Latest / Monero Talk / MoneroTopia Conf debrief and BTC TKVR Privacy Magazine with Vlad Costea! | EPI 333

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MoneroTopia Conf debrief and BTC TKVR Privacy Magazine with Vlad Costea! | EPI 333 · Monero Talk

• Doug Alrighty, Vlad, what's going on, man? Hello! Vlad It was good to be here again. Doug Yeah, I feel like we made it out the other side, right? We were all talk a couple of months ago, and then Monerothopia actually happened. I'd say we survived, we thrived, right? I think we did well. Vlad we did pretty well. Now that I think about it, basically when I was on your show a few months ago, I bought someone narrow at $150 and I bought one coin every 10 minutes. Someone actually did like a collage of all the moments when I said I just bought more Monero. And right now the price, what's the price? I know that this community is very allergic to the idea number go up, but it's important for your money to buy more goods and services. It's one with 90 ports, so almost $50 gain for every coin that I bought. Not bad. Doug Not too shabby, not too shabby, and it's in the form of untraceable digital cash, right? I add a little extra value points for that. Vlad I remember when people were joking that Monero is the private stable coin. Doug For quite some time, man. Somebody said, like, Monero hadn't gone over 185 or whatever it was for, like, 900 days. I was surprised by that fact. I was like, wow. Didn't realize it was that long. Holy shit. I've been in the rabbit hole for so long. A lot of times has passed. But, yeah, I was excited to see the little pup. That was nice. It felt like we were due, right? I felt like Monero was due for a little something to catch up to everybody else. I was thinking maybe it has to do with, you know, the political atmosphere, Trump coming into office, the friendliness that we're supposedly going to see towards crypto and perhaps even towards, like, privacy tech. We had that recent judgment, right, for the tornado cash case that was positive for privacy tech. So I was thinking maybe, but I don't know, maybe it's just the market being the market, right? Like, there's usually never a reason for anything. Vlad I mean, Zinc and XANO and other privacy coins, they also pumped. But I would add that there is an extra element here because in France, they announced that they want some real-life gain. And that's basically the ultimate. Doug right that's what that's what Monero really popped it was like as soon as that news came out I was like like all the all the all the French Bitcoin bros are like you know us I grab a little bit more of this base twice Vlad tall, which means five to six. Doug a lot a lot of big Frito people came out of like I don't know I feel like came out it came out of France I know there's like there's like there's like you know there's a lot of Monero people definitely coming out of France as well they'd have Vlad Ledger which is one of the largest companies in the space e I'm not sure if Ledger supports Monero. They should I know Doug Uh, well, I think there is a way to do it, but it's not like super, I don't know. I don't want to misspeak on that. There's that new wallet that's coming out. Did you see that? The, the key, keystone wallet. Vlad out of them around my desk i'm searching for it right now i'm just saying how many Doug How many different wallets do you have? What do you- you have all- you have like all the major hardware wallets? I used to collect- Vlad at one point. I wanted to have one of these. I like quite a few of them but honestly I think the Trezor got it right the first time and after that it was just maybe some market thing potential or whatever that company saw and they just wanted to launch products to capitalize on this market that's growing. The original Trezor is still excellent but if you want to use Monero I think only the Trezor Model T is able to use it. Doug Yeah, I never used hardware while it's blue internet dude. We got to get you we got to get you another Vlad Yeah, I mean I was looking at the Monero Nodo in the background and I was thinking you know This episode can be for Christmas gifts because I just got the second batch of the privacy magazine If you have a hundred of those during this live stream, I can actually try to sell them to people who are interested Oh, if in cake wallets, you can send private messages with shipping address or stuff like that. No No, what would be cast? Doug Yeah, no, no, no you can't you said There's nothing like that yet in cake. I mean on a protocol level. You can't do that as well There's nothing no way to do that, but that is it. That's a nice feature I've always dreamt of that like oh man like people miss you Vlad use transactions that would be so cool right Doug People misused the what was the field called the in Monero the You know, you know talking about the the the memo field Monero did have that memo field that was deprecated and people did miss you the payment ID and people did misuse that for Like sending messages, but yeah, there's no formal way of doing it In fact, I have in fact Peter Todd's email is forever memorialized in the Monero blockchain because of party we threw here in New York where we had where we asked people that were attending to Pay with Monero and then send their email address in their payment ID Encrypted and then that's how we would send them the address of where the party was So completely misusing it and yes, so we have Satoshi's email address baked into the Monero blockchain allegedly Vlad According to some documentary maker, I'm not buying it, but it's compelling to the Greek, like in the way in which it's presented. I think normies will look at that and we'll say, Oh, this is so convincing. And I guess Peter Todd, although he enjoys this because right now she's a conference headliner, he was not a conference headliner prior to this. He was just, Doug He was the Monero topi. We had him last we had him at the last Monero topi. And he was I loved having him there is a big I wanted to have them there. This is the you know, there's there's some hate out there. Peter, you know, like people have like their conspiracy theories with the guy writes and he was like a sad and whatnot. He's he's he's the guy that first turned me on to Monero. He was talking about it in like 2015 on a podcast. Monero was like less than a dollar. And he was talking about how it's, you know, trying to solve Bitcoin's fundability problem. And he was, you know, very positive about it at the time. And that's actually what that kind of really led me down. The Monero rabbit hole was, was hearing him first talk about it in like 2015. So a lot of a lot of respect. I personally have a lot of respect towards the guy. I don't know how anybody can write like, obviously, right. He's he's amazing. How old was he when he first got into Bitcoin? I mean, he was like, he's like, order now. No. Vlad But he's about 40 now, so. Doug I'll add it to the point, it was like in 2010, he was communicating, right? I think it was. Vlad He's more than 84 or 85, so he's 39 or 40. When she was communicating with Adam back and helped, Phoenix was about 13, but that's something entirely indifferent. Oh, yeah. Doug All right, just as impressive dude. You're 13 or 14 and you're communicating with Hal Finney before Bitcoin is invented. Like you're literally talking about battle with them. These are just these general concepts, right? That's amazing. That's amazing in my mind. You were a young guy when you got involved in Bitcoin. I didn't realize how young you are, right? You're pretty young dude. Vlad I'm 32 right now. I got into Bitcoin seriously when I was 25, but I read about a gallon like 22 Okay, I feel a bit angry at myself. No, I was 21 when I read about it I was like, this is so stupid. The government's gotta ban it. Why would anyone want to use this? Doug Yeah, I mean, obviously that was my, when I first heard about it, it was like when Silk Road went down and it was Senator Chuck Schumer was like talking to me like, we got this Bitcoin thing. I was like, whoa, what? I was like, this is interesting. But then I didn't stop to research it. I just assumed it was some alternative currency that was centralized, like, you know, like the other attempts that it would just be shut down. I didn't, like you said, it would just be shut down. I didn't stop to understand that it like they invented something here was like decentralized. I was like, that didn't happen, unfortunately, until till later. Vlad You know, I can tell you're not part of the cult, because if you were, you wouldn't say invented, you would say discovered. Yeah, like, of course, Bitcoin is like this mathematical discovery that's been, I mean, I get the point. Cyberpunks wanted to invent this, but the way in which Cyberpunks wanted to do it was to create stablecoins. They did not think of free market money, they just wanted something private. I think Monero is much closer to that idea, because it has unlimited supply. It doesn't care about anything really, except for being private and they sick resist anyone. Doug Well, unlimited supply, I think, it has limited supply. At any moment in time, a narrow supply is limited, and no, it's never unlimited unless we exist for an unlimited amount of time, right? So to say it has an infinite supply or a limit, you know what I'm saying? I think it shouldn't be described as that. Vlad Of course it's finite because it's going to stop the moment when people Doug or not. Monero's supply is finite at any point in time, right? Right now, there's less Monero than Bitcoin, and at any other point in time, its supply is finite. Vlad I guess this also goes back to the conversation or the debate between what it means to be scarce and what it means to be limited in supply. Because well, those those. Doug Things can mean the same, right? They're both, you could be, yeah, anything that's limited in, well, not anything that's limited in supply is scarce, but Monero is definitely, I would say, both limited in supply and scarce. It's definitely scarce. Vlad For example, gold, you don't know how much gold is out there, and there's always someone else who's mining more. Yeah, but it's, it's, but it's... Doug And theoretically, there could be an infinite amount of it, and I'm sure there is, but it's scarce at this moment in time for humanity. We don't have access to an endless amount of gold, right? Vlad So our time in this world is scarce because we don't know exactly when we're going to die but at the same time we know we have a certainty that there is a limit. Doug Yeah, I mean, it took for me, that's a lot of the problem with Monero is when you think of the concepts that Monero are built upon or the aspects of it that make it different than Bitcoin are another level of abstraction and thinking. And that's why it's hard to get people to care, we care about Monero, we understand the problems it's trying to solve, privacy and fungibility. But for a lot of people, that's just like, I don't know, it's too abstract. And just in terms of its supply, Bitcoin, it's only 21 million, got to catch them all. It's an easy, quick thing, people can understand that. Like, wait a minute, there's only 21 million. But that doesn't make it, in my mind, mathematically, any more scarce than Monero, if Monero were to become adopted as digital cash, it would be just theoretically, just as scarce, you're going to reach that equilibrium, whether there's cap supply, or there's a trickle, and there's always demand supply. So it's just a little bit more abstract. But in my mind, I really don't see the difference. Vlad It's also interesting because in Monero, if I'm not mistaken, the fees don't go to the miners. I mean the transaction fees. They get burned. Doug right? No, they go. To the miners. They go. Vlad Yeah, yeah, I don't know why I believe this but Doug Miners can get punished for, that ties into dynamic block size, the way the block size scales. To prevent spam, for miners trying to artificially make a larger block size, they then get punished from percentage of the fees that they would be getting to disincentivize that. But yeah, of course, they get the transaction fees plus the block reward. Vlad Yeah, I was trying to think in terms of deflation and the way in which you can reduce Doug the supply. Well, back to Peter Todd, right? I think he likes Monero's design in that regard. That's what he gave his talk. Vlad That's how the tail emission and I think after he came to or was it before No, I think it was two years ago that he came up with this paper that says yes He'll emission is not inflation, right? And you're right to explain in the context of Bitcoin that if you add tail emission and maybe 1% Inflation every year you're just going to compensate for the coins that are lost, right? Doug Exactly, right? It's like a bucket with a hole in it. The water's coming out at a certain rate and then you pour water in the top and it stays at a level, right? It's the same concept. And that's what I'm saying. This idea that Monero has unlimited supply, I think, is misused against it. And I think Monero really does check that box just like Bitcoin does in that it's scarce. They're both scarce, right? Would you agree? I mean, I think it's like how, right? I mean, what is really the difference there ultimately? Whether you have 21 million or you have Monero with the tail emission where there is only so much of it at any point in time and then you have people that have demand for it because it's offering utility. Do you see it the same or how do Vlad Well, I had this debate with someone recently and she was telling me, you know, it's impossible to audit the supply of Monero. And it's like the difference between basic arithmetics and algebra, you know, basic arithmetics is something that anyone can do. And it's something that you can just type a command in your node and you see, yes, this is the current supply in Bitcoin. In Monero, in order to audit, you have to do much more complex math, which most people are not capable or willing to do. So it's not that you can't audit, it's just that it takes more effort because Doug You have to trust the code and the software. You have to trust that it's been properly verified. But it's the same problem that Bitcoin ultimately has. Yes, you could take out a TI-82 and add it up because you can literally see the coin bases or whatever. But you're also banking on the fact that Bitcoin's software was audited correctly and works correctly. Similarly, it could have an inflation bug. It could have other issues. So it's still just a trust in the software issue. So if you believe that it's possible to create software that can audit, if the software is in fact working, then you believe that something like Monero is possible. But to not believe in that, why would you believe in Bitcoin? I mean, it also has the same issue of needing to trust the software. Vlad I guess many of the people who came into the space, they don't believe in cryptography at all, and they want to see something that's perfectly auditable and open, and they were sold to this idea that it should be this way. Doug It's right, but I'm saying ultimately it's not a big difference, right? Because you're still trusting that Bitcoin was properly audited, that its software was properly audited. You've seen errors in the Bitcoin software in the past, right? Sure. Vlad There were at least two incidents, and one of them is not that distant, I think it was in 2018. Matt Corrillo wanted to do this optimization that somehow turned into an inflation bug, which is not exploited. It was honestly disclosed. It was actually a developer from Bitcoin Cash who disclosed it, and they fixed it afterwards. So it is possible to introduce these. You won an open ledger. Doug Yeah, I think people that don't really know Monero don't understand the tech that it has for auditing to prevent double-spence. It's not just willy-nilly creating. There's a lot of math and cryptography that went into this that people believe is secure. But just like any other element to the software, maybe we think .256 or whatever is secure, but maybe people can, I don't know, figure out how to break that and extract your private key from your public key. We're trusting in the math, the theory that people shouldn't be able to break that. Same concept there, in my mind. Yes, Bitcoin ultimately, you could take out a TI-82, but it still has to deal with that same issue of trusting in cryptography in other elements of its architecture. Vlad Yeah, I mean, for some people, it's convenient because they can view it on this blockchain explorer, or they can run a node and they just type one command and it says, yes, this applies this. And whenever it's a bit more complicated, but I don't get the points of crypto without cryptography or encryption, you know. Doug Yeah. I mean, it's a different tool, right? I do see a use case for it, a perfectly traceable ledger. It's digital property at that point. It has perfect provenance, who the owner is. There's definitely utility for a tool like that. Government seems to love it. Yeah, government, exactly. Government's freaking love it. It's a great tool for government if they want to control how you use your money. So they're all about it. It's working beautifully as that. It's growing. Once people are opting into it, they're getting in line for it. They're like, oh, we want to be tracked and traced. No, we do. Vlad I think it was Peter O'Teal who made this famous quote a few months ago. He said that his friends at the FBI, they say that they're much happier when criminals do Bitcoin transactions as opposed to cash because it's so much for them to trace that. Doug Yeah, like the old school, the people don't even know how to trace that anymore. Nice. Oh my god. Vlad That's why I guess at Panerotopia we saw so many Bitcoin OGs like the kind of people you would see 12 years ago at Forkfest or something. What do you think that you'd see them? Yeah, these OGs who came to Bitcoin maybe 14 years ago or something because they discovered it was this libertarian side of the community and they discovered something with which they were thinking they can stick it to the man, you know, not the attack, try to have private transactions because they thought it was private, only because there was not proper tooling to trace it. If you go back, I've actually listened to an interview from 14 years ago with Jeff Garzaik and this show, it's actually amazing. It was called the Bitcoin Show and it's very old and there's a YouTube channel which has all of these old interviews and Jeff Garzaik was saying yes, Bitcoin is not more private than cash. It's just likes for internet transactions. Doug Yeah, I mean there's you have Adam back talking about it how it lacks fungibility from the early days. What else? Vlad He co-authored the paper for confidential transactions. Yes. It was him and Greg Maxwell who worked on that. It's sort of mind-boggling at this point that this guy spends most of his waking hours right now looking at micro-strategy charts. How do you go from co-watering the confidential transactions to looking at charts and saying, you know, you should buy more micro-strategy stock or whatever. Doug Like, it's such a misuse of his talents. Guys, send your super chats to xmrchat.com slash MoneroTalk. We have over 300 live viewers right now, which is just cool. Like and retweet, let's get the noobs in here. There's a lot of noobs out there. They're all excited about the crypto pump. They're hanging out on Twitter all day, trying to find the next alpha. Let's help them find their way to Monero. Bye. Vlad They should get the Lenovo Nodo so they connect their cake wallet to it. Doug Yeah, we we are we're shipping them out now our first batch and then we'll we'll start people that want to order we'll we'll be producing another batch probably not till we get enough orders but yeah we should we ship them out which was exciting what's the bit of law it's been a long road I think we have it at 650 I think we have it at then we I don't break even on this until we sell like 280 of them so we sold to 100 that's like freeman arrow so Vlad What, the price? Yeah, it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You buy it for like Freeman Arrow. Doug Yeah. And we've accepted all payments in Monero. So as the value of Monero goes up, hopefully it will continue to do so. That's definitely helping with the business at that point. Because right now, yeah, I don't reach break even until we sell like the first 280. Vlad Yeah, that should be a goal, right, sovereignty, not the trust, the note of theft for privacy and cake wallet anymore, which are the, like, all ones. Doug You got you got a thumbs up your you haven't had a thumbs up going like that. Did you see that? Yeah Oh, that's not where's I'm opposing. Oh, yeah, it's frozen shit. Very strange. Let me fix it Yeah, guys, you could go to Monero Nodo calm. Yeah, I'll pull it up to order your Monero Nodo Vlad Yeah, and if you're listening to this, make sure you get your magazine. It's about 50 bucks, which right now is what, 0.25 Monero. Doug The magazine is amazing man. Where is mine? Oh my god. No, I got him. I think I got I think that's some over there Okay, it was like, uh, you know, it was a whirlwind that conference for me as I'm running it So like when I come home, it's like what do I have? Did I what did I leave behind? But I think I safely brought them home amazing job with what you did there the content. Did you did you freeze by the way again? I'm not sure Vlad Make sure I switch style the camera. Doug Okay, well I can hear you, yeah you're just it's just kind of a frozen screen of you You could uh you could share your screen if you want to pull up the privacy magazine so we can show everybody Vlad Now just a second. Doug Okay, but you know very impressed by the content you have in there you're able to pull it all together in a short amount of time. I've been ready for the conference. Apologies for not being able to help you out with the printing but you saw you saw what the situation was once you, you tried to pull it off on your own and you did pull it off. But you know, great product overall you did an amazing job. The graphics are really nice. Vlad thank you for that it actually took like three months to work on this the hardest part was finishing the graphics which was okay what my girlfriend did right now I'm just trying to fix my camera somehow Doug And she was coming up with all the ideas for what the graphics should be. Vlad We worked together on this, so she's good. Doug So is she is she a crypto is she into cryptos? I mean, I guess she has to be right She made this magazine with you seems like she if she's making these these illustrations these memes Is she must know she must know it all pretty well Vlad Yeah, but you have to understand that she comes from a country where she is banned from the mainstream financial system. There is no way for her to receive money from her parents. So this is very convenient. Doug So she's actually using it. She understands it because she's a user of crypto. Vlad For her, it's not speculation, it's a necessity. Well, look at my mug. It's nice. Doug Monerotopia, you know that's a puzzle, right? Vlad I did hear about it, I'm not sure if anyone cracked it. Doug Yeah. So for those, we'll get the word out again. If you want to guess on the puzzle, send us to xmrchat.com slash MoneroTopia, not MoneroTalk and send your guests of what you think the solution is to the puzzle. It's going to be a phrase. It's not like a 25 word C phrase, but it's going to be a couple of words and send your Monero address. And that seems, I don't think anybody's even submitted yet, but yeah, the mug was a puzzle. The backdrop was a puzzle and the canvas bag was a puzzle actually. Is there some kind of bounty for it? Yeah. We're going to give Monero away. Is that what I'm saying? So send your guests with your Monero receive address. Cause if you got guests, right. That's the only way you'd be able to kind of like send you your, your bounty, your prize. Vlad Okay, so what's gonna happen if let's say nobody cracks it for five years and then someone shows up in 2029 and say hey, I just cracked this. We're still gonna give you out the award Doug if i see it if i see it in the you know in the chat uh i would you could hold you could hold me to it you could hold me to it i'm hoping somebody gets sooner i'm sure somebody will we'll we'll push it out there a little bit more a lot of people getting there Vlad e k p k i o whatever this is supposed to be some sort of code Doug the whole the whole thing yeah can get deciphered into so I don't want to give you too many clues but at the end after looking at that mug you could come up with a series of words that would be the correct series of words that would derive from that a phrase Vlad There's also someone here like V-I-Y-X-Y-Z. Doug uh well that's ulysses that's the artist i think is that what you're Vlad Oh, I get it now. Okay, so that's the yard of signature. Doug Yes. You listened to the great guy, fantastic guy. I don't know if you saw him there. He was at the conference. He was helping out a lot. He denied all the swag, and he was very helpful at the conference in general. So yeah, man, what'd you think overall? Monerotopia, let's get to that a little bit. I mean, you ran the freaking show on stage. Thank you very much. I knew you were going to do an amazing job. You're the perfect man for the job. You don't know all these projects, but I knew you would get to know them fast, ask the right questions. Obviously, you're highly technical. You're in crypto for all the right reasons. You treat this stuff. You don't treat it like a religion. And yeah, you're well spoken. So you did an amazing job, man. Amazing job. I got to go back. I got to go back. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to have you again, next one, or in some capacity, whatever capacity at that time, we'll see. But yeah, what was your perspective on? What was your take? Vlad It was definitely interesting because I got to see in the side of the community, which I guess it's divided between people who came for Monero and people who are Bitcoin OGs and they got into Monero and to watch them not care about price. There was no mention about price. I was having this conversation with Shinobi over lunch at one point and Shinobi said to me, you know, Doug I can't believe Shinobi came to like that was amazing to me that he showed up and it was just like last minute He's like hey, man. I'm gonna come by like that was that was awesome. Go ahead. Sorry Vlad Yeah, so he was telling me that, you know Vlad, this is my first shitcoin conference ever. And I told him how is Monero a shitcoin, you know, because first of all, you have to look around you and see what kind of people are attending. And you're going to notice that nobody tells you that the price went up. Nobody tells you to buy anything. Nobody's trying to show anything to you, any product or service or whatever. It's very reasonable. It's all about technical stuff. It's about technology. It's about building a parallel system. And the people are either not financially incentivized, but technologically incentivized or else ideologically incentivized. And it's this drive that makes it worthwhile. And honestly, if you go to any Bitcoin conference, there is at least one presentation that's meant to hype up the crowd. And you're going to have a speaker like Safedine or Jimmy Song or whatever. Or Max Keiser and they're going to go, yes, we made it. Yes, we were so smart. We were so early. I told you so. And there's a type of I told you so presentation in every one of these conferences. I actually went to before coming to Monero token. I'm sorry that I digress, but I was in Larybore in Slovenia, Slovenia. Is that how you say it? And Safedine got on stage and she spoke about his new book and I realized, you know, I saw him from a completely different point of view because he said, you know, this time I'm working on a work of fiction, which is called The Gold Standard, because he has the Bitcoin standard and then he released the Fiat standard. And now he's got to come up with a book that's called The Gold Standard. And the point of that one is to create a work of fiction, which presents our present day from a perspective where the gold standard never ended. And I'm like, wait a second. Maybe that this guy was a fiction writer all along. I mean, this is what he specializes in. Maybe that all of this Austrian. Doug what is the what is the gold standard Vlad thesis gonna be? He basically assumes that during World War I somehow there was no money printing because they were able to fly out all the gold bars and whatever and basically the countries that printed fiat money got screwed and screwed themselves and since there was a continuing gold standard the prices kept going down and actually there was a funny statement that he made and asked him a question afterwards and I realized that once again he's a fiction writer he should not be taken seriously even though he was right about Bitcoin price but that's besides the point basically he said that okay we look at the prices of housing and if we assume that there was a perpetual gold standard which never ended and also with the innovation that we have in building houses with technology then we can assume that the prices always go down and this would be the housing price today and I asked him you know how the hell would you have innovation and technology in building houses unless you had the money printer to incentivize people to invest their money into something because if they don't invest it they're going to lose to inflation like what's the incentive if you're going to have a gold standard what is the incentive to finance technology when you can just hoard and live off your gold bars or bullion or whatever Doug Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's what I know. Vlad I could never have Bitcoin under a gold standard for the simple reason that in order to have Bitcoin, you needed computers and smartphones and all of this technology that was accelerated by the fiat standard. I don't know, it's just this nuance and I don't want to get too much into it. Doug And all that technology has gold in it too, not all of it, but that's kind of a funny way of thinking about it, right? But so wait, what do you say you what do you what is your take on the gold set? Like if we could go back if we go back in time Do you think you wouldn't you don't believe a gold standard would would have been like an advantageous thing Vlad Maybe it could be, but at the same time, you have to understand that the fiat standard has lifted entire nations out of poverty. Because all of a sudden, it doesn't matter how much gold you own in your vaults. It's all about the ability to create stuff. And of course, they created money out of thin air to support this. But in order to get to Bitcoin and Monero and all of this cool stuff, you needed to have a transition, right? And you needed to have something to piggyback off of. I think that the fiat standard has enabled some technological innovation and has enabled manufacturing to become cheaper and has made computers like, there is no way my country from which I speak right now would have affordable technology if it wasn't for the fiat standard. Doug Yeah, it allowed for economies to be on steroids. Yeah, so then what do you think about Bitcoin potentially becoming the gold standard? Do you think that could lead to this deflationary spiral thing where, you know, whatever there isn't the capital for people to invent? Vlad Yeah, and then we're gonna end old words and we're gonna be able to know really what do you? Doug Yes, so how do you, what is your take on all that? Just, I don't think I know your opinion there. Vlad Okay, so even under Bitcoin standard where you have nothing but Bitcoin and everyone's operating on the Bitcoin network or some Bitcoin layers and everyone transacts in BTC every day, governments can still issue their own currencies on the Bitcoin blockchain. There is absolutely nothing that prevents them from doing it. And even if the citizens are well educated and they're going to call this out and say it's perverse and it's against the rules or the conventions of the system, they can still issue promises because that's what politicians do. They're going to create some sort of bonds and they say, okay, you give me one Bitcoin, I'll give you two of my bonds. And I promise you that if we have economic growth, you're going to get 1.5 Bitcoin next. Or they say we're going to go to where with this other nation and they have this amount of Bitcoin, right? So if you give me this amount of Bitcoin to fund the army to be able to go to where with this other country, I'm going to give you 50% on your investment or whatever. So this is still going to work. You can still issue assets, tokens, something to give government some leverage. They don't really have to use the BTC. They can get it from citizens. And of course, there's always Doug Right. That's the thing. Bitcoin already is being fiatized. So it's not killing the fiat problem. In ways, it's already being fiatized. Most Bitcoin is held. Centralized exchanges. It's in the form of ETFs. Vlad Yeah, that's another debate and I did interact with an idiot today on Twitter And I think this is a narrative that's spreading right now that self-custody is not meant to scale It's supposed to be expensive and scarce and it's a privilege It's not something that all users should expect and to me It's mind-blowing because when I first got in of course it was in I guess I was Witnessing the block size words and all of this situation that I didn't understand too much at the time But I thought it was reasonable to have segwit and then go on for a few years like this because there was no urgency Really to increase the box size But now there is an urgency and the means to do it are more justified Because bandwidth is more accessible You have Starlink intranet that you can access in the middle of the desert the middle of the forest Anywhere in the world and storage is more affordable So to say that you're gonna have four megabytes forever. It's just silly You're just limiting first of all the scalability and secondly as a side effect also the privacy of the network I think it was Francisco who made a presentation During Monero token which he explained that ethereum might just be much better for privacy in them Bitcoin because it scales better It can have more transactions and therefore if you can have more transactions and you have tools Yes, no cash. Yeah. Yeah, you hide in a larger crowd Doug Yeah, no, Francisco's always made that point. That's a strong point, right? So scalability actually ties into privacy and anonymity, for sure. I think that's important. I think that's what... Yeah, with Zcash, if somebody on Zcash today was bashing our Zcash community on Twitter, that account on X was bashing. The fact that Monero is adding full chain membership proofs, they're like, oh, I thought you already said you had perfect privacy and you're admitting that your privacy sucks because you're upgrading to Flutter. No, I think Monero community has always been very, very open and honest about the fact that it has issues that it needs to fix. And what Zcash community ignores is that nobody uses Zcash. They're confidential transaction or who's using the best tech for one component of it. As a whole, is the system yielding the most privacy preserving result for its users. And to overlook that is just dishonest. And it just shows a lack of understanding of what we're up against. It's like what our adversaries are. Yeah. Vlad I'm reading the chat right now. I didn't realize I can do this. I got to say hi to fairly reasonable investor. And guys said, what is that? You're just a few subscribes away from 10,000. That's a nice. Doug Yeah, I think we're hitting it right now guys like subscribe anybody who's listening or everybody who's listening right now We have 506 people supposedly subscribe on YouTube right now I mean, it's crazy that I'm only at 10k and now it's insane Like we've been we've been doing this for a long time doing the narrow talks. We had some big guests You know great, you know listen am I am I am I the best host out there? Well, we have some amazing content on this show that I'm just I've always been shocked that our subscribers have been so well We definitely Monero doesn't get any type of pump from the algorithm Vlad that's for sure. Oh, but this is fun. It's 9.99 subscribers right now. I wanted to check to see if I'm subscribed from my Bitcoin takeover account and I am. Maybe I should also subscribe for my personal one just to make the number. Doug Doesn't even make sense that our subscribers are so we have so many we get so many live viewers too. It's pretty crazy I don't know Vlad I'm not sure how that it measures my viewers, because we're talking about the numbers a bit. Doug Yeah, it's like anybody who's like cool. Yeah, they should consider like a live viewer even if they're not currently viewing it live Vlad It says 493 right now on Twitter, but are these people interacting, are they actually listening? I mean, prove me wrong, write a comment or something. Yeah, guys. Doug coming yes yeah there's only like 20 people on YouTube live right now and like 500 on on X don't Vlad I gotta go back to Monero topia Doug I unsubscribes, god damn it. They're rugging me. Don't do it, guys. You're only hurting Monero. Well, maybe that's what you want to do. Vlad I guess this would be my great honor if I was the guy. Yeah, absolutely. Was live on the show when 10K was hit. Pretty memorable. It's a nice video. Doug like that's the only reason you hit 10k's because you had vlad on otherwise you could have never gotten there i'd be like oh look at this one girl yeah we we have a super chat a dollar and four cents from hawktah hawktah girl i wrote investors out on hawk for 50 mil and people saw exactly what happened because it's an open ledger should have launched it on zano yeah there you go we need to get her at the next Monero topia so she discovers zano and then she goes back and relaunches Vlad I think it'll be in jail by then, but I don't know. Doug The whole hock-tah thing that is like how how did where did it where did this girl come from was she like a fabrication? She is sigh. Huh? Why wish she made popular? It wasn't that Memo ball wasn't that right? Like why why did that go so frickin viral? I guess guys Vlad like blowjobs but regardless it's pretty crazy how she was invited everywhere I saw her in Nashville at the Bitcoin conference yeah and apparently she's from Tennessee but my point is that after all of this series of appearances she launched a podcast which turned out to be the third most popular in the world or at least in the US and it's like how do you surpass people like Lex Friedman Doug Yeah, I didn't realize it stopped her podcast is actually popular. It is. Oh my god. That's weird. Is it good? I haven't listened. Is she amazing? She's like, all right, let's talk about Monero Vlad I I did see some short clips and she did have some so Doug to get a Monero person on her show. What does she talk about? Vlad really dumb stuff usually I mean you have to understand that if you get to that as level and that degree of popularity you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator the masses someone says that she's probably more entertaining than Lex Friedman is Doug his guests are obviously amazing take my Monero I look forward to smithing many items for the Monero community oh the maker yeah the maker the maker has an account on XMR bizarre oh there's a Vlad This guy on XMR Bazaark was selling his PlayStation 5, and I tried to get it, I've been messaging them, and I placed a bid, and I've been waiting for two weeks for him to respond. He's not saying anything, I'm so pissed off, because it's for a good price. Oh shit. Doug responding to you no he's probably just not seeing his messages you know we got to fix it wasn't we got to come up with an app we need we definitely need an XMR bizarre app right so people can have it get notifications Vlad If there's someone selling Pokemon for Nintendo DS, nice, I should get that. Doug Let me bring up that what do you think of XM are bizarre man? It's it's getting feels like it's getting a lot of Vlad I bought my first item from XMR Bazaar and it was oh, I think the PlayStation 5 is gone Someone must have bought it. Yes, you bought it in a tender, right? I bought a Nintendo 64 Which has a very deep and long story for me because I remember watching that on I was reading about it in magazines when I was a kid and there was no way my parents could afford that and even if They could afford that. I don't think there was official distribution for that in Romania So I was just drooling watching that in magazines and now I could finally afford it It was like a hundred twenty dollars and I paid so awesome twenty more dollars for shipping and the guy was I guess He's a hardcore Monero guy because he sent me some stickers that he made himself and totally the packaging was incredible and at one point I was Breaking out because he was messaging me every day telling me details about where the package is, you know tracking stuff like hey It's gonna get to you at this point It seems it was held in customs in this country and blah blah blah like she was very involved in the process Doug That's good. Did you give him good ratings? Vlad I did. Nice. He was very open and very, you know, when people talk about what Monero is used for, they're going to be like, oh, the Dark Knight markets, buying drugs, blah, blah, blah. I bought a Nintendo. Doug So many stories like that at XMR Bazaar right now, which is really cool. I mean, we need to break into the larger opt-out, like, community. Get them all using XMR Bazaar, using Monero. That's how we grow. Vlad Yeah, so his name is art lamp art lab art Doug lamp as an art the lamp loud word see I don't think users I don't think I could search users can I know that's a feature Vlad that about is that's true I think he's selling some handmade stuff but he's some sort of artisan I did see that well there's someone selling ps3 games okay business so much fun Doug Yeah, it's fun to see it grow. We got a lot of ideas, things we could do, too, to- Vlad it better. You know what's fun about certain core video games on XMR Bazaar? They don't sell them for eBay prices or scalper prices. You actually get very good deals and you look at them and you're like, holy shit, this is pretty good price. I got the Monero, not the Monero, the Nintendo 64 for $120 and it came in the box. It came with two controllers. One of them was in the box and it came with two games that were in the box and that's pretty amazing. I can sell the games for $120. Doug That's awesome, man. I remember when it came out, me and my best friend in childhood, we pooled our money together and bought one and shared it. It was freaking amazing. Mario in 3D, right? It was like, what? Vlad with the revolution and Zelda Ocarina of Time. It's one, it's still the highest rated game in history. Zelda Ocarina of Time, yeah. Oh wow. And it's still amazing. Doug It's a nice adventure. Yeah, we got some interesting things on here. What do you think we should be doing with XMR Bazaar? What would you like to see happen? Vlad listings and maybe so my girlfriend looked at it and she was like oh this needs updated graphics. Doug Yeah, the graphics are okay. I mean, obviously like the background, right? That type of stuff? Or you're saying like the layout and stuff, or? Vlad Yeah, you can use her art she actually did so in the magazine shame was plugged There's a full-page ad for eczema bazaar. Let me find it Doug Yes, thank you for that. Vlad All right, yeah, it's a very clean design. I know it's in the first half. I've been browsing this a lot So there is an ad for a Monero topia page 60. I guess it's a pretty nice artifact If you buy this because you can actually pinpoint Doug Show it, show it, show it. Let me see. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very nice. Vlad Yeah, but let me search for the one for ExoMar Bazaar. Doug Yeah, it's great. It was actually great. Vlad Actually it's beautiful. It's hand-drawn by my girlfriend. You can use that. Awesome! She's next to me right now and she's smiling. Doug All right. Yeah, if we use it, I'll send a Monero tip. Sure. Vlad I guess that's a quiet consent from her. That are buying from a marketplace. Doug What is the whole Pepe, like, story? So... The nerves. Vlad The story about her drawing Pepe is that she got this apple pen pencil pen, I don't know what it is, but she got it to take notes in university and asked her, you know, can you draw with this and she showed me some stuff and I said, can you draw Pepe? And she actually drew a pretty good Pepe. I showed her what it is and she had no idea what it means. She had no contact of what significance this bears. But asked her, can you draw me as a Pepe? And she did a pretty good job and then I posted that on Twitter and people started ordering their own. And now for some reason she's known as the Pepe Girl. She draws your life. Doug She should post on XMR bazaar as uh to sell her personalized pet bay avatars. So I would charge on XMR bazaar for Monero. Yeah, you'll get customers. I'll buy one I'll buy a pet bay. I'll buy one. Version of myself if she lists Vlad FedEx of our Bazaar for sure but we also found some post rationalization for it because in this introduction section you have our portraits and I also wrote an article about it that's called Pepe is the ultimate symbol of privacy I say you might have noticed that the main character of this magazine is Pepe the Frog as created by Matt Furry in his Boys Club comic book series and now adapted by Ani to tell different stories related to the article. Why choose Pepe you might ask it's because Pepe is an integral part of Bitcoin and internet culture everyone can be a Pepe as demonstrated by the rare Pepe collection which is forever immortalized on the Bitcoin blockchain thanks to the counterparty protocol and the bunch of scientists Pepe is just a green frog he has no race no ethnicity and knows no national boundaries intrinsically Pepe has no political affiliation any movement can use his likeliness to send a more or less rebellious and anti-establishment message yes certain groups have co-opted Pepe in the past in order to popularize their cause just like lots of people from all walks of life are using Bitcoin for lots of different reasons but just like Bitcoin isn't just for isn't just money for criminals and drug dealers Pepe isn't only a symbol of the American outright internet and financial privacy are just the kind of causes that Pepe would support as the internet is the birthplace of the iconic running frog character and without a degree of privacy there is no way for him to receive financial support for his anti-establishment activism most famously Pepe creator Matt Furry is trying to distance his Boys Club character from all the hateful rhetoric to which he was subjected and even though this magazine does not have his direct endorsement or blessing we are sure that you would like the context in which we use Pepe so how does it feel to create an entire 150 page magazine starring Pepe in various privacy related ways it feels good man yes and on the cover there's Pepe taking a pee which is the context in which he said it feels good man right and he's watching Michael Saylor here I'm mirrored so that's why I get my hands around he's watching Michael Saylor in this window screen or whatever and he says it feels bad man because there is also surveillance camera right here and he's taking a pee he's taking a leak and on the back cover you can see that he uses so this is basically Pepe from the perspective of Michael Saylor who looks yeah and she is apparently happy but if you look behind there is no door there is no escape he's stuck here in prison forever just watching and seemingly yeah he thinks he's happy probably the number is going up but there is no escape because you have no privacy Doug The thing is a work of art, the entire magazine, isn't it? It's gonna be a cult classic, very well done, man. Vlad And maybe that this is detrimental to my personal ability to sell them, but I've open sourced the contents, so Doug You list those, please list that on XMR Bazaar as well, the magazine. Vlad Yeah, I will I did open source the contents so anyone around the world can print their own copy So maybe that there are people white if you Doug want to actually if you want a nice magazine on your on your table order it from Vlad as we know it's pretty much impossible to go print you can't go print that yourself it's not gonna yes Vlad It's probably more expensive to only print one, so you shouldn't do more copies. But, you know, it's just like your Monero Nodo, right? You can buy the hardware and put the software, the hard drive, and it's going to run smoothly. But if you buy the Monero Nodo, it's just a matter of convenience. You buy a nice product that you just plug and run. You don't have to think about it, it has the right hardware for the job. It can also integrate BTC Pay if I'm not mistaken. Doug him which is well not yet it's not in there yet but yeah we have a narrow pay in there actually believe it or not Vlad Yeah, so if you want to take payments, I think it's a pretty good way to do it. Doug Yeah. Did you see, did you see how we had the notos? Yeah, I showed you, right? Obviously you saw we had them running on the star link and then we had a lot of the vendors and I don't know if did you yourself try it? Were you connected to the wifi network and then the nota? Oh, you did. It was pretty, pretty wild, right? All three. Vlad So to be able to basically point my cake wallets to that node, it's pretty cool. Doug yeah that was awesome like to know we could do that anywhere with the star link i mean we could go set up frickin in the middle of in the middle of nowhere give a little Monero burning man put the Monero marketplace going on where everybody's running off of uh the the satellite in the noto it gives you Vlad different perspective on what's possible nowadays. Actually I think Elon has made big blocks possible because before this there was a lot of concern. I know that so the former maintainer of the Bitcoin project Vladimir Van der Land he's from the Netherlands and in the Netherlands they have very shitty internet from a couple of providers like it's not much better than dial-up and him and people from the Netherlands were always pointing out you know their actual families that run on this type of very slow internet and if this is happening in Europe then imagine Africa it must be much worse there's always this concern trolling right but now that we have Starlink it's only a matter of enabling some competition for it for the prices to go down and once we have affordable prices we're gonna have to justify why we still have a cable in our homes from some sort of people provider. Doug It's like cell phones taking over the house phone, right? Nobody has a house phone anywhere, right? It's like, once down. Vlad happens, there is no real excuse to not use this and to not have larger blocks because blockchains do scale. This idea that they don't scale and if you make them bigger, there's a slippery slope going on, you can be reasonable about it. You can double the block size every two or three years or something or every having cycle in Bitcoin. And this helps onboard more people in a non-custodial way. Of course, we can get sidechains and that's very nice. But it seems like I saw some news today about XANO in which they announced that they can tokenize Bitcoin to help you transact BTC with privacy. And I was like, this is what you get when you don't enable native privacy on the protocol level. You're going to just let other projects tokenize Bitcoin just like Ethereum did with WBTC for smart contracts. You're going to have stuff like XANO which are going to tokenize BTC for privacy. And these guys were saying, you know, we should not have sidechains. We should not increase the block size. This is what they're enabling. And then they're going to call it, you know, a shitcoin casino scam or something. So to them, I guess it's more morally correct to do nothing and let the free market figure out solutions at the expense of generating some monetary inflation because obviously the economy is not going to be divided by 21 million coins than to actually try to improve Bitcoin, which is wild. Doug Yeah, I mean it's a sign up that they are they're all falling for home and then that's what allows Bitcoin to remain Vlad Right, we are the enemies, we are the ones that are trying to destroy Bitcoin because every attempt to improve Bitcoin is an attack on Bitcoin. Doug Right. And the reason they don't want to improve it is because nobody wants to touch the golden cow, right? They don't want to touch. It's supposed to be digital gold, and they're all praising it as digital gold. But that's... I've always said that's going to be Bitcoin's Achilles heel. It is really just the greed aspect, right? And everybody falling for that meme of it just being this thing that number go up. And that's affecting the design decisions. That's affecting the whole culture in Bitcoin. They're not designing towards being digital cash that governments can't fuck with. They're designing towards being something that goes up and see odd value. Vlad I get that, I understand the appeal, but at the same time you should improve it, you should help it work as cash, as internet money. Right now it's just a pet rock, it's a collectible. Doug Yeah, I mean Michael sailors like oh those crypto anarchists. Like what did he say? He was like incredible. Oh, yeah Yeah, yeah, he doesn't give a shit about self custody that's for for crazy crypto anarchists Vlad I did hear people after that interview saying, has anyone actually seen Michael Saylor send a Bitcoin transaction like this guy even use the network ever? In all of these metaphors, which avoid the technical details. Doug You know, I can't stand listening to the guy, man. Digital energy. I would love... I know. The internet. I love the... Oh, it's digital Manhattan. Digital energy. The digital energy. I mean, that's like the... Come on, man. What is digital energy? Vlad the cyber hornets that are working together to keep this just running. There are so many. Doug I do believe it's digital property, though, like his that digital energy is just, yeah, what's your physics? Digital property. Yeah, I would say I'd say Bitcoin is more akin to digital property than digital gold. It is digital property. It's exactly what it is. With perfect provenance, you know who the owner is. It's like like he said, it's like owning a piece of Manhattan. Now, does that Manhattan has value because there's this real utility that it offers in terms of physically being property in a desirable place? Does that work digitally, where something has utility purely for being a digital piece of property or storing value and having really no other utility yet to be proven? Vlad that there is, in fact, a PlayStation 5 and XMR bazaar, but I think to the U.S. The price is pretty good, I just looked at it, but it's not the same listing that I saw. This one actually comes with a game and it's the newer model which is slower. Doug I love that you guys are like, I love that these listings exist for people to actually go shopping on XMR Bazaar right now. Buy a Christmas gift for yourself or a loved one. Find something on XMR Bazaar to buy. You got to buy, you know, if you celebrate Christmas or any holidays around this time of year, buying gifts, might as well attempt to buy something on XMR Bazaar, put it back into the Monero circular economy. Look at this thing, man. This is pretty cool. This is pretty enticing. A beach house in Santa Isabel, Uruguay. This guy's renting out his place for Monero. Looks like a, I was like Googling it, checking it out. Looks like a pretty cool location. You know, people like, I guess, go there from Buenos Aires. It's like kind of like the mob talk of Buenos Aires. That's amazing. On guide phones and cameras. Like I would consider heading over there for a vacation, 130 a night to rent this. Knowing I rented it with Monero. I mean, that's just, that's beautiful. Amazing. I'm looking at it for a little place now. No fees, guys. Bring it up. Pull it up. Share your screen. Vlad Oh, let me switch to another browser for this that I have a lot of tabs that I don't want to show to people. Doug Yeah, if you just click present you can just show like we have to give you one tab for the sentence Vlad Share screen. Search listing. Yeah, I can show this tab. Doug Okay, I guess you know, what's funny funny to see now to like now that like Monero pumped a little bit You start to see like the criticisms come out from an arrow right away for all the like the haters whether like it's Bitcoin people or and Like the or or the meme that you know Monero works if it's ten cents or you know $10,000 it works just as well Which is where it works as a tool just as well Like that meme in Bitcoin is it just but that it makes no sense to completely disregard the utility that comes with Increase liquidity and market cap. What's him? What's your take on that lad? Oh, I just like following up Vlad Oreo. Or the Amiga. What is this? It's a video game called Nitro, and it's for the Amiga, which is this. If you know the ZX Spectrum, the Amiga was a competing system. Doug No shit. Vlad Very old stuff. Doug That's awesome. Well, how much are they selling it for? Vlad Portugal 15 euro 0.08 xmr Doug I love it, the vinero, the vinero nerds are selling some like, elastic tech hardware. Looking at some denim jacket, lots of crazy stuff. It's like selling everything he's got, what are those? DVDs? DVDs? What does he got there? Vlad So let's see what he's out like. Oh, I guess some of them are in Portuguese. Pork keys. I don't know. I don't recognize. Kill Bill Vol. 2. Al Capone. Feed some record. Doug These will sell records on XMR bazaar, that'd be pretty cool. Vlad so you can get the whole collection he has right here for five euro. Doug Oh my god. Guys, buy it, just for fun. For the holidays, you can watch Elf in Portuguese. Vlad But these PlayStation 3 games, I mean, it's unclear to me which are available and which were sold, but it's a nice stack. He has Grand Theft Auto V, and it's a nice stack. Uncharted 3, this is pretty good. I played it and finished it a few years ago. Call of Duty, he has some bangers. Speaker 4 Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Doug How much does he sell that for? Vlad so all of them for 110 he says they're 11 that's basically 10 euro one this Doug Now is the perfect time, right? Like, we got Christmas, weeks away, Hanukkah, and Monero. I love seeing the price up here on XMR Bazaar too. Just to think one day, right? We're going to see like a thousand, two thousand. Right now it's at 198. Sitting there. Good time to spend some Monero, I'd say. Considering how low did we even go this bear mark? I don't even know. I think it was below 100. Crazy. I think 112 I feel like was a bottom for a while. Yeah, I wonder what the new bottom will be in Monero. Afters all said and done. No idea. That's a body question. Vlad but just so you know after we finish this I'm going to add my what it's not enough magazines yeah I'm gonna put the magazines on sale here okay everyone who has someone narrow to purchase I'm gonna be using a PO box to send them out from and I encourage you to do the same it's less than $100 per year and that preserves your privacy pretty well the way in which I did it was to go to this city which is outside of the city where I live and I just spoke with the nice people there and they're very happy to lend me this space which is this tiny box where I can receive mail and I just pay like $100 per year and I can send them out I just put the sender address from there so in case the people who are supposed to receive the package don't pick it up because back and give us back to there yeah so I just go there maybe once a month I check it it's a good way to preserve your privacy I yeah and it's not that expensive Doug Yeah, no, that is a nice thing to do. Yeah, what do you think of that question that I was bringing up before, this idea that Bitcoiners like to say Monero works for its intended purposes, whether it's 10 cents of Monero or $10,000 of Monero. So what's the criticism? The criticism is that, or it's not even a criticism, just this idea, right? Because they're basically trying to say like, don't store Monero, don't keep Monero, don't hold Monero, just use it. And it works just as well, whether it's at 10 cents or $10,000, which is just, it's just so wrong to say that. Like if we use it, we win. Right, but obviously it's way more useful if it has more liquidity, if you can send larger transactions with it, or just bringing it up because I just saw a bunch of like, you just see the old Monero like FUD come out, when every, like the price barely moved, and like the FUD just starts going out, like give us a break guys. But that one's like, just gotta go, like it just doesn't make any sense. Like, and Bitcoiners like say this, right? Well, I don't know, am I overreacting here? Am I misinterpreting what they're trying to say? Cause I just don't get it, it's just. Vlad I don't understand what's their problem with free market money. Like markets do what they do, but it doesn't mean that something is less useful just because the market doesn't value in the way that you expect. So it's either undervalued or overvalued. Doesn't matter. Like, do you stop using your shoes just because, I mean, yeah, some people stop using their shoes if they become very expensive like them. There is some Jordans that if you own those, maybe you should not wear them outside, but regardless, like your car, right? The moment you buy it, it goes down in price. But should you stop using it because you think it should be a store of value? Or maybe it goes up in price because it appears in some sort of movie. Like I present this example of the Toyota Supra, right? Nobody wanted one in 1999. You could get it for like $10,000. And then there was a movie called The Fast and the Furious where a Supra was featured and then it blew up right now. It's more expensive than a Ferrari, especially if it's in good condition and not modified because most people who got them in the nineties, they got into the tuning scene. So it makes no sense. Just use it. If it's useful for you yourself. I mean, I also use Bitcoin whenever I can, and this is perfectly fine. I know exactly what I use it for. I know exactly what I use Monero for. It's a tool. I don't see it as though I see it as software. I don't see it too much as money. Of course, it has the market valuation, but it's software. Doug Right, and it becomes much more useful as the price of it, in terms of fiat, goes up. You know, undoubtedly becomes more useful, gains utility as its price goes up. Vlad It's just perception and the idea that other people might want it more because they think if they accept it We're going to benefit from this number go up factor, but it's not the main selling point It's not why you should use Monero Doug No, but to disregard the fact that the price adds to its utility is what I'm saying, like this idea that, oh, it's Monero is just, you know, whether it's 15 cents or $15, it doesn't matter. But this is a criticism that's being, this is like, it's not, it's not saying, oh, it's, it works. It's a criticism that's being thrown saying you don't ever need to hold it, hold, just hold Bitcoin, like just use it as a pass through. Right. Wow. I see that a lot. Vlad lot that you should hold right in the middle Doug It's only 15 cents. You can't pass through a lot of value through it. So I'm just saying, just whatever. Uh-huh. I'll get over it. I just find it annoying that like, like obviously it's way more useful if the market cap of Monero is a trillion dollars versus of, you know, a hundred million dollars. Now you, now you can use it as a pass through to send somebody $10 million. Right. I suppose only being able to send them a couple of dollars, uh, makes, makes a big difference in utility. I see that a lot, but. Vlad most guys who bought their Bitcoin and they're storing their Bitcoin speculatively or saving in it. That's the way in which they describe it. They save in their Bitcoin. They got it from QIC exchanges, especially those who enable DCA because it's so convenient. It just takes money from your bank accounts and buys Bitcoin for yourself every week or every month. But they're exposed to information which goes from the exchange to chain analysis and from chain analysis to their government. So if your government knows exactly how much Bitcoin you own, honestly, the US government doesn't even have to buy Bitcoin to establish this strategic reserve. They just have to take away from their citizens to confiscate. Yeah, that's what I got. Doug I was thinking about today, maybe that's what micro strategy becomes, it just gets taken over by the government. It takes all this Bitcoin, a CIA operative, that's the best way to obtain Bitcoin, right? Vlad I do see Michael Saylor becoming the next SDF or the next Duke one because he's playing a very dangerous game Right now he's promising yield on Bitcoin And I guess of course at one point the bubble is going to burst and he's gonna get liquidated And the question is what's gonna happen with the reserves, but there's more to it. For example Roger Ver He may or may not be a political target But I believe he is because the question is why did he get arrested now as opposed to one year ago two years ago? Whatever. So of course they want his Bitcoin Of course Maybe that they're going to extort the Bitcoin from him and they're going to try to negotiate it in a way that says Maybe that you don't want to be in jail for life and maybe that we're gonna give you five years if you let us have Like fifty thousand Bitcoin, which I'm not going to project that he has but I'm pretty sure that he does you think it's to see You think it's really about? Doug The the state just trying to confiscate Vlad Bitcoin. Yes, might be. And a government that's more interested in establishing a reserve might also be interested in arresting people or doing stuff with their Bitcoin. And this goes back to the idea of saving in Bitcoin. Like if your Bitcoin is KYC, and there is an identity that's attached to your UTXO, the government knows how much you owe. And yeah, right. This is like, we're like, also knows how much money you have in your bank accounts. But that's sort of the point of Bitcoin, you should have this asset that they cannot take away from you. And of course, you're going to get people like Giacomo Zuko, who are going to be like, ha ha ha, Bitcoin is fungible at the protocol level, because one Satoshi is one Satoshi, and ha ha ha, Bitcoin is permissionless, so you can send it. But what's the value of sending it if it's obvious that you are the one sending it? Because of course, you cannot stop the transaction itself, but you are the one who can be stopped. So if the tool does not serve the intended use case, what's the point token like Doug like a Monero bro. Vlad Yeah, I have a linear bro, but I'm a maximalist, you know, I, I consider myself an old school Bitcoin maximalist. The way in which I see it is that we should help this currency which has this immaculate conception and pretty high adoption rate acquire privacy and fungibility and also scalability. Once we have these, I think it can be perfect money. I'm still hoping that we get to that point. I'm losing hope in time. Maybe that this is just a phase and Bitcoin is just being this rebellious teenager who doesn't want to adapt to our expectations and is being co-opted by evil forces. Maybe it will always be co-opted by evil forces and I'm going to spend the rest of my life regretting that I ever promoted something that brought more surveillance and more control as opposed to more freedom to people who use it. I don't know. Doug Well, I mean, at that point, as long as you're talking about Monero more, then you can't be blamed for everybody thought, you know, at some point thought Bitcoin was the solution. Vlad What we do and what we reach is also important. And I think that these networks are shaped by the users. And intrinsically, this means that if you're going to use something for good causes and you're gonna be nice and you're gonna prove that there's nothing evil about having some privacy, you just want to be left alone. I mean, I come from a long lineage of people who lost money to their government, okay? The history of Romania is very fucked up. You had the agrarian law of 1862, which gave money, not money, it gave the lands back to the peasants because they were just serfs working the lands of the noblemen. And the noblemen were the owners of the lands, but they were also under the control of the ruler of the land, which was like a king. So there was this feudal situation. Feudalism ended in 1862, not so long ago. And then my grand-grand-grandfathers, they had their land and they tried to enjoy some liberty until the First World War. And after that, they had maybe a brief period of prosperity and peace. But after the Second World War, there was this little movement called communism that spread across Central and Eastern Europe like a plague. And this meant that everything that they tried to accumulate over the years and all the work of their forefathers was taken away by the state. And it became this paradox where it was the people's property, but at the same time, nobody's property. So it was owned by the government under this very stupid pretense. My grand-grandfather was a small business owner. He was just helping businesses change their glass windows. And she was arrested for being bourgeois and enemy of the state and everything that the communists hated because he had like two or three employees for his business and his son could not finish high school. So my grandpa had to wait like a couple of years until he could find an excuse to let the new communist regime, to let him finish his studies because they also realized these communists that they cannot rebuild the society from scratch because they need to take the educated people and put them in positions that serve their interests. So they had to re-compromise with this and just let more or less bourgeois families get integrated inside the system to get some administrative jobs because illiteracy was still a thing at the time. So my grandpa lived all of his life afterwards and communism died one year before the system collapsed. He never got to see the return to free markets. And then my parents, they had their wedding one month before the system collapsed. So they raised a lot of money. At the time, it was enough for them to buy a new car, except that under communism to buy a new car, you had to basically pre-order, you put all the money in a bank account and then you wait two or three years until the car gets delivered to you. So they waited two or three years, but the system collapsed and it was no longer processing orders and they didn't care much about delivering to those who paid because it was unclear to whom the factory belonged after it was no longer property of the state. Vlad So they managed to get their money back after like five years, but by that time due to inflation, the money that could previously buy them one new car could only buy them one couch for the bedroom. Oh my God. So my parents got screwed like this and there was also like a few Ponzi schemes in the nineties in my country and there was very poor financial education and it was only my mom that invested into that and she got rug pulled. Oh my God. So across multiple generations, you know, the state, because there was also a state consent for the Ponzis. At the time it was a huge scandal because politicians were involved and they recommended this and burn lists and media channels, they were complacent. If you look today at YouTube channels promoting meme coins, which are pump and dumps, it's the other side from what was happening at the time. It's just that this degeneracy has spread and has become more accessible. Right. At the time it was- Anybody can do it. At the time it was just a game of the elites who could pull myself. But my point is that finally I have access to something that the state cannot take away from me, right? And I believe it's my right to selectively pay my taxes, you know? I generate a tax event every time I spend my coins. I understand that. But I selectively do it for whatever I think is worth it. I don't want to be extorted. I don't want to have stuff stolen away from me. And I think it's perfectly reasonable given the history of my nation. And I think every person in my country should do the same. It's constitutional. It's very legal. There's nothing wrong with it. Doug And power literally empowers the people. Vlad And I do believe in privacy, like even my bank account, right? If I have money in my bank account, my neighbor doesn't know how much I have. If I send money to my neighbor, my neighbor cannot see how much money I have. It's only me and the bank and the state that knows how much money there is. And Bitcoin is much worse than this because when you send someone a transaction, it's invisible that you take so reveals how much money you own. It's like going to the supermarket and taking the money out of your wallet when you're paying, so everyone around you can see how much money you have. And then you're just putting a target on your back. There might be someone watching who's gonna want your money. I don't think it's an ideal design. There is some deniability, there is some mixing. I do agree with that. It's pretty nice, but it's just not good enough. And once you see how blockchain analysis works, and now it's powered by AI, they don't have to manually type the addresses and trace it by hand on a blockchain explorer. It's amazing. I think there's this quote by Satoshi where he says that we can win a few years of freedom until they catch up. I think they caught up. It's just that people are blinded by this number go up and they don't care. They say don't kill the golden goose. You know, he said it was that lazy golden eggs. Doug Exactly. That's what I was saying before. That's the number go up virus. It's Bitcoin's Achilles heel is the number go up Did you ever have Chris the rules on the show? I did. I had Krista Rose, but I'm just gonna ask you I heard Did you say you were gonna have David Chamm on your show? I'm trying very hard to get him. Okay, that's pretty awesome If you get if you talk to him, maybe maybe get him to come on man. I'll talk to you But I just if he goes on your show, I'm sure you'll you'll give him the whole run down I'd love to hear his take on obviously on current privacy tech and privacy, right? Vlad You know how it is with people like him. You don't get to talk to him directly. You have to talk to some PR team and whatever and you have to negotiate with them and then they talk with him and they come back to you and it's a back and forth process. That's very annoying but necessary I guess. Doug We were trying to get Snowden to be a speaker of Monero topia to two years so we had to went through that whole process didn't work out but maybe we get David Chom to come to Monero topia obviously one step at a time try to interview him. What are you gonna ask him though? What are you gonna talk to him like in with like regards to like Monero Monero's type stuff what do you what are you thinking of asking him? Like I would love to get like obviously I would love to get his take on Monero itself Vlad Well, you have to understand that when you get someone like him, you have to also serve him in the sense that he works on the XX network. And I heard that he's trying to build privacy for CBDCs, which is not, you know, it's not outrageous for someone like David Chom, because he did work with governments before, so it makes sense that the project is so well funded and he's able to pull this off. But I will ask him, like, so in the first part, maybe I'll let him talk about the XX network because that's what once. And then the second part, I will ask him about his work on blockchains while he was still a PhD student in the late 80s or early 90s and e-cash and the fact that you see a resurgence of this on Bitcoin. There's Chom and e-cash on top of the Lightning network, which is just a private token that represents one Satoshi. And people don't call that out for being a shit coin, which is funny. And they don't call this out for being so easy to rug pull because you have mints and the mint issuer is the one who can run away with the money. It happened to me once because they were running on a testnet server that they're not supposed to use for that. And then the server owner, which was Ellen Bitz, they basically said stop using our server. So they shut down the service and they run away with the money. But I only had like one dollar, so I'm not feeling good. My point is that this is very easily ruggable. And for all the privacy benefits that it has, it's not what is ideal for Bitcoin. It's not even a workaround or something acceptable. I would funny science experiment. It is. Yeah. But also once you ask him about mixed nets, which is something that's being built right now by Nim and also talk about his concept of hiding in a crowd. Because generally when you think about privacy, you think, oh, you must stay in this faraway place hidden from the rest of the world. But really the best kind of privacy is the one where you are in the middle of a large city. If you look at the. Like. Doug like Monerotopia in Mexico City, where we blend conference with a public square. Vlad There are multiple layers of privacy there because you had the conference in the middle of a botanical garden that people wear Doug Wherever we do it, it will always be in that type. I think that works out nice. Vlad And then you got merchants who are setting up their booths selling all sorts of stuff from candles to magic mushrooms to drinks to cheese to chocolate. I did get some chocolate from one of the merchants to floats. I bought myself a sombrero and. Doug Dude, that outfit you bought was so amazing. Vlad Guayabera, which is this shirt for men. Doug to a Mexican god. Vlad about quiero that's what they call it it's funny I bought that and also bought some shoes and some Doug You bought a boot rest there, right? Weren't you wearing boots with it? No. Vlad I bought a dress for my girlfriend and I could pay for all of this with Monero which was incredible. Doug I was like, you know, obviously burnt out after it and like can't like almost like, you know I was some point just couldn't wait for a 10 because I was like, oh my god Just because that's just the event that's the building up to the event and everything. It's a marathon It's like you with your magazine, right? It's a point you just wanted to end and but now it's over I'm like, I'm like already ready man. I'm already I'm already starting to think about the next one I thought I would be like really super burned out and not want to think about it But I'm just excited to try to throw you know, take it to the next level. Keep keep it going growing it Vlad I've heard people discussing the setting of Monerotopia, and they mentioned Porkfest a lot. Like they said this one at Porkfest 10 years ago, which I think is a compliment because if you are going to Porkfest, and I never went, I saw images of it, there is a documentary, you can find it on YouTube, it's called the Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, and they show some images from Porkfest. Doug or like Eric Voorhees. Eric Voorhees. Vlad and Vitalik and a bunch of others were hanging out. Doug Yeah, I've got I've got a bunch of times, but I didn't I never went back in the day obviously wish wish I had oh my god Vlad feel surreal when you think about it, but they were all spending and they were spending their Bitcoin which they mined probably and it was pretty cool to see that. And it was pretty much the same this year at Monero topia. I heard that last year was similar. I don't know because I wasn't there, but it was surreal to be able to go to these merchants and buy whatever you think that you want or need and pay in Monero. There was also, I'm not sure what you think about it, but it felt very scammy to me. That Tesla machine that supposedly stores all of your beans, you pay $40 in Monero. Doug talking about that was that was Burwick so Burwick he is his talk was quite controversial as well and then he was there selling his Tesla and you could try it out people but people were trying it out right you know free market if somebody wants to come and do a carnival act for Monero they could do it if you want to pay to do it they could do it right if somebody literally wants to come and sell snake oil you're more than welcome to come sell that at Monero people want to buy it with Monero like I can't really blame them for it so I kind of saw it as being harmless in that respect and people were trying it and believing in its results for those who don't know what we're talking about it's called the Tesla machine Burwick was on I had him on he was talking about as well I don't know what the science behind it but the effects are when you're like apply it to your body and things it's it's healing you it's it's making you younger it's regenerating yeah I didn't try it I would I was tempted to try it I was just trying to be like what the hell what the hell is this guy up to but no I didn't put the light bulbs up against the humming light bulb Vlad I did see people like Nick Spanos do it and by the way, that was it. See him Doug I didn't even know he was there man. I didn't even know Nick Smiles was there. He's a legend I know how did I miss that because I met him I met him in Miami and he was big He was like a had lost a lot of weight So maybe that's why I didn't even recognize him that right now. He's hanging He's the guy that started the New York the New York City like Bitcoin Center, right? Is that yes, okay Yeah, he's a big Monero fan, too. I talked to him with the Miami. I had no idea he was there I'm surprised he didn't we've got talks about didn't even know I was talking to Nick Smiles Vlad He's a friend of Ray Yousef's and they hang out and they work out together. That's how he lost a lot of weight. It's amazing. It is amazing. I guess he's some sort of personal counselor or something to Ray Yousef's new business. No one's. Doug Well, yeah, he's he's the real deal, man. He was definitely super OG and he's always been a Monero fan. He knows Riccardo Spagni. He's like he he knows Monero from the beginning. Vlad That's why I'm saying that it felt like a Bitcoin event from like 10 years ago It's something you would see you can see it in documentaries and maybe old pictures But to see all of these names like Tatiana moros She played a set with some songs and self was there you had all You even had some family drama with John Bush. Oh my Doug Yeah, we'll be releasing all the videos. People can watch it, people that didn't get the virtual conference thing. We'll be putting it all out. I gotta go back and watch them. I've only seen bits and pieces. The John Bush fiasco, that got ugly. That got ugly. Vlad Feel bad for him. I'm not saying I'm not taking any sides It's just that it must be horrible to have your xy on you around Doug Oh my god, I know I felt bad. I felt really bad. I suppose then she did Vlad stage anything unreasonable here like yeah i believe you can start your own community in a rural area you just buy some land and you get people to build their houses next to you and stuff like this yeah and then his ex-wife got on stage and said this guy's a scammer this guy he stole money from this and this and this and i have documents to prove it and blah blah blah well they're both they're both kids to public school without my consent and when right she's gone back she was sorry Doug Well, cause she's like super, you know, they, they're, they both have the same philosophy. They both came, were like anarchists, right? And now they, I don't want to get it to it, but it was, it was a shame that they had a air, their personal laundry, personal dirty laundry out in front of everyone. And it was, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't put that on the, I mean, but some people there seem to enjoy it, like the people there, they were watching it. It happened early morning, happened first thing Sunday morning when everybody was. Vlad Or in Mexico when Mexico has the telenovelas, you know. Doug Yeah, exactly. They should have had that element in drama. Oh my god, were you there? Were you there when they, when the venue kicked us out of the dome and they, this, the group of people that came in and took over the dome to do their cacao ceremony? Were you? I didn't stand. Vlad after that the beginning but i had to go to the room leave my stuff and go to the mike tyson pipe it was on that night Doug That was drama man. That was drama. Oh my god, Veneratopia had everything even an invasion We got invaded and taken over a little bit It was unbelievable. But we won the dough Vlad So if I was to describe the whole experience in one word, it would be rural in the sense that you felt like you were somewhere in the countryside, even the toilets were not so great. I was trying to not use them. Doug But it's amazing venue, right? You're outdoors, you're in nature, and you're in the middle of the city. It, while having this like nature experience, this rural experience, you're in the large, you're in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world. We just need to grow. I think we need to continue to grow out there, right? What, what do you think in terms of like next Monero topio? What, what, what advice do you have? Vlad I think it's a nice venue. My only suggestion for you is to get better lighting within that dome. Oh yeah. I didn't notice that there were some spotlights on top of the buildings that you did not use. Maybe if you switch them on you could, because I was looking at the live stream and it looks very dark. Doug Yeah, no, the AV again, we still, we did better than last time, but I would not give us an A. Unfortunately, we improved vastly because the first time was really bad. But yeah, definitely lighting and just the communication with the people that are viewing it live at home, we didn't have, that wasn't very fluid, like we weren't bringing up a lot of questions that people were asking at home, things like that, definitely can improve on the live stream. But venue as a whole, doing it in Mexico City, doing it at the venue versus doing it in Argentina somewhere or somewhere else in the world, what's your take on all that in terms of what we should do next for Monerotopia? Continue to improve it there, try to grow the marketplace. My goal, my thinking is to not leave Huerta Roma until we left a lasting impact there. It just becomes a place where the vendors that go there, because a lot of those same vendors just go as part of other marketplaces on regular weekends when we're not down there. So we get to the point where a decent amount of them are accepting Monero, accepting digital cash. Vlad a beautiful idea to help that community grow and also get them to accept Monero. The lady who sold me the Pancho and the Sombrero and Guarabera and everything, she was very happy to accept Monero and said she actually asked me where she can exchange it and where she can spend it and that was very cool to see. It seems like they're getting a sense of being part of something. It didn't feel like they're just remote people. It felt like they're part of the community. I'm not sure what the arrangement was. Maybe that there was an exchange for cash after an event. Doug Well, no, what the arrangement was, was we asked all the vendors to agree to accept Monero. And we said, at the end, if you want to sell your Monero for pesos or US dollars, there'll be people looking to buy it off of you. And that's exactly what happened. And it worked out very well. And originally, you could be thinking, and it was like, okay, well, that kind of makes it artificial, but it's not because it serves a use case, right? So at the end, you just happen to have this open marketplace where there are people that do want Monero at that point, four pesos and $4. And you have some of the vendors, they're making decisions on the spot. Now, then most vendors trade out their Monero for pesos, probably, but some of them didn't, some of them kept it. And we created a scenario now where all the attendees have a way of obtaining AYC-free cash-purchased Monero at Monero-topia in a peer-to-peer way, right? All perfectly legal, people just out of pure need making peer-to-peer transactions. So it ended up playing out very well. There's no other arrangement beyond that. We gave all the downloaded cake wallet, we gave like 50 pesos free in Monero just to have, which is like, you know, it's like, that's like a $2, right? Not even. But yeah, that was basically, that was the entire arrangement. And I'm sure you saw it. Did you see the guy that had the barbecue that was barbecuing and selling tequila, Cesar? Did you talk to him? Because he was at the last Monero, he still had his Monero sticker up. And he had told me that he made 50 Monero transactions between the last Monero-topia and this one, because he had that sticker up and people would find him and be like, Hey, you accept Monero? Yeah, I see you have a Monero sticker. He'd be like, yes, I have cake wallet. And they'd be like, all right, I'll take whatever you got. I just want to spend Monero right now. It was like, I was like, people that were like, you said often it was like Europeans, like Canadians, tourists, and they'd come spend their Monero. He said 50 different transactions, sounded a little high, but I was like, but whatever, even if it was five, 10, I mean, that's, that's pretty awesome. That's, and he cut and he kept the Monero. I think the missing, the missing link, the thing to really make it work is like what you said when you went to spend your Monero or the outfit you bought and the woman was very receptive to it and she just wanted to know where it's shaded. It's just an edgy, we just need to educate them so they all know that there is a way for them to easily turn it into pesos whenever they want. So they don't need to turn it into pesos that day at the end of Monero-topia, but have them realize that they very easily can do that. They could buy whatever gift cards, they could use an instant exchange to turn it into a stable coin, like just teach them this world of crypto so they can learn how to hold Monero or turn it into Bitcoin to store their value if they want to go that route or turn it into a stable coin or buy gift cards with it or go on Hovino and trade it. Doug Why not get them to that point? I think that's the real, that's how we need to leave them, right? Where they're, sure, I'll take Monero, I'll take whatever, I'll take Dogecoin because now I know crypto, I know how to accept it, I know how to turn it into what I need to turn it into to live off. Vlad Well, I agree, and I found some very nice stuff on XMR Bazaar. Sorry for... No, no worries. ...insrupting. I was just scrolling and I found such... My God. Bring it up. Do it for- present it. I'm going to end up spending my money here. Anyways. Doug I've got to go Christmas shopping on XMR Bazaar. I've just been so freaking busy with everything. Now I could actually enjoy. I'm so excited after the conference now to be able to focus on XMR Bazaar, actually, is the thing I'm most excited about. The Nodo is now we're shipping it, but the XMR Bazaar project, there's a lot of potential there. The XMR chat, very exciting. Let's make sure my screen once again. Vlad gun. Do it. Search list things. So what I discovered, basically I think they are mislabeled. They're under electronics as opposed to video games. They have steam decks and these are very nice portable systems. I would get the one terabyte one, but basically they are pocket sized computers and you can play a lot of computer games. Doug Oh shit, I should get that, I should get that from my daughter. She's not a huge gamer, she has like the little, the latest, like Nintendo. Is it the Switch? But this is kind of a cooler version of the Switch, right? You just play PC games. Vlad Yeah, but you're basically locked within the Steam ecosystem, being this distribution marketplace where you can buy stuff. And also something that I think is incredible that I find here is the Neumann U87 Microphone, which is an industry standard for studio recordings. It's one of the most legendary microphones out there. Doug Oh, shit. Vlad She's selling it for $1,500. Wow. Doug I might grab that before you. That's a good story, bro. I think it's beautiful. Vlad It is. You have no idea how many records have used this, or... Doug Really well you gotta get I'm getting that if you don't get it. Oh, what happened lost you are finding some fines, man Vlad I was just scrolling and I realized, you know, there's some very good stuff here and did not expect to see. Doug What else does that guy have listed? Lucky Lucy. Let's see. Oh, right, yeah, you brought him up before, I think. Vlad No, I don't think so. So if you just he or she is selling VST plugins for any doll This is important if you so for example, you can have some software compression for your audio, which means that your Lower moments are gonna be louder and your loud moments are gonna be brought down to a level that's acceptable So if you scream into the microphone, it's not gonna flip or cause the soldier, right? It's all cash up Okay, just a gift cards and what's not a ray is about what's upon ruin the Neumann TLM 100 and free So these are microphones that are mostly used if I'm not mistaken for Recording guitars and other instruments. Okay. Okay, they're not I mean they can be used for voice But they're mostly use their studios for guitar amplifiers or I don't know speakers in general You put this next to a speaker. I think this is the best way to use it TLM 103 But these are legendary microphones and I have no idea how they they ended up here I guess this person had a music studio or something. You know Doug Yeah, he was a collector. I don't know Vlad Who knows? But this is a gem. It's a rare find. And that's awesome. The U87. Doug You knew that? You just knew that always? That or you like when I like researched it? Vlad No, I knew because I have some software that emulates this because it's so legendary Really nice you can't really emulate the real deal Doug Dude, you're getting that, you're getting that. So what is kind of the setup you need? You just need obviously just a regular mixer, right? And plug it in. Vlad Yeah, it's an XLR microphone. I see that it has this shock mount comes with it. What year is this thing? That's a good question But it's been produced for like 40 50 years and you can hear it on countless recordings How do you think you would say that I was like I think there's like a Bob Dylan singing into a microphone And that's one of these very cool goes way back. I think even the Beatles were using it, but it's so good It's an industry standard. You can't really beat this Doug You got me sold man, you got me wanting to buy Vlad I mean, I can brag all day that the one that I'm using right now, which is the Azure SM7B, is the one that Michael Jackson used for a trailer, right? Oh, really? That's cool. The one that I showed you, the Neumann, is a condenser microphone, which means that it captures sound from a broader spectrum around the room, and it also gets more frequencies from your voice, whereas this one is a dynamic microphone, which means that it's made just for voice, and it doesn't capture all the tiny frequencies, like all the spectrum. This is actually good for talking and maybe some singing, but that was excellent. Doug So the legendary one, would it be good for podcasting, or not really, because it's like the way it's picking up sound or something? Vlad Sort of overkill, but it's like a nice- Doug Like, it just looks cool, it's like driving around in a frickin' Ferrari. Vlad It's like the Ferrari of microphones. Yeah, that's amazing. Let me see when this was made. It should be a Wikipedia page for it because it's Doug so legendary. Dude, I love that you're getting so much value out of XMR Bazaar and finding these amazing things. Vlad So it's from 1967. It's still made in Germany. He went to this day Wow the chairman's Doug van for tech. Vlad It was used on Neil Young's heart of gold Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. I don't think this is a highlight though. Oh Arrow Smith walk this way grateful dead touch of great talking heads road to nowhere Don McLean's American Pie Juby brothers what a fool believes blondie the tide is high Frank Zappa's lumpy gravy album It's effective for broadcasters and has been used by individuals and organizations such as Casey Kaysom and NPR Casey case of yeah U87 is also popular for miking guitar or instrument amps as an overhead microphone. My god There's one at Abbey Road Studios. My god. I'm falling right now Doug You're gonna wait for the Monero price to go up. Did he price it in Monero or dollars? Vlad It's 7.56 Monero right now. Doug Okay, but I'm pretty sure we have where you could like leave it stable and dollop, right? Yeah, yeah Vlad have that. Anyway, buy some of my magazines so I can afford that microphone, please. Doug Guys, buy Vlad's Mac. Definitely worth it. Wasn't the one you were talking about. So you're, and then you're adding shipping? How you doing that? How are you basing? Vlad Oh, I think I'm just gonna add one price which includes the shipping because if I use post however you are, national post, I think it's the same cost for external deliveries. Doug Cool. How much do you sound them for? Vlad I think if I want to cover all the costs, it's around $15. Doug Okay, yeah, put them up on XMR Bazaar. Remind me, I'll bring it up on the next show. Yeah. All right, man, we're over two hours. 740 live viewers, according to the X. Well, we'll take it. Not too many XMR chats, though. I don't know. I guess we weren't really prompting the people. I wasn't pushing it enough. I don't know. Guys, you gotta send those out. Maybe people want to hodl their mid-air now. They don't want to spend... Vlad It's not a stable coin anymore. It's gonna go. Doug Oh no guys, come on you gotta spend it. It's worth to say whether it's ten cents or ten thousand dollars Vlad the price went up. I mean, I'm not sure if it went up during our talk. I see it fluctuates between 200 and 198 bucks. Doug I I I mean the market the way it is where Bitcoin is and all these other cryptos Monero should be I like $2,000 to be honest given its like actual utility Compared to like it's just incredible man. Did you ever think things would get this crazy in terms of like I shouldn't calling Vlad That's my list. I was thinking about that microphone. Fuck my life. Speaker 4 Yeah Doug He wants it! Sexy man, sexy. Vlad Well, it's not just a microphone, you know, it's like a piece of history. Yeah, you're often looking at me right now not understanding what's wrong. Doug She appreciate items like that as well. Do you guys... Vlad Maybe from other field, not, you know, recording the electronics or whatever. Doug So you follow you're you're like a big music music cat, right? Vlad 10 years ago, I wanted to start a rock band and do stuff and I bought so many years like this audio interface and this microphone and I have a bunch of others. I think I have a wardrobe full of audio stuff and I ended up rationalizing the use of it for a podcast which I started almost six years ago, which is insane. But my point is that I did want to make music. I did make a music video with my girlfriend. Maybe I should show that to everyone as we close this, but it's doing my good point. So I'm not sure if it's appropriate for when there are. Doug I think we started our shows at like the same, around the same time when I started Monero Talk. Vlad buy Bitcoin over. So we made a song together earlier this year. And everyone will listen to our financial advice, I think is better off right now. Not in terms of freedom and privacy, but in terms of US dollars. So where is it? There's on that. Okay, so let me figure this out. I go to present your screen. I'm sorry for the people on Spotify, you're not going to be able to see, but you're going to be able to listen. So we presented this at the Warsaw Film Fest. Really? This was in April. Yeah, that's awesome. It was the Bitcoin Film Fest. So not just the normal Film Fest. And I think we started something because we were the first ones in the history of the festival to come up with a music video with that entirely original because there's also the crypto couple, Brandon and Carla, and they do these weird style style songs, you know, where they change the lyrics to be about the 100% original. It's written and produced by me and my girlfriend. And we had a lot of fun doing it. So it's three minutes long. Bring it up, bring it up. Make sure it makes sure you go. Okay, here we go. Can you hear it? Speaker 4 Oh, no we do, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 5 I'm not one of these guys. They will make you roll by full-time. Time, time, time, time to ride Who knows who's there yet? Who knows who I'm not? Who knows who's there? Who knows who's there? Vlad Yeah, we had a lot of fun doing this did you you are you Doug You are going to be a cult classic, man. People are going to look back at me like, you know, there's this Blackestia guy. You've done Bitcoin right. You've done crypto right. I love your artistic, uh, I don't know, man, it's good. Vlad it's good i know man i i just like starting projects and complete there's Doug I like your aesthetic. Vlad It's just something else and make sure you don't get bored. I think it's a good approach. Doug No, but you do things with style, man. I mean, the magazine is beautiful. Everything you do, you put a lot of work into it. You have a good craftsmanship. Vlad I appreciate it because when I look at stuff that I do in retrospect, I always feel like I could have done something better. Like when I listened to the song again, I was like, ah, in the mixing, maybe I should have done this and this. That doesn't sound right, but that's how you know that. Doug Who filmed it? Even the filming had a nice, like, 70s look to it. Vlad No, we put the camera on a tiny tripod. It was basically almost on the floor and it was filming upwards Okay, so there wasn't too much camera work. We just did this ourselves. Well done. Well done Did you get a lot of views? No. Yeah, you really get a lot of views But nobody appreciates and nobody appreciates it The problem at this point stuff is that people are spoiled with free content Yeah, and something you produce is only as good as I don't know It only lasts until something else comes along and takes the spotlight and you're like, okay Doug I would like to make a good Monero commercial or short film that nobody's really gotten anything in Monero land to kind of catch like that. Vlad I just had this crazy idea, right? So this punk rock drum intro, and it starts out like Billy Joel Armstrong springing into the microphone, saying, digital cash that you cannot track. And then there's a chorus like, Monero, you spend it. And then there's a break in the crazy guitar solo that comes in. And then it goes back to this don't recurse my girlfriend's laughing. Doug Is everybody a Pepe in this? Is it like a Pepe? Vlad It's Sydney a Pepe. Yeah That should be the goal for our next project. Let's make a song about Monero. You definitely should Speaker 4 But I will buy it Vlad I don't know what budget we have. Uh, yeah, you got to do a Kudo, you got to do a fundraiser. I mean, well, we can take donations, but I wanted to, if I'm going to do it, it has to be fun and this is my creative process. Usually I just come up with something crazy and then I backtrack from there. See how I can make it work. I'm a little bit. Doug same way. Look at Copa Monero, man. I was like, we're going to do a football tournament. Vlad I think whenever it's punk rock, so it has to be punky not punky punky where it's unlistenable like Whatever sex pistols were doing on stage, but that has to be more like the class or whatever more. Yeah Yeah, yeah, I love it. Do it. See you gotta push me a bit. Give me Doug I pushed you in the magazine, right? I think you're already on your way when you say that, but yeah, I was pushing you even more to get it done from an aerotopia. I wanted you to get it done. Vlad It was a very good deadline and everyone loved it because it's, it's the kind of event where you want to launch a privacy magazine and then you're, we're telling me, you know, Vlad, I just came from this conference in Bangkok and there are a lot of web free privacy people and maybe it's a good idea to go there. I'm pretty sure that if I went there, maybe I could sell many more magazines, but it's not that hardcore audience that I see, you know, that's the, you know, the people listening to this podcast, the people going to XMR Bazaar, the people who use Zashi Walk for Zcash, you know, that, that's the kind of people that I care about. And I know there's this tribal thing between when they're on Zcash, I get it, but I see Zcash as my favorite science experiment. Doug Yeah, I'm not... Well, I just wish Zcash would participate in Monerotopia. That'd be awesome. And then I'd get my hands on some Zcash, because they could be one of the privacy tech sponsors. I don't have any Zcash. Obviously, you know, yeah. Zado. Did you see Zado? Zado's been pumping. The only reason I have Zado is because they bought privacy tech sponsorships, and we spoke about this, all the reasons why I got Andre involved in Monerotopia. I mean, I think it's amazing what they're working on as well. And he was one of the... He was literally the first dev of Monero, essentially, right? He coded the first version of Monero from the crypto note white paper. But yeah, Zcash should be presenting at Monerotopia. They should be on stage. They should be, you know, I'd have somebody there debating on the panels. I don't know why they've cut themselves off from the grassroots community. That doesn't make any sense to me. Vlad Well, you know, there are clubs and I think the Zcash people are friends with the Ethereum guys and they hang out together and they go to the same web free whatever events and maybe that they also have some bad taste in their mouths from the Twitter interactions, but they should discover that people in real life, they're not, you know, Twitter is not real life. That's something important to figure out in your journey. But speaking of Zanno, it was funny at Monero Zopia that there was this guy from Wow Narrow who got on stage and crashed Zanno and said, you know, basically in his ranking score, he made Wow Narrow look much better than Zanno, but afterwards there was this guy, what's his name, which guy, the Zanno scientist. Oh, I got to give him a shovel, right? Zanno.org. It's listed on their team. Valerii Bissarco. We called him Val. I think. Yeah, yeah. Ravel, wow. Okay. So this guy got on stage and did this very scientific presentation and then blew everyone away because, you know, you look at these new privacy projects, you expect some hype, you expect some price talk and this guy gets on stage and talks for photography. Right. And how private assets are issued and how how everything works and. Doug Yeah. I mean, they worked with Co to develop their hybrid proof of work, proof of stake. So I found that intriguing that Co was working on Zado. Those are the things I was interested in. Obviously, what interests me, we need a solution for a Monero-like stablecoin, right? That would be freaking awesome. I don't know if it's Zado that figures that out. I don't know where that comes from, but no. Vlad Any story about that one has been in development for so long. Doug Yeah, Tari, I'm not too excited. Yeah, I mean, it's just vaporware right now, right? Obviously, I guess they're testing it, but it's been a long time. Why not just launch something and then iterate? Vlad I don't know. Maybe it's not good enough and I don't blame them It's just that there was so much hype going back to 2018 or something And they said they raised some money for it and then it was gonna be ready I mean they sort of missed the they came in that whole NFT thing Exactly. They they came out in the aftermath of the icomania and they said, you know, we're gonna get this, right? Which is admirable when you do this But then they missed on the NFT mania and now it's just like they're missing out on the meme coin mania I don't know what's next after this Exactly. It's like going back to ICOs. Yeah, so Doug That's what I'm saying, and I wish Ricardo would've like, I don't know, stuck with Monero a little long. Like there was so much to do there still in Monero, but I guess he got interested, whatever. People have their whatever drives them, but like to not be continued to be super passionate about building Monero at that time, I'm just surprised. Vlad Right. I think at one point he conceded that whenever doesn't scale and she was saying this. Yeah Doug He doesn't think Monero scales like that's his conclusion, but Tari will scale Vlad I'm not sure but I did ask the zano guys I had them on my podcast and ask them do you believe that fluffy pony? I mean they they work with Nicholas bonds saber-hagen first. Yes. Yes One of them was the employee and that's Andre right and she works directly with him in the same office So he knows who he is and ask him is it fluffy pony? And the way in which he described it was it's like asking if Michael sailor is Satoshi Speaker 4 Right, right, exactly. Vlad Because FluffyPony is this guy who comes from Bitcoin and he had a lot of Bitcoin that he mined and got rubber means and he became a fan of Monero and basically kickstarted the adoption for Monero and he did a pretty good work. He was like the spokesperson for the project for her. Doug while in a lot of ways he was he was like the the bitcoin jesus the Monero jesus right he was he was the roger ver in a lot of ways so Vlad I do have a lot of respect for him. I do see that Joel from Dash spends a lot of time demonstrating that somehow Fluffy Pony collaborated with the Interpol for some Doug Yeah, why is he if he's obsessed with that point like or suggesting that he is like so so what what does that even prove? Who cares as an attack on Monero? I don't really understand how that's an attack Yeah, like for all we know the NSA is you know was helped to create Monero, right? Like it's open source Vlad I don't know. It's just strange. I like faffypony. I liked him Doug But I'm saying you that system of him is like we you know, it is what it is Is he a good that character a bad character? But it's like to criticize the narrow by going after fluffy pony to me makes no set makes no sense Right. That's like going after Roger bear for for Bitcoin in a criticism of Bitcoin, right? Cuz that's like Joel, right? I don't know. Yeah, we gotta get Joel to participate in the next one era. He should be out of a narrow top Yeah, he's he's into all these, you know, he's more of a Z cash guy, right? I know he he's coin agnostic I think at the end of the day, but I think you know He has his bags just like we all do but I think he would enjoy Monero topia. He'd be a good good addition, right? Vlad Yeah, I mean, he's a nice guy. In person, he's much nicer. And she has a degree of integrity that I respect. Like, he doesn't trash something without looking into it. I was on a panel with him at the Lightning Summit. And the topic was the Lightning Network. And he was very knowledgeable. So it wasn't just someone who never tried it and was trashing it on first principles saying, you know, this cannot work because not everyone can open their channels or whatever. He actually used it. And I could tell that he tried to use it. And he found some limitations and was able to describe them. So I respect that. Doug Yeah, no, he's technical. He's an OG. He's been using crypto, like trying to use it as digital cash for a long time. He came out of the whole pork fest like thing, you know, true libertarian. Yeah, he has he has obviously a very good understanding. I do always feel like he's trying to like, you know, throw jabs at Monero. I think it's only because he has I think he has Monero, too. But I think he just he has more Zcash. Yeah, you know, I think it's as simple as that. I hate to say, you know, but I don't think he would disagree. You know, I have more men. All I have is Monero, right? So, you know, I'm not trying to act like I'm a completely unbiased person here. Vlad Also, his main affiliation is dashed, so you should always keep that in mind. Doug Dash guy like that's silly to me like all right Dash was interesting But if we're going for the digital cash thing and it's like literally Dash comes out saying no, no, no No calls the privacy coin. We're not one like so what are they at this point? I guess they're doing interesting things with their Masternodes is that still a thing in that I don't even know I don't follow closely What are they do is Dash doing inventive things? They've been did they were good with UI UX, right? I think that's kind of like what maybe their claim to fame was Vlad market thing I think right now a lot of ATMs are still supporting Dash so if you're searching for something that has relatively good privacy and is cheap to transact maybe it's an option but right now when you have MimbleWimble on Litecoin I think that one's better than what Dash can offer. Doug Huh, no Dash articles in the Privacy Magazine? No. Vlad Yes, and it's not I mean Joel also has an article and it's about living on crypto It's in the middle of the map Doug Okay, awesome Vlad it's called how to privately live on crypto. Very cool. And she does mention, I think, Dash among other currencies that he's using. Doug Are you throwing in jabs at Monero? No. Does he mention Monero as using him as in the privacy magazine? I would think. Vlad Just a second in person spending so he broke down all of the you're gonna have to read this article Doug Have a mad jolly. Really? Dash. The Private Smitter. Vlad Okay, so he does say Monero, there is also a service called Monezon, which allows you to buy products on Amazon with Monero by uploading your wishlist and having another user buy it for EU. If you use Dash, which has instant confirmations with some practice, you can feasibly buy a gift card in person with the exact amount you need for a purchase quickly enough to not cause a major inconvenience to the cashier. So, he does mention coins as tools, I don't think he is viable here. Doug Yeah, you know, of course. I think he does a good job at that. That's why I said, I think he'd be a good addition to Monerotopia. Vlad Once again, the graphics by my girlfriend are incredible. They really are. Doug very nice shout out to Monero no no thank you thank you yeah definitely shout out to Monero no no Monero no dot-com buy one for Christmas yeah order them guys to be kids Vlad or time scrolling through ExoMar Bazaar if there is still Monero Node that was out there to buy. Doug I gotta put, maybe put notos on XMR Bazaar, why not. This is the first noto, this is 001. Then we have it etched into the Monero itself. Are you installing that? I don't know. This one, I guess, is technically mine. And then I have the original original, which is silver, which is the prototype, that's actually the true original. They were both that, if you could see the 001 there, but. So what are the specs on this one? I don't know, we could pull it up. Vlad We could pull it up, but like my only question, my only concern is, do you think this is going to become obsolete in a few years or do you think it's going to be well. Doug Well, it's designed, it's designed. We up the storage. It's a pretty diesel thing if you want to pull it up. But no, it's designed to go for like eight years. And we work for the Arctic to kind of estimate, right? So like, yeah, if you have this like major boost in transactions count, maybe like five years or something. Vlad But at the end of these five years all you have to do is just upgrade the storage right? Yes Doug I think we have it, you know, where you'd be able to do that in itself. Bye! Vlad I think I ripped some more of that. It has a two terabyte SSD. Doug Yeah, I believe so. Just pull it up. You can pull it up. MoneroNoto.com. You know. Vlad It's on the homepage. You have the specs, which is the RK3588 ARM64 octa-core processor with four low-power cores and four high-power cores, hardware-based encryption with a GPU that's quad-core, 32 gigabytes of RAM and dual channels. Doug Yeah, we were we were originally 16 gigabytes of ram and then we during production we opted to 32 To try to add to its longevity. So now it's it's pretty freaking it's pretty stacked. All right, that's uh, go ahead Vlad You can also prune your node, right? You don't have to store the entire history of transactions. Maybe you can just store one terabyte worth of transactions. And that's it. Doug Yeah, I mean for now this is, you know, is a run in full nodes, but it's possible. It's very cool I mean, it easily does hook up with cake wallet. I haven't even tried because I've been so busy. I have yet to try LWS is integrated into it. So using my Monero my Monero wallet or edge wallet Edge we were having a little bit of an issue because I don't know There's kind of something missing in the UI there on their end right now but they'll fix that but with my Monero you can very easily run my Monero on your on your phone and Have the elder, you know link instead of using their LWS, right? Which is essentially what allows my Monero to have that instant field set up in your view key Giving up your view key to the my Monero servers You input it into the noto and run your own LWS and then point to it through my Monero And that's super cool because now you have an instant wallet. You have that instantaneous my Monero wallet so whenever you open it up, it's fully synced obviously the advantage of Wallets like cake wallet is it's a true wallet. You're downloading the whole blockchain You didn't give your view key up to anybody So where you're sacrificing there is the convenience of the instant sync with the true wallet like that But with with my Monero in combination with the noto running your own LWS It's kind of like the best of both worlds because now you haven't sacrificed your view key So that's that's also an exciting feature and honestly, I haven't even been running off that yet I've just been running off the cake connect to the noto Vlad I guess that's the easiest setup, and Cake does give you the option to change the nodes to which you're connecting. I'm always checking right now the stats, and there are some people commenting on Twitter. Guys, please subscribe on YouTube, because we're at 9.99k subscribers, and it's important for Doug to hit the 10k milestone on the episodes. Speaker 4 HA HA HA Vlad For scientific purposes, it's for science, the definition of science. And this is episode 333, so I guess it's a magical number. Oh wow. How does it work with this one? Doug I don't know what to say, we're getting Vlad power here. The Vlad boost. You deserve it. Vlad Thank you people just subscribe hit that button check out the show. I know the talks are long, but there's so much Doug I thought this was a great episode man. I was this this felt like we were just hanging out chillin, which is fantastic Vlad And there was so much to see at when Aerotopia, if you were not there, you missed out. I'm sorry. You're going to be able to see the live stream whenever that one gets released. But just that agarist feeling, when you feel like you're part of this peer-to-peer economy, I think that's worth the price of admission. Feeling like you're part of something, meeting guys who are either ideologically driven or technologically driven, and they don't care about price at all. They just want this idea to work, to have internet money that's priced. Doug That was magical hanging out with everybody. It's a magical feeling. You're hanging out with like-minded people that want to hop out It's it's a rare breed. Strong group of people, right? Amazing people, amazing people, talented, together strong Yeah, yeah, really enjoyed hanging out with you there, man, and The vibe you brought it was fantastic. What would you like to see the next one happen in your mind? When or where? When. When and where, I was kind of asking that before, but yeah, when and where. I've seen this Vlad trick with conferences where they tend to organize the next edition after 11 months. So it's actually sooner than they expect. It's not exactly one year, but maybe you should time it in a way that makes people going to love Bitcoin in Argentina. Also able to attend this one is those who travel to, I think at the same time you've had the event in El Salvador and that's called adopting Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And not some people went there instead. you Doug yeah we might actually yeah we might actually i know which is amazing right because imagine because we had a good crowd we've fallen in bitcoiners even with that going on which is like pretty amazing Vlad Yeah, but the big winners who came to Monero topia, they don't care about the Hopium regarded also Doug poor nation state as well. Cypherpunk Bitcoiners, yeah. It was kind of their way to rebel. Like, I'm going to Monerotopia instead, fuck this. But I forget the point I was just gonna make here. I don't know. Oh yeah, originally, so originally it was supposed to be alongside Labekov in Argentina in Buenos Aires. So that's why it ended up being around that time of the year. But then we moved it back to Mexico City. So we'll probably do it back in Mexico City. Same venue, just try to blow it out. One last time and really get the adoption thing going. Cause like, there's just so much built up value that's already there. It's like the network effect of that place. You know, it's like, I don't want to throw that away. So that'll probably keep me there in at least another year. And then I'm thinking maybe doing it actually in like February, March. So actually, instead of doing it only like sooner with like 11, actually doing it later. And that's really mostly because of personal reasons. Cause we have another family member on the way over here. So, congratulations. Thank you, man. Thank you. So I'll be in the trenches with that project as well. That'll be another project on my plate. So I'm thinking maybe delaying it a little bit. And then like, instead of doing it in November, waiting till maybe February or March. What do you think of that time? How's the weather in Mexico? It's good all year round, Mexico City. There's so we have the dry season, right? So you want, you want to do it during the dry season, even during the wet season. I'm thinking like we did it the first time in the beginning of the wet season. And we did get rain. We got like pouring rain one night. But other than that, when it's not raining, it's beautiful, clear skies, same weather, warmer, a little warmer in the beginning of the rain season, warmer during the day and evening. We did it now in the November, it's like dead of dry season. Like the chance of rain was like 0%. If we do it in February, March, same thing, very low chance of rain. And actually I think it's a little, no, I think it's starting to warm up then at that point a little bit. Cause it got cold at night, right? Cooler than you would think. Yeah. That's cause you're at that elevation too, 8,000 foot elevation. All right, buddy. I say we will kill it here. This is fantastic. Vlad Get this one, I'm going to list it on XMR Bazaar. I have about 90 of them left. So I want to ship them fast so they end up under your Christmas tree. If you have a loved one or someone stacking DRCU that you want to learn about privacy, this is a very good primer on Monero, on Zcash, on MimbleWimble, on Litecoin, on how you can use Bitcoin with privacy and how you can set up BTC Pay. And there are some philosophical articles. There is even one about how you can start your own country, which I think is interesting. And I think it will go for like 15 bucks to cover all the costs. So it's 50 bucks with shipping included. It's like 150 pages, thick paper, pretty heavy. Doug Beautiful coffee table keep it on your coffee table your guests come over they pick it up What's this next thing you know they're going down the privacy tech rat that they're learning about Monero's Vlad The beautiful part about magazines, because people have been telling me, you know, you should make this, you should put it, you know, reformat it to put it in a book format and sell it as a book. But when you deal with a book, you feel that pressure to start from page one and read until the last cover, you know, when you're dealing with a magazine, you just open wherever you want and you read for five minutes, and you don't feel a commitment. You don't have to commit to reading everything. You just read whatever you find interesting, you put it down and that's it. And it's also more fun. It has graphics like a comic book, I actually had this conversation with someone who was like, Oh, how come you pay like 2025 dollars to print one? And I said, Have you seen the graphics? And they said, Oh, you should do it as a book, but it's the same, it can't be the same. Doug No, I think it works very well as a magazine the articles. Yeah. No, it's fantastic. Maybe you'll maybe you'll have one by the next Monero topia. What do you think? Would you would you do another one? I will Vlad So based on my experience with this crew of writers who contributed, I will definitely do another one. And maybe next time I would get a mere talky because he has been promising to write an article. And maybe next time I'll get more people, like maybe I'll get Zuko to write an article. Maybe I'll get fluffy pony to write an article to have more, more of these big names that attract readers and get people curious to find out more. And maybe I was thinking I can actually do one with nothing but experiments in the privacy sector, like white papers and research papers. And you have people to explain what they're working on and how it can actually improve the field of privacy. The drawback is that I can't possibly be an editor for these. So they can say whatever they want and there's no way for me to verify that it's in fact true, but it is beautiful. When you open up and you push a community towards achieving a goal, it's incredible. I even have, so I'm not going to brag too much, but Toksudo, who is one of the most featured people on your show and somewhat of a co-host, he has a very nice article on Thraceable. He has a nice article about Monero. And I also have an article by Ellie Ben-Sasson, who is a big name in the privacy space. He has been speaking about zero-knowledge proofs and using them to sync your node instantly for like 10 years or something. Very smart guy and he wrote a lot. Doug I don't, yeah, I think I know the name, yeah. I haven't read all the articles yet. I'm looking at it right now. It's on my bookshelf, but I can't read it. Vlad Well, unfortunately, so you have, where is it? You have the small format. I did thumb through it though. I was like... So the Mexican's ripped me off. They delivered this, the tiny one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is the way it was supposed to be, right? And this is much easier to read, the second edition. Doug No, it's a much better format for a magazine. Vlad And I paid them to do this and they came up with this and then they were like, Oh, if you want it in larger formats, you can wait another two days. And I'll look just for you guys. I know exactly what you're doing there. You wanted to say one paper and print and ink and come up with this. I mean, it's nice. It's easier to hold in your hands. Doug Yeah, it's not that bad, man. I know you're a perfectionist, you had your vision, but it works as a small, small one, too. Vlad the way it's meant to be yeah this is it's really funny it was my idea and my girlfriend has executed beautifully basically this Pepe with mushrooms in the article because it's fungible not fungi it means mushroom I love it every mushroom is like another mushroom I don't know what happened with my video once again Doug That's a thumbs down, aww, that's not true. Vlad Anyway, let's end this because I don't think people will listen up to this point, but if they do listen, they should write a comment and say what they want to buy from XMR Bazaar, or what or not they want a Monero Noto for Christmas or one of these magazines. Just comment about this stuff. Doug Wait, do we have miss super chat? No, our last shot was when smart contract that Monero. We're not going into that Vlad as Ronald came into existence. Doug Yeah, well, you know, Luke Parker has got some ideas with things, but we won't go down that rabbit hole right now. All right, Vlad, we'll we'll leave it here. Thank you so much, man. You're frozen right now on my screen. It's. Vlad It's fine, I highlight the magazine, it's all good. Alright brother. Remember. Doug Well, we'll be in touch and I'll be reaching out to you at some point trying to get you excited about the next Monero topia So so be ready and I'm sure I'll talk to you before then too Vlad Okay, best of luck with the newborn and have fun. Thank you, man. All right, bye. Doug Thank you so much. Adios. Speaker 2 Hi, Monero Land, thank you for joining on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to our show tube, Odyssey, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Go to MoneroTalk.Live for a full list of places where you can watch endless. If you want to interact with us, guests, or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter, Mastodon, or any of our social media platform. MoneroTalk is also made possible from contributions by viewers and listeners like you, and supporting us is easier than ever. By typing in MoneroTalk.Crypto in your Monero.com or cake wallet send address to send us a tip. 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