Title: S16 E53: Xenu on Bitcoin Culture & Moreno vs Zcash
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Xenu (AntiMoonBoy; Monero advocate, host of the weekly AntiMoonBoy News podcast, antimoonboy.com)
Published: 2025-10-27
Duration: 4:18:45
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2025-10-27_s16_e53_xenu_on_moreno_vs_zcash_final.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2025-10-27_s16_e53_xenu_on_moreno_vs_zcash_final.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization, reconciled against the YouTube auto-captions of the same livestream (offset about +63 s) and against a full local small.en (VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps (three-way comparison over the whole episode, rerun after edits). Doubtful words and dropped stretches were re-transcribed locally from 82 short audio clips with medium.en (int16, VAD). Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (TitaNet reference voices for Vlad and Xenu, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop), the paragraphs were re-segmented on the small.en word timings, and short turns were re-attributed by hand where needed (e.g. 00:03:28, 00:42:08, 02:04:14, 02:28:30-02:28:32, 02:41:11, 02:46:12-02:46:15, 02:59:11, 03:10:47, 03:23:44, 03:34:51, 03:50:08, 03:56:37, 03:57:20, 04:08:13, 04:12:06). Sponsor reads are read live by Vlad and labelled as Vlad Costea. Xenu's audio drops out several times during the livestream and Vlad repeatedly fixes it; Xenu takes a break around 01:11 (Vlad reads the sponsors alone). Vlad deliberately mispronounces Monero throughout as a running joke (Moreno, Montevideo, Montenegro, Sombrero, Macareno, Madonna, Sandero, etc.; see his list at 04:15:11); these are kept as spoken. Names and jargon were checked against the title, the show notes and the web: Monero (ring signatures, Bulletproofs, stealth addresses, Dandelion++, FCMP++ / full-chain membership proofs, Luke Parker / kayabaNerve, ArticMine, Rucknium, Serai, Haveno, Bisq, Qubic selfish-mining attack), Zcash (Electric Coin Company, Josh Swihart, Zooko, Zashi, shielded pool, dev fund / lockbox, Tachyon, ZecHub), Zano / CryptoNote, Wownero, Pirate Chain, Z2Z, XMR Bazaar, Samourai Wallet / Whirlpool, Tornado Cash, Bitcoin Knots / filters / OP_RETURN, Luke Dashjr, drivechains / Liquid, Paul Sztorc / LayerTwo Labs, Ava Chow, Gloria Zhao, Wladimir van der Laan, Matt Corallo, Peter Todd, Greg Maxwell, theymos, The Rage, Sam Bent (Doing Fed Time), KuCoin / HTX / MEXC / WhiteBIT / XT.com / Bitfinex / Kraken, Trocador, Peter Schiff / Irwin Schiff, Joel Valenzuela; sponsors SideShift.ai, NoOnes.com (Ray Youssef), LayerTwo Labs, Bitcoin.com News. Token segment (documentary): Ordinals / blockchain data, the filter wars and OP_RETURN around 00:07:34-00:21:30. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess] (19).
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[00:00:45] Vlad Costea: Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I don't have video, but I'm gonna be fixing it. My name is Vlad, I'm live with Xenu, the king of Moreno and the queen of the Moreno-chan meme. And this is the show that dares to ask the questions that others don't even have the courage to. And basically, the goal of this conversation is to debate Zcash versus Montevideo. And also, we considered before we started this, while we were doing some prep talk, that it could be a good idea to talk about the stuff that we also have in common, because we seem to have a lot in common.

[00:01:24] Vlad Costea: And some of it concerns the current direction in which Bitcoin is going. So just to tease you guys, those listening, we're gonna do that brawl, but maybe after the first section in which we complain about Bitcoin culture. It's good to have you on, AntiMoonBoy.

[00:01:42] Xenu: Hey, thank you. Thank you, Vlad. It's great to be here. I'm happy to be on the show.

[00:01:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I do have to compliment your aesthetics. I did my best to make the most of it and have some animations on screen. And I also appreciate that you were patient with me because I started late. So I guess this gives you enough of a reason to call me a retard.

[00:02:10] Vlad Costea: That's where the word comes from, right? French, it means late.

[00:02:16] Xenu: Yeah, exactly. There you go. I am a big fan of aesthetics. So I'm happy that you put in the effort there because that was pretty funny to see on Twitter where you took the Monero-chan image. It really just shows you how AI is just crazy right now.

[00:02:34] Vlad Costea: I agree. And at the same time, I think the reason why we started doing this is that I announced that I sold all of my Xenoblade marble rupees, XMR. And I swapped it for Zcash and Zano because Zano is basically a code fork of the CryptoNote protocol, which is very similar with Moreno. Basically, it's what you would get if you stripped Montevideo of Dandelion++, which gives you network level privacy and made it proof of stake. That's kind of it. But the privacy is kind of the same.

[00:03:19] Vlad Costea: Ring signatures and bulletproofs and confidential transactions, stealth addresses, it's all there.

[00:03:28] Xenu: Yeah, absolutely. It really is all there. And I will say too, that Monero has a great culture. And unfortunately, yeah, there's some bad words thrown in your way, which is unfortunate. But I want to represent Monero in a in a appropriate way. Because I think that I have a lot of ideas that a lot of people will agree with. Because really, the purpose of anti Moonboy is to push back against Moonboyism. Moonboyism is, I think, out of control. I think people are buying cryptocurrency, like they're buying tech stocks.

[00:04:08] Xenu: And what I want to bring this back to is using cryptocurrency peer to peer digital cash. So yeah. Right.

[00:04:17] Vlad Costea: So all of this started with Bitcoin, which we can both agree right now that it's not very much used as peer to peer digital cash, even though there are small markets for it. And most of the activity is just speculation on the price. And it seems like the culture has moved towards what we like to call the store of value, or the savings or whatever people like to call it so that they don't look like speculators. And it kind of sucks because on one hand, Satoshi's bet concerning the network was that it becomes sustainable via transaction fees, which we're not seeing.

[00:04:54] Vlad Costea: And we constantly have to come up with reasons to use the Bitcoin base layer, because there is no constant demand for block space. And on the other hand, it sucks because the mission as stated in the white paper, and which has been pushed over the first few years of Bitcoin, was to use it as digital cash to use it as unstoppable money that cannot be censored, that cannot be confiscated, that makes the user sovereign. And it seems like there are legitimate altcoins, which also have interesting features such as contracts and privacy, which fulfill this purpose much better.

[00:05:37] Vlad Costea: And Bitcoin right now just embraces the digital gold mantra, which once again, there's nothing wrong with it, as long as you also scale it and make it fit for payments, which so far, it was not made. And it's really disappointing.

[00:05:53] Xenu: I mean, it's incredibly disappointing. And the best metaphor I can think of is to compare the white paper by Satoshi with the headshot of Michael Saylor on Forbes magazine. You know, it's just like all of that, like power and like people were scared of Bitcoin, like it has so much like intensity, right? It's like we're taking over right where we are taking the financial institutions back into our hands. Right. And now we're kind of just playing around with these conferences. We're looking at a number go up.

[00:06:29] Xenu: We're watching CNBC. Hey, guys, let's go watch CNBC. Let's see what Bitcoin is doing today. You know, it's very sterile. It's very corporate. And it's really unfortunate because I love Bitcoin. I really do. And I mean, I got started here because of Bitcoin. So it's not like I want it to fail. I'm just highly critical of where where we've gotten to. And a lot of that is really derived from this culture of people who just are in cryptocurrency, who just want to get rich. They don't have idealism.

[00:06:59] Xenu: You know, they don't have any soul. They they're just greedy. And I know maybe this is just a reflection of humanity. That might be the case. But I feel like if we have a response to this as a pushback where it's like, listen, guys, we can still save Bitcoin, we can we can start using it more. I think that would be really effective because so much of Bitcoin culture is just dominated by a number go up. And, you know, I feel like a lot of people are starting to get tired of that.

[00:07:34] Vlad Costea: I agree. But at the same time, as long as the number go up, it seems like people are more willing to compromise. When the number doesn't go up, that's when we get fights. And what's happening nowadays, it's that we have this silly situation where I don't even think it's a technical conversation. It's just a bunch of lawyers imagining the worst kind of situation and what can happen. And a bunch of nerds who feel like they don't like and they're not being represented by the technocrats. And they want to overthrow the system with a guy who actually lost 200 Bitcoin on his server and uses the same server for a different purpose right now, which is crazy.

[00:08:19] Vlad Costea: And the technical conversation has no merit whatsoever. It's OP_RETURN. It's been around for many years. If you can compress data, put it on the blockchain, you actually can. It's a permissionless network. You have to understand that the people you don't like are going to be using it. But these guys are like, no, it should not be there. We should use filters, which, by the way, are stupid. No matter how much you filter, someone's going to figure out a workaround. And the workaround usually involves a lot more work and more bloat for the UTXO set.

[00:08:54] Vlad Costea: And basically you're just welcoming them to make the network more centralized and kick out the nodes with low specs.

[00:09:02] Xenu: Yeah, I think the best way to summarize the filters war going on is a Simpsons meme. It's the meme of Moe throwing out Barney out of the bar. And Barney in this case would be the filtered out material, right? So Mo throws him out and then behind him, there's the filter material because filters don't actually stop the content from being shared. It's just going to get included in a block anyway. So it's really it's just pure virtue signaling. And yeah, the whole conversation I think is just podcasters looking for attention for the most part.

[00:09:43] Xenu: I think there is some merit to wanting to limit certain things on Bitcoin. Absolutely. Well, at the same time, Bitcoin Knots, for example, has been fighting against the guys over at Samourai Wallet. They're very against the Bitcoin improvement protocol that they use as well as Whirlpool. And because those protocols require more space, and that space would actually get censored by these filters. And the thing is Bitcoin, it's chosen this path. I disagree with it, but whatever. It's chosen this path of optional privacy. Where they have certain things that you can do if you do these certain things, right?

[00:10:30] Xenu: And in my opinion, this is a problem. But whatever. With regards to this whole situation, I feel like Bitcoin is reaching a point where there's a lot of hostility at each other. And a lot of that is of course because the number is not going up that much. In fact, it's not going up at all compared to the projections we've seen. I mean, Adam Back, for example, is predicting seven figures. It's like, what are you talking about, man? It's kind of insane.

[00:11:10] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think there are three aspects to what you said. First of all, you mentioned the key word to solving this issue, which is privacy. If Bitcoin made it so that miners cannot actually distinguish between transactions, it would be much more censorship resistant. And we would never have this conversation of what is allowed to be in a transaction and what is not. Basically, the fee would be the filter. As long as the transaction is valid and it pays the right fee, it goes into a block. And if we had privacy, we would never get here.

[00:11:46] Vlad Costea: Also because it would be difficult for people to actually see what's in the transaction. Only the sender and the receiver would know. So food for thought, let's add privacy to Bitcoin. The second aspect to it is that basically the filters built by Bitcoin Knots were filtering OP_RETURN transactions. And Samourai was relying on them to broadcast messages to the blockchain to mark some of their services. So by design, Samourai has always used OP_RETURN and Bitcoin Knots was sort of designed to eliminate this kind of use case.

[00:12:25] Vlad Costea: It's not per se against CoinJoin, but it is against OP_RETURN and Samourai was using that.

[00:12:31] Xenu: And yeah, just to point out, it's frustrating because if Bitcoin is choosing this path of optional privacy, you need to allow that optional privacy to happen with that extra data. So it was always frustrating because the Samourai Wallet guys would get into fights with Luke Dashjr. And it's kind of like, listen, man, we're trying to achieve privacy here. Like, why are you fighting against this?

[00:12:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and Luke, to be honest, I don't think he ever had the cypherpunk credentials or he ever believed that Bitcoin was a cypherpunk project. He had a lot of controversial statements. I remember I interacted with him a few times and for the record, I'm very pro drivechains, like sidechains, which are secured by miners. And he was saying, yeah, but miners can steal and do this. And I said, yeah, but what's your alternative? And he said, we already have Liquid. I was like, yeah, but Liquid is a federation.

[00:13:32] Vlad Costea: He said, yeah, that's perfectly fine, because if someone tries to steal your funds, you can actually go to a court of law and sue them. So I was like, so what's the security method? Basically, we fall back on the judiciary branch of the nation state. Is that why we're here? To go to court if someone steals from us? Is this the cypherpunk future that we envision? Is this what we're really building for the next generation to have a network that relies on court? How is that different from PayPal anymore?

[00:14:06] Xenu: Well, exactly. And yeah, Luke, he has said some freaking weird things. The cat thing, like, dude, what? And, you know, we don't have to get into it, but he's done a lot of great for Bitcoin, which is the thing. Like, it's like, okay, he contributes. Cool. And he's doing his own thing. That's fine. I think the problem, though, is like he's built up this cult of personality. And then you have podcasters who have nothing else better to do than to shill his stuff, because they don't want to talk about using Bitcoin, evidently.

[00:14:40] Xenu: They'd rather just talk about this Bitcoin Knots stuff. And it's turned into this whole circus, really.

[00:14:48] Vlad Costea: It's actually funny. I had a conversation in the previous episode with Paul Sztorc, CEO of LayerTwo Labs, and I told him, you know, both you and Luke have raised VC funding. The way in which you approached it was to get someone to post memes on your page and just focus on building. So he did not invest much on marketing. But the way in which Luke has approached it was to build a cult. And he was like, let's get this guy who's kind of nuts, too. Let's get this one who is also very religious.

[00:15:19] Vlad Costea: And let's basically start pushing all of these edge cases and all of these situations which are ridiculous and fantasize about pedophiles using Bitcoin in ways that nobody likes and say, yeah, but if you give more storage or more capacity for OP_RETURN, then this is going to happen. And then you're going to go to jail for running a node and all of this fantasy, basically, because in the real world, that's not how it works. And it also goes back to another conversation that every Bitcoin transaction and every block hash can be a JPEG.

[00:15:54] Vlad Costea: There is a website where you can turn any piece of text into a JPEG. It generates some sort of image. It's kind of ridiculous because it's encoded in a way that you're not going to double click. You don't sync your blockchain and then you open the folder where you have the block and you double click on the JPEG and you're like, oh, my God, someone put his dick here. That's not how it works. It's encoded. And you do have to know specifically what kind of encryption or encoded.

[00:16:27] Vlad Costea: What's the noun for that? Encoded is the verb. What's the noun for encoded? What kind of code, basically? You need to basically open that. So it's really silly. And we got to a point where people are outraged. And I think it's just an excuse to fire Bitcoin Core, because these people are not what the culture has been educated to like. And they were never what the culture has been educated to like. They're not like Robert Breedlove, muscular and Christian and meat eating and whatever. They're not like Saifedean to talk about low time preference.

[00:17:09] Vlad Costea: They're a bunch of nerds who understand so well how fragile Bitcoin is that they don't really hold much of it. And they also maybe have political opinions which don't fit into this typology of what the average Bitcoiner is. And you have Ava Chow, who used to be named Andrew Chow, went from being a man to being a woman. And you have Gloria Zhao, who allegedly was the girlfriend of someone from amongst the Bitcoin Core developers. And you also have Wladimir van der Laan, who also became trans, as far as I know.

[00:17:52] Vlad Costea: And he was the maintainer for a long time. And to be fair, these guys are great coders. Like, I don't care what they are, I don't care what they do in their private life. They did a good job and they earned everything that they have. But in the case of Gloria Zhao, it's very nasty. Because if she wasn't a woman, and she did not have a degree of sense of humor, instead of just bowing her head and saying I'm sorry, which is probably what they wanted, they would be fine with her.

[00:18:22] Vlad Costea: But now they're saying, well, a Bitcoin Core developer should be 35 years old, at least. Should have this experience and this background and blah, blah, blah. And nobody ever said this about Matt Corallo, when he joined the project and he was like 16. Nobody said this about Peter Todd, who was like 20-something. Nobody said this about Greg Maxwell, who was 20-something. Nobody said this about Theymos, who owned the Bitcoin.org domain, was one of the first contributors to Bitcoin, and he was 20-something. All of these young people, they got a free pass.

[00:18:53] Vlad Costea: And then when you get this woman that they don't like, they find excuses to fire her. And I think this is what it's about, really. They just want to fire this class of devs. And I don't know what's going to happen next, but I don't see any solution from here. Maybe there's going to be a fork.

[00:19:14] Xenu: Yeah, maybe. And I think a fork is really the only solution for this problem, right? Because regarding filters, they're useless. It's virtue signaling, basically. It's wearing the mask, and you're not actually stopping these transactions from going through. They're still being picked up by miners. So they should fork, or hard fork. I think that would be the appropriate solution here. And yeah, the funny thing about this is I don't even really like Bitcoin Core, but I'm defending them in this case because I'm on their side. Because this whole conversation, it's very nitpicky, and it reminds me of how the government, when it attacks privacy, it focuses on these issues that do not reflect actual privacy usage.

[00:20:09] Xenu: So for example, they'll say that we need to stop encryption to save kids because of pornography and stuff. I mean, I can't argue with that. Those things are terrible, but at the same time, we need to have digital privacy. We need to have these rights. So it's kind of like the fact that they're doing this to the Bitcoin protocol and calling people who are just running a Bitcoin node, these promoters of CSAM, it's ridiculous, I think. I think it's all just theater, and they're just looking for attention.

[00:20:44] Vlad Costea: But then again, you see what's been happening. There was a conference in Lugano this week, and there was so much virtue signaling, and you had a technical debate where the Knots team actually got a round of applause from the audience. I think, honestly, in a way it's like the revenge of the hypocrisy of Core, because in 2017 they used all of these non-technical guys, and they larped that nodes are important, and running your own nodes is a vote against the miners, and all of this non-technical babbling, which is untrue.

[00:21:24] Vlad Costea: And they made them believe that their nodes are almighty, and somehow Bitcoin is like a democracy, which it's not. And these people became very confident, and they grew their own platforms, and they became, they used to be a fringe minority that was useful, and somehow they became the mainstream. And guys like Adam Back sort of lost the battle. They used to be super, like, the voice of reason, and someone that they held in high regard. And now it seems like Adam Back has fallen out of grace, and somehow I think it's the consequence of inviting all of these people, and using them while they were useful, but not seeing how they're gonna end up eating him too.

[00:22:11] Xenu: Yeah, I mean, you go to Adam Back's Twitter profile, and he's posting charts, and he has, like, laser eyes, and it's like, dude, what are you doing? We need digital cash. Go back to work. Like, we don't care about that. But I mean, listen, I'm not against buying Bitcoin to make money. Like, investment is a use case, right? So I want people thinking I'm against number-grow-up necessarily. However, we need to have some perspective. We need to have some focus. And yeah, I mean, Core 2017, you brought up a good point, like, they were pretty reckless with that.

[00:22:49] Xenu: I mean, the whole block size stuff, like, you know, they don't look great in retrospect with that, because Lightning Network did not pan out the way they they've claimed that it would. And I don't know, it seems like they're still, they still kind of have this ego, and perhaps this is just a reaction to that ego that they've had, you know, over the past decade.

[00:23:14] Vlad Costea: Yeah, maybe it's what they deserve. But at the same time, it's tragic for Bitcoin, because these guys will be saying, yeah, we got to save the base layer for financial transactions, which sounds very reasonable. But you look at the blockchain right now, and people are doing sub-satoshi transactions, because there is no demand for it. And then if there is demand for it's not scaling. So how are you going to balance this? They don't want to increase the block size. They don't want to have more transactions, but somehow they want to save the network from other use cases.

[00:23:50] Vlad Costea: People have been asking me in the chat why I'm wearing this helmet and this vest and these protection glasses. I've been part of the Citrea ceremony today, I was basically node number 57 out of 60. And I had to go through a process to create this network, which is going to launch in a couple of weeks. And where was I going with this? Yeah, Citrea is something that's actually trying to use block space, like the Bitcoin blockchain as this data availability layer, which is something that they're gonna hate.

[00:24:23] Vlad Costea: They're gonna say it's not financial. But on the other hand, you're gonna get a throughput of thousands of other transactions per second on the second layer, and features that you find in Ethereum. So it's sort of a layer two that's convenient, and people who are interested in this kind of stuff will be using. It's also something that will make them very angry, just because it exists and it's not the holy tech stack that Satoshi left us. But it's at least something that's gonna pay the miners. And as far as I know, virtue signaling and LARPing on Twitter does not pay the miners.

[00:25:00] Vlad Costea: And then like 10 years, we're gonna have a very serious conversation about what's really paying the miners and what's not. And it's not gonna be just a hypothetical conversation. It's gonna get very serious because the block reward diminishes. We had a halving last year, we're gonna have another one in three years, then another one in four years. So seven years and then another one in four years. So in 11 years is gonna be very severe.

[00:25:32] Xenu: Well, I think the people are going to rally around Michael Saylor. That's the black pill. That's what's gonna happen. Because that's what Bitcoin has become. It's a tech stock now. People aren't using it. So what they're going to do is they're going to follow the guy who's, you know, the face of Bitcoin, the CEO of Bitcoin, Michael Saylor, CEO of Bitcoin. That's really what it is now. And so, yeah, regarding the mining, with Monero, we've gone through this recently. Proof of work mining can be attacked. And Bitcoin mining absolutely can be attacked by selfish mining.

[00:26:09] Xenu: We'll see if that ever could happen. I mean, Bitcoin is very large, so the chances of that are probably smaller, but it could theoretically happen. Because miners, they're going to be looking for profit. And, you know, if the Bitcoin price doesn't continue climbing at the rate that it's forecasted to climb at, you're going to have issues.

[00:26:32] Vlad Costea: Basically, if Bitcoin does a 10x from here, it's going to flip gold. But I think that's the math, the moon math. So is that feasible? Like, think about gold, how long it takes. Like, what kind of history does gold have? And what kind of recognition? And how many places where you can buy and sell gold you have? And how many places around the world gold is recognized as something valuable? And you think that's something that's 16 years old, 17 in January, is going to somehow flip it on markets?

[00:27:07] Vlad Costea: I mean, I'm not saying it's impossible, but then what's next? You assume that there's going to be infinite inflation, and that nation states are really that stupid? Might be. But then again, if you get to a point where Bitcoin is a million dollars or something, it just means that you're going to pay 10x more for everything else. So I don't think you're going to have a better life or a greater purchasing power. It's just that the world is becoming a much worse place.

[00:27:37] Xenu: Well, the narrative that was sold to the Bitcoin majority is the strategic reserve. That ended up being a meme. It didn't happen. We have this Bitcoin president. He doesn't give a shit about Bitcoin. Like, come on. He probably doesn't understand how Bitcoin works. He thinks Bitcoin mining is literally digging into the ground. If you ask Trump, I'm assuming he would probably say that. The people in government, they have no idea what's going on. And so anyways, we were sold the Bitcoin strategic reserve. It pumped off of that momentum.

[00:28:13] Xenu: And then what did it do? It just died. And yeah, there's not a lot of interest right now in buying Bitcoin. I might be wrong. It's hard to talk about these things, because projects can just pump and dump at a moment's notice. We saw this with Zcash recently. Zcash just pumped violently. And I mean, people will say there's reasons for this. Maybe it was just something manufactured. I don't know. A lot of these things kind of just happen. And I've taken, from my point of view, I try to ignore the noise.

[00:28:46] Xenu: I'm just looking at a use case and adoption. When it comes to Bitcoin adoption, it's just not being adopted. It is being adopted, but the adoption or the goal of adoption, the objective. Is a tech stock. It is to buy and hold digital property. And there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. If that's the direction we're heading, fine. But yeah, will it flip gold? I really don't think so. In fact, I think gold will continue to climb. I think it's undervalued, in my opinion, even after the price bump that's happened.

[00:29:24] Xenu: I think gold has been undervalued.

[00:29:26] Vlad Costea: I don't think there's anything wrong inherently with the tech stock. It's just that that's not the reason why we got here, many of us. It's very weird to see the goalposts move and the narrative change and you're supposed to adapt with the times and say, yeah, this Blockstream is the new leader of Bitcoin, we have to listen to them. They're going to build this layer two, which is their sidechain. And then they're also going to work on the Lightning Network. And all the shitcoins were going to go to zero, right?

[00:30:01] Vlad Costea: That was the promise of it. And of course, it never happened. Like, I participated to multiple pitch decks for the Liquid sidechain, which is actually a federation. And they were saying, yeah, we can do tokens and we are regulated and we can actually work with Wall Street and Ethereum is just for degens and for these use cases, which are not legitimate. But you know what? It turned out that Wall Street, which was the target audience for Liquid, also has degens who don't like regulations. These people want to do something with the least amount of permission possible, and they wanted to do stuff just by hiring a bunch of nerds and bypassing all the existing laws and regulations, which honestly is a lot more punk rock than a lot of what we have seen in Bitcoin, where people are preemptively trying to comply.

[00:30:59] Vlad Costea: Now, I'm not gonna shit on companies and projects that basically did their best to stay alive, but a lot of them did not even wait for these laws to exist. They just got this hunch that something's gonna happen, this tide of change is gonna hit them. So preemptively, they hired some lawyer who advised them that they should be doing this in advance before there's any framework that tells them how to do it. And of course, the more they regulated themselves, the worse the actual regulations became, because when the government stepped in, they were like, yeah, so these guys are doing it like this, let's make it much worse.

[00:31:39] Vlad Costea: And today, to be honest, I see how in Europe, where I live, the amount of businesses accepting Bitcoin is diminishing, mostly because of something that's called MiCA, which is a framework for basically an adaptation of the travel rule, which you have in the US. And for a lot of companies that were accepting Bitcoin as payment, it became too much of a headache. They have to get a license, they had to lawyer up and basically every transaction needs to have a justification, like a story, where does the money come from?

[00:32:15] Vlad Costea: And most users don't want to deal with that. They don't want to expose where they actually got their Bitcoin. And most merchants don't want to deal with that either. So what we actually saw was that the adoption of Bitcoin diminished across Europe. And then, of course, there's the virtue signaling that, okay, you can use it in the jungle of Costa Rica, you can use it on the beach of El Salvador, you can use it, where else, in Argentina or something, or the Middle East. But once again, when you see in day to day life that places that used to accept Bitcoin were very open to Bitcoin are starting to not take it anymore as means of payment, it's very hard to think that you're winning.

[00:33:01] Vlad Costea: And your only cope is that there's another part of the world in which probably you're not going to move, which is more friendly for the time being, because at some point they're gonna want to get money from the World Bank, they're gonna be accepting of some sort of CBDC from a larger nation state, like a superpower. And they're just gonna say, yeah, sure, do that. As long as we're in good relations with this larger nation state, we're just going to comply. And that sucks. And if Bitcoin scaled fast enough to get adoption, to get that critical mass, and I know this is a fallacy in Eric Voskuil's book, which is called Cryptoeconomics, which argues that there are lots of things which have a lot of adoption and are still illegal.

[00:33:52] Vlad Costea: Like drugs or whatever. Just because more people use them doesn't mean that the governments will allow them to exist. But it seems like Bitcoin had the right momentum for a few years, and it kept becoming more accepted as means of payment, and then sort of lost the plot. And we just accepted that maybe that the store of value should come before the medium of exchange. And then the governments just regulated the medium of exchange part to the point where you pay more taxes, you have to do more accounting.

[00:34:23] Vlad Costea: It's just more difficult around the board, and most people just gave up. Now, the best way to pay with your Bitcoin, ironically, is to use the Visa network. So basically use these services where they take your Bitcoin, they give you a debit card, and you spend the Bitcoin on that custodian with them on the Visa network. And they say, yeah, but it doesn't have KYC or whatever, but still, it feels like defeat.

[00:34:53] Vlad Costea: Long run.

[00:34:55] Xenu: Yeah, well, somewhere along the way, the counterculture became subverted. I don't know when it happened. I wish I did. But it became subverted, and it's turned into a tech stock. And you said something, you said Wall Street is the target audience. That's exactly it. Wall Street is the target. They don't actually care about the digital autonomy of the average person using peer-to-peer cash. That's not even on their radar. All they're caring about is margins, and they want to make a profit during this quarter, and all that crap.

[00:35:31] Xenu: So it's a real problem where Bitcoin right now is viewed by a lot of different people as snake oil, or even cryptocurrency in general. There's a lot of snake oil, and I don't blame that designation. A lot of cryptocurrency is just scammy. It's a very rotten scene. You have these things pumping that are just absolute nonsense. In Monero, we dealt with the whole Qubic situation, and they were talking about this AI that's going to change the world. It's a Twitter bot that can't even do math. You ask it three plus three, it says 84.

[00:36:08] Xenu: People are throwing their life savings at this. It's like, what is happening here? But this is what cryptocurrency is. It's people trying to get rich and trying to make money. Now, regarding regulations, yeah, they're going to get worse. They're not going to get better. You mentioned MiCA, for example, and this is actually going to find its way to the United States. They are going to go after any sort of non-KYC exchange, any sort of wallet, for example, that isn't registered. You will not be able to self-custody without registering that information.

[00:36:43] Xenu: The thing is, for people listening, we're going to be talking about different privacy stuff later on, but really the biggest threat against privacy right now is KYC. They collect so much metadata on people, and this is really the problem. And so with all these regulations pushing people towards KYC, it's only going to get worse, especially with digital ID looming in the background as well, which I think will happen within the next year or so because it just seems inevitable at this point. And so, yeah, one other thing I want to say, too, is digital cash is under attack.

[00:37:24] Xenu: It's really not just Bitcoin. It's not Monero. It's digital cash. This concept of being able to spend peer-to-peer what you want, when you want, how you want, et cetera, without that being logged, that is what is under attack. And so what the people who are attacking Bitcoin have done is they've changed the narrative, and they've changed it only into store value, digital gold. They don't want people using Bitcoin in defiance of the state. And I think that's very recognizable if you have the perspective of a crypto-anarchist.

[00:38:04] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah. But to be fair, if you go back and you watch the documentary The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, which I think is on YouTube, so you don't even have to get some subscription on one of these streaming services, you don't even have to pirate it from some Pirate Bay fork or whatever, you're going to find it on YouTube. And there's this CEO from an exchange that's called TradeHill. I wish I remembered his name, but he talks during an interview, and he says, I'm not going to go to jail for this.

[00:38:37] Vlad Costea: Like, if there's any regulation that I have to apply, I'm going to do it. I'm going to accept KYC AML. I'm going to do whatever they ask me to. I'm not going to go to jail for this. And to be fair, it's hard to judge him, but this was very early on, like 2013, 2014. And I think this has been the attitude of a lot of companies in the space, especially those in the US. Coinbase was famous for self-regulation, in the sense that they did not even get some sort of order to do something, but they were preemptively getting blockchain analysis firms and they were hiring some of the worst people to do it.

[00:39:16] Vlad Costea: And did they win in the long run? Only because of the ETFs, I think, if they did not get this advantage, which, by the way, makes the whole market unfair and makes Coinbase a huge honeypot and a single point of failure for these ETFs. I guess Kraken or Gemini would pose more of a threat on the open market, on the free market. But there's not much of a free market. Coinbase sort of attracted this capital from institutions. And now we just live in a world where Coinbase and BitGo are the largest custodians of Bitcoin in the world.

[00:39:58] Vlad Costea: And I don't even know what this means. Like, if it's a big security risk or it's a big financial risk, I don't think we're going to have another FTX or Mt. Gox moment with them, but still.

[00:40:14] Xenu: Well, the Mt. Gox moment will be Michael Saylor freaking losing money.

[00:40:18] Vlad Costea: Oh, I agree with that, yeah.

[00:40:21] Xenu: Yeah, oh yeah. That's going to be funny. But regarding Coinbase, yeah, they had that KYC attack recently, where—this is the new way, by the way, to attack these companies—they bribe these people. So what they're doing, Coinbase and other companies, they outsource their work to freaking India or whatever, and these people are making pennies on the dollar. And so they call up these centers and they're like, does anybody want to leak information?

[00:40:49] Xenu: We'll give you, like, $100. And they— They got, like, a thousand bucks or something, like, and he gave all this KYC information. The whole thing was ridiculous. And this is another reason why digital ID is inevitable because, like, we're having all these situations where these companies are outsourcing their identification management, and it's always a disaster. There's another thing with Discord recently, same thing. They had a whole ransomware attack because their third party that they hired got hacked. Yeah, you know, you brought up, to change subject, you brought up the fact that, you know, some people don't want to fight back.

[00:41:31] Xenu: And I completely agree. You know, like, when the Samourai Wallet stuff first happened, there was a lot of Bitcoin companies that either folded or they said they were taking a break, you know, and I'm not going to judge people for that because this is serious stuff. And I treat cryptocurrency seriously. And it's like, listen, like, you have families and stuff, this is not worth it, right? But we need projects that do fight back. And this is why I'm passionate about Monero, because Monero does fight back. And it's, you know, it's a project that I very much support because of that.

[00:42:08] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so I agree. I think Bitcoin has a big culture problem with this. Because there was, I think last year was horrible for privacy all across the board. You had, actually, it was two years ago that the Tornado Cash developers were arrested. And then I remember I was moderating a panel in Riga at the Baltic Honeybadger. And Max Hillebrand, who at the time was CEO of Wasabi Wallet, told me something along the lines of, the same cannot happen to us because we're not selling a token. And his understanding of the situation was basically that Tornado Cash went to jail because they were making a lot of money off of their mixing service, which is not true and turned out to be not true.

[00:42:58] Vlad Costea: And the next year, they came for Samourai Wallet, which to be honest, I think they came for them because of their speech and because of the way that they were approaching people on Twitter saying that they can mix money for Russian oligarchs or whatever. So it was speech. It was nothing concerning the service itself because the Wasabi guys just scattered. They were like, okay, we're closing the company. It was fun while it lasted, but we're not going to fight for this. But the worst response is not from these companies, which were directly targeted.

[00:43:34] Vlad Costea: Everyone basically acted upon their survival instinct. The worst response came from the community. Which did not care. They're like, oh, they're shutting down these services. We're not going to have any more privacy on Bitcoin. Okay. The number is going up. We're getting ETFs. Let's cheer for Larry Fink. So much inflows. Oh, look at this. Oh, 100K, 110K, 120K, 125K. Who cares? Oh, we don't have privacy anymore. Oh, Alex Gladstein just said the other day that a lot of the early Bitcoiners moved their coins to institutions and they don't self-custody anymore.

[00:44:15] Vlad Costea: Who cares? This is a stonk. Make as many dollars as you can before the ship sinks. I think this is sort of the mentality. And in contrast, you look at the Ethereum people and how they treat Alexey and also... What's his name? The other guy from Tornado Cash. Roman. Roman. Yeah, Alexey and Roman. They're heroes. They treat them just like in Bitcoin we treat Ross Ulbricht, maybe. But even in the case of Ross Ulbricht, we saw how a bunch of assholes said, well, he's not pure enough for us because he said multiple blockchains are good.

[00:44:53] Vlad Costea: So he should go back to jail. I did see some of these messages and the culture, for lack of a better word, is fucked because in Ethereum they actually send money to these people. They help them fight. They support them in court. They make sure that this is not going to be a terrible precedent for privacy. And they run campaigns to make it look like, hey, the average person is not a criminal and people use privacy because they have legit reasons. These are public blockchains. Even their neighbor can watch what they're doing.

[00:45:24] Vlad Costea: It's not just about government. It's also about interactions between people. And it's just horrible that in Bitcoin we did not fight for that and people just forgot about it and then they moved on to the next thing. And Ethereum, which we make fun of them for being funded by JP Morgan and for having that huge pre-mine and for having this culture which has governance and they're more open to collaborating and lobbying. They actually turned out to be better cypherpunks and they actually fought for their own.

[00:45:59] Vlad Costea: And they put their reputation behind this statement that privacy is important, it's for everyone and it's worth fighting for.

[00:46:16] Vlad Costea: Just a second, Xenu. I think there is an audio issue on your end and I'm going to fix it. It's this weird OBS glitch. Try again.

[00:46:30] Vlad Costea: Try again.

[00:46:34] Vlad Costea: I swear I'm not sabotaging this. I do want to hear you.

[00:46:44] Xenu: Check, check, check. You're back. [unclear: I love,] okay, cool. Oh, yeah, Ethereum. Yeah. So, yeah, Ethereum, I mean, they were the real deal. I mean, I think they're underrated as being cypherpunks. I really do. And, you know, during the whole Tornado Cash trial, it was very frustrating. I remember it was like day, it was like in the middle of the trial and things were like, there's a lot of tension. And I went to the crypto media. It was Cointelegraph or whatever. And their headline is about Donald Trump Jr.

[00:47:21] Xenu: Talking about crypto. So they're not even talking about Ethereum. It's like, dude, what are you doing? This is a landmark case. Why the hell are you not covering it? Of course, I follow The Rage. Shout out, great publication. They're doing amazing journalism over there. And you know what? They brought the point that the Ethereum people really donated to them. And I'm not surprised. I mean, they really did care about this case. And this is a landmark case, which unfortunately didn't really have a conclusion. I cover this on my podcast every week.

[00:47:53] Xenu: And it was just like very frustrating because I thought we could get it. But the jury, the jury, I think, did a fair job. But the laws are just not in our favor. They're basing all of this off of stuff that was made in like 1964 or something. It's very, very frustrating to look at from the modern day perspective. So, yeah, it's been it's been some horrible year or two for privacy with the Tornado Cash stuff being kind of a split decision. Still probably going to go onwards.

[00:48:29] Xenu: Like we're probably still going to see them face those charges again because it was a mistrial. Also with Samourai Wallet, you know, you brought up the fact that they took the plea. And I agree with you. Like they probably took the plea because their lawyer said, listen, you guys have some messages that make you look very bad. And because during the Tornado Cash trial, if you guys were watching it, one of the things that really hit Roman hard was the fact that he wore a T-shirt that was a laundry machine with the Ethereum logo.

[00:49:03] Xenu: And that was like used to slander him. And the problem with the Samourai Wallet guys is they were they were a lot more vocal and direct. OK, those guys did not give a fuck. Right. So, yeah, that would have really nailed them in court. I mean, you put that in front of a jury and it's just like, I don't know, man. So, yeah, it sucks because, you know, the Samourai Wallet guys, they really were helping Bitcoin out a lot with privacy. It was a very strong, a very, very rebellious culture that unfortunately was lost because of this, because, you know, a lot of these people just kind of migrated over to Monero afterwards.

[00:49:44] Xenu: So the only the other thing I want to bring up to say, you were we're talking all about, you know, all these donations and stuff. And isn't it so interesting that.

[00:50:22] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Some people said that your audio was gone. I think it's a weird glitch in OBS. Just a second.

[00:50:37] Vlad Costea: Try again.

[00:50:40] Xenu: Check one, two, check. Yeah.

[00:50:42] Vlad Costea: So I'm really sorry. Basically, what he said or you can say it again. Sorry.

[00:50:51] Xenu: Well, from where the beginning, I could repeat the whole thing, I guess.

[00:50:55] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so you were saying about Michael Saylor that he doesn't care about this.

[00:51:00] Xenu: So he like Michael Saylor, like he's worshiped as this like CEO of Bitcoin, right? Like he's looked at as this as the face of Bitcoin. Why is he not donating for these any of these cases? Why is he not supporting the Samourai Wallet guys? Why is he not getting them the best team that money could buy? And the answer is because he doesn't care about peer to peer cash. All he cares about is getting rich. And it's very frustrating because like this is the direction that Bitcoin is headed.

[00:51:26] Xenu: It's really Michael Saylor is a reflection of Bitcoin. Today. That's what it is. The peer to peer cash has been put to the side, and the focus is on number go up, and only number go up. And I get that the there's importance with number go up. But you know, this is a problem.

[00:51:47] Vlad Costea: Yeah, there's someone in the chat who basically said, hands up the table. I swear I did not mute you. It's just this OBS glitch, which for some reason switches inputs. It goes from basically the browser, which we use for the call to Firefox, which is the other browser, which I have open. I don't know what why it's doing this, but I'm gonna pay attention to it during this interview. What I want to add to what you said is that I can confirm that there was this rumor that was started by Matt Odell that one of the ETFs wanted to give like a percentage of their profits to Bitcoin Core developers.

[00:52:25] Vlad Costea: And Michael Saylor got involved directly to stop this from happening. And in the beginning, it was denied. But then Michael Saylor sort of doubled down and said, Well, just imagine these guys had unlimited money to tinker with Bitcoin and think about new ways to make it more efficient to add new features. And he's like, don't mess with my money. Don't touch it. It's perfect as it is. Don't make it more private. Don't make it more efficient, because who needs that? I'm trading this on the balance sheet of exchanges and then ETFs and whatever.

[00:53:01] Vlad Costea: So that's completely unnecessary for someone like him. And what he really needs is just a piece of software that barely works and gets the job done. And that's pretty much the extent of it. And he put a lot of money into this. Bitcoin is not a proof of stake project. So having more coins does not mean that you're gonna get more influence. But at the same time, it sort of matters. People put a lot of weight into this and they say, Well, this person invested this amount of money into the network, and therefore we should not upset him.

[00:53:38] Vlad Costea: We should not do anything to make him go or make him sell his bags or make him angry at all. We want him to be this poster boy, this advocate, this speaker to institutions and whatever it is that he does on a regular basis. And so far it worked. People got rich. But there is, I think, a plateau. There is a limit to this number go up. And once we do hit the limit of this price discovery, not only that we're gonna have a bear market, which is inevitable because markets work in cycles, but we're also gonna have a very strange existential crisis where we look at ourselves and we're like, OK, what did we really accomplish over the last 10 years?

[00:54:26] Vlad Costea: Did we make Bitcoin scale better? Not really. Did we find hacky ways to improve it? Yes. But could we make them better? Of course. Like if we had something as basic as OP_CAT or CTV, a lot of developers could build layer twos that are much more efficient than what we have today. There would be no necessity for me to participate in a Citrea ceremony because they could launch in a way that's not requiring any kind of trust, which would be very beautiful. But once again, we have these layer twos which are going to be launching.

[00:55:02] Vlad Costea: But the question is, under the current culture and given how people use Bitcoin or don't use it at all, if they're going to be jumping to these second layers to actually try them, that's the biggest bet because devs work on cool stuff. They build something and then the users have been indoctrinated to not use Bitcoin. And the only acceptable way of using it is with Lightning, which a large percentage of it is custodial and it sort of defeats the purpose. And I do believe that much of it was a psyop to get Bitcoiners to accept custodians and get used to the idea that, OK, it doesn't work any other way and this is efficient, this works.

[00:55:43] Vlad Costea: Nobody ever stole from me, so why should I care too much? About it. And it really sucks. And to be honest, I find it refreshing that in other altcoins, you find some of the spirit from Bitcoin 10 years ago or Bitcoin 15 years ago or whatever, and people just build and they're like, yeah, let's experiment with new tech. Let's make this work. Let's take this technology that was given to us by Satoshi and see what the limits of it are. Like, OK, we can accept that Bitcoin is digital gold or whatever, the store of value, but what about enabling anyone to make payments in a way that actually scales and is actually intuitive and doesn't cost a lot and broadcasts faster and confirms faster?

[00:56:37] Vlad Costea: Like, that's actually interesting. And if maybe five years ago, with the Lightning Network being more promising, it seemed like a pointless effort because I truly believed that Litecoin was going... Not Litecoin, Lightning was going to be it, but it never happened. And it's good to update, to constantly look at what the market is telling you and understand whether or not something is happening, because if you stick too much to a dogma and you believe that something is going to happen, even if there is no sign that's pointing towards it becomes dangerous.

[00:57:16] Vlad Costea: And it's really good to look at your options out there. Last year, when I returned from Nashville after that conference where people were lining up and waited from seven in the morning until 4 p.m. Or something just to see Donald Trump, and most of them did not. And then Trump got on stage and was such a major letdown. He was speaking about anything else except for Bitcoin. And the day before we had RFK, who was still running for president at the time, and he basically kissed our asses and also gave us like a rim job, talking like he's on a Bitcoin podcast and he got orange-pilled and whatever.

[00:57:59] Vlad Costea: Like, it felt so weird to hear these words from the mouth of someone who obviously knows nothing about it, doesn't care much about it. And is just trying to get our sympathy or whatever. And I just realized that the climate has changed so much. Like I was used to a different kind of Bitcoin event and conference. And suddenly I was there and it felt like the revolution that I thought I was a part of turned into the mainstream or the mainstream took over the revolution. And that's when you have to ask yourself, what's my point here?

[00:58:32] Vlad Costea: Like, am I really better than these people at saying this stuff? Of course, I know more than they do, but they have more people listening to them. And then what's the point? Because where I find sanity in Bitcoin is these layer twos and the BitVM stuff. I think BitVM is the greatest thing that ever happened to Bitcoin over the last few years. Without it, we would be kind of lost and fighting and talking about other forks. With it, we at least have some hacky ways to add more features to Bitcoin and have different ways to use this supply of 21 million coins, of which we have like 19 point something million so far.

[00:59:17] Vlad Costea: But I digress. I wish I could be more optimistic about it. I wish there was a lot happening that makes me bullish, but I see a lot of idealistic developers and I love them. I'm happy that they're doing this. But I just don't see the culture like they have in Ethereum, for example, to actually try it and give it the benefit of the doubt and say, you know, let's see ways in which this can help us achieve the goal. People are just lazy and complacent and they just watch the number go up and that's the extent of their involvement.

[00:59:50] Vlad Costea: They don't want to try new tech. They don't want to hear about new tech, except for maybe the listeners of the podcast, of this podcast. Because I like to think that I have some very smart people listening and every time I attend events, I realize that, yeah, this person who does something interesting in the space is actually a regular. And it's really an honor.

[01:00:21] Vlad Costea: Just a second. You're once again having issues. Try again. Still not. I don't know how we're going to do this, but OK, try again.

[01:00:39] Vlad Costea: Still not. It's an OBS kind of issue.

[01:00:47] Xenu: Maybe I rejoin the call.

[01:00:49] Vlad Costea: OK, you're fine now. No, it's OBS. And if I do close OBS, I'm going to stop the stream and I don't want to do that. So basically. I'm going to have to check your settings every time.

[01:01:01] Xenu: OK.

[01:01:03] Xenu: Yeah, so I mean, it's become this thing where politicians are using Bitcoin just to get votes. They don't actually care about Bitcoin. They don't know what open source means. They probably have never heard the phrase free and open-source software in their entire lives. They don't care about this, right? They see Bitcoin. It's a way to vote for them. And we're now seeing in America, at least, this divide between Republicans and Democrats, where Republicans like tacitly support Bitcoin. I don't know, and Democrats don't. And that's like the new like stance that they have.

[01:01:37] Xenu: The whole thing is very silly. It reminds me of the whole shit show with Dennis Porter that happened recently. Did you see that? This is a classic.

[01:01:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so basically he had big news, which turned out to be that some candidate for governor of California, who is a Democrat, is willing to support Bitcoin.

[01:02:01] Xenu: That was it. It was great. You know, he worked that up, too, for like an entire week. He said, like, things will never be the same. All caps, of course. These are tweets. Things will never be the same. Bitcoin going to change forever. No, it's just like a campaign announcement. Like, this is the modern-day Bitcoin for these people. It's shilling to politicians who don't care about that, who don't care about Bitcoin, who don't care about peer-to-peer digital cash, right? It's a very rotten, rotten industry right now.

[01:02:33] Xenu: And it's attracting vultures like Michael Saylor. You know, we were talking Michael Saylor, and this is a guy. He was interviewed on a podcast, and he said, yeah, I don't think that people should have their Bitcoin on exchanges. It's an outdated concept. The digital energy of Bitcoin to preserve the network, we don't need these exchanges. Like, he's saying all this crap, but he's implying that we actually don't need to have self-custody. We should just give everything to exchanges. I mean, that's freaking absurd. He said that, right?

[01:03:07] Xenu: And so the next day, Twitter kind of blew up. There are people who respond to him. And then he said an apology, and all was forgiven. No one cared after that. It's like, are you serious? This is a guy who's like, literally like the main event of the Bitcoin conferences. And this is a guy who literally was saying, yeah, I don't think we should have self-custody for Bitcoin anymore. It's an ancient, it's a relic of the past. Like, what are you talking about, dude? Like, who told you that you had authority over us?

[01:03:41] Xenu: Absolutely disgusting. And then afterwards, for New Year's, this guy had a fucking party at his mansion, his estate. It was like this, what was it? It was like the Bitcoin 100,000 party or some fucking shit like that. And he fucking, he role-played as the Great Gatsby for the weekend, showing everybody his mansion. Absolutely disgusting behavior.

[01:04:07] Vlad Costea: And he's gonna do it again this year. But to be fair, I think that whole statement about self-custody and the fact that we should all just keep our coins on exchanges was him testing the water to see, okay, where is this community really at? Like, what if I say this? Will anyone actually agree with me? Or is it too early for this? Or should I maybe try to push it slowly as more institutions get in and the regulations get more harsh for people who self-custody and want to make payments out of their own nodes or something?

[01:04:43] Vlad Costea: And then of course, people don't care. They went to his party, all the people who pretended to call him out, they were like, oh, I got invited to this. Let me put on my nicest clothes and take pictures and say that we're saving the world and making it a better place with sound money and the money of the people and whatever it is that they larp about. But yeah, it's disgusting. I don't blame them for trying to make a living in this space. It's actually hard. My front light actually died.

[01:05:15] Vlad Costea: I'm gonna fix it. It's actually hard to make a living in this space. And it's hard to adapt, to be honest. You have to constantly accept the new thing and the new thing sometimes goes against the principles that brought you into the space. And what's gonna happen then? You have to choose between basically standing up for what you believe in or adapting to keep earning a paycheck in the space. I'm super happy and fortunate that I got canceled last year and I was able to build from there and basically pick up the pieces and see where I'm going from there because I don't have to deal with these crazy people anymore.

[01:05:57] Vlad Costea: Basically, they're just talking heads on Twitter and that's pretty much it. And I went to some of their conferences this year. Some of them smiled at me and said, oh, I'm so sorry for you, blah, blah, blah. I think that was unfortunate, but I'm actually happy. It was the best outcome ever. The worst news is that for the average podcast or whatever, if they don't have the willingness to fight back or the resilience, they're just gonna get eaten alive and they're gonna have to disappear because they don't appeal to the cult, which by the way, does not care about them.

[01:06:34] Vlad Costea: They're just a face in the crowd. And then once they do have the courage to ask the questions that are uncomfortable for the whole community, they get excommunicated and they have to figure out their own way from there. And it's kind of nice. That's also when I started my portfolio of privacy coins and I realized that there has to be more to this and there has to be a future for these payments and there can be no future for peer-to-peer payments without privacy. And that's going to be the next big narrative.

[01:07:09] Vlad Costea: And part of it turned out to be true, but we still, so the extent of the adoption is still underwhelming to a degree, but good enough. Like what I've been seeing over the last couple of months is sort of encouraging. We see DeFi platforms integrating privacy and the people that we sort of hated for being annoying or for being exceedingly regulated, they seem to also integrate some sort of privacy features, which is encouraging. But once again, this is not happening on Bitcoin.

[01:07:50] Vlad Costea: Wait, wait, wait. Someone actually said that it's so convenient that the host has so-called OBS problems. Maybe I should update the software. Can you try again?

[01:08:03] Xenu: Okay. Yeah.

[01:08:07] Xenu: So I think the litmus test for a Bitcoin supporter is how they feel about Michael Saylor. I think I'm going to draw the line. Okay. And Michael Saylor, if you are on board with this guy, you're the problem. Okay. Get out. Out. You can have your own Bitcoin. We don't want you anymore. You know what I mean? The moon boys have gravitated to this guy and they've taken over Bitcoin. It's a 51% attack on the soul of Bitcoin is really what it is. Yeah. I mean, regarding privacy coins now, I actually have a bone to pick with that.

[01:08:47] Xenu: I don't like the phrase privacy coin. I think these are just cryptocurrencies. And some cryptocurrencies implement privacy better than other projects. Because you can argue that Bitcoin is a privacy coin. You can argue Ethereum is a privacy coin based on things that you can do with those different projects. And I would agree with that. In fact, they're probably the most used by volume, just by virtue of them having the network effect and stuff. That being said, though, I do agree that there is this kind of recognition, this growing recognition that privacy is an issue with crypto.

[01:09:21] Xenu: People have now finally figured out like, okay, yeah, the transparent blockchain, this probably can't be peer to peer cash in the future. We probably should fix this. So it's a nice thing that these different projects are getting this attention. And I know obviously Monero is getting this attention Zcash lately as well. And I think that's a really positive thing. We need to be focusing on this. We need to be focusing on usage. For me, that's the most important thing. Actual usage statistics. What are these merchants reporting?

[01:09:55] Xenu: What are these websites reporting? The data that they're getting. And what we're seeing in general is a lot of people are using stablecoins. A lot of people are. And a lot of people are using Bitcoin on the base layer. They're not using Lightning Network. No, they're using Bitcoin on the base layer. Monero is punching way above its weight on all these websites, such as CoinCards, for example. And we're seeing people are using cryptocurrency, but it's nowhere near the use case of number go up. And this is just the problem that we have right now with cryptocurrency.

[01:10:36] Xenu: People just want to get rich. And it is what it is. Like buying cryptocurrency to get rich, it's a use case. I'm not going to say you can't do it, but we need to have some perspective here. Why are we here? You know what I mean?

[01:10:48] Vlad Costea: I do hear a lot of people when I tell them that I like privacy projects. They're like, yeah, but would you save in them for 10 years? And I'm like, but why? I mean, of course, maybe. Maybe I would. Maybe I would keep a percentage of my quote unquote portfolio in them. But at the same time, they're meant to be used. They were created to function as cash. Oh, you sent me a message. Let me check that.

[01:11:16] Vlad Costea: Oh, OK. It's fine. I will rant by myself and also present the sponsors and you can come back whenever you finish. You need a bathroom break.

[01:11:34] Vlad Costea: It actually appeared on the screen so people can read that. But anyway, someone asked in the chat, where is this? It was SirJamsalot who says, where XMR chat? I like the show. I wanted to send some Montenegros. You can do that on the show that Xenu is doing. I don't want to receive anything. I'm already sponsored. And by the way, let me plug the sponsors until Xenu comes back, because I feel like it's unfair to talk while he's not here. So first of all, let's talk about SideShift, which is the swapping service where I think the best use case is to use the stable coins that you receive as payment from people and swap them for something that you might actually want more like BTC, like LTC, like the Melania meme coin, if you're into that, whatever.

[01:12:25] Vlad Costea: They have low fees. They have pretty good liquidity. And it's such a cool service with a nice user experience, which, by the way, is also integrated into other wallets, like I think Edge Wallet and also Trezor Suite. They have that hardware wallet interface where you can swap. It has lots of integrations. It's really cool. I think if you go to something that's very popular in Montenegro, which is called Trocador, they also showed the rates on SideShift, and it's maybe one of the most popular ones and the ones with most liquidity.

[01:13:03] Vlad Costea: Check it out. It's SideShift, which is S-I-D-E-S-H-I-F-T dot A-I. And thank you, SideShift, for sponsoring. There's also NoOnes.com, which is a peer-to-peer marketplace headed by Ray Youssef. If you go back a couple of episodes, you're going to see Ray flexing his muscles and saying, yeah, that he's fighting against the forces of evil, and he has five years to get back and save the world from the CBDCs and the surveillance that's coming. And the way in which he wants to do this is with the peer-to-peer marketplace that he built, which is called NoOnes.

[01:13:42] Vlad Costea: And NoOnes is focused on the global South, the people who need these coins the most, the people who don't have any time to virtue signal about doing anything, and they don't have any investment portfolio because they're hustling. They're trying to feed their families. They're trying to actually find a use for Bitcoin, for Montero, and a lot of the coins that they have listed on NoOnes, outside of speculation. And it's really cool. I do resonate with the mission, and I do like that they have this peer-to-peer exchange for coins, for gift cards.

[01:14:21] Vlad Costea: They also have a spot exchange. They also have a debit card that you can use for spending your coins if you're into that. And it's just really cool, and I'm proud of what Ray was able to accomplish. The URL is n-o-o-n-e-s.com. And thank you, NoOnes, for sponsoring. There's also Bitcoin.com News, which, if you ask me, is one of the most balanced news websites out there. Because they don't focus too much on institutions, like, for example, CoinDesk or Cointelegraph are doing nowadays.

[01:14:58] Vlad Costea: And they don't focus too much on US politics, like Bitcoin Magazine tends to do. And what I respect about Bitcoin.com News is that they report on a lot of interesting projects, which might be promising in the future. That's where I read, for example, for the first time about Kaspa, and the fact that people were mining it a couple of years ago. That's where I heard about Zano, which I do tend to like because it has the privacy of Montenegro, but also issues tokens, which I think is an interesting use case.

[01:15:36] Vlad Costea: And I also read about gold and about other markets which maybe are not covered on Bitcoin Magazine. So check out news.bitcoin.com. And last but not least, there is LayerTwo Labs, which is trying to build drivechains, which basically is the ultimate vision for Bitcoin maximalism. Which means that they want to build a sidechain for every interesting use case out there. They have an Ethereum sidechain, they have zSide, which is a Zcash fork that basically has privacy by default, and that one can be used for fungibility.

[01:16:12] Vlad Costea: They have something that's called Thunder, and that one is a big block fork of Bitcoin with prunable blocks. And it's interesting because it has the throughput and capacity of BSV, but on a Layer 2, and with actual pruning, because it makes no sense to keep all the data on the Layer 2. And they have lots of interesting stuff, and they're building even in times of trouble and noise and infighting and potentially civil war. Check out LayerTwo Labs, it's l-a-y-e-r-t-w-o-l-a-b-s.com.

[01:16:51] Vlad Costea: And it's not just an idea, it's actual software that you can download today and run on your computer. It works on Mac, on Windows, and also Linux.

[01:17:02] Vlad Costea: And James Cavanaugh says that Xenu is taking long. It turns out to be right. Okay, oh, he's back. That's so good. So convenient. Just a second, just a second, you're cut off again. I need to make the switch. You're back, you should... Okay, that's good. I should update OBS or something. This hasn't happened to me before, and I'm in the middle of a stream. There's no way I can actually stop this.

[01:17:32] Xenu: Yeah, that's a nightmare. Yeah, no, it's all good, man. Just edit it in post, it's all good. No hard feelings. I've been there where, yeah, you're live. I've been DJing before, and I've had to make some adjustments on the fly. Yeah, it is.

[01:17:54] Xenu: Still there?

[01:17:56] Vlad Costea: Yep. Okay, so I think this is a very nice transition into the main event of our conversation, which is Zcash against Sombrero. Which Sombrero is very popular, and Zcash is getting a lot of traction after a series of conferences and some integrations with DeFi and the technology that's actually finally mature. Because in previous bull markets, if you look at the shielded adoption, it wasn't really happening. And the community in the Romero project were saying that it's not a serious privacy project. Now more than one third of the supply of coins is actually shielded, and it's easier than ever to actually use the privacy features.

[01:18:46] Vlad Costea: And it seems like it's finally a mature technology. And the reason why we're doing this is that I ragequit Montero a couple of weeks ago. No, you didn't. There was this guy who basically said he's going to break my legs. And to be honest, I do have to explain that I've learned from Bitcoin that a lot of these people, if you just give them a platform and you enable them and you just make it normal that they act in this way, they're just going to become more vocal and more powerful within the community.

[01:19:18] Vlad Costea: And it's just going to go south from there. So maybe take this as a warning. Maybe call me a pussy or whatever. I don't care. But what I'm trying to say is that we should not normalize this kind of behavior because I got into this space with the idea that we're doing this nonviolent revolution. And we're using the markets as the mechanism to determine who wins and who loses. Whether we like it or not, it's the markets that decide in the end. Whether or not we're moon boys or whatever.

[01:19:49] Vlad Costea: And there is some merit to the resilience of a lot of projects because the Bitcoin maximalist narrative is that everything is 90 something percent down against BTC. But this also means that altcoins get abandoned and developers just jump from one hype train to the other trying to find their moon bag. Which, to be honest, was not the case with Milango and was not the case with Zcash and was not the case with Dash and was not the case with Litecoin. Maybe Nano and a bunch of others which still have people working on them, still have a market that accepts them, still are making improvements towards being better digital cash.

[01:20:36] Vlad Costea: And I gotta give credit also to the Bitcoin Cash side of the debate, which I have ignored for a long time. But it seems like they were not as stupid as people like Jimmy Song or Tone Vays or whoever was very popular in 2017. Were telling me. Like, the narrative about Bitcoin Cash is that they're illiterate and stupid and uncapable of understanding the technical complexities of what a block size increase actually entails. But they're not stupid. They're not nihilists. They're not like the BSV loonies who basically said, why care about decentralization?

[01:21:17] Vlad Costea: Let's just take this to a gigameg. So all of these projects actually made some interesting progress and Bitcoin sort of stagnated and we got Taproot, which is the most boring upgrade ever, even though some nerds will swear by it. And right now we're stuck and people talk about ossification and it's becoming boring for people like myself who are also technologists of sort and they want to see the latest improvements in cryptography and computer science being implemented. What do you think about this? And at some point we should be adversarial.

[01:21:52] Vlad Costea: Like, I feel like we agreed a lot in this interview. Just a second. Just a second. You're very friendly. Especially since I sort of messed up with this and I hope people can hear you now. Yeah.

[01:22:06] Xenu: Yeah, no, I mean, I'm generally a friendly person. Like, I think my Twitter account has a reputation in some of the cases. Like, I'm really just in general, in person, like I'm very friendly. But like, I guess I got my shield up, you know, being from like 4chan. My 4chan days have hardened my internet skin or something. I don't know, man. Yeah, I mean, like regarding the threats of violence against you, like that's ridiculous. You know, like, I wouldn't take that seriously. There are people out there, Monero, who have different opinions and that's totally fine.

[01:22:46] Xenu: The thing is, like, Monero, I consider it a digital commodity. You know, anybody has access to it. One reason I'm so passionate about Monero is because anybody with a computer can mine it. It's open source. It's available to everybody. I think it's a very beautiful thing and because of this, Monero doesn't have like a political opinion. So there are going to be people who gravitate towards it who have different opinions than you. In my opinion, the kind of the extremist side of Monero is more of a reflection of just society in general.

[01:23:26] Xenu: I think more people use Monero, so it's more likely you're going to find those types of people. This is how I feel. Monero is just used a lot. You know, the other day, literally, it was two days ago, Monero was actually name-dropped by Nick Fuentes on one of the streams. That's a big deal and I know this guy's going to be very controversial for some people, but he's probably one of the fastest risers amongst political thinkers in the United States. This guy's a big deal. He's going to be a big name.

[01:24:04] Xenu: I would argue he's bigger than Charlie Kirk in terms of his influence. He name-dropped Monero on [unclear: his stream] the other day as a sound project that he thinks is interesting. This is what we're seeing. You know, again, violence is bad. Okay, so I'm sorry on behalf of the Monero community. That's terrible. Okay, we don't support that and that's inexcusable. It's not even funny, really. But the thing is, yeah, if you go looking for crazy people on the internet, you're going to find those crazy people, right?

[01:24:44] Xenu: So, if I want to see abhorrent opinions about computer privacy, I will go on Reddit and look up the latest news article about COVID or something. I just feel like, how do these people even exist? What are these people even doing, right? Now, regarding Zcash, to your point, yeah, Zcash has improved lately. I'm not gonna lie. They're doing some cool things. There's a lot of things I don't like about Zcash and that's where we can get into it on that front. I want to get into it because I'm supposed to hate you, right?

[01:25:17] Xenu: So, we got to get more hatred through our veins, I guess. But no, I mean like, Zcash, they've done some good things lately in terms of them promoting Zashi. I think that's a good thing because Zashi has built-in privacy. But I gotta be honest with you, man. It is inexcusable that it is not a milestone for them to go 100% shielded Zcash. I don't know why they're not doing it. I have some suspicions, but I'm not gonna say it here.

[01:25:55] Vlad Costea: No, say them. That's why we're here.

[01:25:57] Xenu: I think they're being cucks. I think they don't want to get regulated. It's obvious to me. And you know what? This is the test for me. If they go full shielded, I'm actually pretty into Zcash at that point. That's pretty cool to me, but they're not gonna do it. You know, they just released a Zashi wallet. They hyped it up. They love this wallet. Call it a very private. And I see a ZachXBT Twitter thread breaking down how every Zashi wallet has a transparent Zcash address attached to it.

[01:26:36] Xenu: So even if you do the NEAR Intents swaps, it's linked to your same address and you can actually trivially link transactions just by that measure. Highly troubling to me because this has been promoted as being perfectly private like these Z-to-Z transactions. It's actually not.

[01:26:55] Vlad Costea: Well, but that's a NEAR Intents issue. It doesn't concern the Zcash network per se. Or you can argue that the way in which they simplified privacy for Zashi where they use the same transparent address for your account that's terrible and I can agree with it. And they did say that they're gonna add rotating public addresses.

[01:27:17] Xenu: That has to be fixed. But like one thing I just like about this though is you have this concept of perfect privacy. Where I think people think that privacy is an on or an off switch, which it's not. It's a fluid situation. And with Zcash, I have to repeat this. It's highly troubling that on their roadmap they are not moving towards 100% shielded only. They have to do that to be taken seriously by me. I don't know what else to say. Like that is the goal really to have fungible digital cash.

[01:27:50] Xenu: That's what Monero is doing. But that's what Monero has been doing, right? Even with without full-chain membership proofs, so I thought...

[01:28:09] Vlad Costea: Just a second. You cut off again, and it's not my fault. I swear. Let me make you hearable once again. Can you try?

[01:28:20] Vlad Costea: Yeah, check. They lost you for like five to ten seconds, and I cut this. You said that it's unfortunate that they allow so many transparent transactions.

[01:28:33] Xenu: Yeah, so Zcash allows these transparent transactions, right? It's part of their protocol. And what you can do is you can correlate those transactions to shielded transactions through basic timing analysis. This is a problem. And the thing about usage of cryptocurrency is that people who are using cryptocurrency or darknet markets, for example, they're retarded. Okay, they don't know what they're doing. They're just people. They're like literally your mechanic down the street, okay? This is why I find darknet markets so fascinating. Because these are markets where people don't want to use cryptocurrency, but they need to use cryptocurrency.

[01:29:17] Xenu: Okay, these markets would not exist without cryptocurrency. And they're using Monero because it's just very simple. You just use Monero, right? With Zcash, though, it's better now because you can go funnel people through the Zashi wallet. That's better. I agree with that. But that's still confusing to people. People, I guarantee you, there will be people who think Zcash is private, and they will withdraw from a KYC exchange, a T-address, and then send that to something they're not supposed to send to. That's going to happen a lot.

[01:29:54] Xenu: Because people do not understand what they're getting themselves into when they're using cryptocurrency. They're not studying the tech. They don't read the white papers. They don't listen to our...

[01:30:06] Vlad Costea: I don't disagree with you there, but at the same time, even in the case of Monero, you have some UX quirks, like generating sub addresses and making sure that you are not receiving payments to the same sub address and also that you are paying from a certain sub address to make sure that you're not revealing your main account. I mean, there are still some quirks that you need to understand to follow through to be sure that your privacy is pristine. I'm not saying that it's as bad as sending from a transparent address, thinking that you're actually benefiting from privacy.

[01:30:42] Vlad Costea: But still, I think the tech stack of Monero... Oh god, I said it. Montero is actually a bit old, and it's bound for major improvements. And maybe that full-chain membership proofs are going to bring that. But also, there's going to come a time, and we have to be very cognizant of it, when maybe quantum computers are going to become a reality. And this can mean, potentially, that what we know today as obfuscated by ring signatures and stealth addresses and all of this tech stack that's available on Montero is going to become visible, just like on Bitcoin.

[01:31:22] Vlad Costea: So we're going to have to face a future where a copy of a full node today is going to be completely transparent to anyone who wants to understand what happened. And maybe that will be so far into the future that we're not going to care. But still, it's an issue that can actually happen.

[01:31:47] Xenu: Well, here's the thing, Vlad. The biggest challenge facing privacy is KYC exchanges. So you're right. Monero can be broken by quantum computing. Absolutely. I'm not going to argue against that. And it's very concerning. There's a lot of people talking about it. This is not something that's not talked about. But we have to keep moving forward, right? And we have to keep pushing. And the thing is, with Monero, we have a situation where we are moving forward with quantum computing. So we have full-chain membership proofs, and we have this forward secrecy being innovated on, right?

[01:32:35] Xenu: It's not perfect. Like, I would love to have a situation where we have this right now, but we don't. But here's the problem, though. The problem is KYC. And this is the problem for not only Monero. It's for Zcash. It's for Bitcoin. It's for everybody. Because you're tying your identity to transaction data. And that transaction data is on a public blockchain. So this, to me, is really the big problem.

[01:33:05] Xenu: And I'm going to put this out there. It's weird to me that Zcash is not facing the same scrutiny as Monero is. Why would that be? Like, to me, that seems kind of weird, right? Where Monero is constantly battling and being delisted from exchanges, but Zcash isn't. And to build on that...

[01:33:33] Vlad Costea: Well, I have an answer for that. And it's actually much simpler than thinking of some sort of conspiracy. They spend a lot of money on lobbying. They actually talk to politicians. They try to tell them, yeah, this is not for criminals. This is for normal people who want to hide their money from their employer or from their neighbor or from the people to whom they make payments. And they also have this academic cover, right? Because they're working on something very avant-garde in terms of mathematics and cryptography, which is zero-knowledge proofs, which they can argue that can be used for some other stuff too.

[01:34:10] Vlad Costea: And for banks and other types of technologies or use cases. So they do have this lobbying aspect, which Monero does not benefit from. Because I do want to go back and explain where Monero comes from and where Zcash comes from. Because they're... Oh, oh shit, I said Bolero by accident. Anyway, Monero is... Just a second before this, because you cut off again. And I need to basically change the input. I'm gonna have to do this all the time and it sucks. And also I do see the messages in the chat and I'm gonna acknowledge them and answer to all of them.

[01:34:51] Vlad Costea: I made a list of good questions. Go ahead.

[01:34:55] Xenu: Well, I was just gonna point out though, one issue with Zcash is it hasn't faced these delistings because it's not being used on these darknet markets. And once it happens...

[01:35:05] Vlad Costea: Just a few months ago, Binance was gonna delist Zcash. And they actually had to run a campaign and they put some pressure. And I think it was the Winklevoss twins. And I don't remember exactly which big accounts.

[01:35:20] Xenu: What happens when Zcash is responsible for a 20 million dollar payment to North Korea? This is a different game.

[01:35:32] Vlad Costea: It is, I agree with that. But at the same time, I think they are in a much better position politically because of the money that they give to lobbyists like Coin Center to just say, well, it's for everyone and this can happen and stuff like this. Like they're paying money to lobbyists to keep them out of jail because the developers, unlike in the case of Bolero, they're fully doxxed and they live in the US. And if someone wants to arrest them, they're basically out there.

[01:36:04] Xenu: Well, speaking of that, actually, this brings me to a point. I was speaking to a friend of mine, Rucknium. Rucknium is a Monero developer. I'm actually friends with him. I talk with him every now and then. He told me he wanted to work on Zcash and he was applying for it because he wanted to do analysis on whatever thing that they have. And it turns out he couldn't actually apply to them because it demanded KYC. And I just wanted to point that that's kind of weird, right?

[01:36:36] Xenu: Why would they demand KYC in a privacy project? You know, it's kind of weird.

[01:36:44] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, because it's not like an open GitHub repo, especially. I mean, there is if you just want to contribute. But if you want to get paid, you have to get hired by one of these companies that actually pay developers and they do tend to have their own policy. If there was more of a grassroots movement within the community and there were a lot of contributions from this person. And at one point they said, well, we want to keep this person around contributing. I can see how they could find the work around.

[01:37:14] Vlad Costea: But if he sought employment from one of these [unclear: three] companies that are building Zcash right now, I can see why they would have that kind of attitude. I know, man.

[01:37:27] Xenu: And for a privacy project, that's that's kind of weird to me.

[01:37:32] Vlad Costea: I mean, when you think about it, even the guys from Wasabi Wallet, they had a company and they did have to sign contracts with the people working for them. And I know a bunch of them. I never had a contract with them, even if the Samourai guys accused me. I actually just had the sponsorship deal with the podcast, but never signed the contract. They were just supporting my show benevolently, like donating to it. And I do see a lot of these privacy projects having to deal with this.

[01:38:04] Vlad Costea: In the case of Samourai and Wasabi is that they actually could open companies in the British Virgin Islands or whatever. But here we're talking about US companies building with US people and having to report to politicians, maybe sometimes with these lobby groups that do try to minimize any potential impact that this can make.

[01:38:30] Xenu: No, see, the thing, though, is this is a major attack vector. Like Zcash can be targeted. So, OK, Zcash, the ticker ZEC, I figured out what this actually stands for the other day. It stands for the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, ZEC. I thought it stood for Zcash. No, it's actually for the company, this for-profit company out there. And this is what you're buying, right? You're buying this like company token, right? And again, there's people working for Zcash that are probably great and that probably, you know, are cypherpunks, probably people I would like.

[01:39:15] Xenu: But this is a problem because the American government is pretty harsh against companies that don't do what they want them to do. And this is a major attack vector because, again, you have these researchers and these people working for projects who are all doxxed.

[01:39:35] Vlad Costea: I think it's the same as Bitcoin versus Ethereum in this regard. Like you can argue, Ethereum has companies and the foundation and legal entities and everyone is doxxed and everyone, I think, is under some sort of contract to work on at least the core development and some of the projects related to it. Whereas in the case of Bitcoin, it's more grassroots and it grew from just people wanting to contribute, earning a reputation. And I used to hate Ethereum with a passion. I was saying, you know, it's unfair. It has this pre-mine, it has this politics. But then I saw what they actually did during the Tornado Cash trials and I saw how they actually scale Bitcoin.

[01:40:24] Vlad Costea: And I did not envision this previously. I was thinking, oh, it's just a horrible shitcoin. It's going to get replaced. But it does scale Bitcoin. 100,000 BTC is wrapped on Ethereum right now. And a lot of these zk roll-ups that started out on Ethereum are coming back to Bitcoin and the amount of money that they put into research and math and cryptography and just computer science in general has advanced the space by at least a decade.

[01:40:54] Vlad Costea: And, of course, they started out as a very terrible idea that had no way of actually working, there's no way you could actually scale putting computation on chain. But they made it work. So they started from this impossible idea of, you know, everyone telling them that it's not gonna work. They hired academics, of course, they had their shitty tokens and bad projects and failed layer 2s like Plasma, nobody talks about that anymore, or Raiden, which was their version of the Lightning Network. But in the end, they made it work.

[01:41:33] Vlad Costea: And I think the optics for which I see Zcash is, first of all, that it's a fork of Bitcoin, a fork of Bitcoin that added the Zerocash protocol, which was proposed for Bitcoin back in 2013, and one that tried to make that Zerocash protocol scale and remove that trusted setup. And I think they accomplished this and they're pushing scaling further. On the other hand, Monero is, oh, let me, I actually have a list. I'm gonna call it Murcielago this time, which actually is quite flattering.

[01:42:09] Vlad Costea: So Murcielago actually is reactionary to Bitcoin in the sense that if you look at the CryptoNote white paper, which was published by Nicolas van Saberhagen, he says that Bitcoin cannot work as design because it has these inherent flaws and issues with fungibility. And it was always supposed to be a competitor to Bitcoin. It was meant to be sort of the version of Bitcoin that can be used in commerce with better privacy and the one that you can actually spend on dark markets. That's part of the spirit.

[01:42:43] Vlad Costea: And the fact that there was Bytecoin and then you had a community fork that eliminated the Founders reward or the pre-mine, whatever it was there, is just the spirit of the network. There were, what's the name for it? There were people who wanted to break away from the status quo from the very beginning, iconoclasts or whatever. And this is basically where the project started. In the case of Zcash, it was always academic and it was always obvious that they want to do this for Bitcoin. And the reason why they have transparent addresses, I believe, is just because they wanted to prove to the Bitcoin community that their concerns about inflation bugs are not legit.

[01:43:28] Vlad Costea: The fact that later on they figured out that exchanges are going to list them, I think this is like a side effect of their initial intentions. But Zcash was always this research lab for Bitcoin. And it turned out that Ethereum used more of what Zcash built. And you could not have Tornado Cash or Railgun or these privacy protocols that use zero-knowledge proofs on Ethereum if it wasn't for Zcash. Today on Bitcoin we have proposals like shielded client-side validation or zkcoins, which are trying to bring part of Zcash's technology onto Bitcoin.

[01:44:06] Vlad Costea: Which is, once again, hacky and incomplete and not as elegant as just soft-forking Zerocash, but it's still an attempt. And I think ultimately when we have this conversation and this debate about which one is better, I think we're sort of missing the picture of the intentions behind the projects and how they started out. Because honestly, and I am very involved in Zcash, but I don't see this as being the money, you know? I see this as being the ultimate research team that is able to make what was previously considered to be purely theoretical into something that actually works in production code.

[01:44:49] Vlad Costea: Which is something that they kept on shipping. If this actually ends up being the money and the one that we use in daily payments, that would be a very hilarious outcome. It would sort of be like Dogecoin in some ways, getting adopted. Because it was never meant to be that, it was meant to be something that is used for research. And of course there are fights within the privacy communities. You see this even with operating systems on mobile, like there are people who prefer GrapheneOS, and then you have the other people who prefer CalyxOS, and you're gonna find all sorts of arguments between them.

[01:45:28] Vlad Costea: It's sort of horrible in the sense that when you say to people that everything has trade-offs and you should not be using, or you should be waiting until it's perfect, which we're never gonna have, because there's a constant battle between the KYC side or the blockchain analysis side, and then the privacy side, and both of them are advancing pretty rapidly. I don't think we'll ever have the perfect privacy for anything. And even if we do have that, there's also the meatspace aspect of it. Like maybe that the transaction itself is perfectly private, but then you have humans who communicate in order to make it happen.

[01:46:10] Vlad Costea: And that part is not gonna be as private, because people are bad at keeping secrets, and they're gonna tell someone about it, or they're gonna talk on the phone about it. Or I don't know, there's gonna be something that's gonna give away the fact that they did do that transaction. Or maybe that their chips are backdoored, so it doesn't matter that the software is protected as long as their keyboard or whatever part of hardware that's involved in the transaction is backdoored and compromised. So where was I going with this?

[01:46:45] Vlad Costea: It's important when we have conversations about this to first of all be understanding or cognizant of the origins of the project and what their intentions are. And secondly, we should not be toxic to the extent that we turn people away from ever trying to use privacy, because you always have different layers and different types of adversaries. And for the most basic ones, which tend to be people in our lives who maybe are not very well-meaning towards our well-being in general, and they want to steal from us, or they want to dox us, or they want to use information about us in a bad way, I think these are the first adversaries.

[01:47:32] Vlad Costea: And then there's also the nation-state aspect, which is debatable, because not all nation-states are using the same resources, and not all of them are willing to go to the same lengths to trace one transaction. So it's very nuanced. I don't know if there's any definitive answer for any of this, but I do see how the two communities can be more, how should I put it, not cooperative necessarily, but more productive in their debate. So that it's not just gotcha moments and they're like, ha, you have the Israeli Department of Defense or whatever on the white paper of Zerocash, this is the Zionist cash or whatever.

[01:48:21] Vlad Costea: Or ha, look, Fluffy Pony is an informant to the Interpol or something, because he got arrested and he said this about Monero. Like, this is such a low-hanging fruit. If you really wanted to have a debate that's technical, you could actually look at how stuff works. For example, the integration of NEAR Intents and Zashi is actually a good conversation, and there's something educational about the way these swaps actually work. Just a second, just a second, because your audio is cut off and I need to fix it.

[01:48:54] Vlad Costea: Okay.

[01:48:55] Xenu: Yeah, I was going to make a video actually about the ZachXBT thing for Zcash, actually. I have Zcash fans, for what it's worth. So, you know, I think it's very important information, that vulnerability of using NEAR Intents, it's something that needs to be talked about.

[01:49:16] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's a DeFi integration, it's something that enables you to swap. What I do like about it, so I would not recommend it for swapping into Zcash, because you're going to be reusing that transparent address. But if you want to make payments out of the shielded pool, it's actually pretty cool. Because, for example, you can scan a QR code for Bitcoin or Litecoin or something else, or Ethereum, and it's going to do the swap in the background and it comes out of the shielded pool and that's a lot more private.

[01:49:48] Xenu: Well, that's the problem though, because you would actually reveal yourself if you do that. How? Because you're, basically you would receive a refund transaction to your transparent Zcash address.

[01:50:05] Vlad Costea: But why do you need a refund?

[01:50:09] Xenu: Because you're paying the NEAR Intents thing, or whatever.

[01:50:17] Vlad Costea: You cut off again, let me fix this.

[01:50:23] Vlad Costea: Okay, you cut off at ZachXBT. And I swear, this is not on purpose, it's just shitty software.

[01:50:31] Xenu: Yeah, no, I understand. Yeah, ZachXBT has a thread, actually we should probably pull it up, it would be better to just like, can we do that?

[01:50:40] Vlad Costea: Can you share your screen? Because I don't have Twitter on purpose on this laptop.

[01:50:44] Xenu: I would rather not. Because it's distracting.

[01:50:46] Vlad Costea: How do I do this? Let me search for the thread and then I can take a screenshot and send it to my computer. That's the way in which I can make it happen.

[01:50:54] Xenu: Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Just because I'm on my laptop.

[01:50:58] Vlad Costea: I'm also on my laptop, which I don't use for Twitter. Because it's distracting and I try to use this for work.

[01:51:05] Xenu: Yeah, but basically, when you use the Zashi wallet, you are forced to use a unified transparent address. And that transparent address can be linked to future transactions you make, even if you are using shielded Zcash. And he figured that out pretty much immediately, which is a huge vulnerability.

[01:51:28] Vlad Costea: But that's not really how it works. Because let's say that you withdraw from an exchange to your transparent address, and then you shield it. And then you wait a few days, because it's a good idea to wait and not pay the exact same amount that you shielded out of the anonymity pool. And maybe let's say that you're going to make a transaction to Bitcoin using NEAR Intents, and it's going to be half of your amount. If it's from the shielded pool, basically it's going to subtract the fee.

[01:52:05] Vlad Costea: So what you're saying is that NEAR Intents works in a way that basically it transfers your shielded funds to your public address and then operates from the public address?

[01:52:15] Xenu: Yes, there's metadata that leaks that shows the transparent address. So I think we should pull this up, because this is intuitive. And it highlights something that I really want to point out to people is that privacy is not an on or an off switch. It's something that we have to constantly be fighting. And with Zcash, I've been told this is 100% private. And that's just not the case. There's always going to be ways to attack it.

[01:52:43] Vlad Costea: You have to also understand that Zashi, the wallet, is not Zcash, the network. And if you're using the full node software, it's actually much better, except that it doesn't have this NEAR integration.

[01:52:57] Vlad Costea: And if you go to the NEAR integration website, you actually get a much better experience in terms of privacy, as opposed to having an integration inside of an app. There's a trade off here between convenience and privacy. And maybe it's unfortunate that this is happening. But the way in which you present it is like me saying that if Cake Wallet has this feature, which does not grant you the greatest amount of privacy that you could have with a full node, like you share your view keys, I don't know, something.

[01:53:32] Vlad Costea: I would conclude that the Monero network is like that, which to be fair is not a good comparison. I think actually Edge Wallet keeps your view key.

[01:53:45] Xenu: There might be other wallets that do. The closed-source wallets, I don't trust for that reason, to be honest with you. But I will say, though, that this vulnerability is not just me just dunking on Zcash. I literally was going to make a video about this, because I have people who like my channel who are Zcash holders. The Zcash people who like me are speaking out because they're pissed off because they're being talked down upon. And this kind of comes back to the culture of Zcash, where it's kind of like elitist in a way.

[01:54:24] Xenu: It's very like hoity-toity, like, oh, we're better than those other people who are depending on darknet markets. Those people who are depending on darknet markets, those are regular people, okay? They're normal people. They're people who you see every day. So when you read stuff like that, it's like, who are you talking to, you know?

[01:54:51] Xenu: You're insulting regular people.

[01:54:55] Vlad Costea: Well, I read the response to this situation and they're actually thankful. And they said, yeah, we're going to take notes of this and we're going to improve it. Like, it wasn't a toxic response that I would see from Samourai Wallet, for example, like three years ago. And they would say, that's not true. Our product is perfect. It's the fault of the user or something like this. They actually said, yeah, we're going to fix it. We're going to add rotating addresses. And also improve the way in which the integration works to enable shielded addresses.

[01:55:27] Vlad Costea: Like, I agree that for now Zashi is not perfect, but you can use the full node, which is actually much better. If your goal is to have the best privacy that's possible. And if you do want to use the near integration, you can go to their website and you can send out of your full node with shielded address. And they're going to do the swap and it's actually the much better experience from a privacy point of view. But it's not convenient. You don't have it on an app on your phone.

[01:55:59] Vlad Costea: Just a second. I need to fix your audio again.

[01:56:07] Xenu: You're going to have fun in post-production, man.

[01:56:10] Vlad Costea: No, I'm going to leave it like this because I don't want people to think that the conversation was not organic or that I made you repeat some stuff on purpose or whatever. It's good to have context for why we got here.

[01:56:24] Xenu: Well, yeah, it's hard to debate when I have to lose my train of thought here.

[01:56:31] Xenu: The problem with Zashi is that you're presenting it as perfectly private. And that's a big problem.

[01:56:37] Vlad Costea: I don't think someone actually said that. Can you find a quote?

[01:56:41] Xenu: Well, I mean, from what I've seen on Twitter, Zashi is branded as shielded, Z to Z, you're in the clear kind of a situation. And that's not the case. When you're dealing with metadata that can be derived from T addresses, you're dealing with metadata. And that will be used against Zcash users. So I'm not surprised this vulnerability exists because, to be frank with you, Zcash probably wouldn't exist if it was fully Z to Z. Or it would exist, but it would not be on all these exchanges.

[01:57:20] Xenu: So that's really what we're looking at here.

[01:57:23] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, but Bitcoin researchers would just accuse it of having inflation if it had Z to Z only. And when I interviewed Zooko, he actually said that he's happy that Pirate Chain exists because it basically proves that there's no inflation in a Z only kind of situation. Like, they can't make that design choice anymore.

[01:57:47] Xenu: Well, like, why does that matter? You're using digital cash. You know why it does matter? As if you're looking at it from the moonboy perspective. That's why it would matter. Because you want to get rich. Because with Monero, the same criticism comes up. And it's like, you know what, listen. The people who are going to find an inflation bug are probably the crypto geniuses, you know, the scientists who are doing a bunch of research and shit. Those are the people who are going to find the bug.

[01:58:21] Xenu: And those are the ones who are going to report it. It's probably not going to be some like script kiddie who's going to exploit the project, right? So with Monero and Bitcoin, Zcash, whatever, the chances of an inflation bug are actually very slim, in my opinion. I really don't view it as that much of an issue. It's kind of like when you board a flight, you're flying to Romania, you know. You're trusting the pilot, right? You're trusting the plane. You put trust in things. That's kind of what we're doing when you're using cryptocurrency.

[01:59:02] Xenu: We're putting trust in the fact that the math will exist, right? So I kind of lost my train of thought there, but sorry, I lost my train of thought.

[01:59:17] Vlad Costea: So you started from the idea of trust.

[01:59:20] Xenu: Yes. Yes. So with trust, like with Zcash, it's very hard to trust them because they are a company, they're a for-profit company. It might not be Zcash specifically now. It's gotten better. They have a Zcash foundation, right? They have like a...

[01:59:40] Vlad Costea: I don't think it's called Zcash foundation. There's the Electric Coin Company, there's Shielded Labs, and there's, yeah, maybe Zcash foundation. That's what they call it.

[01:59:52] Xenu: Yeah, it's something like that. I mean, the point's kind of moot. The problem is you have a company behind it, okay? It's not a company. And that company can be attacked.

[02:00:06] Vlad Costea: I mean, you can argue that you have some... That company does not collect that 20% amount.

[02:00:14] Xenu: They have a dev tax.

[02:00:17] Vlad Costea: No, they removed that after the second [unclear: halving].

[02:00:20] Xenu: They still have a treasury. They have a lockbox currently, right? Well, listen, they've received money. We can agree on that, right?

[02:00:29] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and what do they do with the money? That's the other question. And they actually delivered what they said they would. That was part of the social contract when you entered. Like, nobody actually came up with this dev tax in the middle of running the project. This was there from the very beginning, and it was a tax on miners. The miners said, okay, we're going to run this software. We're going to give our hashrate to it, and we do agree that this condition is going to exist that we pay to the Zcash developers.

[02:00:58] Vlad Costea: To be honest, they actually delivered, because until... So you can shit on Zashi all day long, but until like three, four years ago, it was not possible computationally and cryptographically to even have a shielded Zcash wallet on mobile. This was considered to be impossible. They needed to actually refine the cryptography to make it run on existing hardware. And this is still a major breakthrough. And maybe that, in Monero, you can take that for granted, because Monero uses battle-tested technology, which maybe is not avant-garde, but just works.

[02:01:34] Vlad Costea: Oh, I said Monero again. Let me pull up my list.

[02:01:39] Vlad Costea: Italiano Vero. Italiano Vero. That's the new one. So maybe that, for Italiano Vero, it's a lot more easy, because Blockstream has built some of these technologies, like confidential transactions. The Bulletproofs were researched also by a bunch of Bitcoin developers. Dandelion was supposed to come to Bitcoin to make full nodes harder to dox.

[02:02:10] Vlad Costea: Just a second, I need to fix your audio again. So you said that you love the fact that Italiano Vero saw the potential to use better technology from Bitcoin.

[02:02:23] Xenu: Yeah. No, I like the fact that they did that, because that is humble, right? That it's like, you know what, these people are smarter than us. Let's implement it. And let me tell you, Bitcoin, they have not implemented Dandelion++. No, they haven't.

[02:02:42] Vlad Costea: They have excuses for it. I actually said this to Peter Todd, like, why the hell don't we have this? And he was like, oh, but it's horrible for the peer-to-peer relaying. And I'm like, man, if it works for Monero, what makes you think that? Oh, I said it again. If it works for Macareno, what makes you think that it's not going to work for Bitcoin? And it's really ridiculous after a certain point, but obviously they did not want to make Bitcoin more private.

[02:03:11] Xenu: Yeah, well, absolutely. Yeah, it really comes down to that. Like, they look at Bitcoin like a tech stock. They don't care. I give Zcash credit, they care.

[02:03:23] Xenu: It seems like they care, they want to make private transactions. But yeah, I have issues, though, with the whole, listen, OK? You, out there, the Zcash people, talking to you should demand only Z to Z transactions. Stop being a fucking pussy, OK? Go to the fucking, go to the, what's his name, [unclear: Swilward]? Who's the CEO? I don't know. Fucking go to this guy. Yeah, tell him, hey, pussy, but I want Z to Z transactions because this is bullshit. And that's what it is. Like, I don't see that fucking passion.

[02:04:03] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but to be honest, you're not going to get this from the institutions.

[02:04:06] Vlad Costea: You're going to get this from people who run services and they do accept Z to Z. And it's going to come from BTCPay Server, which actually did the integration to make it happen.

[02:04:14] Xenu: Let them. Who cares? You want fungibility. And I'm not seeing that passion here because I'm telling you right now in the Monero crowd, there would be passion if that wasn't happening. And I don't know, maybe they don't care. Maybe they want to treat Zcash like a tech stock. Fine. But from my point of view, this is inexcusable, really, is what it is, because it's a huge attack vector. You can do timing analysis on this. Very simple.

[02:04:44] Vlad Costea: Assuming that you just shield and then unshield a few seconds later, the same amount. Absolutely.

[02:04:49] Xenu: That's how people use cryptocurrency.

[02:04:50] Vlad Costea: But you will never be able to not do this unless the devs decide that you should keep your coins for a certain number of blocks. But even in that case, the analysis is going to take into account the new rules and they will be able to figure out that, okay, this person shielded one ZEC and then unshielded the same amount minus transaction fees. Like, you do have to stay in the shielded pool enough blocks so that there's going to be more withdrawals from it.

[02:05:18] Vlad Costea: So that you don't look like, hey, especially if you're a whale, it's super suspicious. You're going to have to get out of the shielded pool with smaller amounts.

[02:05:29] Xenu: Zcash can be attacked regardless. I'm having this conversation because transparent addresses is such a metadata leak. Because it's basically using Bitcoin, right? There's no difference.

[02:05:45] Vlad Costea: It could be much cooler, to be honest, if someone made coinjoins when you leave the shielded pool and when you join the shielded pool.

[02:05:52] Xenu: How about you make it just private by default, Vlad? Fuck, dude. Listen, this is so ridiculous.

[02:06:02] Vlad Costea: Wait, it's so unfortunate. Let me fix your audio. I don't know, it almost seems like there's a timer for this and you get cut out after a few, I don't know, minutes.

[02:06:15] Xenu: I get fired up. I probably blow out the mic.

[02:06:18] Vlad Costea: No, it's not on your side. It's my software.

[02:06:23] Vlad Costea: It's FOSS that maybe is not optimized for my hardware. But it's the first time when it does this and people in the chat will suspect that I'm sabotaging the ability to debate. I'm really doing my best here.

[02:06:36] Xenu: No, no, for the people listening, Vlad's been great. We're all good, we're friends. Let me know if I'm good to talk.

[02:06:44] Vlad Costea: You are. I keep watching your bar, which goes from green to yellow, what do you call this, [unclear: fader]?

[02:06:52] Xenu: I lost my train of thought again. It's really hard to go into these rants.

[02:06:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so I said something about coinjoins in and out of shielded pools.

[02:07:06] Vlad Costea: Then you said why don't you make it private by default?

[02:07:10] Xenu: Yeah, why not? Listen, the reason Zcash is not going private by default is because they don't want that smoke. That's it. They don't want the smoke. They're pussies. They're fucking pussies. Prove me wrong, Zcash. Actually, prove me wrong. And this is the thing. This is not just me. This is everybody else. Prove us wrong. Fucking go for that smoke. Because if you do, you'll get the respect. Because in the future, we're not going to have respect from governments. Our open source projects will have to exist like cockroaches.

[02:07:58] Xenu: And with Zcash, it's kind of like they're playing this game where they're like buddy buddy with the government. It's like stop being like that. What are you doing? It's ridiculous. So that's my statement on that.

[02:08:12] Vlad Costea: Oh yeah, but when you have to hire academics, it's very delicate. Who's funding universities? It's a very fine line. You do have to a certain degree to play the game until you win. Hopefully. Like, Monero is playing a different game compared to... No, no, no. Wait, wait. Macareno is playing a different game compared to Zcash.

[02:08:36] Xenu: No, no. I disagree completely, actually. I think Monero also has academics. And that's something I see a lot where the Zcash people, they say that Monero has these idiots...

[02:08:49] Vlad Costea: Well yeah, but Macareno has academics who build for Bitcoin and then Bitcoin rejects the proposal. And then they say, well, let's try it somewhere. Well, they got... I mean, Jonas Nick and what's the other one, Liam Eagen, they don't work directly for Macareno. They're not developers in any way. It's just that their technology got used by people who read their papers and said, well, this is interesting, we could use this.

[02:09:14] Xenu: Okay, but there are Monero developers who are working directly for Monero. Like, just because there have been developers who have taken other things from other projects, doesn't mean there aren't developers who are focused on Monero. Like, Luke Parker's a genius.

[02:09:29] Vlad Costea: Oh, I don't disagree with that, but at the same time he's also rage quit at one point.

[02:09:33] Xenu: Like, these people, they're working very hard on a project. And I find it highly troubling when the Zcash crowd looks down on Monero and says it's an amateur project. There are people who care here.

[02:09:49] Xenu: There are people who really, really care. It's not this amateur hour fucking after school, hey guys, who wants to make privacy? No, we care. We have meetings every Wednesday. The Monero Research Lab has a meeting every Wednesday. This is real shit. And you know what? We're being used, okay? So I want to hear it because, you know what this reminds me of? Okay, I'm going to call you out, Vlad. You know what this reminds me of? When I hear us being talked about privacy and being used about privacy, it reminds me of The 40-Year-Old Virgin where they're fucking at the table and they're talking about boobs and Steve Carell's like, oh yeah, bags of sand.

[02:10:34] Xenu: Zcash isn't being used for shit, okay? It's not being used for anything.

[02:10:40] Vlad Costea: I disagree with you there. And I can also... Come talk to me. Bitcoin and Ethereum are using Zcash right now, okay? No, no, no. They are. Who's using Monero? Wait, Macareno, who's using that? This tech stack, which is wonderful and the most private, who's using it? Which other project is aspiring to be like Macareno? Tell me. You said it's not amateur hour. Tell me, if this one is really the best, why aren't there like a hundred forks of it? What's the best fork of it? Wownero? No, I don't care. You should care, because it's an open source space. And if something is really good, then it's... It's gonna be the most copied, right?

[02:11:22] Xenu: No, because this entire space is captured by vultures.

[02:11:27] Vlad Costea: No, I disagree with you here. There would be like a hundred forks of people trying to capitalize on it.

[02:11:33] Xenu: Vlad, we just talked about Michael Saylor for like an hour.

[02:11:39] Vlad Costea: Wait, wait, you said this space is captured by Michael Saylor. Let me fix your audio once again.

[02:11:47] Vlad Costea: Okay, should be back.

[02:11:52] Xenu: Yeah, I mean... Can you hear me? Check? Yeah. Yeah, this space is captured by Michael Saylor. Okay, it's... I lost my train of thought.

[02:12:04] Vlad Costea: Wait, so I told you that if Monero... Ah, shit. Yeah, I know. Romero, Murano. Okay, Murano, I didn't see this one. I have a full page of names. If Murano really has the best technology out there, why isn't it the most copied? That's not true. Why aren't Bitcoin developers talking about how to be more like Murano as opposed to be more like Zcash? Why isn't Ethereum, which is very academic also, not talking about how to be like Murano? Why isn't, I don't know, name another privacy project, how many of them are actually using Dandelion++ and ring signatures or planning to add full-chain membership proofs?

[02:12:47] Vlad Costea: I can tell you just one of them, and it's called Zano, and that's it. And it's by one of the guys who actually worked on the CryptoNote protocol back in the day. And that's the only project that has full-chain membership proofs on the roadmap. Do you know how many projects are actually planning to add ZK snarks over the next few years?

[02:13:08] Xenu: I do not, no.

[02:13:10] Vlad Costea: A lot of them, including stablecoins. Okay. But they do want to use some kind of trick so that they can actually use a ZK proof to make the regulators happy and blah, blah, blah. Which arguably you could do with the Murano technology if you actually handed the view keys or something. So if that became a requirement to be using the service. Oh, god.

[02:13:32] Xenu: What? View keys? No, no, no, no, no. No, we're not doing that.

[02:13:38] Vlad Costea: Of course not. Which is why you're not integrated with DeFi, and the volume of Murano right now is much smaller than Zcash. Sure.

[02:13:49] Xenu: We'll take that. We'll take the hit. You know why? Because we're being used where it matters. Okay, sure.

[02:13:56] Vlad Costea: Quality over quantity. You can argue like this.

[02:13:59] Xenu: Exactly. And you know why? You know why people aren't using Zcash? Because of shit like this. Zcash isn't fighting this fight, man. Zcash isn't dealing with the smoke, okay? They're not.

[02:14:13] Vlad Costea: Well, I can argue that there's a lot that you don't know, and there's a lot that's being paid for so that there is no smoke

[02:14:19] Xenu: To be dealt with.

[02:14:21] Xenu: I would imagine. I would imagine. They're paying a lot because... Actually, you know, I have a conspiracy theory that the reason for the price bump is because they're aware that these actions are going to happen in the future, and they're trying to get something out of it to afford their payroll.

[02:14:39] Vlad Costea: It's actually not a bad conspiracy. I've heard such worse stuff out there. There are people who think in zero-sum terms. They're like, oh, so just when Murano was getting traction, they wanted to pump Zcash because it's a zero-sum game, and of course it's this protagonist of the market who has to be basically put in a position where he's not in the spotlight anymore. I was like, man, there's so much stuff happening in parallel around the world, which is not necessarily connected. You don't have to necessarily believe like, oh, Ethereum is getting pumped because Bitcoin was getting all the traction from ETFs or whatever.

[02:15:16] Vlad Costea: That's not why. People just... Either they start trends or else there's momentum for something, and it's just how free markets work. Money is moving across multiple projects at all times. Like, we can both agree at this point that meme coins are stupid, but at the same time, from a political point of view, they were an interesting statement. Like, if we're going to get regulated to the point that we can't have meaningful stuff anymore, we're just going to build markets for degenerate stuff, which is very close to gambling, except that it's much worse because the chances for you to win are much more rigged than in the case of casinos.

[02:15:57] Vlad Costea: But politically, you can argue that, yes, they're interesting because they proved you can actually have free markets and transactions with something as stupid as dogwifhat. Like, that one had a stupid amount of volume and was a top 20 coin at one point. And yeah, we are right now in a situation where it seems like we're dealing with a world that's more friendly to the idea of Bitcoin, at least in speech, because in terms of privacy it's getting much worse. In terms of peer-to-peer adoption and payments, it's much worse.

[02:16:30] Vlad Costea: And we still virtue signal about the Saudi Arabian wife who needs a bank account, and about the North Korean who's trying to flee dictatorship, and about the African person who's trying to escape hyperinflation. These are the narratives that somehow give legitimacy to Bitcoin as a payment system. But is it still being used? You take a look at the mempool, you take a look at the number of Lightning channels and the activity on the chain. There's no chain. Actually, I said something stupid. There's no way to see how many transactions are in Lightning unless you get information from every node and they report to you.

[02:17:11] Vlad Costea: So we don't know this, but I can tell that the interest in it has lowered over the years, the liquidity is lower, the number of channels is lower, and it's becoming more custodied. And it sucks. And I find a lot of hope in these projects, which give you privacy. And I hope that Bitcoin is going to adopt this technology at some point, once we get rid of Michael Saylor, once the moon boys are leaving town. And we do need to reinvent this to give it legitimacy, so that it's much more than just a tech stock and something that's cool to invest in from your Robinhood app.

[02:17:50] Vlad Costea: But we're not there yet. Just a second, let me fix your audio.

[02:18:02] Vlad Costea: Check, check.

[02:18:03] Xenu: Okay, you're back. Yeah, just to say something, though, like, so you're talking about usage of crypto. Where is Zcash used?

[02:18:15] Vlad Costea: Well, that's a good question. Right now, most of the volume comes from DeFi. And the fact that there are these integrations next week or something, there's gonna be what's it called, Hyperliquid or something.

[02:18:30] Vlad Costea: And it's just these DeFi platforms that started to use it. And I'm not sure to which extent it's shielded. And maybe that you can win some points here, because maybe most people don't know how to use it. And they do need to send it to their wallets that can shield funds and hold it there. And to their credit, like, if you look at the chart that shows how many coins were in the shielded pool in 2016, when the project launched, and then during the 2021 bull market.

[02:19:02] Vlad Costea: And today, I think over the last three months, it went from 1 million coins to 6 million coins in the shielded pool, which is honestly a progress. It just proves that an increasing number of users decided to move their coins because first of all, the UX is much simpler. Secondly, the technology is more mature, and they trust it more. And thirdly, they actually have hope for the future because there's Tachyon that promises to scale. And there's also shielded assets that are gonna be making this much more interesting.

[02:19:36] Vlad Costea: And there are some actual use cases, there are places that started to accept shielded ZEC. And it seems like it's so much better. It's exactly what it was supposed to be nine years ago, and it was not. And it's unfortunate that there was this, to be honest, the story of Zcash is just horrible. They had all of these bumps in the road, and it seems like they were self-defeating at one point. I don't think that the, and let me pull up my list, the morondo community had to do much of an effort to actually defeat Zcash because all of these technical issues were self-defeating.

[02:20:17] Vlad Costea: They actually had to face the dire consequences of the market punishing them. Right now, it's what it was supposed to be nine years ago. And if anything, the team did a good job over the years, and they did not waste the dev fund, but it took a lot of work. And if some people don't appreciate it, that's fine. But there's also a side of the market which can see value in this.

[02:20:43] Xenu: So prior to the pump, the moving day average, the 90-day moving average of transactions per day for Zcash was 2,400 per day. And it's important to note, 1,100 of those transactions are block rewards. So that means they had 1,300 transactions per day that were actual peer-to-peer transactions. Monero at the same time is having 24,000 per day.

[02:21:10] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but compare the numbers now.

[02:21:14] Xenu: It's still, I mean, Monero is still crushing. I mean, if you're looking at a moving time average, but like moving average shows the actual trend, whereas, you know, a price bump, obviously Zcash has more transactions currently, but it's nowhere near Monero still, even with the price bump, to be honest with you.

[02:21:38] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but if it's going to be integrated with these Solana and Ethereum platforms? It's going to prove actually useful, and it's sort of a shame that Monero did not get the same kind of integrations and the community did not push for them.

[02:21:54] Xenu: I mean, Vlad, I'm like, okay, can you name me a single merchant that has Monero and Zcash, whereas Zcash is used more than Monero?

[02:22:05] Vlad Costea: I don't have that data, so I don't know. Maybe that you're going to win points here.

[02:22:09] Xenu: But it doesn't exist, is the thing. Yeah, but why?

[02:22:21] Vlad Costea: Okay, can you explain why? Just a second, just a second, I need to fix your audio. Uh-huh, you cut off again. Okay, go.

[02:22:33] Xenu: This is the cultural problem with Zcash, okay? They don't use Zcash. They fucking treat it like a tech stock. Monero is so dedicated to using Monero. That's why Monero is used by these websites. CoinCards, ShopinBit, NanoGPT, okay? NanoGPT just added Monero a couple months ago. Monero is the most used cryptocurrency on that website.

[02:22:59] Vlad Costea: I think it was like a year ago. I remember trying it on Cake Wallet.

[02:23:05] Xenu: Well, Nonetheless, it's mogging the rest of the cryptocurrencies, and is Zcash being used on there? Probably not. But is it supported?

[02:23:12] Vlad Costea: That's the other question.

[02:23:13] Xenu: I think it's probably the same as on CoinCards, for example, it's supported. That was actually a tweet by CoinCards. They were like, yeah, since the price pump, we haven't seen a single Zcash transaction.

[02:23:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but that's actually a gotcha, you know? And it's not how you attract customers either. Like, how much did they actually advertise them? That they enable it? Did they actually try to interact with the Zcash users and tell them, hey, you can actually spend your ZEC here? Instead, they try to virtue signal to the tribe that actually pays them better, and actually fuel this fight between them. But that's really not how you get customers from the other side. That's how you just make them say, yeah, who cares?

[02:23:55] Xenu: I completely disagree. You get customers by people being passionate about spending Zcash. And the thing is, when I look on Twitter, I don't see people passionate about spending Zcash. I see a lot of charts.

[02:24:05] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but you're not gonna spend it to someone who's trying to insult you. Or trying to call you out saying, ha, you have this amount of money and you're not spending it in my shop. Like, why would I?

[02:24:19] Xenu: I'm not talking about, like, people who are being like racist or anything. I'm just talking in general. Wait, wait.

[02:24:26] Vlad Costea: What do you mean racist? Why did you bring this up?

[02:24:29] Xenu: Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I misheard you. But, like, you were talking about something else.

[02:24:34] Vlad Costea: But I just said that you take your business to people who respect you. And when someone calls you out and says you're not spending your money in my shop, that's actually the wrong attitude. Why would you? You should expect someone to try to persuade you by saying, hey, I'm offering this service or this amount of goods that you can purchase and you can come to my shop. And now I'm gonna offer you a service. But if they say, well, why don't you spend your money in my shop? Like, I was not even aware that this exists prior to that.

[02:25:09] Xenu: Well, that's why that's why I thought it was racist, because you're like discriminating, right? You're discriminating against somebody for doing something, right? Am I? Really? You're preventing somebody for spending.

[02:25:21] Vlad Costea: I'm not preventing anyone. I'm just saying that when you have any kind of money in your pocket and someone comes to you and tries to shame you. For not spending it in their place, my first reaction is to say, why? Why would I? It's mine. And now that you're condescending me for some reason, I'm just going to take my business somewhere else.

[02:25:44] Xenu: Well, you do that. So I don't see the argument here. Like you take your business somewhere else. Yeah. The free market shows what's happening right now with cryptocurrency transactions. And I think I think it speaks for itself.

[02:26:00] Vlad Costea: Well, that's just because you use past data. Like there's so much. So a lot of people will say this is a bubble and this is just like the other cycles. You see Zcash pumping and then some people like Cobie or whatever, they said that every time Zcash pumps, it's the sign of the end of the bull market. But really, I know it's a popular meme, but this time it's really different. They actually got their shit together. They actually have the proper integrations. They actually have technology that works a lot better than it did in the past.

[02:26:31] Vlad Costea: Like you can argue 2021 it was less substantiated. It was not backed by actual progress. But that's when they figured out how to remove the trusted setup. And from then it was just a matter of trying to pick up the pieces and see what's left from it to see if they're going to drive this ship or they're going to abandon it. But to their credit, they never quit working on it. Like in Bitcoin and maybe also in Montero, you talk about long time reputation and resilience and persistence and being on the market for a long time.

[02:27:09] Vlad Costea: I can think of 10 projects off the top of my head that abandoned the ship. And they said, OK, it did not work. Let's move on to the next one. In the case of Zcash, you did not have that. The people kept working. They made mistakes. They said stupid stuff like, hey, we can make this traceable for criminals, which once again, if it was possible, someone from the Monero community. Ah, shit. Let me pull up the list again. Someone from the Romano community would actually discover it and point it out because you do have smart people working on the project.

[02:27:42] Vlad Costea: And that would be so obvious. Or someone from the Ethereum community or someone from the Bitcoin.

[02:27:47] Xenu: Thank you. Thank you, Vlad, for telling us we have smart people working on Monero.

[02:27:51] Vlad Costea: I never said you don't.

[02:27:53] Vlad Costea: I just said that if the tech stack is so good, why is it not forked to death by every other project?

[02:28:02] Vlad Costea: Forked to death. But let me fix your audio once again, because when you ask me to repeat, you are not heard by the rest of the audience. Okay. So I never said that you don't have smart people. I just said that the technology is basically patched together from Bitcoin research mostly. Cool. And I don't see too many projects, for example, wanting to implement full-chain membership proofs. There's only one.

[02:28:30] Xenu: You know what's funny? You're...

[02:28:32] Vlad Costea: Actually, two of them. There's Wownero and there's also Zano. And that's it.

[02:28:37] Xenu: You were talking earlier about Zcash being a research project for Bitcoin, and it seems like Monero is benefiting from the research done by Bitcoin. I don't know. I don't disagree with that.

[02:28:50] Vlad Costea: It's a fact of research and markets and whatever. It's actually, you know, a lot of Blockstream's research ended up in Monero for better and for worse. I wish it was on Bitcoin. Never happened. It's on Liquid, for what it's worth, but nobody's using that. And maybe it's better than that nobody's using that.

[02:29:13] Xenu: No one's using Liquid, that's for sure.

[02:29:17] Vlad Costea: They actually got removed, I think, from mempool.space because it was so desolated. Did they really? Yeah.

[02:29:24] Xenu: That's fucking hilarious.

[02:29:26] Vlad Costea: It was so depressing to just look at that.

[02:29:29] Xenu: Fucking post a tweet about that.

[02:29:33] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's not on mempool.space, but they do have their own explorer, which is liquid.net for the network. And their block explorer was something along these lines. OK, block explorer, liquid.network. And you can look at it and they have two transactions per block. It's really depressing. It's a ghost town.

[02:30:00] Xenu: Yeah, and you know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of Zcash. Really?

[02:30:05] Vlad Costea: Why don't you pull up a block explorer and look at the amount of shielded transactions?

[02:30:09] Xenu: No, because of the past couple of weeks. You know what, actually, let's do that. You know what, let's do that because I guarantee you the majority of the transactions will be transparent. Let's fucking do this right now. This is good.

[02:30:21] Vlad Costea: The argument was not to compare the transparent ones with the shielded ones, but just to look at the growth that happened in the shielded ones. Because the narrative is that it's a ghost town, right? You're moving the goalpost. It was initially a ghost town. You said liquid reminds you of Zcash.

[02:30:36] Xenu: I'm Proving a point that the majority of Zcash doesn't actually care about privacy. And we can look at the block explorer right now together. I guarantee it's all transparent. Guarantee it.

[02:30:48] Vlad Costea: OK, so the URL, I think, is ZecHub. No, it's not.

[02:30:54] Xenu: Yeah, it's [unclear: called] the block explorer. Let's see it. Maybe I'm wrong. Hey, I would love to be wrong on this one.

[02:31:00] Vlad Costea: So it's zechub.wiki slash dashboard. So what you can see on the shielded supply overview is that right now there are 4.1.

[02:31:12] Xenu: No, no, I'm talking about the block explorer. Let's talk about transactions happening right now.

[02:31:17] Vlad Costea: Transaction summary. Okay, so what do you want to know?

[02:31:20] Xenu: Like the latest blocks, like what are the transactions happening in the blocks? Like are they shielded? What's going on?

[02:31:29] Vlad Costea: Oh, so there's shielded stats, I'm looking at it. Because also with Zcash, by the way, for the people listening- Total transactions, 45.9k over the last 24 hours, 26.7k were shielded, coming from 100 nodes.

[02:31:46] Xenu: Yeah, but like, it's confusing because there's different categories of transactions with Zcash. Which I honestly, I don't really understand. Because I know, because you can go from transparent to shielded, those are different types of transactions. What I'm looking for is shielded to shielded, okay? What percentage of those transactions are happening past 24 hours? Because I have a feeling they're not that high. I have a feeling transparent transactions are like at 90%. But maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.

[02:32:21] Vlad Costea: I just need to find the right data, so I'm not sure, I'm just looking at charts right now. You asked for basically how many shielded to shielded transactions were made?

[02:32:34] Xenu: Yeah, I do, because I'm genuinely interested in that because I do not think people are using Zcash. At least at the level that they should be using it at.

[02:32:45] Vlad Costea: Well, you're moving the goalpost again, because you went from I don't think people are using Zcash, which is one statement, and then at the level that it should be used, that's super relative.

[02:32:57] Xenu: Because I think it should be used more if the privacy is so good, it should be used more.

[02:33:04] Vlad Costea: I don't disagree with you there. Yeah. But you can't deny that there's growth here. And it's, you know, the pump, you can argue that it's just a bubble and it's gonna fade, but you can't argue against the usage that has increased. And the number of coins like there were. So on the first of, what's this, January 2025, so beginning of the year, you had 25,000 ZEC in the Sprout pool, 980,000 ZEC in the Sapling pool, and 942,000 in the Orchard pool. So basically, let's round up to 2 million ZEC.

[02:33:46] Vlad Costea: No, it's 1,900,000, 1.9 million.

[02:33:53] Vlad Costea: That was at the beginning of the year. Now you have the same 25,000 ZEC in the Sprout pool, which is the first version of Zcash, the one that is said to have had the inflation bug. Sapling pool has 700,000, 768,000 and Orchard pool 4,121,000. So within the span of how long has it been? Almost 11 months. We have gone from 900,000 in the Orchard pool to 4.1 million, which you can't deny is something bullish for privacy. It's a good metric.

[02:34:33] Vlad Costea: Just a second, let me fix your audio again.

[02:34:38] Xenu: Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot, but it should be 100%.

[02:34:44] Vlad Costea: I don't disagree with you here, but you know, markets do whatever they think is rational for them.

[02:34:51] Xenu: I think Zcash, they're being pussies and they don't want to face the smoke. That's what's happening right now. I mean, listen.

[02:34:57] Vlad Costea: I mean, if you really want Shielded like 100%, you can go for Pirate Chain, but there are two issues with it. The network effect and also the fact that it's always going to play catch up with Zcash, which is the one that's innovating and then Pirate Chain has to implement it. And right now, I think they still have not added some features. I don't want to say which because I'm going to be wrong.

[02:35:26] Xenu: They still have a trusted setup, first off, and also like they don't have any developers. It's just a guy maintaining a wallet. It's very dangerous. I would much rather hold and use Zcash than Pirate Chain.

[02:35:41] Vlad Costea: Which is unfortunate.

[02:35:42] Vlad Costea: Like if you're listening to this and you want Z2Z to really take off, like guaranteed 100% Z2Z, you should try Pirate Chain. And to be honest, I want to tackle this also because the way in which Zcash is treating forks and the way in which Montero is treating forks is very different. Zcash is like, oh, this is so cool. They had ZClassic, which was the one that had no dev fund and no unfair launch to put it like this. So it was like the virtue signaling version of Zcash, which they treated with respect.

[02:36:21] Vlad Costea: And they said, yeah, this is legitimate. Let's see if it takes off. And now there's Pirate Chain. And maybe that there's going to be, I did see that there's Ycash, which is also a Fork, but I'm not sure if there's any legitimacy behind it. Just people posting on Twitter about it in my mentions. But basically the way in which they approach these is that they say, well, it's really good that these exist because they prove whether or not the tech stack works. And they tried different stuff that we cannot at this point.

[02:36:51] Vlad Costea: The way in which Montero treats Zano is just horrible. They say it's a shit coin. Oh, it's this pre-mined whatever. Oh, we don't like this guy. He was tied to this Microsoft trial and blah, blah, blah. He's potentially a criminal. And for some reason we don't like them. Zano was banned from MoneroCon this year. They could not attend. And I also know that there was a hard fork in 2018, I think, or 2019 when there were forks of Montero made by community members who did not want to update to the latest software or they wanted to make changes.

[02:37:33] Vlad Costea: It was confusing for a while. There was a classic version. There was something else. And it took a while for the market to figure out what's happening. That's also when Wownero was born. But still the way in which they treat forks and the zero-sum mentality is something that I really dislike. Because if you really care about open source and you want your tech stack to be battle tested, you should encourage these people to make changes to it and see if there's something else that it can do.

[02:38:03] Vlad Costea: In the case of Zano, it has a hybrid proof-of-work, proof-of-stake system. And it has this, I forget what it's called, but it's a system through which they issue tokens on this ring signature and stealth addresses and confidential transactions design, which is also popular and popularized by Montero. So it's still bytecoin, crypto note, different design choices, but the community treats this like crap and they're very hateful towards it. In the case of Zcash, they're like, we wish more forks existed so that we could actually see this technology being used in different ways.

[02:38:54] Vlad Costea: I need to fix your audio. Just a second. I was actually waiting to see if it's going to work or I have to do this again. I apologize to everyone and to you, Xenu. By the way, before I let you say this, is Xenu like a male version of Princess Xena, the warrior princess?

[02:39:14] Xenu: No, it's a reference to the god of Scientology.

[02:39:17] Vlad Costea: Oh, okay. I'm not cultured enough to know that, so sorry.

[02:39:22] Xenu: Well, it's actually a very interesting story because in Scientology, you don't actually learn about Xenu until you have like over 10 years of work and then they tell you about him. But he's the god. Isn't that crazy?

[02:39:42] Vlad Costea: It's like the reveal, right? You go through this initiation.

[02:39:46] Vlad Costea: Yeah, literally. Like you don't have internet, right? You can't read this somewhere else.

[02:39:50] Xenu: Yeah, I swear to god that that's how it works. Like you have to do a bunch of work and they're like, okay, listen, guys, we're going to put you in a room and they put you guys in a room and they give you guys all this reading material and it's like this guy named Xenu and he dropped a bunch of aliens in a volcano and that created the souls of the universe or whatever. This is a South Park episode about this, but yeah, that's where I got the name.

[02:40:16] Xenu: It's a very fascinating subject. Scientology in general is like crazy. But I find it interesting though, because it's like, it's such a powerful figure in Scientology, but he's not explicitly talked about. And I think that's very interesting. It's a cool dynamic where he's the god, but he's not recognized as the god. In fact, they deny he's the god if you ask them. How cool is that?

[02:40:48] Vlad Costea: I don't care too much about this stuff. Like there are already enough religions fighting. I'm not going to concern myself with a bunch of Hollywood celebrities inventing their own.

[02:40:58] Xenu: Yeah, it's a whole Hollywood thing for sure.

[02:41:02] Vlad Costea: Okay, we were talking about community forks and the way in which the culture of different projects responds to the existence of them.

[02:41:11] Xenu: In Monero, the reason forks aren't really much of a problem is because the community is relatively united. We want digital cash. It's really it.

[02:41:27] Xenu: I mean, talking about Zano, I wrote banned question mark. I don't know what... It's hard to talk to you with this interview because like I have to delay the conversation because of the the issue you guys have and like I'm forgetting what I wrote down. I wrote down Forks too. Yeah. Yeah, so Monero has Forks and we treat it like a community and I know we're trying to progress forward with all that. Sorry, that's a bad answer, but I honestly forget the question. So community forks, right?

[02:42:12] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Montero hates Zano. Zcash does not hate Pirate Chain or Zclassic or anything else.

[02:42:21] Xenu: Zcash is very uptight about Monero. Don't say that.

[02:42:26] Vlad Costea: Well, how do you define uptight? Because to be honest, like, okay, when these guys are designing their ZK proofs, they don't even think about Monero.

[02:42:36] Xenu: Why is Zcash not attending Monerotopia?

[02:42:40] Vlad Costea: Well, were they invited? Yes.

[02:42:43] Vlad Costea: I don't know.

[02:42:45] Vlad Costea: Like, did they reach out to the right people?

[02:42:48] Xenu: Well, I mean, I don't know who they're gonna send but this is actually a very important thing though. It's like they were invited and they said no and that's a very It's an imbalance, right? It's a very yeah,

[02:43:09] Vlad Costea: But this is not about what you call Ztrash sometimes in Montero. This is actually about community forks and people saying let's use this tech stack for something else. And you say that the community in Montero is very united around this idea of digital cash. But if they care so much about it, why would they discourage people from experimenting with it?

[02:43:31] Xenu: Why would they? Yeah, I don't know. I don't understand what you're asking.

[02:43:40] Vlad Costea: Why so toxic with Zano?

[02:43:44] Xenu: Well, Zano, that's a different subject.

[02:43:46] Vlad Costea: Even if you ask FluffyPony, he's gonna say yeah, they're scammers or something.

[02:43:51] Xenu: Yeah, well, it's a pre-mine. That's a big thing. The pre-mine's tough. So that's gonna take a lot of it, to be honest with you. Furthermore, I don't see the purpose of it personally.

[02:44:07] Xenu: It seems like it's a worse version of Ethereum. That's private, but it's like, who cares? Because if I want privacy, I'm just gonna use Monero.

[02:44:21] Xenu: So...

[02:44:23] Vlad Costea: Well, do you have stablecoins on Pajero?

[02:44:29] Xenu: I don't need stablecoins on Monero.

[02:44:31] Vlad Costea: Oh, you can argue that in and of itself it's a stablecoin for the price action that we have seen over the last couple of years. Except for this year, which seems to be pretty close.

[02:44:43] Xenu: Yeah, no, I like I have... Wait, wait, wait.

[02:44:50] Vlad Costea: There's actually someone in the chat who said I should say the M word three times every time you drop out and your audio doesn't work. I don't think that's fair.

[02:45:01] Xenu: That's what it is. It's you not saying Monero. You're fucking cursing us, man.

[02:45:06] Vlad Costea: Stupid OBS. Maybe I should switch to Streamlabs or something.

[02:45:10] Xenu: Oh, don't say that. Don't say that.

[02:45:15] Xenu: What are we talking about? Yeah, man, these interruptions are throwing me off. I'll be honest with you. Fuck.

[02:45:24] Vlad Costea: I should also look at the chat because it blew up. I have so many good questions and comments.

[02:45:31] Xenu: Oh, yeah, let's go to the chat, actually. That'll bail us out, because I'm sorry, man. Like, if I get interrupted mid-speaking, it's just like, it's so hard to go back. Are they glazing me or are they glazing you? What's going on? It's probably me.

[02:45:49] Vlad Costea: There's RandomShiz1386. He said, Xenu. Recommendations for X accounts to follow for like-minded Pajero and privacy advocates.

[02:46:03] Xenu: Doing Fed Time. Um. Yeah. Watchman Privacy.

[02:46:11] Xenu: There you go.

[02:46:12] Vlad Costea: Watchman Privacy, that's it?

[02:46:14] Xenu: And Doing Fed Time.

[02:46:15] Vlad Costea: Doing Fed Time. Okay.

[02:46:18] Xenu: Okay, I don't know if that's his Twitter handle, but it's Sam Bent. He's very good. He covers a lot of darknet stuff.

[02:46:27] Xenu: Very good. He has his ear to the ground of, like, OPSEC and, crypto usage, which I find very, very important, so.

[02:46:39] Vlad Costea: There's also Joel Valenzuela, who said that sometime in 2016, some Bolero community members put a hit on him on dark markets.

[02:46:54] Xenu: Oh, it's because he was too good looking, right, Joel?

[02:47:00] Vlad Costea: This is exactly the problem to which I point, right? Because you're, of course, you're gonna say, yeah, but these people need privacy, too. They're awful, but we're gonna welcome them. They're useful to a degree, because they do defend the project and they do act like white cells. But at some point, they become cancer. And I've seen this happen in Bitcoin, with the moon boys saying, yeah, you know, Bitcoin is the perfect money, blah blah blah. They were, to a certain degree, useful during the block size wars, but once they grew their own pair of wings and they got their own platform, they sort of became enemies of actually developing the project.

[02:47:39] Vlad Costea: And of course, you're gonna argue, well, in Montero, the goal is just to improve the privacy and nothing else, to make it work as cash. And they're here and they're gonna agree with this, and that's fine. But my point is that you're gonna end up being diluted and your voice is gonna get drowned out by people like The Maverick, who is openly anti-Semitic, and people who say they're gonna break my legs, and people who put a hit on Joel. And sometimes it's good just to call them out and say, hey man, don't be an asshole.

[02:48:09] Vlad Costea: We are here for free markets, we are here for this and that. It's fine that you use this technology, it's fine that you're one of us, but just try to be decent. Like, I haven't seen any of that. And I do see it in Zcash.

[02:48:22] Xenu: What do you mean by you haven't seen any of that? Because I guarantee you there's many Monero people who are against this type of language.

[02:48:30] Vlad Costea: Sure, but did they call out these people? No, because they're so useful and convenient.

[02:48:35] Xenu: That's such a very vague, like, there's no, like, standard way of calling out somebody.

[02:48:42] Vlad Costea: Like, when Luke Parker was at Monerotopia, and he did listen to Jeff Berwick complaining about the Jews, and the next day he said he quits the project because he doesn't want to get associated with anti-Semitism. Was there real conversation about it, or did they laugh at Luke Parker and say, oh, he's so soft and he can't deal with this?

[02:49:07] Xenu: Luke did not say that. He said he was getting tired of the Twitter drama, and he pulled back. And actually, now he's working with the project again. Yeah, because [unclear: he got funded], of course. No, I think it was more so the fact that he was kind of just kind of got over it, and he was working with the project. I, like, I don't want to make assumptions about the guy. I don't know him personally. Frankly, I feel uncomfortable even talking about this.

[02:49:36] Vlad Costea: I did see that he left. Like, he was there on day one. There were three days I was actually invited to MC on the stage. I never got paid for it, but I did it as voluntary work for the community. And I did not see Luke Parker afterwards. He left after day one.

[02:49:53] Xenu: I mean, it's unfortunate. I can't respond to that because I wasn't there. I will tell you that Luke Parker is very involved right now with the proof of work stuff going on. They're involved with Serai. They're involved with full-chain membership proofs.

[02:50:08] Vlad Costea: Sure, but let me argue this. If he did not decide to leave in November of last year, you can argue that full-chain membership proofs could get developed further than they are today. Like, maybe they would be available as production code on-chain, and not just a testnet. And the question is, why did not the community optimize for him to do this, as opposed to just agreeing that, you know, maybe that Jeff Berwick was right and this guy is soft.

[02:50:40] Vlad Costea: Wait, wait, wait. Sorry. I need to fix your audio.

[02:50:47] Vlad Costea: And it was such a good response. Okay.

[02:50:50] Xenu: That was a good response, too. Luke, work more, work more. Like, we're not doing that. Luke is a sentient being. And he was burned out. He said that multiple times. He was burned out. He wrote a GitHub about it. Post on GitHub, he wrote about it. And that's fine. Like, it happens, and we move on. And you know what? Luke then came back, and he was like, hey, I have other ideas. And then we, that was it. The whole thing with Jeff Berwick, I mean, Jeff Berwick is a fucking retard.

[02:51:21] Xenu: Wow, I haven't said retard yet. How long have we been recording? Oh, my gosh. Anyway. Almost three hours. Yeah, Berwick is a fucking retard, man. That guy's a fucking, oh, my gosh. I did not see his speech. I'm assuming it was great. I mean, I don't know. Apparently, he says some things. I don't really care. It did not change anything. Okay. And honestly, Vlad, you got to stop bringing this up, because it's kind of like a cringe talking point where we're getting full-chain membership proofs. So I don't know.

[02:52:03] Xenu: You're trying to make this a thing where it was like this guy stalled the development of Monero. That's not what happened. Monero is still developing. And, man, once we get 100% full-chain membership proofs, it's gonna be hard to argue for Zcash at that point. And I guess I feel bad for the Zcash guys, because, I mean,

[02:52:29] Vlad Costea: What do you see? I can still argue it doesn't scale. Okay. This is admittedly a trade off. Transactions are going to be larger. On chain fees will be higher. And there is no plan, like, after this. Maybe there's gonna be some kind of trade off. Maybe there's gonna be some refinement in the future to make transactions smaller. But for the time being, the goal is just to make it more private for the sender. Right now, it's just one of 16, which is sort of a deniability with decoys.

[02:53:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And yeah, there is no further plan after this to somehow make it scale better. And it's gonna be a greater burden on the node operators. Of course, it's not Bitcoin for people to complain that their Raspberry Pi does not validate anymore. But it's still something to be considered, that it's gonna be more expensive to use Pajero starting next year, or whenever you're gonna have FCMP++.

[02:53:30] Xenu: Yeah, I mean, it's hard to talk about scalability, because we're talking now, right?

[02:53:38] Xenu: And...

[02:53:39] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, but you're sitting on Zcash, and then they come up with Tachyon, which is gonna use a type of synchronization to make it scale to billions of transactions. So you do need your own wizards to refine the technology that you're bringing to the table so that it becomes scalable. You got to work. Of course, first you make it private, and then you make it scalable.

[02:54:03] Xenu: I 100% agree. Can I respond, though? Sure. So it's a balancing act. And our focus right now in Monero is actually right now, it would be the fucking Qubic shit. We got to figure out something with that. But also, it is with full-chain membership proofs. And yes, transactions are not going to be, you know, ideal. But why do you need transactions that are ideal like that? What's the point? Because there's this idea that is being presented, in that we need to have transactions that are 100 million transactions per hour or something, you know, like, we need to have global adoption.

[02:54:55] Xenu: I think that's ridiculous. Cryptocurrency is not growing like that. We need to focus on now. And what we have now is with Monero, we have 25,000 transactions per day, which is a decent amount. And we're growing, we're slowly growing, we're being used, we're being adopted by CoinCards, we're being adopted by ShopinBit, ChatGPT, or NanoGPT, excuse me. And we're being adopted. We need to keep on that path. And it's not...

[02:55:25] Vlad Costea: Sorry, I don't know exactly where I got distracted too. I was watching something. But you got cut off. So I need to fix your audio. So I think you can start from the part where you said you're getting adopted by CoinCards and ShopinBit and NanoGPT. And I think that's where you cut off.

[02:55:55] Xenu: Yeah, I don't know, it's hard to start.

[02:55:56] Xenu: Yeah, we're on that we're on those platforms. And yeah, sorry, I can't. It's really hard for me to start from the beginning.

[02:56:13] Vlad Costea: I think the point that you're trying to make is that it's ridiculous to expect mass adoption, because, yes, okay, so...

[02:56:18] Vlad Costea: The technology is for those who need it, not for the masses.

[02:56:23] Xenu: Exactly. I can expand on this too. So I think global adoption, here's a hot take. Here's a spicy hot take for the Vlad Costea listeners. I think global adoption is a meme. Okay, I don't like it. Never have liked it. I think that we should focus on adoption for people who care about digital cash. And so Monero is not being globally adopted anytime soon. So I really don't see an insignificance about the scaling being worse than Zcash.

[02:57:00] Vlad Costea: Okay, but you can argue that, for example, it's not optimal for people to wait for a block confirmation and not be able to spend their coins for like 10 minutes. Like if you want to buy two items from the same merchant, which is something that I actually did in Mexico, at Monerotopia. If you do want to do that, you have to wait. And it's not the nicest of user experiences. Like you do have to optimize it in a way that makes it convenient to spend two.

[02:57:33] Xenu: Well, you're, you're mixing two different points. So that the Qubic situation you're talking about the first point?

[02:57:38] Vlad Costea: No, I did not say that. I'm not talking about Qubic. It's just about the user experience of having to deal with the Monero chain. Once again, I said it. Let me pull up my list.

[02:57:54] Xenu: That's just throwing me off.

[02:57:55] Vlad Costea: Is there anything I haven't used? Milango. Okay. The user experience of having to deal with the Milango chain means that you have to wait for your UTXO to come back after a block confirmation until you can spend again. And it's suboptimal in some situations, you actually have to wait until you get your UTXO back, you get your change to be able to transact once again. And for even for in person trades or whatever, when you go to a shop and you spend it's not the nicest user experience, maybe a second layer or something that makes it faster would be actually useful for commerce.

[02:58:36] Vlad Costea: Of course, if you're ordering something online and it's just one payment and you don't have to worry about it's fine to have to wait that long. But maybe that you want to do something more advanced, maybe you want to do DeFi, maybe you want to get integrated with various other services that require more throughput and faster confirmations. Like there do have to be some sort of refinements to the tech stack to keep up with user demand, which, as you acknowledge, right now is higher than what we have in Zcash.

[02:59:11] Xenu: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're absolutely right where baseline privacy is very hard to achieve, right? Like where you're everyone's on the same field. We should we have to agree on that, right? Where us being equal when we're sending transactions is hard to achieve. Do you agree with that?

[02:59:40] Vlad Costea: So can you say that again? I was reading the chat.

[02:59:43] Xenu: Well, like like the quality of us sending transactions is hard to achieve that that like kind of fungibility, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[02:59:55] Vlad Costea: Just because it's humans in the middle and not some sort of AI, you can still argue against fungibility and be like, yeah, because these are the coins I sent to you and the information, you know, trust doesn't scale very well. People are going to talk about the money that they sent or received. And there is no absolute privacy at the social level. It's super compromised at the technical level. We can aim to have the best possible technology to minimize the impact of these events.

[03:00:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah, absolutely.

[03:00:29] Xenu: Yeah, it's very difficult to measure that because, yeah, I mean, when you're using a cryptocurrency to send something privately, you are engaging with somebody else to transact privately. But when you're engaging with a business.

[03:00:55] Vlad Costea: I do agree. I think KYC is possibly the greatest enemy that we're facing. Just a second. You said not possibly it is. Let me fix your audio once again. OK, go on.

[03:01:09] Xenu: Yeah, exactly. It's not possibly it is the enemy against privacy and cryptocurrency.

[03:01:18] Vlad Costea: It's also a reality that we have to face and the battle that we have to fight because. We do have to fight, first of all, for self-custody. This is possibly the most important aspect of this entire invention or evolution or whatever you want to call it. Without self-custody, it's worthless. If you just... I mean, we can compare volumes all day, but at the end of the day, in price and whatever, the people trading on exchanges to keep the price at a certain level or pump it, they don't have any privacy.

[03:01:53] Vlad Costea: And the price that we see does not reflect how people actually use it peer-to-peer, because the way in which price is being determined has nothing to do with how you deal with some stranger in a dark alley or something or in the street or in a fruit market or wherever you're sending money. It has nothing to do with that. It's all about exchanges. And there's a lot of power that they have, as you can actually see, as Sombrero used to be listed on Binance. And once Binance delisted Sombrero, you could actually see the price going up because apparently they were suppressing the price.

[03:02:34] Vlad Costea: In some situations...

[03:02:34] Xenu: So why is Zcash on so many KYC exchanges then? You know, you're talking about lobbyism. It's just like, well, doesn't that play into the fact that it's less trustworthy than Monero?

[03:02:49] Vlad Costea: What do you mean less trustworthy?

[03:02:51] Xenu: Because it's on so many KYC exchanges. We've established the fact that KYC...

[03:02:56] Vlad Costea: You can argue that they're shorting it on more exchanges.

[03:02:58] Xenu: But that's not what I'm saying. We've established the fact that KYC is horrible for privacy. So why is Zcash on...

[03:03:09] Vlad Costea: Right, but why is Sombrero on Bitfinex?

[03:03:13] Xenu: I don't know about Bitfinex. It's on Kraken in the US. You should know. It's on MEXC as well. It's only on a handful.

[03:03:24] Vlad Costea: Right, so where does most of the volume come from? I can tell you. Probably Kraken.

[03:03:29] Xenu: No, it's KuCoin.

[03:03:33] Xenu: Oh, well, KuCoin. Yeah, that's a weird one, because...

[03:03:37] Vlad Costea: HTX, KuCoin, MEXC, WhiteBIT, XT.com, Bitfinex, Kraken. Once again, KuCoin.

[03:03:44] Xenu: Wait, Kraken's like six on that list? That's crazy. Eight. Shit. Wow.

[03:03:50] Vlad Costea: And it's actually the XMRBTC pair that's being traded. So most of the volume, like, oh wow, 48.72% of the volume for XMR with the USDT pair comes from KuCoin. Oh wow. And then there's HTX...

[03:04:11] Xenu: Yeah, I think they replaced Binance is really what happened because Binance dropped them and KuCoin has, like, leverage shit.

[03:04:18] Vlad Costea: It's possible. But still, I mentioned Bitfinex earlier, but that's like 2.22%. Kraken is 0.75%. Wow. MEXC is 4.47%. Actually, it seems like most of the action, almost half of the daily volume for determining the price, is on KuCoin. Let me see Zcash. I'm actually curious. You can check this data on CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko after you scroll down below the price data. They actually have the market section. So Zcash has 28.36% of volume on Binance, 4.67% on Coinbase, 2.62% on CoinDelta, 3.21% on Pionex, I don't know what this is, CoinEx 2.82%, 10.69% on XT.com, KuCoin 6.87%.

[03:05:30] Vlad Costea: Seems like it's more evenly distributed across lots of markets. 4.91% on CoinW. I don't even know what this is. But for the ZEC USDT pair, there was $16 million volume over the last 24 hours.

[03:05:52] Vlad Costea: BitMart. What the hell is BitMart? Anyway, a lot of these, NonKYC.io seems to also have some volume. Poloniex, I had no idea this exists, but it had 5% of volume with the ZEC USDT pair. $17 million were traded there. There's still Poloniex. And then there's Gemini, right? ZEC USD is 0.15%. It's laughable.

[03:06:23] Vlad Costea: But a lot of people point out that there's Zcash on Gemini. It seems it's very small.

[03:06:32] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I don't know. It seems like the most significant market is actually Binance, followed by Coinbase and Poloniex.

[03:06:49] Vlad Costea: Just a second, I need to fix your audio again. So what you said is that this is the reason why Zcash was begging Binance not to delist it.

[03:06:59] Xenu: Yes. It was very pathetic. I'll be honest, it was very pathetic. Zooko had a fucking 10 tweet thread about how much he likes Binance. And it's like, listen, Binance is a contributor to privacy data leakage. Why are you shilling for them? And the reason is because if they got delisted, their price would dump.

[03:07:26] Vlad Costea: Okay, but almost half of the Sombrero trade happens on KuCoin, which is sort of concerning. 61 million. Take it down.

[03:07:39] Xenu: Would love it if it would get off of that.

[03:07:41] Vlad Costea: Like, if I ask you what's the main market, you're gonna say that you're using Serai or BasicSwap or something which is actually peer to peer.

[03:07:51] Xenu: Serai doesn't exist yet. [unclear: No shit did].

[03:07:55] Vlad Costea: There's also Bisq. What else? There's actually a fork of Bisq.

[03:08:00] Vlad Costea: Yeah, Haveno.

[03:08:02] Vlad Costea: Haveno, yeah, exactly.

[03:08:03] Vlad Costea: Yeah, Haveno.

[03:08:04] Vlad Costea: I call it Haveno sometimes.

[03:08:07] Xenu: Yeah, it's a weird name. Yeah, in actual fact, the main way people are getting Monero is through coin swaps. They buy Bitcoin, Litecoin, they buy Zcash, and they swap it into Monero through websites like Trocador. That's the main way. And I've studied this through darknet markets. This is how people are getting it. They get it through Cake Wallet, for example. Cake Wallet has a built-in exchange, and people onboard on the Litecoin or Bitcoin, they swap into Monero. So we don't even really need, at this current juncture, we do not need atomic swaps.

[03:08:54] Xenu: We do not need decentralized exchanges, because we already have coin swaps. That being said, absolutely, these coin swap websites will no longer exist in the future. In fact, I'm kind of shocked they're still around. I think they're going to be attacked soon by Feds, because you don't have to provide KYC when you're using them, right? You don't need to demand KYC. That's what Tornado Cash was dealing with, where because they didn't have KYC on their website, they were branded as being malicious, right? So that, in my opinion, is the future.

[03:09:32] Xenu: But as of this point, this is what's happening, though, where you have people coin swapping into Monero using clearnet websites.

[03:09:43] Vlad Costea: Well, I think that's also how they trace payments. I think FixedFloat at one point was closed for one month due to some investigation.

[03:09:53] Xenu: Yeah, so they've been kind of sketchy for Monero people for a while. What's cool about Trocador is they rate each website. So it's very cool, like if you go, for example, let's say you have Bitcoin, you want to swap into Monero, you put in your order, and it will give you different swap sites, and it will rate them by privacy. And certain websites like FixedFloat, excuse me, aren't as highly rated.

[03:10:24] Vlad Costea: I wasn't sure if you cut off or you actually stopped.

[03:10:33] Xenu: Oh, yeah, no, I stopped.

[03:10:36] Vlad Costea: I'm reading the chat. It's impossible for me to keep up with what people are saying. It seems like the debate is also going in the comments, which I think is beautiful.

[03:10:47] Xenu: Oh, awesome. So is there any actual question? Can you talk about how attractive I am?

[03:10:54] Vlad Costea: I don't think anyone said anything about that.

[03:10:58] Xenu: Got a good voice. Come on. No one? Really? No fangirls?

[03:11:11] Vlad Costea: So there is, okay, I'm searching for actual questions. If anyone has a question and you're listening right now, I think this is your best chance, because most of these are comments about what we already talked about. And I think we already mentioned some of this. And maybe it doesn't make much sense to bring it back. I mean, I have arguments from both sides. Some people call me a mental gymnast, others are telling me that I did not do a good job presenting the Zcash data and there are more transactions, so we're past that.

[03:11:51] Vlad Costea: There's Kenza who says he's a fangirl, or she's a fangirl of Xenu. There's a question, why don't you tell people to mine either Zcash or Monero? So why don't we tell people to mine?

[03:12:11] Vlad Costea: Just a second, I fixed your audio, you can answer.

[03:12:16] Xenu: Are they asking me or you about that?

[03:12:21] Vlad Costea: I guess it's you, plural.

[03:12:23] Vlad Costea: Oh okay. So why don't we tell people to mine?

[03:12:29] Xenu: I would love people to mine, I don't know what they're talking about. Well here's the thing though, with Monero, you can mine right now with your computer. That's the difference. With Zcash you have to buy specialized hardware called ASICs. This is actually one of the main reasons why I got, actually this is why I got into Monero. It wasn't because of the privacy. Fun fact, it was because of the ASIC-resistant mining. I like the fact that the mining is dedicated to the common man. And yeah, you can mine Monero with your CPU, so if you have a computer you can mine Monero.

[03:13:07] Xenu: I find that to be a very awesome thing. It's very fair, it's very egalitarian. With Zcash you have to have specialized hardware that you have to buy from some Chinese company. And yeah, I find that to be kind of weird, so that's my answer.

[03:13:22] Vlad Costea: We do have to explain the trade-offs, right? Because in the case of ASICs, it's a bit more obvious that first of all, if you want to compete, you do need to have the specialized hardware, which is scarce, which is hard to acquire, which is specialized. And only the people who are most interested in participating in this are going to be able to get their hands on it. Which in a way is more secure. It's sort of security by obscurity, because it's not largely available to anyone.

[03:13:57] Vlad Costea: It's almost impossible to get attacked by a supermajority of something that already exists out there. It's just the ASICs that you know and generate the hashrate. So this specialization is like a double-edged sword. On one hand, it does help secure much better. On the other hand, it does cause more centralization, because you're going to rely on the companies that manufacture this and the distribution chains, and you're going to basically remove the basic users from this activity. In the case of something which is CPU-minable, which means...

[03:14:33] Vlad Costea: This was actually what Satoshi intended, right? If you read the whitepaper, he talks about one CPU, one vote, and the situation where he envisioned that there's going to be no pools. Actually, it was in 2010 that Slush, who actually created Slush Pool and Trezor afterwards, created the first mining pool and sort of surprised Satoshi. And he did not expect this to happen so fast. And from that point onwards, it was just a race towards specialized hardware, and the project Bitcoin never actually switched from SHA-256, which is the algorithm that it uses.

[03:15:14] Vlad Costea: For hashing. And Monero, once again, let me pull up my list to get another name. I'm getting tired of this, but I do have to play this game.

[03:15:28] Vlad Costea: How about Madonna? I'm going to add it to my list. So, Morondo is reactionary to Bitcoin, and we have to remember this. It does try, if you read the whitepaper of CryptoNote, which is... I think it reads like a manifesto. It says Satoshi Nakamoto with Bitcoin tried to create this and fix a problem, but it's not the best way to do it. So here's a different way. Here's CryptoNote, which is an entirely different code base and approach to achieving the digital cash. And I think that it's reactionary and it did try to preserve that.

[03:16:07] Vlad Costea: And the community agreed that this is the way to go. It's sort of sad that people talk about proof of stake already after having gone through something which is interesting. And to be fair, I was wrong about it, but I did not delete my tweet about it because my point... So it went over people's heads. Look at how Madonna got 51% attacked. Bitcoiners and the community denies it. Bitcoiners are going to be doing the same when quantum attacks are happening, and they're going to see that quantum computers are not real.

[03:16:43] Vlad Costea: My point was just to poke fun at Bitcoiners being in denial and being perma-bulls even in the face of an attack. The Madonna community basically crucified me for that and called me dishonest, and I did look at that and I said, okay, I was wrong about this being a 51% attack. But I don't think I was wrong about the way in which Bitcoiners react to attacks. So maybe I should leave this here. [unclear: Taksuto] hates me right now and thinks... I don't know, he complains about me a lot.

[03:17:13] Vlad Costea: He got Vic to unfollow me on Twitter for a while, I think. I'm not going to get into personal drama. I'll try to stay away. Anyway, my point is... No, it wasn't. Let me fix your audio. Madonna, Madonna, Madonna. Okay.

[03:17:34] Xenu: Yeah, it was not a 51% attack. It was a successful attack temporarily. And the issue with this whole thing is it can impact any proof-of-work cryptocurrency. So, I mean, Monero suffered it and we survived, but, you know, it could happen to you. If you have proof-of-work, I mean, selfish mining is a thing.

[03:18:03] Vlad Costea: And I do think that this dream of allowing anyone to mine is very much compatible with the idea of privacy. So just think about it. If someone wants to get, let's say, Zcash in Saudi Arabia, and they're... I'm not sure if it's the best example, but let's say North Korea or something. You're being targeted by your government and you want to escape and all you have is a computer. It's going to be hard for you to get some Bitcoin and swap it into Zcash. But if you can actually use your CPU for a few months and you're connected to the internet, but once again, that's a luxury in a country like North Korea.

[03:18:44] Vlad Costea: You have to be well connected. And it's easy to find patterns in energy consumption or whatever. You have a spike in your electricity bill and the government hates you. Maybe it's suspicious. But my point is, if you do find a way to use a computer and CPU mine for like a month, maybe you're going to be able to get some money that you can use on a market which is outside of your country and maybe save yourself one way or the other. It's not a lot of money that you can mine, especially with a basic computer.

[03:19:18] Vlad Costea: You can essentially leave your computer on for a year and make just a few bucks. Right now it's very competitive, but it's still something that you can do. And it gives you pretty good privacy in the sense that you're using hardware that you already have and spending electricity to which you have access to get some kind of internet money that you can use. I think that's something worth fighting for. I don't think it's like a dying dream or a chimera that's not worth pursuing. It's something that I sort of respect, but it takes work and it also takes a degree of centralization in the sense that the developers are going to coordinate towards finding a way to keep this dream alive.

[03:20:01] Vlad Costea: I don't think it's worth giving up on it, or at least not just yet. There wasn't that serious of an attack. I think, I gotta give credit, the community reacted very well. They had another pool that they set up and they directed their hashrate to it.

[03:20:18] Xenu: We had a defense fund actually that I created.

[03:20:23] Vlad Costea: That was good.

[03:20:25] Xenu: I mean, when push comes to shove, you gotta just deal with it. It sucked. I'm not going to lie to you Vlad, it fucking sucked. I don't want to deal with this shit, but we had to deal with it and we survived. You know? RandomX actually survived the attack, contrary to what some people are saying. So, I mean, it's unfortunate it happened, but you know what? I look at it in a very positive way and it's like, you know what? This would have happened to us regardless.

[03:20:59] Xenu: We have to improve this mining. So, there's a lot of research being done right now by the Monero Research Lab. They're doing a ton of work right now. There will be mitigations, there will be improvements. That's what you have to do, right? You have to improve it in some way when you face adversity like this. And that's what Monero did. I mean, it was a rough couple months there. August was insane. I was on Doug Tuman's show and we were like, listen, this is bad right now guys.

[03:21:28] Xenu: You got to turn on your miners. But we survived. So, you know.

[03:21:33] Vlad Costea: At the same time, you do have to be aware that basically any server farm that decides to use their surplus computation or electricity, they're going to be able to do something like this. Like this was a small player, right? If you actually had the nation state coordinating. So, not necessarily.

[03:21:56] Xenu: It is probably easier to attack a CPU mining algorithm, probably, but let me add an asterisk there. It's not easy. And it can impact any mining algorithm because you're offering the miners more money than they're getting. So this can also impact ASIC miners as well. For example, I can offer an ASIC miner who's mining Zcash 20% more to mine Xenu bucks. Hey, mine Xenu bucks instead. I'll give you 20% more value relative to Zcash.

[03:22:33] Vlad Costea: Just a second. Let me fix your audio once again. So you said Xenu bucks, you give 20% more?

[03:22:41] Xenu: Yeah, if I were to give 20% more in Xenu bucks, the miner would consider it more profitable than mining Zcash, right? Why would they not? They're making 20% more. Because the value of Xenu bucks at the time is at the point where the amount they would receive of Xenu bucks at the time would be 20% higher. They could dump that and make a profit. And that's actually literally exactly what was happening with Monero, where Qubic, they're offering this fucking scam AI whatever.

[03:23:19] Xenu: No one's using it, but their token was valued higher. So they were able to entice miners to mine their algorithm. And that's literally exactly what happened. This could happen to any proof of work cryptocurrency. This could happen to Zcash. In fact, actually, Qubic was thinking about attacking Zcash, and they didn't, but...

[03:23:45] Vlad Costea: It's much harder to get ASICs. That's the answer.

[03:23:48] Xenu: No, because you can offer them more profit. It's all about profit for these guys. It's not about the access to what type of hardware they're mining. It's about how much you're offering them. So if you were to go to the ASIC miner for Zcash, you can say, hey, I'm gonna give you 50% more than what you're making now. And they would say yes. It would be a lot harder now because Zcash pumped before. Very simple. Oh, yeah.

[03:24:18] Vlad Costea: But these miners are aware that they're gonna get this 50%. It's basically this attack where, let's say that a farmer burns his crops because he makes a lot more money from the insurance, right, than from the actual product that he's making. But the problem is that once you do this once, you're sort of doomed, and nobody's gonna want to do business with you. So the risk in this situation is that they're gonna destroy their business model, and they're gonna be out of the market, or the project is not gonna be valued on the market as much as it currently is, just because this happened, and the miners proved to be mercenaries.

[03:25:00] Vlad Costea: If there is no conviction in the project, and anyone can do this, then maybe that project is sort of worthless, and the market will react to that. So there is a game theory involved, and the miners are not this stupid to just take more money and then realize, okay, we have to get back to this broken network, which has a broken reputation, and maybe it will never come back. In the case of Madonna, it was actually a good situation. It was a happy ending. The majority was never reached, and the community reacted to it efficiently.

[03:25:36] Vlad Costea: But if this was an actual...

[03:25:39] Xenu: Well, hold on, and we were able to react to it. That's a very important point. We were able to turn on our computers and mine against it. You can't say that about Zcash. We were able to fight back. And yeah, I mean, it wasn't perfect. I'm not saying it was perfect. The situation sucked. And we're still learning from it. But yeah, we didn't die from this. Contrary to what some people think about Monero, it's still working.

[03:26:10] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, and especially among the Bitcoin maximalist circle. I don't know, it's like they find this tweet which gives them the signal about what's happening, and they don't read anything else. They're like, oh, of course, we're smarter. Of course, I'm smart for not investing into Madonna or whatever, trying to use it, because this guy told me that everything is going to zero and it's happening in real time. I'm so angry at these people, because when I got into Bitcoin, they were some of the smartest people I've ever seen in my life.

[03:26:45] Vlad Costea: And I'm not sure if it's just the fact that I've learned more over the years and maybe that they don't seem as smart anymore, or maybe the fact that they became dumber. Like the average IQ of the Bitcoiner is now basically level to the lowest common denominator, and they just care about the price going up. But it makes me very frustrated to look around and see that these people, they were taking pride and not trusting and verifying it. They were printing T-shirts with that and wearing hats, and they just wait for someone to tell them what to think.

[03:27:21] Vlad Costea: It's so disappointing. Like, how the hell do you think I found Bitcoin in the first place? Why do you think I cared about it? Because I stopped listening to what the others were telling me. I actually broke away from the herd and I said, yeah, this shows promise. And now, if you're into Bitcoin, you're supposed to accept what the herd is telling you.

[03:27:44] Vlad Costea: I'm angry. It's very emotional for me. And once again, going back to our debate, I think Zcash is the technology that was created for Bitcoin to improve Bitcoin, and that's more mature right now. If we actually get to the point where Saylor gets liquidated and we actually have a serious conversation about how we can make this better as digital cash, this is the technology that's already out there. And we can take it off the shelf and say, we can soft fork this to Bitcoin, and it's not going to change the way it works very drastically.

[03:28:22] Vlad Costea: Whereas in the case of the Moderna tech stack, it's more difficult because there are more moving parts that need to be added. It's just very different. And once again, it comes from the CryptoNote codebase, different culture, different goals, and it's reactionary to Bitcoin. I care. I want Bitcoin to work. I'm not sure. Maybe you don't care because you're not as passionate about it as I am. Just a second. Let me fix your audio.

[03:28:57] Vlad Costea: Okay.

[03:28:58] Xenu: I'm not talking about Bitcoin. I'm talking about Monero. I don't really care. I don't know. I'm not really understanding your argument here. Monero is a digital commodity. It's going to exist regardless of what someone thinks about it. It is digital cash. We've discovered it and we're harvesting it. We are harvesting it. It's a beautiful thing. It might piss some people off that we are politically neutral, but they can go fuck themselves. I'll be honest with you. I don't really care. We're being used. And I haven't even talked about darknet markets.

[03:29:34] Xenu: It's funny, actually. Prior to this interview, I was trolling saying that was the only thing I was going to be talking about. But seriously, darknet markets is a perfect example of real world adoption. And that highlights Monero more than anything else because it is being used by people who need cryptocurrency. They're not like, oh man, I can't wait to read about the latest cryptocurrency. No! They fucking don't! They literally go online and they're like, I need to buy drugs. Buy Monero. Okay. That's it. It's adoption.

[03:30:12] Vlad Costea: Right, but I would be very cautious about this. Maybe some of them are Feds or whatever.

[03:30:20] Xenu: Yeah, I mean, like, absolutely. Like, yeah, you can absolutely have Feds on there.

[03:30:24] Xenu: Yeah, for sure.

[03:30:25] Vlad Costea: And the reason why it's so adopted on dark markets is that it has been around for a long time. It earned a reputation. It has a certain type of message which appeals to these users. It's friendly to them and recommends to them that they should be using it. And there's also the fact that the tech stack has been relatively predictable and stable over the years. It's just tried and tested. It doesn't try to do something. I do think that full-chain membership proofs is the first time in the history of the Monero project.

[03:30:59] Vlad Costea: Oh my god, I have to pull up my list again. It's the first time in the lifetime of the Romano project that you're diverging from the initial design and you're making like a huge change to the way in which it functions. You're adding new cryptography to it. I do think it might be risky, unless it's very well tested before the main chain deployment. Nobody else has done this before, so it's an entirely new approach with new development, new cryptography. And it's admirable that this is happening in the first place, and you guys are not as conservative as the Bitcoin maximalists.

[03:31:43] Vlad Costea: But once again, the reason why it's adopted on dark markets is that it has this predictability and the user experience that got better over the years. The reason why Zcash is not there is that there are so many changes to the project. There was a bad messaging. There was a structure that turns these people off, like the company and everything else, and the foundation. And also the messaging says it's privacy for normal people, it's something that we research in academia. I don't think Zcash ever talks about their work as being final, and say this is it, this is what you're supposed to be using.

[03:32:23] Vlad Costea: They always have something on the roadmap, because this is sort of the purpose of the project, right? They're supposed to push zero knowledge proofs in a way that others can just use. They used to be theoretical, now they actually have libraries that are being used in Ethereum and Bitcoin. And this is where their money comes from also. Bitcoin whales, Ethereum whales, VC investors who are heavily into Bitcoin and Ethereum. And this is exactly why you're not gonna find the average drug seller or whatever being too excited about doing research and reading some academic paper.

[03:33:02] Xenu: Okay, hold on, I gotta call you on this one. Are you lecturing me about darknet adoption? Am I hearing that?

[03:33:11] Vlad Costea: I'm not lecturing you, I'm just seeing the logic of it.

[03:33:14] Xenu: Well, all right, I mean, like, this is like in The 40-Year-Old Virgin where they're talking about boobs and Steve Carell's like, oh, it's a bag of sand. Like, dude, darknet adoption, okay, it happens because people need cryptocurrency, okay? They're using Monero because it works, flat out, it just works.

[03:33:35] Vlad Costea: They used Bitcoin before this and they thought that it's very private.

[03:33:38] Xenu: They still do.

[03:33:39] Vlad Costea: They believe that it's private. Yes. And it was sold to them as being private and it turned out to be the reason why a lot of people went to jail.

[03:33:50] Vlad Costea: Just a second, you said for the most part it does work. I'm gonna fix your audio once again, go.

[03:33:58] Xenu: Yeah, it does work for the most part. I mean, that's why it's still being used. I mean, I think I explained this to you earlier. I don't like the phrase privacy coin. I think these are all cryptocurrencies and Monero is just trusted more than Bitcoin. And that's why it's being used on these darknet markets. I mean, compared to Zcash, I mean, these people do not trust Zcash at all. They view it as a United States tech company. They view it as compromised and they view it as someone who will sell out.

[03:34:30] Xenu: And Zcash has done nothing to alleviate that tension. In fact, they talk down about these people. They say that they're below them.

[03:34:41] Vlad Costea: No, I don't think they said that, but they don't want this market.

[03:34:45] Xenu: Well, then they don't want the general market to begin with. Because cryptocurrency usage...

[03:34:53] Vlad Costea: They want DeFi, which is a different ballgame.

[03:35:00] Xenu: I mean, sure, that's a different ballgame. But like cryptocurrency usage is everything, right? And as a project, you should want as much adoption as possible. With Monero, we stress adoption. Use Monero is a slogan that we have. In fact, in fact, actually...

[03:35:23] Vlad Costea: It's actually, if we use it, we win, which is something that I found on the mug from Monerotopia, which I brought home last year. And it was in Spanish, si lo usamos, ganamos.

[03:35:36] Xenu: See, we care about usage. In fact, people in Monero think that it's a psy-op that we care so much about usage instead of buying and holding Monero. I swear to God. But we care about usage. And that passion for using cryptocurrency has flown into all these other things, all these other economies. Zcash does not have that. Zcash does not have a peer-to-peer marketplace where you can buy goods in Zcash. It does not have that. So this is the problem. And I mean, I don't know, maybe they'll figure it out.

[03:36:21] Xenu: Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll just rely on Flexa or whatever. It's not good enough. You need to have a passionate base who cares about the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency.

[03:36:32] Vlad Costea: I don't disagree with you there. There used to be a website called Z2Z, which was just freelancers offering their service for shielded payments. But I don't think it ever took off. Maybe now, I mean, the project, just think about it.

[03:36:48] Xenu: [unclear: I'm glad] you should lead this, man. You gotta make a fucking website or some shit, a Z2Z website. Like XMR Bazaar, but with shielded transactions. You gotta do something like that, because otherwise, I don't see anything with Zcash right now where people are actually using Zcash. What I see is people just buying and holding Zcash and posting fucking price charts.

[03:37:10] Vlad Costea: And sure, maybe I should make this outside of Europe because it's just getting bad over here. But yeah, I agree with you. Commerce is very useful and should be a priority. But in the case of Zcash, the main priority is research. It's just building the ultimate library to make it. So they started from zk-SNARKs, which have this really good privacy, and they just looked for ways to make it scale. Because in the beginning, you needed a very powerful computer. Transactions were slow, computationally intensive, and the user experience was horrible.

[03:37:56] Vlad Costea: And they had to work from there. And right now, you have Zashi, and you can complain about it, that it has some trade-offs. At least it works on mobile, which used to not work at all before. And now they're still improving it. And if you actually pay attention to what they're proposing and what they're making, you're gonna come up to the conclusion that [unclear: out of all] of this industry, which arguably was very scammy and it had all of these colorful characters who disappeared with a lot of money and they made a lot of shady choices, and a bunch of them are getting pardons nowadays from the Trump administration, these guys actually built, they actually did what they said they were gonna do, but they took a longer time than the market expected.

[03:38:45] Vlad Costea: And they still keep on improving this. And to be honest, they have my respect. I used to shit on them all day. I used to hate Zcash just because other people told me to hate it. I used to hate it because Peter Todd spent a year going to every conference in 2018 talking about how dishonest the developers from Zcash is. I used to hate it because there was the inflation bug that they found. I used to hate it because it was attacked. I think it was spammed like three or four years ago.

[03:39:15] Xenu: Yeah, they had a pretty devastating spam attack for a while where they were [unclear: being saying less].

[03:39:22] Vlad Costea: But once I discovered that they actually made it scale, and once I realized that Ethereum is using their technology, Bitcoin is gonna be using their technology with ZK roll-ups, that's why I have this stupid helmet on my head and this vest and protection glasses. I did a video before this interview in which I participated in the Citrea ceremony. That one is a ZK roll-up that's actually optimized for scalability as opposed to privacy. But you can actually have a fork of Tornado Cash on it, which I think is a net benefit.

[03:39:56] Vlad Costea: It's something that Bitcoin does not have and from which Bitcoin can benefit. And it's all thanks to these guys. Like, you can hate them. It's fine. You can point out to their issues, but you can't deny to the fact that they improved over the years. And I do think that this pump right now is not just a bunch of VCs throwing money trying to exit, to find exit liquidity or whatever. It's just a signal that the tech stack is more mature and they're finally ready to have a proper use case, which turns out to be DeFi after all.

[03:40:33] Vlad Costea: It's not gonna be dark markets. They don't have a proper marketplace yet. There are not too many services that do accept this, but there's gonna be a lot of activity swapping to and from shielded addresses into other assets. And that's gonna be sort of the killer app for it.

[03:40:51] Xenu: So I agree with you that Zcash has improved. Absolutely. I think a lot of it has changed after their new CEO. What's his name? [unclear: Swilward]?

[03:41:07] Vlad Costea: Josh Swihart.

[03:41:08] Vlad Costea: To be honest, Josh is a much better CEO. Zooko was sort of terrible. Bad communication. Yeah, Zooko was awful.

[03:41:16] Vlad Costea: He should stick to dev-ing, which seems to be a much better activity for him. No offense.

[03:41:23] Xenu: Yeah. So like, I will say he's better. I don't think he's perfect. Like I have big disagreements. Again, I'm calling out to Zcash people. You need non- You need Z to Z mandated transactions. Stop with the transparent crap. What are you guys doing?

[03:41:47] Xenu: Anyways, I have to say, though, the problem with your logic is, if Zcash starts to be adopted by darknet markets, everything changes. Literally, everything does. If you were to read a news article about Zcash being used for ransomware to North Korea and they didn't stop anything, everything changes. Now you're in a political event. And I do not trust Zcash in this situation. Unfortunately, I don't. Maybe they would prove me wrong and they would not give away metadata or whatever. I don't know what they would be able to do.

[03:42:32] Xenu: But like, if they are confronted in a situation like this, how would they react? I feel rather negative about that relative to Monero, where they get in contact. There's no one. We're headless, right? We're decentralized. So I think this is a huge vulnerability that, yeah, I don't think Zcash has done anything to fix. Except for the fact that they are apparently moving towards a situation where they're not going to have any dev tax or anything in the future. It's just going to be a project that exists.

[03:43:10] Xenu: I think that would be good. But yeah, as it stands now, I would be concerned if I was a dev and these things started happening.

[03:43:23] Vlad Costea: I don't know. There's a lot of speculation here. And to be honest, there was no previous events to point out to any sort of reaction like this. So it's we can speculate all we want about what we think about certain people and how they're going to react. But we haven't seen it. What we know is that this happened to Bitcoin. And I remember Wasabi Wallet dealing with a situation where it was in the reports of the Interpol and it was also in the reports of the US intelligence because apparently China was paying its spies with Bitcoin using coins mixed with Wasabi Wallet.

[03:44:04] Vlad Costea: As far as I know, none of them got compromised, detained, arrested or whatever. But it also did not travel too much to the US, which could have been a situation where they could get arrested for a few. Hours or something to answer to questions. But this was just the wallet project in a company where basically everyone was sort of doxxed. They had a page with the contributors. They had a GitHub where you could figure out what everyone does and where they work. And it hasn't happened because I guess we had at the time a culture where we did not blame.

[03:44:49] Vlad Costea: I don't know, you don't blame the maker of the automobile just because someone does not brake or just because people make choices when they use the tool or knife or whatever. You can use any metaphor or example of something from the real world which is being used in a way that the maker did not intend. And you can't hold them liable. That's the culture that we have built. It seems like these people in Bitcoin are making it much worse by complaining about content in the blockchain that they don't like and therefore they're just inviting regulators to step in and governments to say, hey, if it's possible to filter, why don't you all filter?

[03:45:36] Vlad Costea: Why don't you all run the software now? Because it seems like you have the option. What are you, some sort of pornography? Are you into, what was the abbreviation, CSAM or whatever? And if we develop this culture and it becomes extended or it bleeds over into privacy projects, then I can see a situation. I mean, we already have Tornado Cash, right, where they argue that they're responsible for how others have used their privacy tool.

[03:46:11] Vlad Costea: But I don't know. There's nothing in the culture or the communication that would point out to a situation where they would say, oh, we're so sorry that someone from North Korea made this transaction. Let's collaborate.

[03:46:31] Vlad Costea: Just a second. Wait, wait. Your audio cut off again. I have to switch from this to this. Okay.

[03:46:42] Xenu: Yeah. So let's say North Korea was receiving a ransom in Bitcoin and they were paid through the NEAR protocol with shielded Zcash to Bitcoin or whatever. That would be traceable. And as I mentioned earlier, the T-address would link to the T-address from that NEAR protocol wallet. So, I mean, privacy is really hard, right? Privacy is very difficult. It's not an on or off switch. And Zcash, I think they're doing very cool things, but I do not think that they're ready because once this starts to get hard, once regulations start bearing down, I am skeptical about them fighting back.

[03:47:37] Xenu: Because as what I've seen already, they like to comply. They like to work with the feds. They like to negotiate. And I don't like negotiating with terrorists. That's just how I feel about that. So I don't know.

[03:47:50] Vlad Costea: You're Conflating lobbying for negotiation. Lobbying is just hush money. And you're saying that this is negotiation, which is not quite bending the knees, just buying yourself time. Or at least that's the way in which I understand it.

[03:48:06] Xenu: Maybe they're buying themselves time. That's actually a good conspiracy where maybe that's why they're pumping right now. Because they may know that they're probably going to dump in the future because of incoming regulations.

[03:48:24] Vlad Costea: Honestly, if they integrate with DeFi, I don't think that's going to affect them too much. They're going to maybe get delisted from some exchanges. But these DeFi protocols are not under the same regulations. Anyway, Jason in the chat actually said something interesting. I'm not sure how tired you are, but I do like what he said. And I do think it's worth discussing. He said, Vlad, what happens to ZEC development if ECC and Shielded Labs close down tomorrow? And he said this is the debate to have with Xenu.

[03:48:55] Vlad Costea: Zero Darts replied and said there would be Zcash Foundation and Zingo Labs to keep developing. This is besides the point. Let's say that all of them close down. And this is actually a good question. Because this is such an avant-garde experiment that maybe there are only like 10 people in the world who understand what's happening and have the vision to keep going. Which is exactly why they need to basically pay for lobbying to be able to keep going. So if these people get taken out, I do think that it's the end for Zcash.

[03:49:32] Xenu: Oh, 100%. If Monero developers... It would be a decapitation. You know, it would be your target, because that's the thing with Zcash. All of their researchers are doxxed. Like if they actually became a threat, they could immediately be decapitated. I'm not instigating violence, by the way. I'm just saying this could happen. And governments have done things like this in the past. Just go and bully all the people that you already have doxxed. You know, this is a concern. Monero does not have this. What are you going to do with Monero?

[03:50:09] Vlad Costea: It's not a good choice. You can't take out ArticMine and Luke Parker and all the others, and you are going to have a crisis because it's hard to find talent. I'm not sure who's going to build full-chain membership proofs if you're not going to have Luke Parker, [unclear: Justin Berman], and all the other guys. It's going to take at least a couple of years to regroup, to find the right talent, to help them, or at least to be sure that they deserve your trust, because these guys worked for many years to earn this reputation.

[03:50:41] Vlad Costea: And then you're going to have a new crop of developers, maybe that they're not going to be competent, or maybe that they're going to be moving too fast. The whole culture of the project changes when the developers are changing. We see this in Bitcoin right now. We have seen the changing of the guards like three times already. I think the first time was when Satoshi left, then when Gavin left, then when Wladimir van der Laan left. And now we have a situation where it's very unclear if there's anyone you can actually trust.

[03:51:12] Vlad Costea: All of them are pretty new and young. And it seems like there's a civil war happening. And I don't know where this is going to lead, because the community has to decide who's going to represent them and who's going to write the code. Or if there's going to be any code at all, and it's just going to be maintained to be compatible with Windows 12 or something when that one comes out. Developers are a very important part of every project. It's very hard to imagine what it's going to look like without some key people.

[03:51:47] Vlad Costea: We were fortunate enough throughout this experiment to not have to deal with, I don't know, assassinations of developers in either camp. Worst case, there was that Ethereum developer who was arrested in North Korea. Not North Korea, he was arrested for going to North Korea to teach them how to use Ethereum stuff. And we also had the attack from, I do consider that Craig Wright was a nation state attack, so I can add that because he sued a bunch of developers to the point that they quit working on Bitcoin.

[03:52:22] Vlad Costea: I do believe that the Tornado Cash is a nation state attack. I do believe that the Samourai trial is a nation state attack. But we did not have something so significant, like we didn't see, for example, Vitalik going to jail, we did not see ArticMine going to jail or whatever, or Amir Taaki, or people who are so essential to projects that if they disappear or they get arrested, there's going to be a significant impact on the project's development.

[03:52:59] Xenu: Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it can't happen. And we're just having our guard up. I agree with you that, generally speaking, things have been okay. It could be a lot worse. It could be way worse. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be actively preparing for the worst. Because you're right, there are members of Monero who are doxxed. Absolutely. And they could be, you know, attacked. And it's fucked up. But, I mean, this government literally commits genocide. It's not funny, but like, literally, this is like, this is nothing to them.

[03:53:44] Xenu: So, yeah, I mean, I've talked to a lot of these developers, they feel pretty good about things. And they're very, they're very pleasant. They're not doomers. I'm probably more of a doomer than, you know, someone like Rucknium, probably more of a doomer. But he's anonymous, right? And he's anonymous for this reason. And I do not blame him. Like, I'm under the impression that I am, like, my OPSEC is not that good. Like, if feds want to know who I am, they know who I am, kind of thing.

[03:54:22] Xenu: It is what it is. I'm not an OPSEC genius.

[03:54:28] Vlad Costea: Right, but your adversary is not only your government, right? Maybe it's another government. Maybe it's someone like your neighbor or your boss or whatever.

[03:54:40] Xenu: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, with Monero, it is something that we talked about actually quite a bit. It's not like this is something that is under the radar or anything. Like, we all have people who make Monero what Monero is. And that can be attacked in the future. And some governments hate us.

[03:55:09] Vlad Costea: At the same time, I do believe that the same governments that hate you in public might be happy that this technology exists for themselves. And by governments, I mean individual actors inside of the institutions. No, so I... Let's be honest, everyone needs a degree of privacy. And everyone is happy that they have, just in case they need to flee the country or whatever, in case of a revolution where they get overthrown or anything, a coup. Yeah, 100%. They do need to run away with something that cannot be traced and is going to enable them to start a new life somewhere else.

[03:55:48] Vlad Costea: So, you do have to understand that the incentives are for everyone to have a degree of privacy, for the small person to keep some savings away from maybe confiscation or whatever. For the heads of state to be able to run away in the event of a communist revolution or something that is maybe unlikely to happen, but not 100% impossible.

[03:56:18] Xenu: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like the whole situation with... It's crazy for sure. I don't want to expand on this too much, I guess. We're all in this for a reason, right? Why are we here, Vlad? We care about digital cash, right?

[03:56:38] Vlad Costea: I came here because I was a nerd about internet privacy. I wanted to do my bachelor thesis about this. I was 20 years old. I saw the revelations by Edward Snowden. I was like, yeah, internet privacy is a big deal. I should care about this. I should look into ways to anonymize my traffic, not because I'm trying to hide from my government, but because, you know, privacy is a human right. I do like to be left alone and mind my own business. I'm not doing anything interesting, to be honest. If I have any agent following me, I have a very boring life. But anyway, I do want to enjoy this, and I do want my children to enjoy this.

[03:57:22] Xenu: You know, my agents like to talk to each other. They're all friends, they have a group chat.

[03:57:30] Vlad Costea: I did not catch the beginning of your sentence.

[03:57:34] Xenu: Okay. I said my agents have a group chat. They all talk to each other. You have my, my several agents who are tracking me. Yeah, okay. Anyway, yeah. I mean, I agree, man. I'm doing my thing. It is what it is. I probably have pissed off some people with darknet market maximalism, but, you know, it's a project I'm very proud of and it's a project that is about peer-to-peer cash. I'm not glorifying darknet markets. I'm pointing to the largest peer-to-peer economy that depends on peer-to-peer cash.

[03:58:14] Xenu: And funny story, when I released it, the day I released it, I forgot exactly what happened. Basically, my internet went down and I was like, oh shit, the feds are here. The day I uploaded it, I thought the feds were raiding me because nothing was working for like two hours, but then it turns out there was like a global like shutdown of like whatever internet I was using at the time.

[03:58:46] Xenu: But yeah, no, I've gotten props on Dread. I got some supporters over there. It's pretty cool. You know, I do want to speak at, like, DEF CON. I've heard people mention that I should go there. So I'm going to probably do that next year. That'd be pretty cool.

[03:59:06] Vlad Costea: There are some Rapid fire questions that I want to address. There's someone in the chat who wants to ask if in Zashi wallet you can connect to your own node. And you do have a list of servers from what you can choose. And you can choose custom server and you just write your host name and port. So yes, you can connect your own node. You don't have to leak your IP address to their service. And they also have Tor, which they added recently. Seems like they're making progress, but it wasn't.

[03:59:40] Vlad Costea: So all the privacy features that you would want, like rotating addresses and Tor, they're not there since day one. They roll them out gradually, which means possibly it's a good idea for you to set up a different wallet and send your shielded funds to it so that the information that you can leak, like the metadata is minimal. There was another question, just a second. I'm getting a bit tired, but it's fine. What's the incentive to keep mining ZEC once you reach the cap limit? Well, supposedly transaction fees, but there is a proposal for those to get burned, just like Ethereum does.

[04:00:26] Vlad Costea: And this means basically that the project is going to go to proof of stake, which I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but let's see what the future holds. Because to be honest, I don't know too much about this. I just know some very surface level information. I don't hold a lot of Zcash to care that much, like my life depends on it, but I do care about the technology that's being built. Another one.

[04:01:02] Vlad Costea: Webtech7928 says Luke Parker is not the only dev of his caliber working on Monero projects. Monero is in top three, most devs working on its cryptocurrency. I'm not going to disagree with this, but you do have to admit that talent is hard to find and especially replace. And for Bitcoin, for example, it's hard to find another Pieter Wuille or Greg Maxwell or even another Adam Back.

[04:01:35] Vlad Costea: Imagine a world without them, it's going to be... Chaotic in the beginning, even for newcomers to understand how they should understand Bitcoin, especially since the average adopter is non-technical, never actually run a node on an actual computer that they bought themselves, they bought a node in a box, and they just use apps and they didn't try anything command-line, and they just learned about Bitcoin in metaphors. And that's kind of the worst way to understand it. That someone told you it's like this, and it should be used for that only, and everything else is degeneracy, and that's, that's where conflicts begin, because you're lacking context, and you're not aware that Ethereum could have been built on Bitcoin if there was a larger OP_RETURN, or that Zerocoin and Zerocash were proposed for Bitcoin, and we could have been, in a truly maximalist world, if there was more openness to development and developers.

[04:02:47] Vlad Costea: But we are in this multi-coin world, multi-blockchain, multi... I saw that the new cool thing is not the blockchain, it's the DAG, which is like a different construct, which is mining orphaned blocks and mines a lot of blocks in parallel, which is interesting, but too smart for my simple mind.

[04:03:12] Vlad Costea: Okay, what else is there in the chat? Crev23 says that Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet were most likely state attacks, although to be fair, they didn't gain any ground either way. Both organizations breached the 10 million in business mark, and both were dealt with as per FinCEN's determinations concerning money transmitting, so yeah. It's really unfortunate, it almost seemed... I'm still confused as to why Wasabi Wallet was able to just ride into the sunset, because they had much larger volume than Samourai, maybe it was just different communication, and the fact that they were very general about it, like, yeah, we give privacy, we don't know who our customers are, we don't care.

[04:04:01] Vlad Costea: Maybe it was just basic communication that did not raise suspicions. Or maybe some people will put on their tinfoil hats and say, well, Samourai is the one that worked, even though, sort of disagree. Because I was there to watch how the technology evolved, and Samourai had this five input, five output coinjoins with equal amounts and toxic change. And Wasabi, in their final iteration, which was 2.0, which still works by the way today, with a bunch of third party coordinators, they had these huge coinjoins with hundreds of inputs and hundreds of outputs, which were of different sizes, and some of them were dividing, some of them were consolidating, and there was no toxic change.

[04:04:51] Vlad Costea: Basically, the coordinator was finding ways to include the whole amount and find pairs for that to be divided or consolidated. And it's really beautiful math. But, yeah, Crev says that he thinks the difference was that it wasn't custodial or they didn't get to 10 million. Neither service was custodial, not Tornado Cash, not Samourai, not Wasabi. All of them were non-custodial. The difference is that in the Bitcoin design, you have UTXOs, and Wasabi and Samourai were leveraging that, and you were running the software on your computer, or phone in the case of Samourai.

[04:05:37] Vlad Costea: But with Tornado Cash, it was on a smart contract on-chain, which was basically immutable and much more interesting from a legal perspective. But all of them got to 10 million.

[04:05:50] Vlad Costea: But yeah, is there anything that we haven't discussed, Xenu, that you would like to mention? I know we're about four hours into this, and if you're still watching and listening, maybe leave a comment or like or whatever it is that you can do, just so I can see that you're still here.

[04:06:13] Xenu: No, I mean, yeah, I got nothing really. I think we covered a lot of ground here. I didn't want to go into darknet market maximalism, but yeah, I think at this point we can wrap up. And if people like what I've been saying, AntiMoonBoy.com is where you want to go. AntiMoonBoy.com, I have all my content on there. I have a podcast every Monday called AntiMoonBoy.

[04:07:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so if there's any other question, you can mention it in the chat. What I do want to ask you, so maybe we can have this like stabbing contest or something, very cheap shots. The lowest of hanging fruits, right? Like, how are you going to react when ZEC flips Montero?

[04:07:46] Vlad Costea: Oh, wait, I need to fix your audio once again.

[04:07:53] Vlad Costea: I hope that they heard all that part about what you wrote and what you have done. Oh, yeah, cut off at AntiMoonBoy.com. Xenu muted at worst time. Okay, at least I know you're here chat.

[04:08:09] Xenu: Should I repeat all of that then?

[04:08:13] Vlad Costea: Yeah, please.

[04:08:15] Xenu: Yeah, so I have a website AntiMoonBoy.com. You can check out my content there. I have a weekly podcast, AntiMoonBoy News, where we break down digital cash without the lame ass fucking chart speculation. I also have some comedy there. I'm pretty good at leading a podcast. It's a fun time, so check it out every Monday. I also have a series called Attack of the Poison Outputs. And that series is about how Monero is attacked, how you can attack it, the weaknesses of Monero. How Monero works. If you're interested in any of that, it's basically a sequel to Breaking Monero, and I'm very proud of it.

[04:08:57] Xenu: It's 30 videos long on YouTube, [unclear: I see] Rumble, and it's totally free, so check that out. Last but not least, I have a manifesto called Darknet Market Maximalism. It's probably the best thing I've ever made. It's a breakdown of why darknet markets matter, why we should be observing them, because I think they're very important to observe, because they represent the oldest and largest peer-to-peer economies that depend on cryptocurrency.

[04:09:26] Vlad Costea: Nice. So they finally heard this. Now, regarding my low-hanging fruit kind of question, how are you going to react when ZEC flips XMR?

[04:09:37] Xenu: I don't give a shit, Vlad. I don't care. You're the AntiMoonBoy, right?

[04:09:42] Xenu: I'm the AntiMoon... I don't give a shit. In fact, I hope it does. It'll be funny. There you go. I can't give you a clip for this one.

[04:09:50] Xenu: Sorry.

[04:09:51] Vlad Costea: It's fine. I don't want a clip. But I do hope my video editor is still watching. Just in case he thinks about doing a clip. So do you have anything like a cheap shot or whatever? Make fun of me? Call me an artard.

[04:10:07] Xenu: Yeah, well, true.

[04:10:13] Xenu: I'm going to try to make a Dracula joke about you being retarded. What could that work with? Uh... You're a retard, Dracula, because when you try to suck blood, instead, you suck our attention spans because you don't stop fucking talking. There we go. I don't know, man. That was... That was off the cuff.

[04:10:37] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that wasn't so good.

[04:10:41] Vlad Costea: I don't know. Anyway, at least you're not like the guys who looked at my nose and they said, Oh, look, he has a Jewish nose. My grandma was Greek, asshole. That's why I have a big nose.

[04:10:53] Xenu: I'm not... I'm not gonna... I'm not gonna do that. No, for sure. Yeah, it's a great time, man. I thought this was a great conversation. A really good talk. And... I know we had some technical difficulties. We worked through that. I think that... I think I got my point across pretty well, and that's why I came here. So, thank you for letting me... Letting me on your program. I wish to come back.

[04:11:17] Vlad Costea: Yeah, let's do this again. Maybe when the stats are different. You can dunk on me and be like, See, I told you it was a bubble and only the VCs are pumping this.

[04:11:27] Xenu: You mean when the stats are exactly the same? Okay.

[04:11:32] Vlad Costea: Actually, they're pretty good now. And in a bear market, I think that's going to be like the differentiator. Like, if people are here for the actual privacy... They claim, as everyone claims right now, it's actually trendy. I think to the credit of Zcash, they actually started a conversation like industry-wide about the importance of privacy. And we're going to see if these people are actually here for the technology, as you know, the meme says, or they just have gold chains like that Indian man from the meme.

[04:12:06] Xenu: Yeah, true.

[04:12:11] Vlad Costea: What? [unclear: Prev] said, I am a Temu Weird Al. At first I read that as Weird AI, and I was like, what kind of AI? But yeah, he means Weird Al Yankovic.

[04:12:26] Vlad Costea: Temu. Wish.com, man. Not Temu. Anyway, I have a full head of hair. There was a guy in the chat who said I went bald or something, and now I wear a construction worker helmet. Yeah, this was fun. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening and tuning in. Maybe it wasn't as spicy as you expected. There's also Haveno. Haveno, Haveno. Anyway, he says that Zano, and he actually types it as Z asterisk A-N-O, almost like he doesn't want this word to be found if anyone ever searches their profile.

[04:13:11] Vlad Costea: Or seeing if they ever mentioned this project, that it was not banned from conferences.

[04:13:21] Vlad Costea: Anyway, I'm not going to get into that. I'm not their advocate. I'm just pointing out to the fact that they could not attend, which one was it, MoneroCon this year. And they tried because I spoke with someone from their team and whatever, it's pointless drama. I look forward to seeing these guys invited to more conferences and showing how they build stuff. I do think that the Wownero guy is an asshole, and I'm going to keep following him. I'm going to keep following him regardless, because I do think sometimes he's interesting.

[04:14:00] Vlad Costea: But I disagree with him a lot.

[04:14:06] Xenu: I got to leave for a second. One sec.

[04:14:10] Vlad Costea: That's fine. Thank you, guys. Make sure you leave feedback because it's useful. Like if you're listening on Spotify or whatever in the future after this livestream. Leave feedback because it seems like it really matters and it helps the content get a bit boosted when people search for Bitcoin content. Once again, what I do here is that I ask the questions that most Bitcoiners are afraid to ask, because they're going to get canceled or their sponsors are going to pull the plug on them or whatever. Speaking of sponsors, thank you very much, LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes.com, SideShift.ai, Bitcoin.com News. This was it.

[04:14:54] Vlad Costea: I'm not sure if you are still here, but I want to thank you very much, Xenu, the warrior prince, for sticking around and only having one bathroom break in four hours and 15 minutes.

[04:15:11] Vlad Costea: And what else? There's someone, Kenza, who said I should invite [unclear: body anarchist] for the spice. I might, but I need to make another list, like a full page of proxy names. And I'm going to read them out right now. It's Moreno, Montero, Montevero, Montango, Milango, Murando, Murano, Romero, Romano, Montevideo, Murcielago, Sombrero, San Antonio, Italiano Vero, Macareno. There was another one with a car name.

[04:15:45] Vlad Costea: Sanero, Sandero. Yeah, Sandero. I got to write this down. I'm going to use it next time. Sandero. There was also, huh, I forgot. Anyway, I'm not going to waste your time with this. I just wanted to entertain you a bit in the end. I'll see you in the next one. And Xenu, if you're there, thank you very much. And you're not.

[04:16:14] Vlad Costea: Should I wait for him? Should I close this? Anyway, goodbye. I'll see you in the next one.

[04:16:31] Vlad Costea: Oh, I'm back just to read this from Eric Singos. Vlad is the Peter Schiff of XMR. Okay. I like that. I very much like that. Just for reference, I learned something new listening to the show of Joel Valenzuela. And he said that basically Peter Schiff's dad wrote a book about how to avoid taxation in the US, how to not pay taxes. It's the second book ever to get banned. And he died in prison because he wrote that book. He was like the Ross Ulbricht of his generation, minus the happy ending where he got clemency from the US president.

[04:17:13] Vlad Costea: So Peter Schiff is actually pretty hardcore. He grew up in a family that actually practices what they preach. And they are very hardcore about sound money and protecting their wealth. I do believe that Peter Schiff gets Bitcoin. He was on some very intense debates with Eric Voorhees back in 2013, 2014. But I do believe that he has to keep his brand. So yeah. If you compare me with Peter Schiff, I'll take that as a compliment, not as an insult. So thank you very much. Webtech says that Xenu went to the bathroom.

[04:17:55] Vlad Costea: Well, OK, I'm happy that you're back. Let me fix your [unclear: audio] once again, because you cut off.

[04:18:06] Vlad Costea: I almost ended. And then someone said that I'm like the Peter Schiff of XMR, and I sort of like it. Yeah, that's funny. I just wanted to thank you and let you just say your closing words.

[04:18:21] Xenu: Yeah, check out my shit.

[04:18:25] Xenu: Yeah, but thank you, Vlad. This is fun. I had a good time. Well, let's do it again. Maybe a year from now, I can make fun of you, you know?

[04:18:33] Vlad Costea: Sure. Let's see how that goes.

[04:18:35] Xenu: Yeah, that was good. Thanks, guys, for listening. I appreciate it.

[04:18:39] Vlad Costea: Bye.

[04:18:40] Vlad Costea: Good night.