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You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
You probably should be.
Oh, Big Friday.
So big Friday.
It's rabbit hole recap time.
We've got a long time guest,
long time,
long time friend,
long time guest,
but it's been a long time since you've been on Alex.
Welcome back to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Don't you guys,
you guys want to tell us,
you guys want to tell us about that background where you are?
You want to lead us?
Yeah,
sure.
I took that photo about five minutes ago.
Matt and I tried to set up in the wilderness and we were very close to having a very epic live view.
The Starlink just couldn't quite hack it. We were close.
My backpack fell like 40 feet down the hill, 50 feet down the hill.
I set the backpack up and it starts rolling down the hill. It was fun.
Um, we are here because the Human Rights Foundation brought together some Bitcoiners for a few days of discussions and collaborations on the periphery of Anthony Scaramucci's digital assets conference, the SALT, which takes place in Jackson Hole a couple of days before the Fed meeting.
So we had a bunch of good Bitcoiners here.
We had Jack Mahlers, Paul Itoy, Eric Herzman. We also had Jeff Booth and a few friends of ours from the activism side of Bitcoin.
and we just spent a couple of days conspiring and we did, we did some speeches at the salt thing.
And, uh, afterwards a friend of ours who lives nearby decided to take us hiking and fly fishing.
And we're up at this, uh, hotel kind of in the middle of nowhere that's not in Jackson hole.
And we didn't realize that it's the hotel where the fed meeting actually happens.
So Matt's driving in yesterday and they stop him and they're like,
are you part of the security protocol?
Yeah, they thought we were working.
That's how we found out.
You said, yeah.
Red meeting.
You said, I am.
I'm here to secure money, though.
I'm here to secure the money the right way.
We're here to put you out of business.
In the coffee line this morning next to me was Neil Kashkari.
And as I was walking out a couple minutes later, Andrew Bailey,
the other Andrew Bailey, not our Bitcoin or Andrew Bailey,
But the other one, the head of Bank of England was walking in.
So look, man, it's a central banker fest.
And it's hopefully some of the last years of this antiquated technology we have where people kind of sit in a closed room and decide the cost of capital for all of humanity, which is completely ridiculous.
But that's where we are.
Yeah.
Did you guys pick up any new Fed speak this week?
I don't know if you caught his speech at all, but it was very Fed-speaky today.
You should do your interpretation of what you thought was going to happen.
We were on...
So first off, on the SALT event, it's historically like a crypto suit event, right?
Right. And so this year, Alex went last year and this year they said that we could have like a Bitcoin HRF section for it.
And I would just say that.
You know, the the Marty, the Marty ism that like shit coins are dead and like we passed the chasm and everyone's a Bitcoin maximalist now is so far from reality.
Like it was just a whole different world there.
um it was pretty pretty fucking uh eye-opening in that regard um like they're you know linking
things with chain link and putting real world assets on blockchains and stuff and eric trump
was there it was like kind of its own circus in itself um on the fed side like what i was saying
to we were talking about powell first of all like it's absolutely ridiculous like how much influence
like these people have on um but i i think like from the bare minimum of what i saw
was kind of like what people expected which is like we're gonna like stay we're gonna stay the
course a little bit but we're open to cutting rates but we're not gonna like specifically
announce that we're gonna cut rates right now and um we were actually on a hike we were on like a
hike like 20 minutes away while that was going on and you didn't actually have to look at any of the
headlines like all you had to do is just like check the bitcoin price like we woke up at 12
and it was at like 117 so i was like okay well like if we were over 120 like then we probably
announced that we're definitely cutting rates but like at that price range it's like okay
they they just insinuated that that's probably the direction we're going to go in but you
my point is you probably know better than us uh because we've had internet troubles over here
no it was uh i was trolling lit up because i haven't watched it yet i've just read
the after effects so that's funnily enough 20 minutes before he went live logan and i
started recording an episode of tftc with michael powell from cross-border capital talking about what
powell might say but i had the same experience we finished that we finished that interview and i was
very locked to the camera being an attentive host didn't look at twitter or anything and
uh saw my block clock when we when we stopped and we were at like 1 16 9 i was like ah
there were some dovish comments uh in jackson hole and uh so for those i'm sure many of you know but
uh i think it was ubs or barclays had a good sort of synopsis of what it was it was like
basically pal came in he basically pushed back against trump a little bit saying hey tariffs are
inflationary at least temporarily like we're doing the best we can with the data that we have
And he said, considering the data we have, there was jobs revisions last month that are making us sort of change our view.
And then he said, we're not going to target a 2% average inflation rate anymore.
We're going to try and go back to the historical target.
But more importantly, he said, we're focused on the jobs market because it looks like it's weakening.
And so with that in mind, our policy may shift.
And the markets took that as rates are getting cut next month.
So that was the extent of what he said, I believe.
But yeah, I mean, it's kind of amazing that we still live in this world where it's kind of like when you're waiting for the Pope to be named and we're all watching.
Is the smoke going to be, you know, is it going to be white or not?
It's amazing that we have this centralization and this politicization of base money for the world.
and literally people sitting a few hundred yards that way in a private room that's completely opaque.
You know, it's a private event.
You know, get to decide.
Big security guards outside the doors.
Beefy.
You weren't sneaking in.
There's no way.
You don't think I can take them?
No.
Yeah.
No, it's hilarious.
I want to give Trevor, who's running the social account, he sent out a tweet that was very accurate.
It said the Fed is abandoning their 2% average inflation target, which is what they're doing.
And everybody's giving them shit because they're like, oh, they're not abandoning an inflation target.
They're going back to 2%.
To be more specific, they want it lower.
And it's like, people, you're squabbling over fine details that don't even matter.
You can have a 2% inflation rate, but they're about to lower rates.
Inflation's already high.
You have stock markets at all-time highs, leverage at all-time highs.
They're about to turn it on turbo.
But they specifically said that they're leaving the 2% target?
So post-2020, when they were thinking about moving it to 3% and then people pushed back,
They said, all right, we're going to try and fight back towards an average, a rolling average of 2% over, I don't know, the timescale.
And then they said, we're going to go back to our previous target from before we made that policy decision.
But to your point, it's insane that we're – I mean, I don't think the three of us are, but the world is lingering on the words of this man and the few people around him.
donald trump's probably happy today though of course i mean he's been trying to push for this
right yeah i just think it's great that finally we have a bitcoin focused view from from the
property you have every single mainstream media outlet like just a two-minute walk from where
we're sitting and you know they're all breathlessly awaiting what's going on and um you know we just
have a different view on the matter so it's nice to nice to have some local representation where
We were almost falling down the hill, trying to like get set up for
a rabbit hole recap.
Uh Gladstein had an interesting idea for you to set up a TFTC ton tier next year I think you should do it Marty So we don have to like prop ourselves up on the hill I do that I in
I'll come to Jacksonville.
You just go and you sit outside and you have this, the background that you're looking at.
I think you need to bring a tent.
Yeah, but you need a tent and you got a shield from sun.
It's super hot here.
I'll set up my next Andrew Ross Sorkin and we'll do like Jamie, Jamie Dimon to come up,
talk about, talk about Bitcoin.
It'll be good.
At that point, we'll have one.
They'll be bending the knee to us.
And it'll be fun.
It'll be interesting to see what happens a year from now.
By next year?
Yeah.
Feeling bullish?
Yeah.
Well, real-world assets and Ethereum treasury companies are going to take over the world.
Tom Lee is saying there's going to be a flippening of Bitcoin.
And that means back.
Yeah, but the SALT event was – it's really jarring because I don't know about you,
but I spend most of my time at Bitcoin events.
And this is my first time back at a digital assets event in a long time.
And it's pretty shocking.
I mean, it really reminds you of how early you are
when someone like Jack Mahlers,
who usually can fill a 10,000 person room at the Bitcoin conference.
I mean, these crypto people and these Tradify people are just...
I mean, he's talking about on stage how they have 43,000 Bitcoin
and they're doing all this amazing stuff.
And people could just care less.
And it's pretty amazing.
There was 30 people in the room, maybe 50 max.
And then there was quadruple that eating lunch outside the doors.
And it's probably Jack's only live fireside appearance in a six-month window.
I just thought it was amazing.
It was pretty hilarious.
That's when I ran into – I mean, I talked to him.
I talked to him briefly, but when I was in Abu Dhabi in December last year,
It was a very similar event that Scaramucci was spearheading.
Is he still shilling?
There's Xfinity, Xfinity, Aave.
He was big on real world assets and he was shilling some shit coin that Galaxy's aped into.
They're shilling everything you can imagine.
I mean, I walked into the room for a second.
I didn't listen much, but the CEO of Kraken was talking about how, well, you know, Bitcoin's fine,
but we really need that programmability.
Like they're still stuck on this,
like Turing complete blockchain stuff.
It's amazing.
It's kind of like the class of 2017.
You had Charles Hodgkinson.
Oh, yeah.
He was there.
You had Brad Garlinghouse was sitting next to me
at the breakfast one day.
I'm just like, what is going on here?
So that's Cardano.
Sorry, and that's the Ripple guy.
Yeah.
So you have all these coins that, you know,
were created years and years ago,
exclusively as schemes to prey on the public basically you know it's kind of sad these people
never got in trouble they'll probably never get in trouble you know and um instead we have the
privacy devs being attacked it may be pretty frustrated it is it's frustrating but it also
means uh we have time to continue to stay humble and snack stats because people are going to get
so bamboozled this cycle tom lee's out there really he was there people sitting next to
standing at the dinner the other night.
So they brought in every single cartoon character.
It was pretty interesting.
Yeah.
Well, I was wrong, Matt.
Hand up.
No, no.
By the way, like, say what we want about Scaramucci,
but I do respect the fact that he wanted us to come.
He wanted a half-day Bitcoin-focused, Bitcoin-only section.
I thought that was really cool.
So I'm grateful to him for putting that together.
because at least you get some of it. I mean, otherwise, it's just coin after coin after
coin after coin. So I thought that was a positive step. And it was actually quite useful, I think,
for a lot of us, because there's a lot of people in the audience who aren't token scammers. They're
like, I don't know, I own 5% of the land in Wyoming, or some pension manager, or the governor
of Wyoming was here, Fed board governors were here, senators, congressmen. So, you know, it's
still a really useful event um and i'm glad that there was a big chunk of bitcoin only focus on on
it yeah i did think it was funny that uh uh he he um well first like thank thank you me for coming
and then like his only question he had for me was what was the price of bitcoin going to be by the
end of the year and she asked you this yeah and i just he's like oh we have the bitcoin experts
here like what's the price of bitcoin by the end of the year and i deflected it and i don't think
he you know he was he just wanted like a straight answer and i was not i'm not making predictions
anymore but then i think like yesterday or two days ago he made he made a public bitcoin price
prediction like for end of the year i forget i think he's yeah 180k by end of the years 180 yeah
so i wonder who told him 180 like i didn't answer but if i had said like 250 maybe his price
prediction would have been 250 i just thought that was kind of funny yeah you should have anchored
like i'm going with josh mandel's 444 000 by november it's gonna happen uh operations it's
also tiresome but like i said it gives us time to build stack more sots and i think um i'd like
to get your perspective on this considering all the work the bounties the um grants you guys are
doing at HRF, particularly around privacy-focused technologies. We've seen the proliferation of
Cashew particularly, I think most recently with the implementation in BitChat. And I saw that
Jack and Callie were pushing some updates to BitChat in both Android and iOS this week. And so
since you mentioned it earlier about the attack on privacy devs, what do you think the status is
right now, Alex? Yeah, obviously it's paramount importance. I'm of two minds. I'm obviously
really upset about the selective targeting of the developers who are building open source software.
And it makes me sad that the American government is going after the blacksmith when someone stabbed
someone else with a knife. Got to go after the criminals, not the actual people making the tools.
It's a sad state of affairs. I did see a DOJ update, I guess, yesterday that maybe signaled
that maybe we'll go in a different direction in the future.
But, you know, for now, it's not a good look on that front.
On the other hand, though, the actual tools are really exciting
and just so much easier to use.
And there's so many more options than there were five years ago.
Just on, you know, on almost every level in terms of, you know,
end user privacy options for Bitcoin.
Stuff is just getting better and better.
Lightning is getting easier to use.
Matt and I were talking yesterday about the Spark stuff and, I mean, the wallet of Satoshi Beta.
I mean, I know we're not talking about a replacement for if you need to coin join 100 UTXOs or something.
But for like retail spending and fighting surveillance capitalism, we're getting there.
Like, just by the 12 months from now, we're going to have three or four different ways to achieve very good privacy and pay merchants who speak lightning.
and we just worked that's light years beyond where we were five years ago yeah now i was in
uh georgia last week for the proto launch and spark was a big topic of discussion behind the
scenes with the uh sort of technically oriented people that were at the event a lot of people
really excited about spark now it's being implemented and i know we were a bit skeptical
of them in the beginning but it seems like late spark has found something here with uh with spark
and I think this happened since last week but
it seems like the Rumble
wallet
will be implementing Spark as well
yeah I saw
well the Spark Twitter account
said that
it wasn't like a press release or anything but
it did seem like they're implementing
what like Tether has wallet development
kit
so I mean Rumble has a lot of users
they have hundreds of millions of users
so if they add a
Bitcoin Tether wallet to rumble. Um, that is, uh, you know, no KYC, pretty easy to use,
decent trust model in terms of rug risk. Um, I, the spark guys recently added the ability to, um,
uh, to, to leave, to like leave on chain, settle on chain without,
without asking permission to do so.
Yeah.
Which is key.
You have like a pretty decent trade-off balance there.
And I think the important thing is it needs to be really easy to use
and it needs to be cheaper than the alternatives.
So when you have that combination,
then all of a sudden you start to see real scale.
And I mean, to Alex's point,
I mean, I wouldn't specifically call Spark a privacy tool, right?
But when you use on-chain Bitcoin,
you're leaking a lot of privacy.
And then when you use a KYC wallet, you're obviously, your identity is tied to you.
So we have like easy to use lightning enabled Spark and ARK wallets and stuff like that.
At least for definitely for like smaller amounts, everyday purchases and stuff.
You get like pretty decent gains there.
And then you have to also think like, what is the status quo?
The status quo is like people walking around and using like Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit cards.
um well well we we were trying to tip the fly fishing guy bitcoin right and you were saying
it was a little there's still bugs with something like a phoenix right where yeah i didn't catch
many fish but me and eric were the only ones who orange pilled our god so um but we onboarded him
to phoenix and by the end of the by the end of the trip i basically asked him i was like do you
want you're tipping dollars or bitcoin and you said bitcoin it's a huge spot i was just a big win
but did he get it before did he get it before pal's comments today yeah he's up he's up so he's
very happy which is good because i did like cut some corners and i said like it's just
you just hold it and it goes up forever uh it's better that we didn't dump the um
but still there can be it's a little tricky uh with with the liquidity issues with with even
something like a phoenix so r.i.p mutiny but i think the idea they had there is amazing it
continues to be great of like maybe you'll have spark or arc or something like that which is for
your first like hundred dollars worth it's just going to be there and then once you have more
than a certain amount you know you go you go into self-custodial lightning no i think you go i think
actually what it is probably makes more sense because that was the mutiny idea which has all
these different ux hurdles like they could go in the spark trade-up model like you're probably fine
with like a thousand to five thousand dollars in that wallet and then you settle on chain
and then because on-chain self-custody is super easy yeah right like there's no
like implementing that in the ux forward way would be actually relatively easy so if you imagine you
have all these people who are getting bootstrapped in whether through and anything from just tips to
gaming to remittances to who knows what.
And they're all in different payment pools, whether it be ARK or Spark, etc.
I mean, the beautiful things, they can all speak to each other via lightning.
They can all buy stuff at hopefully the Square Merchant Terminal soon with, you know, they're
speaking Spark or ARK or eCash.
And yet they can pay a merchant and the merchant gets dollars.
Or in Kenya, they get Tando.
Or in Costa Rica, they get, you know, CIMPE credits.
I think we're heading to a pretty exciting world from that perspective.
Yeah, when you compare it, like I think the broader crypto, like a lot of the crew that was outside of the Bitcoin-focused crew in Jackson Hole this week,
they probably see what's going on in L2s and Ethereum and Solana and all this bridging and stuff and these roll-ups and whatever it may be.
And I haven't played around with it, but I've seen people playing around with it.
And the UX around that is just completely abhorrent.
and I don't think they're aware
at all of the interoperable nature
of all these different second layer
solutions on Bitcoin
because of the lightning.
Yeah that the key right It the glue Yeah And just building on i think we have a pretty heavily privacy focused episode here considering the guests and just the headlines um over the last
week we don't have a list so i'm just going off the top of the head but to your point earlier about
on-chain transactions i think the regulators and sort of banking cabal is aware of this i'm sure
You both saw the BIS come out with some idea to sort of track UTXOs and tag them with KYC information and essentially ask for people using WALS to self-report.
Then they grade individual UTXOs and determine whether or not somebody should receive them or not.
And I think these two froze.
They've been having some technical difficulties.
But I think the reason I bring this up is just to highlight the importance of building out these second-layer solutions that are more privacy-preserving than on-chain UTXOs, which are, as we all know, very hard to use in a private manner unless you know what you're doing.
I think things like splicing in and out of the Lightning Network and doing channel management with that helps.
PayJoin development kit, which HRF is contributing to.
That would be massive if we could get exchanges to adopt PayJoin.
We could increase on-chain privacy.
But I don't think we should depend on that.
I think it's become pretty clear that privacy via second layer solutions and a combination of second layer solutions is best in class right now for people trying to spend in a day-to-day way with Bitcoin.
So I'm going to keep ad-libbing here.
I'm just going to keep ad-libbing.
Privacy, it's important.
There you are.
The laptop was in the heat.
Oh.
I really did.
are you on your phone now
what we're inside now we moved inside
let's talk about the
BIS did you guys see that
no
what happened
they just released
they want to like bag and tag UTXOs
and have like a grading system
about
with ordinals right
I think ordinals
sort of prove that you can
have ways to identify individual UTXOs.
I think they're building on that concept
to apply it to just broader UTXO usage.
Yeah, I mean,
this is where the PayMeInBitcoin thing
becomes really important.
You know, I was looking at this scheme in Thailand.
I'm about to go visit there.
There's a lot of like,
not necessarily Bitcoin,
but a lot of like stablecoin crypto adoption
happening at the government level there.
And they have this thing where now tourists can show up in Thailand with Bitcoin or whatever other crypto. And you can just at the airport change it into cash quickly on your phone in an app that pays any Thai merchant. Right.
So they're trying to move in this direction where essentially they're going to harvest hard currency from tourists and force you to use their shitcoin.
So basically, they'll harvest Bitcoin from tourists from America, Russia, wherever, who will then like, you know, go into their gated permissioned payment system.
And I think the way to defeat that is pay me in Bitcoin.
Right. So if the educational people in Thailand are successful enough and they can get enough word out and if people start to realize what's happening and the merchants just say, no, I don't want your shit coin.
I'd pay me in Bitcoin. Then we can defeat this whole scheme, you know, which is which is ultimately the goal of BIS.
Right. Is to, you know, have KYC Bitcoin exchanged for some kind of credit.
Right. That would be accepted. But if the merchants accept Bitcoin, real Bitcoin.
is anybody's Bitcoin, then we win.
So that's kind of, I think,
how we're structuring our programs at HRF moving forward
is thinking about payment Bitcoin.
Like how can we help get there as fast as possible
for nonprofits, for journalists,
for anybody operating around the world?
How can they just live natively in Bitcoin?
They can receive income, donations, profits.
They can pay their colleagues and staffers.
They can buy things on the internet.
whether through BitRefill or other ways to do it.
And then ultimately they can pay their local merchants and stuff.
I mean, you'd be surprised.
Like BitRefill in Turkey, you can buy anything with Bitcoin.
You can buy groceries.
You can buy an airplane.
You can buy, you know, your internet, your phone.
You can buy your electricity, your heating.
And as we heard recently on Citadel,
you can access any of the top AI models on Bitcoin now.
So it's, you know, we want to get there. We want to get to living in Bitcoin, right? And then none of these schemes win, right? That's how we win.
Yeah, because they rely on like the choke point on ramp of ramps.
Yeah.
I mean, speaking of living by the pay me in Bitcoin mantra, mentality, way of life, if you will, we do that here at Rabbit Hole Recap, particularly via Noster on zap.stream.
We have a 21,000 sat zap from Chroma saying, let there be light.
Thank you, Chroma.
And then we have a question, too.
Or not a question, really a comment.
when we were talking about privacy, non-custodial versus custodial wallets.
Can't read. The readable name isn't up yet, but somebody said,
Shinobi Mr. Hoddle says, all normies will have custodial wallets they forget about and barely use.
And yet, when they do, number will always go up.
And I don't know if that was a comment about privacy, but I wanted to bring up the point,
if normies are going to use custodial wallets, I would prefer it to be a cash-you, e-cash wallet.
because yes, it's custodial.
You're taking on third-party risk,
but you get the privacy benefits.
To Matt's point, what about Spark?
I mean, that's a really interesting middle ground
where it's essentially almost self-custodial, right?
I mean, unilateral self-exit, right?
Yeah, I mean, there's...
There's problems.
You're going to trigger Matt Corallo.
Matt Corallo's going to have some good advice.
What about Spark?
I mean, my point is that like...
I mean, he said the word self-custody.
I was dodging.
I said almost.
I don't want to trigger Corallo.
I dodged the term. I mean, I think we probably need more terms now because it's somewhere in the middle, right? Like, so cash you, you're like unilaterally trusting the Mint, but you have very strong privacy.
Right. And the Mint can't selectively censor you.
Right. Because you have very strong privacy.
Yeah.
And then with Spark, I think they're going to make their trust model even better. It's like kind of probably closer to something like Liquid, right? Where like you almost have like a multi-sig, like a multi-sig type federation type of model.
but better than liquid because you have the unilateral exit.
So you can just go to on chain, but then you also have the nuance of, okay,
like if you only have a thousand sets, like, can you really go on chain?
Like now you're like going to just pay it on the fee,
but you have the right to do that. So, I mean, I think it's,
I think that the absolute statements in general,
like everyone's going to be using custodial wallets or this or that is just
inherently wrong because where we're going and where we should be going is give people as many
tools as possible. And then, you know, let them pick the tools that work best for their model.
Like there's no such thing as like the best Bitcoin wallet. Like it really depends on like,
what is your threat model? What is your technical competence and what is your use case? Right. And
I think that's the case with a lot of open source tools. I mean, that's the same with
Nostra apps. It's like, what is the best Nostra app? Like the best Nostra app doesn't exist.
What do you need it for? And what is your technical competence? And just to bring it
full circle to your original comment, like, I think that BitChat update is kind of fascinating
to me. I haven't really got to dive deep in it, but, you know, release one of BitChat was,
you know, you have to use a Bluetooth mesh and you have to be near each other. And that birth,
that meme of i was actually in a park bathroom with uh alex and i was peeing in the urinal next
to him he's like you want to send me a bit chat message like that meme where like they walk over
next to you um and uh but now it's using nostril relays right so yeah if you're if you have no
internet you can use the bluetooth mesh um but if if you do have internet then you could communicate
with people leveraging existing internet infrastructure.
And so that's a specific tool,
which within itself has different,
basically like use cases or tools within it,
like depending on your current situation
and how you want to use it.
And also just, if you think about some facts,
like if you look at Bitcoin in five-year increments
as it evolves, right?
So let's call it whatever, the early years up through
even really 2019, it was essentially on chain, right? There weren't really any other usable
things. You had like some prototypes, but it was pretty much on chain only,
you know, which is difficult for a lot of people that they, you know, there's limitations there,
obviously. And then you look at the next five years and then we have lightning and lightning
powered stuff. Right. And then in the last couple of years, all of a sudden we have eCash, we have
Spark, we're going to have ARK. Like, I think it's reasonable to conclude that over time,
as more and more developers and brilliant people come into the space who just weren't here in 2015.
You're going to get more and more clever ways to use Bitcoin.
And like, I think pretty obviously it won't be everybody using a custodial wallet,
especially if they can use something like a Spark where they get awesome speed and, you know,
they can use it permissionlessly and don't have to attach their ID to it.
And they get some kind of guarantee that they can't really get rugged.
I mean, you're going to see more adoption in that sort of thing.
I mean, the coolest part is, so like one of the biggest issues we had with any of these kind of things was then you had to like bootstrap adoption for each of them and they all had like independent network effects.
And like when the computer overheated, like that's exactly what we're talking about.
Like the fact that, you know, you can build a spark and then it can immediately pay any other lightning enabled wallet.
Or it could pay an ARC user.
because that is also using lightning yeah makes it so much easier and then it also means that
success doesn't have to be 90 of people using an arc wallet right it still can be a successful
very useful tooling layer um if if a small subset are using it because it's still cross compatible
with every other wallet and people are really on that they don't i don't and it's something that
crypto community is so off base on because we talked about this uh in the past about you know
using coinbase's like social media thing um is they have all these different protocols and you
have to do swaps and you have to do this and do that you have you have usdc on the wrong chain
and then you need gas from this thing or that or whatever and then with lightning it just
fucking works yeah and the and i i do want to give a shout out to the wallet devs of all these
different sort of second layer implementations because i've been using macadamia for e-cash
and lightning just playing around with it and i just scan the qr code whether i have
bitcoin in a custodial lightning account on macadamia or e-cash in a more private custodial
account macadamia if i pay a lightning invoice i don't even know which one it pulls from it just
pays it and that's the ux you want in the um speaking of bitchat too tied and not on bitchat
normie is actually i take this back that was very disrespectful of me my brother is not a normie
but i demoed bitchat to my my brother we were together this week i was like download bitchat
he's like what is it i was like for like four years i know my brother's not a normie i'm sorry
Sorry, Connor.
Everybody knows who you are.
I'm sorry.
But we were together.
I was like, turn off your cell data, turn off your Wi-Fi.
And we were having a message back and forth with everything off.
And it was just like a mind experience Like oh crap This is awesome yeah and i mean i and on to further just go down
like that rabbit hole like that's a perfect example where that's something where cash you
actually is really helpful right because cash you at the end of the day is a bearer instrument
they're bearer ious so you're able to just transfer those offline program programmatically
um so that's a situation where like if you want to do bitcoin transfers in a mesh
or on bitchat or whatever and any kind of encrypted messenger
you can use cash you but you can't really use spark or arc and so like i think we're going to
start seeing these different um you know protocols kind of carve out their own niches and use cases
where they're most useful and then they'll all work together with lightning yeah and building on that
it seems like we were talking about the bis earlier but if you look at some parts of the world
that i think many of us up until recently would have considered pretty liberal and forward thinking
when it came to free speech and freedom of expression have reverse course there particularly
in the united kingdom in britain and they've had crazy laws started with hate speech laws and got
age verification laws than you had. Apparently, they have
a commissioner of children in the UK.
She was on the BBC earlier this week. She was pressed by
the BBC interviewer. Should we have age verification for VPNs?
She was very adamant. Yes, of course, we should.
These tools, whether you need them or not, if you're listening,
maybe you don't need them. Maybe you live in an area where
free speech is still protected. But I think the need for these tools is becoming more and more
critical by the day. And so BitChat can solve all three of that. All three of those.
They want KYC people to edit Wikipedia in the UK now. That's what the government wants to do.
So we're heading in that direction, right? I think the reason you need to remain,
or I remain super bullish is just we're heading in a direction where they become
more permissioned, more gated off, more proprietary.
You know, we can't just,
devs can't just build a wallet
that connects with the US dollar network, right?
That's impossible.
But you're seeing an explosion of people come in
and build stuff that can speak Lightning or Bitcoin.
So I remain pretty bullish.
And, you know, LightSpark,
it's an interesting actor in the space
because they're kind of like,
they're going after bigger establishment fish.
What was the big one they landed?
the other week. So far. Yeah. I mean, so again, that might be in a, in a corporate way,
but at the end of the day, like if you can pay spark, you know, if it's spark speaks lightning,
it's, you know, it starts to get very interesting. So, you know, light spark won't be the only
company in that space. That's, that's kind of pushing in this direction.
No, no, it's critical. And Matt, I think you'll like, I think you'll be okay with this,
but on the subject of VPNs,
we got a new sponsor,
Obscura,
Cantlog,
Carl Dong,
Bitcoiner.
I think you guys supported him
back in the day
when he was doing Geeks builds,
if I recall correctly,
for Bitcoin Core,
reproducible builds.
Went and created Obscura VPN.
Has a very novel
hopping system.
Used the code RHR25
for 25% off an annual subscription.
It's a great deal.
You got to let the person know.
It's a great deal.
Yeah, look,
we have,
At RHR, if you've listened for a while, we have trouble finding sponsors because the worst products will pay you the most, but you don't want to recommend bad products.
So you need to find people that are actually aligned with you and ideologically aligned with you and directionally aligned with you that are offering really good, solid product.
and also in a lot of those situations we will recommend them regardless so then they don't
really have an incentive to pay us so it's kind of we kind of get hit on both sides of that
on that sponsor issue but i mean i will say personally i'm very excited to have obscure
on board so what they're doing is um is is basically mulvads hosting one server they're
hosting one server so to say cant log is a little bit uh it's a little bit more nuanced than that
they have to work together to log you, which is just a strictly better trust model than if you're only using Mulvad.
Or if you're only using, you know, if you're using a single VPN provider, like it's a completely trusted relationship and you have to trust that they're not tracking your activity.
Well, shout out to Obscura.
We just launched with the help of Justin Moon and some others, a short little resource at href.org slash AI with a bunch of different tools that people can use today to start making their AI use more private.
And obviously, some of that is VPN related.
We talk about Obscura, Mulved.
Some of it is related to not needing KYC.
So we talk about PaperCue and Routster and some other tools.
We also talk about Maple.
So, you know, you go and check that out.
It's kind of interesting.
we're going to be doing more and more in that space where you have this overlap of
paying for AI use using Bitcoin or Lightning or Spark or ARK or whatever.
So yeah, that's exciting.
Yeah, I need to catch up with Callie because I've seen him send some notes and some tweets
out about this subject, but it intuitively makes sense to me that actually like eCash
for if you're going to create payments for an agentic world where agents are paying each other,
I think he makes a pretty good case that eCash is actually the best solution to that specific problem just due to the way the sort of data transfer works for eCash tokens.
so Callie if you're listening
I would love to discuss that
because I think that we're going to go through
sort of a valley of
Silicon Valley being like stable coins
are the currency of the agents
or this AI
token connected
to this real world asset is what
the agents are going to use to pay but I think at the
end of the day
all money converges to the best money which is Bitcoin
and the different
ways the different avenues to send
it. And I think agents will be spending and receiving Bitcoin at the end of the day. And I
would not be surprised if it's via eCash. Yeah, I don't understand the stablecoin thing. And
I have a piece in Reason Magazine coming out soon on stablecoins. And they're certainly
globally important and they're going to grow and they're going to become huge and way bigger than
they are now. But if you think about what they are, even if they become in the trillions in
terms of market cap and they start to dominate in different areas, they're totally orthogonal to
Bitcoin. They're guaranteed to lose money. I think Jeff Booth calls them guaranteed to lose coins.
So they're guaranteed to lose money. They can be frozen. They can be censored. They can be
confiscated. They don't really compete with Bitcoin in that regard. So I think eventually
you're going to see this bear out, especially when it comes to AI tools. I mean, I just don't
really get it. Unless it was forced to, why would these open AI networks want to get paid
in something that they have no control over.
So we'll have to see.
Completely agree.
Freaks, it's Friday afternoon.
We're keeping it tight because of the events
that Matt and Alex are attending out west.
They got to go to dinner with Jerome Powell tonight
to really update him on all these new second layer solutions
and the interoperability of the Lightning Network
and how Bitcoin is going to replace SWIFT, not XRP.
You guys got to go elbow out Brad Garlinghouse
to make sure he doesn't get a...
Actually, you know what?
Let Brad Garlinghouse lead Jerome Powell and crew
the wrong way.
You guys should actually entice them
to go get drinks tonight.
No, I will just...
I mean, jokes aside, I think,
you know, as an American,
it really pains me to watch
the country take the bad trajectory.
Like, it's better for all of us
if we can kind of steer them away from it.
And it is inevitable, but like...
But if you can lessen the pain and the bad decisions and how they affect like the average pensioner or the average, you know, American, it's a worthy goal.
I don't know how successful you'll be, but I mean, that was part of the reason why I came down for this week's events.
Right. Like I didn't. I was very aware that the SALT event was going to be mostly suits focused on crypto.
Right. But I convince a couple of them that maybe, you know, we're doing it the wrong way. I think you can have massive, massive wins. And I don't pretend like I'm going to ever convince Charles Hoskinson or Brad Garlinghouse because they just going to follow their pockets. It is what it is. But if you convince some other random person.
Well, also, just closing thought, we're just sitting here and thinking about the injustice of how a small group of people can arbitrarily decide, again, the cost of capital, the rules of the money system for the whole world.
Why should they have a decision making power over the lives of billions of people in places like, you know, whether it be Nigeria or Pakistan or China or Indonesia or wherever?
I mean, it's just so crazy that this unelected tiny group of people get to decide what's best for everybody.
And nobody has an alternative until now.
So I just continue to be so inspired by Bitcoin.
Matt and I visited a place called Inspiration Point this morning.
So we're inspired by a new system where the small cartel of people don't get to make the rules.
By the way, Marty, do you know why they do the event in Jackson?
Alex asked the AI.
The Fed event.
I do not.
It's because they just wanted to go fly fishing.
So they decided.
Paul Volcker, who many freaks will know, famous, famous Fed chair who spiked the rates to kill inflation in the early 80s.
He was a totally addicted fly fisherman.
and the KC Fed Board, which was responsible for putting together the meeting,
decided to lure him here by putting the event here in the Jackson Hole area.
And that would ensure that he would come because so he could fly fish.
So there's your trivia for the day.
And then it had Lindy and now it's 40 years later and it's just still here every year.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Well, three points.
Incredible pun.
I caught that.
It was incredible.
Two, Paul Volcker, if he's the one who decided, you know what?
I'm okay with it.
Okay.
He did the hard thing when it was unpopular back in the 70s, jacked him up to 18%.
Paul, if you want to go fishing, you can.
And then number three, Alex, to your point, that cabal is only going to get smaller.
And I think today, really to tie up this whole conversation and bring it back to what we started with,
I think Trump and Bessent successfully bullied Powell to sort of ease rates at a time when many people didn't think he wanted to.
And I think that's a big theme about this whole squabble between Trump and Powell over the last year, even before the election, is that I think it's pretty clear that the Trump administration and Scott Busset would like to bring more control over the monetary system within the Treasury.
and I think we're headed down this path.
They need consolidated, uniform policy across the Fed
and the Treasury, which aren't really separate,
but there has been this facade that they're separate.
And I think what we're witnessing right now
is the dissolution of that facade even.
And it's just going to be clear that the money
is going to become more centralized here in the United States
and the policy around it.
I agree.
well gentlemen
thank you for
doing the hard things
getting your elbows dirty
with a bunch of altcoiners
and central bankers
I know it's not easy work
but it's very important work
trying to do our best here
I'm just glad I didn't fall down the hill
while trying to set up RHR
but another week we made it happen
huge shout out to Alex for joining us
thank you guys
I love your freaks
stay on the same set
peace and love
okay