Bitcoin Monthly 0008

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

Now, what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! All right, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong?

What if it's the system that is doomed to fail? Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the world. Join me as I speak. Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space.

And save that to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is our monthly updates. I've got Bitcoin Q&A, Antimas, and Brother Rabbit.

And this was really good fun. We did this in person, other than Antimas couldn't actually join us, unfortunately. The rest of us went out for some beers and had a good catch up. It was a lot of fun.

The three of us were huddled around one mic, so the audio quality isn't perfect, but it's still good. And yeah, this was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I hope you enjoy listening. And if you have any questions, you can reach out.

Before we start, I want to say thank you to my sponsors. I've got CoinFlow UK, if you're looking to stack stats in the UK, and you want to buy weekly or monthly, you can do that. If you use the code in the show notes, you will get a 30% discount off your fees.

So make sure to check them out and also check out cryptocloaks.com. Cryptocloaks have been sponsoring this show for about six months now. I absolutely love their products. And if you haven't checked them out already, you want to go to cryptocloaks.com to see the

sort of note cases, the personalizations that they do, all the different types of colors and designs you can even imagine. And yeah, absolutely love that team. They are doing great things, and they are Bitcoin only.

Enjoy the show. We have a very special show today. I am joined by Brother Rabbit and Q&A, lurking in a hotel bedroom for all three of us. And also joined by Antimus, who I had on the show a couple of weeks ago, who has been

helping Q&A over the last few weeks and months, getting these monthly updates together. Q&A, do you want to do a little run through of how Antimus has been helping you and what he's been doing for you?

Yeah, so I've had some significant life changes, let's say, over the past couple of months. And three times we've become somewhat limited, so keeping up with all the latest developments with Bitcoin and keeping the index up to date has become quite a challenge.

So Antimus reached out kindly quite a while ago now, saying that he wanted to get involved. So it's an easy opportunity to see if he wanted to give me a hand to put the index together. Thankfully, kindly said yes, and yes, he's been quite working in the background with

me to keep things up to date and to get these monthly releases out on time. So, yeah, welcome to you, Antimus, and thanks for your help. Yeah, sure, and that is a bit of a pleasure getting to know you as well, and now jumping in.

It's definitely exciting times. Yeah, it's a nice format, actually, and obviously we've got Brother Rabbit with us here as well, Q&A and Brother Rabbit, you've been doing some bits for Ronan and Samurai, some walkthroughs.

Yeah, that's right. Just some back to basics, really, but with a lot of people starting to care about their privacy, so maybe we'll touch on it a little bit later, but we've been doing some sort of introductory sessions into Samurai, giving people a run through of, you know, how to

get started and how you can sort of take steps to better your privacy in that respect. Nice. Cool, so we've got, as usual, we've got a list here, Antimus, as you've been actually putting these together, I think it would only be right that you go through these also,

because I haven't had the time to read through it, so if you can read through and then we'll pick out any bits that are particularly interesting, start where you want to, mate. Sure. Yeah, so this month, I mean, we've got quite a lot of UI updates and bug fixes, but we

can start off, I mean, Bisk brought out a few mine and bug fixes that you should definitely update to, nothing too special there. We've got Blue Wallet, the 6.2.3, added an Electrum connection toggle, I haven't had a chance to check that out myself, but that seems like a useful addition.

Yes, so just to jump in with the Blue Wallet one, one of the key things that they've updated here is that when you generate an address within a Bitcoin wallet, Blue Wallet being one of them, it will show you both the text string and it will also show you a QR version of that address.

Now, you can sort of save that QR code as an image and set rather than taking a screenshot, but you can save that as an image and then send that to whoever wants to pay you via whatever message in protocol that you like to use so that they can then, if they've got Blue Wallet

as well, when they just sort of open up Blue Wallet, we'll have to check that and pull the address out from it and say, "Do you want to pay to this address rather than them pumping to copy and paste it," so kind of a neat little UI improvement.

Nice. Okay. So then we've got, yeah, one of the biggest updates for the month was a huge release from the join market, V0.9.0, introducing Fidelity Bonds to mitigate against Sibyl attacks.

Q&A, you might want to jump in on that as well and go into detail as a big one. Yeah. So my understanding of Fidelity Bonds, like you say, is a Sibyl resistance methodology that they use where makers, so these are the people who are sort of leaving their Bitcoin

within the join market ecosystem to be used within going joined by Takers, the people who want to sort of get an instant mix. They can now opt to use what's called a Fidelity Bond to lock up a percentage of their Bitcoin as collateral, basically, so that they can sort of prove that they're a good actor.

Where this sort of comes in is that before Fidelity Bonds, it was quite easy for somebody to act as multiple makers within the system to sort of potentially Sibyl attack anybody who's coming along that wants to do a coin join.

It was trivial for them to just spin up loads of different instances and put lots of little parts of Bitcoin and wait for people to come along so that they could try and de-anonymise them.

Fidelity Bonds, they have to put a collateral, I believe it's sort of 25, help me out here, guys. Isn't it that it just gets exponentially more expensive the smaller amounts? Yeah, exactly.

So to run five instances rather than one would be like 25x more. Exactly. That work, it's going to cost you exponentially more than it is to run one good instance where it's exponentially more difficult to try and sibyl with the same amount of people.

By locking up funds as well as that sort of give a bit of reputation to certain sellers by making it sort of, if you're putting up a fair amount, you know, you've got a bit of, you know, you're safe to say that, you know, you're not going to have someone come back on you in that respect.

Yeah, so makers now can come along and they can, sorry, takers can come along, the people who want sort of instances can come along and see all of the offers that are on the table and they can see which makers have used Fidelity Bonds and sort of, obviously, the likelihood

is that they're going to opt to use them because they know that people have put up the collateral and are essentially acting in good faith, either that or they've got a shitload of Bitcoin.

Yeah, but I mean, the shitload of Bitcoin would have to be a lot. I mean, they put up a simulation saying that you'd need about 50,000 coins locked up for six months to sibyl attack with 95% success rate.

So that'll be 50,000 coins, well, but it's not out the run as a possibility still. Check the back of your sofa. Yeah. So if anybody's sibyl attack in a joint market to probably sell it, yeah, it's still not impossible, is it?

It's just, you know, it could easily be a government entity who's kept their mouth shut and mined from the early days, like, you've got to expect that unless all governments are completely fucking used, because there are least one of them has done this.

But whether they're going to use that to use on joint market, that's very niche, I'm not so sure. Yeah. And there's one more thing, I think, as well, to point out that these fidelity bonds, once you've set them, there's no changing them.

So especially now, once the change come out, if you want to experiment with them, you want to lock them up for two years, and you've chosen the wrong amount, then you're pretty lost. So you'd have to basically put up a new fidelity bond, which you can only have one per maker.

So probably the best is if you want to start out now, choose a pretty short time, maybe one or two months, just to see how it goes. Obviously, you won't have the full benefits of higher value when locking up for a year or two, but you won't put yourself in a corner, you won't get out again.

So is it completely up to the maker how much they lock up and how long for, as well? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So they can set that completely. I mean, there's a maximum. So the maximum is this 1 BTC equals the value of 1 and 5 BTC equals the value of 25.

That's the maximum. But if you, so you can't just lock them up for a thousand years and suddenly have a huge value, it's capped at the squared of the amount. Yeah, but otherwise you can choose pretty much whatever your timeframe and amount you want.

Interesting. It'll be interesting to see how many people, or how many makers opt to use this. I'm sure the sort of efficient market will opt for those types of makers very quickly, I would have thought.

Yeah. I mean, it does kind of shift towards people with a lot of coins. I mean, it does kind of rule out quite a few other people. I mean, there is still this random algorithm that chooses participants for a round that still does include makers without Fidelity Bonds, but it's only about 12.5% or something.

So you're definitely, you know, you're not doing much if you don't have Fidelity Bonds up. If you're creating a Fidelity Bondi, you basically, it's like liquid or something like that, where you're exchanging Bitcoin for effectively like another token, or is it that it's in some kind of contract, like a time lock?

Exactly. Yeah. It's in a time lock. So, and you can actually have it on in cold storage. So you, they haven't integrated it yet, but they've teased it basically that they'll probably be coming up in future releases that you can actually have it on in, well, in cold storage

and just predetermined, yeah, or you have to sign a message that you control those funds and that then everyone can see and verify that they're locked up for a certain amount of time. So that it doesn't introduce any extra security risk for doing it?

No, I mean, at the moment you do, or you can't have them externally in cold storage, but that as soon as that's possible, that should be fine. That's cool. So that's going to massively increase the liquidity if people can be makers and still have the bulk of their Fidelity Bond offline.

That's going to be, again, it's going to incentivize more liquidity to enter the pool, isn't it? Absolutely. The liquidity, well, you'd still need additional liquidity, obviously, but I mean, that's the great thing as well that you have the non-equal output sizes, so that's pretty flexible.

Have you used it, Antimas? No, I haven't yet, but going through it now, it's definitely intriguing, something I haven't tried out yet, but especially also, because I'm running my node, they've got a join-in box on there as well that I haven't tried out yet either, but that's supposed to make it quite a bit easier.

One of us really should, because I swear we speak about it every single month from the very beginning. Opinoms is going to come and slap us at some point, because we still haven't done that.

Have you looked at the interface at all? No, no, not at all. And there's only one of us in the room that's actually got an excuse and that's brought the rabbit, because Max runs a mine-o-d.

I've got a Raspberry Blitz and you've got a mine-o as well, and I've literally helped my hand and went through it as well, so yeah, I definitely used to get a mouse in gear. When a bus comes, you know, 10 come at once at any moment now.

Yeah, speaking of mine-o-d, that's next on the list. They've got a smaller software that updated all the different software packages and also improved connectivity with ZAP, which also I was struggling with every now and again, that definitely worked, so it's a big plus there.

Passport, yeah, got a big announcement there. No, I think that was this month, wasn't it, Q&A? It was indeed, yeah, yeah, so that was the big news. Yeah, so the news that Antimus referred to is that I start work for Passport, that's product-to-sport leads, this month they come in from enough.

So yeah, really excited to join the team over there and help her to drive things forward. I think, aside from my newly-found bias, I do think they've got a really beautiful product that's easy to use.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to getting started with them and to help her get more keys into more hands, I guess. The software update this time, the beta version 1.0.7, is that they've added support for Spectre Wallet, obviously one of the most popular desktop wallets in the space, so good to know that

they've got support for Passport within that as well, and they've also added support for TestNet for those of us that like to break things and like to dip their toes in the TestNet first, it's a good option to help.

Yeah, next big ones, we're also in Ronin Dojo, Samurai, I think they updated the logic behind pin entry, but I saw there was quite a bit of discussion on that, but that was, I think in the last month, you probably have quite a bit more info on that part.

Yeah, so somebody came out, I forget who it was now, and that shared that there was a, again, I'm using an air quotes here, a vulnerability whereby the six to eight digit pin on Samurai can be brute-forced after, I think it was something like 100 hours or something of continuous triangular.

Oh, I think it was a lot more than 100 hours, I think it was 100 days, if I remember. Yeah, you might be right, actually. So yeah, so for 100 days of continual brute-forcing from a fairly powerful computer, you could break through a six to eight digit pin code, which isn't strictly a sort of samurai

vulnerability, it's true of any pin numbers of that sort of length, bit of a nothing-burger from being honest in terms of it. 100 days. Yeah, well, remembering that this is on a phone that's been unlocked as well, so if you're following sort of best practices and you're putting a good strong password on your

phone, maybe not using your fingerprint to unlock your phone as well, that's what you need to practice, that you've got to bypass that to even get to be able to try this vulnerability as well.

So they have made an improvement there as well, so. So just to break it down, essentially for this vulnerability to be a taking advantage of, somebody would have had to steal your phone out of your hand while it was unlocked, then spend up to 100 days with it plugged into a computer, continuously trying the pin while

you sat there and did absolutely nothing to swing your funds to another wallet, knowing that your phone's just been snapped out of your hand for this attack to actually be fruitful for the attacker.

So again, like I said, a bit of a nothing-burger, but the guys have responded and changed the pin entry time out slightly as well, just to sort of prolong the attack period required, I guess.

It might sound stupid, but it's also quite nice to hear people worrying to this level, like they're worrying past what's really likely to happen. It makes me more confident that if this is the best that people can attack with, then it's pretty fucking secure.

Yeah, and at least you've now been informed as part of this, that you understand what the risk is of it, and then if you want to make a decision to not use it for yourself, then you can consider yourself better informed.

Can you use the longer picture? Could you use like, if it's six and it's 100 hours, well, if you use a digit, then isn't that going to be... So my memory, I can't quite remember what they performed the analysis on, but I think it's I think Q, I think before you said six digits, I think it's five to eight digits.

Right. So eight being the most, my mind is set to eight digits, if you will. Don't ask for a person. There was a couple of criticisms with this, as to why Samurai didn't implement like an actual password.

I'm not speaking for the devs here because I haven't heard them say this, but my initial thought to that was, well, the likelihood is that the user is, most users are lazy, and they're going to just use the passphrase that they created when they created the Samurai wallet.

So again, in terms of you're probably losing more security than you're actually gaining by feeling like you've got a longer password to get into the wallet because most people are going to use the same one, rather than remember a really long secure passphrase and a really long secure password just to get into the app as well.

Yeah, certainly, or even mix up the two, you know, there's a support often receive emails as to, you know, I've lost my Bitcoin. Obviously, with Samurai, you need 12 words plus a passphrase, and so if you're mixing up your passphrase, which is used to generate your private keys, if you've mixed that up

with the password you used to log onto the app, then I think, you know, there's this sort of trade off with UX flow and support tickets, there's also to be considered as well. So while I haven't conversed with the Samurai team on this directly, I think there was a

lot of considerations which which went into to sort of deal with this sort of, what would you call it, release of declaration and attack, vulnerability. So they decided to, I think it's the logout attempts on the pin, if I'm rightly right, I'm saying change the way that's managed.

Yeah, I was one of the ones who jumped into the discussion and I was also advocating for the option to have a passphrase or a password, but that argument definitely, I can definitely see with the support tickets and having three different things to back up and to kind of manage.

I think that is for a lot of people, I think at some point you kind of do, when you know your way around the app and you've used it for a long time and you've kind of got your setup all done, you take it a bit for granted, but I think just like the beginning it can

be pretty overwhelming and they see it live, the support tickets that come in, the people that have locked themselves out and that obviously was an additional hurdle. There's two other ways to look at this as well is that ultimately Samurai is a foam wallet.

So if you're using Samurai for your cold storage, then you shouldn't be carrying that round with you so that somebody is going to be able to snatch it off from you anyway. And if you are carrying a foam wallet around with you on your day-to-day phone, then just don't have any significant amounts of Bitcoin on it as simple as that.

Absolutely. Yeah, seat designer, V0.4.4, it was also a big one that was on TFTC as well, had a good little explainer there last month, went through everything in detail, that was really insightful.

But here last month they brought out quite a few things that they were talking about there as well. Yeah, do you want to jump in there? I think it's definitely worth mentioning here that they've been putting on a lot of development into seed sina and certainly the first I heard of it in the, I think they're on citadel dispatch with Matt.

Oh, that was it. Yeah. And I think they're talking about generating private keys from taking photos using the camera on the seed sina. Exactly. Yeah. There was, so you have a small camera on the back of the seed sina and you can, to generate your seed, you can basically direct it anything.

You want in your surroundings and it will use that to derive your entropy for your seed. And that, I mean, it's pretty, pretty neat feature. And from the way they explain it and the tests they've done, it's pretty difficult to reproduce

that as, yeah, one, one changed one different pixel in the photo will result in a completely different seed. So, yeah, that's definitely a core feature. So just for my, to humour me, prior to this feature was there a way to get your seed sina

to generate a 24-word seed or was it always inputted externally using a different device to generate the seed? I think it's honestly, do you pick them out of, he would cut them out and then put them into a bowl and then cut, wasn't it?

Yeah. So bring your own entropy device so you can do them the way Max has just described there, where you can cut all of the 2000 and whatever words it is out of the bit 39 list or you can, it's got a dice roll entry method as well or as, but as I just said now, they've got the photo option as well.

So there's three different ways of generating the seed, aside from, you know, using another device like a core card or something like that that you can bring your seed with you as well. And you can generate it using the device you couldn't just like you could on a lateral core card.

Yeah. But you had to bring your own entropy. Okay. Yeah. So this is quite a quick setup feature then you can sort of take a photo and, you know, be confident in that, that the photo you've taken be it that, you know, you've got so different pixels on the screen, which I think from what I've heard are, by all, each pixel

is RGB as well. So I think it's, is it two, five, six by two, five, six camera. Don't quote me on that. You know, many different combinations. That sounds, that sounds pretty good, quite, quite easy to get into.

The only sort of tin foil hat response I've got to, I suppose, is obviously if you were to take a photo and it spits out of seed, aside from delving into the code base, how do you sort of verify that that photo equals the, you know, the corresponding seed, I guess,

because it's not like you could do that again on a different device because you can't take the same photo twice due to lighting and anything like that. So how do you ensure that seed A is the right one generated based on the, the composition of that photo, I guess.

I'm probably going to get shot down for that by somebody commenting on this saying, well, this is the reason why I bought just off the top of my head. It's just something, it's just a, a consideration, maybe it would be nice to, and I apologize because I'm not really

looked into this release note, but it would be nice to sort of take, take the photo in addition to added entropy. So adding extra sort of dice rolls on top of that photo or something like that just, you can add a passphrase though, can you? Yeah, you can. Yeah. And you

can obviously then also add additional entropy. But, but what I don't know if you could, but I mean, even if you would, you wouldn't solve the problem of not being able to verify the, the photo being the source of the entropy. Because I mean, that's kind of the trade off,

isn't it? I mean, because if you could store or save the, the photo to be able to reproduce it, you're basically storing the, that source, which you don't actually want to have stored. I mean, that's like with the, with the open dimes, you can like drag folders in and, or

I like images and files to generate that entropy. And there you can, I think, reproduce that. Kind of. I mean, that's, or is there an additional source there as well? Because I always thought it was, it was weird having photos on my laptop that could reproduce the exact--

When it opens up, I mean. Yeah. No, I believe with open dimes, it isn't just your, it isn't just the photos, for example, if you were to drag them into, to create it, that it uses to create that public private address, power keeper. I think that the open dime also has

within it a way of generating a seed, or not in this instance, but an address and private key. And you're adding entropy to that by dragging photos. So I don't think it's quite reliant on just your photos. I don't think you'd be able to take two open dimes, for example,

exactly the same photos onto them and generate the same same address and private key. What about if you had on a seed sign there, if you had, you take the photo, you obviously don't want a copy of that on your computer, but because it's air gapped, would there be

a way of having it so that you could like pass that to another seed? So if you had like two seed signers, put down to like a micro SD card, shuffle that across to a second one and then verify that it comes up with the same one both. That's interesting. I suppose, what are you

solving there that because both seed signers will be running the same code anyway? They're just being used to generate your 24 words, isn't it? It's just verifying. I guess I'm not a coder, sorry. Or is there another device like a specs DIY or like a passport or something

like that, that you could run the same, you could do the same on both devices and see if it came up and they have different code bases and then it would be unlikely that both they're going to throw you out fluff. I don't know. I suppose in theory. That's coming from

the least technical man in Bitcoin. I'm fucking idiot. So in all that, Max is looking at me into an ego and what, yeah, I've got to do it all the time, is it? Yeah, sharp Max. Yeah, okay. No, you, but you could, you could, you know, if the, if the, another device implemented

the Senko base, let's say we didn't, you didn't take a photo on the seed signer as such. Theoretically, if you had a photo and a way to verify it between two devices, that would be the perfect method of doing it, wouldn't it? Yeah. Being able to verify the seed generation from the

same photo. Yeah. But I think in this instance, seed signer, it's sort of capture a photo, generate a seed in one instance. Yeah. And then as soon as you pull the, I think for a member correctly, it's stateless. Yeah. As soon as you pull the, the, the, the power on, on

the device or at least, but it's even then or after you've taken the photo, that photo is raised from memory anyway. Yeah. So there is no way to take the photo off the device after. So it's sort of, in, in that respect, it's, I think, you know, really, really great,

certainly from a security perspective, but then, you know, getting into the weeds a bit, you know, speed wise as well though, like it's all trade offs and like, it seems like it'd be really quick to do it. Like it seems really good and quick. It's like, if you compare

that to just trusting like a ledger or a treasure to generate your seed, there's still an animal of trust, but obviously it's like quick, you just got to take a photo and you do it. Whereas when I set out my coal card, I did like 200 fucking individual lifestyles. I didn't buy

the, the pack, like I know you can buy the pack now, but that took forever to like hours for me to mess around with that. So I get, yeah, there's the trade off really. You feel a bit more involved as well, don't you feel like it's instead of sort of relying on the

device to generate the seed. I mean, you hit, press this button to generate new seed. You feel a bit more involved by taking a photo and doing it for you that way. Mm hmm. But on that note, um, here also in the, in the release notes, they say, persistent settings

with seed signer reset option. So they have introduced some kind of persistent settings. So some kind of storage, um, I don't know, I kind of imagine it a bit like the, uh, tails having that, I mean, that obviously, um, have a, a larger storage portion. But here having

some kind of settings that you can save on the seed sign up. I'm not, I'm very, I don't think that's anything seed related. I think that's, um, more for wallet compatibility. So you can save the fact that you want to, you want to operate with a, say, specter or

blue wallet, um, that require PSBT in slightly different formats. I think that's what you can save. I don't think there's anything seed related. So you don't have to go back into the settings and then say, Oh, I want this type of, you can just sort of do set your

presets. Yeah. And then when you're firing back up, it's where you have done. Okay. Um, yeah, Trezza, they've, um, brought out Spanish language. That's probably fitting now last month with, uh, El Salvador coming out there, bring one to, uh, widen their user base there

and zap, um, edition of native tour, which for me personally was, uh, huge. Um, up to now, uh, you always had to have it running over all but, uh, the tour, which is horrendous. It's the worst app on the planet. Oh man. So huge. We were talking about how bad all

but was about 15 minutes ago over a beer. And then do you want to, like, for the benefit of people who don't really, who've never used it, do you want to sort of explain the flow and explain the benefit of what having native tour means to zap? Yeah. So basically you,

um, have, well, if you, if you want to, um, have a nap or the traffic of a nap, uh, running over tour, uh, you need, uh, a tour connection that has to be built up. Um, and there is an app called all bot which, um, provides basically like a VPN app. Um, it provides, uh, this, uh,

tour access, uh, to any traffic, um, on your phone. And you can basically choose, uh, which apps should be, um, uh, routed, uh, via this, uh, all bot VPN, uh, through tour. And yeah, on the surface that sounds all, all fine. Uh, but it doesn't really work. That's the problem.

Um, like sometimes, I mean, like first the, the UI is, is pretty horrible and you gotta scroll through all your apps and you can, there are, the whole interaction is, is not great. Uh, and, uh, it's supposed to start up, um, on as soon as you start your phone

and supposed to stay on and then that doesn't really work. So I've had to, um, start and restart it, shut it down again every now and again. Sometimes it works a bit hit and miss. Um, yeah. So having native tour in, in a nap, uh, directly is a huge benefit. I mean, you

might have to, uh, wait for three, four, five seconds, uh, to let connect. Um, but having that all natively integrated is a huge benefit and makes everything so much smoother. And also means that you can connect to your lightning node from anywhere in the world, as well without needing to be on your home network, I guess.

Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. Um, up till now, I've been, uh, because I, I'm about like zap. Um, the most, uh, from all, um, like, uh, lightning wallets. Um, I've had zap, uh, for when I'm at home and Zeus for when I'm out and about. Um, which, uh, hasn't been great either, uh,

that combination of jumping backwards, uh, forward. So I'm, uh, really happy with that development. It's interesting is that I think we'll, we'll see more and more apps turn to tour. Um, because, you know, I think people are looking for a bit more privacy. Um, as they're walking around using these devices, obviously the benefit, you know,

using talk can be a bit slower, but the benefit you just highlighted there is that it means that you can use your, your app away from home, not on your home network. So it's those little, the benefits that sort of sell, sell us on these things rather than the negative sometimes.

So I hope that more out apps sort of turn to tour. Obviously it'd be in good for privacy as well, hiding your IP address. So your fingers crossed on that front. There's been a lot of talk about tools. There's issues with it, especially like recently, there was a load like changing from V2

to V3 and there's like attacks and stuff. Is it bollocks or is it like, and is there anything else? Cause from my understanding, it seems like other than the fact is a bit slow sometimes, it seems like everything should go over tour all the time. If you want privacy, but then it's like,

is that going to, if suddenly everyone tomorrow and I care about my privacy, let's just do everything through tour, is that going to mean because there's more people on it that it's going to be slower?

Or does it mean actually it's going to be faster because you have more connectivity, is it? Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I'm trying to say? Because you have like exudes and to my, to my understanding that the more people that go on to tour, uh, the slower it will be.

The slower it will be. So I've had conversations in the past where some, you know, someone might have been downloading a large file on tour and someone else has got annoyed because that might have been slowing down their tour connection. Oh, right. So that is. Yeah. Um, but you know,

that's why sort of this encouragement to sort of run your own tour, tour nodes. Um, and if possible, um, I'm guilty because I could admit that I don't run my own, um, run a tour exit node, uh, in certain, certain jurisdictions, you can't, you can't do so, um, for legal reasons. Um, but,

there seems to be a, you know, I think it's, it's the best, it's the best tool we have, um, to maintain privacy, uh, when, when browsing online, um, it has its trade-offs. I can't, I can't remember the other questions just now. Well, it was really, it was about like

slowing it down if everyone starts caring. So then my next question, my follow-up would be, if we really care about Bitcoin and we really care about privacy, should we not have it that all, or, or Bitcoin nodes have it as an option to be an exit node with

the flicker for switch? Uh, so, because if you said to me tomorrow, oh, the best thing to do is like run the tour exit node. I'd be like, yeah, cool. Fuck knows how to do that. I'm not going to sit and try and work it out. But if it was like on my mind node or my Ronin or whatever, and it was like

tick this and then it's going to do it, I'd be like, yeah, I'll do that because that's the, like, the right thing to do. Could we not have that as a bit of a pushing as everything in Bitcoin seems to rely heavily on tour that we give back a bit? I, to my knowledge, I don't believe there's

any, um, node implementation, which has a, a tour as an exit node available. I don't, could do it. Well, I, I don't know what the hardware requirements are. Um, however, most of these node packages run on really cheap hardware. So if it was anything more substantial than

rooting basic traffic, then you might run into issues. And there's also the other issue that brother mentioned about, depending on your jurisdiction, there are implications to run in an exit node as well. Um, what they are is kind of different across the world, I think, but I don't think

it's as simple as, like you say, just flicking the switches as nice as that would be, I guess. Um, yeah, not an easy one to fix. I don't see tours, the magic bullet, it's still sort of heavily centralized and not very sophisticated attack. Like we saw a couple of months ago, can bring

the network to his knees, which is a bit of a worry. Um, but we've got the latest release of Bitcoin call, which will probably be next month's, we'll go into it in depth in next month's in next. They've released support for I2P, which is like a, um, sort of, uh, tour, or tour, like,

but alternative network, uh, which I think is geared towards, um, sort of bridging that gap and providing an alternative. Um, I will do some homework before the next time we record to sort of, uh, know, sort of more, more of the ins and outs of that and the technicals about it.

Yeah. And just to remember the question you asked about, uh, Tor V2 and V3 addresses. Now, though my knowledge is, uh, lacks on the difference between the two, but Tor is migrating away from V2 addresses to V3. This is definitely something worth mentioning, just because, um, with any look,

any, any software you use, whether that be your, um, node software, in particular, I saw on the show notes today, we've got BISC. BISC uses at the moment V2 addresses. I'm told they're working heavily to implement V3 because I'm not quite sure on the date, but it's, um, sort of, sometimes

soon. I'm not too sure when, um, that V2 addresses will be done with and, uh, V3 addresses will be, you know, they're on out. Um, so yeah, if you're, if your software, software using isn't, isn't, uh, running V3 yet, well, um, you should start bugging them and pushing them to do so.

One thing, um, you can do, I mean, I think also that the exit nodes, um, is pretty heavy on, on the hardware, as Q&A said, but, um, one thing you can do is the browser add-on snowflake, which is pretty nice, um, that you can basically provide your, um, internet access to people around the world who

have, uh, talk connected connection, locked, um, so they can, uh, like, bridge through and use your access, uh, point, which is, which is pretty nice. And you can just, uh, install that as an add-on into your browser and toggle that on, um, and as long as you're online, people can bridge through.

It's kind of like you are a VPN service. They're using your IP rather than their own, is it? Or is it not that they're using your IP? I think so. Yeah. I think that's how it works. I'm not 100% sure, but that's how I understood it. Yeah. So can't we do something similar where,

fuck, I'm gonna ask so many stupid questions. Can we not do something where all Bitcoin nodes, we all have, like, a system where when someone wants to browse something, that it randomly selects any of the people who are part of this group of Bitcoin nodes, and then it routes traffic

through someone's random IP and we will have an agreement between each other to just have, like, a completely randomised link where anyone who's running a Bitcoin node would be able to support someone else. If, like, Q&A jumps on, then he would use brother rapids and if you jumped on,

then you'd use mine or whatever. And so it would always be randomised. It's kind of like a, uh, like, we're all part of, like, one syndicate that will help each other out. Or is that ideally, um, yeah, I mean, that would be, um, I'm not 100% sure how this works exactly. Um, I've got a

chart up here for the snowflake. Um, and I don't quite know how it, um, differs from, from being an exit node. Um, I'm not 100% sure, but that is basically how I understand it, that that is a network. And the people who do have free access to clear net and to tour, uh, can provide, um,

access to people, uh, in, in countries where they're blocked, um, and have, uh, limited access. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, uh, more or less, uh, the list of the, the updates, um, there are a few minor ones that we, we jumped on. Uh, but was there anything else you wanted

to talk about on the updates? I think that block stream mining ones worth a mention. Um, block stream have, uh, come out with, um, well, a couple of different sort of, uh, four rated to mine in the most noble of which is, um, essentially a, um, container with the

shitload of miners in it that they can, um, plonk onto, um, uh, well, anywhere they want, essentially the idea being that they would put that onto a, um, an area of stranded energy or an, an area where energy is, uh, the requirements are quite intermittent. Um, obviously they would

approach the, the energy provider to say that, uh, we know that, you know, on a, on a Sunday night that your power, your station is over producing by 300%. When you're doing that rather than waste it, we'll buy it off you at X amount and we'll power our miners. Um, we don't need you to, um,

to worry about anything to do with Bitcoin. You don't need to hold it. You don't need to touch it. What you need to do is sell us your energy, um, at whenever you don't need it and we'll buy it off you at this, uh, amount, um, which obviously solves, um, a massive problem for the energy

provider. Um, it depended on the type of energy they're either going to have to pay to waste that energy or they're just going to lose revenue by not being able to sell it. Whereas if blockchain come in, um, as a kind of buyer of last resort, I guess, to, to buy that when the energy provider

or producer, sorry, knows that they don't need it, then their revenue, um, is going to increase. So it's, it's a fairly new venture, but I think if this sort of, in theory, in my head, the model seems like a win-win for both parties and, and there's a model that should take off. I don't know

what your guys' thoughts are on it. I would think that it has to, that the peak time thing maybe wouldn't work. Like if, if it's like, oh, you've got very low usage between like, I don't know, two AM and six AM or something like that, it means that you'd only have those miners running for

that time at that price. I think what is more likely to, and obviously you have to invest in the hardware, getting the thing there, insurance on the thing, security on the thing, depreciation at the asset, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you'd, you'd have to want to be, you want to be running

these things 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which means that what's more likely is it would be stranded energy, but it would be stranded energy that is not used at all, they're overproducing, because they've built for five years ahead or whatever they've done. And there's loads of that,

like fuck loads of that, even in the UK, where you've got like, but then the other thing is you've got, say it's solar or wind, you've still got the same issue, which is in the nighttime, solar's not producing, or when the wind isn't blowing, then you're not producing, and then unless

you've got massive battery banks, there's nothing stored, so you can't run them 24 hours a day. So it would, like the places that it really seems to make sense is like Nat Gas, but then that's already kind of covered, you've got Steve Barber, you've got what Marty's

doing, you've got all these different things. So I don't know where they fit, there must be probably places with massive battery banks when they overproduce that, but I don't know. Yeah, I think like, stranded energy that's like entirely stranded, I think that that is a huge

opportunity, but then you have to kind of take up the whole endeavour yourself, because I think there are a lot of energy producers that are kind of in the middle, that do want to provide energy to consumers and they have takers, but just not around the clock.

And I think there is a place for miners to balance that out. I think I have one concern that I have heard of that people are researching into, and then probably a lot of development will have to be done, is that actually kicking them up and down, like starting them up and shutting them back down

again in short intervals actually reduces the lifespan considerably, and especially with thermal expansion and so on. The stress on the boards and the chips is pretty substantial, so no one quite

knows what that will look like and how much the lifespan will be reduced, but I think in the coming years they will be quite a lot of specialisation as well, of hardware for specific use cases.

At the moment there's a lot of like, basically one size fits all, and you kind of tailor it to your situation, but I think in the coming years we'll have more diversity there on the supply side of different machines that will be more efficient in different circumstances.

Yeah, I would think so. I just can't imagine you would, I can't imagine you do that with like below the S19 Pro's or M32S's or like a new hardware that's, you have to invest so much money to get these and get them set up and then you run them like four hours, five hours a day, I just I cannot

see where that could possibly work, even if even if you're getting the energy free or even if they're paying you to take the energy, you'd still lose money, so it would have to be, it would have to be like a continuum, but it doesn't mean that you know maybe they say, well you can have the energy

free or close to free between these hours, but you pay X amount the rest of the hours, so you it sort of evens out, maybe you could do something like that, and it maybe it could even be when energy producers are building something that isn't going to like for example like charging stations

for electric cars and things that aren't at the capacity yet, they put all the infrastructure in ready and then sign a contract for you for like three years time, saying that, well you only have it for this amount of time and then you move your units once we're at capacity and we need it for

the cars and it allows them to build out the infrastructure and get something rather than nothing, I could see that working. Is this block streams way of sort of trying to brand themselves like somewhat of a green company, you know we have in most recent years a lot of companies trying to

drive a sort of environmentally friendly policies and whatnot and buy sort of advertising service that they can rock up with a shipping container full of miners and actually give you something back from your wasted electricity that you know at least that wasted electricity isn't just going

to waste, so you know I don't know exactly who's going to use this sort of service or product, this sort of begs the question especially you know as if highlighted if they're only using a couple of hours a day, four hours a day you know everyone's going to sleep

what for six hours, is it going to be profitable or is it just going to be a little bit of more of a I don't know the publicity release? Well even if it is virtue signaling like as stupid as it is it all kind of works in our favor because at the moment we're all just a load

of like planet destroying drug treatments you know and so at least if we can virtue signal and say oh well we're using all this stranded energy and we're doing this you know people lap that up so it's good for Bitcoin I suppose. We'll see it sounds cool I mean it's interesting to see more

people into that space the whole mining thing is fascinating me at the moment. What struck me as weird is like this the size of the miners because I would have thought like the two extremes would be a lot more attractive like having like tiny miners like the size of nodes for people at home

basically just have the same efficiency but just being a lot more flexible and then for like industrial grade like have like huge machines and that size kind of always struck me so I think that was also something the once you start investing into a field like that and exploring

the opportunities and a product like that if they get it modular enough that it can be flexible and have a long enough lifespan I think I think it does have a place. I think the thing with mine just to come back to your point about having small devices to do is mine's an all or nothing

game you either find a block or you don't and to increase your likelihood of finding a block then you need to do more hashes and you can't do that on small hardware so I guess that's why they they got phased out years ago. Exactly yeah yeah that'll probably be in museums and for a lot.

Talking about I've got 20 other things. I think they're just to cap off an education piece that I wanted to show was the four-part OXT guy from the OXTT namely Ergo BTC he's done a four-part piece on understanding Bitcoin privacy where he talks about the sort of basic the core concepts

of sort of transactional level privacy the core concepts that chain analysis firms will use and then sort of mix or sort of adding some actionable steps as to what you can do and the tools that you can use to counteract those the tools that are used by chain analysis firms so yeah four-part

piece that probably take you just under an hour to read from start to finish but if you wanted to sort of get underneath the surface of improving your privacy it's a really good place to start. Yeah lots of lots of visuals on the guide as well aren't there so it's not it's not a sort

of death by death by words not more on peace but you know it gives you sort of good visuals to try and understand sort of the flows of different sort of Bitcoin heuristics and Ergo does a really good job of sort of breaking down sort of piece by piece as to you know where to start really.

And he was also on the pod with Stefano Vera speaking about it so for starters that's that's pretty good to a resource to jump in there and get both yeah depth there before jumping into the article I think it's pretty valuable. I think finally we we made a lot of use the opportunity

to to show our samurai guides brother do you want us to take us through what we've been doing? Yeah so with any luck this will this will Max has promised to be out in a couple of days so I said he's promised that if you heard that and so if you listen to this now on Sunday the

19th of September we've got the last of four sessions focused on an intro into samurai wallet so this Sunday the 19th will be covering dojo so check out a sort of samurai wallet telegram chat for that that's a live session streamed on telegram but today we've done three sessions on

samurai wallet sort of back to basics how to set up a samurai wallet you know how it all works what all the functions are week two we went through the samurai wallet spend tools so sort of leading on from the four part series of what Ergo did we gave a sort of a breakdown of each of the

different samurai wallet spending tools so if you want to start taking your bitcoin spending seriously bitcoin privacy spending seriously perhaps you should check out a session two and then the session we've just done session three was on folks on well pool so if you're whether you're a sort of a novice

or sort of you've been using well pool for a little while now we we've given over view of sort of getting to grips with the basics of doing a coin join on your mobile device through to running running well or cli on your note and working people do watch the working the catch up

so you can check it out on the samurai wallet youtube page or bitcoin tv.com did it all go smoothly oh don't not exactly we were we were played by technical issues yeah connection issues for on brothers part and hardware issues on my part where my computer decided to mock up some of the

local recorders so i had to do my best post production but i think we got there in there we've got something usable up there for people to catch up with i'll let you into secret for the last session which went quite well i was using my my neighbor's Wi-Fi he did know about it yeah i asked him for

like instead of code so maybe that was why it went so well was he converted you know he has no idea i like it any any other bits to cover no i think that's a that's a good ending point oh that's uh the important bits all right mate well um thanks for joining us this was very nice

it's nice to uh have four of us here i wish you were here joining us for a bit but um absolutely maybe next time exactly no thanks a lot thanks for having me here yeah next time uh we're having a few for you anyway mate i have some wonderful stuff looking forward to it all right but well uh yeah i promise i will uh tomorrow i'll get

straight on editing this and uh get it out as soon as possible so have a look at your next episode and uh yeah thanks everyone i appreciate it thank you cheers guys cheers