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July 12, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:56:43
Decentralize.TV - Episode 3 - July 12, 2023 - Decentralized CRYPTO acquisition - Interview with Loca
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Welcome to today's interview on Decentralized.tv podcast.
I'm Mike Adams and you may notice I'm not in my regular studio right now and that's because we're doing this off hours with our special guest who is involved in a project that I think is really important.
for people being able to acquire Monero which of course is I think the number one privacy coin without going through centralized exchanges which have all kinds of problems that even I've been experiencing lately as well.
I've had my accounts frozen on A couple of exchanges for using them too much, it turns out.
So, imagine that.
But joining me now to talk about LocalMonero.co, that's the website that you'll want to go check out, is Alex.
And Alex, thank you for joining me here.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Mike.
Good to be here.
It's great to have you on.
Now, I want to be respectful, first of all, that Monero is a privacy coin.
We're going to respect your privacy.
I don't even know really who you are or where you are, but what are you able to share about your involvement with the project?
Well, my involvement with the Monero project specifically is rather limited.
No, I mean just the local Monero project.
Oh, okay, sorry.
Well, I'm the co-founder at LocalMoneroAgridesk.
We've been operating since 2017.
We've survived the big crypto crash and we're still chugging along.
Initially, we launched just as LocalMonero as a peer-to-peer platform to serve the Monero community because back then there was no active peer-to-peer platform for Monero.
So we kind of stepped in and filled that niche.
It was like an alternative to LocalBitcoins, which recently closed, unfortunately.
LocalBitcoins being, of course, the grandfather of the industry, essentially.
They've started the whole format, I'd say.
Maybe they didn't start it, but they certainly sort of perfected it and made it mainstream.
Yeah, Monero didn't have an equivalent to that, and so we stepped in and we filled that void.
We also expanded our platform We're good to go.
Front-end for Local Monero that also includes Bitcoin on the platform.
Okay, okay.
I didn't know that, but that's great to know.
So for those who aren't familiar with what Local Monero is or Agora Desk as you're talking about, could you just give us kind of a simplified explanation and break it down for newbies too, if you would, please.
When you want to buy cryptocurrencies, usually people tell you to go to what's called a centralized exchange, which is something like Kraken or Binance or something like that.
The way that it works is that you register an account there.
They ask you for all of your ID information.
They ask you for a passport scan or an ID scan.
They ask you for a selfie video or something like that.
They ask you for an address proof.
And you have to go through all these layers of what's called KYC, know your customer.
And only after that do you get access to actually trade, purchase or sell the cryptocurrency that you wish to purchase or sell.
There is also an alternative to that, which is...
Less popular, less known, but that's slowly changing now after the whole FTX scandal and people realizing how big of a problem KYC is, and that's called peer-to-peer, P2P. And the way that it works is that platforms like ours, where you don't really need to provide any ID information just to register on the platform, all you do is you go on the website, you go on localmonero.co, You register an account.
It's as simple as getting a username and password.
You don't even need to submit an email on our platform.
After that, there's a few people that are selling, let's say Monero.
They post offers on the website, kind of like they do on eBay or Craigslist or something like that.
You basically browse those offers.
You can select any payment method you wish and if there's a seller that offers that payment method, then you can just directly contact them through clicking the buy button on the website next to their offer.
You get a little chat window.
The seller gives you their payment details.
Let's say it's a cash app trade.
They'd give you their cash tag.
You'd make the payment.
Then they finalize the trade and you get the coins directly to your wallet.
Start to finish, this process takes, I'd say, about 20 minutes.
It's very simple, very easy, very fast.
As I understand it, you have all kinds of security measures in place to protect the buyer and seller.
I understand it's not perfect.
We'll talk about that.
But don't you have protection mechanisms for buyers to be able to know that they can trust certain sellers who have a reputation on your platform?
That's right.
We have a couple of mechanisms in place.
One is, as you mentioned, the reputation mechanism.
Every seller has a score that shows how many trades they have and what percentage of positive feedbacks do they have, positive reviews.
That's one sort of protection mechanism because a seller wants to maintain their reputation because if they start scamming or somehow mistreating their customers, then Other customers will know about it and they won't get any more customers because of that.
That's one mechanism of protecting the buyer.
The other mechanism is what we call the arbitration bond, meaning that the seller, when they post an offer and when you open a trade with them, they have to post a bond that is equal in amount to the amount of the trade.
If you're buying $100 worth of Monero on the platform, Then the seller has to post a $100 equivalent bond in order for the trade to start.
That way, there's no way for the seller to sort of just get your money from, let's say, on cash chat and then just disappear from the website without actually paying you the coins that they owe you.
The way that it works is that in case there's some kind of a dispute situation, let's say you make the payment Then the seller starts saying, oh no, I didn't receive any payment.
Then you can press the dispute button and that opens the dispute.
Our staff joins the trade.
We examine the evidence on both sides and then we make a ruling based on that.
Because of this mechanism, if you've actually made the payment, it's very easy to prove it, generally speaking.
If the seller hasn't received the payment, it's also, relatively speaking, easy to prove it for them.
We have ways of figuring it out.
We don't make those ways public because if we do, then that opens up space for scammers to try to game the system.
We have our ways of figuring it out.
Because of these mechanisms in place, there's basically no moral hazard in play for the seller to try to pull this off because they know that they'll end up in a dispute situation and they know that we're going to figure it out.
Can I ask, what's the revenue model for the platform?
Is it just a percentage of every transaction or how does that work?
Yeah, we take 1% from every completed trade.
That's right.
And it's only on the side that posted the offer.
So if you're a buyer that's responding to someone else's sell offer, Then there's no fee for you.
It's just the seller.
And then your...
I hope I'm not prying too much, but I would guess that your overhead involves, of course, maintaining the site, you know, all the data integrity and avoiding DDoS attacks and all that that happens, but then also the dispute resolution team, right?
Because I can imagine...
Scammers are going to try everything at first on every website that they think they might be able to get away with something.
I'm sure they've tried everything that is imaginable.
But then they learn they can't do it and then they go somewhere else.
But it takes time of your staff to enforce your rule system, right?
That's exactly correct, yeah.
And scammers, you know, they...
Every day there's a scammer that thinks that they can outsmart the system.
They can sort of defeat it.
But generally, no.
It just doesn't happen.
We're a step ahead.
Now, if you don't mind me asking, I'm looking at your site right now.
And I admit, the first time I saw this category, it says, buy Monero with cash in the USA. And apparently that's meeting people at a location.
You bring cash and then they give you Monero, correct?
And there's people all over the country that will meet you to do this trade.
Is that right?
That's correct, yes.
Now, my first impression, maybe it's just because, you know, I live in Texas and I don't know, as a Texan we don't necessarily trust meeting people in parking lots that we don't know to do exchanges and things, but do people tend to meet in like restaurants or, you know, public places or something?
I mean, how is this typically handled in a safe and secure manner?
Yeah, generally these meetings happen in a public place where If there's some funny business that somebody wants to attempt, it's going to have a lot of witnesses.
You're probably thinking of armed robberies.
As long as you're in a public place and as long as you be careful about making sure that There's nobody tracing you, following you, then you should be fine.
And generally speaking, the face-to-face cash meetings, I mean, people do them, but generally people stick to online payment methods.
Stuff like Cash App, or maybe ATM cash deposits, or maybe Cash by Mail, or Zelle, or...
Right.
You also, I saw that, don't you have, yeah, you have PayPal, bank transfers, international wires, cash app, Zelle, cash by mail.
Do people mail cash to each other?
Yeah, people mail cash to each other.
The big advantage of cash by mail is that it's sort of, you don't have to meet anyone, and it's It's irreversible, so that protects the seller from scams that buyers can perpetrate on reversible payment methods like PayPal.
This is one of the main reasons that sellers get burned, is they accept a payment method that is reversible.
For example, with PayPal, PayPal will almost always side with the buyer.
There's very little protection for the seller on a PayPal trade.
And if you're a buyer, you can make the PayPal payment and then you can claim that it was fraud or that it was an unauthorized payment or something like that.
And then PayPal will reverse the payment and then the seller will be left holding the bag Even if they can provide all the necessary receipts and evidence to PayPal in dispute resolution.
They just always side with the buyer.
This gets to one of the key advantages of cryptocurrency, by the way, because the payments are final.
You know, the record is immutable.
Of course, once it passes a certain number of confirmations on the blockchain.
One of the things that I love about Monero in particular, but crypto in general, is that it doesn't have all that reversibility.
Because even ACH bank transfers, I've learned recently, some people can reverse those.
Of course, I run an online store, an e-commerce operation, and there's always some small percentage of people that try to do chargebacks after they receive the goods, basically stealing.
We caught one person recently that had stolen about $20,000 worth of product from us that way.
We caught them and it was a younger kid, I'd say under 20, and local police visited him and he sent it all back.
Because he didn't want to get charged.
Yeah, we actually got it all back.
But yeah, I know.
That's the first time that's ever happened.
But the reversibility of fiat banking and transfers and payments is a detriment to the integrity of the entire system.
And it slows everything down because you never know, as a receiver or a sender, if you can trust the other party's actions in fiat.
Yeah, I completely agree, and that is why cash-based payment methods are generally more popular because sellers don't carry that risk of being burned.
One exception would probably be Cash App, where Cash App generally is irreversible.
There have been instances of reversibility in Cash App, but it's very, very difficult for a buyer to reverse a Cash App payment.
I see.
Oh, well that's good to know because, see, even myself, I want to acquire more Monero and the way I've been doing it is to buy Bitcoin first and then swap Bitcoin for Monero.
Well, then you're leaving a permanent record in the Bitcoin chain if you're doing that.
You should go directly to Monero.
Oh, that's what I want to do.
That's why I'm talking to you.
And a lot of people want to go directly to Monero.
They don't want to have that fully readable Bitcoin blockchain record, especially buying BTC from a KYC exchange, which is the way most people get it.
Alright, so, fascinating.
So, what about transaction sizes?
Because, you know, I see a lot of the offers on your site, to me, they don't necessarily look that large.
You know, what if somebody wants to take 20 grand and put it into Monero?
It seems like that's going to raise a lot of red flags to a lot of sellers on local Monero.
Perhaps.
I don't know.
What are your thoughts?
Look, it depends on the seller.
Different sellers do different Generally, if you want to make those kind of purchases, you would have to talk to the seller directly and arrange for that.
Some sellers will outright say no and others might agree depending on the specific case.
You can always just open a trade.
You don't have to commit to anything on the platform immediately.
You can, as a buyer, just Open a trade with a seller for, let's say, a minimum amount.
You don't have to make any payment, actually.
Then, in the trade chat, you can ask the seller whether they can accommodate you and they'll respond, generally, really quickly.
Then, you can cancel the trade.
There's no harm, no foul, no commitments, no nothing.
Okay, and then there's also a reputation score for you as a buyer.
If you're just a buyer, never a seller, then you also have a reputation score as well.
So it seems to make sense.
If you want to buy Monero, you should probably start small, build a good reputation score, have a solid reputation on the platform so that you're going to be more easily trusted by other sellers.
That's right.
That's generally the case.
It's a very sort of free market type of situation where Reputation is very important, and honesty is rewarded, and of course dishonesty is punished.
Yeah.
Right, right.
Okay.
So, let me ask you another big question.
Of course, we have the SEC trying to crack down on the centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance.
And a lot of us have been wondering, a lot of us just who support privacy, digital coins, digital money, Digital stores of value.
I love Monero because, you know, I can memorize a seed phrase and I can have a wallet in my head, basically, and it goes with me wherever I go.
And it's a store of value that can't be physically taken from me, right?
So lots of advantages.
It seems like unless this trend gets reversed in terms of government trying to destroy privacy crypto, eventually they're going to try to shut down operations like local Monero.
Has any of that...
I mean, only what you're willing to talk about publicly, but...
Is that a concern or has any of that already happened?
Or do you think that they're never going to touch peer-to-peer listings like that because it doesn't represent a huge amount of money overall?
What are your thoughts on that?
I don't think that it's realistic to not think of this as something that may happen.
It's definitely a risk.
It's definitely, you know, especially Especially in the US, there seems to be some sort of a concentrated effort to shut down cryptocurrency, at least recently.
Maybe this trend will reverse.
Some people have been speculating that this is just a way for the traditional finance players to sort of destroy the industry and then buy in at low prices.
I think that's a viable theory.
Right, right.
So, like, it's difficult to say.
I mean, I think it's clear that the cat's out of the bag.
You can't really stop this.
I mean, even if you ban this in the U.S., you know, there's always other jurisdictions that are going to be more friendly to it.
And this is, again, kind of, I mean, it's not really a free market situation, but it's a decentralized sort of competition, right, where you have one jurisdiction doing this, other jurisdictions doing that.
And generally, the free market will favor the most efficient, right, the most profitable jurisdiction.
And that, I believe, will be a jurisdiction that will be friendly to cryptocurrency.
So even if the U.S. specifically shuts down peer-to-peer or a platform like ours, you know, there's still going to be other jurisdictions that we'll be able to operate in.
Well, and it would be, I think from a macroeconomic point of view, it would be very unwise for the United States to reject crypto because it's so fluid and borderless that the U.S. would miss out on the opportunity to be a hub of crypto innovation, which would create more economic abundance, right?
If you shut it down in the U.S., it just goes to other countries and anybody can get a VPN and change their IP address to, you know, whatever, Singapore or whatever, and they can do business via Singapore.
So, you know, it just seems so short-sighted.
Like Senator Elizabeth Warren, you know, waging a war on crypto.
It's like, why not understand that just as the U.S. was the innovation pioneer in computing operating systems like Windows and, you know, Mac, iOS, why not let the U.S. be the innovation pioneer in crypto, right?
What are your thoughts?
Well, To play the government's advocate here, the US government's advocate, they do stand to lose a lot from this because the US dollar is a huge weapon in the arsenal of the US government that they can use to clobber everybody into submission.
Let's say how it is, it's a direct threat to the monopoly of the US dollar over the world economy.
The US government doesn't want to see this monopoly go away.
I mean, it's not a monopoly per se, but it's like the US dollar is, I think, responsible for like 70% of the transactions in the world or something like that.
So it's very important for nations around the world to stay connected to I
would agree with you that Despite the loss of this monopoly, this US dollar weapon that they have, they would benefit also from the increased economic efficiency of having this global, decentralized, frictionless medium of exchange system.
I would say that short-sighted governance is the norm, especially in the US. Well, I agree with you, and I think a great example of that, and I think this was a game changer for the whole history of money, was a little over a year ago when, through the influence of the United States, the SWIFT system cut off Russia.
From accessing that transactional system, right?
Our viewers are very sophisticated, by the way.
They already know about this, but just in case anybody doesn't, you know, the SWIFT system, really, it's a centralized ledger that allows nations and central banks and member banks of other countries to engage in clearing and transactions.
But it's a ledger that requires permission from the SWIFT organization, which is heavily influenced by Western powers, such as the United States.
It's not supposed to be influenced that way, but it has been.
So they cut off Russia.
And I think that instantly sent a message all around the world that said, wait a second, The dollar's not neutral anymore.
It's not a neutral method of exchange or means of exchange.
It is now a scoring system where permission is required to use it.
And if the U.S. doesn't want to give you permission as a nation, They can cut you off from that system, whereas Monero is permissionless, right?
So anybody right now could theoretically send a Monero transaction to anybody in Russia or Ukraine or China or South America or anywhere, and there's no central ledger or controlling authority that can cut it off.
So we almost have to thank SWIFT for demonstrating the advantages of Monero, don't we?
I don't want to sound like a Marxist, but in some ways this sort of policy is sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
The system is basically operating in a way and seems to be unable to operate in any other way such that not just the central bank in the US, the Federal Reserve, but also central banks in other countries I
don't see...
Personally, the incentive structure for government actors is such that I don't think that they'll be able to turn away from this sort of tendency.
So because of that, instead of a soft landing where it's like a reform type of situation where we gradually realize that this isn't sustainable, this isn't very productive, we're just inflating and inflating and restricting and restricting and we're sort of Cutting off the oxygen from free market,
voluntary interactions, it feels to me that we're more destined for a hard landing where it's going to be a situation that every central bank ends up in a high inflation or even hyperinflation situation and that drives people to switch to crypto, Monero hopefully specifically, but even if it goes to Bitcoin, I'd be relatively happy.
Because, I mean, we're already seeing this happen in a lot of countries in what's known as the Global South, right?
We look at Argentina, we look at Venezuela, we look at Nigeria, and these things are, I mean, a lot of crypto penetration.
I think the most Penetrated in terms of crypto adoption countries are those that are experiencing this hard landing that I just talked about.
Absolutely.
The US has a much higher inflation capacity than those countries because most people around the world use the US dollar to transact.
The Federal Reserve can print way more money than any other central bank can without sort of ending up in this hyperinflationary situation.
You're right, but they are certainly testing the limits of how far they can print, you know, trillions at a time now, right?
So, I mean, your point is absolutely correct, but my goodness, how many trillions can the system handle?
I guess we're going to find out.
Yeah, we'll find out.
Some people are going to find out the hard way.
Some people are going to take steps, precautionary measures, and slowly diversify their portfolio out of fiat currencies and into stuff like gold, shout out to Peter Schiff, and cryptocurrencies, and especially Hopefully more people realize that Monero is the way to go because of Bitcoin's huge flaws.
I don't think that it's possible that those flaws are going to be rectified just from a political standpoint.
Political in the sense of the Bitcoin developer community is very rigid in terms of the way that Bitcoin is and they don't want to change it.
A lot of so-called Bitcoin maxis, maximalists, they completely reject the notion of implementing confidentiality into Bitcoin's protocol.
And I believe that will be, in the end, that will be the downfall of Bitcoin.
And it's a shame, really, because we could have It's obviously easier because Bitcoin already has a lot of adoption now compared to Monero especially.
If the core developer community were more open to implementing the necessary confidentiality measures that Monero already has, It could have been a much easier transition, but now we sort of have to not only transition people from fiat to crypto, but we have to transition them from Bitcoin to Monero as well.
It's a long way.
Well, just to go down the rabbit hole a little bit on this, and this is just conjecture, and I welcome Bitcoin experts to come on and counter this if you wish, but I've heard allegations that Bitcoin was a creation of the three-letter agencies designed so that they could move money around, and also they could keep tabs on everybody else moving money around, and if that's the case, I can't prove it.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, you can correct me in the comments on this video, If that's the case, then they would never want to offer privacy features for it because it's so effective at tracking people's transactions.
And this also explains why the Treasury is at war with Monero.
I think, isn't that reward still being offered for anybody who can break Monero's privacy algorithms?
I think, didn't the Treasury have a reward out there for that?
Yeah, I think that reward is still active, but it's unlikely that anyone credible will be able to claim it.
There is actually a huge development happening in the Monero development community right now.
I don't know if you're aware of exactly how Monero privacy works.
I'm more technical than the average user, yes.
I've been trying to learn more about Seraphis, by the way, and trying to keep up to speed on things, but I'm no expert on it.
Well, for the listeners, just a brief sort of rundown.
There's sort of three pillars of privacy in Monero.
One is stealth addresses, which is Something that allows Monero transactions to be unlinkable in terms of the receiving address.
So for example, in Bitcoin, when you give somebody your address to receive some coins, that address is recorded onto the blockchain.
And so anybody who knows your address can sort of type that into a block explorer and then they can see all the transactions that went into that address and all the transactions that are going out of that address, right?
Stealth addresses sort of combat that by creating this sort of one-time address that is generated every time that you receive a transaction.
That way, there's no way just to look at the blockchain and figure out which address received what and sent what.
So that's one pillar.
And the other pillar is what's known as confidential transactions, where you hide the amount.
And the way that it works, it's just basically like a sum.
I'm not super crypto-literate, but it calculates without revealing the actual amount of the transaction.
Every transaction has to The inputs and the outputs have to sum to zero.
There's a way to do this in a cryptographically obscure way that prevents people from being able to see what are the amounts of the transaction.
In Bitcoin, of course, you can see all the input amounts and all the output amounts.
That's what confidential transactions are for.
The last pillar is ring signatures, which prevents people from being able to link The outputs, so like which output is actually being spent in a transaction.
And the way that it works in Monero right now is that there's a ring of 16, meaning that every output that you spend, it's like a 16 ring where you don't know which of the members of the ring is the true output that's being spent, right?
Right.
In Seraphis right now, this is breaking news.
This is happening literally in the last few days.
We've had Luke Parker, also known as Kayaba Nerve, releasing his work on what's called full chain membership proofs.
Now, one of the biggest criticisms of Monero is the ring signatures, the rings of 16, basically saying that, "Oh, well, you're not really ...
It's sort of using different statistical methods.
You can try and figure out which output is actually the true spend of a transaction." If only Monero had full-chain membership proofs, meaning if only the ring size was not 16, but included the entire blockchain.
Then you can talk about significant privacy.
Now, it seems that with Seraphis, this is going to happen.
Thanks to something known as Curve Trees, which is what Luke Parker is working on, it seems that, assuming Luke's work is solid, it seems that with Seraphis, we're going to get an upgrade that will increase...
Rings won't exist anymore, but I'm just using it as an analogy.
We're increasing the ring size from 16 to include all the outputs in the chain.
So that's going to completely nullify...
The main criticism that Monero currently gets from people attacking its privacy.
Oh, wait a minute.
And I'm guessing this is actually going to make the future blockchain more compact because it doesn't have to be padded with 15 other sort of stealth addresses either.
There must be something more clever taking place.
Not exactly.
The transaction size actually will increase as far as we understand because the proof needs to include cryptographic signatures.
I'm butchering the cryptography here.
I apologize to all the Monero cryptographers here.
Just as a massive simplification, that is probably even not completely accurate.
We still have to sort of hold the signatures for all the outputs, but it's going to be very compact.
Now, the transaction inputs currently are 670 bytes per input, per ring, meaning.
And it's going to go from 670 bytes up to, I think, around 2 to 4 kilobytes.
So the transaction size is going to increase.
I see.
The privacy benefits outweigh by far.
Clearly, clearly.
So this has been the main criticism or one of the criticisms of Monero also.
I've actually voiced this too.
The blockchain size is very large for the number of transactions that it carries.
And it does take a long time to sink the blockchain given that it's not used as much as Bitcoin by far.
But I'm with you.
If it gives me far more privacy, I mean, you're talking about not just a geometric increase, but every transaction, every UTXO on the blockchain could be incorporated into the possibility of who owns this transaction, then, yeah, I'm willing to have a bigger blockchain for that kind of security.
It's not just every UTXO. UTXO meaning unspent transaction output.
It actually includes all the outputs on the chain.
Wow.
Wow.
So then that's going to make the Treasury go totally nuts.
They'll have to raise the reward to millions of dollars and it probably still...
Still won't work.
I mean, unless they build a quantum decryption machine, which I've seen some papers on that.
Not really practical for this application at this point in time.
Maybe 50 years later, who knows?
But until that day, Monero's got some really smart people on the project.
I keep hearing that from other projects, by the way.
That the best coders are on Monero's cryptography.
That's right.
All the sort of cypherpunks that used to be at the heart of Bitcoin, I mean, not all of them, of course, but I feel like most of them have now switched to Monero.
And Monero has really sort of inherited the cypherpunk spirit that originally was in the Bitcoin project.
I'm not saying that there are no cypherpunks in the Bitcoin project.
I'm just saying that Unfortunately, the real cutting edge privacy work is now being done on Monero and has sort of been abandoned in Bitcoin.
The thing is, you can't have fungibility without privacy.
It's not just about protecting everybody's financial privacy.
It's also about making The next generation of money.
Every time humanity has adopted a new medium of exchange, it has always had the fundamental property of fungibility.
Fungibility meaning one unit of this thing is equal to every other unit of that thing.
If Peter Schiff were on the show, he'd mention that gold has fungibility and Bitcoin doesn't have fungibility.
That's right.
And he'd be right.
And he's correct.
He is correct.
Bitcoin does not have fungibility because not every Bitcoin is equal to every other Bitcoin because some Bitcoins have a history to them.
And other Bitcoins are freshly mined.
And if a Bitcoin doesn't have any history associated with it, then you're not running the risk that at some time in the future, some agency might declare the coins that you hold to be in some way undesirable.
Maybe they were involved in a criminal transaction, maybe they were involved in terrorism, something like that.
And then, of course, you had no idea when you were buying those Bitcoins that they had this history.
In fact, nobody had any idea.
It was only later when the investigation came through.
And now you're holding the bag with coins that nobody's ever going to accept, right?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of implications, yeah.
There are traces of cocaine on every dollar bill in circulation, right?
So at some point, almost every physical greenback bill has been used by somebody to snort cocaine somewhere, probably.
Or at least has been used in a cocaine trade.
So, you know, if the same standard were used against fiat currency, paper bills, then, you know, no one would be able to accept any paper bills without running a cocaine test, right?
But of course, they don't do that.
But for Bitcoin, they want to know the whole history.
Like, where did this fraction come from?
And how was it used in the past?
You know, the double standard is painful.
But Monero, every coin is like a freshly minted coin because it has no history.
Exactly.
Even if you wanted to impose this standard, like, I agree with your point on the double standard.
But the thing is, Even if you wanted to impose that standard on Monero, that would be impossible because, as you say, every coin that you receive is as if it was freshly minted.
There is no history that you can deduce.
Assuming all the cryptography is solid, there is no history that you can deduce from any particular Monero coin.
Even if you're not worried about that specific aspect of it, Financial privacy in general is something that everybody intuitively does.
Nobody publishes their bank account information for everybody to see.
People intuitively understand that financial privacy is important, but there's also a lot of implications from having A medium of exchange that is globally used that is completely traceable like Bitcoin.
One example would be...
Imagine a thought experiment.
We have the whole world switching to Bitcoin as the new medium of exchange, the new gold standard of the world.
What are some of the implications?
One of the implications would be if somebody has Some sort of business and they need to buy their supplies and they have their customers.
If you have a competitor that you're negotiating – sorry, not a competitor but a supplier that you want to negotiate some supplies, purchase some supplies from, well, they can look at your Bitcoin wallet and they can see what you paid to other suppliers.
They can see how much money you earn, what your expenses are and based on that, they can sort of adjust their price in a way that would make you pay the most amount of money possible.
That gives them an unfair negotiating advantage.
Normally this would be a trade secret.
This is applicable not only to a business but also to a consumer.
Let's say you're a consumer that's using a website like Amazon.
You want to buy something.
Well, if Amazon knows your Bitcoin wallet because you've used it to purchase stuff from Amazon before, if they know your purchasing habits, how much you're spending here, how much you're earning because they can see the receipts to your wallet, they can adjust the prices of their products to maximize their own profits.
I think this is called discriminatory pricing and this would happen completely transparently.
This would happen without you knowing it.
And this is used right now by airline companies, by the way, right?
Ticket prices are very different based on the geolocation of your IP address, where you're checking the prices from.
Yeah, this sort of turns it up to 11, right?
And then, because you can do it individually per consumer.
And then in addition to that, you know, it's just a safety risk because let's say you're going to a A region that has a relatively high rate of crime and you want to go to a convenience store and buy yourself a bottle of water.
You use your Bitcoin wallet to pay and let's say you have way more than the national average in that country.
The cashier will tip off some thugs that are around the ransom group.
K&R. Yeah, exactly.
Just like that, you're now a target in a very unsafe environment.
Monero solves all of these.
Of course, we've talked about the illicit funds problem where you might just be selling cupcakes and you accept Bitcoin as payment.
And then somebody buys some cupcakes from you.
And then a couple of months later, you get a notice from the FBI that you're now a target of investigation because the coins that somebody used to pay you were used in some very, very bad activities.
So Monero solves all of these problems without any additional input from the end user.
It just happens automatically.
There's no way to mess this up.
And this should be the way.
You're answering a key point here.
Sorry to interrupt.
But when people say, oh, I don't need privacy coins because I'm not doing anything illegal.
You just answered that.
It doesn't have to be that you're doing anything illegal.
You just gave several examples of where privacy is integral to your own personal safety.
And your ability to run a business, your ability to function in a world without having to create, you know, 500 new Bitcoin addresses or use Whirlpool, CoinJoin, whatever to try to swirl them all around, which makes the whole Bitcoin blockchain even bigger if everybody does that, right?
So, you know...
Privacy is the answer to this, and I forgot who said it, but Monero is what a lot of people thought they bought when they bought Bitcoin, and then they realize Bitcoin doesn't have the privacy that Monero has.
Monero actually fulfills the promise in many ways of the original vision of Bitcoin.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
The notion around Bitcoin was that it's fundamentally private and anonymous, and that's what people Yes,
it's true.
To me, I'm not a Monero maximalist.
I'm just someone who believes that it is crucial that humanity moves to the next generation of money.
So far, it seems that Monero is the best candidate at being the next generation of money.
If some new cryptocurrency project comes along that It fulfills the holy trinity of decentralization, fungibility, and money being electronic.
And it does it better than Monero.
Maybe the blockchain size is smaller or the privacy guarantees are better or whatever it is.
If that project comes along, I'll immediately launch that local newproject.co and I'll be advocating for it.
This is just a counterpoint to Bitcoin maxis.
I get why they're Bitcoin maxis because there's been so many scams in the crypto space with the ICO era, with all the NFTs.
Not all of them, but you know what I mean.
The rug pulls, the scams.
It's understandable why you would want to sort of just shave off the remaining crypto industry and just be a Bitcoin maxi, but they really need to sort of modify their position a little bit from being a Bitcoin maxi to being a next generation of money maxi, and that will naturally drive them towards Monero.
Yeah, really good point, and I'm glad you mentioned that.
I share your position.
I recognize Monero right now as the number one privacy coin in terms of volume and ease of swappability, on-ramps, off-ramps, real-world utility.
You know, you can use Monero in more places to buy more things than any other privacy coin.
But all of that could change over the next few years, and if it does, I'm going to advocate for whatever has the best utility and what people are using.
And I'm sure, whatever happens though, I'm sure Monero will have a major role.
And again, from what I'm hearing, Monero actually has, I think, the most R&D talent right now of any privacy project that I'm aware of.
And super smart people, you know, an outstanding community and so on.
So I think the future for Monero is very bright.
I also feel that way.
So far, the Monero community and the developer community has only been getting better over the years and we're constantly getting new talent.
We're constantly getting the best cryptographers looking at the code and figuring out ways to improve upon it.
So far, the future looks bright, but as you said, if this changes, then immediately I will also shift with that change.
Alright, now in terms of just wrapping this up, I want to be respectful of your time and thank you for sharing so much time with us.
But back to your website, localmonero.co.
I just want to remind people, go check it out.
I'm going to do the same.
I'm not yet a user of your site, but I plan to be after this interview.
By the way, the first time I ever used Monero was to purchase VPN services.
I don't want to say, but it's one that doesn't log files, and it's one that accepts Monero, so very privacy-oriented.
And I was just like, hey, if I want to buy a VPN, why would I use a credit card?
You know, it makes no sense to have my identity tied to this VPN that logs all these files.
I see all these people all over the internet, you know, YouTubers that have popular shows, and they're sponsored by VPN companies that keep all the log files of everybody, right?
And I'm thinking, how do you not know that you're promoting a spy machine?
You know?
But then again, whatever.
Not everybody understands the tech of what's actually going on.
So anyway, I used Monero to buy VPN, and that was my intro to Monero.
And from there, it was like, wow, this is what I want to use to spend.
You know, to, like, Bitcoin, I think, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, are you still okay on time?
Okay, okay.
I'll keep this short, but Bitcoin, because it's kind of slow and expensive to get in and out, but it's ideal for a lot of institutional investors moving much larger amounts because it has much larger liquidity.
But in terms of my personal use, if I'm spending money, if I'm buying something, you know, groceries or seeds at a farmer's market or whatever, I want to use Monero.
Not Bitcoin.
Although I might use Bitcoin to get into Monero, or I might have some store of value held in Bitcoin in some retirement account somewhere, probably with self-custody though, because I prefer that.
But I would use Monero day to day.
That's my take on it.
Well, I mean, even if you talk about store of value, the point I mentioned earlier, let's say you're You're doing a DCA into Bitcoin and you're building up your retirement account.
Now imagine, let's say you're 75 years old, you're drawing from that retirement account and then some three-letter agency puts your entire wallet in a list of I think we're good to
go.
Why would I be using a credit card to buy a VPN? Why would you be using a credit card to buy anything?
You should be using Monero as often as possible everywhere.
The more we do this, the faster we move to a freer, more safer, more prosperous world.
I fully believe that just like the Second Amendment protects us against government encroachment In terms of the ability to resist excessive tyranny, the next generation of money should be the financial equivalent of a second amendment.
It should be able to protect us from financial tyranny, from hyperinflation, from restrictions.
Oh, I think there's a day coming as the dollar collapse accelerates that we're going to see, and this is just my prediction, but don't take this as financial advice, folks, but I think a day is coming when there will be a rush into privacy coins because the dollar's collapse will accelerate due to money printing, and then any kind of government crackdown on usage of crypto will automatically target the chains that are not private because it's so much easier to have your money confiscated or tracked.
You know, to receive notices from the IRS. Oh, we found out you did, you know, 57 transactions out of this wallet ID, and it's tied to your KYC, your social security number on Coinbase or whatever.
That's easy for them to track.
They have all that data.
But with Monero, they don't.
In addition, sorry for interrupting, but in addition to, you know, legitimate history tracking, meaning that they are correct that, in fact, there is a history...
That leads to you that is nefarious, even if you yourself haven't participated in it.
There have also been many cases where these chain surveillance companies report to the police incidents of somebody being somehow involved in this chain when they actually were not involved in this chain.
And the KYC information being not actually matching and then that person being prosecuted We're not just talking about risks that are associated with actually being part of the chain.
Even if you haven't participated in the actual nefarious activity, you just received the coins.
We're also talking about the risk of not even being involved in any of this at all and still being prosecuted because of the nature of the coin itself.
That's the main problem.
See, I hadn't thought about that, but you're right, because a lot of these, the so-called leads that can come out of a company like Chainalysis are based on a statistical analysis, so they could give a statistical certainty that this transaction might be involved in this, but maybe it's 70%.
But they're wrong, right?
And maybe the police say, well, 70%, we think you're guilty.
It kind of reminds me of geofencing warrants where, you know, if you don't have a de-googled phone and you're running around with your cell phone and somebody commits a crime, you know, 100 meters away and you happen to be nearby, you can be swept up in a geofencing warrant just because you were there and you had nothing to do with it.
Exactly.
Wow.
So fundamentally, Having fungible private decentralized electronic money protects you against all of that, leads you to free market prosperity in a way that no other currency can.
It's only pros.
There's essentially no cons.
The only con, I guess, is that you actually have to take the time to learn about it and understand self-custody and understand that you are responsible for your own financial You know, safety, that you can never reveal your seed to anyone, that you have to maintain the security of your devices and all that kind of stuff.
But apart from that, we all stand to benefit from this.
Well, the Monero wallet is one of the best I've ever used of any project.
It's really easy.
It even has mining built into the wallet.
Once the chain is synced, you can just start mining if you want.
GetMonero.org, I think, is the website where people can download the wallet.
And then, of course, our guest today, folks, is Alex from LocalMonero.co.
If you want to find creative local ways to acquire Monero.
And Alex, number one, I want to thank you for your time.
I'm sorry I held you a little bit over.
Can you please hang on?
No, I'm happy to talk about this.
Okay, and I want to ask you a question that's not perhaps appropriate for the interview, but just after the interview, if you don't mind, hang on.
But I just want to thank you.
Really appreciate you, and you're welcome back on here anytime.
Thank you very much for having me, Mike.
And anytime you'll have me, I'll be happy to come on.
Okay.
Outstanding.
And I guess I should probably just mention a disclaimer.
Everybody, if you use localmonero.co, understand it's kind of like a listing service.
It's kind of like, I don't know, a Craigslist or an eBay.
So make sure you use those trust ratings, the reputation ratings.
And what did you call it?
A bond?
Arbitration bond.
Arbitration bond, yeah.
And a buyer, make sure, if you're a buyer, never to cancel a trade if you've already made the payment because that takes away your...
I mean, there have been instances of scammers posing as sellers telling the buyer, oh, no, no, no, you've made the payment but you need to cancel the trade and open a new one because I need to reset something, blah, blah, blah.
Never cancel a trade if you've made the payment and make sure that If you're a seller, never finalize a trade unless you have the money firmly in your hands.
Those are the two main things.
Never forfeit the protection that the website gives you unless you're absolutely sure that you're safe.
Don't trade outside of the platform.
People, nefarious people that will try to talk to you on Telegram and say, hey, let's do it outside the platform.
Don't worry about it.
I'm a high reputation seller.
Everything's going to be fine.
There's often impersonators.
There are people that pretend to be high reputation sellers on the platform.
They use the same username in Telegram and they pretend to be that person.
Stay on the platform.
If you're a buyer, never cancel if you've paid.
If you're a seller, never finalize a trade unless you've Friendly receive the payment, and you should be fine.
Good advice.
Yeah, and above all, folks, remember, it's your responsibility now.
You can't call customer service and say, oh, give me my money back.
Somebody took it.
It doesn't work that way.
This is blockchain technology, and when it's done, it's done.
It's immutable.
So thank you so much, Alex.
I greatly appreciate it.
I appreciate your project.
I'm going to learn more about it myself.
And again, the website, folks, is localmonero.co to find listings of buyers and sellers and perhaps participate yourself.
So thank you all for watching.
I'm Mike Adams here with Decentralize.TV and then my co-host Todd Pitner will be joining me next for his reaction to this interview.
So that should be a fun discussion as well.
Thank you for watching today.
Take care.
Join the official discussion channel for this show on telegram at t.me slash decentralized TV where you can ask questions or offer suggestions of who we should interview next.
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All right, welcome back.
Now, in this segment, we're joined by my co-host, Todd Pitner.
Welcome, Todd.
Great to have you back on.
Great to be back on.
Thank you, Mike.
It's a great day.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you had a chance to review that interview with Alex there from Local Monero, and now we get to react to it.
So tell me, what did you think about it?
First of all, my impressions of Alex...
As I was listening, I'm like, this guy's really, really bright.
You know how there are some people that just, you know, they're pretty smart and whatnot, but they just come across as pat answers or whatever.
But he was really, really contemplative about certain things.
And I loved how he presented things and really, really got me more interested than ever.
In Monero, because I think there are a lot of smart folks like him that are over there.
So I can't wait to hear what you have to say.
I have my notes.
I took copious notes.
So everybody, please forgive me if I have my head down.
But I don't want to miss anything.
But Mike, why don't you just take the lead here?
Okay.
All right.
Well, since interviewing him, which, you know, there's a time gap between what we're doing now and when I interviewed him because of your deep sea fishing trip, by the way.
Congratulations.
We're glad you're back.
Thank you.
But during that time, I took it upon myself to really use local Monero.
And I found some interesting things.
And also during that time, I was banned by the Kraken exchange for some mysterious reason.
I had opened an account on Kraken and I had transferred in just $1,000.
Which is not that much in the world of crypto, you know, just to kind of see if it worked.
And before they allowed me to make a single trade, they closed my account and they sent me a message.
I shared it with you.
They're like, you know, we can't tell you why for security reasons, but we had to close your account.
Like, I haven't even bought anything.
What could possibly have gone wrong at this point?
I immediately knew the answer.
The truth is, we're canceling your account because you're Mike Adams.
Yeah, well, see, there's a theory that that is it, that maybe I'm on some kind of a blacklist of financial institutions, which probably is the case.
But here's what's interesting.
I have an account with J.P. Morgan, and they haven't canceled me.
So here's a case where a crypto, a centralized crypto exchange, Kraken, treats me worse than a globalist bank used by Jeffrey Epstein to launder money for blackmailing world leaders.
So, I mean, think about it.
Now, didn't Gemini also can you?
Gemini has frozen my account, right?
So Gemini froze it, and they sent me a message that says we're freezing your account because, essentially, you've used it too much.
And I'm like, you people suck!
Gemini, Coinbase, a few years ago, Coinbase froze my account, and now Kraken froze my account.
So this actually brings us to the point of why Local Monero makes so much sense, and the original vision.
Of Bitcoin, even, was, you know, decentralized, peer-to-peer money.
Get rid of these central control grids, all the gatekeepers, where you have to ask for permission.
Please, sir, allow me to trade.
You know, screw you.
Peer-to-peer money is supposed to bypass all that.
And that's what Local Monero actually is.
It's a peer-to-peer money trading platform.
And it's also associated with AgoraDesk.com, where people buy and sell Bitcoin in the same manner.
So, with that said, I decided to go ahead and start using LocoMonero.
And, you know, I gotta say, it's tricky.
I want to see a lot more people selling.
And I came to find out the core problem or obstacle Is that you're trying to, in my case, I'm trying to buy Monero with fiat currency.
So there's lots of different methods that you can use to buy, to send people money.
You can send them on Zelle or Zoom, or you can wire transfer.
You can mail cash in the mail, which I have not done.
There's all kinds of ways.
But most of those ways, or you can charge a debit card or a credit card, whatever.
Most of those ways are reversible.
Right.
So the fiat currency world is all reversible.
So the people selling Monero on local Monero, when they send you Monero, that's not reversible.
Right.
And so the sellers keep getting scammed.
They get scammed by buyers.
Right.
Again and again and again, where the buyers, you know, they wire money, and then somehow they reverse the wire, or they send money, and then they claim it's fraud, and they get the money back, and then the seller gets screwed.
So what I found on Local Monero is that all the sellers are pretty hyper-paranoid.
I would be.
They are.
I mean, yeah.
They do their own KYC, basically.
So if you want to buy Monero from them, in many cases, you've got to send them your ID. You've got to do a selfie.
Isn't that interesting?
Yes, yes.
So even decentralized requires KYC in many cases.
Because fiat is reversible.
Because fiat is reversible.
Now, but there's something else that's really cool.
And you can interrupt me anytime.
I'm sorry.
I'm doing a lot of talking.
No, please do.
If you send cash in the mail, that's not reversible.
Cash in the mail, the sellers, they don't need your KYC. Mm-hmm.
It's just like a swap service.
But who goes first?
I presume the buyer goes first?
No.
You look at their trust score and you're like, okay, they've done 5,000 transactions and they got like five-star review.
No, this is what's cool.
This is what's cool.
What Alex has set up on Loco Monero, it goes like this.
So first, I'm a buyer.
Let's say, Todd, let's say you're selling Monero.
Okay.
And I'm the buyer, you're the seller, okay?
Yep.
And I want to send you Bitcoin and you're going to send me Monero.
So how do we trust each other?
Here's how it works.
You post a listing that you're going to sell some Monero.
Okay.
I click on your listing and I say I want to buy $1,000 worth of Monero.
Mm-hmm.
You then have to accept Monero.
My acceptance or my amount, like I want to buy $1,000, you have to click accept.
Okay.
When you click accept, then you have to deposit $1,000 of Bitcoin into a security bond run by the platform.
Okay.
So you got to post $1,000 of Bitcoin.
You do, as the seller.
Okay.
But what if all I have is Monero?
Because you're wanting to buy Monero.
You've got to have Bitcoin.
I think that's how it works.
You've got to have Bitcoin.
All right, so you post $1,000 of Bitcoin with the platform, and then the platform monitors the blockchain and monitors the confirmations and everything, and then that's deposited.
Then I, as the buyer, I send Bitcoin to the seller's wallet, to your wallet.
All right?
And then I click and I say, I've sent it.
I affirm that I have sent it, right?
Okay.
Then you as the seller, you can just hang out and wait for the Bitcoin to show up in your wallet.
Okay.
Like, you got it.
It's done.
Then you release the Monero to me, to my wallet.
Okay.
And then you click and you affirm that you sent me the Monero.
And then I check my wallet.
And I see the Monero's there.
I confirm that that's the case.
And then I say thank you.
But if I never get the Monero, I can challenge the transaction and that security bond that you posted in Bitcoin can be held up until there's a decision made about who has committed the fraud.
I see.
Okay.
Does that make sense?
Wow.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
But if you click that you received it, all's good, and it auto-releases the bond?
Right.
Then the bond is released back to the seller.
Okay.
So here's what I found out, that it's actually not the buyers that are getting screwed most of the time in this deal.
It's the sellers that are getting screwed.
It's unscrupulous buyers that are sending money and then taking it back after they get the crypto.
Man, going into it, I would have totally had that flipped.
I know.
I would have bought the other, right?
Yeah, totally.
But this brings up a good point for everyone watching.
Please, please, please understand that in crypto, scammers are just at a next level.
They are.
Yeah.
They know it all.
I mean, literally, never click on a link that is direct messaged to you by somebody, even if it was me, because I guarantee it's not me.
But they're so good at being imposters of others.
And they will end up...
Making you feel like it's safe to be able to restore your wallet.
Just click on this link.
It'll all happen privately, you know, and...
Yeah, and enter your seed phrase over here.
Yeah, yeah!
And then, boom!
You are your own bank.
Yeah, totally.
So you just, you can't do it.
You've got to be so hypervigilant.
Oh, man.
And I want to talk about hardware wallets at some point, too.
Maybe not today, but I tested four different, well, two different brands, but four hardware wallets, and I have some fascinating conclusions about that.
I couldn't get Monero to work on any of them, by the way.
Yeah, right.
So that, I mean, that's something to consider.
But anyway, so local Monero.
You know what?
You're just saying that.
I mean, you know I'm an epic fanboy, but we have our own issues, right?
Aren't you finding, aren't we finding that I don't care what the private money is, what the private crypto is, they all have their own issues, right?
This is not an easy game, this private crypto.
No, it is not.
But it is very, very important.
So this is where we muscle through it.
And just like with a food forest, you know, if you never plant it, if you never get involved, you're never going to be able to eat the food.
And so, you know, this is kind of like just being a private crypto prepper.
You got to go through some make-ready here.
Let me add to that because what I really learned from Alex in the interview here that just shocked my world was just how dangerous it is to actually buy Bitcoin from a KYC exchange.
Unpack that.
Well, because you've left a trace of your identity on that Bitcoin and wherever it goes after you, like you could be prosecuted Even for never having committed any crime, you could be prosecuted for something that somebody else did with the Bitcoin maybe two hops earlier or two hops later.
There can be a warrant to take your computer, to scan your transactions, to take your wallet, to confiscate things from you just because you were in the middle of some other use of the Bitcoin.
So you are liable for that coin's history, potentially.
Well, exactly.
And what Alex was saying is that people have been prosecuted.
And some people have gone to jail because at one point they temporarily held some Bitcoin that either in the past or in the future was involved in some kind of a serious crime.
That just doesn't seem right.
But you understand that that's...
I mean, I know you know this because you're talking about this for years, but the Bitcoin blockchain tracks everything.
Yeah, everything.
So I'm even like, okay, I've been buying Bitcoin so that I could swap it for privacy coins.
Because you can't go to an exchange and buy Monero even, or Epic, or any privacy coin.
You can't buy any privacy coin on any exchange.
Like a KYC exchange.
And Binance just dropped all the privacy coins not long ago, too.
So you have to buy Bitcoin and then swap it.
But then, boom, that Bitcoin is tied to your identity forever.
Because the blockchain is forever.
So 10 years down the road, they can come back.
And they can track your social security number to that Bitcoin purchase, and then what happened after?
I mean, that just, frankly, it hurts my brain.
Isn't it crazy?
Yeah, yeah.
But I don't know how much...
Well, it came from Alex, so I was going to say, if that was mainstream narrative, it would sound to me like they're just trying to scare us with some FUD, you know, just to get us to...
Pick up our ball and go home and say, oh, well, maybe crypto is not for me.
Well, I think, Todd, we're going to have some guests on that are part of the Bitcoin universe.
Yeah.
And we should ask them this question about privacy and what they're doing to protect privacy in Bitcoin.
So the other thing with Local Monero is that, of course, because there's risk on the fiat side, See, you know, Todd, you've heard me say that the fiat currency banking system is broken.
Yeah.
And it is.
I mean, it is a mess.
Like, there's no finality to anything.
You know, you send money.
Like, for example, even if you deposit money with an exchange, they can hold your money for 10 days.
You know why?
Because you can reverse it.
And so where there's reversibility, it slows everything down because no transaction is final.
So, you know, think about this on the blockchain, right?
If you send somebody Bitcoin and then it gets confirmed and confirmed and confirmed and you can say, well, how many confirmations does it take for you to accept it as done?
You know, some people will say five confirmations.
Okay.
Well, however long that takes, you know, 30 minutes or whatever.
What's the block time on Bitcoin?
Do you know?
Is it like five minutes or something?
Ten minutes?
It depends on the day.
Okay, all right.
Whatever it is, let's say 30 minutes later, it's done.
I mean, that's done.
In a bank, it can be ten days before it's done.
Right.
So the bank, if you ACH bank money over to an exchange like Kraken, who will close your account, by the way, Right.
Right.
So how are you supposed to conduct commerce in a system that's always reversible?
How can you ever trust any transaction in the fiat banking system?
Because none of them are permanent, not even wires.
Did you?
You didn't know, but I was going to say, did you know that I transferred money from one of my personal accounts to another personal account because I wanted to pay out of this other one?
And they held it.
They held it for 24 hours.
I'm like, what the?
You know?
No, I've seen banks hold cashier's checks.
Like, you deposit cashier's checks, and they're like, oh, I've got to hold that for three days.
And it's like, this check is issued by your freaking bank.
You know, like, who are you not trusting in this transaction?
Well, I wrote down here in my notes, I said, show me a centralized ledger and I'll show you a financial weapon that will one day be used against you.
Yes, totally.
So you think about any centralized, I mean, let's expand that.
Centralized fuel, centralized food, centralized medical care, centralized finance, crypto.
I mean, really it's voluntary decentralized free market systems that That's the answer.
And that's what this show is all about.
What do you say, Mike?
Well, exactly.
And this brings us back to Local Monero.
So it is a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange, but it's not efficient yet.
You could pay a 9% or 10% premium or way more if you don't want to show KYC. You could pay 25% premium because you don't want to show KYC. But it's no fault of Monero.
It's the fault of the fiat currency banking system that doesn't have permanency in their own transactions.
That's the issue.
That's the issue, right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just another failure of the dollar, not a failure of Monero.
Right.
Or even the local Monero platform.
It's not their fault that there are scammers who will send money, fiat money, and then they'll take it back.
Yeah.
We used to call that, I can say this, I'm part Native American Indian.
Did you know that?
I didn't know that, but I do now.
I am.
Good.
So the rule is if you are part something, you can use an idiom without being accused of being racist or something.
Okay.
Right?
So I'm part American Indian.
And there used to be a term, not that we're advocating the use of this, called blank giving.
Right?
Which means to give something and take it back.
You've heard that term, right?
Yeah, I've never understood it, why it would be blank giving.
Right, but yeah, no, it was a derogatory phrase to say that Native American Indians couldn't be trusted in their trades.
That's what that phrase means.
Okay, interesting.
Blank giving.
Well, guess who's blank giving?
It's the fiat currency banking system.
They're the ones that can't be trusted.
And that's the white man, not the Indians, by the way.
Just saying.
That's J.P. Morgan.
That's Jamie Dimon.
Yeah.
He's as white as white can get.
I self-identify as a white man who has a friend who's part Native American.
I'm part Native American.
I'm actually Afro-Irish Native American, if you're technically speaking.
That is true.
So, given that situation...
Doesn't this highlight just the advantage of getting into crypto?
Because once you're in the world of crypto, your transactions count.
Man, you know, I was thinking about that as I was listening to these.
And I'm like, I... Got in at, I think, just the right time before it started getting really, really hard with this Operation Chokepoint and the war on crypto and such.
And I am just crossing my fingers in every other appendage I can think of to be able to have somebody who wins the next election Who is friendly to crypto and doesn't look at it as the enemy.
And I know that you interviewed RFK Jr., right?
Yes.
He seems to be pretty friendly to crypto.
And I also interviewed the spokesperson for Vivek Ramaswamy.
Yes, that was great.
Yes, and I think we're going to get Vivek on an interview later in the year, by the way.
That is huge.
On the show.
He's impressive, man.
Yeah, very impressive guy.
I'd never heard of him, but I know of him now, and I'm like, oh, okay.
I think I can get behind that.
This is what's cool.
So we have a Democrat and a Republican who are both pro-crypto.
Right.
Yeah.
And we interviewed Jonathan Emord, who's a Republican running for the Senate, and he says if he gets into the Senate, he will, quote, what was it, vigorously defend your right to self-custody For your wallets, your crypto, your coins.
Now, everybody, if you're watching this now, Jonathan's interview has already been up.
It will be our second one.
Please, please, please watch that with a notepad.
Have your notepad out.
That guy drops more wisdom and knowledge than I've heard from anyone in a long time.
These people are so bright.
It's like unconscious competence.
It's just like How does he do that?
I joked on there that I've been covering crypto for almost three years and he just spits out two sentences that summarizes everything that would take me a whole live stream to get it out.
He's one of the most brilliant guys that I've ever known.
I've known him for over a decade and he's brilliant.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
As an attorney.
Yeah.
You know, his legal practice.
But anyway, this show is not about politics per se, folks, for those of you watching.
We do need to support candidates that are pro-decentralized money.
Now, Biden is anti-crypto.
A lot of Democrats are anti-crypto.
Elizabeth Warren and so on.
But then RFK Jr.
is very much pro-crypto.
Now, on the Republican side...
We talked about Vivek.
He's pro-crypto.
Trump, I think he's open to crypto, but I don't get the impression that Trump is really steeped in it.
Not that he probably doesn't really use it.
I don't think he's got his own wallet and his own seed phrase hanging out anywhere.
But the Republican establishment might be anti-crypto, kind of like the Democrat establishment, right?
Yeah.
So this is really about the establishment versus the outsiders, right?
Almost like centralization versus decentralization.
Right?
Exactly.
Right.
So whatever party our viewers support or whoever they vote for, make sure you include this as a factor.
Like, are you going to have control over your money, your digital money, moving forward as the CBDCs are rolled out?
Or if America, if the government continues its assault on the crypto space, you could be a digital slave to the CBDC wallet system, the surveillance system.
And think about that.
So your fiat ultimately is going to become digital one way or the other.
It's either going to go into cryptocurrency, so let's call that a bucket, cryptocurrency, of which you can...
You know, spend that or take your fiat to be able to buy like Bitcoin, let's say, to be able to convert into private money, be it Monero, Epic Cash, FIRO. And once you're there, then you're outside of the bankster system, if you will.
But if you don't, and you just go along to get along, your cryptocurrency is going to be a central bank digital currency.
What is that going to mean?
That's going to mean the money that you think you have is not your money.
You need permission to be able to spend it.
And it is going to be the ultimate form of control.
And it is going to be the gateway to the social credit scores that are out there.
And you better be marching to the centralized bosses above to their lockstep, getting all of the proper medical treatment out there.
And enjoy then, I think you talked about it, discriminatory pricing, Mike.
That was a really good part of the interview.
Can you unpack what discriminatory pricing is?
Well, I think you're referring to the fact that if the blockchain is transparent, then if you're a company trying to purchase products or supplies, let's say, from upchain suppliers, if they can see your previous crypto transactions, such as on Bitcoin, then they may give you higher prices if you have more money in your Bitcoin wallet or if you engage in more transactions.
They can also see what you paid other suppliers.
So your right to privacy, it's not because you're doing anything wrong or illegal.
It's your right to negotiate in business.
It's your right to not have to tell your coworkers what your salary is.
Correct.
Or it's your right to even protect your business secrets.
Let's say that you're, I don't know, let's say you're Lockheed Martin.
And you've got to buy 10,000 parts to build the next missile.
And if somebody can just track your 10,000 purchases, then they can reverse engineer all your supply chain.
I mean, think about that.
I know.
Yeah, the transactional privacy is critical for a functioning economy.
And that's why I'm such a fan of privacy coins, because that's all I'm ever going to use to buy things.
I'll use Bitcoin to get into privacy coins, but I'm not going to go out there and buy stuff with Bitcoin because it's not private, period.
Are we prepared to talk about Seraphis and kind of the breaking news that you received?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, good point that Alex shared with us.
Yeah, it's called the Full Membership Proofs.
Yeah, I think maybe let's go discuss that a little bit.
Okay, sure.
Yeah, go ahead.
That's interesting.
Well, so from what I know, this is currently in the theoretical stage, and I saw Ruben from FIRO talking with some of the Monero people about this.
It seems like Actually, it seems like Firo might implement this first.
And we're going to interview Ruben coming up, so that's going to be really cool.
And then Monero, it seems like Firo and Monero, they share a lot of knowledge and code and libraries and so on, which is great.
We like to see this collaboration.
I think their devs are very, very friendly with each other.
Most definitely.
A lot of mutual respect.
Right.
So full membership proofs means that instead of the current 16 ring signatures that characterize Monero transactions, the anonymity set for every transaction would be expanded beyond 16, and it could include, frankly, every transaction on the entire blockchain, which would be millions.
So we're not talking about some small incremental shift in the anonymity set, like going from 16 to 64.
We're talking about going from 16 to millions.
I mean, and let's face it, that would be veritably future-proof.
I mean, there's not going to be anything that's going to reverse-engineer those transactions.
Well, I mean, actually...
Well, hold on.
We don't know yet.
I mean, just remember, this is in the theoretical stage, right?
So you can mathematically outline your concept and you can create your mathematical model for how this is going to work.
this is going to work.
Yeah.
That doesn't mean that it's bulletproof yet.
Okay.
Right.
Because some, some other math person may be hired by the IRS, for example, can come in and they can hammer at it and, And this has happened to every project.
Yeah, that's right.
Vulnerabilities, including on Monero.
Bugs or vulnerabilities have been found.
And there have been some anticipated upgrades that were abandoned after six months of pounding on it, finding out, well, guess what?
It's actually not going to work the way we think.
Right.
I mean, you're living proof of that.
Your own tipping system that you were trying to build, right?
Yeah, that's funny.
For what, a year or something?
It was more than that.
You found something better.
We tried to build a fiat currency tipping system on our platform, Brighteon.com, and we spent easily, I mean, I don't even want to say, it was six figures for sure.
Okay.
Many six figures.
And I ended up trashing the whole thing because Crypto just worked better.
And I didn't want to be the custodian of other people's money.
If they were tipping each other, I didn't want to have my company hold that money and then have to pay out to those people and then effectively work for the IRS by demanding their W-9 forms and like, oh, you've got to get your tax forms and then report that to the IRS. Like, screw that, man.
I'm not working for the IRS. Yes.
I just, we just, I trashed the whole thing.
And we just put in a privacy crypto tipping system, which currently supports Monero and Epic Cash.
And we're going to add Firo, obviously, at some point as well, and some other coins.
And that's that.
That's what we built.
Yeah, perfect.
And probably a good time to be able to tell people because you did just implement Epic Cash.
Epic Cash is unique in that both wallets need to be open within a certain period of time for the transaction to go through.
True, the sending and receiving wallets, yeah.
Yeah, so you are going to, like if I tipped Jam, you know, who is one of your, he has videos on your platform.
If I tipped him one epic, let's say, you are informing your audience.
Yes.
Yes.
We actually, we have that in our announcement and it's on the dashboard screen now.
Great.
To tell people to open their wallet once a day.
Yeah.
And this is a characteristic for those listening.
This is a characteristic of the Mimble Wimble blockchain structure.
Yes.
Which has many advantages, but the one disadvantage is that the wallets have to handshake in order to complete a transaction.
So it's not like with Bitcoin or even Monero, where you just kind of push a transaction to the blockchain, and then later on, at any time, the receiving wallet can just scan and claim, you know, pick up that transaction, basically.
I'm simplifying it.
But with Mimblewimble, the wallets have to talk to each other.
They do.
It's a ping.
So sender ping, then you get a pong back, and then you have to ping back, and it goes to the blockchain.
And that process, one benefit is that you can never lose your coins.
You can't send to a...
Like, if you sent to a wrong address and was like, oh, no!
You can cancel the transaction.
Yeah, that's true.
Right.
That's the advantage is you can cancel it if it doesn't go through.
And there's almost zero chance of sending coins out into nowhere where they're lost.
That's right.
Right.
And there's no transaction.
With Mimblewimble, there's no transaction information at all.
So it isn't even like that we would need 16 rings or 100,000 rings or the total transactions on the blockchain.
There's just nothing to find.
If somebody cracked it in the future, they would just open it up and they'd see an empty box.
Yeah, true.
We should do an episode where we talk about the different types of blockchains.
Like, Bitcoin, and then there's the Monero category, and then there's the Mimble Wimble category, and then there's the ZK Snarks, I think, type of approach, which is distinct from Monero.
But, you know...
It gets pretty technical pretty quick, these discussions, right?
Like, you know, you and I have had discussions about the UTXOs, the unspent transactions.
And like with MimbleWimble, if I have a UTXO of, let's say, 10 coins, but I want to send one coin to somebody else, it's going to lock up nine coins until that one is confirmed.
And then the change is made and the nine coins come back to be spendable in my wallet.
Well, if that receiving wallet never picks up that one, and if I never cancel that transaction, then that entire 10-coin UTXO is not really usable.
So you've got to cancel it.
And anyway, there are some subtleties that users need to know, like how to...
There's a level of literacy of the different types of blockchains that you're using that's required for users to know how to cancel transactions or when you need to.
Or what is a UTXO? Exactly.
That's a whole show, I think.
I think so, too.
I like this quote.
Crypto is really, really hard, dot, dot, dot, until it's not.
It is just something that you have to dive into the shallow end headfirst and just do it.
Headfirst?
That sounds like an emergency responder call.
That's what most of us do, but along the way...
Just keep it simple.
Keep it small.
When you're first getting in, you just want to use really, really small amounts to be able to just figure it out.
Once you do, once you figure it out, it becomes a little bit of second nature.
Look, I remember Web 1.0 when the internet first launched.
It was really, really difficult.
True.
And now we do it, we don't even think about it.
So the future of private crypto is going to be, it's going to be great.
Oh, I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, because even with these communities like with Epic or Monero, I mean, there's no boss there.
It's a volunteer community.
And so that means that on development work that needs to be done, ultimately, it needs to be the community that steps up to be able to provide some funding.
And that's just how it is.
So it tends to take a little bit longer and be way more organic, but there are positive qualities to that, too.
I'm telling you, it's like the communities are just really, really tight.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And that's one of the things I love about What we're doing here, because we have met some incredible people already, and many more yet to come.
And yeah, there are some scammers out there, and if you go onto Local Monero and you're selling coins, watch out for scammer buyers.
That's the thing to watch out for.
So you've got to be smart about it.
You've got to have some street smarts, but there are some amazing people along the way.
But Todd, is there anything else in your notes that we haven't covered for this episode?
I mean, Let me take a look.
Well, I was just interested in...
Well, it's in test phase, but this full chain membership proofs, you know, that is going to increase the size of the blockchain.
So it's...
I don't know.
It's kind of like you're giving up being able to make the transactions...
Realistically usable at some point in time, don't you think, to where, I mean, if ultimately transactions take forever, I think you're swimming upstream.
Well, wait, well, hold on a second.
I don't think, it's not going to increase the transaction time, but it does increase the total number of bytes per transaction.
So, but the number of bytes in a transaction, it's just a couple of kilobytes.
Well, I always understood as any blockchain bloats and gets bigger, it is just going to take longer for the transactions to go through.
I may have that wrong.
Well, here's what I would say.
Number one, it will take longer to sync the blockchain because there's more data to download.
But, frankly, the Monero blockchain is so much smaller than the Bitcoin blockchain at the moment.
And, of course, the Epic blockchain is a lot smaller, and so are the other privacy coins.
I've complained before about Monero blockchain size, just syncing and setting up new computers.
Because I install a Monero wallet on basically every system I set up, just as a matter of course.
Because I just want to run nodes and help create more resiliency for the whole system.
But the syncing time has been a bit long.
Okay.
But this change of full membership proofs, it will increase the transaction size to a couple of kilobytes per transaction.
But the trade-off in terms of privacy is so good that I think it's worth it.
And you're always...
You have to think about...
Moving forward in time, that bandwidth gets faster, storage gets way cheaper, and even mobile devices become more computationally capable and efficient with their processors.
Good point.
You can buy a terabyte non-volatile memory module right now for $35.
I mean, it's a terabyte.
Yeah, for $35.
So, you know, you're not going to have a blockchain on Monero that's going to balloon to a terabyte.
You know, it might be a couple hundred gigs at some point.
I don't know what it is right now.
Yeah, I think Bitcoin's like 450 gigs.
So even Bitcoin's not a terabyte yet.
Right.
Yeah.
I just...
True.
I mean...
I think that what's actually more important to consider, in my view, is you've got the blockchain time.
Some projects have a one minute per block, and others might have five minutes per block.
But when you're dealing with privacy coins, you have to think about how long does it take mobile devices to do the math?
for whatever algorithms are required for zero-knowledge proofs and can they do that math within a minute?
You see what I mean?
Because blocks, if they're one minute each, they're coming at you fast.
Like, here's a new block, here's a new block, here's a new block.
And if your mobile phone, let's say, if you don't have a strong processor on it, or let's say you're running a wallet on it, like StackWallet, well, StackWallet has to run the zero-knowledge proofs in order to claim your transactions on the blockchain, and it keeps getting new blocks, right?
Yes.
So the complexity of the encryption algorithms in the zero-knowledge proofs has to be balanced with block times so that you're not just burning up your phone all day long using your battery to run a bunch of math to keep up with the blocks, right?
Right.
So that's an issue.
Yeah.
And that's where fine-tuning is critical.
Yeah, this is what I love is...
Here, I've been covering crypto for almost three years, and I'm learning every episode from you.
You're really smart, Mike.
You figure this stuff out so fast.
Man, I'm just listening to the other experts.
I mean, I started out listening to you on Epic, and I've been absorbing, you know, lots of interviews and videos from other people.
But yeah, no one's ever called me a low IQ person, that's for sure.
But nevertheless, you know, There's really not that many approaches to blockchains out there.
There's only like, what, four or five basic types, MemoWimbo being one of them.
And they all have the same challenges, you know, block size, transaction speed, complexity of the algorithms, and so on.
And so it's really a question of how do you come to the right combination of these things?
Yeah, with, I think you have to put right at the top of the list, Fungibility.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's at the top of my list.
And privacy and fungibility are hand in hand.
If you have privacy in the coin, you have fungibility.
If you don't have privacy in the coin, then you have to work hard to create shades of fungibility, like Bitcoin whirlpools and samurai wallets and things like that.
I tell you, BT's history is BTC's Achilles heel, right?
Yeah.
I mean, wow.
No, I mean, we've reached out to some people to try to invite them on the show who are into Bitcoin whirlpools and things like that, coinjoins.
We want to talk to some people about, are there solutions?
Is there a way to make Bitcoin more private?
I mean, I know the answer is yes, but it's incredibly cumbersome and time-consuming right now.
Because you have to spread out, like if you slice up a UTXO and you try to mix it and whirlpool it over to make it more fungible, It takes time.
If your transactions are too close in temporal proximity, then statistically they can be linked together.
In doing that with the Whirlpool and all of that, is that More expensive, too?
It costs money, yeah.
You pay for it.
Because there's all these transactions going back and forth.
And Bitcoin transactions are not cheap right now to begin with.
Not to mention Ethereum.
Right.
Talk about gas prices, you know.
Yes.
So, Bitcoin, in my view, needs a privacy solution that has to involve the blockchain itself.
And so far, there's a lot of resistance to that among the Bitcoin old guard people who don't want to change a thing.
And maybe they're right.
Maybe Bitcoin's not the right place to try privacy.
Maybe don't mess with it because it's functioning in its own way, but it's not private.
Right, right.
Well, a lot of values being moved on the Bitcoin blockchain, and so it serves that purpose.
But for those of us who really want to go to the restroom in a public airport with the door closed instead of open...
Transparent blockchains, they're not for me, Mike.
Yeah, no, I'm right there with you.
If the bathroom door is open, they might spot your bonus hole.
You could have a bonus hole.
That's an inside joke of a previous podcast, but I'm not even making that up.
We'll just leave that one where it is.
That's why you can actually say it out loud, because it happens to be true.
Yeah, yeah.
It is.
Oh, no, we're out of June.
Okay.
No, but the bonus hole persists.
It is a permanent bonus hole.
Let's not go there for this episode.
We promised people we would focus on decentralized solutions.
Yeah, let's talk about a sponsor instead, you know?
Oh yeah, we do have a sponsor.
I should give them credit.
I always forget.
Thanks for reminding me, Todd.
The sponsor of our show here is the Satellite Phone Store, SAT123. Actually, they have another site that might be better.
It's called beready123.com.
BeReady123.com also shows you the solar generators, the energy storage devices with the charge controllers and the inverters, and you can buy solar panels and have a big kit.
You can function off-grid for quite a while on these devices, and they have the sat phones and the satellite text messaging devices called the bivvy sticks, And you can find out all the details on that at beready123.com.
And I just want to say, you know, we disclose all of our sponsors here on the show, by the way.
And let me just remind people, you can go to our website, decentralized.tv.
And if you click on, I think it is about the show, you'll see our code of ethics.
So we do not charge guests to appear on our show, and we don't have secret schemes of any kind.
Todd and I both disclose if we hold coins of whoever we're interviewing, if we hold those coins, we'll let you know.
We're not running pump-and-dump rug-pull type of schemes of any kind.
And even like with Local Monero, I went out of my way to use Local Monero.
It actually cost me money, Todd, because I was paying these You know, premium prices for Monero to use their system.
I think I paid $184 per coin, which was quite a markup.
And it's what, $140?
No, it's like $160, I think, right?
Something in that range.
But yeah, I paid a premium, you know, just because I wanted to learn the system.
And I also got rejected by some of the users there.
Interesting.
Yeah.
No, because I said, look, I want to do a trade with you, but I don't want to send you my ID because I'm the host of this show.
I told them who I was and the show, and I said, I don't want to send you my ID. I don't want that getting out all over the place.
And they're like, no, no ID, no trade.
Okay, well, it's up to them.
Up to them.
Well, you know, they're probably smart because...
You could be an imposter.
I mean, seriously.
Well, but I offered to get on, like, a Skype with him.
Oh, okay.
I was like, I'll do a Skype video.
I'll talk to you.
You can see it's not me.
I mean, it is me.
It's not like a deep fake.
Yeah, no.
It's not that.
But they weren't interested in that.
But hey, the seller gets to decide their terms.
So you've got to respect that.
Right, you do.
I'm curious.
Are there a lot of sellers on there?
I mean, is there much volume going through there?
Not as much as I would like to see.
I mean...
Like, is there anybody that's offering, like, if you want to buy 10,000...
Or $10,000 worth?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
There are people that'll sell you 10 grand or 20 grand worth of coins.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
They probably want KYC. Right.
Because they're not going to take that risk without getting your driver's license or something.
But I hope that Local Monero actually gets more users buying and selling.
The platform only collects a 1% fee.
I don't have any problems with the 1%.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
But I would like to see more users.
I believe all the sellers, they have at least a 5% markup, don't they?
Well, it depends on the method of payment.
So if you send cash in the mail, it's not much of a markup.
Or if you do cryptocurrency swaps, it's not much markup.
But anything involving fiat, like we talked about, that could possibly be reversed, you could pay 10% more easily, or more.
I've seen, like right now, Monero is $160-something.
Today, if you go to local Monero, there are listings there that will sell you Monero for $300 a coin, no questions asked.
Like double price, essentially.
Why would anyone...
I don't know.
I don't know who...
I mean, who would pay double for Monero?
Who buys that?
I don't know.
I don't know.
There are others that are like 50% markup.
Some questions.
Do you think there are people that set those prices when the price was a lot higher and then they just, you know...
I don't think so.
Okay.
But I don't know.
I mean, look, it's a dynamic marketplace and...
Right.
I guess for some people who maybe they can't provide any kind of ID, that they would be forced to pay a premium to get Monero.
Right.
I don't know.
I mean, it seems like they could just use cash in the mail.
Exactly.
You'd get a much better deal.
Right, right.
So I don't know.
There's our hint from Heloise.
What's that?
Well, there used to be a newspaper article.
Hints from Heloise.
Oh, really?
Oh, okay.
I'm old.
I'm old.
I remember this stuff.
No, you're not that old.
Come on.
I remember newspapers, too.
Yeah, we use them, you know, clean up the dog pee or whatever.
The only thing good about newspapers was the Sunday comics.
The comics.
Yeah, that's the only thing good.
But anyway, bottom line is, okay, we are thumbs up on local Monero, right?
Yes, yes.
Thumbs up on Alex.
Yeah, Alex is cool.
He seems to know his stuff.
He's built, or whoever he's working with, they've built a pretty cool platform.
It's got a pretty good security system in place.
If you're buying Monero, I don't think you're going to get screwed.
If you're selling Monero, you've got to watch out so that you don't get screwed by some unscrupulous buyer.
I think that's the bottom line.
Okay, that's good to know.
Yeah, but use it at your own risk.
Know what you're doing.
Read the instructions.
Don't send money until the seller has accepted the trade.
Because until the seller posts the bond...
If you send the money first, and they haven't posted the bond, and then they can cancel the whole thing, and then boom, you're toast.
You're screwed.
Yeah.
I did that.
I did that once, but the seller was honest, and he didn't steal my money.
That's good.
Yeah, but it was only a $200 trade, so...
Didn't steal your money.
He didn't steal my $200.
But if he had stolen my $200, I was like, go party, dude.
Go have fun.
Just consider it an Independence Day gift or whatever.
Up your bonus hole.
We could call that the bonus hole bonus.
Like a free $200.
Like, yay!
If somebody, you know, ripped me off for $200, I would just be like, you know, dude, have fun.
You know, pay it forward.
Give it to somebody.
All right.
So anyway, that's today's episode.
Unless you have anything else to add, Todd.
No, this was excellent.
Thank you.
All right, that's it.
All right, good discussion.
A lot of topics here today.
So, hope you enjoyed this episode of Decentralized TV. Be sure to go to the website, decentralized.tv, and sign up for the email list to be alerted in advance of the next guest we're having on.
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But Mondays and Wednesdays, so two episodes a week is what we're going to be doing.
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Which is another lawsuit, by the way, against YouTube and Apple and Facebook and whoever.
But go ahead and share the episode and feel free to repost it on other platforms as well.
And remember, our slogan here at this show is, we are building the infrastructure for human freedom.
I hope you learned a lot today.
I know that I did in Exploring Local Monero and from Alex and Todd, I know you learned a lot too.
And thanks for being on with me, Todd.
This has been a lot of fun.
Always my pleasure.
Thank you, Mike.
All right.
You too.
Take care.
And folks, be sure to join us on the next episode on Decentralized.tv.
Take care, everybody.
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