Privacy, BTC and XMR with Riccardo Spagni

Hello, and welcome back to Freedom Tech Friday, a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the Ungovernable Misfits x new Nosta, YouTube, Rumble, and Twitch feeds. We go live every week me. We go live for one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern or 2PM UK time, but you can also catch up later on the Ungovernable Misfits podcast feed.

On on on Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest news and trends for anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between.

Essentially, if there's a news item, tool, or topic that can help you take back some control in today's digital panopticon, we wanna talk about it. My name is Q and A, and I'm head of customer experience at Foundation, where we build Bitcoin focused sovereignty tools.

And as always, I'm joined by my good friends Max, the head honcho at the Ungovernable Empire, and Seth who is COO at CakeWallet.

This is a live and interactive show, and you can help steer the conversation by commenting live, pre submitting your questions, boosting the show on podcasting two point o apps, sending tips, or just sharing the show with your friends.

Top top support for the last show with Guy Swan comes from Rog at s c bitcoin who sent in 500 stats and said, important work, though I must admit that I didn't understand the details of how I would use any of it, obviously referring to the pair stack. Well, yeah, we'll have to see how how that one unfolds. It's quite a new

area of of expertise. I won't I'd be lying if I said I fully understood it myself. But thank you for your support, Raj. Without further ado, we do have a guest, a very important guest I'm gonna bring up very shortly. But for now, Max, Seth, how are you doing?

Double muted. Very good. Gets me every time. Doing well. Glad to be here, guys. I'm I'm pumped for the double feature. Pumped to have Fluffy on here. Oh, I leaked I leaked the guest. Oh, no.

But, yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited. Yeah. Me too. Very excited and excited to have Monero monthly live. We've not done that before. So, yeah, very good. Other than I'm drinking salt in my water because apparently it's healthy and it tastes like seawater and disappointed by that. Wait. You're drinking the salt or you're like gargling No.

No. I saw that somewhere, like, add a bit of salty water and it's good to, like, rehydrate you or whatever and it's it might be true, but it's fucking disgusting. Tastes like drinking water.

That's a sad way to get your electrolytes, but it didn't work. You know, they're these flavored ones nowadays, Max. It is 25. I'm too tired for that, mate. I'm too tired. Anyway, that feels like it's the the top of the next week's show. Electrolytes,

food set Friday. Anyway Yeah. We digress as always. Today, we are joined by none other than Ricardo Spagni. I hope I haven't butchered that, aka fluffy pony.

Somebody who spent well over a decade thinking deeply about freedom, money, privacy, and what it actually means to build systems that can survive or or attempt to survive in an adversarial world.

He's been there from the early days, helping Bitcoin and Monero to evolve, and he's not one shy away from the uncomfortable questions around privacy, the trade offs, and where decentralized systems tend to fail under pressure.

As Max alluded to just a second ago, this is a doubleheader show. The first part of the show will be more of a general Freedom Tech show, hence the name Freedom Tech Friday. But at the top of the hour,

Seth and Max will probably start steering the ship for more for a live recording of Monero monthly. So we're gonna be live for a total of two hours with with Ricardo, which I'm very excited about.

As always, quick reminder, this is a live and interactive show, so please be sure to drop your questions into the chat, and let's dive into it. Welcome to the show, Ricardo. It is an absolute pleasure to have you with us. How's it going? Thank you so much for having me. It's yeah. So far so good, I guess. It's Friday.

Always a good start to a conversation when it's on a Friday. Right? Exactly. And and I'm drinking a peach flavored monster, which doesn't taste anything like seawater.

That sounds delicious. Yeah. Slightly slightly better choice, I think. Max over there just downing ocean water, for health reasons for health reasons. So that's what you do when you escape The UK, I guess.

Oh, yeah. Well, let's, let's go and jump in. Like you mentioned, we're gonna kind of break it up into two sets of topics. I'll kick us off for for the first one, but, obviously, we've, we've known each other for a while. Fluffy, Ricardo. I don't I don't know what you like to go by in these things. What do you prefer? I You call them.

What Rick, Ricky, Ricardo, Fluffy, Fluffy Pony, FP, hey. You over there. Aren't you the Pinero guy? Whatever. I'm whatever works. I'll go with Monero CEO. How does that sound? We'll roll with that. Imminent officer of Monero.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Your official title. Yeah. It's good to have you, man. I know I know a lot about you, lot about your background, but I know that a lot of our listeners do not. So while it's a simple question, I'm sure you've answered it a 100 times.

Well, you haven't on this show. So I'd love to hear a little bit about kind of why you got into the space generally, like into Bitcoin, into Monero, into Freedom Tech, and why you've dedicated so much of your life over the past ten, almost fifteen years to Freedom Money, specifically. Like, what excites you about this?

Why do you think it's necessary? What got you to to jump into this space with both feet? Yeah. I mean, so by way of background, my dad was in IT in various roles growing up. When I was very young, he was in a more technical role and then, you know, ended up more on the management side later on.

But as a kid, I was very heavily exposed to all sorts of of things. Know, my dad would give me like when he upgraded something on his computer, I'd get the leftovers and I'd tinker with hardware and had a Commodore 64 as the first thing I ever wrote code on.

This is late 80s so writing code was all basic and you would type stuff out from books and then it wouldn't work and you wouldn't understand why because you're a kid. You're eight years old. You don't know what you're doing.

But cutting my teeth on that led to me ultimately being a software developer and pursuing that as a career. But I always had this like

desire to find holes in the system and to break the system. And so you know in the 90s especially I was very influenced by things like 2,600 magazine and you know there was a February chapter run by a guy called Sean and we do these meet ups once a month and

I got heavily exposed to things like free BSD, you know, in a in an era where a lot of people were learning Linux, I was learning BSD. And that was like, it's very influential on on me as a kid and and, like, what I consider to be robust. You know?

So, like, growing up in that environment and being so heavily exposed to a lot of really interesting things in InfoSec. And then, you know, being South African and having been exposed to things like apartheid and, you know, which my parents were very against.

And so I went to a mixed school at a time when they were hard to come by. And I I think like a combination of all of that really led to me being hyper interested in

the the edges of the system, you know, where where the holes are. And and even now, you know, like, I have I've developed over the years reasonably strong adversarial thinking and I often see issues sometimes in physical security, sometimes in, you know, architecture or descriptions, systems descriptions.

I'm like, hey, I don't think that's a good idea. I think it'll break or I think it's not gonna work and here's why. And and I think like as a result of all of that, I was drawn to a lot of freedom enhancing tech in the early to early to mid two thousands, you know. I was very interested in encryption and and got involved in a lot of

cryptography, you know, learned about things like a clipper chip at a time when I think outside of, like, deep infosex circles in The US, a lot of people were unfamiliar with the clipper chip's existence as a whole.

So, you know, seeing stuff like that also and combined obviously with growing up like in apartheid South Africa, I think I developed a bit of a anti authoritarian stance. You know, I'm not like down with the government and rah rah, I'm in a guard into the street with like a gun or a flag or whatever.

Think there's not much that I as an individual can do to change the status quo there anyway. But I'm very opposed to overreach, and I I saw a lot of that growing up. I continue to see a lot of that, not even from governments necessarily. Sometimes it's from corporations,

you know, where I'm like, what are you guys doing? Like, what are you trying to accomplish here by by creating such a restrictive environment for for people, for your users or for other people.

So so, you know, all of that to say that I ultimately discovered Bitcoin in early twenty eleven. I think it was May 2011. There was a slash docs post about a

Google developer, Google engineer who was building a Bitcoin library. And I think I think I'd you know, at that point, I'd maybe, like, read a couple of things about Bitcoin but had largely disregarded it.

And and that's that's the that Google engineer was Michael, and he was building the Java Bitcoin library. And I don't know. Like, you know, it's 2011. Like, Bitcoin engineers

sorry. Google engineers held they carried weight. And I was like, wow. You know, I mean, if a if a Google engineer thinks this is important, maybe I should pay attention to it too. And that was sort of how my my crypto journey started.

Yeah. I love that it it was actually, like, born out of real perceived need for you, but also just for for people more generally to have access to this kind of stuff. Like, it it kinda strikes me a little bit as the

more the crypto anarchist approach to things, which has always resonated with me of, like, maybe we're not going to overthrow a government with this stuff, but what we will do is we'll let anyone who wakes up to the need for freedom

have the tools to be able to carve out their own little haven to be able to do what they need to do, communicate with who they need to communicate

regardless of what the situation around them looks like, which does slowly undermine authoritarian regimes, which is a a double win. But, yeah, definitely definitely strikes me as a little bit more like crypto anarchist beginnings there, but also very early to to Bitcoin when I think there was a lot of

idea of what that could be when it comes to freedom tech and freedom money. Yeah. Ricardo, when you're saying, you know, you're one to go out with a flag and a gun in the street, but you are there to protect yourself.

You're actually the first person I ever heard talk about Monero when I got involved in 2017, so thank you for that. When I first got involved, obviously, it was a lot later than you, but it seemed as though, at least in Bitcoin, there previously was a lot more appetite for privacy tech, more of a focus on privacy.

Maybe I've got that wrong, but did you feel that there was a shift after that time, And is that the reason you focus so heavily on Monero? Yeah. I mean so so a couple of things that to comment on there. The the first is, yeah, I am 100% a believer in tools existing to empower people.

I think that we're never I don't think it's possible to stop a a corporation or a government from doing things that are untoward, whether it is intentional or sometimes accidental. You know?

And so instead, if we work on tools largely for ourselves because we want the the protection and the freedom that it enables, then those tools will be useful to others. So yeah. Yep. You nailed that.

In terms of of the the shift, yeah, it's it's unfortunate but very true. There was a lot of talk in the the early days when I got involved with Bitcoin, whether it was on the Bitcoin Wizards or Bitcoin DevRC channels, whether it was on Bitcoin talk.

I I did a I spent a lot of time in Bitcoin OTC, which was like an OTC channel on RC and was heavily influenced well, a lot of my thinking was heavily heavily influenced by the web of trust that that was, like, an integral part of those OTC trades. Like, you know, the fact that you could, like, perform a trade

of real money and goods and services and whatever with some random person that you don't know, that you're never going to meet. It's all anonymous and governed in a way by a a way of trust was, like, highly influential.

And I thought I thought there was a a pretty clear path at that point, especially at 2013, 2014, to Bitcoin gaining more privacy on a protocol level. You know, I was close to the Anoncoin guys.

I thought Anoncoin was a valiant first effort at trying to add some privacy stuff to a Bitcoin fork that could then be back ported to Bitcoin. You know, a noncoin never really took it to the next level on, like, you know, on chain protection.

But, again, I think it was a I I saw it as, a a stepping stone. And and then for whatever reason, things started to shift. And and I have theories about it but I think one of the big reasons was people got rich.

And they got rich and they changed from being the underdogs that were playing with a cool project, the people that were building out infrastructure and services to support this

very young project that had very little in the way of infrastructure. They changed to being big, important businessmen and and, you know, women in crypto and all of that. And, like, suddenly it became an enterprise and it became commercialized.

And we we had something of a similar effect with the Internet in the nineties. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the term Eternal September. Yes. Yeah.

Eternal September is

a sort of weird pivot point where the internet changed in like the late nineties. So September 1993,

AOL started was it it AOL that started putting out their CDs then? I can't even remember. But basically Usenet access just blew up and random people started getting Usenet access and that was sort of like the explosion from

it being a largely tech dominated space to now random people trying to use Usenet for online dating, you know, stuff like that. And that really to to a lot of people at the time, it was like the destruction of the Internet.

And a little anecdote that I found, you know, again, I I was a kid in in the late nineties, learning the ropes. But prior to 1994, you know, in the BBS days and then also, like, early Internet, when you were talking to someone and they said they were a 20 year old female in California,

they were a 20 year old female in California. Post, like, post eternal September, if they said they were a 20 year old female in California, they were a 55 year old man. And, like yeah. Exactly.

So, you know, that it was so weird because, like, we just took everything at face value. And and suddenly that shifted and changed, you know, and, like and and you had to learn to distrust people.

And so going back to the point I was going make about Bitcoin is I definitely felt that shift that suddenly everyone was they were like not everyone, but a lot of people were like, Holy cow, I've made money. I'm wealthy now. I've made real wealth for my family and for me. And I think when you do that, you start to

become scared. Know, you start to develop a fear of how do I not rock the boat? Because if I rock the boat in any way then the luck that has gifted me this wealth might run out.

It was like all that talk of privacy evaporated and then it was replaced with talk of you know protocol changes need to be made very carefully and which is true but you know very carefully doesn't mean multiple decades.

Like you know there's a path, needs to be like this is where we're going, this is what we're aiming for. And and I I was sort of I was I was a little bit excited when when Blockstream launched Liquid because I thought to myself

here's a model for for privacy on Bitcoin. Like, it now exists. All we've gotta do is take that and, like, backport it. You know? So so, like, we just need we just need someone to pick up the the the banner and go, like, hey, guys. Like, this is here's here's the bop for back porting CT and whatever from liquid into into Bitcoin.

And and then and let's set a timeline, five years, whatever. You know? But, like, let's aim for that. And no one did. And that's not a knock on the Bitcoin developers because, you know, the Bitcoin developers a lot of the the Bitcoin core developers rather were the ones responsible for

for liquid and for a lot of the stuff that went into it, you know, Greg and and Peter primarily as well as some others. But it just like it's like he has the cool science project that's just never gonna make it into production, you know? And that really saddened me. So I

didn't want to throw my weight behind something else. I didn't want to contribute to something else. And in fact when I started when I got involved with Monero, was like, again my thinking was hey this is really cool. We can take some of these things, these principles and put it into Bitcoin.

And the only reason that I even took on the the lead maintainer moniker was because no one else wanted to do it. And I was like, hey, guys. Open source projects need a lead maintainer. They need someone who's gonna like click the merge button. So I, you know, I I don't mind doing it. Like but someone's gotta do it.

I think like probably 2016, 2017 especially I realized that Bitcoin's never going to get on chain privacy. It's just not. Maybe they might put some small stuff or small things in with, like, the post quantum cryptography, but I I

the pushback is just too large. You know? Too many people are afraid of what will the government do to our precious money if we do that. And that saddens me to say but it is what it is. And and I've also, you know, I've I've thought a lot about

privacy on an l two level, you know, and I've watched with interest what's happened with Lightning. And I I think that aspects of Lightning are really remarkable and I I love the idea of ephemeral transactions. I don't think every transaction needs to be on chain. I think that that's a bad model in general anyway

which is why I'm excited about stuff like Greece on Monero. But I I think the challenge here is that l two is never going to be able to offer strong enough privacy guarantees because ultimately there's settlement back on chain and that's going to reveal things.

And that notwithstanding, when you look at the level of sophistication that organizations like Chainalysis have, they can set up all sorts of infrastructure to reduce the privacy that that Lightning offers. They're able to run hundreds of thousands of Lightning nodes if they so desire

and and peel the the onion layers back from a lot of the rooting that happens there. And yeah, we can build more things to try and defeat that but privacy doesn't seem to be a focus of Lightning, it seems to be a byproduct.

And I think that that's unfortunate because I really wish that at the beginning Lightning had been launched with more of a hey guys, this is how we add privacy to Bitcoin and scaling is a byproduct.

You know, I think that would have been so cool. But that's just not where we're at. So, yeah, I mean, I've I've I have lost a little bit of of hope. I am a little bit disenchanted and have been for many years with with privacy on Bitcoin.

And I don't know I I don't know if it's ever really gonna change, you know. And and I'll say one more thing about this because I know I've been waffling now for a little bit. But one thing that also has really left me quite disheartened has been the the sort of drumbeat of, oh,

you know, you can just use CoinJoin through whichever client you you love. The challenge there is we've we've seen and continue to see operators like exchanges and and payment processes and so on prevent deposits that come from coin joins even if that coin join is a few transactions back.

Yeah. And that, you know, I mean, the the fact that the commercial side of the industry, which is a critical part of of Bitcoin operating is so hostile to coin joins means that any hope of additional privacy

you know that starts off dead. It starts off basically creating a secluded network where getting in and out of the network becomes increasingly expensive and that's just not ideal. Yeah. It's it's always it's always been hard to kinda look back on Bitcoin's history.

I, like Max and Q, both came in in, like, 2017. So I came in about that same era, kind of right at the the tail end of the the hope for privacy improvements on chain and Bitcoin. But, like, when you look back at the history, like, confidential transactions, 2013 ish, CoinJoins, 2013 ish,

Liquid shortly after. You've got some really fascinating innovations that were proposed for Bitcoin. Like and a lot of these devs still have been pushing privacy. I mean, Jay Maxwell continues to to build and come up with really fascinating ideas for how you can improve privacy on Bitcoin, for instance.

But you're right that it seems like once you kind of like, human nature is you wanna destroy the status quo until you're a part of it.

And then once you become a part of the status quo, it gets very hard to continue to dismantle the broken system if in any way you're benefiting from it. And maybe getting rich on Bitcoin isn't necessarily becoming part of the status quo, but, I think you you hit on an interesting idea there of once people

kind of are able to pull themselves up because of the the wealth that Bitcoin has created for them. It can be a lot harder to to to continue wanting to upend the ship and change things in a way that could threaten your wealth or could threaten you. I mean, we've seen privacy developers, even CoinJoin

protocol developers go to jail for building privacy tech on Bitcoin.

So it does kind of continue to shift the incentives as that that price increase happens. But, yeah, it's always been interesting to kind of look back at history of Bitcoin and see all of these incredible developments that never ended up getting deployed, and then to hear from you, to hear from, like, Andreas Antonopoulos,

I ran into a few years ago and was talking to him about that, and and basically that same idea of, like, he had a lot of hope for there to be core improvements that really changed the game when it came to Bitcoin privacy.

But that a lot of that pretty much ended in 2017, and there hasn't been much real chance of getting anything across the line since then, which is which is sad. Obviously, there's still things we can do. Like you mentioned, Lightning has some good aspects to it, but it's it's tricky.

Yeah. It's so so an interesting anecdote is I I spent a lot of time with Peter Hitchens who created Zero MQ before he he passed away. And he pointed me to story that has subsequently been taken off the Internet, although I'm sure it's archived some way.

It was hosted on sealedabstract.com and it was from the guys that forked ZeroMQ to create NanoMessage. And it was this 2016 post about like a NanoMessage postmortem. And effectively, what had happened were a handful of people in the ZeroMQ community and

a couple of contributors were not happy with ZeroMQ. They didn't like some of Peter's decisions, not even architecturally, but they had various gripes. And so they decided to fork ZeroMQ and create this alternative called NanoMessage.

And after a few years, NanoMessage just died. And then they tried to resurrect it a few years later but this was in that which wasn't very successful. But anyway, this was in that period where it was well and truly dead.

And

the postmortem goes the reason that Nuno Messages died is because we all agreed that we needed to fork away from Zero MQ but the reason that we wanted to fork away from it varied. Everyone had different ideas about what was wrong with ZeroMQ.

And so we didn't actually have a unified vision about what we wanted from NanoMessage. So everyone then got together and all wanted to do different things. You know their personal idea of what needs to be improved in it.

And ultimately the lack of any unifying vision is what led to NanoMessageI. And I think sometimes it's a little bit like that.

The story of success with Bitcoin is that whatever gave you success whether it is you know, you're Brian and you started Coinbase or you know, you whatever built you you did Ledger. You know, I love I love all these people. They're great. They were an early part of my journey. I I mean, I still have the the Ledger prototype

that I was given in, like, man, I think it was like 2014 or whatever. You know, it was it it's so like hacky and and horrendous but like I'm I treasure that. But like once you found that success then for you Bitcoin and crypto in general becomes about preserving that success you know. And everyone then focuses on

what they personally see as the path to success and for furthering the success they have already had rather than being part of the community and like you know working together. And I think the telling point for me was I was at a conference in, it was a Satoshi roundtable and I think it was twenty fifteen

Satoshi roundtable. It might have been it was the second Satoshi roundtable so it must have been 2015. And I am sitting there with Brian from Coinbase and I was like can we you know, we are doing like a little session. There was like six of us. I think it I can't even remember who it was.

But we're sitting in a group and we had to discuss a bunch of things about Bitcoin and I was like this is really useful. I know that we, you know, we can't really publish like a transcription of this based on like, you know, because there's Chatham House rules. So you don't wanna say like who's saying what.

But this conversation between myself and Brian and a handful of others, some I think Peter Todd was in that conversation or whatever and BlueMatt. I'm like this is like an incredible conversation of really cool things about Bitcoin.

And so I said to Brian like hey, you know Brian Bishop, can I dial him in? Like, to we're in person, but can I, like, get him into this conversation

on the phone? Because he types at, like, 200 words a minute and he can transcribe it. And because he's gonna be, like, on the phone he's not gonna know who's saying what so like the transcription will follow Chatham House rules. And Brian was like who's Brian Bishop?

And I was like, you know, I mean this is still like this is like 2015. It's still relatively early. And Brian Bishop is Kanja who is like anyone who's been involved in Bitcoin at least at that time knows 100% who Brian Bishop is.

And what he's done with Bitcoin and his contributions and so on. And

Brian like from Coinbase just had no clue who I was talking about. And I was like damn, like you're that far removed from the industry already and this was 2015. I don't expect any like anyone who is involved in Bitcoin unless they're like Bitcoin Core developers to know who Brian Bishop is today.

But you know in 2015 like it was a different story. So like that to me is just indicative of how easy it is to become disconnected from, like, that part of Bitcoin. Yeah. I think it's it's kinda natural to natural kind of

trajectory, I guess, as the as the the net of people that or catchment area that we we call a typical Bitcoin continues to grow that, you know, we get a watering down of the original ideas,

which is something that I personally wrestled with as I've become, you know, a bit more of a a Bitcoin gray beard comparative to somebody, you know, joining in the last couple of years. Ricardo, obviously, you were, you know, a core part of the early Monero community

and even, as you mentioned before, a maintainer of the projects over the years. But you've always kept a little bit of a focus on Bitcoin as well. That's evident from, you know, the way that you speak about the project.

You earlier in the in the conversation, you leveled some quite accurate criticisms of Bitcoin and Lightning. But I'm curious, what is there, if anything, that still excites you about Bitcoin and and maybe even Lightning can come under the same sort of question, if anything?

Yeah. So, I mean, good questions. I think

I I would say that my the things that excite me about about

Lightning is the potential for more people to use Bitcoin.

We might have lost that battle a little bit already and I'll tell you why I say that. I deal a lot with,

what are they called, freelancers in the global South, so Vietnam and Thailand and so on. And, you know, they they might do, like, a little bit of work on, like, a project. Maybe they've gotta go and, like, clip some videos for social media.

And when it comes to getting paid, unilaterally, they all want Tether on Tron. Not just Tether on Tron, but, like, sometimes they'll just give you their Binance ID and they're like, hey. Can you send it? Yeah.

And I'm like, can you not give me an an actual address? And then they'll give me a Tron address and then I've gotta, like, use a swap to, like, send a Tether on Tron because who uses Tron? Turns out a lot of people use Tron which is wild to me and it's because of the fees, right?

That they use Tron and they use Tether because it's a stablecoin. Now potentially in the future if Bitcoin becomes more of a unit of account then something like Lightning will be palatable to that audience.

Now that's not where we are at today but I sort of see that as the potential future. So that excites me and then I think one thing that just more generally excites me about Bitcoin is the notion that it has provided accessible freedom to a large

body of people. And I know that there are a lot of people that

may not truly understand what that means. You know, they just they they hold Bitcoin because it's an investment in their mind. Maybe they hold it in an exchange. But enough people have been afforded the opportunity to hold Bitcoin in a non custodial wallet and in a way that does not raise eyebrows

in whatever jurisdiction they're in. And I think that that's really cool. So I'm not gonna complain about that. That's an awesome outcome of Bitcoin's existence and I continue to believe that people that learn about Bitcoin now and hopefully,

you know, learn a little bit more about like self custody and that will discover other things whether it's Lightning, CoinJoin, Monero, whatever, and hopefully won't pay that much attention to Tether or Tron.

Yeah. Hopefully. What sort of role do you think Bitcoin plays going forward then if it's not working in the way you probably initially envisioned, and it's not working in the way that I originally envisioned when I started getting involved either?

And good people are starting to go to prison for creating privacy software on it. And like you rightly said, a lot of people who've got wealthy have sort of not necessarily turned their back, but changed their tone a little bit in terms of the importance of privacy and freedom because they're now sitting comfy.

What role do you think it plays? Do you see it as, a a two coin world where you have, like, spending on Monero and store value with Bitcoin? Do you see it becoming more and more suit y or, like, what's your sort of view going forward as you've seen so much of it growing up? Yeah.

I I think I think that Bitcoin will hopefully remain

relatively accessible. It's always going to be more accessible than Monero. And in fact, I'd argue that it's definitely more accessible than Tether on Tron, you know to most people. I think that we have largely passed the point where regulators are trying to prevent Bitcoin from existing.

Whereas if The US ends up angering enough countries then the dollar might not necessarily collapse but it might be less enticing as a stablecoin and then USDT becomes less enticing. Now I think that that is maybe many decades away but it's

still a possible outcome. And so I would sort of argue that if you read through that lens then Bitcoin becomes the most accessible way to get into crypto regardless of what you want ultimately.

I also think that Bitcoin is in and of itself an asset class that was previously, that just previously didn't exist. And so the fact that there are

large institutions besides SAILAR, you know what I mean? Like actual large old school like you know suit and tie institutions that are paying attention to Bitcoin and have people on trading desks that are paying attention to it on a daily basis.

Like that's huge. Know that is a level of relevance that I think cannot be understated. So that is something that is hugely important because

I feel like it paves the way for other things. Now I don't know if Monero ever becomes more broadly accepted on that sort of environment but I do think that regulators have already realized they have lost control.

They can't control Bitcoin. They can't freeze transfers on Bitcoin. Yes, they have a high degree of traceability and I think that that gives them a sense of comfort but they can't prevent North Korea from sending or receiving Bitcoin as much as they would like to. And so if they've reached a level of comfort with that and

they eventually reach a level of comfort with encrypted messaging which I know The US is fine with, The UK and Europe not so much, Australia not so much. But like the vast majority of the world has accepted that encrypted messaging exists and they're not outrightly trying to prevent it.

Then potentially Bitcoin's acceptance now paves the way for Monero to to be more broadly accepted by regulators. Perhaps not, but I mean, that's my hope. I do think that Bitcoin ends up being digital gold, you know, which is the position it's already, really taken.

And then I don't know what becomes I I think maybe most of the crypto market becomes, like, digital silver or copper or whatever, you know. Like, yeah, useful sometimes.

Like, maybe there's some money to be made, maybe there isn't. But it's not gold, you know. Gold is like the gold standard. That's what you want to hold if you're an investor or a high net worth individual or you're trying to build treasury with it.

But I think that Bitcoin is has probably lost too much ground to Tether on Tron and to Monero to be able to be a money and that's okay. Know? So yeah, to answer your question I do think we end up with a multi coin future where bitcoin is

the thing you want to hold and my hope is that people you know maybe with a bunch of like issues with Tether on Tron over time and funds getting frozen and so on that people will realize that Monero is a preferable vehicle from a privacy perspective.

Now think the one challenge that has prevented Bitcoin from being you most useful as a as a money besides privacy is the unit of accounting, you know, the volatility. And and Monero is subject to the same volatility.

For a long time I used to joke that Monero was the $140 stablecoin because every time it went lower than $100 it would go back up and every time it went above $160 it would go back down. But those days seem to be behind us much to my great dismay because now I cannot call it a stablecoin anymore.

I I do think that that is that is probably something that ends up

settling over time. I just think that the time horizon on that is is very, very fast, you know, and very large. And the reason I say that is because for something to become a unit of account, it needs to reach a level of global usage such that there's there's just so much volume happening of people

trading with it and trading in and out of other assets that it has the sort of like net effect of it not being particularly volatile. Know? And that's not to say that like the dollar hasn't gone up or down relative to the euro or the rand or whatever. It just tends to do so a lot more calmly

than Bitcoin or Monero. And so that that's a testament to the amount of usage that it has, the amount of utility it has. So for Monero to reach a high enough level of utility that it does stabilize a bit and it can operate more as a unit of account, well, I don't know. Mean, that might take us another decade or two.

Yeah. Those some excellent insights then. I largely agree that we seem to be hurling towards a a kind of multi coin future where, you know, we can leverage the different properties of of the different coins for all of the the, you know, the different types of use cases that you just mentioned.

I wanted to spend the last ten minutes of the Freedom Tech Friday portion of the show to kind of talk more generally about FreedomTech and more specifically your FreedomTech stack. To the extent at which obviously you're comfortable talking about it, what what does your FreedomTech stack look like? What what's your favorite messaging,

email, file storage, all those sorts of tools that you interact with day to day? And I asked that because we we find ourselves in a weird dichotomy where, you know, the the range of freedom tech tools available has never been greater.

But converse to that, the the amount of kind of surveillance or anti freedom set tools is is also never been greater as well. So we find ourselves in a weird point in history, really.

And I'm I'm cure I'm always curious to to hear about other people who, you know, share a similar mindset to to all of us on the show here as to what you guys use and how you see this this kind of landscape playing out.

Yeah. Great question. So I a long time ago I realized that I realized two things. The first is it's really hard to do business and to even have any form of social life if you're going to insist on everyone meeting you where you are. You have to sometimes, most of the time, meet them where they are.

Stuff like using WhatsApp is unavoidable. You you can take a hard line stance and go, all my friends can only communicate with me on whatever, simplex or signal or whatever. And what you're going to find is people just stop communicating with you. You stop getting invites to things when they have to do that. You

like business becomes really difficult when you are refusing to use email, you know.

So I've I've I rationalized that a long time ago and I decided to compartmentalize my life. And I split data into two buckets. The one is data that if it got out, if it was public, it might cause some damage. You know,

private code repos for any of my companies. Like, they're on GitHub and if somebody, like, had to get access to that code, it wouldn't be ideal but it's also not so disastrous that like my life would would end versus something like my physical address. I I consider that to be something that is

a lot more sensitive and so that goes in the second bucket which is information that I really want to keep private. And as a result of that compartmentalization I am able to switch devices based on what I'm doing.

So when I'm doing something that is sensitive, I have a separate set of devices to when I'm doing something that is not sensitive. So like my daily driver is a MacBook and an iPhone. And, yeah, I mean, I've obviously gone to some lengths to lock it down.

Although Apple does a a fairly decent job of being not too bad on that out of the box. And there's a lot of guides on on the Internet on how to lock things down, how to lock Apple devices down, you know, how to enable encryption, you know, when to use iCloud, when to use local backups for your iPhone.

So, you know, you can you can dig into that a little bit and operate in in a fairly open manner with those devices because you know that the information you're putting there is not critical. So I use that for like of my, like most of my business stuff goes on those devices. All of my, you know, conversations

with friends or like social media, stuff like that. Happy to put it on those devices because, you know, if someone like hacks into my Instagram, they're not gonna see anything interesting.

If somebody looks through my photos, they are not going to see anything weird or compromising and so I don't really care about that at all. That's not to say that I am granting anyone access to it But I think that the amount of protection it provides is commensurate with level of sensitivity around that data.

But then when it comes to a lot of other things, you know, personal documentation, more sensitive business documentation, you know, like, anything a lot of, like, crypto related stuff. Code to a lesser degree because there's very little that I I work on or contribute to where I'm I'm deeply concerned about

about that. You know what mean? When you're contributing to open source, then well, it's all open anyway. So it's not like it's like anyone like, it's not like no one has access to the code.

You know, all of that sensitive stuff goes on a separate set of devices. And in terms of the physical hardware, I have been a Purism owner for a long time. So I have got a Purism laptop. I think that the you know, and I've I've obviously upgraded it over the years and replaced it with newer versions.

Think that there are there are several

manufacturers that are pretty decent. Framework is great. System 76 is great. I like both of those. Getting an old a decent ThinkPad, an older ThinkPad especially is great. I can't say enough good things about Purism on the laptop side.

And one of the things that I love about Purism is they've got an anti interdiction service. So when you order a laptop from them, you can say you can you can pay a little bit extra and you get the anti interdiction service. And then, like,

the CTO or the c the CISO, one of the two, reaches out to you personally and you have this whole GPG encrypted conversation to discuss the interdiction, anti interdiction. And they paint nail polish on the screws and you choose what color nail polish you want on which screw And then they ship the the thing to you. And when it arrives,

you're you flip the laptop upside down and you're like, ah, yes. The glitter nail polish is on that screw and the green nail polish is on that screw. And so, you know, all all the nail polish colors match what I told them. And so I know that nobody physically tampered with that on a hardware level in between it shipping and arriving

by me. Then they And send separately a physical USB key called the Librium key and that arrives totally separately and it encrypts the entire boot on the laptop. So even you like you need both devices. You need to intercept the

laptop and you need to intercept the boot key and you then need to know how to recreate the nail polish. Oh and by the way they send you photos of it. And let me tell you something, recreating glitter nail polish so that it matches the high resolution photo that I have, good luck with that.

So that I think is it does take it to a little of an extreme but anyone that is serious about their data I strongly encourage going down that road. And then on the mobile side, so I have used Purism's mobile phone, LeetRoom five,

for a while. It's okay. Know? Like, I I don't know what else to say about it other than it's okay. It's very dated now. They have a new version called the Liberty phone.

The reason I got the Librium five at the beginning was they had a view one that was made in The USA. So you know, like like it was like hellishly expensive. Was like $2,000 or something. But it was fully made and assembled in The USA so, you know, like especially things like the secure storage chip, you know, like there were no weird like

off brand Chinese chips put into it. It is very dated and so more recently I kind of got a little bit fed up with how dated it was and I realized that I probably don't need to go that hardcore on the the the mobile phone side because, like, you know, I want I also want something that I can, like,

carry around with me. And so there's a a company called Vala, Vala Phone, like v o l l a, and they have a phone called the Quintus. And the Quintus is it is like a modern Android smartphone. Know, it looks and feels like a modern Android smartphone.

Like the camera is very decent, the display is gorgeous and it runs a fully unlocked version of Android. So fully rooted and whatever And you can switch between that and

what's it called, Ubuntu's mobile phone OS. I can't remember what it's called. Oh, Ubuntu touch. So you can switch between like their flavor of Android which is a modern flavor of Android rooted with their own launcher and so on or you can use Ubuntu touch.

And the Vola has really served me well because I realized once I switched to a phone that was a little bit more usable than the than the Librium, then I started using it more. And so now I I I have both of those, you know, and those are my dailies. I've got both of those devices on me.

I use the iPhone for all sorts of nonsense, know, taking random photos. The camera is obviously lovely, playing music, whatever whatever. And then I have a whole separate set of apps and so on on the Vala, on the Quintus and it's a great device. I can't

praise it enough. Again, you know, it's rooted Android that I have had to then go and lock down further to my preferences. But it's an excellent starting point. And then on the laptop in terms of OS, Purism does have their own variant of Linux which is fine.

I've tried it for a while and just went back to cubes. So cubes is a Linux, a flavor of Linux where every single app runs in its own virtual machine. And so it's a bit clunky. It means that, you know, getting data from one app to another is a bit more laborious because they are totally sandboxed from each other

and there is a shared like root file system and whatever but you can you have to imagine it as like multiple machines. You know imagine you literally had a physical laptop for editing a document and then another laptop for

opening a PDF. Know it is like and now they are on the same network and you are copying files between them just to do anything. It really is it can be a bit painful but it's fantastic from a privacy perspective because everything runs through a single router VM and that you can put Tor on and so everything is just locked down

nicely out the box. There's very little that you need to do to lock cubes down further. Yeah and then beyond that like I love Tor, I love I2P from like a network connectivity perspective.

I love NordVPN on occasion where I need to use a VPN. More recently I've been using Obscura and a big fan of what they are trying to do there. They don't have as many sites as Nord but they definitely have built a lot of cool stuff.

And messengers come and go. I use Matrix quite a lot still. I have a lot of friends and people on there. I've managed to get my family onto Signal and off WhatsApp which has taken a while because my parents did not want to switch away from WhatsApp.

At And least our family comms are a little more secure. Not that we're doing anything crazy as a family, but I don't really want anyone knowing when I'm going to go visit my parents. Again, that's just information that doesn't need to be that public.

And I think the only other thing that I want to call out from a Freedom perspective is there's a debit card called Pay, p a y p a y y, and it is a crypto backed card. So you you literally store whatever Tether, and you get dollars for your Tether in a

Ethereum style account, an an ERC 20 EVM style account that you have the private key for. So, you know, if pay disappear tomorrow, you can just go suck the money out. And they give you a card and they, because of the zero knowledge infrastructure there, they can't tell what you're swiping the card for. And

I think it's just an added level of protection. Know, it's not perfect. It's still physical banking system rails. I'm sure that there's a bunch of stuff that they could see if they really wanted to But I've chatted to some of the folk there.

They do a pretty decent job. And the really cool thing about the this is like a little bit geeky but the card has no numbers or name on it. And so the way that you get this card that arrives, like the physical card, I use it through Apple Pay and Google Pay and whatever but you get the physical card that arrives and then you

connect it on an app on your phone, like a Bluetooth Ali app. And over BLE, it then programs the card to work on NFC because there's no mag stripe. It's only NFC. It's only tap to pay. And so the idea is you can change your card number and that physical card you can just reprogram with the new number.

Or you can you know, if you lose your card, it's no problem.

You don't need to cancel anything because no one can you can just cancel the physical card, but you don't need to, like, change the card number on every single site you've signed up for that has to, like, you know, charge the card every month. And the last cool thing that that card does is when you tap,

the little pay logo in the middle lights up. It's like NFC activated light up logo, which is super geeky, but I absolutely love it. So, yeah, I would say that that's those are the big parts of the of the stack that I'm I use.

Happy to delve into, like, any other aspects or any other anything I missed out. Yeah. That was an excellent rundown. I've got a number of new browser tabs open for me to do some deep dives on some of the stuff that you mentioned there. The

the stuff with Purism was wild. I had no idea they even offered that as a service. That's that's excellent. And also, not heard of Volley before, but it looks like they do tablets as well, which is interesting. So I'm gonna definitely gonna check them out as well after this.

We are overtime for Freedom Tech Friday, guys. So if you did join us just for that portion of the show, we are gonna wrap up here, have a brief three minute break where there's a couple of videos for you to keep you occupied.

If anybody needs to run to the bathroom, now is your opportunity. We will be back in, say, about three minutes for the Monero monthly portion of the show, and Seth is gonna be driving. So we'll catch you in a couple of minutes. Thanks, guys.

Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, We appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London.

Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet Foundation and my Nim Box for keeping the ungovernable misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and artwork.

Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills. Thanks to expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news

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We love you all. Stay ungovernable.