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You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
When 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're welcome for being helpful. I want you to know I'm going to miss Super Mario Brothers 2 in theaters.
well we're live right now so i was hoping that uh you weren't going to say something you regretted
no super mario brothers too boys are big uh super mario brothers fans which is
is a millennial who grew up on i remember playing on the original nintendo
it does warm my heart a bit
i mean like mario is a franchise it's uh
I like I don't know
my toddler is he like he's convinced that his favorite game is Mario but he's never played it
I don't know where he picked it up from I mean he's not quite the age where he like he can even
play competently even if he were to find it somewhere um but he like came like just one day
you know how toddlers are like one day he just like picked it up and just all the time just
constantly like he's like sees me or my lady on the phone he's like are you playing mario
can i play mario okay bro
we'll do wrestling matches we're uh we're tops off wrestling in this house i mean the boys
rip the tops off wrestle in our bed and uh the boys are the super mario brothers not bowser
and my wife comes over.
She's peach.
I pick her up and take her to the shower
and lock her in there.
They got to save her.
That's wholesome.
I love that wholesome story.
Great to start us off.
On the opposite side of wholesome,
I didn't put this on the list
because you said you've been away from your keyboard.
So I'm hoping you didn't notice it ahead of time.
Can you click the link I just put in our signal chat?
I want to get your immediate reaction.
Will this media property be impartial
from here on out.
Yeah, so TBPN,
the second-rate rabbit hole recap competitor
that happens on a daily basis,
and it's like less than a year old
and has like 45 sponsorships,
just got sold to OpenAI.
Obviously, I mean,
Marty, what the fuck are we doing here?
Like, Kobe sold to fucking Coinbase.
like what what we're like making pennies in front of a steamroller over here and all these guys are
getting that those premium buyouts you know what matt it's it's actually um very apropos that you
bring that up today it is it is holy thursday in uh in the catholic church the christian
and christianity and this is the day that uh judas sold out jesus for uh 30 uh 30 pieces of silver
you know and it's like the lesson of the day is don't sell your soul
and hey tbpn kobe all these guys maybe they're selling their souls who knows
i mean like you're guaranteed selling your soul if you sell to coinbase or open ai
it's like there's no there's no in between uh i mean we we don't know the details of the tbpn
sale yet.
The Coinbase one was quite lucrative.
I don't get this move.
I don't get this move by OpenAI, though.
Why did they need to buy this?
They have so much fucking money.
I forgot to put in the list their latest funding round.
What was the number?
$122 billion.
Was not their valuation.
No, that was how much cash they raised.
That's fucking retarded.
But John Arnold, our partner at 1031, he was saying that their valuation is bigger than TARP.
Like the TARP bailout of 2008.
OpenAI is officially worth more than that.
Well, you know what happened, right?
Like Altman was listening to RHR and he heard me say that they can't keep subsidizing subscriptions forever.
And he's like, hold my beer.
I'm going to go raise $100 plus billion.
Yeah.
I mean, jokes.
Yeah, go on.
We're getting a lot of responses from my quote suite of this episode.
But I honestly don't understand this pick up by OpenAI.
They have plenty of coverage.
We don't know what the amount is.
Maybe they want AI-fi the media side.
I mean, look.
Sam is a fucking robot, right?
So if like their board, well, first of all, on the funding round, as we know well,
we don't know when this funding round happened.
We don't know what the specific terms are.
You hear what they say, and usually it's a rosier picture.
They could have closed this round months ago before the Iran war happened,
before the current macro environment,
before everyone's trying to pull out money
from private credit funds and liquidity is super tight.
And then chose to announce it now.
And then we don't know what the specific terms of,
you know, how that money is being provided to them.
If it's, you know, all at once,
there's a bunch of different ways
that they could make that seem much bigger than it is.
And it's in their self-interest
to make it seem much bigger than it is.
On the TBPN piece, I could totally see a board meeting, OpenAI board meeting where they're like, Sam, everyone hates you.
You look like a robot.
No one trusts you.
You created an orb coin as well as this to scan everyone's eyeballs.
How can we make the public like you?
And then they were like, oh, well, everyone in tech circles really loves the TBPN guys.
What if we just pay them $20 million to be two of our frontman lackeys?
And then, boom, deal done.
They have so much fucking money.
For the TBPN side.
Once again, you've been doing this for a year.
You absolutely obviously have no ethical lines to begin with
because you have 35 fucking sponsors that are just constantly ringing.
And you get a $20 million buyout.
Of course they fucking take it.
I mean, once again, I'm just putting a number out there.
No one knows the number.
I would imagine it's higher than that.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, even more so.
But even at $20 million, it's like, okay, well, we created a podcast that we pretend is competing with CNBC that broadcasts live on X every day.
And it's been less than a year.
Let's just take the fucking money.
Yeah.
If it's higher than $20 million.
I mean, let's be honest, right?
It's probably majority equity where they don't have liquidity at a really insane valuation, right?
So the numbers are probably larger than if it would have been a cash equivalent deal, right?
It's like you're getting paid in Sam's shit coin, and we don't know when they'll IPO and when you'll have liquidity, and if that valuation even makes sense.
Like it's probably directionally correct in this market, but I don't know.
Is OpenAI a trillion dollar company in public markets?
Probably.
retarded to say out loud i don't know do you no one really knows i mean like this market's weird
i mean i feel like they've been getting smoked by anthropic and you look like the soaring news
last week like that was obviously like a massive loss leader that they had to cut
well yeah i mean in our circles they're getting smoked like in more deep circles they're getting
smoked which is also why it kind of makes sense because tbpn that's their circle right um but in
normie land it's chat gpt and then everyone else like they're still learning what claude is if if
that yeah well shout out to the tbpn guys i like those guys i like their coverage i know i think i
mean i like the hustle too i mean it's hard to do a daily show like it's it's hard to do a weekly
show it's impressive that they've done a daily show for less than a year uh yeah i mean i've seen
the block space media guys charlie and uh colin have started the daily show people like why don't
you do that martin like i don't feel like sitting behind my desk and like just talking to people for
three hours every day yes we do the podcast and a live show like it's a lot of work it's not my
format it's not my format it also means the result is and i mean i don't think we can be
at least in recent times i don't think we can be the stewards of
uh virtue signaling about being high signal and low noise because we've been a bit more noisy
lately but if you do a daily show you basically you're you're you're resigning yourself to posting
I take umbrage with that. Why are we noisy lately?
I think we've been noisier than we have been in the past.
And I think particularly like we kind of have our hands tied.
I'm not making excuses. I'm literally making excuses.
But we've had our hands tied because Bitcoin is very much a macro asset.
So we talk about the macro stuff because you have to.
Like the biggest impact on Bitcoin short-term price and short-term dynamics
and medium-term dynamics is like what Trump says
in a fucking speech or a true social post right now.
And that's just the reality of the fucking situation.
But I think in the past, we've been higher signal.
But anyway, my point stands that if you do a daily show,
you're pretty much guaranteeing that, you know,
70% of the shit is just slop.
And in their case, what they're really good at
is they have a very strong network.
And so it's usually corporate promotional slop.
It's just like constantly just bringing a new CEO in to like shill whatever they're shilling.
But yeah, I respect the hustle and it's impressive.
And I mean, it's really impressive doing it for less than a year and getting a big exit into a private company.
That's one of the hottest companies in the world in terms of people's demand for that equity, right?
Whether you like open AI or not.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
Even Anthropik.
Time will tell.
Don't want to add any more.
I don't trust Anthropik for shit.
Yeah.
I don't either.
What I do trust is the Bitcoin network and the fact that we can have some certainty around what's going on there.
And on that point, let's go to Clark's dashboard where the price of Bitcoin is 66,760 cuck bucks.
One cuck bucks is going to get you 1,498 sats.
We're at a 1.34 trillion Cuck Buck market cap.
We are looking at block heights, 943,392,
which means we are less than 100 blocks away
from the next difficulty read target.
96 blocks to be exact, which should happen tomorrow.
It's looking like an upwards adjustment of 3.8% blocks
coming in at 9 minutes and 38 seconds on average.
Clark's teeny weeny mempool is sitting with 2,062 transactions.
in it mempool.space more than 10x at 22,359 transactions.
Relatively cheap, you have a high priority transaction
that you want to get through, two sats per vbyte.
I sent one, I sent an on-chain transaction this morning,
it was three sats per vbyte, so mempool's cooling off.
That is the state of the network.
Let's provide some signal.
I got some signal.
If you're going to Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas,
I'm sure you've heard.
This is actually going to be high signal.
It's going to be a lot of high vibes,
but officially announced RHR, PubKey,
the Bugle Boys in the mix,
Las Vegas, April 27th,
happening at Tau, Las Vegas, in the Venetian.
You go to hotstyle.pubkey.com to check that out.
It's a penthouse nightclub, right?
No, it's a dive bar, dude.
You've never been in Tau.
It's a dive bar.
Yeah, I mean, freaks.
It's kind of wild how we ended up in Tau, but we did.
So it'll be fun.
It'll be, it'll be, if you're going to be in Vegas, it will be the, the single, the single best event of conference week.
So come join us.
We're going to have a fun time.
It'd be great to meet a bunch of you in person.
It will be.
We've got four VIP tickets left.
So go check that out.
That's what it's saying on the site.
I don't know.
I don't know what the pub key guys are doing.
Maybe they're.
Yeah.
Don't hold us to it.
I don't know if these VIP tickets are as scarce as Bitcoin, but we'll see.
What is the domain?
Hotstyle.pubkey.com.
They're definitely not as scarce as Bitcoin.
They're clearly more scarce.
Did you ever get a towel in New York?
I never went.
No.
I mean, I think the funny part is I think most of our attendees on a normal night
probably wouldn't be allowed dress code wise, right?
Yeah.
So make sure you dress nice.
No, don't dress nice.
You don't have to.
We paid for it.
So you can dress however you want.
I mean, I'm not going to say someone's going to show up in like a fucking banana suit.
You can dress comfortably.
Now somebody definitely knows that you said that.
I mean, I didn't pull that out of my ass.
I had a friend who got kicked out of a casino wearing one of those full banana suits.
i was like bro what'd you expect sometimes you gotta go for it all right on to the list we're
gonna provide signal no noise today no noise none at all uh iran imposes yuan and crypto tolls on
ships in the strait of hermuz vessels waiting to transit the strategic waterway need to be
from friendly countries and some had to pay fees in chinese currency or crypto before being escorted
through the straights being reported by Bloomberg,
Salaam El-Wardani, Alex Longley,
Weilun Sun, and Serene Chong.
How are you getting through the paywall?
Archive.
He's on archive.
I'll put the link in the chat.
I mean, I...
How verified is this?
Well, to be specific, the crypto piece is USD tokens.
Right. So presumably Tether.
I don't think there's been any reports that they're using Bitcoin.
I think the Yuan piece is relatively confirmed and I wouldn't be surprised.
Like, I mean, what we know, like it's way easier to send a USD token than it is to do a wire or something like that.
So it's like one of the least surprising things.
And I would say in general, I think this whole story is the least surprising.
I mean, this is something we speculated pre-war.
We've been speculating for years.
This move away from the dollar for global trade.
It is ironic if they're using a blockchain-based dollar.
But that's also because, I don't know, are there any yuan tokens?
There's got to be yuan tokens, but they probably just don't have liquidity yet.
And I assume there's immediately converting.
I see someone in the comments saying USDC or USDT.
Yeah, I guess technically, but I kind of doubt they're using, you know, a regulated American-based US dollar token when Tether exists, but maybe.
But yeah, I think, you know, without being a broken record, this is a classic Mandibles, the Bitcoin standard, right?
First, they move to other fiats.
Maybe there's some kind of bricks-based currency in the future.
Gold for trade is happening and is expected to increase.
And then afterwards they move to Bitcoin when they realize that all their current systems require trust and none of them trust each other But it I think a pretty important highlight to point out here
Yeah.
And what's the current state of the war?
Again, I didn't watch Trump's speech last night.
I went to bed early.
It's a war ending.
I saw we bombed some big bridges.
No, it's the opposite.
Well, I didn't watch it, but the headline was Trump said he was going to blow Iran
to the stone age and that's why everything fucking tanked.
And I mean, right now, Polymarket is calling for,
they're expecting boots on the ground,
at least by the end of the year.
71% by the end of the year, very high volume market.
I saw someone who made an account
that their only other trade was making $500,000 on trading the strikes,
the original strikes on Iran, made another bet for $800,000 on troops on the ground.
So take that as you will.
I think it's more likely than not.
And I would say, I mean, I have been relatively consistent here.
I don't, I think, I think, uh, this war is going to drag on for much longer than people realize.
I would be pleasantly surprised if it doesn't.
Um, but I'm operating on the assumption that, uh, it's a complete clusterfuck and it's going to go on for a long time.
That's why I didn't do.
So, Logan, pull up the chart.
WTI currently trading at $104 or $103.89.
It spiked higher.
Yeah.
Look at that candle.
I know.
If it closes at this level today, it would be the highest daily close since July of 22.
Obviously, that was when Ukraine-Russia was popping off in earnest.
So, who knows?
$150 WTI could be in play.
it's incredibly sad.
Like we bombed that bridge.
That's like the ethics,
if there were ethics of war,
but I think it's,
there's at least been feigned ethics of war.
Like don't bomb civilian infrastructure.
Don't bomb energy infrastructure.
Don't bomb desalination plants.
And it seems like anything's on the table.
Like they bombed that bridge today.
Who knows?
I've been getting called anti-American
for simply the tft and i'm not even running the tfcc account but the guys running the account are
just like covering what's going on people like stop spreading this anti-american propaganda it's
like we're literally just showing showing everybody what's happening um i don't know what to tell you
yeah i mean uh look the world is more polarized than ever i think social media is a key part of it
whether that's bitcoin or macro or anything politics everyone is a lot of people are hurting
and then people take it out on each other rather than the people that are causing the hurting.
But yeah, I mean, you mentioned the desal plants.
Like, that's wild.
Most of those Gulf countries heavily, heavily rely on desalimization for water.
And obviously, you need water to survive.
Yeah, to be clear, I don't think any have been hit yet, but they've all been.
saying no a couple have been hit have they um let me ask my should I ask my bot
ask your bot oh yeah hit a service building had a power and water desalination
plan in Kuwait. Where?
In Kuwait.
I mean, I think...
Yeah, no, I guess...
Was that the only one that was hit?
No, Ron says a
desalination plan on
Kesham Island.
Completely out of service after being hit
by an airstrike. That was on the 31st.
There you go.
It seems like it's like total war over there.
Everything is a target on both sides.
Yeah.
Good piece of chance, freaks.
Not to sound like I'm off like a hippie, but I don't know.
I'm not going to get too far into it.
It's tiresome getting dragged into the...
It's funny.
We've been covering both sides on TFTC.
Like I've had Tom Luongo.
He was like, it's not Israel.
It's the city of London.
We're taking back control.
It's the city of London.
Had Mel Madison on this week.
He was like, Israel controls the US government.
We're doing it at the behest of them.
We need to detach from them.
And I'll be clear, I have no idea exactly what's going on.
I just know that it looks bad.
And for anybody who's confused about the series of interviews on the war that we've done at TFTC,
it's like, I'm trying to get every perspective that is out there.
Because I'm not over there.
I can't see what's going on.
So I asked, sorry.
Go ahead.
I was going to say optically it just looks really bad from afar.
Yeah, I mean, like, so I asked my bot the desalinization plants question.
So the first desalinization plant that was hit was in Iran.
That's what Kesham Island is.
So that was March 7th. So the U.S. supposedly hit that. And then Iran hit one in Bahrain on March 8th. And then one was hit in the UAE following that. And then most recently, one was hit in Kuwait on March 30th.
30th um just for an accurate timeline but i mean war is fucked up to begin with but that's
particularly fucked up is hitting people's water supplies in a fucking desert
yeah it's not like a tropical rainforest no no then you have like israel expanding in the lebanon
it's all all right we're not a war podcast let's move on um the uh oracle cutting down
yeah let's move on to the happy story of uh job loss continues yeah 30 000 20 to 30 000 jobs at
oracle and i think this is only going to accelerate unfortunately um so oracle is one of those
companies i've highlighted google in the past um google has 190 000 employees uh which is just
wild it's like hard to comprehend how many people that is um i think oracle i just asked my bot but
i was gonna say 160 000 employees so like first of all oh there it is it's in the screenshot 162
thousand employees who what do these people do i don't know what they do i mean it was clearly
over hiring to begin with um but ai is going to accelerate this reversion to mean um and it really
you don't need broad-based ai-led unemployment to significantly hit the economy all you need is
these big tech companies that have you know two football stadiums worth of employees uh to start
cutting big and cutting hard.
And they're doing it ruthlessly.
Like Oracle sent just,
they just got an email at 6 a.m.
I saw one report, you know,
impossible to verify this shit.
But like one guy's been working there
for 20 plus years.
He's like a couple of years from retirement.
He just wakes up one morning, 6 a.m.
You're fired, lose access to all of your accounts.
It's fucked up.
And it's definitely being, I won't say suppressed, but there has been a deliberate attempt by the wealthy elite to make it seem like this is not a trend that is accelerating when it's going to get much worse out there, unfortunately.
So we covered it yesterday in the Bitcoin brief.
I think the signal here, as we said, 6 a.m. termination emails across U.S., India, Canada, Mexico, 18% of the global workforce.
Company cited current business needs and is redirecting capital towards AI data center spending.
Here's a signal.
Shares rose 2% on the announcement.
Oracle's headcount.
And here's some context.
Oracle's headcount swelled from $132,000 in 2021 to $164,000 in 2023, largely through an acquisition of Cerner Healthcare.
um but yeah it looks like they're cutting bait to reinvest in the ai infrastructure build out
that they're part of like stargate isn't that crumbling they're like super over levered
yeah and meanwhile larry ellison is like gobbling up all the media assets including tiktok us
um so
So, yeah, I mean, similar story, by the way, on that timeline, by the way, similar story to what we saw with Block, right, which is there was massive overhiring during COVID printing.
And then this is kind of like a reversion back to the mean.
But once again, I don't think they're done.
Like, I don't think Block's done.
I mean, Jack just released, he released that, what he co-wrote with the partner at Sequoia about how they're going to lean even more into AI and automation at the company.
And that the fact that they're a remote first company makes it easier because everything is in Slack and well-documented and stuff, which is super easy to put into these LLMs.
So I wouldn't be surprised if he's not done.
I mean, he's still got 5,000 employees there.
I mean what Oracle now has 130 to 140 that we don't have a football stadium that can hold all
the employees at Oracle that remain so I don't know guys you got to cover your ass
you got to protect your families you got to prepare prepare for the worst hope for the best but
god I mean I think this accelerates and gets significantly worse and then just imagine just
imagine you work at this fucking company for 20 30 years you get a 6 a.m email find out you're like
you're completely fucked you're unemployable you're not going to be rehired you have bills to pay
and then you you open cnbc or bloomberg or whatever when markets open and the fucking stock is up
it's just like surging yeah i mean specifically if you're at like a massive company if you're at a
company with more than 5,000 employees, I would seriously consider hedging your bets.
We've talked about this a lot. I think upstarts with lean teams definitely have the advantage
here in the AI age. Extending their capabilities, not having to cut headcount because they don't
have a big one in the first place. Headcount was a vanity metric for these tech companies
specifically not too long ago, like pre-COVID.
If you wanted to raise money, you highlighted how many employees you had.
And now-
Yeah, I mean, I would say, yeah.
I would say on the Bitcoiner side, this is like, once again,
you know, maybe for different reasons,
but this was something that not just Bitcoin companies,
but any company that was led by a Bitcoiner was ahead of
because of the opportunity cost of every person you hire is Bitcoin.
that's not stacked.
So Bitcoiners have already been operating
in a hard money environment.
So the effect there among Bitcoin-led businesses,
and once again, I'm not even talking about
just like Strike or something.
Strike has been very, very deliberate
about keeping headcount low and efficient and lean
and trying to be as profitable as possible
and stack as much Bitcoin.
But I'm talking about like the local plumber shop that's run by a Bitcoiner.
You know, it's like they've been very deliberate at reducing headcount because we've been living in a hard money environment for 10 years.
While these people, these fiat people are getting whacked in the face with it in 24 months or something.
Yeah.
Stay frosty out there.
Learn the tools.
onto the next topic, more optimistic,
and I think it will lead to a broader discussion
about quantum risk in Bitcoin.
But this was cool to see from Jonas Nix.
Please welcome shrimps to the family of stateful
PQ signatures, post-quantum signatures,
2.5 kilobyte hash-based SIGs across multiple devices.
Shrinks gave around 324 byte SIGs,
but is single device.
Shrimps addresses multi-device.
Any device loaded from the same seed
creates SIGs 3x smaller than SLH DSA.
This is cool to say,
so you didn't listen to the podcast
I did with Jonas and Mikhail Kudinov
a couple months ago
on their hash-based signature research paper
that they put out, Shrink Plus,
was one of these post-quantum signature schemes
that they were researching
and sort of highlighted as,
Okay, if we're going to do a hash-based signature scheme that is quantum resistant,
the Shrinks Plus primitive seems like a good thing to build off of.
The problem with pure Shrinks Plus, as he highlights here,
is the way in which Shrinks Plus was designed,
you can only have like a single SIG per hardware device,
and you can't really recover easily because of the stateless nature of the key.
And so it looks like shrimps is the solution to that sort of tinkering with that in a way that makes it so you can set up a private public key pair, get a seed phrase, and then recover that seed phrase on hardware devices up to a certain limit.
I believe there's like a limit of 1,024 times or something like that.
They can actually recover from seed without introducing entropy to your private key.
But for those who are worried about quantum resistance, this is a step in the right direction.
So specifically, there was a new round of quantum FUD this week because Google released a research paper in partnership with an Ethereum foundation guy that said that quantum is going to break Bitcoin by 2029, I think was the headline.
Could potentially, if the assumption in this paper.
If you make an ass out of you and me, which I think is a very aggressive timeline that is unlikely by an order of magnitude.
That said, this research was perfectly timely when it was released because this perception that Bitcoiners are sleeping at the wheel here is just absolutely wrong.
It couldn't be further from the truth.
Now, there's some trade-offs when we talk about quantum high level, which is, first of all, this risk is theoretical based on a lot of assumptions.
And there's always a danger making proactive decisions on something as important as Bitcoin on a theoretical concern, not a hard concern.
The second piece is anything that requires quantum resistance is going to use significantly more block space.
So you have, first of all, you have the concern of using novel crypto, right?
So new primitives like new math, new tech to secure these things, which in themselves could have backdoors or issues, right?
So you don't want to rush into a change.
And then the second piece is they're a lot more burdensome on chain, right?
They're using a lot more data.
Obviously, data is scarce in Bitcoin.
We've been neck deep in a quote-unquote spam war for the last two years.
People arguing about chain usage.
Well, quantum signatures will make all of that even more burdensome, and we would see much higher fee rates as a result and more burden on nodes.
Um, so what's cool here is this proposal, this early research would do something that would allow people to migrate to a quantum protected scheme or quantum resistance scheme, um, without doing it proactively.
So you could continue, my understanding is you continue to use less burdensome signatures.
And then if a quantum event happened, afterwards, you can use your seed to then transact securely.
So you don't have to ahead of time take the full burden.
You basically take a partial chain burden, is my understanding, before taking the full burden.
So it would still be more expensive and more data heavy than a typical Bitcoin transaction in the lead up.
But it wouldn't be like a full, once again, this is above my pay grade.
This is my basic understanding.
Well, I don't think it wouldn't be a full burden.
I think you'd have to create a whole new private public key pair transition Bitcoin.
Not my point.
My point is you're not using like these super heavy quantum signatures on chain that are being stored in people's nodes and verified in people's nodes.
That's the whole reason it's stateless, is my understanding.
And then at that time, if there is a quantum day where shit's breaking or whatever, you would then be able to use your seed to then securely transact your Bitcoin going forward in a heavier way.
And I will say that makes a lot of sense to me.
That is a nice middle ground because, once again, the concern is theoretical.
And I think most people would probably agree with at least high level that being the strategy, right? So you like create new wallets, but you're not burdening the chain with these super heavy signatures. And then after, if for some reason we need to, then we'd have a graceful way to transition going forward.
This obviously leaves out the whole discussion about freezing or seizing Bitcoin that hasn't been moved.
I think that's going to be a much more polarizing argument and debate,
and it probably will just result in a fork where people are attacking each other and trading against each other,
and it could be a bit chaotic.
uh but um i think the general premise that if we could have a setup where you can be prepared ahead
of time but you're not taking the full cost that both the network isn't taking the full cost and
individuals aren't taking full cost for that preparation unless it's absolutely necessary
is like the ideal path yeah the um i mean the other thing obviously these signatures take up
lot of space but the other thing to consider is signing right like since the
signatures are so large it one thing the Jonas and Mikhail highlights me when I recorded with them it like that like if you want the UX for like exchange withdrawals and all that to remain somewhat similar you have like multi
Who knows if multi-sig would even be in the same form
on a post-quantum signature algorithm.
But it's going to take way longer if they can't compress
the size of the signatures down far enough, like signing.
Actually, the time it takes to sign a transaction
is going to go up significantly too.
So that throws like a UX hurdle, coordination hurdle,
all that into the next.
And all this is to be said, I think taking a step back
and just addressing the Google paper
and the manic finger wagging at the Bitcoin developer community
to to figure it out to do something about it like i think it's completely unproductive and
i actually recorded with reared and code this morning brandon black will be released on
saturday and i think anybody who isn't should go follow him i think he's doing a good job and that's
one thing that is incredibly uh i don't know if it's disingenuous but i think it's at least
short-sighted and it would be disingenuous if these people know it and they're actively
being as manic as they are but what these papers are describing is that like they found a theoretical
advancement and some like quantum uh algorithm that makes it if they found like a more efficient
path to um to solve shore's algorithm or to use shore's algorithm to break ecdsa what was there
completely disregarding is that like yes you may theoretically like have come up with a better
algorithm to do all this math. However, you need a computer to run software that does that math for
you. And so you need the physical qubits to actually make that possible. And so I think
it's objectively true that the theoretical advancements are happening and they are probably
finding more efficient ways to break ECDSA in the theoretical world. When it comes to the world of
applied physics and quantum physics like the computers that are necessary to actually run
those algorithms simply don't exist and they haven't even found like a standardized architecture
to begin iterating on um and so that's like the most frustrating thing about this like i'm not
going to be i i am not a physicist i'm not a cryptographer i do not have enough knowledge
to be confident enough to say that i don't think this is ever going to happen
um i am more confident to say i don't think it's going to happen by 2029 uh and the sort of hand
wavy devs do something if you don't fix this soon like bitcoin's going to go to zero we're going to
fire the devs and the corporations are going to replace you with somebody who will do something
It's like people like we just, Shrimps is out there.
Obviously, BIP360 is out there.
I'm not going to spoil anything, but Reardon Code,
he's got a big section, Optech Weekly next week,
about another sort of quantum resistant algorithm
that the Bitcoin mailing list has been talking about.
He does a deep dive on that in tomorrow's Bitcoin Optech,
so make sure you subscribe to that.
But long story short, it's complete, the sky is falling, manic antics, and it could be detrimental to Bitcoin if we do rush things in an attempt to appease people who think quantum computing is going to be here in three years at scale.
when based off the information that I've digested
and everything I've read, it doesn't seem to be the case
because the physical computers, the quantum computers,
the physical qubits needed to apply the theoretical algorithms
that are being discovered don't exist
and aren't even close to existing.
And that's what I have to say about that.
Yeah, like we need proper research.
We need to be deliberate here.
We need to make no mistakes.
And that is what the developer community is doing right now.
And I personally think we're in a pretty good spot.
I will say this is like the best FUD we've seen to date,
which is kind of new and exciting
because through all the years of Rabbit Hole Recap,
it's usually the same FUD recycled over and over again.
And there's a little bit of this that is recycled.
We've been, I mean, even Satoshi himself commented about quantum stuff.
Like it has been circulating, but not to this degree.
And what does FUD stand for?
It stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
And I think there is a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, valid and non-valid, surrounding the quantum stuff.
And it's very complicated.
So it's hard for people to, you know, make their own decisions and make their own analysis of it.
I mean, Marty said, you know, he's not a physicist.
He's not a quantum researcher.
There's like 50 people, 100 people in the world that are like relatively competent on this shit.
99% aren't.
But I think we can have a very deliberate mitigation here.
And I think, like I said, I think that's the path.
I think the path is you give people a reasonable upgrade path.
They can opt into it if they want to.
And they don't have to do the full weight signatures until after they're absolutely necessary.
But love to see this research.
Love to see more discussion about it.
Unfortunately, this type of discussion will not be happening in Austin at BitDubs.
Did you see that news?
Do you have an inside track?
I wanted to add one more thing to your point, which is like,
the other thing about hand-waving at Bitcoin devs, do something.
It's like, I went and asked questions to all these different developers.
Some of these people are working on P2P part of Bitcoin.
Some people are working on the wallets.
Yeah, they're completely unrelated.
There's only so many people who understand the cryptography.
and then within that circle who are equipped enough to understand post-quantum cryptographic primitives.
And from my observation, the people that are able to do that are working on it
and seem to be working on it pretty vigorously.
Shout out to Jonas Nick for everything he's doing.
That's the thing.
And I was asking this to Reardon Code.
He couldn't give me, like, what is the line?
Like, what date do we get to?
and you can put this both ways
like let's say we get to
March
April 1st, 2029
no quantum computers here
it seems pretty clear that Bitcoin private keys
aren't going to be broken by quantum
computers, are we able to say okay
you guys shut up
you're fear-mongering
that's what makes it so difficult
that's why it's such good fun
because it will just get pushed off
and
And it'll always be a potential in the future.
And where the critics are valid is Bitcoin is the hardest thing to make quantum resistant because nobody controls it by design, because changes are very difficult to implement on a network scale.
And then last but not least is even when we do provide an opt-in path for people, it takes people time to actually opt into it, right?
It needs to be a multi-year process.
It's going to probably be a decade-long process.
Fortunately, I think the timelines are completely wrong.
But it is important that we get ahead of it.
And I think that's what's nice about this type of scheme, right, which is it lowers friction and the switching costs in the near term until users actually need it.
And that's when you pay the heavier costs.
And I think as a result, it'd be more likely to find consensus on adding it to Bitcoin.
I think it'd be more likely for people to use it in the first place.
but yeah we definitely
like all good FUD
there is
some morsels of truth
in there and why people should be concerned
the big piece that is wrong
is that nobody's thinking about it
and nobody's working on it
and that Bitcoin
doesn't have a reasonable upgrade
path to make this a reality in the future
yeah
and to your point about it's going to take a while
I mean, we do have one precedent of changing the private public key generator algorithm,
which is the implementation of Schnorr.
And that was something like Satoshi was asked earlier, like, why don't you use Schnorr signatures?
I think it was patented at the time.
But he also mentioned like, hey, it's not battle tested.
So we're going to go with ECDSA, which is down the line of Schnorr.
proves that it has survived the test of time
and the patent comes off, we can implement it later.
And that happened.
But that process took, what, 13, 14 years
before it actually got implemented.
And what is Schnorr adoption at right now?
Not that much.
Yeah.
But it should.
It is an acknowledgement that we have made
this type of upgrade to private public key algorithms
to generating how we generate our private public keys
before using specific algorithms.
Yeah, I mean, and I'd say while we're on that,
I think Schnorr could be a...
We don't really have that many examples that we can pull from,
but it's not like a perfect example
because there's not a strong incentive to switch.
definitely not as as strong as like your money gets stolen.
There's really no stronger incentive than your money gets stolen.
So I think there's a very strong incentive for anyone who relies on Bitcoin to get this right
and to do it deliberately and smart.
And then once there's an option for people to actually move to it,
And then last but not least, I mean, the fail-safe, like, break glass Bitcoin upgrade path has always been hard forks.
Anyone can hard fork at will.
So in that situation, you have two chains and they trade against each other.
And I think we've never seen a responsible, well-demanded hard fork in Bitcoin's history.
I mean, Bcash was like an absolute fucking joke.
And I think if push came to shove and you absolutely had to, let's say it seems like quantum day is like six months away and we haven't made any progress.
which once again, I don't think it's going to be the reality, but let's just say,
then you could have a team of very competent developers, fork the chain, have a hard fork,
and then the market can decide, the two tokens would trade against each other,
and the market could decide which way they wanted to proceed.
And it would basically turn into a prediction market on is quantum real or not.
That's what would happen.
And if you did nothing, you would have both sides.
so
just something
to put out there
I will say that
yeah
I don't know about you but
I've been getting a lot of inbound
on this stuff
it is
rocking a lot of people
well and that's like
so that's the other narratives going around there
like see people
that agree with us saying this
Well, the threat isn't actually quantum computing.
It's the perception of the threat of quantum computing.
Even if the threat isn't real, the perception that it may be real is enough to tank Bitcoin.
It's like, well, what do you do then?
Call it the best we can do.
Have a conversation like we're having now.
I'm sorry.
I don't know what to tell you, people.
What about the perception of Austin BidDev's ending?
we'll get yeah i mean it's on a hyena pour one out i mean i was actually uh
i was talking to a good friend rod rudy yesterday about this and uh
it is i mean ben said it in his tweet uh so many people are focused on ai right now and i think we
We both are. Many people in our circles are.
And I think it makes sense.
And there's only...
Austin BitDevs has a special place in my heart.
I think it's part of the reason I moved to Austin.
Went down there in the thick of COVID.
Austin BitDevs was still up and running.
Packed room.
Hundreds of people in Unchained's old offices on Fifth Street.
And I learned a lot.
I mean, we've talked about New York BitDevs.
Austin BitDevs is great
Nashville BitDevs is great
San Francisco BitDevs, a ton of BitDevs
Austin is just one of many
Ben and Buck Purley have been
holding down the fort for many years
and I think
they lasted
they didn't last as long as we have, we've been in here
week in, week out, not month in and month out
so it is a bit
Ben
Ben and Buck
a little disappointed, I mean I show up every week
you guys have to show up once a month and talk about what's happening on the mailing list.
I'm kidding.
But yeah.
And then we're being honest here too.
I think Twitter sentiment and if you ask anybody, they would agree.
Outside of this quantum stuff, it's been invigorating this week.
You said it's good FUD because it's exciting at least.
But things have been a bit stale if we're being honest.
yeah i mean i uh look meetups are hard i'm not going to fault anyone for stopping to do it but
it's definitely end of an era and uh something that i did not expect to see i was kind of like
a two-month hiatus no bro that's even worse if if if this hiatus like i don't don't gaslight us
about a hiatus like either end it or don't i don't there's nothing more permanent than a
temporary solution.
Hopefully
I'm wrong on that. Hopefully it comes back.
You know what's going to happen?
Justin Moon
is going to be sitting in Austin
at some point in the next two weeks.
He's just going to have an epiphany. He's going to be like, no.
This can't happen. He's going to be like,
revert the announcement.
I'm going to host an Austin BetDevs tonight.
Get there.
I think that's the hope.
It would be great to see.
But yeah, I don't know.
I think it's a, first of all, end of an era.
I'm not going to give them shit about ending it or temporarily hiating it, whatever the verb is.
But it is definitely another data point on what I've seen, which is decent developer burnout in Bitcoin.
and I think it used to be consensus among
at least most of the active community members
that open source developers that are building the shit we rely on
need to be supported
and that it's mostly thankless work
and that has definitely turned
you're like working on Bitcoin
you could be making like $300,000 working on AI or something with like way less responsibility.
And you're just getting shit on all day. It's just a really, it's hard out there for them.
It is hard. So I respect that. The grind is long. Life is short, the grind is long.
We'll get through it. We'll get through it. Have fun with your AI. Go have fun with your AI, Ben.
All right, we got some zaps to read.
They're building up.
We got Mav21.
First time he's including a message in his 21,000 sat zap.
Happy Easter.
Happy Easter to you too, sir.
Seth, Zoomer Seth, 21,000 sats.
It's Seth from Satoshi Ravioli.
Been looking forward to today for a while now, LOL.
My third annual listen to RHR
and prep the tax return live day.
I'm a few weeks behind, so nice to hear you guys live.
Let's run back the Zoomer series with Zach Cohen and I after April 15th.
Down.
You're just inviting yourself on the show, Seth.
You're welcome.
You're only welcome if we get the tax documents like ASAP.
My personal accountant has been waiting on it.
Seth, you can just file my extension now.
The Satoshi Ravioli story, by the way, someone tagged me on Noster and was like,
Who's the accounting firm that Odell keeps mentioning?
Satoshi Ravioli?
Their actual name is Satoshi Pacioli.
Pacioli, an homage to the discoverer of double-entry accounting there.
Did you catch the MAP21, Zap?
Did you say that already?
Did I mess up?
Happy Easter, Freaks.
That's our non-clickbait headline for the week.
All cost, Zap, 21,000 sats.
I walk the ends of an empire's coast
with a bolt of lightning
in orange lifeboat.
Nice.
Is that a haiku?
No, that's not a haiku.
It's a short little poem.
Jarvichu.
Only give us a thousand sats.
We're not going to read that.
Make no mistakes.
Thank you for your support.
25,000 sats zap.
The IRS sent us a subpoena
because we tried to use code RHR
in our business taxes this year.
At least we can use card RHR for $50 off at www.maknomistakes.shop.
It's a good joke.
This guy's trying to pump his own things.
Use the code RHR to get 10% off your income tax this year.
The IRS.
If your IRS agent subpoenas you, just say, hey, I'd go to RHR.
And they'll say, oh, oh, okay.
Okay, I'm sorry.
You're good.
Just be very confident.
Soap miner.
Soap minor, I need to put in an order.
I'm almost out of your soap.
The deodorant, by the way, I've been loving it.
One point of feedback.
If you wear a white shirt, it gets a little yellow when you're wearing your deodorant.
I just want to let you know that.
33,333 sats.
Just use code RHR for everything.
Thank me later.
Love it.
Great advice.
Thank you for your support and for your soap.
Long John Silver.
I can't see the full name here.
How come I can't make this side panel there?
Can I?
21,000 stats.
Use code RHR to stock up on beef.
On beef snack sticks.
Way better than Chomps Marty.
Okay, it's Long John's Creek.
Go to longjohnscreek.com.
Code RHR.
No idea how much you get off there.
Our boy Vake Long time OG freak 21 stats Quantum computing timelines obey their own uncertainty principle the more precisely you predict when it arrive
the less accurate
you are
about whether
it actually exists
I like that
good advice
thank you for your support
Jonas Nick
said this to me
when I had him
on the show
because there's people
out there like
Bob McElrath
weird encode
like he's convinced
like he's like
pretty convinced like i don't think it's going to happen ever but we should prepare for it we should
be i think the most important thing doesn't reardon doesn't think it's going to happen right
not in the next century but he said like even if you like i don't think it's going to happen but
i'm staying up to date on this because we know ecdsa is going to be broken at some point in the
future whether or not it's a quantum computer that actually breaks ecdsa is another question
but we can have a high degree of certainty that at some point whether it's a quantum computer
or just a regular computer, a supercomputer.
Like ECDSA is going to break,
so we need to be upgrading these signature algorithms anyway.
And it just so happens that a lot of the leading signature algorithms
that will likely upgrade to happen to be quantum resistant as well.
Brandon's also convinced that Elon is Satoshi.
Is he really?
I didn't know that.
Seriously, very convinced.
I've had a big back and forth with him on that.
How many people are convinced that Elon Satoshi?
I don't know, but can Elon do something about it then
so that we don't have to?
Hey, he animated a GIF.
Elon, opensats.org slash donate.
Love your support.
We take no cut of donations.
100% of contributions go to open source contributors.
all those apps by the way freaks if you're new here we're through our nostre live chat where the
ride or die freaks dwell uh you can access it by downloading primal in your favorite app store
we're going to primal.net favorite web browser uh zaps zap stream supports it a bunch of
nostre apps supported including nostre amethyst um but the new one which is on the list is wisp
by our boy UTXO, a great new Android master app.
And this is the first RHR where you can participate in the live stream using WISP,
which is awesome to see.
Absolutely love to see it.
Open protocols for the win.
Shout out to you, UTXO.
And shout out to the Financial Freedom Report newsletter.
We go to financialfreedomreport.org to sign up for that.
in the story of the week coming from that newsletter is out of Russia, where record
bank withdrawals are happening as surveillance and account freezes surge.
Russia, I can't read today. Russian residents withdrew over
1.6 trillion rubles, the equivalent of $19.7 billion
from banks in January, mainly due to declining trust in the
state-controlled financial system.
In the state-controlled financial system. This exodus follows a significant change in banking
oversight of the central bank doubled the number of suspicious activity indicators with digital
signals that automatically trigger account freezes. Allegedly aimed at preventing fraud,
these new criteria temporarily blocked as many as 3 million bank accounts and cards in early January.
To tighten its grip, the Interior Ministry proposed capping cash withdrawals at 50,000 rubles or
$615 for flagged accounts, while a $10,000 lifetime limit on foreign currency withdrawals
was recently extended through September 9th.
All these regulations reinforce the digital limitations
on Russian savers, making physical cash
one of their few remaining protections
against state overreach.
For more stories like this and others,
go to financialfreedomreport.org.
It's it.
Financial repression.
The main reason I picked this one
to highlight this week is because, freaks,
the bank runs continue.
Yes, they do.
So I'm not sure if you saw it out of Germany, what they're doing with their coinage there.
Did you see that?
No.
What are they doing with their coinage in Germany?
I think it's 10 and 20 euro coins that they have.
They actually have real silver in it.
And they're reducing the silver content by 46%.
Wow.
What a scam.
Yeah.
True debasement.
Actual currency debasement there.
physical debasement old school and they're going after the coins um on primal on the video which
you can get after a couple hours after we record i post the video to nostor i have to like
download it and compress it and re-upload it uh is 21 000 sats um from our boy roaming
he did asteroid emoji
alien emoji
guy's very consistent
thank you sir
talk about it last week the theory
of all the
we did talk about it last week
didn't we it was part of our high signal
portion but did we get the theory
in that there's like a
a
discrete satellite war going on
just like Russia China
that's a new one
just sending each other's satellites out of space.
I mean, what about Elon?
Elon has over half the satellites.
He's got like 8,000 satellites in space out of a total of like 14,000.
I don't know how Starlink been.
Has anybody experienced some disruption in service?
I'm on Starlink.
It's great.
Fantastic.
There might be a covert satellite war going on out there.
I'm sorry to hear my children.
I didn't know that right now.
this stream is brought to you by starlink i couldn't couldn't do it otherwise use code rhr
for 15 off what if starlink bought us would would you i'd be down to i'd sell to starlink
there's worse there's worse suitors for all we just get spacex equity bro i'm tired i'm tired
we're perpetually tired now i think starlink is um
starlink is probably one of the single coolest pieces of tech that has been released ever
i guess wild that it exists and it works as well as it does
yeah and like not just the home piece the the mobile one is wild like the
it's got the wi-fi router built into the dish um and you can just power it from a battery pack
you just have high speed internet wherever the fuck you are in the world is wild it's like some
science fiction shit i've been doing research on the tesla home battery packs like the solar
system and you get a generac and you get some solar panels and a tesla home yeah
I'm more of a generator guy.
I haven't done the solar and the batteries.
But I mean, I do think in general people should be thinking about their power situation and their water situation and your food situation and have redundancies.
tendencies uh because i feel like the supply shortages are accelerating across the board
chaotic times we live in yeah i am the top boost from last week
podcasting 2.0 apps was a pringle mac with 88 888 sets palindrome boost i can't believe we spent
the last two days visiting Bitcoin Park.
You freaks rock.
So much generosity and spirit in this building and beyond.
I will see you IRL before we leave, Matt,
and we will head to Philly at some point
if you are around, Marty.
Otherwise, see you at Thames,
Texas Energy and Mining Summit,
Bitcoin Park, Austin.
Pringle Mac, thank you for making the pilgrimage.
I am traveling with family,
so I apologize that I am not there.
But it seems from your Nostra post that you are thoroughly enjoying the best of Nashville.
So I love to see it.
We have Stimmy 40 hours per week with 30,000.
Three sats, palindrome, boost.
Shout out to Bitcoin Park and all the meetup organizers for sharing incredibly high signal at Grassroots Bitcoin.
This is how we win.
Hitting the gas in every locale.
Special props to Foise and all the freaks building in their communities.
love to see it and then we have ride or die freak eric nine nine with 21 000 sats thank you for all
the hard work you put in thank you sir thank you guys for going back make your way up to philly
side note all the parents out there um kids do have tablets but they're not allowed to use them
unless we go on like a really long plane ride or car ride that's when we'll pull it out um
downloaded synthesis tutor for the oldest to do math tutoring.
Probably the best education investment we've made.
He's been playing with it for two days.
He's already on like advanced fractions.
Is it paid app?
It's a paid app.
It's like $129 for the year.
But you can use code RHR for 15% off.
Yeah.
You can get it to $100.
You get 35% off if you use code RHR.
And it goes all the way to trigonometry and stuff like that.
It starts with the basics and moves up.
He started on subtraction yesterday.
He's already on fractions.
I mean, it's a perfect example of like, it's such a, you know,
screens and technology can be massive negatives to children and then also can be massive
tools for empowerment for both parents and children.
And you just have to find like a balancing act.
I mean, specifically for those of us who want to homeschool, you know, the internet and
tech makes it so much more, uh, effective.
Um, but it's a balancing act for sure.
It is.
Yeah.
We get to it in the last year cause it's spring break.
So we're like trying to figure out ways to, and we're in, we're not,
obviously we're not on vacation.
So it's like, it's just us and the kids and a lot of the other kids are on
vacation.
So nice buck 52,000.
I got my kid a chainsaw.
Love it.
Use code RHR.
We got a brand new chainsaw.
We got a chainsaw at our new house.
They left us two chainsaws.
We got a...
What brand?
Dahl, I think.
Steel?
S-T-I-H-L?
I thought it was D-A-H-L.
Dahl is an artist, isn't he?
Is it Dahl or Wall?
I mean, I don't know if I pronounced it right,
but Steel's my favorite.
S-T-I-H-L.
And I will say, I have a gas-powered steel and an electric-powered steel,
and the electric one gets a lot of shit from people
because they just assume the worst, but it is so fucking convenient.
It's great.
Highly recommend.
It is.
Just press a fucking button, and it goes.
All right, we've got big news.
in the software update section start os version 0.4.0 beta has been released it's a major reway
overhaul long awaited they waited until april 1st
2026 to officially push it to confuse the masses is it here is it not we'll have to wait today to
find out a day has passed and the GitHub page is still up.
This has been a long awaited.
Matt and I have been very close to the Start9 team as they've been building this out and
pumped to see that it's finally in the wild.
Yeah, we're the largest investor in Start9 proudly.
I love that company.
Their team is great.
I think it's a great example of how to build an open source focused business.
It's fully MIT licensed.
You can do anything you want with the code.
You can run it yourself on your own hardware.
Or you can go and buy pre-built hardware from them at start9.com.
I think it's start9.com.
By the way, I see pseudo-Carlos.
Roald Dahl is an author, not an artist.
He actually was blowing up on Twitter this week because apparently it was very base.
His first date with his wife, he ended it by saying, I'd rather be dead than fat.
We have to talk to Matt Hill.
We need to get an RHR discount code.
But anyway, 040 has been a massive undertaking, complete redesign and rewrite of a bunch of the core stuff there.
And also on the AI topic, it has open-class support.
Um, so I'm excited to give it to give it a spin.
I don't know.
I have to check with Matt if they're going to provide a more graceful update path.
But right now you basically have to reflash, uh, the OS.
You have to like put it on a USB drive.
It's relatively straightforward.
The hardest part is having a USB drive.
Um, I feel like I have like 45 USB drives, but I can't find one right now.
but I'm looking forward to update.
So am I.
Shout out to the team.
I know you guys have
I know people have been banging down the door
and asking when 040, when 040.
It's finally here.
You got there.
Next up on the software update section
Frigate version 1.4.0
has been released.
silent payments is not just a new approach.
So this is from Craig Rall and the Sparrow team.
He's been really working on silent payments.
Sparrow team.
It's just fucking Craig, bro.
Come on.
We got to keep it going.
We got a massive team there.
Build some of the best software.
I used your software this morning, Craig.
Thank you for building it.
What's big in the side?
This is like a big wall of text.
I can't read all this.
Craig, I'm sorry. So, so yeah, so Craig is most known for Sparrow, but he's been very focused on
silent payments. And the key with silent payments, which is awesome, is that instead of having to
give people a fresh address every time, you can give them just a single human readable
payment code. So, you know, as similar to what people see with lightning addresses, right? So
like, instead of giving a fresh Bitcoin address, you could just do like Odell at primal.net.
That is awesome from a UX point of view. It's something that we really need on OpenSats. Like
we're sending out, we're like, got to get 200 addresses every month from grant recipients to
send out the monthly payments. It'd be great if we just had a fixed payment address that we could
use. So as a result, it implicitly helps privacy because it removes address reuse from the equation
and makes it much easier to accept donations, for instance, without address reuse. You don't have
to run a separate server. The big negative, and also it solves the gap limit, which is something
that he's had significant issues with, which is in the background, Sparrow has a default that is
checking all your addresses that are potentially have Bitcoin in them.
And sometimes if you are running like a BTC pay server and a lot of people are
initiating a payment, but not actually sending the payment,
you end up with a big gap in those addresses. And then your,
your software that you're looking at says a balance that's lower.
So it helps improve that situation by just completely removing the gap limit
altogether. But the main trade-off and the main burden is that, uh,
Your software needs to be scanning constantly for new payments coming in.
And so he created Frigate, which is like a drop-in Electrum server type solution that has silent payment support that does all that heavy lifting with the scanning for you because no one else was doing it.
And it makes specifically mobile use of silent payments much more, much less friction, much easier to implement.
The trade-off there is similar to if you're using someone else's Electrum server.
So you're not running your own Bitcoin node, you're using someone else's Bitcoin node.
Similar situation.
Obviously, you could see Frigate being, you run your own Frigate on Start9 or Alboral or however you want to run it.
One of the cool things about Start9, by the way, that people don't realize, and I saw a confusion on the chat,
is they've just made it really easy for anyone to package their own apps.
So like they don't even want to be involved.
They like, you know, have like the key apps that they maintain,
but they want it to be an open app marketplace where like anyone can package
open source apps that you can easily run and self host.
And Frigate is a perfect option for that.
But yeah, I mean, it's just classic Craig.
I was talking to Craig at a private event a couple of months ago,
and he was just super excited about silent payments.
It was just great to see.
because I know when that guy gets excited about something,
it actually ships.
And Sparrow is something I rely on on a daily basis.
I'm so fucking grateful Sparrow is here.
And if Sparrow offers silent payments,
hopefully we'll see more support across the ecosystem.
That's probably the last piece
that's stopping silent payments right now
is just you need more wallets that accept them
and more wallets that send to them.
By the way, the sending side is quite easy
for hardware wallets like Coldcard.
Use code RHR for 5% or 10% off.
I don't think we're sure on what the discount is.
Biggest discount.
Coldcard.com.
There we go.
Coldcard.com, best hardware wallet.
But the receiving side is not so simple.
So right now, what that looks like in practice is that you are receiving to a hot wallet and then sending to cold storage afterwards.
The sending process is super simple.
The software is basically translating it into an address that is a PSPT that the hardware is signing.
So there's no changes that need to be made on that side.
We have This Isn't Me, it's some person in the YouTube chat asking, can that work for giving – essentially, could you give a silent payment address to DCA?
Yeah, it's perfect for that.
It would be perfect for that.
And he's asking, are there any that you can name that do that?
No, not right now, I don't think.
But, uh,
No, but I would love to see strike.
Let's just, let me put it this way.
There's discussions within strike on both pay join and, uh, silent payment support.
And I think it'd be perfect for the business.
And I think it's perfect for auto withdraw, which strike already offers.
Um, and, uh, pay join is great because you don't only
to get privacy improvements, but it actually reduces the cost
huge shout out to strike for sponsoring the show.
You can use code RHR when you sign up for $500 off your transaction fees.
And then after that, if you set up auto DCA.
Trading fees.
Yeah. Trading fees. After that,
you don't have to pay any trading fees because DCA fees are waived.
The auto stacking feature is legit.
I, I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about.
Uh, probably.
Um,
Hey, you're, you're a big,
Hey, you're a big ninja launcher.
Okay.
Let's just ninja launch what you're thinking right now.
Just tell us, tell us.
Um, we had our quarterly strike board meeting,
uh, you know,
1030 runs the largest investor in strike for the new freaks out there.
Um,
and there was one user that,
uh,
in the lifetime of his account has done 40,000 transactions and they need,
they didn't look into it further, but my, my belief for 40,000 buy,
sell transactions.
And I think the guy like literally enabled hourly DCA as soon as it was
live and just never turned it off.
Every hour just buys a little bit of Bitcoin.
It's like kind of fucking awesome.
But yeah, there's no trading fees when you do that.
And if you're willing to wait on withdrawals,
there's never any transaction fees.
There's always a free option for the batch transactions.
That's a great stat.
Yeah.
I don't think it's real, though.
It'd be four and a half years.
I mean, it's probably hourly DCA plus something else.
They added that early, so that might actually be like 20.
You have to try.
That's a matter.
I think they actually might have had that.
Yeah.
Do you see Brian Armstrong is going to start focusing on quantum computing risks to cryptocurrencies?
He's going to put a lot of effort into it.
Thank God for Brian.
Thank God for him.
Oh, it would be remiss of us.
It's not on the list.
We didn't mention it.
But as of Monday or Sunday, excuse me, every square terminal.
Oh, that's awesome.
I mean, there's a little bit of fine print.
It's for eligible sellers, and I don't know what that means, but supposedly it's in the millions.
But this is exactly what we wanted to see.
We've talked about this for a while.
We knew that it was a bigger undertaking than it seems like on the surface.
But this is the dream.
The dream is that if you're a square seller,
you don't have to talk to the person
that's poorly paid cashier behind the payment terminal
about whether or not they accept Bitcoin or not.
It's just on by default.
And the opt-in part is whether or not
the merchant keeps it as Bitcoin.
By default, the merchant converts it to dollars,
as it should be.
You shouldn't be forcing merchants
to accept your novel magic internet money
and keep it.
But the payment method is great.
And I think this is a huge step forward
for Bitcoin as money
and being able to use it on the day-to-day.
And I know myself personally,
I would 100% prefer to spend Bitcoin
on my family's daily expenses
than use fiat.
Any freaks in the live chat?
I've seen this in the wild yet.
Have you used it?
I haven't seen a Square terminal this week.
While you guys answer, we'll get to the last item on the list today.
Cypherbox version 0.0.8 has been released.
Progressive self-custody Bitcoin wallet on test flight powered by Strike.
This is really cool.
I thought this was awesome.
I don't know how involved.
First of all, I haven't used this app, and I don't know how involved Strike was in actually bringing this to reality.
I mean, Strike has a fantastic API that they might have just used on their own.
But to me, UX-wise, this has always kind of been the dream, is that you are able to onboard someone to an app that grows with them
and starts out custodial and then moves to self-custody single SIG
and then moves to self-custody multi-SIG.
And these guys seem to have put a lot of focus on UX.
I think it's really cool, the UTXO management view they do.
I don't know if you saw this, but they have like progress bars that show
if you might have a higher future fee burden,
which is a really hard thing to explain to users.
And I think they did it in a very graceful way.
You know, you don't want, for privacy's sake, you don't want all your Bitcoin in one UTXO.
But for cost's sake, the more UTXOs you have, the more expensive it is in the future.
So I thought they did a really good job with it.
But once again, haven't tried it.
Don't know who's behind it.
Came on my radar because of this announcement.
And I wanted to highlight it.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's really cool to see.
I'm just looking at the size of capsules.
what happening that all we got for the list anything uh we got to rap about here
oh what i forgot uh to tell somebody we were recording it too
okay i hope everything's all right um
No, I mean, I put my thoughts on the list.
Look, freaks, I know sentiment is down right now.
I know the world is chaotic.
Vines are high. Vines are high. Come on.
Dude, they canceled Austin BitTubs.
Don't want that marshmallow, bro.
Don't want that marshmallow.
I'm not going to call it a bottom signal,
but it fits the fucking bill.
Uh, and I just, uh, like I, it's always been a grind.
There's like, there's like 10 days, like every four years where you feel good about yourself
in terms of like Bitcoin price action and shit.
Um, the rest is always the shadow of the last all time high.
And I think this is where people that just keep stacking and staying humble enough, this is where you make your wins.
This is the portion of Bitcoin where when we're flying high and people say you're lucky, invalidates their perception and their bullshit.
Um, and it's always been that way. It will always be that way. Uh,
and you just gotta, you gotta grind,
you gotta grind through it and have a little faith.
Yeah. Stop being a bunch of pussies out there. It's, it's long. It's arduous.
Yeah. This is what you signed up for a marathon.
I don't know what to tell you people. I mean, this is what, uh,
it's like you always have those people that like pop up around all time high.
They're like, stacking sats is retarded.
You're better off doing a lump sum buy.
Like, here's my calculation for why if you bought a lump sum and just aped your entire savings into Bitcoin, you would do better than if you just set up auto stacking and just stacked every day or every week just without emotion.
It's like, yeah, okay.
But in reality, what happens is the best times to buy are when people are market selling and dumping Bitcoin and they're not buying Bitcoin.
because people are emotional beings and they don't want to buy when it's down
and they want to buy when it's too high.
And I mean, it's interesting because this cycle,
you had the public companies doing it.
And so you actually see it in real time, right?
Just like, okay, they bought the top
and then they literally just dumped at this point.
So life goes on.
Bitcoin will continue to go on.
It's going to get better.
We're going to win the war in Iran.
Oh, my God.
Only like two or three nukes are going to be dropped.
Wow.
We're going to be...
What does winning the war in Iran look like to you?
I have no idea.
What is the objective even?
I don't know.
It's being facetious.
Sorry.
Continue.
Yeah.
I had something I was going to bring up. I forget what it was.
Yeah, the credit crisis is still happening.
Can you see Blue Owl?
It's bank runs by another name, right?
Yeah, I think they had something like 48% of their investors request,
or 48% of their AUM was requested for withdrawal.
They said, we hear you, but you're only getting 5%.
So yeah, bank runs, but you can't even get access to 6% of the cash.
Yeah, I mean, in their defense, like these private credit funds,
the way they generate the interest rate for their investors is by loaning it out.
So like a bunch of it is locked up in loans.
they're not necessarily being malicious here
no we talked about this when it dropped like the whole
marketing private credit private equity to retail investors is just a mismatch of
a strategy and a client archetype retail is notoriously finicky
I mean how much do you think how much money is locked up in people's buy now pay later
chipotle burritos and shit.
I'm going to get that money back.
And that's
how much
how big is the market for
Oh pseudo Carlos Good job I completely forgot opensats slash blog We just announced our seventh wave of Bitcoin grants
You can go to opensats.org to donate or apply.
Donations are appreciated,
particularly reoccurring donations are very appreciated.
We had three first-time grants in this wave and six grant renewals.
We first time grants joined markets and G.
It's pretty cool to see the development continue there.
Picked up by new people.
And they use Noster for a bunch of the coordination, which is really fucking cool.
We have Robit.
We have Spectre DIY, which is a do-it-yourself hardware wallet.
They've been around for fucking ever, fully open source.
Rawbit is a visual editor that helps people see how Bitcoin transactions are built.
One of the cool things that Gigi does with these releases is he has very well thought
app descriptions of all the projects we support with links. And none of that is he's
neck deep in AI, but refuses to slopify our OpenStats blog. So love to see it. And then
six grand renewals, Bitcoin dev launchpad, Bitcoin jungle, Bitcoin safe, BitShalla,
Crux, which is another DIY hardware wallet and PayJoin. PayJoin continues to be
one of the most impressive projects we've been funding.
But the grants will continue.
I feel very confident in saying that.
Not only the best project, one of the best projects to back.
Thank you, OpenSAT's board.
But one of the most important projects out there.
Long term.
I think we talked about it last week.
Did we?
what implementation it's a lightning channel closes and opens yes we did yeah um but yeah
opensets.org i know it's tax time you want a tax deduction for this year not not your your current
taxes for 2025 but for tax year 2026 you can donate and get a tax receipt or you can donate
anonymously and not get a tax receipt, just send
Bitcoin.
We appreciate all the support.
So labor of love.
I
do not make any money from it.
And if you think you can do it better, please
do it better.
I would love that.
Matt's tired.
He doesn't want to have to do OpenSats.
Somebody start a better one.
Let him divvy out
the funds that have been raised to date.
and go chill on a beach somewhere, please.
You realize we're sending out a million dollars a month right now.
I do.
In Bitcoin.
I do.
Wild.
It is wild.
Okay, around the numbers, this is pretty wild too.
All right, total volume for global buy now pay later transaction volume.
It was expected to exceed $500 billion by 2025.
These are stale numbers.
That's insane.
With the stress, driven by a 13.7 year-over-year gross rate revenue generation, the providers of the liquidity for these loans generated $12.5 billion in revenue in 2024.
Future growth, the market is expected to grow significantly, with some forecasts predicting the U.S. market size alone will reach $423 billion by 2031.
North America is a major hub with projected usage by 90 million Americans in 2025.
Asia Pacific currently accounts for the largest share at 36.42%.
90 million Americans.
That's almost one-third of the country.
It's more if it's just adults.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, 50%.
Wild.
How many adults are in the US?
I'm just going to divide by two.
All right.
Users took an average of 6.3 loans per person from single lenders in 2023,
up 11% from 2012, or excuse me, 2022.
Average order value, the average annual buy now pay later amount per consumer
in 2023 was $848.
so nothing too crazy for us at least probably for most americans it is target demo services
are most popular among gen z millennials with 44 of gen z using them in 2024 common use cases
electronics fashion and travel are major categories with one in 10 americans using it for vacations
I'm sure that'll end well
Gen Z loading up on buy now pay later loans
and going to the bank and mom and dad
I need a bailout
can't pay Klarna back
they're knocking down my door
they're knocking down your door dad
that person at the door
they're from Klarna
they're going to need your checkbook
because
I bought a Brutus I bought some of the green gear Fucked up It is
We got a couple zaps to read.
I guess we can wrap up.
Prodigious.
21,021 sats.
Great posts.
Nice.
Thank you, sir.
All cost.
21,000 sats.
Open water Bitcoin.
I think it just started.
I mean, as we've been recording,
I know you've been a little bearish the last hour
Bitcoin's up $120 million
Definitionally
we are very far from open water Bitcoin
and we didn't get much of it
this year or this
cycle or whatever the fuck you want
to call it but it's good
here
it's a good time
to maybe de-lever
if you're levered up and
maybe
slow down your lump sum purchases
because we're probably near the top.
You cut off when the title is open water Bitcoin?
Yes, yes.
Yeah.
And you probably should be stacking
when Austin BitDevs gets canceled.
Yeah.
This is when you lump sum in.
When Ben and Buck say, you know what?
There's no money to lump sum.
Nobody has any money, bro.
Can we get buy now, pay later loans to buy Bitcoin?
I feel like-
Technically, yes.
Actually, you can.
Cash app, you can.
Yeah.
I get a notification once a week, like, you can get a $200 loan out.
Consulting.
You admitted last week that you couldn't get a credit card because you got denied.
It's true.
Just took out a jambalow.
the credit
the credit system is completely
like i don't know how it works like you pay off your credit card
sometimes your points your credit score goes down
you're out there buying a new house like trying to oh the credit card system is fucking retarded
yeah and then if you're like super responsible and you never take out any debt no one will lend to
you it's like those should be like the most yeah should be like the best people to lend to that's
been my biggest problem i've only ever had one credit card my whole life and i've like been
religiously paying it off and i got it like three years ago because i started flying american so
much it's like i might as well get the points that's one of the cool things i think uh strike
doesn't get enough credit for is for the Bitcoin collateralized loans.
There's no credit score needed because you have hard money
as the best collateral ever.
Yeah.
I mean, this is the way loans should work, right?
You should be able to...
I think that's how they work in the hard money world, basically.
And we've just been living in fiat land for so long.
Yeah.
Asset-based lending.
it would incentivize people to be more productive
to acquire assets
if you're thinking about that
what's it called
we can just get a credit card
what's that called
I don't know what you're asking
when like credit's not collateralized
it's just
uncollateralized
not uncollateralized is another word for it
I see ghost of Terry Davis.
Why is the interest so high
if it's the best collateral ever though?
I think it will go down over time.
I think it's a, first of all,
I think liquidity is very tight
as we've been talking about
with the private credit stuff.
But I think there's also,
there's an education mismatch, right?
Because the people that realize
that Bitcoin's the best collateral
would rather buy Bitcoin than lend you dollars, right?
And the people that are willing to lend dollars
instead of buying Bitcoin
don't think Bitcoin is the best collateral
because otherwise they would have bought Bitcoin.
So it's a little bit of a chicken and egg.
But I think as it becomes more common
and as we see more established players enter the market,
rates will go down.
And I think eventually what you will see is
rates for Bitcoin collateralized loans being the cheapest capital to borrow, rather than right now,
you know, one of the more expensive ones. And I will say that strike specifically, I mean,
we're actively trying to reduce those rates. And the product is set up in a way
with no payment penalty and no origination fees so that as those rates go down,
you can immediately take advantage of them. Like that was very deliberate.
it.
Yeah.
It's a liquidity problem.
There's a scarcity of liquidity on these
lending desks for Bitcoin collateralized loans
and
if scarcity you can charge
more.
Ba-ba-ba-ba.
All right.
We'll be tapping out.
Love you, freaks.
Stay on the stack side.
peace love