Bitcoin monthly 0016 with BQA and Antomous

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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.

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 deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Welcome back. This is Bitcoin Monthly, and today I was joined by Bitcoin Q&A and Antimus.

This was actually recorded about two weeks ago, so I apologise it's gone out a little bit late. Things have been a bit crazy this end, but I really hope you enjoy it. And if you have any questions, you can reach out and ask me.

I want to thank everyone who's been reaching out, asking questions, screening SATs, buying merch and giving feedback on the website. If you haven't checked it out already, I'd really appreciate some feedback on ungovernable misfits.com.

Before we dive in, I just want to say thank you to my sponsors. Let's start with foundation devices. Foundation devices are making my favourite hardware in the space. It's really important to me that things are open source.

I also care about design. I think it's really important with something that you're storing your wealth on and that you use often, that looks good, feels good, it's weighty, and it's a pleasure to use.

If you haven't already seen the passport, I suggest you go to foundation devices.com, it's absolutely stunning. If you are not so technical like me, you can also opt to have Bitcoin Q&A walk you through and hold your hand all the way through the setup process so you can be confident.

And finally, you can use my code, which is bit by bit. It will get you $10 off your purchase. And you can also reach out to me if you have any questions you want to know about the trade-offs and you just want to understand this device a little bit better.

My DMs are always open and I will always be honest and upfront with you. Next up, we have fast bitcoins. I don't know if you've noticed, but we've had a little bit of a dip. It's not even a dip for ants anymore.

It is a perfect place to be stacking some sats. As you all know, I always suggest you go to a no KYC service if you can or mine at home, but it can be difficult getting the liquidity and I know not all of you do this.

So please, if you are going to stack sats, if you are going to use a KYC exchange, make sure it's a good one. Make sure you're using a service that is going to do everything they can to protect you, everything they can to keep your data safe, and everything they can to get your arcing gear and get your sats off exchange.

I love how much they push this. They do not want to custom be your sats. They want you to hold your own keys. This is absolutely the most important thing you can do and I love that the team pushed this.

Check them out at fast bitcoins.com. Enjoy the show. Bonjour. Are we all in? Good morning. Morning, morning boys. How's it going? Yeah, good. My mouse is playing up, but other than that, I'm good.

You, having technical issues? I think it's, I call them swans, my sweaty hands. They're fucking disgusting all over the mouse. I think that's actually what's causing the problems because I was swearing at my starbook for ages, like just being shit, I fucking hate it.

The mouse is terrible, like absolutely abusing it. Just use it as a coffee holder now. Now I'm using my Mac one and it's doing the same. So I actually think it's me that's to blame. I need like Botox in my hands or something.

I'm a disgrace. There's a different acronym for that, isn't there, that basically says that 90% of computer issues are the idiot that's sat in front of it and I can't think what it is now.

Yeah, it's right. It's right. How are you guys? Yeah, doing well. Yeah. It's a lot of my hands. As usual, but I think that's the same for all of us. It was wonderful to get back. There's quite a few topics today to dive into.

So looking forward to this one. Are you all right? It's gone, sorry mate. I was only going to say, yeah, just doing good, plugging away as always. But they've gone, what were you going to say?

I was going to ask Antimus how things are going after his new launch. Yeah, I mean, it's now closer to one month. It's going well. I mean, there's a lot of things to do. A lot of things were working on with tutorial videos and getting some articles out there to have a bit more documentation, which I think is going to be really important.

I'm just getting all the basics ready and done so we can get on to like the pushing up volume a bit. It's been cool. Nice. And we've got lots of topics today to cover. I don't know where we want to start.

Some are a bit more controversial, possibly than others. Where should we start? Software update things first, or should we just dive in at the deep end? Yeah, hit us with some software updates first, Antimus.

I need to have a few more sips of coffee before trying to tackle CTV. All right. Yeah, there are a few larger updates now over the last month. One of them was BISC, V1.9.0. They've been teasing and had a few pre-releases for their API, which is pretty cool.

They've officially launched that now. So you can integrate this into different other software that you either built yourself or, I guess there'll probably be a few things coming out in the next months, but you can automate quite a few processes, which is quite cool.

So you can just hit a certain price or something that you just automatically set different offers, or if one of your offers gets taken, you can automatically put up a new one and all this kind of stuff.

So that's quite cool. That's cool. Yeah, like after the traders, or more frequent traders, or people are living on Bitcoin that might want to sell by or sell a bit more frequently, that's nice.

I did not heard about that one. Yeah, that's definitely cool because I think this will push liquidity up a bit and make everything a bit more efficient because at the moment, you kind of have to be sitting around, you laptop the whole time, and if one of your offers gets taken, you have to manually do all the rest and so on.

So I think this could, I mean, obviously, I think it will take a while until this actually is more widely adopted. One thing to watch out that you can in the settings, you can toggle the option to hide your offers from people using the API.

And I think this is kind of a security measure so that if you kind of fat finger the percentage on your trade, on your offer, and you suddenly go whatever 10% under price or something, that the API clients don't just automatically take your offer like within a split second.

So you've still got a bit of wiggle room to maybe, yeah, to just see that you made a mistake and correct that. So you don't actually have to be online with this to work then, is that right?

Well, you need your BISC instance to be online, but what you could do is you could have a VPS or something and have it running on there. And then just have like the, yeah, or on your laptop or whatever and you could just have the API integration, you could write an app or a program or something that just has certain

conditions in it that you want to do. But it's not built into the user interface yet. So you can't really set like conditions, but it's, yeah, you can interface with it. Yeah. I never wanted to leave mine running.

That was like a big thing. If I was like, oh, I'm just popping out or I'm going to be out for the rest of the day. I wouldn't ever want to leave the thing running because it would be so hot.

You could fry an egg on it. Yeah, I've actually, I've heard that a lot. And obviously it is pretty intensive, just like from percentage wise, if you're a CPU, CPU and memory usage, but I haven't had like the temperature issues even with my laptop.

Oh, really? I think it's gotten a lot better in with recent updates, actually. I've noticed that my computer's sort of less bogged down by having been scrolling in the background fairly recently.

So maybe perhaps there's been some optimizations in the background that have helped that. Or maybe Linux being Linux, it's just a sadness. It's going to have a good day. Yeah. And to be fair, this was a couple of years ago when mine was like running all the time and it was really hot.

So, you know, it might be different. But I did hear, did either you catch the talk on Citadel dispatch with Matt and Wiz where he was talking a little bit about like, oh, if he could redo the project, what would he do?

And he was talking about like they tried to do a rust implementation that they actually had like semi up and running and you could run it from an Android phone. But it never got implemented and he was sort of talking about like, oh, if he could do something from scratch, what would he do?

It was quite an interesting talk because I think that's like a big, that's a big thing for a lot of people. Like not everyone is on their laptop all the time, but you had an app running on the phone, like how much more usage would this thing get?

And obviously it wouldn't be so resource, what do you call it? Resource intensive or like basically just, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that would have been absolutely amazing. I mean, to hear that, they were saying that this was up and running a few years ago.

That would have been great. One of the huge pain points I have with Bisk is I mean, they actually do have a mobile app just to get notifications and that doesn't even work. And it's like, that would be something that would be, I mean, I'm not a developer, but yes, this isn't the most difficult thing to get thick.

But it seems that there's no one working on this, which is a huge shame because that would help in the first step. Yeah, so next up we've got, there's been a new Bitcoin core release version 23.0.

Fairly minor releases, core releases go to be honest. The two main headlines are taproot support for new wallet creation in the GUI. So if you are to download Bitcoin core today, you can opt to create a, it's not the default.

A native segment is still the default because it's still the most commonly used and most wallets don't actually support sending to taproot addresses yet. But within core, you can opt to create a taproot wallet, which will give you the addresses which will be starting with BC1P.

So that's a nice feature to have and kind of, I suppose, leading the way and laying the groundwork as you would expect from core in the wallet ecosystem. I would sort of err on the side of caution as I alluded to, you know, most wallets don't actually support sending to taproot just yet.

In fairness, there are a few. I know Moon does. I know Samurai does, but I can't speak for any of the others yet. But it's nice to have the option and know that we're sort of making use slowly but surely of the new features from the most recent soft fork.

And the other update is that descriptor wallets are now the default within core. So what is a descriptor wallet? So anyone listening to this will be used to backing up 12 or 24 words is kind of their master backup for their Bitcoin wallet.

And what they actually also need as well as those seed words to be able to find their Bitcoin when they recover it is what's called the derivation path. Now, most typical wallets will follow the sort of standard native seguit derivation path that's defined in that improvement proposal.

But when you get to multi-sig or using wallets with fancier derivation paths like Samurai's a perfect example, then you need to have an awareness of those derivation paths when you're recovering into a different wallet.

Because otherwise, if you're kind of recovering into a wallet, they're just defaults to the default derivation path. You might have a bit of a shock to see a zero balance if all of your funds are in a different derivation path.

So descriptor wallets are a way to kind of circumvent this and it's basically a way of backing up, it's also additional to your seed words, but it's a way, it's like a map to your Bitcoin basically that includes all of the derivation paths to recover the Bitcoin based on where they were used within your wallet essentially.

So it kind of makes recovery a little bit simpler and it's kind of the unified standard. I know Spectre and Sparrow have been using this for a while. It's been in core for a while as well, but I just don't think it's been the default, which has obviously changed with version 23.

Yeah, that's still an issue of like backing that up. I mean, now over the years, there've been a lot of solutions of backing up your seed words, but then up till now it's still pretty difficult to back that up in a secure way for long-term storage, I mean, obviously you can put it on a thumb drive or something like that or put

it in a password manager or encrypt it on a cloud, but there's still something as the amount of information is still quite a lot. It's not easy to back that up in the same way as you would your seed.

We've also got a BTC pay server, the 1.5.0. They've brought out a whole new dashboard design, which is quite nice to see. So you can see a whole bunch of graphs on the usage and payment flows and so on.

So it just makes everything quite a bit more accessible. That's nice. While we're talking about BTC pay server, guys, I'm going to put you both on the spot now after last month's recording and ask you if you've looked into pay joining both of your servers.

I have looked into it in the sense that I spoke to Mr. Crown about it and said, can you ever listen to that episode I did with Q&A and just see if you are going to get annoyed? He promises it's only five minutes to implement.

Please can we do it? So I've done that. I've done the nudge. So I think it is going to happen, but it's not done. Yeah, same thing here. I mean, I've definitely looked, I mean, from all I've now seen, I mean, and as you said, I mean, it's not a big deal to actually implement it.

Just what we spoke about last time as well of how to exactly separate funds and so on and to see the actual management of liquidity on there. And then I'll see because we're also going through coin join with the payments that are coming in.

So exactly how to manage that. I'm still working through that. But as quite a few people have also mentioned to me beforehand when it's done out to be true, there is a very small percentage of people that actually do pay with SATs.

Most do opt to go with credit card or PayPal or whatever. So shame on them. Exactly. I'm surprised by that. That's what I thought that was going to happen with ours. And I reckon 90, 95% of people are paying in Bitcoin.

Really? And we're not. Yeah. And we're not doing any sort of deal or offer. First I was like, oh, maybe we should say that would give you 10% off if you pay in Bitcoin. And then we're like, no, we'll just keep the pricing tight and just it is what it is.

And we were shocked actually. There's only been a few who have done credit card. I've got a theory around this. And it could be purely anecdotal. But the clothing that you and Mr. Crown have for sale is geared, you know, it's literally called on governable misfits and it's geared towards, I guess it's more appealing towards

the more the Bitcoin user that sort of tends to spend their time more in the privacy circles. And generally speaking, those people are much more open to using Bitcoin as a tool for privacy or, you know, any other various reasons to sort of circumvent the state, et cetera.

Whereas what Antimas and Nick are doing is more, you know, it's cold storage, isn't it? And it's most if people are kind of just backing. Yeah, everyone needs it and generally speaking, that's a more broad or wider audience that might just be using Bitcoin as a savings vehicle.

So they're not sort of counting every single sat. Sorry, they are counting every single sat and they don't want to part with any of them. Hence, they're using credit cards. That's probably true.

Yeah, that's probably true. I've spent more time on PGP and doing swaps and fucking around than I think I ever have. Because people keep my DMing me like, can you do a page on? Can you do this?

Can I pay in Monero? I'm like, no, you can't pay in Monero, but I'm not against the idea of it. So then I'll reach out and like T devs like, I'll take that. And then I'll send you Bitcoin, but I'll send you the details over PGP.

And I'm fucking it. It takes me like an hour to do one transaction, but I'm learning. So that's something. Right. Um, do we, do we, uh, talk about the, the unspeakable of once again compass?

Um, yeah, go on. So the, so compass, uh, turns out had a, a, a mining. I'm using an echo tier mining through a third party called bit river in, uh, in Russia. So if you had a compass miner, uh, hosted in Russia, it was done.

They were kind of subbing that out to a third party called bit river in Russia, bit river have been hit with sanctions from the US, uh, which is consequently flowed sort of upstream to compass.

So that anybody who had a miner hosted in Russia through compass has essentially been shut down. Now that sounds bad, but unfortunately it gets worse because all of this came around. Um, and the CEO of compass posted into their discord.

Uh, I think it was one of you that actually gave me the heads up on this. And basically saying that we're going to have to shut down the Russian arm of our business. This is going to happen in 48 hours.

We're going to try and flog your miners for the best price we can. We can't promise that we're going to get anywhere near a market rate. And basically you haven't really got a choice in that.

Um, which is, um, I get that, you know, obviously compass don't want to be, uh, seen in violation of the sanctions. Um, but it's a real shitter for the people who had, uh, their miners hosted with compass.

Now, I'm not sure if there's been any further developments on from this. I do remember seeing one or two tweets from people literally showing screenshots of, um, their miners being taken offline where you can see the hash rate dropped to zero.

So it looks as though they did follow through with it. I've not had any reports since on whether anybody's actually got any value from back from that. Um, in terms of whether they've been able to flog their miners or not, but it seems as though

any, any of those users that fall into this bracket are kind of up shit creeped without a paddle and have no idea whether they're going to get any money back whatsoever from their miners.

Um, would that be a fair assumption? I know you're pretty close to this one. Yeah. I mean, I, I don't have any, um, too much additional information. I mean, it's just, uh, what they've been communicating openly.

Um, as you said, it's, it's a, they're in a pretty rough spot, um, just from the regulation side. Um, but I think one of the big mistakes again as they, as last year as well with the whole delay situation.

So on, I mean, giving people a 48 hour notice if you've got tens of thousands. Uh, in, in hardware worth, uh, sitting over there. I mean, that's pretty brutal, um, out of nowhere. And I mean, this was beginning of May.

So I think this was a second of May or something that came out with the, with the announcement or maybe a few days earlier, but it was definitely not too long ago. And the whole Russia situation had been going on for quite a while.

So, and they'd always been very vocal about now. This is not, uh, affecting us. This won't be any, um, any problem for, for you guys. Um, obviously everyone had the, the option to list their machines on their marketplace.

And they also had the option to have them shipped to them. That was active and that was a possibility, um, up until this announcement. So, um, people could have done something, but I think also it wasn't handled, uh, very well.

One thing, uh, I can say if, uh, anyone's listening to this and you're, uh, living in Russia, um, you can get some machines on the cheap. Um, they're looking for buyers. So, uh, yeah, if you, if you want to stack up big time on hardware, um, give them a shout.

I think it's worth mentioning as well. I've just reread the, the release that they put out was that you didn't have the option to get the minus sent back to you at all. So it was either you let the, as a user, you let compass sell it for the best price that

they can get or you're kind of on your own to try and negotiate with a Russian, uh, mining company who you have no direct relationship with. So, um, yeah, not great at all. But yeah, but beforehand you could have, I mean, at that point, yeah, I think about a month ago or something, you still could have had them shipped to you.

Yeah, that was a, that this was only once the sanctions had been sort of, uh, put into motion. Yeah, as soon as they were active, um, basically compass said, yeah, we can't get your miners out of Russia, but best we can do is try and sell them for you.

Yeah. Yeah, not good. I feel very sorry for anyone who's been caught up in that. I don't know whether they pushed at any point, like saying, guys, you know, this is obviously, we all knew where this was going.

I wonder whether there was any communication to say, look, you know, we can find a new, um, some more rack space for you somewhere else. You should maybe consider getting them out of there because there's going to be a problem.

I don't know if anything like that was done. It sounds like people had the option and it just seems like it was a bit of a cluster fuck again and that there wasn't really any like planning or thinking and people would have lost just so much money.

And it just seems to happen constantly with compass, um, not that, you know, the sanctions is anything they can do about it, but I don't know. It just seems like maybe they should have, um, thought ahead a little bit.

Yeah. I mean, this is a situation in which, I mean, it is a huge thing. I mean, it's not just a facility, um, like last year and some are that kind of didn't get their approvals and so on.

I mean, this, like, everything is cut. I mean, like transaction, like just like financial ties to Russia, transportation, everything is cut at the moment. I mean, it wouldn't have even been, um, I don't, I mean, there are no fly zones, um, over different countries and so on.

I mean, getting this out would have been a huge thing if you want to just take down the entire facility and have all machines relocated. Um, obviously they could have done that right at the beginning and just said, okay, we're going to just not go take the risk.

On the other hand, I do think this in this situation, in contrast to the situation last year, that each individual user also has to take part of the responsibility as well as tough as it is, but the prices were cheap, but everyone did know that there is political risk, even before the whole situation escalated.

And after this situation escalated, there still was the option to have them, um, taken out or sold. Um, and people did not, or I guess some did, um, but those people who are caught up in it now, um, it's an absolute terrible situation, but I think that the, the fault is not entirely on Compass's side in this situation.

Yeah, I agree. As much as they piss me off and still fucking work Gibbs, I think that you're right. There was a lot of opportunity for people to get out of there. I think a lot of people just getting the rack space, like people who want to use something like Compass, I think quite often don't have access to semi-reasonably priced power or

don't have the rack space or don't have anywhere that they could run something like this at home. And then, you know, someone's piled in and bought a few miners and they're in Russia. Was there an opportunity or did they see it as an opportunity where they can find somewhere else to, um, to house them?

And I think probably a lot of people were just thinking, Oh, well, you know, let's just see how this plays out. Like, is it going to be over soon or is this going to continue to get worse?

Yeah, maybe there just wasn't a solution in their head of like, I guess the idea of sending a miner, like unplugging it and then not having anywhere to house it. They were like, Well, that's a loss.

So whatever I do, I'm going to be losing. Let me just take the risk. I can kind of see in their head for a lot of people how that would have played out. And, um, yeah, it's just a shame. So in more positive news, we've got a new wallet being released on the market, a new desktop

wallet called my Citadel, which is a desktop wallet that has, I think it's from the guys who are behind RGB, which is like a scaling proposal that's been around for Bitcoin for quite a while now.

So what's interesting about my Citadel is that it leverages time locks and tap routes so that you can, um, aside from all of the, the sort of standard features that you'd expect to see from a desktop wallet, like hardware, wallet compatibility and spec spend receive, and cold storage, et cetera.

You can actually create, um, like wallets that sort of, um, have, uh, predetermined sort of rates of decay behind them, meaning that let's say you were to set up a two, three multisig wallet, uh, as your super cold storage, um, you could have that, uh, decay down to a rather than needing two signatures to spend from that.

You could, uh, after three years or any, any amount of time, you can have it decay to a one of three so that, um, let's say you lost one of your keys and it's back up from the two or three, um, and you, um, weren't able to spend, sorry, you lost two of the keys,

should I say, so you weren't able to spend, you could wait for that predetermined amount of time, uh, to wait for the wallet to decay so that one signature was valid, uh, and then be able to recover your funds, um, obviously that's just one example and there's multiple

ways that you could do that, so if you were to set up a more complex multisig for a business say that's like, I don't know, uh, five of seven, uh, you could have that decay down to a three of five, um, after a year and then down to a one of three or something like that

after like five years so that you've always got that sort of, um, fall back if you like so that in a catastrophic event where you were to lose multiple keys, uh, you're not gonna, uh, screw yourself out of your Bitcoin, so, um, seems pretty early, it looked very

much like, uh, an MVP wallet, um, not quite as polished looking as some of the other options out there, um, but I'd say it's, it's a version one, um, but it's really good, good to see, um, teams building on top of, uh, taproot and, and building sort of, uh, advanced wallet

features, uh, such as like a decay and wallet, um, which I think we're gonna see a lot more of, um, as Bitcoin continues to grow in its adoption because it's gonna be a requirement for those sort of, um, different use cases out there, so yeah, nice to see.

Yeah, especially, I mean, the, um, all these different optionalities, I mean, now with taproot, it's gonna be amazing to see how many different, um, in, how many different directions, uh, you can push this and one thing that is a huge task is to get the user

experience and all the, like, um, user interface, nice and self-explanatory, um, so that you can actually navigate, um, through that and know what options you have and what is more beneficial for this situation and that situation.

And from just glancing over the, um, the Git app, um, it's quite cool to see that they had different categories of, um, like a normal spending wallet and, uh, more secure, hodl wallet, and then also for companies or groups of people, uh, collaborating together and

so on and, um, seeing this, like, being built out more into different, uh, groups, uh, for different use cases with different features, um, I think that's gonna be really interesting over the next couple of years.

Yeah, there's a great picture example on the, uh, GitHub repo actually that sort of demonstrates what I just said that to, in, in one single page, essentially, it's literally just, you've got like a little slider where you can say, I require at least, uh, three signatures at any time for this wallet.

So that's kind of, um, the standard, uh, and then I require at least two signatures after and then you can just input a number of years, weeks, months or anything like that. And then you can drop it down as like a third option, say, uh, I can require any single

signature, uh, anytime after this date, and there's just like a date box there as well. So to, you could make a really complex wallet that's got a lot of, uh, fallbacks in it based on, um, time that's been elapsed, uh, in a really simple way.

So obviously I'm not suggesting people run out and do this for their call storage. This is a brand new wallet. So, you know, as always, tread carefully and just mess around on, uh, on test net first, I'm almost certain this has got a test net option.

Um, but yeah, in terms of like adding, being able to add that functionality with a graphical user interface, uh, is a really great step to allow people to do more, uh, complex sort of scripted and backups with their Bitcoin wallets, especially their call storage anyway.

One thing I was just thinking, uh, do you think this would be a good implement, implementation opportunity for CDV, maybe pushing this in that direction, but that would be something, um, you could build it in quite a few, build on that concept.

Yeah. See, that's where it's not kind of clear to me. Um, obviously this leverages, leverages taproot to sort of hide all of those complex scripts, uh, within, um, the sort of underlying tree structure of a taproot tree.

So if you were to kind of look at this wallet, um, on chain, you'd just see a taproot address and all of these complex spending, uh, conditions are kind of, are not revealed, um, until the time of spending based on, and, and of course it depends on which sort of tree you take

as to what information you reveal when you do spend, but initially upon setup, it's so completely hidden. That's one of the great benefits of, of taproot. Um, where that ties in with the CDV, I'm not quite sure yet.

Obviously, CDV has only kind of come to the forefront fairly recently, so I'm sure there might be some overlap there, but, um, it's, uh, far too much for my small brain. Now we've hinted at it.

Can we get into, uh, the topic I really want to know about? CDV. Okay. Why don't I'm going to, I'm going to throw the ball back into your court and ask what, what you make of it so far before I'll sort of have a stab at kind of, um, breaking it down for the layman based on, uh, what I've sort of learned over the past sort of seven

days with the, the increased focus that it's been given shall we say? Yeah. Well, like I said to you before, like I'm quite lost with it, to be honest, from what I understand the main controversy is about the way that it might be implemented and more about that than actually what it can do.

And so that was kind of where I wanted to know more, because it's quite an important topic. You know, if things are changing in Bitcoin, we need to make sure that, uh, there's consensus and that people understand what's going on.

And right now, if someone says to me, do you want it or not, I would just say no, because I don't really understand enough. And like what I've been told, it doesn't make enough changes that make me want to add any risk to what we've got.

Like if someone was saying, oh, you can have confidential transactions, or you could have something that like I really care about, I guess I'd have paid more attention. But from what I've heard so far, there's nothing that makes me like, wow, we need this.

So yeah, I, before I get into the explanation, I tend to agree with you that this isn't, um, as impactful, um, to require such a, uh, seeming the urgent change or updates to Bitcoin. Um, the, the, the benefits don't seem to outweigh the even minor risks.

So, so what we're talking about is, uh, CTV check template verify, um, or bit one, one nine, essentially, which is an improvement proposal by a guy called Jeremy Rubin, uh, or a soft fork implementation, um, of what's, uh, essentially been clogally termed covenants.

So a covenant, um, much like you would hear it in day to day life is kind of, um, a restriction on what you can do with something. So in this context, bit one 19 gives a sort of framework where, um, if it was activated, you could encumber, um, some Bitcoin that you received, um, to be, uh, only be spent in a certain way.

Now, there's many different ways in which, um, this could, uh, pan out, uh, and there's many different, um, encumbrances you can put on different UTXOs based on that this sort of proposal.

So there's been a couple of examples, um, where you can exchanges might be able to use this as a, um, potential scaling solution of, there's some holes in this theory. So let me try and get my head around it as I talk.

Um, let's say that the Mempool is absolutely jammed, uh, and there's exchange, uh, withdrawal fees like 200 sets per bite because the Mempools just packed with transactions. Well, if this, if CTV was, uh, activated, um, a exchange could, uh, sort of commit, uh,

to, uh, let's say they do, uh, 5,000, um, withdrawals to 5,000 different customers all at once. So they could commit to all of those, uh, basically saying, this, this piece of Bitcoin, I can only spend some acts as part of his, his withdrawal, but I'm not actually going to, um, send it

to the chain, uh, right now because chain fees are, um, ridiculous. Um, but because the, because the exchange has kind of locked that Bitcoin, uh, and said that this is the only way I can spend this Bitcoin is to max his address that he's provided to me.

You can be almost, you know, 99.999% sure unless there's a bug in the system that that Bitcoin is yours, or be it, it hasn't sort of, uh, technically landed at the address in that instant because it's not sort of confirmed on chain, I guess, but because, um, the exchange

has sort of made that commitment within the, the, um, framework of CTV, uh, it's essentially said that I can't spend that Bitcoin to any, anywhere else other than max's address. That's one of the main, uh, uh, air quotes, again, benefits that I've heard touted around

CTV, uh, like I said before, there's many of the different ways that you could encumber these, um, Bitcoin and I guess the world's your oyster in terms of what's kind of possible with this.

Um, in terms of like an actual code change, I believe it's not actually massive, um, especially compared to something like taproot. So the actual complexity of this is fairly, um, it's like a reintegration, isn't it?

Again, this could be completely wrong, but my understanding was that it was like something that was previously possible in Bitcoin and it, it got taken out or restricted after it was already in, like it got taken out just to make sure that like Bitcoin was hardened or whatever you'd call it.

So that it's like re-implementing something or am I making that up? No. Well, that's absolutely possible. I'm not sure, not sure for certain, but I know there has been certain opcos that were removed just because they weren't used, whether this is one of them or something similar to

this was one of them that was removed, potentially yeah, absolutely. Um, so I'm just trying to think, um, so just, just to circle back to that example that I used with the, um, with the exchange and covering the Bitcoin, uh, so obviously that would sort of kind of not impact the change straight away.

Um, and I was listening to a guy swan podcast on this a couple of days ago where he said that that sounds good in theory because you're sort of, you're sort of locking those Bitcoin up and those, those customers know that their, that Bitcoin is essentially theirs without,

uh, having to, um, fill a block up with that big transaction pay and those 5,000 people. Well, what is, what guys, one was saying, which is I completely agree with is that that's just kicking a can down the road because eventually all of those people might want to do something with that Bitcoin.

And so they're eventually going to have to hit the chain anyway. So you kind of just rather than doing it now, when the chain fees might be high, you can potentially do it in the future when the chain fees are lower, which is great.

Yeah. I see that as a benefit, but ultimately all of those transactions do have to kind of hit the chain and take that footprint anyway. So I don't know, it just seems to kind of new to the, the benefits for me.

I'm not sure what your thoughts are, guys. Yeah. One thing I'm, I'm not 100% sure on, but the way I understood it was that they don't just, if they do one of these congestion control transactions.

So basically pre-committing to all of these transactions. It is a transaction that is actually mined in a block, but the outputs aren't created. That's the way I understood it. Correct. Yeah.

So it's not just that they hand out certificates basically for that you, you're promised this Bitcoin. It is actually on the blockchain and you can verify it. Yeah. But what the difference is, or the quoted benefit is that, let's use, let's say it's

binanced, binanced does that one single transaction where, so rather than them sending 5000 UTXOs as they currently would in the high fee rate and paying a fortune for it, they're paying to send one UTXO to this address that has the encumbrance on it, paying these 5000 people

in the future so that they can pay the high fee for one single UTXO and then when the fees are lower, then they can fulfill that withdrawal to the end address is my understanding of it. Exactly.

So get in the savings in the future. Exactly. The one thing that it does do is because you as a user, you have to pay the second transaction fee, right? I think that's my understanding of it, yes.

Okay. Okay, but so the difference is, sorry, I was just talking all over you, mate, I was just thinking, so the basic difference is that rather than just putting a very low fee and waiting, you have this as a different option where you know that it will at some point go through as long as the fees do actually drop.

But if they don't actually drop or like Q and A, like you were saying, like if someone's a ash and need to send those sats, then you need to do it any way and you're going to pay it any way.

So to me, the only benefit is that like that transaction can't drop out. You can't just like put it at one sapper bite and then it gets like perched or whatever. Like that's the thing that can't happen or can it still?

We lost you for like five or 10 seconds then, mucks. Fucks sake. Don't worry. It probably made zero sense anyway, so answer must carry on. I don't see a huge benefit in these batch transactions in a normal case as we just discussed.

I mean, you're just kicking the can down the road and there's a huge benefit for the users. I think where it is a viable benefit is with lightning because you can use the same mechanism to open up a whole bunch of lightning channels for your users.

So you could say, okay, with one of these transactions will open up a thousand lightning channels that you can use right away without having to pay the fee for the opening transaction. So this is great for onboarding, obviously, because you can instantly, without any cost, open up an onboard people onto lightning.

The downside is obviously the same in the sense that when you close the transaction, you have to do two transactions or close the channel. You have to pay the fee for the open transaction and the closed transaction.

So it's the same in the sense that at some point you have to pay the fee. But there I see a larger benefit for the user and for onboarding a lot of people to instantly open these channels and get people onboarded and then at some point they have to pay up.

Yeah, that's a good point, actually. The other more compelling positive argument I would say for CTV is what's been called vaults. So this is somewhat similar to what we just talked about with the new Citadel wallet and this is where I might see a bit of a crossover with vaults or with, you know, if CTV gets

activated, a user could leverage the framework. So let's say they've got their cold storage, again, it might be a two or three multi-sig. They could encumber the addresses within that wallet to only be able to spend a certain amount of Bitcoin every, you know, 10, 50, 100 blocks, whatever they wanted to specify.

So let's say you've got one Bitcoin and you say, right, I'm going to encumber this Bitcoin so that I can only spend one million cents per week. So the way that could be useful, it could also be very unuseful if you needed to move your stack pretty quickly.

But the way it could be useful is let's say you've got to watch only on your phone for your cold storage and you see a million cents go out because somebody's managed to get their hands on your keys.

That could be a red flag warning for you just to look into what the hell has gone on and try and get that Bitcoin moved into a more secure setup because you could, in that instance, you could have already pre-encumbered to say that I need all three keys to move the whole lot and get around the 1 million that sort of transaction limit.

That's just one example. Obviously, there's a million different combinations you could do for that. So this is, in my opinion, a little bit more of a compelling argument as to why CTV might be useful, but I'm not convinced that you wouldn't be able to do this with taproot and what we already have on the chain.

This is the bit that I was mentioning earlier, where it's not kind of clear to me where the crossover is and what we can do already and what CTV enables outside of what we've already got with taproot.

So I want something that I'll be monitoring, but this, for me, is a far more compelling argument than the whole potential scaling-ish benefits that we've just spoken about. What's the risk?

Yeah, the risk is exactly. I think that was one of the huge discussion points around covenants in general, is this idea of one-time covenants and recursive covenants. Either one-time covenant would be that you encumber your address and your one UTXO to

only be able to spend to a certain address or in a certain circumstance, but once that transaction has been mined, what happens to the UTXO after that is totally free again. You can implement covenants to be recursive.

So in a sense, you can think of it like the GPL V3 license in a sense that you say, "Okay, I'm going to put a certain restriction on this UTXO, and once I pass it on, this restriction will stay in place indefinitely."

So anyone who holds this UTXO in the future has to fulfill the same criteria. This is just something that is generally possible with covenants, but this was one of the main design points which a mined CTV was designed so that this is not possible, that

this is really embedded on-chain to be perpetually enforced. It is obviously a bit of a, the way that this is done is that you enforce the restriction or the covenant in the address that you create.

So if I say, "Okay, Max, can you pay me," I'd encode the covenant into the address that I create, that I then send to Max. He then pays to that address, and he cannot decide what the restrictions will be while just paying.

So it's still my choice as the recipient of what restrictions would be on that UTXO. So I see that there's a problem or a danger is similar to the situation we had a month or two ago with AOPP, where exchanges were requiring their users to sign a message that

they own the address, the receive address with a withdrawal. This is obviously also something that cannot be enforced on-chain by the sender, by the exchange. But it can be, well, it is something that if it is technically possible and easy to do, can quickly be a requirement legally.

And I see that that could be a potential danger in this sense as well, that exchanges or other institutions set this as a requirement. And I think Andreas Antonopoulos had a good point on that in one of his videos on CTV, where he said that as soon as you set something up as an option, it quickly becomes an obligation

or a requirement in a legal sense. But before that is technically viable, it's not something that can be enforced. Yeah. So I think it's worth, you mentioned it correctly, I just think it's worth reiterating that this current proposal of CTV does not enable that recursiveness.

So even if it were to be activated in its current guise, and let's say exchanges were forcing users to withdraw to an incumbent address, like you correctly said, Artemis, that once you've got it into that address, you can do with it what you want then.

There are other proposals, I'm not sure who they buy, but do introduce this recursiveness, which is a very, very incredibly slippery slope that you just kind of summarize quite nicely there.

So I just wanted to reiterate that CTV doesn't actually allow for this. So the risk, I guess, with the recursiveness to kind of break down a little bit more simply if I can, is exchanges could essentially kind of make their own compliant portion of the

Bitcoin network where all of the Bitcoin cannot leave any sort of incumbent addresses, essentially, which would kind of have the result of essentially splitting the network into and then being sort of parallel to one another, that once those Bitcoin are in that side of the network, if

you like, they're kind of stuck there because they're always incumbent with a covenant and you can't send to any address that isn't sort of incumbent by that same rule. So yeah, the recursiveness seems a very slippery slope and yeah, it's going to be one to watch

I think, but yeah, Jeremy's proposal doesn't actually allow for this, which is definitely a positive. Yeah, I think one thing I think this is right, but correct me if I'm wrong. You can with CTV do recursive covenants, but you have to predefined every possible option in the future.

So you could say, okay, this address, I can send to this and then that can send to them this address and so on and do multiple hops, but you can't say indefinitely. You have to pre commit to every possibility in the future.

Correct. Yeah, but that would have to be instigated by the receiver so you'd have to kind of shoot yourself in the foot and do it that way. But yeah, it's technically possible that way, but not really enforceable.

Yes. Yeah. And there is a big difference to saying, okay, this is an indefinite thing that can never be changed in the future. No. I know we lost you for a brief portion there, Max, I don't know what you caught and what you didn't.

I think I got most of it. It keeps cutting in and out for me. I hope we have the recording, but yeah, I got, I got the majority of it still from my side, from what I understand, from what you two have just said, and it just doesn't seem interesting enough for me compared to the potential risks and Antimus, what you were just saying there.

I think that worries me. Yeah. The risk to reward for me is just not there, but that's my limited understanding and unless I hear something else that like makes this thing really appealing, I would probably be against it.

But then the question comes like, okay, if I'm against it, what now? And how are they looking to implement this if at all? And what does that process look like? So initially when Jeremy sort of brought this back to the forefront about a month ago, he

initially said that he was going to propose a new Bitcoin core client, which was proposing to activate CTV using speedy trial, which we've spoken briefly about in the podcast before and is the way that Taproot was actually implemented.

And it caused a lot of controversy back then as well as to, I mean, I think there's always going to be controversy in a decentralized governance system. You know, you're never going to get everybody to agree, but speedy trial essentially give a brief summary is anybody running that client gives miners a window and to signal their support

for this new proposal. And if a predetermined threshold of those miners signal that they are in support of this anytime in that sort of signal window, then it's deemed that the miners are for this proposal and it is activated.

Now there's various different ways that, you know, if the miners don't signal, then the users can still run that code anyway and kind of force the miners hand to. I see it as the best of both worlds, but there's an incredible amount of nuance to go on around that as well.

But it's kind of a try quickly and fail fast method of implementation, but I think ultimately no matter which way proposal was proposed to the network, it was always going to cause uproar from, you know, some parties who disagree with the methodology and I don't think we're ever going to get away from that.

That's just the very nature of a system that has no centralized source of power. There's always going to be conflicting opinions and it's going to take a lot longer to reach consensus, so based on the pros and cons that we've just listed, I see no real reason to rush this through.

I think Bitcoin's got far bigger problems that, you know, the clever people that work on this at a core level could spend their time working better, but who am I to dictate to that? I'm just a user and I guess that's one of the beautiful parts of this system.

It's not up to me who or any single one person, what the core devs work on. Yeah, I think also listening to the Twitter spaces with Jeremy Rubin and quite a few others, they had a discussion at the beginning and then also like a Q&A.

And from the tone, it sounded a bit frustrated at this point that, I mean, Jeremy also rightly said that I think the first proposal or the first working implementation of CTV was actually released earlier than the first working implementation of Taproot.

And so it's been around for a long time for people to test and there's been a lot of work that's gone into this. And I can understand that for him and for the people who are working on it, it's been a long time coming and they feel that there is technical consensus and that the work has

been put in, the documentation is there to get everyone informed. I think one point that they are missing is that the attention of most of the people in the ecosystem has been towards Taproot over the last years.

And Taproot only activated at the end of last year. And so I think for the broader ecosystem, you can really only start the clock as from that point when the attention shifted towards that and it just takes time to sink in, takes time for people to process it, listen to different podcasts and read articles and wrap their

heads around how this actually works because it's not just about being sure that the risk has been mitigated technically, it's also just having a broad consensus and a broad understanding of what is going to happen and how people should react to this before things get implemented

and I don't see the downside of waiting another half year for that to come. I think that's reasonable because even if there is technical consensus, it's like most users, we can't go and verify, oh yeah, that's going to be fine, once that's implemented, that's going to be fine.

There's going to be this worry, it just takes time and it will happen I suppose, as long as there aren't any risks, from what you guys have explained to me there, there's nothing where I'm thinking, oh fuck, we absolutely need this, but yeah, maybe there are some interesting

things that can be done, but I'm sure most people will be for it as long as the risks aren't there. Yeah, for anybody wanting to dive into this and get under the skin of it a little bit more, I'm trying to understand it, Bitcoin Gandalf's put together a sort of collection

of all the relevant resources at bit119.com, which is a really great resource for anybody that's got a spare 97 hours to spend reading a website, but all Joe can decide, that sounds like I've thrown shade on the website, there's a lot on there, so you can spend as long as

you like to get under the skin of this and really try and understand it, so for those that want to do that, that's a great place to start. The only other thing I had on the list guys was self-shield with C2, so Max, I believe, the podcast you and I did is coming out today as the time of recording, so this actual podcast

will be coming out after that, is that correct? Yes, I promise, it will be out today. Perfect, so if you're listening to this first, then you haven't heard the podcast with Max and I doing the basics of what seed tool is, then go and listen to that first because I'm

about to just cover off the updates that we released this week, so the two updates that we've got coming out are seed exo, which is a method of splitting up your seed phrases into multiple other seed phrases, so you can essentially look at it as kind of a multi-sig

for your seed phrases, but the difference between it being that you need all of the sort of subsequent child seeds if you like to recover the main seed, so try and break it down just a little bit because it's quite a complex topic, it sounds like a complex topic, but in reality, when you kind of understand it, it's not too bad.

So let's say I have my 24-word seed from Michael Sur's device, I can then use this tool to split that seed up using fancy mathematics to say I want to split that into two other bit 39 seeds, such that I can hide them separately and I could load some funds on to each of

those if I wanted to, to act as some plausible deniability, so if somebody was to discover one of these seeds, they would see, oh, there's a million satts on there, great, I've just nicked this cold storage when in reality, they've nicked my plausible deniability seed

and that my real cold storage funds are actually on the combination of those two seeds, two is just to develop an example on where you can do as many as you want. And my real cold storage is recoverable with a combination of those seeds where I've actually got 15 Bitcoin and Haha, you've only stolen 1 million satts.

So it's quite a powerful feature and to date, the only cold card has implemented it, I don't know whether they implemented it or whether they came up with it either way, they're there, the only signing device that is compatible with it, but now you can test this out on

C tool as well, and just to see how it works and see that you can kind of split your seed in a way that gives you some plausible deniability, but also, again, you can have some redundancy as well as in terms of you can create multiple copies of these as well, I'm going to throw

it to Max now to see if I actually explain that pretty well because it's kind of a difficult one, it took me a while to wrap my head around it, so field me with any questions if it didn't make sense.

Yeah, no, I think it does, I think it does. We did cover it, I think, when it was originally released, I think it's like a year, a year and a half ago when it was originally released and I was like, yeah, that's actually a really cool idea.

So my understanding is that you can split it so that you have that plausible deniability, so someone can access one wallet, but without the two pieces or the three pieces together, it shows you a different wallet.

Such the same as having a pass raise and not having a pass raise, it's different wallets, so it's a good way to, yeah, if you have an attacker come to your house, you're better to give them something than nothing, you leave with your life and they leave with some stats and you keep the rest.

Yeah, because at the moment, seed plates or seed backups are fairly inconspicuous pieces of, the typical laymen probably isn't going to know what one is if they stumble across it. It's going to last forever, so I think the potential plausible deniability here is going

to be useful, particularly in the future as Bitcoin continues to gain adoption and the concept of seed backups becomes more widely known and understood, which obviously brings with it the potential inherent risk.

As I stressed with the podcast covering C2 with Macs, although you can run it offline, this isn't designed to kind of replace your call series device, you can use it as a check tool so that if you were to do seed X or on your call card and you can check the resulting

seeds to check that they, when they're combined, they make the same master seed if you like, you can run that test a couple of times, be confident that the signing device is doing it, you're getting the same result, be confident that it's acting as it's intended and it's

not kind of giving you different results and then you can be, once you're comfortable with that, then you can go and do it for real, just on the offline call stories device. For anyone who's used Tails, that's a great option, that's an operating system that you

can run on our thumb drive, just on RAM and using that on Tails is a great option. I think you've even got that in the documentation I think. We mentioned it at the top of the page, so you can just download the raw file for the website, the HTML file, drop it onto Tails and then play till your heart's content, generate

as many seeds as you want, do bit.85, do bit.47 wherever you want and then, as soon as you pull like Tails USB out, your computer, everything's forgotten and wiped, so just that little extra layer of security if you were using it on your typical day-to-day computer, if you like.

Yeah, we covered that in the episode as well. I have to say, I was really pleased that we did that one because when you two were like nattering away, it was all going a bit over my head after the last conversation and then once you've broken it all down and I've had a play, I was like, "This is actually fucking

awesome," so yeah, I would say to anyone if you have missed that one while listening to this one, definitely go back and have a listen. Yeah, massive shout-out again to Superpharo, who's the anonymous lead dev behind it, he's the real brains behind all the code here, I'm kind of just the face of it and the guy

that sort of says, "Can we do this?" and he kind of goes and implements it, so shout-out to him and yeah, if you haven't listened to the podcast with Max and I, go and check it out because we delve more into the different use cases and what you can kind of get out of this tool and how you can do it.

Sweet, anything else from you, Antimus? No, I think gone through the list. Perfect. All right then, well, I've got to shoot off but it's been really good to catch up with you both. I'm going to have another listen through your explanations, the bits that I missed when I cut out but yeah, it's been a good one.

Cheers, fellas. Thanks a lot, man, it's great. Speak soon.