining is just a tool for safety.

A (117:52)

It's just. No, it's just a transaction efficiency tool we're compressing.

C (117:56)

Right. It's not for Russian oligarchs. It's just a safety tool because, you know, you can. The five dollar Ranch attack is real. We don't want people knowing how much our big stash is. So we need to be able to break the on chain heuristics that allow people to know how much money we might have. That's what this is. It's a safety tool. It's nothing to do with money laundering. No, no, no, no. Like, don't, don't be naive about it. Like, don't, don't attract that kind of attention and let it grow to the point where when they want to start making examples of people, it's like, oh no, everyone coin joins and everyone runs a coordinator. Like that's just normal how bitcoin's used. Are you going to really arrest 500,000Americans that you've caught doing this? Like, no. Like that just can't. You need to get to that kind of scale first. Like they can't make bitcoin illegal in America. There's just too many people that use it. Like, but we had to get there first. So you gotta pick the right battles and you gotta present it in a clever way.

A (118:49)

Yeah, there's something to be said for the public courage to do what you know is perfectly reasonable and to stand on that without like, like other people look for that. Other people look for the courage to be like, look, no, like this is perfectly reasonable. Like, why, why would this be unreasonable and you force your enemy to be unreasonable or to have like, like think about this in the context of like some of the arguments and the debates is like when, when you actually get two people in a room to debate about something and you have like the crazy left, how quickly they break down into just nonsense. If you just ask basic questions. You know, that's actually something that Charlie Kirk talked about that I thought was like, like fascinating. He says, you know, they have four years. They have four years and they pump these people full of propaganda and nonsense. And I can ask, in 30 minutes I can ask questions that start to topple the whole thing down. And that's why they hate me, is because if you just ask the right questions and you force them to defend their position, there is these universities have made them dumb. It have made them stupid. They have no idea how to defend their positions. They have no idea what they even believe. They've never, they've never stress test a thing. The whole point of university is to stress test is to explore ideas, is to figure out how to defend yourself in the world. And they've done the exact opposite. And that's why literally a few well pointed questions can begin to crumple people's entire identities. It's because they've never asked them.

D (120:28)

It's impolite. It's impolitic. That's questions.

A (120:30)

It's offensive. It's offensive. And so like the, the same thing goes here. Is that like, please explain to me why I, like, this is my daily life. I, I have no victim. I've never done. I'm. I haven't harmed anybody. I'm. I'm doing what I know to be the right thing. I'm doing what I know to protect my family. How am. Please, the onus is on you to make me wrong. It goes to say, like, I'm not talking about, like helping Russian oligarchs or whatever. And I think that obviously is going to be bad. Like, that's gonna. I think that sucks that they have to fight through that. I think they have every right to say that. And that doesn't make anything that they did a crime at all. But there is a point to be made that that's, that is painting a target on you. And now the onus is on you to defend yourself rather than the other way around. Like, it's, it's giving up your power to say that. Like, now you have to defend yourself. It's like, no, I wasn't funding Russian oligarchs. You know, because now everybody's assumption is that you're the bad guy.

B (121:38)

Yeah.

A (121:39)

And. And you better hope that you have a bunch of dumbass, you know, autistic bitcoiners behind you to, to try to raise money and. Yes. And defends. Defend that. What you did was in fact, there's nothing wrong with it because privacy is a basic right. But it's already uphill battle. It's already an uphill battle, but people are looking for someone to do it publicly and stand up for it and do it reasonably too. Yeah.

D (122:12)

Hey, I gotta go here in a bit, FYI.

C (122:14)

Yeah, same.

A (122:16)

I already left. Just came back.

D (122:17)

You already left, came back.

A (122:21)

Let's see, there's a bunch of little like items, but none of them are huge things. There is the China ban though. So China shut down up to 2 gigawatts.

D (122:30)

China ban Bitcoin.

A (122:32)

Trying to ban Bitcoin CCP scrutiny. So Nano Labs posted that a hundred X a hash, the computing power of the network dropped by a hundred x a hash. At least 400,000 machines were shut down.

C (122:49)

And that can just be winter cold, man, Like a lot of people. Like.

A (122:53)

No, there was a, There was a CCP investigation into operators promoting Mining sites and a bunch of them voluntarily shut down. Like, like there were. There were identified like things that did in fact occur because of the response to the ccp.

C (123:10)

I'm saying there's a mix of those, that's all.

A (123:12)

Yeah, I mean the, the price fell. So of course also. Yeah, of course mining hash rate is.

D (123:18)

Also going to fall. Did the ann about stories like this is that to anyone who this matters to, like people in China, they already knew about this weeks ago. And to anybody reading this story from a different country, this story does not matter to you in any way possible. So why is it a new story?

C (123:37)

I hate it because the difficulty adjustment exists and everyone forgets it. Like people like this happened to miners. I'm like, right, so then the difficulty will go down and it will be no different. Like it just like this is why I get so up.

A (123:50)

We've done this a hundred times. Way worse way, way more times.

C (123:54)

Well, I get bent out of shape about node stuff because I'm like if you do anything that makes life worse for nodes, like having arbitrary data on there or making blocks bigger or anything like that, there's no difficulty adjustment. Someone just goes, oh screw this, I'm not running a node anymore. It doesn't get slightly easier to run a node when that happens.

A (124:10)

There's no mechanism a spam difficulty adjustment.

D (124:15)

Just come up with an idea, man.

C (124:18)

I came up. Well, I've been in favor of two soft forks that might make it a lot easier to run a node though interestingly, a cat doesn't make it easier to run a node. That's like going forward, it would versus a reality where it didn't happen. But it doesn't delete anything. It just makes it all. Suddenly your UTXO set would drop from 13 gigabytes down to like 6 gigabytes, which would actually be really helpful. Um, but anyway, I'm, I'm going off topic here. Difficulty adjustments exist. It doesn't really matter what happens with mining like beyond below a certain threshold, no one ever notices anything.

A (124:57)

Yeah.

C (124:58)

And also it's like why the, the, the security budget fud is so wrong. Because if you, if you cancel harings or whatever, it just. The har. All that happens is the, the difficulty reflects whatever it is you're doing. You can't ever make any more bitcoin by turning on more miners. Like collectively, you just can't do it because the difficulty just goes up and then you're not making. You make less per hash. It's just, it's not a Thing like even if you were like there's going to be 42 million bitcoins instead of 21, then the difficulty is just twice as high as it would have been the entire time. Like it's, it doesn't make any difference and so many people just have not groked that. Yeah.

A (125:41)

So let's go ahead and just push this towards the end then because this is the last one for the year. We're closing out 2025. I will say one more news item that I just thought was pretty cool. Is all time high for bitcoin. Not, not value, not capital, but actual bitcoin on the Lightning Network just got crossed 5600 bitcoin on lightning Network. There's been a pretty steep increase in channel capacity and nodes which is pretty dope.

C (126:09)

We just paid out a second entire bitcoin in total via Lightning on Ocean. Wow, that's about 250 grand or. Well, no, sorry, it's about 160 grand. Injected into the Lightning Network like nice. By some very struggling liquidity management like people like Phoenix and they're very. Every time we find a block it's hard.

A (126:35)

But yeah, pressing, filling those, messing up those channel liquidity stress tests. Well, so 2025, we're closing out 2025. What are your thoughts on the big thing, the non thing? Like What. How was 2025? You know, you look at it in the four year cycle we were supposed to have a big green candle, kind of had a little piddly red candle.

C (127:01)

Well, 2021 was a really unimpressive bull market and 2022 was one of the worst bear markets. So I really hope we don't get, I really hope we don't get a repeat of that. I'm not, I'm not in the mood for 2026 to be a down year but I'm kind of ready for it because I've been so, so disillusioned with bitcoin this year that I've made different decisions. And if the price goes down a lot in 2026 and things improve significantly with bitcoin, then I'll be able to. I'll actually have dry powder to buy a bunch, you know. So I'm looking forward to it if that's the case.

A (127:34)

You heard it here, mechanics selling all his bitcoin.

C (127:38)

I paid off more mortgage than I usually do it that way. Like I really. There's nothing else I want to buy but I just figure paying less interest to banks is a worthwhile thing to do. So I'll do That, but I can't bring myself to own anything else. I own stocking companies I've worked at. I own zero precious metals or other stocks.

A (128:02)

And you know, you're really messing up the clip. Mechanic.

C (128:06)

Oh, sorry. Yeah, I've shorted everyone's bitcoin.

D (128:15)

I think there's going to be. Go ahead.

B (128:17)

Oh, well, I was just going to say there's. There's another thing that my algorithm has shown me is, you know, like, you know, precious metals are a crazy run. And, and there's like one guy in particular was like talking about how silver, the silver bull run, has like cleared all the crypto bros out of his feed or something because, like, they're no longer following him. Like he's making them mad by celebrating the silver run or something. And I'm like, man, I have no problem with silver and gold doing well. I fully expected that they would. Trillions of dollars are being printed. There's never, never a question that silver and gold were going to do okay. But I still think that they, they fail to solve our, like, they're not going to set us free for the same reason that they didn't stop the fiat crisis that we're in to begin with.

A (129:09)

Yeah, nobody invented gold and silver 20 years ago to solve this problem.

B (129:14)

Right.

A (129:14)

They got us here.

B (129:16)

So there's like the laws of economics and the history of how econ, you know, like money works pretty much tells us that we, we're only going to be free if we have some other solution. And the only thing that seems close to that, you know, is. Is bitcoin. I think, I still think, you know, everything's, everything's eventually going our way. Like the economics of bitcoin are just, it's a black hole. It's going to suck up all the value. So it's just people are slow because, you know, this is a major, this is a huge shift. So.

A (129:51)

Yep.

D (129:54)

I'm still sort of a believer that the more intelligent people are into bitcoin. And this means that bitcoin price action precedes tradfi price action. So my price predictions, I'm a UTX Oracle price guy now, guys, I'm a price guy. My price prediction is that there's going to be like a dip in tradfi stuff like gold, Silver, S&P 500 in like January, February. And bitcoin's also going to dip even further when they dip. But then bitcoin's going to rise out of them later on way faster. Because I just think things happen in bitcoin faster than they happen in other markets. But on Bitcoin wise, I'm going to make a prediction that. So 2023 was all about ETFs. When will they happen? 2024 was all about Covenants does. Isn't it strange how far covenants and like, you know, we got to make sure everyone has a utxo. Like how far away that is now. That was all 2024. No one's talking about that anymore. 2025, everybody's talking about spam wars and everything. I think maybe treasury worker happened.

C (131:08)

There was a lot of Treasury.

D (131:09)

Oh, yeah, yeah, treasury companies. So I think 2026 is going to be something completely different that is not even here right now. I'm hoping that it's going to be an exchange hack which causes a massive run of withdrawals on chain. Coinbase fees are going to go up, spam's going to be irrelevant and we're going to be in glorious on chain bitcoin heaven again.

C (131:35)

I mean, we've done it before though. History rhymes, not repeat. We've had too many of those. This is like Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the camera. Me like, seen that one before. So.

A (131:45)

Yeah, yeah.

C (131:48)

I don't know, man. I think we need something new. I want something new. Something new, but I have no idea what that is. I lack the creativity.

D (131:55)

Well, I mean, a Coinbase hack, even though it's not new to us, it'd be a shock to the world.

C (132:01)

It would be because they've to their credit, I think they've never been hacked.

D (132:06)

That we know about.

C (132:07)

I don't get it. Because whoever runs their back end is like really incompetent because there's a meme that whenever the price moves a lot, the exchange goes down.

D (132:16)

Yeah, well, that's kind of their front.

B (132:17)

End is the incompetence, though.

D (132:20)

I mean, they wouldn't consider that their back end.

C (132:24)

I mean, what would be the point, Jeff? Because that would be the most trading action they'd get. They take a cut of fees. Right. Why would you want to be down when everyone is buying and selling like.

A (132:34)

They'Re buying and selling their own crap?

B (132:36)

I was about to say some sort of insider trading happening.

A (132:39)

They're dumping their own on people.

D (132:41)

Coinbase trading is like.

A (132:43)

So if they have a high volatility moment, they can. They can exchange hands, fulfill orders and then get back on the market.

C (132:49)

And I'm so naive. How did I not think of that?

A (132:54)

Same thing Robin Hood did. Same thing Robin Hood did.

C (132:57)

How much fart coin do you think Brian bought before he listed that on Coinbase so much, that tweet?

A (133:04)

He was like, he was in the pre mine. He was in the pre mine for sure.

C (133:09)

He wrote some like high minded tweet that week about like how they're changing everything and how it's critically like redefining the world. And you know all this stuff, what they're doing with crypto and people are like, three days ago you launched FartCoin. Are you like, how are you possibly up here, like grandstanding about the difference you're making in the world?

A (133:29)

Listen, Brian Armstrong, you know how all the crypto pump and dumps have like a telegram group and then all the influencers have their telegram groups where they keep track of which telegram groups they're pumping shit in and then they get in and they know what stuff and they coordinate them over what stuff they're going to pump. Well, there's a telegram group that is above all of this. It is the biggest, it is the master telegram group and it is run by Brian Armstrong and he has a direct line to all the influencers and every. And if you are, if you get a good crypto token that you're going to issue, you get in that, you get in that group, you let Brian Armstrong make some money off your stupid token. That's how, that's how you really make it. That's where the Solanas of the world.

B (134:15)

The real Dragons Den, that's where the.

A (134:18)

Solanas of the world and the XRPS live.

D (134:20)

I have one positive thing to say about Brian Armstrong. He did put out some pretty awesome bitcoin super bowl commercials last year. So, Brian, I know you listen to the show now, you're listening to this show every day. Please, man, every day, put out another awesome bitcoin super bowl commercial.

A (134:39)

I'm in that telegram group, actually. I never saw them chat all the time, dude.

D (134:44)

They were bitcoin only. It was just like, bitcoin's going to end fiat. Like, just that.

A (134:48)

It wasn't anything else in 2024.

D (134:52)

When was it?

A (134:53)

I think it was super year ago now. I think it was. I think it was 2024.

D (134:57)

Is it, was it a Super bowl commercial? Yeah, I think it was 2024. 5. Like this, the February 2025.

A (135:04)

I don't know. They were cool commercials. I know what you're talking about, though. They're really good.

C (135:07)

But Brian did very conspicuously change his tune the minute Trump got in the second time. And I figured that was. We went over that on this podcast.

B (135:15)

Does the meaning.

C (135:16)

My theory was, you know, you're. You've been scamming shilling crypto nonsense to like retail, but now the president might fall for it. You're scared, so you want to tell him, look like you need to, because he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Bitcoin is like serious and crypto's nonsense. And he had, he'd refused to say the word for many years, trying to push all the scam coins and drop equivalents. So I do think suddenly in 2024, Brian Armstrong went full bitcoin again after years of being conspicuously absent.

D (135:49)

Yeah. All right, guys, I gotta run.

A (135:52)

All right. Later guys.

B (135:54)

Later.

A (135:54)

This has been the round table.

D (135:55)

Happy New Year.

A (135:56)

Happy New Year. We are out. All the close out. Wonderful.

D (136:02)

See ya.

A (136:08)

Thank you for listening. I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful new year. I think bitcoin's next year is going to be pretty dope. Honestly. I'm actually pretty bullish on 2026, but that's just me. Maybe I'm just, I'm just always bullish on bitcoin and that's how it goes. But I honestly think the reason, because I didn't really get to get into it, we had to close it out a little short. But I think the reason 2025 ended up being kind of a just a crab year, honestly, is because everyone was expecting it to be the best year. And bitcoin loves to take the path of greatest pain. And I think its job is to decimate everybody's expectations and wash out all the weak hands that weren't preparing for a long term position in this and then we can grow again. And I think that's kind of where we are. And maybe that does mean one more leg down. But I think, I think 2026 is gonna be a big year just because I think there's a lot of new stuff still waiting to be fruitful. We're still waiting to see it come to fruition. Like tools that are released and new things that are available and things that we can use but haven't really seen their adoption, haven't seen that push forward to, to some new thing that like really people are using en masse or really getting into. Like, we still just have that kind of like speculative narrative. And I think we're entering the space where we have a far bigger potential network, entering for a breadth, like a handful of different possible narratives and reasons of why bitcoin is important in people's lives and for things and tools to be adopted. I think we were in a really interesting spot just because we are in kind of new territory and we've opened up into such a large landscape and it's trying to find its footing and that's kind of why I think bitcoin has done what it has done so far. But I think it's kind of a bullish. The bigger the wind up the. The bigger the growth, I feel like. So anyway, that's just. I don't know what it is. That's just how I feel about it. And so that's kind of where I'm taking the close of 2025 and we got a lot of stuff coming. I really hope that I get to be a part of this. I hope that what we're building with Paradrive and stuff like I think it's going to be cool. I think it's going to be so cool. But I know nobody has really gotten to experience what I am experiencing or what I have envisioned. But we're extremely close and I hope to have something at the very beginning very early in the year to show you guys and I hope people are as excited about it as I am and we really get to bring this vision to life. So stick with me. Don't forget to shout out to subscribe to share this with everybody you know and love and don't share it out to people you hate because it might make their life better and that we don't want that. You know, anybody you want to be financially ruined in the collapse of Fiat, do not send them bitcoin audible because it will save their ass. And that's what we don't want that. We don't want that. So only to people that you love and care about send bitcoin audible to all of them and a huge shout out. And don't forget to check out our sponsors. Ledn IO pubkey P U B K Y app Building the tools for a decentralized future. Leden is bitcoin backed loans. Been using them for a while and they are a godsend in the bitcoiner toolbox to the HRF and their financial freedom report. And then lastly Chroma and Lighthealth get their blue blue green light blocking classes. I think that is a huge undersung thing of light therapy and getting your light health right to control your energy levels and your hormones. So check them out. I've got discounts and goodies and special links that if you use them it really helps out this show and thank you guys. Thank you and I will catch you on the next episode in the new year of bitcoin. Audible. Not going anywhere, guys. Because I am. Guys. One. And that's our two sets.

B (140:37)

Sam.