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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.
Call your neighbors, call your friends.
I'm going to switch over from Squawk Box.
Rabbit Hole Recap is here to compete at the 630.
Sorry, Becky.
Becky, quick. We're coming for that ass, girl.
What did I tell her?
If she donates to OpenStats, we'll stop competing with her.
Yes.
I just realized, by the way, Marty,
that I forgot to tell the freaks when we were going live.
That's on me.
Hand up.
We're Gold Podcast now.
The price of gold is $4,114 pound drill price.
Are you going to read it?
Are you going to read it every episode now?
What is it in Bitcoin terms?
In Bitcoin terms?
Ooh, I just had this chart up.
Jokes aside, I think that's actually probably one of the most important metrics
is Bitcoin price in gold.
Because we haven't hit an all-time yet.
We're not in a bull market until we pass the all-time high gold price.
We bounced off a low, currently sitting at 26.59 ounces of gold per Bitcoin.
Fell as low as 25.53.
It's pretty crazy you can get 26 ounces of gold for Bitcoin.
Yeah, that's a lot of gold.
Imagine being bearish on that.
Can you even fit that much in pockets?
How big is that?
I don't know.
This is 8 grams.
How many grams in an ounce?
16?
No, 16 ounces in a pound.
I was doing lead math.
How many grams?
I have no idea.
Ask Maple.
I think it's like 30-something.
How many grams in an ounce?
28.34.
So what does that mean?
This is like almost a quarter of an ounce
or a little over a quarter of an ounce.
So four of these times 24.
So 100 of those.
A hundred of those rings?
I don't think you can fit in your pocket.
It's a hundred of those rings.
Imagine being bearish on that.
That's pretty crazy.
Can you hold up the ring for scale again?
Bitcoin's currently a hundred of these.
Nice.
Yeah, pretty nice.
That's pretty good.
I'm pretty happy with that.
But unfortunately for us,
Bitcoin was created by the CIA.
Our good friend Tucker Carlson.
I love how after Tucker said that, he was literally like,
by the way, I was created by the CIA.
That's kind of what he said.
He was like, my dad was the CIA, and his dad was half his gene pool.
Yeah.
He was literally at least half created by the CIA.
I think he was trolling somebody earlier.
I saw some clips from that event.
Beyond the gold clip, he got triggered when somebody referenced
referenced the fact that his dad was in the CIA
and alluded to Tucker being deep state.
Well, the really, I mean, Tucker's done, like,
there's a bit of a love-hate relationship there with me and Tucker.
But, because he's done a lot of good shit.
But also...
I'm overwhelmed with Tucker, but we do have our qualms.
Well, I disagree.
I'm definitely not overwhelmingly positive,
but three months
I mean, what, three months ago, he was like
yeah, I just found out that my dad
was in the CIA. It's like he's been
on the record saying his dad was in the CIA
way before that.
Yeah. I think it was
this Candace Owens interview he said that.
Mm-hmm.
And then
of course, he's just
constantly shilling telegram and flooding
signal.
Which his brother
Elon was also doing.
this week, even though his encrypted chat app
is not open source and encrypted, quote unquote,
encrypted by a four-digit PIN that most people are probably doing like 1-1-1-1-4.
Well, let's jump in.
Let's start with the gold Tucker CIA
Bitcoin thing. I mean, it is
I think it is important FUD to break because it's not the only person
of relative prominence
that is out there
saying this is the fact
that the NSA or the CIA created Bitcoin.
Catherine Austin Fitz, who's big
in
World Economic Forum,
Great Reset circles,
conspiracy circles, for lack
of a better term.
There are many
others that I've run into that have said
it's the CIA behind the scenes
or the NSA.
I mean, we've been hearing this for decades.
Well, not decades, but since Bitcoin began.
Yes.
I remember it's one of the first pieces of quote-unquote FUD that I heard
when I was investigating Bitcoin, what, 12 years ago?
Yes.
And Parker and I actually, earlier this year,
when Tucker started running with this line publicly,
had a conversation.
We actually recorded a podcast about it.
It's like, okay, let's run with the assumption that the CIA,
the NSA, the deep state, whoever,
let's assume that they did.
Could you still have confidence that Bitcoin is what it is?
And I tweeted this out last night. Even if the CIA did
create Bitcoin, anyone who was so driven and or capable
can audit the code to determine whether it does what it's supposed to do.
The whole point is we don't have to trust the creator,
first of all. And then second of all, I think even a more interesting conclusion is so then you say
like, oh, okay, you don't have to trust the creator, but maybe the creator, it's alleged or
believed that the creator has maybe a million coin that's just sitting there that could be dumped on
the market. I mean, I would go to argue that probably historically and continues to be the
biggest threat to Bitcoin is the American
deep state and affiliated entities. So if they have a direct incentive
to see Bitcoin win, that's bullish as fuck. It's the most bullish conspiracy theory ever.
Yes.
It's a ridiculous reason not to own Bitcoin. It's like, oh yeah, well the people
in charge created it and have a massive incentive to see it succeed, so
that's why I don't own it. It's retarded.
well tucker during that clip at the tp usa event he was saying well they're they're using it to
funnel us into this uh digital panopticon cbdc world and that's the weird this is where this
argument really loses teeth because they equate bitcoin to a hyper controllable cbdc surveillance
coin and i think that's they basically use the transparent ledger and the chain heuristics that
can be used to follow utxos to determine try to determine to guess who owns what bitcoin and they
really latch on to that and say this is how the government's going to control you they're going to
be able to see everything you do and as we know we've been discussing for years yes this is almost
this is a half truth yes this is the case if you use bitcoin flippantly and unintentionally
not unintentionally but uh without the intention of using it privately by using the tools that
exist whether it's coin join pay join which is a form of coin join um basically using new addresses
using bitcoin in a in a way that preserves your privacy it is easier for people to try to figure
out which addresses you own, how much Bitcoin you have.
But just because it is possible
doesn't mean that the government's going to know exactly
who was what, where, when.
I think there's a better argument that
USD tokens, people call them stablecoins,
are quasi-CBDCs
or private bank digital currencies, PBDCs, if you will.
and I think
there's a tendency by people
including Tucker to conflate
broader crypto with Bitcoin
and it's probably more like that
I don't think Tucker's gone deep
on the probability analysis
surveillance tools that are used on Bitcoin
and the different tools that people can use
Bitcoin with
to use it as freedom money
it's probably more
of a
he's directionally correct on that
Right? Like USD tokens that are operating on blockchains provide the state and affiliated corporate entities a ton of control over people's lives. And it is something that we should push back against. I think the creator, regardless of who you think the creator is, is kind of irrelevant to that.
I see Soap Miner, our favorite soap maker, zapped us 21,000 sats in the Prime Alive chat.
He said, good morning, freaks. Soap Miner accepts CIA PSYOP sats.
And that's a perfect example, right?
He zapped us 21,000 sats, which is about $21, grew lightning.
And I have no idea.
We have no idea what UTXO funded that transaction.
We have no idea how much money he has.
We have no idea his transaction history.
that's incredibly powerful
no other
protocol allows for that
at scale
he only accepts
CIA PSYOPs ads
he only accepts that
period
did you see his new ad
that his wife did
I thought that was AI
no that's his wife
is that really
Logan go to primal.net
slash Odell
it's one of my recent retweets
let's let's play the clip
oh this is not the one i are you seriously still using chemical filled commercial soap
let's change that now soap miners soap lets you ditch chemical laden brands and choose a smarter
value-driven clean while mainstream brands poison their products with synthetic detergents
parabens, and unpronounceable chemicals, Soap Miner brings you pure tallow soap your ancestors
trusted. The base layer of our soap is just three ingredients. Grass-fed beef tallow, lye, water.
That's it. The scents come from pure essential oils and the color from natural clays. Everything
natural and pure. These bars cleanse without stripping your skin, moisturizing naturally
while commercial soaps leave you dry and irritated. We handcraft every bar using time-tested methods,
zero synthetic garbage, zero toxic chemicals, zero mystery ingredients seeping into your body.
One bar will last a month while commercial soap dissolves after days because real ingredients
have staying power. We demand Bitcoin because we recognize true value just like you do.
Stack quality soap like you stack sats. Get Soap Miner's Tallow Soap today. We only accept Bitcoin.
Soapminer.com.
It's a beautiful thing. I used this morning to shave my face.
I haven't showered yet. I will shower
after this
and
use the soap to
wash my soap.
I already showered today.
I traveled with the bar of soap minor.
We have
Matt21, Zap21000Sassy says,
Good morning. Great soap.
I'm sending a tweet out right now.
Why?
to let people know that we're on air.
People are waking up,
and to let Squawk Box know that we're competing with them.
Well, it's live on X, right?
Did you tag Joe?
I did.
He's live on Squawk Box right now,
checking his notifications,
shivering in fear that he has a new competitor
at this hour.
But let's continue the thread, Tucker.
Bitcoin's a CIA creation.
No, seriously, though.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sorry, sorry.
Elon's madly complete.
I threw us on a ridiculous tangent I apologize Freaks and Martin Continue He been on a complete propaganda tear with this ex chat It is a bit disgusting I think earlier this week when AWS went down AWS East proved that centralized third parties are security holes number one was affected by this
Many other services were affected by this.
I was recording a podcast on Riverside.
Monday afternoon and had to stop and reschedule it for yesterday
because Riverside...
AWS went down?
On AWS.
We could not even record during it.
That was actually an illuminating moment of how dependent a lot of systems are.
On AWS, Signal being one of them, Elon, and many others,
Onyx took the opportunity to sort of throw shade towards Signal.
I mean, it was more than shade. It was pretty aggressive posting.
Yes.
Can we trust XChat?
Well, first of all, Primal didn't go down and Strike didn't go down, which I was pretty proud of.
Both centralized, but pretty impressive.
Obviously, Bitcoin didn't go down and Nostra didn't go down, which are decentralized by design.
I think a lot of people threw some shade that I think it was 30% of Lightning nodes run on AWS.
The thing we should be proud of, Freaks, is that 70% of Lightning nodes do not run on AWS.
Flip the script. Flip the narrative.
I do think that Elon deserves a lot of credit, that he self-hosts all of his stack.
right like he's just got like gigantic uh surfer farms uh that hosts all his shit including x
um so it's pretty cool that when half the internet goes down uh x doesn't go down right i think uh
that's an important service uh for the world that you're still able to communicate through x
All that said, look, the way Signal's designed is that you're not trusting the server provider.
And this means that Signal's able to operate without hosting their own servers.
And they can use a variety of large server operators.
You know, AWS being the big one, but you also have Microsoft with Azure.
And to a lesser extent, you have Hetzner in Germany.
now they clearly did not handle their
failover right. They should be hosting on multiple
of them. But I think the important thing to realize here is
what happened was a denial of service. You didn't have access
to Signal, which sucks. A majority
of my life runs through Signal in terms of
projects that I operate on and on family stuff.
And I just wasn't able to send messages, make calls,
stuff like that for three hours, which is pretty lame.
But it doesn't actually affect the security and privacy
of the Signal Protocol.
The whole design is that both message content and metadata
does not leak to the server operator.
That's how it's built.
That's how these things should be built
if privacy and security is important.
Then the second piece is, I think it's great to see an encrypted version of DMs on X. This is something that has been desired for a long time. What most people don't realize is part of the reason Signal even exists is because first it was text secure.
and Jack, when he was running Twitter,
acquired it and acquired the team, including Moxie,
and wanted to add encrypted DMs
and never added encrypted DMs.
Who knows why?
Maybe it was technical reasons,
maybe it was political pressure,
but he never added encrypted DMs.
And he then spun it out as an open source project.
Even though Twitter owned the intellectual property
that became Signal,
They spun it out for a common good.
And then we ended up having the Signal Foundation
and ended up having this nonprofit, Good for the World,
which is pretty fucking cool.
I think Dorsey actually does not get enough credit
for the success that Signal has become.
Because if you follow just direct economic incentives,
there is no good reason for him to release Moxie
and the code out to the public after he failed to implement it.
But anyway, all that said, Elon deserves credit
for finally adding encrypted DMs.
into X.
It's strictly better than regular DMs.
Regular DMs like Elon and all the employees,
a lot of employees at X can just read them on demand
in your full history of all your DMs.
I think people don't really appreciate
how crazily dystopian that is.
And so XChat, their encrypted alternative to DMs
is strictly better than that.
But at the end of the day,
First of all, not open source, so we can't verify any claims.
I think at a bare minimum, it should be source viewable.
So maybe you can't fork it and monetize it, but at least be able to verify what's running.
That's key.
And then second of all, it operates on a four-digit PIN,
which even if you pick a quote-unquote secure four-digit PIN,
it's trivial to brute force.
Once again, as we said, Elon is running all his own servers,
including huge AI data farms.
He can brute force that shit probably
in less than a day to get access to your messages.
And people don't pick secure pins.
Maybe it's their birthday that they've already told X
when their birthday is.
Maybe it's 1212, but they don't pick secure pins.
Class for their phone number.
Yeah, and I will say that this is a hard problem to solve.
which is why it's like trade-offs all the way down.
No solutions, only trade-offs.
But I think Signal makes the best trade-off balance
in how they handle it,
which is if you reinitialize Signal on a different device,
you just lose all your messages.
You can't get access to those messages.
And this is also where people say
the phone number dependency on Signal is questionable.
Well, they're trying to make a reasonably secure,
user-friendly messenger, which is very difficult to do.
And that's part of the reason why they use the phone number requirement.
Even though the phone number isn't doxed to people you contact,
it's used as spam mitigation and user authentication.
It's nuanced, right?
But for Elon to go out there and be like,
Signal's insecure because AWS is down, he knows exactly what he's doing.
He's a smart guy.
he's incredibly intelligent
he's one of the best executors on the planet
he builds multi-billion dollar businesses
like it's lunch
and he knows exactly what he's doing
I mean I think that's a red flag
I think that's a red flag
and it's disappointing to see
just as it was disappointing to see
Tucker Fudd signal for an inferior solution
in Telegram
because I know Tucker knows what he's doing
And I know Elon knows what he's doing here.
So it's a little bit more of the same on that front.
But anyway, those are my thoughts.
A masterclass in newsjacking is what Elon displayed on Monday when AWS went down.
But to your point, I don't think anybody should run with the assumption that XChat is NTED encrypted until there is at least source viewable code.
No, it's better than DMs though.
you can treat it as better than DMs
I wouldn't treat it as secure comms
or the other
piece by the way is
it's absolutely ridiculous
that Amazon going down
stops your
communication method
I'm not
bailing out signal here
they should make that shit more resilient
and I'm hoping
first of all there's a bunch of alternatives that are more resilient
including simple acts
which has some reliability issues
which stops me from using it as my daily driver right now.
But you can pick your own server and you can host your own server
which makes it more resilient.
Keat, which is not open source
which is an issue and I'm hoping they open source it soon
but it's cool because it doesn't require any server whatsoever.
It's purely P2P. The problem there is it docks
your IP address so people should just be aware you can use it with a VPN
if you don't want to talk to your IP address,
but I'd like to see them be open source.
And then finally, White Noise,
which is trying to build a signal on top of Nostra,
which uses the global relay network,
which once again, the Nostra relay network
is kind of similar to Lightning Notes, right?
Like I think people can FUD the Nostra relay network
and say 30% are run on AWS.
But I think the cool part is 70% aren't, right?
And there's a bunch of Nostra relays
that aren't run on AWS.
and if you're running a smaller
Nostra Relay, you can self-host it
relatively easily.
So I think we have
better solutions available to us
in a situation
where we don't have Amazon
and NSA and stuff trying to stop
Signal. Signal works.
But it was never designed in the threat
model of denial of service from
major corporations combined
with the U.S. government. The U.S. government
wants to stop Signal messages from happening.
They can't necessarily read them,
but they can stop those messages from happening.
And we need to have better solutions available to people, I think.
Agreed.
Funny to note, this was AWS East,
is the block of servers that went down.
And it seems like many systems are highly dependent on this.
the CEO of the AWS or the leader of the AWS unit within Amazon
came out only a couple weeks ago
and announced that 90% of the code for AWS
was being generated by artificial intelligence.
So it seems like the LLMs may not be as foolproof
as many MAG-7 tech execs would like us to believe.
Who knows if this was the exact cause of it.
I just thought it was pretty funny that he came out and announced this in the head.
One of the biggest outages that they've had in recent years.
It's a weird flex.
I don't really understand that flex.
Coinbase did something similar.
Brian Armstrong came out with that kind of flex.
I don't think it's really something you should be proud of
if you're hosting mission-critical infrastructure.
but hopefully we see Amazon
give us a real
debrief of what happened here
but I would say
to actual operators, if you're running
a service, you should have failover situations
it's one thing if you're hosting
on big tech servers
but
you should be able to gracefully fall over
to servers hosted by someone else
or at least somewhere else
in the AWS ecosystem
not US East
if US East fails
I don't think there's been an official post-mortem on it,
but there were many people on X saying that AWS suffered a massive outage,
apparently caused by DynamoDB experiencing a DNS resolution failure
and causing a total failure cascade in US-East 1.
So it looks like a database dependency and a DNS resolution failure.
Yeah, I will say Primal, for instance, does not use AWS, period.
But we're not self-hosting yet, so we'll start self-hosting pretty soon.
But then also the beautiful thing is that you can run your own caching server.
You can run your own Primal backend if you want.
And be independent and easily switch between it and the UI.
I see Mark C. zapped his 21,000 stats.
He said, just got the baby down for his morning nap and see our HR morning rip.
What a great start to the day.
Shout out to Paul Lacks.
Is that the hat you're wearing?
No, this is Pub Key.
He just knows your lore.
I am a DePaul alumni, and I was the head coach at DePaul's men's lacrosse team, our club team, my sophomore through senior year.
And we went to the Nationals my senior year.
We won our conference, went to Nationals.
I was the head coach.
I'd suffered my sixth concussion my freshman year.
Hung up the cleats, hung up the stick, put on the whistle,
and led the men to glory.
We went from 2-10 to, I believe we went 10-3 our senior year.
Went to Nationals, won our conference.
It was a beautiful thing. Shout out to you, Mark C., for knowing that DPU lacks lore.
I'm proud of you, Marty.
But this isn't a lacrosse podcast. It's a Bitcoin podcast.
Did you see what was happening at the Federal Reserve this week?
It's a gold podcast. No, probably not.
There was a teach-in with many people from the crypto industry.
basically a day-long event i think i watched like two hours of it
was actually pretty interesting the fact that the federal reserve was open to
industry quote-unquote industry leaders it wasn't there was no bitcoin people there
outside maybe the ceo of fireblocks who took some time to explain multi-sig and how you can
he focused on bitcoin specifically for a good amount of time which i was happy about but
It was mostly a crypto event.
How can we integrate stablecoins and real-world asset tokens into the banking system?
It was interesting.
Exciting.
Fed Reserve Governor Waller was there, and he was saying that, hey, we need to implement this stuff.
But the reason I bring it up is because stablecoins, real-world assets,
this is all that crypto and Wall Street is focused on right now.
I think it's a red herring, a siren call that people should be aware of.
They're going to try and tokenize all the things and dump shitty commercial real estate exposure onto retail.
So beware.
Look, I mean, I think, yeah, first of all, investment in real estate is a shit coin.
It's one thing if you want to own your own house.
You can't live in a Bitcoin.
and I think it gives families a lot of flexibility and relative freedom if they own their own house So I respect that But to actually own real estate as an investment is just a horrible investment compared to Bitcoin
You're way better off holding Bitcoin.
And I think history has shown that.
I think the future will continue to show that.
I think it'll be very obvious to people after the fact.
But real world assets, it's been a broken record about this for seven years now on the show and longer in person.
But real world assets require some trusted third party to actually enforce that contract and hold the real world asset for you.
There's no way to cryptographically, natively, digitally connect your token with something in the real world, whether that's gold, whether that's dollars, whether that's real estate, whether that's stocks.
All that said, I do think UX-wise, it's probably strictly better than the conventional traditional system.
So there is a step improvement there.
But I think it's way overhyped and people focus way too much time on it because you do have that trusted third party involved.
And that's the key fundamental thing that Bitcoin solved, right?
Is that you're able to have money that you can save without permission with no trusted third party involved because you have this native digital bearer.
Yeah, completely agree.
But going back to the CEO of Fireblocks, his name is escaping me.
It was pretty cool to see him explain to the people in the audience.
were asking questions about like okay like how do we do the sort of interbank settlement with
this technology and he was like you don't need to bitcoin the ledger does it for you thank you
if you have your custody set up right and you're able to officially separate accounts for your
clients using uh separate wallets with specific utxos and you're accounting for that appropriately
and you're sending between those, it is doing the settling for you.
And so it was a signal to me.
It's like wild times.
We have people sitting in Federal Reserve buildings
explaining how this stuff works to Federal Reserve board members
and basically saying this technology completely revamps
the system of account that we have in the banking system right now.
The ledger does it for you.
the files are in the computer
if you will
and
I think it was a
sign of the times it was very
corporate and very
sooty but it was like whoa
we were actually
making the case to the Federal Reserve that
Bitcoin the protocol
distributed
ledger technology for lack of a better term
is a step function improvement
in the way that we settle money
in the banking system today.
The Federal Reserve, it's officially noted
in the notes of a meeting that was held
that the tech is here and it's better.
So that was cool to see.
But as I said, a lot of focus on stablecoins
and real-world assets.
And I would piggyback on what you said.
I agree.
It may be a step function improvement
in the way that you issue an account for stocks
or the real estate shares still doesn't really make any sense to me,
but stocks makes a lot of sense to me.
But again, what is the market about?
I mean, look, I think the real estate shares also make sense,
except for the fact that the underlying asset's a shitcoin.
And maybe it makes more sense after post-hyper-Bitcoinization
when these things get repriced.
and there's actually
a proper market valuation
on the independent real estate that's being valued
because right now it's just completely overvalued
particularly in Bitcoin terms
but even in fiat terms
but when I say the shares make sense
is because there are people that already do these schemes
and it's very convoluted
and difficult for the end user
If you're going to say all else is equal, and I hate that I'm arguing the opposite side of this, but if you say all else is equal and you're buying one one-hundredth of a building, pre-blockchain versus post-blockchain.
It's like pre-blockchain, you're signing a contract with someone, you have no secondary capability, you can't then sell it to someone else, you can't easily transfer it.
It's net-net benefit.
It's net-net, I think, a clear benefit to the end, quote-unquote, investor.
Once again, besides the fact that the actual underlying asset is completely overvalued.
I would say, just real quick here, I'm going to put my Bitcoin Policy Institute hat on for a second.
We've gotten a lot of shit, playing politics, blah, blah, blah, getting involved with the beast.
The status quo of Bitcoin Policy Institute doesn't exist is that these meetings continue to happen that are just completely dominated by corporate shit corners.
It's just like massive companies that only care about crypto.
and the reason Bitcoin Policy Institute exists in the first place
is so that Bitcoiners that care about using Bitcoin as freedom money
have a seat at the table for these types of events.
I would say in BPI's situation right now,
it was a miss that we didn't have anyone at that meeting.
But the fact that it was a near miss, I think, is a win in itself.
And the assumption is that those types of meetings,
we will have a Bitcoiner there.
that is actually advocating for people that care about Bitcoin
as freedom money in America.
Yeah, I mean, the list, it was
the CEO from
Fireblocks,
you had Charles from Paxos there,
Kyle Simani, the Chainlink guy.
Coinbase was there, right?
I think Coinbase was there.
You had LeadBank.
LeadBank, for anybody who's not in the know,
they've been an incredible partner for Bitcoin companies in the space for many
years.
One of the leaders on the banking side to actually stick their necks out and
bank Bitcoin companies,
even during the 2023 crisis when people were playing hot potato,
a bunch of other shit corners,
basically going to the federal reserve and saying, here,
here's what you guys need to do.
And to your point, I think we need many more Bitcoiners.
in the room when these conversations are happening.
When it comes to things like escrow,
they're very fundamental, low-hanging fruit.
They're banking functionalities that could bring a lot of value,
not only to Bitcoin, but to the banks themselves,
as it pertains to leveraging multi-sig
and using Bitcoin as collateral for lending products.
and that really wasn't covered in depth.
It was all about tokenization
and stuff that should not be a priority right now.
We need to re-collateralize the banking system
with better collateral.
And that should have been the focus.
It wasn't.
But luckily we have the people at BPI
working to change that.
And on that note, big news out of BPI this week.
Connor Brown, who was the lead for Bitcoin
in AI within Cynthia Lummis' office.
Senator from Wyoming has stepped down from that position and joined
BPI as the head of strategy. It's pretty big.
Big get for BPI. Congrats to you guys.
I'd love to see it. I think wins all around.
For those who don't know, I've known Connor.
I've known Connor for eight years now. We met in 2017 when he was a young lad,
a young pup in law school.
And he's one of those lesser known
but highly impactful individuals
in the Bitcoin industry.
I mean, you want to talk like,
okay, Kobe and Ledger were able to sell their podcast
for a season to Coinbase for $25 million.
Like, okay, good for them.
That's great.
We haven't been able to, you know,
sell RHR to that level.
But Connor Brown
grew up on RHR
and then ended up leading Bitcoin
strategy for
a senator out of Wyoming.
Senator Lummis, I think, is a massive...
That alone,
RHR is winning
just on that front alone.
Huge shout out to Connor.
I'm very excited to have him at BPI.
I think he's going to
gradually then suddenly
take a much larger role at BPI
so I'm pretty excited about it.
Yes, I will be hopping on an Accela
train down to DC to
record with Connor for TFTC
a week from Monday
in the Rumble Studios. We're doing it in the Rumble
Studios, so be on the lookout for that.
That's exciting.
Yeah. Connor's a good friend.
I'm happy for him, happy for BPI.
I think we'll be able to
expand upon it when we sit down to record
but he's been
doing some very big stuff behind the scenes for Bitcoin for many years.
I'm excited that he's now moving into a...
I think he's going to be able to speak more freely now, too.
Yes.
We'll be able to see Connor unleashed.
It's going to be a beautiful thing.
A lot of work to do.
And to that note, I've been talking to Connor behind the scenes,
and I feel like he'd be comfortable with me relaying this.
I know this is a core initiative for BPI too, but if you're young, hungry, and suit-like, the Hill needs more Bitcoiners.
The Hill needs more Bitcoiners.
If you're a young, hungry suit corner, we need you. Uncle Satoshi needs you.
Uncle Satoshi needs you.
and Connor's been tweeting about this too
if you're out there and you're willing to
live in the swamp and help advise on Bitcoin policy
you are desperately needed
so consider taking up the call
you don't have to be young either
if you're an older freak, C-Corner
it'd be great to have you
A lot of these staffing positions are lower level.
I think that's the problem we face right now,
is we do need young people.
Yeah, we need the interns.
It's a significant pay decrease
if you're a well-established suit-coiter already.
Maybe consider it your civic duty.
No, fuck that.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
Your Satoshi duty.
Yes.
Try to look for things to talk about.
It's been a pretty slow news week outside.
Well, let's talk about,
can we talk about how
Shitcoin RHR sold for $25 million for a season?
I sent Marty a tweet.
So if you're not aware,
up only is
Crypto,
Kobay, Kobay's,
and Ledger Status's show.
They've had some prolific fucking
episodes, to be fair.
I mean, the one with Sam Van Vandt and
Suzu on the same episode. And Martin
Shkreli.
And Martin was like,
Shkreli was like, you're going to jail.
You're going to hate it.
They said
they weren't going to do another season unless someone
bought a $25 million NFT and Coinbase bought it.
And there was this tweet that was like,
imagine, so Ledger's status is like basically
just turned into a dad poster on crypto Twitter.
And he's like building a ranch with like his,
he's got like a flock of children.
And someone's like, imagine being Ledger's wife.
And just like your co-host just got you $12.5 million
for an eight episode season.
and I sent Marty the tweet.
I was like, Marty, when are you going to do this for my wife?
I'm trying my best here.
The best part of that tweet was because his British co-host
has infinite internet aura points.
I guess there's more to the story.
He has some kind of shitcoin investing company
that Coinbase bought for the $375 million
and part of that was the $25 million
podcast sponsorship.
He hooked up his co-host.
He was a good co-host.
So he gets a shout out for that.
He could have just kept the money himself, probably.
And Kobe, I mean,
despite the fact that he's a shit corner,
he is hilarious.
And I've been following OnX
for more than 11 years.
One of the better shit corners.
Yeah.
it was
it was amazing that they avoided
like it was kind of fucked up that they were like
FTX friend people
yeah
there was no
me culpa or whatever on that
like there was never like a
I'm sorry I fucked up
no to Kobe's
sort of aura
point like he's
evaded this his whole career
I mean he was prolific early days back in like
the 2014
to 2017
era.
He's been around forever.
Calling tops and bottoms.
What is it about
RHR?
Who would we sell
the show to
for $25 million?
It doesn't exist.
It's never going to happen.
We're about $25 million short
on being comparable
to their acquisition.
it is there i mean but we get zaps what is we get zaps so we got that coming for us
but what is it about this show this format are we too boring like remember last cycle when up only
was was very popular it's like this shit they're talking about i mean like to your point like ftx
they're front men essentially and that blew up and these people are able to maintain personal
responsibility is not sexy.
It's like telling people you have to do a long grind of being conservative,
raising a family and saving hard money.
There no mass appeal there We exist for the ride or dies and that fine Once again to the Conor Brown point we have a super strong Rabbit Hole Recap mafia
One of the coolest things about 1031, for instance,
is a bunch of the companies we support,
the founders grew up on Rabbit Hole Recap.
I don't know if you saw a million posted.
One of the freaks said that we curse too much.
and million responded
and his daughter
who's working at primal now
like has been listening
to rabbit hole recap since she was like
12 and he's like she turned out fine
like that's crazy
that is crazy they're children that are
adults now they're adults that
are running that are running
portfolio companies at 1031
yeah
that's cool we're old we're old dude we've been
on this game for a while
$25 million might be slightly cooler, but that's pretty cool.
That is cool.
We're not in it for the money.
We're here for the tech.
We're in it for both, but yes.
If anybody just wants to give us $25 million to split down the middle,
Logan, we'll throw you some sats.
Dude, the funniest part is it's an eight-episode season.
We do 52 episodes a fucking year.
hey
let's not rain on people's success
shout out to Kobe and Ledger even though you've been
from Bitcoin exchanges
they deserve credit for it
the Ledger
part of it is hilarious he's just in the woods
building a ranch
just along for the ride
honey we're 12 and a half million dollars richer
good for that family
I agree
I always like Ledger
a lot.
Yeah.
It's a good one.
What do we have to look forward to this weekend
in Lugana? Are you excited?
I don't know.
I'm doing four panels.
When is your
Shark Tank?
That's on Monday. I'm doing four
panels in addition to that.
Are you excited for that?
Yeah, they did the first round yesterday.
So I sat in for a little
bit.
There's some cool pitches there.
I think it's cool that Tether is throwing a bunch of money as prizes, automatic prizes for the top winners on both the open source side and the for-profit side.
I used to love Shark Tank.
I definitely do not watch it anymore, but I used to love Shark Tank, so it's kind of cool.
And they're doing it at their version of Bitcoin Park, the POW hub.
they have like a four production suite
like Giacomo is a legend among men
he's a fearless leader over there
I interviewed Francis
for civil dispatch and then right afterwards he was a judge on the first round
so like the idea is they have like capital allocators
and they have one entrepreneur on the judge panel
so like it's kind of funny that Francis is on the judge panel
because not only is he not an investor,
but also he bootstrapped his business
and never took outside capital.
But he was there as their advocate, basically.
So that was fun.
Vibs were high.
People were excited about it.
It's cool seeing young people excited about building on Bitcoin,
just in general.
Are you allowed to talk about what pitches have been made yet,
or is that for?
a recording that will be released later.
I think I'm not supposed to.
Everything is going to be exclusively posted to Rumble,
is my understanding,
including Plan B Forum's livestream.
Yeah, not shocking.
Tether invested $750 million into Rumble.
Most expensive livestream of all time.
But yes,
it should be up with pretty good production quality
hopefully relatively soon
because I always think the stuff ages really poorly
so
hopefully it gets released sooner rather than later
yeah
I'm just looking at the mempool
I want to check the mempool
one sat per vbite across the board
mempools are empty
it doesn't look like people are mempooling right now
um
No, I think they are.
Marty, they're still spamming the chain.
They're just spamming it quite cheaply.
Yes.
That's what's happening right now.
That is what's happening.
I will say that, freaks, I've been doing my part.
I send a lot of on-chain transactions.
I do as well.
I've sent probably average
at least three to four a week.
Yeah, I mean, if you're not sending
at least 16 on-chain transactions a month,
And you're part of the problem.
Yeah, you are.
You're like, I made the line for you, Marty.
It's, uh...
I'm looking at the...
I'm just on mempool.space perusing.
It's a great website to peruse if you're looking for data.
1.11 zeta hash per second.
Did you see they added their stale block feature?
Where if there's two blocks competing, it shows it
on the homepage now?
Let me see.
Shout out them for that.
Where am I supposed to see this?
I mean, you'll only see it if there's two blocks competing.
So it'll just show us it.
I think if you go to...
Foundry and Antpool had a block that...
was competing
block number
let's see if I see it here
while scrolling scroll scroll scroll
no I can't find it
but they had a block that was competing
that was two blocks next to each other
trying to look for this
if you go to
let me
and see if I can find it.
Block 920-212.
920-212.
I passed it.
Scroll to it on the main page.
I'm way behind it.
scroll to it on the main page
920212
I'm in the process
I was down at like
919
and you can see
you can see two blocks there
just back to back
it's pretty cool
212
I mean I think it's intuitive
how they display it
and just for the freaks
that maybe are
newer and don't know
what a stale block is
is like sometimes you have
at the chain tip
two miners find a block at the same time.
And then there's basically a race
on which block gets mined on top of with the next block.
It's 920212.
Yeah, I'm not seeing it in my UI.
Okay, well, I see it right here.
Interesting.
And you can click the stale block, which is kind of cool.
Anyway, I think it's a simple, nice UX improvement.
because it does happen a little bit more frequently than people realize.
Technically not a fork.
It only becomes a fork if both sides get mined on top of it in continuity.
It happens more often than people think.
It's part of the reason why we want very strong block propagation
where newly mined blocks get transferred through the network very quickly.
obviously it sucks for a miner if they mine a block
and then someone else goes
to someone else gets the reward for it.
Yeah, it makes you feel like a loser too.
It's like I mined the block,
but everybody else chose this guy's block
and built on that.
What about my block?
It was perfectly valid.
Why didn't you build on this one?
Yeah, it's hard to not take it personally.
Yeah.
I was going to say, though, looking at the mining section,
1.11 Zeta hash per second over the last week.
I just think it's crazy since we've passed a Zeta hash,
like 0.11, like we're adding an X hash.
I missed immediately.
That would be 100 X hash.
Yeah, I mean, there's so many things with Bitcoin
that you're sitting there laying in bed and it just blows your mind.
like that one Bitcoin is worth
a hundred of your rings
which is like what the fuck
and these rings
this ring is
more than double the price
is that a Mene?
yeah it's Mene so I can track it
on the website
yeah my wife's jewelry portfolio
is up a ton
yeah
Roy if you're listening it'd be great
to price it in Bitcoin
you don't need Roy to do it
you can download opportunity costs
and do it right in the UI
I know but it should still
for all the users of Mennay that don't have your extension
they should be able to just
tab BTC as the denominator
yeah
we've got an upwards difficulty adjustment of 5%
coming in a little over 900 blocks for 6 days
By the way, I have a bug report for opportunity cost.
What is it?
Big numbers.
It messes up with big numbers.
I went to Forbes Rich List.
Go to Forbes Real-Time Rich List.
Why were you on Forbes Rich List?
just aspiring
trying to dream big
do I have to have an excuse to realize
yeah
you see it messes up the numbers
I'm seeing Elon Musk is worth
487.5 billion
which is 4,449,414
bitcoin
is that correct?
It sounds right.
Yeah, it does sound right.
No, yeah, it was wrong for me.
It was way low.
Maybe I'm on Firefox, so maybe it's Chrome specific
if you're using Chrome or Brave.
Yeah, it was on Chrome.
Anyway, bug reports submitted.
I've done my duty.
All right, thank you.
I'll hit up Moses, let him know.
We need to work on this.
It is open source, too.
You can make a PR.
I just did.
I like the analog PRs are the best PRs.
Or issues. It's not even a PR.
PR would involve me doing code change.
Now you got me on Forbes Rich List.
We got Elon, Larry Ellison, Zuck, Bezos, Larry Page,
Sergey Brin, Bernard, Arnolt, and family.
Steve Ballmer, Jensen Huang, and Warren Buffett.
I mean, it's pretty crazy seeing it in Bitcoin terms, right?
Yeah.
If we aggregate all these together, 1.3, 1.4, it's 2.7, 1.4, that's 4.1, 1.7.
That's 5.8, 1.7, that's 7.5, 1.9, 9.4, 2.1, 11.5, 2.3.
2.3, 13.7, or 8, excuse me, 3, 16.7, and then 4.4.
That would be, yeah, 22.1 million.
22.1 million is the aggregate wealth of 22.2 million.
22.1 million Bitcoin is the aggregate wealth of the top 10 billionaires in the world.
Definitionally
overpriced, right?
Yeah, the 10 richest people in the world.
Literally can happen. Once we move to a Bitcoin standard,
they all have to scramble.
Who on this list has Bitcoin?
Zuck's mentioned it. Elon definitely has it.
Elon, Zuck.
I think Bezos has mentioned it.
I think everybody...
Warren Buffett may be the only one
in the top ten that doesn't have Bitcoin.
And he's old, it's fine.
Elon, what, you said
his net worth is 4 million Bitcoin?
4.4.
He probably has, what,
like 100k Bitcoin?
Would not be shocked.
yeah
so he's way
under exposed to bitcoin
regardless of how he cut it
because there's no way he has anywhere
near
a million bitcoin
but bitcoin was created by the CIA
and the price is crashing so
it doesn't really matter
so is SpaceX
it tends to be bullish
what was that
I said
I said SpaceX was also created by the CIA.
It tends to be bullish.
Facebook was created by the CIA.
All the most valuable things tend to be created by the CIA.
That is true.
I can hear my children rustling outside the office door.
We scheduled this early, not only to compete with Squawk Box,
but I like my...
We can wrap. You want to read shout-outs?
Oh, yeah.
We got shout outs.
I was going to say, I really enjoy driving my boys to school.
We have to get on the road here in about 15 minutes.
I shouldn't be an absentee father in the morning, especially with a new child.
Wow.
Holy crap.
I agree.
Rabbit Hole Recap, 379.
Stay humble.
Stack gold.
Pringle Mac, 95,000 sats.
been MIA, busy being the change we want to see in the world, but still
Never miss a show. Prison Island time makes
live rips a bitch.
Keep back the basic
principles.
Alive. Stay humble or get wrecked.
See you two freaks in
person somewhere in 26.
Love, Syl and Tony.
Syl and Tony, we love you. Thanks, Syl and Tony.
Appreciate you guys. We need to catch up.
Ride or die.
Stimmy. Hashtag 40 hours
per week of headphones on.
22,222
SATs 2s across the board.
pound drum boost shout out to ben working in senator ben's office great to meet you this week
there are freaks in bitcoin bends everywhere this is what winning looks like like we said earlier
love it there's up only yeah sure they got bought for 25 million dollars or one season
but are did they have as much influence behind the scenes as rabbit hole recap mafia i don't think
It's a good name, too, up only.
I mean, besides the fact that it's pretty much gone,
all their positions have gone down only.
But good name.
Gert, ADIQ, 21,000 sats.
Hi, Freaks. I'm appealing for your help.
A catastrophic node failure has occurred,
meaning I'm out of a lot of sats.
Can I ask that if you have a channel to my node,
which is Mickey Weir
M-I-C-K-E-Y
W-E-I-R
can you please force close the channel
so I might recover my fun
help a fellow freak out from a bad situation
I appreciate karma
and we'll put it back out into the world
love you all
dang
well that's fucked up
hope for the best there
yeah
beware freaks
I've lost a lot of stats running lightning notes freaks
if you don't want to deal with that
consider listening to the rip that I had with Francis on Sill Dispatch your favorite podcast app Did you guys touch on this Touch on AWS Was it going on as you guys were
Bull Wallet just uses Liquid at rest.
It's like Moon, but with Liquid.
Spoiler.
Instead of doing on-chain swaps where your fees get ridiculous,
it just uses Liquid swaps.
which are like a regular
liquid transactions like 33 sats
for a transaction super cheap.
I like the trade-off.
And then of course you have
the trade-off is that you have to trust
Liquid but
he has an auto-swap feature in the app so once
you hit 2 million sats, a million of the sats
go to on-chain
so that you reduce your exposure.
Which I like that idea.
I like the idea of
graduating people into stronger custody.
be. That's my threshold
for fat UTXO, million sat UTXO.
That's a good one.
It's a good one. I think you can probably push it,
but a million solid.
You can probably put
fee-wise, you can probably push it to
100k sats, but I like a million
sats.
Thousand bucks.
No.
Ten thousand bucks.
Maybe by the end of next year. Who knows?
Dude,
Dude, people are fading a million dollar Bitcoin right now.
Have you noticed that?
Yeah.
Bullish as fuck.
I love that.
I love that sentiment.
People are really down on the coin right now.
That's when I'm most bullish.
I'm not going to tell you to smash buy,
because historically telling people to smash buy on the show
has led to a precipitous decline in the price.
Consider staying humble and sagging sides about it.
Yes.
and we will end on that because my boys are getting yelled at
and I think my wife
much love
peace and love freaks