← Swan Signal Live - A Bitcoin Show
Swan Signal Live - A Bitcoin Show
Coldcard Fallout, Multisig, and Why We Still Need Bitcoin
00:39:42
Brady and Isaiah open on the hardest week Bitcoin self-custody has had. A firmware change from 2021 left Coldcard seeds far weaker than advertised, and roughly 1,400 to 1,500 Bitcoin was swept, mostly from patient savers who had done their homework. They work through what actually held up, why multisig and collaborative custody came through the week intact, and what vendor selection and review culture have to do with security. Then the wider frame: the decentralized red team auditing Bitcoin's code, the awkward fact that open-weight models are doing that work, and the macro charts explaining why any of this matters.
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Transcript36 lines
- [00:02]
A
Welcome back to Swan Signal Live, everybody. Happy Friday to you. Hope it's able to find some happiness out there. Our sincere sympathies to all of our brothers and sisters in bitcoin who have their hard earned stacks left from them last, late last Thursday, Friday, over the weekend, in several waves of attacks. Isaiah, how are you doing, man? I know it's been a long week for you and everybody else out there in the bitcoin world that have been trying to help people save their funds.
- [00:41]
B
Yeah, it's definitely dark days if you look at it from solely that angle. But I think one thing it did do was kind of reunify people around a common mission again of like, hey, we're here to help. Here's the information. We're going to continue to work because, hey, we're going to make sure people know and reach out to anyone that you know that may be affected. And there was a lot of, a lot of good things that I saw as well. So that, that's I guess the silver lining. But yeah, some tough conversations, some that turned out good. But yeah, a lot. So definitely heavy week.
- [01:17]
A
Yeah. So ColdCard posted this to Twitter Thursday evening. Last Thursday evening, 6:37 or was this is the morning following. This is the next morning. So yeah, the sweep started happening Thursday evening. Coldguard posted this early the next morning. Urgent security updates, Mark 3s and Mark 4s and 5s and their queues were vulnerable. The mark threes, especially on a Firmware update from 2021, March 2021 that switched changed up basically the path that generates entropy or randomness on the cold card, which is the most important function of any hardware wallet while you're creating your seed. And you could of course create your own randomness or entropy with, with dice and you can do that with other hardware wallets as well. But most of the time people will use the on device randomness generator to create randomness for the seed. And if you do not have enough entropy, you won't get to that 128 bit or even up to 256 bit security, which basically makes the cryptography uncrackable. And these hardware wallets were sitting at about 40 bits of entropy, which was much more accessible because we're talking about exponentials here. So you can imagine the difference between 40 and 128. Or actually we. It's hard for us to imagine that, but it is significantly higher. We're talking about like the number of atoms in the universe level of, you know, field to sweep or like to try to, to Break. And because it was so low, attackers were able to sweep funds by just running through a whole bunch of possibilities until they found one that worked. So I mean that's basically what happened throughout the week. Here's the, here's a look at the losses. Alex Thorne at Galaxy Digital has been tracking this stuff and he does a great job with data, as we know. Here are the different waves that came through. The first one was over a thousand bitcoin and I think we've ended up at about 14 or 1500 bitcoin total. The sweeps have largely stopped at this point and unfortunately they were targeted at, or not targeted necessarily, but affected mostly smaller bitcoin plebs who have been stacking smaller amounts for a very long time. You can see the distribution here. There were some, some large addresses as well. But this is mostly the bitcoiners who quote unquote have been doing, doing the right thing, doing their homework, trying to figure out how best to self custody, understanding why self custody is important. And as we know in the industry, Isaiah that Coldcard had a reputation as being the most kind of cypherpunk hardware wallet out there. And there's something to be said about a kind of like something that's lacked merit based basically evaluation of what was going on with ColdCard. The way that at NVK, the CEO of CoinKite that makes cold cards behaved at times where there were, you know, constructive criticisms made and even an attempt to raise questions about this particular vulnerability that no one had put a finger exactly on. But there was something weird going on and that was noticed a couple of times. I think in 2022 there was actually a collision. Two people generated seeds on hardware wallets and they're, they basically came up with the same seeds. So they're, they were sharing addresses and transactions that they didn't, you know, weren't, that weren't theirs were showing up in their wallet. And then James o' Barne raised a question about this just I think in 2025 as well, which was ignored and kind of written off as fud. And so the approach, I think Guy Swan was on Cafe Bitcoin this week and he said something I thought was good is like the demeanor, the personality type that you want to see in somebody who's securing your life savings is someone who is humble, willing to listen to possible issues and to actually have this mindset of like I just want this thing to work as well as it can, right? And so I'm going to listen and I'm going to check and follow up and try to make this thing better. And that wasn't the attitude or the personality type at coinkite.
- [06:28]
B
Yeah, for sure. And the biggest thing that I've talked about in conversations and you. You hit on as well. It was mainly, you know, hardcore bitcoin only want to. Obviously we believe in bitcoin only at Swan and it's an important thing to me personally. And so you want to support those companies and so for a lot of people you would go meetup and I can think of the local meetup for. For me, Coin, Coin, Coin Kite or, or Cold Card was the recommendation. Right. For someone new. Hey, this, this might have, you know, has all the bells and whistles but this is the most secure. This is kind of like the gold standard. Right. Be the use when it came to Cold Card and yeah, I mean from a professionalism standpoint and other things like yeah, I think MBK had a reputation in ways. Some people loved it, some people didn't. And to me it just boils down to whether it's incompetence or malice or anything else. Right. Like neither. Neither one of those is okay. Especially when it comes to. Yeah. Securing wealth. And I think the only positives coming out of this is it's going to harden the review for any company that you're offering these type of things. And you know, I look at it as the non engineer and say how do you not sit all day on any. And then we're going to talk about some AI models later on and just work to say how do we destroy this thing? How do we crack this? How do we make in find vulnerabilities? That should be the only thing you're doing from a security perspective if that's the product that you're offering and that's the one where I just scratch my head and say how is this not something that was known a long time ago? So yeah, lots of different theories and things that are floated and you know, on the Internet of course we're going to get those. So we'll, we'll see. I think there's still more, more to come there and the dust will settle. But it's super unfortunate. Lots of hard conversations and yeah painful for a lot of people. And it's unfortunate because you know, there's times where people had made poor decisions like hey, I'm going to use a bunch of leverage or I'm going to do these goofy things and they lose their Bitcoin. You're kind of like, well yeah, that was really dumb. You shouldn't have done that. This is not that case. Right. You can research, you can read, you can hear from people in bitcoin and say, hey, I'm choosing the best thing, I'm doing it the right way. And you still come out on the other end and you're like, I don't know what I could have done differently. And that's the hard part, I think for a lot of people.
- [08:44]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And we saw some pretty, I think on the sort of the brighter side of this thing, which obviously it's super dark. But I think that there's a couple of things that I saw this week that are worth noting. One is just the way that the bitcoin community came together to help each other out and saw a lot of posts about some wins getting people off their cold cards. I know that, I mean Thursday night and Friday, all day Friday, Saturday, Sunday, that there were just posts coming out about people able to get to friends and family and rescue funds. I thought that was amazing. The bitcoin red team that came out of this was really good. This is just kind of bitcoins social layer, the immune system functioning and it's decentralized. There's I think a dozen or maybe two dozen people now working on this red team project. Completely decentralized. There's no one company doing it. It's just bitcoiners from different companies or just people working on the side to help scan hundreds. I think I've done 425 Bitcoin related repositories and code bases in the past week or so. There's been fundraising to pay for token usage, to pay for open router seats and get access to Kimik3. I even saw this one. I think he came back, created a new account a nim to write this post. It was like Alpha Phoenix or something like that. And told the story about how he had lost a lot of money. I think he said it was $1.6 million worth of Bitcoin and this is just a massive, massive gut punch. He seemed to be, you know, have young, young kids. He's probably in his 30s it seemed and he's an entrepreneur. But just coming out six days after what happened and being able to go through that, just the valley of despair that he must have been in and then come out the other side with this mindset of this happened, it sucks. All I can do now is buckle down and start building my stack again. And he ended his post with how much he still believes in bitcoin, how much we need it, how he still believes in self custody. He's going to be self custodying his bitcoin. Why? Self custody is important. So I saw many other cases like that too. That was just the one that stands out to me. But I know I just think bitcoiners are pretty special, kind of just across the board. And I've had that. I've known that for seven years now since I started going to these bitcoin conferences and meeting people. Just I think the values that attracts people to bitcoin, that there's, there's a lot of common overlap and you know, we don't obviously agree on everything but there are these sort of fundamental values that we align on that's you know, beyond just bitcoin is going to help improve the world, you know.
- [11:59]
B
Yep. What, what have been your thoughts Brady, around folks that still have cold cards? Maybe were never set them up, didn't get impacted by it. Hey, I'm going to re redo it. Like what kind of advice or guidance or thoughts would you provide? I know Cafe Bitcoin has been full of a lot of these questions throughout the week. So just wanted to see, you know, for someone that is out there. I've had a couple of them. But just curious kind of what, what you would give from an advice perspective there.
- [12:25]
A
Yeah, I still really love multisig collaborative custody for a, you know, a lot of people. I think it's a great recommendation for a general audience because you know, the multi sig, even, even multi sigs with two cold cards, as far as I can tell, I didn't see many reports of multi sigs with cold cards getting swept. There was that added layer of difficulty to try to, you know, pair up keys on, on multisigs because you could, you know, derive keys with certain addresses and you would just, even if, if you had one of the keys, you would just see nothing there would be and you know, it'd be empty. So just having to figure out how to pair up two keys in a multisig with cold cards was difficult enough that people with, with those multi sigs were able to. To get their funds off. I, I didn't see any reported cold card multi sig sweeps. But I, you know, I may be wrong. At the very least there were very few of them. And Slipstream, which is a Amara service, it's kind of a private mempool basically was used a lot over the past week in order to move those multisig funds in a safer way. So that was cool. So yeah, I think kind of bare bones at this point, multisig. Even if you would have had two cold cards, the generated keys for a multisig, you were, you did fine. I would say. You got to really evaluate these hardware wallets. And obviously we were trusting a lot of us. I haven't used ColdCard myself, but I know a lot of people in Bitcoin did, obviously. And you know, you can never like, if you're not a completely technical person, you can never verify everything on your own. Right. So you do have to trust at some point. Yep. And I think the stakes the, the are much higher now. Like, you've, you've got to be able to prove that your device is actually using the randomness that it's, you know, supposed to be using, as opposed to what happened with ColdCard. I don't think that that mistake's ever going to be made again, you know, so I like. And then random is being generated in many different ways, many different sources. So if you are going to use hardware randomness generation on a device we like, we use Jade at for Swan Vault. So we use actually two. Two Jades. And I can talk about multi vendor here in just a second. And we had a long space this morning. If you wanted to hear more about it on Cafe Bitcoin, you can check out that podcast. And Yan was on. We also have. He also wrote an article that was published today on why Swan shows Jades. But they, they're very good. And we did a very, very thorough review of all of the options when we built Swan Vault. And this is where we landed for a lot of reasons that are laid out in Jan's article, including how thorough the randomness generation is on a Jade. So we're not recommending any of our clients, Swan Vault clients to move funds. There's no reason to worry. Your funds are safe. We are starting the process of evaluating a second vendor. And the reason that we did one in the first place, one of the big reasons, was to make the experience much better for setting up a vault and make it much more approachable for a general audience. And it is a great experience. It fits like a glove because we only support one device. And there's also a whole attack service that opens up when you start supporting other devices as well in a multisig quorum. So we wanted to limit that attack service too. But we are going to start the process of evaluating another vendor so that we can make make it an option for anybody who has Swan Vault already or does set one up in the future to choose a multi vendor setup but as far as the actual devices go, I really like the Jades and I really like Multisig. So I think Swan Vault's a really good option. There's other collaborative, multisig, collaborative custody options out there. Unchained and Casa both have been doing it for a very long time and you could use Jades with them as well. And then I think if somebody does want to set up their own multisig unless like, you know, you're very, very, very confident about what you're doing, the I, I would recommend something like Swan Sovereign. And there's other services like this too where you basically have another set of eyes from an expert to help you plan and set up the quorum and test it and do annual, you know, check ins or semi annual check ins to make sure everything's operating as, as it needs to be. So I like the idea of, you know, if you do want to do it completely on your own without using collaborative custody, I think finding someone who is an expert on self custody just as a second pair of eyes and have somebody as a partner that you can call and kind of an outside party force you to make sure everything is working twice a year. And that's what Swan Sovereign does.
- [17:52]
B
Yeah, cool. I, yeah, I think it's tough to for those and I've had a couple nice others that comment too, like, hey, I still have a cold card. I've not set it up. It's like, yeah, you, you got to make that your own decision. Everyone's got their own preference and, or decision on whether they would want to use a product from, from this. But yeah, I agree. I recommend Jades. I've had a lot of people use them. There's a reason why we use them in swanvault. They're a great device. Whether it's in a multi sig or single sig or whatever you decide. They're really, really good. Yeah.
- [18:26]
A
And one of the things that we looked at was just the size, the capability, the resources of the company that makes them, the size of the engineering team, their practices. And we looked at all of this stuff very closely on, looked at all this stuff very closely. So when you see it, you can see a professional engineering operation and then you know, another operation that's smaller. And like the CTO is creating nims to create new like repos for random number generator libraries. And then, oh, this looks good. Can we include this in ColdCard? And then he signs out and signs in with the same GPG key and it's like the trail is there so the, the operation to behind like at coldguard was just not like a robust professional operation. Right. And Blockstream certainly is. They have incredible engineers there. They have a big team and they do it the right way, they do it professionally. So that's just another, another criteria that you can think about when you're selecting a hardware wallet. So I did mention the red team stuff. Rob at AnchorWatch and I can't remember what Kali does right now. He's working on Bitchat. Maybe Calib is a ton of stuff.
- [19:50]
B
I was gonna say it depends on probably the week and where it does.
- [19:55]
A
They're sort of leading the efforts. And he posted this. I just thought we could riff on this for just a minute. So he wrote when the dust settles, we'll have to talk about the fact that not a single vulnerability was found by a US frontier model. Instead we're spending 10k a day on open weights models like Kimik3 and Quinn3. Eight defined vulnerabilities in Bitcoin infrastructure. It's a disaster. And he has a screenshot here. Looks like it's from ChatGPT using 5.6Sol, which is their frontier model right now, especially for coding. And this happens all the time with me as well with Claude. There's a, you know, a warning basically it just stops processing. This warning says this content can't be shown. We take extra caution with cybersecurity requests and just trying to research what was going on with Coldcard. Trying to, you know, put together just reports for my own sake and write, you know, working on Jan's post which mentioned Coldcard I kept getting kicked off fable on Claude and kicked down to Opus because with it for the same reason. So yeah, this is, I mean why is Kylie calling this a disaster? And I mean basically it's just you can't, if you can't use the US based Frontier models and you have these, all these open source Chinese models and just look at the history of Open source. It tends to win out in the end. And you know, it's, it's running the entire Internet. Open Source software is, I think Linux is run on like 80% of servers or something like that. And it just goes on from there. There's so much open source software that's running on Bitcoin itself of course and they, they will like if it's open then people will start to use it and these, the America will start. The American AI frontier models will start to fall behind. And they're not that, you know, Kimmy K3 and Quinn are not that Far behind from what's available right now, which is like kind of the, the dumbed down versions of the frontier models that they're using right now. So Fable is a dumbed down version. And not just dumbed down, but like, you know, also they're completely cutting you off from doing anything with cybersecurity, with Fable. But Mythos is still not out. And I'm sure they have something even stronger than Mythos now. And I hear, you know, rumors that there's just insane numbers of vulnerabilities being found behind the scenes and that's why they're doing this. But in the end, if you. If we can't even use Fable to protect our, our systems, right. Like, it's just we're going to fall behind. And so these open models are catching up and they're catching up faster because what's available from the front US Frontier models is just. It's not actually the frontier anymore.
- [22:53]
B
Well, then I think it just goes into a bigger conversation around the valuations of these companies as well. You know, the amount of money raised and where they go. And I think there's conversations to be had there as far as trying to get to an ipo and hey, we're not going to allow you to do certain things. And then there's other models that will, you know, ultimately the things that are the most useful, that allow you to operate the way that you want, that aren't going to filter things through for you. That's what people want.
- [23:17]
A
Yep.
- [23:18]
B
And it's going to be very clear. And so I think there's, there's definitely an element of that as well.
- [23:24]
A
So, I mean, we could go on forever about the cold card stuff. I know it's been talked about a lot this week. We've done a ton of time on it, many, many hours on Cafe Bitcoin, which is our morning space on Twitter. 10:00am Eastern is when we go live from, from Corey Clipson's handle at Corey Swan spent a bunch of time talking about this week. I thought we could just wrap up in the last section here, kind of expanding out and remembering why we need bitcoin. There was a whole bunch of great macro charts that were posted by our favorite macro bitcoiners out there this week and thought we could pull those in. So first one is average salary. This is a chart that shows what the average US salary buys in gold and the S&P 500. So a year's pay buys 90% less gold. This is going starting from 1971, when the gold Window closed and a year's pay buys 88% less of the S&P 500. And these are the, these, this is what we're supposed to buy to avoid the impacts of inflation. And this is how they're performing.
- [24:39]
B
Yeah, pretty, pretty clear as far as the, the why and how you cannot save in dollars ultimately. But just there, there's no way that you can outrun and almost out earn this for the average person. Right. There's going to be, you know, multigenerational wealth and some, you know, families. And I heard a stat that the difference between the 0.1 and 1% has, can just continue to widen. It's like the asset owners will continue to see huge dispersion, but for the, the average individual, it's just like you fall farther, farther behind. You did similar, it's almost similar to the idea of the, the whole cold card thing. Not to bring us back into that conversation, but you did everything right. You listened, hey, I need to take self custody. And you do these things. Same thing. Younger people, whether it's millennials, Gen Z, etc. Go to college, get a degree, do these things, all this and then you'll have the same opportunities. And it just hasn't worked. And so people are frustrated. They're like, what the heck? I did exactly what, you know, parents or, or community or people I trusted told me, and it just doesn't work. And you can see right there that.
- [25:44]
A
Yeah, and here's the perfect example. Here's the perfect, like, specific example. The American dream, right? Buying yourself a house. So if you, you know, Jeff Ross posted this. Saving for a house is a defining event, but for many young adults, and we were sold the American dream, this is a big part of it was owning your own home. Over the past 10 years, if you've saved for a single family home in US dollars, prices have increased by 78%. If you've saved for a single family home in gold, prices have decreased by 41%. And in Bitcoin, prices have decreased by 98%. So how you save over the long run is critical. Choose wisely, in the words of Jeff here. And you know, I'm actually living this right now. We are building out, we decided, been living in our starter home for 17 years, raised two kids in it. They're both, they're 11 and 14 now. And it's great house, Small. We had, but we had a great lot. Great big yard, great location, loved it. And we always planned to, you know, either upgrade the house at some point and move somewhere Else or just add onto the house. And I'd say, you know, six, seven years ago, something like that. We started saving bitcoin to basically fund that project whenever we got around to it in whichever direction we went. And so we started in April building onto the house and it's, you know, we moved out. It's a, it's a whole renovation of the, of the existing structure and adding on a new floor and back. So it's like a big, a big project. And the cost is absolutely insane for what we're building. Absolutely insane for what we're building. And 10 years ago, you know, when we started talking about this, like what are we going to do in the future? Like it's not, you know, kind of daydreaming. And it was just half, probably half the cost. It probably would have cost about half 10 years ago for what we're doing now. And just the number in my head of growing up and like my parents built a big house when I was young and how much that cost and then looking at homes when we bought one way back in 2007 and kind of watching house prices, you know, over the years, just monitoring the market and see if there's something out there that we liked. It was, it's crazy how, how much like just cost of building a house has gone up in the past 10 years. And we're starting to feel it now more viscerally this inflation that has so many other countries have experienced. We're starting to feel it speed up so that you can notice it. Right.
- [28:23]
B
It's not slow. And Dr. Jeff has a 10 year number. Right. And so 98%, that's staggering. And you're like, well okay, 10 years ago with bitcoin, I don't know, you can run it at much shorter timeframe and it's still very material. And that's what I've always tried to do and frame it for people of like, okay, why bitcoin? It's like, well, it allows you to live your best life, right. Do the things that you plan to do and allows you to do that. And especially if you're saving and thinking about stuff in the future, it really makes a huge difference. But yeah, even the gold number is massive. And that's really. Yeah, just telling from that standpoint on a house and the other challenges, it's gone up. But is the quality as good as it was in the past? Other huge thing that gets left out. Right?
- [29:08]
A
Correct.
- [29:08]
B
And there's so many videos that people see on social media about, you know, walking through Home inspection on, you know, a one point whatever million dollar house. And it's garbage a lot of times.
- [29:17]
A
Yeah.
- [29:17]
B
And that's crazy. Paying more for something that the quality is less and it's. We could go into food, we go into all these other areas. Right. And it all stems back to this idea of, you know, Lyn Alden's concept and others. Right. As well. But the idea of like the broken money, like her title of that book is perfect.
- [29:38]
A
Here's the gold versus the S&P 500. I'll give you this one.
- [29:44]
B
Yeah, I've always liked this one. And the first time I saw it, I think I was still, I think I was still probably at Merrill lynch, maybe, maybe it was right after I discovered bitcoin. But I always credit credited Preston Pish for, for talking about this so much and, and I pulled it up, I was like, wow, that's pretty crazy. But you can see here with the S and P measured in gold, right? You have the dot com crash or kind of that run up. That was the all time high. And we've actually never returned to that. When measured in, in gold. Right. From a dollar perspective, the S and P just hit all going up into the river, I think. I believe so. It's hitting all time highs and always bumping up against all time highs. But when you measure it against something that can't be created at infinitum, it's. It's a little bit different. And this is one that I would say in my past life with financial advisors showing this, they would always have, you know, this visceral reaction of like, well, you know, and explain it away. And it's kind of funny. It's like, well, I mean, this is truth. This is, this is it. So like how do you, how do you look at that? And my favorite way to kind of introduce bitcoin to those folks that are in more the traditional space and just kind of ask them what their opinion is on gold. And it's the barbarous relic and it's something that has no cash flow and it's, it's junk. They're going to have a harder time wrapping their mind around it. But when you can just say measured in these things, life either is getting more expensive or less expensive or the valuation actually changes when you start measuring it in something that's real. And so like what are we measuring things by? And gold and bitcoin are a great measurement for that. And so yeah, it kind of shows you what a lot of money printing can do. And A lot of creation. And it does look like maybe 2008 was some, some kind of big moment, right? Oh, maybe 2020 had a big moment. Like there's some, you can see some big things that happen in, in that chart as well.
- [31:32]
A
All right, inflation gap. This is the M2 monetary inflation versus the consumer price inflation. And what do you draw from this one? Yeah, CPI has been, it's now a 300 point gap. So if you're, if you're listening on the podcast, plus 96% for CPI, plus 396% for monetary inflation.
- [31:52]
B
Yeah, CPI is a basket that's always changing. This has always been my issue. And so, like, we'll use a great one, like beef. Maybe it was a ribeye, now it's ground beef. Both are still beef. Both are delicious. But it's a very different, you know, end result there as far as what it is. But I've always liked measuring inflation because it gets you a lot closer to the monetary level, like the Big Mac index. Like, that's always one that people joke about, but it has all the things, right. It has labor, transportation, you know, food prices. And it will track much more with like the M2 number than it will for CPI. But it's just a huge game where you can, you can gamify what's in, what's out, how to adjust it. Oh, well, we're not actually including housing the same way. Oh, we took this out of it. We made this adjustment and that's how you can keep, you know, inflation more tame. But even with all that, and we've seen it this year, like inflation has spiked at times with energy because energy is a huge driver of it now. Yeah, we had a lot of success because of technology. Right. Technology is deflationary. If you look at the, like shale revolution in West Texas. If you look at it in Oklahoma, North Dakota, like, we've been able to extract a lot of these resources to make energy a lot cheaper, like, still really inexpensive. And so that's helped put a damper on that. But you can't put the damper when you start looking at the amount of money that's been created on the other side.
- [33:09]
A
All right, a couple more quick ones. This is dollars left over after food, gas, and personal interest and rent from a median household. So these are your basics. Food, gas and rent, personal interest and rent. So it is. The nominal number is sitting at around $45,000 and the real number is sitting at about $35,000 and going down since 2011.
- [33:37]
B
Yep.
- [33:38]
A
Or so has been Pretty precipitously dropping. And I think a lot of people can feel this, your, your money, leftover money to like go on a vacation or go to the movies or go out to dinner or something like that is, is really, really drying up for the average person.
- [33:54]
B
Well, and it's, it's just like, hey, growing up, the parents that were, you know, pretty well off and what they did, like what did the parents job, what were the parents jobs and they were able to have single family or, sorry, single income family and they had a pool in the backyard and vacations and all this stuff. And it's like they didn't make, you know, anywhere close to what you would need to make to replicate that. It's like something like the early 90s at 80k is now like 350 or something like that. It's a wild difference where then you look at the jobs that are out there and they just don't exist. But yeah, pretty flat. Look at this chart from. Yeah. To me, 2013 onward, really even on the nominal, which is not accurate at all.
- [34:33]
A
Correct. I saw another number recently. It was like the income needed to live comfortably. And obviously that's, I didn't dig into what that meant. It's not an objective measure, but still the numbers were like $200,000 a year for like most states and then 350, $400,000 a year in, you know, the richer states, New York, California, et cetera. So it's just, I mean that's, that's still in terms of salary. That's a, that's top 10% of, of salaries in the country. So if you're, if only 10% of the country is able to quote unquote, live comfortably, something is wrong. Here's another chart, the last one in this series here, this from Luke Roman. The blue line is the consumer sentiment. Red line is spx and the green line is SPX priced in gold. So stocks just going up and to the right and you can see the sentiment and the SPX priced in gold, just cratering starting in 2020 or so. And there's this massive divergence now. And I think this chart really sums up like the difference, the gap between what people are really experiencing and the stock market.
- [35:53]
B
Yep. Stock market is not the real economy. There was learned that lesson a long time ago. But there was a number of people that were like, hey, look at this.
- [36:02]
A
Yeah.
- [36:03]
B
And the metrics and the tracking of it, it just doesn't, doesn't equate. And I think 2020 was a great example right. Down 34% in early April, finishes the year up 17. But we shut the world down like that. That should be as clear as can be in the answer again to the solution of making the S and P go up. Right, Was a lot of stimulus and a lot of extra stuff because we weren't doing anything. And that is continued in different ways. Maybe not to the same extreme there, but the extreme again, it has to go bigger each time. And so how many more times do we go around that loop to come back? And I think that's always where bitcoiners will cite. Hey, it's around the corner. And I was just having this conversation this morning with a client and talking about, hey, I went to this event, they were talking about stuff and they're talking about this, you know, not influencer, but someone that writes and thinks. I think they do a really good job about how, you know, this big thing's going to happen. I was like, it will, but it's hard to know the timing. Just like trying to predict bitcoin price, right? We could say, hey, it's going to be worth this big number. But it's really hard to then say also, this is the date and it's the same thing or the year. Yeah, the year. It can be. It can take a lot longer than what we think to get to where these things happen. And so it's just really, really important to say, yes, you can be right, but you just can't bet the farm that it's going to happen in a window that maybe makes sense to you. But for a lot of people you have a conversation, they still don't get some of this stuff. They can feel it, but they can't articulate it.
- [37:26]
A
Yep, absolutely. All right. It's been a tough week. I hope that there are some positive takeaways here. Bitcoin lives and has grown up since its infancy. The day it was born in an adversarial environment, out on the Internet, open source code and a giant honey pot to go after. And has been hardened and antifragile because of all of that testing, self custody, got that kind of adversarial attack over the past week. And I think we will come out stronger because of it. In the same way that bitcoin is antifragile, Bitcoiners in our community are antifragile in the industry around it will just get stronger and everything will level up from here in terms of self custody. And I'd love to see efforts like the red team getting out there and being proactive about finding these vulnerabilities before hackers do. But as we enter in to continue to enter further into this world of extremely capable AI, especially on a cybersecurity front, we all need to be more vigilant. So engage on Twitter, stay up to date about what's going on. Go donate some sats to the bitcoin red team@opensats.org and check out other custody options. I highly encourage a multi sig setup from Swan or Casa or Unchained or others. Do your own research. But I highly encourage suggest checking out a multisig if you're not on a multisig now. And we still need bitcoin, man, we still need bitcoin. We just saw the data. We've got to keep stacking the world we're living in. All the math is not math. And at some point there will be a painful reality for a lot more people to be able to have a resource to store their wealth in over time. So it'll be an interesting end to this fourth turning era, next five or ten years for sure. So stay strong, keep your head up out there and we will see you next Friday. Thanks y'. All.
- [39:39]
B
See y' all.