 Hello party people and welcome to episode 33 of The Daily Decrypt. I am your faithful host Amanda. Today's episode is brought to you by Newbits. Taran Lupo has made this YouTube video in which he gives a step-by-step screen capture of how to buy something using bitcoins on purse.io and I think that this is very useful because purse is seeking to reach an audience of people who potentially have never even used Bitcoin before. Why? Because you actually can get fatty fat discounts on Amazon products I know because I've done it. And so if you've never used purse and want to try or you have friends or family who you think might want to try check out Dr. Lupo's video where he gets 23% off like this nifty food chopper for step-by-step instructions. The Bitcoin Purchasing Power Index or Bitcoin PPI for short has been launched with a nice sponsorship from Bitbond and it measures the moment-to-moment value of Bitcoin in Big Macs, which they rightly categorize as a nearly globally recognized commodity. Bitcoin PPI says that they aim to express Bitcoin's value in a way that is independent of central banks products. Which is nice because fiat currencies may not be quite as like this as Bitcoin but that doesn't mean that they're not volatile. As someone said on Reddit the other day Bitcoin may often be marketed as a get-rich-quick scheme, but unlike fiat it is definitely not a get-poor-slow-for-sure scheme. And for your information today one Bitcoin buys 100.2 Big Macs. Are question wallets better and more secure than brain wallets? Writer Emelian Dutong has said yes and has described how he created his own question wallet in this medium post. A brain wallet is the name given for when a person memorizes a long passphrase which when plugged into a SHA256 hash calculator spits out the private keys of their Bitcoin address. So it's like storing your Bitcoins in your brain. But Emelian argues that this is difficult for two reasons. One, if you use a passphrase that's printed in any book ever or that's been printed online anywhere ever that stuff is going to get brute-forced and your money's going to get taken. And two, if you use a passphrase that has not been printed in any book or online publication ever well then it might be hard for you to remember. And so Emelian suggests creating what he calls a question wallet in which you come up with a bunch of questions for which really only you or maybe like your spouse know the answer. And then the answers to all of those questions in order are your brain wallet. And these kinds of wallets are especially useful if you ever have to travel through hostile areas like airports for example. You may remember that our good friend Davy Barker from Bitcoins Not Bombs was harassed at an airport once for all the Bitcoins in his bag which were shirt logo pins with the Bitcoin B on them. The 21 Bitcoin computer has begun shipping. This is a machine that is targeted to developers and tinkerers and coders and hackers and 21 company has published this set of guides which teaches you about the different kinds of apps that can be built with their machine. There's a guide to build a simple Bitcoin game a guide to build a Bitcoin payable HTTP proxy whoa a guide on how to receive a text message someone without having to reveal your phone number to them all sorts of things. So people like moi will probably not be delving it too deep into the coterie and hackery of all of this but if you're the kind of person who will I want you to reach out to the Daily Decrypt with whatever it is that you end up creating and tell us about it because we want to report on it. Okay deal. The Merkle has published a piece on the risk level of using public Wi-Fi hotspots and what you can do to mitigate that risk. So it's not very difficult the Merkle rights for a malicious actor to set up a rogue access point in a coffee shop or airport or library or wherever people are using public Wi-Fi and because the signal would have the same name even the cashiers who are telling you the name of the signal to connect to would not know the difference. Now this has crypto implications in that a lot of people use web wallets and web wallets are accessed via passwords. And so if one of these malicious actors on a public Wi-Fi network scoops up your passwords while you are connected to their access point, they have access to your money. And so the Merkle recommends basically just using a VPN or if you're not going to use a VPN at least set up your web wallets to have two-factor authentication. You may have heard about the problems around Bitcoin's block size cap which is basically that frequently it is reached which means higher transaction fees and slower confirmation times. And some argue that lifting this cap will lead to centralization. I saw this post today on the BTC subreddit and yes I said BTC subreddit. And I think it makes a compelling argument. Redditor BeYourOwnBank argues that it is the biggest threats to Bitcoin namely hugely centralized miners and things like lightning network and things like government actors and central banks who actually would profit the most from having a small artificially small block size gap. And BeYourOwnBank goes on to argue that using the market of crypto users dynamic block caps can be set which shift with supply and demand or even block caps can be lifted period. And he argues that it is this scenario which would actually create the most decentralization. And so I just think it's worth a read primarily because this block size cap thing is not just a Bitcoin thing. A lot of cryptocurrencies have block size caps you just don't hear about it because they don't have the market penetration that Bitcoin has and so it has not yet become a problem for them yet. Today's episode has been brought to you by Nubits and one Nubit has been worth almost exactly one US dollar since they launched back in 2014. How do they do it? I'll tell you. So the value of one Nubit is maintained by people who hold what's called new shares and the people holding new shares cast votes on monetary policy within the new network. Those new shares being crypto equity tokens. There's that word that I love again. Visit Nubits.com to learn how the new network is proving that monetary policy can be both decentralized in governance and voluntary in participation. And your mom called. She wants you to subscribe to the Daily Decrypt.