668: --yolo

Just food for thought. I do wonder what the eventual effects might be for bitcoin, hopefully positive!

Welcome back for the new year! Whilst I prefer the shows not focused on US-internal politics, I know there'll be some of that, it's only natural for a US based show. If we're talking about the US Fed, though ... what do you think about the NY Fed holding 7000 tonnes of gold on behalf of foreign governments ? After invading Venezuela, the US might be able to steal its bitcoin reserves, or maybe not. The gold in NY is much easier to steal. If I wanted a sovereign reserve, I know where I'd look!

Hey Chris, I’ve been looking for a product in Australia similar to Fold you always mention. I settled on CoinJar. They have a prepaid Mastercard that you can instantly setup and use. It uses onchain BTC to fund purchases directly. Seems like a good product and trusted company since 2013. Of course it’s custodial, but unavoidable I beleive. I’d been keen for other Aussies to boost in and let us know what they use. Alby hub is still my main savings account. Skip the coffee: stack sats!

Love the track! Nice pick, Chris. Filoxera: love it

Ha ha, I like it! Calling out “piss-poor hiring practices” as the cause for layoffs and the Fed’s strategy for curbing inflation of “trying really hard”. This is the way! I appreciated your video on BIP444, man that is out there. How does everyone feel about Knots now I wonder?

Happy episode 100! I hope the show keeps being worth you making it, because I sure appreciate listening to it. Banger of an episode 99 too 👍

Congrats on the 100 Chris. How to celebrate? Do whatever you want Chris, just have some fun. A guest sounds like a good idea, or how about some listeners calling in? I’m surprised to hear you say that you’re thinking of stopping at 100. I hope you don’t and I will continue to listen and support as long as you keep going. But you gotta do what feels right for you and your family. May the force be with you.

Value boost to bump streaming contribution...

I also have a serious question for you. I recently listened to an interview with the Samurai wallet dev who has been sentenced to 5 years prison for writing open source software. In the interview he talked about how his constitutional rights were not respected and how hostile the judge was. They had no evidence of an actual crime being committed, so the charges are for “conspiracy” to commit crimes. Basically, as they were “aware” that their software could be used for illegal purposes, they’re guilty of conspiring to commit that crime. This is pretty scary, does this mean any open source dev could be guilty of a similar crime? With your background in FOSS and Linux, I’d like to hear what you think about this? https://fountain.fm/episode/GgxUJOIxjJ96e0YFuVO2 Here’s the interview for anyone interested. Also a V4V pod with no ads.

Yes, my nephew did complete his sats quest. I made it easy for him by loading up a Lightning wallet and telling him about a bar where he lives which accepts sats. Told him he has to take some friends and shout them a drink with the Sats. And offered some additional cold storage sats as a “reward” once the quest was completed. Incentives at work :)

Boosting from Fountain with my Alby hub connected via Nostur connect! Re tax implications for spends on the CoinJar Mastercard setup in Australia, they report to the tax office directly or you can easily download transaction reports for your accountant. Also got my node setup dialled in now with clearnet and Tor working smooth and BTC Explorer to monitor it. I’ll get my act together and put the compose file on GitHub and report back. It gets easier every day: stack sats.

Economics is a political issue. Arguably THE MAIN political issue. Treating it as a technical problem separated from politics is an ideological strategy deployed with particular strength since the 1980s. You can find a great academic account of this fact in "Thinking like an economist" by Elizabeth Popp Berman. Granted, it's bigger than a partisan issue, especially when the only two alternatives are "capitalism is more important than democracy" vs "they are equally important" like in the US (and most of the West, honestly). So no need to apologise when you bring up the broader political context to discuss economic news. Keep it up!

2117 for the 117th episode plus 2000. Heard the Cold Card issue first from TWIB but also diversify and dont trust Canadian companies (que Team America Theme song). Is litigation against Kite in the works?

Add this to the previous boost. Got fat fingered in my rage! And while I’m at it, did Bitcoin maxi culture fail? 100%, yes. It failed. NVK and his mates personified it and look what happened.

If I think back to all the BS “podcasters” spouted about “don’t trust, verify” and all that crap, without doing it themselves, it makes me feel sick. V4V pods with zero paid ads is the only way we’ll get reliable information. As they say “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome”. Turns out they were right. Keep it up Chris. Thanks.

Part 2: I’d love to hear more about your node config on Bitcoin Core and what version you’re running. I’ve been holding off upgrading and am still running v28 but as v31 is coming out soon I think I need to upgrade to keep within the maintenance window. What configuration changes have you made to the defaults and what do you suggest for version updates and basic config changes?

+1 for ppq.ai This has been my go to AI for about a year now. It’s built by a Bitcoiner, you get discount when you pay in Sats and if you pay over LN, there’s zero KYC and the built in privacy of Lightning. Use it with a VPN (like Mullvad, also paid for in Sats) and offers pretty good privacy for general use. You can connect via a browser or with API keys. I use it for general topics or learning, not for anything private is sensitive. You can connect to all the latest models and it’s really good value as you pay per query (PPQ). There are more and more online services like this that accept sats and if we’re going to get the world using Bitcoin as money, these are great places to support the global P2P Bitcoin economy.

I don't see any reason why btc couldn't stay under the cost of mining a coin for quite a while. The miners with reserves would keep going, and the small ones wouldn't make it. But my prediction is that it doesn't stay below $60k for long, exactly because this idea is widespread and people will start buying again if it does

#TheHolyHandGrenade Boost. 1253, though 12533 may be the price to warrant the clip 🤔. Boosting to drive you to another episode. I believe if we talk about gold and the other currency in their lowest denomination it would help. An atom of gold's worth, the dollar can be infinitely divisible just look at Office Space. A Sat is therefore much more valuable than any current atom of element 🤯

This seems a very accurate description of btc to me, and also one which depends on two things: btc being hard money, and btc being usable as money for trade.

Trying to keep it short: Money used for Money-Commodity-Money trades is capital. This is how an industrialist uses money. Contrast this to the Commodity-Money-Commodity use of money by say a poor farmer.

It's interesting that you ask if Saylor is downplaying btc as an asset, when the clip you played has him describing it as capital. In classical political economy, capital is a specific role played by hard money.

I enjoyed Ep 100 a lot and am happy to hear you’ll keep going. Don’t know where my week would be without TWIB Thursdays! I want to ask you a question. Imagine you had a team of 5 (humans and/or agents) working on TWIB full time. What would you want them to do and what would your vision for TWIB be? What would it look like? What do you wish TWIB had right now? Some food for thought. Thanks for the signal, and the sound fx, I love the sound fx!

"Your inner child" back again even though River is holding my bitcoin for up to 5 days 🤬😭. I would love the Holy Hand Grenade clip for past and future 12533 boosts. Sats per doller is fine but 97% of the dollar has been inflated away since its creation. Other people like to compare bitcoin to gold but the smallest unit of gold is an atom. Gold can be traded by gram, but the equivalent amount of sats to atoms in a gram of gold is 3.06 x 10^21 sats which is more than will ever exist 🤦. At the current dollar and aluminum price though, a pop tab and a sat are worth the same 🥳 10 steel bottle caps are also worth a sat at scrap prices if we want get ahead of 2077 Fallout's timeline 🤔. - also you should definitely go on Vance (VCP) podcast in person in St Louis. Let us know what bitcoin bounty we would need to raise to get you there 😈

Five years ago Michael Saylor created a 20 part podcast series with Robert Breedlove, he talked about history and first principles. I listened to it twice and it helped me deepen my understanding of Bitcoin and build conviction. I shared it with friends. Now when I listen to him talk I don’t even understand what the words mean. I do not share any of his talks with Bitcoin newbies any more. He’s a different guy focusing on different things. Good luck to him, I’m just glad I came across the old Saylor when I did.

I'd bet Saylor's selling btc is because of whatever Galaxy Brain thing I don't understand that separates what he's doing from a Ponzi scheme. But if it's not that, maybe it's simple? Buy low sell high, and he's betting against a hot bitcoin summer?

Hey also, keen to know how you handle gifting sats to non-coiners. Thinking I might do that this Xmas for a few family and friends.

Reporting back regarding CoinJar. So far so good. Have updated my Jupiter party subscription to use the attached Mastercard, now paying for my membership with sats! Few retail purchases this week too and it’s working great. Hurts to spend those sats though! Also flipping back to core with config tweak given the knots BIP444 shenanigans. Buy store brands: stack sats!

I gave my nieces and nephews some Bitcoin for Xmas in 2022. Turns out that was a great time to do that, as it’s gone nothing but up since then. I’ve gave them the same amount of fiat again last Xmas, and explained how it was now worth much less in Sats. When I see them I check in and ask them how their magic internet money is going. One of them is right into it, so I send him Sats and a quest to spend them at a local merchant. I’ve become the Bitcoin uncle!

I love video for technical tutorials but prefer audio for news and interviews. How about some detailed video content on a technical topic, perhaps available as bonus content? Video content would involve more effort for you, so putting that effort towards evergreen technical content would mean it sticks around longer. Thanks for the in depth content and the research you put into every show. (+1 vote for the Alby hub deep dive with Wes)

I vote for an audio format podcast. Video is HUGE data-wise. I download my queue of podcast content daily to the local storage on my #GrapheneOS phone. In this usage model I can stream content without a data connection, I never worry about storage, and my phone can stay in the cab of my truck while I walk around with bluetooth headphones enjoying TWIB and working at the same time! Thanks for producing the best podcast I've heard on the topic of Bitcoin and for doing it in a format focused on audio delivery.

I've been enjoying the balance of the show recently, keep up the good work!

Where do you find the number of nodes on the network? There was a great site called Bitnodes which used to have lots of network info like this but it has recently shut down. Can you explain the difference between a “listening “ node and a non listening node. If the node total includes non listening nodes it’s much higher, so I wanted to find out the difference. Thanks.

A journey to get enough sats on here - River for the win as well as Bitcoin ATM's that charge $9 usd for the conversion 🤦. 12533 I hope you can get the Monte Python Holy Hand Grenade clip for this number 🤪. ? Can you compare the price of sats with usd mill ($0.001) and Gold's smallest unit (atoms) - or maybe the microgram price as the current system is even more crazy than the Bitcoin number? This way people can see how inflated the united states dollar has become and the real power of the sat 🤯

I think you did have a technical problem last week, I could see more sats in the fountain stream alone than the total you read out on the show. So here’s a double for this week. Stick to the signal and leave the $1 million dollar price talk for the other B grade podcasters.

Oh no maybe we broke your fountain account 😭 missed 9 of us above the 2000 sat mark by my count for 106. As long as people accept sats as payment it wont die. I tried to share the math on gold to bitcoin, The equivalent sats to ever exist equal to atoms of gold would be one grain of sand worth of gold - or 6.86 milligrams - thats how rare bitcoin will be 🤯.

I’d like to hear more about places to use Bitcoin as money. Especially any online services you use or are aware of. I know there are VPNs, Email services and AI aggregators who accept sats. Any more? I’ve always thought using sats to support Open Source projects and developers should be an easy win. Thanks

Part 2: A listener shared this website, which has some excellent explainers and guides on wallets, entropy, keys, seeds and more. Awesome resource, all tools are free to use under the MIT license. https://selfcustodylabs.com/

My question last week was more about generating the seed phrase and checksum in an offline way. I rolled the dice so can get the entropy offline, but wonder how to generate and verify the actual seed words and checksum. It seems like that part is harder to do in a truely offline way. Do you have any tips on that? Thanks.

I need to open some new Lightning channels to connect me to regular merchants I use. What would you suggest to find the right nodes to open channels to? Is there a tool I could use to input my payments history and help me find the right channel partners? After a long stable run I’m suddenly experiencing lots of failed payments to merchants I’ve been paying for years, including Fountain for your boosts! Got any tips or tools that could help? Thanks.

https://fountain.fm/clip/dqidRsWFbLpasGKDfxLi is the "We Call Them Poor" song, but the artist is on X, can you poke them and get them to add the song to wavlake? I dont give my data to Elon or Zuck 😂

Clipped the first song you shared and made a playlist but waiting on Fountain to fix the bug I found 😇. How do we share clips of boosts to add to the list you randomly select from? Became a premium fountener so I can save on the fees once I start zapping the artists $1 a song that I add to said playlist 👊

Hey Chris how do we clip stuff for you? How can we request said clips? 2000+ sat Boosts are us selling our sats to you for your sweet sweet attention. To be unclear is to be unkind. We know you are the kindest Bitcoin Podcaster. Help us help you 🤟 Boba boosted 12533 but wiffed on the monty python clip 😭 you make us want to be better men and women 👊

Part 2: Do you see any opportunities in the Bitcoin education space through TWIB? Memberships and courses, educational content? And are there any ways to “open source” any of this via V4V community contributions or something like that? I see why you’ve done with Linux Unplugged and wonder if it’s possible to do a TWIB version of this. Anyway, some thoughts to ponder. Your show drops on Thursday in my part of the world, and I always look forward to “TWIB Thursdays” now.

Hey Chris It was interesting to hear you say that you look at each of your shows as businesses. Tell us more about the vision for TWIB. Do you see it following the same path as LUP, with V4V, memberships and bonus content, but no paid ads? Are there other unique things you’re considering for TWIB? TBC in the next boost.

Part 2… When sentiment is low (and fuck me, it is as low as I have ever seen it), my happy place is a deep technical rabbit hole. When the price is crashing or the sky falling in, work on your skills and learn new things. Like running your own node on a self hosted Linux server. This week I’m hardening my node and learning all about reverse proxies. It really is the gift that keeps on giving and if you don’t get rich off Bitcoin, you’ll have some valuable skills to hit the job market with!

Bitcoin meetups and events are the best. Meeting other Bitcoiners IRL is like being reunited with old friends. I attend all the meetups and events I can and even travel to some. I would definitely attend a TWIB event. Thanks for the quality content every week, and for the laughs too! Gotta keep smiling (and stacking) through the bear :)

What do I think of BIP444? If you’re interested, read the original BIP, understand it properly then make your own judgement. Too many Bitcoiners are just listening to their favorite influencer and picking a side to support. The BIP makes no reference to a decision being made to determine if arbitrary data is objectionable. The BIP lists 7 Op Codes or conditions which would further restrict arbitrary data at the consensus level. I think Matthew Kratter picked that ball up and ran with it himself for some shock value. This BIP seems unlikely to have legs, but if we’re going to debate it we should at least understand it properly. My 2 sats worth. (Bonus boost for “nose candy Mark” in the last ep. I approve!)

Here's an intetesting article I ran across on Nomadnet: 42bfb438810723c65fe196af59948600:/page/nip-05/kudzaikutukwa@freedom.tech/the-golden-encirclement.mu If you don't have Nomadnet, I think it is also posted here on Substack: https://kudzai.substack.com/p/the-golden-encirclement-how-c…

When the Op Return drama started I was interested to learn more about Knots. And I did. But over time I came to the conclusion I would not run it for the following reasons. Key person (and crazy person) risk with Luke, limited number of developers and support of BIP110. Then I also learnt that each version of Knots includes a built in depreciation setting by default. So Knot for me!

Holy hand grenade clip is okay, but the clip where he miscounts to three would be perferable "one, two, five! - three my lord, oh right three" followed by the explosion 😂. Love the emoji shout out! Thank you. Social media is fine, but how many fans do you need to give you $10 a month to make this worth your time?

Hey Chris. I want to echo some of the other comments here and say that TWIB is a highlight of my week and that the signal and value you provide is awesome. The fact that you live and breathe Open Source and live off V4V means the content is of the highest quality. It seems like all the other Bitcoin pods have either lost their values, sold out to advertisers or just gone bat shit crazy, so we need you here buddy. I’d like to see more of the membership for TWIB and think there must be opportunities there for you. An Open Source Bitcoin community centered around TWIB, learning new skills and helping each other out, I’d be a part of that. Over and out.

In anticipation of your deep dive on AlbyHub, let me say that AlbyHub is a growing disappointment for me. I tried to create two self-hosted docker AlbyHub instances with the idea that I would experiment with custom channels between the two instances (to avoid the expensive/limited LSP's baked into AlbyHub). Wrong! It seems at every turn AlbyHub hides key technical details and config options from the UI in the name of "security/ease of use". Overiding the default web address for the web admin console with a secure tailnet IP address seems to break AlbyhHub's interaction with the external internet. AlbyHub is not an experimenter's dream, but more of a nightmare.

Every month I add a little extra to my regular DCA and keep it in a mobile wallet for spending. I want Bitcoin to be money, so want to make that a reality. There aren’t too many merchants who accept Bitcoin around me, but not zero. I pay for my haircuts and always support cafes and restaurants who accept it. If I find a merchant who accepts Sats in a place I visit, I make a point of going there and spending sats. I also pay for as many online services as I can in Sats: Proton, Mullvad and ppq.ai are examples. And boosts of course! This is how I do it.

Episode 111 makes the run time 111 minutes 🥳 . What do you think of the idea of 2000 plus the previous episode to get shout outed? Im boosting 2111 just in case 😉.

Thanks for sharing your agent and node methodology. I kind of knew the answer wouldn’t be something like “put a few wrappers in place and let ‘em loose on your nodes”. But I didn’t think the answer would be Nix, even though I hear you talk about it all the time on LUP. another rabbit hole to discover! Here we go again! :)

A question about nodes and one for Wes. What is Nix Bitcoin? I hear you talk about Nix on LUP, and as I understand it Nix is a distro, but maybe it’s not? And how does Nix Bitcoin fit in? Is it a node implementation? Or not? Help me out with this one please. For Wes: What would it take for more Open Source believers to get into Bitcoin more? I’d love to hear his thoughts on this, hopefully you have some time on the road for some Bitcoin chat. Safe travels.

Has AI affected my job? Yes, in a positive way. I am self employed and take care of clients’ website and e-commerce infrastructure. AI allows me to do way more than before. An example is testing, I use AI to write scripts to automate testing, saves me hours each time. AI helps me troubleshoot issues on tools I have very little experience with. And this is just the beginning, I haven’t even gone deep into the Agent world yet. AI is going to disrupt and create opportunities at the same time. It’s up to all of us to make sure we’re in the right place to benefit.

Had a couple m5 atoms around from when I was testing the year of voice with home assistant. Turned them into Bluetooth relays for home assistant. https://esphome.io/projects/index.html Amazing haha. Now my blind openers stay local.

Blue onyx for blue iris. CPAI drop in replacement written in rust. https://github.com/xnorpx/blue-onyx

What’s better for privacy? Recursive dns like unbound in opnsense or dns over tls through cloudflare? Whats more performant?

Belated boost for this, and other episodes. So much of what Dash talked about resonated with me. Running multiple nodes, disappointment in Bitcoiners and looking for answers somewhere else. Thanks for the thought provoking conversations Cody.

Belated boost for the last few episodes. Thanks for the useful and thought provoking content. Where else can I find Mishima Yukio, Taiwan and Bitcoin Policy in NZ on the same stream!

Gents! I’ve been running NixOS as a server for a year now, really keen to get started with flakes in NixOS, but struggling to get started - any pointers? NixOS on the media PC has been amazing! Meshtasic devices rocked up on Friday, but I didn’t make it to the post office in time, have to wait until Monday now! *sigh*

Thanks for the update on this Chris. Keep ‘em coming, people are afraid and a bit freaked out so some calm words and solid advice from an OG like you will be really helpful. Interesting spin on random numbers on LUP too, seems like this is not the first time generating random numbers has led to problems.

About node setups and security: I started with a Raspiblitz about 3 years ago, this was a great first node if you want to learn the more technical side of running a node as it packages everything up and has a very simple GUI but also allows you to use the command line as well. It runs over Tor by default, so gives you that extra layer of privacy. Two years in I started running Bitcoin Core directly on an Ubuntu server, which in many ways is simpler than the Raspiblitz once you get used to doing everything in the command line. You’re running way less services, just what you need: Bitcoin Core, Fulcrum Server, Mempool.space and Tor. I went on to run a Lightning Node a year later and am still going strong, using that to route all my payments. Both my Bitcoin node and LND run over Tor, which for personal use (not routing on Lightning) has been good for me. I followed the guides on the Ministry of Nodes You Tube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@MinistryofNodes) , Ketan is a well known Aussie Bitcoiner and a big open source and Linux guy. His guides are excellent. Next step is to connect Alby Hub to my LND node, so I can route my own boosts on Fountain.

Double boost for this and the episode with Oscar. Conversations with people like Oscar who are creating real use cases for Bitcoin are great. Is there a way to connect my LND node to Fountain? Can I do this with Alby hub? I’d love to connect directly and not have to manually top up my Fountain wallet if I could. Keep the signal coming, thanks.

Long time listener, first time booster. Really enjoy the show. Have a couple of servers setup at home running Proxmox, NixOS, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Immich and so much more! I’m running Tailscale thanks to you guys. My off site backup uses a Synology box at my folks place 400km away, all via TS. PS this is a post code boost, Australia. Maybe a Western Australia meetup!? Cheers.

Now that we’re all entropy enthusiasts, can you share some tips on how to create a seed 100% offline. The best method I found was to roll dice and then create the seed phrase offline on Tails, which is then wiped after shutdown. But I still wonder how “offline” that could be? I saw another boost here talking about using a NixOS offline to do it. Do you have any tips or shared experience in this area? Thanks