RABBIT HOLE RECAP #388: A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE

What's up, Freaks? This rip of RHR was brought to you by our good friends at CoinKite. They produce the Cold Card Q, my favorite hardware wallet. It's got two secure enclaves. It's got a full screen, full keyboard here. As you can see, if you're watching, if you can't watch, just imagine something that looks like a BlackBerry. It allows you to create private public key pairs offline in an arrogant fashion. You never have to connect the cold card queue to an Internet device. You can sign transactions and PSPTs remotely in the most secure fashion. If you're a Bitcoin power user and you're looking for the best security, go pick up a cold card queue and go to Coinkite.com. Find the cold card queue there. I think you go to ColdCard.com as well. Use the code RHR for 5% off. Step up your security. Get a cold card queue. This was also brought to you by our good friends at Stackwork. If you're looking for a great way to make KYC-free sats, Stackwork has bounties. Go to stackwork.ai, find their bounties page, and contribute to the bounties. You can make Bitcoin KYC-free for completing the bounties. If you're a developer looking to scoop up some easy sats, go check out the bounties, contribute to them, and stack some sats. Stackwork.ai. Matt and I have been talking about privacy and the importance of using a VPN for seven years now, literally seven years. I believe at least once every episode or two. It's like, hey, make sure you're running a VPN. I think it's especially important today where you have governments in the UK, other parts of Europe, all across the world, really trying to introduce digital ID and curbing speech with hate speech laws. Make sure you're protecting your privacy and shielding yourself from government surveillance as you're perusing the web. our VPN of choice here at RHR is Obscura. It's built by a Bitcoiner. Four Bitcoiners, Carl Dong did some very critical work for Bitcoin back in the day, but he decided to shift his focus to bringing privacy to everybody with Obscura. It is a VPN that cannot log. Literally, by the way, it's designed. A lot of VPNs will hand ways, say, we're not logging, we're not logging. You can't trust them. You want the VPN that cannot log. That is Obscura. Go to Obscura.net, use the code RHR for 25% off when you sign up any of their deals. Make sure you're using it, particularly if you're in one of these countries where the governments are becoming extremely censorious and targeting citizens that exhibit wrong things. You should be running a VPN. That VPN should be obscura. Obscura.net. Code RHR. 25% off. This rip was brought to you by our official electrolyte sponsor here at RHR. Salt of the Earth. You've been hearing Matt and I talk about it quite a bit. I drink multiple packets up in a day. You've got to stay hydrated. That's why my face looks so good. That's why I'm getting buff. I'm able to get to the gym more because I'm hydrated. Matt, he's looking incredible. I'm sure you've all noticed it. You want to know why? Salt of the earth, baby. Go to drinkssauté.com. Use the code RHR. You're going to get 15% off. I'm dead serious. It has made my life way better. My wife, she's right behind me right now laughing, but she's laughing because she knows it's true. She drinks like seven a day. I drink a few a day, maybe seven a day too. Matt, I don't even want to tell you how much he's drinking. It's good. It keeps you hydrated. It keeps you alert. keeps you ready to go. DrinkSauté.com That's D-R-I-N-K-S-O-T-E dot com. Use the code R-H-R for 15% off any order. You've had a dynamic where money's 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 probably should be. What's up, freaks? Come back to Rabbit Hole Recap here on a beautiful, beautiful Thursday afternoon, 2.15 Eastern. 15 minutes late to this one. But that was my fault this time I don't think it's that bad We've been later before Yeah freaks We announce the time the day before Or sometimes day of You should always add at least 15 minutes It's been pretty consistent I can't If I add 15 minutes to the time Then we'll be 30 minutes late So I have to give you a time And then we're rushing to make it We have to hang her to that time. Oh, you feeling in the holiday spirit yet? Yeah, did you see what I named the episode? A Christmas miracle. I just saw it. Just read it. Manifest. I don't know what the Christmas miracle is going to be, but it'd be nice to have one. Tune in. Okay, now I'm going to tweet this with some clickbait. Let's see what the... Tune in. Some people have their Christmas show this week, but since we're crazy people, we're going to have a Christmas show next week. So I couldn't call this episode Merry Christmas, so instead it's called A Christmas Miracle. It's a two-parter Christmas special. Before. I almost called it Merry Christmas Part 1. But I hate having multiple parts. Okay, tune in. And we're explaining why Bitcoin is going to hit $444,444 by Christmas. Okay, guys, here's what's going to happen. Elon Musk is going to start mining Bitcoin, and it's gone to the moon. He's going to mine Bitcoin on the moon. We were talking about this. I was talking about this last night with somebody off the record. This whole mining in space and AI data centers in space, Wasn't there a conversation in Bitcoin a while ago where we really dove into the physics? I forget if it was Drew Bonsol or a couple others. And basically the conclusion was that you can't dissipate heat from the chip, so it's almost impossible to mine in space. And now we have this whole, we're going to put in space. I didn't hear that. Isn't it quite a bit of a vacuum in space? There's nothing for the... Yeah, but the thing is, it's space. There's no atmosphere. What are you saying, Logan? I think Logan's trying to tell us something. Why don't you speak up, Logan? I don't know where the heat to transfer to. Am I really quiet? Yeah, you're very quiet. Why? I don't know. All right, bye. I think he was agreeing with me, though. I'm just going to assume that he was agreeing with me. I mean, I can hear you. You were just very quiet. Any freaks in the live chat on Noster or YouTube if you're physics experts? I remember a call because you can't dissipate the heat. You can't move it. It's very cold, obviously, but you can't move the heat off the chips. I'm asking Maple. Okay, I think you can hear me now. I can hear you. We can hear you. Because space is a vacuum, objects cannot lose heat through conduction, direct contact with a cold substance, or convection, air or water, carrying heat away. But they can cool through radiative emission. I don't know. Maybe that's to say I saw it. Is that what you were going to say, Lou? Radiative emission is much slower. Yeah. Or it can use cryogenic cooling. Advanced instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope use multilayer sunshields and cryo coolers to reach temperatures as low as 7 Kelvin for precise observations. Kelvin. What an interesting temperature scale. I mean I Is it where Kelvin starts or something I mean the crazy thing for me is I mean I think you could probably figure out the cooling thing The power aspect I can see being a massive advantage But like what you just like never repair them AI robots that go up there and they can I mean, it all just sounds very expensive. If the goal is to keep costs down as low as possible, it all sounds very expensive. Yeah. But what else? Daru also said that, like, aliens are going to use shit coins. Yeah, they're going to have must coin. Mars, the Martians will use must coin because it's going to be impossible. Yeah, I don't think that's true. It would be possible for the Martians to propagate blocks because they're too far away from the center of hash. But not if the center of hash is in orbit. I think the solution to that is like lasers. If I recall correctly, you could have a laser system where you could send kilobytes of hashing data immediately across space. They also don't need to mine. Like they could just. Well, that was all you got to go back and read your read your Drew Bonsall Bitcoin in Space. That was the whole thing. I would say this isn't fair. We can't participate in the construction and propagation of blocks. We are beholden to the whims of those earthlings and what they're doing. This is suppression. Yeah, but I mean, how's that? I think they're going to, if there's like a successful Mars colony, there's going to be way bigger conflicts than the Bitcoin side of things. Yeah. I think this whole thing's stupid too, because I don't think we're ever going to colonize Mars, nor do I think it's worthwhile. Wow. You don't think we're going to colonize Mars? No. I don't know. I think we probably will. Never is a long time. and to be fair I don't think Elon's intention is to colonize Mars like move people there he's talked about as like a base to go to other solar systems that could be it Elon's like pitching it as like a life raft he's like this fucking pod is done this is Noah's Ark last night me and my boys are going to take essential employees only and abandon ship it would be easier to reverse nuclear winter than to terraform Mars yeah yeah I don't think it's going to happen yeah I don't know do you think the elites are building underground underground facilities for the coming apocalyptic shifting of the poles I don't think it's enjoyable to live underground I don't think it's enjoyable to live on Mars and I don't think it's enjoyable to live in London so I don't know why the elites would do that Which one would be the worst? Mars, the underground? Definitely London. Oi, mate. That ain't okay. London's proper good, okay? This went from English to Australian. I did see one of the freaks was defending London's pub game. London pubs are awesome. They do get good for that. I had to admit I've never been to London. I do have a fascination, a romanticization of what English pubs are like. As you can see, I'm dressed perfectly for a nice pint in an English pub right now. You're a little bit underdressed. I had a Christmas recital this morning. I had to dress up. You have to look like Peaky Blenders or whatever When you go to those bars I am As always the ride or die freaks Are dwelling in our Nostra live chat You can access it Through Primal app or any other Nostra app that supports it I see Soapminer zapped 100,000 sats He said marty the bitcoinproducts.com Web page is fantastic amazing Merry Christmas Freaks just be clear next week is our Christmas episode Merry Christmas to you as well Merry Christmas to you it'll be a Boxing Day episode we'll meet on Boxing Day speaking of London that's the day after Christmas yeah do you know what Boxing Day is for what it signifies it's when they box things that's when all the help would be tending to tending to the needs and the desires of the family that they served on Christmas. Obviously, it's a big holiday. And so the help would not be able to participate themselves in the Christmas holiday with their families. And so Boxing Day is the day after Christmas. You get a big box. It's the underclass. It's when you get their bonus and you get a box full of goodies, and then you get the day off, you get to go get hammered. It's a great day to celebrate. The pubs are popping on Boxing Day. I highly recommend. Math 21 That's just 21,000 sats too No message, thank you Math 21 So what, Boxing Day is Friday? Yeah Yeah, I can do Friday, we'll do a tight rip On Friday Would you rather do Christmas Eve? No Would you rather do Christmas Eve? I think we're doing like a 3 o'clock mass Yeah, we're not doing Christmas Eve I also see a comment from a freak who did not zap Which is disappointing Asking me if Polymarket removed Bitcoin support Trying to make some returns before Christmas I say Humblestacks, that's a freak But no, they do accept Bitcoin They automatically convert it to USDC though So just be aware, you can't withdraw Bitcoin You can only withdraw stable USD tokens but yeah they accept Bitcoin on chain you down for some business on air? sure I'm going to be vulnerable right now to soap miners comment thank you number one bitcoinproducts.com go check it out it is fantastic but thinking about how we can make more useful for people thinking about adding a rating system and then we're thinking like how do you do that and make sure it doesn't get What do you think about the idea? Rating system, only way you can sign in is via Noster. And you need to have X amount of followers and Y amount of posts about Bitcoin. And then you're allowed to post a rating. I like that. Relatively simple resistant. It can still be gamed, but it's harder. Yeah. And I figured Noster obviously has a very Dense population of hardcore Bitcoiners So you get some high signal from those reviews I think I like that idea I thought you were going to go the zap route Is where you were going Well we need to raise it 100,000 sats minimum zap Gotta bump it up No for ratings For ratings But I think that's I don't actually think that accomplishes anything except making you money. It doesn't really stop the civil resistance. In fact, it probably reduces the amount of reviews you get. Because you really want more ratings, more good ratings. The goal is to have as many good ratings as possible. One interesting thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is what a lot of people don't realize is zaps as they currently stand are not verifiable. The receiver can fake them, right? So as a receiver, you can pretend you received zaps that you didn't get. So when you see zaps on a post or whatever, you're trusting the receiver, or more specifically, you're trusting the receiver's wallet, right? So if the receiver's using Primal Wallet, Primal could fake the Zaps. If they're using Wallet of Satoshi, Wallet of Satoshi could fake the Zaps. If they're using their own node, then they can fake the Zaps themselves. So it's hard to do any kind of real ranking systems based on Zap activity, which is what people's immediate thought is. Like, oh, we should just rank posts by Zaps, or we should be able to tell who's bots and who's not by Zaps. But like I said, it's gameable. Now, Spark, which is LightSpark's, I guess you can call it a layer two network, but it's designed to make it easier to build lightning wallets and also transfer stable coins or USD tokens, has a negative on the privacy side that it settles on chain on Spark every time you do a lightning transaction. So if someone has your Spark address, they can see all of your transactions that you made on Lightning. So Lightning usually has pretty solid privacy guarantees, but not if you're using a Spark-enabled wallet. So let me use a real-world example. Like if you paid a wallet a Satoshi user and you pulled their Spark address from the invoice, you could then go into a Spark Explorer and view all of the transactions they've made. And it's kind of weird thinking about it from a Bitcoin perspective because it's a reused address. But if you think about it from the shit corner perspective, right, like Tron or Ethereum or Solana, that's exactly how those networks work. It's like an account based system on Bitcoin, essentially. Exactly. It's exactly how those networks work. Right. Like if someone pays you from Solana, a Solana address, you can look up their Solana address and see every transaction they've ever made. Anyway, this is all very long winded. One benefit of that is we could have verifiable zaps on Spark because you would be able to easily see the cryptographic proof of every transaction that was made without trusting the receiver. But anyway, that was – Wait, so they're making an on-chain transaction for every Spark transaction? It's an on-chain Spark transaction. It's an on-Spark chain transaction. Oh, so it's like a side chain. Yeah, that's why I said like layer two. I don't know. You can argue about semantics. Okay. Now I get it. Now I get it. Does ARK have the same thing with BTXOs? I don't fully understand how ARK works, to be honest, even though I did a whole hour and a half episode with Alex B. on it. I mean, I've said this in the past. If you go to the early days of us talking about lightning, like we didn't really understand lightning until we used it for months so like i'm not gonna like kill myself reading white papers and stuff i want i'll use it we'll use the tools and then we'll have a better understanding like i remember we were doing the lightning torch and i wanted to do uh i was trying to send to dorsey and we wanted to do it the proper way with full node to full node. We would send one transaction and then we couldn't send a second one. We're like, what the fuck? Why did the test transaction work but the second one didn't work? It was because of Lightning liquidity. That's a completely foreign concept in the beginning of Lightning. Now it's second nature. Of course it's a liquidity game and you have to manage your channels or whatever. Just because one payment works doesn't mean the next payment will work because you just used up all your liquidity. Or just because you can pay in one direction doesn't mean you can pay in the other direction, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know the specific. And all this stuff, by the way, is also like a work in progress. So, like, originally Spark was broadcasting every address in. So I think no matter what you're trusting, the Spark operators, they can see all the transactions. But they were also, like, providing it publicly in, like, a public block explorer type of setting. and now they're giving people the option to hide from that block explorer but the Spark operators still see it and I think they're going to do like HD wallets so that you don't have a fixed address so there's all these different things that are changing over time yeah I need to download Wallet of Satoshi it's back in the United States right yeah with Spark yeah I need to download that I need to download Arcade check out the ARK stuff. Yeah, I haven't played with ARK yet. I need to play with ARK. Yeah. Shout out to Y Citadel. I'm an amazing Citadel in Wyoming for sats. Ycitadel.com. That's Y-W-Y. I saw this. Citadel, vote with your feet. So this guy is selling his Wyoming house. I assume he accepts Bitcoin. But I think the price was $680,000. it's priced in dollars, not, not in the coin. Wyoming could be good. It looks like a cool house, but yeah, that's W Y citadel.com is basically the webpage for his house listing. Go check it out. Go check it out. Vague stay humble. Stack sats. May the force be with you. 21,000 sat zap. No star Wars jokes. where Lord of the Rings shows there. Why not? I'm kidding. I'm a big Star Wars guy myself. Old stuff, not the new stuff. I think the hating... You don't like the post-Disney stuff? No. I did like Rogue One. I thought Rogue One was pretty good, but... The other stuff, not so much. Mike Rama, 21,112 sats, three salutes to the crew, palindrome zap. All right, let's get into it. Y Citadel, by the way, says – his name is Wyoming Citadel. Wyoming Citadel says Bitcoin's accepted. That's good to know. Bitcoin's accepted, and if you go buy his house, he's going to get a good deal because we're trading at 85,620 cuck bucks. One cuck buck is going to get you 1,168 sats. excuse me, we're sitting at a $1.71 trillion market cap. We are at block height. 928,451, which means we are approaching the next difficulty adjustment, which is 925 blocks away. Estimated to come on Christmas. It was Christmas Eve last year. Did China ban Bitcoin again? Bitcoin mining again? We'll get into it. I don't have it on the list. I just remembered. Miners getting a Christmas gift of a downward, if you're plugged in, this is a gift to you. Downward difficulty adjustment of negative 1% on Christmas Day UTC time. We're looking at 2,606 transactions in Clark's teeny weeny mempool. We have a mempool.space. We'll see there are 49,735 transactions in their mempool. V is getting pretty expensive. Two sats per V-byte. If you want to get into the next block, you better pay up. Remember the day of 141 SAP per V byte high-pronty transaction? No, it's hard to remember it. It feels like so long ago. Did China ban Bitcoin mining? There are reports out of Xinjiang province, Blockspace Media reported on it earlier this week, with a few sources, one of which I do trust, Kevin Zhang, who's at Nakamoto, formerly at Foundry, who's where it confirmed. It's happening, apparently, in Xinjiang. Um, they're, uh, putting a moratorium on mining. They want to do some inspection. I think there's an inspection period where they have to unplug and block space was reporting that anywhere between 400,000 to 500,000 ASICs, uh, will be unplugged over there as part of this inspection period. Seems like many of the miners there are convinced they're going to have to move. For a power draw perspective, I think the estimate was 1.63 gigawatts worth of power that the miners are taking up. That's how much those many miners take up. So it's a considerable amount, estimated to be about 10% in network hash rate. It is believed that around 14% of overall network hash rate is still within China's borders, even post-2021 mining ban. but at the time, the 2021 ban was estimated that there was anywhere between 40% and 60% of network hash rate. And so I did a little breakdown of this earlier this week, different dynamics at play, if this is true. I mean, this will be, if we have this negative difficulty adjustment on Christmas, that'll be five out of the last six difficulty retargets have been, or difficulty adjustments have been downward adjustments, which is a pretty long streak of downward difficulty adjustments. Mining death spiral. It's here. Ari, are you ready? I can hear Ari cracking his knuckles right now, getting ready to write some tweets about the mining death spiral. Ari Paul, ladies and gentlemen, he'll be back with the mining death spiral fund. But if this ban is true, again, compared to 2021, and less disruptive to the network. And I think the exodus dynamics will be different because obviously in 2021, there was a ton of excess electricity capacity here in the United States as a stand today in 2025 due to the AI arms race. There's not as much rack space availability for miners here in the United States. And so that hash rate does move. I don't think the US will benefit as much as it did in 2021. Keep you posted though. Nice How many times can they ban Bitcoin mining? I think this is the third time If you have looser requirements it's been more than that There was a couple of years there where it was like twice a year it was announced Yeah There are some people saying that they're doing it because Bitcoin mining is taking up way too much energy in China and it just completely absurd I think China like in the last years added like a terawatt of electricity capacity Yeah they add way more power than us They're like kicking our fucking ass in that regard. The real reason, if they are banning Bitcoin mining, is because they don't like that it enables capital control evasion, which is what Bitcoin does. You can mine Bitcoin and then do whatever you want with it. When I think of Bitcoin mining in China, it's like I always think of Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park. You know where I'm going with it? Life finds a way. Life finds a way, yeah. Yeah. Life does find a way. Miners find a way. All right. On to the list. Free Samurai, first on the list. Bill and Keone.org. Keone is set to report to prison tomorrow morning and the petition currently has 8,352 signatures higher than it was last week when we checked on it but not high enough. We need to pump those numbers. Keone again scheduled to report tomorrow morning. Bill as of right now or I think is just scheduled to report January 3rd. And I think since last week, it was this week that Trump commented on it, right? Yeah, Monday night. Great to see. Yeah. And shout out to the decrypt reporter who was in the press pit and used his very short, allotted time to ask a question, to focus on that question. Shout out to him. Silent here. Actually, not silent. He was very vocal. Quite loud. I'm cautiously optimistic here It seems like There's really strong support and really strong momentum Shout out to all the freaks who've shared this with friends and family Who signed it themselves It's good to see I saw Ross Ulbricht Came out in support Senator Lummis has been very loud about it Rep Warren Davidson Came out in support Good to see Yeah, it's great to see I'm cautiously optimistic too Who knows, I think At this point Less than 24 hours From when Bill is, or excuse me When Keone is supposed to report He may Definitely be reporting Unless there's some midnight Did you see the poly market? Is that 53%? Pull it up, Logan By 2027? yeah so it's one year right yeah freaks if you really if you want to see bill and key on free the play here is is to vote no on that polymarket you got to ham the no button so that trump has can bet yes and do the pardon that's that's how you financially incentivize the reality you want to see vote no vote no on polymarket Go do it now Go do it now Talked to Kieran earlier this week too And he seems to be In good spirits, it was cool It was nice to see him take the day off Yesterday, spend time with his family Looks like they had a Wonderful early Christmas dinner But I think one of the things That will be imperative Not only for us, but everybody else listening Is if they do report to prison and we have to wait a certain amount of time for a pardon. We can't just stop the campaign, obviously, we've been talking about. No, we've got to keep going. We've got to keep going. Wait, can you pull up that polymarket again? What a timeline we live in. This is just a pardon polymarket of, like, all of the names. Can you scroll down? How many people are on the list? Why does Matt Gaetz need a pardon? 48% Elon Wasn't he doing Got corruption charges against him or something Wasn't he being censored by the house or something like that Wait look Himself is at 12% Trump pardoning himself is at 12% Who's Dr. Kwan It's Do Kwan It's Tara Luna But see his supporters know what's up They're voting no to incentivize the outcome They want to see did he even get sentenced in the United States? I thought it was in South Korea my understanding it's like half half like he's doing half his time in America and half his time in South Korea what is SBF at? 21% pretty crazy Do Kwon famously stuck a treasure up his butt trying to evade he let his memes be dreams yeah I think that was verified yeah I don't know if that was real I mean hopefully it wasn't real like you there's a lot better ways to try and smuggle Bitcoin the whole point of Bitcoin is that you don't have to stick something up your butt just be aware of freaks yeah if you want to the open dime the open dime was made specifically for butt stuffing. I see Senor Gringo Poppy 2059 in YouTube asking sub dorks when 200k. I was actually just talking to Gigi about this today. I think it was like 200k by conference day was 2021. I'm pretty sure. It was like almost five years ago. It was spring. I think it was spring 2021. God, I mean. Oh, yeah. It was like – We were all going to meet in Miami. It was like the first conference post-COVID. Wall Street bets was popping off. We were printing trillions of dollars. Corn was screaming. You think we're ever going to hit 200K? Maybe we're in purgatory. Maybe this is our life. We just sit here and we talk. We're like, yeah, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. Maybe we already died and we're just sitting in purgatory. It feels so far away now. We need a Christmas miracle. $444,444 by Christmas. It's going to happen. Okay. Everybody goes smash by. Kidding. Don't fret, freaks. Don't fret. Stay humble, Stack Sats. Vake with the, I mean, Vake is his second one, so he's adding to his 21,000 total. Read a 10,000 sats. Watch Andor Marty, by far the best Disney Star Wars stuff. We'll take a look. Is that new? I don't know. 21,000. Thanks, boys. Why Citadel? 21,000. Thanks for the shout out. Thanks for the sats, brother. Ben Jessman, 22,222 sats. Two's across the board. Pound room. Who's that? Came for the clickbait title, staying for the super cycle. Ben, you just heard of it. I mean, that means Ben saw the title on X, not on Nostra. Somebody with a Nostra-only show coming to us via X. Very interesting. Very, very interesting. Okay, moving on the list, Jade Vulnerability was announced this week. Pretty serious. everybody is being advised to upgrade their Jade immediately. This seems pretty bad. Yeah. So should we read through it? I mean, it's a long post. Basically, specifically, my read on the situation is there's three ways to use Jade. First of all, this applies to both the original Jade and the Jade Plus. There's three ways to use Jade. you can use it via USB, via Bluetooth, or via QR code. This specifically applies if you use Bluetooth or USB cable, which I think is what the majority of people use it with, especially for the first Jade, because the first Jade has troubles using QR codes. It's like technically works, but between the screen and the camera, it's like kind of a pain in the ass. And I think specifically you'd have to use a malicious app. So if we assume Blockstream wasn't attacking people, then it means you weren't using the official Blockstream green app. And my read of the situation is that in a worst-case scenario, they could actually extract your seed. An attacker could remotely extract your seed. Basically, worst-case scenario when it comes to hardware wallets through this attack vector. It was responsibly disclosed to them. They patched it. it's been patched for a few updates now and then this is them publicly mentioning it and saying if you haven't updated yet, update I know everyone's a little bit religious about their hardware wallets I had a relatively benign announcement on Nostor saying seems like a pretty bad vulnerability for Jade so people would update their fucking wallets and some people were like no you're blowing it out of proportion blah blah blah I just want to be clear here Adam Back is all over Twitter in all caps telling people to update their app. So take it from the man himself. Consider taking it seriously. But if you haven't gotten rugged yet, you're probably good. I don't think they know any. I don't think they have any cases where they've been able to show that it's actually been used. I see BTC Wrestle saying doesn't require physical access. I don't think so. I think it required a malicious app. Yeah, it says Jade devices running firmware versions 1.0.24 to 1.0.36 can be crashed by a malformed RPC request, leading to a device. Yeah, by the app. Yeah. Yeah, so it's not a physical address. You just send an RPC request. Exploitation analysis, probably important to mention. We wish to emphasize that we are not aware of this vulnerability being exploited in any malware in the wild. However, as with any other security-sensitive software, we expect that bad actors monitor our releases, looking for vulnerabilities and attempting to develop exploits against older software versions. So no evidence of this being exploited in a while, but it is a pretty bad one. If you have a Jade, specifically if you have a Jade that has a private key on it that's securing a material amount of Bitcoin for you, make sure you update that firmware ASAP. Next. Good. Because of this, I realized that the Jade Plus doesn't have a secure element. I'm surprised that. I thought they added one. I mean, this is like they didn't. This is a perfect example of why secure elements should be in hardware wallets. I guess like the number one thing they're supposed to protect against Is extracting a private key Remotely Yeah Anyway update If you haven't updated already Yeah Beware freaks Also be aware if you're a strike user in California Has been wondering when am I going to get access to these loans everybody's talking about. Well, the wait is over. Strike. Massive. Launches consumer loans in California. What is it? The fifth largest economy in the world? I think it's higher than that. Third? Let me ask Maple. California's population is 40 million people. How big is... It's not population, it's GDP. California. economy. 4.1 trillion in 2024, making it the largest state economy in the U.S. and the fourth or fifth largest economy globally, trailing only the United States, China, Germany, and sometimes India, depending on how India is feeling, I guess. That was pretty good. I said fifth, fourth or fifth. I'll take it. That's good. Anyway. If you're in California and you've been looking for a strike loan, please borrow responsibly. It should be a very small percent of your stack. But, yep, it's live now. You can just update your app in a couple clicks of dollars in your bank account. Pretty sweet. Pretty sweet. Californians rejoice. Nice. Also, I realized last week we didn't mention that Jack went public with Tether on XXI last week. So huge shout out to him for that. It's kind of crazy seeing he's not the first one and he's not the last, seeing a buddy ringing the bell. It's like, what timeline do we live in? Right. And I have somebody here saying, can we get some Marty optimism going on? Things are feeling pretty down. Matt A. Miller. Don't worry, brother. Here's some optimism. The price is down. We're crabbing. We're consolidating. We went up 8x between November 2022 and July of this year. Guess what? We're cooling off a little bit, but things are still happening in the background. XSI went public. People are getting strike loans in California. We're staying on top of vulnerabilities and hardware wallets. People are still working. We're still working to make this a thing It is a thing, we're trying to make it a bigger thing The thing Progress is being made Who's saying you're not optimistic enough? Matt A. Miller Did he say it in the comments? No, he just said Oh, I see Did you see his next comment after that? Need Marty to shoot a snot rocket for the smiles You see, he asked for optimism and like you just want me to be a clown? Is that what you want? You don't want me to like serious analysis. You want me to snot rocket in front of you? It's disgusting. I'm offended. I'm kidding, man. I don't have snotty bents in the cage this week, I think, and my sinuses are feeling good. The trolls are out in full force. Merry Christmas, freaks. Love you all. You got the Ripple hat on It's not a Ripple hat And also I see Do you see the comment above that too Do you think that's a troll or do you think he actually believes that That's gotta be a troll Level 99 slacker He's a long time freak I think he knows better He knows better Moving along Fold has become the first public Bitcoin financial services company to operate nationwide through BitGo's federally chartered trust framework. I guess there's two stories here. Number one, the fold is the first public Bitcoin financial services company to do this. And two, the BitGo has a federally chartered trust framework. I think this was one of the bigger stories of the week is the OCC coming out and granting these federal charter trusts to BitGo. And was it Anchorage? Who else got it? I don't know. Were there multiple? There were multiple. I think there was like two or three. So they're like basically a bank, right? Yeah. Essentially, yeah, BitGo has like a banking charter. Federally, so you don't have to go state by state. Yeah. And so now it's also available in New York, which has like been the white whale of every Bitcoin company because of the BitLicense. and there was another I don't know if you have it on the list but the Federal Reserve came out and rescinded a letter of recommendation that they wrote in 2023 basically saying hey we don't want the banks trying to incorporate Bitcoin or other crypto assets we're playing with it, it's too risky they came out this week and rescinded that basically said hey we actually want you to be innovative and experimental so we're going to rescind that and let you play around with the have fun with your crypto, if you will. Yeah, what did Trump say? Play with your Bitcoins? Yeah, they're going to let the banks play with their Bitcoins if they want to. Point being, it seems like, at least in the banking sector, in its relation to Bitcoin, there has been a number of positive developments in terms of regulation becoming looser in terms of what these banks are allowed to do, which, as a free market guy, I'd love to see. I'm not saying go put your Bitcoin with your bank, but I think it's a positive signal overall. The Bitcoin's wired. You shouldn't do that. Yeah, don't do that. But there's some people that will. Yeah, I mean, I saw some chatter that like the big banks are just going to outcompete all the Bitcoin companies on terms and product offering and stuff. Like I'm fading that call. Say hey Juan, I know who you're talking about. He knows what you're talking about. He went on a second-tier podcast. He went on a second-tier podcast. I think, I forget what it was called. It was like TABC or something. TABC, yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, that's one theory. Ryan Gentry came on TFTC. And he made the case that, hey, these banks, they have a low cost of capital. They're adding all this infrastructure. is going to be hard for native Bitcoin companies that are private to compete. But I think... As he was announcing his public Bitcoin holding company. But we've talked about this in the past. I think particularly as it pertains to lending capital in the Bitcoin space is sort of a commodity, whether you're private or public. Yes, the banks are definitely going to have somewhat of an advantage due to economies of scale. I just don't think that like I prefer Bitcoin only services Yeah, Bank of America is not going to provide It's going to be years If that, that Bank of America Provides like a competitive Bitcoin product To actual Bitcoiners Yeah Like have you been in a branch lately? I've not It's like fucking insane You know, we'll say like Bank of America I don't have to go in the branch I haven't had my debit card This is probably too much information, but I haven't seen my Bank of America debit card in like three years. So I'm beholden to the debit card on my Apple Pay. And thank God their ATMs now have NFC. Why don't you order a new one? Because I didn't feel like re-entering all the information. Wow. Yeah. So shout out to NFC enabled, uh, ATMs allowing me to get cash when needed quite frequently. All right, moving on. We've got the human rights foundation, financial freedom report story of the week coming out of bricks. Stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. But there are other countries in the bricks coalition. Yeah. Digital currency launch. The BRICS monetary block has launched a working prototype of a digital currency known as the unit. Wow. Great name. That's a good name. Backed by a basket of precious metals and BRICS national currencies, the first hundred units were issued in a pilot led by Russia's economic strategies. That's a good fucking name. The BRICS block includes many authoritarian or hybrid authoritarian regimes that use capital control, censorship, and financial surveillance to manage dissent. A state-designed programmable digital currency rail used across multiple authoritarian states can harden those powers. For more stories like this, make sure you sign up for the Financial Freedom Report newsletter, which comes out weekly. Go to financialfreedomreport.org. What a great name. Wow. The Stay Emble Stack Units. It's got a masculine frame to it. It's just like an absolute unit. You're not going to use the unit currency? What are you, a pussy? You don't accept units? We're not being facetious either. It's an incredible branding. It's a good name. I mean, it's a shit coin. This is something we've been discussing for years. It's also something that Lionel Shriver had in her book like a decade ago. but this is the expected path I think the expected path is BRICS countries are going to launch their own commodity backed shit coined with gold being a key backing there and I think this is what markets are seeing as well which is one of the reasons why we've seen the run up in gold and silver and then they'll realize that that requires too much trust trust will break down and Bitcoin emerges as this beautiful global distributed financial network that doesn't require any trust whatsoever between counterparties. Because if you think all these countries are going to be able to trust each other and work together at scale, I mean, I have a colony on Mars to sell you. They might have just, what's the phrase I'm looking for? they tied their wagon to destiny just by the branding alone somebody's going to want to control the unit it's like no it's being led by Russia case in point you think China's going to come in and be like you know what actually Russia we're the world's factory we've got all this energy infrastructure we're stealing the IP of every country in the world. We're actually more of a unit than you are, so we're going to take control of this system. Some squabbling, some integral squabbling on the horizon for the BRICS block. I can see it. No, but to your point. Mandibles and the Bitcoin standard. Yes. And why Bitcoin standard? Because Bitcoin is a distributed peer-to-peer cash system that none of these countries can control. A political balance. I feel like we've been way ahead on the quantum FUD. I mean, 1031 even in January released a blog post about quantum and how people shouldn't be concerned about it. Did you see the sailor tweet about quantum? Yeah. Should we be reading too much into it, or was that just AI slop and he just wasn't actually thinking when you press post? No, no, no. Pull it up. You'll find it. Did he just ask chat GPT Like, should I be worried about quantum? And like, chat GPT responded to that, and then he just pressed send tweet. Yeah, well, was he actually – he's effectively advocating to freeze Satoshi coin. Pull it up, Logan. We'll talk about it. I mean, we went from op return to quantum. I'm becoming more convinced that there is some provocateurs in the social layer just trying to get us confused and talking about dumb shit Quantum being one of them I mean I think this is completely different parties could be are you finding it Logan? we're just going to sit inside I'm looking for it I just searched it was like yesterday you know how to search Twitter? He doesn't post that much. I'm logged out on this computer now. And, of course, you can't search on Twitter if you're not logged in. Martin, are you pulling it up? Don't worry. Queen is Logan's number one fan. Is Queen defending him? Yes. He might quit on our ass, according to her. Right before we went live today, we asked Logan what he actually does here. What is it you do here actually? I make a new Twitter account so that I can search on Twitter. Marty, can you find the tweet? I'm not looking. I'm being lazy. Accountability. Lead from the front. I should be searching. It was clearly AI generated because it had the M- and also it was like the classic quantum won't do this, it will do the exact opposite. which is a massive LLM trope. The Bitcoin quantum leap, quantum computing won't break Bitcoin. It will harden it. The network upgrades, active coins migrate, lost coins stay frozen. Security goes up, supply comes down, Bitcoin grows stronger. Yeah, so did he just ask Chad GPT, like, should I be concerned about quantum and Bitcoin? And then this was the response and he just pressed untweet? I don't know. I wasn't there. I can't say. Because I think that's the generous interpretation. And the opposite of the generous interpretation is that he is using his platform to advocate for freezing Satoshi's Bitcoin. Well, let's talk about this. Yeah, go on. No, let's run through that. I mean, I know we touched on it last week, but I was actually thinking of you today because I was like, I need to think more about Godel. because the way you frame it when you think about these attack vectors and not in my defense, like I was like, we're not in a rush because quantum computing isn't here. And then you were immediately like adversarial thinking, like what would let say everybody thinks we need to transition to quantum when we do What are the risks on the other side And you lay that out pretty good So let hear that for the freaks that have been heard yet Well, no, I mean, so there's two different things, right? We talked about it last week, but there's two different things. First of all, I'm not sold that quantum's a real risk, right? I think there's a lot of hype there. We talked about that last week. So we're purely in the theoretical realm right now, right? But the general premise is that it would break public key cryptography. And how does it do that? High level, you can take a public key and you can reverse engineer it to get the private key. You spend energy, you spend compute, you spend time, and you're able to get the private key. Bitcoin and modern encryption and hashing algorithms rely on you not being able to get the opposite side, right? You have this public information that you're able to verify things with, but you're not actually able to sign without the private information. Now, with Bitcoin, you have two different aspects. You have the addresses, the public addresses. You have the early address types that were not hashed, so they didn't have an extra level of basically protection on them. and those could be potentially or theoretically brute force at rest, right? You have like infinite time to do them. Satoshi's coins being the largest example, but basically any old addresses that are unmoved. But then also when you spend from a modern address, from a SegWit address, and that also applies to Taproot addresses, by the way, which is the most modern address. But if you send from a SegWit address, which is in between, at the time it hits the mempool, there's like a race. that if it's a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could then try and do it. So I think that middle aspect, I think it's relatively safe to assume, is basically safe because everything at rest would be theoretically attacked way before quantum computers are sufficiently capable of attacking on the fly. So that's the technical argument, right? So the technical argument is we should have address types that are even more quantum secure, quantum resistant from that kind of reverse engineering than the modern day SegWit addresses that are hashed and so have that protection. But then there's also the other piece of it, which is people scared that old coins will get dumped on the market. and so then there's different proposals about freezing old coins or adding some kind of rate limit so only you know old addresses can only spend so much per block so it would slow it down and it's just like it's like this weird fetish you know like fetish or fetish i don't even know how you pronounce it about like controlling other people's money um like this is uh it's uh and and and like an obsession with the price of Bitcoin, which I don't pretend I'm not obsessed with. But like if you break the fundamental like societal contract we have in Bitcoin of property rights of like just unlimited property rights, then like what is Bitcoin? Like Bitcoin is not valuable at all in that situation. And I think it's particularly crazy because, because it is theoretical. don't read the comments Matt because it's theoretical what people are advocating so this is why I hope that Saylor wasn't intentionally advocating for this like I said he might not be but there are people in the space intentionally advocating for this freezing the old coin you would have to do this preemptively like by design you would have to do this preemptively and you could call it a soft fork but it's effectively a hard fork because if If anyone wants to spend the old coin, then we would have a chain split. So maybe you can argue semantics that it's a soft fork, but effectively what you're saying is we are so scared of this theoretical risk that we're going to preemptively block coins from being spent with a hard fork, which I think is just a complete non-starter. It's absolutely insane. I don't think there's support for it in the community, but there shouldn't be. Like it's absolutely ridiculous. And so like just let's just run through a scenario. If Satoshi woke up tomorrow and was like, wow, Jameson Lopp and Saylor are advocating, which by the way, we're on opposite sides of the opportunity. They're not return stuff, are advocating for freezing coin, freezing my coin. I'm going to spend it today. Would we know if he spent it or was Quantum, did Quantum spend it? Like how do you even – all the OGs, quote-unquote OGs selling right now, are they selling or is it quantum? And like when do you make that distinction on whether or not the old keys are broken versus people just actually spending? And when do you just realize you just got to stack up and if old coins are sold on the market, then we'll have some downturn in market dynamics for a bit until Bitcoin recovers. and it'll be fine. We'll just move along. Yeah. No, I think this is very well articulated. I think, I mean, apparently some of the people really pushing the quantum narrative right now, some of them run quantum-related funds. They all run quantum-related shit. Yeah. Like, they're all incentivized to continue the hype cycle. And to point on the theoretical aspect of it, John Arnold included this in our piece, in his piece on 1031.xyz. You'll find it. And he talked to Hunter Beast and a couple of others. I think Adam Back looked at it as well. The idea is theoretical. So, like, it is true. Google, with their willow chip and others, have created sort of quantum states and successfully sent bits between the two different in a quantum fashion. But that's rudimentary. I said this earlier today. It's like the stone wheel of quantum computers. It's barely anything. To successfully wage an attack that would brute force private keys by reverse engineering the private keys by using public keys, you need to basically have quantum computers that not only can enter a quantum state and send information, but they also have to be able to run computation and operating software on it. We're not even at the level yet. We're just sending binary bits in a quantum fashion. The way I understand it, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, but I have a reading on this. Definitely not an expert. If you want to get to a state that you can actually crack stuff, you need to be able to run computation in a quantum state, which is, I think, orders of magnitude harder than what's being done now. And what's being done now is like barely being able to send binary between each other. And then on top of that, it's like how much energy is going to be necessary to do all this? Is it going to be equivalent to the AI energy consumption that we've seen in the last three years? And if so, like who's going to be able to acquire all that energy? And are they going to use that to focus on Bitcoin specifically or attack other things? Well, it's interesting you mentioned AI, right? Because I think part of it, part of the recent level of fear-mongering, and we talked about this last week, like the quantum thing is not something new. Like this has been discussed at length for quite some time. I mean, I think Peter Wulla in 2019 was questioned on why taproot addresses aren't hashed by default. Why is it just, you know, bare pub key and as a result, not as quantum resistant as Segwit or whatever. He's like, oh, well, if quantum happens, then Bitcoin's fucked anyway. And I will keep reminding people of Vitalik and his quantum Bitcoin mining scam that he had before Ethereum. Which, by the way, all the shit coins are way more exposed to this than us. Because Bitcoin by default doesn't reuse addresses. Or Bitcoin wallets by default usually do not reuse addresses. But I think part of it is because of the AI hype. Right. So like everyone and it like goes in line with like the remember like the A.I. 2027 fear mongering that was happening like we were going to have A.G.I. Like there's going to be super intelligence and they're going to nuke everybody by 2027, which is crazy because it means we'd probably nuke everybody before we hit 200K, which is just just be unfathomable. Then we get set to hell, the nuclear hell. So I think part of it is that. Right. So, like, part of the quote-unquote concern is that LLMs will speed up quantum development, which, to be quite honest, has been, you know, pretty slow and lacked real practical uses or proof. Yeah, the idea, isn't that what Matt Pines did? Like, he's working at an AI company focused on... Aliens, right? ...discovering new physics, you know. I think they're looking for aliens. And maybe you need some... Maybe you need quantum. Maybe you need to be able to wormhole to the other galaxies, too. Anyway, I think... I think there's a happy medium here where we have... where we self-work in, or maybe we don't even need to self-work in. And like maybe like it's also above my pay grade, but supposedly you might be able to do with Taproot as well. But create some like extra quantum hardened address types and let people optionally use them if they want to. It's going to cost you a lot more in fees and you have the choice if you want to use it or not. And if you're going to sit there and be worried that other people's Bitcoin might get stolen and then sold on the market, just sell all your Bitcoin and you're just in the wrong network. don't be fucking insane that'd be like saying that if someone gets hacked if a large if Sailor gets hacked we should freeze his Bitcoin because it would cause a price dump that'd be insane right it's fucking insane if Coinbase gets hacked we're going to freeze the Bitcoin so that the Bitcoin price doesn't dump don't get hacked If you get hacked, you fucked up. Hey, we learned by the good people at Slocket and Ethereum that if you get hacked, you just roll back the chain, make everything right. You freeze the thief's coins that they stole. You remember when CZ wanted to do that with Bitcoin? Yeah, yeah. He sent out a tweet. He wanted to reword like, kind of a lot. Yeah, for not that much money. Yeah. It's like $20 million or something. and everyone's like no fuck you bro this is not Ethereum because he had an air of confidence too where he's like yeah we can do this we're going to do this right and people are like no we're good alright before we get to software updates let me pull up Fountain and read the top boost from last week's rip just rabbit hole recap 387. The printer is coming. Gert. ADIQ. 22,222 sats. Toots across the board. Palidrome boost. Gonna fix your thumbnail on a rumble. And you chew. Tay be rabbit. And no rabbit. You radges. Pure does my heed in can. Merry Christmas Reese. That was a hard one to read. I thought it was a different language And then it just says Merry Christmas freaks at the bottom, which I don't. Anyway, thank you for your support and Merry Christmas. Thanks, Gary. Are you in Appalachia? Where are you? Speaking of reading, next post from Reed, 21,000 sats, proposal for new RHR title, 2025, worst cattle bike ever. I like that. I like that. I retweeted that one. It's a bad cattle bike, guys. Yeah, next week's episode is going to be called Merry Christmas. The week after that, we'll call it Worst Cattle Bike Ever. Yes. Looking forward to 2026. Unless there's a Christmas miracle in between. $444,444 is coming. Let's see if we made our way there. No, we are down from where we started. All right. Software updates. BTC pay server is out with version 2.3. Starting today, you can charge merchants of subscription fee to use your BTC Pay server, making it sustainable for local enthusiasts to onboard businesses to accept Bitcoin while undercutting credit card fees and preserving merchant self-custody. Brings in several long-awaited features, making it our biggest release this year. They have subscriptions, server monetization, Plugin Builder 1.0 for ratings and reviews, Payment requests, redesign, EDD, and Drupal 11 in 14 new languages. It's pretty big to see. Yeah, absolutely massive. Huge shout-out to the BTC Pay team. Uncle Jim in the boardroom running a server for his local merchants, you know. Yeah, this is something that BTC Pay operators, like instant operators. So like the cool part about BTC pay historically has been that you can run it as, as Marty said, in an uncle Jim mode where you're, you're managing the actual node infrastructure and the instance. And then people can basically, there's like a sign in like a login for individual merchants. So you can onboard merchants, but they don't actually have to run the BTC pay backend. And now, but, but people are basically like kind of just doing that out of the goodness of their hearts or kind of charging out of band for the services or trying to monetize in other ways. Now it's actually, you know, first class citizen, you can charge for it, which is really cool to see. I mean, we're seeing it with the Square rollouts right now. It's if you give someone, I think Square they're giving or Block, they're giving $25 if you're the first person to pay Bitcoin at a Square merchant. So basically they're giving you $25 if you are basically, you have proof that you onboarded that merchant to Bitcoin. And like, it doesn't take much that people love it. People just go out and do the thing on this note, by the way, I don't know if you saw the tax free section in Oslo airport now accepts Bitcoin using BTC pay server, you know, like the duty free shops. Did not see that. It's pretty bad. And so I asked Rockstar who did that. He doesn't even know who did that. Just some local freak presumably went to the tax-free shops and convinced them to onboard to BTC Pay. And so there's probably being run, like a random freak is probably running that BTC Pay instance for free. Because I doubt Oslo tax-free, duty-free shops are running their own BTC Pay server. Yeah. And to be clear here, if they're running your BTC, if you're using a hosted instance of BTC Pay, the key is they're not taking custody of funds. The custody is still held with the merchant. They're just not running all that infrastructure separately. Yeah. Pretty cool. Cool to see. Merchant adoption enabled by better infrastructure. We saw Square roll out their stuff earlier this year. Now you have the free and open source version of that, BTC Pay server. getting more robust. This is what you want. You want as many options. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it's a tool that you can use in many different ways without permission. And we'll have corporate options. We'll have open source options. And people will choose how they want to use Bitcoin based on their use case, drought model, technical capability. It's beautiful. It's cool to see. Next up on the list, Tether has released PearPass, password manager that keeps your data on your devices. This was cool. No servers to hack, no cloud to leak, just pure local security. So this is using the hole punch tech that they basically subsidized over at Tether. A couple of pieces here. So the most popular, or still not really that popular, but the most popular use of hole punch has been Keat, which is their P2P messenger, their video and audio and text messenger that's encrypted. Now, Keat has come a long way, and it's pretty usable now, but it has some issues with the other person needs to be online. You don't have the benefits of having a server in between in terms of uptime and reliability. But the opposite is true, right? Like you don't want a server in between if you care about censorship resistance and permissionless use. Keet has also been really slow to open source. Now this, first of all, is already open source is my understanding, which is awesome to see. Like I hate like the promises, oh, we'll open source in the future. Like just fucking do it. For things like this, it's incredibly important. But second of all, it's just like a really interesting novel use case for serverless tech. Right. Basically, with password managers, you've had two different sides. Right. You've had the hosted server stuff that is sacrificing security for convenience because you have a server involved that's holding all your intimate passwords. Right. Like most private data that you have. or you've had self-hosted stuff that doesn't sync between devices and you lose a phone or something and then you just lose access to your bank and everything. You can't order a new debit card and it's a huge pain in the fucking ass. So this is an interesting middle ground. I think it makes a lot of sense. I will say it is very early. I don't go and just upload all your passwords immediately. Enter all your passwords into this app. but I think it's a cool project it wasn't on my radar and now it is I see Esme Horn zapped 33,058 sats he says 21 great British pounds from London thank you guys for everything you do thank you sir thank you for not taking it personally me shitting on London the last two weeks and have you considered leaving? Yeah, why don't you save that money for a plane ticket? Yeah. Portugal's not too far away. Portugal, where would you go? Portugal's good if you're UK. Yeah. You can still be close to family. I've only heard good things about Portugal. A lot of British expats go to Portugal. By the way, did you see in terms of British and not leaving, did you see Peter McCormick's change.org petition about consent? No, it wasn't. I think it's... He has a webpage. I said change.org, but it's actually self-hosted. So shout out to him for that. What are we looking at? Is it a pinned tweet? Hopefully so. he posted on Noster it's called I Will Not Consent I think it's it's I No Longer Consent.com I No Longer Consent.com he's entering this is his Martin Luther King phase, British Martin Luther King phase he's full nonviolent protest in the UK this country doesn't work anymore life keeps getting more expensive, public services keep getting worse and we're all expected to work harder for less. Most people can feel it, but we're expected to carry on as if this is normal. It isn't. This is a calm, lawful way for ordinary people to withdraw legitimacy from a failing system and show that authority comes from us, the public, not the government. Yeah, I mean, Peter's been radicalized throughout the years. I remember we were beating him over the head. His journey has been great. I do think, boy, you don't even have universal free healthcare in the United States. What are you doing? It's like NHS is a shit show, brother. I mean, for like I think it's a lost cause, but I commend him trying to fight the good fight. He obviously cares about his hometown of Bedford and he's building businesses there and trying to practice what he preaches. I love Peter. We're friends. It has been fun to watch his transition into like, hey. No, I disagree. Throughout the years, I've disagreed with the government. The government is not our friend. The government is not our friend, Peter. We've been telling you this for years. I'm glad to see you're opting out. You could be friends with someone whose opinions you disagree with. Like, that is true. You should be. Like, this is, it's insane that you're supposed to agree with everything. Otherwise, you're enemies. But I just want to point out here, the British speech laws are so fucked up that he was so careful when he wrote this thing. Can you tell? Yeah. He's just making sure I'm not calling for any harassment or violence. No breaking the law, just collective noncompliance. Ordinary people withdraw consent calmly, lawfully, together. I feel like you have to really walk on eggshells over there right now. Yeah. Parker's watching. Parker, I see you. Oi, mate. This is British. I'm making fun of my accent. Did he text you? No, he quote tweeted the episode. Thank you for sharing from your massive audience. Tune in whenever Marty Ben tries to do a British accent. It sounds decidedly Australian, and he knows it, but can't do anything about it. It's true. Who is I see Pete Smith is shitting on our audio Is it my fault Or is it Marty's fault It's probably my I need to get the short mics that we have In the studio in Austin I thought I told you they didn't mail me one of those You haven't done that yet Do you listen or you're insubordinate right now He says I need to put a high pass filter on my mic Or is it your mic that we're supposed to put the filter on I know my audio quality Has historically been horrible You sound good to me Oh look High pass filter I have the option Should I click it? Does it sound any better now? Where do I do this? High pass filter is for like HVAC I don't have an HVAC running Do I sound better? I clean up the audio on the podcast release The Chundy Gunderson 6647, the mic is fine Okay 21 in the primal chat You guys sound fine Bitter21, audio is good Brian Sounds the same, fine Sounds like Pete Smith 6321 is just an audiophile We care about you We do Thank you for caring Speaking of caring the team at CoinKite cares about you being able to easily sweep the Bitcoin off your Sats card and they've released in TestFlight. That's buddy. They didn't release that. I said in TestFlight. It's not CoinKite who released it. Oh, who did? It's Matt Ramson. Nashville BDK contributor. Nashville local who runs our BitDubs. Oh, that's good to say. But anyway, just in time, for Christmas, if you are loading up a bunch of Sats cards, it makes it easy to manage them. It's not for redeeming Sats cards. The best way I know of redeeming Sats cards is Cove Wallet on iOS or Nunchuck on Android and iOS. The coolest part about a Sats card, by the way, Sats cards, if you're not familiar, are the, they look like a gift card, but they actually hold a private key on them. And it's a way to gift Bitcoin physically. It's the card version of Open Dimes. The coolest part is that you can just tap that on the phone without an app, and it just shows you the balance in the browser, which is just incredibly satisfying. It's pretty sweet. It's pretty cool. Where do you hold your Bitcoin? You pull out your Sats card, tap it on your phone. Right here, brother. Right here. Look at it. Look at it. Okay. Fuck. Yeah. I see what you're laughing at. The next thing on the list. Moving on. SatsBuddy, shout out to Matt for dropping it. Sorry, I assumed it was CoinKite. Supposedly Logan sounds the best according to Bitter21. Yeah, because he's got the mic that I want, and I bought those mics. Do you think Logan intentionally fucks with our audio just so he sounds better? I wouldn't be shocked. I wouldn't be shocked. Should I send you a really petty thing to do? Should I send you the Rodecaster as well? No, I don't need that. You're not going to be able to plug this in. I know. I was going to buy another one because I assumed that you need yours. Moving on, Venezuela oil blockade. Apparently, we were supposed to be told last night that we're going to war with Venezuela. It didn't happen. Instead, we got the warrior stimulus check, $1,776 going to our armed forces because of the influx of revenue from the tariff That was Trump fucking with the journalists right I don know I wasn I haven been following with journalists. Well, like he convinced like all the news agencies to like cover his live press conference that they thought we were going to war and then he was like, I'm giving all the troops money. Yeah. I mean, so Tucker Tucker was pretty convinced yesterday from I can tell. There was clips floating around of him saying, hey, I heard from people inside the intel community that were preparing for war. But Venezuela, it seems like we're already somewhat in a silent war. You actually have no opinions on the blockade? I mean, I think the blockade were blocking the oil coming in and out of Venezuela. I saw a stat. Apparently, it costs $200 million a day for Venezuela to run their government, run their services, run their operations. They have a billion in the bank, and so this blockade is an attempt to take away the source of the revenue, which is oil. And that's the theory I heard, is the blockade is happening to starve the Maduro regime of their revenue and cash balances. Do you have any? I mean, you're the energy guy on the show. I was hoping we were going to get a more interesting take than that, to be honest. I'm a little bit disappointed. Do you want, like, is oil going to pump? Like, what are we talking about? Is that what you want? That's the crazy part, is oil is cheap as fuck still. Yeah. No, I mean. I mean, I think what Maduro, what Chavez and Maduro did to the oil gas industry in Venezuela is a crime against, number one, the citizens of Venezuela, but I think more broadly a crime against humanity because it's one of the most oil-rich nations in the world, and you had a bunch of British and American oil and gas companies, I think Shell, Chevron, BP, were down there, and they essentially got kicked out, their assets confiscated, and Chavez and Maduro did not maintain them properly. Their energy infrastructure has collapsed, obviously. They can still get some oil, but it's not as robust as it should be. I think the other big thing that really is probably forcing the issue or a material consideration with forcing this issue is the oil and gas deposits that were found on the coast of Guayana, which – Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up. 100% related. Which borders Venezuela. And Venezuela has been basically posturing that they're going to invade Guayana to take over those assets. assets and so I think this is a protection for the untapped oil gas in Guiana. Like have you looked at it on a map? Like it's, I mean I think it's arguable whose deposits they are. Like it's like basically like right on the border in the water. Well they were one country at one point, right? It's like the same oil. Yeah. Like what was it with like Kuwait and Iraq? It's like, oh they were like they, Iraq was saying that they were like cross drilling. It was like they were putting their straw in drinking their milkshake through the border. Yeah. I mean, it seems very similar. I mean, if you look at oil reserves, Venezuela is still like absolutely massive in the global scheme of things. I'm pulling up Google Maps here. Yeah, Guayana. It's crazy. I mean, they're right on top of each other. Yeah. And like the Guayana Reserves Is that how you pronounce it? Guayana Guyana Guyana Guyana Guyana You know I'm very good at Pronunciations Yeah I mean apparently this reserve That they found on the coast of Guyana Is pretty massive Why is their border dotted on Google Maps? Is it because no one can agree on where the border is? Yeah, like I said, I think part, like that western part of Guyana was Venezuela at one point, if I recall correctly. All the borders are dots in this region. You see also on the Suriname side? Yeah. Same. Anyway. Yeah, so I imagine that's it. What's the safe? Do you think it's actually, like, do you think the drugs piece is just kind of tangential to all this energy stuff? I think it all ties together to a certain degree. I mean, the drug stuff, I've said it. It pissed off a lot of people on X, but I think it's justified. You have narco-terrorists running drugs in international waters, which is technically piracy, and the libertarians out there saying, like, we shouldn't have a drug war. These people should have trials. It's like, well, we haven't declared war. It's like, well, the combination of the narco-terrorist China, whatever, they've smuggled a ton of fentanyl to the country over the last couple decades and killed literally hundreds of thousands of Americans. I don't know what you expect people to do. So the 4D chess theory of bombing the narco boats is that you bomb them, and then the narco terrorists have to sort of reshuffle and recalibrate, and that sets off them calling each other and moving assets and moving money, which can make them easier to find. That's the 4D chess theory. It's not even that 4D. It's pretty straightforward. It's like 3D chess. No, yeah. I mean, I think it's – Of course, if you blow them up, they're going to scramble. I think it's all connected. You want to stop the drugs from being imported, killing Americans, and the oil and gas is certainly a big cherry on top if you can get Maduro out of there and get an ally, a perceived ally, maybe a controlled ally in Venezuela. Yeah, I think Peter's talking about your mic, by the way, with the high-pass filter. Peter, shut the fuck up. Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably more to do with the energy stuff. But I don't know. I think it's definitely a messy situation no matter how you cut it on the dealing with just droning drug boats with like zero due process. But I understand the argument for it if we can't stop them otherwise. I did think it was interesting that they were like critics of the administration's blowing up the boats. They were like, you should just seize shit. And then it was like two days later, they seized the oil tanker. It was like right after people were like, oh, well, why don't you seize boats? And then they filmed the whole thing in like 4K and posted it on Twitter. The helicopters. Yeah. So, I mean, it's definitely all related. Yeah. I'm not trying to be a sicko fan here either, a psycho fan how you pronounce that but I do worry this could devolve into Gen Z's Vietnam if things escalate you're forced into some war there's a decent chance he was supposed to also be the no war president a couple things first of all, on the boat bombings there's two things here One, are we justified to bomb their boats without due process? And the second was, like, there was a specific case where, like, supposedly a Hegseth blew up the boat, and then, like, they were floating on, like, pieces of wood, and then he, like, shot another missile. Like, he double-tapped them, which is, that's particularly bad. Like, that is, I don't know. It's hard to support that. Like, they're probably going to drown anyway. You can, like, I don't know, bring a boat up against them and arrest them if you so be it. Or you can just leave them out there. But I don't know. Hitting the second one is kind of questionable, or even more so than that. But, I mean, I think the core of this thing, the core of this issue is Venezuela is a relatively strong adversarial regime in our sphere of influence that is being backed by China. and it's like Cold War 2.0 we're having like a proxy war over there for dominance over the atmosphere yeah I'm just looking at the map and I think energy has a lot to do with it I think it has everything to do with it and they found right before all this started when did they find the Guyana reserves it was like right before all this shit started it was like last year At some point in 2024, I think, reserves discovered. It was 2025, I see. No? You see here, the rise of the Guyana Superbasin. Yeah, so I think they found stuff successfully. like not successively they just it was much bigger yeah they're just finding more and more deposits or like let me see the Buenos Aires Herald it looks like they discovered it in 2015 but like since then they keep finding more and more It was way bigger than they thought it was. Let me see. Yeah, that's what I think it was last year or two years ago. They were like, oh, this is actually way bigger than we thought it was. Christ is Lord 7, not 1 through 6. Christ is Lord number 7 on YouTube says, by 2029, 2030, start of Great Depression 2.0, which hopefully they call it something else because that's horrible branding, Everything and everyone is going to tank, bro. Then America is going to confiscate your BTC just like they did with your gold in 1933 to help combat this depression. All right, brother. Or it might be a Christmas miracle. It could be a Christmas miracle. Sup, freaks. This is a – I got a lag, so I can't read it. 25,125 sat boost. Some FL Justin. Florida Justin. Some freaks. Merry Christmas. Stay adventurous. Stack sats. Via con Dios. Live with God. We also missed a Pringle Mac 21,000 sat boost. Huge shout out. I know it's early for her right now. When I told her the time we were ripping, she said it was 5 a.m. her time. Thanks. Good morning. Thank you for waking up early to zap us. Support the show. Join the live chat. Nothing's going to happen. Buy an 80-foot flat screen, smoke a little weed, play some video games, and watch the NFL. We all good, bro. Nothing to see here. Catch the game last night? Catch the game. Do you think the Eagles are going to win the NFC East? I haven't watched a single football game this year. Yeah. Great Depression 2.0. this country's fat we could use a great depression did you hear about like how much weight was lost for the life span increase because people were intermittent yeah but now we got seed oils and glyphosates and shit like even if you're poor you'd get fat as fuck yeah um I got one more the truth of the matter is Marty we're living in a great depression I think Mallers does a good job of it's a silent depression explaining this better than me But I think he hit the nail on the head. When the Great Depression happened, the dollar was still backed by gold, and the depression was priced in gold. And if you price everything in gold right now, we're in a Great Depression. We're getting our fucking asses kicked. But no one realizes it, which is even worse. Yeah. I paid $29 for six chicken breasts. last night. It's insane. Were they good? They were good. They were good. Local farm. Not every chicken breast is made the same. No. We made some cutlets. I'm sure you saw me eating, scarfing some down right before we hit record. I did. Made some cutlets last night. Hello, Pungle Mac. She's going to Pilates now. Love you guys. Merry Christmas. Do you think she was waiting to go to Pilates until after we announced her shout-out? I'm glad we released her. I hope not. I hope not. She's got to hope Pilates class is punctual. It starts on time, and she's got to get there. Still enjoy Pilates. It's become my wife's favorite exercise. I think that happens when you get to a certain age as a woman. Pilates just becomes the go-to class of choice. It's what I've observed. I'm not trying to sound clear. Supposedly a lot of NFL players do Pilates. Yeah. What is going on here? I'm going to write into this a little bit, but this is pretty crazy. shooting of the MIT professor. Did you read the three-body problem? Yes. This is like the plot of the three-body problem. Yeah. Okay. So those who are unaware. Yeah. Police intensified the search Wednesday for suspect in the killing of Professor Nuno F.G. Loriero at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more famously known as MIT, two days after he was shot to death at his home outside Boston. And Laurie Hero, a 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist, was shot Monday night at his apartment in Brookline, Mass. He died at a local hospital on Tuesday. The Norfolk District Attorney's Office said in a statement, the prosecutor's office said the homicide investigation was accident-ongoing as of early afternoon Wednesday and had no update. Earlier, they had said no suspects were in custody. The investigation in MIT's Professor Killing comes as Brownian. Okay, we don't have to get into the Brown stuff. That's awesome. I mean, I think the brown stuff is unrelated, incredibly fucked up. It feels like the brown stuff is politically motivated, considering two people were killed and one of them was vice president of a young Republicans club. Yeah. But, and also I don't have the Australian shooting on the list, which seems like a massive false flag. but solution to that is the stricter gun controls and stricter hate speech rules they're already doing KYC on everything on the internet in Australia but they need it to be even stricter with this with everything else that's going on this has kind of gone under the radar so I wanted to highlight it I mean this guy was basically you know numero uno infusion research at MIT like top dog MIT researcher focused on fusion tech. And it's kind of interesting, right? Cause it kind of goes with the hype of quantum stuff that we were talking about earlier. Like fusion feels like it's got so much fucking hype behind it for years, but a couple of pieces here, right? First of all, uh, before Bitcoin existed, you didn't really have a strong financial incentive for mass produced cheap energy. and now with AI and the AI data centers, the big tech companies are aligned on that too. Like they would love to have, and you know, the national security establishment, like would love to have very cheap energy for AI compute. So there's a direct incentive for it. The second piece is, oh, does LLM speed up fusion research, right? It goes along with all the other hype stuff around AI and bleeding edge tech and whatnot. So I don't think it's like the most far-fetched thing to think that he was on the verge of some kind of big breakthrough. Do I think aliens killed him, like the three-body problem? No, probably not. But the Israelis kill Iranian nuclear scientists all the fucking time. And there's like a million different people with motives to kill someone who is working on cheap, scalable energy. I don't think this is like a disgraced lover type of situation. I feel like there's probably something more here. Yeah, so this is, I mean, apparently he was on the cusp of having the breakthrough to make this tech reproducible and scalable. His research on magnetized plasma dynamics, magnetic field amplification, and confinement and transport in fusion plasmas helped inform the design of fusion devices that could harness the energy of fusing plasmas, bringing the dream of clear, or excuse me, clean, near limitless fusion power closer to reality. it is suspicious and I saw something else there was another MIT physicist nuclear physicist who was assassinated in the 90s or early 2000s as well for uncovering a cold fusion cover up by the DOE they don't want you to have that clean cheap energy freaks was that the opposite though? Was that them hyping it and he was exposing it? No, they were covering up that they had made some breakthrough. Yeah. And he exposed, like, hey, we might actually have cold fusion. The DOE doesn't want you to know it. Dead. Yeah, like, there has to be, like, somebody knows that he's on the cusp of the breakthrough that's going to really unleash it. Like, who's just going to walk into this house and murder this guy? or it could have been like big oil and any kind of established energy people but yeah I mean like look if you like listen to the administration if you listen to David Sachs on All In Pod talking about this stuff he like talks about like this Manhattan Project like we need to have better AI than China and a huge part of that is that they're kicking us at kicking our ass in energy and so like imagine we have a massive breakthrough that maybe isn't The fusion you read about in sci-fi books, maybe it still has trade-offs or whatever, but let's just say it brings the cost of energy down in the States, 10x or something. Something within reach, not super extraordinary. That's a well-worthy reason to kill somebody. That's funny, too. I mean, the stakes are high, and I saw this earlier today. Trigger warning. About to have Logan pull up a Curtis Yarvin tweet on the show. Don't freak out. Don't freak out. I thought this was pretty funny, but also highlighting something in this vein. Let me find it. Did you delete it? Oh, no, here it is. I'm not sure if you saw this, but China. China. China. Well, I see Bill Monroe saying it was someone was claiming it was the Iranians retaliating for the Israelis, assassinating their scientists. I think that was the Israelis who claimed that, which, by the way, It could easily be the Israelis who killed them as well. I don't. You should take that one with a grain of salt. Another grain of salt. Not an expert in this field, but this is being reported today. China apparently has a working prototype of an EUV lithography machine. It's a secret lab in Shenzhen, a team of former ASML engineers. I think that's the important part. We're going to go back to the quote tweet. Reverse engineered parts. Yet to produce working chips. Deep involvement in Huawei. Aiming for use by 2028, 2030. There was, Curtis Yarvin said, obviously, it would be very racist to suggest that when EUV light sources are one of our last three technical advantages over China, hiring Lin Nan as head of light sources might not be the greatest idea. So apparently, a classic case of Chinese IP theft and espionage. Recruits included Lin Nan, ASML's former head of light source technology, whose team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Institute. So they're making these breakthroughs. Apparently, EUV lithography is one of our sort of key advantages, technological advantages. And ASML was just hiring Chinese scientists to build this or work on this stuff. And they up and left and brought it to China. China. Why can't we all just get along? Come on. Come on, people. You sound like a naive Padgett. Everybody. Hi, I'm Marty Bent, and I believe in world peace. I know we have a global audience out there. Why are we doing this stuff? It's like, Marty, shut up and shake your ass. Why are we doing this? It's all so tiresome. Is this purgatory? Is this what purgatory is like? We're just constantly thrown into the 24-7 news cycle, thinking about PSYOP after PSYOP. Is Bitcoin going to $444,444? Are we ever? Because he's miracle. Oh, I think I told Marty already, but I, um, the other day I did tell Marty on a 1031 call. Um, the other day we were eating breakfast and I asked my oldest Bitcoin or gold. And he turns to me and he goes, gold is better. Uh, damn. All right. We got a zap. From KD Kangaroo, 30,003 sats, palindrome boost. First time checking live, catching live. Appreciate you bastards. He's probably Australian. See, I try to do Australian, then I go Boston. Yeah. Trash London. Accents. Accents aren't my strong suit. What is it? Rise of lights. Rise of lights. fosters um i australian for beer i uh i just want to shout out it looks like he's gone now but um there's like the most civil argument happening in our youtube chat that's christ is lord guy between him and bitcoiners arguing about if the government was going to seize our bitcoin and then he just ends it with just kidding bro i'm wrong and all this stuff. I'm going to go hike the dog and get to the gym. Y'all take care. God bless and get to mass this weekend. It's just great that it just... It ended so civilly. So rare at today's age. David Sachs has been a massive disappointment. He let SDNY sell the samurai Bitcoin right out from under his nose. Did he? Bitcoin is on the blockchain. He did. Which, according to the executive order, was not supposed to happen. So that is in support of nation. How do we know that? we can see it on chain? Keone, he came on my show and said that's what they did. Oh shit. Well, they should have burnt it. They should have. All seized Bitcoin should be burned. Alright, what are we going to do for this Christmas? Are we getting dressed up? We should just send it. Anytime Bitcoin is seized, as a government, we should send it to Satoshi's addresses so that if quantum happens, then it's just the winner gets the coin. I like that. What are these quantum hackers going to do? What if, should we just be spending all of our time trying to create a quantum computer to hack such these coins? Because we could get it. Maybe we should set the argument out. Expect that it's going to happen. These coins are going to move. They're going to get sold. Don't do anything about it. And all the while it's us building the quantum computer to get satoshi's courts what i thought would be fun is imagine so like jameson and sailor get their wish and they they do a hard fork and they say that you know the old addresses can't spend anymore and then satoshi like is just sitting there just like laughing or whatever and he just like sends multiple transactions where all the money goes to the miners just like instead incentivizing just pure chaos. That would be kind of a fun outcome. It would be. They would literally have a trigger at any point where any of the old addresses could just send huge mining fees to encourage miners to mine that chain instead. The beautiful dynamics. I mean, this is to be expected. Rough consensus, distributed systems. Nobody's going to agree. that's the other thought I was having with it it's just such a dumb rabbit hole but whatever you got to keep yourself busy if we did a saw fork and we added quantum resistant addresses so not the freezing part we're not freezing old addresses we just add quantum resistant address type and then Satoshi's coins move and they get sent to a quantum resistant address do people panic? is that a good thing? Was his coin stolen? Or was he just upgrading? Is he going to sell on the market? Kind of crazy things to think about. All right. Let's go enjoy our Christmas week. Seven days till Christmas. We're going to have a downward difficulty adjustment. Santa is bringing better mining conditions for miners that are plugged in on Christmas as of right now. Who knows? Asher could scream on the network. It'd fall off. It'd be an even better Christmas. We'll find out. Maybe there'll be a Christmas miracle. And we'll see you guys on Boxing Day. See you on Boxing Day. Omega Candle. En route. Prepare. Fade the Omega Candle. Stay up the stack sides. Peace, love, freaks. Thank you.