Bitcoin Monthly 0014 with black coffee and BQA

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. Alright, 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 space and deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is the monthly show. I'm sorry, it is a little bit late, but things have been crazy for Bitcoin Q&A, Antimus and me. Antimus wasn't able to make this episode so Black Coffee kind of be stepped in.

And we covered everything that's been happening over the last couple of months. The crazy stuff going on with Samurai and Wasabi. We also talked about the recent Bitcoin developer conference in London.

It was amazing. It was so good to catch up with Q&A, Black Coffee, and many others that I don't want to dox. It was an incredible event and it was really amazing just to see up close just how early we are.

If you get a chance to go next year, I highly recommend it. It is pure signal, no noise. Before we start, I just want to say thanks to all of you who've been sending me saps by the podcasting 2.0 apps, and I really appreciate the personal messages that come along with them.

It's really good to see the new FUDBUSTER shows and the bite-size Bitcoin shows are being received well. I've had a few messages about them and people sharing them with family and friends.

That's exactly what I wanted. So thank you for doing that and I'm really happy you like them. I also want to thank my incredible sponsors. First up, FastBitcoins. FastBitcoins were there at the conference.

They sponsored it and it was really good to meet the team properly. I'd met Danny obviously previously, but what an awesome team and they have a real vision of what they want to create going forward.

It was really nice to see just how excited they were about some of the upcoming developments on Bitcoin and the things that they're bringing to the table. Everyone knows I constantly bash on the KYC services, but these guys really are awesome.

And if you are going to hand over your personal details, you really need to make sure it is going to people who care about privacy and security and will do all they can to protect you. So go to FastBitcoins.com and check them out today.

Next up, we have Casa. Casa has been sponsoring this show for about six months now and I'm very happy to have them on board. One of the reasons I particularly wanted to work with Casa is because you can sign up as a NIM.

You don't have to give them your personal details, which means like we're seeing today, if you do have a security breach, a data leak, then it's not so much of an issue for those users. I always suggest to people signing up to Casa to use a new burner email and to have pre-mixed coins to send in there.

And then you can still enjoy collaborative custody. You can still get all the benefits, but you don't have that risk. So if anyone would like to check this out, you can go to keys.casa and you can use the code bit by bit 10 to get 10% off.

And if you have any questions of how to do this, you can reach out to me and I will happily help. And finally, we have foundation devices. I won't go into all the details right now because Bitcoin Q&A explains a little bit in this show.

And I also have a new episode coming next with Bitcoin Q&A and ZAC, their CEO. All I will say is go to their website if you haven't already and look at this absolute beauty. Go to foundation devices.com and go and have a look.

I'm pretty sure you're gonna end up ordering one once you've seen it. So if you would like $10 off your purchase, you can use my code bit by bit and you can reach out to me if you have any questions.

I really hope you enjoy the show. Hello mate, sorry, slight delay there. It takes a while with the software, how are you? I'm not bad thanks, how are you? Very good, it was nice to see you the other day.

Oh yeah, it's cool, isn't it? It was just meeting people in person. Totally different. Yeah, definitely is, definitely is. A good pub session. It went on longer than it should have. What time did you guys finish in the end?

It was after midnight, which is very late for me. (laughs) Yeah, I wish I could have stayed actually. Where did you go somewhere nice afterwards or if it was spoons forever? We didn't stay in there.

I don't know if it went somewhere nice. I don't know Q&A's thought somewhere that it was a nice place to be on that way. It was okay. Oh here he is. How's it going guys? Not bad thanks. Not bad thanks.

In my opinion on what, whether what was a nice place? After we left spoons the other day, we went onto that pub, whether it was a decent pub. Oh yeah, it was alright, yeah. It was a nice little hole up in the middle of the city.

It was, they served Guinness, so I was happy. (laughs) Yeah, that's why you leave it. (laughs) Very nice, but yeah, it was nice to catch up with both. Oh, fucking out, sorry, is that my dog?

Yeah, and that was really nice to be there and see sort of ground level everything that's going on and the developments that are going on, because like, it's different. You sort of get accustomed to it or used to it when you're seeing things online and everything that's going on and all the things being built.

But when you're actually in the room with people, it's just totally different. Oh yeah, totally. I mean, this is the first Bitcoin conference I've been to. And you know, so it streams the deep end pretty gnarly technical stuff going on.

But it's just so good, just getting to speak to people, you know? And you know, you go into some of these presentations and come out sort of having understood half of it, if you're lucky, but it's good.

It's so worth doing. That's very good going half of it. I think maybe I was at about 10% (laughs) but yeah, it was really, how did the next day go? 'Cause you were doing a presentation, did that all go smoothly?

Yeah, I think it went pretty well. Q&A was sitting in on one of them, so again, his opinion is probably more valid than mine. Yeah, it was good. So I was helping Ben Ark out with some workshops he was running, he was doing the presentations.

I was just sort of, I was the man on the ground, he wasn't able to make it in person. Yeah, they went pretty well, I think. Yeah, I thought it was great. I learned a lot and we built a Bitcoin point of sale from like coffee left to help me out here with the hardware that's involved, but it's based off, it uses Ben Ark's LN bits,

like sort of a counting system as a backend. You know, obviously the default is his custodial one, which isn't, well, it's great for onboarding, but it's an ideal and then you can connect it to your own LN bits if you're on one on your own node.

But yeah, what was the hardware that we use it? It's an ESP32 with an integrate display on that board and then got a nice little sort of pressy keypad made by a company called Liliga. And it's exactly that, really, what you say.

It's been rebranded to move away from the shitcoin, which is Bitcoin, POS. Ben's gone for LN, POS now, which I think is probably a good choice. Yeah, I like it. So what it enables is a user to generate lightning invoices back by your own node.

That's obviously you need an internet connection for that so you can tether it to your phone or to the Wi-Fi, wherever you've got this point of sale system. You can give it an expo so that you can receive online.

On-chain payments, it'll generate a fresh address each time and the little screen just displays a QR code. You can do LN URL payments, which is the offline, well, the device is offline and it's got a secret held within the put of sale system that enables it to show a QR code,

which gives the payer a kind of a route to your node, which is always on and sat at home running over tour or whatever, so that it gives them a route so that they can generate a fresh invoice each time.

And the final one is like LN URL withdrawal, which is like the ATM feature, so you could actually sell Sats for fiat if you're that way inclined using this point of sale system or do refunds if you're a merchant.

So it's a really, I've been really, really impressed with it. Don't get me wrong, it's very much in like hack-a-man stage at the moment with cheap hardware that's easy to obtain that you do have to hack around a bit and Black Coffee will be the first one to say that I've been flooding his DMs with questions

in the last couple of weeks since the conference. But it's really powerful. I don't know if I've missed any of the sort of features of their Black Coffee or whether I've even done it justice, but I think-- - No, I think you've got a spot on them.

- Yeah, I think as the UI around it improves and the setup of the actual device itself is still very, there is some developers in that room that are far cleverer than I that were, that had a couple of head scratchy moments when you were doing the workshop.

I don't think that's any reflection on you. I think it's just a reflection of where the tool ends up currently. But you know, as this sort of stuff evolves, I think it's gonna be a really powerful tool within the tool chest of a sovereign Bitcoin that wants to host their own store or wants to back it by their own node.

The one, and we've probed out into the weeds very quickly here, but the one head scratch that I can't get around that hopefully maybe somebody listening to this might be able to slide into my DMs and help me fix is the LNURL feature doesn't work over tour.

Is that right, Black Coffee? - It should do. Things are moving fast on this all the time that there's changes in LN bits going on. There's changes to the code. I found quite a few times that things are breaking.

It may be just something like that. It should work. I mean, I've had it running over tour, no issue. - I'll go back to the drawing board, but one takeaway that anybody that's listening to this, if you do run your own node, all of the lightning-enabled nodes have LN bits on it.

So I would urge you to have a play around with it. There's loads of different extensions for different purposes. I've just touched on a couple of them, but it's a really powerful talk if you're wanting to sort of delve in with lightning and look into taking payments or even if it's just donations or stuff like that.

It's a good bit of kit. - Cheap to make as well, isn't it? Did you save like 40 quid or something like that to me? - It's even less than that. That's what I was going to be doing. - Oh, is it?

- Yeah, I mean, there's three versions of it. There's M5 stack version, which comes on. M5 stack sort of quite nicely packaged up. Bit of hardware. You get a screen and then you can slap on a little keyboard onto it and it looks great.

That's probably like a 50 quid. But then there's two other versions and you can probably build one for $15, even less actually. There's a bare-burned version, which is like $10. So in some places where people don't have a lot of income, but want to be able to take lightning payments easily

and issue these invoices without an internet connection, it's perfect, I think. - I think the utopia for me would be, you buy this pre-made device, you power it up and it creates a local web server that you can access in your internet browser on your phone, which I know Black Coffee you tease with me is in the works.

And you could just go onto that, it's a really simple web interface and just put in your credentials for your node, just copy and paste stuff, or even potentially scan it with QR codes and then you're up and running.

That, if we can get to that sort of stage where that's the onboarding flow and then you've got like a little put-sale system there that's connected directly to your own nodes that you can take on chain or off-chain payments.

And you can do that within like 10 or 15 minutes. That's the utopia for me. And it doesn't feel like we're a million miles away from it. - No, not at all, and I've got a branch that needs merging into the main repo that has some of this QR code for the initial setup.

Just waiting to be merged in really. - That's really cool. And so the big benefit of this, or one of the big benefits is the offline option. So presumably if people don't have internet connection or struggle with that sort of stuff, like they can still take these payments and then you have a certain amount of addresses

that are already sort of ready from the X-pop or something like that, is it? Or how does that work? - You're talking about lightning or on-chain? - On-chain. It does both, right? - It does, yeah.

So if you're doing an on-chain transaction, you've got the X-pop on the device and it'll just, the device just iterates through the X-pop to generate new addresses. We looked at the code in the pub actually.

Quite interesting things to do. - Yeah, I saw it. It didn't mean much to me. - Plus one. Plus one every time. And then the offline lightning stuff. So someone needs an internet connection.

So if the device is offline and it's generating this invoice for someone to pay, the person with their mobile phone has to be online, they make the payment. When the payment's completed, they get a link off to a webpage.

On that webpage, they get a pin code displayed. The vendor who's got the point of sale device presses the star key. They get a pin code displayed, compare it against the purchases pin code, if they're the same sort of confirmation that that payment's been completed successfully.

- The question I've got, you know that that whole pin flow. Is that just so that the offline vendor knows that the payment has been confirmed? - Yes, that's correct. So when you set up this device in Ellen Bitts, there's a secret in Ellen Bitts and there's a secret on the device.

So the device encrypts this. The device generates the number, like one, two, three, four, encrypts it, sends it, or it's in that QR code that gets scanned by the device. Then when the payment's made, Ellen Bitts decrypts and shares that back with the purchases, they've both got that pin code.

- So I guess this is kind of to remove the trust of, you know, the payer standing in front of you and showing you what looks like a confirmed payment screen and you're not knowing whether it is or it isn't.

- Yeah, got it. - Nice. Well, this is a little bit of a different show. I didn't really do an intro, but obviously we normally have animus with us. Black coffee is kindly stepped in. So it's gonna be a bit of a different flow 'cause we normally go through all the software updates and have some structure, but this is gonna be a bit looser.

We've gone straight into the weeds here. Maybe let's go through some of the stuff that's happened in the last month outside of the conference as well. There's been lots going on and there's loads of stuff I wanted to pick both your brains on.

So what's at the top of everyone's minds at the moment? - I think for me, one of the exciting releases is Robosatz. Has anybody heard about this? - Yeah. - So the TLDR is that it's essentially a tall, based, pit-to-peer Bitcoin trading market where you can go from fiat to Bitcoin or Bitcoin to fiat.

You can go on there just like you can on Bisc or HODL HODL and create a buy order or go and take somebody else's buy order. So there'll be like a message board and it'll be, this person is selling 100,000 SATs and they are selling it for a 1% premium over the spot price.

It's all based on lightning network. There's no on-chain, I think. It's all lightning based and it uses something called HODL invoices which I know at a very high level is a kind of rudimentary escrow system that works on the lightning network.

So that there is some mitigation there that just like you have in Bisc and HODL HODL where there's mitigations in there so that the seller can't sort of run away with your fiat and then never send you the Bitcoin.

There is like an arbitration process. It's, you know, it works very similar but it's purely based on a tour hidden service. So somebody's presumably hosting this at home, you know, on a server that they've got at home and they didn't want to expose their IP address which I think is really cool.

It uses the, you know, if you log on to the, into the website, I say log on, you don't actually need, there's no personal information, of course. When you go in, you'll be given sort of an ID and these IDs, I think, well, it looks like they use the same algorithm to generate the sort of avatars as the Samurai while it does

'cause there's loads of, you'll get sort of your own robot picture when you sign on. These can be single use if you want to. So every time you revisit the site, you'll be given a fresh one or you'll be given a secret so that you can kind of reuse the same address, not address, reuse the same online ID

so that you can start to build up a bit of a reputation, you know, if you're gonna be doing lots more trades. And really promising, I haven't tried it yet because there's the liquidity, well, two reasons, number one, the liquidity's fairly low 'cause it's a new service.

People are just trying out with really small amounts, which is understandable. And the second reason was that, although the liquidity's low, there's not many payment options that are available to me personally at the moment.

A lot of it's kind of US-based or there's not sort of, you know, I'm a big fan of like revenue and things like that and there's not that much liquidity for that. And keeping my eye on the seller's board just to see if there's any that pop up within my sort of price range and whatnot so I can test it out.

But it looks really promising. I spoke to a few people who have used it. So I think it's just, again, another great option to add and I just hope that it continues its early success and that the liquidity pool continues to grow.

- Did I see Amazon gift cards as an option for payment or am I making that up? - Yeah, absolutely. I think the payment options can be literally anything. It's just reliant on the seller. So the person who wants to sell some Bitcoin dictated what payment method they want to take essentially.

So yeah, I've definitely seen a couple of Amazon gift card orders there as well. So obviously a really private way to purchase Bitcoin, you know, you go to Amazon, you buy a $100 gift card and then you sort of send that code over to the seller and they send you the Bitcoin.

You know, you don't even need to exchange bank details with that one person, which is always kind of a tiny little bit of a sticking point with peer-to-peer markets if you want to access like the global market.

- I don't even think it's a tiny little sticking point. I think it's a massive sticking point. Like I think personally that that's a bit underestimated how much of a problem that could be because if I was wanting to gather information on Bitcoiners, I'd probably lurk on Bisk and these kind of places

and probably do a few trades and then I have their details and then I'd try and track them and build up a kind of picture of who they are and who they interact with. Like it seems that that would be a pretty useful way of trying to infiltrate and learn more about the Bitcoin community and who's using it.

And for what? Obviously it's better generally to do that and there's going to be a lot of good actors. It'd be better to do that than go to like, you know, Coinbase or something like that.

But I think if you can cut out that risk using gift cards and it seems like gift cards like certainly here in the UK, they've got like this all for one gift card where you can like literally you can go pretty much everywhere.

It's like Tesco's Nargos and all the different, you know, normal retail shops that you would visit. And so if you can exchange gift cards with that or with Amazon or anything else, you will just go and buy your petrol or go and buy whatever it is you need to buy.

And it cuts out that whole attack vector, I guess. So if like there's someone sat in the middle gathering data. - Yeah, I think it's, you're absolutely right in what you're saying. It's definitely a marked improvement over using the centralized exchange.

Obviously because you're showing it with one person who, in all likelihood is probably another privacy preserving or privacy respecting user because, you know, there's either there's two reasons that they're going to be on BISC or Huddle Huddle or Robosatz is that they want to sell privately,

presumably because they don't want people to know they're selling Bitcoin for the obvious reasons. Or they're a spook and they're following the reasons that you've just outlined as well. Ultimately, you'll never know until something comes to bite you in the arse, but it's still better than sent

sharing your details with somebody who you know is in bed with the government. - Oh yeah, 100%. Like I don't want that to put people off. I'm just thinking like, you know, it is, you have to think critically and think about these things.

And so I'd say like, if that is a payment option to use Amazon gift cards or whichever other gift cards, like I'd like to see more of that because it seems like that cuts out a huge amount of problems that like you say you don't know, you could think everything's fine.

And then 10 years down the road, you get a knock at your door and you think, fuck, why didn't I just use a gift card? Why didn't I do it for cash? Like I've tried to do everything right. I tried to do everything as privately as possible and I've still got stung.

So yeah, I don't know. It's something to think about, I guess. - Yeah, just to put it into perspective as to how early this Robosatz tool is, I've just logged on while we've been talking.

There's three sell offers where you can go on and buy Bitcoin for that on the whole marketplace. One is for a hundred euros, which is via Revolut for a 10% premium. Another one is for 10 euros.

Another one from Revolut, which is 15% premium. And then there's $100, which is a 6% premium and they accept Amazon Strike or Zell. So that's it for the whole marketplace. So very early days yet, but so if you're gonna test it, go on and do it for small amounts and just see how it goes.

- I think it's so promising though. Being able to access this sort of thing through a web browser versus, you know, if you run Bisc on a desktop, you have to leave it running. It's, it can be a bit of a resource hog.

I wanna see that. - You need 17 fans pointing at your laptop so it's blah, blah. - Yeah, it definitely runs hot. It's been a while since I've run Bisc, but my laptop sounded like it was going to die on me every time that I fired it up.

And also like, you know, with all this talk of people who are saying, oh, you know, they want yield and all this sort of stuff. It's like, well, I'm thinking just through this robo-sats thing and there is obviously a premium on there as there probably should be because people want to be private and that comes at a cost.

But if someone wants to sit in the middle and like buy and sell, I could see that being like quite a profitable business. If someone sort of provides the liquidity on there rather than fucking around with like routing fees or any of the other sort of hair-brained ideas, not hair-brained ideas, but like very, very low yielding ideas

that still have some risk. Like, do you not see that this could be a nice place for someone to sit and earn a few sats? - Yeah, I think you're onto something there. The only thing to consider is that whilst running a routing node on the Lightning network, you know, if you've sort of, you know what you're doing

in terms of setting up your channels and balancing, you can kind of, that's sort of fairly passive once you've got things set up. So you can kind of set it and forget it and just check it, you know, maybe once a day if that whereas, you know, if you're doing lots of trades on something like robo-sats, then that's very interactive.

You need to confirm payments. You need to send Bitcoin payments. It's all a manual process. So it's, you know, there's definitely potential effort to make some money off it, but it's a lot more work than doing, you know, being a maker on a joint market or trying to make some money off using a routing and a Lightning network.

- You're right. Yeah, and also because it's lower amounts, you know, if someone sat there and they're getting 10% on, you know, a couple of grand, then, then lovely, jubbly. But if someone's doing like a $20 payment and they're making 5% and they're doing a load of those a day, like, it's not going to be particularly like,

worth most people's while. So I guess that's going to be, well, I don't know. I guess there's no reason that you can't have larger amounts just because it's early. - I don't know whether they've imposed the limit on it because it's so early days or not.

Maybe that is the case, I'm not sure. While we're sort of on the sort of privacy piece, did you see the news that came out yesterday about the data leak with on-chain capital? Well, I say with on-chain capital.

It's with a third party that on-chain capital uses for their email marketing called, what they called, what they called, active campaign. So it's obviously like, let's say, a third party marketing campaign that on-chain capital used to do some of their sort of marketing and whatnot.

They've had, I don't know whether they've been hacked or whether it was a social engineering thing, but names, email addresses, usernames, IP addresses, all been leaked. Which for a marketing thing doesn't seem that catastrophic.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a good thing. The kicker here, the worst one is whether or not that user has an active account with on-chain capital, i.e., have they got probably a significant amount of Bitcoin in a vault secured by, well, collaboratively with on-chain and with themselves, it's a collaborative custody.

So essentially painting sort of target on the names of these people to say that this person's definitely got Bitcoin and they're using on-chain capital, which don't get me wrong is probably from a security perspective is additive in terms of, the likelihood is that the user won't have the single key that's protecting their Bitcoin,

that it's gonna be much harder to attack, but that doesn't make you any less of a target, unfortunately. So now that I work at a startup company in Bitcoin that deals with information similar to this, this is the absolute stuff of nightmares from a company perspective.

So it's really unfortunate that, although this looks terrible on on-chain capital, it wasn't actually directly their fault. It's sort of a third party that they've chosen to work with. So they are somewhat culpable, but just another stark reminder, I guess of being really, really careful who you share your information with,

and even if it's something as trivial as opting out of email marketing, that might have saved you from being on this list that's probably gonna be circulated fairly quickly on the dot net forums.

- And this isn't the first time this has happened, is it where customer data has been hacked through from a marketing platform? I think the same thing happened with Ledger. - Yeah, it happens all too often, unfortunately.

It's a really difficult one. From a company perspective, because especially startups that don't, they might not even have a marketing department that use external companies, there's a lot of trust that you're putting into that third party with potentially some fairly damning information as we've seen in this case.

So I think, yeah, well, again, it comes down to the user, just you've just gotta be really careful who you share your information and your data with, be very, very selective. I just hope that, go on.

- I was just gonna wondering, do they have the option for people to use a NIMM? So like, what I always suggest with CASA, 'cause obviously they're one of my sponsors, anyone who like friends and family who are setting up and they buy a reasonable amount and I don't really want them to only have one key

or don't wanna fully trust them to do everything. I'll sign them up with a NIMM and I'll make sure that everything is post-mix that goes in there and they have a separate email address and they run a VPN.

So they don't have the data on who they are. They don't have the data on their email address or their real name or anything like that. So even if there is a leak, they're a little bit protected, but I don't know if that's just a feature that CASA allows or if that's something that Unchained allows, but if it is something that they allow,

then probably that's something for people to consider 'cause it's not that difficult to mask those things and it adds just so much more protection. - Yeah, I don't think Unchained offers the pseudonymous sign-up that CASA does and I think a limitation with, even with the CASA one is I think you can only do

the lowest tier, the gold, I think if you've got any form of significant wealth and you use the higher tiers, one of the prerequisites there is that they have a video set up session with you and any large transactions have to be authorized by a video chat to double check that there isn't somebody in a Balaclava stub

behind you with a knife to your neck. So don't get me wrong, that's a great idea, but if you want to do this privately, it's there's a CASA 22 system there. But yeah, I don't think Unchained capital offer the private bit, I think they do sort of some form of KYC with everybody.

- Right, yeah, I mean, like you said, you can't do anything past gold, but you pay first, you pay a lot more for that service like concierge service and the video calls and all that kind of stuff.

And secondly, yeah, they can't, they can't do all of that without your details, but that's kind of why I suggest it to people. It's just, you know, start with a gold membership and, you know, go through all those little hurdles, like setting up a new email address and running a VPN and making sure it's post mixed.

Like, it's not that hard, like when I set mine up, it took me an hour or two hours, like messing around doing it. And it's like, you know, the added protection is well worth it. So yeah, definitely, definitely something to consider for people who are going to use these sort of companies.

- Yeah, 100%. I think the problem is not many people, people don't see, you know, max.bitbybit@gmail.com. You know, first name, last name at insert, you know, email provider name here. They don't really see that as a threat, but, you know, when we're talking, you know, signups with country and capital or CASA,

even something trivial is using that sort of information. And we get a really, you know, as sort of privacy leaks go, this is probably on the more mellow side, but even just that single piece of information is enough for somebody to go Google into, you know, it wouldn't be a stretch for them to find out where you live.

And, you know, God, heaven forbid, you know, what could happen then, just from a simple email, 'cause you use your first name and your last name, it's a difficult one to try and get across the people that aren't sort of as entrenched in this space as we are.

- But how do we get around this? Because like both of you have to take details on customers because, you know, you're both selling products and services. I'm doing the same. If you then, you know, are taking these details and you want to do any type of marketing and you want to protect these people, obviously, like, how do we fix this?

Is it fixable or is it just down to user behavior and having to just drill into people to use burner emails and not give their real details? Like, how do we, how do we prevent this in the future?

- I think it's both, there's education, but there's also people operating these businesses maybe shouldn't be using these services. I mean, one of the things I've done with my business is just stop using MailChimp and delete the account.

And, you know, after someone orders something on my website or I delete their, you know, any details that they've sensed me after a period of time. But I mean, so many companies are using things like MailChimp or whatever the name of the one that I'm trying to be using.

I'm looking at emails now from Casa and they've come from MailChimp. I think that people need to learn, or these companies need to learn that there's solutions for having these marketing platforms on premise.

They don't have to be some third party service. It's, you know, it requires more work, but I think if it's going to avoid your customers getting hit with a spanner, it's probably worth doing.

- Yeah, Nail on the head there. I think education's a big one, you know, warning people when they're doing signups, if possible, without scaring them. And then, yeah, like Black Coffee just said, you know, customers, sorry, companies purging information regularly.

We, everything that we, all the information that we get from people doing orders on our online store, get to automatically purge 60 days after we ship, after we ship to them, just to give a little bit of a window for any returns or issues like that.

It automatically gets wiped from the server. So just little automations like that that can help. And again, like Black Coffee said, just being very selective as to, you know, if you're going to partner with somebody, what information they get to see.

And I do sympathize a little bit in terms of, you know, Black Coffee eludes to the fact that, you know, you can host all this stuff in-house, which yeah, completely agree with, absolutely possible.

And it's only ever getting easier as, as the open source ecosystem continues to flourish. The problem is, you know, if you're a small starter with, you know, five people and you're trying to crank out a product and you're working, you know, all the hours that God sends to you, to get the product to market, are you going to want to spend,

you know, even a small portion of that time building or hosting your own marketing service or whatnot, you're probably going to lean on the services that already exist, whether that's the right or the wrong decision, clearly sometimes in this, on chain capital cases, the wrong decision.

But I do sympathize with small startups or one-man-buns that might lean on services that already exist, but it's a tricky one and a fine line and you only ever hear about it when it goes wrong, don't you?

- Exactly. - Cool, we've got the UK Bitcoin cash points. What is going on there? I've seen loads of people tweeting about it. Half of them saying this is bullshit, it's not happening. Half of them saying it is, I've not really taken the time.

What is happening? So the FCA, the Financial Conduct Authority, which is kind of the UK version of, help me out here, guys, what are they called in the US? - It's for the SCC, isn't it? - No, I think it's a different one, but it's the financial relationship.

- It's the nosy twats in the government, basically, that stick their nose into, yeah, that stick their nose into-- - NTG. - Yeah, everything that you do and tell you that you can't do it and then their banker friends go and flaunt all those rules anyway.

The FCA has written to providers of cryptocurrency ATMs telling them to cease operations or face enforcement action. I think this stems from the fact that some of the ATMs are only asking for a phone number and an email address.

- Can confirm. - And apparently they've decided now, even though the regulation doesn't sort of stipulate what is actually required, they've decided that that's not enough and that you need to cease operation.

So it seems like very much a knee jerk reaction, but that's what governments do best. So whether they follow through with it, I don't know, because I don't think there's any sort of anything formal at the moment.

The article, which was in the telegraph, just says that the FCA's written to these companies telling them to shut down, but unless they back that up with some form of actual regulation or proper reasoning, then I think these companies are well-roading their rights to stand up to them.

But whether they will or not, I don't know. Well, we will see. - Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? But the net is tightening on all this sort of stuff. And I don't think it's going to slacken anytime soon.

Everyone just needs to get their own personal LNPOS device and walk around with an ATM. Hawking sucks from there, that's the solution. - Well, yeah, it is the solution, isn't it? Like trying to get this circular economy going and being able to trade with your peers.

And it does feel like it's getting better. It feels like there could be quite a nice flow, especially for people who are home mining, maybe with these Bitcoin meetups or with selling goods and mining.

Like you can kind of stack and sell when you need to without having to touch any exchanges or even cash points or anything like that. Like the more people that you interact with and the more goods and services that you buy and sell, like it does feel like it's not a million miles away.

Like it's totally possible now, especially with like, I'm not saying the point of sale and with this RoboSATs thing and with BISC and everything else, it feels like, yeah, the net is tightening because it feels like they're getting really concerned and they should be, I suppose.

But there's always going to be ways round it and it kind of pushes people. I guess it's almost like a wake-up call. If anyone with half a brain who sees this and goes, oh shit, they're phasing out cash and they're stopping these ATMs and all the other crazy shit that's going on.

Like anyone with half a brain should go, "Well, maybe I should get myself some NoKOSy Sats." Yeah, definitely. I've just been rereading the article. The level of hypocrisy here is staggering.

There's a quote here from the regulator that says, "We regularly warm consumers that crypto assets are unregulated, ally and high risk." Yeah, potentially right. Which means people are very unlikely to have any protection if things go wrong.

So people should be prepared to lose all their money if they choose to invest in them. Meanwhile, I get paid next week. I can draw all of my money out, walk into a lab rooks and spunk it all on a bandit or a slot machine in 60 minutes.

And where's the regulation there? There's fuck all. Yeah, but gambling doesn't actually scare them at all because it doesn't take their power away whereas this does. It is absolutely fucking stupid.

And also, I think there should be a distinction between crypto and Bitcoin. I think it's clear enough now that Bitcoin is a pretty solid place to have your money. I don't even feel uncomfortable saying that.

When you see the other shipcoins that are out there, like the great British pound and the US dollar and everything else, it's pretty clear. Certainly long term, if you're holding long term, this is a very good place to put your money.

It's like, how can they write something like that when you can see everything? It just doesn't make any sense. And so how much longer do people continue to believe this bullshit? 'Cause you just know the average person will have opened that and they'll go on, oh, bloody hell, that's the end of Bitcoin then.

Oh, they're gonna stop that, close that down. Oh, high risk. And like, they believe it, but how long? It's deliberate, isn't it? The crypto thing, complete the two, scare people away from it.

The SCA, they're never going to say, oh yeah, Bitcoin is probably a really good place to keep your money. You shouldn't be holding the British pounds. We can't control it, but crack on, which it's just not gonna happen.

Whereas, you know, if they've got the likes and let's say this happens, you know, polygon, Ethereum, whatever, there's some vulnerability in it. A load of smart contracts get hacked. They can say, oh, look, this is the problem with crypto.

And then if you've conflated Bitcoin with crypto, suddenly it gives you a lot of power just to shut down the whole system if you want to. Yeah, it's very frustrating that there needs to be clear that they are not the same.

I think that just creates a huge amount of confusion. And like, it would be reasonable to say that about a lot of, you know, these crypto assets and pump and dump schemes and all that kind of stuff.

But like Q&A said, that's one massive casino. It's no different to any other gambling. It's exactly the same. It's just like throw a dart at something and see if that's a winner. Like, who fucking knows?

It's just timing and luck. Yeah, completely agree. Speaking of regulations or not, as it may seem. Did you see the Wasabi wallet? I want to call it news, maybe? Oh dear. What's the fourth disaster train wreck?

No, I missed that. What happened? (laughing) Yeah, so for anybody who's living under a rock and hasn't followed the uproar. Last, when was it? Last Sunday, the Wasabi wallet Twitter account, completely out of the blue, just posted a tweet that says, the ZK Snacks coordinator.

Now ZK Snacks is the company, like the parent company to Wasabi wallet. It's the corporate entity, if you like. They're the people that run the coordinator further Wasabi wallet coin joins.

So the tweet said, the ZK Snacks coordinator will start refusing certain UTXOs from registering to coin joins. That was accompanied with a black picture with a candle in the middle and no further explanation.

So there was a lot of people thinking it was a joke because their social media account tends to have a bit of a track record for doing sort of vague tweets that nobody seems to understand.

Nobody kind of believed it. Anyway, it turns out that it's true. And the Wasabi wallet coordinator is going to basically be doing chain analysis on everybody that is registering their Bitcoin to do a coin join with Wasabi wallet.

Now this seems, well, it doesn't seem, it is a commercial suicide from them. The whole reason that people go to a privacy wallet like Wasabi wallet is to try and improve their privacy, to break the links of their, to put up a brick wall in their UTX or their Bitcoin's history so that they can spend more privately

after they've done that coin join. So the fact that they're going to start refusing certain people or certain UTXOs made from sort of blacklisted addresses from entering is completely antithetical to everything that they said that they sort of stood for and everything that the privacy activists in Bitcoin should be striving for.

So over the course of the next couple of days, it turned out that, well, it turned, there's two things here. Number one, there's been no public acknowledgement of any regulation or law or enforcement against them to dictate why they should be doing this.

None whatsoever. They've been asked pointed questions on whether this is the case. And also say is, no, at the same time as this announcement came out, there was a journalist contacted Wasabi wallet and Samurai wallet, it turns out as well, asking for comments on basically a, I'm just going to try and find the article now.

Let me just, do you want? - I saw the one from Samurai, their response. I thought that was very good. I didn't see anything from Wasabi. - Yeah, so essentially, it appears that this knee-jerk reaction from Wasabi wallet to start, the only evidence that we have at the moment is that it's off the back of this journalist

contacting them for comment on some potential changes to the landscape. If you want to just fill for me for a minute, I'll find it and I'll read it out. - Black coffee, what's your thoughts on all of this?

- I don't know, it's just, it's a mad situation, isn't it? And it's been brewing for a long time. I don't know, there's a company acting as a coordinator in coin join, it's a target, isn't it?

I mean, there's obviously some individual with some pressure being put on them and it might not be regulatory, but it's a, if you look at ZK Snacks, it's an incorporated company registered in Gibraltar, it's not going to be that far hard to find out who's the director, a knock on the door and some pressure put on them

and you can sort of understand why they're doing this. - You know, if it was me, go on, yeah. I was just going to say, if it was me and, you know, I'll load a police turn up at the door. I'd probably, I don't know, would I be in a different situation, who knows?

- Yeah, so to be clear that the people behind ZK Stacks are very public people and names are known. They, I think some of them are actually ex-European MPs, believe it or not, so they clearly have, you know, they're no stranger to sort of regulation and stuff, so.

The Financial Times article is titled, The NCA, which is the National Crime Agency in the UK, calls for regulation of crypto mixers used in churning criminal cash. And basically, there's-- - Nice target.

- Yeah, so the journalist who wrote this, wrote to Wasabi Wallet and Samurai Wallet said, "We're going to do this piece. "Can you do a comment for us?" It seems that Wasabi Wallet didn't do any comment from what I can see.

Samurai Wallet wrote back and true to journalist style, they included like one sentence of the very lengthy reply that was sent back to them. But it's basically, you know, somebody from the NCA is just calling for regulation.

There's been no sort of, of crypto mixers. There's been no, no change to the actual regulation. It's just a Financial Times article of a comment that somebody from the NCA has said. On the surface of it, you know, and I've kept fairly close to this, this is the only reason I can see publicly why Wasabi have taken these steps.

Obviously, there's been a massive uproar from the community, you know, previous people who were previously quite outspoken in sport of Wasabi Wallet and have understandably, sort of drawn to question what the hell is going on.

The way that it's been handled from the Wasabi Wallet team in terms of communication has been diabolical, quite frankly. And the whole thing just seems incredibly strange. The following day, Samurai Wallet actually published a media article which detailed their full response, which is a fantastic read and I'll send you the link max.

Basically, it draws a distinction between the difference between a mixer, where you are actually giving up custody of funds to a third party who is then mixing them up and you hope that they will send them back to you.

Then there is a distinction between a coin join coordinator like Samurai and like Wasabi Wallet. And all these coordinators do, they never take control of any of your funds. They just pass messages from inputs to outputs.

It's completely blinded, so you just connect to it and it sort of helps coordinate the transaction. It never at any point takes control of any funds. So the crux of what Samurai Wallet was sort of saying back is that any proposed regulation along these sort of lines doesn't affect them or shouldn't affect them anyway

because they're just essentially a messenger. So if that's true, which I believe it is, how far do you draw this in terms of, let's say us three were to spin up a telegram channel and coordinate our own coin join.

Does that mean that telegram should be regulated in the same way as a Bitcoin mixer that takes custody of your funds because telegrams are one pass in the messages. It becomes a very, very blurry line as to how possible it would be to police this.

Obviously, like Black Coffee said, any sort form of centralization is gonna be a target and I'm sure there's gonna be things on this front are gonna continue to unfold. But I just wanna read out the final sign off sentence from the Samurai Wallet article, which says, "We believe the NCA should instead focus

"on more productive methods to prevent serious crime "and catch criminals," which I thought that might sign off. And I believe the way that this should have been handled. Now, if I wanna put my neutral hat back on, there may, beside me, it may come out in a couple of weeks and say, actually, wherever we're based in Gibraltar

and I believe they've got offices in Hungary as well, we've, the police have approached us and we couldn't say anything. But Samurai Wallet did a Twitter Spaces yesterday where it's any sort of alluded to the fact that even if that was the case, there's no sort of law to say that they couldn't talk about this.

So it just seems strange that the way it's been handled from the Wasabi standpoint. And I suppose, I wanna finish my sort of rant about this with a question to you guys is, in their situation, given that who they are or who they say they are in terms of privacy activists and they wanna improve it on privacy,

would you continue to run the company in the way it is and just impose the chain analysis onto the users that want to improve their privacy through that service or would you just shut up shop?

- You'd just shut up, shall I please? - Exactly, so that seems very strange to me why they haven't done that as well. Maybe it sort of shows their sort of true incentives as to why they're actually here, you know, don't get me wrong, there's no absolutely nothing wrong we're trying to make some money, you know, and offering the service.

But when that service completely goes 180 degree, you turn on what you're actually trying to achieve. Just seems very, very strange. And just to cap off the calamity, one of the lead devs, no power actually said on Twitter.

A couple of days ago that they're gonna have to hire an in-house chain analysis person, which I'm actually just lost for words. The fact that a dev who's dedicated his life to privacy, you know, and built one of the most used privacy tools in this space, whether I like it or not, would come out publicly to say that,

given that there's been apparently no regulation to say that he needs to do it, just the whole thing's just really, really strange. - Yeah, great. And I mean, what's so strange about the facade being, I've noticed this over the years, is that just the communications never really that great.

So you don't, you never really understand what's going on behind the scenes, whereas, you know, Samurai will come out and they'll release the statement like they have done. Just Samurai tweet something and then sort of disappear back in, you don't, you never know what's going on.

- I've never understood. Like, you guys are so much more technical than me. So I don't really like, I can't really look into the code or really understand what's going under the hood, but like, I've always just stayed away from Wasabi because yeah, I've never really understood any of their tweets or what, whenever there's arguments,

like one side seems to make sense to me and the other side just hurts my brain. And then I've just kind of, I've followed who's generally right. I know that's an appeal to authority and I'm not like verifying myself, everything, but like, I kind of have had a sense over the last few years of like, who talks shit and who actually knows

what they're talking about. And, you know, almost everyone who I trust uses Samurai and nobody uses Wasabi. And so that's kind of just why I've stayed away from it. And like, the basic thing of this address reuse thing, like it just, again, like my understanding's pretty basic, but it just seems dumb.

Like, I don't really know and I don't know if they stay around. I know they've got a big following and I want there to be as many privacy options out there as possible. I just want them to be good and it just doesn't seem like this is.

So, yeah, I mean, to answer your question, what would I do? Firstly, I would try and sort the issues with the coin join implementation that I have that seemingly isn't particularly good. And secondly, I would fold.

If I would fold rather than do what they've done, I'd just, it doesn't make any sense. It's really, really peculiar. And then you've got, you know, a small group of people who just consistently shout and scream on Twitter and anyone who says anything negative, even if you can point to things that are provable and weird,

like they'll just deny everything and just call everyone a retard and start shouting and screaming, it's, I don't know, it's very tiring, I try and stay out of it, but I certainly wouldn't be using them and never have.

- Yeah, interestingly as well, just to cap this one off, on the same day as the release, there was a new Twitter account spun up called, Wasabi BTC, run by somebody anonymous that says that they're gonna fork off the project, provide their own coordinator service and basically continue on the current path that Wasabi will, it is now,

minus the chain analysis implementation. So it looks like somebody's sort of taking the ball by the horns that doesn't agree with this. We don't know who's behind it. I'm not sure we wanna know who's behind it, but it's good that at least somebody's taking the initiative, you know, aside from all of the technical issues

with the implementation itself that you just alluded to Max, it's somebody internally, I'm guessing, doesn't agree with this decision and wants to continue on the current path. But the problem is that, you know, you're splitting the Wasabi liquidity pool in half then, well, it might not be in half,

but you know, you've got two separate coordinators then. So the lower liquidity coupled with the technical issues behind the coin-jung protocol itself are gonna make for some interesting opportunities for on-chain analysis, you know, it's essentially a smaller liquidity pool with, you know, the potential issues

that we've seen from time to time in that coordinator. It's gonna make it cannon fodder for anybody that knows what they're doing with a chain analysis tool, in my opinion. - So, I mean, what can we do?

'Cause as much as I like samurai and that's what I tend to use, I don't like the idea of there just being one option and I know that there's joint market, but it's still not that accessible to most people, like most normies that, you know, I have used it, but with open arms over my shoulder and even then it was, you know,

for me, honestly, it's just a little bit intimidating. I wasn't completely sure and comfortable with what I was doing. Like, how can we make it so that there's at least two implementations that are accessible and usable and work?

Or are we destined just to have one? Because I don't know why that just doesn't sit right with me. I'd like there to be options. - I know I completely agree. I think, you know, joint market's getting there.

They've got the web interface now, which is very much in alpha mode. There's a lot of bugs with it, but, you know, there's progress being made at least, I think outside of that there's just a distinct lack of desire for privacy for 90% of the space, which doesn't, you know, if there's nobody asking for an extra service

or a different service with different features, then nobody's gonna build it. Me personally, you know, from a personal standpoint, Samurai worked perfectly well. If you don't have an Android use, firewall, it uses the same coordinator in the back end.

So you don't need an Android phone. But I think choice is good. And, you know, in the telegram chat that they did yesterday, Samurai, while it was welcoming competition, and I think it's a great thing if we can.

But I think it comes from a lack of desire, you know, there's nobody else is asking for this or from what I can see. - Yep. Well, I mean, without echoing exactly what Q&A's just said, the competition's good.

You need it in any marketplace to keep things, you know, just keep innovation going and to keep giving people what they want, really. So I'm personally really excited to see what's gonna happen with joint market in the web UI.

I think that could be huge. Just getting people more comfortable with it as a bit of software, 'cause it's not easy to use on the CLI. And I open on some amazing stuff with joining box. But for most people, it's tricky to say the least.

- It is tricky. One thing I will say when I said that kind of goes against what I said about there's a distinct lack of desire for privacy, something that goes against that would be, you know, that since the whole Canada-Canadian trucker's debacle with the donations and whatnot, yeah,

that was almost as big of a clusterfuck as this wasabi thing. There's been a concerted effort for, certainly on Bitcoin Twitter anyway to get bit 47 implemented into as many wallets as possible.

There's been bounties created for implementing it into Blue Wallet. And there's a Rust language library being built so that if you're building a Rust-based mobile wallet that you could sort of port in that library and that would make implementing bit 47 a lot easier for you.

And there's also work started for bit 47's library to be within BDK Bitcoin development kit, which is ran by Block, I believe. And what they're building there essentially, BDK is kind of like a framework that people can use to build, you know, their own custom sort of user interface around it to sort of, so that they don't need to start

from absolute zero when they're building an app. They can use sort of a robust framework so that they can get to market a little bit quicker and do things from a sort of an agreed upon and well tested framework.

One of the apps or the first app that's gonna be released that uses BDK is Envoy from us at foundation devices. We're building on BDK. So you can bet your bottom dollar that I'm campaigning very, very hard for us to make use of this bit 47 library if and when it does come to fruition.

And staying on the bit 47 trail, Sparrow Wallet finally added the full support for offline painting payments. So previously you could just do the interactive spends, known as Koot, so you could do using the sort of tour base communication service, you or I could sort of combine some of our UTXOs to do a spend, a coin join with every spend

if you wanted to. The additional support that Craig has added is now for the offline stuff. So just to give an example, you know, I could have a QR code displayed on my website and I static one and the payment code underneath it if I wanted to.

Max, if you wanted to send me some money, you wouldn't need to interact directly with me now. All you need to do is go onto my website, take a photo of the QR code with Sparrow Wallet or just copy and paste the string of texts and numbers from my website into your Sparrow Wallet.

That will then because they're too compatible bit 47 wallets, you would be able to privately generate an address that only I'm aware of and send directly to my wallet privately with nobody else seeing that address.

Obviously the address is still on the blockchain, it's still a typical transaction but it's not an interactive procedure and nobody would know that that address was derived, you know, from you sending a payment to me.

So quite a powerful feature and probably would have saved a fair bit of heartache for the disaster that was the Canadian truckers. So good to see that the implementations are being built out and, you know, to have two wallets now is huge, you know, we've now got essentially cross platform bit 47 wallets

so you can spend from your Android phone to a desktop wallet using the bit 47 protocol, so really great to see. - There's no iPhone wallet that can do this, blue wallet, not thinking about it or any of these more popular ones.

- No, so our best bet at the moment, yeah, as it stands, you're right, there's no iPhone implementations. Our best bets are blue wallet, somebody taking that bounty, I don't know what the bounty's up to now, I think it was like 10 million sets last time I checked, so it's, you know, it's not a jump change

and essentially somebody, you know, making a pull request into blue wallet which obviously is cross platform, that would be great or the next best option will be somebody to build on top of BDK and make a cross platform app there.

But yeah, at the front runner at the moment will probably be blue wallet, but to be honest with you, they've been posturing about this for well over 12 months now and nothing's happened, they seem to be, you know, focused on other things like lightning and hardware wallet compatibility.

Not there's anything wrong with that, but it just, again, it just doesn't seem like there's an appetite there, but the beauty of, you know, blue wallet being free in open source is that anybody can, you know, thought the project, implement it in, therefore, with the project, get hold of that bounty and get it moved into blue

while it doesn't necessarily need to be a blue wallet developer, it just needs to be somebody that knows what they're doing and competent enough to implement into their wallet framework. - Yeah, I mean, looking at blue while it's such a good project, they're pretty busy at the moment,

so one of the presentations I sat in on advancing Bitcoin was from EGLE, who I think he leads the dev on blue wallet, but they're doing a lot around lightning moving to a new lightning development kit.

So I think they got their hands, yeah, the busy chaps at the moment, it would be amazing to see this in there and, you know, also bringing in the coin join of some sort as well would be great, but that's a lot to ask.

- Yeah, it'd be nice to see. The thing is that the majority of people are still using iPhones, and so I don't know about the majority, but a hell of a lot of people still use iPhones, and I always have this problem of like when I'm trying to onboard friends and family, probably 90% of them are using iPhone,

it's very rare that anyone's running Android, I don't know if that's just like, I don't know, if that's just my friends and family, but very, very rare to see anyone with Android, and so I'll always suggest blue wallet, but yeah, then you don't have that option, and I'd like to be able to interact with them

and yeah, pay names would be incredible. - Yeah, I've not really come across that, to be honest, Max. Yeah, I'd say it's probably a decent 50/50 split, it must be, you know, a down south thing, everyone's got too much money down there, just running around with iPhone.

- Oh yeah, there we go, play it as well. - Yeah, yeah, but no, you're right. And this is, you know, blue wallet made the decision of using React Native, which allows this sort of cross-platform development to take place a lot less work, and it's probably one of the best wallets on iOS.

So, some PRs with Bit.47 in would be most welcome, I expect. - What else haven't we covered? We've gone through some of the nightmares, we've gone through some of the exciting changes, like what else is going on, anything we've missed?

- Oh, Q and A, I'm sure you've got something to talk about. - Yeah, I won't go into full shield mode in terms of the foundation release, because Max and I recorded with Zach yesterday, so I don't know which podcast is gonna come out first, Max.

- That will probably come out first, I think. - Haven't redesigned yet, but they'll be close to each other anyway, and we should fairly hard, but let's cover it a little bit. - So, the headline, well, because this was gonna come out after I would urge you to go back, we talked for a full hour, Zach and I to Max,

going into the ins and outs of our new product, won't you? But I'll just give you the headlines, there's three main things to talk about. Passport Batch 2, we've announced all the details of it, including images of the device.

We're really happy with how it looks, we think it looks really, really beautiful, and so that's due to start shipping next month, we're still taking pre-orders, so feel free to head to foundationdevicid.com to have a look, and if you like one, place your pre-order.

They are, since we did the release, they are literally flying off the shelves, I've never seen anything like it. So, it's really good to see, you know, we've got a really positive response from the market when we've released it.

Basically, it's a redesign and an improvement of the founders edition. It's like a changed look with a new user interface, some, it looks a little bit less ghetto, shall we say. It looks, it's a bit fancier and, you know, we, we, we internally, we sort of had a discussion and sort of said,

look, you know, hardware wallets don't need to look boring, they can be secure and look really good as well. So, we kind of ran with that and overhauled the design, give it a beautiful colour screen, some rose gold, accent colourings, rechargeable and removable lithium-ion battery, so that we've got improved battery life,

which also allowed us to slim down the device quite significantly. And alongside that new release, we are going to be releasing our mobile companion app called Envoy, which is designed to be a, like, well, as I said, a companion app that makes onboarding onto Passport really easy.

It will walk you through all of the steps to get started from zero and then allow you to manage your Passport as a watch-only wallet from then on and designed to be really simple. You'd, there's no massive amounts of bells and whistles.

The whole point is simplicity, at least that launch anyway, we will be working to add more complex features after that. That'll be a cross-platform app, as I alluded to before, available at Android and iOS.

Talks, talk over to your own node, if you want to, if not, we will, you can connect to our default servers, again, over the tour network. So we'll make your privacy the sort of default there.

And the final sort of product, if you want to call it, that is what we're calling the concierge service, which is essentially an hour with me, one-on-one, to help the beginner get set up with Passport.

So I will essentially sit there on the other end of a JITC call with you and walk you through the whole setup. You know, if you don't want to pair with Envoy, again, it's not absolutely not a requirement, but, you know, everything we do is about openness and compatibility.

So, you know, if you have this call with me, you know, you can add it onto the, when you buy a Passport, you can add it into your cart, we can schedule a call and I can help you get the device set up and then connect to any wallet of your choice.

We'll go through updates in the firmware, backing up your keys, connecting to, say, spiral wallet or Envoy or anything like that. And it's just that sort of extra helping hand for people that like to have somebody on hand to Uncle Jim, them, if you like, so that they can ask questions as they're actually doing

the thing because, you know, foot for us three that have been in the space for quite a while. And this stuff can seem, you know, setting up how well it might seem really trivial, but for some people it's really scary and that might be the first foray that they're taking outside of, you know, buying some Bitcoin

on an exchange, so that was a high level. Yeah, go back and listen to the podcast with Zach and I, where we get into the weeds a lot more, talk about features, talk about, you know, the design process and things like that.

So, there'll be full details in there. And yeah, yeah, what do you think of it, Mark? You've seen the pictures, what about you, Black Coffee? - It looks phenomenal. I'm just gonna have to pull the trigger, you know, after we've spoken today, I'm just gonna buy one.

'Cause I've never sort of held one before and then a few weeks ago, I mean, when we met her, I had a little look at the first version of the foundation and I was so impressed with the build quality.

So, you know, little bits like the magnetic step on cover, that sort of thing, it's so nice and I'm sure this version is gonna be another level on from that, so yeah, blown away by what I saw then and I'm sure this one's gonna be brilliant.

- Yeah, I had the first one and it blew me away and now I'm looking at this one. As soon as we got off the call, actually, yesterday, I wrote to Q&A, I was like, get me one of those immediately.

I need one, like it's fucking beautiful. - I sent your comment verbatim to Andy, our designer and it made him laugh out loud. - What was it? It was, that device makes me visually aroused.

(laughing) - Yeah, well, it's true. - Well, one final thing before we sign off that I'm gonna be ordering today that I wanted to ask you about is the new Samurai hoodies on the new very, very sexy website.

Have you, but I haven't heard you speak about this yet. So, maybe, well, purely for my benefit, but hopefully for the listeners benefit as well, can you sort of give us the rundown of what's going on there?

- Yeah, yeah, new website made almost entirely by Mr. Crown. I've helped where I can, but as usual, not much good. But yeah, he's an absolute monster. He's been working, I don't know, the last month or two, really, really hard, just updating so that we can have articles on there.

We've got clothing on there. We've been designing all the clothing together. And one of the bits of clothing is the Samurai hoodie and we've decided 80% of the profits goes to Free Ross. I had a chat with Samurai and I said to him, look, you know, we'd like to do this hoodie, but I wanna do some good with it as well.

Would you be happy? And he said, absolutely, like, that sounds perfect. Let's do what we can. So, yeah, that's gone live. It was actually really touching yesterday because I got a retweet from Free Ross, their page and then a message from Ross's mum saying thank you and how much she appreciated it and that really like,

that's probably one of the best feelings I've ever had in this space. It's like, yeah, it's a small thing that I can do. You know, it's not gonna be a fortune, but just having that message really, yeah, it meant a lot to me.

- Yeah, I saw that this morning actually, I saw the tweet back from them and I thought that was really cool. So one question I have and it's probably gonna be a bit of a logistical nightmare for you if it's an online store.

What a two question. Number one, have you got a custom painting for the store? And number two, do you accept painting payments? Especially for samurai hoodies, that'll be pretty-- - One step ahead of you, mate.

I've already done one a couple of days ago. - Nice. - So, do you know what though? If I'm totally honest, it failed like four times and then we just did it samurai wallet to samurai wallet in the end because it kept failing.

I don't know why, but yes is the answer. We will do that. So if anyone's listening and then I actually, we did the address via PGP as well. So proper scythepunk stuff. - Get you? - Yeah, only took me about three hours to do one order.

(laughing) But yeah, and the other thing to mention is like sizing wise 'cause you're asking me about that. I would say the sizing comes up very slightly small. So like if you like your hoodies a bit more relaxed fit, probably think about going up a size.

Yeah, 'cause you were asking me about that the other day. - Yeah, really, this sounds really shilly now, but I do genuinely mean it. There really reasonably be prices as well. I can't remember the last time I saw a decent good quality hoodie for sale for $45, which is less than 40 quid in the UK.

- Yeah, well, we thought long and hard about that because the thing is like we don't really make any money from these. This is more, you know, trying to do something good and also like it helps raise awareness of free Ross.

It helps raise awareness of Samurai and it helps raise awareness of the website. So it's not really about earning the money. It's more just to get the word out there. And I think the more people who wear them, then people might ask and they say, "Oh, where'd you get that from?

"Oh, I did this and 80% goes to free Ross. "Okay, I'll get one of those." So we wanted to just to keep the pricing as reasonable as possible rather than price people out. - This may or may not be a trick question, but do you think fiat?

- We do, yeah, yeah. I actually talked about it yesterday, saying I'm kind of disgusted at myself that I'm doing it. But the way I rationalize it is every time we get a fiat payment, it gets converted straight into SATs.

And so I know that I've got strong hands and that I'm going to use this properly. And that I think it's better for me to take that and better for some money to go to free Ross rather than not.

'Cause a lot of people just don't want to spend their Bitcoin. I went into this in detail in the pod that's just gone live, but I do think a lot of people are scared for two reasons. And one of the main reasons I think people are scared is because they haven't actually used privacy best practices.

So when they spend Bitcoin, they're scared about, "Oh, what if I then get taxed?" Or because I've now technically sold and what if I'm tracked and what if this and what if that? And I just want to hold and then, but if I buy, I can only do it with KYC.

And I think that actually stops people from parting with their SATs. So for now, we do have an option on there for fiat. I'd like to only accept Bitcoin. We prefer Bitcoin, but yeah, we will cater to fiat and we will take those slave notes from you and convert them to real money.

- Completely get where you come from. I just feel like as I'm using air quotes but proper Bitcoiners, I think we, anybody that's buying from a Bitcoin based merchant has a moral obligation to spend some SATs in my opinion.

I'll certainly be spent be part of ways with some SATs for one today. I'm just, I'm at the checkout now actually funny enough. But yeah, if you're going to buy one, make sure you pay with SATs.

This circular economy doesn't get kick-started without everybody playing their part. - Agreed. What about you, Black Coffee? Are you accepting fiat as well on your store or are you? - Yeah, I saw the same, you know, early on, it was Bitcoin only, just no one buys anything.

You switch to, yeah, just taking that horrible dirty fiat and suddenly people want to spend it. I guess, you know, people don't want to hold on to fiat, they want to hold on to Bitcoin and that's it.

I mean, I do the same as you, any fiat goes straight into SATs and just sits in a wallet forever. - Yeah, yeah, I think for now, that's the best way. But like Q and A said, I do think we should be spending Bitcoin.

I certainly do where I can. I mean, literally, 'cause I haven't got any slave notes left. But it's, you know, the other thing is that it kind of helps because we have to buy the material and spend fiat to do that.

So when the fiat comes in, it effectively just pays for those orders to go out, which we need some fiat to do that currently, 'cause I can't find a decent printer who accepts Bitcoin. So yeah, for now, we need that for that side of it.

And then obviously, we keep the SATs. So it's like auto-stacking, basically. It works quite well. - Yeah. And yeah, I mean, the samurai hoodie looks great. And you've got a load of other things up there as well, Max.

Including a really nice looking seed sign of t-shirt, which I'm gonna be quite poor at the end of today. - Yeah, I thought you might see that one. Well, that's the same. So we have an agreement with seed signer reached out to him 'cause he put a thread on a while ago about funding and wanting to keep developers on.

And obviously it's difficult with an open source project. And so I reached out to him and I was like, look, mate, I really love what you're doing. I can't be sending you a load of SATs, like I'm no whale, but I'd like to do something.

Would you be up for me designing a t-shirt and us selling it and we'll give you 80% same thing? We'll give you 80% of any profits. And he was like, yeah, I mean, that would be amazing. So mid-Mr. Crown worked on the designs.

We took a few weeks and we had samples and making sure the quality was good. And yeah, we're very, very happy with that. We've had a fair few sales of that already. And so yeah, we look forward to sending those SATs to seed signer and helping continue development.

- Very nice. There's a lightning payment on its way to you right now, Max. - Excellent news. I'll track you now then. - Good luck. - Good luck. Yeah, no, appreciated it, mate. So anything else we haven't covered?

I think we sort of went through most of the things. I think the big stuff anyway. It's been a crazy month or so, like it feels like a year. - Yep, I agree. - All right, boys. - Yeah, I've got nothing else, but thanks for having us once again, Max.

- Yeah, always a pleasure. - We'll have to catch up again in person soon. That was good fun. Enjoy the rest of your days, guys. I'll sit and edit this for the rest of my life now. - Right.

- Good luck. - Did you have some great? - Speed you later. - Mate.