pocket. Welcome to Game of Notes, a weekly podcast on the Cosmos from independent Validator
teams. Hello, welcome to Game of Notes, a weekly podcast on the Cosmos from independent
Validator teams. And yeah, once you see it, that weird dopling effect between Noel's
headphone and his head really is a put it's like, you know, does anybody remember the
film Stargate? You know, when it's kind of like that weird, liquidy 90s special effects
where they were trying to like do the it's kind of like a weird water effect.
It's like an ornate doesn't do it justice. I love that effect whenever it came out. I
was like, wow, that is so inspired. I think Stargate, I haven't watched it in years. Does
it hold up? I think it does. Not super well. But it's like, it's very much in vain of the
classic 80s action flicks that they was trying to like invoke them. I think it holds up. But
I'm also I like the idea of Stargate more than I do like a Star Trek, which I know is
a really hot take. So that is quite a hot take given that I mean, because Star Trek is like
wholesome space communism. And Stargate is kind of like, we sort of just like wandered
through a gate and then triggered a war. And now we're going to kind of just get involved.
We're actually really useless because everybody else like way more powerful than us. So, you
know, we'll give it a try. But we're just we've just sparked it into seller war. Sorry,
everybody. Like, but then I guess that's kind of how things do turn out in real life. Like
these things get screwed up. There is that whole weird thing where they're just like,
yeah, we've just got like rifles and those guys got laser guns, but their armor is like
weirdly completely penetrable by 5.56 NATO ammunition. And that's just like and then
they even get the the P 90 and they're like, ah, but it's pistol ammunition, but it's high
velocity designed to penetrate the body armor that terrorists will be wearing, which is
why it's in police use, which is why we're using it because we're like cool stuff. And
you're like, yeah, they're armored aliens. I'm not sure any cool German heckler and cock
gear German firearm is gonna just because it's just cool and experiment. It doesn't mean
it's gonna defeat alien armor. That's like, but it's like to stop lasers. But their armor
also is like from the shoulders up, right? Like there's very little actually guarded
they got like, it's like a, it's like a it's like a belly shirt type of armor though, right?
For most of them. Oh, yeah, because there's that weird thing where it like folds up into
like a hole and then they're just like wearing sandals. We just shoot their legs. We rename
this episode belly shirt armor.
What's the what's the the I just that I see the legs of just rubbery, you know, the
seed of diehard when
Yeah, it's in the defense. And then the German guy doesn't understand. So he was in English.
It's just like, yeah, that it's not even a continuity era. That was what the photo of
the screen rise.
That was awesome. Diehard. It is a good film though. It's good film.
The depth of Stargate knowledge. I'm going to go back and start watching this again.
SG one was good for a while. It genuinely was. I remember like as a kind of like schlocky
TV series. I mean, it was no like about Stargate, but it was it was good. And I mean remake
about Stargate, hot take remake obviously better than the original. I'm not even sure
that's hot take actually. It's probably not hot take at all.
I was gonna say, yeah, I think that's a great upon. I've been wanting to watch the most
recent Stargate series Stargate universe or something like that. Apparently that's whenever
it went over from the sci fi channel to like the S Y F I channel, the sci fi where you
know, sci fi shows go to die basically. And apparently it's great or something. I don't
know.
SG one had a didn't have MacGyver in it.
Yeah, it did.
I don't know who it was. Is that Richard Dean was running that?
Yeah.
SG you know, I watched a few episodes of Stargate Atlantis and it wasn't even that bad. Like
I mean, it wasn't like again, it's like a definition of what's bad, like kind of watchable
if you got to know what age would have been like early twenties and it's a Saturday and
you hung over. Yeah, except for sci fi for a hungover Saturday magic. God, I can't imagine
having like three hours to piss away watching five out of 10 sci fi now. It's got to be
eight out of 10 or above critically recommended recommended by two or more people I respect.
Otherwise I'm like, I just have the time, my man. I can't help you there. But yeah, do
you want to rewatch the original Stargate?
The movie, right?
That you're talking about?
Yeah, the movie. I kind of like I just have this like warm feeling towards it without
actually remembering whether it's any good. I just want to have my dreams crushed. That's
the thing where we are with Stargate.
So, all right, here's my take for that. If have you seen the abyss? I'll just start
with that.
Oh, yeah.
Yep.
An underrated film.
Okay. So if you've seen the abyss then and then you saw it like more recently, you'll
basically have the same take. Like there isn't a lot of like nostalgia holdover for
it is just if you enjoy it like 10 years ago, you'll probably enjoy it just as much
now. I count them about the same same level of enjoyment. I don't know why but that's
okay. That's good. I rewatched fucking Hun for Red October recently. That also holds
up. It's amazing. It's a great film.
That the bit at the beginning where they're just talking to your Russian and you know
that Sean Connery can't keep it up for long and he's speaking Russian with a Scottish
accent accent and it literally just zooms in on his mouth and then zooms out of this.
It does something like that, doesn't it?
No, no, it's not like that. It's there. They're talking and they're in the the ward room and
just mid sentence. They just switch. I think he says, I think he says like, yes. And then
that was it.
He goes, yes captain. And you just, and that's it. We're out. We're in English for the rest
of the film and you're like, beautiful. Seamless. I barely noticed.
I guess we're not reading reading subtitles anymore.
Exactly. We just ran out of energy on that whole thing.
That's it.
Yeah, I just, we watched that film, we watched that film a little while ago and it was around
the start of hostilities in this, in this recent push of Russian offences in Ukraine.
And the problem is there's like three times during the hunt for red October where they
sing the Russian national anthem and there's like the iconic one where there's all the
sailors singing it and then Sean Connery is like, let them shun and like I would be like
walking around the area where I live, just humming the to myself and then like, I get
like an elbow of the ribs.
Whoever I was with was like, you just humming the Russian national anthem. I was just like,
oh, let them shug and they're like, you gotta get beaten up. Like you can't, there's a war
on.
I swore.
I was sitting.
Exactly. For a second there.
Wait, hold on. Now, maybe this is a political but now I need to know. Does Brent not also
have like a really strange section of your political area that's like per Russia right
now? Cause in the US there's like a pretty good part and that's like, oh yeah, obviously
Russia's doing the right thing.
In the UK, most like town halls and things are flying the Ukrainian flag. Like it's a
very common, like very, very, very common to see Ukrainian flags flying in public places,
like officially. And there's quite, I mean, there's actually quite a big Ukrainian expat
population in the UK of one kind or another, I think as well. I mean, like when I was growing
up, I knew Ukrainian lad in my class and stuff like that. I don't know if that's like indicative
of the entire UK, but I feel like there are a fair few Ukrainian people around and people
are generally. So I think there's two things going on. I think there's like, I think the
British ruling class have like let in a lot of Russian oligarch money. And I think they're
pretty cozy with the, especially the Russian oligarchs and they own a lot of English stuff,
a lot of stuff in England and Britain. But I think the average person on the street is
quite anti Russia for historic, maybe like kind of latently for historical reasons. But
then, you know, it's like, you know, the Simpsons joke where where Lenin like punches way out
of the tomb and it's like, must go to capitalism and then, you know, all the tanks come out
and stuff. And it's just like, we thought you guys, then we thought you guys were the
good guys now. And I think that kind of Simpsons thing has played out. And now people are just
like, ah, the bad guys are all along. So I don't think like, I don't think people have
any beef with Russian people, obviously, because it's not about that. But I think people are
like, obviously, Russia is like invading Ukraine. And that's not cool. And not a big fan of the
Russian government.
That's good. I have a couple of family members that are convinced that Ukraine is the aggressor.
So that's always fun to deal with it. And like Thanksgiving. Yeah.
That's that's a shit take really.
It is. It is exactly.
It's just a shit take. It's like, why are you punching yourself in the face?
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
It's a shit take.
Oh, well, anyway, yeah, I had a friend who had done a lot of touring in Russia and had quite a lot of
the only person I can think of actually was a scout. So I used to know who was very pro Russia
in a really weird way. And I remember when Ukraine first got invaded and that was like
Eurovision was on. And everybody on Twitter was just being like, oh, this is awkward, the country
invading the other country. And it was just like, it's not an invasion. There's actually a lot of
and you're just like, oh, okay. This is the only person I know. The only other person I know who
said something similar to that, I'm pretty sure is a Russian spy. So there's also that.
And that is a whole, I can't, that story is honestly too long to recount. But I once met a
Russian spy, I'm like 95% sure that she was Russian spy. And very, very, very, you know,
you know, Ukrainians and Russians, they're all, we're all the same people.
You're all the same people. It's all overblown in my opinion. Okay, cool. So that was
anyway, welcome to Game of Nodes, a week podcast on the cosmos from independent
validated teams. And we won't be telling the Russian spy stories. So
so there, I think there is a less exciting bit of drama from the cosmos this week, which
should see you were going to bring out. Is that right? I'm flying, I'm flying dangerously,
not even looking at spreadsheet. You're bringing up all nodes, all nodes slash
Jacob drama already. This is pretty early. I need like at least another eight minutes to let it simmer.
Well, I mean, we can just talk about more. I've watched in the last, I mean,
I watched a great documentary on contemporary Australia the other day, it was called Mad Max
2, the road warrior. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I gather that's basically, is it the follow on to Wake and
Fry? They go looking for the yabba and they just find that oil refinery place in the desert.
I thought it was a prequel to finding Nemo. All those things can be true. Yeah. Wait, okay,
okay, hold on. Sorry, I'm not sufficiently memed. You're going to have to explain that one to me.
Finding Nemo. Have you not seen Finding Nemo? Well, you probably know it.
I'm aware. You will soon. Okay. Okay. Well, here's some fish, right? There's some,
there's the beginning of the fish and it gets lost at the end of the fish gets eaten by a dentist.
No, escape from a dentist. Yes. Yes. But it like some stuff happens in the middle of miles.
Paral. Basically, Sydney is like used a lot, right? 42 Wallaby way, Sydney or something like that.
And just just a relation to Australia. But my hot take is that I think finding Nemo is one of
the most rewatchable movies. I've probably seen it a hundred times. My nephews used to watch it
basically constantly. And it's still entertaining. I can watch it now if they put it on. I'll just
watch the entire thing. I'm totally satisfied just sitting all the way through it. More rewatchable
the master and commander. That is a heavy claim. That's a heavy claim. Is that is the street actually
called Wallaby Street? Wallaby Way. Yeah, I think it's 42 Wallaby. Hold on. I'm gonna put it up.
That's weird. In Wallace and Gromit, their house is on West Wallaby Street, isn't it?
I think it's a nod. The beloved British cartoon slash no, it's not cartoon. It's stop motion animation.
I don't know if I'm proud or not that I actually got a spot on 42 Wallaby Way.
Well, I wasn't kidding when I said I've probably seen it a hundred times.
So if you watch Finding Nemo a hundred times, you get to 42 West Wallaby Way every time
without even blinking. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So now I can bring up, I can, I can talk about the
drama. Yeah, it's simmered a little bit. I had to prepare. We've had a bit of the simmer.
So, okay. I guess here, here's the scope of the drama. There's always been undertones of like
aggression towards white labeling for validators in the cosmos, right? Where white labeling,
the idea is you as an infrastructure provider will run the actual node hardware for a,
for someone else to like be the marker for more or less. It's kind of a decent way to put it.
But one example of this, you could argue that like steak like Moe was white labeled because
like he didn't have any actual involvement with the validator itself. He just kind of was the
face of the validator, whereas he had a different entity effectively running his validator. I wouldn't
really consider him quite white labeling, but that's the idea. And so recently it came out that
all nodes has something like 40 or 50% of the voting power over the Luna classic chain. And I
think about the same amount on the new Luna chain. And the way this works out is it's spread across
a bunch of different validators that haven't announced that like someone else is actually
running their nodes, but someone was doing like a node analysis and they found that there's like
half validators all sitting behind like five centuries. And then they traced those validators
back to all nodes. And the argument of whether white labeling itself can be is better not is
one thing. But what really kind of drives the point home is that all nodes actually keeps the
private key of the validators. So like the thing actually makes sure they're signing. And it also
keeps the seed phrase of every node that they white label for. And that includes other things
outside of the cosmos includes their Ethereum validators includes all of their validators.
Do they publish that last piece? Or where did that last piece come from that they said? I know
that was talked about that like they own all the keys or they have all the wall keys. But is that
like confirmed or what? It was talked about in the hold on. What's the chat called? Terra Founders
Chat. I want to say Terra Foundation League. Terra Rebirth League. It was talked about in the Terra
Rebirth League chat. Terra Rebirth. Okay. Yeah. Was it their CEO that confirmed it or something like
that? That I don't know. I'm only like I'm in that chat, but I don't pay too much attention to it.
I've seen screenshots of it. I don't know if it was specifically the CEO because I don't know who
the CEO was. I think there's someone named like Johnny or something like that. Not that that helps
any. But my understanding is it was confirmed that they do in fact have these seed phrases and
the private keys of all the validators. And obviously that means that they're in a sense
they're compromised, right? If the CEO wanted to do some sort of hostile act, they could like pull
commissions or in a sense they could basically not allow people to actually access their validator.
And we do know that that seed phrase isn't necessarily given out to people they're white
labeling for. So in effect, they are just running their own validators under a different name.
But so that last piece, does that mean they're voting for them? That is correct. They're voting
for them. That's how that came out because several of the, I think, I think part of how it came out
is someone was talking about they were not able to vote even though they've been in the active set
for like two months or something. They're like, Hey, we need our seed so we can actually like
vote. Yeah, we're not like you haven't given us our seed yet. So we can't we can't vote.
That's fucked. So back to the first piece around having that bit is because there's a whole bunch
of things where you can go, is that the worst thing in the world? Is that the worst thing in the
world? And we'll pause on an opinion on that for a second. And then you're like, Oh, wait, they
didn't even have the ability to make a wallet, right, that represented that. I mean, that's
that's a true really white labeling though, is it? That's not white labeling, right?
That is just pay to play, isn't it? It's something that's not white labeling. It's
something that is, I think that is just civil as a service, isn't it?
Yeah, because I'm guessing the initial stake and everything else was from whatever those
customers are, right? Because they had to probably buy in to get to the set because all
nodes is not doing that. So they're, they're in essence, running the infrastructure and be curious
to know what the financials are of this. I mean, I'd be interested to really know what the financials
are of those of those arrangements. But yeah, I mean, the thing is, it's like, like Todd just
said in the chat, this takes it from, you know, the users having full custody of their,
or the validators, having full custody over their tokens to now the service has full custody. And
that's kind of like breaking a pretty, I mean, honestly, a spoken contract of, of running validators.
Now you're, now you're talking about like the people inherently that are delegating to these
compromised validators, that contract between the validator and the delegators kind of broke
that contract of up trust and in my opinion of, I don't know, at least who you think you're
delegating with, right? Because you're actually, I mean, literally, all those people are delegated
with all notes is really kind of the idea, right? So they have full custody of the keys and everything
else associated that it's interesting. The governance thing is really everybody gets all
wrapped up around the governance because of that component. So if they're not, if they're just like
a tell us how you want to vote these shares and they, and they vote them, that's one thing. If
they're not even like, if they're not responding to their own customer's requests on governance votes,
that's, that's pretty, god damn ridiculous. That's crazy. And so as, as things do in the cosmos,
this came to a head with Jacob Gideke and bringing out into the public. And I guess at this point,
as of today, he has been rejected from the, the lunacy. There's some doubt that he's been
basically kicked out of because for bringing this up for bringing it up. Yep. Yeah. Nice.
Was, was it the bringing it up or was it the way in which he was brought up?
That's fair. Yeah. Probably the way because part of their statement was like part one,
Jacob is exiting Dow. Part two, everything Jacob has said, we don't necessarily believe his words
are his own. So then they do the research and go, Oh shit, this is happening. Yeah. I'm curious
that what you said before, like they're running five proxies and have a bunch of signing notes
behind that. How the fuck are they doing that? I thought that was one to one. I thought you
couldn't have, you can't have one. Can you have one century communicate with multiple
Horcrux structures? You cannot. They're not using Horcrux. What would they use? So they just have
five century servers and then a bunch of validator notes behind one to one. Just like a, you can't
have, you can't have one century communicating with multiple signers. Can you? Well, it just
shares peer information, right? And so century is kind of like a layer of indirection. So
Oh, you're talking like old school, like the actual private peer and like separate. So they're
running validator notes. They're not running signers or any validator notes. And then they're
just communicating. They have a private network internally. That's for sure. Oh, that makes sense.
Like 18 months ago, two years ago, state of the art. That is some of fish. Exactly right.
That is some of fish at fucking sibling right there. That's a pretty good idea. The accepted
like the accepted security model, which everyone shoved down your throat when you started in
those most which I forgot about that. But, but that actually that that architecture makes a
lot of sense for the sibling structure. So kudos to them about, about running.
That architecture totally makes sense in this situation. Like that's perfect. Like that's
really smart. And I was like, how the hell did they do that?
Another way like as soon as it was like, we need a word for this is like, it's like, it's like a
simple node architecture. Then block payment was just in the traffic. It's called full custody.
That's literally the technical term. It's like, oh yeah, of course, there would be that that is
actually the term. It's not simple architecture. I'm not, I'm not impressed with the overall
situation. But this architecture of what they're doing illegally totally makes sense. Like this
is a highly approved architecture for is this illegal? Is this illegal? Like whatever you want
to call it allegedly, allegedly usurpers call the FBI. Well, I mean, I think there's a funny
thing about this for like, the question becomes, is the actual network then behind those centuries?
Because I think, I think they have more than 50% of the voting power. So that means those
cities are dividing like the dark net versus classic nodes is lunacy. Yeah, basically,
from a like a very real legal perspective. Basically, yeah, the true, the true king of the
shitcoins. How did a network end up with greater than 50% civil power? That's fucking crazy.
Okay, promise that on lunacy, it's like 60%. Okay, so
fucking insanity. That's amazing. So 60% is run by all nodes all behind these the same
infrastructure, all at Hetzner, right? I think everybody somebody came back to say they're
all at Hetzner, right? Or I think that was a Jacob structure. I mean, it's huge, huge.
Why? And for the people who are all nodes customers, did you know this was the structure
before you got involved in this? Because you don't have to be in the cosmos too long to actually look
at a white label contract and say, Oh, shit, I own nothing here. Right. So like, I'm curious on
who those who those groups are. And if they walked into that knowing, Oh, this is the situation that
we're going to get, or they signed a contract blind and then they bent over or something.
It's a really, I mean, I mean, you guys would agree, right? Like, like, if you saw that situation,
if you're in the cosmos for more than a week, and recognize that you're going to run a node,
but you have no custody of the wallet keys, you have no custody of the of the node itself,
that's when you walk like, it's pretty crazy. Why though, right? Like, if you don't have the
skills to run the validator, but you want to run a validator, and you can use your marketing chops
to run the validator, it's still a good deal for you. Right? Because depends on what depends on
what they're charging, because there are a lot of white labels in the cosmos, there's a ton of
them, right? And and and you could do you could Google cosmos white label, and you can come up
with that, you know, a dozen different vendors that are that are offering nodes and those types
of situations, even like bison trails and shit, right? Like in that, in that old situation,
didn't they get bought out? And then yeah, coinbase. Yeah, yeah. They might still do that.
They used to do that in the helium side for a long time. So they still do. So the funny thing
about that about that is bison trails actually owned a lot of lunacy originally. And that's part
of where this issue came into be, because they ran a bunch of nodes, and they just signed all of them
off whenever Luna forked. And then that made all those basically gain control of the network.
And Todd just said, at least they'll give the keys over, which I didn't know. So that's that's
one thing. So basically, they both have the keys, right? So I guess say that goes against what you
said before about them not being able to govern though. And Coinbase cloud, which is bison trails
usually will not. That's right. I've heard that too. Like they own the whole infrastructure.
And basically, you're just a customer like as a right as a SAS type of idea. Meanwhile,
null is just changing backgrounds. Are you in this conversation or what are you doing over there?
Oh, it's just I was looking at the whole nerds websites.
This is what reminds me of like in general, I'm just always surprised by
the size of some of those huge providers like the I think it's like Block Demon, like they were on
they were the ones I think got up on stage at Gateway and Prague last year. And they were like,
okay, I'm not I'm just going to like be a bitch and just be like they're basically like we're
Billy Big Balls blockchain. We own big balls blockchain.com newsflash. They did. We're just
we're just like the best and everything. And then what's funny is like obviously,
like Cosmas is like some pissant tiny ecosystem compared to Ethereum, fine, whatever. But they
did double sign, you know, like literally the other day, like, won't say the company was talking
to an account manager for a thing. And they were like, kind of doing the sales part of trying to
press you. They're just like, I'm sorry, something block demon. And I was just like, oh, yeah,
they double signed in our ecosystem. And they're like, what's that? And I was like, basically
cost people money through a mistake, you know, but but actually, you know, it's a mistake maybe we
can all make. So me being facetious about it is maybe actually just like keeping problems on my
own future self. And this poor account managers like, sorry, what am I? Oh, so like double signing,
right? So what happens? And, and then like, well, okay, so we were going to tell you about this
product. And I was like, no, no, it's very bright. So there are two parts to a Cosmos validator,
right? And so we've got a pen. And they, and they, they just said something about connection issues.
And then, and then, and then they, they dropped off the call. I don't know why they've been trying
to rearrange it. But yeah, they were trying to impress me before that we have that unfortunate
connection issue. They're trying to impress me by mentioning block demon.
Amazing. I know we, well, yeah, this is a pretty good website. Like these guys have got this stitched
up. Like, they got a good website. There's been $1,000 on the website. So they must be great.
No, it's just, it's so captive. Like, if you go like, so they've just done a good job at like
making it captive and giving you options. So like, they've got all these networks that they're running
right. They must have fucking a thousand people working for them. But the prices are like, in
some cases up there in a, in a bear market. But if, if this was like a big ball, like, you know,
to not to have a full hands off approach, it's like, it's putting a big ball's blockchains,
not bad. And, but when you go into the networks, right, it's got the first one up there is actually,
it's got two options. It says you can stake now or host now. You click the host now button,
you go and create a validator, right? But then you click, if you click the stake now, it actually
takes you to like a staking page, which is captive in their website, you connect your wallet and you
and you state through their website. So they don't let you out at all. There's no external links.
It's pretty well done if you're like catching users anyway.
Well, I think they're one of the biggest Ethereum providers for validators. So they can forward
it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they've, she's so like the note, 720 a month for a Cardano node.
480 a month and the basic for a Asmo node plus advanced plan of a buck 40 an hour, I think,
or 570 an hour for enterprise plan. I don't know what those differences are.
What is it? Is that you get your keys for that?
For the 570. 570 you can vote.
What happens if they double sign you?
I'm sure they have some patrol. I'm sure there's insurance on this, right?
So is there any, is there any mention of it? Because like a traditional insurer to provide
your obvious isn't going to give you fucking shit. And as if all nodes have got,
over a guest double signing penalties aren't that massive, are they? I mean, they are,
they suck, but like they're not colossal if you're a company with a few million in the bank,
especially at today's prices. Right. Yeah. But 380 for a Juno node?
You got $308. $360. I'm not sure what the advanced lands adds because that adds
another 700 bucks. That's pretty cheap. Something 360 cheaper than your AWS brother. Move it over.
I mean, I see other you can snark all your like those nodes on AWS anymore,
motherfucker. You should pay more attention rather than just being on your visit to the zoo.
There is an option to migrate a node. Yeah, I know you move.
Yeah, I saw that. I saw that. I saw the migration. They run a shitload of nodes. Oh man.
They are the number one provider on stakingrewards.com by a defining margin. Like they have $2 billion
in stake value. The next one is 1.2 billion. Wow. Don't advertise that shitty fucking website bro.
But is that, is that, I wonder if that, that's their numbers, right? I'm wonder if they're
talking about all of their, I assume that's all their customer nodes, right? So it's not really
imagine. It's not really a fair fight, right? Cause they're basically a symbol. Cause they're
selling every single network. Our symbols worth $2 billion. Yeah. Hey guys, just FYI,
you can get a passage node for 360 a month. So I know you guys are going to run right out.
I mean, we are making big bucks on passage right now. Huge alpha. Definitely GMI. So,
you know, invest now, invest now. Well, I mean, meeting extra blocks, you could do that on a
fucking Raspberry Pi. So yeah, we're never passing. Does passage have wasm enabled? Cause it has
wasm enabled and you can't run it on a Raspberry Pi. I don't know actually. It's only a problem when
they like make a wasm transaction, right? I mean, it's true. You could get one of those blades when
they come out and try and make a, try and make a 19 inch rack full of Raspberry Pi. Man, those,
those blades look fucking slick. I love, I love pie clustering. Me too. Pie clustering is awesome.
Yeah. There's, there's even just like some little trays you can fit five, five nodes in,
yeah, well, no, it's, yeah, pies and I love them. I see them. I'm just like, oh, that's
fucking cool. You just can't, you can't get the fucking piezo. I don't need that at all.
You can't get the piezo like they're so back ordered, or at least they are here in the U.S.
I know, I know elsewhere there's a little bit more, but the back even the, even the CM modules are
back ordered because I was looking at, because they have boards like you were talking about in all
that has like maybe four or eight nodes, but it takes the, the compute module, but you don't have
the whole pie. You just like stick like each card in there on like a, on like a PCB of some sort.
Like that's awesome. Like in a one U with like eight of those things shoved in there with a
couple of network cards in the back. That's awesome. I just sold Raspberry Pi for, go ahead.
I was just going to say, there's, there's this one tray. It's got like a little LCD screen for
all of the five pie and it's got like little fucking USB L's. It's so cute. Yeah. You should go
and look at a Jeff Geerling on YouTube. I think it's awesome. You were watching that guy?
That's where I get all my pie from Jeff. He's a good dude. Like he's like,
that's where the blade thing comes from, isn't it? Yeah. He tests all those and they send him a
bunch of those. He's just like, he's a good engineer and like he, he's a fun dude. So go
watch him on YouTube. He's a great, great to watch. I have some friends that used to work for the
Raspberry Pi foundation and there's a lot of, yeah, it sounds like a strange organization.
Yeah. Did you say that you sold one recently for like a gold bar?
Yeah, more or less. I sold it for over double what I bought for like a year ago. Dude, I
would have taken that. Is that, is that the most impressive trade this year then from one of us?
Could be. Oh my God. I don't know. I had a pretty impressive trade last year going through my
fucking coin lever. I can't find where three grand came from. I had one spectacularly bad trade that
was so bad our company accountants were like, oh, that's great. That's a good loss to write off.
I would have preferred to have made somebody and they were like, well, yes, but at least this way,
it's a loss in a way that we could work with. And I was like, you lose, you lose large.
They're like, if you can, if you're going to lose, lose it in a way that's very clearly documented
and it's not capital gains loss, but it's an income loss because then you can put it on. Yeah,
exactly. Capsicum loss. I can't even remember. Let's just put it this way.
Nope, he's frozen. He was so upset. He's frozen. He's literally broken Australia.
Some sort of some sort of quality at the cable. Oh, the the fucking, the Starlink's been pretty
skewed. Ah, fucking Elon. So I realized we literally have, I've managed to devise that off
of Cosmos again a little bit, but is it, is it, is it the, the, the, was it confluence of the
spit, the spheres? What the fuck is from the witch? I can't, I was trying to make a reference there.
It's died. Fuck it. We're moving on. Is it Burns night and Australia day on the same day? It must
be. Is it Australia day today? Oh, no, wait, tomorrow. You're in tomorrow, aren't you? It's
26. Yeah. It's a 26. Well, how about it's Australia day right now. So in 20 in on the 26th. So Burns
night was yesterday for you. Yeah, but it's still the same time in UTC. So, so you've got a whiskey
hangover. And now you need to immediately start drinking, uh, Castle Wayne, my go to reference
of an Australian beer, VB. Yeah, I mean, I was going to go for a swim in the zoo later on. So
I don't know that like it's good idea to start drinking with the animals. Do it. Do it. Do it.
Do it. River Phoenix. Sure. I don't know what the fuck that is, but let's do it.
Well, did River Phoenix drown swimming the Mississippi River while drunk?
Really? That's what happened? Isn't that correct? No. Oh, no. Are you thinking of Jeff Buckley?
You think of Jeff Buckley? Yeah. They were recording and he went out afterwards and
literally swam the Mississippi drowned, right? Yeah. Yeah. People will have remembered River
Phoenix drowned in a river that had been like river unlucky for some. That's what that is.
I don't want to say OD, but did he OD? That's what I was under the pressure.
Yeah. You're thinking of Jeff Buckley. I know Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi. I remember
that because it was like, I think it was like late night or something similar that and he ran out
or something. Yeah. And he just got swept away and that was it. Yep. That's an OD on
cocaine and heroin, a mixture commonly known as a speedball. That's right. Yeah.
Use an LA or something similar to that, I think. There's a lot of mention of speedballs in the
book mentioned on the previous episode of the podcast, Homicide by Paul Simon. Paul Simon,
what am I doing today? David Simon. David Simon who wrote The Wire, not Paul Simon who wrote
Graceland. What is wrong with today? Close. They could really, they're almost the same people. I'm
just like 95% to the right answer. It's a fine line. It's a fine line. It's still a stupid
line between stupid and clever. Yeah. It's just never worked. Turnabout.
I love you. You're welcome. You prepared that. I did. I was hoping it would come up today.
Have you prepared a Twitter? What is it? Your Twitter quote of the week? Have you prepared
one? Your drill tweet. My official drill book is at different locations.
1,000 kilometers away from where I am quite right now.
Fucking with the program. How perfect is it that a book of digital tweets that are available
everywhere at all time is a thousand miles away from Houston? Now you can't pull up a drill tweet.
It's pretty unfortunate. Somehow it went from digital to analog to digital,
but you can't make it happen. Are you doing search? I think he's doing a search on drill tweets.
I was just checking. I was going to attempt to quote my favorite one from memory, but then I was
like, I chickened out. So I was like, it's so long suckers. I rev up my motorcycle and create a huge
cloud of smoke. When the cloud dissipates, I'm lying completely dead on the pavement.
There you go. That's my answer. It's not original to have that as your favorite drill
tweet, but I think it sums up almost everything that is great about drill.
But yeah, there's also a new drill book, which I need to go and read, or newish. I think it's
called The God Method, How to Become God, something like that. Others in the chat,
but it sounds great. I can't wait to read it. Once I finish this history of the privatization of
the military, I'm going to read the drill book. How do you fit in with all these documentaries,
you're watching? Lots of documentaries. Yeah, I've got another one lined up. It's called
Beyond Thunderdome. I think it's about current Australian government economic policy, something
like that. Tina Turner's in it weirdly. Never heard it before. Why would you be reading a book about
Australian politics? So you admit that is true. That just blew. Do you see what happened there?
So we admit that is Australian politics. Straight over, Niles. He's just like either
he's complicit in the joke or it's so straight over his head. I'm looking at other things. I was
actually just looking at... I've rehashed all of my nodes lately. You've rehashed all of your nodes?
No, I've just rearranged how I have them all arranged, if that makes sense. And how I operate
the actual node itself, because we're on Horcrux, we've changed to using RAID 0 and everything
with four NVMe drives. Man, these things are fucking humming. They are going really well now.
Are you doing that with the... Even fast chains like RAID 0 or even F-MOS is pretty quick, right?
Are you doing that with those two and seeing less misses and everything?
Yeah, my misses are really good, have been for a while. But yeah, man.
Defri, I want to know how your experience has been getting away from AWS into the world of
degeneracy? That's easy. We run a route sign-in, so all you do is you trash the old,
you bring up a new node somewhere else, connect it, sync it. Thank you, Paul Kajoo.
So did you go...
You went with the... Did you have to rewrite all Ansible scripts and everything,
or write Ansible scripts and everything, or did you go with someone else who just do it manually?
We already have some Ansible. I think either forked off of Shorzoo's fork of Bulkor or
somewhere upstream, it's Bulkor's Ansible. And we wrote... I rewrote a bunch of things to suit
the way that I like the node to be set up that's different. Yeah, same. Yeah.
So yeah, there's like basically kept the core of the SSH hardening, because that's exactly what we do.
The firewall enabling stuff, obviously, and then basically stripped out of the stuff,
install and configure Cosmovisor in the way that we want, add a system defile for that,
some other bits and pieces. And one thing that... And also, we... It's not really necessary, but
additionally, having two-factor auth and stuff is we tend to do that using Google Authenticator
or a compatible 2FA solution over the SSH. So that's like... We just... That stuff as well.
But it ended up being a bit of a faff, because I forgot that when you fork something off GitHub,
you can't change the visibility unless you basically trash the GitHub history.
So there's kind of... I think in our company one, there's like a fork, which is like the...
When we just need to bring up a box, we have like one fork. And then when it's actually a node,
we have like another one, which is almost exactly the same, but I've just trashed the GitHub history
on it because I was really tired when I did it. I was just like, I'm just going to push a new repo.
Fuck it. If you message GitHub, they'll cut the fork out, so you'll keep the history,
but then you can make it private because I've done that before. But it does require explicitly
that you mess it up. There's no way to do it in an automated fashion. That's weird. I mean,
it kind of makes sense that there must be some historical raisins reason for it.
I've done the same. I think I forked Schultz. I think I took your version. And I've rewritten...
Plus, I've added all the other stuff like Aptos and all the stuff we do for Stargaze APIs.
And Chainlink stuff and everything. It's all in there. Plus, I'm running Ansible Vault on
50% of those files maybe because it might be a... Not necessarily secrets, just like some server
addresses or other types of things. I might be running HAProxy or something I don't want to put
out there. So then I always get worried about fucking checking in a non-voltage file just on
accident. And so it'd be nice to take some of that private, even though I mean, I want to respect
the work that was done because all that kicked it off for me. But I've changed so much of it just
because... I have nothing to contribute back. That's my issue. Because even me putting all
these different chains on one repo is probably not the right way, but I'm so far into it. And then
I would never do a PR back on some of that stuff because there might be some things like maybe
some setup or main type of things. But everything is my way, right? Same thing that Frey said.
It might be specific security things that I want to do. That might not make sense for you guys.
Yeah, exactly. And the core of the most useful things I think in the Ansible script. And
actually, if you're a validator listening to this and you are a bit unsure about some basic
best practice for setting up boxes, like you should check out Polkatoos, secure server setup. It's a
good base for starting, which is just set up the firewall, set up correctly, ban everything that's
not the exact ports you expect to be using for the current use of that server, harden your
SSH configuration, and then you can add additional things on top of that if you want. So like in
our case, that's like, we like having 2FA because another thing that 2FA does is it
automatically stops people just like spamming or 2FA and what? So SSH. So through what?
What's that? So through what service? You can set up. You can basically just use Google
Authenticators. You can set up. There's a package for that, right? Is that what you guys are doing?
Yeah. We don't have anything exposed, so I'm just curious. No, no, no. That 2FA is actually built
in the SSHD in the oven, then. Isn't there an option? So it's a lot. Yeah, so SSHD, you can
configure a, basically a check that will challenge people. And I don't know if under the hood,
it's actually using the same password challenge. It's just TRTP, right? It's just giving you a,
it's giving you a TOBT code and your, whatever you do on your phone and blah, blah, blah.
Right? Yeah. I mean, like on the phone, just use Google Authenticators, or the use whatever
application. Can you use the same to, can you use the same code off of every server or you are
actually per server generating 2FA? You can configure that however you want because it's
just dot files. Okay. So you can, you can pick a, you can pick a secret and then that generates
the same TOBT or whatever, right? Okay. So you can actually, if you want, you can automate it to the
point of having all the config in Ansible and then actually having the file on your machine
for the configuration and then just push and then it just bootstraps the server,
grabs the file and then the server is, is like once it's done, you can only get in with the 2FA.
Yeah. I have to say, I don't like having that file shuffled around by a automated service.
So it does everything else, but then doesn't restart the demon. And then you could basically
jump in, make the final change, restart the demon, and then it'll kick you out.
And then you just log back in and it'll work. Or you can log back in another session before
you actually restart it in. Actually, I don't think it does the SSH session. So I think you're
fine. I think it's just if you have a log out, then you have to log back in, then you'll have
cocked it up. So you can just do the classic open another window and just double check it works.
Right. Right. But yeah. That's cool. That's pretty useful. Yeah. That's nice. Nice structure on it.
Like as long as it doesn't get annoying, where like you, I mean, honestly, I don't know if there,
has there ever been like a SSH key, not even a RSA key, but the newer EE, whatever,
for the whole thing are called. 12, 5, 5, 9 or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Has there ever been a
any sort of comfort? I mean, other than you losing obviously at private, but that's never
been compromised, right? So no, so really, you're just, it's one more factor on you losing the
private. That's all really that does. Right. Yeah. And because it, it like it has a sort of
debouncing effect as well, because you can only make so many requests in 30 seconds or whatever
the configuration time is. And that's just like configuration on the demon. So you could, it
gives you another way of essentially rejecting requests that come in that are unknown. But we
don't do that on every server anymore purely because we have more as we move more stuff towards
bare metal, we have more throwaway servers than we used to. Right. We used to rely on a lot of AWS
services that kind of plug into the node you're running. We had, we ran more testnet boxes,
we were speculatively running more testnets and looking to run more main nets. And of course,
we've come off of main nets recently as well, which were all on AWS. So those boxes are just gone.
And for things like utility boxes, if a year ago, I think being at that point a lot more tired
and a lot more paranoid, we'd have been looking to put 2FA on like everything. Now, if I can
answer it, I can just trash the box. If I think there's a problem with the box, I'm just trash it,
but rebuild it. And it's a couple of hours of work to, you know, for things like monitoring or
whatever, re, re, move point stuff at something else. So the, that, that has changed, I suppose,
in terms of actually having 2FA set up and things like that. Yeah. Once you start using,
honestly, like with, with Ansible and plus using the same two or three vendors that we,
I mean, we have stuff in-house, but when we use outside vendors, like I can get,
I can get a box and a node running in like eight minutes on any chain. Like just from,
from bare metal, whatever they give me to running two or three Ansible commands. I mean, it's so
much, it's, and it feels good. Like there's, there's a lot to be said for automation when it
comes to that. Like having all your tools there and everything looks the same. And you know,
I know what machine I'm on and the security side, but is that, is that, it's like,
fucking yeah. I'm always a bit surprised when I, when I run the Ansible script and the set and
everything kind of works. And then I'm like, oh, I should literally just have to install the binary.
Yeah. Copy it into the Cosmify as a directory and then start. I don't even do that. I Ansible,
all that shit too. Do you? I Ansible upgrades. I Ansible, just the initial, I mean, I mean,
knowing that, like if you're starting from the current version, it's a new box and it goes,
it's going into Genesis, right? So I don't have to worry about upgrade folders and that kind of
shit. And then I run it. How good is the, how good is the new version of Cosmovisor with
Cosmovisor and knit? I bet it's everyone uses that now, right? Cosmovisor and knit.
1.0 for life, baby.
Roll in 1.0.
I'm such a 1.4. Now.
Are you?
It's like, yeah, it's so much better. Yeah.
Why is it? What's better?
I just like the init just makes things easy. It's just one command instead of like having to
type in a bunch and then copy.
To help copy binaries around or things like that. Is that, is that, is helping just say
a nation of that?
So you just do, when you, when you're starting your chain up, like you install the binary in
Cosmovisor and use Cosmovisor init and then point it to the binary. So you just set your
environment variables first and then point it to the binary and then it'll create like the
Genesis folder, the upgrades folder, the link, it'll copy the binary to the Genesis folder
and just set everything up.
I think he's making the argument of 1.4 versus pretty one, not one versus 1.4.
Well, one, you can't use init. I don't think.
Really? I thought that's when it started.
No, I don't think it's in one.
I don't even know.
All the, all the logging issues are fixed and all that type of stuff. Like it's just a way
slicker tool now. But they've moved the fucking thing as well, which is kind of annoying in the
repository. But I was going to say something to you, Tray, with your hardening script, if you are
using, well, everyone should probably do this anyway, but if you're using OVH, they actually
have some custom config in the SSHD config.d folder and it enables password authentication in
that. So you need to clear that folder out of stuff as well.
You mean, you mean this, were you talking about what we talked about with suitors?
So when you're hardening, yeah.
Yeah. When you're hardening on your node in your Ansible script, you just need to clear
out the SSHD underscore config.d of random, did I get rogue? No, just random conf files.
Because there's this 50 cloud init file, which actually has password authentication. Yes,
in it. So it'll override the main default config. So when you use, even if you use line in file,
or if you're using, there's actually an SSH module that you can set configurations with,
it just does it in the main file. And then if it exists in that config.d, it actually
overrides the main file one. So you just have to make sure you clear that out.
I have nothing on my OVH boxes on that folder. I actually just look because that actually
worried me, but I've never seen anything in there. Same. Etc. SSHD underscore config.d.
Empty. 50-cloud init. Empty. Well, it's on every one of my boxes.
That's weird. I wonder what that is. Yeah, that would be bad. This should not be doing.
Actually, maybe it depends on what, like I'm running from a Debian 11. I'm using their image,
unfortunately, but just making changes based on drive structure. But I'm using the Debian 11
image. So maybe that's a, maybe that's different based on image that you're pulling from.
Yeah. Well, I use, I use the Ubuntu 20.04. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe I'm just lucky because
I'm on Debian. Yeah, maybe. But I would check it anyway for anyone. What are you using, Shilty?
Boot 20 as well, but it has some custom setup. Anyway, worth a check. I just noticed that when
you're doing it. So like, I take all the inspo as well from all of your guys' scripts, actually,
like, you, sir, you linked me to some of yours and Shilty and Okutu have taken inspo from all of
those, but essentially ended up writing them all myself anyway. And that was mainly a learning
thing for me because I'd never used the answer before. So it is easier for me to learn if I
actually go and write the whole thing and make all the mistakes while I'm doing it.
That's right. Yeah. So yeah, it's actually, you know, fuck, it's so much, so much better than
doing it manually. Like, well, just so much better. You just, yeah. Then you get in the other situation
where if I make any change to a box, I'm like, why the fuck am I doing this? Like,
why am I typing? Like, and any change that comes up, like, if somebody does not follow the structure
or they use like their own binary, which is somebody is okay, or if they have like a different
init script, or they run like setup scripts in their own repo, instead of actually just doing
a make install and all that type of thing. Like, ah, god damn it, like breaking my shit. I mean,
I've added to make install to a lot of networks just because of that. I'm like, no, I'm not putting
up a new crap. I'm just gonna throw some lines into a variable in there and everything. Yeah.
Right. The only problem is that you start getting to like even like, we, I think, I forget what
chain we were just on that has a newer version of the Cosmos SDK.
You're about say DevNet. That's what you're talking about. Is this a DevNet?
Where some of the core commands didn't work? Some of the core commands are different. Oh,
and the config is different. That's what it was. Maybe it was, you're right. You're right.
Chelsea is it was say DevNet where like, they moved all the config structure in the files from a dash
to an underscore. So all my sets break. And then I think there was a bunch of changes in there.
I think it's no longer inbound and outbound connections. It's now just a total connections
and let the node figure it out. There's a bunch of stuff in there. The non-logger seeds, they're
called like bootstrap here. That's right. Bootstrap here. So the seed is gone. And actually, I think
those nodes even read, I ran a, I ran a, an actual tender seed node. And I think the nodes
rejected that because they actually wanted another actual seed binary running as a bootstrap here
instead of a seed or something like that. It was like, there's a, anyway, there's changes coming.
So there might, this, this, this fork might get forked again for having to manage chains that
are on, what was that? Is that 47 or 46 or something? I think it's 47. I want to say it's 47.
Originally it was 46 back when Nevercraft was the first one using it, I want to say.
And then it was pretty unstable originally. So I think it pushed back.
Yeah. I'm down for, I mean, change is cool. I'm not, not, I'm down playing that. It's,
all that stuff is good. It's just, that's just, you know, one of the downsides of automation is
you gotta, you gotta manage that shit, right? Actually, just realized that craft is like
officially down now. I would think so. Finally stopped. Well, even though, no, I mean, like the,
the blockchain, like the test sets down, but their website's actually down now. So I think that it
is officially buttoned up. Is this it? Is this the first one?
It's officially rugged. Actually, before it began. So when, with your, your configurations,
you surf, I, I am going to move because I haven't done the configuration scripts yet. I know you
guys use like set or line in file for all of your configs changing the config.toml and
app.toml. I'm actually going to change and start putting all of those into my system
d files as environmental variables. I really like that idea. I was thinking the same thing.
Like I, I, the only issue with that for me is like, you can't just fire the binary up on its own
without running it through system d. And so you're kind of dependent on Cosmovisor and the
folder structure and all that kind of stuff. Cause sometimes like if we're troubleshooting,
I'll just run the binary manually because I want to be able to be live and be able to kill it.
And I don't want to tail shit out and everything else. But I, but the idea of being able to ignore
the config and run it all through like, like a pass in variables in on system d is actually
pretty, pretty, it's pretty strong for automation versus like setting out the file and everything.
Yeah. Setting the files and bad pain, unless you have, unless you just maintain the config file
locally on your, but it just makes it easier to see like what you're actually changing.
So when, you know, when you're trying to troubleshoot the issues with bloody, you know,
on a test or something, you can just go, well, I've got these settings rather than having to
be like, oh, fuck, you know, this, that and the other. So yeah, let me know how it goes. But that,
but that stuff back up, it'd be interesting to try that. I just didn't know if everything,
we talked about this on the channel, but I wasn't sure if everything that was available
was actually command line available. It's all available as, um, as environmental variables,
I'm pretty sure, because you can either set them when you call the, um, the binary in the,
in the line that calls the binary, um, or you can just set them all as environment variables
for when you start the binary. I just, I'm not sure if can, uh, Cosmovisor will affect that at
all, but, um, I guess, should be right. You just environment variables in the system,
Defile. I don't think Cosmos, it's not really doing anything, right? So it's running the binary
with those. That's a good question, actually. Now that I'm thinking about it, because you're
really passing the variable down to the binary. Yeah. I guess they pass it on maybe because
it all, I'm not 100% sure how system D works, but I assume it runs like in a sandbox, um, environment,
because you can have, yeah, I saw, I used the wrong word, the free, but you can have like
five instances of Cosmovisor working with all, each with their own, um, you know, environmental
variables in the system D. So what I mean is it doesn't share the environmental variables between
different system Ds. The frag of it. Yeah. Each one, each one's run demonized. So it's
running the background. Um, but you're, that's a good point because you're actually running
Cosmovisor start in that binary directory, but you are setting environment variables that I
assume would be only to that, to that process. Yeah. I think you, I think you'd be able to run
multiple chains on one note if that's what you're going with that. Yeah, I think you could. Um, and
and do you know, it's also worth saying that like the only config of our environment is very, very
common as a best practice for software development has been for the last five, I don't know, maybe
10 years, like 12 factor app is the, is the like definitive, especially if you do anything like, you
know, serverless or stuff like that where, or especially like stuff like AWS, like you're
basically running through a way hardware and you're passing in environment variables all the time. I
mean, like this is one of the things where like to use that to talk about aptus for a second, like
is very, very different between we've run some stuff on bare metal and we've run some stuff using
Amazon EKS, which is a very different experience. And it's because like obviously when you throw
stuff up on EKS, you're basically just like, I would like one very, very generic validator,
one very, very generic VFM please. And then I'm going to give you effectively via environment
what you should know as secrets. And obviously, the way you encrypt them, decrypt them using
Kubernetes and using Qtool and everything is, is out of the scope of this. But, but you're,
you're passing all of that configuration in, in such the only place that actually really lives is
on your laptop or the deployment box, or you can I think with that to actually configure it to be
in like an S3 bucket or a vault. But that's another way of doing it. There isn't really a concept of
remote signing, I don't think. So that's the other thing, but it's very, very different to
how like if you're configuring a box by bare metal, all of that environment is basically
just co-located somewhere on the box. It's not passed. I don't think aptus has the same thing
Cosmos does where config file values map to environment variable values to allow you to
draw a factor of everything. I don't think so. I don't even know. I think it's, I don't, that's a
yeah, I don't, I don't think so. We do. So on a different note, uni is dead long live uni.
What the fuck is happening there? The fray. What's up with the uni five?
Well, uni five outpashed after upgrade on a block that had
IBC TX's and wasm calls. So that's nice. That really helps narrow it down.
Was that was that the first block after the, I thought it failed at the upgrade. Oh, so it did
it didn't make a block after the upgrade. Yeah. I think it made two blocks. Second block,
there were price feeder calls, IBC calls, wasm store calls, maybe even a wasm execute call.
And yeah, fun times. It could be a number of things, but probably, probably fees is the one,
isn't it? Fees or fees? Well, fee global fee or call are the two likely smoking guns, but I think
global fee is the newer one. So yeah, hopefully it won't result in our IP uni, but it may result
in our IP uni because I've done months of staking to get that shit even there.
You got too emotionally invested in a test net. So much hours in time.
It's been a weird one because it's been the first time that uni shot the bed where
it hasn't been 100% my responsibility to fix it. How does that feel? It feels magic.
I've just had other shit to do. But it's really like I can recommend, I see what other people
just swing into the chat occasionally and say things like, oh, if you try blah, blah, blah,
then fuck off again for a day. It's great. So that's really unhelpfully what I've been doing
while mainly Reese and a bit of friend of the show. And to be fair, friend of the show Jake,
friend of the show Reese have largely been, I think, looking at that. And Reese has been
sort of narrowing it down. Wait, hold on. We have one more call to make there. Chill
validation's been doing their part. Well, Chile has been doing a lot upstream. Yes. So Chile actually
has been doing a lot upstream in the SDK. And it's that which means that Chile was aware of
some similar issues on other chains, which has led to the problem of smoking gun for uni.
So I mean, yeah, I mean, Chile's great. As an aside, chill validation, if you want to shout out
a node operator that does demonstrably good upstream work on Cosmos SDK,
they delegate to chill validation. Yeah, I just want to take the opportunity to call them out
because they've been grace and stay one. Yeah, it's definitely definitely a word you call that.
Definitely. Stake, Stake Chill. Yeah, for sure. And like honestly, like what just a great guy,
great guy and like just a fun to be around. It has a great sense of humor and like just,
big fan. We have asked Chill to come on before, but he's not like, I feel like I jump on a podcast
photo guy. Oh, fuck him then. Yeah, he's never mind. Does he even watch the podcast?
Never mind. Fuck all that. Yeah, I don't think he's keen to be like have his face on the
internet and talk shit about stuff. Some words, some words be concerned about that.
We are too stupid to be concerned about that. So here we go. Let's go. Yeah, no, Chill is sick.
That's why the non-podcasts hate. On a completely boring note, my accountant tells me that I'm going
to have my fucking tax sorted out at the end of this week. Congrats. So elated. Oh, mate. Nice.
Did you get your note? Yeah, I know you guys have already done your whole rigmarole and are already
like, I'm fine. The conclusion for us was hilarious. It was like, well, these are all just wrong.
It's too convoluted to even explain why they're wrong, but they're wrong. And my new account is
basically just like, the thing the government cares about is getting paid. And our suspicions,
these are wrong by such a margin. The problem is that the way everything's been filed is basically
arguably fraud. But the amount they're wrong by is probably going to be 1% wrong. So you're totally
fine because as a company, especially working in a super new area, if it is like, it's not a great
excuse to have to be like, the account is definitely fucked it up. But like, if you've actually paid
the right amount, they'll be like, oh, well, whatever, boys and boys, they won't quite do that.
But they were just like, basically, the only problem you can have is if you try and sell a
company or if you try and take out a loan, because then it goes from being like, our books were
screwed, our accountants didn't have a great year, sorry, to being actual fraud. But we don't plan
to either of those things. So it was just like, okay, that's fine. They're like, you have remarkably
calm about this. I was like, I just care about paying the right amount of tax. I don't really care.
Like if we've, if we've always, it's like slightly it's in category 14b instead of 14c,
like I'm sure we can just change that. And they're like, yeah, we can just change that. I'm like,
well, okay, amazing. My sense of elation has not dissipated. Thank you very much. And they're like,
okay, you need to be a little bit worried. I'm like, but I pay you to be worried.
Anyway, have a great Friday. They're like, it's not Friday, it's Wednesday. I'm like, click.
It's game of nodes night. It's Friday now. So it took a couple of accountants to get someone who
agreed with the way that I wanted to do it. So that's not how it works. You don't just get to
re-roll until somebody goes, you get to pay less tax. And you're like, apparently that's not how it
works though. So the thing is that I interpret the tax code in Australia in one particular way,
right? And then there's like this thing here that if you, if you make a best effort to like pay your
tax, then, you know, if you get audited, they're not really going to fucking steamroll you. They're
going to be like, we don't agree with that. And you can go, well, this is why we've done it type
thing. But, you know, we were talking about it. And for starters, it is fucking impossible for me
to get the transactions, right? How in the fuck is the government going to get them? So there's
that problem. And we talked about it and running back at the envelope numbers, the way we're doing
it, you're roughly going to pay like a little bit more tax than what you would if you went through
and like defined the whole like chain of custody of bloody tokens, right? And figured out all the
cost basis and all that type of stuff. So because it's like in a high transaction environment,
we, we estimate that we will get away with just doing it in the way that we're doing it.
Because it saves like so much money in, in administration costs that you can argue that
it's just not feasible to run the business with that type of admin. So, you know, I don't know,
we'll see how we go. I've had other accounts that were just scared of, well, you know, I've talked
to other accountants in this journey to find one that I synced with that, you know, some of them are
worried that they're going to get an audit, which, you know, may or may not. But the thing is,
is like the, the tax codes are like still developing and there's room for interpretation
there. So I don't think even if we do get ordered, I don't think we get hung out to dry. I think
they'll just say, we don't agree with how you're doing it. Can you have another look type thing?
So here they're really, really detailed and specific. But the problem is that, like you say,
it's getting data, like it does like they're like, okay, here is exactly what you need to do if you
get an airdrop or something. Like, okay, great. Even I don't know how to get that data. I'm so sorry.
I'm really like, I'm trying my best. That's exactly it. Like if we can't get it, what fucking hope
in hell does like a third party have of getting it? Like we're the validators. Well, the issue,
the issue here in the US at least is they can determine what that value is. And it's up to you
to determine that that's incorrect. So they can say that you like, we don't know what those values
are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or we think that you've, you've acquired X amount of assets.
And so therefore, this is your tax amount. And so trying to figure out how they got to that number,
why that number is incorrect, showing that it's incorrect is on the burden of the taxpayer,
not on the federal government. So that's the issue here is I totally agree with you. Like,
I can't even get like, I'm we're hoping that I'm hoping that Todd shares his Juneau full node,
because that's the only option I have for pulling some transactions from last year in 2022. But if
I don't, and if the history of Juno is a little bit shady, at least, I mean, difficult to be able
to get a full picture out at least for our stuff. Then I got to, then I have to pull what I can and
like make some assumptions. And if those assumptions get questioned, then I got to fucking figure out
how to do that deal with that. And I still want, and what I what you don't want is you don't want,
I want to be, it would be accurate enough to be able to move past and know that I feel comfortable
that that is accurate. At the same point, you like you want to be shady enough where you end up being
an audit, which is that you're then you're proving every single thing that comes out of that. So
I don't know if you have the same thing in Australia. No, I don't think so. I think they just
like go through your books and tell you that you've done it wrong and ask you to do it again,
in a better way or whatever. But as far as I'm concerned, the way that we're doing it though,
we will pay more tax earlier on because we are paying tax on our holdings, as well as our
gains or our income from sales. So I think you know, whatever, whatever we're, that no, that's
what I wanted to do. And then some, then they can, another bloke came and said, no, you can't do it
that way. And then I talked to other people who gave me the reference, someone gave me the reference
in the chat the other day of like, it's fucking, it was the Tom Cruise bloody thing.
That was me. I'll put a link in the show notes. There's a video of Matt Damon talking about Tom
Cruise and some safety thing or like some crazy fucking born, not born, whatever crazy movie
he was in with doing stunts and all that type of shit. And he wanted to do some crazy mission
impossible. You want to do some crazy stunt and the safety guy said, you can't fucking do this.
You can't fucking do it. And he goes, so, so I talked to the safety guy, safety guy says,
you can't do this. He goes, uh-huh. Uh-huh. So I get another safety guy. Exactly. Sorry,
you just keep, he's going from accountant to accountant to get the answer you want. So I got
another account who says this is totally the right way of doing it. That's a secret.
Yeah. I mean, that was totally the thing. It was so funny when you sent that through.
So the only reason I'm comfortable doing it this way is because during COVID Australia
introduced a new rule for businesses, small businesses. You can actually claw back
tax from previous years. So there is the risk that if it's a really high market and we're
high holding a lot of tokens that we'll end up paying a lot of tax in that FY because of our
holdings. But then at the end, the next year, when all those tokens reduce in value, you'll have
like a big loss from those tokens if they reduce in value. So then you can actually
claw back tax from the previous year that you've paid on those tokens because they were high.
If that makes sense, if they, if you couldn't do that, you would have to carry that like,
you know, you'd be carrying the losses on your books until you sold them out, but you'd never
be able to get tax back from previous years. So you've had a really good year and paid like,
you know, just weird numbers, like a hundred grand in tax. And then the next year you lost 50
grand, but you're never getting that fucking tax back. So. But the 50 you can carry for, right?
Is that your situation? Yeah. Yeah, because it's, it's, because crypto is just like used cars.
We're a company that happens to mint a thousand used cars a day. They're just only worth a dollar
right now. But we've got, we've got a lot of used cars, you said that, but we've got so many used
cars we don't want to do with them. But the problem is, right, these used cars, right,
will pay tax on them at $10, right? And then, but then things like, you know,
at the moment that you use cars, they're sat, they're illiquid, right? It's not important why
these used cars are illiquid at the moment, but they're illiquid. So we've, we've paid a tax on
them, but we can't actually do anything with them at the moment. But if we decide to actually
actively start going now, we're going to sell these used cars, we can get some hot shots in here to
sell those used cars for a dollar, which isn't suspect at all for a used car. Anyway, whatever,
we're going to sell all of our used cars. We've already declared the tax value of them at the
time of receipt, right? We sell all of them. We, actually, it's not even like used cars because
they're an asset. They're not even, they're like a business asset. They're not even like we have
stock because if they use cars, they'd be stock, but actually they're, they're more like the business
has bought 10,000 used cars for our many middle managers. We have 10,000 middle managers who need
a used car. We've got 10,000 used cars. And then the value of those used cars has got down a lot.
So we're going to sell all those used cars because we don't have any staff either because we fired
one of them. So that's a capital gains loss on all those used cars we bought. And it's not an
income loss and we can't carry it forward. Oh, no, we do carry it forward on our books, to be fair.
But as you might have spotted, if we make 10,000... You can't carry it back.
Well, this is it. If we make 10,000 pounds capital loss, fantastic. We need to make some money
to take advantage of that. And you see, it's the making money part that's hard. Like, if I knew
how to do that, and I wouldn't be, if I knew how to make money, then I wouldn't be in a position of
writing off such a big loss. The funny thing is though, in your next year as well, the phrase,
you can make an income and no capital gains and you can't even use that loss. You have to recognize
everything's income. And because any staking rewards we make in other ecosystems or anything,
it's just straight up company income again. So we're just incurring more regular tax.
So what we would need to do basically is unsteak a load of Juno or a token and wait for it to go up
in value. Yeah, no, so wait, what we need to do? Okay, let me wear this out. You need to
unsteak a load of Juno and then sell it our loss incurring... Let's say we sold everything we have,
we incur a massive loss and we look like total schmucks. Then we need to get in on the next
Solana like super early doors and just buy or get it somehow, whatever, and then just hold it
really riskily and just YOLO 100% because we've already incurred the income tax as well if we
do this. So we already know we owe the income tax and then we need to try and ride it to the top
and then sell it, which incurs then capital gains, but then we don't pay the capital gains because
we've already lost the money and then we go hey and then it hopefully evens out and we look like
legends. We're like a film where there's traders and they do a great trade. Trading places.
Trading places. We're like Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd in trading places.
A frozen orange juice. Exactly. We're in the brown house, brown stone.
It's brown stone. We're in the brown stone rather than getting rugged by the gorilla.
That's right. Rugged by the gorilla. So Rama says, so you're saying I should invest as a business
and not as an individual so I can claim losses. Can't do that as an individual in Australia with
crypto. You can't claim losses as an individual, is that right? Now I was going to say that's not
entirely true. So yeah, I mean, in terms of trading as a business, you can actually... Welcome to Game
of Nodes, a weekly podcast on tax in the cosmos. Yeah, right. Oh, shit. I'll just go through it.
Especially during tax season. There's a couple of different things. So as an individual, you can
do high volumes of trades and actually call yourself a trader and then you can be taxed as a
trader on a stock basis. So you can actually do the same things that you can do that I'm doing
in a business. It's just a lot harder to do it as an individual and actually say, like if you're
day trading, you can use crypto as stock and that's essentially what we're doing as a business.
That's why we have to do a stock take at the end of the year and then pay tax on the amount of
paused. In terms of like actually... So in terms of what you say, I can claim losses, you can't
claim losses even as a business. It's just that when you're a business, you do a profit and loss
statement at the end of the year rather than like capital gains and income. So income is obviously
part of your profit and your capital losses become part of your losses and then that balances out
to whether or not you made a profit and loss. A little bit different as an individual in that you
have to pay income tax on your income no matter what happens with capital gains and losses. But
if you are a high volume trader, you can say that that's your regular job and those small capital
gains that you make is income rather than capital gains losses. So income and losses,
like you can say that your gains and losses is positive and negative things against your income.
So it's a little bit different when you're trying to day trade or when you're high volume
high volume individual trading, if that makes sense at all. GamerNodes is not a tax advice service
and do not take this advice seriously. Also remember that Noel talked to 75 accountants
with Australia to get the answers that he wanted to be able to hear that aligned to his viewpoint
on Australian taxes of crypto. Yeah, I only listen to the things I want to hear. So you said
I don't have to pay. I don't know. I feel like the sign of a good accountant might be the accountants
that seem to know what they're talking about. And then when you go, well, but never hang on.
But I thought and they go, no, that's wrong and you're wrong. And here's why you're wrong.
And you need to do this. You're like, well, I am paying more, but I am reassured that these guys
might actually know what they're talking about. That's kind of how I feel about us, which maybe
falls to confidence. Yeah, that's basically what my accountant did. I was telling him what my plan
was and he was like, I can see why you think that's the plan, but I pity you. Okay, well,
how much do I owe you? Yeah. So I like when you just talk to your accountants and you
bullshit to each other and muse about things until something sounds right. And then you're like,
yeah, let's do that. Well, you know, be not you're not horseradid with your account. This is
somebody you pay, you're just like you're paying an expert. Like, it's not like you're like,
oh, well, come on, come on, come on. Give us a little bit. I ain't no expert in fucking tax.
Yeah, crypto tax. Crypto. It's all interpretation. It is all interpretation.
Yeah, I guess you realize that like big companies that have like 500 employees or more,
they must have no fucking clue. Like as in even working out what they've made in a year,
like looking at their stock, like know how many. Okay, let's say, sorry, I don't know why we're
doing this. We're a used car dealership. Even knowing the value of all the used cars on your lot,
like nobody knows that. Like, so you kind of go like everybody's taxes are a best guess,
like we're just in this kind of like where everybody's management reporting is just a
best guess. And we're just like all this collective delusion that we're being 100%
bang on. So you're just like at the end of the day, there's got to be a point where you come to
scale. We try our best. We're not trying to swindle the tax man, which will pay off our taxes,
probably fine. It's my hopeful when I put it up in front of small claims court or whatever.
Come on, come on, lads, we're just trying our best here. They're like,
you're both completely wrong. That's your defense.
But completely wrong. There's not even a cursory effort to correct these glaring mistakes. And
you're accountant to just been in the dock said that you said, oh, it's okay, we'll fix them
during the year. What kind of management strategy is that you're like,
but you can say the accountant told me boys will be boys. I've heard that boys will be boys.
Are you telling me? So here's here's an idea I've had to run this one by the boffins yet.
But next year, whoa, hold on, we guys pass for a second by the by the what the boffins.
What is the what what? So you know, we have a lot of smart people. You know what puffins are?
They're a small bird. So yeah, right. A boffin is just a much larger puffin from Bathin Island.
I think you just make a shit up now. Fuck with us. It's like an English-Australian
colloquialism, I guess. Anyway, yeah, it means like point dexters or whatever.
Okay, so it's like a smart okay. God, I'd never heard the term before. So like,
what are you talking about? Is that your wife? I don't know.
I have to run it by the boffin family. So anyway, because one problem that I can see right is that
if I'm paying tax on the saleable value of my holdings, then I should actually be paying tax
on the realizable saleable value of my holdings. So if it's got thin liquidity, I should be able to
model the saleable value from the thin liquidity and say, well, I can only realize this for,
this is the current price at market. Yes. But if I sold my amount that I have to be able to pay the
tax on it, then I would only have say it was 50 grand, then I'd only have 20 grand. So I'm only
paying tax on 20 grand. That's a theory I have. I feel like other people would not agree.
Keep finding that right. But I also just think like, is it dodgeball or just like,
let's see how that goes for him. Yeah, it's like, I have this collectible asset and I won
this out for 100,000. I can probably get 12 bucks for it. So yeah, people have cold years worth 100,000,
but no one has offered me 100,000. So bold strategy, Cotton. That's the one. Yeah.
So anyway, I mean, it makes sense to me. I mean, the other thing is I could just sell them and then
pay them the tax on the lower value that I could get for it. So why not just, you know, take out
the middle man and pay less tax? It's all about like tax minimization, right? I think if you can
present a good argument for a tax minimization, then they might still tell you just to get fucked.
I mean, for us, it was more about like, obviously, for political reasons, like we all sold,
obviously, during the bull run and stuff, because it would be kind of done not to, but like,
it was very easy to not sell everything and still run up a really, really large tax bill.
And depending on how much like liquid cash you have on hand, like the tax bill could easily
exceed the amount of dollars you have in the bank to pay it, depending on what was staked.
And also because the thing is the money is not there anymore, it has disappeared.
And so I think from our point of view, it's less about what we're paying in tax and more about
liquid cash. And as soon as we were like, well, we're not going to go bankrupt, then we were
reassured. But it was still like, I don't know, it's been a real learning experience, this entire
thing. It's that thing of like, how do you think it could or should be tax or whatever,
like learning how it actually is and how that shakes out for you as a business. It's like a
job. It totally, we thought we were being smart and we still weren't being smart. That's the thing
that last year has taught me. Like I thought we were being really conservative and quite smart
and it turned out we were being dumb, dumb to the point of nearly shafting our business.
It's crazy. And you don't see it till it's still there in black and white.