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Oct. 30, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:20:13

Episode 20 - Oct 30, 2023 - Todd Lewis reveals advantages of MIMBLEWIMBLE for privacy crypto

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	Welcome to today's episode of Decentralized TV. I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com, which hosts the Decentralized TV show here in our Brighteon studios.
	And we're joined, as always, by our co-host, Todd Pitner.
	Welcome, Todd.
	Great to have you on the show again today.
	Oh, it's great.
	You know, last week you had a couple of guests in studio, so we didn't record on a regular Friday, so I miss you, man.
	It feels like forever.
	It does.
	No, I felt the same way.
	Yeah, we missed a week.
	Good thing that we were way ahead on the recordings.
	Right.
	But we've got a really great guest joining us today.
	I want to thank you for helping to coordinate this, too.
	Joining us here in just a second is Todd Lewis, who is a developer, one of the key coders in the Mimblewimble blockchain, which, of course, powers Epic Cash and a couple of other projects as well.
	And his company is called Brick Abode, A-B-O-D-E. That's his website, or his company's website, brickabode.com.
	And Todd Lewis joins us now.
	Welcome to the show, Todd.
	You're the second Todd today.
	So, welcome.
	Welcome.
	Thanks, guys.
	Good to be here.
	From rainy southern Brazil today.
	Generally sunny.
	You're in Brazil?
	No kidding?
	I am.
	Florianopolis.
	Well, I mean, full-time, you live there?
	I've lived here for eight years.
	That's amazing.
	Do you speak Portuguese?
	Very badly, yeah.
	Okay.
	With a lot of enthusiasm, you know?
	Yeah.
	And so there's little, like...
	There are a few mistakes that enough enthusiasm and pointing can overcome.
	I've been there.
	Yeah, I know what you mean.
	Well, welcome to the show.
	It's great to have you on.
	I'm sure you're probably familiar with the show format.
	We want to help educate the public about decentralization technologies.
	You know, when I first learned about Mimblewimble, which has an interesting history behind the name, you know, I was really enamored with the technology itself, and I've come to learn that you are quite an expert, if not the expert, in applying Mimblewimble on projects.
	So could you just start with a little background of what is Mimblewimble?
	Why does it matter to the future of decentralization?
	Yeah, so I'm far from any kind of expert on Mimblewimble.
	There are people far more expert than I am, but, you know, I've used it a time or two and can talk about it.
	Oh, right.
	Yeah, a time or two.
	Okay.
	Here's the chief engineer.
	Yeah, you're just being humble, but go ahead.
	Yeah, so Mimblewimble is, to my mind, the single most important breakthrough that's happened since Bitcoin.
	Since the original, you know, blockchain architecture.
	And Bitcoin got a lot of things right.
	The one thing that you didn't get right, and Nakamoto talks about this in the white paper, is the fact that the original Bitcoin white paper, that transactions are transparent.
	You know, it's public ledger and you can see all the quantities going in and going out.
	So Bitcoin is a surveillance chain.
	You know, everything is done publicly and everyone can track what money goes to which wallets and whatnot.
	And the reason it did that is the available technology at the time that Bitcoin was built, that's all that we had.
	We didn't have a technical solution to that problem.
	It was recognized as a problem, but there's just nothing that we can do about it.
	And Mimblewimble is, to my mind, the single best breakthrough that we've had about that.
	And it's a mathematical technique to allow you to create a transaction where you can mathematically prove to the blockchain That the money coming into the transaction is equal to the money coming out of the transaction.
	But you don't have to tell everybody what those quantities are.
	So, no one knows how much money goes left or how much money goes right.
	No one knows how much money is in any individual quantity on the chain, UTXO, an unspent transaction output, but the chunks of money that sit on the blockchain.
	And as a result, you can use MembleWimble to achieve pretty complete anonymity around payments.
	And anonymity is important for two reasons.
	One is just the political reason that you don't want other people knowing what your transactions are, be they governments or hostile actors.
	And in the grand history of money, no one's ever chosen To voluntarily make their books public and share their transaction history with everybody.
	It's not a desired feature of a monetary.
	You know, I mean, it's a bug.
	It's not a feature.
	And we know that from the 3,000 year recorded history of people having the option to do that and very wisely choosing not to.
	But the more important reason why it's important is fungibility.
	If you can track individual transactions, then you can have tainted coins and you can have external actors use violence or threat of violence to censor the chain and to stop people from interacting with certain coins.
	And that destroys the fungibility of money.
	It means that one coin is not worth the same as other coins are.
	Some coins start to be worth more and some coins start to be worth less.
	And that's the even more important thing.
	It's an anti-feature that happens when you destroy anonymity on the chain, right?
	Fungibility is central to the monetary function.
	One coin really needs to be worth as much as any other coin in order for the monetary system.
	Let me jump in right there.
	And that's why Mumble Mumble is so important.
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	There's a little bit of a lag.
	But according to Michael Saylor, one Bitcoin is equal to one Bitcoin.
	And he insists upon this, even though it's obviously not true.
	I mean, just in terms of logic.
	I've got some tainted Bitcoins I can sell him.
	And then I can go out and buy some more tainted Bitcoins at a discount.
	And sell them to him some more.
	Like, how much is he buying that one Bitcoin?
	Has he said?
	Do you have his phone number?
	No, I don't.
	I don't.
	But how does he get away with saying that?
	I mean, who believes that, that all Bitcoins are fully fungible?
	Because it's clearly not the case.
	Well, I mean, that's trivial to disprove.
	Just like, send me your wallet address.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's market disprovable, right?
	You can buy tainted bitcoins today at a severe discount to their nominal value.
	So if that's the case, why isn't he going out and grabbing the arbitrage?
	And the answer, of course, is that one bitcoin is not worth as much as any other bitcoin is.
	You know, tainted coins are worth less.
	And that's what happens when you have this technical deficiency in how your blockchain works.
	So, and Todd, feel free to just jump in anytime you want to, but I've got another question ready here.
	So, our audience, I think, is very familiar with the concepts of, you know, privacy crypto, because that's what we advocate here in a generic sense, is privacy.
	In cryptocurrency, for all the obvious reasons.
	But tell us about what sets MemoWimble apart from the other approaches to privacy, such as zero-knowledge proofs, what Monero does, or what Zcash optionally does, or what have you.
	Go through that, if you would, please.
	Yeah, so the earlier privacy coin algorithms were well-motivated, right?
	They were asking the right question, and they were trying to come up with good solutions.
	And here is, to my mind, the biggest difference, okay?
	The ZK-SNARK white paper is something like 120 pages long.
	Wow.
	And it's half math.
	And they need every one of those 120 pages to explain all the complexities in ZK-SNARK. Memble Wemble, you can explain in three pages.
	All right?
	It is a simple solution.
	And as an engineer, I know that especially when I'm looking for something to give me safety properties, something that needs to be reliable, something that I need to have confidence it's not going to break because people are going to try to break it.
	Oh, yes.
	You know, then I know which one I'd prefer.
	And that is every single one of those 120 pages is a place that a problem in the algorithm can hide.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I mean, it's just massively harder to have confidence in machinery that's that complicated.
	And the beauty of Mimble Wimble is the mathematical techniques are exceedingly simple.
	They are very simple.
	And so as an engineer, I can have confidence in it because I can see the math, I can understand the math, and other people can understand the math too.
	And that, to me, is the single strongest reason why I think MembleWimble really is a breakthrough in this space.
	At the same time, also, you hear a lot of talk in Monero and FIRO about something called full membership proofs, you know, the Seraphis effort and so on, which is expanding the anonymity set.
	But as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, but MembleWimble sort of by default makes that concept, I mean, it's irrelevant because it's It's beyond full membership proofs.
	You don't have other members' encrypted IDs anywhere in the MembleWimble chain, correct?
	Yeah, so the idea of anonymity pools and the rest of it is this complicated machinery that Monero stacks on top of it.
	One solution on top of the other.
	And then they have these problems in the earlier layers, so they stack more layers on top in order to try to solve the problems that they introduced earlier.
	And the whole time, they're just adding more and more complexity to what they're doing.
	And you're exactly right.
	It solves a problem that Mimblewimble never even has in the first place, which goes back to the fundamental advantage of using a simple and powerful solution as opposed to, you know, what's the name of the game that the con artists do in the park with the shells and the ball and they move the balls around?
	Cups and balls.
	That's what it's called.
	Cups and balls, yeah.
	Sleight of hand, yeah.
	All of these complicated games they do to try to create anonymity using all this sleight of hand.
	And again, it's well-motivated.
	They're trying to solve the right problem, but the mechanism that they use, and this is not a value judgment, this is just an engineering judgment.
	It's an inferior solution.
	And you see it in In the ways that they have to keep stacking more and more complexity on top to solve the problems that their solutions are fundamentally just inadequate.
	Okay, but Monero and others, but they have other advantages as well.
	And one of the things I wanted to ask you today about MembleWimble is the handshaking between the wallets, which has become an issue in our using it or attempting to use it, whereas with Monero, I can just send a transaction and And I don't have to worry about the receiving party having their wallet open.
	I know that they could log on a year later, and they can still claim ownership control over that UTXO on the blockchain.
	But with Mimble Wimble, there's...
	I know it's a good and a bad, at least as I understand it, but correct me if I'm wrong again, there's a handshake.
	You're exactly right.
	There's a multi-part handshake between the wallets, which has, like...
	Some advantages, like you can't lose money in that, but also the wallets have to be online talking to each other.
	Isn't that a detriment to scalability of...
	The wallets don't have to be online.
	I mean, I should start by acknowledging you are right.
	It is a three-step process to complete a memble-emble transaction.
	And you can reduce that to two with deposit slips in ways...
	You know, where you front load the first step so it doesn't have to be synchronous, and that kind of gets down to two steps.
	And the common way that Mimblewimble implementations work is they have the wallets talk to each other in real time over the network, but that all of them, to my knowledge, have support, and certainly Epic Cash does, for doing that asynchronously with messages that you can send through other channels.
	So that It does give application builders a way to, you know, to move the messages through more convenient channels.
	You know, you send them over Telegram or Signal and use the security of that.
	But it is an issue.
	And it's one of the trade-offs that you make when you do memble.
	Well, the fact that it is a three-step transaction.
	And there is active research in the cryptographic community about ways to extend MembleWimble to reduce it to two or one steps.
	I'm really interested in hearing more about that.
	Are there promising approaches that might be able to achieve something like that?
	It's promising.
	And there are several different approaches that people are trying.
	And they're in various stages of, you know, analysis and prototyping.
	But, I mean, people want to be really sure that it's cryptographically secure before they do it.
	And that's still an open question, right?
	They haven't had a slam-dunk solution yet where we can say, this reduces MembleWimble to two steps or one step, and it maintains all of the critical properties of the original solution.
	But it is promising.
	You know, it's something that I think we reasonably can't anticipate happening, and the cryptographers continue to work on.
	Well, that's great.
	That's great news.
	I'm not a cryptographer, and don't even play one on TV. Well, the follow-up question to that, and again, Todd, I know I'm dominating the show.
	I apologize, but you can jump in at any time.
	No problem.
	Is there any talk of any other existing large project maybe sort of converting to MembleWimble at some point?
	And I'm not saying Monero would do this.
	I don't think they would.
	But what if Bitcoin one day said, oh, we want to become privacy-oriented?
	Not that they will.
	But if they did, is that possible to take an existing project and just make it MembleWimble?
	Or is that too...
	You can always just fork the chain and add whatever you want, okay?
	Yeah, but I mean...
	But it would be an incompatible change, okay?
	Right, right.
	And you would have to significantly upend...
	I mean, all your software would be incompatible.
	It's basically like building a duplication.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	Todd, when you engineered, worked with the team to engineer Epic Cash, was Mimblewimble right away the solution for you that you went into it?
	Or were you thinking about other ways to be able to engineer it and then just decided on Mimblewimble at the end?
	No, the motivation for Epic Cash from the beginning was, you know, there's a core group of us who believed that Mimblewimble was important.
	We thought MembleWimble was the future, and we wanted to bring a chain to life that we hoped, and to some degree I think we've been successful, made real the promise of MembleWimble and brought it to people in a way that they can use and that has the features that people want.
	To unlock the power that MembleWimble has.
	But it was motivated by MembleWimble from the very beginning.
	Man, it's a ton of wisdom.
	I believe Epic Cash was launched three, three and a half years ago.
	2019, I think.
	So I guess it'd be more.
	But...
	Today, with regard to that handshake, there is what's called Epic Box, which does get us kind of there, right?
	To where both wallets don't have to be open necessarily.
	Yeah, it's a workaround, you know, and it does significantly improve convenience for the users.
	Um, but it does so at the, at the cost that you have to trust, you know, the boss.
	Yes, that's right.
	Right.
	And, and so, and like, I'm a big believer in, in individual sovereignty, like the coins are your property and it's really your decision in terms of what the right, you know, security and convenience mix is for you.
	And for a lot of small transactions, that kind of security trade-off is, is perfectly acceptable.
	You know, uh, So I think the right attitude is not for us engineers to force our security judgments on the users, but instead to try to give options and make sure that they're well-explained options, so that people make their trade-offs knowingly.
	But there are things we have done and there are things we can continue to do to try to make membo-level convenient and accessible.
	Can I ask you a technical question of something that I experienced with Epic Cash, with MimbleWimble, that the Epic Cash community was very helpful and eventually helped me resolve it, but I still don't quite understand what was happening.
	Can I ask you that here?
	Is that okay?
	Sure.
	So I think it eventually came down to how there's multiple steps in a transaction.
	And I was trying to send from one wallet to another wallet.
	And it would, of course, lock up the full UTXO during that transaction until it got resolved.
	And so that caused the appearance of available coins to vanish locally.
	But that's true across Monero and Bitcoin and everything else as well.
	So that's not unique.
	But...
	Step six in the transaction was failing where I think it's the receiving wallet responds to the originating wallet and then the originating wallet pushes it to the blockchain where the miners work on it.
	That step was failing.
	I think it came down to I had something configured in a local router that was causing a failure.
	And, but only at that step.
	It's like the transaction started to send, it showed it was starting to send, and, you know, the UTXO was locked up, but it failed, and it would, unless I canceled that, it would never come back.
	You know, and I had to cancel transactions, and then it came back.
	But somehow, have you ever heard of this, where there's maybe like a router, like a, Yeah, I mean, this is the downside of having the wallets and whatnot communicate in real time to the chain and to each other.
	If you have a local router that's blocking certain ports or not forwarding them in the right way, it would be very inconvenient.
	Yeah, port forwarding.
	I think that was the issue.
	Yeah, it definitely can be inconvenient.
	And this is one of the reasons why we encourage people to look at the alternative ways to pass the messages.
	We encourage wallet authors to look at the other mechanisms.
	The HTC mechanism in the core wallet is there because we have to have something, and that's the least common denominator, right?
	Uh-huh.
	But I think there is a lot of opportunity in the graphical wallets, for example, to add value on top of that because it kind of has to be integrated with user experience in order to let people choose the way they want the wallet to work or detect the local environment or use other app integrations.
	Where you can, you know, send a transaction by a signal or telegram or however you want for smoke signals.
	Todd and I always joke about carrier pitching.
	Yeah, or sneaker net.
	So, yeah, and this is one of those things where, you know, the core wallet does what the core wallet does.
	And it works, and it gives you tools to build higher-level functionality on it.
	But we've always been very supportive in Epic That we want the graphical wallet designers and the mobile wallet designers to be taking these features and leveraging them and extending them in order to address these kinds of problems.
	Because we really can't address them very well in the core wallet unless we make it much more complicated and potentially you're increasing your security footprint at that point.
	And these are really things that we hope that the graphical wallet authors will be adding in and helping users with different ways to manage those issues and to get around them.
	Well, I'm really glad to hear that because, you know, Bitcoin is not my number one coin, obviously, because I prefer privacy coins, but at least with Bitcoin, you know, you just kind of shotgun the transaction out there, right, to the blockchain, and that's it.
	It's like a fire-and-forget type of transaction, which, you know, advantages and disadvantages, but I've never...
	I will say this about it, okay?
	We're not inflicting it on you Because we don't care.
	The reason that these problems are there is that it is a three-phase process.
	It's a three-step process.
	And it's not that way because we didn't pay attention to it or because we forgot.
	It's that way because it's that way in the math of how Mimble Wimble works at its core.
	Makes sense.
	And so what we have to do, so we're attacking that on two fronts.
	Number one, we've been working, and I think we should continue to work to make the experience more convenient, work on the app integrations, work on the different ways to let people in the modern Internet exchange these messages online.
	In ways that don't have these problems.
	And that's doable today, and there's been good progress on that, and I think that progress should continue.
	And then the second one is, to fix the three-phase transaction problem, we need mathematical breakthroughs from the cryptographers.
	And they're working on that, too.
	They haven't solved it yet, but they are working on it.
	There are interesting proposals, and I'm hopeful for the future.
	What I don't want to do is sit around and not give people solutions today.
	Just because those solutions have issues and have these problems.
	I want us to be working and trying, solving problems for people today and working towards solving them better in the future.
	I'm right there with you.
	Dive in, use the tech you have today, start using it, deploying it, and it'll get better with the iterative improvements.
	And I've got to say, the one thing that I really love about MembleWimble is that Whereas other blockchain projects will obscure wallet IDs and transaction amounts that could potentially one day retroactively be decrypted with some...
	Quantum computers or whatever.
	But on Memblewimble, it's not even there.
	So you don't have some future risk of a retroactive decryption of transactions that you made 12 years ago when you bought whatever on Memblewimble.
	You paid for 9mm ammo or whatever.
	That story is complicated, but there's a lot of truth in what you just said.
	All right?
	So it is not vulnerable in the same way that the older traditional blockchains are vulnerable.
	It would be much harder to break and the kinds of computing breakthrough you would need to do are different and more difficult.
	You can never say with complete certainty this category of encryption is going to be immune to future kinds of attacks.
	blockchain is much smaller.
	There's much less to work with in terms of what the public information is.
	And the fact that we don't have persistent wallets, that each transaction is like doing a separate wallet, I think does go a long way to giving you good tools to construct privacy in your transaction patterns.
	Yeah.
	And to have much more confidence that it's going to be secure in the future.
	You know, Todd, Epic Cash is...
	But I don't want to skip over the fact that there are important details in there, right?
	And if you do deeply care about future-proofing your transaction patterns on the chain, like there's...
	You got to do some work to understand the details of what goes on chain, what potentially could be reconstructed later, and how difficult it is in order to make those judgments.
	I'm glad you said that.
	This is the careful engineer in me not wanting to skip over that part and lead people.
	And some of it's user behavior too.
	I mean, users have to be mindful of what they are doing.
	Yes.
	And, you know, frequency of transactions, repeatability, IP addresses, you know, all these things.
	But I'm sorry, Todd, you go for it.
	Todd, EPIC stands for EPIC Private Internet Cash.
	And to dumb things down to a level that I'll understand it, I really like the explanation at one point in time that if you think about...
	Epic Cash being just private crypto on-chain, not unlike dealing with somebody in real cash.
	With real cash, you don't just throw $100 and hope it gets to the person.
	You need both of them to have that transaction, right?
	So it's coming out of my pocket.
	I have to give it to that person.
	He receives it, puts it in his pocket.
	You know, which with Epic Cash is like putting it to the chain.
	So there's that ping pong ping.
	But you also mentioned something, Todd, and I think I just had an aha.
	You mentioned about the advances in cryptography ultimately being able to solve.
	But you don't just go into an operational blockchain like Epic Cash and start tweaking and making changes, do you?
	Is this the purpose of ECK then, the Canary Network?
	Is that my aha, that that gives you that playground to be able to make some changes and try to break it?
	Or I'm just still trying to understand the...
	I don't really know and couldn't say with confidence, so I'll just pass.
	But I will say this.
	I prefer Epic to $100 bills.
	$100 bills, as you and I have discussed, Todd, have serial numbers.
	Those serial numbers are meticulously tracked.
	True.
	And that's a good point.
	I want to share with everyone.
	Go ahead.
	What do you have there, Todd?
	No, please.
	Yeah, so Todd, the reason why I have been quiet is because I have talked so much to you in my days, Todd.
	We did 40 hours.
	If people want to go to YouTube and search for Uncle Vigilante, that's my crypto show that I do there.
	And if you go in, we have a playlist that is the quest for superior money.
	And that's where we spent literally, I think, 25 episodes walking through the attributes of superior money.
	If we could create superior money today, what would those attributes be?
	And then we compared Epic to Bitcoin to gold to Federal Reserve notes to CBDCs.
	It's a fascinating series, and I really encourage people, if you really are interested in a deep dive in monetary policy and the future of money, that would be a good one for you to go subscribe.
	So, again, that's why I'm being quiet, because, you know, I've already talked myself out with you, Todd Lewis.
	But let me bring in another factor, though, that I found since launching this show with you, Todd, that I found to be very important is the liquidity of the project.
	So when I want to, let's say, donate money to somebody in privacy crypto, which I just did recently in Monero, and the reason I chose Monero is simply because of the liquidity and the ease of getting in and out And, you know, Epic's daily volume is a tiny fraction of Monero and Monero is a fraction of Bitcoin.
	And so, you know, Bitcoin's got the biggest volume by far.
	You could sell, you know, $10 million of Bitcoin and probably not even move the market.
	For Monero, you could offload a million dollars and probably not move the market.
	The smaller the project gets, then the more movement you have, obviously.
	You can't offload a million dollars of Epic without cratering it, right?
	I mean, that's just math.
	So there's another factor in all of this, and that's why I ended up using Monero, because I knew that what I was donating to this person would...
	They maintain that value as they liquidated it because they wanted to go back into fiat.
	They didn't want to hold it in Monero for whatever reason.
	That's on them.
	I'm like, you should just hold the Monero, frankly.
	But they're like, no, they want fiat.
	They've got to pay bills.
	Okay, I want to make sure they can sell it.
	So what we really need in Mimblewimble is a very large, successful, high-volume project to give that in-and-out capability, right?
	I mean, ultimately, we would make it a lot more usable.
	Yeah.
	These are market questions, and I'm an engineer, man.
	Oh, come on.
	You can take a shot at it.
	Oh, I'm happy to take a shot at it.
	What I'll tell you is, I mean, every coin starts at zero, and what we're trying to do is build superior money, right, to turn Epic into everything that a memble, memble coin can be.
	And if we do that, then that's the problem.
	I mean, there's an element of stoicism here.
	What do we control and what do we not control?
	What I have influence on, not control, is what features Epic has and how good of a solution it provides to the users.
	And the better of a solution that it is, the more uptake we'll have and the liquidity naturally comes.
	So, that's my contribution to liquidity.
	And then there are all the other aspects of creating liquidity, which I can't speak to at all, right?
	The one thing I will say is, if you want a liquid, easy means of payment, I mean, there's always USD. Ugh!
	Ugh!
	Hug!
	No thank you.
	But this is kind of the point, right?
	Yeah, but there's so much...
	If liquidity is all that we care about, the Federal Reserve System has a quite extensive payment.
	No, but liquidity is one factor that does matter if people are trying to move in and out.
	But yeah, I don't want the price risk of holding dollars because I know that it's a dishonest ledger, right?
	And the central banks are printing, and that's cheating.
	So in my mind, Bitcoin is an honest ledger compared to...
	The Federal Reserve is totally dishonest.
	I'm just not going to use dishonest ledgers anymore.
	But right now, especially...
	See, hodlers, right?
	So people buy Bitcoin and hold it.
	In my view, that's not adding to liquidity, right?
	It's just the utility of it, right?
	By definition, it's not adding to liquidity.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's just that one transaction, they bought it and they hold it.
	But I want to see people using it and tipping each other and buying and selling and sending and donating to each other.
	And then we have a thriving ecosystem.
	But I guess we're on the same page.
	We all want the same thing.
	We want to see it more successful.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and the last thing I'm ever going to do is try to tell other people what decisions they should make with their money, right?
	Yeah.
	Because I'm not the Federal Reserve System.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Thank God.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, my personal agenda in all this is to create choice for people and to create good options, to create good solutions, right?
	Yeah.
	And if we fill the universe with good solutions, then people will have good solutions.
	And then the marketplace chooses what the marketplace chooses.
	Right?
	My goal is not to control what other people do or tell them they should use this or use that.
	All I'm trying to do is make Epic into the best coin that we can make it into.
	And also just generally make the world a better place by giving people dominion over their own property, which they're morally entitled to have anyway.
	100%.
	Completely agree.
	Go ahead, Todd.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	Did you want to ask a follow-up question, Mike?
	Well, I did, and it's about CBDCs.
	So we know money is going digital, right?
	And the central banks are going to be pushing the CBDCs.
	It's happening in some countries.
	And I want to ask you, Todd Lewis, how do you think that user experience is going to look like For CBDCs versus something like an Epic Cash wallet, because, you know, as you said, we want to give people options and let people have freedom to choose.
	I fear that the CBDCs are going to come with, you know, incentives like universal basic income.
	If you use it, you'll get $500 a month as a UBI, and that's going to sucker a lot of people into it, into a slave system, basically.
	Where they're controlled and surveilled.
	But what do you think are going to be the differentiating factors between CBDCs and then privacy crypto?
	I mean, two.
	Number one is privacy.
	Yeah, right.
	Three, privacy, dominion over your property.
	Do you actually control Your property.
	Right.
	Property is control, right?
	I mean, what is property?
	What does it mean to own something?
	It means that you have control over its use and disposition.
	And if you don't control it, it's not your property, right?
	And there's this whole gray area of, like, how much do you control it?
	What level of property does that constitute?
	With a blockchain, it's pretty simple.
	Unless the security of the blockchain is compromised, then you have dominion over your property.
	Yes.
	And CBDCs fundamentally don't do that.
	And then the final thing the CBDCs don't do is finite supply.
	They don't maintain scarcity.
	So if I want dominion over my property, if I want the ability to conduct my business in private and also keep the currency fungible, and if I want a store of value That's not going to have the supply continually inflated.
	Well, the CBDCs are 0 of 3 on that.
	Exactly.
	And I'm not going to tell anybody not to use them because I don't tell anybody what to do with their property.
	I think it's stupid.
	Well, I agree with you.
	I think it is foolish to invest in a dishonest system that you know the other party cheats, and that's the Federal Reserve.
	You know they're going to cheat because they published the cheating figures, which is the increase in the money supply.
	And they brag about cheating.
	Do they really?
	Yeah.
	I mean, people don't remember this very much, but Ron Paul, when he was the chairman of the House Banking Committee or the subcommittee or whatever, Tried subpoenaing the records from the Federal Reserve over their swaps with the ECB, where they were doing euro-dollar swaps to just mint huge quantities of money into existence.
	And the Federal Reserve fought him tooth and nail for years to refuse to supply those records for congressional oversight, right?
	And when the records finally did come out, surprise!
	They showed exactly what we all do they were going to show, which is they were minting vast quantities of currency, completely off-balance sheets, with no public disclosure at all.
	And then Congress got outraged and passed a law, and now we know that will never happen again.
	Oh, no way!
	No, that's not what happened.
	Nothing changed at all, and they have every bit of the ability to keep doing that today that they did in 2009.
	And I don't know why any of us would assume, given the continued immense secrecy over the question, that that's not exactly what they're doing.
	So I'm not so sure that they are fully disclosing the amount of dollar supply.
	They're even cheating about the degree of their cheating, is what you're saying.
	And I agree.
	That's exactly what they're doing.
	But Todd, I know you want to jump in.
	Well, no, I wanted to say one more thing about that, which is you can look at that and be pessimistic.
	But you can also look at it and be optimistic.
	Because there is a solution to this category of problem.
	It's a solution that civil society has.
	And we exercise it from time to time.
	And it solves the problem.
	And it doesn't require the government losing control over the money supply or overthrowing the government or anything.
	It's just hyperinflation.
	Hyperinflation is civil society saying enough.
	We're not going to accept this garbage anymore.
	And there is a tipping point at which, and not just hyperinflations, but also what I call superinflations.
	In the 1980s, In Mexico and Israel, I think.
	They had sustained periods of triple-digit inflation that did not tip over into hyperinflation, but put the fear of God into the governments and the banks, right?
	And caused the reinstitution of monetary discipline.
	So I don't think it's a hopeless story.
	You know, civil society chooses how much to accept payment and how much to hold cash balances in these currencies.
	And they can CBDC all they want, When confidence is lost in the ability of the money to retain purchasing power, the process begins and they have to overreact in the other direction with severe monetary tightening and severe deflationary policies in order to reinstitute confidence that the currency is worth holding.
	They can't make you hold the currency.
	They just can't.
	Especially when all these alternatives are available, like what we're talking about here today.
	I mean, there's more competition now in terms of monetary value than ever before in human history.
	And there's greater access to inflationary hedges than there ever has.
	Good point.
	I can order copper.
	I can go on the internet.
	I can enter my CBDC debit card.
	I can schedule copper to be delivered to my house.
	You know?
	I mean...
	Are you going to make copper ownership illegal?
	Pardon me while I go buy more silver, too.
	I need a couple more bags of junk silver, too.
	Yeah, this is going to be interesting to watch.
	Todd Pitner, you're...
	But even if they outlaw gold ownership, right?
	Even if they outlaw silver ownership, how are they going to outlaw copper ownership without shutting down the economy?
	How are they going to outlaw aluminum parts without destroying these?
	No, they'll just outlaw electricity transmission lines with it.
	No more utility poles are allowed.
	But they do things like that.
	At some point, We have, I'm sorry, we have bad delay on this, so I keep talking over you.
	No problem.
	This is the one time I'll do it, but I apologize.
	It's okay, go for it.
	But, you know, money is a commodity.
	It has to be a commodity in order to function as money.
	And any commodity, especially durable commodities, can serve as stores of value, right?
	Right.
	And so there's always the option, unless they're going to regulate the economy to the point that they're regulating all commodity access, right?
	Which, how are you going to do that and have a functioning economy?
	Sure, but if you don't have a functioning economy, what's even the point of having a government?
	The whole purpose of having a government is so you can milk the economy.
	At some point, the incentive structure breaks down, and they give up.
	And the pages of monetary history are filled time and time again with civil society forcing this on the government.
	And to some extent, I think it's already baked in with Social Security, bankruptcy, Medicare and Medicaid in the United States, similar systems around the world.
	We know that the government liabilities are in no way payable, just measured against GDP, right?
	The defaults are coming.
	Inflation is just one form of a default.
	And civil society will react and the governments will react.
	And we know how this goes because we've seen it many times before.
	Well, you're exactly right.
	And look, the West has already defaulted on the debt that they owe Russia, by the way.
	By refusing to pay the $300 billion that they seize, Russia's ownership of Western currencies and Western central banks, the West defaulted on that.
	So we are actually living in a Western financial default scenario right now.
	And Putin was just talking about that the other day.
	And BRICS, you know, Saudi Arabia just announced they're joining BRICS, and there's probably going to be 100 other nations.
	So never before in human history, and this is supporting everything you said, never before in human history has the world had so many options of stores of value or transactional currencies for settlement.
	So this is going to be a new chapter.
	Well, and, you know, the globalization requires...
	Monetary access in order for global trade to function as well.
	And even if they go protectionist and put in currency regulations, that civil society has a deep reservoir of things that it can do to fight back against expropriation, right?
	It's just a question of how inconvenient it's going to be for us to do, and at what point does it tip over to that being the right choice, right?
	But we've seen it happen many times in the past, and I would be astonished if it doesn't happen again in the future.
	Wow.
	A profound observation, Todd, and I want to thank you for sharing that with us.
	And I keep trying to invite Todd Pitner to chime in because we're going to wrap up this segment of the show here.
	I want to back the bus up to crypto.
	As an engineer of a blockchain, they say that – I can't remember what this is called, but it's basically store value, means of payment, unit of account, choose two.
	You can't have all three.
	But I think you addressed all three when you were designing and engineering Epic Cash and achieved it.
	Can you unpack that a little bit?
	Do I have that right or am I totally missing the mark on that?
	Well, I think of the 2,500 years of monetary history that we have, the first 2,400 years of it did have all three.
	Right?
	And so I'm not convinced that you can't have all three.
	But also, I mean, we have a big toolkit for, you know, how to...
	I mean, this is Gresham's law, right?
	When a currency is going down, you flush it, right?
	And it accelerates the use as the medium of exchange because people are fleeing out of it and using alternative stores of value.
	This is how the inflationary cycle works.
	Bad money drives out good.
	And that happens until the bad money collapses.
	And so I think it's definitely a feature of inflationary monetary systems.
	I'm not convinced that you can never have it.
	And I don't think it's very specific to crypto.
	Okay.
	Crypto is pretty much just a pure commodity.
	Certainly, privacy coins are because we keep punchability.
	One epic really is as good as any other epic.
	And so, given the precedent of gold and silver, I think it's reasonable to think that you can use a coin for all three.
	But even if you can't, we have the toolbox.
	We know what behaviors to have.
	You pass the trash With the currencies that are inflating, you know, and you spend them as fast as you can, and you get your economic value back out of the system, and you put it in things that are good stores of value.
	Yeah.
	Which is important right now, Mike.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, we're watching globally the destruction of the value that was artificially amplified by low interest rates and money printing.
	And so many people think they're wealthy, but all they hold is fake fiat counterfeit currency that's going to go to zero or close to it at some point.
	And so there's going to be this wealth destruction phenomenon globally.
	And the people who – this is my opinion obviously, but the people who get out of that fiat system – I disagree with you, Mike.
	Do you?
	Mike, I disagree with you.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Let's hear it.
	Go for it.
	Well, this is one of my favorite observations from Mises.
	The wealth destruction has already happened, right?
	The wealth destruction happens during the inflationary phase, during COVID, when no one was working and everyone was consuming.
	When the monetary base shot up astronomically, that's when the damage was really done to the economy.
	It just hasn't been fully realized by people yet, though.
	That's what's coming.
	It's all over except the chronic.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Exactly, I agree with you.
	The damage has already been done.
	I don't think the destruction is in the future.
	I think much of the destruction is in the past.
	And there's certainly more destruction coming in the future.
	I mean, I don't mean to downplay that, but the damage has already been done, right?
	And you can see that the damage is going to continue because we're in the middle right now in the United States.
	I'm not in the United States, but in the United States, they're in the middle of the biggest monetary contraction to have happened since the Great Depression over the past 12 months in terms of the nominal reduction in the money supply.
	Okay?
	Okay.
	And whether that is the actual reduction in the money supply is a question that's more or less impossible to answer from the outside, but let's just take it at face value.
	The cost of debt servicing in the United States has tripled over the last year, and you're going to see huge quantities of debt roll over into these higher interest rates in the next, say, four years.
	It's the biggest monetary contraction we've seen since the Great Depression, and they are one-sixth Of the way through reversing the COVID burst in the money supply.
	Does anyone think that this level of monetary contraction is going to be continued for the next five years?
	I certainly don't.
	No, even the Fed doesn't.
	No.
	I mean, the level of debt payment in the United States would be astronomical.
	Crush the economy.
	Absolutely crush it.
	Yes.
	And first to the chopping block would be the federal government.
	Right?
	And so I just have...
	And for that reason, the monetary expansion they did during COVID, that damage is not going to be undone.
	Right?
	They're making a good show of it at the moment, but it's a fart in the wind compared to the hurricane of money that they printed during COVID. All you have to do is look at the M2 graph and you can see it.
	It's this huge spike and this tiny little decline.
	And that tiny little decline is the biggest monetary contraction since the Great Depression.
	Exactly.
	Wow, that's a great way to put perspective on all of this.
	First of all, this is really fascinating.
	And Todd Lewis, what you've offered here is very valuable, very profound, and much appreciated.
	We are going to wrap up this segment of the show.
	And I just want to thank you for joining us.
	But do you have any final thoughts before we let you go here today?
	Epic Cash for the win.
	Pay attention to Memble Wimble because it's important.
	And if your company needs software development, go to BrickAbode.com.
	We do great work.
	There you go.
	Yeah, BrickAbode.com.
	I've got it up on my screen if you want to show that.
	BrickAbode.com.
	Thank you for joining us today, Todd.
	It was a pleasure.
	This is the first time we've spoken.
	It was a pleasure to meet you, and I love the way your mind works, and I really appreciate all your comments here.
	Hey, likewise, man.
	Thanks for having me.
	Absolutely.
	Thank you, Todd.
	You didn't disappoint.
	I knew you wouldn't.
	I've been waiting for this interview for a long time.
	I love it.
	It went big picture really fast.
	All right.
	Well, thank you, Todd.
	We'll let you go, and then Todd Pitner and I will have the reaction and commentary after this short break.
	All right.
	Thanks, Todd.
	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.
	This is the after party.
	And this is Todd Pitner and myself with the reaction to the interview with Todd Lewis.
	So, first of all, Todd, I know you've known the other Todd for quite a long time.
	This is the first chance that I've been able to speak with him.
	So, you know, I was really impressed with his knowledge.
	And I love the fact how everybody that we meet in the privacy crypto space seems to understand Austrian economics, too.
	Right.
	Isn't that interesting?
	Yeah.
	They're all Ron Paul fans, which makes sense.
	I know.
	I know.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	At his core.
	Seriously, I know that we were going to interview Todd about three weeks ago, and that got pushed back.
	I've just been waiting for this for a long time, just because he is just...
	I love his personality.
	I love his dry sense of humor, but he is so...
	Darn smart.
	And he is able to really articulate things well to where I think the common person can grasp it.
	I love how he talks about Mimble Wimble.
	And, you know, he's kind of like E.F. Hutton.
	When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen, right?
	When Todd Lewis starts to describe engineering, I pay attention.
	For sure.
	Well, I also love the fact that he's really describing how...
	In my opinion, we're in the infancy of privacy crypto right now, which means that there are many more advances yet to come.
	In other words, we're not stuck in where we are today.
	There are a lot of really smart people working on solving some of the problems, some of the scenarios that we brought up during the interview, in fact, and working on better cryptography and so on.
	I think that even right now, the technology that exists right now can enable massive human freedom.
	I do too.
	I mean, you don't have to wait either, but if you do wait, it's only going to get better.
	And frankly, in fact, I want to ask you this, Todd.
	I don't think the central bank digital currency systems can compete with the decentralized privacy crypto because the centralized systems are going to be run largely by power-hungry, arrogant, incompetent people or incompetent institutions.
	I might have to disagree with you there.
	Yeah?
	Let's hear it.
	Only because I think that 90% of the population just won't care like we care and like our audience cares.
	So there are going to be a segment of us who are, I think, smarter than the average bear, who are paying attention now, but I think the general populace is just going to ultimately say, oh, Cool.
	This is more convenient.
	Cool.
	I can get, you know, Owen Benjamin, what's he say, some fancy pants and lollipops, you know, if I use this CBDC. I just think that I believe in the NPC theory so much, Mike, that...
	I think the greater percentage of the population is going to be just fine with CBDCs.
	Okay, but I should clarify, I meant from a technical perspective, I think that the central bank digital currency systems are going to be more failure prone.
	Oh, I agree.
	I agree.
	You know, can you imagine all the smart crypto people out there, the hackers and stuff?
	They're going to have a field day on it.
	Oh, yeah, exactly.
	It's so great that you brought that up.
	There are going to be so many problems with it that they might have to cry uncle at some point in time because, you know, you think that the hackers are attacking crypto?
	Oh, my gosh.
	The soft underbelly of a government-created CBDC? Good luck.
	Well, exactly.
	And I think some examples of this, look at the food stamp program in America right now.
	That thing is down all the time.
	Look at the FBI background check system for purchasing firearms, the NICS system.
	That thing's down all the time.
	I mean, thank God I have a concealed carry so I don't have to use that system.
	But every time I'm in a gun store, it's like, oh, the FBI system's down again.
	Well, yeah.
	Because they suck.
	I mean, they don't know what they're doing.
	And then half the time you deposit money in a bank, Wells Fargo or Bank of America, and then people's credits vanish.
	It's like, where's my money?
	And then they say, oh, there's a problem, we're working on it.
	Because it's a centralized system, which means the failures are also centrally originated.
	Whereas in crypto, because you have decentralization and you have nodes that are essentially voting about what's the right answer, so you actually have, you're a lot less failure prone because issues that happen with one node do not propagate to the other nodes.
	That's right.
	And Mike, think about this.
	This is a perfect setup for the Druid Babylonian bastards that are controlling these CBDCs, and they have their horror media in the palms of their hands doing their bidding, right?
	I guarantee you there's going to be just an amazing hack to where just...
	Billions of dollars of wealth is just going to disappear, and the press will be telling the same story, every channel, and it's going to be all about Putin hacked our system.
	Putin stole your money, yeah.
	Yes, they'll create that enemy, right?
	Oh, you know that narrative's going to come, Mike.
	Well, I do, but there's two thoughts about that.
	Number one, there are very competent hacker groups out there right now that have been running, what is it, you know, where they encrypt your hard drive and then you have to send them Bitcoin?
	Yeah.
	To unlock it.
	What's it called?
	Ransomware.
	Yeah, ransomware.
	So, you know, we've covered stories about ransomware locking up hospitals and governments.
	Yeah, right.
	And whoever's running the ransomware operations, they're pretty darn good at it, actually.
	Very smart.
	Right.
	So they're going to be hitting these CBDCs, no question about it.
	And in fact, there was even, what did they, they took the central bank of, was it Pakistan, I think, or someplace for tens of millions of dollars.
	But the other thing, though, is that the CBDCs, if money is stolen from them, They can just print the money again to make up for it, which dilutes the value of all the money that everybody else has, which is one reason not to use that system.
	Yeah, which is a huge reason.
	Are you starting to pay attention out there, good folks?
	We've got to get our money out of the current system and into silver, gold, private crypto, Food Forests.
	That's right.
	The list goes on and on.
	But we have to start acting now, you know, with an escape plan.
	And that's where, Mike, you know, I think this show is really, really starting to gain traction is people are really getting educated to the fact that their purchasing power is just...
	Going down every single day.
	I mean, it's crazy.
	The food inflation is crazy, Mike.
	Yeah, we're seeing the TikTok videos and the Gen Z young people posting videos like, I can't afford to buy food.
	I can't afford to pay rent.
	I can't afford to live.
	And here's another thing that's just absolutely shocking that just came up on my radar.
	Did you know that California Governor Newsom is about to sign a law that would make it illegal for shopkeepers to stop shoplifters?
	So and they argue that shoplifters need the food because they can't afford to buy it.
	Like this is the justification now.
	Oh, my God.
	So everybody becomes serious.
	Yeah.
	But I mean, imagine if you're running a retail operation in California.
	What?
	You have to just open your doors and it's a giant looting fest now.
	Everybody come on in, just steal whatever you want.
	I mean, how long does that business stay in business?
	Well, think about it.
	I think I learned this from you on your podcast.
	Weren't you talking recently about shrinkage?
	About all of these...
	I can't remember which retailer you're talking about.
	The Dollar Tree is having a lot of shrinkage.
	Yeah.
	People are shoplifting from the Dollar Tree.
	From the Dollar Tree.
	But what is it that you said that people don't even go to...
	It's basically not even illegal to shoplift under $950 worth of goods.
	Nothing's going to happen to you.
	In California, in certain areas.
	That's it.
	Under $950, you're not going to be prosecuted.
	So how many stores, how many retailers are just going to pick up their ball and go home in California?
	Well, eventually all of them.
	All of them.
	And so is that the long ball that they're playing?
	The reason why Newsom is doing all of this is that he just wants to kill California?
	Well, probably that's part of it.
	But bringing this back to our show and what we talk about, what I'm trying to get young people to understand is that it's not that food is becoming more expensive.
	It's that your dollar is becoming worthless.
	And the reason your dollar is becoming worthless is because it's a dishonest ledger run by the central bank, and you're never going to get ahead in that system.
	You will never have real wealth if you try to collect and hold wealth in dollars.
	It's just a mathematical certainty at this point.
	Unless you happen to run like a vaccine company and get free money from the government for all the billion jabs or whatever.
	But for most people, working 9 to 5, W-2 wage earner, you're never going to get ahead in dollars.
	You have to get outside the system.
	And until young people understand that, and many of them do understand this, But the only honest ledgers out there are things like gold and silver and crypto.
	Yes.
	Where no one can counterfeit the crypto.
	No one can counterfeit the gold.
	I mean, they can try, but they're a simple test.
	Oh, that's not gold.
	So the inability to counterfeit an asset is its most important intrinsic value.
	Indeed.
	Yeah.
	So, let's kind of wrap this up, unless you have anything else on your mind that you wanted to talk about.
	I just want to say that Todd Lewis rocks.
	I really enjoyed him.
	I'm glad he came on the show.
	And I think we're all a little bit smarter.
	I loved hearing YouTube riff.
	That was great.
	Yeah.
	No, I really enjoyed the conversation with him.
	I love talking with smart people and big idea people, too.
	I mean, Todd Lewis is a big idea person, right?
	Yes.
	Even though he kind of downplays his own capabilities, obviously.
	I know.
	But he's not...
	I mean, I've met coders in the past who are oblivious to the world and they just focus on code.
	Right.
	And he's not that way.
	No.
	He's got a big picture view of what's happening in the world.
	He's trying to put together practical solutions to help humanity be more free and more abundant for the future.
	And that counts.
	I remember during our series on the quest for superior money, he was in his room and he has like, I think 4,278 kids.
	What?
	He has a lot of kids.
	And they just come in and out of his, where he's doing his Zoom.
	One of his boys, like eight years old, comes in with this, and I know you were looking for this, but a Nerf dart gun.
	Yeah.
	And he came and shot Todd in the head.
	And Todd was just like, oh, thanks.
	And just started talking monetary policy.
	It was funny.
	Oh.
	Yeah, that is funny.
	But I also love the fact that he lives in Brazil because I also have found that people who have never left the United States of America, even if they travel or living somewhere or whatever, if they've never left America, they tend to...
	Really not see the big picture.
	Right.
	Right.
	Because, you know, you can be a victim of total media gaslighting and not seeing the world.
	You live in an America, you think the whole world revolves around the United States.
	And frankly, you know, the BRICS nations are proving that that's not true.
	I know.
	In fact, the U.S. is about to lose its global dominance position.
	I mean, it's a mathematical certainty at this point.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Do you think there's any Hail Mary pass for the U.S. to...
	Not lose here, Mike?
	Well, I think the Hail Mary pass attempt was to try to defeat Russia and to overthrow Putin and seize the commodities and energy assets of Russia.
	That worked out well.
	Right.
	That's the model of the U.S. Empire, is to roll into a region and overthrow the leader or enslave the leader or assassinate him.
	You know, economic hitman.
	Or just use directed energy weapons and light an island on fire.
	Right.
	But the U.S. needed Russia's commodities, because Russia sits on one-third of the world's natural resources.
	Largely energy, but also minerals and things like that.
	And the fact that Russia just said, no, you're not going to just come in and pillage our country.
	And then how the West's efforts boomeranged and crippled Western Europe.
	The industry of Germany is in a state of collapse.
	Right.
	I mean, it's devastating.
	Western Europe will not recover in our lifetimes, for sure.
	But I think America tried a Hail Mary, and I think it failed.
	Okay.
	That's what I think.
	And I think it's done.
	And frankly, I think America's...
	Maybe we'll get too far off topic, but even America's projection of military power, which has backed its monetary power all these years, the military power is obsolete because of hypersonic missiles and drones and China's new laser technology.
	So Russia's got the drones and the hypersonics, and China's got the lasers, and America's got ICBMs engineered in 1975 that are obsolete.
	But we have trannies in the service.
	Manning the missile silos too, by the way, and getting medals for that.
	Not necessarily manning, it could be womanning.
	Sorry, thank you for the correction.
	I've already offended the whole group at this point.
	Is that a missile in your silo or are you just happy to see me?
	But, yeah, I mean, the U.S. military has become a joke, and the U.S. currency has become a joke, the U.S. government's become a joke.
	The elections have become just a clown show of rigging.
	I mean, it's done.
	The US empire is done.
	In my mind, we're not going to save America as it is.
	We're going to have to survive this and then design a better way to run society rooted in liberty and freedom and sovereignty and self-custody of assets and all these things that, frankly, Todd Lewis was also talking about.
	So, he's an architect for the future of humanity, you know?
	He is.
	He is.
	He's part of the solution.
	That's right.
	And so are we, Todd.
	We are part of the solution.
	Yes, we are.
	Yes, we are, Mike.
	Yes, we are.
	This was great.
	With our coffee mugs and our shirts and our hats and whatever, and our Rubik's Cube, we're part of the solution.
	At least that's our effort here.
	That's what we're trying to do.
	That's our effort.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Todd, just in alignment with our ethics disclosure, since we covered Epic today, we need to disclose you hold Epic.
	I know you've said that publicly.
	Yep, yep.
	I hold Epic.
	I hold Monero.
	I hold Firo.
	That's it.
	That's it?
	Okay.
	I also hold some of all that and some Bitcoin on top of that.
	Basically, some of every coin that we've talked about here, except for that one that was about the energy project.
	I never picked up that coin.
	So yeah, I hold some of the coins too.
	We just want to be clear about that.
	And we also want to give credit to our sponsor today.
	Actually, we have a couple of interesting sponsors.
	We have, of course, the Satellite Phone Store at sat123.com, which is, of course, satellite communications so that you're not dependent on the traditional cell tower grid.
	But we also have something new that I want to introduce here in just kind of a standalone segment here.
	So let's go to that now.
	Alright, and we're happy to announce a new sponsoring partner, which is AbovePhone.com.
	And if you put in slash DTV, then we'll get credit for that here at Decentralized TV. So it's AbovePhone.com slash DTV. AbovePhone is a de-Googled phone provider that has an ecosystem of applications that are fantastic.
	This is a way to have a mobile device.
	It works, of course, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and everything.
	And you can put a data SIM card in it, and so you can get your bandwidth from the cell towers if you want.
	And you can also buy those SIM cards from above phone using Monero, by the way.
	So you can have privacy crypto to purchase a SIM card so there's nothing that ties you to the phone or the data or the cell towers.
	How cool is that, Todd?
	Wow.
	I mean, we finally found a provider.
	That's amazing.
	That's amazing.
	So this is just kind of a junior varsity question here.
	With that phone, are you getting a new phone number, or are you pointing over the number that you've always had?
	How does that work?
	Okay, so the phone is, of course, it's brand new hardware.
	You purchase the phone, which are Google hardware phones from the Above Phone company, which is all pro-Liberty.
	I mean, they're all on board with everything we do.
	And then you have a SIM card in it, which passes data back and forth to the cell towers.
	But you don't have an SMS or a phone phone.
	Rather, there's an app that lets you set up a phone number and you have calling and receiving.
	It functions normally, but it's using data instead of using the actual phone protocols that the cell towers use.
	Now, the good news why this is great is because you are not going to be wrapped up in some kind of geofencing warrant.
	Because normally, you know, like if you're standing around and then somebody robs the bank a block away, well, you know, they can issue a geofencing warrant.
	And they can say, let's go talk to everybody, visit everybody's home who was, you know, within 100 feet of the bank robbery based on your phone number and your phone checking in with the cell tower and registering as a phone.
	So with these de-Googled phones from above phone, they don't register as phones.
	They register as data devices, which is common for things like trackers and security cameras and what have you.
	So those data devices don't get swept up in the geofencing warrants.
	That's fascinating.
	Yeah.
	That's very cool.
	Right.
	And then in addition, there's nothing about this phone that's tied to your identity, right?
	So your name, your social security number, your credit card, nothing is tied to that, especially if you paid using crypto, obviously.
	You know, privacy crypto, even better.
	So this is the way to be anonymous and protect your privacy while actually having a mobile phone device.
	Now, it runs virtually all the apps you need, but not 100% because it doesn't use the Google Play Store, obviously.
	It's running the Graphene OS, but a specialized version of Graphene with all these apps on top of it.
	I mean, I've used Graphene phones.
	I'm running Graphene right here.
	I've been doing this for years.
	I de-Googled a while ago.
	I don't know if it's been years, but it was a while ago.
	And I can run everything that I need to run, you know, like Signal or weather apps or, you know, mapping.
	I don't run Google Maps, obviously.
	Like, Google has no place.
	Can you get crypto wallets on that phone?
	Absolutely.
	I've been running all the crypto wallets I've been running.
	Really?
	Epic wallet.
	I've been running Cake wallet.
	I've been running, you know, Beam wallet.
	I've been running Monero wallets.
	I've been running all the, yeah, all the crypto.
	Oh, that's awesome.
	That's even better.
	You want Samurai on there if you want.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So you don't need Google.
	Perfect.
	You should de-Google your life, because Google's spying on you all the time.
	Right.
	And so are iPhones, by the way.
	So again, go to abovephone.com slash DTV, and it'll take you to this website here, abovephone.com, and you can get their hardware, you can get their SIM cards, you can even just take your existing hardware if you want and use their SIM cards.
	And that gives you a level of privacy.
	But the best way is to get their Google Pixel hardware that's been de-Googled with their SIM cards that you purchase with crypto.
	And then that's the whole package.
	Then you are truly private and you cannot be easily tracked like you can with your normal spy device.
	Wow.
	So, cool stuff.
	And last question.
	Yeah.
	Then is there, like, a monthly fee that's associated with, like, you know, I know with my setup, you know, I have a lot of daughters, so there's five of us on the plan.
	And so every month my wireless bill is pretty healthy.
	Oh, okay, yeah.
	Well...
	So you can use the hardware without paying any monthly fees, but if you want to use the apps that have a phone number for you, there's a small monthly fee associated with that.
	But that's optional.
	You don't have to run that.
	The other thing is the SIM data cards you pay per gigabyte.
	Okay.
	Right?
	So it just depends on how much data you want to use or whether you watch videos on your phone all day through the cell towers.
	But, you know, just switch over to Wi-Fi when you're home and you're just using your Wi-Fi so you're not being charged for that data.
	So it's actually a lot less expensive than using a regular phone.
	It sounds like it.
	And it's a lot more private.
	And you have total control over it as well.
	I'm ordering...
	Yeah, yeah.
	Serious.
	Yeah, it's pretty cool.
	All right, so folks, if you want to decentralize your mobile phone, this is the answer, and you can help support the show, by the way, because this is a sponsoring partner.
	So go to abovephone.com slash DTV and check out what they have to offer, and I think you'll really enjoy it, and it'll revolutionize your life, and you can probably sleep better at night knowing you're not being constantly tracked.
	So, all right, there you go, Above Phone.
	Love it.
	Very cool.
	Alright, so it's kind of cool that we have a de-Googled phone partner for the show.
	So cool.
	Because I run a de-Googled phone.
	I do not run the Google spyware.
	And how's that working for you?
	It works great.
	Google doesn't spy on me.
	Nor does Apple.
	I don't run Apple anything.
	Apple's a giant spy machine.
	Yes.
	So anyway, isn't it cool we have so many solutions now available that weren't available, you know, three years ago?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, and you've been the tip of the spear on most of it, you know?
	Well, I don't know about that.
	I mean, I feel like I'm a late adopter sometimes, but I try.
	Well, I think when it came to crypto, you were cautiously suspicious.
	I am always cautious.
	Yes.
	But when it clicks with you, then you go into hypersonic mode and you learn everything there is about it and you try to break it.
	And when you can't, you're like, okay, this works for me.
	Well, the de-Googled phones, this is like, I think, my third de-Googled phone now, because I've tried different operating systems.
	Graphene probably being, I think, the most successful one, which is Android only.
	And did you know Graphene only runs on Google hardware, though?
	So the Google Pixel hardware that's made by Google, it's de-Googled.
	It's kind of like capturing a Terminator and programming it to protect John Connor.
	Okay.
	You take out the original Terminator firmware, and then you shove in Terminator 2.
	Okay.
	And then now it's protecting John Connor.
	So that's the same thing.
	You take a Google phone, you de-Google it, you put in graphene, and boom, it's no longer a Google spy machine.
	Perfect.
	Yeah.
	And then you get your freedom back.
	Anyway, Todd, look, it's always fun.
	I really enjoy doing these interviews with you.
	We have fun every time.
	Me too.
	And we learn something.
	Yeah, I'm more energized after we get off these than during the whole rest of the week.
	Me too, because we normally film these on Fridays, and it's always the most fun day of the week to look forward to.
	And I hope the audience feels this too, Mike.
	I hope so.
	I hope so, yeah.
	I mean, we're getting a lot of positive feedback, and of course, folks, check out the website decentralized.tv for links to the social media sites and Telegram and everything else.
	And thank you for supporting us.
	We're going to wrap up this episode today.
	It was a lot of fun.
	We all learned a lot.
	And, Todd, I want to thank you for getting that guest for us.
	He was fantastic.
	And let's just stay tuned for more developments and announcements and cryptography advances.
	I mean, it's going to be an exciting couple of years here as the powers that be try to push CBDCs on us.
	And we're just going to, like...
	Mimble, wimble, nimble out of the way and just do something totally different where we have custody of our assets instead of them.
	Butter the popcorn, Mike.
	Butter the popcorn.
	Okay.
	All right.
	You got it.
	Well, thanks, Todd.
	It was fun today and we'll do it again soon.
	All right.
	Thanks, Mike.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	And thank all of you for watching today.
	Decentralized.tv is the website where you can catch more episodes.
	We've I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.

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