MONERO MONTHLY ...ISH 15

The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every eleven seconds eleven seconds. I am investigator investigator.

Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token. The world's most private privacy. Which means that it hides virtually all transaction details.

World's most private privacy.

Good morning, Seth. It's been a whole ten minutes since I've spoken to you. I've missed you. How are you doing? I am doing well, man. It may have been ten minutes for us, but it has been many months for Monero monthly. So sorry everybody out there. The crazy schedules and everything have,

have made this one a tricky one to pull off, but I'm excited for us to finally be back after our our quick ten minute break between Freedom Tech Friday and

Monero monthly. It was funny. Q brought it up, actually. He was, like, flicking through the new website, and then he's like, oh, Monero monthly. Hang on a minute. You haven't done one since March.

We were caught caught in the act. We did say ish. We did say ish. And I actually think it's a better way to do it because we jump on here when there's something worth talking about. I wanted to do this one because

with everything that's happened with cold card, everything that happened with Bolts, and I were talking about Bitcoin stuff here, but there is a reason. Monero is becoming more and more necessary to anyone who either has preserved their privacy or is looking to preserve their privacy, And it puts people who

have looked after their privacy and used tools like Whirlpool to protect themselves and now in a situation with bolts down where spending becomes very difficult unless it is literally peer to peer buying from our or whatever.

If you wanna use swap services, if you wanna use gift card services, if you wanna do these, like, prepaid top up things where you have a Visa card, like, anyone who's actually living on and spending is in a really difficult situation.

I'm one of them, which is why I'm, you know, having this conversation. And, really, being able to spend now,

I genuinely believe the best thing you can possibly do is just to spend an hour. So just to spitball with you about that and and get your thoughts. Am I have I gone too far with that? Am I being reasonable with it? And and if I am, then what's the advice here for people who actually wanna use their money?

Yeah. I mean, it's a it's a crazy time right now because I think we all kind of overlooked a lot of the the Lightning issues once Bolts came out, and once they started providing services Mhmm. As a BTC pay plugin, providing services to all of the liquid, quote, unquote, lightning wallets, the the Aquas,

whatever ones use that. I'm a blink at the top of my head. Mhmm. But they become it became kind of like a a crutch in essence, but I don't say that to demean bolts. Like, the thing that they built was freaking amazing. Like, I I know I was a heavy user.

I think a lot of people, especially in the privacy preserving Bitcoin space, were, especially because it was a really useful tool when you were buying or selling Bitcoin peer to peer, especially over something like RoboSwats, the RoboSats.

It was super, super useful for that. Yeah. It was just a good way to go between Lightning and Bitcoin anyways. It became a crutch, but was a fantastic service, and I think no one expected it to just go away overnight. I mean, even, like like, we were using the Bolt's BTCPay plugin for accepting lightning at Cake, and it was fantastic.

Like, every once in a while, had issues, but overall, was much, much smoother and

orders of magnitude simpler for me to actually admin than it would have been to have a proper Lightning node, manage channels, deal with all that. And as we saw, even if you went the hardcore route with the LND thing, that that that was vulnerable. People lost funds, foundations, node got drained, like Yep. There is no

one size fits all solution anymore. And a lot of this this AI paradigm shift has has shown that some of these things that relied a little bit more on centralized guarantees break down in this new paradigm.

And the resiliency of things being protocol level and simpler like Monero

has been proven out because that's I mean, throughout all of this madness, throughout the the Zcash inflation bug that was found with AI, throughout the cold card hack, which was likely driven by AI, Bolts attacks, a bunch of other services in Bitcoin space coming under attack and shutting down or having to pause pause services,

Monero just kept on tracking and It just works. The Monero community kept pushing on using AI to audit itself as well, which we can definitely talk about a little bit more later too, but it was it's one of those cases where the complexity of Lightning has kind of come back to bite it and is causing issues that just simply

don't exist with Monero.

And so it's been something that's been really interesting to see how smooth that's continued to be at CakePay for our users. Like, none of that changed, whereas Whole Wallet ceased the ability to use Lightning, Bull Bitcoin, Aqua, multiple others. Their Lightning functionality just died when Bolts turned off their servers. Mhmm.

And that that was pretty shocking. And I know, like, for people like us at two, it it breaks a lot of the the no KYC privacy preserving workflow as well. It makes it even harder than it used to be to

to use Bitcoin in a privacy preserving way, not even just to make payments, but even also just to, like, to stack Bitcoin. If you're buying over Lightning and you wanna send to OnChain, the way you do that now is a bit more painful or a bit less privacy preserving

Mhmm. Which I think is going to shift a lot of the space to finding other solutions, but Monero just continues to work. And I think this will be yet another thing, kind of like the Samurai Wallet incident, that shakes a lot of people awake to say, like, okay. Maybe maybe there are some fundamental issues here.

Maybe something like a Monero is a better fit for me than I thought, or maybe it's just something that I'm gonna lean on more than I I have been leaning on recently.

Well, that was the shakeup for me. That's that's when this shortly after the, samurai arrests, and that shook me. We had one good tool. It's gone down. What else is there? And, you know, the samurai guys had always spoke very positively about Monero.

They were certainly not the maxi types in any way. And, yeah, I think this, like you say, is the next shake up, which is funnily enough, people who want to break links on chain and then they have Postmix, they were having to break the links from their broken links to be able to use Bitcoin most places. So it's like a weird,

you get the privacy, but then if you wanna use any service, you're gonna get your funds held. Like, you're just going to. It it's gonna be flagged. You're gonna get shotgun KYC. You're gonna have these problems, and that lightning hop

was a way to break that link and to be able to still interact with the services that you needed to interact with. And so that is a very

big kick for everyone who is leaning on Bolts. And it was a like, it was so much of the the lightning infrastructure was Bolts. Me and Q have probably said it a 100 times on the briefs. Like, we'd be lost without Bolts. Bolts is is massive. Like, how many of these services lean on it and, like, how good is it?

And we've praised it over the time and, like, oh, I hope it never goes down. If someone wants to pull a a an AI clanker onto it, you will find literally hundreds of times that me and Q have said that. And and now it's down.

And so I think it is gonna force more and more people into using Monero. And what I found from using Monero is the more I use it, the more I like it. Like, it just fucking works. You don't have a lot of the issues that you have with Lightning.

You don't have a lot of the privacy concerns you have with on chain, but you do still have an issue if you are holding only Bitcoin and you wanna use Monero. You have to be thoughtful about how you're gonna move into Monero.

And if you just have KYC coins and, like, they're not gonna flag up the easiest way, like, cake swaps, I've used that a little bit, and it's fucking easy. It just works. But if you have tainted coins, you're gonna have to rethink that. And so I think that would be a useful thing to to go into.

A lot of people who are listening to this show will be heavy Bitcoin users who have maybe used Monero once or twice. But I genuinely think this is the show that starts to push them in and and use it more. So I just wanna make sure that we don't have anyone have funds frozen or have problems unnecessarily,

and, like, you're literally the perfect person to to walk us through that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because so much depends on just how, like, what what the vibe around your coins is to a lot of these The vibe. These central swap providers.

They use different services to check to make sure that they're not accepting tainted funds because what you have to realize about Monero, like, unfortunately, we don't have any good decentralized instant swap tool. Like, Thorchain hasn't launched Monero support. Soraya hasn't launched.

We don't have anything like that right now where you can do cross chain swaps in a way that is decentralized but feels very seamless. So that's not there yet. So we're still stuck between the two.

One, the centralized swap providers, the ones like Keconom primarily leans on for Monero swaps, and the the peer to peer Monero swaps, which is gonna be things like Havana, which works very well, has had their own AI driven issues lately, unfortunately,

but they're they're still one of the best out there right now. Well, iGun is the other one. What was that? IGun. A lot of people in, in some of the groups that I'm in have mentioned iGun as, like, a as a swap service.

Yeah. So they're a an atomic swap provider. They're in the atomic swap camp, so definitely going to be much more painful from user experience perspective, but more decentralized,

more, like, completely trustless. Because as long as they built the protocol right, there's no way that a a malicious party that you're swapping with can steal funds. So that's definitely that's, like, the other end of the spectrum from the centralized swappers.

The interesting thing that was, like, for the vast majority of people, even with no KYC coins, the centralized swap services are totally fine. But the two things I've noticed is, one, post mix Wasabi funds are, like, very tainted. I see quite frequently like, in general, I I would say we see very, very, very, very, very infrequent

holding of funds, and all the funds always get refunded to the user if they do get blacklisted or tainted, like, through K Wallet. So just to clarify that, it is super rare. But when it does happen,

mostly it is Wasabi related. Like, if they're post mix Wasabi or somehow related to a Wasabi mix, they seem to really not like Wasabi wallet funds Mhmm. And not be able to to handle them.

And then beyond that, it's kind of a mix of things that I wouldn't expect, but I have seen some Samurai Wallet cases as well where post mix funds got frozen. But it's not it doesn't always happen.

And the thing to remember with those services is the way that they actually work is they're they're using other exchanges upstream to help to supplement their liquidity.

So, like, a good swap provider, someone like a ChangeNow, they'll have their own liquidity where they have their own Monero, Bitcoin, etcetera, in their own wallets that they can just swap instantly. But then they also supplement liquidity from some sort of an upstream exchange, something like a a Kraken or a,

Qcoin or something like that as well.

And when they get over a certain threshold in their own wallets, they send that to the exchange that they use so they can rebalance to some other asset that they need to be able to hold because swap volume is driving that way right now. So Obviously, if you send them tainted funds and they send those to their exchange,

they then actually are the ones who have the problem. So they have to be quite cautious with what funds they accept, or they can get their own exchange accounts frozen, which breaks the functionality they're able to serve users for all cryptocurrencies that are affected by that and not just them. Are you saying then

that you could have a swap provider that if you sent, let's just say, a $100 in to be swapped, that provider might use funds that they have themselves, that they have, on their balance, And therefore, the KYC stuff is less of an issue.

Whereas if it's a larger swap or they just don't happen to at that time have the funds to swap, they go to another exchange. And therefore, larger swaps are maybe more likely to be stopped if you're using a centralized option.

In theory, yes. But the actual threshold for that, especially on the good centralized swap services, is very high. Okay. Okay. Tens of thousands of dollars would be Right. Okay. The the minimum where on some of the smaller ones, you would start hitting issues. Not like you're swapping a thousand dollars, that's gonna be a problem.

But they do still have to be cautious where even if they are using their own liquidity, eventually, funds are gonna go to an exchange True. Generally.

Yeah. And they need to make sure that they don't get their own exchange accounts blocked or that they don't send tainted funds to someone else, and then that person gets gets things blocked. So it's a mess that is brought on by the transparency of Bitcoin. Yeah.

Like, the the lack of fungibility is brutally clear when you actually try to use this stuff, like, outside of the the normal white market approved ways. Like, not for anything nefarious, but just like you try to use it privately, you don't use KYC, and you swap for some other cryptocurrency, and you start to figure out how nonfungible

Bitcoin really is and how painful it is to you and to the merchants for swap services that you're trying to use. It's a major problem that I think gets

hand waved away by most people in, like, Bitcoin, Twitter, like, people I I think people who don't use Bitcoin for anything other than storing value. And I think it's very clear when you're speaking to someone like that and the way they hand wave their way because,

yeah, it's a it's a fucking big problem if you wanna use this stuff. It really and and that's why it's such a breath of fresh air using Monero. It really like, when I wanna do a top up or buy a gift card or, like, just put food on the table for my family.

When I send the transaction on Monero, I've never had a problem ever. It's just never a problem, and that's worth so much to me like that.

The value of just knowing it works, not having problems down the line, not having funds held, not doing mental gymnastics of have I done things in a way that's distanced myself enough from a coin join, that's distanced myself enough from this other thing. It's just so much fucking around, and as I say, just extremely easy and refreshing.

Yeah. And I think you noted on the head that the people who are like, ah, the fungibility doesn't matter, or Bitcoin's fungible, one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. I would guarantee you those people are not using Bitcoin in any

No. In any way outside of I use KYC exchange a, and I send funds to KYC exchange b. Yeah. Or I take funds from KYC exchange a to my my self custodial wallet, and then I send them back and sell them when I feel like it. There's no way they're using them, like, to actually buy goods and services or to swap with another crypto or

use anything peer to peer, basically, because you start to run into those limits quite quickly when you are using it day to day, and you realize that the fungibility of, like I feel like five or six years ago when, like, fungibility was more of a common topic, like, Marina community was talking a lot about it.

I was pushing a lot about it, like, went on Stefan Lovera's podcast and talked about fungibility a few years ago, and Mhmm. It was kind of this meme of, like, we were saying, hey, this is a problem. It's going to be a problem for merchants. It's going to be a problem for you, but it hadn't really happened too much yet.

And that that has really shifted, I feel like, especially in the wake of Samurai Wallet going away and what seems like a broader crackdown on coins that have privacy not being as widely accepted.

Yeah. It seems like that that trend is here to say, and it's something that's only getting worse at this point. It's not it's not getting better, especially because the privacy tools around Bitcoin are not getting better either, and things like Bolts are are shutting down entirely.

Do you know what I think about a lot as well, especially given what we're seeing with AI, is I'm thinking you've got on chain data, which is there forever, and then you've got all this information that can be sifted through by AI, by anyone, and it's getting better and better and faster and faster and more capable.

Like, what happens down the line? You see it where you have arrests which can't really be proven, where they suggest that someone's linked to something that you have people using Bitcoin in a very basic, stumbly, fumbly way,

and I'm guilty of it as well. Like, I've done my best, but I'm not the most technical guy as, obviously, everyone who listens to this knows. And I look back and I go, oh, I fucked that up. That's there forever.

And now you have this you effectively with AI, like, everyone just has a team of analysts who can just sit and pass through data that's there forever, and I get scared by that. I'm like, this is not fucking good because even if you are a good person and you haven't done anything wrong,

it doesn't mean you don't get mixed up in these problems. And this is such a a nice sidestep from that above and beyond everything else we've talked about with usability. It's like just peace of mind of, like, you know, I'm not gonna or hopefully gonna have a knock at my door in five years and be like, hey. We think this.

Yeah. Yeah. And the, like, the Bitcoin fog Roman Sterlingov case is another really good example of that of, like, from what we can tell and talking to his lawyer and everything, like, he just bought Bitcoin peer to peer from the wrong guy.

And the fact that Bitcoin was traceable and nonfungible meant that that he is now in jail for something he did not do. Now, obviously, like,

I don't I don't want to necessarily assume that exactly what he him and his lawyer are claiming is true, but I I know their lawyer quite well. He's a great guy. Like, I I think that he's he's being quite honest and realistic about it.

And there's no other tie for him except for this on chain link that supposedly the Bitcoin he he had owned at some point on Mt. Gox was used to buy the domain for this Bitcoin fog mixer. And, like, that that was done pre AI, but still with the black box of chain Chainalysis.

And part of the craziness of that case was that chainalysis were basically able to say, he's guilty, Yeah. But we're not gonna tell you how we Exactly. They didn't have to reveal their methods.

And something interesting with AI specifically is if a finding is almost entirely or entirely AI driven, you won't be able to tell the methods unless you're doing it in a very specific way. But even then, the way that inference works, it's kind of guesswork,

and there won't be a proven reasoning trace in the exact same way that it would be for a human who's keeping track of exactly how they're reasoning through something. And so you'll get weird cases where Claude says this person definitely owned this Bitcoin, but

no not even the person who ran the prompt and did that can tell you why that's true beyond what prompt what Claude says for why it's true,

which could be purely hallucination. It is definitely going to be be problematic. I haven't seen it used in any cases or anything yet, but it's definitely going to be problematic. Yeah. And another one of those critical issues when something is non fungible that Monero just solves for.

Now that may also mean that Monero becomes comes under even heavier attack. Yeah. Because it is more resistant to those sorts of nation state level overreaches, but, obviously, we've we've been preparing for that for a very, very long time.

Yeah. I think, unfortunately, it's gonna be attacked really heavily, but it is by far the best option that anyone has as far as I can tell to actually use their cryptocurrency and and to have some privacy. So, you know, there's all of those reasons for people to start using it. And I just as we have a voice ungovernable and

there's not many sort of bitcoin y podcast that talk about this stuff, I just think it's important to lay out there and to forewarn because we've actually had a pretty good track record of making predictions and those predictions coming true. And I I do strongly predict that Bitcoin is gonna come under attack

in all these different ways, and we are seeing the Bitcoin companies and services are under attack. Bolt's being a perfect example. BTCPay going down as soon as we finish this call. I've gotta go and try and fix my fucking lightning channels and piss around with all of that stuff. And, yeah, I just I want this to be an episode where

people maybe put away their feelings and start just looking logically at what's happening and what's likely to happen and just try and protect themselves because, you know, I don't wanna see people that we care about getting caught up in problems, and that is what I foresee. And I think this is a really, really, really good sidestep.

And I think the more people in Bitcoin who start to use Monero for what it's great at, it only strengthens the Monero network as well. And I think those two, we said it so many times, just like Bitcoin and Lightning, they work so nicely together.

I think that Bitcoin and Monero in many ways actually works better, and it's the swap element that still needs to be not perfected but made easier and is still something that needs people need to think about carefully.

But using both for what they're good at at the same time, I think, is is just a perfect

you need both, basically. I don't I'm sort of rambling here, but you need Yeah. You actually need both. Yeah. I mean, especially as long as well, I'd say Bitcoin is acting as a story value, you know, hasn't been the the most successful

True. Last bit of time True. Over the lifespan. It's been a good story value. And as long as that holds, that pairing definitely is Mhmm. Is important and useful and has been over the years. Like, I think the best of both worlds.

If you store your wealth in Bitcoin and keep a good bit in Monero, not just swap it at the time you need it, but keep a good bit in Monero and and use that as much as you can for payments.

And I think, like like we've talked about before on the show too, I think, like, one of the superpowers of cryptocurrency is if you have one, you can get another pretty much without fail. Like, we have talked about, yes, there can sometimes be with decentralized swap providers issues with tainted Bitcoin, but that's

very, very, very rare. Like Mhmm. Like, speak for authority because we process massive amounts of volume of Bitcoin and Monero swaps, and the amount that we get frozen is absolutely tiny, like, handfuls, every year.

But if you have Bitcoin, you can swap to USDT. You can swap to Monero. You can swap back and forth as much as you want. And if you need something more hardcore, you can use something like, Ridoswap.

You can use something like Eigen Wallet for their atomic swaps. And that superpower means that, like, even when crackdowns continue on Monero, like, Kraken theoretically are drastically reducing the amount that you can deposit and withdraw, of Monero specifically starting tomorrow.

Even when that crackdown happens, it will affect some people. Like, that will be painful for us at Cakepave. We can't get them to give us an exemption, but we'll figure out how to handle that.

It doesn't affect the person who's just using ChangeNow or something via Cakewallet to swap between Bitcoin and Monero or is using Rito swap and swapping directly peer to peer. That that person can continue accessing no matter what. And as long as you can access Monero, there are so many places and ways that you can spend it,

especially in the kind of the freedom tech world of services and goods that you just kinda need for everyday life, both digitally and physically,

that makes it still a super, super powerful tool. And I think it helps to alleviate some of the pain of the lightning issues where a lot of merchants have lost the ability to do Lightning or had to take it down for days on end or wallets have ceased supporting Lightning because of those issues.

The fact that Monero has stayed up and all these services are still able to accept it is absolutely huge. So that ability to, like again, we're we're never talking, like, stacking Monero for for savings. That's not like our focus is not price appreciation,

but using it as an actual tool Yeah. Continues to get better and better despite the pressure against it. Yeah. We we were gonna get onto some of the services that you can use it for a little bit later in the show. But, yeah, just just again, to anyone who hasn't tried,

just give it a go. Like, we're we're gonna go into where you can use it. I've seen a a massive what everyone can see, there's a massive trend that it's used for many of these services. It's one of the preferred, I think, like, you know, normally 40% of all

cryptocurrency transactions on a lot of the services that I've looked into seem to be Monero. I liked the fact that you said if someone uses CakePay and they have got an issue that you can organize a refund. I think that's

maybe something that would otherwise scare people. Like, oh, what if I I don't go and try and use Postmix or, like, Asabi coins because you're you're probably gonna have an issue. But,

you know, if you've got funds that haven't just gone through that and you wanna give it a go, I think that's something nice with K Qualys that as you're a partner with us, like, we know that the ungovernment was gonna be looked after, and it's something that people can, wet their beak with.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There are tons of ways they can actually use it. And I don't if you wanna go ahead and jump into some recommendations. Obviously, we've we've talked about a lot of these before, but there's some good places to dive in and use it.

Use it day to day, not just like this is a theoretical thing, but you can actually use this for a lot of the things you need day to day. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, just some off the top of my head. MOLVAD, it's a very heavily used by a lot of the ungovernables, IVPN, Obscura,

which I'm still not used. You speak really highly of it. But So so good. I think we might do a Freedom Tech Friday with them at some point. But, yeah, you know, those are all options. Proton ish sometimes maybe when they feel like it ish.

SilentLink, PikaSim that I've not heard of before. Yeah. They're new. I want to be hesitant with them, but I've I've heard good things. Okay. I just need I haven't actually tried them myself, so they're more of a check them out and see if there's something that could be useful. Like, they run BTCPay and accept Monero directly and

and seem like a good project, but it it is new to me. I haven't actually used them yet. Yeah. Sponsor of the show, partner of the show, MyNimbox, who are awesome. Very heavy on the Monero side.

That is their preferred option. And, like, I I'm pretty sure it's 40% of everything that they take is Monero. It's what they want to use. So if you do want private hosting for your BTCPay, virtual private servers, whatever else, they they they have a lot they can offer. And, yeah, Monero has definitely accepted there.

CoinCards. Although I remember on CoinCards, there was a I'm sure they, like, charged more to accept Monero for a bit. I don't know if they still do that. Do you know? Yeah. They were charging, like, an extra 5% for Monero. Because when the the exchange they used in Canada shut down Monero support

Mhmm. They basically had to start, like, swapping it through Ridoswap to be able to then sell it. So they were taking a hit on all the fees around those. Okay. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but CoinCards is a fucking amazing company. They're not CoinKite.

They're absolute cunts. CoinCards is amazing. Like, I I can't recommend them highly enough. Yeah. Yeah. Mike's a fantastic dude too. He's he'll he'll come out to events. You may run into him even at small Monero events, but, yeah, absolutely fantastic people. I've I used them for a long time before I joined Cake as well, and,

honestly, they do some things better than we do at Cake Pay Cake Pay, and I have to applaud them for that. Yeah. Shout out to them. ShoppingBit, XMR Bazaar. XMR Bazaar, that's it's been a while since I've looked at that. I'm trying to remember. Wasn't there, like didn't Vic, like, put his car on there or something like that? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They've had some crazy things bought and sold on there. It's basically it's like a peer to peer marketplace that's Monero driven. So the the way that you actually buy buy goods and services is via Monero.

Yeah. So it has, like, reviews of of people who are listing things and really, really cool service. Yeah. Very cool. NanoGPT, one of my favorite projects in the whole cryptocurrency space. Like nanoGPT.

Again, can't speak highly enough about. I use them literally every single day for, editing, some of the visuals that we do, images, having access to some of the models that I don't wanna docs myself on.

Top up with Monero takes seconds, and, it's much less expensive to use than other services, at least that I found, like Maple, for example. I think that NanoGBT is fucking amazing. So if you're using AI and, yeah, wanna wanna play around with Monero, that's a really good place to start.

Yeah. They're super cool. You can, you can access them directly in Cake. We're we're actually talking with them about having a better direct integration because right now, it's basically like a

a web UI that you can easily deposit into to be able to start using it. But just that ability to, like Mhmm. Not even have an account if you don't want one, just top up a tiny bit of crypto. I think their minimum is, like, 10¢. $10. So oh. Yeah. If it's way less than that.

I think it's, like, 10¢ for that, and it's it's more for credit card, obviously, because the fees there. But crypto is is super, super cheap. To to start, they don't take anything on deposits. Their rates are all at,

like, at cost. So it's really, really fantastic service. Definitely recommend giving them a try. And they have, like, for those who are more hardcore with AI,

they have an an OpenAI compatible API. So you can connect it to to Py, to OpenCode, to Hermes, to whatever you want, and use it directly via API as well, not just through their front end. Yeah. We we did a whole Freedom Tech Friday with them, actually. And if you missed that, go go check them out. But, yeah, incredible service.

I've not used it within Cake. I've just done it directly. But are you saying that if you're in Cakewallet I've seen that you have it. Yeah. It's basically just like a web a web UI

that gets launched from Cake Wallet with our own branding and easier top ups with deep links directly into Cake Wallet. So it's it's nothing honestly, it's nothing crazy right now, but we need to we need to expand it and make it more useful for sure. Yeah. Definitely.

Because I I think it's one of those things where once people start using it, it's really addictive. Like, Jordan had to push me for

months and months and months to use it. And I was like, no. I'm I'm used to what I'm used to. I'm not fucking around with that. Like, it's gonna be really expensive. It needs to be this. I had all these assumptions. And since using it, I've been blown away. Anyway, that's enough of a a nano GPT shell.

Monero Nodo, not familiar with that one? It's a Monero, like, node in a box

product. So you can buy it, just plug it in. You a Monero node with no extra configuration or setup. It's from from Doug, same guy between it, but behind Monero Talk and XMR Bazaar as well. So Oh, okay. He's a legend in the Monero space. Well, good to support then. Very cool. Yeah. Many, many places. Many of these Visa cards top up

options. I'm always hesitant to mention them in case they get hammered, but there there's a lot of them with Monero options on there. So if you just wanna go and do your shopping, top up your petrol or whatever, like, it's it's really useful for that.

Are we missing any others? There's obviously more, but Yeah. I mean, there's a million more. Did we mention cloaked wireless? Nope. Yeah. So cloaked wireless is a really cool one. They're they are US only, so if you're listening outside The US,

Their main phone service doesn't apply to you. They do have data eSIMs, so you can use that part of their product. But they're a a US MVNO, so you get, like, full proper cell service, and you can pay for everything in Monero. You don't have to do do anything extra. All that they require is a ZIP code.

And so it's a fantastic way to get a as privacy preserving as a SIM can be. Obviously, there's still things with, cell towers, know your location, that sort of thing, but at least it's not directly linked to your identity.

And they have a lot of hardening that they've done in terms of preventing SIM swaps, because that's a pretty common attack, especially for high profile individuals or

cryptocurrency holders where you're you're using an exchange and you're using just SMS two factor, and a SIM swap can get get them into your exchange account. It's a really good tool to protect that. You have to prove cryptographically that you own it. Otherwise, you can't access it, basically.

Yeah. Yeah. They just do they basically just do stronger multi factor auth, and then they have protections behind the scenes against SIM swapping in general as well. But, yeah, it's it's it's really cool. Nice.

Very nice. So, yeah, that's kind of like the the theme of the show for me anyway was was that. It's just if you're, a, sitting on the sidelines and not using Monero at all, consider it. If you're using it a bit, but you were relying on these lightning services and they worked well enough for you, but they're currently down,

don't feel dejected or I've there's been a a a feeling that I've seen in a lot of the groups recently, which is kind of like, fucking hell. Like, BTC pay down, Bolts is down. There's this cold card stuff.

There's just like a am I as safe as I thought I was? Is this as useful as I thought it was? A bit of a downer mood on things. And rather than just leaning into that, I really wanna say, like, there are other options, and don't be scared to try them. And I think that's really the message I wanna push here for the ungovernables is

don't give up on freedom and using these tools because there are some fantastic ones. Yeah. And the other kind of silver lining, I think, to all the craziness lately is the services that are still standing are only getting more and more hardened and secure throughout the craziness that's going on, especially in the Bitcoin space

with the cold card thing and bolts and and all of that that's driven this huge red teaming security hardening exercise throughout the Bitcoin space, which is a little embarrassing that that wasn't happening before this for a lot of companies and projects,

especially if they were a company that had the money to focus on security and should have been thinking about that from the ground up. But it's great that that's happening in that space. And on the, like, on the Monero side, something that's been really cool to watch is that the the Monero

research and developer community has been really on the cutting edge of using AI as well to to continuously audit and secure Monero to look for things like inflation bugs, but also just to look for ways that they can harden the software itself and make it more more secure and performant as they go too. But

like Monero people always do, they're doing it cautiously and with with good skepticism about what AI can and cannot do, not just assuming it'll just fix everything or find every bug, but using it layered on top of their existing cryptographic and

software engineering expertise and all of that good stuff. So there's been a lot of good ongoing efforts talked about since, like, June and on, but ongoing for months before that of people throughout them in aerospace

in an organized way, but not always completely out in the open because security stuff sometimes can be done a little bit privately and then disclosed as necessary. That's been happening all the way since June. There's been good funding for AI related scanning from Magic. They've gotten into,

like, Claude's cyber verification program and onboarded some of the Monero devs into that to be able to do more focused testing from Claude, which has some advantages of the open weight models.

And then even, like, the Minerva community is writing an AI policy right now, not only on just, like, submissions, like, do we accept AI generated code, but also on the security side, what are the the thresholds going to be for findings, and how are we going to use AI to help us evaluate

security reports at the same time. So that's been something that's really encouraging. I know there was a lot of, like especially after the Zcash inflation bug, which was found by AI, a lot of people freaked out and

were wondering if the Monero community was doing anything about it. And, honestly, they've been ahead of the curve and ahead of the Bitcoin space in terms of of doing that proactively from very early on, when it comes to AI. So that's something that is reassuring. It means that Monero,

alongside other things in the the space, are are going to become more and more secure, but also there's going to be more and more persistent AI attacks. So this this arms arms race has escalated, but Mhmm. I think the Monero community, the developers, researchers specifically, have done a great job of staying ahead of the curve there.

It has been unbelievable to watch this arms race, like, from the sidelines. And I know that you and all of the the Cake team are heavily leaning in and using AI. And, I know Q obviously has been as well and and Zach and everyone at Foundation. And, like, what's your general feeling about

like, if if I gave you a switch and I said, Seth, you can either flick the switch, AI goes away, goes away forever. You go back to the security assumptions that you had previously with the teams you had previously, and you continue developing as you were previously, or you can keep the switch on.

But be aware that all the skills and the abilities that you have, the hackers have as well. And, like, where does this lead in terms of we rely on certain assumptions, like mathematic assumptions and security assumptions for this whole crypto world to work? Like, are you a little bit worried about

how safe are our funds, how safe is our information? Like, what what would you choose? Man, that is a a great question. I think just so life could be simpler, I would choose the the AI doesn't exist paradigm. Me too. It's just it's it is a much cleaner place.

But at the same time, I think a lot of people, especially if you're not actively using AI for positive reasons, like, to do good things, you may feel like you're only seeing the negatives, but there's also just incredible stuff that we just literally could not do before this. Like, so many of the things I've been working on,

so many of the things that I've been able to ship from, like, an operational perspective, an infrastructure perspective, a personal perspective would never have happened if I didn't have good, powerful AI that was privacy preserving available to me.

Just like we just covered on Freedom Tech Friday, the new ungovernable.network website is claw driven. Like, Q did an immense amount of work to to shape it and to direct it well. Like, that cannot be understated, but that also

I don't know if never would have happened. That's probably not accurate, but it would have taken a lot longer. It would have taken a lot more time and a lot more effort to get anything close to that. It never would have happened.

There you go. There's your there's your judgment. It never would have happened. So, like, those kinds of things, we have to also talk about the benefits. And I feel like sometimes AI falls into the same the same terrible news cycle where Monero is, where if you're if you're not using it day to day,

you probably are only hearing the negatives. You're hearing about this hack and how they swapped to Monero. You're hearing about how,

this person was arrested and they were using Monero. You hear about these spooky darknet markets and how they're all using Monero now, and you think, God, that's a terrible thing. I really wish that just didn't exist. But when you actually start using it day to day and you realize this is a tool for freedom for me and my family,

you start to realize that it's worth it existing even if bad things can be done with it. And I think AI, just like literally every other technology that's ever come out, is exactly like that. Bad people can use it for bad things, but it also enables good,

smart, ethical people to do more than they ever would have otherwise. And it it just becomes this new paradigm where, like, this this arms race has always existed, but it's easy and tempting for us to fall behind now in the arms race and say,

I don't really wanna deal with this AI thing, or I think it's all a hoax, or I I just don't think it's worth it. And then we fall behind, and we become vulnerable in a way that we weren't before. And yet if we push, if we get on the cutting edge, if we find ways that we can leverage it,

we, like, as people building projects, building companies, we, as Monero contributors, we know better the tools that we're protecting, so we will be able to better use AI to defend it. Now there's always a push and pull that will always be an alternating thing. Always have to be quick to quick to be on top of that. But I think, overall,

we can make it a good thing, but it is up to us. Just like any other technology, AI, I think, is is neutral out of the gate, and we have to figure out how we're going to use it to fight for freedom instead of allowing other people to fight to destroy freedom with it.

I I would have disagreed a couple of weeks ago, but I tend to agree with you now. And the only reason I agree is because you and others have been talking about how good these open weight models are.

I was getting quite worried where we were having issues, and then people who needed to defend and protect their own projects and customers couldn't have access to these closed source black box things.

And then it's not just a tool that can be used for good or for bad. It's a tool that certain people can tell you whether you have access to or not. And then that, to me, was very fucking scary, like, really, really scary.

So I am optimistic in the sense that these open weight models seem to be developing. And and from what you say and other people are saying, it it seems as though it's gonna be a tool that anyone can use to varying degrees because not everyone is gonna do what you guys are doing and, like, suddenly invest tens of thousands into hardware

or hundreds of thousands into hardware, is probably where it'll go. But they can still access these tools, and pay as they go, which without that, it it's terrifying. Yeah. And, like,

it's I think, like, the self hosting piece is gonna be really interesting in, like, two or three years. Like, right now, yes, the hardware cost is is just absurd for a regular person to be able to do larger, more advanced models. Smaller, like, agentic stuff, like, you wanna drive, like, Hermes,

you can do that with, like, a really good gaming PC. So we're talking $23,000 at most. You can do that and have a pretty good experience. But that's where the beauty of things like NanoGPT that we talked about, like Venice, like OpenRouter come into play is if you use them and you choose to use the privacy preserving models,

you can get the best things that are out there, basically, in terms of speed and effectiveness, while also preserving your privacy and enabling you to do really cool stuff. Like,

even just, like, while we've been on this podcast, I just pulled up all the things that I kicked off running before that. Like, while we've been on this podcast, I've been building out a better app for,

my car so I can control it in a way that's more privacy preserving and not have to deal with the garbage that comes with the one from the manufacturer. I've been doing a security pass and an optimization pass on uncoverable.network to see how I can help to make the site more performant and secure. Nice. And I've been deploying Hermes

over iMessage for my wife so that she can start using

AI as she sees fit. I'm trying not to push her into it, but find the ways that it works for her. And I'm not doing any of that. Mhmm. I have a lot of context and stuff that I've saved up, so it knows how to do some stuff that that is necessary there. But, like, the fact that I'm able to do essentially four

different tasks while I'm chatting with you on a podcast, because I'm not actually having to do that work, that I could do some of that myself if I had infinite time, but I have, like, negative infinite time. I don't know how to say Yeah. How to say how time feels right now in life.

Shit. But that that sort of ability is, like, I think something that people forget is that it it enables smart, competent,

passionate people to do incredible things that they could never do otherwise. Yeah. And that is that's not going away, and the bad people using it for bad things is not going away. So we gotta figure out how we how we embrace it and fit it in. Yeah. I I have a question around a further tie with AI and Monero.

With people spending so much money on hardware, is that hardware I presume it's usable when at rest or when not being used to mine Monero. And if that is the case, is that a nice way to offset some of the costs?

For example, if, you know, let's say I'm governable, I speak to our dad, John, who has a lot of power because of his, COVID methane plant and generators. And if I said to him, hey, dad. Like, I wanna invest heavily in uncomfortable infrastructure, and I wanna buy

a load of kits so I can run our own stuff. But I'm only gonna be using that kit, you know, 60% of the time, generating images, doing show notes, blah blah blah blah blah, whatever else it is that we're working on.

Would it then make sense to, while it's not being used so heavily, for it to switch over and be mining Monero and therefore pay for itself to some degree?

I am embarrassed that I have not thought of this at all. I love that that that's that's the way you're thinking about this is, like, how can we use this to also secure Monero and earn Monero at the same time and recoup higher costs? That's a fascinating idea I had not considered at all.

It is absolutely possible. Like, essentially, you should think of a an AI optimized system as a powerful GPU. Like, it's it's really graphics cards that are the thing that drives AI in a a very performant way. So, like, the DGX Sparks that I'm running here are a

Blackwell NVIDIA GPU with a 128 gigs of RAM. That's that's essentially all they are under the hood.

If you're running it from, like, a gaming PC, the main thing that's doing the work is the GPU there as well. So you'd have maybe a GPU that's more than you need for gaming, but something that you you want to be able to to run your own AI yourself.

And all of that absolutely can be used to mine Monero. I think the caveat is that mining Monero with GPUs is generally not as efficient as mining it with a a recent, especially AMD CPU. Mhmm. But it is absolutely something that you can do. And as long as AI compute remains general purpose compute like a GPU,

that's definitely something that can can be plugged in and make the most of the hardware cost. Something I'm I'm gonna have to look into for our Mhmm. Our cluster for sure is how,

like, how performant are they? That's Yeah. Definitely gonna give me a good little experiment I'll have to play with here. Yeah. Just interesting because, you know, if you're already if you have low power costs, which someone like me can sort out through our mesh networks, etcetera, like, I can I can get hold of low cost power?

And then, you know, it depends how you're using it. But, again, for me, it might be the okay. I want you to create a 100 images.

Here's the here's the inputs that I want. I wanna see them in the morning. When I get up, I wanna review, and I'll choose one. And then I might give you some adjustments. And at the same time, I want you to be writing show notes from the transcript that you've made. And it will have a certain amount of tasks, but it just definitely

will not be used a 100% of the time. It's gonna be whirring away while I'm asleep. And then I wake up in the morning, and it's gonna have some tasks that I'm gonna give it. But I would overspec my stack, and therefore, it just kind of makes sense. Because even if it's even if it's just breakeven on the Monero,

you know, like, the amount I'm paying for the power or whatever, even if it's just breakeven, it's still more useful than paying for a swap or trying to get hold of the Monero. Like, it's the best way to do it, and it's gonna secure the network, which we seriously fucking rely on from everything that we've just said now. So,

yeah, worth playing around with. Yeah. Yeah. I'll definitely do that once I once I have some downtime, all that stuff finishes if I ever if I ever let these poor little servers rest. Twenty thirty.

Yeah. I'll I'll throw, well, yet again, that's another great use case for AI is I'm just gonna tell tell Claude,

hey. Test XMRIG on these and see what the performance is like running against p two pool and giving a readout. So I'll just I'll just yell at the clinkers and make them go to work and tell me when they're done. So I like it. Yeah. Maybe

maybe we can wrap up by walking through some of the software updates. I know that normally we did kind of more time on that, but there

are definitely a few things that I I wanna dig through a little bit today. Sure. Figured we can do that. Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. So one of the ones we mentioned in Freedom Tech Friday, we briefly mentioned here as well, but a very important, like, call out for people. If you're running BTCPay server,

there have been multiple updates to it over the last two weeks. First to two dot four dot two, and then yesterday to 2Dot4Dot3RC4. Quite just flows off the tongue. Easy to say. But both those fit both those releases fix critical vulnerabilities with a BTCPay.

So be sure if you are running it right now, if you can't update immediately and you're not on at least 2.4.two, just shut down. You probably lost funds if you're using that and running LND already. But if if not, just go ahead and shut down until you get a chance to update. If you can't update, go ahead and update at least two .4.two.

But if you do the normal update path, you'll automatically get 2Dot4Dot3RC4, which is kind of a hidden release. They haven't published the source code because they don't wanna disclose exactly what is broken, what's vulnerable in two dot four dot two.

Always fun times, but make sure you do go ahead and update that. I have tested and validated that the Monero plug in works totally fine on two dot four dot two and two dot four dot three r c four.

That's what we're using in in production, in staging, on my test environment all across the board. But that that is an important one. Along with that, there has been a couple updates, just minor things to the Monero plug in for BTCPay.

Worth updating if you want to, but nothing breaking or critical or no major vulnerability there.

Beyond that, I think the the other few things to mention, one, since we last talked, obviously, there's been a ton of releases. So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna highlight all of them, but just some high level ones that are important for people to know.

One is Monero, the core software. Monero d constantly gets up updated, so it's it's been bumped to 18.5.1 since we last recorded an episode, which makes the the Tor support using SOX better and adds a ton of bug fixes and improvements.

Not a lot of details to get into there, but always worth upgrading if you're running a node or if you're using the Monero GUI or Monero CLI wallet. Go ahead and make sure you're on the latest there.

In related news, cake wallet, monero.com, we've had a bunch of releases since we last talked. The primary one for people to be aware of when it comes to Monero is obviously alongside all of the the constant improvements and bug fixes that we do. We launched native Tresor

Safe seven support for Monero. So you can use it over Bluetooth on iOS and Android without having the the Tresor Connect app or anything like that installed.

And it is a super, super, super nice seamless experience. So I'd highly recommend that. If you do have a TresorSafe seven, and want to use it to store Monero, for now, it's the best experience.

Hopefully, we'll make the Passport Prime experience even better, which we're working on behind the scenes right now. But, for now, the the Tresor experience is is very, very nice. Very good.

Third, p two pool. So that decentralized mining pool, we've talked about a ton on here. There have been some big updates. There was also a hard fork that happened in June, which obviously it's

long past June. But just so you're aware, if you haven't looked at your PT pool and are confused why it's broken, you'll need to update. That was four dot 16 that,

handled that hard fork, but there's been a few critical security fixes as well, in recent releases, like in four dot 18, just released last week. So important to keep updating there. And just like a general call out here,

like, the space in general, like we talked about our on the AI stuff, the space in general has gotten crazy from a security standpoint.

You need to make sure that you're keeping your software up to date if you're self hosting stuff either for, like, a store where you sell stuff peer to peer or even just, like, nodes for you to use at home,

it's really important that you stay up to date. But at the same time, it's also really important that you don't panic because attackers are going to try to use all of the security craziness to ramp up phishing, specifically spear phishing.

They may try to use the panic around, oh, god, I have to update now to slip something into, theoretically, a bug fix release. Yeah. And then people don't validate the SHA signatures, they don't check the GPG signatures, and they they download something or install something that is malicious.

And that like, I expect that to increase. Haven't actually seen that happen yet, which is a little shocking.

Mhmm. But as people get rushed and a little more panicked, that becomes more and more important that you do stay up to date, but that you are constantly validating what you're downloading to update to and making sure that it is legitimate.

And then really last one, I think, is Cuprate, which is the alternate client for Monero, the Rust built from the ground up version of Monero d, essentially. They I know we've talked to them a few times in the past. They have hit a a huge milestone, which is that their latest preview release

actually has full support for wallets to connect to it and use it as the back end, which means, like, Cake Wallet, you can now connect to Cuprate. Oh, nice. We're gonna be working really, really closely with them to performance tests.

We've already been doing some security vulnerability testing and hardening work with them to help improve that, both from just the findings we have of running a major major node infrastructure at scale, but also with specific AI driven

security scans that we we do internally at the same time. But we'll be we'll be working on deploying that and testing against Cakewallet. In theory, this could bring massive performance improvements for wallet sync.

Like, they they have tested and and seen anywhere from, like, five to 20 times faster wallet sync

Oh. With cup rate versus Monero d. So, obviously, we'll validate that. We'll make sure that, like, that actually holds at scale, but that's gonna be something really, really fun that we're working on is is working closely with them to test that both internally and then slowly rolling it out to users as it becomes more stable as well to

hopefully get a really, really, really good performance improvement to make that most painful part of Monero's user experience significantly better. So that's definitely an exciting thing that I'm I'm looking forward to.

Yeah. That's very nice. I've got, one to talk about, which you may know about, and is relevant to the people who are more on the Bitcoin side, and maybe this is the first time listening to a Monero monthly ish.

If you're running Umbral and I'm pretty sure it's the same on Fart nine as well. But if you're running an Umbral, you can one click install a node on there, and it works. And it also gives you the option to mine on there, and you can set, like, a percentage of the GPU, whatever it is that it's running on.

It you can scale that from, like, oh, only use 30% maximum or 50 or 90 or whatever. So if you have some hardware that sat there and not really doing anything, again, it can be mining. And I thought that was quite cool. For the less technical people, just one click is quite nice.

Yeah. Yeah. And we definitely need to do that's probably another thing I need to put my clankers on is improving that experience. I know you've had a lot of problems with running Monero nodes on those prebuilt node packages before. Only on Fart nine. It it was a it was a major problem where it would not that it wouldn't work.

It would work, and then it wouldn't. But when it didn't, it took the entire fucking node and PC down and, like, fucked everything. And it did it to me twice.

And I was like, oh, it must be something I'm doing. And then I spoke to Black Coffee and a few others who were, like, very technical, and they were like, no. No. It's it's not you. It's just fucked.

So that that was why I was for a long time, like, oh, well, I'm just not gonna mess around because I don't want all my other stuff going down. But this time with Umbral, it seemed to just work.

So I don't know about the Fart nine infrastructure anymore, but people can let us know if that's now working. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely something if if you are running it, like, ping me or drop a note or something, I would love to know if it's stable and useful now. I haven't kept a close eye on how the maintenance looks for that. Mhmm.

Like, who's actually maintaining it, but it's definitely something I need to look at to see if there's some improvements that that I can help make at the same time because it would be nice to have those those one click node things. I pinged you a screenshot of it.

It's just running an error node an error node on the on the list of apps on Umbrace.

But I can I can log in and send you the developers' names? It does have some info on them. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll dig into it. I'll dig into it. Should be easy to pull from from their repo as well because it should have all of that. But, yeah, definitely something that that we can we can work to improve. Maybe I can work to improve,

in in in my spare time. For All your spare time. Somehow we managed to turn this into an AI podcast, which I'm not mad at. So as the anti a guy anti AI guy, that's all. Yeah. That's a mouthful. Yeah. Like, six months ago. I think it's funny. But Well, we all were. I mean, Q was as well. Uh-huh. I was skeptical.

I mean, I remember actually being like, oh, this is useless for anything other than, like, me writing emails because, like, I'm so fucking dyslexic. I can't write properly. So just like making things make sense when I write them down. And

very quickly, it's like, we've all become like AI Maxis. We're all using it all the time in different ways. Mine's more on the creative side. Yours is like pen you know, similar and also, you know, building the websites and all this stuff. And it's like, it's hard to ignore, especially when it's so crucial

in the industry that we're in. Like, you can't have Bitcoin and Monero and cryptocurrency stuff without leaning into it. Because if if you're not leaning into it and you're not using it, you are putting people at risk, either yourself or the the people that your

your clients are. Like, you can't you can't not use it. Yeah. No. Absolutely. And I I think, like, talked about too, it's just people like the three of us are just so strapped for time. Like, we Yeah. We love

what we do. Like, we love our families, but we want to be able to do more. And that's, I think, the most exciting part about it is it allows us to do more than we would have done otherwise. So it it is exciting times. Scary as well, but exciting times.

Yeah. Definitely. Is there any other updates or any bits before we jump into the XMR chats and bits and pieces? I don't think so. I never actually got all of the the XMR chat stuff. Let me grab them now because I think Jordan sent screenshots.

I can do this. Yeah. I've got the screenshot. So Deidales Monero, Maybe you fellas can talk some sense into me. I'm finding it hard to justify holding Bitcoin in any capacity over Monero.

Price action in most time spans is pretty similar, but Monero seems way safer and easier to use and hold in this regulatory regulatory environment. I mean, you've almost created our show. This was, in January.

This was written, so I'm sorry it's taken this long. So sorry. I'm really sorry. But, yeah, you're right. You're more right now than you were when you wrote it. I find it difficult as well. The only thing is the historical price action. If you're looking at long time frames, you can still argue that Bitcoin would be logically

a better hold, and I don't know if that continues to hold. I don't know if that trend continues. I don't know. But speaking personally where a couple of years ago, my holdings of Monero, I'd be like, oh, maybe 1% if that. And now I would be like, I mean, I would be comfortable with at least 50%.

So just speaking from personal use, I think you're right. And, Seth, I think maybe you're sort of the reverse of that where you were much more Monero only, and then you dipped your toes in with Bitcoin as well. And so maybe you you're back to front on that.

Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much exactly as you mentioned. I was was more hardcore, which is funny because, like like, the first time I ever did a presentation was at Guns and Bitcoin twenty twenty.

And my whole thesis was I think most people are gonna land on save money in Bitcoin Mhmm. Use Monero for spending. Even though I wasn't there yet, I was more hardcore than that. I was basically Monero only at that point.

And yet, I ended up coalescing back to my back to my thesis and Mhmm. And ended up on that as well. So, again, we'll we'll see. I think that's,

like, that's the interesting thing is there's nothing stopping Monero from being a really good store of value and Yeah. Honestly, not a lot holding up Bitcoin in terms of a store of value these days. It's hard to say exactly what would make that certain, but

Well, done a better way say flexible in. I mean, Monero has been doing really well recently, the last six months, last year. Again, probably the wrong way around for you when you were more Monero, only Bitcoin was outperforming it. And then recently, it's the other way around.

So who knows? Who knows what what the future's gonna hold? I remember early days, someone when I did we didn't really know each other that well. We'd maybe spoken once or twice, but there was some argument about Monero and how shit it was, and no one should use it. And someone had written, oh, yeah. Seth for poverty.

Because you've chosen to be all in on Monero, Seth for poverty, because he's choosing to have the one that won't appreciate. I have to say that was quite funny, but, they were wrong. I mean, it's Ah. It's been the other way around recently.

Recently. Yeah. Recently. Yes. Since I got into Monero, I would be a lot better off if I had just bought Bitcoin, just to be completely honest. But, yes, recently and pretty consistently over the past year or two, Monero has been a very good performer.

Yeah. Anyway, that's not what we're about here. It's about freedom. And so if you care about freedom, yeah, I I I agree with you. Doctors of Argo, anyone listening who didn't support the Samurai boys can get fucked.

Yeah. Agree with you, mate. Most important development for Bitcoin since its inception, while you eat your own cum talking about spam, save the children, be a slave, same fucking shit every time, privacy first.

What a what a lovely and explicit message from doctor Zavargo. But, yeah, I agree. A lot of wasted time from people talking about all sorts of stupid shit, like the bit one ten stuff, and the focus as always should be freedom and privacy and hashtag free samurai.

Doctor Zavargo again. Seth, your voice sounds like a virgin cunt choking a choir boy. Happy New Year, bitches. Bitches. Again, colorful. Any thoughts on that abuse? He really has a way with words, like a a poet, truly.

It's impressive. It's impressive. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for sending that through. That was again on oh, no. That was actually in July. That no. It can't have been. I get confused by your horrible American no. It was it was the January 7.

You know, like, you you do it the wrong way around? Like, you have the you do month, day, year, don't you?

Yeah. We do month, year Which is the right way. Is so retarded. Like The way god intended. Well, it can't be because, like, day is the smallest unit. Yeah. You go from from medium to low to high, from middle to shortest to longest. No. It makes sense to me. I don't know. It's horrible. I don't know. Anyway, that was in January,

so we're we're working through them slowly. Ex patriotic said Holler and sent some Pico's as you call them. Field is required. No message. Eight Mythrandeer. Shitcoiner incoming, xmrchat.com unlocks paying money to podcasters with a message attached while avoiding custodial lightnings and running l n nodes.

Is a bit 47 fork of XMR chat possible, question mark? I'm not the man to ask about that, but you can, do bit 40 7 payments on the new website that QNS Clanker has made. So maybe that sidesteps it.

Expatriotic. Sorry. I'm late trying to back up system to migrate from Mangaro to Fedora. Question. Why is Max an autistic bell end?

Baby, I was born with it. I I don't know what to say there. I think I'm I think it's it's coming back to me that on our last Minor Monthly or, like, one of our last ones, we talked about how nobody was sending the mean messages anymore. Yeah. We did. Yeah. That's true. Pretty sure we kind of invited this back into our, our lives.

But We have. It keeps us grounded. I like it. The rest of the day, I'll be like, why am I an autistic beland? So thanks. Vietnamese. Cake wallet question. Would it be possible to enhance bird pay so that it also works with new x plus TikTok competitor upscrolled?

I think we we tried to cover this one before, and I never actually looked into upscrolled. But Okay. I need to at some point. Ugh. It sounds gay. I don't know. I've I've never heard of it. I mean, a new social platform, I just don't have a lot of faith in anyways. No. No. X m r enthusiast sent $12.75.

Bill and keanu.org is tutor the honeypot now, FML. Don't know what he means by that. Is tutor the honeypot to tutor like the the email service? Like, Tutanota? No. I guess so. I guess they renamed. I forgot. But interesting. I don't know. I I don't know. I'm sorry, XMR enthusiast. I'm not sure.

Mister Nielsen, thank you folks for your great work and reading of Keanu's letters. Love you all. Thank you. Yeah. And if anyone has missed those, go back and listen. We've had some listeners reading through them. John's done one. I've done a couple.

It was great writing and sad to listen through. But if you listen to them and you boost them, a 100% pass through of every single sat goes to support them, and well worth having a listen.

WebWipe, no longer important because that's so long ago. Sorry. WebWipe.

We've got a lot here. Do you wanna go through all of these? Mean, maybe save one for next time, but I don't I think maybe we should save some for next time. Okay. Because we've got a lot. We've got, like, a a a year's worth. So I've done the first two screenshots,

and there's one, two, three, four, five more. So I think because some of these have been read on the other shows anyway because they're specific to the other shows. I think we'll do the rest for the next Monero monthly ish. Maybe it's gonna be a bit sooner than than this last lag.

Let's do that. I do wanna say thank you to everyone who's been sending in boosts and XMR chats.

I want that was a chair, by the way. I didn't just fart before everyone jumps on me. Yeah. I just wanna say thank you to everyone, anyone who has just listened to the Freedom Tech Friday show to to get in contact and let us know any ways we can improve the website and help more ungovernables join us. And

thank you to you, Seth, for giving me the rundown on all this stuff, and don't be afraid to have a play with Monero. And if you're having problems or you're worried about something and you don't wanna reach out to the smart people because you think you're gonna look dumb,

I'm your man. Just reach out, and I'll I'll help you in any way I can. Love it. It was good to be getting able to, rip another one of these. It's been way too long. Need to need to try to do these more frequently. But I'll also say, like,

Monero kinda needs to do some more stuff. I have a monthly monthly podcast here. Like, I feel like we had a good amount when we had six months to catch up on. But it's hard hard to put together a month of, like, interesting critical news,

every time. So we'll definitely keep an eye on how we how we handle this moving forward, but absolute blast getting to chat through all this again. Yeah. Thanks for for driving this, Max, and putting up with my my procrastinations.

No. No. It's great. Alright, mate. Thanks again. Thank you to all the ungovernables, and we'll catch you on the next Monero monthly ish.

If you have any questions, please reach out and ask, probably Seth, but you can try and ask me as well. And we'll catch you on the next episode. Before you go, I wanna say thank you for all the support from all the Ungovernable Misfits and the Ungovernable Misfits crew.

Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernable Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement.

You can check them out at foundation.xyzed. You can use my code, Ungovernable, for a discount. Either way, give it a go. It's just Ungovernable. Check that out. And also a big thank you to Cake Wallet.

If you haven't already tried Cake Wallet, give it a go. You can use this on Mac, Linux, Windows, iPhone, and Android. It's got some great Bitcoin features, great Monero features. You can link this to your own node on both. It's got swap services, payment services, all sorts of things in there that help people who actually

use Bitcoin and Monero. And if you have any questions while using it, you can just send in to our own little tech support here, and me and Seth will go through it in the next episode. Thanks for listening, and stay ungovernable.