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Dec. 15, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
02:03:46
Episode 25, Dec 15, 2023 - Doug with Monero Talk reveals exciting news about the world's top privacy
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Thank you.
Welcome to Decentralized TV here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And, as always, joined by my co-host today, Todd Pitner.
We'll bring him in just a minute with our guest today, with Monero.
And his name is Doug, and he's with Monero Talk and was with the recent Monerotopia event and knows all things about Monero, which, of course, is, I think, the number one It's the most popular privacy coin out there today.
It's certainly a coin that we enjoy and own, by the way, in full disclosure, we definitely hold Monero.
So welcome to the show, gentlemen.
It's great to have you, Todd, and also Doug, our guest today.
Welcome to Decentralize.tv.
Great to have you on.
Thanks for having me, man.
Absolutely.
Welcome, Doug.
Mike and I have been talking about this one for a while and really excited to have you on and learn more about Monero.
In fact, the first issue we had was trying to reach anybody at Monero because it's a privacy coin project and whoever is the current founders or developers aren't necessarily really public about it, which is understandable.
But Doug, that's why we appreciate you coming on so much to help us.
Yeah, that's definitely part of the security with regards to Monero.
A big portion of the developer community in Monero is It's anonymous, like Satoshi Nakamoto himself, and there's good security reasons as to why you may want to do that.
Yeah, we get it.
It's a little harder to co-op the community of developers if you can't access them.
Yeah, exactly.
Well said.
So I think our audience has at least some basic understanding of Monero.
And I've got the website up here, getmonero.org, I think is the starting point that I've given out for people to just learn about it.
Monero is a privacy crypto.
It's very successful.
But Doug, what would you say to somebody who's just asking for the first time, what is Monero and why should I care about it?
Well, now that everybody in the world essentially knows Bitcoin, I explain Monero as what Bitcoin was meant to be, which is unstoppable digital cash, peer-to-peer digital cash.
And so a lot of people, even that may go over their head, like what digital cash?
A lot of people hear the word cash and they don't realize what comes along with that definition.
And really what it is, it's the ability for people to transact in a peer-to-peer nature, just like physical cash, where they take a dollar, a hundred dollars out of their pocket, and they pass it to somebody else.
And when they do that, that transaction is just between the two people, right?
Whether you're buying a piece of pizza or you're buying a joint from your drug dealer, whatever it may be.
But you pass that money along, that cash, and it's just between you and the seller.
And it's not broadcast to the entire world.
And there's a great amount of value that comes with that.
But on the internet, This concept of cash is elusive.
It's a really difficult problem to solve.
In the real world, it's quite easy.
We're accustomed to it, right?
You're just passing a better asset.
You're just passing the cash or the gold nugget, right?
But on the internet, it's really hard to mimic that.
And so Bitcoin was the first attempt at that, or one of the first.
Depending on how you want to look at it, there were even predecessors to Bitcoin.
But Bitcoin was the first breakthrough, right?
That kind of...
It solved the Byzantine Generals problem.
It solved a lot of the underlying issues through ledger technology.
But where it was lacking or flawed is that the ledger that Bitcoin uses is completely transparent and known to the entire world.
So any transactions that take place in Bitcoin Are broadcast to the entire world for the entire world to see.
Let me stop you there, Doug.
Just to finish it off.
Monero, very similar to Bitcoin, very similar technology, proof of work, shared ledgers, but the primary difference is the ledger is completely obfuscated.
So you don't know who the sender is, you don't know who the receiver is, and you don't know what the amounts are.
And the end effect is it's like cash.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just want to point out that one of the things that Todd and I have discovered in doing this show is that Bitcoin maxis, as they're called, many Bitcoin maxis, even though Bitcoin has its role and has its place, they do not realize, and this was shocking to me, but many Bitcoin maxis apparently do not realize that Bitcoin is not private.
Todd, am I right about that?
We've noticed this, right?
We've noticed it, or it's they choose to ignore that fact.
I think that's more likely.
It's because when you try to talk to them, and again, Bitcoin, we love Bitcoin because in many ways it's a gateway to private crypto.
But when you do talk to a maxi about that, they just, you know, put their ears in their finger, or their fingers in their ears and just, they don't listen.
Yeah, what do you think, Doug?
You hear that too?
Oh, yeah.
I've been here for many years, many years.
It's kind of why I started the Monero Talk show.
I mean, initially, I was...
If you go back in my interviews from years ago, I interviewed a lot of the BTC Maxis from back in the day because I was like, you know, I found my way to Monero.
I was wondering, like, why didn't you find your way to Monero?
And so, you know, the take is different, right?
So some Maxis just ignore...
Some Maxis think, you know, whatever.
They just haven't studied enough.
They think that somehow Bitcoin is private enough because it's pseudo-anonymous, right?
Some think that actually its lack of privacy isn't a problem, but that it's a good thing.
There's actually, I'd say, quite a large part of the Bitcoin community that's okay with that.
They see that as a feature.
Because if you lose your Bitcoin or somebody steals your Bitcoin, you have this ledger that tracks it.
Sounds great in theory, but it comes with all those bad things that we're talking about.
And yeah, others think that Bitcoin basically can solve the problem by using tools outside, you know, on top of Bitcoin, right?
Like Whirlpool and things like that.
Great with Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I see it as essentially being private enough.
But what all those takes miss is that it's not just about privacy and this ability to send things, you know, send an amount of crypto for one person to another without the world seeing it.
But it's about the fact that if every single transaction is like that, is private by default, then the crypto becomes fungible.
Exactly.
Which is what cash is, which is what gold is, right?
So this is where the Bitcoin maximalists really start to become hypocrites because they've kind of pivoted away from digital cash because it doesn't function well as digital cash.
It's like, yes, you have those that still kind of think it is, but I mean, anybody...
Who's removing their head from their ass is going to admit that Bitcoin currently does not work well as digital cash.
It's super expensive to send transactions.
You can only send seven transactions per second.
Yes, there's the Lightning Network, but really the Bitcoin protocol does not work as digital cash.
So what is it pivoted into?
What's the argument?
Well, it's not digital cash, it's digital gold.
But what they fail to then kind of deal with is the fact that gold is fungible, right?
And it's a really important element of sound money is fungibility.
So I think that's kind of the core when I talk to people about Monero.
I actually don't always even talk about it in terms of its privacy, but more so its fungibility.
It's a little bit of a higher level, I think, of understanding because you got to kind of really understand what gives money its value and why gold has its value.
But for those who kind of already understand gold.
It's a very important thing to note.
I'm really glad you brought that in, Doug.
And I'll add that I have gone to great lengths to try to play with Bitcoin in a way that makes it more private.
And, for example, I've used the Samurai wallet and then I've used the Sparrow wallet.
And on the Sparrow wallet, you know, you can send coins out for mixing in the Whirlpool coin join algorithms and, And then the minute you do that, now you have this complexity of four wallets now in Sparrow.
You now have your premix and your postmix and your bad bank and I don't know what else.
And you have to really track all your UTXOs, your transaction outputs, and know which one you're spending where.
And by the time I'm doing this, and it cost me like 3% of the Bitcoin to do this, I'm thinking, my goodness, In Monero, every coin is more private than this automatically all the time for no extra cost.
Exactly.
It's like, wow!
You might be getting the privacy with those transactions, but everybody else that's using Bitcoin, their transaction history, their Bitcoins look different than yours on the blockchain.
And even yours, even with all those techniques you might do, they're still coming with a history attached to them.
That history may make it difficult to determine what you're doing and who's sending what to who, but there is still a history attached to And that history makes your Bitcoin, that transaction, different than any other transaction.
And that's where fungibility really falls apart.
It's because every single Bitcoin has a unique history attached to it.
So Todd, you've been covering privacy coins for years and you know all about fungibility.
Can you kind of brief our audience just in case they need a...
Why does fungibility really matter?
Well, it's kind of like if you take a thousand pieces of gold and you smelt them down and then you recast them Each gold coin is the same.
Whereas in Bitcoin, because the transaction history accompanies each Bitcoin, they can look all the way back to, for example, the Silk Road, and they can identify that this was part of the Silk Road, and the powers that be...
Can then limit you from being able to transact or the exchanges can.
So there's no fungibility with Bitcoin, ultimately.
Every Bitcoin is not the same as the other.
In Monero and other private crypto, fungibility is king.
That's primary number one.
And Monero, Doug, launched in 2014, correct?
Yeah, yes.
And I'm curious, as I covered another privacy coin for a while, how did you get involved with Monero Talk and when?
I started MoneroTalk late 2017.
Before that, I did a Monero meet-up here in New York.
We did a Monero after-party.
There used to be a big Bitcoin conference that took place in New York, and we threw a Monero after-party after that.
But I started off as a BTC maxi, actually.
Okay.
I remember to the day, I always tell a story.
The second one is Stealth Addresses, which obfuscates the receiver.
So there's no address to look up on the blockchain.
And those first two, actually, were essentially pitched by Satoshi Nakamoto himself.
Actually, I shouldn't say that.
What he pitched was Ring Signatures, which is the third one, which obfuscates the sender.
Confidential transactions, stealth addresses, and ring signatures, obfuscating the amount, the receiver, and the sender.
But yes, Satoshi Nakamoto, in early posts when he was talking about essentially this flaw in Bitcoin, without maybe giving the same names, he talked about the concept of a ring signature, and he talked about the concept of a stealth address.
As being solutions for obfuscating the sender and the receiver.
And then confidential transactions was created by Bitcoiners.
It was created by Adam Back and others, but then it was never implemented in Bitcoin.
Is that right?
For various reasons, yeah.
And that's where Monero really began to shine.
Because it became the project that implemented these technologies that were essentially created by Bitcoiners, but was never implemented into Bitcoin.
Wow.
Can you, for the audience, just explain obfuscate, what that means?
Yeah, obfuscate is just hide, right?
It's just hide.
So, like, you know, the...
Confidential transactions is based on encryption, right?
So the amounts don't need to be revealed, but it works in a way where it's ensuring that there is no double spend taking place.
And using encryption allows it to happen.
And it's a very secure technology.
There's really nobody who would argue against it, even in Bitcoin land, right?
Saying there's some weakness there, that it can be exposed and you can figure out the amounts.
As far as we know, it's kind of technically impossible.
Sorry to interrupt.
I was going to ask, didn't the IRS or somebody actually put something out called Breaking Monero or something, trying to figure it out with a bounty?
Yeah, but nobody's claimed it.
Nobody's done it.
They put out a bounty for Monero and Lightning Network, and I believe the Lightning Network...
Bounty was awarded.
You could go look into the Monero one.
There's people trying to figure out if it was.
There's people that put out rumors that they think it was, but there's no evidence of that at all.
But yeah, my point, just getting back to the description of the tech without going too deep.
The confidential transactions uses strong encryption that really nobody has argued against.
Like I said, the Bitcoiners invented it.
Nobody's saying there's any weaknesses there.
Stealth address is the same thing based on strong encryption.
There's really no way to unravel it and figure out what the actual receive address is.
And the third thing is ring signatures.
And that is where Monero openly does get some criticism for that aspect.
And that obfuscates the sender.
Where things aren't clear is because of that criticism, people then criticize all of Monero.
But it's really just one portion of its tech which is obfuscating just who the sender is.
And it works very well.
There's no evidence that any authority has been able to figure out who the sender is using techniques.
But theoretically, it can be done.
There is a certain type of attack that can be done where you might be able to figure out what there is without getting into details.
But what could be said of that and of Monero in general is that it's always evolving, right?
Monero is always evolving.
This is another major difference between Bitcoin and Monero, and it's had this difference from day one, which is why it Which is why it acquired confidential transactions way before Bitcoin and Bitcoin likely never will because Bitcoin has ossified.
It has no intention of changing its base protocol.
Monero has taken a different route and it's always been open to evolving if it thinks it's necessary for purposes of maintaining its cash-like nature.
So it's kind of always kept this balance of We're good to go.
But being digital cash today, working as digital cash today, and then evolving with the technology, and here's an important part, once it's vetted enough where the devs feel comfortable enough to implement it, where it doesn't feel like there's going to be any security risks.
And this is where it also differentiates from a lot of other privacy coin projects, which are like, oh, the newfangled thing, it's more private than Monero.
But is it developed by one dude in his basement and it's never been vetted?
Monero has this robust community of people that are looking at this tech.
There's conferences and there's tons of money that goes into the vetting process.
There's people like the IRS that are trying to break it.
And then at the end of the day, Monero uses that ecosystem to then slowly evolve and adapt.
And I say that because the ring signature is an example of something.
All right.
Problem has been pointed out.
Monero community has never been in denial of it.
Right.
Like some other tech.
It's very open and talks about it with the goal of improving and And now, I think you had mentioned maybe we wanted to talk about this.
Now we've just recently announced the concept of full membership proofs.
And full membership proofs will likely be added to Monero in the near future, probably a year, two years out from now, with the addition of Seraphis.
And full membership proofs at that point, there'd really be no technical argument against Monero.
Let me jump in here, Doug.
Sorry, but I'm really glad you got to this topic because I wanted to bring this up too.
Exactly.
So the ring signatures currently, as I understand it, is based on 16.
The anonymity set is 15 or 16, as I understand it.
And yeah, that can be expanded dramatically.
But what you're describing is that Monero moves with deliberation.
So it's not like Monero, the whole community is just going to leap and hope it's good.
That would be very destructive if somebody made a mistake.
And there's a difference between having a paper that...
That proves, okay, yeah, the math works here for a zero-knowledge proof.
Great.
But that's different than whether it can resist being attacked by governments of the world, right?
So you have to be careful, obviously, about what's at stake here.
And when you roll out these things, as Monero, you said maybe a year or two, rolling out full membership proofs and the Seraphis update, You know, those are things that Monero has to get right because a mistake would be catastrophic to the reputation of the coin.
So I'm glad you're being careful.
Todd, I'm sure you agree with that.
Everything will be highly audited.
So go ahead.
Sorry, Todd.
Go ahead.
Well, my question is, so Monero is a community project.
How do you go about when you need to develop new things or get on exchanges and such, how do you go about raising the money to be able to do that?
Because I found that's a huge issue with a microcap, right?
That's a community project.
You're really dependent upon...
The community for funds.
And so it just astonishes me to see how, you know, since 2014, you're now, what, like $3.5 billion market cap?
Or $350?
No.
No, it's multiple billions.
Yeah, I don't even know what the market cap is.
Well, I mean, we can bring it up here, but yeah, we get your point.
It's in the billions.
Yeah, I think I have it.
I'll bring it up.
2.8 billion.
There we go.
That sounds about right.
Right, right.
So is it largely you on Monero Talk that goes and discusses things, and then is there an organized way for community members to be able to support the next project within?
Definitely not largely me.
I'm the guy who just loves Monero out there talking to the devs and everything.
I certainly help get the information out there.
But the real discussions take place in the chat rooms among the devs, which are completely open to anybody that wants to go and participate.
These Monero-based chat rooms where, like we were saying before, a lot of the people chiming in there are anonymous developers.
With, you know, a long track record on GitHub of all the commits they made and contributions they made to Monero.
And so Monero has what is called the research lab where, you know, higher level research takes place.
So things like, we're talking about the full membership proofs, right?
So like the first thing is just kind of researching these concepts, deciding whether or not it's even, you know, hypothetically possible, right?
So there's this research that takes place there.
And then things just get funded along the way.
Somebody will do a request to the community saying, like Luke, for example, maybe like, listen, guys, I think I figured out how to do full membership proofs.
Here's what I got.
I'd like to be funded for the next year so I can work on this and take it to this level.
And yet, people in the Monero community Just regular Joe Schmoes, they contribute.
They send their Monero along.
There's no dev tax in Monero.
And so a dev tax is great in some ways, right?
Because it does kind of create this self-sustaining ecosystem where you now have this treasury that can be used for funding development.
But it also potentially leads towards centralization because you now have this funding that's just going to this small group of people, right, that are in control of that pot of money.
So Monero has always stayed away from that.
And really, it's just more akin to what Bitcoin is, right?
Bitcoin is no different.
Bitcoin has managed to evolve over the years, and it's done it in the same way.
Basically, just the community contributing.
And as more businesses are built on top of Monero, just through the nature of capitalism, you have these businesses, for example, like Cake Wallet, right?
It's a very well-known wallet.
In Monero, they've done very well by Monero.
Some new development comes out.
They're the first in line to say, let me donate and really help support this campaign.
Cake Wallet's great.
I got it on my phone, too.
So the funding's increasing as new projects are being built in the ecosystem that now are gaining capital and then looking to contribute back into the basic utility of Monero to improve it.
Doug, I have to apologize.
I have failed to plug your main website.
I know your channel name is MoneroTalk everywhere, but do you have a main website that I should be showing the audience here?
Well, we got a bunch of...
You could tell the Monerotopia website.
Monerotopia.com.
Okay.
That's the Monero conference that we run.
Okay.
Monerotopia.
It's also the name of our weekly show.
Monero Talk is what we initially started out with.
That's our show, which is also weekly, but that's where I interview people in the space.
It's like an hour, two-hour long interview with a dev or whoever it may be.
Monerotopia is more of a community show.
We do that every weekend.
It's live.
Monero Talk is recorded.
Monerotopia is just a live show with people calling in and all this stuff.
So I tell people to check out Monerotopia.com.
Well, that's great.
And that's where we then run the conference as well.
Okay, we've got the website up.
I think this is the right one.
Monerotopia.com.
Does that look right?
I can't see my screen.
It says Monerotopia.
It's frozen on me.
El dinero de la gente.
Yeah, the money of the people.
So there we go.
Yeah, that was the conference that we just did in Mexico City.
Okay, awesome.
Awesome.
We just did that this past May in Mexico City.
Great.
We'll be doing the next one probably.
We're going to take a little time off and probably do it like a year from this coming November.
And we're looking at doing that potentially in Argentina.
Wow.
This one we did down in Mexico City.
Great success.
We opened it up too.
It wasn't just Monero.
Monerotopia was open to allowing any project that wanted to come and talk about privacy tech, digital cash tech.
Obviously, we wanted it to be respectable.
The Monero community is very passionate about privacy.
Not allowing kind of scams to perpetuate.
So we filtered out things in that nature.
You have to.
We're very open to people coming and sharing their text.
So we had a couple of different competing privacy coins that were there that had things to present that were new and novel.
Well, I saw some of the interviews you did there, and Ruben from Firo was there.
We've interviewed Ruben on this show.
Great example, yeah.
Because FIRO, we see as a project that, you know, they're doing work that's actually contributing to the Monero project, right?
Exactly.
Doing it for FIRO, but now Monero is gaining from that and will likely...
Learn from that and use that to update ourselves, even something like full membership proofs.
We might see full membership proofs implemented in FURA before Monero.
Perfect example.
And we had other cryptos there, but the real theme of Monerotopia was opting out, right?
Opting out and building a digital cash circular economy, right?
Exactly.
Or an parallel economy outside of the existing system.
Monero, we see as the best tool for that right now.
But the end goal is to do that.
Whether we're using Monero or something else, that's the real goal.
Monero is the tech.
That's what we think is doing the best compared to any other competing crypto that's trying to be digital cash.
But the real goal now is to grow usage of Monero.
Not to talk about it as digital gold or to talk about what the market cap might be in 10 years, but to talk about what its transaction count is going to look like in 10 years.
How many people are going to be using it?
Who's accepting it?
These are the things that we really focused on.
And by way of doing that, we actually had a marketplace built into the conference where most of the vendors were there willing and accepting Monero.
And so we're really trying to drive that home.
We're all about that, Doug.
We believe in the practical application of these cryptos.
In fact, We don't like talking about speculation and buy low, sell high, and we don't give price projections here.
We talk about utility, and in fact, I want to show you something on my screen here.
Monero was the first privacy crypto that we implemented as a tipping system on our platform, Brightown.com.
And guys, can you show my screen?
Yeah.
So this is one of my videos.
And underneath the video, it says Tip Crypto.
I don't know if you can see this, Doug.
I can't.
I can't see.
I'm only seeing a picture of myself.
I'll just describe it to you.
So there's a button that says Tip Crypto.
And then because I've entered my Monero receive address in my wallet, and also the other three coins that we're supporting, Epic, Beam, and Furo right now, because those are three other privacy coins.
But if I click Monero, then it pops up on my screen is the Monero QR code for me as the content creator to receive Monero.
And this is sent peer-to-peer, direct from the viewer of the content, directly to the content creator's wallet.
It doesn't go through our servers, obviously.
We don't get a piece, and we don't log any files, and we don't have any information that could ever be subpoenaed, because we have no idea who's receiving tips.
But we implemented that.
And...
People love this feature.
It was really simple.
It didn't require any real code on our part, you know, because we're not handling the transaction, but it shows the utility of it.
And this is what I would like to see, too.
I know Todd agrees with me on this.
We want to see use cases, and we've seen a lot of use cases.
We're having guests coming on, offering various products and services that have told me they will accept payment in Monero and other privacy coins, by the way.
So it's spreading, Doug.
And Mike, Mike, Let Doug know about what you're going to be doing in your own shopping cart.
Oh yeah, that's true.
You may know, Doug, I have healthrangerstore.com.
I'll bring it up for the audience looking here.
We're in the process right now of being able to accept all the privacy coins that we support on brighttown.com.
We'll be able to accept them as payment on our online stores.
We have more than one store, but we do quite a lot of business.
And the reason this matters, Doug, I'll turn it back over to you.
Sorry to hog the time here, but We are living in a world where there's increasing risk of food rationing because of the food scarcity problems that are happening and food inflation.
And we've seen rationing in other countries like Venezuela, for example.
So when we sell a lot of food, storable food, certified organic food, we want people to be able to buy food from us without any authority knowing that they just bought food.
We think that's important for security.
What do you think?
Oh.
100%.
We talk about this all the time on Monero Talk, Topia and Monero Talk, right?
This is like a real world example.
I think we even had here...
I'm in New York.
I know I could hear the people booing from far away.
I'm here from New York and...
We had our mayor here talking about how he basically wants to put in policies that will push people away from consuming meat.
We saw that, yeah.
Basically restricting the amount of meat that people will essentially be able to purchase or consume.
And so wheels are turning.
Is that the first hint of what the future may be like in the CBC world?
With digital identities and now not only tracking everybody's purchases to the point where the government can control the amount of meat you can consume.
It's super important that we have the ability to purchase these things, whether it's meat or something else.
We have the freedom to transact and The elimination of traditional cash is very real.
We talked about this on the outset.
What is cash?
And we need digital cash.
We need digital cash because real cash, true cash is just not going to exist anymore.
It already basically is kind of gone.
Everybody's using their credit card or Apple Pay or Venmo.
It's like a relic.
I still use it everywhere.
I've been using cash exclusively at grocery stores and gas stations for 15 years just to do it.
Yeah, well, they may even make it where a guy like you won't be able to do it, right?
They may.
It just won't exist anymore.
Yeah, right.
So that is why Monero or some form of digital cash is just crucial because the entire world is going to be digital.
And so we need a replacement for cash.
So you can buy your ration of meat and eggs without some tyrannical government Dictating whether or not you can.
It sounds extreme, but it's just not, man.
We saw what they didn't with COVID. I mean, these things aren't really hypotheticals anymore.
They're unfortunately...
Let me add this.
We saw in Canada, of course, people who are donating money to the Freedom Convoy truckers, they got their bank accounts seized.
by the Canadian government, right?
So Todd and I were having this conversation a few shows ago.
I said, look, we donate a lot of money every year from our nonprofit.
And the last time around, a wealthy friend of mine had given us half a million dollars to donate out to independent media.
So we issued a bunch of checks totaling half a million dollars through an online bill pay service, and they froze the whole thing and said, oh, this might be fraud.
And I told Todd, I said, man, next time, I'm just going to say to somebody that we're donating to, look, do you want free money?
Set up a freaking privacy coin.
I mean, just download the wallet.
And by the way, Monero's real easy on this because the liquidity is so high.
You can get in and out of Monero without messing with the price.
So it's easy.
Just say, go download Monero.
You want $10,000, $20,000 worth of Monero?
Boom, there's my donation.
And as a bonus, the government doesn't know who I donated to.
Right.
That's key.
Tremendous bonus, right?
I've heard you mention – I've got to go watch this because I heard RFK was on your show.
Yes.
I'm quite the RFK fan right now.
Yeah, he's pretty awesome.
I first discovered him when I was running for Congress in 2020 as a Republican.
No kidding.
And I – With COVID, I was one of the rare guys who was out there very early, like in March, April.
I was against the vaccines and against the lockdowns, very much against it.
What about the medical intervention of that thing over your face where you...
Ventilator murders?
I got COVID right on the outset.
I got it in February, right before I declared that I was going to run.
Actually, like the day that they gave me the go-ahead, the local Republican Party where I am.
And I came down with COVID. I was one of the first cases out where I live here in Minnesota County.
But it ended up being kind of a godsend because I experienced it from the outset.
So I knew it.
Granted, everybody's different, right?
But I did have a firsthand experience with it.
I saw the overreaction that came with it.
For me, it was like a weak flu.
Unfortunately, a lot of people perished, but it was most of the people that had comorbidities or they were elderly or they were overweight.
There's issues.
But I experienced that and I saw the government's overreaction and that they wanted to shut everything down.
And so I was looking for intelligent people that have kind of thought these things through already, and I found my way to RFK, actually.
And so now that he's running, I'm excited.
I'm excited.
And this is coming from a Republican.
I'm really a libertarian, obviously.
Well, RFK gets excitement from across political parties, that's for sure.
Wait, where am I going with this?
Yeah, go ahead.
You know, RFK most eloquently talks about the importance of free speech.
He's talking about the importance of cash.
And he's talking about the importance of cash essentially being a form of free speech, perhaps even more vital than speech itself, right?
Because it's where we put our money, right?
And it's how we exercise our free speech in physical form, right?
Like you said, you could donate to a political movement anonymously with cryptocurrency.
That's extremely vital to protecting democracy, right?
That's right.
The Constitution, this government, the United States government, the founding fathers thought about this very deeply and they saw that as being one of the most important things that need to be protected and that's free speech for the purposes of protecting political speech so that minority opinions and minority of political groups Could never be essentially thwarted or stomped out by a totalitarian government.
And so as we transition into the digital age, we need something that allows us to exercise that.
And it's going to be digital cash.
That's what's going to give us that freedom.
And we saw that with the trucker rally.
But where I take it one step further, and this is why I'm very jealous that you had an RFK on the show because I'd love to get him on Monero Talk.
Where we take it one step further is not only did they essentially sanction people's bank accounts, right?
I think it was GoFundMe they were using, right?
They also blacklisted the Bitcoin addresses.
They did.
Good point.
That's a lack of fungibility, right?
Yep.
Yeah, that's a lack of fungibility.
It's a lack of censorship resistance, right?
Because then they basically didn't allow them to liquidate that crypto into usable cash, right?
Because they weren't able to then turn around and anonymously spend that Bitcoin.
They wanted to send it to a centralized exchange to liquidate, and they couldn't do it.
And the government ended up basically confiscating like 30% of that Bitcoin.
That's incredible.
That's the bigger story here and the BTC Maxis that were out there running as, look, Bitcoin worked.
The government tried to stop.
The traditional banking system stepped in and they were confiscating people's donations or censoring them and so Bitcoin came to the rescue.
But it didn't come to the rescue.
It failed in that very real sense where it was most important and most vital and what it's really meant to do well, it didn't do well.
And I think this is exactly why, by the way, the BlackRock ETF on Bitcoin is likely to be approved while the U.S. government will be at war with Monero and other privacy coins as they already have this bounty.
But I think that This is just my opinion, but I think the governments of the world, Western governments in particular, they realize they can't physically stop cryptocurrency because of its distributed nature.
But they can.
They can sort of lend approval to something that's very transparent and trackable, a surveillance type of blockchain, which is essentially what Bitcoin is, and they can kind of co-opt it.
Whereas anybody who wants to be free...
They may use Bitcoin as the on-ramp, but ultimately they're going to swap that into something like Monero or other privacy coins.
I mean, that's what I use Bitcoin for, is to get to Monero.
Or now I'm on Kraken, so I just buy Monero directly on Kraken.
I don't even go through Bitcoin at the moment.
And I'm not trying to trash Bitcoin.
It's got its place.
It's got a role.
It's going to be an institutional...
Ticket item on Fidelity and BlackRock and whatever.
But I want money that I can use at a farmer's market without the government investigating me for seed smuggling.
You know what I'm saying?
The government does not fear Bitcoin.
They don't fear Bitcoin.
They're accepting of Bitcoin.
So you've got to ask yourself why.
This technology was built to disrupt centralized governments.
Maybe not completely destroy them, but to remove a lot of their power, particularly their power to print money.
But then what comes that also, their power to essentially surveil transactions and censure transactions.
And why it may feel like Bitcoin has solved that problem for the points that you're making, it really doesn't.
Because at the end of the day, the ledger is completely transparent.
And so it can be obfuscated.
It could be co-opted in that sense, right?
So they may not be able to technically easily stop a transaction, but if they know who you are and they know who the receiver is and they can see when transactions are being sent, they could effectively censor and confiscate Bitcoin as needed, right?
So it comes across like this thing that is taking power away from governments.
But at the end of the day, the government is really not fearful of Bitcoin.
If anything, it may be able to help them, allow them to more perfectly tax everyone, right?
So on a Bitcoin stand where everybody's using this completely traceable ledger, And now everything's been perfectly tracked and traced through chain analysis and everybody's been KYC that's obtained their Bitcoin, effectively everybody.
Now you can very easily see how money is moving from person to person and you can send your letters in the mail saying, you know, we see you have this much, you spent this much, whatever, you owe this amount in taxes.
And so this idea that Bitcoin is this tool that governments can't stop, it's really just that they've realized that they don't need to stop it or want to stop it because it doesn't really hurt them in any way.
Really important point there, and it kind of leads me to a question I wanted to ask you anyway, which is about do you think one day, let's just say the U.S. government will declare, and again, it's just a declaration.
They can't stop Monero, but they could declare Monero to be illegal.
Now, again, they can't stop it, and it would be immediately challenged because First Amendment grounds, by the way.
You know, how can you ban me from trading fiat for an expression of computer code, right?
Yeah, because it's code speech, money is speech.
Exactly.
It's like me buying Hunter Biden's art, which I've bought all kinds of Hunter Biden's art, by the way.
Just full disclosure, I'm the donor buying all the art.
Yeah, I've got a great collection of Hunter Biden art.
I hope you use Monero for that.
Oh, dang it, dang it.
But you see my point, if they were to say it's illegal, couldn't we wake up and see some at least temporary fear about Monero and valuation, recalibrations, things like that?
What do you think might happen?
It's hard to say.
This is why I would love to ask RFK that question.
I don't know if you did.
No, I didn't ask him that question.
Yeah, so we talk about this all the time on the show.
Europe seems to be even further along than the U.S. in this regard of really being against quote-unquote privacy coins.
So we might see something extreme happen there where they effectively try to ban Monero.
In the United States, if I had to bet, I don't think it's going to happen.
I think as broken as our democracy or our democratic republic may seem, there are still checks and balances.
And at the end of the day, there are a lot of Liberty-loving, capitalist-loving people, and you'll have, I think, representatives step up and fight against any banning of Monero.
I would think.
I could be wrong.
I just want to finish his question.
If it were to happen, there would certainly be some dark times, but Monero is really built for these dark times.
And eventually, Monero would outlast any ban.
It would be similar to whatever, historically, trying to ban alcohol or ban certain types of drugs or ban guns.
Or hemp seeds.
And Monero, more than any of those things...
Is unstoppable, right?
Because it's people just running code, running software on their computers, and there's really no way to do it.
And even, you know, we could get into all of this, too.
I mean, we talked about Monero as being the fungible version of Bitcoin or the private version of Bitcoin.
I also talk about it as being the more unstoppable version of Bitcoin because of other different...
Design features that it has.
And I don't know if you want me to get into that.
Like the proof of work, how distributed it is, things like that?
Exactly.
Yeah.
But Todd want to jump in.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Is Monero on Coinbase or no?
No.
Monero has never been listed on Coinbase.
You got to ask yourself why.
No kidding.
Never, never.
No.
Yeah, that's why.
To purchase Monero in New York on a centralized exchange never has been.
Right.
The Gemini doesn't carry it.
Kraken does.
Kraken carries it.
That's why I'm buying it.
But that demonstrates already that private crypto is in the crosshairs, right?
I don't think these exchanges are ever going to list any private crypto.
But that's something they can't take away then either.
And I think it actually leads to more decentralization in the real world utility of the coin.
100%.
It's forced Monero to do what crypto is supposed to do, which is to build a decentralized ecosystem.
We can't use centralized exchanges, but what have we been doing in the meantime?
We're using local Monero.
We're building out atomic swaps, which now exist as versions of that.
We have different decentralized exchanges that now exist and new ones that are being built.
All these solutions that wouldn't have been developed as quickly but for the fact that you can't easily obtain Monero on a centralized exchange.
So it's promoting the development of a robust, unstoppable ecosystem, right?
So once they do ban it, it's like, well, whatever.
It's already unstoppable.
And two, it's forcing people to obtain Monero in a way where they're not KYC'd because they can't get it on a centralized exchange.
So there definitely is a silver lining there.
If we go down that path, the issue, as I see it, is going to be the on-ramp to crypto, right?
Especially as people become aware.
So what's your answer to that?
How being able to get fiat from your bank account into Monero, what's the best way to do that?
Cash in the mail.
Cash in the mail.
Local Monero.
I watched that.
That was great.
I love Alex, by the way.
Yeah.
We had a great interview.
Years past.
But the answer is all these things I just mentioned, right?
So Bitcoin is going to be your surveillance coin that you can obtain with KYC, but then you can anonymously move into Monero using, for example, Atomic Swaps or using the Surat Dex or using Havino Dex.
Or you can use local Monero and use cash.
Or you can mine it.
Maybe that's a little less practical.
But I'd say the most practical way is going to be essentially purchasing other surveillance coins and then swapping into Monero and not through even instant exchanges.
There's a whole bunch of them like trade orgs.
There's off-star exchanges like TradeOrger.
There's all these instant exchanges.
But now we have these decentralized exchanges.
And so that's how people are going to get their Monero.
They're going to buy these other cryptos through the centralized exchanges and then anonymously swap them.
Can you name the top couple of DEXs that work with Monero right now so we can just plug them?
BISC? BISQ, right?
Sarai is being built.
It hasn't launched yet.
It's actually being built by Luke Parker, the guy who's proposing full membership groups.
I mean, he's a genius.
I recommend going to watch some of his interviews that I've done with him and some of his presentations.
I have, yeah.
It's amazing.
Sarai Dex, Havino just launched.
It's basically very similar to BIS. Same exact concept as BIS, decentralized exchange where you run your own software, but it's Monero-based.
So wait, how do we spell Havino?
Just like it sounds?
Yeah, Haven with an O, Havino.
Okay, got it.
Okay.
Is it.io?
I don't know what the...
Yeah, if you Google it, you should Google Havino and Monero and you'll find it.
Okay, we'll find it.
Oh, Havino.exchange is what it looks like here.
Opening Monero to the world.
Yeah, here it is.
We've talked a lot about full membership proofs.
Can you just please explain that for those of us who don't know?
Oh, yeah.
Thanks, Todd.
That's good.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know how much more, how detailed I could get.
Basically, it eliminates the concept of ring signatures where we were saying, right, there's 15 decoys and one real signer.
Now, the anonymity set is essentially all transactions in the Bitcoin.
That's wild, man.
That's perfect.
And that's because of Seraphis?
No, actually, so Seraphis was proposed before full membership proofs, and the original intention of Seraphis was just to essentially increase the ring size, right?
Oh, okay.
We're at 16, and then with Seraphis, it would allow us to go almost to a ring size of, let's say, 150 or 200, whatever it may be, to the point where it was arguably equivalent to an infinite anonymity set.
But then recently, full membership proofs was proven to work theoretically in Monero.
And so now the thinking is that that will be implemented with the Seraphis update.
Okay.
And so that's where the tie-in with full membership proofs in Seraphis.
So with Seraphis update now, we're going to most likely – I mean, it hasn't been built out.
But there's really – I mean, no reason why we won't see it added with Seraphis.
Let me add in a note here about the innovation.
I'm so impressed with Monero's innovation.
And also, you know, you mentioned before Firo and Rubin.
And I know Rubin collaborates with a lot of developers from the Monero world.
And I just got to say, I'm really impressed because, you know, Bitcoin...
The innovation is pretty stagnant, in my opinion, there.
And yet, with Monero and Firo in particular, those two projects, I see all this really forward thinking and future-proofing it, knowing how to Preemptively defend against quantum computing attacks in the future, right?
Expanding the anonymity set so that even statistical analyses by governments running supercomputers cannot penetrate the systems.
I've got to say, I think the smartest people...
I might take flack for this, I probably will, but I think the smartest people in this space are in the privacy coin space.
That's just my opinion.
Because you have to be the smartest people because that's where it's the most demanding.
It's attracting the true cypherpunks and the crypto anarchists.
And so it's not only necessarily the smartest, but it's the most passionate because they're driven by the desire to create an unstoppable digital cash network.
That's what they're in it for.
They're not in it for becoming a billionaire and hoping that their Bitcoin goes to the moon, whatever.
They're in it for this goal of creating a system for transacting value that the government can't censor, surveil, or control in any way.
And back to your question of, well, how is it funded?
I mean, really, at the end of the day, that's how it's really funded.
It's funded by the passions of these people.
that are sitting there till six, you know, five, four in the morning, eating their Cheerios and drinking their Pepsi.
Right.
And, you know, they don't care if they're getting paid for it.
They want to see this thing work because they know it's revolutionary and they know it's completely essential to maintaining our liberty in the digital age.
And so you're not only getting intelligent people, you're getting extremely passionate, driven people that are on the mission.
Hey, Doug, does Monero have a canary network to be able to test all of this on?
How does that go before you would actually implement everything on the base chain?
Actually, I would say WoW Narrow is the test network, or it essentially was at some point of Bitcoin.
WoW Narrow, you'll probably see full membership proofs on WoW Narrow, yeah, even before Firo, potentially.
But, you know, I hope people don't hear that and they run out and buy WoW Narrow, right?
Like, people need to understand that, once again, it's not just about the latest and craziest tech.
It's about implementing it in a safe way and it's really about the network effect of the system and Monero has In my opinion, beating out all other quote-unquote privacy coins and winning the network effect for purposes of digital, you know, discreetly.
I've got to bring in one more extraordinary use case that just came up in the world.
And Doug, I want to be respectful of your time.
We're at a little over an hour.
Are you okay for five more minutes or so?
I'm as good as long as you guys are well.
Okay, okay.
I took a couple of weeks off.
It's summertime.
We just had two back-to-back Monero conferences, so I took a couple of weeks off, but this is good.
I'm getting back in the swing.
Awesome.
All right.
So here's the use case for Monero.
Okay, so there's a guy who's a Chilean-American named Gonzalo Lira.
He lived in Ukraine.
He was a YouTuber.
And he was very critical of the Ukrainian government.
And he was arrested and charged with aiding the Russian narrative and whatever.
And he was imprisoned in Ukraine.
Again, he's an American citizen.
He was imprisoned for two and a half months.
They let him out on bail.
They gave him his passport back.
And he decided that he was going to try to escape the country.
But the point is, when he was in prison, the Ukrainian government rifled through his computer and his belongings, and they found that he had $140,000 on his PayPal account that he had earned from Patreon donations.
In prison, whoever, the government, the secret police, whatever, they paid the prisoners to beat him and torture him and demand that he pay them half of that money.
And he was forced to log into his PayPal from prison and transfer $70,000 to not have his eye gouged out with a toothpick in prison.
So how's that for a use case of if they can see it, they can beat it out of you?
And they also took $9,000 in cash out of his apartment.
But if he had had Monero, and let's say, just memorize the seed phrase, which is not that difficult to do with some practice, and you don't even have to have anything on your computer.
You just have your secret Monero in your head, or a paper wallet somewhere, whatever, he would have been safe from that.
So isn't that a real-world use case, too?
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, you don't even have to look to that.
Just look to Bitcoin, right?
One of the things they say about Bitcoin is it's unconfiscatable, right?
I don't know.
Just do a basic Google.
It's one of the most confiscated assets of all time.
Yeah, because they can see it.
There's never been another asset where they've taken billions of dollars away from somebody in one felt swoop.
Like in literally one click of a button.
They're like, now I own all your Monero.
I've just taken it all away from you.
And what makes it confiscatable is, like you said, the fact that it's not private, so they can see it.
They see it there on the blockchain.
And then they just have to find you, and it's a simple wrench attack at that point.
So the fact that they can't, you know, with Monero, that you can't see the amounts and there's no blockchain to look at, definitely adds to its unconfiscatability.
Yeah, and we live in a world where...
Economically, a lot of people are increasingly desperate.
And there have been – I mean I've even seen cases of like big Bitcoin guys getting kidnapped and then found with their limbs chopped off dead in a bag somewhere.
Yeah.
It would be like if you kept this safe – you had a Fort Knox of very – Yeah, but we all know that you have a billion dollars in there, jackass.
So when I knock that door and I put a gun to your head and say, now open it, it doesn't matter how secure your safe is.
It's a glass house where your shower is right near the front.
You're cool.
You're totally cool, man.
You're behind something physical.
It doesn't matter that they can see through.
Anybody who knows that's dealt with a decent amount, they don't want the whole world to know how much money they have.
Surveillance coins are the extreme example of that.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, and then let me mention one more thing.
On the merchant side, on the practicality side, And I know, Todd, you and I have had discussions about this.
And I just want to say to our audience, if you own a business and you are a merchant, if you're accepting payment for anything online or in person, you should love Monero.
Number one, the payments are irreversible.
So there's no chargebacks.
People aren't ordering stuff and taking delivery and then charging back and ripping you off.
And then secondly, again, nobody knows who you're selling to.
And that could be important as a business because you might be selling to somebody that gets on some political dissident list one day and then suddenly they're investigating you.
You sold duct tape to somebody who used duct tape to maybe tape it over someone's mouth in a carjacking or something.
It's like, what?
We're a hardware store.
We sell hammers, too.
I mean, what?
What are you going to do?
And this goes back to cash, right?
When somebody shows up with cash, like you said, at a hardware store, the attendant, the guy who runs the cash register never questions where you got that cash, right?
Commerce would break down.
It wouldn't work if you had to question somebody every time they went to spend something, right?
And so when people show up with cash, no questions asked because they don't know.
There's nothing for them to see.
But with the transparent ledger, it now puts the onus on that person Because now there is something to see.
So they're responsible in a way to check, right?
But if there's nothing to check, then they're not responsible.
And it just leads to a more frictionless form of commerce when you don't have the ability to look up histories of transactions.
Totally.
You got it.
Just nailed it.
Okay.
So look, we...
I've taken too much of your time, Doug, and Todd and I are going to have a discussion.
But I want to give you the opportunity.
Is there anything else that you want to add here in wrapping this up?
I mean, this has been an amazing conversation.
We love what you're all about and Monero Talk and Monerotopia and everything.
But is there anything you want to add?
Well, number one, I'd love to have you come on a Monerotopia show or a Monero Talk show that I do on my end.
That'd be great, too.
Sure, we'd love to do that.
I guess, number two, just to shill some things, I know I mentioned Monerotopia.com, but if anybody wants to watch our YouTube videos or our podcasts, if they just Google Monero Talk, right, and Monero Talk YouTube channel, everything is there.
Perfect.
A third and fourth thing I want to mention.
One is the Monero Noto project that I'm working on.
This might be a little advanced for your people out there, but if they're kind of getting into Monero and they're interested, we're launching a plug-and-play Monero node to make it super easy for people to get into it.
Dude, I want to run one.
Come on, tell me about it.
Yeah, MoneroNodo.com.
Check it out.
MoneroNodo, N-O-D-O? It's going to make it very easy for you to get a node up and running.
It's a little plug-and-play device that we're developing.
Is it a piece of hardware that's running the node?
It's a piece of hardware, yep.
Wow.
It's a little computer, but built for the purposes of running a Monero node, making it very simple.
And then the other thing that it does well, it allows you to use a light wallet in the best way possible.
So when you're using a wallet, Like Cake Wallet or MyMonero, whatever it may be, that wallet's connecting to a node.
The best way to use Monero is if it's connecting to your own node.
It just adds additional security and privacy.
So you're going to be selling this hardware that's pre-configured with a Monero node and it's got the whole blockchain already loaded and you just plug it in and run it, huh?
Essentially, yes.
It'll have to re-download the blockchain, but there's no dealing with code.
For any Joe Schmo like myself, you very easily plug and play, and you've got a node up and running.
I like it.
And it shows you how to connect your wallet to the node, so it's very simple.
The last thing I want to mention, another project we're working on, there's nothing to Google at this point, but it's called XMR Bazaar.
And this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about building out the circular economy.
So this is going to be like a dark market, but for the clear net, Monero-based, peer-to-peer.
So kind of like a local Monero, because I know you've recently been getting into that, but for purposes of buying and selling goods and services directly with Monero, peer-to-peer.
And what's very unique about it, because there's another one that launched kind of recently, it's called Monero Market.
But what's interesting about XMR Bazaar is we figured out how to do trustless multi-sig escrow so that...
Right.
So I'm sure when you use local Monero, you went through the escrow process.
Right.
And they use some bonding system, right?
So the way this is going to work is it's going to use a multi-signature so that we as the platform are never holding your Monero.
They're held in a multi-sig that's then signed by...
The receiver and it's signed by the mediator that's mediating the transaction.
So it's just an interesting thing to keep your eye on.
The real goal with that is to build out a peer-to-peer digital cash economy where anybody can come and whatever, sell their motorcycle, can rent their house out, whatever it may be, and they can do so directly with Monero in a trustless way using this transaction.
So your CBD oil, you know?
Whatever it may be, yeah.
Yeah, you know, because the traditional banking system...
Right, like we were talking about before.
It doesn't have to be anything even controversial, right?
Right.
Whatever it may be.
Whatever you would want to sell for cash.
Yeah, very cool.
But I've had problems just trying to...
One time I was buying a gun magazine and just trying to pay for the magazine and the shipping.
It was like $25.
And my Chase credit card, of course, declined it because the merchant had the word gun.
I wasn't even buying a gun.
Not that day.
But...
It's like I was just buying a gun magazine.
It's crazy.
This is how we win, guys.
This is how we win.
We've got to build out our own ecosystem.
We've got to opt out.
It's not about asking for permission.
It's not about being angry at the government for the fact that governments are going to do what they do best, which is try to control people.
The only thing we can do is try to build a system outside of theirs that they can't stop.
That's right.
Well said.
You nailed it, Doug.
Okay.
We're going to email you after this show, by the way, because I want to purchase a Monero Noto from you, and of course I'll pay you in Monero, and I want to be one of your first users, okay?
We only accept Monero.
Actually, no, I think we have now payments on there.
So you could pay in other cryptos and then just send us to Monero or Monero, obviously.
Well, I'll just send you XMR because that's what I'm saying.
We use the Monero gateway.
You might want to check that out.
So that's a really nice way to natively accept Monero.
For example, if you're creating a WordPress website, it integrates very nicely with WooCommerce and It's not like a NowPayments.
It's just Monero-based.
It's probably the easiest way to natively accept Monero for e-commerce purposes if you're using WooCommerce.
My devs are talking to NowPayments, and we are looking at accepting multiple privacy coins through NowPayments, but we'll look at that later.
Take a look at that.
We absolutely will.
And also, I think there's a Monero add-on to BTC Pay as well that we've been looking at.
That's also a great solution.
Yeah.
So, yeah, our devs are a busy thing.
Our e-commerce devs had previously never worked with crypto.
But, hey, now they are.
So, they're getting up to speed.
All right.
Alright, gentlemen.
Thank you, Doug.
It's been a pleasure.
It was great, Doug.
Cheers.
We had a lot of fun.
Take care.
Cheers.
Bye.
Alright.
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All right, we're back with Todd Pitner for the post-interview discussion.
But first, I want to just plug this company, RedPillPrints.com.
They now have, there it is, Decentralized TV t-shirts here.
And can you show camera one on my desk?
They've got mugs, coffee mugs, and they've got hats.
And this is the curved bill, and this is the flat bill, if you want to go full gang stuff.
That's so cool.
Yeah.
So cool.
You've got the coffee mugs, you've got shirts, all kinds of stuff.
Go to their website.com.
Redpillprints.com is the website.
And I just want to tell you, look, they're not a sponsor, and we're not paying them, and we don't get a cut.
But they have sent us this stuff for free to show that they are willing to, you know, custom print products.
Even just order one t-shirt or ten or hats or whatever.
They'll do it all for you.
Redpillprints.com and they will accept crypto as payment.
So we really like that.
We just want to give them a plug because we're trying to create the crypto economy as well.
Yeah, that's right.
That's it.
Let me get this light down now.
That sucker's bright.
See?
That's what's in my eyes.
I know.
It's like a lightsaber or something.
Okay, with that said, so what do you think, Todd?
I mean, pretty fun discussion.
Fun guy.
I really, really like Doug.
Yeah, he's cool.
I can tell why he has been hosting Monero, his show, for so long.
I mean, he's very, very good.
Yeah, he is.
He's a sharp guy.
He's going to have a lot of success in this.
I did not realize, by the way, that Monerotopia...
Was his show.
I just never connected.
I mean, I knew he was there, but I didn't know that that was his thing.
Yeah.
So I learned that today.
Yeah.
That's his baby.
Yeah.
No, he was really amazing.
I mean, he brought out all of the right points.
I think people who aren't necessarily up to speed with private crypto probably learned a ton today.
Oh, yeah.
Because he is very, very good.
down from the top shelf down to a level that even I'll understand it, right?
So I just give that a 10 out of 10.
Yeah, me too.
And you can tell he's answered these kinds of questions, you know, a thousand times.
And he's explained this to a lot of people, you know, total noobs.
Like, what is digital money?
Or even, what is Bitcoin to start with, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And one of my takeaways, and I wanted to be able to say it, but I never got it in, is that when people think about Bitcoin being a transparent ledger, To where everybody can see what you do, right?
Think about this.
It is just one executive order away of our beloved government here, at least in the U.S., of being able to say, I hereby declare That we are going to start taxing unrealized gains.
Right?
Because they can take a snapshot of when you got the Bitcoin, how much the price was.
And if you go in this bull run, can you imagine to where if all of a sudden...
You know how volatile crypto is.
Can you imagine it's at, what, 25,000, 30,000 now?
And it goes on a bull run and it ends up being 125,000 at some point in 2024, let's say.
If they enact that and you are holding anything that is a transparent chain, Believe you me, how great would that be for the Druid Babylonian bastards, as I call them, to be able to declare, hey, that $100,000, you owe $35,000 in tax.
And then the price goes back down.
And you're like, but what about my loss?
Yeah, exactly.
No, that sounds like something that Elizabeth Warren would push out there because she's at war with crypto.
I... I mean, really, this show should be required viewing for everybody in our sphere of influence for them to just understand what is private crypto.
They need to hear from Doug.
They need to watch this show because if you haven't really thought through these issues, it can surprise you and it can bite you in the ass, frankly, down the road because everything that you do in Bitcoin is permanently etched onto the blockchain.
There's no going back and deleting it because it's the nature of a distributed ledger and a blockchain structure in particular.
So governments could go back five years from now, they could go back and, oh, you bought this on a KYC exchange and then you spent this Bitcoin over there and now that's a taxable event.
Now we're going to retroactively demand you pay these taxes.
Whereas with Monero, it's like nothing to see.
Nothing to see it.
And that's what I really, really also loved, the forward thinking of the XMR bazaar.
Because now we're talking about being able to earn crypto by just selling your own stuff.
You know?
It's stuff.
I mean...
I can't wait to utilize that service.
I mean, because I have a bunch of stuff that I want to sell for Monero.
Yeah.
Okay, so it's not body fluids, is it?
Well, you know, I'm not going to confirm nor deny.
Because, you know, people will pay top dollar for unvaccinated blood, by the way.
I'm just saying.
Yes.
Pure blood.
Well, that's me.
I'm a pure blood.
You could list that.
I did self-identify on that interview as a stuck pig.
Everybody forgive me.
At one point in time, I was sweating like crazy, and I'm sitting here thinking, oh my gosh, usually I knock my AC down to, you know, about three or four points before I turn on the lights, and I was like, Oops.
Oh, no, no.
I don't think anybody noticed any sweating.
Don't worry about it.
It's all good.
But I also like, getting back to the interview, I like the fact that Doug was also very open and honest about the one point of Monero that can be criticized and that is being improved and resolved, which is the ring signatures.
And, you know, currently the anonymity set of 16, I think in 2023 that seems like a small set.
It's still functional, but...
Sure.
But today, they can do something much better than that.
For example, full membership proofs, and that's in process.
But I like the fact that, at least as Doug is representing Monero, that the Monero community seems to have really good self-awareness about strengths and possible weaknesses that need additional work, because that's a very mature process of iterative development that because that's a very mature process of iterative development that leads to a strong future.
And you know, I've learned so much in the last two and a half months just engaging with you and a different outlook on privacy coins and private crypto.
And I realize how tribalism can just really ruin things, right?
Yeah.
Across all projects, right?
And I know at one point in time, Monero went through their own issues, you know, their own drama.
Yeah.
But it just encourages me because...
Their whole community and their devs and everything, I mean, I don't have a lot of experience with them at all.
I mean, just by casually watching some videos and such.
But I really want to sink my teeth into it more because I just really like what, you know, they have going on.
And they just seem very forward thinking.
And I love the thought that they are dedicated to building out a circular economy.
Right.
I agree.
I think that application is really smart, and it's something that's aligned with our values here on this show.
Again, we're not in this for speculation, and we don't encourage speculation.
We encourage real-world utility.
That's how we actually add value to Monero or any project is to show people how to use it and then implement it ourselves and use it ourselves.
And I can't even tell you, by the way, how many private conversations I have with people now where I'm acquiring something from them.
Like a quarter of a cow.
That was the other time.
Or I bought some blueberries from a friend that grows blueberries.
Or I might be buying brass for reloading ammo.
From friends of mine who produce a lot of brass because they're shooting up the place all the time.
And, you know, I've said to every one of them, like, here, can I just pay you in privacy crypto?
And then that opens the door.
What's privacy crypto?
Which one should I use?
And then it's like, okay, here, check this out.
Here's how it works.
And...
Then often the question eventually comes around to them asking, well, how do I convert this to money?
And I'm like, no, it is money.
You don't need to convert it to fake counterfeit fiat.
You use it as it is.
You need to go to decentralizeddirectory.com and learn all the ways that you can take that crappy melting fiat and decentralize your life.
I'm glad you brought that up.
Let me plug it for you, Todd, because this is Todd's project, folks, but he's putting together decentralizeddirectory.com, which will initially be a place where you can get some information in different categories about decentralized solutions, but more importantly, if you wish, you can engage Todd as a consultant to take you deep down the rabbit hole of decentralization and share with you some secrets and some financial secrets and food secrets and things that maybe can't be stated publicly, but you can learn through consulting. you can engage Todd as a consultant to take you
So yeah, you want to add to that, Todd?
I just have to tell you, I spent a good bit of my day today.
Now, by the time this airs, decentralizeddirectory.com will be open and available, and you'll be able to go see for yourself.
But I'm just super excited with the team that's pulling all of this together.
We have the strategy in place to be able to basically, you know, have a conversation with me, and I'm going to unlock this directory for you to where it is the rabbit hole.
Next week, I'll be able to explain a little bit more.
In the week after that, a little bit more.
But it's all coming together, and I'm real excited.
So you know that I am installing the Food Forest.
After our fourth episode with Jim Gale, I engage the foodforestabundance.com because I put my money where my mouth is.
And I'm telling you, I see his vision.
But check this out.
This is what they just presented, and I approved.
Look at that.
Whoa!
This is all just green grass back there, right?
Love it.
Here's my little, it's a lanai cage, right?
We don't have a pool, but that's a screen-in porch, which becomes important in Florida because you can ride the mosquitoes if you have a small enough saddle.
But all the way from bananas to, this is like just a walking grocery store right here.
Beautiful gardenias, orange tree, mulberry bush, mango, avocados, two different kind of avocados, so that they'll produce fruit at two different times of the year.
You're making me jealous.
It's like a smoothie shopping walk.
Yeah, and so I want to share this, Mike, just because Part of my value add for people who come to me, and we have a chat where I can be, I'm not going to say consultant, but I'm going to be your guide, is that I have arranged with many different decentralized solution companies an opportunity where people,
just because of my relationship, are going to save a tremendous amount of money by working with them.
Yeah, you've negotiated these discounts that aren't public.
That are not public, but you will have access to them through decentralized.com.
So I invite everybody to come.
I'm so excited.
We're going to help so many people just do things with their crappy, green, melting cash that is going to empower them in the future.
I love that.
And I'm very happy that you're launching this because we get a lot of questions from people who actually need a little bit of consulting, hand-holding, or guidance of how to navigate this.
But we're trying to make it easier for everybody.
Right.
Just getting to the interview again today, to use Monero, you don't have to be a geek.
You don't have to understand all the zero-knowledge proofs and how it all works.
You don't have to look under the hood to drive your car.
Hopefully you can change a tire or something.
Hopefully you know how to reboot your phone.
You don't need to go in and tweak the carburetor or fuel injectors.
Same thing with Monero.
You can just use it.
And I forgot to mention in the interview, the Monero wallet, I think, is just the default Monero wallet.
It's got to be the best default wallet out there.
It's just super clean and simple, and it has mining built in.
Do you know that?
Wow.
I did not know that.
Yeah, you just go to advanced and then, I don't know, system or settings, and you just click to start mining.
You can choose how many CPU cores, and the wallet does the mining for you.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
Because mining can be a pain on some projects.
Yeah, that's right.
Not for the faint of heart.
You learned.
So I actually did mining for about five minutes.
Then I did the math and realized this is not going to make me any money at all.
But I wanted to see how it works.
Leave the mining to other people who can run those giant rigs with near free electricity.
That's their wheelhouse.
But for us, we're just about using it.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway.
Yeah, no.
So, yeah, thumbs up to the interview.
I, you know, hope that many of the Monero community see this and know that you are invited here to Decentralized.tv, and we hope you spread the good word, because we sure do like you.
Yeah, I mean, that really needs to be stated, too, that we really make an effort here on this show to not be tribal.
Right.
We are not trying to pit one project against another, and we're not running a pump and dump on some favorite project.
And we disclose when we hold projects.
And you, Todd, for three years, you covered Epic Cash, and you said publicly you have some amount of your money in Epic Cash, and that's fine.
And what I love about you is you're so open-minded.
It doesn't...
It doesn't mean that every five seconds you're talking about Epic Cash.
You're interested in the whole realm of privacy solutions, and so am I. And I hold Moneo as well, and everything else.
I'm really not interested in the CBDCs, Mike.
Right.
Oh, I had a question that I wanted to answer in the interview, but I'm going to ask you.
Go for it.
Okay, so we know how the general population managed the pandemic.
So, how many people, what percentage of people do you think are going to just embrace CBDCs as, oh, how convenient?
I'm afraid it's a huge percentage.
Well, so we have to talk about NPCs, non-player characters.
I believe in that.
I do too.
And I think NPCs are, I don't know, at least half the population.
More.
And some people call them PLFs, programmable life forms.
And these are people who really have no discernment or consciousness, and they just absorb whatever is said to them by the media, and they just do things by default.
They're sleepwalking through life.
These are the people who got the jabs.
These are the people who, you know, change their icons to whatever popular icon on social media is being pushed.
They just join the crowd, follow the herd off the cliff, you know, NPCs.
So, yes, a lot of NPCs are going to use CBDCs and get UBIs.
universal basic income.
Yep.
But the good news here, Todd, is those NPC characters, they never change history.
They just go along with the flow of history.
It's people like us that change history.
That's true.
And so we have way more power than any number of thousands of NPCs because they can never step outside their scripts, their programming.
Yeah, yeah.
They are programmed by mainstream media and they entirely lack the ability to critically think about anything.
And it's crazy.
You can have NPCs within the same family, Mike.
Oh, yes.
I mean, I kind of...
I kind of walk amongst them.
Okay, there's an omission.
But look, I'm in the same boat.
I have some family members and former friends who just went to sleep.
And they're in the NPC category.
But, I mean, I've also got friends, I mean, even from high school, that are wide awake and on board and fans of the show, by the way.
Yeah.
That's great.
Each person has to decide for themselves whether they're going to be a slave or a free person.
And if they're going to be a slave, then they're just going to go along with everything, including the CBDCs.
If they want to be free, then once you start going down that rabbit hole, you start using Monero or other privacy coins.
You start using a de-Googled phone.
You start using a VPN. You stop using Google.com as your search engine.
So on and so forth.
You start growing your food.
You can't stop it.
It's a snowball effect of freedom.
Coming back to the interview, I have a sneaky suspicion that probably 99% of Monero holders are not NPCs.
I just have a sneaky suspicion.
If you're holding Monero, welcome to the land of critical thought.
It's a really cool exercise in self-selection.
Actually, it's kind of an IQ test.
If you hold Monero, you have passed the IQ test.
I never ordered it, but I had a shirt designed that was a mask, someone wearing it, and it said, at this point, it's an IQ test.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And there are similar IQ tests all around us.
Like, people who just hold all their savings in dollars are idiots.
Yeah.
The dollars are losing value every day.
And by the way, if you buy an asset like a house, and then it, quote, appreciates in value in the fiat dollars, Then you sell it for fiat.
You have to pay the IRS on the quote gain, which was really only because of inflation.
You didn't gain any actual value.
You bought it for half a million.
You sold it for one million.
You got to pay taxes on half a million of gain, but the dollars aren't worth what they used to be.
So you lost and then you pay taxes on the money you lost.
I mean, how is it that people don't understand the negative effects of inflation or compounding inflation, basically?
I mean, it just escapes people.
Well, because they didn't have decentralized.tv for...
They don't understand math, I tell you what.
So, we could say too that, by the way, it's not just Monero.
So, people who are into privacy crypto, I think, are cut above.
They really are.
I do too.
I do too.
And I think people who are into privacy crypto have a much better understanding of what crypto is.
Mm-hmm.
Where Bitcoin, it's kind of like the default crypto to get into where you have a lot of noobs in Bitcoin.
And I'm not saying you don't also have some really advanced, amazing people in that as well.
Sure.
But Bitcoin is kind of like the noob magnet.
Oh, buy Bitcoin or Dogecoin.
There's a super noob magnet right there.
Right.
And then at that point, people maybe slowly come to learn that what they have is not what they thought they bought.
Right.
They thought they bought Monero, but actually it was Bitcoin, and then they come to find out this is not private, and everything's transparent, and there's no anonymity through KYC exchanges and so on.
So I think that as we educate people through this show, and also we are educated, we learn something every time from every guest.
We're just helping to spread the knowledge that's going to help make this whole thing a success.
Yeah, so many great guests.
We haven't even released the shows yet as of this recording.
You know, people are just going to learn more and more about private crypto.
And on each of these shows, you and I afterwards are like, wow, I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm overjoyed and also overwhelmed.
Like today, here on my screen, we just learned about this, Havino.
Right.
Which I guess it hasn't been launched yet, but it looks like it's on the verge of being launched.
And, you know, I didn't know about this, but that's exactly what I'm looking for.
You know, we want a way to do these non-custodial swaps or atomic swaps of crypto because...
You see, the thing I love about crypto is you can be so rapid, you can be nimble in where you want to allocate your assets.
Right.
So whereas in the banking system, or even in a brokerage system, and you know I've had these horrible problems with Robinhood that's seized my accounts and seized my funds, and they did that because I bought crypto on Robinhood.
It's the dumbest reason ever.
Could you have our producers reach out to them and invite them on the show?
They're barely responding to customers, I don't think.
But what are we going to do?
Bring Robinhood on and trash them for the whole show?
Because I don't have anything nice to say about Robinhood.
But the point is, I wire money and then I buy crypto with my own money and then that flags something.
And in the traditional financial system and in the brokerages, they try to slow everything down.
Like, oh, you can't have too much of your money today.
Oh, you can't wire too much out.
There's a monthly limit.
There's a daily limit.
There's an ATM limit.
There's a cash limit.
Oh, you're supposed to give us advance notice if you want too much cash.
Well, what's too much cash?
$1,000.
Really?
I got $1,000 in my pocket!
Yeah.
Because I buy groceries with cash.
I literally have probably $1,000 in my pocket right now.
Along with my Glock 43, by the way, if you think you're going to rob me.
And my vicious security dog over here, too.
So good luck.
It's going to be the most expensive $1,000 you ever got.
But limb replacement is expensive.
But the point is, the banking system slows everything down.
But in crypto, you're just like, boom, boom, boom.
I can transfer in minutes.
I can swap.
I can buy.
I can send.
I can receive.
I can donate.
Boom, and nobody tells me you can't do that because they don't have control.
We have control.
Yeah, you got it.
Done.
Are you listening out there?
I think we're getting through, Mike.
I mean, if you want control over your money, it's got to be something where you have self-custody.
Yes.
And in the bank is not self-custody.
No.
And it's not if, it's when you are going to have an issue.
And you, and you, and you, you know?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Well, look, they shut off Nigel Farage from the bank in the UK. They did.
Because they said that they didn't like that he was friends with Trump.
It's like, really?
This is your reason?
Unbelievable.
But then JP Morgan was happy to do financial transactions for Jeffrey Epstein, the child molester?
It's like, oh, so, wait a minute.
So if you rape children on your rape island, that's okay with the bank, but if you're friends with Trump, that's bad.
Nothing to see here.
Carry on.
Right.
I don't get it.
I don't get it.
And, you know, again, we don't make this show political, but it's just, you know, if you're a Democrat, you're not being debanked.
Right.
Right?
Yeah.
No Democrat is being debanked.
It's only the conservatives right now that are being debanked.
And I guarantee you there's never going to be an NPC that will be debanked.
Right, because they'll go along with it.
Yeah.
What do you want me to do now?
Eat the bugs?
Eat the bugs.
Yes.
All right.
So anyway, getting back to Monero.
So a couple of other points I want to cover.
So Monero, what I really love about Monero is that it has such high liquidity that it's very easy to get in and out of.
It's astonishing.
By the way, I should plug on Kraken, which is the only exchange that will apparently allow me to use my own money.
Kraken, if you get to the Kraken Pro level, Which I have apparently achieved pro level now.
You've got to get signed up on Kraken, Todd.
I don't know if you've done that yet.
This weekend.
Okay, you've got to get that going.
You get to the pro level, and then...
I've got to provide documentation to get there, so of course they have all my KYC. I don't care.
In this case, I don't care, because I'm buying Monero.
Anyway, on their pro level, you have this pro...
Screen, very customizable.
You can buy and sell and you can do limit buys and sells and so on.
And the cost to buy crypto is extremely low in the pro system.
In some cases, it's like half a percent.
So if you've been out there paying 3%, 5%, 7% to buy crypto with a credit card or a debit card or something, you are over, overpaying.
You can get crypto for 1% or less on Kraken at the pro level.
Yeah.
Anyway, I owe them that.
They didn't ban me a second time, so I owe them a plug for letting me trade on their platform.
And everybody, please look forward to an upcoming show where we are actually going to be interviewing a representative from Kraken.
That's true.
Yes, we have Kraken coming on the show.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Okay, but getting back to Monero, like I said, we love the liquidity because you can buy and sell and it doesn't mess with the price.
Because on any given day, there's, I don't know, like $60 million trading hands in Monero.
Yeah.
I'm sorry to even use the word dollars.
But $60 million worth of Monero is trading hands.
So if you want to go in there and buy $100,000 of Monero, you can.
It's not going to make the price go crazy.
In fact, it might not even be much of a blip.
Right.
Which is good.
It's amazing liquidity.
It really is.
I'm super impressed.
Now, the downsides that we know of, of Monero, we already mentioned the ring signatures.
The blockchain is bigger.
It's a lot bigger than a MemboWimbo blockchain, as you know as an expert on Epic.
The MemboWimbo blockchain is really, really streamlined and very small and very compact and very suitable for portable devices.
So Monero is never going to brag about having a super small blockchain, right?
That's not one of its strengths.
No.
It's kind of a hefty blockchain.
Yeah, I'm looking here.
It always takes a little while to sync it.
Yeah, so basically, just from my own research here is, for example, the Mimblewimble Epic Cash blockchain, 2.54 gigabyte for the entire blockchain, and XMR is almost 64 gigabytes.
Yeah, but there's probably a lot more transactions on Monero.
Absolutely, absolutely.
So...
But if it's the same number of transactions, Mimble Wimble would still be smaller.
Oh, way smaller.
Yeah.
You'd probably go to five gigs.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, there's trade-offs, right?
Mimble Wimble.
Totally.
You have to have a handshake.
But that's kind of like, I was thinking about that the other day.
We talk a lot about, you know, digital money that behaves like cash.
I've never...
I've paid someone in cash where I haven't handed it to them.
So, you know, so yeah, you have to have both wallets open at one point in time for the transaction to settle to the blockchain, right?
But that's kind of like cash.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, but it's just, you know, through the internet, there are cases like the tipping system where the content creator, their wallet may not be open.
Right.
And in that case, Monero...
Being that Monero doesn't require the open wallet handshake, then it actually works better.
But in terms of e-commerce, or let's say even local commerce, you're in a farmer's market, you're buying some pumpkin pie, and you're paying in crypto, then yeah, it seems like you could use a Membo Wimble chain, or you could use Llanthus, or you could use stealth addresses.
I mean, almost anything would work, but definitely Membo Wimble would work in that case as well.
Yeah, it's very fast.
But the idea is, let's just get acclimated and educated on all private crypto.
Absolutely.
And, you know, it's not us versus them.
It should be we at this point in time.
I completely agree.
You know, the CBDCs, the weffers, you know?
Todd, remember when we did the Dash interview?
Yes.
And Dash with Ernesto Contreras, he described this two-tiered supernode system.
Where there's a super set of nodes that can sort of rapidly confirm transactions in a couple of seconds.
And it's like a randomly selected assortment of super nodes.
And I kind of thought of it as kind of like a lightning network on top of Dash, you know, kind of like the lightning network of Bitcoin.
But you know what I'm wondering is, why doesn't Monero...
Maybe they have thought of something like this, but wouldn't it be great if a project like Monero or Firo or anybody had a super-rapid point-of-sale privacy crypto ultra-fast supernode system or however that would look?
Monero, because the blockchain size is bigger, if you're trying to have somebody new Right?
And they set up the wallet and then it's got to sync.
And so it's just waiting.
And it's not convenient for a new user if they haven't been running the wallet and syncing the node.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, it's difficult for newbies.
Right.
And then there's the issue that you got a noob.
Okay, they set up their wallet and it's all synced.
And then so you send them something.
You send them like.1 XMR. And they're like, great, awesome, I've got some coin.
And then they start to spend it.
And then you have the UTXO issue, even on Monero.
Where they spend like.01 and then they got to wait because the.1 gets locked up during the confirmations of the transaction.
And that noob is like, where'd my money go?
Well, I bought a cup of coffee and I'm waiting for change now.
Where did it go?
You know what I mean?
And then you have to start explaining, okay, transactions, unspent transactions.
Noobs don't want to hear that.
And even I went through a frustrating time last week to where I was trying to test sending some Epic to be able to go through Change Now to be able to get different privacy coins and, you know, just a small amount.
So I sent 100 Epic to Change Now to be able to get Thera is what I wanted to exchange it for.
You know, it's still waiting.
It's still waiting.
Still waiting today?
What do you mean?
No, it's been like a week, and I opened up my wallet through the Epic Pay wallet.
They now have the swap function in there, and it just still says they're waiting for a change now to actually do the swap.
Huh.
Well, you should probably cancel that one and try it.
I can't.
That's the thing.
That's why I'm so glad I only sent 100 Epic.
Which, you know...
Yeah.
Huh.
Well...
Yeah.
So, now, there is a, you know, a transaction number, and I could go through with...
You could email their support, yeah.
Yeah, I could email their support, and I'm sure they're pretty good at responding, but it's been a little busy lately with you, Mike, so...
Yeah, true.
We've been doing a lot of interviews.
I haven't made that a priority, but I need to.
It's just like...
Crypto...
Crypto can be a little bit overwhelming until it's not.
But it's so important.
We all have to.
We have to become proficient in private.
Yeah, we do.
And there are some little hiccups like that.
I had an issue similar.
You know how I'm using Litecoin to swap for other privacy coins.
So, yeah, I think I was buying...
I think I was buying Furo with Litecoin, and I was using a swap service, and I sent the Litecoin, and then the swap failed, and I contacted customer service, and they said, yeah, there was some really major volatility change in price, and so we couldn't complete the trade.
And I said, okay, well, send me back the Litecoin.
And then they said, well, can you show us that you sent the Litecoin?
From your original Litecoin wallet.
And so I took a screenshot of the signature of the sending.
And it's got all the confirmation codes and everything.
I sent them that.
And then they replied and said, you know, that's really weird because this amount of Litecoin actually came from this other wallet.
And it turned out that...
Somehow, the wallet that I was using to send Litecoin had aggregated my Litecoin with some other transaction.
Wow.
Unbeknownst to me, and then they had sent that to the swap service, so the swap service never saw my originating wallet as the sender.
Ah, that's weird.
That's super weird.
It freaked me out a little bit, and ultimately, I said, look, Since maybe you don't want to give me the money back, the Litecoin, just buy the Furo at whatever price it is.
I don't care.
I'm just testing this stuff, so just do it.
And so they did, and I got some Furo.
But there are hang-ups, and this is why atomic swaps are so important.
I don't like these custodial swap services.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, they can freeze your funds, you know?
Yep.
They are.
We need decentralized swaps.
Non-custodial swaps.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
But you're right, Todd.
I mean, people have to have knowledge about all of this and start small.
You know?
Yes.
Test a little bit.
And whenever you're using a new service, you're right.
It's just send the smallest amount that you can get away with to just test it that it all goes through and works.
True.
I would hate for somebody to just ape into something and, yeah, let me send my whole ballots.
Yeah, true.
And everybody should remember, always, every day, If you are going to become crypto curious, and we hope you are and do and will, but when you're dealing with crypto, there are some of the most smartest scammers out there in the world.
So you just have to be really, really careful and, you know, protect your keywords with Mike's dog.
I mean...
No, there are scammers that will walk you through going to the command line interface for your local wallet and typing in commands that will reveal your seed phrase, and then they instruct you to read the seed phrase back to them, and then they'll just steal your entire wallet that way.
And it's all for the purpose of serving you, to help you with this problem.
And usually they DM you.
There's a bunch of people DMing me since we launched this show.
I've got every random person, it seems, on the internet trying to DM me on Telegram now.
Hey, one other thing I want to mention.
Kraken.
I noticed this about Kraken, that you can actually buy Monero on Kraken And then five seconds later, you can withdraw it, even before that initial sale goes through the Monero confirmations.
That's amazing.
It's amazing.
And what it means is Kraken is taking risk.
Yeah, they are.
Right?
I mean, some level of risk, although, of course, I'm buying it with my own money that I deposited with them.
But if there's ever an issue where, for some reason, that doesn't go through, like I've already withdrawn...
The Monero.
Right.
Yeah, because I don't leave Monero on Kraken.
No, you can't.
But if you do have issues, you can use your satellite phone, Mike.
Okay.
All right, we'll get to that in a second.
We'll get to that.
But I'm just saying that Kraken is actually, their service has been very good because they don't make you wait for the confirmations in order to withdraw the crypto that you purchased.
And that's a big deal.
That's awesome.
Especially like Bitcoin.
You know, some of those confirmations can take a long time.
Oh, yeah.
And they can be expensive, too.
All right.
But since you mentioned the Satellite Phone Store, that's our sponsor today.
Let me bring him up.
SAT123.com.
Satellite phones is backup communication that helps you decentralize from the cell towers.
And they work anywhere on the planet.
These are the Iridium phones here.
They work anywhere on the planet, including the oceans and deserts.
And these are the bivvy sticks, two-way satellite text messaging.
And they work even when the power grid is down.
As long as the satellites are still in orbit, then you're still going to be able to make calls, receive calls, and also send texts with the baby stick here.
Keep in touch with loved ones.
And we appreciate them supporting the show.
SAT123.com They are our official sponsor.
I feel like we've plugged like a dozen things that are unofficial sponsors, like non-sponsors.
Like, yeah, don't forget about the decentralized TV hats from Red Pill Prince.
Not a sponsor.
And what do I have here?
Cracking, not a sponsor.
Here we go.
AGN Speedcubes, not a sponsor.
But this is what I do in my spare time when I'm waiting for guests to connect or whatever.
You know, I got my speedcubing back, Todd, since my finger healed.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
So I'm speedcubing, and I learned something really cool, that even if you don't cube for several weeks, like, your fingers remember it.
Your body.
Really?
Yeah, your muscles.
Like, mentally...
I'm like, what is this thing?
But my fingers just do the maneuvers, you know?
That's crazy.
Yeah, like, you know, your fingers remember what you're doing.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, body memory.
So, anyway, that's all fun.
I ordered one of those.
Did you?
Yes, and I tried to sit down this last weekend and go through it, and it has the algorithms and cheat sheet and everything like that.
But I'm like, whoa, I'm going to have to remember a lot of stuff here.
Correction, it's not A-G-N, it's G-A-N. That's my bad.
It's GAN, I think.
That's the brand.
But yeah, you've got to learn the F2L, first two layers.
That's the method that I use.
The first two layers, and then you have position, last layer, and orient, and then position, last layer, and you're done.
And use F2L. You'll be solving it in under a minute pretty consistently.
Okay, that's great.
F2L. F2L, yeah.
I will...
First two layers.
Not...
Google it.
I will use a decentralized search engine for F2L. Yeah.
I think it's called Cubing...
CheatSheet.com.
Let me see if that's it.
CubingCheatSheet.com I think has the best diagrams for the...
Yeah, here it is.
Dan's Cubing CheatSheet app.
And what you want, you see here, 3x3 CFOP F2L. That's what you want.
Right there.
The 3x3...
Yeah, 3x3 F2L. Okay.
And then if you want to focus on things like, let's say, the Orient Last Layer, there's also a two-step...
Here it is, two-step OLL. This is easier to learn.
And there's only, you know, how many cases?
Nine, ten cases here of Orient last layer.
So you've got to memorize these algorithms, and they're not that difficult.
And then position last layer is also really easy, and you'll have it in no time.
Here it is, the two-step PLL. These are really easy, and they're really fun, too.
This step is the most fun step, actually.
Which one?
The two-step PLL right here.
Okay.
These are fun because you're swapping the pieces on top.
You're just...
You're either swapping edge pieces opposite or corners to each other, and these tricks are just like, I don't know.
They're really fun.
Bottom line, wrapping it up, Todd, first of all, thank you for being here today.
I know I gave you really short notice on this interview.
I apologize for that.
But it was a great interview.
Totally worth it.
Yeah.
I really like Doug, and I can't wait to engage more with him.
Yeah, I think he's welcome back, and we'd love to join his show and just kind of keep in touch with the Monero community and see what they have going on.
I hope that that full membership proves something.
I hope it doesn't take two years, but I also don't want anybody to rush anything because they've got to get it right.
Get it right on WowNero first.
What is really WowNero?
Just like a meme coin version, or what is that?
I think it's a fork of Monero where it behaves like their Canary Network, where they do all of their playing with, you know?
I don't know.
I'm just pulling that one from you know where.
Yeah, I don't know either, but I just...
I don't own any WowNero, since I have no idea what that is exactly.
I just was holding Monero, and I hope that they get it right.
I'm pretty sure they will.
Smart people.
Yeah.
Me too.
Okay.
Well, we'll wrap this up for today.
Did I forget anything?
We got everything?
No, I think that was a great, I don't know, hour and a half, I think.
Yeah?
Yeah, we can...
It's impossible to do this show in under an hour.
There's just so much to cover.
Oh, yeah.
I know.
No, it's great.
I like the format.
I hope people have the patience to stick to it all and...
And I think we're delivering the right kind of value where people will make this a must-listen, must-watch show.
We're getting a ton of positive feedback, no doubt about it.
People are learning things on this show.
And frankly, we could tighten it up if you and I would goof around a little bit less in this segment.
That's my fault.
I just can't take everything too seriously.
No.
Can I add, though?
Yeah, please.
Two times, I heard the word bonus, once from you and once from him, and I didn't say the word.
I know.
I'm very impressed.
Great restraint.
You didn't bring it in.
By me.
Yeah.
Well, I think we're obliged, though, to mention...
The bonus hole.
And I happen to have one right here.
This is a bonus hole.
Okay.
Right here.
It's made out of polyethylene.
This is cross-link polyethylene.
This is a PEX pipe.
So this is today's bonus hole right there.
Beautiful.
Yeah, there it is.
No, this is actually part of my finger rehab, by the way.
Oh, it is?
Yeah, it's a little tool for my finger rehab, so I have to keep practicing gripping and doing strength and dexterity exercises with it.
I almost cut off my finger.
Yes, I did.
And now it's back.
I actually carry this around.
This is the bonus hole.
Is that your shooting hand?
Yes, it is my shooting hand.
Did you practice with the middle finger for a while?
No, I just practiced left-hand shooting, off-hand shooting.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I was actually very proficient shooting with my left hand before the accident, so it didn't really set me back much.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.
That's cool.
I can even run AR-15s left-handed and shift my eyes with the optics and shoot around corners and things like that.
That's cool.
I've done a lot of training with that over the years.
But I will admit that magazine changes, I was not very fast.
With holding the gun with my left hand because the trigger release on a Glock is on the left side of the Glock.
So it's kind of hard to hit the trigger release if you're holding it with your left hand.
It's not really made for lefties.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
But now I'm back in business.
You're back!
Yeah.
That's great.
Now I can shoot them up.
Bang, bang, bang.
Amazing.
Both hands.
No problem.
Yeah.
All because of your bonus hole.
Because of the rehab bonus hole right here.
This is a physical therapy bonus hole.
Yeah.
It's getting the job done.
You know, we need to...
I might order a custom coffee mug that just says bonus hole on it because, you know, when I need some caffeine, that's my bonus hole.
There you go.
Perfect.
Okay.
Sorry, Monero, folks.
We're going to get complaints like, you guys are joking around too much, not taking it seriously.
No, we are.
But we've got to have fun in life, too.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, thank you.
Monero, I hope you appreciated the interview, and we sure did.
Thank you, Doug, for joining us, and again, can't wait to engage further.
Yeah, and let me just add, you know what?
A lack of a sense of humor is a sign of a low IQ, so if anybody didn't find this funny, there you go.
You're an NPC. All the super high IQ people I know, they don't take life too seriously.
They joke a lot.
Like, think about the physicist Richard Feynman.
I mean, he was a jokester.
He was having fun with it all the time.
It's true.
Yeah, you've got to laugh along the way.
But thanks for watching today, folks, and thank you, Todd.
It was a lot of fun.
Awesome.
Yeah, appreciate you.
All right, you too.
All right.
Thanks.
Cheers.
Okay, absolutely.
And folks, check out the website, of course, decentralized.tv for all the other episodes that are similarly interesting and fun and informative.
I hope you agree.
We'll see.
And you can also catch us on Brighteon.com, of course, and BitChute and Rumble and other platforms as well, including platforms that we've interviewed here like Bastion.com, the decentralized peer-to-peer platform.
So we're distributing content on Bastion and Cordal as well.
So, hey, the cool thing is we use everything that we find out about on the show, don't we, Todd?
We sure try to.
And you're doing the food forest.
Yeah, I'm doing the food forest and other things that I can't share yet.
And also, come on Telegram and just search for Decentralized TV. There's no dot in it, but just search for Decentralized TV. Sorry, I dropped my bonus hole while you were talking.
My bad.
I'm sorry, yeah.
Decentralized.tv, and then your directory is decentralizeddirectory.com.
You got it.
All right.
Well, thank you, and that's the show for today.
Thanks for watching, folks.
I hope you learned something and had a great time, and we'll be with you again the next episode of Decentralize.tv.
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