Bitcoin Custody | THE UNBOUNDED SERIES: QnA

Welcome back. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. I hope you got to spend lots of time with friends and family. Some of you might have realized recently that the Unbounded podcast has closed down.

This means they're no longer paying for hosting, and this means, unfortunately, that the great audio that was recorded would be lost. All of the five guests that appeared on that podcast are considered by all of us at Ungovernable Misfits to be part of the family.

Q, Diverter, Seth, Pavel, and Colonial, all privacy advocates, all people we have a lot of respect for. And TBD, who ran the podcast, did a really great job of running through some of these important topics.

So rather than it being lost forever and that audio fading into nonexistence, we decided we would host it here. I'm gonna be releasing one a week, probably. We'll start with Q, then Diverter, then Seth, Pavel, and end with Colonial.

Thank you to TBD for putting in the effort to make these podcasts. Thank you to all the guests, and we're very happy that we can host this audio so that anyone in the future looking into privacy, security, freedom, has some more great audio to listen to. I hope you enjoy these, and stay ungovernable.

This is the Unbounded Podcast, where we explore the front lines of technology, human rights, and freedom. Today, I'm joined by renowned Bitcoin educator q and a to discuss the intersection of No KYC Bitcoin, sovereign wealth, and radical privacy, and how these tools and concepts can help us reclaim our financial freedom. So let's dive in.

Q, welcome to the show. Hello, sir. I feel like this is a long time coming. Very, very happy to be here. Thank you. I really, really appreciate it. I cannot think of a better person to have for our conversation today.

I consider you to be one of the best at no KYC sovereign, Bitcoin, privacy, all this kind of stuff. And so you are at the cutting edge of self custody and privacy solutions, and I'm thrilled that you're here. I consider you to be one of my mentors,

and, yeah, welcome to the show. Thank you. Yeah. Well, quite the introduction. I, appreciate the kind words. Yeah. I am one of the ones that likes to repeat himself over and over again and drive the point home of a few topics in Bitcoin that are really important that sadly as the net of what we classify Bitcoiner

seems to grow and grow, which everybody expected. Fortunately, the things that I hold dear become or the values that I hold dear, should I say, become more and more diluted. And, again, that probably shouldn't be a surprise to me, but it doesn't make me any less sad to see it happens.

I apologize to anybody that does follow me that hears me banging on about the same old things over and over again, but I do really think that they're important, and I'm sure we're gonna have a deep dive into those today as part of the call. Yeah. Absolutely.

This idea of radical responsibility when self custodying Bitcoin. I got that term from diverter, radical responsibility. It's a radical responsibility to self custody. That's how I think of it. And I don't think the industry

does a very good job at all of really explaining to people what you are taking on. If you're gonna be the bank then you're the security guard, the vault, and you have to manage that. It's clear that people don't understand. There's some horror stories out there. Was it an ex athlete UFC fighter?

I wrote this whole viral post how he had put everything into Bitcoin, was saving in Bitcoin for years, and lost it. It's a big, big thing. So give me your philosophy,

and what do you think even for intermediate and advanced people? Yeah. You're absolutely right. I remember that story coming out, and, sadly, it's not the only one even within the last twelve months. Frequently heartbreaking stories of people losing significant

amounts of Bitcoin, like more Bitcoin than I could ever dream of owning in an entire lifetime, regularly getting lost, through

people thinking they have their self custody solution locked down, and then they make a mistake. They again, they use a passphrase. They don't understand it. How it works, they they can't recover the wallet. They quite a common one is they get phished and they end up let's say they seek support in a telegram room or something like that.

And somebody a scammer posing as somebody official will offer them support on a one to one basis and will, you know, eventually socially engineer them such that they enter their seed words into a a website and then, yeah, poof, Bitcoin gone. And that's one of the common ways.

And the the Bitcoin is gone, and this as we all know, it's there's there's no re repercussion for that. Once it's gone, it's gone. So yeah, but, to bring it back to the self custody piece, you're absolutely right, and Divertus quote is is a great one, radical responsibility.

You are, like you said, you are the vault keeper. You are the bank. The book stops with you. And if you don't have your stuff in order, then the consequences are potentially catastrophic.

So what can we learn for this? What advice would I give to people?

Yeah. Just tread very carefully. Like, you can lose everything if you're not very, very careful. So to be more practical about it, take very small baby steps. Start out with small amounts of Bitcoin. When you start practicing self custody, you absolutely should practice receiving,

sending small amounts, wiping your wallet multiple times over so that this is, like, second nature to you. Such that if we go back to the samurai scenario that I mentioned earlier where it's like, okay. I now need to recover. That should never ever be your first time trying to recover a wallet.

And if you had followed the loose advice that I've just given where you've recovered that wallet multiple times over before now and you sent loads of different transactions,

then when it happens, it's an inconvenience, but you're not sat there in sheer panic thinking, oh my god. My life savings are at risk here. Things have gone really wrong. I'm and I'm really panicking. Because when you panic, you make rash decisions. You seek this the advice of who you think are legitimate people.

And, unfortunately, more often than not, particularly when we're talking about Telegram, they're just out to to steal your Bitcoin. And if you're in a panic, you're just gonna be compliant because you think this person's gonna help you. And and, again, that is where things can go drastically wrong. It's such a such a horrible state.

I've I've been there. Yeah. I mean, I think when you practice and you go through, it's muscle memory that can help you with that. But it it's pretty wild that people that you can intellectually intellectually know, know, I have my seeds. If I have my seeds, I can recover my wallet.

But sometimes even you could see people that were with the samurai incident, they're they're like, it's like, dude, you got your passphrase. You can recover this. It's like they couldn't even they were in such a panic that they couldn't realize that you got your passphrase. You got your seeds.

You're you're gonna be able to recover this thing. It just comes back to a lack of understanding. Like, they they probably created that wallet maybe even up to a couple of years prior. They maybe didn't read or didn't understand the warnings that are that are given in the wallet and didn't make adequate backups.

It's like a lack of understanding for people that, you know, everybody's got very, very busy lives. Bitcoin is one facet of people's lives where they're trying to save a bit of money or they they wanna be able to to transact freely. And people, when they're getting into it, do not understand the implications.

And trying to steer people towards the right tools for their knowledge base is is an important one as well. Samurai was wonderful. It has a wealth of awesome privacy tools and stuff like that. Is it the best option for absolute newcomers? I would say probably not for the reasons that we've mentioned.

You know, as you go further down that rabbit hole and you wanna gain your privacy, then, yeah, it's it's one of the best tools out there, but people don't need to be interacting with complex stuff from the outset. So another piece of advice is keep your self custody solutions as simple as you can for as long as you can.

A lot of people fall into the trap of thinking they need the most secure self custody setup from day one because they hear these horror stories, which are true, where people get their Bitcoin stolen, etcetera.

But the elephant in the room is that way, way, way more people screw themselves out of their Bitcoin than the handful of people who unfortunately get it stolen from them. Like, the risk is you, not not people stealing from you for most people. The risk is you, people. Burn that. The tagline. Yeah. That's the tagline.

That should be on every every box. You've been in this space for how long now? I started in the wider cryptocurrency ecosystem by buying all sorts of rubbish in 2017 and then slowly transitioned to primarily just a a Bitcoin focused individual.

And I would say I've probably been all in Bitcoin since 2019. For quite a while now. You've seen this change a lot as we've gone mainstream.

I have more questions about Bitcoin than I've ever had. Is this really freedom money? Jack Dorsey said, if it's not digital cash, we go home. Go work on something else. That resonated with me. I think it resonated with a lot of people. Where is this going? How do you see the changes? Yeah.

Well, clearly, Bitcoin has exploded onto the the global stage. It's very much an election topic these days, particularly in The US, which is where a lot of the social activity seems to stem from or focus around.

And we've got politicians talking about strategic Bitcoin reserves to gain votes, etcetera, and all of the the circus that follows that as well. From a social perspective, the thing I alluded to earlier, the the shift that I've seen in what's important to the average Bitcoiner.

Yeah. Most people use this thing as as a savings vehicle, and that's absolutely fine if that's what people wanna use it for. I think I say on pretty much every podcast, it's not for me to say how somebody else can use Bitcoin. The whole point of this system is that it's opt in, and you can use it however you see fit.

The risk arrives from when government officials get too involved in the system. The whole thing becomes way too politicized,

and people are focused way too much on, you know, mister Trump trying to pump their bags by holdings in Bitcoin as a a US reserve asset and losing sight of what I would consider the important fundamentals of the network, and that is, you know,

making sure as many people as possible can self custody that and the changes that may be or may not be required to do that. And I guess practicing what they preach in terms of, well, practicing self custody and using this thing as digital cash, which is possible.

It could be easier with some potential changes that have been spoken about for many, many years, whether there's actually an appetite to for those to actually happen.

The chances of that, I think, diminish with each passing day as we continue to hurtle towards the the ossification of the network, which is, again, is something else that, once it worries me, but it's it's something it's a trend that I'm not really a fan of.

There's been a huge shift, especially in the last couple of years, where people are focused on using this as an investment vehicle.

Most people are simply not practicing self custody. You can see that from the congestion or lack thereof on the network. It was only this morning, while as a bit of a timestamp for listeners, the value of Bitcoin is somewhere north of a $100,000.

And the amount of transactions that were in Bitcoin's mempool this morning, the transaction queue, was less than 10,000 transactions that the mempool pretty much cleared, which is a bit of a meme on Twitter. But, essentially, there was little to no activity on the network whatsoever.

So what that tells me is, you know, we're at or hovering around all time highs in terms of fiat valuation.

So clearly, the world is is pricing this asset and seeing some value in it, but the actual activity on the network is negligible at the moment. So it it's clear to me that most people are interacting with Bitcoin or Bitcoin Bitcoin vehicles, like ETFs,

etcetera, through methods in which or methods that don't allow them to leverage Bitcoin's properties. And what I mean by that is basically they're holding an ETF or they're holding it on an exchange where essentially they they have no Bitcoin.

They have a claim on Bitcoin, Bitcoin, and that's plain to see from the lack of congestion on the network, which, again, is the main trend that saddens me a little bit. And for anybody that follows me on Twitter will see that I frequently post pictures of the lack of congestion on the network.

And most people probably think, well, that's bit weird. I don't know why he's doing that. But the whole point is to highlight that we're here. We're sitting at, like, plus a $100,000,

and there is zero activity on this network. So and I'm poking fun at the the state of affairs at the moment, and, sadly, most people are using a quasi Bitcoin vehicle rather than Bitcoin itself,

which comes with it many, many risks. Bitcoin's either freedom money or it's not. I'm concerned about it. Where where are the red lines for you? I remember Samurai, the cofounder.

Can't I remember which one it was, but he was on a podcast and the guy asked him, where are your red lines with this? When do you just say, okay. I'm out. I'm not doing this anymore. And he said something like, if they KYC Bitcoin,

basically, he's like, I'm out. I I go to something different. But are there certain things that could happen where you're this isn't what I wanna be a part of anymore? Does that make sense? It does.

In terms of the network itself, there there's not that many changes afoot or that have been proposed that would would be, like, a a red line for me. Most of the the risks or the the things that I want nothing to do with are external to the network. Things like using KYC services to to obtain Bitcoin,

like exchanges is is a red line for me and something that I try to steer friends, family, any acquaintances away from due to all of the risks and the complete ineffectivity of that type of system. So, yeah, most of the stuff is external.

And for me, personally, in terms of, like, what I work on day to day, for those who don't know, I work at a company called Foundation. We make Bitcoin hardware and software to help people self custody, and we are very much like a a values driven company.

Two of our main values are open source. We open source everything that we do, and the other one is that we we don't do custody. Like, you'll never see us put out a custody product such that we're holding other people's Bitcoin. Again, because that is just a story that's gone wrong way too many times.

It comes with a whole host of regulatory pressures and risks. And by implementing such a product, we'd be going against our own ethos. Everything we do is designed to make it easier for people to self custody their Bitcoin.

If So we were to come out with a custody product where we held your Bitcoin for you, I don't doubt we could probably do a wonderful job at it and make the UX really simple, but it's not what what we're here for. So those would be my two main red lines is is KYC

and using custodial products. Wrapped into that custodial products isn't just exchanges. You've got things like custodial Lightning wallets, things like eCash, FediMint,

all that sort of stuff, which don't get me wrong. There's some very cool tech behind all that sort of stuff, and they do unlock different use cases that we can't do with just plain old Bitcoin. But the trade off is that you give up your Bitcoin to somebody else, and that is a big red line for me. Sure. So is Bitcoin privacy dead?

I have a quote for you. So Urban Hacker said, there's a quote. He said, Whirlpool's down. Now everything sucks. So so why even bother? What what do think about that? Is speech controversy dead? No. Is it severely kneecapped? Oh, yes. So with Whirlpool

gone, the the simple turnkey solution to gain a decent level of privacy on the Bitcoin network has been removed. There are alternatives. And in fact, Urban Hacker has done a great podcast with

Gabriel Custodia on his podcast where they they go through the state of affairs now that Whirlpool has disappeared, and they look at all the other options. A couple of them, in my opinion, are viable.

Are they anywhere near as good as Whirlpool? Absolutely not. But, you know, you have to play the cards that you're dealt at the end of the day. And fact of the matter is Whirlpool is just not functioning right now, so it's not even an option on the table. Can you still gain a semi decent level of privacy when interacting with Bitcoin?

Yes. But you've gotta jump through way more hoops than you used to two years ago. So I'm I'm talking about things like a joint market, which is a peer to peer coin joint protocol.

I'm talking about self custodial lightning to get good levels of spend privacy. But, again, I'm not talking about these in a vacuum. They they all have their trade offs. Join market is nowhere near as easy to use as Whirlpool used to be. The fees can be significantly higher than they used to be in Whirlpool.

I know that's ironic after me saying there's almost zero congestion on the network, so now is actually a pretty good time to test out JoyMarket.

However, if the the fees were to rise upwards to levels that we've seen in re even in the last twelve months, upwards of, like, $2.03, 4, even 500 sats per byte, nobody's gonna be using JoyMarket because the the fees for people who are acting as takers that want to gain privacy, like, it just becomes prohibitively too expensive.

And then on the Lightning side of things,

you can get some great spend level privacy by default if you do Lightning in a self custodial manner. But to get to that point where you're able to do or practice self custodial Lightning, the barrier to entry is quite significant. You need to run a node. You need to manage channels. You need to understand liquidity.

You need to understand maybe the network, things like the Tor network and things like that. It's yes. You can get there, but, again, there's trade offs, and you've got to jump through a lot of hoops to get there, which raises the barrier to entry and makes it even more diff for the newcomer. So a lot that has changed since Samurai.

It's seven months ago, I think, roughly seven or so months ago. People in the community have had time to digest what happened there. We we were all massively shell shocked, And and you and Seth for Privacy

and Foundation, you guys were amazing during that time period. I have to say you were helping people navigate and figure that out was just unbelievable. I think you guys really made just a a really positive impression, and it was amazing to see that. But what have you learned? What has the community learned from that experience?

Well, there's a couple of things. Number one, you know, if live or active regulations are often not worth the paper that they're written on. To pad that out out a bit, you know, the Samurai guys were operating

under the FinCEN guidance that had been active for a number of years up until the point that they were arrested. And then they were arrested for, amongst other things, one of the things that the financial action task force sorry, that FinCEN mentioned was basically

excluded them from any types of money transmitter regulations in the fact that they'd never took custody of funds. And then they were arrested for being a money transmitter, irrespective of the fact they were never taking custody of funds.

So they were following the guidance, but then a different three letter agency said, we don't recognize that. We're we're gonna arrest you anyway. So the other thing would be that a lot of Bitcoiners like to wax lyrical about how they're gonna take down the state, yeah, how we're gonna topple all the banks and the three letter agencies.

And then with a stroke of a pen, two people's lives were changed forever despite the fact that they were following the regulations that were publicly available to the whole of the industry. And totally transparent.

This was open source software. Like, it's everybody. It wasn't like they were hiding anything. I mean, they had they had lawyers. You know, they do conferences. They do podcasts. It wasn't like they're hiding out somewhere in the dark and not publishing this code. It was all completely 100 transparent.

But to get get back to your point, when that arrest happened, learned a lot about people in the community, talking we're gonna stand up for privacy and self custody, and that's the red line. And then you realized

a lot of people folded. And I think that's one of the biggest from a kind of cultural perspective, I guess, is there's not a lot of people in the Bitcoin community that care about privacy. I mean, I think that's just pretty apparent now. I don't think anybody could argue with that.

And then the icing on the cake several months later when you have Michael Saylor coming out against self custody of Bitcoin. I was like, oh, wow. Where has this gone? Because this is not what I was sold when I came into it at the beginning. Yeah. I cosign everything that you just said, really.

And that's one of the things that saddens me about the cultural aspect of this is that people like Sailor, who don't share the same values as you or I, are put on a pedestal. Why that may be, I guess, is open to interpretation. If you were to ask me, I'd say that everybody or those that are fans of him put him on a pedestal because he's,

you know, the messiah that pumps everybody's bags by buying a few $100,000,000

worth of Bitcoin every couple of months. And it seems to get him a lot of worship from a lot of the the community, but, yeah, clearly doesn't share the same sorts of values as people who value self custody and privacy and stuff. But, again, it's not for me to tell Sailor how he how he interacts with Bitcoin.

If he wants to sell debt and buy billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, he's free to do so. If you want to keep it with a custodian, which I believe he does, then, of course, he's free to do that. Everybody's in Bitcoin through their own lens. He clearly has a significant amount of Bitcoin.

And if you take a step back and look at it and think, well, is that individual who is owns a regulated business, all of his Bitcoin's held in custody, he's clearly under the eyes of the government as one of the largest Bitcoin holders.

Is he gonna come out and say, everybody should not pay taxes, everybody should use no KYC, we need confidential transactions? Like, he's just not gonna do that because that wouldn't be good for him and his personal situation, whether we like it or not. You know, look to Jack Dorsey.

Jack handles it well for somebody that has a public company and that's, you know, very public and has fiduciary responsibilities and things like that. He doesn't come out and say kinda these crazy things. Back on Samurai, because I love those guys. I donated.

When they got arrested, and I remember on the telegram communities, you had Samurai, you had I was really big into Ronan Dojo, and then you had one as well. I mean, when that arrest happened, it was mass pandemonium out there. Do you remember that? I was like, everybody I'm sure the FBI is recording everything, but nobody they didn't care

because everybody was freaking out. And it was I thought that was fascinating to watch from a social kind of perspective.

What are some of the things that we could learn from that? Yeah. There there there was two main things for me. Number one, on the day of the arrests, most of the Samurai servers of which there were multiple were taken down.

And what that meant for end users of Samurai was that if you weren't connecting the app to your own dojo, which is their node software, and you were just in the default one, then you unable to transact. So you could your balance. But because their back end was down, you couldn't construct the transaction to to spend the funds out of it.

People, irrespective of the fact that this was open source software and no funds were actually at risk, people panic because they they see the the sensational news and all that sort of stuff, and they're like, okay. I need to move move my funds straight away.

Those that were using the default dojo or the default back, I couldn't do that, and that was a cause for quite a lot of stress and anguish for for people.

So the first thing I learned was that not enough people were running their own node. There were there were ways now is one of the ones trying to help out these types of users where they were able to connect to different nodes or recover their wallet elsewhere so that they were not locked out of their funds.

So it was only a temporary issue because they were connected to the default back end, but it was eye opening to see how many people it did affect. Again, it is one of the things in Bitcoin that everybody, particularly people that share my values to say, you know, you should always run your own node.

This was a prime example of why that was. The second thing that I learned as part of this is, again, that not enough people are comfortable with how to recover their wallet. I think you alluded to it earlier. You're talking about passphrase and things like that.

And one of the not really a quirk, but it was something that Samurai did differently or slightly differently to other wallets is that they enforce the use of a passphrase when you set up a new wallet.

Passphrases are great for it in terms of additional security, but they can be very risky if you don't fully understand how to interact with them and how to back them up. So we found ourselves in a situation where a lot of users were trying to recover their Samurai wallet elsewhere,

and they completely forgot that they even had a passphrase. They were just taking their 12 words and throwing them into BlueWallet or into any other wallet, Sparrow or something like that, and not entering the passphrase. And they were recovering completely

valid but empty wallets and clearly panicking quite a lot. I've always said that passphrases are great, but you need to be careful with them. But also that people, you know, they clearly never recovered this Samurai wallet before. They were trying to do it for the first time in a panicked state, and it wasn't working for them.

The third thing that just popped into my head as well is that when people were trying to recover, because Samurai Wallet was such a dense a densely packed featured wallet, it's got wonderful privacy tools. It uses account segregation,

but all of that comes with a cost. If you try and recover all of those features or all of the different facets of the wallet in a different type of wallet, let's say BlueWallet, for example, that's a lot more basic, you're not gonna recover everything automatically.

Like, it's not just a case of put your 12 words in and, hey, presto. Here's all of your funds. There's multiple different accounts. There's different address types. Yeah. It's bringing back a lot of memories. I do remember those too. I do remember those. Yeah.

That panicked state of trying to recover a wallet, I don't wish that on anybody. I've been there. I know you probably deal with it every day, every week, and it is a very, very scary kinda situation.

I wanted to cover this with you. If you ask a 100 different people, even within the Bitcoin privacy space, some of the brightest people out there in the Bitcoin space, in my opinion, what is financial sovereignty? We'd get a 100 different answers. I think it's important before you decide to self custody,

you really need to have a mental framework. What is the goal here? How do you think of that? Yeah. There's there's a couple of key points here that encompass

what financial sovereignty and, more specifically, Bitcoin is to me. The first one is being able to store your wealth over time in an environment that isn't easily inflated away. We sadly live in an environment where central banks can just print money at will completely untethered for

any purpose they see fit. COVID was a shining example of this. They decided to lock the entire world down, stop everybody going to work and just said, yeah, we'll pay your wages. Don't worry. And everybody thought this was wonderful.

And now we're all reaping the benefits of that because the price of milk and a loaf of bread has doubled, and we're all paying the price of that through inflation.

So one part of financial sovereignty for me is to be able to not be stolen from slowly over time like that through inflation. So that's the first one. And, obviously, Bitcoin has proved itself to be pretty good at that since its inception. The second one would be being able to transport that wealth with you wherever you wanna go.

Again, if I was let's say I wanted to move to the other side of the world and UpSticks and, you know, go and live in Australia, If all of my wealth was tied up in physical gold or property

or even cash in the bank, like, I'd have a sick lift there to to liquidate all that or be able to take access to that type of wealth with me. There'd probably be a hell of a lot of questions asked, and I'm sure there'd probably be a lot of taxes involved as well.

So being able to do or have your wealth stored in a method where you can just do that without jumping through 3,000,000 hoops, I e taking 12 words on a piece of paper or steel or on an SD card or in your head, and hopping on a flight, like, that's a win for me. That's a huge thing. A lot of people in this audience fall within that.

Digital nomads, expats, solo entrepreneurs, people running businesses globally. They tend to be younger, tech savvy, and they want to have optionality and ease in being able to seamlessly travel around the world and go to different countries and be able to do business with Bitcoin,

pay for maybe an employee or a consultant or things like that. That's not maybe appreciated by a lot of people because it's a very experiential thing, if that makes sense. But, you know, if you go travel and you're kinda you you have yourself set up where you can transact that way, it's just super powerful. Yeah. It really is.

And and it feeds into the the third point of what is financial sovereignty to me, and that is being able to transact with whoever you want whenever you want. Yeah. Money is 50%

of every single transaction we ever make for our entire lives. And if you have a money that prevents you from transacting with whoever you want whenever you want, which is sadly true for most fiat currencies, then that money is clearly not the best option for you personally. Then, you know, again, I hark back to to COVID times where,

we had people getting who had dissenting opinions to the status quo. They had their bank accounts closed. People were cut off from their wages. They couldn't buy food, and a a good form of money, that shouldn't be able to happen. 100%.

Imagine some authoritarian agency, the state is coming after you, debanked or they somehow cut you off from financial services. Like, look at COVID. I mean, doctors were fired.

There was, you know, a lot of financial hardship during that time. But so if the mob comes for you, how resilient will you be? And that would be one thing that I add to your list there, and that is a fantastic, fantastic list. I look at it exactly that way is how resilient are you? Absolutely.

I think people need to understand that their bank account is just an illusion and can be taken away at will. And if people don't believe me, I would say go into your bank account. And if you're lucky enough to have more than a couple of thousand dollars in there, try and withdraw it in cash and see see how that goes for you.

I got a quote there. Your bank account is an illusion. Yep. And you can only partake in that illusion if the bank wants you to. It's a powerful thing. Like, you know, it it is definitely what motivates me.

If you can set yourself up to where you can take more control, you know, for me who travels globally and does business globally, it's a it's a huge thing. Yeah.

To tie it in finally with what we've been talking about earlier around self custody, like, I talked about three main things, being able to store your wealth free from inflation, being able to transport your wealth wherever you want, and being able to transact with whoever, whenever.

Like, if you don't practice Bitcoin self custody and you have the ETF or you have money on an exchange, you can't leverage any of those things at all. And if you've got Bitcoin on an exchange, the exchange could be selling you paper Bitcoin.

If you've got Bitcoin on an exchange and you try and transport it and access it from the other side of the world, the exchange might say no. And if you want to transact with somebody who the exchange doesn't agree with, again, they can say no. So you can't leverage any of those awesome properties if you don't practice self custody.

What what are the key nonnegotiable pieces set themselves up for financial sovereignty or to become bankless from a privacy perspective, how you acquire and transact with Bitcoin.

Yeah. So it wouldn't be a surprise to hear that self custody is is first and foremost because that that predicates everything else. Well, I don't wanna repeat myself again, but, like, all of the properties of Bitcoin, like, they are only leveraged whenever you're in full control of it.

So that is step number one, and I wouldn't even consider anything else that I'm about to cover off until you've got that lockdown. The next natural step would be how

you acquire the Bitcoin. We've talked at length about self custody and how important that is. But if you were to take another leap down the black pill rabbit hole, if there are people that know you have Bitcoin,

that could be an attacker on Telegram, that could be a petty thief in the street, or it could be a government. Anybody that knows that you've got Bitcoin can try and take that Bitcoin from you.

Now you might be able to lock your door and keep the petty thief out of your house, but are you gonna be able to stop the men with guns that have three letter agency badges on them from coming to take that if they see fit? Probably not is the answer for most people.

So this is one of the pieces where I like to wax lyrical about no KYC options. And what I mean by that is obtaining Bitcoin

using methods that don't tie it to your personal identity. Now that isn't because I am urging everybody to perform tax evasion and avoid paying what what they're due, etcetera, if they ever sell any Bitcoin in the future. It's to stop them becoming targets, Bury your head in the sand and think, I I don't need any privacy.

I'm a law abiding citizen. I'm just using Bitcoin as a savings vehicle. I'm more than happy to pay my capital gains tax. All of that is perfect and great. But if your personal information is leaked by one of these exchanges, which again happens all too often, and your

home address becomes public and they think, that guy lives down the road from me. I can see that he's got an exchange account. I might go and pay him a visit because I need to put some food on the table, and I'm happy to go and hurt somebody and take that from him. Like, I just do not want that to even be a risk in my life.

So the one of the ways the wonderful ways that you can mitigate that is by purchasing Bitcoin,

or obtaining Bitcoin. You don't even need to purchase it. Using methods that don't necessarily tie you and put you on a centralized database that can and probably will be leaked eventually over time. Yeah. No KYC, everyone. So a couple more things that I wanna cover with you, Q. Can I call you Q, by the way? Q and a? Yes, please. Yeah.

Or mister Bitcoin. I call you mister Bitcoin. Mister I'm gonna call you mister Bitcoin. So let's take a step back. So a lot's happened last year. It's the beginning of the new year. Starting fresh, what is the tech stack that you could confidently recommend

today? Let's say for an advanced beginner, intermediate. Yeah. So for somebody that's in that ecosystem already and maybe already an existing Samurai Wallet user, although the wallet's not being actively developed right now for for obvious reasons, the guys are sadly locked up. The wallet still functions. It's open source code.

You can still go and download it. Or if you've got it installed on your phone, like, it still works. Obviously, you would need your own node, which leads me on to the next step in that in running your go or well, just running your own node in general. But if you wanna run samurai or Ashigaru,

which for those who don't know what Ashigaru is, it's kind of a fork of samurai that's being actively developed that has some changes. Changes for the better, in my opinion, around UX,

that is also another option. It's a new project being developed by some anonymous developers. They're they're clearly talented. They know what they're doing by the nature of of the changes that are being made.

But because of the fact it's a new project, and we don't know who these people are behind it, you should tread a little bit more carefully. The code is much less vetted than Samurai was by the nature of it being around for less time. But with that said, again, all of the code is open source.

I know a couple of people have had at least a cursory check over that. So I would be fairly confident to say, you know, it's there's probably nothing malicious going on here. One of the cool things about Ashigaru looking at it from a an attack vector perspective is that they enforce you to use your own node.

So, obviously, that raises the barrier to entry, but it means that, you know, they can't be spying on your transaction because you have to connect it to your own node or a another Dojo that you specify. So from, I guess, a privacy perspective, that's a win.

However, you know, if you don't have your own Dojo or access to somebody else's Dojo that you trust, then it means that you cannot use that wallet, unfortunately. The the next thing would be a node. If this person is already entrenched into the Samurai ecosystem,

then, obviously, they are going to need a Dojo. They can either run the what's colloquially named the Vanilla Dojo, which requires a bit of command line work. You can gain a I personally run a Start nine, which is a node software.

And I know that there is a open source team that are working on packaging

Dojo for Start nine. That seems to be fairly imminent. So within a couple of months, that should be a possibility so that you can run the Dojo software and connect your Ashigaru or your existing Samurai wallet to that piece of software. So those would be my updates for somebody who's already entrenched within that ecosystem.

And then, of course, a foundation hardware

wallet to go with that. Start nine, I I don't know a lot about them. Do you guys partner with them? Nope. We have no affiliation with them. It's just a node that I've been running for probably the best part of at least twelve months now on a little mini desktop that sat on my desk right next to me here. Yeah.

It's just a great, well architected piece of software. They've done a great job balancing the trade offs. It seems to be very stable software. All of the releases appear to be well Ted, and I've never really had much issue with the stability of this node, which in the node world is the holy grail, essentially.

The whole point of nodes is that they sit there quietly in the background, and you're able to to use them as and when, you call upon them by loading your wallet. It's been, great for me. Would happily recommend the Start9 as a node package. What's your framework? Does it have to be open source?

Does it depend on level somebody's at? It depends on the person. You know, you gave me a scenario of somebody entrenched in the in the the privacy sphere,

where they require privacy spend tools and to connect to a dojo. Would I recommend that blanket for everybody? No. Of course not. And when I do my consulting course through foundation, I get people to tell me a bit about their Bitcoin experience. And the reason is so that I can position

the topics and and concepts that we talk about appropriately for them. There's no good diving into talking about UTXO management for somebody who's never even held a hardware wallet before. You've gotta gotta cater it and pick the right tool for for the right person.

An absolute beginner trying to understand Ashigaru and connect their own dojo, which doesn't even exist, versus download Envoy. It's the the app that we build at Foundation. Download Envoy, press this button, encrypt back up your seed words to iCloud.

Not a trade off that everybody's comfortable with, but for an absolute beginner, it could be the difference between them having access to their funds in six months' time and not having access to them. So it very much depends on where you're coming from, what your skill set is. The beautiful part about this whole ecosystem,

especially the open source ones, is that just because you start out in Envoy with super easy self custody doesn't mean that you can't then progress to having your own node and downloading some more advanced piece of software and doing stuff like Lightning or multisig.

Like, it's a journey, and it's about being aware of your own abilities and not trying to run before you could walk such that you don't screw yourself out of your funds. Yeah. Kind of a funny thing that I say for people that are trying to figure out how to how to go about it in the very beginning.

And I said, you're a beginner if you haven't used a command line interface since high school.

If you haven't used a command line interface, like, you are an absolute beginner and use Envoy. Yeah. And and thankfully, even with more advanced things like nodes, like, we're very much in a a space now where you don't need to do all that sort of stuff.

If you run a Start nine or an Umbrella or something like that, like, these are beautifully architected pieces of software that you if you can plug in a power cord and an Ethernet cable, then you can run a node. And and that is that just wasn't a thing five years ago when I started running nodes.

Like, you had to know how to build a Raspberry Pi and configure all things in the command line. Trajectory looks good for things like self custody and and running your own node, etcetera, and long may it continue. Continue. Absolutely.

So let's wrap this up. First of all, thank you so much. I, like I said, consider you to be a mentor. I know you've been a mentor to many, many people in the industry and just the impact that you have had. It's amazing. It's really, really inspiring.

And it's people like you that I have met in this space that I'm like, this this is where I wanna be. Some of the smartest people in Bitcoin are in the Bitcoin privacy, no KYC space. Like, the run a dojo community, foundation community, just just huge, huge fans. What can we look forward to from foundation?

You came out with a major we didn't really get time to get into it, but a major product release, Pass port Prime, in addition to your Passport hardware wallet.

But as you look over the next few months, what are you looking forward to, and what do you think our audience should be on the lookout for? Yeah. So from a personal perspective, obviously, very excited about Passport Prime. It's been the the sole focus of basically the entire team for almost two years now.

So to see it out in the wild and actually be able to talk about it and showcase it to to people online and in person at events and stuff has been very, very exciting. We are just a couple of months away from actually shipping the device now, and I'm very excited to get it into people's hands. It is a Beautiful.

It ruffled some feathers, and it is a bit of a departure from the type of device that we've done before. Clearly, our existing two passport devices were air gapped focused Bitcoin only hardware wallets designed to just store your Bitcoin, whereas Passport Prime with a touchscreen and additional connectivity is allowing you to well,

with the one of our taglines is secure your entire digital life. So we're gonna enable you to store and encrypt your files, store, obviously, your Bitcoin as well. We're a Bitcoin company at heart. That will never change.

Decodes, store all your other Bitcoin seeds from different wallets, security keys, pass keys, password managers, and that's just to start with. That's the stuff that we're gonna build and ship at at launch. Passport Prime is open source, and we're gonna build a developer SDKs inviting other people to build apps for our hardware.

So one of our first partnerships is Cake Wallet, very popular Bitcoin and Monero wallet for mobile. They're building their app to go on to Passport Prime such that people can store their Bitcoin and Monero or or any of their other assets that are available within Cakewallet.

Asphalt Prime can become your digital Swiss army knife and be the the the keeper of all of your types of keys. It doesn't matter whether it's a Bitcoin key, the two FA key to your Twitter account, like the world, the sky's the limit, essentially. The only limitation we have is the the wider developer community's imagination.

I'm personally very excited about things like Nostra integration as well so that people can have unfettered access to to social media and things like that. We're gonna ship the core features within the next couple of months, All guns blazing. Let's get this out into the hands of our trusty supporters.

I haven't seen it within the Bitcoin space. It makes sense. You have to simplify and streamline. This this is my mantra in 2025. Simplify and streamline.

I think this product is going to be a big, big help. So I'm I'm definitely looking forward to it, and we'll be following that. What's the best way for people to follow you? I know you're on Twitter.

You have an amazing podcast. We didn't even get into that. One of the one of my favorite podcasts, Ungovernable Misfits. It seems like that's really, really taken off. Congratulations on that. But what's the best way to follow you? Yeah. To learn about what I do day to day, head to foundation.xyz.

To subscribe to the podcast, head to ungovernablemisfits.com. To follow me on Twitter, I am at b t c q n a. And to see my educational material, you can head to bitcoiner.guide.

And if you wanna get in touch, then all of my other contact methods are there as well. Awesome. Q, thank you. I'm grateful for you. Take care now. Been a pleasure. Thank you. That's a wrap, everyone, for this episode of the Unbounded Podcast.

Stay tuned for the next podcast, the next episode. It's already in the works. It's already recorded.

I'm hoping to be able to get these out once every other week. Would love to get them out once a week. That's a little tough to do right now, but shooting for once every other week and hope to ramp it up soon. Until next time, stay resilient.