How we Know Craig is Faketoshi

My mind, I kept waiting for a better fake Satoshi. And so I've just been kind of writing Craig off, but now I've realized that window of opportunity is closing because there's only gonna be so long where you could conceivably be the correct age to be Satoshi Nakamoto. You know, in another decade, nobody's gonna be able to claim that unless they're, you know, much older and it's gonna be less and less likely that somebody's been taken seriously, Craig is instead of, uh, instead of having epic, legal wins, where he is getting closer and closer to being able to Sue anyone who links to the white paper, he's doing these embarrassing, liable suits where he just lost two in a row and the whole community sits back and laughs at him. And it's just such a failed strategy. And he, this is what he spending his time doing because this window of opportunity won't be open forever. That's an interesting point. I hadn't really thought about the age problem that basically everyone's aging out of being a compelling Satoshi candidate. The thing is it's very easy to prove that you're a Satoshi Nakamoto, right? Sotoshi has some known PGP public keys out there. You just have to sign a message with the corresponding private key and your Satoshi. You could just take the first Bitcoin block, which we know that Satoshi mind, because he embedded that, uh, times article in the, I think in the Coinbase transaction somehow maybe op return. I'm not sure how we did it. He linked the first Bitcoin block to a British newspaper headline. Yeah. Cause the guardian. Was it chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks? Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Right. And then you sign a message with that. Block's private key and we know you're Satoshi, so it's incredibly easy to prove your Satoshi. You don't have to do it in person. It doesn't have to be a big deal, but Craig can't do that. So he has to result to pretending that PGP doesn't work. That Bitcoin transactions are not final because they haven't been approved by a court. I mean, he says a lot of really silly things that the real Satoshi would never say because they're preposterous at the same time, you know, this is a way to attack developers and to suppress people is to legally threaten them. And I think we see a similar kind of approach with OFAC. It's frustrating. It's pedantic. It's weird, but people like Arthur van pelt and mark from the Dr. Bitcoin pod and the author of this Bitcoin magazine article, Elsa Waldorf, they're doing something pretty important because the way that you debunk liars and cheats is you very carefully evaluate everything they've said and done. And you put it in the context of their greater story. And that's a lot of work. It requires raking through a lot of muck. But because of this work, we can see clearly that Craig is a very poor Satoshi candidate. It's almost hard to imagine a worse candidate for Satoshi given the things he's said and done. And so we don't have to take him seriously and we know to wash out for him. But if this work hadn't been done, you know, a lot of people think that Craig's information security expert. He has a lot of PhDs from online diploma mills. If you don't look too carefully, maybe he looks legitimate. Yeah. And maybe if you're not, not technically literate, especially in Bitcoin, maybe having a conversation with him, he seems rather convincing. Cause there are some things that he's aware of. And of course he's involved in his alt coin thing. In my opinion, really, it's actually not funny. I mean, he's kind of a laughable character, but it's not funny because he is also going after actual Bitcoin developers that has created a discouraging environment around participating in Bitcoin core. It's required folks like Jack Dorsey to set up legal funds, to help contribute money, to defend these developers who are just developing on Bitcoin and write claims that they're violating his copyright, that kind of stuff. Isn't funny. And it's a drag on Bitcoin's development. It's a drag on Bitcoin. It's an attack on Bitcoin. And I hope that that isn't like gonna be what his focus is. I hope he keeps going on with these silly liable suits. Cuz he looks like a clown. I feel bad for the people he goes after, but his public image gets knocked down every.

Bitcoin Dad Pod

The Fatal Flaw in Having so Many Cryptocurrencies

Coming back around to maximalism. Like one of my other beliefs of why maximalism is sensible is because I've, you know, I've worked for a company that went from being a Bitcoin only to, uh, supporting pretty much every token under the sun. And I saw that there is friction in the sense that there's overhead for how many different assets that you as an individual are managing, or even you as, as a company and the infrastructure that I was having to manage. And I don't think that the average person wants to own or keep track of more than maybe a dozen assets. So while there will be tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of different crypto tokens out there, there's gonna be a very long tail. And I think the vast majority of people are only gonna have a handful of them, or they may, the vast majority may only have Bitcoin.

Linux Foundation’s New Pod Uses DRM ...

Here's a fun fact for you. The website for the Linux foundations podcast, the untold stories of open source uses a Spotify embedded player, which uses a DRM solution and makes a certificate call to a wide vine server on low.

Podnews podcasting news

How Adam & Dave use Sovereign feeds with Object Storage

<Affirmative> that don't know, like what, what, this is the, the sovereign sovereign feeds that Adam uses to generate the feed has the web, uh, has a web book feature that will ship the, um, the full XML of the, uh, podcast feed, uh, in a, in a get request or a post request up to a server of your choosing with a secret. And so we've got, uh, I, I could actually talk about this for a second, um, because some interesting things came out of this. Like, so what it'll do is you, you know, you just set up a box somewhere that can receive this, this, uh, HTTP request. And then when it comes in, you know, you just do whatever you want to with the feed. You're gonna, you're gonna stick it somewhere. Um, and where we, where we stick it is in, uh, object storage in an S3 bucket on Linode, uh, in their New Jersey data center. And that's, uh, a bucket that is accessible through the ER through the domain name feeds dot podcast, index.org. And so then we got all that work in, uh, whenever the, whenever the, the web hook gets called, it saves the feed temporarily on the file on the, on the box, turns around, does a call to upload it to object storage. Uh, and then it's done well then, uh, the object storage bucket is fronted by CloudFlare. So the CloudFlare, so Cloudflare's, Cing everything. Uh, and then, uh, ping to mark VO, zero who runs the, uh, no to CDN and told him, you know, Hey, can you put it a redirect for us? Right? And so our old feed URL URL is now 3 0 2 redirecting to the feeds dot podcast index do org. And, uh, so we didn't lose, we didn't lose anything and we're not officially changing the feed URL, the feed URL staying the same. It's just gonna be a, a redirect for, for an indefinite point of amount of time. The, uh, the interesting thing was now we can get, we can get some.

Podcasting 2.0

Spotify’s Recent Podcast Tech Screwup

Before we get there, just a couple of podcast news items I wanted to cover here in the office. Just keeping an eye on things. I thought this was pretty funny because dynamically inserted ads are a hot topic in podcasting right now. This is one of the biggest trends, sweeping podcasting that we are not participating in, but just about everybody else's, especially the pod, the yes, Spotify platform. And they had a bit of a technical faux PA this week, they started putting booze ads on all different kinds of podcasts as banner ads and whatnot. In fact, some of you could even click to buy the booze. I think it was wild Turkey, but the automated system ended up putting ads on podcasts about sobriety and alcoholism, even ones where you could click and buy immediately. Oh my goodness. Just like, I don't know, like, and of course Spotify, a spokesperson said on Saturday they made a technical error that caused, uh, the ads featuring wild Turkey brand incorrectly be placed on a number of podcasts. <laugh> sure <laugh> Spotify, you know, they fix it. Right. But the damage is done. Imagine, imagine you were listening to a podcast about something for something for alcoholics that are trying not to drink. Right. And you it's about that topic and you see an ad for wild Turkey on there. That's. Like the worst of the worst. Don't you think most people would blame the podcaster. They wouldn't think it was Spotify that placed it there. They think the podcaster. No, no, of course, of course. I wonder if that's how they, they learned of it. You know, they got some feedback into the podcast and the podcast was like, wait a second. And I think that's really what happens when you start taking humans away from this whole process.

Office Hours

My Plans for a Off-Grid Podcast Compound

See it one day, you know, myself having a little piece of the land on there, you know, I take jus up there, I Parker and then maybe I, maybe I get like one of them shipping containers or something, you know, and I deck it out with sound insulation and proofings, and, uh, maybe a, uh, split AC unit and, uh, bunch of silent computers. And I just go crazy, just go crazy. Some solar panels on top generates its own power. So like good content. I think we should. Get to it. I'm thinking, right? Like we could say the JB studios powered by the sun, that'd be pretty rad. Hey, mm-hmm <affirmative> we know some people that, uh, are experts in the, uh, the solars, you know. You know, the other advantage, uh, the panels would kind of act as like shade. You've. Been thinking about this for a while. I'm just saying that is an advantage that's not often talked about with solar, is that it's it shades your sort of attic space a little bit, and that makes a big difference in the end. Get a little air flow up there to help cool it down. You get a little shade, so it, and then plus you had to split AC unit. I think that would, I think that would work just fine. If you had enough solar power and battery, I'm thinking of solar shed, right? So on this piece of property, I have a solar shed. It is basically a big shed with some panels on the roof pointed towards the, you know, the, the, the sun as much as I can. And then inside is essentially a battery bank and a large inverter, so I can pull jus up and plug her in. And then as things got, you know, more built out, maybe if I had a well and a septic over time, I'd add a washer and dryer in there. So we could park Jupe somewhere and have a big, large residential washer and dryer. So we could just do a bunch of chores and clean and do, uh, laundry and have the battery power to recharge our batteries. Plus jus would have our own solar. So, I mean, it'd be great. Chris, where do the racks of pies go? You could have them. I mean, they'd probably be in the recording, uh, crate. I don't know what we'd call it, but yeah, the recording crate, which I'm already taking to <laugh>, uh, you know, cuz I think I do Reaper on a pie right then I'd have like the remote host pie. I don't have a mumble pie. Really. Do you think they can handle that? I mean maybe in maybe in a year or two, they'll be like super pies, but I don't. Know. I don't know. Doesn't Jeff gearing have a, a system for racking up pies and putting them in like a regular data. X <laugh> I probably, yeah, probably. Yeah. You could see it. I mean you've, you know, maybe like the cm four, the cm five, you could just have a wall panel of, oh man. Imagine just a wall panel with, with modules mounted and, and they're just doing different studio tasks on, on one wall Mount minimum, clean wires running into it. Cause you just need USB interfaces. Oh, all net booting. So they're all running off centralized storage, which would be solid state. Woo. All running off ethernet Poe. If I could, maybe I get a little hats or whatever, you know, carry your boards that do Poe. I mean, I'm just saying, imagine if the only connection they had was the ethernet. So we're we were doing audio over ethernet as well and, and Poe. So you got, you got a, a cluster ish. They'd all be separate machines, but basically a cluster of compute modules that have carrier boards that support Poe and that's all that's going to them and it's all DC. Oh my goodness. I'm just telling you. Yeah, man can dream. I tell you what sounds great. I'll start thinking about it now. So that way after I spend loads of money, trying to get jus fixed up, I can, I can enter up there one day and plop her on that piece of property and then begin building my base around her podcast compound.

Why More and More Companies are Shilling Proof of Stake

Why Inflation and Surveillance are here for the Long haul

The fiscal and monetary position of most countries today is so bad that the only way forward that most central banks and politicians who understand a bit about the sort of financial crisis that's looming over their heads, like the sort of Damocles is that if you don't control inflation, but also suppress interest rates. So as to basically inflate away government debt, then we are going to have a serious financial crisis with serious inflation. And this will essentially result in a new political consensus. And so all of the geriatric rulers today who sleep walked us into this situation, they'll be replaced to remain in power. They need to basically have the fiscal side of government, the government spending side unite with the central bank and create an environment where inflation is sort of moderate high. You know, let's say around 5% and then maintain that for 10 to 15 years. Because in that environment with 5% inflation, if they can keep government debt payments to under 5%, you know, ideally around 1%, then over time, the government debt just gets smaller and smaller is a relative to GDP because 5% inflation means that GDP is increasing at at least 5%. Cuz basically all prices are going up at least 5%. Well, how do you do that? Obviously this means abusing people's savings. And like we said, before, money is like water. It flows downhill. It flows to where it's treated best. So they need to close the dams. They need to lock people into their, their current holdings. You know, you can't be allowed to sell out of a stock market. That's underperforming and get into Bitcoin because that would actually destabilize this very careful equilibrium of financial repression. And so financial surveillance is, is key for this to succeed. I.

What Concerns us about Ethereum Long Term

The major validators are gonna be exchanges that most people hold their Ethereum on, or these third party validation services, like the one wheat covered, what is it called? Like Lupa or something. They create this derivative called St. E so that you can stake your E but then there's no drawback because you get this other token. That's just like E you know, it, it even breaks the assumptions around the cost of staking, but these big third parties are gonna be super easy to regulate. So moving to proof of stake is basically saying, yeah, we don't think that any government will ever really get very adversarial with us because, you know, obviously they could just regulate the literally regulated custodians that are doing all the staking and then they would control the network. I think, again, you're the optimist here. It's gonna be Coinbase. It's gonna be FTX. It's gonna be Binance. Right? Do you like these companies? Because the more I learn about them, the less I like, but I think you're being the optimist here. If you read that Vitalic thread, which will have linked in the notes, he says in there that he would prefer to work with the government. I believe that's the idea. The whole entire idea is to essentially make it complicit with the system, by handing it over to the centralized exchanges and whatnot. That is, I mean, this vitals a smart man, and you essentially it's like, it's like taking, it's like making Ethereum a, a public company now. Cause they're, it's gonna be all of these public companies are gonna be the, the massive holders. They're gonna be the big validators in the stakers, and they're gonna get, they're gonna get the thumb of the us government on them. So it's essentially now Ethereum will be subject to the policy of public companies. And I, I gotta figure that's baked in because he's a clever man. He knows the knock on effects of this.

Podcasting 2.0 is More Than Just Boosts

But podcasting 2.0 itself is really more than just the boost podcast. And I talked about this in Ko radio recently, podcasting 2.0 itself is a set of new standards. It's a spec, it's a whole bunch of new features for podcasting that are really, really powerful. And you can go look it up the podcasting 2.0, name space. There's so many great things in there. They solve problems that JBS tried to come up with solutions for for years, but they do it in a standardized open source way that an entire community is contributing to. And it adds features that not only would make podcasting more accessible to people with accessibility needs that not only make podcasting easier to find through Google search and stuff like that, but it just adds features that would make the content better as well, or make it more accessible. Like we have a question in here about, will we ever release office hours as an Opus file? And JB used to release things as, uh, an ag Forbis, an ag thera, a web M an MP4 couple, two MP4 types and an MP3. So we had five to six different file versions for every episode. And we had to create five or six different RSS feeds. And as a result, if you go searching on places on the web, you can find all these old HD feeds, low quality feeds. You've probably seen this if you've ever gone around for a little while. Oh yeah. And it sucks. Right. Well guess what, one of the things in podcasting 2.0 namespace is a file type enclosure namespace. So you can have multiple file types in one feed entry and the, the software on your phone could expose that option. So you could choose as a listener, you could choose the Opus version of a show or the MP3 version, or it would probably default to the MP3 unless you chose something different. And that could be exposed all via one feed entry, just small little things, because the, the reality is is that the podcasting RSS spec hasn't been updated since 2009, it's been a little bit and things have changed. That was well before, uh, mobile podcast players have the presence they have now. And it's just, it's a whole set of features that I'm, as you can tell super bullish on, I just really just, I really wanna advocate for it because I think it behooves the podcasters out there to get into this. I think it's it's to the benefit of the medium long term. And sometimes when you work in a medium, or when you work in an industry, you have to do things to keep it healthy, to keep it going. You can't just sit on your, you know, existing success and not ever push it forward. That's what I'm a big believer in. So that's why I talk about it so much. And I have a link in the show notes to a really good medium post that completely introduces the entire thing from top to bottom talks about how the podcast index fits into this, how the name space fits into this. It talks about what pod ping is, which is one of the really cool features about this. So one of the neat things is as a publisher, when you publish an episode. You can announce it to the pod ping service. And that pod ping service acts as a store of information that the podcast index in, but also all of the podcasting 2.0 apps participate in. So everybody gets a sensible controllable J on announcement, basically a little J on file update that says here's some new feed information, new shows out. So instead of every podcast player and every service having to like pound an HTTP RSS file, you know, just N XML file sitting on, on an HTP share, um, instead of having to hit that all the time and, and, and pull it down and see if there's any updates. The pod ping network tells things when stuff, when things are updated and it's completely decentralized, it doesn't require the podcast index. Although the podcast index is a front end to it, it doesn't require your specific app implementation. It's a completely open spec and that's part of podcasting 2.0 as well, without that, you have to rely on services like Spotify and apple to do those kinds of updates for you.

My Starlink Dish is Dead

LINUX Unplugged

Why We’re Skeptical of Ubuntu’s new Gaming Initiative 

Think canonical lives within their own little echo chamber. And I think they tell themselves something kind of like this. Well, a Buntu has more desktop market share than all of the other distributions combined. So if we just ship something as default on a Buntu, then by its very nature, it'll have millions of users. And it doesn't really matter if the chattering cloud online and in social media and on YouTube, don't like it because these millions of quote unquote average users will just use the default quote unquote. And um, you see this pattern of thinking from canonical frequently. Sometimes it serves them, sometimes it doesn't, I think in the case of the Firefox snap. Yeah. That's probably an accurate statement. I think in the case of gaming, they're kidding themselves. And it really shows how, how to touch. They are. First of all, Linux gamers are the exact type of user. Who's willing to use some crappy script to optimize their system for better games. And if that script maybe replaces a snap with a flat pack or a Deb, so that way their launch times are fast. They're gonna do it. This is the enthusiast market. This is the kind of market where these things matter. And I think the other thing that shows how out of touch canonical is, especially with this particular crowd, is they did this out of the right, the wrong order. They did this out of order. I think what they should have done is they should have got these, these positions filled first, get these people hired. Imagine, imagine applying for a job where the company is already two miles down the road on the project you're gonna be working on. And so you just come on board and you're basically inheriting whatever they've already started. Even if they don't have any insights, aren't they, they aren't doing it. Right. And here's an example, not only did they launch this snap without everything complete for or to actually work properly, but they clearly are not thinking beyond steam, right? There's no accounting for things like Lutra or bottles, which is another big part of the Linux gaming ecosystem, but they don't have any plans for that. They maybe don't even know what those things are. It's hard to tell. It does kind of make me wonder like, yes, the focus purely on how do we, you address making gaming the best in whatever ways are possible for our users or, you know, is it complicated by some of their own internal directives and things they're trying to accomplish? It's like wait for these hires. So that way these experts can give you an informed guidance on how to do this, but also get a w bro, get like a single w get a single win for snaps in this community's eyes. Get it. You know, we don't care if a snap of one package has 10 X, the users of a flat pack, none of us care, get a w bro, get a win, fix the launch times, fix the launch times. It's something you need to do. Anyways, show us your listening, get a win. You get these people hired. You help them inform the roadmap and you get a snap win. And then you say, by the way, everybody we're now launching a gaming snap. Instead, what they did is they've got this cart before the horse, before they've even made their hires. They've made this gaming snap that wasn't even functional when it first launched. But thankfully, a former employee of theirs that was familiar with how snaps work, helped them realize the bits it was missing to actually function correctly. You can find a link to that in our show notes. I think, think you can probably guess who one of those employees was. So they launched this incomplete product. They don't even have the staff on board. And then the other question is why now? Why in 2022, when these things aren't in place, why not three years ago before steam and west three was created and they pivoted to arch, why do you care now? Do you care now? Because all of a sudden valve has something that's not based on a Buntu. And so this is a reactionary thing, help me understand these things. And this is my last point. I think canonical doesn't have the way to properly advocate for this anymore. These questions I'm asking somebody savvy should have been out ahead of this, laying the groundwork in the community. That's how it used to happen. Strong community interaction. And because snaps face such a massive headwind from the community that gotta get out there because what's gonna happen is there will be guides. There will be YouTubes. There will be forum posts. There will be links on Twitter that tell you how to undo all of this work, that they are going to invest multiple staff hours into lots of development time. And by the way, it's not valve packaging this. So it's not like they're building some great relationship with valve either. They're packaging it outside of valve. It's questionable if we even want that. So they're gonna do all of this and they're gonna put it out there. And then because the community hates what they create in 35 seconds, there will be scripts to replace and undo all of the work they've done.

Lyn explains why Lightning has POWERFUL network effect for Bitcoin

And so what I'm seeing now is that lightning is like another network effect on top of Bitcoin's network effect. Uh, and in some ways it it's an even stronger network effect, even though it's smaller, it, it's kind of harder to displace because liquidity's very hard to build up. Liquidity is a type of network effect. And so it, you can imagine, so people often say lightning is small compared to those crazy things happening in defi, right? So, but one is that there's, there's no financial incentive to get on other than to use it. You're not being, you're not like, you know, uh, you're not speculating. You're not doing arbitrage opportunities really. I mean, around, you know, it's really about that actual utility, first of all. But also it's just an inherently hard technology to get bootstrapped because it's a chicken egg prop. No one can use it when liquidity's low. Uh, but in order to get liquidity up, you have to get users, right? So it it's one of those things. It's like a freight train, you know, like one of those super long, like mile long trains. And they're very, very hard to start, right? Because you're, you're so much mass to get moving, but once you start moving, once you do that really hard part in the beginning, it's really hard to stop that train, uh, because there's, there's just a tremendous amount of momentum. And so the way I would describe lightning is that it's a, it's a very technically challenging system to, to build. It is very, very hard to bootstrap. Uh, but now that it's, it's reaching critical mass of liquidity and usability, uh, and serious network effects, that's really hard to replace anywhere else, uh, that that's extremely valuable, uh, in, in the direction it's going. And I know that there are, you know, there are still limitations. There's still a lot to do. There are, there are disagreements in the community about different directions to go in what different implementations are prioritizing. Uh, but I think the real, the hardest part, which is establishing that baseline liquidity, uh, is a, a very powerful network effect that is now built on top of Bitcoin's, you know, original network effect.

The Kevin Rooke Show

Kevin experiments with value for value sat splits with podcast guest

Now, this is the part of the show where I usually ask you to send in stats and comments and questions over the lightning network. But today we've unlocked a brand new use case for lightning payments on this show yesterday, I asked Lynn to send me her fountain username, and today fountain released an update that allows me to put any username into the show, split it so that that user gets a portion of the stats that are sent in. So right now you should be able to see in the show splits, if you're using any podcasting 2.0 app, any stats you send in any comments and questions as well will be split 50 50 between Lynn and I. So we'll both be able to see the comments and questions and half the stats will go to me, half the sat we'll go to Lynn. Um, this is also Lynn's first experience with podcasting 2.0.

Insteon’s Local Protocol 

Also had their own proprietary networking protocol, which actually looks like it was kind of neat. I mean, it's 900 megahertz, which is usually pretty good. It also could coexist with powerline networking, which is kind of neat and it supported local control, but it was proprietary and patented and you know, unique to them. So that's just sort of gone now. <laugh> so not only are you, your cloud service is gone, but the whole protocol that has been created is essentially now invalid, it's still usable, but nobody's there maintaining, supporting shepherding it.

Self-Hosted

BTC Pay Server to Feature Podcasting Plug-in with V4V support

Or, um, what we want to do in the future is to shift everything towards plugins and make, um, BTC P core more, more of a general payment processing platform and build specific use cases at, uh, at the plugin level. And, um, here we, uh, got several things. For example, I'm working on a plugin, uh, called L and bank, which, uh, gives users the, or gives BTC pay host the ability to open up the internal BTC pay lightning note to their users. And, um, are basically have, uh, lightning bank based on BTC pay server as, uh, layer three on top of BTC pay server. Interesting. So for, um, for the regular users, they don't have to care about setting up channels, um, funding them, providing liquidity, caring about, um, rebalancing of those channels. All of that is abstracted away. The, uh, server admin takes care of that. And the user has just a neat, uh, and shiny interface to, uh, send and receive funds. And basically it's, it looks like a bank account. That's where the name is coming from thing. What do you think some of the other plugins might be in the future? What kind of applications might be most useful for some of these plugins? Uh. Yeah, basically you can, uh, can build whatever you want. Um, I mean, for, for example, another plugin I'm working on which isn't released yet, but I hope there will be, um, an early version out soon is called pot server. And, uh, this is inspired by the whole podcasting 2.0 and, uh, value for value movement. And, um, <laugh> also a bit, uh, because, uh, some, some month ago we, at this whole discussion of Joe Rogan potentially being de platform from Spotify, we see, um, things in, in, in terms of the tracker protests in Canada, where people get de platformed and so on. And so I thought it would be nice to have a way to self-host, um, your, your cast, and also, um, be able to use all of these neat and shiny podcasting 2.0 features like accepting, uh, streaming sets and, and so on. And so I started to, um, build a podcast hosting server based on BTC P, which will bring all these, um, yeah, shiny new, uh, features, uh, like the value block, et cetera, to, um, uh, to, to BCP and your podcast.