Bitcoin Monthly 0015 with BQA and Antomous

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.

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

Welcome back to Bitcoin Monthly, and I'm sorry for the delay. It is out late, as per usual. Really poor from me, and I apologise for everyone who's been waiting for it. But it was awesome to record with Antimus and Bitcoin Q&A again.

We covered loads of interesting topics, and it was just good to have both both back. Thanks, as always, to everyone who's been screaming sats, asking questions and reaching out to me. I really do appreciate it, and I've always hear if you have any questions.

I'd also like to thank the show sponsors for allowing me to continue with this show. I'll start with Foundation Devices as we had Q&A on. Foundation Devices make the best hardware available.

It is fully open source, and it's so simple to use. They have a new design now, and it looks stunning. If you haven't listened already to my conversation with Q&A and Zach, it was about five or six episodes ago now.

I suggest you go and have a listen, and if you haven't seen one of these things, go to foundationdevices.com and check one out. You can use the code bit by bit to get $10 off, and they really are incredible.

Fully open source, incredible user flow. They have their own app now to make onboarding even easier. If anyone has any questions before ordering one, you can always reach out to the team, or to me, and I'll be happy to help.

Next, we have FastBitcoins. FastBitcoins have been sponsoring this show for a few months now, and I've got to know their team very well. What I really like about this team is they focus on making people take their sats off exchange.

They push people to withdraw, and you can do this via lightning. They've been expanding all across the globe, and their goal is to make it as easy as possible to get sats into the hands of plebs.

If you have any questions, or you want to reach out, you can do, but check them out at fastbitcoins.com. And finally, we have Casa. Casa make it so simple to have multi-sick, literally anybody can do it.

Their UX is so simple, and they are always there to hold your hand in case you lose a key or mess something up. I've been using them for over a year, and what I really love is that you can do this as a nim.

In an ideal world, you would send post-mix sats to your Casa two of three, and you would use none of your own details. You'd go in with a new email address, a burner email address, and ideally use a VPN as well.

If you follow these steps, then you can have two of three, and have them there in case you make a mistake, but also protect your privacy. Personally, I think this is incredible, and from as little as $10 a month, you can have this upgraded security.

You also can get 10% off if you use the code bit by bit, and if you want to reach out, and you want to ask me about this setup, or what the trade offs are, I'd be happy to help. A few listeners have reached out, and I've helped and bought them.

So I'll be honest with you, I'll tell you the trade offs. Obviously, you can do all this stuff by yourself, but Casa just make it so simple. Keys.casa, and the code is bit by bit 10. Enjoy the show.

Hello, are we all in? Morning. Everybody hear me? Are we all in? Did anyone hear me? Good. Anyone there? Ah! Hello? I think I'll just hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can hear you now. Hello, I got you.

Hi. How are we all? Yeah, doing good. Doing good, you well? Yeah, good. Thank you, mate. Yeah, it's wonderful here, man. It's great to be back. Yeah, it's been a while. What have you been doing?

Slithered off into a hole. I didn't hear from you. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's been a lot, but it's been actually great. Setting up, working a lot with Nick together, getting everything ready for shop launch this week.

So, a lot to do, but it's been amazing. Ooh, very nice. And so, when you say shop launch, what are you selling in this shop? Well, I mean, last year we did the first batch of the seed mints, got things rolling there, and we're still working on manufacturing there, so that will might still take a month or two

till we can get the seed mints out. But Nick has developed together with SeedSiner, the steel QR plates as a backup solution for your cold storage or also for everyday use. So QR code is stamp yourself on a stainless steel three millimeter plate.

And yeah, so we'll be selling that in different versions and a whole bunch of different tools to go along with it and a bit of a few accessories will be supporting SeedSiner with 21% of all learnings on that.

So, yeah, exciting times. Very nice. Yeah, I've seen the steel plates, they look really cool. And it seems like you don't even need, 'cause I first thought you needed like a pen on top of each of the punch holes, but it seems like you don't need that either, which is pretty nice.

Yeah, Nick has been, well, it was like the end of the last year, at the beginning of this year, he did a lot of research on that with different steel alloys, but also with different surface finishes, trying to get the reflection and the contrast right.

So the first few prototypes you'd need, still need to like dot each mark to get it to scan. But now we've got the surface right and the contrast is nice and high. So now it should all work out with one punch for each hole.

For the uninitiated that haven't got to clue what we're all talking about, do you wanna just give a quick rundown of what the steel QR is for and when people might sort of wanna use it? 'Cause I think people might be familiar with the concept of stamping their seed words into steel, but people might be a bit confused

if we're talking about QR codes. Good point. Yeah, I think the first thing that everyone has to remember when thinking about this is that seed signer is not hardware wallet as we know it.

It's a signing device. So that means it doesn't actually save your seed. So it's a stateless device every time you turn it off, it forgets everything that you used it for previously. So this means every time you want to do a transaction, you have to enter your seed into the seed signup.

If you have your seed backed up, written out like human readable, it's quite a long process of typing in your seed into your seed signup. So seed signer actually came up with the idea to use QR codes for this.

So you'd have as a backup, you'd still have your seed words written out for yourself just in an emergency situation, but you'd additionally have a QR code, which contains your seed, so that you can quickly scan your seed into your seed signer to do the transaction, which is obviously a huge UX improvement.

And he had set up these templates you could print out with like a empty QR code, template printed on it. And then you could take a Sharpie and just fill out the dots that the seed signer would display.

And that would be your backup. Now, the thing is obviously having that on paper is great for short-term use or for small amounts or whatever, but if you're, especially if you're using this for your HODL stack, or if you're just having any kind of amounts on there, you want to have that pretty secure

and have the same level of security and durability as the well-known solutions in steel that you normally have for your regular seed. So, Nick then started playing around with lasering this template onto steel plates.

And then you can actually now, so you can buy one of these empty QR templates on a steel plate. And then when the seed signer displays your QR code, you can actually stamp each dot onto this template.

And that will be a very durable solution. It's a very high grade stainless steel, so this will survive any kind of fires and all sorts of different attack vectors and the physical realm there.

So, yeah, and that's a very easy solution to quickly scan in your seed to do a transaction on the fly, but still have a high level of security. - Very nice. The shops basically going to be a place that anyone can go before they want to stamp a seed or do anything naked.

They've got all the tools they're going to need there. - Exactly, yeah. We'll be selling the tools to go along with it, either like a manual center punch or an automatic center punch as you like it.

And then also like in a handvel and some other tools that you might need to help out with the process. But it's good to keep in mind that this is additional. So, I would not advise people to have just the QR code as your backup, 'cause then you always relying on seed signer or some other device to decode it in an emergency situation.

So, this is also a good option for people who already have a seed, have it well backed up on steel, somewhere in a safe or buried under a mountain. And they just want to improve their user experience.

- Accessibility, or yeah. - Exactly. So, this should be seen as an addition to your regular backup. - Very cool. What about you, Ku and I? You've been lurking around doing fuck all the usual?

- Yeah, dish for sat me feet up as always. (laughing) No, I've just been been buckling down, tying up the loose ends to gear up for... - Think you muted yourself, man. - Yep, I was just sat there talking to myself about this.

(laughing) - Sorry mate, that's me. I was trying to mute myself and I muted you. Sorry I was talking. - Noise, I just said that we've, I'd just been knuckling down, tying up the loose ends ready for Passport Batch 2 launch, which we have spoken extensively about in previous podcasts.

So, production starts this week and we're on track to be beginning shipping towards the end of this month, which is great. Feels like we're finally at the final hurdle now. And most of the supply chain gods seem to be smiling down on us, which is always nice.

So, yeah, really exciting to you. Get the device out there into people's hands and there's been a few photos floating around from Miami, there's a couple of pre-production devices that the guys had at the booth there.

So, half of Bitcoin, Twitter seems to have got their hands on or be a pre-production device before. I even have unfortunately, and I work for the company. So, kind of a bit of sweet, but really, really great to see the physical products in hand and with the new user interface on it as well.

I don't know whether you guys saw the photos. - Yeah, I absolutely love it. Especially, I mean, I was looking forward to mine arriving sometime soon, but listening to you and Zach here on the pod a week back or whenever that was got that got FOMO real high, just hearing about the materials used in that casing

and all the different upgrades you did there. I mean, that's amazing for everyone. Yeah, you definitely recommend going back and listening to that one. - Yeah, so we're really close now. So, it's good and we're really excited to get things out, but yeah, other than that now, I've been just been knuckling down really,

it's been pretty busy being watching a couple of live streams from Miami. It seems that you both probably agree with me here, but all of the signal was coming from the open source stage and there seems to be a lot of shit-coinery going on, you know, more so on the largest stages and a word on the ground

was that there's a lot of NFT or crypto-related stands in the sort of exhibition hall, which is a little bit disappointing. But yeah, the signal seems to be from the open source stage and there's been full streams of the whole every talk released, or Matt's done it on the Citadel Dispatch stream.

And I think they're also on the Bitcoin Magazine YouTube channel as well, so anybody that's wanting to see what the real sort of Bitcoin space is about, I'd urge you to check out them rather than all the noise on the main stage.

Have you guys managed to catch any? - The first day I sat myself down, I was like, "Ah, I was just tuning in, like, "have a little listen and make myself a coffee, "set down the sofa." And then I turned it on, I turned it straight off within about 30 seconds 'cause I was so annoyed.

Then I was like, "Ah, I'm gonna come back to it, "just, you know, don't be so short-tempered. "Let me go back to it." Turned it back on, then I lasted about a minute. It went on and off about, I don't know, five to 10 times and then I just went, "Fuck this, I'm off."

And that was me done with the first day. I just couldn't cope with it. It was nonsense, absolute fucking nonsense. But then I have been tuning into Citadel Dispatch. I'm about three quarters of the way through the first one he dropped 'cause it's about like three or four hours long, but that was really good, that was really, really good.

So I guess it's just picking the useful stuff up. Apparently there was quite a good mining talk. I think a kind of alchemist was on it and maybe diverter and someone else, but John had reached out to me and said that was really good.

So I'm working my way through the content, but yet certainly that first day and some of the talk there was just like everything I hate about the Bitcoin space all rolled into one shitty day.

- Yeah, the only thing I will say around the main stage in terms of a positive was the Jack Mahler's announcement. Did you guys catch that one? He's seen the sort of headlines on it. - No.

- Yeah, why, I just saw the headline. Yeah, but I didn't see the talk. - I did watch that one. That was not on the first day. Was that on the second day? - Yeah, it was, yeah. - If it happens, pretty fucking cool.

Like really fucking cool, actually. - Yeah, so the headlines are essentially that Jack Mahler's from who's the CEO of Strike, which is a Bitcoin native payments application that's I think just available in the US at the moment.

They've partnered with Shopify, which is like an e-commerce platform. But the larger news is that they've also partnered with a company called NCR, which I've no idea what it stands for, but essentially NCR are responsible for something like 18 or 19% of the world's payment terminals.

So if you've, the chances are you've probably used one in the last couple of weeks when you've been to Tesco or Walmart, any of the big main sort of food stores, the likelihood is they'll use a put sale terminal and NCR may have been behind that.

So he's sort of Strike have partnered with NCR to essentially enable anybody, any retailer that already has one of these put sale terminals to do business with traditional fiat rails to integrate Strike as well.

So that enables them to, with literally just, well, the way I understand it, that with a simple software update to their existing hardware that they've got in terms of that point of sale system in their shop, they will be able to receive Bitcoin or lightning payments, which my first thought was gonna be,

okay, that sounds Bitcoin and lightning payments are great, but is that gonna be sort of a wall garden where you have to do it through the Strike app, which is a KYC app, which would be, you know, not great.

But no, he went on to say that, so let's say I go into Walmart and I'm gonna buy a six pack of beer, any of the compatible payment terminals, if they've got one of these NCR terminals in their store, I could just say that I want to pay with lightning.

So rather than just tap in my debit card, they could show a QR code on the screen. And I could pay that with any compatible Bitcoin or lightning application. So that essentially means that no KYC spending, you know, I could do that with Zeus wallet that's backed by my own node over tour.

I don't even need to have, you know, I don't need to interact directly with the Strike app and I don't need to do any KYC or anything like that. So for people who are earning Bitcoin and subsequently living on Bitcoin in the US, this is pretty big news if it comes off, obviously.

This is all, not none of this has gone live yet. It was just the announcement. But it seems pretty big to me, especially for those people that are living on Bitcoin because if you're living on Bitcoin currently, let's say your entire income is in Bitcoin and you need to go to Whole Foods or to Walmart.

You either have to sell some Bitcoin and convert that into cash, which on peer-to-peer markets is absolutely doable, but you know, it's just going to take you a little bit longer. Or you can do it through a regulated exchange, which is then going to have you liable to capital gains taxes, potentially if there's a gain there.

Or the third option you've got is that you go to a service like Bit Refill and you buy a gift card, which is absolutely again doable and I know loads of people that do it. But then you've got the kind of thing with, you know, if you buy a $100 gift card and you've got some left over, you've got to keep all that gift card.

Remember what's on it and then is it going to be enough for your next shop or do you need another gift card? And it's doable. It's just a little bit of a sort of hacky workaround. So to be able to now just walk in with a lightning app, any lightning app to Whole Foods and do that exact same purchase

without having to jump through any of those hoops I've just mentioned seems pretty big jump for me. - Massive, if it happens. - Absolutely massive, what I do wonder is whether it does happen because it basically allows Bitcoin to be used as cash.

And like you said, it's like the perfect off ramp for Bitcoiners. And it just feels to me like that's too good to be true because it does feel to me like we are starting to get into this and then they fight us stage.

It would not be good for them to have this as an option. So I'm just wondering, does it actually happen? And if it does, how long for? But then maybe that's just from years of bullshit and announcements and things not actually happening.

- Yeah, I think that last point that might be the concern that I see the most is how long will it stay up for? Because I don't think, I think they've done their due diligence now like on the legal side as well if they can actually implement it and so on.

And they should be pretty far on on that process if they're confident enough to put that out there. So I'd be surprised if they don't actually implement it. The question is once they do, how much like visibility will that suddenly generate and like put a spotlight on it?

And like how long will it take till some kind of regulations change to put some kind of restrictions onto that process? Because it is, if it really does come the way that they've now announced it, that is what we've all been waiting for.

And yeah, I mean, it will be a dream come true, but we'll see. - Yeah, I think as soon as the regulator gets wise to the fact that this is gonna enable people to spend their Bitcoin in a private manner.

And potentially not be declaring those capital gains taxes which it would trigger in the US. I think it's definitely gonna come under scrutiny. The other two things that have just popped into my head around this announcement that are quite interesting to think of is number one, I think especially at launch the uptake on it's gonna be

incredibly low because particularly in the Western world where more people are buying Bitcoin as a long-term savings vehicle, I can't see people rushing into to spend their Bitcoin. There might be people like I touched on before that are earning Bitcoin that don't have a choice, but that's a relatively low percentage

of the Bitcoin user population if you like. So I think uptake's gonna be slow, especially when you can consider that most of the people that might sort of be enthusiastic about this will probably already be KYC'd on the strike app where they can still pay Bitcoin invoices but it takes dollars out of their account.

Obviously that's a KYC'd service but they're much more likely to do that, aren't they? To get rid of the fiat than the artist spend the Bitcoin. So I think it's gonna be really slow on the adoption.

And the final thing was on the more on the merchant side, if it is just a simple software update to people that have already got these NTR terminals in their store, then the incentive for those retailers to sort of push this and to adopt this and try and make their customers aware that it's available is the potential

for their fee savings is colossal. If they're using the traditional for payment rails, they're paying anywhere between 1% and 3% on every card purchase that they take. Whereas to do it through strike, I forget what the fees are now, but I'm almost certain it's less than 1%.

Obviously there's no guarantees that it stays at less than 1%, but strictly speaking with what we know right now, it would be significantly cheaper for them to accept through the Bitcoin payment rails that strike users than it would be to use the legacy payment rails.

And when you extrapolate that out to a big retailer that has one of these terminals like Starbucks or McDonald's that are doing millions and millions of transactions every day, those 1, 2, 3% on each transaction soon start to adult.

So I think there could be a good little bit of game theory here that might be worth sort of keeping an eye on in terms of the benefits for the merchant. - Yeah, definitely. It's been something that's been talked about for a long time and like the incentives definitely there.

It makes sense. It's better for everybody, almost everybody, other than the, yeah, visas and mascars and everyone else and people who are sat in the middle just sucking up those fees. But that is the thing that worries me is like how quickly before they go, hold on a second, we're suddenly making far less than we were before

just 'cause this horrible little technology that is cheaper for the merchant to receive payment and it's more private for the user. We don't like that and I suppose that's my fear but it is brilliant for now if it happens and it's amazing for people like miners and anyone who's using Bitcoin all the time and really is all in with Bitcoin.

It's incredible. It's really, really powerful. So I really hope that it stays. It's the most exciting thing I've seen for a long time. - Did you guys see the mempool.space mining dashboard update that's come out really, really cool?

- No, I did not. - So it's essentially-- - I've heard about that saying that. - Yeah, it's essentially mempool.space but rather than the sort of individual transactions and the mempool kind of information sort of split out into a nice dashboard.

It's all geared towards mining so you still see the traditional sort of blocks flowing from left to right across the top. But each block now sort of, you get told who's mined the block, the fees that were collected, the fee rate, the average fee rate, the typical ones like that and when the block occurred.

And then there's like this beautiful pie chart underneath where you can see the breakdown of hash rate or successful blocks mined by each pool and you can click into any one of those to sort of see how many, if I click on F2 pool, you can see in the last however many, whatever this time period is, how many blocks they've mined,

which blocks they were mined. So it's just, it's probably a bit more of a nerdy one to be honest with you but if you're interested in more of the sort of technical stuff, it's really a great one to see.

And it looks like Foundry USA, the obviously the US based mining pool are sort of considering how what's the word I'm looking for. They haven't been around that long and their hash rate has grown exponentially and they seem to be taking a quite a sizable chunk of the hash rate, which is, well, I don't know whether it's a,

I'll leave that open to the room, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that hash rate is coming into America and we seem to be seeing a little bit more sort of centralization towards this, towards the western side of the world and the eastern side.

- Yeah, I mean, I'm just on the site. I mean, it looks amazing. I haven't actually seen this in the pie charts. Great to see that and you're right. Foundry is definitely up top. I mean, seeing it like disperse more around the world and get out of China throughout the last year in large part

and also like grow in the US, I think that is a good thing. It's just a shame that there's not a lot, that that's not divided up between a whole bunch of different ones that is then in one region then also so centralized.

I think that is not the most ideal thing. But as we've seen in the last year, things can change quickly. And I think the investments that are being made at the moment could like break up the whole mining landscape in the next coming years as well.

So I'm not too concerned at the moment. - Question I have that's just popped into my head actually is I know we sort of just touched on the fact that obviously Foundry is literally called Foundry USA and it's based in the USA.

Can you kind of home mine a point in the hash at Foundry? Because, you know, we might be saying, you know, oh it's in the USA in the name and all the hash rates. It's, you know, beginning to concentrate in the US but if there's, you know, let's say we've got a load of home miners in, I don't know, Lithuania

and they're pointing their hash at Foundry. Well, technically the hash isn't in the US. - Good point. I'm not sure on that one. - As far as I know, I think they do have an open pool as well that you can connect to.

I mean, obviously they have their big mining farms themselves and I think that does make up a large portion of their hash rate. But I think you can point your own home mining hash to one of their pools as well.

The thing is, I mean, at the end of the day, that's the issue with all pools, you're not quite sure. I mean, that's always like there's Oxford reports and so on on mining and like how much hash rates and what country and so on.

It's always based on where the pool is located and that's obviously not accurate for the reasons you just explained. But the thing is that at the end of the day, these pools do construct the blocks and decide which transactions are included.

So the main power is in their hands and is obviously then dependent on the regulations in the country that they're located in. So short, the miners located around the world, the home miners, they can switch then to another pool if they don't like the policy being implemented.

But at the end of the day, I think it's still still to be considered US-based and under the US regulations. While we're talking about mining house, what's the latest on you guys, do we accomplish everything going swimmingly or not?

- Yeah, well, it's all not much has changed. I mean, I can say the actual now operation is more or less smooth. There's like a few hiccups every couple of weeks or something for like half an hour down or something but they're straight up again.

So there's no big hiccups in operation. So that's been fine for me. Obviously, the jury's still out on how much the delay actually cost us. We'll have to see. But like projected break even as some time approaching mid-2023 we'll see.

What hash rate will we'll do and if we actually get there or not? - Yeah, same here, don't really know. From my shitty maths, it looks like similar, like maybe 2023, maybe 2024, but that would be break even.

And it's like there's a lot of ifs and buts. So it's like maybe in a few years I might-ish sort of get my money back maybe. But I don't know, I don't know. I certainly wouldn't be putting any more in line with them, but it's been a valuable lesson.

So yeah, I take it as that now. Just learn from my mistakes and move on. I'd definitely like to do some more, but obviously not with them. I'd just like to do it here in the UK, bit difficult.

So I'm sort of trying to find a nice way of like working with other Bitcoiners, maybe abroad, just on like an individual basis, trying to find people who are already in that space and doing it and yeah, it's definitely something I want to explore more.

Have we got any software updates? - Yeah, I mean, we spoke about this like the last few weeks, just on direct chats. I think we wanted to mix up the format of the monthly bit to open it up a bit more for discussion.

So probably realize that by now. But we still wanted to include like software updates as they come in just the major ones that we find most important. There were a few big ones now over the last four to six weeks.

We can quickly go through that. I mean, definitely one of them is the Dojo V1.15.0. It came out, we spoke about that a few months ago as well, that there was the research being done on Fulcrum, which is an alternative to Electrus, which is a lot more powerful

and they now actually implemented it. I've not tested it out myself, but I don't know if you have Q&A or Max. - Yeah, I've been running with this one. So just a quick recap for anybody didn't hear us talking about first time is Fulcrum is a version of Electrum Server, which is sort of like a backend

for many of the Bitcoin wallets that are used today. It's kind of used as a database so that you can look up transaction details faster and that's useful when you're sort of restoring wallets and stuff, it's just a faster way to query the sort of the history of all of your, the addresses within your wallet.

So Fulcrum is kind of an optimized version of this that has been a come to light sort of recently in the past six months, really, that I think it was originally developed as a BSV or Bcash implementation, but obviously, you know, they're very similar protocols to Bitcoin being forks of it.

So I don't think it took much work to sort of convert it back to the one true Bitcoin or to be compatible with the one true Bitcoin. I've been testing Fulcrum well, fairly recently, actually.

And I've been importing my post-mix wallet from Samurai, which, you know, due to the very nature of it, it's got, you know, a fair few thousand remix transactions. If I was to try and sort of import that wallet using the traditional Electrum Rust server, which is kind of the default that comes with

pretty much all of the node implementations, it's been the default for years. If I was to try and import a really sort of deep wallet like that that's got thousands of transactions, Electrum Rust server is gonna have a very, very tough time.

And if I was running it on a Raspberry Pi, it's probably gonna fall over just because it can't deal with that level of sort of transactional query. So, you know, if I was lucky, it might take, you know, a couple of hours and it would chew through it eventually.

Whereas Fulcrum, the optimizations that have been included, which obviously are way above my head, basically result in that very same wallet being able to be imported in a couple of minutes.

So it's a colossal difference for people who transact regularly, particularly Wirpool users that might sort of run a running dojo or just a traditional dojo that are, you know, always online getting remixed, you know, a couple of remixes a day.

That soon starts to mount up if you've got a few UTXOs and it makes for a very, you know, we'd colloquially sort of call it a deep wallet where there's just lots of transaction history. So the fact that this has been included as an option into dojo, where, you know, naturally people are gonna be getting those remixes

with the Samurai wallet is a very big improvement. So yeah, it's been absolutely a positive experience for me and Kudos to the guys behind dojo for leading the way and implementing that because like I say, if anybody is gonna need it, it's gonna be people using Samurai wallet just due to the nature of the way that the wallet gets used.

There's a lot of on-chain transaction, so great to see. - And for anyone, we're in on like new implementation being set up here. I think it's still an optionality. So you can still choose to use the default way with an Electron Rust server.

But if you want, you can switch over, is that right? - That's correct, yeah, yeah. So with dojo now, you can use what's called address indexers. Sorry, address indexer, which is the Samurai wallet's sort of fork of Electron Rust server that's been slightly optimized.

You can also still use an Electron Rust server, the traditional one that is sort of packaged with all or no packages. And now you can define a fulcrum server as well. So you've got good optionality.

Also the guys at Raspberry Blitz and Citadel have also got sort of, I've got fulcrum in the works as well. It's in testing phases at the moment. So it seems to be, you know, the benefit to being recognized by other node implementations and it looks like that, you know, it's on the roadmap for those two teams as well,

which is also great to see. - Speaking of Citadel, if you tried out that node implementation, 'cause I've been hearing a lot of praise over the last couple of weeks, especially from people testing this out and absolutely love it.

I mean, I think it's, the moment's still a one man show, more or less, been done. And, but still it's supposed to be a wonderful experience, but I haven't had the chance yet to dive in. - Yeah, I've got one on an old low powered desktop that I had lying around so I wanted to test it out.

Yeah, it's been really great. So for those who haven't heard of it, essentially it's a fork of Umbral. The, I believe their lead developer, who's not even 18 yet, which is quite mind boggling, forked off from Umbral when Umbral changed their license.

So Citadel is, looks visually very similar to Umbral, but it's maintained its free and open source license, which is highly desirable for people, you know, that are aligned to that sort of ethos like myself.

So yeah, I've been running it on an old desktop, just to try it out, just to see and try and provide a bit of feedback. 'Cause it's quite a young sort of node implementation. But yeah, it's been, it's been pretty good.

There has been some hiccups along the way. You know, you can tell it's sort of still starting out. So I wouldn't, you know, if, if you've only got one node, I wouldn't rush to, to move to Citadel just yet, unless you're happy to sort of tinker around.

But yeah, no, it's been great and the two devs that are sort of behind it have been really responsive to the feedback that I've been providing with them. So definitely want to watch if you're into that, that sort of node implementation where you've got Bitcoin lightning and, you know,

loads of other sort of self-hosting apps like NextCloud, password managers, et cetera, et cetera, definitely want to watch. - Yeah, that's interesting. 'Cause when I'm onboarding people, that would be a nice one to do because I don't really agree with them not being open source, but it is so simple to use Umbral.

You know, when I'm setting people up, it has been by far the most simple. So if we could have something like that that sort of still fits with the ethos, but it's simple, then that's where I'd probably push people.

- With the, like, node implementations like Umbral, but also start nine with their embassy and so on with where they have so many different options. I think it's like a kind of love hate 'cause on the one hand you can like having everything on one device, especially if it's a pie, it would slow the thing down.

It's a huge centralized security risk if the thing blows up. But on the other hand, it's so great to have an option where you can really just easily plug and play different open source software that are not directly Bitcoin related as well.

I mean, last year we had our fiasco with our self hosting with, what's the software called? Forgot it. - You know host? - Yes, that's the one. And that was a pain in the ass. But having that all plug and play ready on a node is amazing.

What I love about these solutions is that if you actually want to use a whole bunch of different things, you can just get three different pies and put the same software on it and have your next cloud on one, have your password manager on the other and have your Bitcoin node on the third.

But you only have to work yourself into one software kit and like the user experience there. That's I think one of the main advantages of that concept. - The other thing I saw that I thought was pretty cool is your pay join for foundation.

I felt like I really wanted to do that myself and then I remembered who I am. But yeah, I thought that was really fucking cool. How did you do it and like, is it something I can do? - Yeah, so I did it for just a cap of what Max is talking about.

I published a guide on the foundation devices blog as to how you can purchase one of our hardware wallets called Passport and you can pay to our B2C pay server which we self host and you can pay using a type of collaborative Bitcoin transaction called a pay join which is essentially like a little mini coin join between your wallet

and the foundation devices wallet. So just sort of the why might you want to do that? So pay join is a type of transaction that provides multiple interpretations and its main goal is to undermine something called the common import ownership heuristic which is a really long winded way to say

that it's an assumption that chain analysis firms use to sort of try and track the flow of funds across the Bitcoin network. So they work on the thought process that if there is five UTXOs into a transaction then they assume that all of those inputs are owned by the same entity which for most typical Bitcoin spends

is absolutely true and that's why they apply that heuristic because it's right most of the time. Pay join is slightly different in that. It looks like any one of those traditional Bitcoin transactions or what actually happens is that when you settle the transaction you actually do a little bit of negotiation

with the person that you're paying so that they supply an input to the transaction as well. So that kind of undermines that heuristic. The net result of the transaction is of course that the payer gives away value to the receiver as you would expect.

So you can do that via any compatible wallet. So in the guide that Max was talking about I did that with Sparrow wallet surprise surprise and that was paying to our BTC pay server which is also a pay join compatible.

So there's a couple of extra steps required to do it but the beauty of wallets that are compatible with this like BTC pay server and Sparrow wallet is that essentially once you've sort of indicated that you want to do a pay join transaction they obfuscate all of the difficult stuff away from you

so that essentially you can pay with a pay join or also known as a coin join without any much extra headache and just provide that extra level of ambiguities to who's the sort of true ownership of what the true flow of funds was in that transaction for anybody that was watching it on the blockchain.

The final sort of really cool thing about pay join is that let's say you buy a passport for don't know what the current market rate but let's say it's 500,000 stats. That amount that you would be paying to the foundation devices BTC pay server is not actually visible on the transaction at all.

So if you were to look at all the inputs and all the outputs you would not see one for 500,000 stats. So it completely obfuscates the amount being sent which I think is really, really cool.

And it's kind of, you have to sort of sit down and then think about how it's achieved but it's essentially the net result of the inputs versus the outputs essentially put. That value is not visible anywhere.

- That is absolutely amazing because I mean, that's something I've been thinking about now with the shop that we're launching that we'd love to implement something like that. So I'd have a few questions on that front as well.

So you set that up in BTC pay server and that is then automated. So you have a hot wallet with a whole bunch of funds on there to participate in those collaborative transactions but there's no input required on the store side.

So you just have an additional button on your checkout page, either pay regular BTC pay or a pay join or how would that work? - Yep, no, you hit the nail on the head. It's just an extra option for the payer that once you've enabled it on your store, they have that option when they come to scan

the traditional QR code to ingest your Bitcoin address to pay you and they can just click on pay via pay join. Instead, and that will just give you a, what's known as like a payment link which you would then paste into spiral wallet or whatever compatible wallet that you're using.

And then from there, the wallet flow will sort of, what's contained in that payment link is like, where they can find your server to do the negotiation bit as to gain the receivers input for the transaction.

So the way that that works is, as you correctly said, the person who's running the BTC pay server needs to have some funds that are hard so that it can sign, it can participate in that transaction and supply that input.

Whereas a more traditional approach to use BTC pay server would be you set up, you create your storefront and you just throw an expub in there, which essentially gives the server the ability to derive an unlimited amount of addresses.

But that expub could be from your passport hardware wallet which is completely offline, not connected to the internet. So there's an extra level of security there. So the caveat with being a pay join enabled merchant with BTC pay servers that you do need to have a certain level of funds, hots if you like, sort of active on the server

so that they can participate in these types of spends. - Do you know if it's possible to have the inputs for the pay join coming from a different wallet and the outputs going to a different wallet?

- I don't know for sure, but I'm going to say just thinking about it quickly off the cuff, I'm going to say probably not, but there's something I'm going to go and check. - Because that would be amazing because then the inputs you could always manually every whatever few days or weeks or whatever, refill with fresh post makes UTXOs

and have the outputs of your customer related transactions go into a separate pot that can then go through well pool. - That is a very interesting point. I think I need to sit down and think about that as to how it would work because in terms of like the signing or whatnot.

But yeah, I'm going to go and think about that one, but my gut feeling is that it's not enabled and it's not possible right now within the UI of BTC pay server. But yeah, it's not a bad idea actually.

- Okay, and so if, and to us and me both want to put this into our store and you've obviously said that we have to have the hot wallet to sign these transactions, which is fine 'cause you can just have a certain amount that you leave on there and once it becomes uncomfortable, take the rest off.

But how difficult is it for me to implement that? Like if I want to finish this call, jump on a phone to Mr. Crown, I'm like, right, can you put this on our BTC pay server for uncomfortable misfits?

Is he going to be swearing at me or is he going to be just like, oh yeah, that's done? - It's five minute job, literally. So let's say you're using the traditional setup of, you just got an expub in there and it's going straight to your cold storage.

All you need to do is in the backend of BTC pay server through the user interfaces, add a new wallet, so which you would have done when you initially set up that cold storage expub. So what you do is add a new wallet and then give it, you can let it generate a wallet for you or you can generate a wallet offline from,

you know, it could even be a Bit.85 child seed from your cold card or something like that if you wanted to put those seed words into the server. So you're essentially adding a new wallet and then just deposit some Bitcoin into there and then tick enable pay join, job done.

That's it, it's literally a 10 minute job. So, you know, I can talk you through afterwards if you want, it's really easy. The other thing that's off the back of what Antimus suggested was I'm almost certain you can set up like automation in the backend of BTC pay service.

So if you do have multiple wallets that once the hot wallet has say over a threshold of certain amount is that it will automatically sign a transaction to send it to a different wallet and offline cold storage wallet where, you know, you might just have the expub.

I'm almost certain you can automate that so that you wouldn't need to go onto the store weekly if you're doing a lot of transactions and sort of offload in that hot wallet because it was over your, you know, what you were comfortable doing.

I'm almost certain you can automate that process as well. So it's kind of a, it can be a setting for get it type thing. - Amazing. Have you found that there's any uptake with this or is it sort of like people don't really realize it's there?

Have you found that people use it? - I, well, two things. Number one, I don't, and I don't want access but I don't have access to the foundation devices BTP server. So I don't get to see what transactions are coming in but if I was a guessing man, I'm gonna say probably not and that's twofold is number one, people don't know exists

which is one of the reasons why I did the article in the first place. And number two, there's only a limited amount of wallets that support pay join, spiral wallet being one, blue wallet being another which is commonly used wallet but again, it's kind of, I don't think it's sort of front and center in terms of the UI.

So you'd have to go looking for it just to know it was there really. So yeah, I'm guessing the uptake's gonna be low. I can ask cause I can find out but I don't get to see that sort of information.

- And one thing to mention there is that the fees will be higher and I presume they are then paid by the customer, right? - Yeah, so the fees are always paid in this set up, the fees are always paid by the sender but the fee will only be higher if you, it depends on the makeup of the original transaction

that you were gonna send if you weren't using pay join. If you were just spending one single UTXO and you were paying to a foundation devices address to buy a passport and then you had to change amount.

So that transaction will be one input and two outputs, one's the payment, one's the change. So all you're doing is adding one more input which would be the one from the pay join input from the receiver.

So the cost implication is fairly small to be honest with you. But if you were to, let's take it to the other extreme and let's say you had loads of small UTXOs that your wallet was combining to make that typical spend of paying foundation their output for the device and then you've got to change output from that as well.

That could technically be more expensive than doing a pay join because there's more input. So it's kind of, it just depends on the makeup of your wallet as to whether it would be dear or cheap or what.

At current fee rates you're hardly gonna notice either to be honest. - But to get this work with a pay join you have to as a sender put a larger amount as an input in than regular. I mean, you can't put in less, right?

'Cause I mean, there's no way of actually paying it. - Yeah, yeah, you're gonna have, yes, that's correct. Yeah, you'd need more than what you are paying because, well, no, technically not because the sum of the inputs if you have, let's say the device is half a million cents.

If you were to put a, no, I think you're right. I'm getting myself confused there. Yeah, you're gonna need slightly more than what you're gonna pay to put it simply. - Okay, wonderful. Well, that's definitely something I'm gonna look into.

That's exciting. - Yeah, that's really amazing. 'Cause I mean, if this becomes more used by more of the stores online and this becomes more like normalized, that's gonna really fuck with chain analysis, isn't it?

- Yeah, if sort of a pay join becomes the de facto type of payment, then it's not gonna take long to pollute that transaction graph. But again, I suppose in the grand scheme of things of all the other transactions that people, just typical average Bitcoin users that might be, I don't send it to call storage

or send it to their friends or whatever, that are unlikely to adopt this sort of tech. And I think whether it'd make a dent, I don't know, but you gotta start somewhere. The other thing I will just cut this off by saying as well is that if you've ever done a stowaway with a spiral wallet or a samurai wallet,

that is essentially exactly the same as what we've just been talking about, but in a sort of peer-to-peer fashion from one samurai wallet to another samurai wallet or from one spiral wallet to a samurai wallet.

- It's more involved though. There's a lot more to that, 'cause you've both gotta be communicating and both online and you've gotta actually communicate. Whereas this, it's like the receiver is doing fuck all.

- Yeah, because they've got that always on server, the BTC pay server that's kind of sit there listening, whereas if you're doing this in a peer-to-peer fashion using like samurai to samurai, then yeah, you would need to tell the receiver to sort of wake up their phone and put it into listening mode,

which is analogous to sort of having a BTC pay server online if you like. - So here's a question. If we wanted to do like for peer-to-peer transactions, is there not a way of like, for example, me, you, an Antimus and a few others all running something that's constantly online and have an agreement between us where it's Q&A,

you wanna go and send a payment. You do a pay join with us, but we don't even have to, 'cause we've already got an agreement where we've said we've got a pool of, I don't know, 500,000 sats and all of us have that just sat there and ready to go.

So that any time you send a transaction or any time we just send a transaction, there's this pay join happening or collaborative transaction happening and we don't actually have to be involved, like you don't have to call me and be like, oh, mate, yeah, can you just go online and here's this code

and make sure, you know, go into your SAM right wallet 'cause I might not be available at that time. Is that possible? - I don't think it is. The closest thing to that that I know is planned.

I've no idea if it's in active development is kind of a wake up notification where, let's say, I wanted to pay you, Max, via SAM right wallet, I could sort of initiate the transaction my side and it would sort of ping you a notification, like as if I had sent you a message on Telegram and it'd say Q&A wants to send you some Bitcoin,

do you want to accept yes or no? I know that's been talked about, I've no idea you'll wear along the development process it is, but it's probably the closest thing to what you sort of described that I know has been spoken about.

Just spitballing here, but I might be completely wrong on this, but going back to what I asked earlier about having the inputs come from a different wallet than the outputs go to, you could, as a workaround, if that is true, if that were possible, I could set up a BTC pay server and if you, Max, wanted to pay for a passport,

you could go to my BTC pay server and put the transaction in there and the output goes to foundation. - I think I've lost you both. Oh. (laughing) - Oh no, I could hear you. - I was trying to work out, has he lost us both 'cause we're both talking absolute shit or has he actually lost us 'cause of the connection?

(laughing) - Yeah, I apologize, I didn't, I didn't show up here what you said, I'm supposed to apologize. - Okay, okay, I'll recap. Okay, so if it's possible to have the inputs of a pay join transaction come from a different wallet than the outputs go to, I could set up a BTC pay server, just a private one

and if Max then wants to buy a passport with foundation, he could, instead of going to the BTC pay server of foundation, he could go to my BTC pay server, set up the transaction and I'd automatically contribute an input and the output would automatically go to foundation.

- Yeah, that sounds to me like you just described the Stonewall X2 with Samurai and Sparrow. - But it would be automated. - Right, okay, I'm with you. In theory, it works now with more interaction within the Samurai and Sparrow wallet ecosystem.

So I don't see why you wouldn't be able to automate that. The caveat obviously being that you need that online server all the time, but yeah, in theory, in principle, it works, of course.

Yeah, it's a good idea. - Yeah, that would be amazing, but I think that's the thing is like, I've done these collaborative transactions before, obviously with you and a few others. It's fine, it works like most of the time, but it's just a bit fiddly.

I know it's like really good to do it and I should do it more, but honestly, I'm just like, if I'm quickly need to send a payment, I'm like, oh, I don't want to like disturb everyone and fuck around and everyone has to get onto their wallets and mess around, but if what Antimus has just described as possible, and it's all automated,

then there's no extra steps, there's no more fucking around once it's set up. And so then there's no reason not to. And I think that's a lot of the time that's the barrier is just because we can't be asked or it's a bit more fiddly and we're just like, oh, I just won't bother.

But if it becomes no more difficult and basically the fees are practically the same, then there's no excuse. And I would think that then more people are going to do it for all of their payments or for most of their payments.

And then that really makes a massive difference. - Yeah, so while you've been talking, I completely agree with everything that you just said by the way, while you've been talking, I've just been double checking something within my samurai wallet to check it was actually indicated in the UI before I drop an information bomb

that's not actually public. But if when you're creating a Stonewall X2 in Samurai wallet, when you toggle cahoots on, there's three options, one of which is grayed out. The first two options are online, which is the way that you just described where, you know, you pin Gantamis offline and say, can you help me out with the Stonewall X2?

And he puts his wallet online and you do that over to her. The other option is the in-person or like the DoG way to do it where you're both in person and you scan QR codes back and forth to construct the transaction.

The third option, which is grayed out, and I'll read it out, says that the participant is called Samurai wallet. And it says, Samurai wallet controlled servers will act as a participant to create this coin join.

This is the easiest and quickest option. Obviously there'll be a fear around that, but that's been in the UI and grayed out for quite a while. So clearly something that is at least on the roadmap for them.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but that's essentially exactly what you just described. So yeah, it sounds like it is definitely possible. - It is and it isn't because a lot of people will be like, "Ah, it's a spook server, oh, we can't use that."

So that you're obviously then relying on Samurai, whereas what I'm talking about is I'm relying on a trusted group of individuals. So I would say, right, okay, I trust you enough and I trust Antimus enough and a handful of other people enough that I would be happy having collaborative transactions for all of my transactions with you

because I'm comfortable enough. Whereas I think when you're relying on a centralized party, like Samurai, then you could be like, "Well, okay, how much then insight do they have on what I'm doing and the payments and stuff?"

So I'm sort of thinking, although it's cool, I'm just thinking like it is slightly different model, isn't it? - I agree. But what I will say, and I completely understand your fears there and I get that people might not want to share their transaction information with a centralized party, even if they are a privacy wallet.

But everything to date that Samurai wallets ever produced has been free and open source. So I don't see a reason that if this does come to fruition, why you wouldn't be able to take the code and run your own server from, you know, run that code on your own server, I don't see why that wouldn't be possible.

Again, I've got no authority on this, I'm just sort of spitballing and saying what I think as it comes into my head, but I don't see why that wouldn't be possible at all. - And so if it was possible, is there a way that like you could have that?

So that's running on your own and dojo or something that's always on anyway, and then that's just sat there signing transactions with a certain pool of post-mix funds and everyone who's running a run and dojo just has a certain pool of post-mix funds that sat there, which is then signing and agreeing these collaborative transactions.

So everyone's already running their own server technically anyway, as far as I understand it. And then you take this open source code like you've just said and then you run it on there. Is there a way to do that and partition it off?

- Yeah, obviously why not? Anything's possible with enough time and money thrown at it. So it certainly seems feasible, like you say. Everybody hopefully should be running their own server, like you say 24/7, always on node like a running dojo.

So I don't see why you couldn't implement something that sort of feels a little bit like the sort of joint market approach where you can allocate a certain portion of your funds that are sort of available to parties that know your onion address for your collaborative transactions on your running dojo or what.

Yeah, again, I'm just making this up as a goal on, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible at all. I suppose the only thing to consider is that from there is that what would be the incentive to do that?

Why would somebody want to have those funds made available so that other people could coin join with them? When you think about, we've already got that with Whirlpool and Remix in, which is completely free and you don't have to move your funds out of the pool, the Remix pool to do anything, you just let them sit there.

Because it sucks with Chen and Alice's even more and you're only doing it with the people that are in your trusted group. So I know that the payment that you're gonna make that I collaborate with is just gonna fuck around with the transaction graph or whatever you call it, even more, and then that would make me smile

'cause I'd be like, "Ha, you can't." That's really fucked you up. And that just makes my day better. - It's definitely a promising idea. Maybe I'll get into Zalco's DMs after this and plant the seed and see what happens.

(laughing) - Wonderful. Okay, yeah, moving on. We've got another, quite a few developments going on with Seed Signer, which is amazing to see. Now, I think for anyone who missed this, now they got a bunch of crowdsourced funding through donations at the beginning of the year to give Keith Buckeye the ability

to work on revamped version 0.50 full time. So that's been amazing and it's been putting out a ton of content and completely redoing UI, UX, and also a whole bunch of other new features implemented.

And as a caveat, the full release is not out yet, but they've been putting out a whole bunch of pre-releases for the 0.5.0 to test out. So anyone interested in that can definitely do that, just be wary that it's still not officially been released yet.

But there've been a lot of, Keith has been putting out regular tweets with a whole bunch of information on this progress, different screenshots of the UI, which is looking great. And it's a lot more streamlined, better performance.

And yeah, it's looking great. Yeah, I've been playing around with this last week and I haven't updated my seed signer since one of their first releases and the difference in terms of usability and the UI that you just touched on there is massive.

So for the tinkerers who like building their own hardware and stuff, this is gonna be a big improvement. And it was really great to see that the developments continuing over there at a rate of knots.

And I like what the guys are about around there. And it seems like seed signer got a great response that in Miami as well at the Bitcoin conference on it, both at Guns N' Bitcoin as well.

So yeah, nice to see him going from strength to strength. - Yeah, and also just generally in the community, there've been just so many people chiming in. I mean, like case design and there are a few people who've been doing great work there of tinkering around and just like doing improvements on the existing cases

or coming up with completely new designs. That's been really amazing to see. But also they've been exploring because I mean, I think we've all heard of the supply chain issues with the Pi zeros or with the Pi's in general.

And so there's been a lot of work been done on testing out different platforms to run this on so that you just have more optionality and maybe even more performance boards. That would be great to see as well sometime in the coming year to have more solutions there.

- Isn't the reason that they're using, is it like the Pi zero or something they're using is a specific one because it doesn't have wifi? - I'm assuming that sort of like the more powerful or more modern boards kind of all come with it.

And then you'd have to somehow disable it, which is maybe the issue. Is there anything else that can be used that doesn't have the wifi? - Yeah. It's the Pi zero at 1.3, the original one that they've been, that you're recommended to use, which as he said, doesn't have wifi or Bluetooth.

And that's great. And the performance is actually fine. They've been doing a lot on the software side to get it more lightweight to be faster, but it's fine. Pi has actually brought out a new version of the Pi zero, which unfortunately does not have an option to get it without wifi and Bluetooth.

So there have been people who've been able to disconnect it and to like destroy the components on the board that enable wifi and Bluetooth. So there is that workaround, but obviously that's not a great solution for most people.

So there has been some work being done on the slightly larger format CM4 boards, also from Raspberry Pi. They're like the compute module boards. They're a bit bigger, but they also come in all different power ranges.

Also with and without wifi option. And there have now in the last few days been news releases that have been like, or like information being leaked that they're working on a whole new version of these compute modules that should be coming out soon.

And they'll also be without wifi. So that's great to see and that might be an option to switch to at some point, but still early days. - Cool, do we have any other topics that we haven't gone through, any other thoughts?

- Yeah, there are a few others that are quite interesting. I mean, we don't have to go into all of them in depth, but there are a few to look out for Zeus, the lightning wallet, mobile wallet came out with V0.6.0, which was a complete overhaul as well, looking great.

And I've been having quite a few issues over the last year or so with the wallet. And yeah, it's been running fine since the update. So that's great to see. It looks a lot more modern and beautiful and just nice workflow there.

I'll just run through the others and just interrupt me if you want to chime in on one of these. There's also embassy OS V 0.3.0, which is also a complete new, newly written implementation there of their operating system.

I have not used it yet, but from all I've heard, there's a whole host of new features and improvements there. So that's definitely great to see. It's been in the works for quite a while now and eventually now been released.

We've also got Spectre V 1.9.0. That was also a larger update there. A month or two ago, we spoke about all there. Then you update with Swan implementation there. Big controversy, just generally with those and the situation at the time,

but I think that's been implemented quite well there. So yeah, that's good to see. And also Sparrow 1.6.0 has been churning out updates. It's amazing to see and been so much improvements just on small things as well in the UI, but also now on a different collaborative transactions.

And yeah, so that's great. Yeah, a couple of nice updates for Sparrow was when he added the ability to have multiple accounts, which is kind of a Bitcoin standard where you can have different sort of portions of Bitcoin kind of segregated, but all managed by the same seed words and passphrase combination.

When it was first implemented into the UI, I think it wasn't bad by any means, but it wasn't as sort of as intuitive. So if you had say, you've got all the tab down on the left-hand side, like send receive addresses, UTXOs.

And then on the right-hand side, there was like some smaller tabs with the denoted each account. Well, they've all been shifted over to the left-hand side now. So it doesn't sound like a massive update, but that's just so much more discoverable for people who've got multiple accounts within the same wallet.

And you sort of, you always know where you are within the wallet rather than sort of, previously I was kind of getting myself confused as to, you know, I was trying to send the transaction and I was, you know, in the wrong account or something like that, and I was wondering why something was going wrong.

So just like you said, small, small updates that just make the user interface really a nice place to be. The other cool one about 1.6.3 with Sparrow was, he's being Craig, obviously, as I did the ability to export wallet output descriptors in terms of a QR display.

And also as a PDF export so that you can either save it to your computer or you can print it out as well and keep that offline, which is useful for people who use multi-sig because output descriptors are kind of the sort of skeleton backup of all of the public keys and the structure of the wallet

so that it's quite useful as like an additional backup that you should keep alongside the, obviously, the seed words for all of your signing devices. So again, it doesn't sound like a big one, but if you're a multi-sig user, it's just a real, sort of nice to have.

There's one more that I've, one tab I've got open in terms of an update that did you see the Breeze announcement and their collaboration with Blockstream, namely their green light product.

The headlines are Breeze is a sort of Swiss army knife that's in their own words that is Bitcoin and Lightning wallet. It sort of has a unique set of trade-offs that it sort of essentially runs a lightweight lightning node on your phone and it's got loads of different functionality, podcasting 2.0, point of sale options,

send and receive lightning and on-chain it, of course. And so it enables you to get started with lightning in a better way, in my opinion, of course, than using sort of a custodial solution where you're not in control of the funds.

There are some sort of caveats just the way that they achieve this, but it is this significantly better than a custodial option. So they've announced an update where they're, or announced an intention, should I say, to work with Blockstream and their green light product.

So what they're planning on doing is taking the node out, this is optional, of course, taking the node out of the app and being able to connect to a green light server. So a green light server is essentially a hosted lightning node hosted by Blockstream, which sounds like a backward step, but the trade-off with green light is that

they do the hosting, so they manage the lightning node and they do that, obviously, on a more robust server than a Raspberry Pi, let's say. But the way that they implement that is that the keys required to sign transactions always remain on the user's device.

So it's a bit of a hybrid model where it's great for onboarding in the fact that you don't need to run your own lightning node, or Blockstream, who are hosting your node for you, can't steal from you because they don't have the keys, because they live permanently on the user's mobile phone.

Couple of caveats again, unfortunately, is that whilst they can't steal your funds, if the green light server goes offline, be that through a server outage or that Blockstream just goes rogue, then your funds are kind of stuck and you're gonna have to go through a laborious process to recover them into another compatible wallet.

So it's more of a denial of service risk than a theft of fund risk, but the trade-off with that is it's much easier to get started in a more sovereign manner again than doing so through a custodial solution.

The reason that Breeze have gone down this route is that, according to the Medium article, is that they've stuffed the app so full with features, including a lightning node, that they've kind of reached the limits of hardware, if you like, so for them to continue to iterate, they wanted to take more of a modular approach

where if a user chooses to, they can opt to go for a green light server instead and unlock sort of the future potential features that Breeze are looking to add in the future, which they're now able to, because they're not hosting a lightweight lightning node on your phone, so it just frees them up to focus

on all the stuff while still giving the use of the optionality to have that unique trade-off balance of not running their own lightning node. - But it's then the same kind of trade-off model as the equivalent would be a on-chain wallet, like whatever, a samurai wallet that you connect to the samurai servers or blue wallet on-chain wallet

that you have on your phone and then connect to a node run by blue wallet or also with Sparrow, you can connect to different election risk servers provided by other people. So you do have the privacy implications with that.

You obviously still hold the keys, but you give up all your transaction privacy, right? - Yeah, essentially, yeah. I suppose the difference between the on-chain model that you've just described and the off-chain or lightning model that I described in Greenlight is that if I'm connected to the default Electrum server in Sparrow wallet,

if that Electrum server goes rogue or it goes offline, I could still receive because that's the way on-chain works. I might not be able to see that transaction, but if somebody's got one of my addresses, they can send to it, and soon as I connect to another Electrum server or recover the seed into a different wallet,

all my transactions are there, that becomes a lot more difficult with lightning. - Yeah, absolutely, yeah. But the privacy implications would be the same, or is there some kind of solution for blockstream to blind that?

- I don't think there's anything in the protocol right now that enables them not to see where the transactions are ending up, because again, like I say, they're the ones that are running in those in theory, they're going to see everything.

But I believe there are different improvements to the Bolt spec, which is kind of what the lightning network is kind of built around. There's some stuff coming down the pipe that may be able to improve services like this, yeah, but I don't think there's anything available right now.

- Okay, wonderful. Nice, yeah, I don't know. From my side, I've gone all through all the points that I had on my list. I don't know if you've got anything else you want to touch on. Two of you, no, me too.

- No, well, just one little teaser from me, I'll sign off with, I'm finally returning with, well, it's not an article actually, but it's kind of more of a little bit of a educational piece slash tool, slash something to help people get, or be able to practice with sort of seeds and passphrases

and just get comfortable in a safe environment interacting with Bitcoin. So hopefully by the next time we release, that should be available. So just a little teaser, I guess, and just keep your eyes peeled for it.

- Looking forward to that one. And also one other thing I just want to quickly touch on. If you want to see an absolutely beautiful website, built by Mr. Crown and also some absolutely fabulous merchandise from Max and him, go and check out Ungovernable Misfits.

That is a absolutely great place to go. - Nice show, thank you, I'll send you some stuff now. - Yeah, my hoodie turned up, and I'm genuinely not just saying this 'cause we're our pals, but yeah, it's a really, really nice quality hoodie, and I've had it on all weekend, and the sad thing is,

I think I'm gonna have to buy a couple more unfortunately, 'cause they are really, really nice, so fair play, fair play. - Ah, you finally got it then, 'cause I was getting messages all the time, I was like, where's my hoodie?

Have you rug pulled me? Where's it ever gonna come? And I said to Mr. Crown, what's happening with this thing? - Yeah, no, it turned up last week, and yeah, it's been one thoroughly since.

- Excellent. All right, well, thanks for the shill, and yeah, anyone who's listening, do go and check it out, we've got some new stuff on there, literally went live yesterday as well, so yeah, we've got some nice stuff coming out.

- Yeah, thanks guys, thanks for joining, and yeah, we will speak very soon. - See you next time, love it, man.