Max & Q discuss the ongoing legal battle involving the Samourai Wallet developers, who are facing charges from the US government. They explore the recent developments, including the revelation that the prosecutors withheld critical evidence that could potentially dismiss one of the charges. This evidence, from FinCEN, indicated that Samourai Wallet's noncustodial design did not qualify as a money service business, contradicting one of the charges. They also touch on the implications of the Blanche memo, which suggests a shift in how the DOJ approaches crypto-related cases.
Our second major topic is the controversy surrounding the op_return limit in Bitcoin transactions. Max & Q explore the arguments for and against removing the 80-byte limit, with proponents arguing for network efficiency and harm reduction, while opponents fear blockchain bloat and a shift away from Bitcoin's financial focus. They discuss the implications of these changes on the network, including potential impacts on fee estimation and miner centralization.
IMPORTANT LINKS
VALUE FOR VALUE
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(00:00:41) THANK YOU FOUNDATION
(00:01:38) THANK YOU CAKE WALLET
(00:02:43) Stag Lyfe
(00:10:06) BOOSTS
(00:22:23) Samourai Wallet Case Review
(00:35:21) OP_RETURN Discussion
(00:59:25) Business on Air
[00:00:04]
Unknown:
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Bitcoin. Now what's the Bitcoin?
[00:00:19] Unknown:
Bitcoin's like rat poison.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:00:22] Unknown:
Oh. The greatest scam in history.
[00:00:25] Unknown:
Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero. Welcome back to The Bitcoin Brief, the show where me and q and a catch up every two weeks to talk about Bitcoin, privacy, open source, keeping your Bitcoin secure, and the news and software updates that matter. I just wanted say a massive thank you to everyone who's been supporting Ungovernable Misfits and a big thank you to Foundation Devices for supporting the show. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.x,XYZ. They make cypherpunk tools for fuckwits, and anyone can use this, even me. If you have any questions or you want to reach out, feel free, and I'll be happy to go through things with you. For anything super technical, I'll pass you on to q. If you wanna buy one of these incredible passports, use the code ungovernable.
It will get you a discount, and it will let them know that I'm shilling. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to the k Wallet team. Not only are they supporting this show, but they're also bringing out some incredible features. For those of you who actually use Bitcoin and actually care about their privacy and security, Cake Wallet make it incredibly simple for you to live outside of the traditional financial system. You can use Cake Pay within the app to buy gift cards for food, petrol, and whatever else you might need day to day. You can use silent payments, and, of course, you can use Monero.
You can connect both Bitcoin and Monero nodes, use coin control, and this team are constantly innovating. And I'm really excited to be working with them. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, but check them out at cakewallet.com. Download the APK or start using this today on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, or of course, your Android device. Enjoy the show.
[00:02:43] Unknown:
Hello, mate. How are you doing? Hello. Yeah. Doing well. The sun is out. I've had a few little trips since we last recorded. So I've not actually been online or in work all that much, really. So, the list is reflective upon that today. They're out of the loop. But we've got two big topics I wanna do a deep dive into. Okay. Unfortunately, no bullshit. Bitcoin's been MIA since we last recorded as well. So as you know, they are a crutch for the show in terms of providing us with a very healthy list of software updates, etcetera. But they certainly are. There's two main topics that I wanted to talk about that we can get onto in a bit. Short of one today, hopefully, we'll have a good discussion about samurai and, all the op wine I mean I mean, return stuff.
[00:03:26] Unknown:
And it has been noted that you've been not at your desk and not on Twitter with so many messages. Where's q? Where's his insights? What's happening? Was he off gallivanting around the world? Was it worth it? It was worth it. Yeah. Two separate trips to to your for two very different purposes.
[00:03:42] Unknown:
Okay. Second one was a stag do or a a bachelor party for those over the other side of the Atlantic. Is that what they call it? Yeah. They call it a bachelor party. Ugh. They can't do anything right, can they? That's a horrible thing to call it. Weekend sounds much better, doesn't it? It does. Yeah. Way better. So that was good fun. Yeah. We went and terrorized a a small part of Portugal for a couple of days. Lovely. I bet they were pleased about that. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. You can tell they really, really loved, British tourists, especially in big groups of only males of our age.
Beer drinking males of your age. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, brilliant. And then I came back to The UK, and it's actually hotter here than it was in Portugal.
[00:04:26] Unknown:
Oh,
[00:04:26] Unknown:
what's the temperatures there? Oh, we're we're, like, 25, 20 six. Okay. That's pretty decent. Yeah. Don't know what that is in medium units for the Yanks. It doesn't matter. Sorry, guys. Probably, like, 90.
[00:04:39] Unknown:
Yeah. 25, 20 six is actually pretty much a perfect temperature. That's prime, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. You start going hotter and it's like 25, 20 six with a light breeze in The UK. Like, there's not a lot that The UK has got going for it, but that oh, there's a few days of the year where it's just perfect.
[00:05:00] Unknown:
Yeah. It's one of those days where it's difficult to walk past the beer garden.
[00:05:04] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice cold beer. You know, when you've got, like, the I kinda wanna say, like, frost on the outside, but it's not frost. Like, condensation on the outside. You, like, take it out into the sun. It's, like, fucking nice and cold, and you just see that. And you're just like, yes. I'm winning
[00:05:22] Unknown:
at life. Yeah. You can't beat a frozen glass, can you? It comes out the freezer. No. You can't.
[00:05:26] Unknown:
Oh, I actually like it with wine as well. I don't I think we've gone through this. I don't think you're a Absolutely not. Wine drinker, but a frosted glass with, like, a nice glass of wine just sat if you're in a sunny climate, just sat chilling with that is
[00:05:42] Unknown:
Delightful. Absolutely delightful. Yeah. That's the exact word I was thinking, delightful. It really is. Got more traveling coming up as well. Yeah. I'm away more in May than I am at home at at the moment, much to the wife's dismay. Got a trip to Vegas in two weeks. Well, less than two weeks now. Week on week on Sunday, I head out. Very nice.
[00:06:01] Unknown:
Very nice.
[00:06:02] Unknown:
Indeed. You're looking forward to Vegas? Yeah. I mean, the actual thought of going to Vegas, like, we're all gambling and partying and stuff like that. That era of my life is almost in the past, thankfully. Yeah. So that aspect, they'll be really not bothered about at all, but it'd be good to meet up with the the rest of the foundation team and see some other Bitcoin related friends that I have. And because I share a few beers with those guys, gonna be doing I think I spoke about this briefly last time, but now it's all confirmed in public. I can give a little bit more information, but gonna be doing, like, a fireside chat with the Bugle Boys and a few other people. Jacques Shapiro from Bitcoin Policy Institute and Rob Hamilton. And we're gonna be doing a chat about the dichotomy between NGU and Freedom Money. Very nice.
So looking forward to that. I'll make sure that's linked in the show notes. I have no idea whether there's any tickets left. You just have to click the link and find out. I can't find it at the moment, but, yeah, that should be fun. Looking forward to meeting up with those guys again.
[00:07:03] Unknown:
Uncoverable Misfits are gonna have some very special prizes to be given away on stage with you and with others. I don't know whether to reveal what they are, maybe not, but they're very special, and we've got a fair few bits going up. So if you are going to that event, keep an eye out. Look forward to it. I shall definitely be donning my, free samurai shirt for that one. Nice. Nice. I suppose you won't be wearing a hoodie. Be fucking baking there. No. I'd imagine it's probably gonna be pretty warm in Vegas. I would think so. Yeah. Very nice. I almost thought about going the other day because weirdly, where I am, which is, like, quite a random place, bumped into a person who happened to be really into Bitcoin, and they were like, oh, yeah. I'm going to, Vegas at the end of the month. Come with me. I've got a spare ticket. And I was like, I've got a lot going on. I can't really do it. He's like, oh, well, the ticket's there. If you do, like, if you want it and, like, I'll book you a flight, like, you can come. And I was like, maybe.
But, yeah, I can't, unfortunately.
[00:08:04] Unknown:
Difficult with family and stuff as well, isn't it?
[00:08:07] Unknown:
Yeah. Too much going on, but I was tempted especially to go and see the Bugle Boys.
[00:08:11] Unknown:
I'm sure that'll be a a lot of fun. Yeah. Last bit of AOB, we sent out a Passport Prime slash Passport core shipping update last week, I believe. So if you're a customer or subscriber, check your inbox if you haven't already seen it. TLDR just been plagued with issues mainly driven by, the whole tariff situation, which thankfully seems to have found a sensible conclusion now. Well, that's just been causing delays from, you know, parts that we've got to do the manufacturing process. We we saw some of them from China. And, obviously, anything shipping from China to The US at the moment has just been completely fucked in terms of, like, is this gonna cost us $5, or is it gonna cost us $50? Like, we have no idea. And then the knock on effect to all of that in the supply chain on both The US side and on the China side is just fitting us in the bottom a little bit. But, thankfully, we seem to be out of the woods now, and we're a couple of weeks away from beginning all of the manufacturing process. So
[00:09:06] Unknown:
there is light at the end of the tunnel. Excellent. Well, that's good news, mate. Yeah. It's stressful. When you don't know the outcome of something, you're just, like, waiting and unsure, and then you got people waiting on you. That's not a great feeling. Yeah. Especially when you can't just fix it at the click of a button.
[00:09:21] Unknown:
Yeah. Nothing you can really do. Yeah. Well, like I say, light at the end of the tunnel, we appreciate everybody's patience. So I'll we'll work through and look for alternative solutions to get things stateside over to our, factory in New Hampshire to start putting these things together ASAP, but we're getting there. Good. So a bit of a of a backwards show today given the short list. What I was hoping to do was just run through the boosts, make a very, very quick mention, which I'll do now. Phoenix Android 2.6 has been released with some cool contact list related updates, and Robosat 7.7 alpha has also been released, and that has an updated view on the coordinators as well. That's literally it. That's all I could find. I feel like I've had the rug pull from me without the no bullshit Bitcoin guys, but those are the two notable releases I could find since we last recorded. And then should we hit the boost, and then we'll do a deep dive on all of the summary updates and then all of the upwind stuff that's been going on. Sounds good. I'll jump on the first one. Bon with 42,069
[00:10:20] Unknown:
sats. Guys, I haven't sent a boost in a long ass time even though I've been listening to every episode. Appreciate the hustle and dedication to the show, sending extra sats for past episodes. Cloud emoji lightning lightning.
[00:10:36] Unknown:
Thank you, Bon. Good to hear from you as well. Hope you're doing well, mate. Yeah. Absolutely. So after he sent that, Bon sent me a a DM on and said that he could see his boost, the one he just read, went through, but my portion of it failed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you run your own node. Yeah. Just that's basically what I said. I was like, you gotta love self hosted lightning. Just shrug shoulders emoji. And then he zapped that note with the equivalent. So if Bon if you've kind of lost those initial 8,000 and then sent them again separately to me on Noster, firstly, thank you. Secondly, you didn't need to do that and because I don't know what happened to those sats that fail on my side of the split. I think we've talked about this before. Is that our Oscar Pacerist mansion?
[00:11:20] Unknown:
Yeah. I think they go back to him. I think that's how it happens is they go back to him. Like, they don't technically go. Right. But I'm not sure. I don't think that it takes that whole amount and then just takes your portion and then splits it across the other parts, like the other splits, I don't think. Jordan will probably be able to answer that or Oscar if he's listening. Jordan, let us know what's on. Maybe you could check that initial boost of 42,069 sats and just see how much actually left your wallet. That gives us a clue, wouldn't it? Yeah. This is the self hosting issue, which we talk about all the time. Because I have Ginevra and wartime from my last moan that I had with Barn Miner where we were like, oh, fucking lightning, mate. It's such a pain in the ass, and we're having a whinge. And they were both like, oh, fuck you.
I had, like, a right whinge about it. Like, not explaining the trade offs and just saying it's shit. And it's like, it's great when it works. But what I find is it only works if you're not running your own stuff. If you wanna run wallet of Satoshi or Albi or whatever, one of these custodial things, they're really good. They work like all this stuff with fountain works like most of the time for me is fucking excellent. But
[00:12:32] Unknown:
if you use it how I would like to use it, I often find that sort of half of my stuff fails. Yeah. Generally speaking, all of my sends are are completely they go through, I'd say, 99% of the time, but it always seems to be, like, the receiving side more specifically with splits and things like that where it seems to fall over. So who knows? I don't know. I don't know either. Anyway, John with 21,420 sats. Nice. I'll gladly take whatever cuddles you boys have to offer. Stressed but working hard and making great progress. Can't wait to tell everyone what I've been working on. You two are always welcome to come and visit. We can go shooting anytime. Ammo and stakes are on me. Oh, that sounds amazing. I wonder what he's been working on. I know what he's been working on. As do I. I'm just trying to create some suspense.
[00:13:20] Unknown:
It's not OnlyFans for anyone who's wondering. We get a lot of sick, twisted people who really like his voice. Yeah. I'm one of those people. All the ladies come out of the woodwork. Oh my god. John, he's so hot. You heard his voice? Oh. So no, ladies. I'm afraid it's not that. Bitcoin Derby with 0.033 XMR. BTC Derby return in June. We are going to discuss projects such as Dojo Bay, Samurai case developments, running nodes, and the retardation of filter oars. More on that later. Saturday, June, '3 PM, ye old dolphin, d e one three d l.
Anyone is welcome. Hashtag free samurai.
[00:14:07] Unknown:
Bitcoin derby do it right. I like these guys. I was just about to say, I've no idea who's behind that handle, but they always seem to have some really based topics for their meetups. So Yeah. If you're in the Derby area, make sure you head on down.
[00:14:22] Unknown:
It's funny. Like, some meetups you'd go to and, like, as a new person to Bitcoin, Bitcoin, you might go there. Oh, you know what? This thing sounds alright. I'll go in. And depending on what location you are in The UK, your experience is gonna be so fucking different. Oh, yeah. You're either gonna, like, come out like a proper cypherpunk type person or you're gonna be, like, a full on n g u. You've got your sailor poster on your wall. Like, all of that stuff. It really varies depending on where you are. It's worth traveling probably. Yeah. Definitely. Late stage HODL with 5,000 SATs.
[00:14:59] Unknown:
Y'all talking about Panama City, Florida. I guess that's when we were talking about favorable tax jurisdictions during the last show. Yeah. My guess is I don't think Florida is. No. No. Neither. Such an American thing to assume it was about them. Yeah. I know. I know.
[00:15:16] Unknown:
It's because they'd never left the country. So you know, I've I've got no idea if late stage Hopley is American. I'm just presuming given the comment. I mean, most people are. Most people we interact with are Americans, aren't they? True. Unfortunately. A few Canadians in there, but and then, like, a spring fling of Aussies.
[00:15:32] Unknown:
Didn't, Canada just elect some another retard as their president? Well, I'd imagine. Doesn't every country elect another retard? I mean, some are bigger retails than others. Exactly. Haven't they now, elected the Mark Mark Kenny, is it? The ex Bank of England guy? Oh, not him. Yeah. I think I'm pretty sure he's in power now. Oh my lord. They showed a bit of promise, didn't they, with that Poliveri
[00:15:57] Unknown:
guy, but, obviously, he never got in. That clip of him just, like, eating an apple while he was just, like, deconstructing someone's argument.
[00:16:04] Unknown:
That's it. Yeah. He knew how to say the right things, didn't he?
[00:16:08] Unknown:
Oh, well. But, I mean, you know, he would have got in, and he probably would have done something completely against what he'd originally said anyway. So Yeah. I don't know that it matters. True. W with 2,100 sats. I should have boosted a lot more than a hundred sats for the amount of effort it took you to read my last comment. I got a good chuckle out of it and appreciate you taking the time. So is Froster a derivative of frost? No. I still haven't read up on it. Yeah. It is, isn't it? Didn't we say that in the last episode? Yeah. It's a sign in protocol that uses the Frost framework, essentially, but Frosta
[00:16:44] Unknown:
is geared towards nostr Yeah. Hence the the stupid name. The stir. But it is built on top of frost scheme, I think is probably the best terminology for it. Okay. Fixed round something signing something something. It's an anagram not an anagram. It's an acronym. So, yes, Froster uses the Frost protocol. They're not strictly the same thing, though. Okay. Good to know. Vegan Bitcoin. I don't know whether that's true or whether it's a troll. Because they boosted in XMR. They sent 0.006 for XMR. And I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say there's probably not many vegan Monero fans. I don't know. There's a lot of vegans
[00:17:22] Unknown:
around the world, isn't there? I think you could have one slip through.
[00:17:26] Unknown:
Possibly. We'll see. We'll find out. They can let us know. Also, they're called vegan Bitcoin, but they boosted in XMR. Interesting. Mhmm. Trying to throw up the scent there. So this is addressed to you, Max. Number one, Android keyboard. Get yourself an APK of Microsoft SwiftKey. Download a language. Block the Internet on Graphene. Done. Okay. So I've never tried Microsoft SwiftKey, but I essentially do the same thing but with Google's Gboard, download it, and then cut it off from the Internet so it can't send all of your questionable search history back to Google. Number two, install Futo speech to text. That's f u t o. It's open source, local, and needs no Internet. Oh, nice. Okay. If you've not tried that one, that sounds useful. That would be very useful for me. And number three, all bot has problems.
Don't we know it? Use InvisiblePro instead. Again Okay. New one on me. I've not heard of InvisiblePro,
[00:18:24] Unknown:
but thank you for the recommendation, vegan bitcoin. Yeah. Thank you, vegan bit. I think vegan bitcoin is a new booster, XMR chat booster. Yeah. I've not seen that name floating around before. Well, thank you for the advice. I appreciate that. I will probably, if I'm honest, mean to do this, get distracted, and forget about it, and not do it. But then at some point, I'll reach out to queue, and he might remember that there's the Google option and the Microsoft option for the the Swift Key thing. So at some point, your advice will be useful most probably. I've just looked up the, Invisible Pro now. It's
[00:19:00] Unknown:
got 4.2 stars on the Google Play Store out of 6,000 reviews and, allegedly, over a million downloads. Okay. So seems like it's not exactly a new app, so might be worth a try. Thanks for the recommendation. Okay.
[00:19:14] Unknown:
Thank you, mate. FOMO Chronic boosted 1,001 sats. Turkey boosted 500. Blau, Elise, boosted 210 sats. Income tax in Panama only for work in Panama itself. 0 to 11,000, 15 percent. 50 k plus is 25%. Making money outside is tax free here.
[00:19:41] Unknown:
Jesus. Be right back. Just going to book a flight to Panama. There's a lot of countries like that. Question for you, Blau, Elise. Thank you for that information. The fact that you said making money outside is tax free here tells me that you live there. Give us a clue us up on the entry requirements. You know? Who's Palmer to Greece to, to become a citizen?
[00:20:04] Unknown:
I think it's quite expensive now. Imagine it would be. Yeah. I think. But, yeah, you can let us know on that. There's a lot of countries like that where you can be there. And as long as you're not earning or running a business in the country, you don't get taxed. Nice. That's that whole kind of like flag theory thing, isn't it? It's like you reside here, but your business is over there. You have some other corporate structure over there. Each bit fits into a puzzle piece, which basically makes it that you don't pay any tax and that no one really has control over what you do kind of thing. I see. And then even if the country that you reside in doesn't like what you're doing, but you're living in your property, then it's not owned by you. It's owned by a business, which then can't be touched by that country, so they couldn't even take the property, blah blah blah. It's all that stuff. There's there's a few books on it, I think. Who was the guy that I spoke to? It was, Roger Ver? No. It was a he didn't do it so well, did he? It it was a few years ago I spoke to somebody at the what's the one they do at Parallel Hippolis?
[00:21:12] Unknown:
Hackers Congress.
[00:21:13] Unknown:
Hackers Congress. I interviewed someone, did, like, a live interview years ago there. The name escapes me. They'd written a book on it, and, yeah, definitely something to consider. Nice. Yeah. Well, when it comes back into your brain, let me know the guy's name, and I'll look it up. Yeah. It will come to me. And finally,
[00:21:30] Unknown:
thanks to Pled to Polymath, We All Eat, and Cas Peland for streaming 923 sats, 922 sats, and 836 sats, respectively. Thank you very much, guys.
[00:21:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Ristepa.
[00:21:45] Unknown:
Thank you very much. I wouldn't Appreciate it. I wonder how many people will get that reference.
[00:21:52] Unknown:
Not many.
[00:21:53] Unknown:
If you get the Ristepa reference that Max has just said there Dropped. Yeah. Just drop me the name of the thing where it references, and I'll send you a hundred sats. Oh. Drop me a DM. Okay. Limited 10 people only. The first ten
[00:22:13] Unknown:
people. I don't wanna get milked. Yeah. Because you know I would have just done a tweet now. Right, everyone. Just to let you know. Let's train him. Yeah. That was a little throwback. I I appreciate that. Yeah.
[00:22:24] Unknown:
Right. Let's go and do a deep dive on the samurai stuff and the the op return stuff, shall we? Let's do it. Before I do dive into the samurai stuff first and you can leave this in the show, by the way. I was thinking then. Jordan's gonna have an easy time with the the chapters on this one because there'll there'll only be, like, two. Mhmm.
[00:22:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Could be very happy. You're welcome.
[00:22:46] Unknown:
Yeah. So samurai situation. Given that we had a quite a list, what I thought would be a good idea because there is some new news here, which I'm gonna get on to. But I thought it'd be good to have a quick recap on the overall situation, start to finish. Obviously, I'm not gonna go into everything, but I'm gonna go through all of the the signpost stuff and then rebuild the story leading us into the the stuff that's happened in the last couple of weeks since we last recorded, if that sounds good with you. Yeah. Sounds great. So back in 2024, the Samwell developers were charged by the US government with or indicted, should I say, not charged, with two crimes.
Conspiracy to commit money laundering, basically alleging that the samurai wallet facilitated, quote, over a hundred million dollars in laundered proceeds from illegal dark web markets, e g Silk Road, hydro market, blah blah blah. This charge carries a maximum sentence of, I believe, twenty years in prison. And then the other indictment was for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. And the prosecutors here claimed that samurai operated as a money service business without registering with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN. Remember that because that's an important piece of the latest developments. Mhmm. So just to recap that final one, they are accused of operating as a money service business without registering with FinCEN.
This violates US regulations and carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. This hasn't gone to court officially yet. There's been multiple hearings over the course of the last twelve months. I think we've had four. Basically, they've been smaller hearings. There's been a lot of evidence discovery going on where any court of law, I believe, doesn't matter whether you're you're in The US or not, but you've gotta share the evidence that you've got with the other side so that they can build their defense and the the prosecution can build their prosecution case, essentially. We've had hearings in May. We've had one in September.
We've had a third one. I can't remember when that one was. And then the most recent one was in March. That was held in the Southern District Of New York, and this was kind of one of the shorter ones, I believe. What they did there was just agree on the the pretrial motion schedule where the prosecution was set to provide all of their expert disclosure by July, and the defense was to do the same by August as well. There was a couple of other bits around where the individuals in question were residing or were able to reside during all of his pretrial motions. And one of the guys thankfully got to stay where he was living in Portugal as well just for a bit of extra comfort while they go through the stressful situation that I'm I'm going through right now. Moving on to April, we had what's now been known as the Blanche memo.
Deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, on April, issued a memo which was well received by everybody in the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem, basically. And the memo was titled ending regulation by prosecution. And the idea here was directing the DOJ, the US Department of Justice, to cease pursuing cases against crypto mixes for unintentional regulatory violations and to focus on clear criminal activities like fraud or embezzlement. The memo also disbanded the DOJ's digital asset enforcement team. So, basically, this is kind of the new guard under Trump coming in and looking at some of the stuff that was going on under Biden, this whole regulation by prosecution that seem to have been trying to set a precedent for the last four years at least with cases like samurai, cases like tornado cash, Bitcoin fog, etcetera, etcetera. This kind of new memo basically said, look. We don't agree with this. We're gonna stop it, and we suggest that you start focusing on real criminal activities.
Understandably well received, and everybody was feeling pretty positive about, you know, the impact that this was gonna have on all of the cases that I've just mentioned. But, of course, the one closest to our heart is the samurai one. On April, the defense requested a dismissal of the case based on everything I've just said in that Blanche memo. And on the April 24, both sides met to discuss this request. On the twenty eighth, they jointly asked the judge, I think his name is judge Berman, for a sixteen day continuance or extension of pre trial motion deadlines just to take all of this sort of stuff into consideration. But this continuance doesn't affect when the official start date was due to commence, which, as I read this, I believe is still on November year. So we're still months away from the trial even beginning. On the May, the prosecutors indicated that they would not be dropping the charges per the, defense's request. And they argued that the Blanche memo does not create a legal right or benefit for the defendants and should not influence the court's decision.
Obviously, not the outcome we were hoping for. In and around that same timeline, I believe it was early May, just a couple of weeks ago, the samurai wallet legal team has filed a letter with the Southern District Of New York accusing prosecutors of withholding critical exculpatory evidence. Basically, what happened was in 02/2023, before the guys were even indicted, six months before the charges were filed, FinCEN, those are the guys that I mentioned at the very top of all this explanation, informed the Southern District Of New York Prosecutors that the samurai wallet's noncustodial design did not qualify as a money service business, which is one of the exact things that the DOJ is trying to charge them for. So to recap, FinCEN informed the prosecutors, no. They do not fit the bill to be a money service business because they don't take custody.
What we've all been saying all along. Yeah. This means that they did not require a money transmitter license. Here's the crucial part. This information about this conversation between the prosecutor and between Vincent was not disclosed to the defense until April 2025, nearly a year after the deadline was mandated. Oh, you can't. Okay. Sorry. I got confused. So basically, this is you you there might be some people on Twitter hearing about, like, references to Brady here. Basically, what I've just described where the prosecution withholds something that could be positive for the defendant, some information. That's known as a Brady violation, and Brady just refers to where this happened that, you know, a court case where this happened to set legal precedent in the first place.
So to recap, the prosecution had knowledge and guidance from FinCEN, which they blatantly ignored and decided to charge the samurai wallet developers with being, you know, operating a money service business despite FinCEN telling them, no. They don't qualify because of our guidance. Once again Yeah. That's what we've been saying all along. Yes. The defense then argued that the fact that they withheld evidence could have influenced various things like bail decisions. One of the guys who's resided in The US, he's been under house arrest for almost a year. I think he's not on it anymore, but even locked up in his own house for under a year. That could have influenced the bail decisions and that the court's refusal to allow any motion to dismiss. So they requested a hearing to examine all of this going on in front of a judge and explore what remedies including, of course, case dismissal, citing a blatant violation of due legal process.
So at this point, myself and everybody is not doing victory laps because, you know, you're fighting the US government at the end of the day, but everybody's feeling increasingly more and more confident, myself included. Yeah. On May, the prosecutors responded denying basically just saying what we did is not a Brady violation. They argued that the FinCEN conversation involved, quote, informal caveated opinions, end quote, from individual employees, not a formal agency ruling. Yeah. Yeah. And thus does not constitute a Brady material, which is completely bollocks because there is guidance with FinCEN that, again, we followed all along that says, if you don't take custody, you don't qualify as an MSB.
[00:31:02] Unknown:
Whether or not they've had individual employees from FinCEN tell them the exact guidance that FinCEN have set out in an official form or not. Yeah. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Well, it doesn't make any sense is is the thing. It's just they're trying to clamber at something Right. Where it would be like, oh, yeah. Well, it doesn't really doesn't matter because of this. Like Yeah. Obviously
[00:31:24] Unknown:
obviously, like we said from the start. The prosecution also claimed that the disclosure made seven months before trial was timely enough for the defense to use it effectively despite let's not mention it at the four pretrial hearings we have or included in any of our evidence. Prosecutors emphasized that the money laundering charge, the more serious of the two, was unaffected by the FINCENT guidance. Mhmm. On Monday the twelfth, the defense submitted a letter to the Southern District of New York in which it made the case for the court to schedule a hearing regarding the information that came to light on April 1. The defense's motion to dismiss under the Blanche memo remains outstanding.
And finally, the defense's request for hearing on the alleged Brady violation is pending with the next hearing, which was already scheduled before all of this additional drama, for July year. So in my opinion, we're in a much more positive situation than we've ever been because through my eyes, they've been caught with their pants down, and they're just trying to play it down. My hope is that the judge sees through this and completely throws out one of the charges, which is probably the the more likely option, or just completely dismisses the whole case because the prosecutor has gone outside of due legal process. But once again, we will see.
[00:32:40] Unknown:
You're now fully up to date. It's crazy, isn't it? That's why with all this stuff, I've been following it, but I've not tried to hold on to too much hope at any point when there's these changes. Cause it's like the end of the day, they can sound as retarded as they do and obvious that they're wrong, but they can still win. And it it's so frustrating watching that happen. It's such a massive injustice, and they're supposed to be the justice system. It's so fucking topsy-turvy. But it's good. At least it looks more positive.
[00:33:10] Unknown:
Yeah. It's two to three weeks ago, We had no kind of sturdy ground for dismissal.
[00:33:16] Unknown:
Now we have two separate ones. One for the Blanche memo and one for the Brady violation. Well, let's hope. Let's continue to keep our fingers crossed. And one thing I would just say is anyone listening to this, don't let this stop you from helping support Free Samurai and sending funds in because with all of this legal stuff, they play games, they try and drag things out, and they try and either destroy people emotionally or financially. This stuff is extremely expensive. Any sats that you can donate to try and help these guys, would be appreciated. So just don't, like, take the potential win as a as a sign to back off or take your foot off the gas. You you really need to continue.
[00:33:57] Unknown:
Absolutely cosign that. Head to p2prights.org. Donate what you can. Purchase some samurai swag from, ungovernablemisfits.com.
[00:34:05] Unknown:
Are they is that back in stock now, by the way? Still not. Yeah. Still not. We are really close. They're getting printed very soon. By the time I got the screens over to our new printer, they were then swamped with a load of other work. So with the screens are there, they've got the designs, they know the colors, and they have the garments now. Everything is there ready. I'm I'm just waiting for them to be printed. So I have a feeling it will be sort of end of the month, something like that. We're really, really close. Obviously, every boost that you send into this show, a percentage goes to free samurai. So, you know, you can support it that way. You can support it directly. When the clothing comes on, you can do that. Just just anything that you can do because this is definitely the biggest, most important thing happening in Bitcoin by far much more than our next topic.
[00:34:52] Unknown:
Yeah. Even in a utopian world where the next time we record, the charges have been dropped and the guys are free, if you've donated any money to that fund, number one, I'm sure they've still got a lot of legal costs to pay for. But number two, even if they haven't I'm sure. All of that fund is gonna be rolled over and and used as a slush fund to help protect the inevitable case where the next lot of open source developers are thrown into purgatory over something stupid again. So that money is never gonna go to waste even if 100% of it is not used for the samurai case. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So lots of Twitter drama, lots of GitHub drama, lots of Bitcoin mailing list drama has all been going on since I've been pretty much offline for the whole of the last two weeks. Mhmm. Got home on Monday, got myself back into the Twittersphere, catching up with all of the, you know, the popular posts and stuff. And, oh, wow. There is some hot takes floating around.
So Yeah. Have you been keeping abreast of this, or do you like me to give you the the in-depth
[00:35:49] Unknown:
or as I see it? Yeah. I definitely wanna hear how you see it. Me and John sort of loosely covered on the last episode that we released. We're, like, loosely following it. Our views haven't changed since the last time this sort of stuff was brought up. Actually, I think before samurai case started because I remember doing a live stream with those guys and talking through the opera and stuff. And, basically, it was retarded then, and I still feel it's retarded now. And I'm not bothered to argue with people. As I said, like, there's much more important stuff to focus on. It would be nice for it all to just to quieten down, and we can get focused on things that matter again.
[00:36:26] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm gonna get into it in a second. Don't worry, listeners. And Max and I I'm gonna go on. Let me just say we we almost certainly share the same view on what the outcome should be here, albeit that all of the drama around this is just complete nonsense.
[00:36:41] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:36:42] Unknown:
However, I'm gonna when I do my explainers, I'm gonna try and remain on the fence in terms of how I explain things. Impartial. Yes. Yeah. And I'm gonna try and steel man the other side. And by the other side, I mean, you know, the side I I agree with much less. Because I think that b g t q Yeah. K r Yeah. No r k? Because I do kind of sympathize with some of the why of their argument. It's Mhmm. The how is where it all falls down. Anyway Okay. Let's get into it. So been a lot of drama around op return and the sort of policies around that in recent weeks. Op return, for those that don't know, is basically a kind of output type that allows users to embed provably unspendable data like hashes or time stamps into a transaction in such a way that doesn't bloat the UTXO set. I'm pretty sure since 2014 when this was introduced, this has always had an 80 byte limit.
And this is kind of an arbitrary limit. The idea to prevent kind of abuse and prioritize what most people would consider, quote, unquote, financial transactions. Mhmm. There's been some historical drama between Samurai and and Lucas Junior before now, isn't there, where Knots lowered the limit and that was gonna cause issues for Samura users. Below. Yeah. Because Samura users were, you know, one of the many different types of Bitcoin users that actually used op returns as part of the kind of fee structure within Whirlpool, which obviously is not active at the moment. Some other uses for op return at the moment, like, say, people do time stamping. I know Peter Todd has got the open time stamps thing, which is a service that aims to, I believe, prove the existence of a document at a certain block height, essentially. So it's like an immutable this exists.
Mhmm. I think it's a paid service. And then more recently, there's been some, scaling solutions, things like roll ups and stuff like that that want to embed hashes into a Bitcoin transaction as, like, an anchor point for some second layer scaling solution. So that's the kind of what an op return is. Oh, and it's also worth me spelling out here that that 80 byte limit is node mempool policy. So there can be and there is Bitcoin transactions with up returns in them in the history of Bitcoin that are much larger than the 80 byte limit. Mhmm. The 80 byte, quote, unquote, limit is the default relay policy of all Bitcoin Core nodes.
So what that means is that if my node receives a transaction with an upturn data size of more than 80 bytes and I just run all of the defaults, my node will say, nah. Go away. Not interested. That's, in my eyes, is a nonstandard transaction. It won't relay it. It won't relay it. But Yeah. That is not what transaction or a valid transaction or a consensus compatible transaction is. There is nothing to say that there can't be a larger than 80 byte op return in a valid Bitcoin transaction. So if you're a motivated actor for whatever reason, be it JPEGs, be it layer two scaling, whatever it is, and you want to build a transaction with a a 90 byte op return, you can, but you're gonna have to get that direct to a minor.
Now in years gone by, that's a nontrivial thing to do because you'd have to have a direct relationship with them. You'd have to know a guy essentially and say, look. Hey. Mhmm. You know, here's a hundred dollars on a credit card transaction. If you include this for me, you know, you can keep that hundred dollars, and I get my transaction mined. The limit is fairly easy to circumvent. And and I say it's easy these days because we have services like Marathon Slipstream, which is essentially what I said. But rather than knowing a guy, you just go to a website and pay a bill. So if you wanna get around this men poor policy, you can. You just speak to a minor. They've you know, some of them have got services popping up. You just go on and say, hey. You know, mine this for me. Obviously, they'll check it. And if it's consensus valid and it pays a fee, they'll do it because miners, you know, as I'm sure you and John have whacked lyrical about many times, are, economically incentivized actors. They're there to make money. Especially these days.
Exactly. So enter the the beginning of the latest round of controversy. There was a pull request to Bitcoin Core. I believe it was created by Peter Todd, the the guy behind open timestamps. And his pull request is quite, I believe, quite a simple one in in all honesty. And he proposes to remove the 80 byte relay limit for the standard Bitcoin Core node. Mhmm. That's it. It just wants to remove the limit. Now you might be thinking, okay. Well, that sounds pretty trivial. But also, if you can circumvent it, like, why even remove it in the first place? Why not just leave it as is? So here's the arguments as to why people like Peter Todd, myself, Max, and most people in this camp are like, either a, the 85 liters is fine, and we don't really care about the fact that people can circumnavigate.
Or let's just pull it out anyway for reasons that I'm about to go into. So the first one, harm reduction. A lot of the the proponents of this argue that the 80 byte kind of relay limit encourages what they're calling harmful workarounds. So that is basically, if you don't have a way to get your non stranded transaction direct to a miner, people will take other solutions to achieve their goal. Don't forget. The goal here is to embed non, quote, unquote, financial transaction data into a Bitcoin transaction so that you can kind of embed it into the blockchain for for whatever reason, for the, you know, purposes that I outlined earlier. Now some of these workarounds are essentially worse for the overall network than just chucking it into an op return. Most of them do it by stuffing this extra data into the actual output part of the transaction or the signature part of the transaction, which creates UTXO bloat, which means it grows the UTXO set, which affects every single node on the network. The bigger the UTXO set, the more beef you need in your computer to be able to kind of keep that in memory and be able to be a performant node.
[00:43:17] Unknown:
Which is one of the big problems that we were talking about many years ago, which is, like, you don't want to have less nodes on the network because it's harder to run a node. You want to have more. You want it to be easier. Right. Exactly. That's a very important thing for decentralization.
[00:43:32] Unknown:
Exactly. So, yeah, basically, by having this limit and making it difficult to get that relayed around the network, they go for these other types of transactions and stuff the data elsewhere where it can't be pruned and it has to be managed by nodes, which makes it more difficult in the long run to run a node. The next one is kind of network efficiency. So let's say we try to stop people from using Opera Turns and we make it even more difficult for them to relay them. We essentially incentivize them to go direct to minus. And you might think, okay. Great. Well, if Mara's got a tool for you to do that really easily and and you wanna do that for whatever reason, go ahead. Just go and do it. Which on the surface of it sounds great and it sounds sensible. But if that type of behavior becomes quite widespread, what that means is that we have a load of transactions waiting to be mined.
Miners know about them, but everyday users that just run Bitcoin Core or on their umbrella or whatever or Start Nine, because those transactions are being sent direct to miners out of band I know what you're gonna say. We have no sight of them. So we can't use them in our fee estimation Fee estimation. Which at 1 sat per byte is fine. If we are 200 blocks deep in the mempool and the next block fee rate is 250 sats per byte, then you can bet your bottom dollar. I wanna know about every single person that's potentially in the queue in front of me because I need my transaction mined now. If I don't know about everything, I can't make an educated decision with that. Mhmm. So that's a big one for me. And part of the reason that I'm kind of in this camp that I'm running through now in terms of, like, why we would rather them use Upreturn than do all of this other stuff, like go direct to miners,
[00:45:15] Unknown:
stuff all the data into ETXOs, etcetera. I just wanna throw something in there. It's one of the most beautiful thing about Bitcoin for me is that everything is so clear. You know how things work. And as long as you can wrap your head around the nuts and bolts of it, you can use this thing, and it just fucking works, which is totally different to every other thing pretty much in the world, like, certainly around finance or sending money or doing anything like that. It's the complete opposite. And if you then start taking the system, which is so well engineered and you can say, okay. I really need to make this transaction. I need it to be in the next ten minutes or needed to be in the next hour, and you can be very close to the perfect amount of fees that you'd need to pay without being under or over as a general rule to then start fucking with that or allowing other people to fuck with that to make it less useful. This whole thing about, like, oh, yeah. This is supposed to be used for money. Like, don't fuck up the money. It's like, actually, that is fucking up the money because if you can't use your money, then it's not good money. Something else just popped into my head while we're talking about, like, the whole mining aspect of this, and we wanna disincentivize
[00:46:27] Unknown:
people to go direct to miners. Not hide their transactions, but don't put it through the membles where everybody else can see it, is that once again, if this becomes commonplace and there's loads of additional transactions that are paying, you know, they will attract a higher fee to go direct to a miner. In my head, correct me if I'm wrong here, this I'm just speaking out loud, but that's gonna further exacerbate the mining centralization problem. Yeah. Because Yeah. Those miners that are doing these out of band transactions are gonna be attracted a lot more in fees. And it feels like there would be a further centralization of power there, and the home miners and the the small guys with just a couple of machines that aren't taking part in this are just gonna be hurt because of it. Yeah. So it obviously hurts fee estimation.
[00:47:12] Unknown:
It does as far as I can understand it. John can correct me if I'm wrong, but it will affect the smaller miners or just most miners, not even necessarily small because it's only gonna be the big guys that can be doing this. They've already got economies of scale. They're gonna be getting better energy contracts, better cost of machines. They're gonna be getting loans very, very cheaply. The squeeze on small to midsize miners is already I feel it because we've got our pleb minor group. Like, people are hurting. People are struggling. Mhmm. They're doing everything they can, being as canny as they can, but it's fucking hard out there at the moment.
I think I'm pretty sure this would make it worse.
[00:47:50] Unknown:
Yeah. And then the last one that I didn't really have a full understanding of until read a couple of posts on it is about if we have a lot of the network trying to not relaying these transactions, but as we've established that these kind of quote unquote nonstandard transactions are gonna get mined anyway. We can't stop that because they meet consensus and they're going straight to a miner. When, you know, let's say Mara mines a block and it's got, you know, a couple of thousand of these transactions that most of the nodes don't know about because they've got the filter policy on and they don't wanna know about these transactions. Those nodes still have to store those transactions because they're in a valid block. They then have to download all that information and verify it because they didn't have it in their mempool anyway because they were like, no. That transaction doesn't meet my policy limit. So this does have an impact on block relay latency, I think they're calling it, where it's a case of because you didn't know about this in the first place, but it's a valid transaction in a now mined valid block. You're being forced to learn about it anyway and validate it and etcetera etcetera.
Now in my head, it feels like that would only affect the people choosing to run the filters. But I guess it feels like it could also be an additional strain on the network Mhmm. You know, of having to propagate all of that additional information, especially if, let's say, knots that wants to run increase these filters becomes a larger part of the network. That was kind of a new one to me and an interesting kind of data point. To summarize the the argument in favor of removing this op return 80 byte limit is basically just all of the miners already ignore the limit because they're rational economic actors. So core's, like, mempoor policy, the default policy should just reflect reality, basically, of why would we make up our own nodes and not be able to see all of the transactions that are out there given that we know they're either gonna work around the filter or they're just gonna go direct to a mine anyway. Like, we are not stopping these transactions.
So that's the summary of the reason for the pizza talk pull request of removing the 80 byte limit. So here is the argument for those against AK, also known as the filter raws. So the reasons that they basically, they don't want this pull request merged, and some of them are even going further to say we should reduce the 80 byte limit to further kind of disincentivize these types of transactions, albeit though we've established that you probably can't disincentivize them. Anyway, so the first one is quite a funny one. Blockchain bloat. Critics including Luke Dash junior, the Bitcoin knot's maintainer. Who else have we got? Samsung Mile, the Jam three guy. They warn that removing the 80 byte limit could lead to an influx of nonfinancial data, e g NFTs, blah blah blah, increasing the blockchain size and node operating costs, potentially harming decentralization.
So what they're saying here is that if we remove this limit, we're giving them, like, the thumbs up and the the green light to go and be even more degenerate. I don't subscribe to that because the mempool's been empty for weeks. There's been no disincentivization for people's transact. Like, if they wanted to do all this sort of stuff, the fact that there was an 80 byte limit on the the op return has not stopped them thus far. They've been stuffing that data here, there, and everywhere. Taproot, multisigs. They're not bothered. They're happy to pay fees and stuff. So in my opinion, removing the limit would not incentivize them to make more of these JPEGs or whatever. But that's point number one. Point number two, and this seems to be the strongest point from this or the most kind of repeated point is the philosophical one. These guys basically argue that Bitcoin should remain a financial protocol, not a general purpose database.
They view the change of diluting Bitcoin's core value. Basically, they don't like non financial transactions, and they want to do anything they can to stop them. This is where I at the top of all this, when I said I kind of sympathize with their Outlook, all these JPEGs and stuff like that are completely irrelevant to me. I think they're Yeah. They're retarded. I think they're stupid, and I think they have zero value. But I'm yet to hear a tangible way that we can actually stop this. Because all of the solutions, like decreasing the the limit or don't relay the the transactions and just stick your fingers in your ears, none of it's gonna work. So this is the one, like, I understand where they're coming from. Like, Bitcoin to me is money. It's a savings vehicle. It's a transactional vehicle that I can use free from third parties. I want to protect that as much as I can, but I'm yet to see a way that we can truly protect that from the, quote, unquote, threat that these NFTs or or scaly solutions provide by using this arbitrary data storage.
[00:52:30] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I agree. I'm not collecting or sending or storing or doing anything with NFTs. I've got no fucking interest. Never have. I can't imagine I ever will do, but as you say, it just seems to be an argument of, like, we don't like a thing that is possible. So we're gonna suggest a thing that we think might make it less possible, but actually definitely doesn't because there are still ways around it, and it's not gonna stop anyone from doing it. And so it just seems a bit of, like, a pointless fucking row to me. It's like energy could be spent much better elsewhere. If you can't stop it, unless you can come up with a solution that actually stops it and doesn't then potentially cause different issues that you weren't thinking about that could actually be worse than the fact that someone's paying fees to minors for a transaction that you happen to not like, but you can still make your transactions. It's not like we suddenly have ridiculous fees at the moment. The mempools are dead. So I know what you mean. I don't disagree.
I only think this thing is useful as money, really. But if other people are paying the fees and using it as it was designed to do something that you don't like, well, that's a design problem.
[00:53:45] Unknown:
Yeah. And so some of the the hot take I was referring to on Twitter when I came back was a lot of people are virtue signaling. I'm now running Bitcoin knots because it protects the network blah blah blah. And you're just like, yeah. Great. Well done. So now you don't relay larger upturn transactions, and you've got a kneecap for mempool. Like, you've gained nothing. Yeah. No. You have gained something. You've got your Vertu tokens, and you're part of the LGBTQRK
[00:54:13] Unknown:
society
[00:54:14] Unknown:
group. Yeah. And that that means something. That's worth something. Yes. That's basically the top and bottom of it at the moment. The initial poll request by Peter Todd has been closed, but there is now a a similar one that was I think it's by Greg Sanders. I think he goes by Insta Gibbs. Again, I believe this hasn't been merged yet, but his proposal is that it will remove the 80 byte cap as Peter Todd wanted to do and eliminate limits on the number of return outputs per transaction. So, basically, I think what they're gonna do is mark it as deprecated in the next release and then remove it completely as a nonconfigurable option in the one that follows. Okay.
We shall see whether that gets merged. But, again, I there's people have been talking about, like, this could be the end for Bitcoin and blah blah blah. And I'm just like, guys, we have so much bigger fish to fry. Yeah. Yeah. You've got two entities controlling, like, probably well over 50% of the block template construction at the moment. Like, I'd be way more concerned about stuff like that or scalability than some fucking d gens putting some NFTs or data that represents NFTs into an opportune.
[00:55:25] Unknown:
Yeah. It does just seem like a weird argument, but people seem to have to have something to argue about and pick their camp. And if they want to run knots and have I believe it's just Luke Dasher. He's the sole maintainer of it, and you wanna have that as your node. Like, he doesn't have the best security history. I don't know. I mean, each their own, but that's the whole thing. This whole thing's supposed to be anyone can use this any way they want. And if you wanna use and run that node or that put your trust in Luke, that's fine. That's not a problem. I just think maybe you don't have to screech about it on Twitter. Maybe,
[00:56:03] Unknown:
just do it, see how you get on, and worry about other things. Yeah. Absolutely. And with all of this said, you know, I've made my allegiances very clear here. But if there's anybody listening to this that thinks that there's viewpoints from the other side or critical points that I've missed that might make me, change my viewpoint. Like, I'm I'm all ears here. And I do have a podcast with Bitcoin mechanic who sits firmly in the the loop dash junior camp on this queued up in my podcast feed, which I'm gonna go and listen to over the next couple of days just so I can try and get a bit more of an understanding as to where people are coming from outside of what I can only see here as virtue signaling.
[00:56:38] Unknown:
That's the other thing is you and I and most people that we interact with have very similar views on most of these types of things that crop up. Right. And so a lot of that is just like being in a bit of a bubble. You have your certain views about what's most important. You only really communicate with those groups of people. So it's gonna be completely the same on the other side, and then you're gonna rely on certain people for advice on the more technical stuff, and it goes up that chain. I'm gonna ask you. You might ask someone else. They might ask someone else, and we have our trusted people within our bubble. So I don't blame anyone who's on the other side squawking and screeching because a lot of them are just not particularly technical, neither am I. And they're probably just listening to somebody that they trust and going, oh, yeah. That makes sense. Right. Running knots. Tweet. Yeah. It's important to,
[00:57:30] Unknown:
check your biases. Something I'm trying to get better at as I turn quickly into an old man is trying to make sure that I expose myself to what I would describe as dissenting opinions because we're all, like you say, very guilty of singing from the the team hymn sheet, so to speak, and just parrotting the the friendship narrative. So it's important to listen to the other side. So if you consider yourself in the the filter roles, please tell us why we're wrong. Yeah. Definitely do that. Definitely,
[00:57:58] Unknown:
send it as a large boost as well because we're gonna read it much better. We'll understand it better. I thought you were gonna say send it as an up return in a Bitcoin transaction.
[00:58:08] Unknown:
If I was smarter and quicker, I would have said that. Yeah. Bonus points if you do send it in an opportune. Yeah. That would be excellent. And and just to cap all this off to demonstrate perfectly the ineffectiveness of this, only yesterday, Mara mined an entire block with a single transaction containing a massive op return in there. Mhmm. Just one transaction in the whole block. And if you Jordan remind me, I'll send you the links to this so people can see it on mempool. Space. One of the, fields on mempool.space is the audit field. And it says not seen in mempool.
I whoever did this sent it straight to Mara Yeah. And, you know, nobody would have been any the wiser. So you'd be there thinking, great. I've paid to get into the next block, and then this thing pops up and you're like, what the fuck? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although, ironically, talking about low fee rates, this guy paid 2.5 sats per byte. Well, I suppose we we don't know how much they paid out of band. It's just That's true. Yeah. Good point. But it just demonstrates the, you know, the insanity of all of this that whether we like it or not, this type of stuff will get in. And the preferable way for me from the way I understand it is let's let them do it in an opportune. You know, if you wanna look at that data, great. If you don't prune it. Yep. I think that's good. Let us know why we're wrong, please.
We'll keep covering it. Indeed. Well, that was a bit of a different show, but I quite enjoyed doing the the deep dive on a a couple of topics. Good. Thank you, mate. So Oh, apologies for for recording and releasing late by the way, guys. But as you might have gathered from the top of the show, my fault would have been off gallivanting on a stag. Final bit of business on air, I'm gonna be in Vegas Two Weeks on Monday when we would normally be recording next. So we need to work Oh, there we go. We need to work out a a time to get together because I'm gonna be in Vegas the whole week and traveling on the Sunday. So, yeah, let's talk about that after the show. We need to make sure we get one in that week because I'm literally out for the whole week. So maybe we can make something work earlier in the day perhaps.
[01:00:05] Unknown:
This is what it's like trying to record with a superstar
[01:00:08] Unknown:
just traveling around the world. Has its pros and cons. This will be the last show before Vegas. So if you are listening to this, please do come and say hello at the Foundation booth. I don't have the booth number, but I'm sure you'll find us. We've got Yeah. A pretty sizable one there. So please come and say hello. We will have passport primes and passport cores there for you to come play with. So please come and check it out in person and,
[01:00:29] Unknown:
yeah, love for you to see it. And I'll give you a guided tour. Lovely. Alright, mate. Well, we'll speak off, thanks for that. Good rundown, and catch you on the next one. See you, pal.
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Bitcoin. Now what's the Bitcoin?
[00:00:19] Unknown:
Bitcoin's like rat poison.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:00:22] Unknown:
Oh. The greatest scam in history.
[00:00:25] Unknown:
Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero. Welcome back to The Bitcoin Brief, the show where me and q and a catch up every two weeks to talk about Bitcoin, privacy, open source, keeping your Bitcoin secure, and the news and software updates that matter. I just wanted say a massive thank you to everyone who's been supporting Ungovernable Misfits and a big thank you to Foundation Devices for supporting the show. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.x,XYZ. They make cypherpunk tools for fuckwits, and anyone can use this, even me. If you have any questions or you want to reach out, feel free, and I'll be happy to go through things with you. For anything super technical, I'll pass you on to q. If you wanna buy one of these incredible passports, use the code ungovernable.
It will get you a discount, and it will let them know that I'm shilling. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to the k Wallet team. Not only are they supporting this show, but they're also bringing out some incredible features. For those of you who actually use Bitcoin and actually care about their privacy and security, Cake Wallet make it incredibly simple for you to live outside of the traditional financial system. You can use Cake Pay within the app to buy gift cards for food, petrol, and whatever else you might need day to day. You can use silent payments, and, of course, you can use Monero.
You can connect both Bitcoin and Monero nodes, use coin control, and this team are constantly innovating. And I'm really excited to be working with them. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, but check them out at cakewallet.com. Download the APK or start using this today on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, or of course, your Android device. Enjoy the show.
[00:02:43] Unknown:
Hello, mate. How are you doing? Hello. Yeah. Doing well. The sun is out. I've had a few little trips since we last recorded. So I've not actually been online or in work all that much, really. So, the list is reflective upon that today. They're out of the loop. But we've got two big topics I wanna do a deep dive into. Okay. Unfortunately, no bullshit. Bitcoin's been MIA since we last recorded as well. So as you know, they are a crutch for the show in terms of providing us with a very healthy list of software updates, etcetera. But they certainly are. There's two main topics that I wanted to talk about that we can get onto in a bit. Short of one today, hopefully, we'll have a good discussion about samurai and, all the op wine I mean I mean, return stuff.
[00:03:26] Unknown:
And it has been noted that you've been not at your desk and not on Twitter with so many messages. Where's q? Where's his insights? What's happening? Was he off gallivanting around the world? Was it worth it? It was worth it. Yeah. Two separate trips to to your for two very different purposes.
[00:03:42] Unknown:
Okay. Second one was a stag do or a a bachelor party for those over the other side of the Atlantic. Is that what they call it? Yeah. They call it a bachelor party. Ugh. They can't do anything right, can they? That's a horrible thing to call it. Weekend sounds much better, doesn't it? It does. Yeah. Way better. So that was good fun. Yeah. We went and terrorized a a small part of Portugal for a couple of days. Lovely. I bet they were pleased about that. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. You can tell they really, really loved, British tourists, especially in big groups of only males of our age.
Beer drinking males of your age. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, brilliant. And then I came back to The UK, and it's actually hotter here than it was in Portugal.
[00:04:26] Unknown:
Oh,
[00:04:26] Unknown:
what's the temperatures there? Oh, we're we're, like, 25, 20 six. Okay. That's pretty decent. Yeah. Don't know what that is in medium units for the Yanks. It doesn't matter. Sorry, guys. Probably, like, 90.
[00:04:39] Unknown:
Yeah. 25, 20 six is actually pretty much a perfect temperature. That's prime, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. You start going hotter and it's like 25, 20 six with a light breeze in The UK. Like, there's not a lot that The UK has got going for it, but that oh, there's a few days of the year where it's just perfect.
[00:05:00] Unknown:
Yeah. It's one of those days where it's difficult to walk past the beer garden.
[00:05:04] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice cold beer. You know, when you've got, like, the I kinda wanna say, like, frost on the outside, but it's not frost. Like, condensation on the outside. You, like, take it out into the sun. It's, like, fucking nice and cold, and you just see that. And you're just like, yes. I'm winning
[00:05:22] Unknown:
at life. Yeah. You can't beat a frozen glass, can you? It comes out the freezer. No. You can't.
[00:05:26] Unknown:
Oh, I actually like it with wine as well. I don't I think we've gone through this. I don't think you're a Absolutely not. Wine drinker, but a frosted glass with, like, a nice glass of wine just sat if you're in a sunny climate, just sat chilling with that is
[00:05:42] Unknown:
Delightful. Absolutely delightful. Yeah. That's the exact word I was thinking, delightful. It really is. Got more traveling coming up as well. Yeah. I'm away more in May than I am at home at at the moment, much to the wife's dismay. Got a trip to Vegas in two weeks. Well, less than two weeks now. Week on week on Sunday, I head out. Very nice.
[00:06:01] Unknown:
Very nice.
[00:06:02] Unknown:
Indeed. You're looking forward to Vegas? Yeah. I mean, the actual thought of going to Vegas, like, we're all gambling and partying and stuff like that. That era of my life is almost in the past, thankfully. Yeah. So that aspect, they'll be really not bothered about at all, but it'd be good to meet up with the the rest of the foundation team and see some other Bitcoin related friends that I have. And because I share a few beers with those guys, gonna be doing I think I spoke about this briefly last time, but now it's all confirmed in public. I can give a little bit more information, but gonna be doing, like, a fireside chat with the Bugle Boys and a few other people. Jacques Shapiro from Bitcoin Policy Institute and Rob Hamilton. And we're gonna be doing a chat about the dichotomy between NGU and Freedom Money. Very nice.
So looking forward to that. I'll make sure that's linked in the show notes. I have no idea whether there's any tickets left. You just have to click the link and find out. I can't find it at the moment, but, yeah, that should be fun. Looking forward to meeting up with those guys again.
[00:07:03] Unknown:
Uncoverable Misfits are gonna have some very special prizes to be given away on stage with you and with others. I don't know whether to reveal what they are, maybe not, but they're very special, and we've got a fair few bits going up. So if you are going to that event, keep an eye out. Look forward to it. I shall definitely be donning my, free samurai shirt for that one. Nice. Nice. I suppose you won't be wearing a hoodie. Be fucking baking there. No. I'd imagine it's probably gonna be pretty warm in Vegas. I would think so. Yeah. Very nice. I almost thought about going the other day because weirdly, where I am, which is, like, quite a random place, bumped into a person who happened to be really into Bitcoin, and they were like, oh, yeah. I'm going to, Vegas at the end of the month. Come with me. I've got a spare ticket. And I was like, I've got a lot going on. I can't really do it. He's like, oh, well, the ticket's there. If you do, like, if you want it and, like, I'll book you a flight, like, you can come. And I was like, maybe.
But, yeah, I can't, unfortunately.
[00:08:04] Unknown:
Difficult with family and stuff as well, isn't it?
[00:08:07] Unknown:
Yeah. Too much going on, but I was tempted especially to go and see the Bugle Boys.
[00:08:11] Unknown:
I'm sure that'll be a a lot of fun. Yeah. Last bit of AOB, we sent out a Passport Prime slash Passport core shipping update last week, I believe. So if you're a customer or subscriber, check your inbox if you haven't already seen it. TLDR just been plagued with issues mainly driven by, the whole tariff situation, which thankfully seems to have found a sensible conclusion now. Well, that's just been causing delays from, you know, parts that we've got to do the manufacturing process. We we saw some of them from China. And, obviously, anything shipping from China to The US at the moment has just been completely fucked in terms of, like, is this gonna cost us $5, or is it gonna cost us $50? Like, we have no idea. And then the knock on effect to all of that in the supply chain on both The US side and on the China side is just fitting us in the bottom a little bit. But, thankfully, we seem to be out of the woods now, and we're a couple of weeks away from beginning all of the manufacturing process. So
[00:09:06] Unknown:
there is light at the end of the tunnel. Excellent. Well, that's good news, mate. Yeah. It's stressful. When you don't know the outcome of something, you're just, like, waiting and unsure, and then you got people waiting on you. That's not a great feeling. Yeah. Especially when you can't just fix it at the click of a button.
[00:09:21] Unknown:
Yeah. Nothing you can really do. Yeah. Well, like I say, light at the end of the tunnel, we appreciate everybody's patience. So I'll we'll work through and look for alternative solutions to get things stateside over to our, factory in New Hampshire to start putting these things together ASAP, but we're getting there. Good. So a bit of a of a backwards show today given the short list. What I was hoping to do was just run through the boosts, make a very, very quick mention, which I'll do now. Phoenix Android 2.6 has been released with some cool contact list related updates, and Robosat 7.7 alpha has also been released, and that has an updated view on the coordinators as well. That's literally it. That's all I could find. I feel like I've had the rug pull from me without the no bullshit Bitcoin guys, but those are the two notable releases I could find since we last recorded. And then should we hit the boost, and then we'll do a deep dive on all of the summary updates and then all of the upwind stuff that's been going on. Sounds good. I'll jump on the first one. Bon with 42,069
[00:10:20] Unknown:
sats. Guys, I haven't sent a boost in a long ass time even though I've been listening to every episode. Appreciate the hustle and dedication to the show, sending extra sats for past episodes. Cloud emoji lightning lightning.
[00:10:36] Unknown:
Thank you, Bon. Good to hear from you as well. Hope you're doing well, mate. Yeah. Absolutely. So after he sent that, Bon sent me a a DM on and said that he could see his boost, the one he just read, went through, but my portion of it failed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you run your own node. Yeah. Just that's basically what I said. I was like, you gotta love self hosted lightning. Just shrug shoulders emoji. And then he zapped that note with the equivalent. So if Bon if you've kind of lost those initial 8,000 and then sent them again separately to me on Noster, firstly, thank you. Secondly, you didn't need to do that and because I don't know what happened to those sats that fail on my side of the split. I think we've talked about this before. Is that our Oscar Pacerist mansion?
[00:11:20] Unknown:
Yeah. I think they go back to him. I think that's how it happens is they go back to him. Like, they don't technically go. Right. But I'm not sure. I don't think that it takes that whole amount and then just takes your portion and then splits it across the other parts, like the other splits, I don't think. Jordan will probably be able to answer that or Oscar if he's listening. Jordan, let us know what's on. Maybe you could check that initial boost of 42,069 sats and just see how much actually left your wallet. That gives us a clue, wouldn't it? Yeah. This is the self hosting issue, which we talk about all the time. Because I have Ginevra and wartime from my last moan that I had with Barn Miner where we were like, oh, fucking lightning, mate. It's such a pain in the ass, and we're having a whinge. And they were both like, oh, fuck you.
I had, like, a right whinge about it. Like, not explaining the trade offs and just saying it's shit. And it's like, it's great when it works. But what I find is it only works if you're not running your own stuff. If you wanna run wallet of Satoshi or Albi or whatever, one of these custodial things, they're really good. They work like all this stuff with fountain works like most of the time for me is fucking excellent. But
[00:12:32] Unknown:
if you use it how I would like to use it, I often find that sort of half of my stuff fails. Yeah. Generally speaking, all of my sends are are completely they go through, I'd say, 99% of the time, but it always seems to be, like, the receiving side more specifically with splits and things like that where it seems to fall over. So who knows? I don't know. I don't know either. Anyway, John with 21,420 sats. Nice. I'll gladly take whatever cuddles you boys have to offer. Stressed but working hard and making great progress. Can't wait to tell everyone what I've been working on. You two are always welcome to come and visit. We can go shooting anytime. Ammo and stakes are on me. Oh, that sounds amazing. I wonder what he's been working on. I know what he's been working on. As do I. I'm just trying to create some suspense.
[00:13:20] Unknown:
It's not OnlyFans for anyone who's wondering. We get a lot of sick, twisted people who really like his voice. Yeah. I'm one of those people. All the ladies come out of the woodwork. Oh my god. John, he's so hot. You heard his voice? Oh. So no, ladies. I'm afraid it's not that. Bitcoin Derby with 0.033 XMR. BTC Derby return in June. We are going to discuss projects such as Dojo Bay, Samurai case developments, running nodes, and the retardation of filter oars. More on that later. Saturday, June, '3 PM, ye old dolphin, d e one three d l.
Anyone is welcome. Hashtag free samurai.
[00:14:07] Unknown:
Bitcoin derby do it right. I like these guys. I was just about to say, I've no idea who's behind that handle, but they always seem to have some really based topics for their meetups. So Yeah. If you're in the Derby area, make sure you head on down.
[00:14:22] Unknown:
It's funny. Like, some meetups you'd go to and, like, as a new person to Bitcoin, Bitcoin, you might go there. Oh, you know what? This thing sounds alright. I'll go in. And depending on what location you are in The UK, your experience is gonna be so fucking different. Oh, yeah. You're either gonna, like, come out like a proper cypherpunk type person or you're gonna be, like, a full on n g u. You've got your sailor poster on your wall. Like, all of that stuff. It really varies depending on where you are. It's worth traveling probably. Yeah. Definitely. Late stage HODL with 5,000 SATs.
[00:14:59] Unknown:
Y'all talking about Panama City, Florida. I guess that's when we were talking about favorable tax jurisdictions during the last show. Yeah. My guess is I don't think Florida is. No. No. Neither. Such an American thing to assume it was about them. Yeah. I know. I know.
[00:15:16] Unknown:
It's because they'd never left the country. So you know, I've I've got no idea if late stage Hopley is American. I'm just presuming given the comment. I mean, most people are. Most people we interact with are Americans, aren't they? True. Unfortunately. A few Canadians in there, but and then, like, a spring fling of Aussies.
[00:15:32] Unknown:
Didn't, Canada just elect some another retard as their president? Well, I'd imagine. Doesn't every country elect another retard? I mean, some are bigger retails than others. Exactly. Haven't they now, elected the Mark Mark Kenny, is it? The ex Bank of England guy? Oh, not him. Yeah. I think I'm pretty sure he's in power now. Oh my lord. They showed a bit of promise, didn't they, with that Poliveri
[00:15:57] Unknown:
guy, but, obviously, he never got in. That clip of him just, like, eating an apple while he was just, like, deconstructing someone's argument.
[00:16:04] Unknown:
That's it. Yeah. He knew how to say the right things, didn't he?
[00:16:08] Unknown:
Oh, well. But, I mean, you know, he would have got in, and he probably would have done something completely against what he'd originally said anyway. So Yeah. I don't know that it matters. True. W with 2,100 sats. I should have boosted a lot more than a hundred sats for the amount of effort it took you to read my last comment. I got a good chuckle out of it and appreciate you taking the time. So is Froster a derivative of frost? No. I still haven't read up on it. Yeah. It is, isn't it? Didn't we say that in the last episode? Yeah. It's a sign in protocol that uses the Frost framework, essentially, but Frosta
[00:16:44] Unknown:
is geared towards nostr Yeah. Hence the the stupid name. The stir. But it is built on top of frost scheme, I think is probably the best terminology for it. Okay. Fixed round something signing something something. It's an anagram not an anagram. It's an acronym. So, yes, Froster uses the Frost protocol. They're not strictly the same thing, though. Okay. Good to know. Vegan Bitcoin. I don't know whether that's true or whether it's a troll. Because they boosted in XMR. They sent 0.006 for XMR. And I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say there's probably not many vegan Monero fans. I don't know. There's a lot of vegans
[00:17:22] Unknown:
around the world, isn't there? I think you could have one slip through.
[00:17:26] Unknown:
Possibly. We'll see. We'll find out. They can let us know. Also, they're called vegan Bitcoin, but they boosted in XMR. Interesting. Mhmm. Trying to throw up the scent there. So this is addressed to you, Max. Number one, Android keyboard. Get yourself an APK of Microsoft SwiftKey. Download a language. Block the Internet on Graphene. Done. Okay. So I've never tried Microsoft SwiftKey, but I essentially do the same thing but with Google's Gboard, download it, and then cut it off from the Internet so it can't send all of your questionable search history back to Google. Number two, install Futo speech to text. That's f u t o. It's open source, local, and needs no Internet. Oh, nice. Okay. If you've not tried that one, that sounds useful. That would be very useful for me. And number three, all bot has problems.
Don't we know it? Use InvisiblePro instead. Again Okay. New one on me. I've not heard of InvisiblePro,
[00:18:24] Unknown:
but thank you for the recommendation, vegan bitcoin. Yeah. Thank you, vegan bit. I think vegan bitcoin is a new booster, XMR chat booster. Yeah. I've not seen that name floating around before. Well, thank you for the advice. I appreciate that. I will probably, if I'm honest, mean to do this, get distracted, and forget about it, and not do it. But then at some point, I'll reach out to queue, and he might remember that there's the Google option and the Microsoft option for the the Swift Key thing. So at some point, your advice will be useful most probably. I've just looked up the, Invisible Pro now. It's
[00:19:00] Unknown:
got 4.2 stars on the Google Play Store out of 6,000 reviews and, allegedly, over a million downloads. Okay. So seems like it's not exactly a new app, so might be worth a try. Thanks for the recommendation. Okay.
[00:19:14] Unknown:
Thank you, mate. FOMO Chronic boosted 1,001 sats. Turkey boosted 500. Blau, Elise, boosted 210 sats. Income tax in Panama only for work in Panama itself. 0 to 11,000, 15 percent. 50 k plus is 25%. Making money outside is tax free here.
[00:19:41] Unknown:
Jesus. Be right back. Just going to book a flight to Panama. There's a lot of countries like that. Question for you, Blau, Elise. Thank you for that information. The fact that you said making money outside is tax free here tells me that you live there. Give us a clue us up on the entry requirements. You know? Who's Palmer to Greece to, to become a citizen?
[00:20:04] Unknown:
I think it's quite expensive now. Imagine it would be. Yeah. I think. But, yeah, you can let us know on that. There's a lot of countries like that where you can be there. And as long as you're not earning or running a business in the country, you don't get taxed. Nice. That's that whole kind of like flag theory thing, isn't it? It's like you reside here, but your business is over there. You have some other corporate structure over there. Each bit fits into a puzzle piece, which basically makes it that you don't pay any tax and that no one really has control over what you do kind of thing. I see. And then even if the country that you reside in doesn't like what you're doing, but you're living in your property, then it's not owned by you. It's owned by a business, which then can't be touched by that country, so they couldn't even take the property, blah blah blah. It's all that stuff. There's there's a few books on it, I think. Who was the guy that I spoke to? It was, Roger Ver? No. It was a he didn't do it so well, did he? It it was a few years ago I spoke to somebody at the what's the one they do at Parallel Hippolis?
[00:21:12] Unknown:
Hackers Congress.
[00:21:13] Unknown:
Hackers Congress. I interviewed someone, did, like, a live interview years ago there. The name escapes me. They'd written a book on it, and, yeah, definitely something to consider. Nice. Yeah. Well, when it comes back into your brain, let me know the guy's name, and I'll look it up. Yeah. It will come to me. And finally,
[00:21:30] Unknown:
thanks to Pled to Polymath, We All Eat, and Cas Peland for streaming 923 sats, 922 sats, and 836 sats, respectively. Thank you very much, guys.
[00:21:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Ristepa.
[00:21:45] Unknown:
Thank you very much. I wouldn't Appreciate it. I wonder how many people will get that reference.
[00:21:52] Unknown:
Not many.
[00:21:53] Unknown:
If you get the Ristepa reference that Max has just said there Dropped. Yeah. Just drop me the name of the thing where it references, and I'll send you a hundred sats. Oh. Drop me a DM. Okay. Limited 10 people only. The first ten
[00:22:13] Unknown:
people. I don't wanna get milked. Yeah. Because you know I would have just done a tweet now. Right, everyone. Just to let you know. Let's train him. Yeah. That was a little throwback. I I appreciate that. Yeah.
[00:22:24] Unknown:
Right. Let's go and do a deep dive on the samurai stuff and the the op return stuff, shall we? Let's do it. Before I do dive into the samurai stuff first and you can leave this in the show, by the way. I was thinking then. Jordan's gonna have an easy time with the the chapters on this one because there'll there'll only be, like, two. Mhmm.
[00:22:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Could be very happy. You're welcome.
[00:22:46] Unknown:
Yeah. So samurai situation. Given that we had a quite a list, what I thought would be a good idea because there is some new news here, which I'm gonna get on to. But I thought it'd be good to have a quick recap on the overall situation, start to finish. Obviously, I'm not gonna go into everything, but I'm gonna go through all of the the signpost stuff and then rebuild the story leading us into the the stuff that's happened in the last couple of weeks since we last recorded, if that sounds good with you. Yeah. Sounds great. So back in 2024, the Samwell developers were charged by the US government with or indicted, should I say, not charged, with two crimes.
Conspiracy to commit money laundering, basically alleging that the samurai wallet facilitated, quote, over a hundred million dollars in laundered proceeds from illegal dark web markets, e g Silk Road, hydro market, blah blah blah. This charge carries a maximum sentence of, I believe, twenty years in prison. And then the other indictment was for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. And the prosecutors here claimed that samurai operated as a money service business without registering with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN. Remember that because that's an important piece of the latest developments. Mhmm. So just to recap that final one, they are accused of operating as a money service business without registering with FinCEN.
This violates US regulations and carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. This hasn't gone to court officially yet. There's been multiple hearings over the course of the last twelve months. I think we've had four. Basically, they've been smaller hearings. There's been a lot of evidence discovery going on where any court of law, I believe, doesn't matter whether you're you're in The US or not, but you've gotta share the evidence that you've got with the other side so that they can build their defense and the the prosecution can build their prosecution case, essentially. We've had hearings in May. We've had one in September.
We've had a third one. I can't remember when that one was. And then the most recent one was in March. That was held in the Southern District Of New York, and this was kind of one of the shorter ones, I believe. What they did there was just agree on the the pretrial motion schedule where the prosecution was set to provide all of their expert disclosure by July, and the defense was to do the same by August as well. There was a couple of other bits around where the individuals in question were residing or were able to reside during all of his pretrial motions. And one of the guys thankfully got to stay where he was living in Portugal as well just for a bit of extra comfort while they go through the stressful situation that I'm I'm going through right now. Moving on to April, we had what's now been known as the Blanche memo.
Deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, on April, issued a memo which was well received by everybody in the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem, basically. And the memo was titled ending regulation by prosecution. And the idea here was directing the DOJ, the US Department of Justice, to cease pursuing cases against crypto mixes for unintentional regulatory violations and to focus on clear criminal activities like fraud or embezzlement. The memo also disbanded the DOJ's digital asset enforcement team. So, basically, this is kind of the new guard under Trump coming in and looking at some of the stuff that was going on under Biden, this whole regulation by prosecution that seem to have been trying to set a precedent for the last four years at least with cases like samurai, cases like tornado cash, Bitcoin fog, etcetera, etcetera. This kind of new memo basically said, look. We don't agree with this. We're gonna stop it, and we suggest that you start focusing on real criminal activities.
Understandably well received, and everybody was feeling pretty positive about, you know, the impact that this was gonna have on all of the cases that I've just mentioned. But, of course, the one closest to our heart is the samurai one. On April, the defense requested a dismissal of the case based on everything I've just said in that Blanche memo. And on the April 24, both sides met to discuss this request. On the twenty eighth, they jointly asked the judge, I think his name is judge Berman, for a sixteen day continuance or extension of pre trial motion deadlines just to take all of this sort of stuff into consideration. But this continuance doesn't affect when the official start date was due to commence, which, as I read this, I believe is still on November year. So we're still months away from the trial even beginning. On the May, the prosecutors indicated that they would not be dropping the charges per the, defense's request. And they argued that the Blanche memo does not create a legal right or benefit for the defendants and should not influence the court's decision.
Obviously, not the outcome we were hoping for. In and around that same timeline, I believe it was early May, just a couple of weeks ago, the samurai wallet legal team has filed a letter with the Southern District Of New York accusing prosecutors of withholding critical exculpatory evidence. Basically, what happened was in 02/2023, before the guys were even indicted, six months before the charges were filed, FinCEN, those are the guys that I mentioned at the very top of all this explanation, informed the Southern District Of New York Prosecutors that the samurai wallet's noncustodial design did not qualify as a money service business, which is one of the exact things that the DOJ is trying to charge them for. So to recap, FinCEN informed the prosecutors, no. They do not fit the bill to be a money service business because they don't take custody.
What we've all been saying all along. Yeah. This means that they did not require a money transmitter license. Here's the crucial part. This information about this conversation between the prosecutor and between Vincent was not disclosed to the defense until April 2025, nearly a year after the deadline was mandated. Oh, you can't. Okay. Sorry. I got confused. So basically, this is you you there might be some people on Twitter hearing about, like, references to Brady here. Basically, what I've just described where the prosecution withholds something that could be positive for the defendant, some information. That's known as a Brady violation, and Brady just refers to where this happened that, you know, a court case where this happened to set legal precedent in the first place.
So to recap, the prosecution had knowledge and guidance from FinCEN, which they blatantly ignored and decided to charge the samurai wallet developers with being, you know, operating a money service business despite FinCEN telling them, no. They don't qualify because of our guidance. Once again Yeah. That's what we've been saying all along. Yes. The defense then argued that the fact that they withheld evidence could have influenced various things like bail decisions. One of the guys who's resided in The US, he's been under house arrest for almost a year. I think he's not on it anymore, but even locked up in his own house for under a year. That could have influenced the bail decisions and that the court's refusal to allow any motion to dismiss. So they requested a hearing to examine all of this going on in front of a judge and explore what remedies including, of course, case dismissal, citing a blatant violation of due legal process.
So at this point, myself and everybody is not doing victory laps because, you know, you're fighting the US government at the end of the day, but everybody's feeling increasingly more and more confident, myself included. Yeah. On May, the prosecutors responded denying basically just saying what we did is not a Brady violation. They argued that the FinCEN conversation involved, quote, informal caveated opinions, end quote, from individual employees, not a formal agency ruling. Yeah. Yeah. And thus does not constitute a Brady material, which is completely bollocks because there is guidance with FinCEN that, again, we followed all along that says, if you don't take custody, you don't qualify as an MSB.
[00:31:02] Unknown:
Whether or not they've had individual employees from FinCEN tell them the exact guidance that FinCEN have set out in an official form or not. Yeah. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Well, it doesn't make any sense is is the thing. It's just they're trying to clamber at something Right. Where it would be like, oh, yeah. Well, it doesn't really doesn't matter because of this. Like Yeah. Obviously
[00:31:24] Unknown:
obviously, like we said from the start. The prosecution also claimed that the disclosure made seven months before trial was timely enough for the defense to use it effectively despite let's not mention it at the four pretrial hearings we have or included in any of our evidence. Prosecutors emphasized that the money laundering charge, the more serious of the two, was unaffected by the FINCENT guidance. Mhmm. On Monday the twelfth, the defense submitted a letter to the Southern District of New York in which it made the case for the court to schedule a hearing regarding the information that came to light on April 1. The defense's motion to dismiss under the Blanche memo remains outstanding.
And finally, the defense's request for hearing on the alleged Brady violation is pending with the next hearing, which was already scheduled before all of this additional drama, for July year. So in my opinion, we're in a much more positive situation than we've ever been because through my eyes, they've been caught with their pants down, and they're just trying to play it down. My hope is that the judge sees through this and completely throws out one of the charges, which is probably the the more likely option, or just completely dismisses the whole case because the prosecutor has gone outside of due legal process. But once again, we will see.
[00:32:40] Unknown:
You're now fully up to date. It's crazy, isn't it? That's why with all this stuff, I've been following it, but I've not tried to hold on to too much hope at any point when there's these changes. Cause it's like the end of the day, they can sound as retarded as they do and obvious that they're wrong, but they can still win. And it it's so frustrating watching that happen. It's such a massive injustice, and they're supposed to be the justice system. It's so fucking topsy-turvy. But it's good. At least it looks more positive.
[00:33:10] Unknown:
Yeah. It's two to three weeks ago, We had no kind of sturdy ground for dismissal.
[00:33:16] Unknown:
Now we have two separate ones. One for the Blanche memo and one for the Brady violation. Well, let's hope. Let's continue to keep our fingers crossed. And one thing I would just say is anyone listening to this, don't let this stop you from helping support Free Samurai and sending funds in because with all of this legal stuff, they play games, they try and drag things out, and they try and either destroy people emotionally or financially. This stuff is extremely expensive. Any sats that you can donate to try and help these guys, would be appreciated. So just don't, like, take the potential win as a as a sign to back off or take your foot off the gas. You you really need to continue.
[00:33:57] Unknown:
Absolutely cosign that. Head to p2prights.org. Donate what you can. Purchase some samurai swag from, ungovernablemisfits.com.
[00:34:05] Unknown:
Are they is that back in stock now, by the way? Still not. Yeah. Still not. We are really close. They're getting printed very soon. By the time I got the screens over to our new printer, they were then swamped with a load of other work. So with the screens are there, they've got the designs, they know the colors, and they have the garments now. Everything is there ready. I'm I'm just waiting for them to be printed. So I have a feeling it will be sort of end of the month, something like that. We're really, really close. Obviously, every boost that you send into this show, a percentage goes to free samurai. So, you know, you can support it that way. You can support it directly. When the clothing comes on, you can do that. Just just anything that you can do because this is definitely the biggest, most important thing happening in Bitcoin by far much more than our next topic.
[00:34:52] Unknown:
Yeah. Even in a utopian world where the next time we record, the charges have been dropped and the guys are free, if you've donated any money to that fund, number one, I'm sure they've still got a lot of legal costs to pay for. But number two, even if they haven't I'm sure. All of that fund is gonna be rolled over and and used as a slush fund to help protect the inevitable case where the next lot of open source developers are thrown into purgatory over something stupid again. So that money is never gonna go to waste even if 100% of it is not used for the samurai case. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So lots of Twitter drama, lots of GitHub drama, lots of Bitcoin mailing list drama has all been going on since I've been pretty much offline for the whole of the last two weeks. Mhmm. Got home on Monday, got myself back into the Twittersphere, catching up with all of the, you know, the popular posts and stuff. And, oh, wow. There is some hot takes floating around.
So Yeah. Have you been keeping abreast of this, or do you like me to give you the the in-depth
[00:35:49] Unknown:
or as I see it? Yeah. I definitely wanna hear how you see it. Me and John sort of loosely covered on the last episode that we released. We're, like, loosely following it. Our views haven't changed since the last time this sort of stuff was brought up. Actually, I think before samurai case started because I remember doing a live stream with those guys and talking through the opera and stuff. And, basically, it was retarded then, and I still feel it's retarded now. And I'm not bothered to argue with people. As I said, like, there's much more important stuff to focus on. It would be nice for it all to just to quieten down, and we can get focused on things that matter again.
[00:36:26] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm gonna get into it in a second. Don't worry, listeners. And Max and I I'm gonna go on. Let me just say we we almost certainly share the same view on what the outcome should be here, albeit that all of the drama around this is just complete nonsense.
[00:36:41] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:36:42] Unknown:
However, I'm gonna when I do my explainers, I'm gonna try and remain on the fence in terms of how I explain things. Impartial. Yes. Yeah. And I'm gonna try and steel man the other side. And by the other side, I mean, you know, the side I I agree with much less. Because I think that b g t q Yeah. K r Yeah. No r k? Because I do kind of sympathize with some of the why of their argument. It's Mhmm. The how is where it all falls down. Anyway Okay. Let's get into it. So been a lot of drama around op return and the sort of policies around that in recent weeks. Op return, for those that don't know, is basically a kind of output type that allows users to embed provably unspendable data like hashes or time stamps into a transaction in such a way that doesn't bloat the UTXO set. I'm pretty sure since 2014 when this was introduced, this has always had an 80 byte limit.
And this is kind of an arbitrary limit. The idea to prevent kind of abuse and prioritize what most people would consider, quote, unquote, financial transactions. Mhmm. There's been some historical drama between Samurai and and Lucas Junior before now, isn't there, where Knots lowered the limit and that was gonna cause issues for Samura users. Below. Yeah. Because Samura users were, you know, one of the many different types of Bitcoin users that actually used op returns as part of the kind of fee structure within Whirlpool, which obviously is not active at the moment. Some other uses for op return at the moment, like, say, people do time stamping. I know Peter Todd has got the open time stamps thing, which is a service that aims to, I believe, prove the existence of a document at a certain block height, essentially. So it's like an immutable this exists.
Mhmm. I think it's a paid service. And then more recently, there's been some, scaling solutions, things like roll ups and stuff like that that want to embed hashes into a Bitcoin transaction as, like, an anchor point for some second layer scaling solution. So that's the kind of what an op return is. Oh, and it's also worth me spelling out here that that 80 byte limit is node mempool policy. So there can be and there is Bitcoin transactions with up returns in them in the history of Bitcoin that are much larger than the 80 byte limit. Mhmm. The 80 byte, quote, unquote, limit is the default relay policy of all Bitcoin Core nodes.
So what that means is that if my node receives a transaction with an upturn data size of more than 80 bytes and I just run all of the defaults, my node will say, nah. Go away. Not interested. That's, in my eyes, is a nonstandard transaction. It won't relay it. It won't relay it. But Yeah. That is not what transaction or a valid transaction or a consensus compatible transaction is. There is nothing to say that there can't be a larger than 80 byte op return in a valid Bitcoin transaction. So if you're a motivated actor for whatever reason, be it JPEGs, be it layer two scaling, whatever it is, and you want to build a transaction with a a 90 byte op return, you can, but you're gonna have to get that direct to a minor.
Now in years gone by, that's a nontrivial thing to do because you'd have to have a direct relationship with them. You'd have to know a guy essentially and say, look. Hey. Mhmm. You know, here's a hundred dollars on a credit card transaction. If you include this for me, you know, you can keep that hundred dollars, and I get my transaction mined. The limit is fairly easy to circumvent. And and I say it's easy these days because we have services like Marathon Slipstream, which is essentially what I said. But rather than knowing a guy, you just go to a website and pay a bill. So if you wanna get around this men poor policy, you can. You just speak to a minor. They've you know, some of them have got services popping up. You just go on and say, hey. You know, mine this for me. Obviously, they'll check it. And if it's consensus valid and it pays a fee, they'll do it because miners, you know, as I'm sure you and John have whacked lyrical about many times, are, economically incentivized actors. They're there to make money. Especially these days.
Exactly. So enter the the beginning of the latest round of controversy. There was a pull request to Bitcoin Core. I believe it was created by Peter Todd, the the guy behind open timestamps. And his pull request is quite, I believe, quite a simple one in in all honesty. And he proposes to remove the 80 byte relay limit for the standard Bitcoin Core node. Mhmm. That's it. It just wants to remove the limit. Now you might be thinking, okay. Well, that sounds pretty trivial. But also, if you can circumvent it, like, why even remove it in the first place? Why not just leave it as is? So here's the arguments as to why people like Peter Todd, myself, Max, and most people in this camp are like, either a, the 85 liters is fine, and we don't really care about the fact that people can circumnavigate.
Or let's just pull it out anyway for reasons that I'm about to go into. So the first one, harm reduction. A lot of the the proponents of this argue that the 80 byte kind of relay limit encourages what they're calling harmful workarounds. So that is basically, if you don't have a way to get your non stranded transaction direct to a miner, people will take other solutions to achieve their goal. Don't forget. The goal here is to embed non, quote, unquote, financial transaction data into a Bitcoin transaction so that you can kind of embed it into the blockchain for for whatever reason, for the, you know, purposes that I outlined earlier. Now some of these workarounds are essentially worse for the overall network than just chucking it into an op return. Most of them do it by stuffing this extra data into the actual output part of the transaction or the signature part of the transaction, which creates UTXO bloat, which means it grows the UTXO set, which affects every single node on the network. The bigger the UTXO set, the more beef you need in your computer to be able to kind of keep that in memory and be able to be a performant node.
[00:43:17] Unknown:
Which is one of the big problems that we were talking about many years ago, which is, like, you don't want to have less nodes on the network because it's harder to run a node. You want to have more. You want it to be easier. Right. Exactly. That's a very important thing for decentralization.
[00:43:32] Unknown:
Exactly. So, yeah, basically, by having this limit and making it difficult to get that relayed around the network, they go for these other types of transactions and stuff the data elsewhere where it can't be pruned and it has to be managed by nodes, which makes it more difficult in the long run to run a node. The next one is kind of network efficiency. So let's say we try to stop people from using Opera Turns and we make it even more difficult for them to relay them. We essentially incentivize them to go direct to minus. And you might think, okay. Great. Well, if Mara's got a tool for you to do that really easily and and you wanna do that for whatever reason, go ahead. Just go and do it. Which on the surface of it sounds great and it sounds sensible. But if that type of behavior becomes quite widespread, what that means is that we have a load of transactions waiting to be mined.
Miners know about them, but everyday users that just run Bitcoin Core or on their umbrella or whatever or Start Nine, because those transactions are being sent direct to miners out of band I know what you're gonna say. We have no sight of them. So we can't use them in our fee estimation Fee estimation. Which at 1 sat per byte is fine. If we are 200 blocks deep in the mempool and the next block fee rate is 250 sats per byte, then you can bet your bottom dollar. I wanna know about every single person that's potentially in the queue in front of me because I need my transaction mined now. If I don't know about everything, I can't make an educated decision with that. Mhmm. So that's a big one for me. And part of the reason that I'm kind of in this camp that I'm running through now in terms of, like, why we would rather them use Upreturn than do all of this other stuff, like go direct to miners,
[00:45:15] Unknown:
stuff all the data into ETXOs, etcetera. I just wanna throw something in there. It's one of the most beautiful thing about Bitcoin for me is that everything is so clear. You know how things work. And as long as you can wrap your head around the nuts and bolts of it, you can use this thing, and it just fucking works, which is totally different to every other thing pretty much in the world, like, certainly around finance or sending money or doing anything like that. It's the complete opposite. And if you then start taking the system, which is so well engineered and you can say, okay. I really need to make this transaction. I need it to be in the next ten minutes or needed to be in the next hour, and you can be very close to the perfect amount of fees that you'd need to pay without being under or over as a general rule to then start fucking with that or allowing other people to fuck with that to make it less useful. This whole thing about, like, oh, yeah. This is supposed to be used for money. Like, don't fuck up the money. It's like, actually, that is fucking up the money because if you can't use your money, then it's not good money. Something else just popped into my head while we're talking about, like, the whole mining aspect of this, and we wanna disincentivize
[00:46:27] Unknown:
people to go direct to miners. Not hide their transactions, but don't put it through the membles where everybody else can see it, is that once again, if this becomes commonplace and there's loads of additional transactions that are paying, you know, they will attract a higher fee to go direct to a miner. In my head, correct me if I'm wrong here, this I'm just speaking out loud, but that's gonna further exacerbate the mining centralization problem. Yeah. Because Yeah. Those miners that are doing these out of band transactions are gonna be attracted a lot more in fees. And it feels like there would be a further centralization of power there, and the home miners and the the small guys with just a couple of machines that aren't taking part in this are just gonna be hurt because of it. Yeah. So it obviously hurts fee estimation.
[00:47:12] Unknown:
It does as far as I can understand it. John can correct me if I'm wrong, but it will affect the smaller miners or just most miners, not even necessarily small because it's only gonna be the big guys that can be doing this. They've already got economies of scale. They're gonna be getting better energy contracts, better cost of machines. They're gonna be getting loans very, very cheaply. The squeeze on small to midsize miners is already I feel it because we've got our pleb minor group. Like, people are hurting. People are struggling. Mhmm. They're doing everything they can, being as canny as they can, but it's fucking hard out there at the moment.
I think I'm pretty sure this would make it worse.
[00:47:50] Unknown:
Yeah. And then the last one that I didn't really have a full understanding of until read a couple of posts on it is about if we have a lot of the network trying to not relaying these transactions, but as we've established that these kind of quote unquote nonstandard transactions are gonna get mined anyway. We can't stop that because they meet consensus and they're going straight to a miner. When, you know, let's say Mara mines a block and it's got, you know, a couple of thousand of these transactions that most of the nodes don't know about because they've got the filter policy on and they don't wanna know about these transactions. Those nodes still have to store those transactions because they're in a valid block. They then have to download all that information and verify it because they didn't have it in their mempool anyway because they were like, no. That transaction doesn't meet my policy limit. So this does have an impact on block relay latency, I think they're calling it, where it's a case of because you didn't know about this in the first place, but it's a valid transaction in a now mined valid block. You're being forced to learn about it anyway and validate it and etcetera etcetera.
Now in my head, it feels like that would only affect the people choosing to run the filters. But I guess it feels like it could also be an additional strain on the network Mhmm. You know, of having to propagate all of that additional information, especially if, let's say, knots that wants to run increase these filters becomes a larger part of the network. That was kind of a new one to me and an interesting kind of data point. To summarize the the argument in favor of removing this op return 80 byte limit is basically just all of the miners already ignore the limit because they're rational economic actors. So core's, like, mempoor policy, the default policy should just reflect reality, basically, of why would we make up our own nodes and not be able to see all of the transactions that are out there given that we know they're either gonna work around the filter or they're just gonna go direct to a mine anyway. Like, we are not stopping these transactions.
So that's the summary of the reason for the pizza talk pull request of removing the 80 byte limit. So here is the argument for those against AK, also known as the filter raws. So the reasons that they basically, they don't want this pull request merged, and some of them are even going further to say we should reduce the 80 byte limit to further kind of disincentivize these types of transactions, albeit though we've established that you probably can't disincentivize them. Anyway, so the first one is quite a funny one. Blockchain bloat. Critics including Luke Dash junior, the Bitcoin knot's maintainer. Who else have we got? Samsung Mile, the Jam three guy. They warn that removing the 80 byte limit could lead to an influx of nonfinancial data, e g NFTs, blah blah blah, increasing the blockchain size and node operating costs, potentially harming decentralization.
So what they're saying here is that if we remove this limit, we're giving them, like, the thumbs up and the the green light to go and be even more degenerate. I don't subscribe to that because the mempool's been empty for weeks. There's been no disincentivization for people's transact. Like, if they wanted to do all this sort of stuff, the fact that there was an 80 byte limit on the the op return has not stopped them thus far. They've been stuffing that data here, there, and everywhere. Taproot, multisigs. They're not bothered. They're happy to pay fees and stuff. So in my opinion, removing the limit would not incentivize them to make more of these JPEGs or whatever. But that's point number one. Point number two, and this seems to be the strongest point from this or the most kind of repeated point is the philosophical one. These guys basically argue that Bitcoin should remain a financial protocol, not a general purpose database.
They view the change of diluting Bitcoin's core value. Basically, they don't like non financial transactions, and they want to do anything they can to stop them. This is where I at the top of all this, when I said I kind of sympathize with their Outlook, all these JPEGs and stuff like that are completely irrelevant to me. I think they're Yeah. They're retarded. I think they're stupid, and I think they have zero value. But I'm yet to hear a tangible way that we can actually stop this. Because all of the solutions, like decreasing the the limit or don't relay the the transactions and just stick your fingers in your ears, none of it's gonna work. So this is the one, like, I understand where they're coming from. Like, Bitcoin to me is money. It's a savings vehicle. It's a transactional vehicle that I can use free from third parties. I want to protect that as much as I can, but I'm yet to see a way that we can truly protect that from the, quote, unquote, threat that these NFTs or or scaly solutions provide by using this arbitrary data storage.
[00:52:30] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I agree. I'm not collecting or sending or storing or doing anything with NFTs. I've got no fucking interest. Never have. I can't imagine I ever will do, but as you say, it just seems to be an argument of, like, we don't like a thing that is possible. So we're gonna suggest a thing that we think might make it less possible, but actually definitely doesn't because there are still ways around it, and it's not gonna stop anyone from doing it. And so it just seems a bit of, like, a pointless fucking row to me. It's like energy could be spent much better elsewhere. If you can't stop it, unless you can come up with a solution that actually stops it and doesn't then potentially cause different issues that you weren't thinking about that could actually be worse than the fact that someone's paying fees to minors for a transaction that you happen to not like, but you can still make your transactions. It's not like we suddenly have ridiculous fees at the moment. The mempools are dead. So I know what you mean. I don't disagree.
I only think this thing is useful as money, really. But if other people are paying the fees and using it as it was designed to do something that you don't like, well, that's a design problem.
[00:53:45] Unknown:
Yeah. And so some of the the hot take I was referring to on Twitter when I came back was a lot of people are virtue signaling. I'm now running Bitcoin knots because it protects the network blah blah blah. And you're just like, yeah. Great. Well done. So now you don't relay larger upturn transactions, and you've got a kneecap for mempool. Like, you've gained nothing. Yeah. No. You have gained something. You've got your Vertu tokens, and you're part of the LGBTQRK
[00:54:13] Unknown:
society
[00:54:14] Unknown:
group. Yeah. And that that means something. That's worth something. Yes. That's basically the top and bottom of it at the moment. The initial poll request by Peter Todd has been closed, but there is now a a similar one that was I think it's by Greg Sanders. I think he goes by Insta Gibbs. Again, I believe this hasn't been merged yet, but his proposal is that it will remove the 80 byte cap as Peter Todd wanted to do and eliminate limits on the number of return outputs per transaction. So, basically, I think what they're gonna do is mark it as deprecated in the next release and then remove it completely as a nonconfigurable option in the one that follows. Okay.
We shall see whether that gets merged. But, again, I there's people have been talking about, like, this could be the end for Bitcoin and blah blah blah. And I'm just like, guys, we have so much bigger fish to fry. Yeah. Yeah. You've got two entities controlling, like, probably well over 50% of the block template construction at the moment. Like, I'd be way more concerned about stuff like that or scalability than some fucking d gens putting some NFTs or data that represents NFTs into an opportune.
[00:55:25] Unknown:
Yeah. It does just seem like a weird argument, but people seem to have to have something to argue about and pick their camp. And if they want to run knots and have I believe it's just Luke Dasher. He's the sole maintainer of it, and you wanna have that as your node. Like, he doesn't have the best security history. I don't know. I mean, each their own, but that's the whole thing. This whole thing's supposed to be anyone can use this any way they want. And if you wanna use and run that node or that put your trust in Luke, that's fine. That's not a problem. I just think maybe you don't have to screech about it on Twitter. Maybe,
[00:56:03] Unknown:
just do it, see how you get on, and worry about other things. Yeah. Absolutely. And with all of this said, you know, I've made my allegiances very clear here. But if there's anybody listening to this that thinks that there's viewpoints from the other side or critical points that I've missed that might make me, change my viewpoint. Like, I'm I'm all ears here. And I do have a podcast with Bitcoin mechanic who sits firmly in the the loop dash junior camp on this queued up in my podcast feed, which I'm gonna go and listen to over the next couple of days just so I can try and get a bit more of an understanding as to where people are coming from outside of what I can only see here as virtue signaling.
[00:56:38] Unknown:
That's the other thing is you and I and most people that we interact with have very similar views on most of these types of things that crop up. Right. And so a lot of that is just like being in a bit of a bubble. You have your certain views about what's most important. You only really communicate with those groups of people. So it's gonna be completely the same on the other side, and then you're gonna rely on certain people for advice on the more technical stuff, and it goes up that chain. I'm gonna ask you. You might ask someone else. They might ask someone else, and we have our trusted people within our bubble. So I don't blame anyone who's on the other side squawking and screeching because a lot of them are just not particularly technical, neither am I. And they're probably just listening to somebody that they trust and going, oh, yeah. That makes sense. Right. Running knots. Tweet. Yeah. It's important to,
[00:57:30] Unknown:
check your biases. Something I'm trying to get better at as I turn quickly into an old man is trying to make sure that I expose myself to what I would describe as dissenting opinions because we're all, like you say, very guilty of singing from the the team hymn sheet, so to speak, and just parrotting the the friendship narrative. So it's important to listen to the other side. So if you consider yourself in the the filter roles, please tell us why we're wrong. Yeah. Definitely do that. Definitely,
[00:57:58] Unknown:
send it as a large boost as well because we're gonna read it much better. We'll understand it better. I thought you were gonna say send it as an up return in a Bitcoin transaction.
[00:58:08] Unknown:
If I was smarter and quicker, I would have said that. Yeah. Bonus points if you do send it in an opportune. Yeah. That would be excellent. And and just to cap all this off to demonstrate perfectly the ineffectiveness of this, only yesterday, Mara mined an entire block with a single transaction containing a massive op return in there. Mhmm. Just one transaction in the whole block. And if you Jordan remind me, I'll send you the links to this so people can see it on mempool. Space. One of the, fields on mempool.space is the audit field. And it says not seen in mempool.
I whoever did this sent it straight to Mara Yeah. And, you know, nobody would have been any the wiser. So you'd be there thinking, great. I've paid to get into the next block, and then this thing pops up and you're like, what the fuck? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although, ironically, talking about low fee rates, this guy paid 2.5 sats per byte. Well, I suppose we we don't know how much they paid out of band. It's just That's true. Yeah. Good point. But it just demonstrates the, you know, the insanity of all of this that whether we like it or not, this type of stuff will get in. And the preferable way for me from the way I understand it is let's let them do it in an opportune. You know, if you wanna look at that data, great. If you don't prune it. Yep. I think that's good. Let us know why we're wrong, please.
We'll keep covering it. Indeed. Well, that was a bit of a different show, but I quite enjoyed doing the the deep dive on a a couple of topics. Good. Thank you, mate. So Oh, apologies for for recording and releasing late by the way, guys. But as you might have gathered from the top of the show, my fault would have been off gallivanting on a stag. Final bit of business on air, I'm gonna be in Vegas Two Weeks on Monday when we would normally be recording next. So we need to work Oh, there we go. We need to work out a a time to get together because I'm gonna be in Vegas the whole week and traveling on the Sunday. So, yeah, let's talk about that after the show. We need to make sure we get one in that week because I'm literally out for the whole week. So maybe we can make something work earlier in the day perhaps.
[01:00:05] Unknown:
This is what it's like trying to record with a superstar
[01:00:08] Unknown:
just traveling around the world. Has its pros and cons. This will be the last show before Vegas. So if you are listening to this, please do come and say hello at the Foundation booth. I don't have the booth number, but I'm sure you'll find us. We've got Yeah. A pretty sizable one there. So please come and say hello. We will have passport primes and passport cores there for you to come play with. So please come and check it out in person and,
[01:00:29] Unknown:
yeah, love for you to see it. And I'll give you a guided tour. Lovely. Alright, mate. Well, we'll speak off, thanks for that. Good rundown, and catch you on the next one. See you, pal.
