No Price, Just Privacy | MONERO MONTHLY 13: Riccardo Spagni

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

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.

How good is that? Goodness gracious. That was, that was worth the 589 hours you spent on that one, Max. That turned out so well. Just shy of 589, but nearly there. Was everyone else's glitching? I thought my Internet died.

How so? I was just, like, glitching the whole time on my side. I don't know why. No. It was smooth as butter on mine. Same. Oh, okay. Perfect. Well, anyone who is joining us now wasn't with us for Freedom Tech Friday, welcome to Monero monthly.

I think this is episode 13, it must be. It is our first live show. We were joined again by Ricardo, which is awesome to have you on. It was

probably my favorite Freedom Tech Friday we've just recorded. We had, like, 12 questions lined out. We asked three. You covered all 12. They're the easiest guests we've ever had. So thank you for that. I I appreciate that. You know, I mean, I I there's so much to talk about.

We probably could have gone on, like, another hour, and so I kept having to, like, curb my curb myself.

No. It was awesome. And, obviously, now, Monero monthly, we're gonna be going more specifically into the Monero stuff, but never a better time to cover this kind of thing. As I mentioned before in Friday, I'm newer to really using Monero.

First started in 2017, then dropped off, and it was really not until the samurai arrests that I started more heavily picking Seth's brain and starting using this. And it's become basically what I use all the time for payments now, which if you'd have asked me a few years ago, that that never would have been the case.

So I think I'm not alone in that. We're starting to see more and more people join this show asking questions. A lot of the time, it's still in DMs because they wanna still be the

Bitcoin Maxis and and not be outed and all that kind of stuff, but there's definitely a shift. So, yeah, awesome to have you on, and I think what we're planning to do with this show is Seth's got some, questions that are too long for my dyslexic brain to read. And then,

after those, we'll go into some of the listener questions. Anyone who asked questions live is gonna get preferential treatment, and then we've got lots that are pre submitted as well. Did we all we also did a giveaway for a free samurai hat, and I think we were gonna choose live, won't we, our favorite question?

So we'll let you choose your favorite question, Ricardo, and someone can get a free samurai hat. So that's the that's the lineup. Let's do it. Let's let's jump right in. So I I figured for this one, I thought a a cool subject would be for us to kind of turn back the clock and look back at the the history, the start of Monero.

So we've covered that on the show. I kinda walked through these same four Reddit posts that were so useful to me when I got into Monero to figure out, like, what happened in the early days, because there's a lot of weird, convoluted stuff that went down just like with any project, but I think Monero has had some some uniquely

odd things happen over the course of the first few years. So we've gone over a lot of the history already on the show, but I would really just kinda love to pick your brain and get some insight from someone who is actually there.

And the first question that jumped out at me, just you were one of the early people actually looking at the code, trying to figure out, like, is this something interesting? What is the CryptoNote protocol? Trying to really see, like, what what's going on here.

And you you had mentioned in a Reddit post that it had blatant and obvious obfuscations, no comments. There was a lot of weirdness with how the code was actually written. What was your first impression when you dove into the byte coin and then the the Monero code base to get a a sense of, like, is this a useful legit project or not?

Yeah. I mean so so, like, right at the beginning, it was very like, firstly, I I wanna just state outright that I am not a very good c plus plus developer. I hate c plus plus for, you know, most things.

So I was already like, oh god. I gotta, like, read read through c plus plus. And and and this is naturally predating, like, AI tools that could have maybe helped. And, you know, when you're looking at a code base for the first time,

the way that I tend to approach it is like I mostly go, oh, here's a thing I want to change. Even if it's just text, know, even if it's just like the phrasing of something is weird. And then I grip the code base and I find where it is and I make the change and I learn through doing.

And I was at that point a lot more familiar with Bitcoin's code base so I was like I well, firstly, I was expecting a a Bitcoin fork. And then I very quickly realized that it was nothing like Bitcoin. Like, that was a a a bit of a surprise.

And and it had no it had no comments. Like, that was super weird. You know? Like, I'm looking through the code and I'm expecting comments. And the comments had literally been stripped out because I can't imagine anyone is able to develop a code base of that size with no comments. Like that makes no sense to me.

So there was that sort of got my Spidey sense tingling a little bit because strip out the comments on open source? And, you know, you go through the git history. You're like, well, obviously, the comments must be in the git history. No. They're they don't exist. And the git history was,

you know, it was like three commits or whatever. It was like initial commit, first commit, whatever. That was it. And then, like, a a handful of things passed that, and that was the entirety of Bitcoin's code.

And and this is before Monero existed. This was, you know, like, we this is when they were trying to create the impression that Bitcoin had been around many years. We were just Mhmm. And and so you're looking through this code and you're reading the CryptoNote white paper and you're trying to, like

you know, you read stuff in the in the white paper and then you try and find it in the code base. And that doesn't exist because not everything in the white paper was implemented, especially around, like, some of the the programmable bits.

And so it was a little bit confusing. And then the counterpoint was true too. The white paper has if memory I mean I haven't looked at it in ages but if memory serves, the white paper basically says on proof of work mining that egalitarian proof of work is very important.

And and that's it. It just doesn't it doesn't go into how they're gonna do that, you know, like like how it should work. They're just like, oh, yeah. You know, proof of work should be egalitarian. We'll give you one vote. We can all agree on that. Hey. Wink, quick, nudge, nudge, shake hands. You know?

And then and then it's like like you would expect, detail on and this is how we do it. But but they did have a whole CPU bound, a reasonable attempt at the time, a CPU bound mining algorithm. So you know again just no comments. And it was very confusing. So one of the first things I did

because like I'm not a cryptographer, yeah I've got familiarity with it but I'm not a cryptographer. So one of the first things I did was I decided I needed to understand the cryptography and maybe we as a community needed to understand the cryptography.

And so I started a hunt for somebody to help me with that. And during all of this, know, Thankful for Today launches Bitmuneiro so you're like we're we're very weirded out by byte coins 80% that's already mined which ostensibly has happened over many years. And on the dark web, all of this is sort of happening simultaneously.

So, you know, it's it's not this is not a linear recollection. But I go out and I'm like, need to find a mathematician you know, or cryptographer. So I go into Reddit and I think it was there's a there's a jobs there's like three subreddits for finding work.

And, you know, you can post, like, jobs there but you can also post your own profile if you're for hire. So I go and I search the the subreddit for cryptography, cryptographer, know those sort of things.

And there is like nothing. There is like one post from some dude that is like three months old and he is like you know, he's a post grad. I think he's doing his doctorate at the time, might have been his master's at some university in The US and you know he's willing to do anything. He's willing to lecture whatever whatever.

And so I reach out and I'm like, hey. I have a a white paper and I need I I want it annotated. And it's like cryptography. And he's like, look. I'm I'm not the best cryptographer. That's not what I what my degree focused on. That's not what I specialize in. But I do have a good friend at university who is more of a cryptographer.

So you know because as I said it's a paid gig. And so he was like would you be averse to both of us doing it and then we both get paid? And so I'm like yeah that's fine and so we negotiate the rate and I can't I wanna say it was like $500 or something like that for both of them to annotate the CryptoNote white paper.

So those two those two that annotated the CryptoNote white paper, that was Saray and Sarang, the very first two members of the the Monero research lab. And I I lucked into finding them on Reddit.

And I'm I'm pretty sure I can even go find a conversation in my Reddit chat my message history.

Yeah, it so and then of course then it became like a thing. They had to understand. They didn't know anything about Bitcoin either. So they had to understand all this stuff and it was so fascinating and I think useful to all of us to have them come in from a pure cryptography and math perspective with no not burdened by bitcoin

and and the bitcoin, you know, the history that had been till then, like six years of bitcoin history, five years, I guess, but come in with fresh eyes and and write this whole annotate, like, set of annotations on the white paper.

Yeah. Absolutely crazy. I I actually had no idea that was how both of them got started. Like, obviously, I I've known that they they were a part of MRL for a long time. I've gotten to know Aaron specifically pretty well, but I had no clue that that was how it happened. Like, a a Reddit job

posting, you track down two cryptography students and favored them into annotating. Pretty much. The white paper. And and it was it was, like, virtually like that. Then I'll then I'll tell you I'll tell you another anecdote. So I had to go to Utah because my business partner at the time was in Utah. And this was this would have been like,

man, I can actually look at my photos and tell you exactly what it was. So I went to Utah in November 2014. And so I I say to to Brandon and Aaron, I'm like, hey, guys. I'm gonna come through I've gotta come through to to to Utah.

I I would love to fly you guys up for the weekend and then we can hang out and talk Monero. And and so, you know, they're like, okay. Cool. No problem. This is, like, such a great idea.

And and probably I'm trying to think when it happened. It must have been like

two weeks before then. I get this kid emailing me and saying like, you know, he wants to get involved in Monero research. And

I think I have a I have a feeling that Greg had just published the confidential transactions paper, if memory serves. But in any event, I say to him, this this the kid's Shane. Okay. This is Shane that that did the or the ring CT paper.

He says to me like he wants to like he wants to get involved and I'm like I'm coming to Utah because he's also in The States. I'm like I'm coming to Utah and I'm flying like the two MRL guys well, you know, these two cryptographers up for the weekend. Do you want to come too? And he's like, okay. So now I fly like the three of them

up to Utah and it's myself, my partner at the time and you know we're like hanging out with my business partner there and we're going he's taking us to all the cool spots in Utah which very hard to find alcohol there as I learned. Very hard to find caffeine too.

That aside, he took us to really cool places. We went and did a bunch of walks in the canyons. We went to Zion National Park which was incredible. And we're hanging out talking crypto and whatever. And so then

we rented a car. So then the one day, I think it was like on the they all arrived on the Friday and left on the Sunday or the Monday. So on the Saturday we decided that we're going to go out to go get lunch and my business partner is like no he's got some stuff that he needs to do with his kids. He's like take my Audi. It's an Audi TT.

I'm like okay but there's like five of us and an Audi TT is not a big car. So here's, like, myself and Brandon in the front and then, like, my partner and and Shane and Aaron at the back.

And I don't know how we managed to all pile into the the TT, but we managed to make it work. Everyone basically sitting on top of each other. And we're driving on the highway to get lunch, and the car runs out of gas.

So he, pulled over to the side because I did not check. I didn't I didn't bother looking at the at the the gas gauge. I don't know. I just assumed it had gas in it. And so now the five of us are we abandoned the car on the side of the road to walk down the off ramp to go find a gas station

and fill up a thing with gas so we can walk all the way back and fill the car up and

get going again. And it was the most it was the best bonding experience between us, know what I mean? Like running out of gas on the highway and having to having to go walk to fill it up was was awesome. And that was the start of the MRL.

So half of the the Boneiro team for the first two years piled into one Audi TT and then stranded on the side of the road. Imagine imagine what could have happened. You know, we would never have had RingCT or, like, a whole bunch of things if, like, we had died on the side of the road running out of gas.

Yep. Yep. It could have it could have turned south quickly all in the the the middle of Utah. Could've gone down. Man, those are awesome. I I had not heard either of those at all. I had no idea about that origin story.

I love hearing that kind of, like I don't know. Those anecdotes that people don't understand about the the background of Monero. I'm just like, that's real people actually making this stuff.

One of my other questions that I I'm curious if you have any other kind of, like, highlights, but since you were involved so early, you got the chance to really engage with Monero OGs, some famously, some infamously,

like thankful for today, smooth, taco time, e I z h. I know there were a few others that were kind of critical in the very early days, especially of the Bit Monero and then Monero forks and and and launches.

Any memories or highlights that jump out at you from those early days working with those people and just kind of going through that

that bit bitcoin Bitmuneiro Monero progression, figuring out Taco thankful for today and what to do with him and just I know there was a lot of drama that happened and, like, curious if anything jumps out at you. Yeah.

I mean so so thankful for today, like, my interactions with him were mostly on Bitcoin talk, and he was he was fine at the beginning. Know? I like, I never made the connect no one made the connection that he was, like, you know, just a a a Bitcoin, like, sock puppet account.

And then we we had this discussion where he's like, Monero needs to be merged mined with Bitcoin. And we're like, no. That's a terrible idea. Like, why would we do that? Know, it's it's it's idiotic. Like, Bitcoin's like 80% pre mined. No one wants Bitcoin and we certainly don't want Bitcoin miners getting Bitmuneiro.

Like, Bitmuneiro is is is like it's it's like a re relaunch of Bitcoin. Like this is great. Let's just leave it as is. And he's like, no. No. No. It's really important. And and so now we're we're having this back and forward. And so he he says, what if we used the minor version

as in m I n o r version number on blocks as a voting mechanism. And so miners can choose to set the the version the block version to indicate whether they support this or not. And then we'll tally up the votes

after after a few days or a week or whatever it is, and that will then tell us what miners want to do. Do they want it to merged mined or not? So we're like, okay. Cool. This is this is that's that's totally fair. We love that idea.

So he goes and he he, you know, puts a new version out and he sets the default to yes yes word to merge mining. We're like, bro, are you are you for real? Like, you can't do that. That's ridiculous. Like, we don't know if miners even read the the forums or IRC or whatever. Like, you can't do that.

And so we have this whole argument with him and then he relents and the default was changed to abstain so that was a third value that was added. I think I can't remember the numbers, but it was overwhelmingly against merge mining.

And if it was today, they probably would have gone and spun up a ton of AWS instances to try and like wait A thousand new miners joined the network. Exactly. Yep. But we just we just had too much mining power collectively then they could master.

And and so he, like when the results were in, I think it was like over a weekend or whatever and it was like a Monday. The results were in, it was clearly, everyone was against it. Nobody is voicing a positive opinion on RSE.

We already realized that Bitcoin talk was, like, pretty stock puppeted so we, you know, we a lot of conversation was happening there.

And he's like he was like, well, you know, kinda screw you guys. Like, I don't I don't really care what the vote says. I think we should do this anyway so I'm gonna do it. And that was the tipping point. That was the point where, like, a bunch of us basically, like,

started a secret little group chat in a separate channel. I think it was called, like, Bitmuneiro dash fork or something. And we were like, hey. So I I think we need a fork code base and, like, you know, not support whatever change he makes.

And so, like one of the people that really spearheaded that and drove it from a human perspective was David Latapi who subsequently committed suicide. And David was, he was not a cryptographer, he was not a developer, he wasn't even really an IT person. He was very big into post humanism and biohacking and that sort of thing.

But he's this lovely French guy and he was the one that really corralled us and was like we need to do this. And you know when myself and Taco Time and Smooth and whoever, we were quite reluctant to do anything like that.

But David pushed us and we're like, okay, I guess we should do it. And David went and registered monero.cc which was the the first Monero website or domain. And and we all collectively sort of decided that we should fork it as Monero instead of BitMonero.

And so we did the fork and told thankful for today that we're going to maintain this fork without any merge binding changes. And he was like, he was just angry with us. He was not a happy camper. But you know, it was the right move.

And I will tell you one other anecdote about that. So when you fork something on GitHub, it doesn't show up in in search. So for for many months, if you searched for Monero, you found BitMonero.

And I had to like I had to get a hold of GitHub support which is like, you know it's GitHub. This is prior to the Microsoft acquisition but still like getting a hold of GitHub support is nearly impossible and begged them to to disconnect it so that it lived on a as a project on its own instead of a fork.

And I had to, like, buddy them into it, and they eventually did. And and so that's why Monero does not show as a fork of Bit Monero, which is what it did show as initially. Okay. I had no idea how that had happened because it since it is a code fork, it gets a little funky there. So fascinating you were able to to pull that off. Yeah.

You had hit on you had on mining there. I know that that that goal had been merge mining, but there was another weird part of mining in the the early days of Monero that I think you you were involved in fixing, which was this, like, discovery essentially that it seemed like the original authors had intentionally crippled

the mining side of Monero. Once that was discovered, you all were able to optimize it and make it much better. But, like, what was the state of mining when you first got involved in the project?

And what were some of the the kind of the key changes or, like, discoveries that y'all made as a part of that? Yeah. So so I was one of the first miners. I I think my the earliest block on mine must have been, like, you know, block 10 or so. It was, like, really I was there at launch.

And and that's all I really wanted to do, by the way. I just wanted to mine it. I didn't really care about anything else. I was I was fascinated by it from a coding perspective I mean, from a code perspective and the fact that it did things differently to Bitcoin. But I was I was you know, 2014 was a time when Feathercoin and Vertcoin

and all of these things were launching and if you mined one of these things early on and you waited like three months and sold, you made a bunch of money. So I was like cool I'm just going to mine and then sell. And I had like a bunch of I mean I had GPU mined Bitcoin before Art4's or with Art4's client before

ASICs came around. And I spent money on Butterfly Labs ASICs which is a whole another waste of time and effort to talk about. But I had all these GPUs that at that point I think I was mining Feathercoin with them. I had mined Litecoin as well.

And so I just wanted to direct like the GPUs of mining them but like it was CPU only. So I fired up like an AWS whatever the big c dot eight or whatever whatever the big CPU cluster or CPU servers of VM.

And I was like I'm gonna mine on this thing. Know, it's gonna cost me like a thousand dollars for the month but I'm gonna mine on this thing. And and that was all I wanted to do. And so I'm mining and you know you you sort of you see your your speed and you can see like the you can calculate the network

hash rate and so and I think I was like at the beginning I was like 2% of the the hash rate. I was like, oh, 2% of the hash rate with one AWS c dot a v m. I was very proud of that. You know? And then,

who's who was also one of the original Monero core team members, after about a week says to me, there's a faster miner. And I'm I'm like, how do we get it? And he's like, I don't know. I don't know. But there's someone's created a faster miner. I'm like, well well, we need to get it. Like, can we can we pay someone for it?

And and he's like, no. But, like, you know, we we can let's let's get in a group chat. So we get in a in a, like, a channel on on RRC and it's like myself and Offee and Noodledoodle and TacoTime. And Noodledoodle was the one that discovered like this big increase.

And I'm expecting because I'd been in that world, in the mining world for a while and you know like when I was mining with Artfor's GPU miner, everyone was trying to ecard gains but the gains were normally like I think the biggest gain I ever got was like a new miner that was like 15% faster.

And this that noodle noodles miner was like a 150% faster. Wow. Or something absurd like that. And I was like, how is it an order of magnitude faster? That makes no sense. And Taco Times like you know we're like badgering Moodle Doodle because he just wants to give us the binary. He doesn't want to tell us how.

And so eventually he like relents and he tells us like no there's an inner loop that's computed on every single pass but the value never changes so you only need to compute that once outside the main loop.

Otherwise it's like a gigantic waste to recompute that every single time the loop runs. And I was like, I mean that like there's a level of sophistication in this code base. I can't imagine that change being, I mean that code being accidental.

Like the CryptoKnight mining algorithm

was created from scratch and the person who created it, who wrote that implementation surely that they knew that that value doesn't change if every time you run the loop. And there were a couple of people that discovered this simultaneously because we saw the within

a space of like forty eight hours the hash rate just went through the roof. And so you know and of course there's an article that I forget the guy's name that he wrote about finding similar things.

That and other things you know and improving the miner. But it just became a race then because then we realized that they had purposely hampered mining in order to enhance their ability to mine, in order to amplify their hash rate.

And then it became a race to dig into the mining code and really find every single tiny thing that you can eke out of it. And this happened in, I mean we're talking about maybe the first ten days of Monero's existence where all of this is happening. Where we're all just like

you know, this happened so quickly. So there was if anyone benefited from it more than anyone else, it would have been the the crypto nerd scammers because they had they had access to that, you know, to to the more powerful mining code from launch. And and the rest of us the rest of us scaled linearly. Know, I started off with one

AWS c eight VM and I think I had 10 within a few days. I was like, I don't care about how much it's gonna cost me. I wanna mine as much as possible. So, you know, it was for all that they had maximized their potential, I think they underestimated the veracity of of that early mining community.

And so they didn't actually get that much out of it. You know? They they maybe got a at the time, maybe they managed to get a few 100,000 Monero in in that early mining period, which they definitely dumped in order to try and keep the price down the minute it hit the first exchange, which was exchange.

To.

Yeah. That's one of the beautiful things about it not just being a pump and dump is there's there's actually people who were involved with it who wanted to to fix it and find ways to make it better.

And also just one of the the huge benefits of proof of work specifically for for launching a new network like that is it inevitably, those funds are going to be sold back very quickly for people to recoup their their spend on hardware, their spend on AWS rentals, whatever it is. So that

works works out well for Monero at that point. I do have, like I mean, I have, like, a million questions we we could go through.

I'll I'll I'll end with one last one, and then I'll let Max jump into some listener questions that we have for you because I wanna make sure we have time for that. But I think my my last kind of general question for you is, like, you've been in Monero from almost day one until now.

Like, how how do you feel about how Monero has evolved over the years? What are you really excited about moving forward? Just kind of like a maybe a state of the union style. Like, how are you feeling about Monero after having been along for the ride the whole time? I think you have a very a very unique perspective.

I you know, when like, at the beginning when especially just after the fork,

I I remember having conversations with with Takatime and Smooth in particular. And and I I will say, of all the people that were involved in Monero early on, Smooth has had the absolute best opsic.

He is Satoshi level opsec. For everything that he has sent me via email, for being on my own private IRC server where I could see his IP address and everything, I have absolutely no idea who he is, where he lives, what time zone he's in. Nothing.

Absolutely nothing. He has been so principled with that. I'm not saying he's Satoshi, but man, that level of control and principle over your opsec in 2014 is impressive to see. But, you know, I remember having conversations with with them

shortly after the fork. And I I had this, like, little realization where I was like, this could actually be something. You know, this could this could be up there with Tor and, you know, and I was close to like the ITP guys at the time as well. I was like, this could be a real tool for change, for for freedom,

for improving the lives of people.

You know? And and that because, like, Bitcoin Bitcoin at the at the time was like, yeah. Bitcoin will add privacy, but when? This could this could help people now. And I think Monero has delivered on that, you know, in in such a big way. It has resisted insane, insane attacks and I don't just mean technically sophisticated

attacks or well resourced attacks from state level attackers but it has resisted attacks that are so conniving and, you know, require very careful thoughts to deploy you know and I

have seen several of them but at least one instance that comes to mind of a Monero contributor that started off with positive contributions and then very quickly became incredibly divisive.

Tried to sow all sorts of discord amongst contributors, tried to call every contributor into question, made things so challenging Like, he's he's literally the only contributor that as an as a group we have just all ejected.

And now he moderates the Zcash Reddit. So, you know, there's that. I ran into him this week. I forgot he existed, quite honestly. And I was like, oh, you're like you lead the Zcash subreddit and can ban anyone. Okay. Exactly. Yeah. We you know, I think it's but but to to start off as

a positive contributor where we are like welcome new contributor give us a virtual hug on ROC and to cement yourself and then go that bad. Like And for Monero to survive that I think was especially because it was it was you know pretty relatively early on in Monero's growth.

I think I think he got involved in like 2016. And and, yeah, I mean, like, to see that, to see Monero survive that, to see Monero survive all sorts of other sophisticated attacks really it it is very, impactful to me to see that and to know that the work that we did on Monero has

paid out in large sums in terms of the people it has helped. And you know I've had people come up to me at conferences and tell me their stories about Monero. I had a lady who was in a domestic abuse situation and she tried to store some money in bitcoin and

her partner discovered it. And she realized she needed to get more even more sophisticated than that. And that's not to say that she couldn't have gotten more sophisticated with Bitcoin. You know, I don't like, I don't think he had magical insights into, chain analysis stuff. But

the process of going, I need to be more private, even more private with this and her finding Monero, her learning about it, her figuring out how to acquire it, how to store it in a more private manner. I think that was incredible to hear because she, know, Manero affected her

life and helped her to get out of a horrendous situation. And that story and some others that people have told me over the years about what Monero has done for them, that sits with me. And it makes me realize like hey we did it. We did the thing. We built a tool that has helped people to regain control

of their privacy and freedom in authoritarian situations and regimes and that's that's what it's supposed to do. Was never Freedom suck. Yeah, it started off as a way to enrich a bunch of Russian cyber criminals and the world co opted it for good.

And that I think is that I think is a unique story in this space. Yeah. It's awesome. Like I say, it's it's proper freedom tech and it just works out the box and

it's incredible hearing those sort of stories and it's been awesome to hear the history as well. Like me and Seth, I think on our first episode we ever did, we went through the history of Monero, but it missed some of those excellent stories you just told. So they're real clickable ones.

We are running up to time, so I did wanna just answer or go through the questions for you to answer from our listeners. If anyone wants to ask any questions live, they'll jump to the head of the queue. But I'll kick things off with BTC wrestle.

He messaged on Nosta and said, are Monero delisting's actually positive? Despite demand, they push more to p to p economy, forcing users to transact via via peers and DEXs. Could this be a net benefit if it encourages real world decentralized use at scale?

Yeah. I mean, I I am of the opinion look. At the beginning when the delisting started started to happen, I was very like I was not happy that that was happening. You know? I mean, I was like, this is gonna reduce access for people and so On consideration and being, you know, like a bit down the line now,

I think it's done two things. The first is it has absolutely pushed people towards decentralized services and tools. It's also pushed people towards you know, mean like honestly getting onboarded with Monero is not difficult. You can

buy some Bitcoin or Tether or whatever and you could use a KYC free swap service to get into Monero. So it's not like it's is even that challenging to do in a centralized way. So kind of haven't stopped much you know.

And so I also think that has been quite good to see the futility of those attempts. And I am grateful that the lessons that the community has taken has not been well we should just give up but the lessons they have taken from that are we need to take this and be stronger, you know.

And I think that that is that's exactly that's what I hoped it would achieve when I started thinking about positive benefits, potential benefits to delistings. And that's where we are at now. Know what I mean? Like more focus, more attention on decentralized systems, atomic swaps, that sort of thing.

Like more efforts and work on getting Monero on DEXs and that is great. That's perfect.

Yeah. Absolutely agree. Like, seeing this as someone who is much more heavy on the Bitcoin side until sort of the last year, eighteen months, the amount of pushback from the Monero community and the sort of fighting spirit that I see out there is really, really cool to see. Like, it's it makes me more interested in using the tech. It's

like a a not giving up, not being discouraged, and it was also a signal to me. It's like, okay. If these delistings are gonna happen, it's obviously for a reason, and that's probably because this stuff works. And that is something that really has pushed me further down into use, and

I think probably a lot of other people as well. So great question. BTC Russell, thanks for that one. A question from Ava on Noster. Monero survived longer than almost any privacy tech in a hostile regulatory environment.

What's the single design decision or cultural norm that's made that possible? It's kind of on the same lines, but

Yeah. I mean, I think I think that there's there's actually a few things that really have played into Monero surviving or having a culture of survival. The first is we made a decision really early on and it

was something that I personally pushed for really hard. I was very, very sick and tired at the beginning of 2014 already of the Bitcoin subreddit being almost entirely price focused. And so when I when I with the with the Monero subreddit, when we were putting together the list of rules, and I think it was myself, TackleTime,

Rolant, which is DNA Lior backwards and a few others like when we were busy figuring out these list of rules, oh, and DeBrain as well. Then I was like guys we need to say no price talk. Like that's just there's got to be a rule. And the net effect of that has been a bigger focus on the technology

and on you know, like all these other aspects. And there is no price talk on RSE. There's no price talk on on Reddit. It carries through in so many aspects of Minero's culture and it creates a, you know like no one cares if the price goes up or down because it's just not an aspect. It's not a thing that gets spoken about.

There are venues for that if you want to go talk about it but it's not in the main venues that people are exposed to. So that already means that the the negative, oh my god, I lost so much money, you know, all of those posts that you often see which push people away, those aren't there. So that that alone makes a massive change.

You know people can talk about delistings but they can't talk about the price impact of delistings because price talk is discouraged or is bad. So you know all of this just means that people have to focus on a different part a of it than like, oh, I want to get rich, price go up.

So that's a big component. And then the other thing is, you know, I had a very flippant attitude towards a lot of people and a lot of things as a lead maintainer. And I think that that helped build a culture of we don't owe anyone anything.

Like the only thing that we as contributors owe is the knowledge that what we are doing is working on a piece of software that is responsible for people's money, people's privacy and sometimes people's lives.

And so we need to take great care with the software. But beyond that we don't owe anyone anything. And even within that we don't owe people anything. You know, we don't owe you security for your money. Like it's not our job. Like we do our best but we are unpaid contributors.

And so people would say like oh you know when is this happening and I go soon. And that would just be you know two weeks. Would be like a decent response. And people were to stop asking because like it was they were they were we made, like, joke road maps. Like,

I think it's, still three or four road map like, fake road maps from an era from, like, you know, 2015, 2016. We made memes out of things like road maps because they were you can't have a roadmap like that in open source software because things change, you know. And so all of these all of these different traditions cultural

things, and I'm not responsible for them, you know, I contributed to them along with others that reinforced them that formed sound bites. Things like the don't buy Monero unless you have a use for it sound bite that I used to like every single podcast I went on I was like don't buy Monero, don't buy Monero, don't buy Monero.

And that became a cultural thing on its own. Like all of this has made Monero incredibly, incredibly robust and antifragile. It is the most antifragile cryptocurrency that I am aware of. And I say that with old UK but it is

from a cultural perspective, it is more antifragile than Bitcoin. Yeah. It's the the culture around Monero that I see is similar to the kind of one or 2% of Bitcoiners that, like, me and Q and Seth and people tend to interact with who do care about privacy, who do care about freedom.

But the the other 98 is incredibly fragile, actually. It's like the most fragile community, so it is refreshing to see. This again kind of leads on from what you were just talking about as a question from Gallo XMR.

Can you ask him if he's going to contribute as a dev for Monero in the future?

I mean, I guess the question is, how do you know I'm not contributing right now? That's the wonderful thing about, you know, about having a bunch of contributors who are pseudonymous and anonymous.

Great answer. I think we can leave it there, actually. Question from Victor asks how we can protect against future network attacks, example, Cubic. Have the developers chosen a solution to selfish mining, and is there a timeline for when it might be implemented?

I think, Minh, you went through loads of these different options maybe five episodes ago. Is that right, Seth? Yeah. Yeah. We've covered it a good bit over over the last few months. But, yeah, curious if if there's anything you need to add.

Yeah. I mean, nothing really to add apart from what you guys have covered. You know, I think there's like, firstly, I think a selfish mining attack is unless it unless it is sustained in double digits, it's hardly an attack, You know and is kind of a like Cubic was really a joke.

We knew it at the time but I think we all gave in a little bit to their attempts at creating a culture of fear and uncertainty which happens you know. Like they did a good job of marketing it. You have to give them that much.

I would say the best solution apart from things that will be done technically, the best solution as a community is we need to learn to differentiate between people who are engaging in good faith and people who are not.

There are certainly going to be attacks in the future or things in the future where as a community we will, know the fear will come up in us and there will be people who are less technical who will write things out of fear and say I'm really scared

what's happening and can't the devs do something or whatever. We have to be sympathetic and kind to them but we also need to be able to weed out those that are trying to turn the conversation from that into something disastrous from an arrow.

People that in the face of an attack push for immediate action that is not backed by strong sound technical principles, that is very dangerous and we need to watch for that because as we saw with Cubic, frankly if we just sat back and did nothing,

it would have just died out on its own. That's, you know, I mean we have had a lot of conversation about it and I think we fed the fire And I certainly engaged with a lot of the Cubic people, I wish I hadn't.

I think a better thing would have been for us to unilaterally block them on X and ban Cubic posts on Reddit and ignore it. And then, you know, like when journalists reach out about claims they made just go well that's not the case. Here's why.

But like that's never going happen in a decentralized community. Know, it's a wonderful pipe dream. But I do think we need to learn to just take a step back, calm down to a mild panic, give things a moment to play out. If there is any urgent action that needs to be taken, it will stem from existing

contributors that have been around for years not from some random, you know, person who's been on Reddit for three minutes shouting from the rooftops. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. We are running up to time. I know Hugh and Seth have gotta jump in. Ricardo, I'm sure you've got things to do as well.

This has been awesome. We have two more questions which we can wrap up with. One is from Matthew Kappa. As a regular EU in 2026 with Micah travel rule, KYC, 1,000 unhosted wallet checks, Monero delistings, fully traceable BTC, full dystopian world.

How can ordinary people legally preserve real financial private legally preserve preserve real financial privacy? What simple steps still work today? Yeah. I mean,

I I think I I would love to be able to say that, like, the best solution is regulatory arbitrage. You know? I mean, like, and it is the best solution. Like like, of course, the the simplest solution for individuals and the best way to show the the EU that they're that they're being hostile is to take

the taxes away from them by moving out. But I also recognize equally that for 90% of people, 99% of people that's not possible. And a great lesson for me on this was I have some developers that work for me that are Ukrainian.

And when the war in Ukraine started, a lot of them left and they went to, you know, Poland and and other parts of of of Europe to, like, obviously get out of a war zone. And one of my developers stayed and I was like you need to get out, like what can I do to help?

You need money? What can I do to help you get out of a war zone? And he said to me my wife's parents are refusing to leave and we cannot abandon them. And it just goes to show like even if you are heavily motivated or highly motivated and you have the funds and you have the means and everything,

you still might not be able to. So regulatory arbitrage best case but like for most people where that's not possible, I do think that we are going to see an increase in

under regulated or unregulated markets. So you see this within

Islam for example. Muslims have got an entire separate monetary network and that is, you know, like something that is

so it's called like Hawala and Hawala is like entirely distinct from the regular financial system. Now a Hawala is pretty limited because a lot of it involves cash and so on. What's your relative view Phone credit isn't it something?

No. No. No. That's so that's that's separate. That's a whole that the phone credit thing is that's a whole another system. Yeah. But Hawala is basically a trust based system where, you know, you can have, like, your buddy in one country

gives cash to someone and then, you know, like, your buddy in this country can give you cash. Hawala is actually incredible because it is entirely trust based and it's kind of wild you know.

From a religious perspective you are not going to cheat the system and so therefore the system doesn't get cheated. But anyway, point being that like the fact that regulations exist

does not mean that humans are not going to figure out how to root around them. They are going to figure out how to root around them. Hawala exists to root around restrictions and limitations in parts of the financial system as well as provide a system that is compliant from a religious perspective financially.

Because I mean there are certain banking institutions where Muslims just won't bank with them so then they can still use Hawala to operate. And the same thing is going to happen. Know if the EU continue to create a dystopian future then

people are just going to go underground with their messaging. They're going you know signals signal and WhatsApp and whatever will go off the app store and people will side load and they'll use other apps and you know eventually like EU is going to be shamed into

opening things back up because it's going to like from an external perspective people are going to put pressure on them because it starts to go into, like, human rights violations territory.

Yeah. Definitely. Leave if you can. If you can't use the tools. Final question from Liberty Tools First. Why the Monero pump? We just said we're not talking about price, but here we go. Why the Monero pump?

What are his thoughts? Second, what's the long term goal of Tari? What separates it from projects like Solana or Ethereum? I got no idea. Before you answer that question as well, we need to choose a a favorite question from the ones we've just had

for someone to to win the free samurai hat. So I'll leave that to you at the end, Ricardo, as well. Okay. Cool. So so, look, I don't know why the Monero pump. I have no idea why. You know, I mean, I've I like to think that it's because people are starting to realize that privacy is important, you know.

But who knows, maybe like somebody woke up one day and decided that Monero is a cool name. I will say this, the pump has not been preceded by a bunch of KOLs talking about Monero. And that is it's akin to Bitcoin. You know, when Bitcoin has had run ups in the past, it's not been because a bunch of people speak about Bitcoin,

you know, bunch of KOLs or whatever or or influences are talking about Bitcoin and then Bitcoin Bitcoin's price go up. It's the other way around. Bitcoin's price starts doing numbers and then the KOLs go, oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bitcoin. Yeah. We love Bitcoin. Like as if as if they were always

in on the on the inside track. So I, you know, I I think it's I think this is very much this is very similar. I I've actually only seen one guy who a few, I think it was a couple of months ago, said that he bought $3,000,000 or $3,300,000 of Monero and then he posted the day that he's up like, you know,

whatever his purchase And number was 5.5 or that's kind of like and he is not what I would call like a massive influencer, but that's like that's the closest I have seen to anyone that's like influencer ish talking about Monero in that context.

And so that's kind of cool to see that it is as Seth says, the inverse of Zcash's. And which I also think potentially means more longevity. I am not certainly not saying that Monero's price isn't going to go back down to the magical $140

stablecoin level, but I do think it's probably more sustainable. And in any event, even if it's not sustained, this has brought attention to Monero and I think that's useful.

We lost him just as he was going to have to talk about Salon. There we go. Sorry. It was like your connection has been lost. And I was like no. So on the long term goal of Tari, so Tari exists for a few reasons but I want to focus on three key aspects. The first is Tari exists so that people can stop asking

for Monero to get smart contracts because then you can just go Monero is not going to get smart contracts for a number of reasons. The biggest one of which is it adds a degree of metadata to transactions that we do not want from a traceability perspective.

So you can say if you want privacy focused smart contracts go to Tari. So that's one. Secondly, it exists so that anyone who wants to contribute from a code perspective to a smart contract system and really does not want to contribute to Monero at all can pitch up and work on Tari.

Know like at least then those efforts aren't wasted and we specifically built Tari in Rust so that we are not sucking C plus plus developers away from Monero. Now you know obviously there is an effort to rewrite Monero in Rust but that I think is still some time away from reaching a level of maturity where it can replace

the Monero core software. And it might never. You know what I mean? Like rewrites have a tendency to sometimes not have sticking power. Although I do hope it does because I love Rust as a language.

And the third thing is I think there is a need for a different approach architecturally to smart contracts. And that's what we've been trying to do with Tari, you know, where transactions in the l two are more ephemeral and less like it's stored everything on a blockchain forever where there's still proof of work as the key

security mechanism where that proof of work includes merge mining for Monero which is a positive for Monero's hash rate. And where ultimately a bunch of privacy first decentralized applications will exist.

And my hope is that those privacy focused decentralized applications become beneficial to Monero by providing, you know and there's all sorts of things that we can do like atomic swaps or wrap Monero or whatever.

So, you know, then then you can start to open up Monero in a very decentralized way to, you know, perps and and other applications that aren't possible on Monero without compromising on a centralization from a centralization perspective.

Perfect. Well, thanks for getting those questions. And then you you wanted to know the which which question is the winner. That that question on on what aspects of Monero's culture have led to it being so robust. I love that question.

And that was Eva. Is that right? Eva and Yeah. So Eva and Nostra, if you wanna reach out to me, collect your free samurai hat, you can have it in dark mode or the samurai colors, either one you want. Just reach out and I'll get that sorted for you.

So we're gonna wrap up. But, Ricardo, thank you so much for joining us. This has been awesome. I really enjoyed the Freedom Tech Friday. Good to have a live Monero as well. Listening to all the the history of Monero has been amazing. So for anyone who's joining towards the end of this,

for those who can, because it looks like x has been down for about the last hour, you can join us in, like, a day or two. It's gonna be on the ungovernable misfits feed. Thanks to Seth and Q and all the listeners for the questions and getting involved. This has been great.

Thank you all so much. Absolutely a blast having you join us Fluffy, hearing some unique tidbits from the history of Monero. I I never heard of you, man. I've been here a while, and getting to pick your brain, so thankful for it. Thanks so much for having me, gents. This was, this was a lot of fun. Thanks, Ricardo. Bye, guys.

Delicit. Delicit. Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Delicit. Monero is considered a privacy token.

The world's most private privacy. Which means that in Hines, virtually all transaction details change world's most private privacy.