What's up, guys. Matt Adele here and this is Gary Leland and you're
listening to episode one thirty four of the Crypto Cousins podcast. Fat your interest
in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies by joining Hall of Fame podcaster Gary Leland on the Crypto
Cousins podcast. And remember we are all cousins in the world of crypto.
This week's price of bitcoin six thousand, eight hundred and fifty two dollars.
That's down seventy four dollars, are one point one percent over the past seven
days. How how howardy? Welcome to the show, Matt, second time
here, Very happy to be here. A little bit different conditions this time
than the last time, though, right, yeah, tell me about it.
It's pretty unreal, this whole situation right now, it's really unreal.
We were just talking before the show started about that, and I said,
let's get on the show and talk about this. If we can talk about
all this, I think it's crazy, and I agree with you. I
don't think people have any concept of what's going to be coming down the pike.
People just think we can just restart the economy when we have twenty million
people unemployed right now and small business owners around around the world. You know,
it's not even just a domestic issue. This is a global issue that
are just in pain right now. They're getting absolutely destroyed, not bringing in
any income. And I really worry about the knock on effects that will happen
down the line because of this thing. I think there's gonna be so many
effects, not only I mean, you can just it's just like a house
of cards are a domino. Like when you set those dominoes up, you
knock one down, and the next one goes, and next one's goes.
You know, for instance, I'm a small business, but my sales tax
to the state this month should have been about five thousand dollars. They're gonna
make about five hundred dollars, you know, off of me. So and
then if you think that I'm a small business, so you take every business
in the state of Texas and if they got that kind of downward trend.
So the state now is running out of money. I'm going to talk about
the people. I'm talking about a state who's going to try to support people.
They don't have any money, so and they can't print money like federal
government can. So I don't know how bad effects. It seems like that
would affect it even more than the federal government to me, if you don't
have any money. Yeah, I mean. One of the things I mean
I've been talking about on our podcast a lot is a lot of people look
at this crisis from the perspective that we had a super healthy economy before.
But I'm of the belief that it was a house of cards to begin with.
I agree with you completely, Yes, So we end up in a
situation here where a lot of these small businesses are super leveraged, their landlords
are super leveraged, the states are super leveraged. And then when you just
you just stop all income generation there for a couple of months, the whole
thing just goes up in flames. Like how do you? How do you
recover from that? And hopefully we can recover, but it's going to be
painful. There's there's no easy way out here, even though the stock market
is like completely disconnected from that reality. Yes, I'm just sitting here riding
and we have because we didn't pull out early enough, so we're trying to
ride it back up you know before, and have a cutoff. Every day
we change our get out number as it goes up, so we can benefit
this time, because I believe we did. I think it's all going to
fall apart. I'm in a good situation, I mean really compared to most
people. I'm sixty five. I could just be retired, but I'm not
because I enjoy working. But I got Medicare, I got no bills,
my house is paid for, I got money in the bank. So I'm
an okay situation. I'm not one. That's why I don't do much whining.
But there are a lot of people like my daughter, for instance,
who's young, bought her first house a year ago. Now what happens there?
And is this housing market? All these people in her situation are a
lot of I'm going to start selling their houses and no one's buying houses.
So now she's paying for a house that's worth half of what it's worth,
you know. So she's going, Wow, I love this house, but
I'm paying for so many dollar house. It's only worth so much money.
I just have to walk away, I mean. And what I mean that's
kind of like that domino effect again. Yeah, the last time with a
housing market, what that did by itself? Yeah, and this time it's
not just the housing market. I come from a similar perspective as you.
You know, I am much younger than you, but I've always been very
conservative. I have savings. I said to you before we start recording that,
all things considered, I'm good, you know so, But I really
do feel for people. There's a lot of people that we're living paycheck to
paycheck that are in a heavy amount of debt just about their first home.
You have to wonder, you know, especially the young people. I'm from
New York. I see people who have been hustling for eight years, nine
years, they still have debt, they have no savings. They've gone job
from job to jobs, slowly moving up the ladder, you know, finally
getting a decent income, and then the rug was pulled right out from under
them. That has to trigger a perspective change, right, Like, what
was the point? Why was I doing this whole rat race to begin with?
What do I have to show for it? And now he's kind of
going to have to start over? Too possible. You're maybe who worked for
doesn't hire you back, maybe they can't be that size, maybe they go
out of business, and now you're starting over from scratch. You know,
I talked to I interviewed the Bitcoin Rabbi last night, and he was real
excited that he had talked to you recently, I think, and he was
a nice guy. Great dude. Are you surprised, because I kind of
am, that we're not seeing more crime and I'm not saying that in a
negative way, or is it being hidden to us? Because I would think
personally, if I was one of those people who had like one paycheck's worth
the savings and I had three kids and a wife I was supporting, and
I hadn't made any money in three weeks, I would have to go steal
some food. I couldn't let my kids starve. I mean, you know,
if I couldn't find any food in any other way, I would go
steal it. I mean, I'm just being honest. I'm not a thief,
but I'm not gonna let kids starve. So are you surprised we're not
seeing more of that? Or do you think there is that and we're just
not being shown that because you're scared. It's a contagious thing that if people
see it, they get the idea. I think if there was heavy crime,
we would see it. Just because of social media and whatnot. It's
like it's pretty hard to keep a lid on that kind of thing nowadays.
I think it's it's probably one of the few silver linings of the crisis is
that people seem to be coming together and like helping their neighbors. Uh,
you know, we've seen in past crises. You know, New York is
a super dense city when they had the power outages in the eighties, like,
it just devolved super quick. To not see that right now, to
not see mass vandalism, theft, breaking and entering and stuff in the big
cities is definitely, I mean, that's definitely a silver lining. You can't
say otherwise. But the question is is it because it's just early in the
crisis, it could be, right, like, maybe that's still to come.
Hopefully it's not. Let's see how, you know, how does this
unfold going forward? When does when do people start getting back to work?
Do people actually get hired for the jobs that they lost? Do we see
mass downsizing from companies? What does the Fed's reaction here actually does it actually
help? Did do these twelve hundred dollars payments they're sending out to people actually
you know, help bridge that gap? Is that enough doesn't matter. I
don't know, it should be interesting to play out. You know, hopefully
we don't see mass crime, but I mean it's on the table, right
Yeah, I mean it's something I've seen mass crime for reasons less than what's
going on right now exactly. You know, So I have to agree with
you. It is this silver lining, And if it was going to happen
somewhere, I would think the place that it would we would be seeing it
is in New York, Chicago, all the big cities, Detroit, amount
of people there in a small area. And then a lot of the police
are they have they're down too because they're sick too. Yes, like everybody
else. I have a buddy who works around MPD. They of than one
Maskis m really taking care of them? Absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, I want
to ask you a couple of questions about rabbit Hole recap. How long y'all
been doing that? Now? I want to change subjects here because you know,
it seems like I've just been the content of my show for the last
three of our episodes. That's all that's been talked about late. Yeah,
yeah, I know, that's all I see. And help themselves, that's
all I see. And I wasn't going to talk about it. Next thing,
I know, you know we're talking about it. So so let's switch
a rabbit hole recap though. How long have you already been doing that together?
I think it's two years in August. I'm not sure. It both
feels like it was yesterday and also that it's been like a decade shows.
I love that show. I love it when you two get together and talk.
You thank you. You talk about stuff that I'm interested in. I
mean, I think is why I like it so much. And one of
the things that you've been really on is coin join, mixing coins and all
this, and I'm not sure, I'm really I'm getting the importance of all
of this, And so that was another one of the reason I wanted to
bring you on, so I could figure out and people who may would be
like me and don't understand why you think that's so important. You can tell
us, you know, the scoop here, give me a rundown on what's
so important about this? If I get some bitcoin, do anything with him
beside put him in my wallet. You know, it's a bigger issue than
just bitcoin. With the rise of technology, we've seen privacy get trampled on
on a massive scale. Like governments now are able to mobilize their efforts in
a way that we've never seen before. Individuals are able to mobilize in an
unprecedented way as well, but governments also have that power, and even more
so because they're you know, the these central behemence, these big organizations.
So the question really becomes do you trust the people in charge? And in
America maybe that's an open question for people, but I think well for most
people, I don't think they would trust, you know, the Chinese government
or the Russian So the issue is if we let our privacy get overrun here,
if we let them easily track every every location you've been to, every
single payment you've made, every single message you've sent, and the wrong people
get that power is going to be really hard to come back from that.
The ability for the masses to be controlled by a small few, it's never
been in this state before in human history, I would say. And so
right now, at least with money, we have cash, right, cash
is a very private to use cash, right, But I see a world
where cash goes away with there's governments around the world have been trying to restrict
cash usage, and then not only that, individuals want to move to digital.
You know, my peers preferred to spend with a Venmo back and forth
or or a cash app rather than actually use cash. A lot of my
peers never never even interact with cash. They have their their credit cards and
they have their payment apps and that's what they use, and those are all
tracked. So if we don't have a private alternative, I think we're going
to have major issues. So this is all tangential to me. You know,
it's it's payments, it's the ability to move around privately, it's the
ability to communicate privately. And then on the other side with communication, this
crisis has highlighted it to the extreme right because we've always been able to for
the most part, been able to communicate privately in person. Right, we
meet up in person, we have a drink, We're able to communicate privately.
But our communications are slowly moving more and more digitally, and this crisis
everything's moved digitally. You know, we have people having happy hours on Zoom.
So if you're not able to communicate privately, if all that's able to
get hoovered up and put in a database and searched through and used against you
at will. That's going to have some really chilling effects on freedom just in
general. Well, yeah, one of the things you said there is you
think that the paper money or money is going to disappear as we know it
now. What leads you to believe I've been seeing that a lot lately,
hearing a lot of people say that. What makes you think that's any more
of a reality now than it was five years ago. Well, because the
world is increasingly digital, you know, like I said, the younger people
aren't really using cash, so that's already it's the market is almost dictating it.
But then at the same time you do have you do it, like
in America has been a little bit better about it compared to other places in
the world, but we see in like Europe, they're doing more and more
restrictions on how large of a cash purchase you can make. If you try
and remove a large amount of cash from a bank account, or deposit a
large amount of cash in a bank account, it arises suspicion. Well,
right now, I know three people I've talked to in different part of the
countries that have gone to the bank to get large amount of moneys and we're
told they couldn't have that much money, you know, exactly, One place
was twenty five hundred dollars was the most he could get. One place was
thirty five hundred. And this is like east coast, west coast, since
center of the country and another part of the country was like so right,
even though they all went in to get like ten thousand or so, that's
all they could get, exactly. And a lot of times if you take
out a larger amount of money, they ask you what are you using the
money for? They have you fill out this activity report so they can submit
it. It becomes a suspicious transaction just the act of using it. And
then I have friends that are in Europe that they say, if they try
it, cash isn't officially banned in their country or whatever, but they try
and spend with cash the merchant wherever they are, the merchant thinks it's suspicious.
They don't They wonder, why is this person paying with cash when they
could just use their card to get some points. It's automatically suspicious because you're
you're not wanting to be tracked. Yeah, the act of privacy is suspicious
itself. You have a fed coin or something is that what you're saying.
You don't even need a chain or like a blockchain or anything. They could
just you know, but they have trillions of dollars of stimulus spending. Yeah,
they could just spend a half billion dollars on an app, you know,
and you plug in your Social Security number and then like that's your there's
your money, that's your money app, you know, and you can send
money to people and moving between banks and stuff like that. It wouldn't even
need a bank, I wouldn't think. Then you just they see how much
having the bank and it gets on your app. Our government is in a
lot of ways bought and paid for with lobbyists, you know, being paid
by corporations, and then the corporate and then and then the lobbyists going after
the politicians and everyone donating to them and whatnot. So I don't think banks
are going anywhere because of that. Even though they might not be necessary in
that situation, they'll make sure that they got a hand in that pie as
well. Yeah, they're they're not wanting to I D lose that profitable income
they're making. There's too many rich people making too much money, I guess
on that end, so I see what you're saying that I was thinking when
you first were saying that if some type of fitcoin WHI, You're right,
it's not needed at all. You just make a government version of EMO and
there it is, There it is, and they know every dollar you spend.
It's really stops counterfeiting and it stops people from doing events that they don't
pay taxes on too. Right, Well, that's what they'll use as the
excuse. They'll use the excuse of tax evasion, crime, counterfeiting, protect
the children. These are the common appeals, appeals to emotion that they use
in these in these situations. But like I said, like just you know,
even if you love love our government currently, it can take a turn
at any moment. You know, at any moment you could have you could
have people in charge that maybe you don't trust, that don't have your best
interests at heart. And do you want them to have that kind of control
over you? So do you want them to have that kind of control over
the masses. Well, let's go back to mixing and stuff. I understand
now what your reason is, how does this help in that area? So
with bitcoin, I think it's it's more of a growing pain issue. But
we have this issue where we have these large fiat on ramps and off ramps,
and they're all regular related and they all have KYC super strict KYC link
everything to your name, your address, or social security number, everything,
and they have data sharing agreements where they're sharing all this information among each other.
They're not necessarily even protecting it that well. You know, we saw
with the Equifax hack where almost every adult American had their financial information compromise.
There's no opt in there. You're automatically in Equifax's database. You have no
choice, You're just automatically in there. It's part of the system. It's
built into the whole system. So this information can get leaked, this information
can get voluntarily shared, it can get bought. And with that information,
they're able to track all your bitcoin transactions, how much bitcoin you have,
and every transaction you make in the future and also potentially in the past if
you commingle it with past transactions. And because because bitcoin's a public ledger,
this is all transparent and out there. The part that's not transparent is the
KYC aspect. But I suspect that maybe nine ninety five percent of new people
coming into bitcoin are going through KYC services. If you put all that together,
you end up with a very grim situation where not only are the bitcoiners
who are using KYC services getting tracked, and potentially if that gets leaked,
like criminals and whatnot, will know how much you have every transaction you make
as well, or foreign governments, right, you know, maybe the Chinese
or the Russians KYC and then they know as well. But it ends up
in a situation where the people you transact with you compromise them. So let's
say you went through KYS, you have some KYC bitcoin, I come down
to bit block Boom in August and you pay me some bitcoin and it goes
into my wallet unbeknownst to me that I now have a transactions that's linked to
Gary. Right, I'm one step away from that KYC. So it actually
hurts the privacy of everyone else in the system at the same time. So
I consider this almost an existential threat to bitcoin. Bitcoin probably be fine regardless,
because I think long term will have a circular economy where you don't buy
bitcoin, you earn bitcoin, and you don't sell bitcoin, you spend bitcoin.
So those fiatle on ramps off ramps aren't as important, but until then
it definitely presents a threat to actual bitcoiners. Our best tool we have right
now because there's no protocol improvements really in the pipeline is coin join. And
the issue with coin join is it the whole concept of coin join relies on
being a part of a larger crowd. So if you don't have other people
doing it, it's not going to be that effective. Well, first of
all, when someone's going to pay you something bitcoin, do you ask them
if it's been mixed or do you have a wallet for that? Well,
first of all, you should always segregate everything. You shouldn't be like co
mingling your bitcoin funds. Explain that to me, what does that mean?
So if you were going to send me a bitcoin, I would over create
a new wallet and it'd be I'd label it Gary, and that would be
the funds that Gary sent me, and then I would deal with that accordingly.
Okay, So, but you're not going to end up with the thousand
wallets Sunday because a thousand people sent you one hundredth of a bitcoin. You're
going to open up that wallet, I guess, and coin join it and
then just get rid of the wallet. Unless I ever sing any more money.
Yeah, maybe, right, I mean in keeping all these wallets.
Right before Samurai had the coin join built into mobile, doing on the spot
coin joints was not very feasible. So you segregate first and then you coin
join afterwards, and that provides you some decent protection. It's not perfect,
like coin joint isn't perfect, but you have to remember, like if I
don't coin join after you pay me, and you're malicious, you could potentially
track my past and future transactions as those funds get commingled with my other bitcoin.
So and if someone has compromised you, then you might not be malicious,
but they can then track me through that as well. Right, So
it becomes a very insidious issue. And really the most practical way for us
to handle that right now is for coinjoin to be normalized, for people to
just do it as best practice. We don't reuse bitcoin addresses anymore. We
know that if I give you an address and then I give some guy Tom
the same address, that Tom can see your payments to that address. We
don't do that anymore, and coin joint is just another type of bitcoin transaction,
and it should be normalized to the point where it's a net benefit there.
Now, am I incorrect or did I see Have I read something or
seen something or heard somebody say that there is a people who won't accept mixed
coins, coins have been in mixers, or there's a problem in that in
I don't know, if you notice I've intentionally keep saying coinjoin not mixing.
Yes, I didn't know the proper term. So yeah, no, that's
fine. A lot of people, plenty of people called coinjoin mixing, and
you know, this is just my personal preference. This is how I like
to frame it. Historically in bitcoin, you know, coinjoin was first proposed,
I think in twenty thirteen, so it's relatively new. Historically in bitcoin,
people that we're seeking privacy use something called to casto mixer, right,
And the idea was you would basically send bitcoin to a third party, and
that third party would send you different bitcoin, They would send you someone else's
bitcoin, and that would break the link on chain. This custodial aspect has
made it very much a target for governments. It's you know, they consider
it money laundering. So using custodial mixers is a very bad idea from a
legal point of view. Coin join the difference with coin joint is it's a
bitcoin send, it's a batch bitcoin send with other users, usually with the
same exact denomination. So you have a bunch of transactions that go in at
point zero one bitcoin, for instance, and a bunch of transactions come out
at points zero one bitcoin. So you're never actually giving up custody of your
funds, You're not getting someone else's coins. You're basically creating. Let's say
five utxos go in, five new utxos come out, and you do have
a centralized coordinator that handles that in terms of like a service like Whirlpool,
but you could do it with just peer to peer so like me and you
could do a two per coin join and if you looked on the chain,
it would be a guessing game whose funds were which when you when you hit
that point. So then in terms of legality, there have been some issues
recently with people depositing into KYC compliance services of regulatory compliance services like exchanges and
stuff, where they've had transactions flat I'm pretty sure all those transactions have been
related to a SABI, and with SABI was using this fixed fee address and
there was this proximity involved with that fixed fee address. The issue was you
would have a scammer come into the coin join, they would pay this fee
address, and then you would go into a coin join round and you'd pay
the fie address. So all the transactions were like linked to that fee address,
and the exchanges didn't want that. It's too much liability for those exchanges.
One of the beauties of Whirlpool is there's no deterministic links to any transactions
that go through there. There's no there's no links to like a there's not
essential address that has proximity. So hopefully we won't see flagging happen there.
There hasn't been flagging there. There might be, though there's still there's a
chance there still could be. Coin joins are completely visible on chain. If
regulators or institutions want to use that as a flagging characteristic, then they might,
you know. But the way I view it is they could also just
ban bitcoin. You might not be able to sell your bitcoin in your country
at any given time. That's a risk you take when you own bitcoin.
So I hope that we can further educate institutions and regulators, but I'm not
going to get my hopes up on that. I operate under the belief that
it's it's like a one way system. I have no intention of ever selling
bitcoin on the KYC exchange. I have no intention of needing to do that.
The whole the whole idea is is that we're opting out for a whole
different money. If you're the idea that you're going to go into a store
in five years or eight years and try and spend bitcoin, and that store
is going to look back at your transaction history, how far do they look
back? Are they gonna, you know, and try and analyze it and
decide if you can spend or not if we hit that point, which ironically
it would probably be more likely to hit if people didn't use coin join.
I think bitcoin has bigger issues on his hands, and it's not really a
very useful money if people have to do these these analysis to deal with it.
So it's it's like a little bit of a chicken and an egg kind
of thing. Well, what do you have time period or would it not
be a certain amount of hops for the bitcoin? Yeah, but like where
do you draw the line? ATMs coin source ATMs they told me one of
the guys that as the owner that Kepny told me that they follow bitcoin five
hops, you know, and if during those five hops it goes to the
wrong person, you can't use those machines anymore. Yeah, that's ridiculous,
that's what he said. So like, let's say you buy at the ATM
and then you send me bitcoin, correct, right, completely legal transaction,
and I coin join it. Right, They're gonna flag you, right.
Or then let's say I pay you, I pay, I pay you bitcoin,
then I coin joined and then you try and sell it. Well,
you didn't say cojo. It was more like if you if I bought bitcoin
and send it to you, and you send it to Lebanon or something,
right and hands a terrorist, then I'm kicked off the machine, right idea
exactly. Well, that's one of the reasons why coin join we need people
to use coin join, right, is because you have these situations that are
completely out of your control where bitcoin can have perceived taint by regulators or not.
The thing is, I think this is all antithetical to bitcoin. Like
if if you want to be completely regulatory compliant and you want to day trade
bitcoin and you want to buy a bunch of bitcoin and then sell it six
months later, because they ticked up a little bit in price or whatever.
Then you leave it on exchanges, you know, or you just send it
out to one address and you'll hold it, you hold it non kwise,
you hold you hold it non custodial in your own address, and then you
send it right back in just one transaction out one transaccident. By all means
like, if people want to do that, they want to do that.
But if you want to actually own bitcoin, if you want to actually use
bitcoin, you're gonna like every spend should be a coin join. You should
make do as many coin joins as possible. You should be constantly doing it.
It's it's like it'd be like if you were using the Internet without encryption,
or you were screaming your personal conversations like on main Street in front of
everybody. It's like the most ridiculous thing ever. It's it's just it's just
basic financial privacy. So I assume you have made a video showing people how
to do coin. No, I haven't yet, because I know you make
a lot of videos, so I thought I just assumed you might have.
Hey, before we go any further, I do want to take advantage of
this opportunity. To make sure if anyone's listening or watching that is not for
me with bit block Boom, that they go to bitblock boom dot com and
check out our conference that we're still planning on hosting in August in Alas,
Texas. So checkout bit block boom dot com. And if you decide to
get a ticket, use the word cousins at checkout cusi NS and that will
save you thirty percent off the price of your ticket. But you think we're
gonna see that, Matt, You think I'm still planning on it. I
mean I'm still moving along everything as though we're gonna have it happen. I
sure hope. So last year was a lot of fun, a lot of
great Texas were going to be really great. I'm really kind of you know.
We we were selling tickets at a good pace. We had a lot
of new people there I wanted to meet, you know, that'st thing about
it. I got to meet so many people that I didn't know. And
you know, we had even now we had things starting on Thursday, you
know, with the with the dinner Welcome dinner Thursday night, and more things
are being added. We're getting ready to add the Citadel thing that was going
to happen in San Francisco. She asked if she could do it, difing
Bit Block Boom. Oh what Katie's thing. Yeah, yeah, so she's
going to do that on Friday, and then I want to do my own.
I have Bigcoin Citadel. We want to do a workshop. Yeah,
I said, I'm I'm you know, my goal really is for some day
this to be like a week you know, events, and most of them
not be mine. You know that other people were doing so many events that
you know, now we got to starting on Thursday, you know. I
figured next year we'll probably start on Wednesday, you know, and go till
Sunday. What I really enjoyed about Bit Black Boom last year was that it
was a very intimate event. There wasn't that many people there, the price
was very accessible as a very low price. It just was a very good
atmosphere. Like, the atmosphere was just fantastic, And you deserve all the
props in the world for that because you threw you threw a great conference.
And I strongly hope that it will happen again this year. And I'm gonna
say yes, I'm gonna say it's gonna happen, So we'll see. Like
I said, I'm planning when it happening. I'm still moving full steam.
And it's funny, you know, ticket sales were going really big and now
they slowed down. There's one a week here, and it's funny. I
saw like four the other day to people from Norway. For that was the
kind of a surpriser there to me. Yeah, we had a decent amount
of Europeans there last year. I actually am always surprised. I had more
people I think from Europe maybe than I had from Dallas, which is right
where it's at. And then I had someone say to him he said,
well, that's because you're not having any local speakers, and I said,
well that made no sense to me at all. You can go see those
local speakers anytime. Why would you pay, You know, these are the
people you can never see. So that is true. That's true. They
want to ask them that wallets. Okay, we coin joined this money,
this bitcoin. But let's say this guy Fred has ten bitcoins that he's gathered.
You know, over time, he's been coin joining him. What should
he do with these ten bitcoins to keep him as safe as possible. I
wouldn't think you'd want to put them all on one wallet. You know,
in case you get robbed at your house and you have to give them one
because they do a lead pipe attack, you want to give him a wallet
to get their ass out of there. You know, I would think you'd
want several wallets. What do you think is the best thing for someone to
do if once they get this all done and now they got to store So
like, this question comes up all the time. It's obviously a very common
question. No, no, no, no, it's good. It's a
very important it's probably one of the most important questions. But the problem is
is, you know, it depends on your particular situation. Right, there's
a lot of nuance here, but good rule of thumb. As you said,
multiple wallets, right, that's always a very good rule of thumb for
people because you compartmentalize. Right, Like, if something happens to one wallet,
whether that's theft, physical theft, whether that's digital theft, or whether
that's just a bug in the wallet code because you can't read code, it's
good to have to use multiple wallets and to split it up. I think
it's super important for people to store their own keys. Usually in this case,
it's usually a hardware wallet mobile wallets as well. Basically hardware wallets and
mobile wallets or where we are, like, there's I think there's very little
reason to at least the average user to be storing bitcoin on their computer.
You know, if you're more advanced, maybe you're running like TAILS or something
like that, which is a privacy focus system OS on the computer, and
that's how you generate your keys, and there's all these complicated ways where you
can do better cold storage than maybe you would obtain from a hardware wallet.
But basically where we're at as hardware wallets and mobile wallets because mobile it's it's
a more hardened platform, they're more secure devices in general for the average user,
and you want to split up your funds, so like any single wallet
doesn't screw you. As far as hardware wallets, there's only three that I
would ever recommend, which is a cold cards my favorite, and then Ledger
and Treasure after that, and like kind of just drops off a cliff and
you don't really want to use like fly by Night hardware wallet makers that doesn't
have a lot of code review or whatnot. And then hopefully we'll have easy
to use multi sake, so you'll be able to use multiple hardware wallets to
store your keys. So if any hardware wallet is affected or compromised, your
funds aren't stolen. Your funds aren't taken in that situation. And that does
help you as well in those lead pipe situations because you can keep the keys
in different locations, right, so like you keep them stored in all different
places. And then as far as mobile wallets, like my two favorite mobile
wallets, I think Summarizes is the best mobile wallet there is. It's only
on Android, and then if you have a iPhone, like green Wallet is
pretty solid by blockstream. So you name three wallets there, NBC's cold Card
and in Treasure and Ledger. This Fred has ten bitcoin in this scenario,
so should he have like three of each one or should he have all of
one, you know, ten of one. Let's say he's like wanting to
put one bitcoin on each one because he thinks of bitcoin is gonna be worth
a million dollars and he doesn't want a million dollars ten million dollars on one
wallet. It's a personal decision. It depends on your situation. You know,
ten bitcoin is like a decent is a decent amount of money right now,
that's like seventy thousand dollars. I imagine most people aren't storing just immediately
ten bitcoin themselves, so they're gonna hopefully come in slow and steady and get
used to it and learn the wall and actually use it so they get comfortable
with it. You want to get comfortable with it. I usually tell people
you want to back it up with the small amount of bitcoin on it,
back it up, wipe it, and then restore it so you know that
process works, so you're not trying to do it in a disastrous situation where
you're trying to restore the backup. I usually tell people they should buy two.
If they get a hardware will, they should buy two of them.
You're gonna buy a cold card. Buy two cold cards. Then you know
you can initialize it. You set up your whole cold card, you create
the backup, you send a little bit of bitcoin to it, and then
you can reinitialize it on the second cold card so you don't even have to
wipe the first one, and you can make sure your restored process works.
Everything goes smoothly, and then you have a second cold card with you're able
to access your bitcoin, so you can put them in two different locations,
and if something happens, you don't have to actually restore the seed on the
fly at that moment. You can just go to your backup cold card and
have it ready to go. So I'm a real strong believer. And like
what we just said, ten bitcoin, So that's seventy thousand dollars, Like
what, you can't buy two hundred dollar devices? Like that's ridiculous, Like,
of course you can, Like that's that is worth it. Buying a
second one is worth it. So should Fred buy ten? Or should Fred
by two? And then as they get more valuable start subdividing again, That's
what I would think. I would think fresh and made by two and Fred.
Or let's say we got Joe and Joe's working to get one, right,
Joe gets one, should he stop doing that wallet and move over to
a second one? Start fill it in, you know, on the hope
that it's gonna be worth a lot. I mean, in this is our
day, the situation, I like having two of that or the same wallet,
right, So like in that case, I'm not talking about necessarily splitting
it up between those two wallets. If you have two cold cards. They
mirror each other, they're controlling the same wallet. Like I said, I
think bickcoin in general should be a process where you come in and you know,
you slowly get your hands dirty, and you learn more as you go.
There's like two sides of the spectrum. You don't want to be someone
who just blindly buys bitcoin and just leaves it on the exchanges. But you
also don't want to be someone who just all of a sudden just deploys all
their savings and just immediately throws it into a wallet they've never used before.
You want to be in the middle ground. You want to slowly and steadily
improve your understanding a bitcoin, get more comfortable with it, and adapt how
you're storing it, how you're securing it over time, as you get more
comfortable and as you realize what trade offs you're making and what concerns you have?
What is your threat model? Who are you worried about potentially taking your
bitcoin? Are you worried about the wallet manufacturer? Are you worried about your
government? Are you worried about a criminal you know? Are you worried about
your significant other? I mean, if you're worried about your significant other then
probably should get a new significant other. But like these things should all be
you know, you learn as you go. First of all, I think
maybe there's a few bitcoin experts, but most people aren't expert. I think
it's almost impossible to ever be an expert in bitcoin. And I think this
idea that like, oh, I'm too much of a new to understand is
also ridiculous because we all came in as news. We all started as fresh
bitcoiners that had no idea what was going on, and you slowly learn over
time, and if you have questions, you ask and you learn. And
fortunately bitcoin is a very accessible community in terms of learning and knowledge. We
have lots of resources on the Internet, and we have lots of active people
that are happy to answer questions or happy to help you along that process.
It does come down to personal responsibility, and in this world right now,
most people have been trained to have zero personal responsibility, so that is a
major It messages with people's heads. But it does come down to personal responsibility.
It is your money. You are responsible for storing it, and you
have to take the appropriate measures to learn make yourself better and store it properly
well. As a spider man says with great power, which having your own
money is kind of great responsibility exactly. That's one of my favorite quotes.
And I know someone famous said it besides Spider Man, but I always think
it's Spider Man when I think of that quote. Well, you know,
we're getting near the end of the show here because I try to keep these
at a certain amount of time and before I go, and I appreciate it.
You gave us a really good walk through on coin joining and Wallace and
hopefully that's gonna be helpful for someone out there. And you educated me because
I wasn't sure that I was following the coin join. I wouldn't even calling
it the right thing. So so I appreciate that. So is there anything
you want to make sure and say where we get out of here, I
don't want to cut you off and there was something you wanted to cover or
over or no. I mean, look, thank you for having me.
I always enjoy our conversations, both on the air and off the air.
I'm really looking forward to bit block Booms, so I really hope it happens.
I'm excited to participate it in again, and I want to do a
workshop, as I said, and we want you to do one. I
want you to you know what I think it's gonna happen. Matt. Here's
what I'm predicting. It's gonna go one two ways. It's gonna castle.
Either that's one and I'll just send everybody back their mind. Are me having
this at in the August and everybody else's events have been canceled for the whole
year are postponed. I'm gonna be like the first real event and I'm gonna
have the event of the year. I mean, it's gonna be one or
the others. It's gonna be the best event ever, or it's not gonna
happen. This is what I said to you in like middle early March,
when it looked like Bitcoining twenty twenty was about to be canceled, but it
hadn't been canceled yet, And I was like anyone who complained about growing a
conference in August in Dallas when it's super hot, because I've never experienced heat
like that before. I came down there like jokes on them, because it
might turn out to be the perfect timing and location for it, you know,
especially as you know people are saying like, oh the heat can can
mitigate maybe the virus spread and stuff like that. So you know, I'm
CAUTI to see optimistic there. But what I want to leave people with is,
don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. You want to get your
hands dirty. That's the best way to learn, at least that's my favorite
way to learn. I think that's how people learn. That's why the workshops.
Get your hands dirty, you know, get comfortable with storing your own
keys, learn how to use your own node. Do you want to run
your own note it's getting easier to do it now, and play around with
coin joint. I completely understand that some people just want to be completely regulatory
compliant and ask for permission for everything, and that's you know, by all
means, if you want to do that, that's fine. But as I
said, you know, I think that with bitcoin comes great responsibility and you
you owe it to yourself to learn how to use this stuff and to play
with it. And once you play with it, you'll see it's it's not
this scary boogey man. It's just Bitcoin best practices. Yeah, it's just
taking the time to learn what you need to know exactly. And there's there's
a ton of resources out there. I agree, I mean there's a ton
of resources. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show. If anyone
wants to follow Matt, your mat underscore odo is that right? Correct?
So follow Matt. He's always got great things that he's posting. You're one
of my favorite people to follow too, so I appreciate you coming on the
show again. Thanks a lot, and hopefully I'll be seeing you in August.
Thank you, Gary. I hope you've enjoyed today's show, and I
want to give a big thank you to all my cousins out there for listening
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