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Do you hear that? It sounds like the air is just sort of leaking out of the ETF hype that we've been going through over the last week. Just sort of fading.

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You shared with me a clip of Kathy Wood and a very enthusiastic NBC guest talking about how something else must be going on behind the scenes.

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Why hasn't Gary moved yet? Why is Gary bringing up thud like Bitcoin can be manipulated when he literally taught a course on it at MIT where the conclusion was it can't be manipulated.

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This is a real thing. And if there is attempts by market makers to manipulate Bitcoin price, we're going to see it much more clearly than in traditional opaque markets.

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Yeah, it was interesting to watch Kathy Wood kind of opine on the matter and agree that there must be some other reason. And then she brought up the old rumor that Gary would like to be Treasury Secretary one day.

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And so perhaps he's just trying to delay this as long as possible because he's looking at the next job.

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I thought this was an open secret because the one persistent narrative around Gary Gensler is that he's a political animal. He's just in it for himself and his career.

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That's his main motivation. And you can kind of see that from the way that he releases these incredibly cringy SEC videos where Gary Gensler is talking to the camera and explaining how cracking down on stoner cats is such a success for the SEC and the investing public.

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When I see those videos, I think how much ego do you have to have to put yourself out there, Gary? Does the SEC not have a marketing or sort of public relations director? Shouldn't they be doing this?

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Why are you putting your name on this? And I think his political aspirations, his apparent desire to one day be named Treasury Secretary, that seems to be a reasonable explanation.

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And that also means that approving a spot Bitcoin ETF as SEC chairman puts him contrary to the interests of the US Treasury and managing the dollar standard in general, which is a point we've made a lot on the show.

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It's not quite saying the quiet part out loud, but when you analyze the motivations, that seems to be the obvious conclusion.

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And I think the reason why the air is sort of slowly leaking out of the ETF hype is we were in this eight day window for some reason where there was possible approval window where the SEC could approve the ETFs all at once.

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When that window closes, that kind of moves us more towards the January 10th window, which an analyst at Bloomberg says we still have a 90% chance of approval by January 10th, 2024.

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Unless he steps down over the holidays, how does kicking the can cover his butt? It seems like if he's still there in January, then he's going to be the guy at the SEC that approved the Bitcoin spot ETF.

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I'm thinking about my own career and having to make necessary decisions that senior leadership did not like. One strategy is to delay as long as possible, over communicate with your boss or your boss's boss who hates what you're doing and doesn't want to accept that the cost is necessary.

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And look, I'm on the record of trying to sort this out as long as possible. Yeah, it gives him some plausible deniability after the fact, I suppose, when he's getting his quote unquote next job interview.

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I don't really think it's going to create the big disruption that people are so worried about. I don't know.

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We'll see. I would love to be wrong on this, but a lot of times with this particular type of event, there is a buy on the rumor and then a slow sell on the news as the market just sort of digest the new reality, which is generally not as shiny and incredible as everyone expects.

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So I'm not like a spot ETF bull or a bear either way, but I just don't think it's going to have the life changing impact on the price of Bitcoin that everyone's expecting.

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It's just going to be yet another financial tool. And I just say that because I look at all the other spot ETFs that exist, like the one in Canada around the world already, and they've not really moved the needle at all.

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And I understand that the US market's much larger, and I'm just, I don't know, I think I'm just more middle of the road expectations wise.

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I think what it does change is that if a Bitcoin spot ETF makes it into corporate American 401k retirement plans, then like the rest of financial markets, there's just a constant buy pressure.

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And so this tends to make the price more sensitive to upside and less sensitive to dumping off.

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So I think it might be from a pure financial sense, a change in Bitcoin volatility, kind of pushing that volatility more to the upside as opposed to the downside, because every time wage slaves like your Bitcoin dad get their paycheck, there are these automatic deductions that go into 401k and other retirement savings plans.

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Like we saw this during this bear market is the DCA errors are creating some base demand for the amount of Bitcoin getting created because only so much Bitcoin gets created per day.

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If you have enough plebs that are stacking that daily, it creates a base floor demand and this I guess would increase that, which is a good thing.

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Would that actually be the funny thing? Everybody gets so excited.

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There are all these expectations and what really ends up happening is just more consistent demand, more buying, which just creates a new floor price because there's a new floor demand.

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I think if we look at what happened with the approval of the gold ETFs, which I think was around, I want to say 2010, maybe 2009, the price of gold jumped up to a new level.

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And then it sort of languished. I mean, I think it's been like a pretty okay performing asset, but there was this step change and kind of floor price and then it sort of hung out.

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And part of that story has to do with the actual scarcity of gold. What is in these ETFs? Is it real gold? Is it some sort of paper gold derivative?

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Is it possible to audit the gold supply? And it seems like no, it's not really possible anymore.

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So I think we can conclude that the effects of the ETF will be complex.

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It'll likely result in more Bitcoin going into corporate financial cold storage and never coming out. Is that good? Is that bad?

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I don't know. It's hard to tell from where we are now. I would say generally not great for Bitcoin as a freedom technology, but it's an open protocol. You can do what you want with it.

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Do you have any insights or thoughts on, it looks like today as we went started recording, one of the bits of feedback that the SEC is giving the spot Bitcoin ETF issuers is that they want cash creations over in kind creations for ETFs, meaning the issuer would have to

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transact in cash instead of using Bitcoin directly. SEC prefers cash because broker dealers can't directly handle Bitcoin.

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But I guess it's seen as a positive step indicating progress in the approval process.

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But interesting development in that you're going to have to use cash. You can't sell Bitcoin to buy a Bitcoin ETF. Hadn't really considered it, but it seems SEC is clarifying that.

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Interesting. So I guess that means that you give the Bitcoin ETF issuer cash and then they go and buy Bitcoin for you.

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In a way, it means it's going to sell more Bitcoin because you can't sell your existing Bitcoin to get into this ETF. You have to go buy new Bitcoin, more Bitcoin. Maybe I'm getting a little more bullish now that I think about it.

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I have no idea. I think these financial constructions are quite complex and given the way they're implemented and architected, it might have various effects that could be completely opposite.

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So you might have a setup where due to the places that you can send Bitcoin and the lockup and waiting periods, that's very bullish for Bitcoin price, but it also could be the opposite in my view.

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I mean, maybe some idiots sell their hard asset for cash. Imagine selling your Bitcoin for cash and then aping into an ETF with that cash. I don't think that's going to be a super common scenario, but you might see some institutional selling.

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This is the Bitcoin dad pod recorded on November 17, 2023. I'm your Bitcoin dad and I'm here remotely back in the old US of A with me. It's Chris. Hey everybody, welcome back to the pod.

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On today's show, we're going to touch on consumer inflation moderating in the US. How is that possible as government spending continues to rise?

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On Twitter, there is a conversation about the problem of Bitcoin. How do you have decentralization when throughput is so limited and there are 300,000 pending transactions in the mempool? Does it even work?

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We're going to discuss how to handle that in a bull market with a full mempool. Is lightning the solution? Maybe, maybe not.

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In privacy, swan Bitcoin is limiting customers interaction with privacy services due to a partner policy. They also kind of give clear guidelines on how to avoid that limitation, but it's definitely encroachment on financial privacy in general.

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FinCEN is also seeking to impose much stricter surveillance requirements into what they define as mixers. We'll get into that. It's absolutely an attack on free speech, the ability to write open source code. It's very vague.

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It's incredibly reckless and irresponsible rulemaking with very unclear benefit for security, etc.

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Jamesson Law, who I guess is now an open source journalist, has compiled a GitHub repo. He's had this going for a long time, which tracks physical attacks on Bitcoiners.

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There was some news that was, I think, not very well documented about alleged attacks on Bitcoiners in Sweden due to their lack of financial privacy for individuals.

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We'll see. 810 million Indian citizens have been completely doxxed in a database hack that is 810 million, or more than twice the population of the US, just for a little context.

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So all of this FinCEN surveillance is going to go into a database and it is going to be hacked and then we'll get to deal with the fallout as individuals.

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Human Rights Foundation has put out a global CBDC tracker. It's quite interesting to see how many governments visualized our investigating CBDCs, rolling them out in the US.

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It details Project Hamilton, which is a, I believe, MIT and Federal Reserve CBDC test project.

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For a little light shot in Freudia, we're going to poke fun at Noriel Rubini, a rabid Bitcoin critic who is now launching his own altcoin.

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But don't worry, it's green tech and AI powered.

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Then in Bitcoin education, we're going to introduce an open source website that documents Bitcoin knowledge around opcodes.

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It's a developer resource, but I think enthusiasts could also read that and find interesting information.

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And then in Bitcoin Optech 277, the episode covers mostly a transaction malleability fix or solution for lightning anchor outputs and a piece about Bitcoin manuscript development and implementation for business.

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Then we have some booths and that's our show.

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Well, we got good news this week. Put up the Mission Accomplished banner because US inflation is moderating and everything's good.

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Feds are going to keep the rates where they're at right now because things are just doing great.

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And wrap it up, boys. We're close to that 2% inflation again. Problem solved.

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Or is it? This is an article from Wall Street.

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What you can see is that if you look at the import price index for consumer goods, removing automobiles, inflation is ticking down from the 2022 highs.

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It's almost a 35 degree angle down if you kind of draw one on the mark on the chart.

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You could say, OK, well, maybe the Fed policy is working. Higher interest rates are somehow constraining inflation.

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But the news from Walmart is that basically consumers, regular people are super strapped.

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They're waiting for sales and deals before they make purchases.

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And so you see that in durable goods, furniture, things like that that you can kind of put off a purchase.

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Those are ticking down.

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They also reported a drop in just food sales as well. Just general food.

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Was it general food or was it food eating outside the home?

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Because it looks like CPI food at home is still on a slight uptrend.

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Well, both. So just I want to dig into the Walmart one for a moment because I think it's really fascinating not to derail us.

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So the last quarterly report that Walmart had, they saw a decline in sales.

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Again, it was food and junk food and things like that.

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And they ran with the headline that it was because of Osempic.

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Osempic was causing their customers to buy less food.

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The Walmart stock didn't really take a beating as a result.

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Osempic is this weight loss drug that seems to just short-circuit the human brain and make you desire less stuff in general, right?

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Yeah. I think it's about $500. It's not covered by insurance.

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And it's a shot that you either get administered by a doctor or you get a kit and self-administer it's sort of like an insulin shock.

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It's not a cheap thing.

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And so I never really bought the line that Walmart shoppers were buying less because they were on Osempic.

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It seemed like, I don't know, it seemed like a BS story.

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It also happened to coincide with Osempic just recently became available in the Walmart pharmacy or something like that.

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But I thought it seemed odd that that was their attribution for a decline in sales.

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This quarterly report, the one you just referred to, they couldn't use that as a cover story and they just came out straight up and said people can't afford food and some of the basics.

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And as a result, their stock was destroyed.

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And it made me realize that the companies that come out and say consumer spending is down first are getting absolutely punished by the stock market.

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So these companies are coming up with all of these reasons for sales decline that are anything but the consumer can't afford goods.

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And when Walmart had to finally come out and admit it, they got destroyed in the market.

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And I just thought that was an interesting cycle that we're in right now.

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And I think the corollary to this data, which is that consumer CPI seems to be ticking down, especially when you control for food and energy,

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which is preposterous because food and energy and shelter are the largest spending categories for a regular person's budget.

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And of course, shelter is still up, rents are still increasing year on year.

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So how much of that is due to sort of actual rents going up and how much is due to this odd adjustment called owner's equivalent rent that is a construction in the CPI

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we've talked about before that basically if you kind of add mortgage payments and things into the CPI in a naive way,

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the CPI becomes a index that tracks mortgage interest rates and it doesn't kind of do any other tracking very well.

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So it's a hard problem to track consumer price inflation.

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That said, you can't naively rely on the index to sort of figure out are we in an inflationary monetary environment or not.

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And for that, we have the St. Louis Fed.

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They have a data system called FRED.

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When I was a student, I use this a lot to look up economic data and anyone can just log in.

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We have a link in the show notes and there is a chart here called monetary base total and you can calculate the monetary base in many different ways.

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FRED has a info page that shows how they do it.

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I don't think that's super important right now because if you look at this chart, you'll see that the US monetary base climbed very, very slowly,

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basically a very low angle kind of acute angle until 2008 where it gaps up and then it goes on a 45 degree line until today with some volatility.

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So what does that mean?

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It means that the US monetary base, the sort of base money, however, that's defined is increasing.

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And if it's not increasing due to consumer lending or necessarily business lending, it's increasing due to government spending.

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And we know that US government spending is high, record high budget deficits, record high debt issuance,

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and that is going into the economy in very specific places.

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Right now, a lot of that money is going into military spending specifically around US support for Israel and Ukraine and the conflicts that those nations are engaged in.

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So CPI can go down.

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Consumer price increases can moderate, especially as people get poorer relatively due to price inflation.

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But inflation can still rage on.

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Monetary base will still increase as long as the US government that has the ability to directly and indirectly print money has very large spending commitments.

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And those spending commitments have not been resolved.

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And so the monetary base and inflation will continue to tick up in my opinion.

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And I think that this chart right here is a very bullish case for Bitcoin.

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Everything else in your portfolio is defined by this monetary base number.

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It's denominated in dollars and the number of dollars are clearly increasing.

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I mean, if you just look at the jump between 2019 and 2021, so that's, you know, it's basically an eight month period.

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The monetary base increases by, let's say, roughly 45 percent.

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Well, we haven't had the government response to the recession that we're in slash entering.

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So this number is going to go up again and inflation is going to rage again.

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And there's nothing other than Bitcoin that isn't denominated in dollars.

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So if that's not part of someone's savings, I think that would be a big oversight, frankly.

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Yeah, well put.

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And I think it's important to remind everybody that if the official CPI number is somewhere around 3%, that's the rate of inflation.

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If you were to zoom out and say you go back to January 30th of 2020, overall, like aggregated inflation is like 23% still.

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We're way up on so many goods still.

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The prices are increasing.

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They're just increasing slower.

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But I love the Trueflation dashboard.

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I think they've been nailing it.

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I've been getting more and more aggressive in my recommendation as I've monitored them over the last year and a half.

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And I think they really have made an outstanding product out there that helps people truly understand inflation and the overall impact.

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And they have this new aggregated indicator that's fascinating.

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But I'll link to the source and the show notes.

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But if you look at the last year, car insurance in particular is just up like almost 20%.

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And that's something I hear people complaining about on the regular now is how they're getting screwed by car insurance and repairs.

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You know, people are trying to save money by keeping their car, but the cost of car repairs is up about 10%.

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Services in general are just up.

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So it's still quite a problem, I think.

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And it doesn't really matter if the Fed says they're pretty close to their goals and they're starting to pat themselves on the back.

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And I mean, I saw Jim Kramer basically spend five minutes on air praising the masterful moves of Jay Powell and how he has orchestrated the softest of the softest landings that was on CNBC yesterday.

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Oh my God.

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That is like the biggest recession flag you could get.

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I know.

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The reverse Kramer ETF is like one of the best performing ETFs.

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I don't know why I don't own it.

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I know.

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I know.

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I'm really concerned now.

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Now that he said that, it makes me pretty concerned.

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But meanwhile, I'm sitting here and I'm just feeling it still.

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I'm just still feeling it every single day.

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And I can't imagine where my mind would be at if I didn't have Bitcoin.

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And there's a really cool site that I want everybody to check out.

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One more recommendation.

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It's pricedinbitcoin21.com.

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If you go to pricedinbitcoin21.com, it shows you the price of basically everything in the world priced in sats.

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And how it's been doing over time.

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Like if you look at the US dollar, well, the US dollar is actually up against Bitcoin 3.43% today.

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But you zoom out over the month, Bitcoin's up 21.85% over the dollar.

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If you zoom out to the three year, it's 54%.

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Bitcoin's up 54% over the US dollar.

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Crude oil, 51%.

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Gold in one year, 30, 30, 40% basically.

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The SMP, Bitcoin has outperformed the SMP by 48.27% in the last year.

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And then they have a denominated individual currencies like the Euro and all the, you know, every fiat you might be interested in.

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And the situation's even more brutal over there.

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So when you start pricing these goods, like you mentioned, in sats instead of dollars, the performance of Bitcoin is undeniable.

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On the day to day, every now and then, the dollar has a win, maybe on like the week.

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But outside of that, Bitcoin dominates oil, gold, SMP, median house prices and every fiat currency when you actually price them against sats.

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I mean, there's your clear inflation number.

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Bitcoin is a ruler to hold up to a world of unfixed value because you can't change the number of Bitcoin.

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You can't change its emissions schedule.

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The short term, whales can pump and dump.

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But like you said, the US dollar gets some wins in the short term.

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But over any reasonable time period, Bitcoin just crushes other assets in preserving value because it was built to do that with modern technology and a clever structure.

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And legacy finance is still in many ways stuck in the 19th century.

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The downside, though, is as more people realize this, more activity happens on the blockchain.

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As people decide to try to cram their JPEGs into the blockchain before it gets super expensive to do so, activity goes up and people are starting to complain.

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I saw somebody on Twitter who's often a bull, often just going on all the time about how great things are, complaining about 300,000 pending transactions earlier today and fees spiking up to $12.

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And they're right. I looked, the average transaction fee is up a lot right now.

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It's up about 700% from a year ago right now.

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So, you know, some people are feeling that.

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Right. I mean, I'm feeling it because I'm trying to fee bump a transaction and it's not something I do very frequently.

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It's a real pain in the butt.

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And as you really, it makes me kick myself that I hadn't chosen a more aggressive fee days ago.

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It's not fun. And I think that the takeaway is that in a high fee environment, you need to think about Bitcoin transactions and how you transact a lot differently.

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Because you can have transactions stuck in the mempool.

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And once a transaction is in the mempool, because there are people like mempool.space that run a gigabyte mempool.

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So if your local mempool is 300 megabytes and your transaction gets purged out of it and it disappears from your wallet,

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that transaction could still be sitting in someone else's larger mempool, not getting purged.

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And then it goes through weeks or months later and you're like, whoa, where did my Bitcoin go?

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If you say tried to cancel it with whoever you're transacting with and pay via another channel or something.

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So this gets really complicated.

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And I think that one solution that people are kind of jumping on is lightning.

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But the problem is lightning also requires on-chain transactions to both set up a channel and then close channels

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and rebalance channels. So lightning is not a perfect solution.

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It sort of mitigates the on-chain fee environment if you have the right lightning channels set up already.

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But as we can see today, the time to set up those lightning channels was a month ago.

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And that timing is bad because about a month ago, people were panicking about, oh, an irreparable flaw in lightning.

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And I noticed several very large channels just shut down.

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They just noped out and didn't bother properly closing.

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And it's still, I've had another large channel shut down recently just last day.

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I'm trying like a 5 million plus set channel just gone now.

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Now I want to rebound some of the other channels to try to make up for the missing liquidity and the fees are redonkulous.

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So the timing sucks actually for a lot of us lightning node runners because probably other people have been experiencing the same problem I have.

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People have got freaked out about losing sats and just shut their nodes down.

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And some of us are still kind of repairing from that.

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Now we're in a situation where the fees are super high and I'm feeling the pinch.

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And we felt it on the show because someone tried to send in a big boost and it failed because our lightning channels weren't correctly balanced.

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And we have to invest time and sats into fixing that.

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Yeah, I'm going to give it a think over the weekend and kind of come up with a complete solution for the JB node.

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There are advantages I suppose to having hosted lightning systems as well, but I want to keep it self-hosted.

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Yeah, you almost want a failover mechanism.

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So you try to run it through your own node and then you attempt to route it via an LSP as kind of a secondary.

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Yeah, that'd be cool.

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Now what about privacy?

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Do you think that we are critical in general of Swan Bitcoin?

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Because I think they're perceived as a Bitcoin first company that's doing it right.

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DCA, you can buy but not sell on their platform.

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They encourage self-custody.

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So a lot of those things are super positive.

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At the same time, I think we have correctly critiqued their back-end custody solution because they were on Prime Trust.

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Now they've moved to Fortress Trust.

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These companies are pretty suspect.

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And the founder of Prime Trust founded Fortress Trust.

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And then after he left, it turned out that they had done a terrible job and lost over $84 million in funds.

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So there's new news about Swan changing its privacy policy and stating that they're going to close accounts of people who interact with Bitcoin privacy tools like CoinJoin.

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What's the overall take?

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Are we just salty dogs because Swan doesn't sponsor our podcast?

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I mean, I think we're more critical than most in the podcast space, but not as critical as those in the social media space.

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The problem I think we have really isn't so much with what Swan's trying to accomplish.

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It's more like the issues that they have to deal with where they're in this kind of weird intermediary spot.

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The money transmitter license issue means that they're really limited in who they can work with until they solve that problem for themselves.

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We've seen Strike handle this really well.

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Not only do they have their own infrastructure like River does, but Strike just this week announced that they're also available globally.

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I suspect the Swan team is working on solving this problem.

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But in the meantime, they are kind of forced to follow the rules that their bank follows.

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And that is simply now that Swan customers cannot directly withdraw or deposit from any address that comes from a mixing wallet source.

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So if you have like a wasabi wallet setup and you're taking your Swan Bitcoin and you're depositing into a wasabi wallet, then I think you can't use that anymore.

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You'd have to go to another wallet and then to your wasabi wallet now.

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And that's simply because of their bank provider trying to follow these new fins and guidance that aren't even not law.

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They're not even policy or regulation.

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They're asking for input on guidance.

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And this shows you how permissioned the traditional banking system is when the banking gods just begin discussing a new policy about blocking an entire customer base.

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Before they've even made a policy or rule, they follow over themselves to implement it.

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And that's what's happened here.

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And if you try to send to like a known mixing address, Swan has to terminate your account if they find out about it.

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And I think this gets back to our previous critical perspective on how they have to operate and the infrastructure that they have to interact with.

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Because as a traditional financial business that interacts with bank accounts and accepts dollar payments, that means that they are subject to the current financial regulatory environment.

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This story has sort of fallen off the radar, but we are experiencing Operation Choke Point 2.0.

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These fins and guidelines, they're not law.

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But if you don't follow them, well, you might get an investigation.

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Well, we might have to look at your banking charter.

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This is exactly how it started with KYC years ago.

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It was, hey, we think this is something we should probably do.

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And a lot of institutions just snapped to it and started doing it.

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And then the ones that didn't started getting in trouble.

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And then it took about two years, but we were pretty much KYC'd everywhere.

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And it's not like Congress passed a law that said all Bitcoin purchases must be KYC'd.

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It was the same exact process that we're seeing right now that essentially blocked single Bitcoin address use and mixing services.

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And these companies voluntarily do it because the exact incentive you just laid out.

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And it worked with KYC.

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I see no reason why it won't work with this.

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It's already begun.

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Right.

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And KYC is this, frankly, moral panic that if we don't confirm that everybody's financial transactions aren't doing anything bad, then terrible things will happen.

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Well, after, what is it, 15 years now of a war on terror in the US, we've pretty much established that 99.99999% of financial transactions are just individuals and businesses trying to do right by themselves.

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And imposing these broad financial surveillance rules has a huge cost.

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It disadvantages the poorest people in the world who don't have the money to be worth the time of onboarding into these KYC systems.

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And they might not even have the documents.

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It makes my life less good because there are many transactions I have to perform in cash just for various reasons.

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And every time I go to the bank, I have to answer questions and be treated like a criminal.

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And one day I'm going to lose my banking because I'm going to say, you know what, I think that question is inappropriate.

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And I don't care to answer it.

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And they're going to say, OK, well, we're flagging you as a high-risk customer and we're closing your account.

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And that's inevitable at this point.

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I mean, I don't mean to sound too bitter about it, but this is the state of things.

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And why is there this obsession with KYC?

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Why is there this belief that if individuals have financial freedom, they're going to do terrible things?

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I think it gets to this sort of broader social and political and economic issues

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where the fundamental inequalities of our economic and political models are being exposed in real time

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faster and faster as communication and technology networks develop and more people interact with them.

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And rather than having difficult and complicated discussions about, you know, how could we improve our politics?

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How could we approve our economy?

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How could people, you know, exist at a greater level of flourishing?

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It's more convenient to go negative, blame the problems on bad actors, terrorists, whoever you want to point the finger at today.

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And, you know, I think that's the state of things.

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KYC is just a social cost.

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I don't think there's anything particularly good at it.

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Sure, you can dig through the data and you can find a couple examples of, OK, well, this person, you know,

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we tracked them down because of their financial profile and they were a really bad person doing terrible things.

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These are clearly outliers.

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Not to rant about this, but it's just, you know, we say KYC, we know your customer, AML, anti-money laundering.

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We say these words all the time because they constrain us every day.

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And as we repeat them, I feel like we begin to just accept them.

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And of course, that's the way that it is, but it doesn't have to be this way.

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It's probably not going to change, but I don't think it's right.

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And I think that, at least with Bitcoin, we have a network where there is no native KYC and we can transact as we like.

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Unfortunately, as you interact with regulated financial businesses, they attempt to enforce these restrictions onto Bitcoin.

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And I think that they will ultimately be unsuccessful because as the noose of KYC tightens around every participant in the traditional financial system,

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that system becomes harder to use, more expensive and less flexible.

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And we perceive, at least I do, the pace of change in our world to be accelerating.

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And yet this financial system, which is sort of the nervous system of our world, is ossifying and getting more brittle.

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So how is that going to work out?

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Well, things are going to break and we need an alternative system that is flexible enough and non-permissioned.

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And again, that is Bitcoin.

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How many times have we shielded Bitcoin so far in the podcast?

321
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Well, things will tighten though, right?

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These new fins and guidance on blocking, as they call it, convertible virtual currency mixing, this is bad news for Monero.

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It's bad news for coin joiners.

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Also, it blurs a line between mixing and coin joining.

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And I think it will become law of the land.

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And I think it's going to raise questions amongst Bitcoiners who have been mixing or coin joining their stack for a while if they're going to be able to spend it in the future.

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Like it raises all these common fud questions we've had all these years and it seems like it will become rule of the land.

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I find it extremely problematic.

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I think there might be a small group that's organizing right now to try to fight this, but the Treasury Department wants this.

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I just did a little review of the news and I can find stories going back two, three months about the Treasury Department releasing little press releases saying that we need to do something about cryptocurrency mixing.

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As if it's some giant source of fraud and terrorism funding.

332
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The concept is just absolutely ludicrous.

333
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And now in retrospect, I appreciate how important that piece of crap Wall Street Journal article was that claimed that Hamas was being funded with crypto because it just played so perfectly into all of this.

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And it was absolutely debunked.

335
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The numbers were nowhere near what the article claimed.

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At the end of the day, you're not going to stop Hamas or other groups that engage in terrorism or that the US government just doesn't like from operating because they're supported by your geopolitical rivals.

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Those are nation state actors.

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They have means to transact.

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I mean, not to sound too pessimistic, but what is the real effect of KYC?

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It gives yet another yoke for whoever is in control of the government apparatus to silence their opposition and control their citizens.

341
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That's the real purpose or the real effect of this regulation in these systems.

342
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That's depressing.

343
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Let's go create a Bitcoin Island and we'll create a circular economy.

344
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We just will need one of every type and trade.

345
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Maybe no lawyers though.

346
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Sorry, guys, but boost and let us know we need a carpenter.

347
00:33:06,000 --> 00:33:09,000
We're going to definitely need a couple of mechanics and electricians.

348
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We're going to need podcasters obviously got to keep everybody in the loop, right guys?

349
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So yeah, let's go form our circular economy and I'm off to now.

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I'm done.

351
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Podcasters but no lawyers.

352
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I wonder about that.

353
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The contract and the splits.

354
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What else do you need?

355
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It's right there in the feed.

356
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And just as a throwaway, if you need more examples of how a lack of financial privacy can hurt you, Jameson Locke has a GitHub repo that documents cases of Bitcoiners being assaulted and robbed of their Bitcoin.

357
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And in particular, there is a case this month from Röninge, Sweden, where a couple was experienced a home invasion and were threatened to extract their Bitcoin private keys.

358
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And that was particularly easy in Sweden because the Swedish tax authority in the interest of preventing tax evasion publishes very detailed personal information about everyone who pays taxes in Sweden.

359
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And on one hand, I think that it makes a lot of sense to have a way for citizens to pay the taxes that they owe.

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If tax enforcement is not done in a fair way, then it's an unfair system.

361
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You know, why should the poor pay but the rich not pay exactly?

362
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I mean, that doesn't seem fair.

363
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But the way that this has been implemented in Sweden seems very 19th century.

364
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I mean, if this was a book in the library that you could look at, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

365
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But these are online databases that you can scrape using automated tools and come up with lists of people that have assets that you could perhaps physically steal.

366
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So again, financial privacy, we need it.

367
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And it exists for the wealthy in the traditional financial system because it's possible to individually not own anything other than a claim on a corporate holding company that owns stuff for you.

368
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And that level of distance makes it hard to trace assets to individuals.

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That's how a lot of tax evasion or all the tax evasion in the world sort of happens today, I think.

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But that's not available to regular people.

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And as a result, no financial privacy and thus crap like this.

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Yeah, we'll have a link in the show notes.

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I think it's just a great example of why it's just everyone has the right to privacy.

374
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It doesn't really matter what the reason is.

375
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Should we just ignore the 810 million Indian citizens who have had their passport details dumped online?

376
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That's incredible.

377
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I mean, when you think about it, like that's like more than everyone in the U.S.

378
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It's just wild.

379
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Geez, just the irresponsibility.

380
00:35:36,000 --> 00:35:45,000
This is the same government that demonetized whole denominations of currency and so wiped out the savings of like the poorest people in their society because those people saving cash.

381
00:35:45,000 --> 00:35:46,000
Yeah, it's pretty harsh.

382
00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:52,000
But for a pick me up, do you want to check out the Human Rights Foundation's global CBDC tracker?

383
00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:54,000
I know this is one of your favorite things, Chris.

384
00:35:54,000 --> 00:35:56,000
I do like the UI a lot on this.

385
00:35:56,000 --> 00:35:58,000
This is a really cool way to kind of visualize it.

386
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:02,000
And, you know, I didn't realize there was so many already in production.

387
00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:06,000
It's not a ton, but there are a fair amount that are actually launched.

388
00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:09,000
And then there's a whole bunch that are in the research phase.

389
00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:10,000
Oh boy.

390
00:36:10,000 --> 00:36:18,000
The good news from the U.S. is that there is not yet a launched CBDC, but there is a pilot.

391
00:36:18,000 --> 00:36:20,000
Have you heard of Project Hamilton, Chris?

392
00:36:20,000 --> 00:36:26,000
Is this the one that's being run by a couple of universities, I think, that are doing this?

393
00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:28,000
And I know they've been running it for a little bit now.

394
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:33,000
It's a partnership with the Federal Reserve and MIT.

395
00:36:33,000 --> 00:36:34,000
MIT, okay.

396
00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:40,000
And so it's a hypothetical central bank digital currency for wide scale general purpose use.

397
00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:46,000
And this is different from FedNow because FedNow is more of a white label payments network

398
00:36:46,000 --> 00:36:48,000
slash potential CBDC.

399
00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:53,000
So that would mean that retail doesn't get to interact directly with the system.

400
00:36:53,000 --> 00:36:56,000
They have to go through a financial services provider.

401
00:36:56,000 --> 00:37:02,000
And I think that's kind of the more U.S. corporate capture way to do things.

402
00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:09,000
Generally, the U.S. government, because of the way lobbying works, tends to roll out systems that benefit corporations.

403
00:37:09,000 --> 00:37:18,000
I know you've been talking a lot about the AI licensing rulings, which are just basically favoring the largest lobbying groups for their AI projects.

404
00:37:18,000 --> 00:37:21,000
And why shouldn't our monetary system be the same?

405
00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:34,000
The problem, I think, with a retail CBDC-like project, Hamilton, is that it results in the central bank competing with the private banking sector for customer deposits.

406
00:37:34,000 --> 00:37:45,000
And as we've seen this year with several bank runs and failures in the U.S., banks have an inherent structural problem because deposits are potentially short-term liabilities,

407
00:37:45,000 --> 00:37:48,000
but often they stick around and are sticky in banks.

408
00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:54,000
But there are these tipping points where suddenly everyone gets worried, the deposits disappear, and the bank fails.

409
00:37:54,000 --> 00:38:05,000
And because the bank's investments are generally in longer-term securities and loans and mortgages and things like that, there's always a liquidity problem in the traditional banking model.

410
00:38:05,000 --> 00:38:09,000
I don't think it's going to be solved because why do banks make money?

411
00:38:09,000 --> 00:38:13,000
Because they accept the duration risk of their business model.

412
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:14,000
They're being paid for that.

413
00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:25,000
So a retail CBDC, it cannibalizes your banking sector, and frankly, the U.S. has one of the most developed, or if not the most developed, financial services sector in the world.

414
00:38:25,000 --> 00:38:40,000
And so there are incumbents with a huge amount to lose, and I just don't see a project like that getting through the wall of lobbying from money and Wall Street and financial system participants who do not want the government competing with them at the retail deposits level.

415
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:48,000
Earlier in the show, you teased us about a known Bitcoin skeptic who has launched their own ludicrous AI altcoin.

416
00:38:48,000 --> 00:38:49,000
I want to hear about this.

417
00:38:49,000 --> 00:38:52,000
Well, this is your favorite guy, Nouriel Rabini.

418
00:38:52,000 --> 00:38:53,000
Oh, yeah.

419
00:38:53,000 --> 00:38:56,000
I always have a hard time saying his name, so I just call him Rubz.

420
00:38:56,000 --> 00:39:06,000
So Nouriel is one of the, how to put it, he's kind of like a traditional economics influencer, a la Ben Bernanke, or what's that guy?

421
00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:10,000
Is it Ben Bernanke at the New York Times who has that cringe column?

422
00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:11,000
Not Bernanke.

423
00:39:11,000 --> 00:39:15,000
You're thinking of the, yeah, you're thinking of the, you know, he does work.

424
00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:21,000
He also, you know, old Rubz here works for the School of Business at the New York University.

425
00:39:21,000 --> 00:39:27,000
He's a Turkish-born Iranian-American economist, consultant, and a writer, according to Wikipedia.

426
00:39:27,000 --> 00:39:28,000
He's 65 years old.

427
00:39:28,000 --> 00:39:32,000
He comes from Harvard University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

428
00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:40,000
Nouriel has been just a rabid anti-Bitcoiner, sharing the dumbest, most ill-informed criticism of Bitcoin.

429
00:39:40,000 --> 00:39:43,000
He's one of those people who's always predicting the end of Bitcoin.

430
00:39:43,000 --> 00:39:48,000
If you go to that website that tracks people who've predicted the end of Bitcoin, he's on there like all over there.

431
00:39:48,000 --> 00:39:50,000
I mean, he does it every year.

432
00:39:50,000 --> 00:39:57,000
I think he's also called Dr. Doom in some circles because he's predicted 14 out of the last two recessions.

433
00:39:57,000 --> 00:40:01,000
This gives you a sense of someone who has elite credentials.

434
00:40:01,000 --> 00:40:13,000
Maybe has done some economic research, which I'm not familiar with, that maybe sort of justifies them and then weighs in on a million topics beyond their scope of expertise.

435
00:40:13,000 --> 00:40:23,000
Well, he has a hedge fund or investment firm called Atlas Capital and they are launching a crypto token, the Atlas Climate Token.

436
00:40:23,000 --> 00:40:33,000
Essentially, it's going to be a tradable token that represents a basket of US Treasuries, gold, real estate and investment trusts.

437
00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:38,000
It's just a way of attempting to tokenize and make more fungible, less fungible assets.

438
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:51,000
Things like this have been tried time and time again over history and it's just amusing because he's such a rabid anti-Bitcoiner and now he's becoming potentially a sh** coiner.

439
00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:53,000
And that's just the power of financial incentives.

440
00:40:53,000 --> 00:41:04,000
And it's so funny because one of his top criticisms of Bitcoin is it's not decentralized, which, okay, he never backs that up, but then would this be more decentralized?

441
00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:05,000
Your little act token?

442
00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:07,000
Is that more decentralized?

443
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:08,000
Of course not.

444
00:41:08,000 --> 00:41:09,000
Of course it's not.

445
00:41:09,000 --> 00:41:13,000
So all of a sudden that criticism just doesn't really matter anymore.

446
00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:19,000
And the other funny thing is that he's criticized Bitcoin for being manipulated by a core group of whales.

447
00:41:19,000 --> 00:41:21,000
Well, what do you think an altcoin with a premine is?

448
00:41:21,000 --> 00:41:23,000
And give me a break.

449
00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:30,000
And again, he never backs up any of his arguments and some of these are years old, but you could take every criticism he's lobbied incorrectly at Bitcoin.

450
00:41:30,000 --> 00:41:38,000
And in most cases, they accurately would describe an altcoin that is being managed by a small group of people with an expectation on a return of investment.

451
00:41:38,000 --> 00:41:44,000
And that's just the shot in Freud of financial innovation.

452
00:41:44,000 --> 00:41:49,000
This episode of the Bitcoin Dad Pod is brought to you by my podcast network, jupiterbroadcasting.com.

453
00:41:49,000 --> 00:41:55,000
Episode 110 of Self Hosted just went out and we chat with the man behind the Google Photos Killer image.

454
00:41:55,000 --> 00:41:56,000
Brand new update just came out.

455
00:41:56,000 --> 00:41:57,000
Big changes in there.

456
00:41:57,000 --> 00:41:59,000
We talk about that a little bit.

457
00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:06,000
We also get Alex's first impressions of 45 Home Labs' new HL15 lab server, high-end box built for homelabbers.

458
00:42:06,000 --> 00:42:10,000
And of course, we have Kota Radio and Linux Unplugged, a bunch of other great shows.

459
00:42:10,000 --> 00:42:11,000
Well, really those shows.

460
00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:12,000
Over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

461
00:42:12,000 --> 00:42:20,000
I must have really liked that episode with Alex because I looked at my phone and I had the HL15 store page open in like four tabs.

462
00:42:20,000 --> 00:42:26,000
But I have to say, the pictures really suck because I couldn't figure out, is it rack mounted?

463
00:42:26,000 --> 00:42:27,000
Is it a towel?

464
00:42:27,000 --> 00:42:30,000
I should get them to take some pictures.

465
00:42:30,000 --> 00:42:41,000
I mean, they're clearly homelabbers and Linux people because their sense of design and how to present a thing is just about as good as your Bitcoin Dads.

466
00:42:41,000 --> 00:42:48,000
Now, Chris, have you ever run into the problem where you're writing a custom Bitcoin script?

467
00:42:48,000 --> 00:42:52,000
You're not using Miniskrip because you like to stay close to the metal.

468
00:42:52,000 --> 00:42:53,000
You don't need too much abstraction.

469
00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:59,000
You're just going to write opcodes by hand and then put large amounts of money into that product.

470
00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:00,000
Oh, I try.

471
00:43:00,000 --> 00:43:01,000
I try.

472
00:43:01,000 --> 00:43:03,000
But, you know, I can never remember the opcodes.

473
00:43:03,000 --> 00:43:04,000
I can never remember them.

474
00:43:04,000 --> 00:43:08,000
Well, you need opcodesexplain.com.

475
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:18,000
Actually, opcodesplain.com because it is an open source list of Bitcoin opcodes with some context, examples, linkages.

476
00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:19,000
You can add to it.

477
00:43:19,000 --> 00:43:27,000
And I think this is really going to help you out and maybe you can unfreeze some of those Bitcoins you have stuck in unspendable scripts with this.

478
00:43:27,000 --> 00:43:34,000
You know, there is something really appealing to be able to interact with your money on the command line, send money, receive money on the command line.

479
00:43:34,000 --> 00:43:37,000
I mean, it's so awesome, right?

480
00:43:37,000 --> 00:43:39,000
Let's see you do that with your US dollar.

481
00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:41,000
So I was looking through this.

482
00:43:41,000 --> 00:43:47,000
There are a bunch of codes that are not yet sort of expanded, but you can look at new opcode proposals in here.

483
00:43:47,000 --> 00:43:52,000
This is kind of a more of a primary source, I think, or maybe secondary, very close to the primary.

484
00:43:52,000 --> 00:44:01,000
So this could be a tool if you want to learn more about Bitcoin scripting or if you're at the point in your Bitcoin career where you're working with scripting at a low level.

485
00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:11,000
And the creator of this page also has an incredible product, which I have not yet tried because I didn't want to install another app on my phone, so I have to boot up an old phone.

486
00:44:11,000 --> 00:44:19,000
But they have a wallet called Padawan Wallet that is a testnet only Bitcoin wallet to teach you how to interact with Bitcoin.

487
00:44:19,000 --> 00:44:26,000
So I'm going to go through this this weekend, and maybe I will finally know how to use Bitcoin without losing all my money.

488
00:44:26,000 --> 00:44:27,000
That's the goal, at least.

489
00:44:27,000 --> 00:44:28,000
All right, all right.

490
00:44:28,000 --> 00:44:29,000
And you know what?

491
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:31,000
It's pretty nice UI, too.

492
00:44:31,000 --> 00:44:35,000
So if you just want to kind of get an idea of what the capabilities are, you can kind of browse through it pretty quick and get a snapshot.

493
00:44:35,000 --> 00:44:47,000
So you have, as always, the optech linked this week, and you seem like you've zeroed in on transaction malleability, which I'm kind of struggling to understand.

494
00:44:47,000 --> 00:44:59,000
I think there's a proposal to add a feature that would be kind of a nice thing for lightning operators like ourselves, but kind of opens us up to maybe some kind of fee hijacking from this is where I'm kind of starting to get a little fuzzy on this.

495
00:44:59,000 --> 00:45:00,000
So could you break it down?

496
00:45:00,000 --> 00:45:02,000
I think it starts with ephemeral anchors.

497
00:45:02,000 --> 00:45:11,000
This is a proposal where when you create a lightning channel, you create this zero value output that anyone can spend.

498
00:45:11,000 --> 00:45:13,000
And this basically gives you an anchor.

499
00:45:13,000 --> 00:45:25,000
It gives you a place to hook so that if you close a lightning channel or it gets forced closed and it's not clearing in the mempool, you can make another transaction that grabs this anchor and then spends it with a higher fee.

500
00:45:25,000 --> 00:45:28,000
And this would be a way to fee bump a lightning close transaction.

501
00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:34,000
So this seems like a really good idea because lightning security requires on two things.

502
00:45:34,000 --> 00:45:46,000
Cryptographic validation between two lightning nodes, which we're very confident in and works as long as everyone's online and there's no problem in the computer hardware or whatever that would interfere with that.

503
00:45:46,000 --> 00:45:51,000
But lightning security also relies on transactions clearing within a certain period of time.

504
00:45:51,000 --> 00:45:57,000
And so in periods like now with a full mempool, if you built your lightning channels a while ago, well, good on you.

505
00:45:57,000 --> 00:46:11,000
But if they force close, you might end up in situations where your channel partner could take back more money than they're owed because your lightning channel close didn't clear in a full mempool because it was built with fees from a year ago that were much lower.

506
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:24,000
So you solve that with an ephemeral anchor because now if your lightning close transaction isn't clearing, you just send another transaction that includes that anchor and then a miner has to mine both and that accelerates it.

507
00:46:24,000 --> 00:46:37,000
However, the problem is that as you delve deeper and deeper into Bitcoin and how the sausage is made, Bitcoin transactions don't actually work the way you think and they're kind of scary in that there is malleability.

508
00:46:37,000 --> 00:46:54,000
So malleability means that some aspect of the transaction can be changed by the miner or if someone can take the transaction out of the mempool and modify some part of it and then put it back in and it can get mined and the transaction is a little bit different than the way you broadcasted it.

509
00:46:54,000 --> 00:47:17,000
And to be honest, I'm not technical enough to talk to you in detail about malleability, but I will point out that Segwit, part of that upgrade, was to fix certain malleability problems in Bitcoin, specifically making transaction IDs much less malleable because pre-Segwit, it was possible to broadcast a transaction and then when it got mined, finally something

510
00:47:17,000 --> 00:47:30,000
happened and the transaction ID changed and it was possible to sort of lose coins and wallets or for exchanges that were trying to track deposits in withdrawals with transaction ID. This turned out to be a very bad idea and a lot of people lost money.

511
00:47:31,000 --> 00:47:49,000
However, creating ephemeral anchors that aren't vulnerable to various malleability problems is also pretty complicated and you could soft fork a new opcode called optrue into that. You could do a bunch of different things, but it's just kind of an interesting read.

512
00:47:49,000 --> 00:48:11,000
I won't claim to fully understand it, but Bitcoin transactions like most things in computing are much more terrifying and experimental than we would like to think. The fact that they work most of the time and people generally don't lose money sending Bitcoin around except in very rare exotic circumstances is a real testament to how well Bitcoin works even though it doesn't work exactly the way we think under the hood.

513
00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:22,000
No, and right now it feels like it's more expensive than ever. So when a proposal comes along that says, yeah, it's going to take up a little more block space, but it solves this problem, I'm actually like, oh, a little more, a few more bites, okay, all right, well, okay.

514
00:48:23,000 --> 00:48:36,000
Things are just a little bit different in a high fee market. It's the high fee episode, I guess. If you'd like to get in touch with the show, don't forget you can email us at bitcoindadpod at protonmail.com, Weapon X at Bitcoin Dad Pod, or join the real time chat in our matrix channel.

515
00:48:36,000 --> 00:48:41,000
Use something like Element. We have a Bitcoin chat room going all the time. We'll have details and links in the show notes.

516
00:48:42,000 --> 00:48:51,000
And this week's baller boost comes from Patar with 250,000 sats. No message, because if you're a baller, do you really need one?

517
00:48:52,000 --> 00:49:02,000
You don't have to, no. It's pretty great. I use Fountain too, and so I often see Patar on there spreading the love. He's a big supporter of the podcasting 2.0 ecosystem and the shows that take boost.

518
00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:07,000
And so it's nice when he shines his love light on us. I feel like we've been recognized. So thank you, Patar. We appreciate that baller boost.

519
00:49:08,000 --> 00:49:15,000
Hallett comes in with 10,000 sats. He's also using Fountain. He writes, great job describing the coming economic storm, Dad. It definitely needs a name.

520
00:49:16,000 --> 00:49:20,000
I've taken it calling it the everything bubble, but I would be interested in other candidates. Great show. I would too.

521
00:49:21,000 --> 00:49:27,000
I want other people to boost in their candidates for whatever we're going to call this financial calamity that we're going to soft land our way into according to.

522
00:49:27,000 --> 00:49:28,000
Thank you, Hallett.

523
00:49:29,000 --> 00:49:39,000
And that's a great idea, because we can save that title, and then when we get the next sort of economic shoe to drop, then we use that title and we can make a shirt.

524
00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:42,000
Yeah, or make a shirt. Oh boy. I do love merch.

525
00:49:43,000 --> 00:49:49,000
I was born in the last 40 years, and all I got was this and whatever the name is, you know, this lousy crash.

526
00:49:50,000 --> 00:49:51,000
This lousy everything bubble.

527
00:49:51,000 --> 00:50:03,000
Anonymous boost in 5000 sats using the podcast index as an Idahoan and former Idaho National Laboratory employee.

528
00:50:04,000 --> 00:50:09,000
I wanted to offer some thoughts on the mention you made of the cancellation of the new scale small modular reactor project.

529
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:12,000
All right. Oh boy. I think we might be about to get corrected.

530
00:50:13,000 --> 00:50:15,000
What is strange is how it seemed to come out of nowhere.

531
00:50:16,000 --> 00:50:18,000
The local community was very excited for this project.

532
00:50:19,000 --> 00:50:21,000
Countless conferences were held of the benefits it would have.

533
00:50:22,000 --> 00:50:28,000
And Idaho State University even started offering courses specifically tailored to operating a new scale reactor.

534
00:50:29,000 --> 00:50:31,000
Then new scale declared that costs had ballooned and the project was no longer feasible.

535
00:50:32,000 --> 00:50:34,000
At the same time, we should have seen it coming.

536
00:50:35,000 --> 00:50:41,000
In a conference this summer, I asked the INL director, Dr. John Wagner, what he saw as the largest hurdle for nuclear.

537
00:50:42,000 --> 00:50:44,000
He looked at me in the eyes and said cost.

538
00:50:45,000 --> 00:50:50,000
Many of the people working in the space have been increasingly worried about the mounting regulatory and construction costs placed on nuclear.

539
00:50:51,000 --> 00:50:54,000
And cost reduction has been the central focus of the INL for a while.

540
00:50:55,000 --> 00:50:58,000
Regulations in a harsh financial scene have regularly killed nuclear projects.

541
00:50:59,000 --> 00:51:00,000
And unfortunately it happened again.

542
00:51:01,000 --> 00:51:07,000
I can't say to what degree renewable subsidies led to this, but I would generally place the blame on the Kafka S licensing process.

543
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:11,000
It took new scale almost 10 years to get approval to even start construction.

544
00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:16,000
After which point the situation was bad enough and the investment small enough that it couldn't be done.

545
00:51:17,000 --> 00:51:19,000
The US seems to be willing to take its energy future seriously.

546
00:51:20,000 --> 00:51:22,000
And that is going to have long term negative consequences.

547
00:51:23,000 --> 00:51:26,000
I think he meant to say the US is unwilling to take its energy future seriously.

548
00:51:27,000 --> 00:51:29,000
It might have been possible to get nuclear up and running before.

549
00:51:30,000 --> 00:51:31,000
I'm not certain if we can now.

550
00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:33,000
Wow, that's a killer boost.

551
00:51:34,000 --> 00:51:35,000
Thank you, Anonymous.

552
00:51:35,000 --> 00:51:36,000
I've also heard that.

553
00:51:37,000 --> 00:51:42,000
I've heard that very thing that they had the funding when they started the process within 10 years in, it kind of falls apart.

554
00:51:43,000 --> 00:51:45,000
And now you imagine we're in a higher rates environment, a tighter monetary system.

555
00:51:46,000 --> 00:51:47,000
Money is a little harder to come by.

556
00:51:48,000 --> 00:51:49,000
What a shame.

557
00:51:50,000 --> 00:51:55,000
What a shame because, you know, this just seems like if the incentives were a little differently and we were putting more subsidies towards nuclear,

558
00:51:56,000 --> 00:51:58,000
maybe then we could see some of these projects take off.

559
00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:04,000
But I just look at the next decade and I think our real solution is if we want EVs and we want electrical heat,

560
00:52:05,000 --> 00:52:09,000
and we want to reduce our use of fossil fuels, then we have to have more energy generation.

561
00:52:10,000 --> 00:52:11,000
And we need all types.

562
00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:18,000
And I think that renewables probably muddy the conversation because if you're dealing with regulators and you're saying,

563
00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:21,000
listen, we need to reduce the licensing requirements to make this easier.

564
00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:25,000
And then they say, well, it's easy to do wind and solar and those are popping off.

565
00:52:26,000 --> 00:52:27,000
Do we really need to prioritize nuclear?

566
00:52:28,000 --> 00:52:30,000
And if they're not enmeshed in a very complicated subject, it's hard for them.

567
00:52:31,000 --> 00:52:33,000
Anonymous, if you have a chance or haven't already,

568
00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:39,000
I'd be interested in your thoughts on Eric Townsend's energy transition crisis YouTube documentary.

569
00:52:40,000 --> 00:52:41,000
We'll include it in the show notes.

570
00:52:42,000 --> 00:52:47,000
If you can take a look or have some thoughts about that, I found it really interesting and informative.

571
00:52:48,000 --> 00:52:52,000
These are views that Eric has expressed a lot over the years and he sort of put them together into a documentary.

572
00:52:53,000 --> 00:53:01,000
And I think that right now he sort of has the goal of basically being hired to manage the sovereign wealth fund or some large investment fund

573
00:53:01,000 --> 00:53:10,000
that really wants to get serious on nuclear and specifically wants a government that's willing to come up with a reasonable licensing regime for modular reactors

574
00:53:11,000 --> 00:53:17,000
and basically create a nuclear valley somewhere where they can develop that technology without being disrupted by bureaucracy.

575
00:53:18,000 --> 00:53:22,000
So if you had a chance to look into that anonymous and felt like sharing your thoughts, that would be really appreciated.

576
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:24,000
Yes, thank you for the great boost.

577
00:53:25,000 --> 00:53:26,000
OrangeMart comes in with 5,000 SADs.

578
00:53:27,000 --> 00:53:28,000
Just as thank you.

579
00:53:29,000 --> 00:53:30,000
Well, thank you, OrangeMart.

580
00:53:30,000 --> 00:53:30,500
Appreciate that.

581
00:53:31,000 --> 00:53:34,000
We also got a 3,000 SAD reoccurring boost from Bob B.

582
00:53:35,000 --> 00:53:36,000
Thank you so much, Bob.

583
00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:37,000
Thank you, everybody who boosted in.

584
00:53:38,000 --> 00:53:44,000
We had six boosts and most of them were above the cutoff and we read all of them and they all go in the show notes for every episode two.

585
00:53:45,000 --> 00:53:47,000
We stacked 270,000, 200 SADs, not a blow away.

586
00:53:48,000 --> 00:53:52,000
We'd love to see it a little bit higher next week, but also still pretty darn good and we appreciate the support.

587
00:53:53,000 --> 00:53:58,000
If you'd like to boost in, there's a couple of great ways you can try out a new podcast app like Fountain or Podverse or Podfans or Castamatic.

588
00:53:58,000 --> 00:54:01,000
Just go to podcastapps.com and pick one that suits your style.

589
00:54:02,000 --> 00:54:03,000
It's kind of like at Linux distro.

590
00:54:03,000 --> 00:54:04,000
There's probably one just right for you.

591
00:54:04,000 --> 00:54:07,000
You might have to try a couple, but the nice thing is that you get all the new features.

592
00:54:08,000 --> 00:54:09,000
You get like cloud chapters.

593
00:54:09,000 --> 00:54:12,000
There's lots of podcasting to those shows now that have all kinds of great features.

594
00:54:13,000 --> 00:54:15,000
You can go explore a whole new ecosystem of podcasts.

595
00:54:15,000 --> 00:54:16,000
You also get the boost button.

596
00:54:17,000 --> 00:54:18,000
It's pretty cool.

597
00:54:18,000 --> 00:54:19,000
Or you can keep your app, you know, your one dot O app.

598
00:54:20,000 --> 00:54:21,000
Just go get Albi, getalbi.com.

599
00:54:21,000 --> 00:54:22,000
Then you can boost from the web browser.

600
00:54:23,000 --> 00:54:24,000
We recommend the podcast index.

601
00:54:24,000 --> 00:54:26,000
I think you can boost from Fountain and Podverse pages as well.

602
00:54:26,000 --> 00:54:29,000
You just top Albi off using anything on the Lightning network.

603
00:54:29,000 --> 00:54:31,000
Or it actually do on chain now too.

604
00:54:31,000 --> 00:54:33,000
And then you can start boosting from your web browser.

605
00:54:33,000 --> 00:54:35,000
And it's a great way to support the show and get your message read.

606
00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:37,000
And we appreciate everybody who does so.

607
00:54:37,000 --> 00:54:42,000
This has been the Bitcoin dad pod recorded on November 17th, 2023.

608
00:54:42,000 --> 00:54:49,000
I've been your Bitcoin dad and I'm here remotely back home after a while with me, Chris.

609
00:54:49,000 --> 00:54:51,000
Thanks for joining us, everybody.

610
00:54:51,000 --> 00:54:52,000
See you next time.

611
00:54:56,000 --> 00:54:57,000
Bye.