Latest / Monero Talk / MoneroTopia24 MC & Discussing Why He Is Stacking Privacy Coins w/ Vlad Costea | EPI 321

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MoneroTopia24 MC & Discussing Why He Is Stacking Privacy Coins w/ Vlad Costea | EPI 321 · Monero Talk

• Doug All right, Vlad, what's going on, man? Hi. Vlad We're live. We are live. I forgot to switch off my VPN. So if anything becomes low quality, it's my fault. Doug No worries, no worries. Why don't you switch it off now? I guess you can't, too late. Vlad I guess I can, but there's gonna be a delay. Doug All right, well, we'll see how it goes. We'll see how it goes. What are you using over there, IVPN? Vlad Oh yes, IVPN. Sweet. Doug Very nice. You paying with Monero for your IVPM? Vlad No, for this one I paid with lightning. Doug Ah, all right, all right, all right. Still, still, that's pretty cool. Vlad connect and I'll be back. Doug Okay, go for it. Those who are already tuning in, please like and share, retweet. Let's get the word out. Let's get some people in here. Watching live, I'm going to... Loading Prozen, okay, I'm back. Doug Okay, he's back. Yeah, Vlad, if you can retweet, we'll try to get some more people, get some more eyes on this. Vlad Now they should be listening to this. Doug Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get them. We'll get them. Vlad I'm going to retweet it and also quote tweet and say, come, come, watch me. Penis by Monero. Why should what we're in this spot BTC on live stream. I will be fumbling the bag of generational wealth. Such a clown show exclamation point clown emoji. Vlad Okay. I'm trying to find an excuse to buy more Monero. So basically what I'll be doing during this episode at random times is to go into cake wallets. Let me type the pin. I have a confirmed balance here. Vlad I don't want to say how much, but I can do it. And basically what I'll do is to just buy one Monero, but I guess we'll have to wait for confirmations for that. But just for the sake of it, let's go to swap. Vlad There is a very convenient function here where I can input an amount. I'm going to choose one XMR just because we are here and we're about to start this. And I paste the address. I choose the exchange rate and I hit exchange, but I have to also type the BTC amount. Doug So what do you do? Right now you're swapping Bitcoin into Monero? Vlad Sure, why not? I'm paying for the security of the Bitcoin network while guaranteeing the privacy of my future transactions. Isn't that nice? All right. I always wanted to do this, but it's more fun when it's live. Vlad It's just that this exchange function for some reason does not display my balance. You have a bug here, cake wallet, fix it. Doug Yes, bug cake cake is definitely loving you that you're doing this live right now on air. That's fantastic. What's the issue? Vlad is more than the maximum but it doesn't display any amount. I have the balance it's confirmed maybe I should wait for more confirmations before I can swap it I don't know what's the rule it's just that the exchange function does not work for me yet so we'll see until the end of the episode you can go on with the questions I'll just randomly penis by Monero that's what I call a penis by I don't care about the price I don't care about graphics or whenever whatever candle Doug Why is this called a penis buy? I'm not following the uh Vlad imported from the Bitcoin culture where people were buying at the top. Doug Oh, okay. It's sort of like just. Vlad version of the yellow buy. Yellow is on, what's it called? The Wall Street Bets? Okay. Basically, it's an impulsive way to buy without any consideration, without any rationale behind it just because you want it. Vlad Got it, got it. It's the only way it should be, honestly, but whatever. But you're way, way more talented. Doug tapped into the memes that I am and Jesus. Vlad Just to make it even more fun. Actually, I forgot what I wanted to say. Oh yeah, Monero has been outperforming BTC over the last month. I have this. Doug Ever since you've been tweeting about it, man, what are you in here? You're like the you're controlling the markets here Vlad Yeah, I'm like, we're on Buffett right now. So over the last 30 days, it outperformed BTC by 15 .6%. Over the last 24 hours by 6 .6%. So my fund has been gaining from this and Zcash has been underperforming over the last week. Vlad It's disappointing, it's like 7% down. I'm just trying to make a point because Adam Beck responded to my tweet when I said I want to get into privacy coins. He said, you have no idea what you're talking about and you're gonna lose your money. Vlad And I was like, okay, so what if there was a way to have privacy and not get poor? Because the narrative is that everything goes down against BTC and people say, no, you shouldn't be buying privacy coins expecting for returns or whatever because they're just tools that you use once and you don't store them, you don't save in them. Vlad I'm like, fuck that. Someone has to change this mentality. And I'm still a Bitcoin maximalist. I still want Bitcoin to have privacy but what's the best way to demand for it? To go through the bit process, it seems like it's not. Vlad So if I do use privacy coins and I learned from this and I proved to people how they work, maybe just maybe we're gonna get some confidentiality to be able to hide the amounts. If we never get that, I'm gonna be super disappointed but we're heading towards a future where not everything is gonna be divided by 21 million Bitcoin. Vlad It's gonna be divided by 21 million Bitcoin and a hundred million Monero or maybe also 84 million Litecoins and so on. So we're heading into a multi coin future which isn't all that bad as long as these networks produce honest money and they are. Doug No, but you but you but you labor yourself a Bitcoin maxi? No, of course. Is that okay? Vlad Maxie. They're not. They're just conservatives. I'm trying to make Bitcoin better. They're not. They just say, oh, this should not be on Bitcoin. We're trying to gate keep it. Look at me. I'm the elder statesman. Vlad Buy my steak dinner. Doug Has has is this is this is this kind of a new Vlad here, you know, going into privacy coins or have you always been? Into I remember you interviewed fluffy pony. Uh, what was that? I was back in like Was that like 20? Doug That was like 2018 um I don't really remember the content so much. I think you were you were coming out of like kind of from uh, uh, I wouldn't say negative standpoint, but you were Right. Your it was it was more of a from a bitcoin. Doug It was from a bitcoin maxi standpoint, right? It wasn't It wasn't for me. I don't think I'm interested in privacy Vlad the Maxi culture was developed to this extent. I think it was still the early days of it. There were a few events that laid the foundations of this attitude that Bitcoin is perfect and you don't need to change it. Vlad And every attempt to change it is a scam and an attack and blah, blah, blah. So I believe at the time, there was still some agreement that everything proof of work is honest. And most coins at the time were proof of work. Vlad Proof of stake seemed like this utopia that will never get achieved. And the expectation was that if it ever gets achieved, it's gonna be decentralized. And of course, if we look at any proof of stake project right now, it's not really decentralized. Vlad So that's the way in which they do it. They make sure that the founders lock some coins, but they also have more voting power than the others and it becomes sort of a mess. But I'm impressed by Monero because I know you're going to ask me this. Vlad I'm impressed by it because it was born in this culture of constant fighting and infighting more specifically because the founder tried to launch this network which had a pre -mine and the users were not happy with that pre -mine. Vlad And then they said, you know, fuck this. We're gonna fork out and create our own network which is fairly launched. So from the get -go, there is this adversarial thinking which lays out the foundation of the project. Vlad And that's beautiful. If you compare it to Zcash, it was basically this ceremony with the best of the best in terms of cryptography, the biggest names. You had Edward Snowden, you had Zuko and Peter Todd and I think also Bram Cohen, a bunch of others. Vlad It was just this cypherpunk roster of all stars who decided to set up this network. And it was different and it's still culturally different. Monero is forged with fire and fighting whereas Zcash is forged with look at us, we're great, we're smart, we're gonna raise funding, we're gonna do this and that. Vlad But honestly, their technology is great. So I'm grateful for what Zcash did and I'm sure that Monero developers are also super grateful right now because they can get inspired. I did read about something that's coming in a few months to Monero to increase basically the pull of your plausible deniability when you're sending transactions. Vlad Maybe you know better what that's called. Full chain membership proofs. Doug Exactly right so that that yeah that's basically you know moves Monero closer towards Zcash like privacy in terms of obfuscating the sender right that's beautiful. Oh, yeah, fantastic. So I guess you haven't until recently, you haven't really followed Monero tech developments that closely. Vlad Not much, honestly. I know that, for example, Peter Todd went to a conference about Monero and then came with the Taylor mission idea and came up with this paper that Taylor mission is not inflation. Vlad And there are some interesting ideas in Monero that maybe that Bitcoiners don't really discuss. And that's why I'm here, I guess, also to prove Adam back that he's wrong. Adam back is also a legendary trader, by the way, not too many people know about this, but he enjoyed. Vlad Oh, really? Doug Really? Okay. He's kind of one of the first to really point out the necessity of fungibility in a cryptocurrency, yet he never really drank the Monero Kool -Aid by any means, right? Vlad But if you look at some Blackstream researchers, for example, there is Nickler, Nicholas, Jonas Nick, that's his name, not Nick Jonas from the Jonas Brothers, his name is Jonas Nick. And if you look at his activity, he did contribute to Monero to some degree. Vlad Okay. The confidential transactions idea also came to Monero from Gregory Maxwell. And so there is some collaboration there. Maybe it's not very obvious or very public, but there is, and I think even among the most hardcore community of maximalists, if you talk to them in person, they're going to agree that Monero is interesting and honest, and there's nothing scammy about it. Vlad They just want to defend their brand and they want to act like they're high priests within their own community. Doug So this this theme of all cryptos trending to zero against Bitcoin, do you think we're beginning to see the the death of that or it's it's it's here to stay among Bitcoiners? Vlad Well, there are people who look at Bitcoin religiously and they think that it's this something that resembles too much of a Ponzi scheme, basically, and they disregard the technological aspects of it. Vlad And they disregard the market's dimension which exists on other networks. And they say, no, Bitcoin doesn't need this because it wants to be money. Okay, but is it really money because it's not fungible? Vlad And then you get big brains like Giacomo Zucco, who come along and say, yes, Bitcoin is fungible at the protocol level. And KYC, AML, or anything that makes it non fungible, is just at the human level. Vlad It's just a social convention. And then he tries to send his coin joint Bitcoin to an exchange and he gets it locked. And he acts like, oh, you're breaking the rules of Bitcoin. I'm sorry. An exchange is not a business that operates within the rules of Bitcoin. Vlad That's not how it works. And if there was privacy by default, and that exchange accepted that currency that has privacy by default, then there would be no confusion in regards to this. They know what they signed up for. Vlad But in that situation, it's terrible. I'm not happy with how Bitcoin development is going. Because there are so many good ideas, and I'm still optimistic, I get a lot of interesting developers who come to my show. Vlad And they come up with these concepts on how to improve it. But at the same time, there is this frustration, because even something like op cat, which is on other networks, it's on BCH, it's on liquid, you can try to see if you can destroy anything using it. Vlad But at the same time, people say no, we should wait, we should take a few years to consider it. But it's been around for years. It's been so when you think about it, SegWit has only been tested for maybe four months on Litecoin before it was deployed on Bitcoin. Vlad And that was considered to be something necessary. And there was consensus for it. But right now there's, it seems like there are too many proposals to improve it. And everyone acts like they're concerned that it's going to have negative effects. Vlad The irony is that the same people who rejected the idea of a block size increase are now coming to the conclusion that it's a much simpler change. You just increase the block size, there's no other concern involved, you already know what's going to happen, as opposed to adding some new op code, which some developers can use for something that's going to possibly, there's no guarantee of that, but it can possibly alter mining incentives, Vlad and make miners maybe prioritize some transactions over others or do some reorg stuff. Doug So you think, what do you would say the likelihood is that we see some big changes in Bitcoin? Obviously, we haven't to date. But do you think there's a chance that we'll see confidential transactions implemented in Bitcoin, that block size might be increased, tail emission added? Doug I mean, what would you put the odds at for changes like that? Vlad Very low. Maybe we'll get op -cat or CTV in a couple of years. But even in that case, it's still not enough compared to what Bitcoin really needs to become money. And it seems like we're too complacent. Vlad We, and by we I mean most of the community, is too complacent with this position of store of value. And this narrative that you're making rich people not happy when you want to add privacy is very strong. Vlad Even some big company CEOs who otherwise say that Bitcoin needs to be fungible will agree that it's nice to not be in bad terms with Michael Saylor. And honestly, that's what pisses me off most of the times. Vlad I realized that this is one way to capture Bitcoin. You get the ETFs, you get BlackRock on board. These people have unlimited access to the money printer. They can make the number go up. They can suppress the price because they have the means to do it. Vlad But at the end of the day, it's no longer the cipher fund project that we expected. It's just the tool for the rich that they use to make themselves richer. Play some games with this. And is it really making the average person more financially free, more sovereign? Vlad Exactly. The average Bitcoiner is going to say, yes, of course, as long as they can afford to pay the fee. But even today, we had this situation where fees spiked for about an hour and they were up to $90, which is insane. Doug And is it really being disruptive at all at that point in terms of disrupting the state apparatus, right? Vlad Well, it's very tame, I can give you that. But there are some people who say, look, I can send you funds from this coin join and you don't know where they came from. And if you generate a new address, which was not previously used, then you also have pretty good receiver privacy because of the rest of the network doesn't know who you are. Vlad But it's still not there. It's still not fungible. Just because you don't know about your genes because you had a series of mixes doesn't mean that people can't see what amount was sent. That amount maybe is going to leave some traces. Vlad And all it takes on this public ledger is just one horrible mistake. And you're going to undo all the efforts that you made for preserving your privacy. You just send a transaction of the wrong type to the wrong address. Vlad And you're going to reveal who you are. Or maybe you leak your expub to some third party and they're going to know what happened from your wallet. So I had this conversation with a guy who's running a Wasabi Wallet coordinator right now. Vlad And he believes that Bitcoin privacy is very good. And there's also silent payments that are available on Cake Wallet. You can plug your sponsor here, which by the way, I still can't use Cake Wallet to swap for some reason. Vlad I've been restarting it over and over because I advertise this as penis buying Monero, but I can't. Maybe I should have used another service. Sorry Cake Wallet, I still like you. Thank you. Doug There's a couple of instant exchanges built into it, so I'm surprised it's not working. You can select which one you use. To our viewers, we got like 210 live views right now, like 200 on X, which is super cool. Doug I just posted xmrchat .com slash MoneroTalk. Vlad, I don't know if you saw this, but we launched this recently. It's a way to send Super Chats with Monero. So I've been testing it out here on this channel. Doug So if anybody wants to give it a test, you go to xmrchat .com slash MoneroTalk. Send a Monero -based Super Chat to us. You should use it too, man. You should try out xmrchat .com. It's a good way to stack Monero. Doug I'll send you some Super Chats. Vlad I guess stacking Monero needs a much better verb you don't stack Monero Doug Nobody's figured that one out. I mean, I think it takes a guy like you, man. You're good with the memes. You're good with the language. You're hip. You're cool. What could it be? I don't know. Vlad think the best way is to mine Monero. That's the only way to get private coins. Well, is there something that starts with MO so that it's Mo Monero? You get Mo Monero. That's it. That's it. Doug I say mo mo narrow more Liberty more Monero more Liberty Yeah, that still is a really stacks. It's hard to beat stack sats man. That's you know That's a tough. I never liked it. I was them. No Vlad That begging bits camp. Doug Bag you. OK. Vlad A bit is a much better denomination. You have one million bits in one Bitcoin. People ask you how much Bitcoin you have and you say a hundred bits. It makes much more sense. What's a bit? A bit of a Bitcoin. Vlad Nice. What is the smallest unit? It's the bit cent, not the satosh. Because people are used to this idea of the cent being the 100th part of the whole. Doug The Pecanero, Pecanero is the smallest Monero unit. So maybe we could work around that one. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I've been thinking about it. There's, nobody's really nailed the stack Sats version for Monero. Doug Anybody out there can nail that one. Let us know. I've yet to hear it. I've yet to hear it. Use Monero. Just use Monero. Shit, man. So I, you know, I don't follow you super closely, but I feel like through the year, you're a big Wasabi guy. Doug So are you still a big Wasabi guy? Is that, is that still? Vlad Well, it depends what that means. Wasabi Wallet is a service that shut down from a company perspective. From a protocol, open source project perspective, it's still alive. You go to Wasabi ST, Wasabiist, but it's WasabiST .io, I think, and you're going to find a list of coordinators that you can use. Vlad So Luckily, I think we got our first Doug First, we got our first super chat, sorry to interrupt here, but super chats always come first, here we go. Pack in heavy, tipped 50 cents, don't buy Monero. There we go, that is our stacking sats, it's don't buy Monero, which probably explains a lot in terms of Monero price. Doug But go ahead, sorry, go ahead, continue, Vlad. Vlad I don't remember what I was saying. I was just thinking how much Monero that is half a dollar of Monero. It's a very small amount. Yes, but you're talking about. Doug cake wallet oh shit you were talking about wasabi and how you know obviously it's been shut down but you can still you can still use it um you know Vlad know, yeah, wasabi st .io. And you're going to find a list of coordinators. These are community driven, a bunch of guys who decided they want to take on the risk to get arrested potentially. But there's also this approach that if a lot of people do it, it becomes more normal. Vlad And it's not such a big deal. And all of these coordinators have different fee rates, they have different anonymity sets, they have a reputation system. And all that it takes for you to point out to a new coordinator is to change one URL from the settings. Vlad And that's it. You restart the client and you're gonna be on the new one. And I think that's beautiful. It's the powerful open source because in the case of samurai, they were not really able to pull this off. Vlad They relied too much on the centralized development of a couple of guys. And once these people went to jail, I mean, I'm not sure if they went to jail, but they did get arrested and they're investigated. Vlad Yeah. So as soon as they went away, the project sort of died. I did see the community I think they came to Monero, which is not so bad. I think they made much better gains over the last few months, holding Monero as opposed to BTC. Vlad I do believe that these ETFs play a major role in slowing down price discovery, or not slowing down at least plateauing price discovery. Maybe that the retail if there's gonna be another wave of FOMO, there's gonna be a retail demand that's going to persuade these institutions to dump on whoever's gonna buy thinking that he gets a Lambo by investing $1 ,000 in Bitcoin. Vlad So yeah, that's where we're at. We're still in the phase where we're waiting for something to happen. We got the ETFs early this year, we got a new all time high. Monero didn't for a while. When was the last time that Monero hit the all time high? Doug It's a good question. I mean, it hit, yeah, it hit, uh, what was that? 2022. Doug 2021? I don't know. It was the last Bitcoin bull market. It hit basically around 500 again, but it never exceeded. So Monero has been as high as $500 and it never exceeded that. It hit that in what, 2018 or something? Doug And then the following bull market, it hit around 500 again, but didn't break through it. Vlad Oh, there's this myth that there's someone exploiting an inflation bug, which I don't believe. Doug Yeah, I mean, you know, that that's obviously what people say. And I guess I guess we don't know. But I think I think the more logical or likely scenario is that it's it's being manipulated by exchanges. Doug You know, exchanges selling paper Monero because it's just so easy to do, right? Vlad Once by Nance and what was the other one Kraken, I think the listed Monero, the price went up and the expectation was for. Doug Yeah, Monero and Kraken US, but yeah, when Binance delisted, that was a major one. That was major. Vlad Usually people expect when there is a listing that the price is going to pump and when there's a delisting It's a sign that the project is dying and therefore people are gonna sell But it went in the opposite way in the case of an arrow because there's a community. Vlad There's a bunch of users You have miners you have node operators who are very resilient and They are forged with this mentality that they must resist. Oh Look Doug a non -tip the dollar real change won't happen in Bitcoin until the four -year cycle fails to make an all -time high interesting theory Vlad I think we're going to make a new all -time high for the simple reason that there's a lot of brand recognition and there's going to be a lot of marketing going into it. So at the end of the day, it's the retail that's going to pump the price, not the institutions, but the institutions will enjoy dumping, because at the end of the day... Doug What will be selling will be selling as retails buying is what you're saying Vlad I think he will and that's going to be a major turning point because Bitcoin has this history of heroes who get praised and then they get slayed for some reason. That's what's going to happen with him also because what is he reporting the company profits on? Vlad Is it BTC or USD? What does he pay his employees on? Is it USD or BTC? At one point, there's going to be this selling pressure on him. He can't get more debt and issue more stocks and whatever and use all of these tactics infinitely. Vlad He's going to have to pay up. And how is he going to pay up? Well, he can pretend he can borrow the Bitcoins to someone else and get cash for it and pay back. But at the end of this never ending spiral of lending against something, someone has to pay, right? Vlad So it would be hilarious if he doesn't pay and he gets bailed out by the U .S. government from the taxpayers money, but I don't think that's going to happen. I do believe that he's going to sell. He did sell at one point for tax reasons and he made sort of a smart remark about it that you should leverage the Bitcoin that you have to minimize the amount of tax that you're paying. Vlad I'm not an expert in the U .S. tax system, but there is a precedent to sailor selling. So I would not hold my breath that he's going to do what he pretends to do. He's going to find the smart justification for it and say it was necessary for microstrategy to sell some reserves and do something with the money, expand or pay dividends. Vlad I guess he already got a bunch of Bitcoiners to buy his stock, which means that they're going to be happy if he pays more dividends. But anyway, this is not the kind of conversation I enjoy having. Sorry. Doug Well, what do you think? Let's talk about the topic just a little bit more. So like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is really doing well in terms of spreading this meme of number go up and making it, you know, this this digital gold tech where everywhere just perfectly, basically perfectly traceable property that you hold that goes up in value. Doug And the government really doesn't mind that it exists at all. Perfectly taxable, but it's an asset that will continue to go up. How do we, you know, how does that not how does that that stop? I mean, that does seem like the perfect way to co -opt and just continue to pull in the masses. Doug Why are they going to be interested at all in something like Monero? Obviously, we know why it's interesting. We know why it's important. But Joe Schmo will likely isn't going to see a reason why they need a Monero. Doug You know, they have nothing to hide. They rather buy the buy the thing that they feel in their mind is guaranteed to go up in price. Vlad I mean, that's reasonable, but at one point, these returns are going to diminish. There is only so many people who are interested in buying this Bitcoin. Yeah, exactly. I think at this point, most of the people who have access to the Internet or television have heard about it at least once and have an opinion on it. Vlad The ones who wanted to buy, I think they already bought. And maybe that there is there's some untapped territory with these zoomers who are doing meme coins, and they're basically yoloing their savings into something, which they either go bust with their two hundred dollars or they're going to buy some new car or whatever. Vlad There's this mentality that these people feel like, I don't know, the last sucker from a Ponzi scheme, which happened with real estate, happened with pretty much everything that they're going to have to pay pension systems in Europe. Vlad There's this generational pressure on those who were born maybe after the mid 90s that we're going to have to work to pay for everything. All the excesses of the previous two generations. And that's not nice. Vlad So I do understand this, but is BTC going to have this speculative side to it? Maybe if there are BTC tokens like ordinals and people can gamble on them and people still pay transaction fees. But I don't see it getting that big from this point onwards. Vlad Maybe 100K is going to be the top. But that's just my estimation. People called me a bear when I created my super cycle chart, which basically said that Bitcoin is going to go to 100K by next year. And they said, no, you're too bearish. Vlad We're going to get ETFs. We're going to be at 288K this year. I'm like, where did you pull that number? It's just that even so even Adam back. I'm trying to fight him right now with my freedom gains fund. Vlad But Adam back supported stock to flow at one point. And that was the silliest sort of price prediction mechanism, which implied that since the supply is limited, and the demand should remain constant, the price is going to increase according to the schedule. Vlad But predicting demand for something, not only that it's not Austrian, a bunch of Austrian economists like Seifedin, self -proclaimed Austrian economist, they prophesied that theory. It's just silly. There is not constant demand for milk or bread or something that we consume every day. Vlad There are these cycles where there's more demand at one point and at another, there's less demand. And you're going to assume that only because the supply is limited and you know how many bitcoins they're going to be at a given point in time, then the price is going up according to the schedule. Vlad It's so stupid. But I guess they hope that it's going to become this self -fulfilling prophecy and people are going to buy into it and say, yeah, we need to make this happen because we want it to happen. Vlad As opposed to this is going to happen because it's supposed to and it makes mathematical sense. I don't know. I have lots of reasons to be angry at Bitcoiners. Doug Bitcoin as it is, do you think it has utility? Does it offer real utility beyond being the speculative asset that people are hoping goes up in value? Because Michael Saylor says it will. Vlad Well, that's a good question. I mean, it does have utility for some people who build on it. But the problem is that the culture is so messed up that when someone smart comes along and build something on Bitcoin, they're going to get called cold out for being scammers. Vlad You know, they're going to say, oh, how dare you put graffiti on my precious time chain or whatever? How dare you open markets for better and for worse? Eric Voorhees was one of the earliest educators on Bitcoin. Vlad If you're watching Peter Schiff back in 2013, he was there debating Peter Schiff on gold versus Bitcoin. And that was a big deal. I wasn't around at the time, but I did research looking back to see who was educating back in the day. Vlad And Eric Voorhees did Satoshi dice, which I think was important for getting more people who were usually into gambling to also discover how to use Bitcoin. But right now, the narrative is that he created something criminal on Bitcoin and that he should be frowned upon because he also created some bloat on the blockchain and monetary transactions were getting delayed because of this gambling situation. Vlad I mean, you can't win. You either create utility for the network or else, whatever. For what it's worth, the tethered people get a free pass for everything. So they created Mastercoin, which turned into the OmniLayer and they should tether on the Bitcoin blockchain. Vlad And nobody ever called them out for saying, you're bloating my precious blockchain with your stupid USD token. Nobody ever did that. They get a free pass and then they move to Ethereum. Yet their CEO is still getting invited to Bitcoin conferences like he's some sort of Messiah. Vlad Maybe because he's funding Blockstream. I don't know. I'm just saying. But it's funny that you have this culture of high priests, but then you have people who break all the rules and do whatever they want and they get away with it. Vlad So it makes you wonder. Doug You were at the Bitcoin conference too, right? Vlad Oh yeah, that was a lot of fun and that was the moment when I realized I need to buy privacy coins. Doug What was the Eureka, was it Edward Snowden's speech? Sure, I mean, you already knew everything. I'm sure Edward Snowden had to say. So what was the Eureka moment there? Was it just the culture you were looking around? Vlad So I was around during Edward Snowden's speech and it was interesting to me and I was on a panel. They invited me. It was very nice of them because I used to write for a Bitcoin magazine. I think I have a copy. Doug of a, no, I have a copy of a magazine that you made for the Mayorka blockchain conference at the Vlad That's super nice. Yeah, I need two of them. Yeah, no three of them. I have three of them that I launched at that conference Doug I think I have the first one. Yeah, somebody the the guy who runs the the conference gave it to me at a Manero conference Oh that that's very nice of him. Thank you, Chris. Good. Good job on you on that by the way Very no Vlad enjoy creating stuff. And right now, I'm also doing a magazine about privacy. But let me get to my previous point, which is about how I realized in Nashville that I need to get into privacy projects. Vlad Basically, I was invited on a panel to talk after Edward Snowden's presentation. And I spoke about the samurai and the wasabi situation. And then I I also listened to RFK, who is a minority candidate, he's an four or 5% of votes at best. Vlad He's usually not even in the polls. And then I listened to Donald Trump the next day. And that was such a letdown. And after the Trump presentation, I realized that much of this industry has gambled on Trump winning, because they realized, okay, it's horrible under the Biden Biden administration, they want to do business, the miners want to keep mining, the exchanges want to keep what they're doing. Vlad They're not happy with what happened over the last four years. So they're putting their money under this guy. And this guy, not only that he doesn't care too much for us, but he's also a single point of failure. Vlad So if we're heading into a future where we get Kamala Harris as the president of the US, I think much of the business space and business sector around Bitcoin and crypto in the US is going to shut down or else move offshores. Vlad And what's that going to mean for Bitcoin and for a lot of projects, even mining, like they're going to overregulate it and put more taxes on it. And that's not what the US miners want. And that's not what makes miners profitable. Vlad So if we run into that situation, then how am I going to protect myself? How do I hedge against that kind of future? Well, I'm not going to buy Ethereum because that one is even more vulnerable. They just need to arrest a couple of these stakeholders, they need to arrest Binance people and Coinbase people and they already have a nice majority of the coins that are being staked. Vlad So of course, I'm going to look into privacy projects and I put some thought into it. And at one point, I complained on Twitter that Bitcoin has no fungibility. And I got this reply from Adam back. And that's what triggered me. Vlad It was Adam back who made me say, Okay, fuck this, I'm gonna buy some Monero, I'm gonna buy some Zcash. I'm gonna buy some xano because Roger Ver told me that it's great. And it has Monero cryptography and it does tokens, like, okay, I'm gonna buy these. Vlad And let's see what happens. I'm I have basically the highest market cap privacy coin, the one that has pretty good technology and is listed on all exchanges, which is Zcash. And I also have a bunch of lower cap ones that have a lot of upside potential. Vlad Let's see what happens. And the responses that I got from the community were fun. Not nice but fun. And it's been a journey. I've been doing this for three weeks now. I report every week to explain what's happening so far. Vlad I'm 40 something percent up against BTC, which was presumed to be impossible. But I pulled Doug 7% up. Your timing is fantastic. Vlad important to have these, I mean, this, of course, sounds stupid, but to have this diversification of assets to have lower cap ones and higher cap ones, because, for example, over the first two weeks, Zcash single handedly generated most of the gains, right? Vlad But now I think all this news cycle has gone and nobody cares about it as much. And it's going to take some more news for it to pump again, some actual development, because Zuko said he's coming back to Zcash and he announced that he's going to work with Nim, which is this MixNet project. Doug I met Monero Topia last year. Vlad Yeah. Did you have Harry? No. Harry help and their CEO showed out to him. He's on lists. He's the actual type of Protestant and activist who is on lists and he cannot travel to certain parts of the world. Vlad But he's the CEO of NIMM. And for some reason, he was able to get funding from the European Commission for his mixnet. And if I understand correctly, he basically went to them and said, aren't you angry that the US has control over the Tor network? Vlad Don't you want to use something that the US cannot use to spy? He was able to get some millions of euro from the European Commission by doing this. Doug didn't know he was getting funding from them. That's that's crazy. So and then what's what Zuko is now getting, Zuko is getting funding from NIMM to go back and work on Zcash. Vlad I am not sure about that. I did see a partnership between the two of them. I did see Zuko being hyped about the network level privacy of NIM. I do have the NIM VPN on my phone and I have been playing with it. Vlad It's super slow so I don't I understand what it's for but I can't seriously use this every day. It's sort of overkill. It's not practical. It's nice for email but that's pretty much it. If you're trying to load Twitter you're going to wait 10 minutes to refresh your feed and it's not the kind of experience that I want. Vlad For my regular VPN privacy stuff I just use iVPN. It's nice. I think I used to have promo code for that but I don't think it works anymore. But it's nice. I like IVPN, also Mulvad. I used to like Proton. Vlad I don't like it anymore. Cause they don't accept their email. Oh yeah. Also that they're, they were pretty hypocritical, I think. Doug Bizarre. Yeah, what do you think that's all about? That was odd behavior for a privacy Vlad or maybe it was just their social media manager who is a hardcore maxi. Because I do remember I was this social media manager at one point for an exchange and I was basically fighting with a bunch of other executives from another exchange. Vlad I had this heated exchange of replies where I told them, you know, you're some of the first people to do KYC of all exchanges. And then I got a call from the CEO of the exchange who was like, what the hell are you doing? Vlad It was fun. I got fired. Doug Zcash, I tried getting them involved in Monerotopia. It's not really going too well. I don't know why. They don't want to participate. I tried to get them to participate last year as well. What do you think that's all about? Doug I feel like that's their biggest issue, I feel like, is that the people that believe in this stuff, that are excited about it, that understand the importance of untraceable digital cash, they don't really trust Zcash because they just do a horrible job dealing with the community. Doug They don't really have a community. And I feel like part of their problem is they don't know how to deal with the people that would care most about their product. Why would they not want to come to a conference where it's a bunch of people that are excited about using untraceable digital cash? Doug Why would they avoid something like that where that could be a place where they can win those people over by showing them the tech and getting them excited about it? Any thoughts that I'm trying to figure them out? Doug I don't really get it. Like they're not aware of the mistakes they're making, and the mistakes just seem so freaking obvious. Vlad Oh, I do understand that and I do agree with you like they got the Doug hard part right, which is the tech, but like the other part, they just they just can't get out of their own way. Vlad Yeah, it's a different culture. They have different expectations. They have a foundation, they have a more political body. I guess this is just for sticking with their own tribe. They decided to not participate because I guess they would rather invite you to their own Zcash event just for, I guess, dominance purposes to show who's the boss. Doug simple as that. That's kind of silly. I mean, if they want to if they want to win over more users and bring people into their camp, you would think they'd want to go to that camp and speak to them, right? Doug So a little little surprised by that. I think you do a great job, kind of, you know, dealing with multiple communities, being a diplomat among digital cash projects, I think you're doing a great job at that. Doug I mean, Vlad Overwhelming at one point because I said, okay, I'm into these privacy projects and then I got the pirating people saying Oh, you should buy some are and then I got Who else? There's so many Wow narrow. Vlad There's There's a bunch of stuff. I don't even have time to look into that. Honestly, it's overwhelming I do appreciate that all of this stuff is out there. Oh, the Darrow people are also annoying Yeah, you guys got owned Like why are you still doing this? Vlad Just for a better tech to get built but they're they're so arrogant to some extent and they They get under my tweets and they comment and they say no you made the wrong decision You should buy this instead of that and I'm trying to be conservative, you know, I'm trying to use the tech that's been tested That's why the only five coins I added to my quote -unquote fund I'm not such a rich person, but apparently I'm moving the markets with my tweets but I bought like coin because it's the most Accepted across exchanges and ATMs and it has M web which is very cool. Vlad Basically you peg into this Additional blockchain which has good privacy and mixing built -in and when you want to pay to a normal address You're gonna do a peg out out of that one And what's gonna be seen on the main chain is that there were moves? Vlad There there were funds that moved from this large pool of funds so they don't know exactly where it comes from But in most cases they don't care and I do appreciate this Doug Yeah, maybe I should try to get Litecoin involved in Monerotopia. Vlad Oh, yeah, they're very friendly. And they have this developer who comes from the Grin++ project. And he was able to do something very respectable and somehow miraculous with Litecoin, which used to be this old and boring project, right? Vlad At one point, I do remember it was Michael Novogratz, who got on CNBC and said, oh, you see those stickers that you have on screen? You should remove Litecoin because it's no longer relevant. You should add Terra Luna at the time he was into Terra Luna. Vlad And yeah, it had its fair share of hate. And I think it's not deserved, especially from Bitcoiners when they know that Litecoin did testing for SegWit and also for Lightning Network in the early days. Vlad And there seems to be no respect for it. They say, oh, it should die. It's such a shit coin. But right now it has much better privacy than Bitcoin. And it's also merge mined with Dogecoin. And that means that the miners are making money from Dogecoin mining. Vlad So I think from a security perspective, there are more certainties that Litecoin has compared to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has this large brand and recognition. But there's a lot of uncertainty about the mining of it. Vlad And nobody knows what's going to happen after a couple of havings. Because at that point, we need transaction fees to be super high. Doug Yeah, I was I was never that excited about Litecoin, you know, it's kind of there watching it from from its early days. And I just always saw it as as kind of Bitcoin's test net, similar to a wild narrow for Monero. Doug But yeah, I mean, the fact is, it has allowed it to add tech that Bitcoin likely never will. And because of that, it's it's become perhaps more advanced than than Bitcoin. I mean, it has become more advanced than Bitcoin in terms of tech. Vlad Yeah, so about my penis buying, I decided to move the funds from Cake Wallet, and I'm sorry that I wasted my time trying this. Right now it displays that I have zero balance, which it has displayed always. Vlad I was never able to do the swap. I'm gonna wait for one on -chain confirmation, and I sent this to an undisclosed exchange where I'm gonna be buying, let's say, one Monero every 10 minutes until the interview ends. Vlad Okay. No, I don't want to run out of money. I have rent to pay, but I'm outperforming Bitcoin anyway. Doug You're buying one Monero every what? Every 10 minutes? I'll try. All right. All right. Vlad Yeah. Doug We'll watch the price as you pump Manero live on air. What is the price of Manero? I think it's actually doing pretty well today, right? It is. Let's check it out. Oh, yeah. All right. Pump it. Pump it, Vlad. Doug You got the Midas touch. You got the Midas touch. So Manero attack. So obviously the privacy stuff. How about all the other aspects of Manero? Have you started to delve into those things? Like you're talking about tail emission, about dynamic block size, Dandelion, plus plus on the network. Doug Have you looked into all the other aspects of Manero beyond its privacy? Well, AC resistance, that's obviously a big one, Random X. Yeah, yeah. Vlad I do like about Monero the fact that it's this idea rather than a technical implementation. I think people in Bitcoin are too religious about the design of Bitcoin and they say we should not change this because it was made like this by Satoshi and therefore we should not touch it. Vlad And they say we should not hard fork because it's going to divide the community. And for what it's worth, there are some Monero leftovers, I guess, from old hard forks. There is Monero classic. There are a bunch of other networks that seem to still have some users or some miners. Vlad But for what it's worth, it seems like people are at least people in Monero are more open to the idea of getting to a concept as opposed to sticking to a particular implementation of it. They want to reach a goal and to reach that goal, they agree as a community that they should do something. Vlad So it's a different culture compared to Bitcoin where they say don't mess with the money and Monero, they don't care if some change is going to affect the price. They just want it to work as designed or as intended. Vlad And that's something that I very much respect. Doug Yeah, I think Manero does a fantastic job at that, at maintaining that culture, everybody being on board with the fact that it is a work in progress. And that too, that you'll you never actually achieve the goal, you always just, you know, are approaching it, and you just have to constantly evolve, especially if you're trying to maintain your privacy, and maintain your ability to not be co opted. Doug I think that's, I think that's the biggest differentiator between Manero and the other projects isn't necessarily just its privacy, but that it's designed to not be co opted by any corporation or any government. Doug And like, obviously, privacy plays into that. Random X plays into that. I would say even the tail emission and dynamic block size play into that. That's, that's kind of the way I look at it. It's not just it's not a privacy coin. Doug It's a it's a cryptocurrency that's built to not be co opted by the state. And for that you obviously need privacy. Vlad Yeah, so I just bought one Monero. Alright! Doug Yeah, I know. You're very distracted over there by buying these Monero, but I'm not going to complain. I'm not going to complain. I never, you know, I haven't bought Monero in forever. I just earn Monero through buying Monero businesses and things I do. Vlad I mean, I wish I was as fortunate as you are. But if you want to get me Monero, you can buy tickets for Monero -topia. Oh, yeah, here we go. Promo code Vlad24, and you get 10% off. And you're going to pay for my plane ticket, so I can buy more Monero. Vlad Thank you. Doug I thoroughly support this message. This would be a good time to announce that you'll be the Monerotopia MC, right? Can we make it official here? Vlad Yeah, we can I guess you spoiled it on Twitter when you posted another I did I didn't leave it for The show how many people are watching right now? Doug Uh, well, according to this 390, it's saying, I don't know, there's, there's like X really give accurate numbers. It's saying 372 live views on X. And I know, is that mean like 370 people are actually there presently now, or like at some point 372 people have viewed it. Doug I do not know, but we're at, uh, yeah, 391. If you combine, uh, YouTube and X. So yeah, yeah, guys like, and share, retweet, get the word out. We have Vlad on here. We just announced that he will be one of the MCs for Monero topia. Doug Maybe the only one, I don't know. We'll see if we get a couple others on board. Uh, but I thought you'd be the perfect MC man. Uh, give it, given your, your privacy fund and your recent interest in privacy coins. Doug Um, and, uh, your ability to understand the tech and your, and your fantastic personality, I think, I think you're gonna do a great job down there. Um, as the MC and asking the hard questions, uh, I've seen your show, you're really good at kind of getting to the point. Doug So I'm excited to see you grilling some of these projects on stage as well. That's a big part of an Aerotopia. It's not a come up on stage and we just all, you know, Kumbaya, uh, it gets, it gets, it gets a little heated. Doug People ask tough questions, which is really good, which is why I wanted to get Z cash down there. I wanted to, you know, let's, let's get him in the hot seat. Let's get them, let's get them to prove themselves. Doug But yeah, super excited to have you as an MC. Vlad I just bought one more Monero. I got some. Oh my God, right? Yeah. Let's penis buy. Penis buy, man. Doug I really hope Monero price doesn't crash man because then I don't know how you're gonna afford to get down there I mean, you know, we'll have to find another emcee But yeah, if you want to help Vlad please use his promo code to buy your Monero topia tickets Because I told him I'd give him a percentage of all all sales made through that promo code So not 24 Vlad 24 go for it by your by your VIP Monero topia tickets using Vlad 24 and that will help Vlad Pay for his flight down to Mexico to be our emcee Vlad I'm gonna be broke by the end of this. I hope it's not too long Doug You so you so you are you are buying on the top. You are seriously penis buying here Vlad I'm penis buying, I'm logged into some exchange. Of course, I use Tor and some disposable email address and nobody's going to know it's me until I reveal it selectively because I want to as opposed to being obliged to. Vlad And that's the whole point. But of course, chain analysis can look at my Bitcoin transaction, which I sent from Cake Wallet and assume that it must be me. So it's not that private because of this broken link, which is Bitcoin. Vlad It's going to be traceable. So it's not that nice. You know, these swaps are not making you private automatically. That's something you should know. If you want to get private Monero, you should probably mine it just like Bitcoin. Vlad If you want to get private Bitcoin, you mine it. Doug Mm hmm. Mind it or buy, you know, sell goods and services for it. Obviously, the person you're selling to will know that they, you know, gave you Monero, but nobody else will. I think it's also a great way to to obtain Monero is to to do work for it. Doug It is you don't you don't often see a Monero pump. I think a big part of that is because it's not on a lot of exchanges, right? I mean, do you any any thoughts on how Monero overcomes that? Or is that not necessary? Doug What are your thoughts there? Do you think it do you think it's good that Monero is not on exchanges or on as many exchanges as you know? Most coins. Vlad I think it's nice. I think it's nice because it leads to the development of these markets, right? People do want to use it. Just because it's not on exchanges does not mean that it has no community or no demand. Vlad It just means that the state of the regulations has got to a point where it makes no sense to keep it on exchanges. It gets them into trouble. But people want to use this. And for example, last year when I was in Argentina attending La Bitconf, there was this guy. Vlad I don't recall his name. And maybe it's better if I don't because otherwise I could dox him. But he told me about this village in Latin America where everything... Oh, you just got another donation. Where everything is financed with Monero. Vlad And there's this circular economy that's all about Monero. And there was also a football team or something. Doug Are you talking, I'm sorry, are you talking about the, I got distracted by this comment here. Are you talking about Monarrow Town in Argentina? Vlad I think so. I don't recall the specifics, but I did hear about this and I was baffled. I think that's the word for it. Or socked. I was thinking, you know, Monero is just this cypherpunk pipe dream. Some people use it for whatever reason, but it doesn't have any real use case. Vlad People don't use it for something. And they said, you know, just like there is Bitcoin beach in El Salvador, there's so also in Latin America, I don't recall exactly. Maybe it's. It's it. I've Doug been there. I've been there. I have a video of me, like a little documentary of me going there. It's in, it's in the Formosa province of Argentina. Yeah, it's real. It's a small town, literally in the middle of nowhere. Doug These young, young group of guys started to be, they started using Monero because it allowed them to essentially gamble on football on soccer. They were kicked off their, the gambling website that they were using and for Monero basically was allowing them to go do the gambling that they were previously doing. Doug That's how they got into Monero. Then they started a little group among themselves, like a WhatsApp group where they were just trading their, you know, if somebody won winnings in Monero, then they had their Monero, they needed to now turn it into pesos. Doug So they started like a little trading group among themselves. Then they started getting their local businesses to start accepting Monero. So when I went there, I literally lived off of Monero completely the entire time I was there. Doug Now granted, very small town, the guy who was there is like walking me around. He like took me to the grocery store. They're like, look, they'll accept Monero and they did, you know, and I stayed at a hotel that accepted Monero. Doug There's only one hotel in town. The hotel accepted Monero. I got my food for everybody there with Monero the entire time I was there. And yeah, it organically is gaining adoption there. And then while there, we came up with this, this bright idea of starting Copa Monero. Doug So yeah, I'm actually one of the one of the people behind that. Working with the young gentleman who lives down there who's organizing at Alessandro. And it's a Monero based football tournament where 12 teams from the local area are competing to win Monero. Doug And it's, it's real man. Have you seen it? Have you seen any of the games? It's, it's actually fantastic. It's actually really, really fucking cool. It's like, it's like really, it's really cool. It's not, it's not getting the attention it deserves. Doug I mean, it's amazing. They're putting in a ton of effort. Soccer, I don't know if you, you know, I'm sure you realize, right? Argentine is all about football, right? It is their, their life down there, especially in these little towns. Doug The soccer stadiums are like the main part of the town. They went, they went ahead and painted their soccer stadium in Monero colors. I mean, they're, they're completely, completely on board and into this and it means a lot to them. Doug They're, you know, they're, they're not wealthy people by any means. And they're putting in these efforts to earn Monero. It's, it's beautiful to see and it's working. It's super cool. Vlad Oh, it's even more cool now when I guess the Pesso has lost a lot of its purchasing power. But Monero, I think this year, let me, let me fact check myself before I say something stupid, but I think Monero has performed better this year than BTC. Doug Has it? I don't know about that. Vlad How do I see your tip date on this chart? Doug I love that flat is more of a Monero maxi than I am. And I don't know, you know, your bag's pumped for two weeks and you're, you're ready to go all in. Let me, let me actually. Vlad It has been performing better since May, I guess. Doug Okay, okay. Vlad Anyway, it's a lot of fun to discover that you can use privacy and privacy doesn't make you poor, as the narrative says. Anyway, it's been 10 minutes. I gotta buy another Monero. Doug I'm bringing up Copamanera .com. So we're also, we're doing a fundraiser to raise money to help fund it. But yeah, here it is. Here's a, actually, let me play this real quick. That's Formosa. Manero Stadium. Doug This is the 12th game it's playing. Thanks for watching! Doug Copa Monero, man. It's real. It's real. And yeah, here's a little documentary of when I went down there. And the finals is going to be played actually in November during Copa, during Monero topia, we're going to air the finals. Vlad So similarly I just bought another Monero and I was going to tell you that on the topic of me I'm seeing Monero topia. I have this major case of imposter syndrome right now because I'm pretty sure that there are people who have been active within the community for much longer and they do deserve to MC the event for the simple reason that they know everyone much better and they know which questions to ask and they are in a much better social position than I am and I'm just this guy I'm the Johnny come lately you know this guy oh look this guy he says he's pumping the price and blah blah blah she's such a bull for Monero and right now he is taking the spotlight so if there's anyone else out there wants to go MC and get on stage I'm open to that you know if you're going to be there by the way buy your tickets using promo code GLAAD24 because that's how you save 10% and you should buy more tequila as opposed to paying more for your ticket and if you do feel like you deserve the spotlight much more than me I'm not sure if it's filmed by the way but if it's not filmed and you want to stay anonymous but still show off your skills I can just step aside and let you take control of the situation I'm not a control freak I just want you to learn something good Doug No worries about it. This is this is why I think it'd be great. You know, you'll be up there learning right and questioning so Don't worry. I don't think I don't think you're stealing the spotlight from anybody and Anybody who's there that wants to participate? Doug It's very it's very open forum, right people just start asking questions and it's it's You'll see you're actually gonna really you're really gonna enjoy the vibe I think but yeah we get it we can have other people that want to come if other people want to help em see no problem, but don't worry, is that you're not stepping on any toes someone to worry about that and It's nice to hear that you're self -aware You know of who you are and you know your your arrival into into Monero that that's your genuine guy man It shows prying Lantis tipped $5 .56 using Monero is addicting This addicting Yes tip $5 good to see Vlad here I enjoyed his talks with Paul Stork good luck with changing BTC you'll need it I'll tell you what all of all of today's tips. Doug I'm gonna send to Vlad to help him with his flight down to Mexico to be the MC. I have been saying all tips all tips will go towards further development of XMR chat But today I will be sending the tips received for today To Vlad so keep them coming glad at the you already made like 15 bucks here in Monero So guys keep it going all tips will go directly to Vlad to help him to help him get down to Mexico Vlad I mean, I just bought free Monero on the live stream, but this is for the fund. It's not for traveling. It's for proving Adam back that you can get rich using privacy. Doug Did you ever see the Adam back video where he talks about fungibility and the importance of fungibility in Bitcoin and like, this was in like 2013, have you ever seen that? Vlad Yeah, I did. And I've also seen the one where he talks about. So basically, there is Aaron Van Veer Doom. I'm not sure if you know him. He is an old contributor to Bitcoin magazine. Maybe the Doug I interviewed him like way back in the day when I first started Manero Talk. Vlad Yeah, so there was Adam in the audience 2017. It was during this whole scaling debate. And he said, you know, the fees are high, how, what kind of advice would you give to businesses that want to accept Bitcoin, but the fees are too high for the customers to use and Adam back responded, use tabs. Vlad And that that was such a meme at the time within the big blocker community, at least. Because Adam back said use tabs, which means just write down which amounts are owed and just make only one transaction for 10 or 20 people. Vlad And it's so silly when you think about it. I mean, sure, it's a way of saying batch transactions or whatever, or you think Doug I mean, do you think Adam back, I mean, not that, do you think Adam back was Satoshi or part of the Satoshi crew, whoever Satoshi is or was? Vlad No, I actually did a video of this. There was this guy, what's his name? I don't recall exactly his name. It's something random or hated or I don't know. Anyway, he did a very viral video which claimed that Adam Beckett Satoshi and he based his claims on the fact that Satoshi was using double spaces and was typing in British English and hey look there's this British man who has the qualifications to have been Satoshi, Vlad but I don't believe that it was Adam Beckett for the simple reason that Adam Beckett worked for Microsoft and was a professional or still is a professional coder in C++ and there are some mistakes that Satoshi has made. Vlad You know, it's blasphemous to say this, but Satoshi was not a perfect coder. He was not a genius. He just put together some ideas and if you look at the interactions between Hal Finney and Satoshi, it almost seems like Hal Finney is being condescending or is acting like this older person who knows better and is telling him, you know, this was not optimal of you to code like this to have this syntax in C++. Vlad So I do believe that whoever Satoshi was, he was not a professional coder or maybe it was Hal Finney with a double personality like Jekyll and Hyde, but there are parts of the code and I'm not a C++ expert, but I did speak with people like Amir Taki and Eric Vaskil who maintains the lib Bitcoin library and client and he told me, you know, point blank Satoshi was not a professional coder. Vlad Maybe he was good at ideas, but he was not good at implementing. If anything, I think it's more likely that someone like Nick Sabo could have been for the simple reason that Nick Sabo is not known for coding and he also came up with BitGold which is a precursor of Bitcoin and it was maybe 90% of what Bitcoin is today. Vlad So it makes a lot more sense. Adam Back, it doesn't make too much sense because I guess he would code better and Hal Finney was at that point very experienced with coding. Basically, he wrote version 2 of PGP. Doug And Adam Back was one of the only people that were referenced in the Bitcoin white paper. And Nick Zabos, yeah, wasn't referenced in the Bitcoin white paper, right? So it's like you're, I guess you wouldn't reference yourself, right? Doug Potentially, maybe that was his slip -up. It seems like, so it's... Vlad If you look at the emails, you're going to see that Satoshi was not aware of Nick Sabo's big gold, or at least pretended not to. Doug Yes, I do. I do recall that that's kind of that's kind of interesting Nick's and Nick's office is a Monero fan. I don't think he tweets anymore I don't even know if he's on X anymore, but he's he said things positive things about Monero in the past Vlad fan of Monero, he's a fan of Gren. At one point someone asked him, what do you think about Gren? And his reply was, it puts a smile on my face. Doug We got to get Nick Szabo down to Manero Topia, man. How do we do that? Yeah, let me bring this. $50 ,000, that's the answer. Yeah, for Nick Szabo, really? Is money really affects that guy? I'd be surprised. Vlad Yeah, I heard that's what it costs to- Really? Doug Yeah, I tried. I tried to get Edward Snowden. This is before he, you know, spoke at Bitcoin conference. I was talking to him. I spoke to him in years past too. I tried to get him to do a Monero talk interview and he wanted like 20 grand at the time or $25 ,000. Doug And then I offered to pay him in Monero. I was going to raise it from the Monero community. And then he said no. And then he didn't do it. And then recently, again, I reached out to his people and we were talking and I was trying to get him to come to Monero topia, obviously remotely. Doug And he wouldn't do it. Even though like it was like, I think we were like negotiating and we were willing to pay like, you know, upwards of 10 grand. I mean, to remotely tune in to a conference that completely utterly aligns with what you're supposed to stand for and you don't do it for $10 ,000. Doug That's like the biggest L there possibly is I mean, he kind of is really revealing himself as not actually, I don't know, believing in the things he talks about. Like how would you not come and talk to this community of people? Doug Which is a small there aren't that many people that like enthusiastically align with the things that he espouses. And here they are all like waiting to hear from you. And we'll give you $10 ,000 plus dollars. Doug And you don't even have to leave your leave your house. And you say no to that. I mean, that that just like blows my mind. Vlad Well, I'm trying not to be cynical right now, but have you tried paying more? Doug We were willing to negotiate. Yeah, I would have paid more. But the negotiation is just like, it wasn't about the money. You just didn't want to participate in it. You didn't want to be associated with it. Doug Which is, that's what I'm saying. That's the issue. Why does he not want to be associated with Monero? I think recently he started saying the M word. But historically, it's only, you know, Zcash is the only thing he's ever mentioned. Vlad Yeah, that's because he was one of the members of that trusted setup in the beginning. He participated in the ceremony for Zika. Doug right so that you know he's just revealing himself as being a number go up guy as opposed to a you know privacy privacy tech guy right which he claims to be obviously he is but is he Vlad I mean, he has to make money somehow. I don't think he's selling many books anymore. So, he's not working for the NSA, I think. So how does he make money? Doug I don't know but get $10 ,000 to come out to a live stream for an hour You know, that's not that bad a deal it's not like he's Literally an hour Vlad another Monero. It's been 10 minutes. That's the rule. Doug I'm bringing up Monerotopia .com just to, oh, so Amir Taki will be there. Amir Taki will be there, Rachel Rose. Obviously we'll have all the Monero devs, not all of them, but some of the big names, Luke Parker, Justin Buhrman, Francisco, Rucknium is gonna be remote. Doug Yeah, we'll have Amir, we'll have Rachel Rose, they're of Darkfy, Pavel, I'm sure you recognize and know a lot of these people, right? Vlad Yeah, I did meet a few of them in Prague. Very cool. I wasn't at the MoneroCon, but I was at Pizza Day, and also the Hackers' Congress. And a bunch of them are coming there. Awesome. I did see him in Prague. Doug Yeah, I love Pavel. Fantastic guy. Anybody you think we should try to get? Any thoughts on that? Any speakers, people you'd like to see there? Like it doesn't just have, you know, obviously not just Monero, any privacy tech, or cypherpunks, or people that you think that would be obtainable that we could get that we should try to get? Doug You mentioned Eric Vasco before I've interviewed him. He might be a cool person to try to get. I don't know what that is if we could do it, but. Vlad Oh, he has some very interesting insights. You should get him. Yeah, so Eric Vassil has this idea that Bitcoin is scaling with every fork that's out there. So basically, of course, the system is limited. Vlad It's hard for the community to agree to change it, but you're going to get other users using other networks. And that's the way for Bitcoin to scale. You're going to get Litecoin, you're going to get Monero, you're going to get Zcash. Vlad You're going to get all of these proof of work networks which resemble Bitcoin, including Dogecoin. And they're going to have users that maybe could be on Bitcoin. But for the fact that they cannot use Bitcoin in the way that they want, they're going to be on other networks. Vlad And this is how I guess also Bitcoin becomes more resilient. It's useful. Oh, I'm GMC host now. Doug I just noticed we got you up there as MC. It's official, man. It is official. You got some buys, man. You're working out. You're doing well. Vlad pull -ups and push -ups. I mostly work with my body weight after getting injured when I was playing basketball in high school and I was also doing like Olympic lifts and it was too much for my fragile lower back and I herniated one of my discs and I went to a doctor and he told me you know you're too young to go for surgery but it's not that bad maybe you can just take it slow for the rest of your life not lift heavy anymore and just work with your body weight you'll be fine. Vlad I mean I got a bit fat just sitting for a living but I still do push -ups and pull -ups and I enjoyed this. It's just that feeling of being strong and in control of your body. Doug Yeah, here are the privacy tech projects we got involved. We got Zano, BasicSwap, Firo, DarkFi, Wildnarrow, Pirate. Would be nice to get Zcash and I'm going to keep trying and Litecoin, I'm writing that down. Doug I'm going to try to get Litecoin. So who is the guy that you mentioned would be a good rep for Litecoin? To talk about Litecoin privacy, tech. Vlad Just one second. David Burkett, that's his name. Are you buying more Monero right now? I was looking at this. Anyway, I have to buy a 36. So that's five minutes from now. What is it? Burkett? Burkett. Vlad B -U -R -K -E -T -T, I think. Okay. Doug We have 456 live views. Once again, is this accurate? I don't know. X says 444 live viewers right now. I think it's just a cumulative and adds it up, but we'll go with it. Yeah, that's what I think about it. Doug Because that's it. Vlad The engagement does not really... Doug Yeah, go up, right? It's not like here we have a ton of you. But we'll go with the 466 live views. Guys, send your super chats. Did we show this one? I don't know if I should. Esquillo tipped $38 .96. Doug Vlad, there you go, man. Vlad I'm a rich man. Doug 10th of the way to your ticket Hey, Doug back in the day Z cash or Manero used to hold events together. Let us end the flame war Yeah, I'm trying to end the flame war I don't know what vents I think I've been to every Manero event there ever was but yeah What what are these events that you're talking about from back in the day? Doug I mean the first Manero con was in Denver. I Manero con Thank you for the tip man or you know Vlad Vlad Vlad should be thank you these tips are going to Vlad But they're very generous greatly appreciate that and yeah, I couldn't agree more and the flame war I mean, you know I'm guilty of being hard on Z cash and I will continue to be hard on Z cash because I just speak the truth in terms Of my my point of view, Doug but that doesn't mean I want to silence them And I don't want to hear their their point of view as we've been talking about this show They obviously contribute a ton of amazing tech to the privacy privacy space Tremendous amount of respect for them and Zuko in particular for that Zuko has me blocked on on X by the way I've chatted with him in the past I think he was pissed because he associated me with the reason why cake never listed Z cash Last I checked I'm not in charge of in charge of cake. Doug I mean, I You know, I guess I I went I was advocate. I was at the time advocating that they don't listen You know that they don't add Z cash to their wallet at this point cake has added so many other cryptos I don't think it, you know, I don't think really matters. Doug I'm not opposed to that But I think that's what turns you go off to me. He saw me as the guy who Was opposed to Z cash being added to cake um, but I don't even know why that would piss him off so much like Like you like why why is that the thing? Doug um But yeah, let's end the flame war. I don't know how to do it if other people know how to do it Please do it get get Z cash to get somebody from Z cash to calm down and uh present So What else what else what else we got? Doug Uh, roger vera man That was that was kind of a big deal for you when you had roger vera on I feel like that was uh You got that got a lot of attention. That was a great interview. I've had him on in the past um, I think He's finally starting to get We you know Reobtain the respect that he deserves obviously had it back in the day when he was bitcoin jesus And then he was crucified Um, but he I feel like he is now rising and uh, Doug I think you were a big part of that in helping him. Uh you know Get them it kind of Be rerespected again in the in the crypto community. Well, what are your thoughts on that on roger vera and your interview with him and Vlad So first of all, I just bought another Monero. Doug I could see the distraction in your face. Vlad Secondly, I don't think I should get credit for bringing Roger back because he's in a significant figure. It's just that he has been inactive. I have no idea what he did with his time and with his life. Vlad Maybe that he wrote that book. Maybe that he went to festivals, as some people pointed out from his Instagram feed that he was a party boy for a while. But he came to my show and for some reason I got a lot of views. Vlad I got like 60 ,000 and I could not believe it because usually it's not like this. And I have a new guest every week. It was not the first time when I had someone from the BCH camp or discussing the block size words or something like that. Vlad And the perspective with which I started in my Roger Ver interview was that I said, first of all, this interview takes place on the day when Russell Brecht turns, I think, 11 years since he is in prison. Vlad And secondly, at this point, you have been in Bitcoin for 14 years and you've been in BTC for seven years and then you've been in BCH for another seven years. And you can clearly see the difference between the two situations in which you found yourself because in the beginning, you're this hero who was funding startups and he was starting businesses and everything was successful. Vlad He had that Midas touch and then he was impatient and did not want to wait for the block size to get increased. He wanted his businesses to continue their operations without changing anything in the ways that they were using Bitcoin. Vlad So he started BCH and since he didn't start BCH, I got to correct myself here, he joined BCH after it was created. And from that point onwards, he faced a much more, how should I put it, unpleasant experience with people who backstabbed him, with frauds who pretended to be Satoshi, with a lot of friends who turned on him and the fact that he ended up supporting a minority fork. Vlad So it was not a nice experience for him, but for what it's worth, he believes in what he's preaching. He doesn't do it just because he's stubborn or whatever. He does want the mission of digital cash to meet this completion phase. Vlad And I also know because I met him in Spain when I was attending the Mallorca conference, I met him in person. I had a brief conversation with him. He likes Monero and he told me that it's a pity that Fluffy Pony is not friendly with him because right now he realizes that he likes the technology behind Monero and maybe that uses it. Vlad I don't know about that. And he also onboarded me to Zano or Zano. I don't know how you pronounce that. He told me, you know, just download this wallet. I'm going to send you one dollar. This is how it works. Vlad And then I created my own Vlad coin on Zano. And I sent that out to a bunch of people on Twitter. And it feels like the beginning of something. So I do keep that in my fund. I do have some Zano, which I bought. Vlad And it's fun. It's fun because there is that early community spirit when people just interact with each other. Nobody knows if it's going to be worth something or if it's going to be big. But there are some minor expectations within the project. Vlad It allows anyone to generate private tokens. That's sort of the value proposition of it. And I don't know how that's going to play out. Maybe it's going to be used for all of these web free meme coin agents who create tokens and then nobody is going to know who sold, which is very funny, by the way. Vlad When you don't know who sold and who bought. That's going to be scary. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun if that happens. Or maybe it's going to fulfill this cypherpunk dream of people setting up online companies and issuing their own tokens and sending that out to shareholders and not revealing the details or the specifics of the transaction unless it makes sense between these parties. Vlad So I do see a future where this can make sense. But for now, I just like the community and it's weird because for the longest time I've been part of this Orthodox community with Bitcoiners trying to please all the high priests trying to not step out of line. Vlad And then I interviewed Roger and it seems like I got expelled from. heaven or whatever now i'm just Doug like you got more popular than ever from it, right? So it actually worked to your advantage. I have Roger on in in 2020. And yeah, he is he's he's he's a Monero guy. I mean, he's like you said, he's a digital cash guy. Doug He's very, he's, that is what he's interested in in the in the in the use case of crypto digital cash. And obviously, Monero does that very well. He's, he's very genuine about that. And yeah, he actually he's the one that got me it has got me looking at Xanno as well. Vlad Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to hate him because he seems sincere in his ideas and in his intentions, and he also has this good intuition. So when he sees potential in a project, it's good to pay attention to him because he also as far as so he said this on my podcast, actually, that he sold his Lambo to buy Bitcoin very early on 2010, 2011. Vlad He saw some potential in this, sold his Lambo to buy Bitcoin. I mean, how many guys are willing to do this? Yeah, it's the opposite. Of course, I guess he bought more fancy cars after he got rich. But it's just that he had conviction in this project very early on. Vlad Maybe it was his libertarian ideology or the fact that he read all the right books and it was just the perfect discovery. I tried to. Doug selling my jeep in 2018 for Monero how did that go I got a guy it was so close but then he didn't do it and I met him years late actually met him like two years ago at a conference he's like hey man I was the guy that almost bought your jeep for Monero I was like ah he didn't he didn't he didn't pull through Vlad I did see that you have this auction website where you're selling cars for Monero and there was a BMW. Doug Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's a XMR bazaar. So it's a, it's not just cars, it's, it's like a full, you know, peer to peer Monero based platform for buying and selling goods and services. It's actually it's gaining, it's gaining some steam, it's gaining some momentum. Vlad Yeah, so I tweeted buying one XMR every 10 minutes on livestream, my kids will have to work at McDonald's to pay for college. Doug Here, wait, hold on, we got more super chats here. MotherJugs just tipped $1 .69. Hi, Vlad. Vlad Thanks for the 69. Doug thank you very much corn cob tipped three dollars and thirty two cents for digital cash you got to do you use stream yard when you stream Vlad No, I use OBS. Okay. Because I'm a Puritan, you know? I like to add stuff myself and design my own graphics and have more flexibility. Very cool. I bought myself this fancy M3 Ultra MacBook. It's pretty much overkill, but I got this after I did a live stream from my old computer and I ran out of memory and it was very laggy to the point that the video froze because my RAM, I guess, was full. Vlad So I said to myself, never again. I'll just get something that's future -proof and I can use for the next seven years, I hope, or 10 or whatever. It has 64 gigabytes of RAM. My first computer had 16 megabytes. Vlad It's insane. Doug I just saw the other day somebody who's selling looks like a nice nice laptop on XMR bizarre Vlad but I'm gonna buy into two minutes at a much lower price. Doug Oh yeah, the price just crashed a little bit. Vlad Yeah, it was 0 .028 BTC per Monero. Now it's 0 .0272. So I'll avoid the dip. Doug There's a couple of laptops for sale right now on XMR Bazaar. Is it all the same guy? I know it's different people. Linux laptop. Yeah, the reason I was asking if you use StreamYard, for xmrchat .com, if you want to start using it, because it's very slick with StreamYard. Doug We are trying to make it slick with OBS as well, where you can very easily just show the Super Chats. Vlad Also, for the people who came later, buy your Monerotopia tickets and use promo code VLAB24 for 10% off. Doug And by doing that, you will be supporting Vlad's trip down to Mexico. I'm giving a percentage of all tickets sold by his promo code. So please go ahead and do that. And all XMR super chats today are going to Vlad as well. Doug We will get you down there, Vlad, no matter what the price of Monero is, we will get you down to Mexico. I promise. Ay caramba. So yeah, man, I think we covered a lot of ground here. Anything you want to get out there to the Monero community? Vlad Yeah, I just bought another Monero. Doug So what are you at right now for the day, for the stream? You bought like what, like five Monero? Vlad four or five, let me check. Doug All right, I guess we gotta keep the stream going. I wanna see how many we can get you to buy. Vlad No, no, no, no. I'm gonna run out of money soon. We'll do we'll do a marathon. Yeah. No, but this was fun. I guess I got canceled by a bunch of people who will be watching this making short clips with me buying Monero call me a trader. Vlad I don't know. It's fun. But at the same time, it's so paradoxical when you say you're free market maximalist, and you're also Bitcoin maximalist. How does that work? Like you think there should not be something else that exists for another use per use case or purpose. Vlad Someone said brb getting first closed on lightning. Yeah, I know. That happened to me. When I think it was 2021. And I was running a lightning node. And we had this very pure initiative. It was called rings of fire, where we were opening channels with each other in a ring structure. Vlad So we had about seven people opening channels with each other. And then we were connected to other rings to create routes between us. So maybe that someone had the connection with bit refill, and someone else had a connection with block stream, and so on and so forth. Vlad You could get a pretty good route. And you could also route somebody else's transactions. It was nice. But at one point, it started breaking and it was also after there was this initiative by Renee Picard who said how about we set the fees to zero, so that we are true missionaries of this project and we don't do it for any money. Vlad We do it for free and we get better chances and we we scale the network we make it much more efficient. Of course, it did not work out. Of course, the hardware that I was using was underpowered for what I was trying to achieve. Vlad Of course, this whole narrative of passive income, which are lightning node fell apart. And I think I was making like 30 satoshis per month, basically routing one transaction every day. Speaker 4 Hmm. Vlad Routing on Tor, bad idea. Because the network is going to automatically pick the fastest route. And if you're slowing down the transaction, you're going to get ranked. Your node is going to get down ranked. Vlad And you don't route too much. So not a great idea. I think I wasted a lot of money balancing channels and trying to open new channels with other people. I got forced closed. I had other issues with the node shutting down. Vlad You have to be online all the time. So if I had any electricity outage in my house and that was happening at least once a week and I had to buy UPS, I was not a very good node. My reputation was not great anymore. Vlad So I had to give up. And then I discovered Phoenix Wallet and Breeze and Blix and all of these cool wallets that are basically LSPs, which stands for Lightning Service Providers. And it's cool. It's still non -custodial, but you're using somebody else's infrastructure. Vlad And it's just, I don't know. It's not why I got into Bitcoin in the first place. And there's also this whole new class of e -cash and what you call this, Fedi -Mens. Doug pheroments. Vlad And that's banking reinvented. It sort of defeats the purpose of everything I want for Bitcoin to be. And if people throw a lot of money at this, a lot of fiat, and they say, yeah, this is the future of money. Vlad This is how the global South is going to be making transactions. You go to these community leaders and you empower them to become the bankers of the entire community. And they assume that they're going to be honest, which I think they will not. Vlad The incentive is too great for someone to just run away with the money and live a good life somewhere else and never get extradited. And the state doesn't care much about Bitcoin. If it was stealing the local currency, I think they would make much more of an effort to extradite someone as opposed to running away with some Bitcoin. Vlad So I don't see this being successful, but they raised a lot of money. There seems to be a lot of hype behind it. And in the meantime, someone sends another tip and said she's getting first close on lightning. Doug No, I was the same guy. I just wanted to get eight on tip. That's very, very generous. Nine dollars and ninety eight cents. You know, the only time I use lightning actually was last Monero Topia. Peter Todd insisted that I paid him in in Bitcoin on Lightning Network because I owed him money to reimburse, you know, because he came to be a speaker or whatever. Doug And I wanted to pay him in Monero. He I got him to accept half in Monero and the other half is via Lightning. And I used what was the Phoenix? Yeah, I use Phoenix. And I was not impressed by the process at some point. Doug He sent me. I went to send him the the big first of all, obviously, I had to move Bitcoin into it and I got I had to pay like whatever the Bitcoin fee was. Right. It was like five dollars at the time to just move my Bitcoin into into Phoenix to onboard it to Lightning. Doug And then the the fee itself for the Lightning Network was more significant than I thought it would be. It was more than a Monero transaction. And then when I went to send him the the Bitcoin he had sent me, I guess, a an invoice, an invoice. Doug Yeah, OK, an invoice because that was foreign to me, like an invoice. Like what the fuck? And when I finally went to send him, I guess the invoice had expired and I couldn't send him the Bitcoin. I was like, this is not this. Doug This is this is not a good first experience with Lightning Network. And then I was like, all right, here's my Monero address. Just send the Monero and you can send it any time and it will cost a fraction of a cent. Doug It'll be completely private. I just I just, you know, I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't know. Not not a fan. Not a fan of the Lightning Network. Vlad Well, I do understand that it serves a very specific use case, instead of having multiple transactions between two parties, you open channels, you're going to have two on -chain transactions for opening and two on -chain transactions for closing on both sides. Vlad But you're going to have maybe 50 transactions between the two of them, and then they settle. For this use case, I think it's excellent. But for the way in which it was presented as the only scaling solution that Bitcoin needs, and the future of money and something that's better than Visa, I mean, you tap your card with Visa or MasterCard or American Express. Vlad If it fails one or two times, you're going to switch to something else. That's how it works. You're not going to accept the fact that you're trying to pay for your groceries and there's a failure in the payment. Vlad That's not acceptable for everyday payments. And then you're going to deal with lightning, and then you assume that the future of commerce is going to be built around something where people look at each other and they shrug and they say, OK, let me wait to find another route. Vlad Or maybe I'm not connected to the right Electrum server or whatever, or my LSP is malfunctioning. Or maybe I don't have a proper internet connection. You just need something that works 100 percent of the times. Vlad And that's not lightning. It relies too much on all of these network factors. Doug Right. And most people are using it in a way where it's custodial, right? Vlad Oh, that one actually has a higher success rate, but it's not really using Lightning. It's more like settling the balance sheet on the custodian's account system. So it's silly. But at the same time, people created e -cache on top of custodial Lightning. Vlad I know the guy. His name is Calle. Maybe you should invite him to Monerotopia, because he's a big privacy guy. Writing that down. Yeah, what is his name? Calle, C -L -E -L -L -E. Thank you. Doug How do you spell it again? Vlad Say it again. Kale, C -A -L -L -E. Got it. He's the creator of eCash on Bitcoin. And basically- Yeah, I don't know much about eCash. Go ahead. He started from this reality that people use Lightning Custodially and said, why don't I create this system to create mints that make payments anonymous so that you're going to be able to have some privacy against the custodian? Vlad That's eCash as designed by David Chom. And it's pretty smart, but I don't see how this scales Bitcoin. And I don't see this as a solution to scale Bitcoin at all. It's interesting for privacy, but it's not really Bitcoin. Vlad To me, Bitcoin means self custody. It means sovereignty. It's something that right now is closer to the Monero project because it seems like the community and the developers are willing to move forward with something that comes close to the purpose of the project as opposed to defending the limitations and saying you should use something else instead. Vlad Anyway, I just bought another Monero. Thanks for watching! Doug We got some more tips here too, so don't worry, you're making Monero as well, in addition to buying it. Someone should make a collab. Vlad of the moments when I said I just bought another Monero. It should be amazing. Doug Mandetta tips 25 cents. Hey Douglas, can you please get Pierre from Bank Exit Collective to Manero Topia, Mexico City. Collective has 3 ,000 plus French people that are into Manero. He's an active Manero community member. Doug You would think I would have hurt. I don't think I know this guy. All right, yeah. I've definitely, definitely down for that. I'll put them on my list. Pierre from Bank Exit Collective. Have you ever heard of that, Vlad? Vlad No. Doug Yeah, either. Very cool, very cool. I will try to reach out or Mondad, if you want to reach out on my behalf, please do. You can have them email me. No, it seems like Vlad He left a Telegram username. It's t .me slash sotidebunk, which means leave the bank. Okay, yeah, there you go. Doug I will look that up later. Also, if you ever want to contact just manerotopia at protonmail .com, if you ever want to contact me regarding the conference or tell other people to contact me, just have them hit me up at manerotopia at protonmail .com. Doug He tipped again of saying we didn't get well, we did get the previous tip. So we got we got another 50 cents out of him. And then he tipped again. I know Manero Bro tipped a dollar. I don't believe we shall ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. Doug That is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government. All we can do is this is this is the quote of Milton Friedman, Milton Friedman, where he's basically describing Manero. Thank you. Thank you, Manero, bro, for that dollar. Doug Flat man, this is this has been great. You're making a lot of Manero here. You're you're buying Manero. You're getting Manero tips. And it. Vlad If you're buying your ticket to Monerotopia, which you should, in Mexico, it's in November, use promo code BLAD24 for 10% off, and you can buy more tequila. Doug We will have tequila like we did last year. We had, we had a little, a little bar down there, obviously, uh, you know, for sale with Monero. If you buy the VIP ticket, we give you a cup, or at least that's what we did. Doug Let we'll figure something out. You basically get, you get alcohol for cheap, for cheaper, perhaps. Vlad Hayek. I just proved that. It's from Hayek. Doug Okay, it's from Hayek. Yes Monero bro again tipped again. Oh, he's finishing the quote All we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop Frederick Hayek Yes I predicted that many years ago What else man what else any anything else you want to get out there Vlad Well, check out the Bitcoin takeover podcast. I have some very interesting interviews, which are not, how should I put it? You're not going to hear some of these people anywhere else. And if you do, you're not going to hear them talk about the same stuff. Vlad I do my best to have a unique show, just like this one is. I don't think you have much competition in the Monero space, but I do have a lot of competition in the Bitcoin space and I purposely make it for myself. Vlad I don't care much about other people's expectations, what they want to hear. I just want to interview people. I want to interview for my own, my own selfish reasons. My upcoming guests are going to be Charlie Shrem and early September. Vlad That's going to be a live stream. I already recorded with Marty Malmy, who is the first Bitcoin developer ever. And the first believer in Bitcoin, he was basically Satoshi's little assistant at one point, writing web pages and trying to educate people and supporting Satoshi when he was trying to introduce the project to the Peer -to -Peer Foundation website. Vlad And it's a very nice interview about the first year of existence in the case of Bitcoin. And who else do I have? Ben Ark, creator of Hell and Bits, who works on Lightning, but at the same time is really open to side chains. Vlad I have this economist who worked at the Bank of Japan. Wait, wait, wait. Why do I forget his name? It's 3 in the morning here. I have his face in my head. He created quantitative easing. Quantitative easing. Doug created the concept of quantitative reasoning. Vlad Yeah, obviously, when he was at the Bank of Japan. And he was also very influential. His writings were really read during the 2008 financial crisis. And why am I such an idiot? And I don't remember his name. Vlad Because I did interview him, Werner. That's his last name. So he is a big deal because right now he likes Bitcoin. And he likes this entire economy that's based on proof of work and community driven assets as opposed to big corporate banks. Vlad It seems like he climbed the ladder of the banking system. And he was at the top of the game at one point. And he gave up and realized that he doesn't want to be a part of that. He doesn't want to lie to himself that he enjoys that. Vlad And he goes to these Bitcoin conferences sometimes. And he was also involved in some DAO on Ethereum. He gave up on that. Because I guess he realized that it wasn't exactly what he thought it was. But he's pushing for small banks, small community banks. Vlad That's his idea of what developing economies should have. And we're getting much less of that. If you are banked for whatever reason, you should not be. But if you still have a bank account, like I do, I have a bank account for paying taxes. Vlad Only one, which I've had since I was 14 years old. And I used to get my allowance from the state in that account. But I keep that open. And I do realize that it's becoming way more corporate. And we get fewer banks buying out the others. Vlad And we get to this very nasty environment where you don't have much of a choice. And it's not very competitive. So maybe that this is a microcosm that's worth exploring. Maybe that we will reinvent banking, but I would prefer not to. Vlad Maybe it's better to not do any banking at all and try to build this peer to peer voluntary economy. Take it to the next level. Make the most of it. Richard Verner is the name. Carlos Verner. Congratulations. Doug Yeah, college Gonzales is on top of it. He's reading your mind Manero broke my fact checker. He's your factory. Is he on all your streams telling Manero bro tipped the dollar? Manero declared public enemy number one by the IRS 2020 joined the financial revolution. Doug Yeah Um, this is true. This is true. That was uh, a great indication of its success when the irs Put money towards trying to figure out how to trace manero You should get get get a get a manero guest. Doug Obviously, you know, you had fluffy pony back in the day That was that was amazing. Um maybe get uh Vlad Wish I got fluffy pony on my own podcast at the time. It was for a crypto insider. I was working. Oh, right. Okay Doug And so maybe get fluffy now fluffy hasn't had plus it probably hasn't done an interview in a lot. That would be killing Vlad get him I was in his DMS bugging him saying come on because there's I mean she really come Doug I'm on the narrow talk first, but for you Vlad, I'd let it slide, I'd let it slide. Vlad Tari, he launched a lot of interesting stuff. So he's doing media, but he doesn't seem interested in talking about Monero anymore. Maybe it's because he doesn't want to look like a benevolent dictator or something, because for a while he was the maintainer of the project and the loudest voice and the biggest advocate. Vlad And he doesn't want to be, maybe it's healthier to allow the project to decentralize. But I do want to interview him about some of his early days. Not too many people know he was part of this cult within Bitcoin that was called the most serene Republic. Vlad And it was basically an organization which had membership and you had to pay an annual fee to be part of that. And they discussed, they kept all of their communications within this IRC channel. And the head of this organization was another Romanian whose name was Mitcho Popescu. Vlad And he supposedly drowned four years ago, I think, or three years ago in Costa Rica. Doug Yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard about that, yeah. Vlad He was this very strange guy. He came not too far away from where I was born. And he discovered Bitcoin and then he created his own exchange, which was called MPEX. And he was one of the first people to price Bitcoin against commodities. Vlad And you're able to trade Bitcoin against derivatives of some of these commodities like sugar or oil or gold or whatever. So it was a pretty cool idea in the early days. And at one point he claimed to have owned 1 million BTC. Doug Wow, he's a 1 million BTC, that's amazing. Vlad Yeah, and he was posting pictures with strippers and whatever he had his own blog where he was dunking on people making fun of them. He was writing a lot. He enjoyed writing like diaries and explorations of his dark ideas. Vlad And he became famous for some memes like at one point, I wait, it's been 10 minutes, I just bought one more Monero. At one point, Doug And big big booty Latina just tipped a dollar loves Manero topia. Thank you big booty Latina Vlad Oh, there's a lot to love about it. So thank you, big booty Latina. I'm happy my girlfriend hasn't heard that. Maybe she will. Doug over his shoulder. Any chance you bring your girlfriend to Monero topia? I guess I guess it depends on how many how many Monero tips you get. Vlad Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's pretty expensive. And she's a med student for her to skip class. It's not very nice. I'm trying to. Doug I love your my girlfriend tweets, by the way, you do a good job of that. Vlad I tried, but basically I'm showing off, so I'm presenting what she cooks for me, but I show off this mug, which says Bitcoin takeover podcast, so it's like hidden advertisement, you know, because the best ads or the best t -shirts are the ones that show something to which everyone agrees, and then there's a tiny logo. Vlad And people are going to pay attention to the tiny logo after they see something which, to which they agree, you know, something very nice. Like a puppy, or a nice cat, you have a nice cat on your t -shirt and then you see the brand. Vlad It's the same. You see the cooking, which, of course, you're going to love the dishes, they look nice, and then you see the logo of the podcast, and you're going to be reminded that you should subscribe to the Bitcoin takeover podcast. Vlad So yeah, it's actually marketing for the show, but she actually cooks for me, and it's great. Doug She seems like a very nice girlfriend, man. Based on the tweets, she does a lot of nice things for you. Is she into Bitcoin? Vlad Well it's interesting because she's from Iran and there's no way for her parents to send her fiat and I will leave it to that. I think they use USDT a lot because locally it's easier to source it. There are a bunch of guys who sell it and it's pretty tough. Vlad I guess she changed my perspective about what this is about. In the beginning I was like why do you use that coin but then I was not as judgmental because it's very hard to find Bitcoin. Speaker 4 Mm hmm. We can work mine it. Vlad if you want, because electricity is very cheap, but the access to A6 is not great. Doug the stability, right? If you're actually sending it to people that need money, it's a bit of a risk when you send them something like Bitcoin that could go down. Vlad should find an audience in Iran and get people to CPU mine one arrow because makes a lot of sense for them but then you're gonna get into more trouble yeah Doug I will, I guess I probably shouldn't say more than I, I probably won't even say anything, but yeah, I know. Vlad This book's coming to our conference. Doug You tell me, I'm sure they are, and they're welcome to join and participate. Vlad tickets, which you should get VIP tickets and use promo code BLAB24, please. Doug Yeah, if you're spook and you're coming, you should definitely at least buy, I mean, I would hope they buy VIP that if you're going to, if you're going to try to infiltrate, that's where the infiltration would take place. Doug It'd be at the VIP dinner. So, uh, spring for the VIP ticket, if you're going to come down there and you're a spook, you're just not doing it right. No, that's horrible. But I'm sure they're among us, right? Doug You know, you, but it shouldn't matter, right? Where nobody's doing anything illegal or it's playing around with open source code. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Well, I think. Vlad So Carlos Gonzalez is going to fact check me, but I think it was Eric Hughes, who said that privacy without the social layer that normalizes privacy is useless. Because you can always single out the people trying to protect their privacy. Vlad So it does need people like you and me, boring everyday people, no offense, to make it normal. Like Naomi Brockwell is trying to do with VPNs and whatever she does content on. And there's another guy, all things secured. Vlad I watch him on YouTube sometimes. And he also does a great job. We do need to explain that there's nothing wrong with wanting others to leave you alone. And it's a funny story about myself, because my mom told me that the first words that I put together, of course, a child learns words like food, mom, dad, whatever. Vlad But the first words that I actually put together was lasamonpache, which in Romanian means leave me alone. So I was telling her this, the first. Yeah, exactly. So I guess I was born like this. So the state, I mean, my government should be more accepting of this, because we used to have a communist country where all the phone calls were surveilled and listened to and tapped. Vlad Your neighbors were collaborating with the secret police. So you had to be very careful what you're saying and to whom you're saying it. If you're angry about your boss or the regime or whatever, there was no way for you to voice your opinion. Vlad So I think my government should be more accepting given this recent experience with four decades of communism. And understand that I'm trying to protect myself from something that my grandparents and my parents experienced, but they had no idea, but no choice but to be part of this. Vlad I should have the means to protect ourselves from something like that. Doug 100 100% man. The fact that they're, you know, there's people that are like, you know, I have nothing to hide. I mean, it's, that just is like, this is just a low IQ statement. I mean, they obviously believe in privacy, they're just not thinking about it. Doug I mean, do they close the bathroom door when they go to the bathroom? Do they do they broadcast all their bank transactions to the world? I mean, Vlad No, but there's more to it. You go. I think a better example is when you go to the corner store or Convenience store call it whatever and you take your wallet, right? Do I have my wallet here? Anyway, let's say that this is my wallet right here and you open it, right? Vlad You don't want everyone to be able to see how much money you have you don't want to the person behind you To know that you have a lot of money in your wallet these days I guess people have succumbed to the big brother and They pay with their cards But if you have a lot of money You don't want the person next to you to know that you have a lot of money You don't want your neighbor to know that you have a lot of money Doug Yeah, I mean, the more extreme example is imagine if your thoughts were broadcast to the world. I don't think there's anybody who would want to live in a world where all their thoughts were broadcast and published. Doug And essentially, you know, money is a form of action. And for all your transactions to be broadcast to the world is basically, you know, a form of allowing the world to peer into your thoughts and who you are. Doug And I think every human would agree with that basic concept of wanting to maintain their individuality. Privacy is just so core to being human. The fact that they've managed to trick people into thinking that it's a essential to humanity. Vlad It's also funny that the most successful people around the world are also the ones who pay the most for their their own privacy. For example, Elon Musk, he is renting this private jet that he uses to travel around and he doesn't want people to track it. Vlad But of course, there are a bunch of websites that do that and they do it for fun. And you also have a bunch of billionaires who buy yachts and they travel around the world. And these are also tracked and they do their best to have privacy for the simple reason that they know they want to have some peace and quiet once in a while. Vlad Of course, they're public figures and they have to deal with the celebrity status, but they do desire to have privacy. And when they go to a place, they don't want people to talk about it. They don't want paparazzi or whatever to pose them in their most mundane, everyday situations. Vlad So I guess to some degree, privacy is a luxury and always has been. I guess the least fortunate people are also the ones who can't afford to have any privacy and they're always going to be public. But I think with this technology that we have, we should make it affordable and accessible to everyone. Vlad Anyway, I just bought another Monero. Doug Vlad, this has been fantastic, we're rounding out, we're over two hours, we're over two hours and you're probably running out of Bitcoin to purchase Monero with right now. Are you using it? What are you using to swap into Monero? Doug I guess you don't have to tell us. Vlad I tried to use, oh, which currency? It's BTC. I said it. You're using BTC? Okay. I tried to use Cake Wallet. I love your Cake Wallet, but you failed me this time. I tried to swap using their built -in service. Vlad For some reason, the swapping service was displaying that I have zero balance. And then I just sent out the funds to the Spear to Pure Exchange. And right now I'm just using the Spear to Pure Exchange to place orders and buy. Vlad My order got filled. During this episode, I bought nine. Doug using like using like bisque or something or you know you want to say we're using yeah we got Vlad or may not use bisque. Doug Okay. Mo tips a dollar. I choose my pension in Monero. And if I die before I can spend it all, I feel happy to take it with me to heaven. So there is less supply. What makes it more in value for the ones that hold and believe in it? Doug Oh, thank you, Mo. Thank you for the dollar and thank you for sacrificing your Monero and taking it with you to your final resting place. Vlad He says he wants to take it to Haven, not Heaven. Doug Oh, okay, is that what he said? Vlad Yeah, there's the E that's missing from heaven. So maybe he has this haven where he wants to take it. Doug I feel happy to take it to Haven. Wait, we got another one. Mondatta tips 50 cents. Monero is pretty useful for private cross -border money transfers. Monero can potentially replace MoneyGram. Vlad I'm not sure if it can scale to replace right now, but for the people who care about this, it works. Doug Yeah, I mean, it's currently scaling in line with the actual demand. Obviously, if a billion people overnight tried to use Monero, it wouldn't work. But it's built to scale. Thoughts on that? Thoughts on Monero scalability, on -chain scalability, given dynamic block size? Vlad Well, it's going to be interesting to watch it and see what's happening. I think it's going to be useful to integrate some sort of pruning for the purpose of not bloating the blockchain, not making it too big. Vlad But at the same time, I'm not so well versed to understand to which extent that's possible. But there is no reason to store all the data, all the information about all the transactions that ever happened. Vlad And I do know that the ring signatures make transactions rather big. In size. But when you're going to replace that with Zcash tech, I think it's going to kick ass. I'm actually bullish on the narrow. Vlad That's why I bought so much. Doug Mo, yeah, I mean, transaction sizes will still, you know, with full chain membership proofs, it's, you know, well, it's still transactions will still be heavy compared, compared to Bitcoin's Mo tips, a dollar share your love, your knowledge, your money to those who share with you. Doug We are all one and one for all be a hero of the apartment. All right. Thank you, Mo. Another dollar. People are people are sending you lots of tips here, lad. Petite ebony tips. I wonder, I wonder if Petite ebony is related to, uh, what's it like? Doug Big booty latina. Big booty latina is this, uh, uh, two, 2021 cents FYI, Monero bro, USA had to use violent force to get their freedom from the British. Yeah, man. Vlad Yes. Wait, who is Monero, bro? Doug uh i guess he's talking to both of us or me i don't know usa had are you talking no there was another guy Vlad Monero bro, who said, yeah, public enemy number one by the IRS in 2020. So there's a conversation that's taking place. Yes. Doug yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I don't think anybody disagrees with that. Don't comply, use Monero. I think, I think, I mean, do you think it would be bullish for Monero if Kamala Harris won the presidency? Vlad Oh yeah, that's my bet. That's why I'm buying Monero. I honestly hope that I'm going to lose with my bet. And it's going to be great for the entire industry. And we get Donald Trump for four years. But if we get Kamala Harris for eight years, I expect that to be catastrophic for businesses in the Bitcoin sector. Vlad So if that happens, I'm gonna go much deeper into Monero. The other thing is so during Monero topia, is that before or after the elections? Doug It's right, it's right after the election. Vlad My man. It's gonna be thrilling. Doug It's going to be amazing. You're going to be the emcee and your and your your privacy Account is going to be going through through the roof your privacy fund. Um Yeah about unrealized capital gains, I don't know how how true the rumors are but there's been like chatter that you know their her administration is looking to Potentially implement unrealized capital gains. Doug I think that's I don't think there'd ever be the political will to to implement that but oh my god, would that be catastrophic in so many ways and That would open up a lot of people's eyes to thinking where could I put my money where? Doug the government can't come and extract unrealized capital gains from me Vlad I honestly don't know. And here it's always been like this. If you send an invoice for something and you get paid in Bitcoin, for example, and use the state invoice system or whatever, and you have a registration number, you're going to pay tax on that regardless if you sold it or not. Doug So wait, if you receive Bitcoin, you're holding Bitcoin, you pay tax on receiving it as income, but you're saying you also pay unrealized capital gains tax if the price of Bitcoin goes up but you don't sell it? Vlad Oh, I gotta look into that. I don't think so. Doug No, I don't think so. But yeah, because they're talking about unrealized capital gains. So this scenario where you buy Monero at $10, somebody gives you Monero and it's worth $10 and you hold it and then whatever a year later, it's worth $100, you don't sell it. Doug But the government's asking you to pay capital gains on that $90 growth. I don't know where in the world they're experimenting with it. I'm sure there are places where it's already being experimented with. Vlad maybe France or some country that's more socialist. I'd be thinking. Doug the impact, right? The impact that we'll have on the stock market, on real estate, right? You own a home, you have to start paying capital gains on a home that you don't even sell. That would be... Vlad But I think this has been part of the conversation quite a few times in the past and it never happened. It's just a fun way for the left to say that they're going to do something about the rich, which they vilify, but at the same time, they take a lot of money from them. Vlad So are they really going to go against the people who fund their campaigns? Or maybe that they will do this because it, so basically it's just like progressive taxation and it's going to strengthen the status quo and make it harder for you to get rich in the future. Vlad And maybe you're going to have a bunch of people parking their wealth into Monero and they're not going to pay any capital gains. Doug that's exactly what I'm getting at. I think it'd be quite bullish for Monero if Kamala Harris got elected and started inching the U .S. government towards unrealized capital gains. Where could you put your money at that point where you wouldn't have to pay? Vlad Well, there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering if that happens. And I do see a lot of businesses not doing so well anymore. But, you know, it's scary when you realize how much of the industry has gambled on Trump winning, and if that doesn't happen, we're all screwed. Vlad I think there's going to be some retribution or some backlash from the new administration that realizes that these people funded Trump with so much money. Anyway, I just bought another Monero. I'm at 10 right now. Doug You're at 10? Holy shit, man. You're catching up to... Wait, wait, wait. Vlad So just for the record, I've been lying. I haven't bought any Monero. I don't know what Monero is. I never touched it. I don't even know what I'm talking about. Okay, so don't come for me asking to pay tax or something. Vlad I don't have anything. Doug Are you currently on a boat right now? That's that's about to sink Uh for the for those invited to one For those just tuning in um Vlad will be our host down at Monero topia And if you want to help him get to Monero topia to pay for his ticket And you are buying a ticket to Monero topia use promo code vlad 24 you'll get 10 off and vlad will get a percentage of the of the ticket sale Just putting that out there one last time Dude, Doug uh super excited that we made this happen i've oh i've always wanted to talk to you I've like I feel like we we've chatted I think in the past through twitter a little bit here and there. No, I think Vlad invited me back in April or May. You invited me because I basically put an address. I think I received about a quarter of a narrow, which I thought was cool. I think that was like 50 bucks. Anyway, I was excited at the time and I was still new to the space and you reached out to me and you said, hey, do you want to get on the show? Vlad But you said you're going to be available in a couple of months and that was a long time. I think by the time you were available, we both forgot about it. We moved on and did something else. No, it's fine. Vlad It happens like this sometimes. But I think you've got me in a much better situation right now. When I have more skin in the game or do I? I don't know. Maybe I'm just playing an MMORPG right now, pretending to own something which I don't. Vlad But yeah, it's a lot of fun. And I do like the Monero community because they're ideologically pure. Doug Awesome, man. I'm glad you have found your found your way to Monero. You know, like I said, I have been watching you for quite some time, mostly because I guess I discovered you when you interviewed fluffy back in the day. Doug And yeah, we always want to chat with you. So appreciate you coming on. Greatly appreciate you being the Monero topia MC. That's, that's, that's super, super awesome. Super cool. I think you're gonna do a great job. Doug And yeah, look forward to chillin with you down in Mexico. Vlad Yeah, buy more Monero and use promo code VLAD24 when you buy your ticket for Monero -topia. 10% off, man. Think about it. Doug Fantastic, Vlad, we'll leave it here. We'll kill the stream according to the numbers here. We have 794 live views, which is fantastic. I think, you know, like we said, I don't know if those numbers might be off, but we'll go with it. Doug We got 800 live views right now. Thank you to everybody that tuned in. Vlad also want to issue a challenge to anyone else who comes on the show try to beat my record to stack more Monero not stack to buy more Monero during this interview i like that my record i reached 10 during this interview beat my record buy more Monero Doug I don't think anybody's gonna come near that, but you never know. Reach out to me if you wanna be that person to come on Manero Talk and beat Vlad's record of purchasing 10 Manero during the show. Although we don't really know, right? Doug We don't really know if Vlad purchased anything. He can just be playing games over there. And that is the beauty of Manero. All right, Vlad, I'm gonna kill it here. Thank you so much, man. I'll see you on X. Doug I'm sure we'll be chatting. You're welcome anytime. We do our Manero -topia shows on the weekend on every Saturday at 11 a .m. Eastern. If you ever wanna jump on, jump on stage, just pop in. I'm sure people would love to have you there as well, so. Doug Anything you wanna shill, one last chance to shill or put the word out on anything? Vlad Buy more Monero, listen to this podcast, which is really nice. Come to Monero -Topia, use promo code VLAD24 for 10% off, and also check out the Bitcoin Takeover podcast. That's it. I'm out. Doug Cheers, man. And your magazine that you're putting, you're moving forward with that, right? The Bitcoin, I mean, the privacy. Vlad Yeah, yeah. So basically, I put together a bunch of people from different projects who are interested in privacy. I did not curate them. But I think the ultimate curation is going to be the quality of the content that they write. Vlad And I did get worried today when someone said, How about you make money from ads from people who write articles to promote their projects? Now realize I don't want that. I don't want advertorials. I want pure signal, pure content, coming from people who understand how the technology works and why it's useful. Vlad I don't want to be someone's shill. And I don't want someone else use my platform to show something which doesn't do what it says it does. So I guess I do need some peer review. If you're an expert in these technologies, maybe you should join the group also hit me up. Vlad I'm going to add you. And if there's going to be any sort of advertisements, I'm gonna put full page ads, which are obviously ads, and are honest about what they are, as opposed to trying to insert advertisements into the content. Vlad That's not an honest way of presenting anything. And also, I'm going to launch the magazine at Monero topia. That's you Doug I was just gonna ask that's fantastic. So we'll potentially have like printed printed copies down there Vlad That's what I want. I hope you know some print shop locally because it's going to be more efficient. We get it. Doug Yeah, well we could help you figure that out for sure. We could definitely help you figure that out Vlad I set a deadline for writing articles for the 1st of October. Then I'm gonna get my guide to do the graphics and do some editing to make sure that everything is up to the standard. And then I hope that by the 1st of November, I'm gonna have everything done. Vlad I'm gonna publish the digital edition. I'm gonna open source it, and then I'm gonna launch everything at Monero -Topia. Fantastic. Physical prints. So you're gonna be able to buy some at the location. Doug If, as you're doing that, let me know who's contributing to it because maybe those might end up being good people to try to get to come down to speak as well. Maybe we get somebody from that as well, one of your contributors. Vlad Everyone is in the face where they say they're gonna write. Let's see who actually writes. I have Amir Taki. I'm excited that he is one of the most active people in the chat. I have someone from Monero, someone from Zcash, someone from Zano, someone from Nim, someone from... Vlad Oh, beautiful. What's the other one? I think someone from Pirate Chain. Doug Okay, so it's it's perfect crossover with Monero topia. Vlad Litecoin, someone who wants to write about confidential transactions on liquid and someone who wants to write about silent payments. Someone who wants to write about Dandelion++. I think there's a lot of stuff that was proposed, but I hope that there's going to be an execution of it because that's what matters, not just words. Vlad Someone reached out to me and said, hey Vlad, I want to sponsor your magazine. I told him I'm not going to sell air. I'm going to wait until I actually see the articles being written, and then I can get to the part where I ask people, would you like to sponsor this, as opposed to trying to sell something that does not exist. Vlad I'm going to write one or two articles myself, one about the Freedom Gains Fund and another one about something more practical. Doug about how you've lost all your Monero after buying it on air in public. Vlad Oh, damn you, Biz. Doug I'm glad I'm gonna kill it here. Thank you so much, man. We'll be in touch This is fantastic and thank you Thank you to everybody that tuned in and sent all these generous tips to Vlad through XMR chat greatly appreciate that and See you guys all soon. Doug Thank you Vlad. Appreciate it. Well, good night. Cheers, man.