Bitcoin monthly 0020

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

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

Alright, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back to Bit by Bit. Today, we have a break from Club Mine a month. It's been amazing, but we couldn't miss out on the Bitcoin monthly, could we? I've been sick as a dog. You can probably hear it in my voice.

I feel absolutely fucked. So I want to say thank you to Bitcoin Q&A and Antimas for carrying the show. Not only did they carry the show, but Antimas has also written the show notes. That means that they're actually good this month.

We've got all the links, all the info, and everything that we discussed in there. So thank you so much to Antimas. Before we start, I just want to say thank you to my show sponsors. I want to start with my anonymous sponsor.

They've sponsored this show for three months for a 20-second ad read. As we've had Club Mine a month, I've been rotating the sponsors a little bit, but today I want to dedicate some proper time to this.

First off, I want to say to have an anonymous sponsor reach out and offer to pay for my time is incredible. They reached out and said that they cared about this show deeply, listened every single episode, and they wanted to make sure that it continued.

I have to say it blew me away, and all they asked for in return is for me to talk about value for value. Value for value matters because it stops the misalignment of incentives. It means that podcasters don't have to take on shitty sponsors that fuck over their listeners.

And it means that the podcasters that don't take them on can actually survive and possibly even thrive if they do things right. So I just wanted to say thank you so much to this anonymous sponsor.

And thank you to everyone who's been supporting on Breeze and Fountain. I also want to thank Foundation Devices for not only sponsoring this month by giving two Foundation Devices passports away, but also for supporting this show every month and allowing it to continue.

I really do appreciate that open source ethos, beautiful design, an incredible team. In a couple of days, I will be releasing a pod with Bitcoin, Q and A and Lily. So listen out for that one and also watch out for the prize draw for these passports.

If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation devices.com. Use the code bit by bit for $10 off. And if you have any questions at all, you can reach out and ask me. I'd also like to thank FastBitcoins for sponsoring this show.

Despite me constantly bashing KYC services, they still support me. This shows me that they care about Bitcoin and they care about the direction that this goes. And although I do bash on KYC services and I do and I suggest you go and mine or you buy KYC free, I know that not all of you are gonna do that.

If you're not gonna do that, then I can only suggest that you go to a team that really cares about this movement, that really does everything that they can to keep you safe and doesn't just give up your data for no reason.

I have a huge amount of respect for this team. And if you wanna ask me any questions about the trade offs, I will be open and honest. You can also reach out to FastBitcoins team and they can answer any questions you might have.

Go to fastbitcoins.com and enjoy the show.

(upbeat music) - Hey mate. - Hiya. - Oh man, okay, this took a while. - Got a love Mr Bit by Bit and his technical team. (laughing) - Yeah, he's got a lot on his hands.

Let's hope he makes it in here. - Not looking promising, is it? (laughing) - No, I've got more. - Here he is. - Cool. (laughing) - Special needs, here we go. (laughing) - Hello. - Hello. - There you are.

Thanks for sorting that mate. - All good, all good, all worked out. - Are we recording? - Yeah, I mean, you can cut the FastBit, I guess. (laughing) - Yeah, I'm having a fucking nightmare here with all the technical problems.

I won't bore you too much with it, but it has been the worst I've ever experienced, which is saying something for me. So, at my fucking wit's end with it. - Frank, what's the problem? - Yeah, without going into massive detail, my Mac book will not connect to the internet or it lies, it says it is.

Like, it will connect to Wi-Fi's, but it won't actually work. And I've tried it wired, I've tried it on five different hotspots, two different Wi-Fi's, always connects, but nothing works.

Rebooted it, restarted it, gone through three or four different guides doing all the shit they say and just nothing fucking works. I can't then access any of my audio or any of my stuff because the Mac book's so old and the storage is so shit that it just stores everything in iCloud.

So I can't pull anything like I can't access anything and just put it on a drive. And then I don't wanna use my Linux machine because I don't wanna go onto my iCloud on that and then docs myself 'cause it's gonna be just for Bitcoin stuff.

So much more cunty and stupid stuff all mixed in there as well, but yeah, very, very annoying. So I'm now using a different laptop and don't have access to anything and just spewing. - Fucking hell.

- Yeah. - Man, that sounds rough. (laughing) - That's okay. - Ooh. (laughing) - But yeah, other than that, mate. All good here, how are you? - Yeah, yeah, wonderful here. I'm just not juggling it a bit of the location upping backwards or forwards to my parents and stuff.

Quite a bit to do back there, but it was quite nice to get to see quite a few people I haven't seen in a while. And it's been a nice summer vacation. And obviously before that, Riga. A little pretty amazing.

- Yeah. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah, so talk to me about Riga. What was it like? What did I miss out on? - Well, you missed Q&A, that's for starters. - Tell me something more than that. (laughing) - I mean, it was just like the signal to noise ratio.

It was just amazing. I mean, it was a bit of kind of a blessing and a curse. 'Cause I had these like stams, like small booths for seat signer. And so I was there like non-stop from when it opened to like when they shut down.

So I didn't have any chance to go around and didn't hear one talk. I didn't get to go anywhere else. But on the other hand, there were just like so many people that came to the booth. So I had like those great conversations.

Those are people I met. So I didn't actually have to go around and like start getting into conversations with people that everyone just came by. So that's really amazing. But obviously I didn't really see much apart from that bubble.

Yeah. - He was like the local celebrity every time I walked over at the seat signer booth. It was like six deep at the bar, just queuing up to have a conversation with him to miss. So I think he resorted to like a ticketing system at the end and yet to go over and hold you up.

He's just got that charm, hasn't he? It's just like some sort of mechanism. - Just as well. - They didn't have any video man again. Blushing it. - Echo those thoughts. So yeah, it was my first proper.

- I was just put his fucking mute on there, has he? - Yep, sat there talking to me self, I can knob. Sorry, let me start again. - So yeah, Echo Antimus's thoughts, it was my first proper Bitcoin conference, went to one in London, a smaller one, as you know, actually there as well.

- Yep. - A little earlier in the year, but yeah, this was a fairly mind blown experience to, you know, to put the faces to the names and the names that I've been speaking to for, you know, sometimes up to four years in some cases, to be able to sort of sit down and have a beer and chat face to face with people like that.

They know who they are, listening to this was incredible. Aside from all the Bitcoin content, the main thing that I learned from the weekend is that those electric scooters are fucking lethal.

(laughing) I won't dox who it was, but one of the crowd that we were knocking around with had a fairly sizable accident and put themselves in, got themselves a bit misshapen shallot shall we say.

Maybe had something to do with the five or six pints that we'd had in the afternoon before we left to cop on these scooters and wears back into town. So yeah, not big and not clever, but great fun at the same time.

So, but aside from that, yeah, the Bitcoin stuff is great. Listen to some really great talks. But for me, it was, and you hear it all the time, don't you, and you just kind of wave it off if you've not been to a Bitcoin conference, but like the main event is kind of the networking bit outside of all the talks.

I see what people mean now when they say that and it is fairly true to be able to just have those conversations with so many, like-minded people that are all from such different backgrounds, but all share largely the same values, really great to shoot the shit with them and drink probably a few too many pints.

(laughing) Plus one on that. But, and also Reg is just such a beautiful town, like the old town, it's not like a very big area, but loads of really great bars and restaurants and stuff. So, like it obviously spread out a bit, like over the different bars, but still like just walking around you, bumped into people here and there.

And so it kind of took over the old town there for a few days. - Very nice, I have to get there next year. I've been saying it for a few years, but next year I definitely will. - It's quite funny, even when you came away from the, 'cause the conference was like a 15 minute car journey out, or scooter ride out of town.

But even when you got back into the main bit of the city, you could spot the Bitcoin as a mile off, 'cause they were all bombing around on these scooters and every other person had like a Mempool hat on, or a this batch hat on, or a Samurai hoodie, or something like that.

And you could just spot them like whizzing around on the pavement, in and out of pedestrians, causing absolute havoc. God knows what the locals must have thought for the weekend, but yeah, we haven't got a lot of fucking hell.

It's that time of year, again, where these-- - Yeah, they do. - They are, yeah. (laughing) - Quality, what's the food like? Is it good? - Well, I didn't have anything real local. I'm not quite sure what that would be, actually.

I don't know if you're naked saying more to that, but we just had a few steaks. Those were-- - Yeah, I'm just gonna say that they're just steak pretty much the whole weekend. (laughing) - Can't go wrong.

- Well, well, the first one I got was not brilliant, I'd say that, but the second one was pretty amazing, so I topped it on both sides. - Yeah, I shared a pretty meaty, sizable rib eye with Glenn Hoddle, which was thoroughly enjoyable.

Massively overpriced, but-- - That's very sweet. - It was tasty, yeah. Well, it sounds sweet, but we shared it because it was cheaper and we just beat Cheapskates. - I was imagining like a scene out of Lady in the Tramp there.

One end each is tuned towards the network. (laughing) He was giving me the eye, so maybe he had it on his mind. - Yeah, it could well be with him. Well, that's seared into my memory now, so.

- Thanks for that. And any talks you went to that were worth listening to, obviously, Antimas, you didn't get to do any, but Q and A, anything that really stood out? - Yeah, I mean mine, obviously.

I thought it was fantastic. - Well, they let you on the stage today. - No, not at the main event. I spoke on the Thursday at the Newb Day. So Wizard of Oz, obviously, he's been around for a long time on Twitter and whatnot.

He organized with Steph from Peach, which I'm sure we'll be talking about later. They organized Bitcoin Newb Day, so simpler talk based on Bitcoin basics. And I gave a talk on practical Bitcoin self custody or secure in your Bitcoin, basically.

So just talk to the basics of that, absolutely breaking it beforehand. The first time I've done any formal public speaking. So I've shared the slide deck on Twitter for those that are interested.

And there was one guy that was recording audio, but I didn't catch his name, so I'm still trying to hunt him down once I find that out there. Published that as well for any of the beginners listening that want to send it to anybody that is trying to orange bill.

Everybody was talking about GG talk. He did it twice. He did it once at the Newb Day. I had to follow him, actually, the fucker. And he absolutely smashed it out the park. And if I wasn't nervous enough beforehand, hearing him do his talk and then knowing that I was going to follow it didn't help settle the nerves at all,

but yeah, he absolutely nailed it. And he has put a video of him doing that. So I do urge anybody that's listening to this to go and check that one out on his Twitter feed. He's a fantastic, it was informative and funny at the same time.

So yeah, that was probably one of the highlights for me. - I'm now just leaving this awkward silence for as long as I possibly can. (laughing) But wallowing in it. Just know that today I'm not on on form at all.

So you two have to carry me in the conversation and everything else, even more than usual. - Well, we would definitely well do our best. We obviously won't get up to your standards as quickly.

But while we're on the topic, we might as well pull like one of the topics forward that we usually do later on with new releases. But as we just mentioned it, just now Peach Bitcoin was announced and released at the Real Conference.

And it is a mobile-based peer-to-peer trading app. It's a bit like Bisk or Think Rowo Sats or something like that. But entirely mobile-based. They have not released it officially. It's like beta release.

You could sign up for it for about, yeah, a couple of weeks or something. But they've shut it down now and unfortunately I missed it. But I know Q&A got in. So maybe you can tell us all about it.

- Yeah, so I actually had the pleasure to learn about this a little bit before the conference. Steph kindly asked me if I wanted to help test. So yeah, it's, like Antima said, mobile-first, well, mobile-only, paid-to-peer exchange run by Peach Bitcoin, which is a company, but they're kind of just a provider of the application.

And obviously they make fees on being sort of a trust minimized third party that kind of acts as the message board for where buyers and sellers will come to meet. Much like Huddle Huddle do and much like Bisk does as well, albeit Bisk is a fair bit more decentralized.

So I actually used Peach aside from the testing I was doing before the conference to do a in-person cash trade at the conference. Works in a very similar way to the Pidbit exchanges that I just mentioned in the fact that the seller funds an escrow when the buyer sort of indicates that they want to take that offer.

That's then held and then you would send over your fiat, be that via a bank transfer, faster payments, separate payments, revenue, cash, whatever it is, you know, all the typical methods are there.

As soon as the seller acknowledges the payment, the Sats are released into your wallet. Peach isn't actually a wallet itself. You have to give it an address to a wallet that you control, which I kind of prefer that way to be honest with you.

So Peach is never sort of, you can have it go directly to Call of Stories if you wanted to, straight to your Whirlpool wallet. If you want to Whirlpool it, the destination is free for you to choose.

And the way that the escrow system works with Peach is it's a two of two multi-sig between Peach and the seller, which then degrades to a single-sig for Peach only so that they become the sole custodian of the funds if there is a dispute.

So that degradation takes place after 15 days. So basically if there's a dispute in the seller but release the funds, the buyer would contact Peach, get in touch with them, provide the proof that they've taken the payment.

You wait 15 days, Peach then becomes, Peach is then able to send the funds. If they're happy with the data that you provided, then they'll send the funds out of the escrow to you. I've not had to go through that escrow process yet, thankfully.

So the cash trade that I did at the conference went swimmingly, really smooth UI and been massively impressed with it. - Yeah, it's awesome to see this out in the wild now 'cause this, I don't know how public the people behind it are or not at this point, but I've been talking about it for well over a year now

and like it was just an idea, I don't know. Yeah, 18 months ago or something like that and to see it now out in the wild and being used and it's had such good feedback, it's really, really fucking cool.

- Yeah, another interesting sort of unique point that Peach uses rather than Huddle Huddle or Beshk is that they've kind of really slimmed down the UI and simplified it. So basically if you want to go on as, typically you'll go on as a buyer, you just indicate, it just walks you through, it says, how much do you want to buy?

What payment methods have you got available to you or are you willing to use? And then you just hit next and then it just goes away and locks and it says, okay, based on the criteria that you've given us, these five, 10, whatever matches match your criteria.

This one's 1% over, this one's 3% over, this one's a 10% one and you can just scroll, like kind of like swipe through. It's almost like, - 10 of the sets. - Yeah, exactly. I was gonna say tinder.

It's almost a bit like that where you just swipe through. They do actually use the word match as the terminology as well. So maybe they have, took a bit of an adage from some of the dating sites.

But yeah, it's really simplified, really slimmed down. You don't sort of get that sort of decision fatigue if you like, when you kind of navigates through some of these other paid peer alternatives.

So I think they've really focused on making it as simple as possible to get from just setting the app up to finding your matches as it were. - Regarding the like escrow deposit, that's actually quite a nice touch with the two of two with between peach and the seller.

'Cause that was one thing that I always thought was bisque that if you have a trade as a seller and the buyer doesn't actually pay, they still see the UTXO. And that way, I guess that probably won't be shown in the app somehow.

So only if the trade actually is completed, the buyer sees, that's the point when they actually then get the UTXO and then see what information is. - Yeah, I think I know what you're saying.

So I couldn't kind of just, if you were a seller, just try and learn about your UTXOs without having any intentions of buying them, is that what you mean? - Exactly, yeah. - Yeah, I'd have to revisit to know whether that's true or not.

It's been a good, well, nearly a month since I've looked at the app, so it's not exactly fresh in my head, but I think you might be right. - Okay, and then there were a few other points that I saw, and I don't know if you have more insight there, but for starters, it's not using Tor at the moment, but that's plans to come.

- Yeah, it's definitely not at the moment. I'm not sure on future plans, but yeah, if you're gonna use this, make sure you've got a VPN enabled on your phone. - Okay, and then also there were like limits set.

I saw on the website or somewhere else, it was about 1000 Swiss francs or something, is it like daily limit or something? - Yeah, I think they're doing that to stay underneath the Swiss KYC laws, because I presume that they, because they are a centralized entity, they're doing that to sort of essentially use the same,

or come under the same bracket as like the Bitcoin ATMs in that part of the world, where you don't need to collect any personal information. Even though you're not buying off a centralized entity, you're buying off another Bitcoin user, presumably because Peach is kind of part of that as a service, you know, that it's there app

and they're servers and whatnot. I think they're just there on the side of caution to stay under that limit, regardless of whether they should or shouldn't sort of have to collect that personal information if you cut to my drift.

- Yeah, it makes sense. And then there was also the point of like, do you have like login credentials or something? Well, how does that work? Because like verification, if you lose your phone or something and you have funds in escrow or something, like how can you regain that?

- So yeah, there's no personal information. I think you're just given like a Peach ID upon signing up when you first sort of start the app. You're just given like, I think it is literally just called a Peach ID.

But in terms of backups, that's a good question because the phone itself isn't a wallet. So I guess you would just need to back up your Peach ID so that in the event that you wanted to kind of, if you lost your phone or something whilst midway through a trade or something like that,

then you'd have sort of a method to be able to recover it. - Okay. And then last question I saw had was like around open source 'cause at the moment, I don't think it is. Do you know if there are plans for them to open it up?

- My computer's just froze. I'm just checking you can still hear me. - Yeah. - Cool. Yeah, so definitely not open source at the moment. I don't think that they've got any immediate plans to do so.

But for me, given the nature of what it does, it's not kind of storing any Bitcoin. It's just a message board at the end of the day with a nice user interface around it. So obviously I'm a massive open source proponent and would always prefer to use open source tools where possible.

But I think given the nature of the kind of the, what Peach is trying to achieve, it's less important even so for me who's open about being a massive open source advocate. So I'd be surprised if I saw it anytime soon, huddle, huddles not open source either.

Bisc is slightly different, isn't it? Because it's a client side only running over the tour network. So yeah, definitely not at the moment and probably wouldn't hold your breath for that.

- Yeah, I mean, especially with like the absence of tour. I mean, if they put that in natively, that would be great. 'Cause then at least like the IP collection kind of would be out the window.

And I presume, I mean, you obviously don't have to give like full KYC information, but still you're putting up like bank details and stuff like that to be passed on to the buyer. - Just one point on that, it would be really nice if we could see gift cards.

I have sort of been banging on a little bit in the background about this, but gift cards would be a nice way because cash, obviously, if you can do it, cash deal, it's different. But otherwise, like you're saying, you are giving your information to somebody else.

And you don't know who's on the other end of that trade. And although this is way, way better than giving all your details to a normal exchange, you know, it's definitely a lot better. I wonder whether that could be incorporated.

- Yeah, so a couple of things here. So just coming back to your backup point, Antimus. Essentially, when you press backup within Peach, it just downloads a JSON file, which is, well, not human-ledgable, but it's kind of just a file that you can save on your computer, SD card, wherever you want.

And then presumably if you were to reinstall Peach on a new phone after you've lost one, you just drop that JSON file back in and you can restore your account that way. So fairly neat approach.

Gift cards, Max, I'm almost certain they're already there. Yeah, Amazon gift cards are already there, which is a good start. - Oh, they are now, okay. - I think they are location-specific, just because of the way that Amazon gift cards work.

So you have to say which gift card you're willing to buy with be that, you know, from the UK, France, et cetera. And on the, yeah, it's a good point you make about the lack of open source and the fact that you are, depending on how you do it, you might be putting some, sharing some payment details with the seller.

Essentially, your Peach account is just a private public key pair. So all of your comms with the seller or the buyer, depending on which end of the trade that you're on, are encrypted. Obviously we've got no way of verifying that because the app's not open source, but if you trust the team on what they say, then they're encrypted.

It's only when you have to go through the arbitration process, if something goes wrong with the trade, then you would, you can say share only those details with the Peach arbitrator and sort of unlock that with the private key that's contained within the application.

So it's only at that point that they start to learn like your payment method, et cetera. If everything goes down a happy path, then Peach doesn't see anything. - Okay, very nice. Yeah, and it's a nice setup.

I mean, it would be amazing to at some point be able to verify that, but obviously, I mean, as a new project as well, I mean, I guess they're probably one of them. I mean, first of all, get it out of beta.

I mean, that's probably the first biggest step. We'll see how that develops. - There's also no trading fees right now as well, but obviously that ain't gonna last. So if you're gonna check it out and test it, now might be a good time to do that if you can get access to the app, of course.

- Yeah, definitely. I'm gonna get the team on the show as well as soon as they're ready. And also before we move on, I just wanna say a massive thank you to them because they found out that I was doing the Pledminer month through our Mashed Adele chats and they have sponsored the Pledminer month

and paid for a shitload of postage and stuff so that a load of the S9s and other machines have gone out to people. So yeah, they're not just talking the talk, they're walking the walk, they're supporting the decentralization of the network and people being able to acquire the no-KOC sets.

So yeah, a big thank you from everyone at Pledminer month. - Yeah, cosign that. Obviously what name names, what chatter to a few of the devs there and obviously Steph is public. They've got a really great team there, so I wish them all the best for the future as well.

- Okay, well, I mean, in that light, I mean, now we're already on P2P or exchanges, we might as well jump into the software updates. First on the list is BISC, the 1.9.5. That was a pretty small update, nothing like major, but just quite a few small improvements that just make your life a whole lot easier.

Like being able to copy paste addresses and transaction IDs and like, usually when you go on a withdrawal, so you wanna withdraw funds onto, while it was aimed automatically, just as a default, just selects all funds and all UTXOs.

You always have to like de-select everything, which you just wanna do a bit of coin control. Kind of smaller stuff like that. And also in the process of like mediation, they also have new, like sometimes the proposal from the mediator didn't go through and there was no way to re-send it and then you're kind of stuck, had that a few times.

So they've built that in as well, the immediate, you can re-send proposals so that you can definitely get out of the trade. Then we've got BTC pay server, the 1.6.10. Just bug fixes there.

And then a big update from core lightning, the 0.12.0 web, 8.0 in it.

I'm sure they do this, just the troll podcast. (laughing) And you're like really thrilled, what? V0.12.0 dash web 8.0 in it. Anyway, they've got a new plugin, which is quite cool. So it's called bookkeeper.

And at the end of the day, what it does is it tracks all of your fund movement throughout your node, and you can get a pretty good overview and analysis of all the fund flows and can also export as a CSV so you can import it into stuff like coin tracking or other accounting software.

So if you're using it as a business or also as a commercial routing node or something or you just wanna have a better overview, like a nice detailed list of your profitability and stuff, yeah, you can do that.

And they've also introduced zero conf channels with white lists, so that would be, so you can set up a channel and usually the like opening transaction would have to be confirmed before you can start transacting.

And now you can actually do transaction before that the opening transaction has been confirmed. So there's a lot faster and a lot more flexible, but you have to like set the other connection nodes on a white list.

So if you've got trusted peers that you're transacting with or if you've just got multiple nodes yourself and you're trading backwards and forwards between those, you can spin up new channels really quickly and transact really flexibly there.

We then have LNDV 0.1.5.1 better and they've also introduced zero conf channels. So it's kind of the same thing. I mean, they didn't mention whiteness in their release notes, so I'm not quite sure if they've got the same system there or how they're doing that or if it's just open for anyone.

And this is pretty interesting. I don't know if anyone else has done this yet, but they have set taproot addresses as the default. So as a default, all your change addresses will be taproot addresses.

And also when you have a collaborative close with one of your channels, the output will go to a taproot address by default, which is pretty big. - That's interesting. Yeah, I think it's the first one I've seen where they've made it the default now.

I don't know of any wallets that have taken a plunge. I know Moon has it as an option in the background of the settings, but you've got to go in and explicitly turn it on. LND is the first one I've heard to make that the default standard.

So we'll have to keep an eye on that to see whether that continues. But I suppose it's inevitable eventually you're always going to get the first movers and shakers. So yeah, good to see that they're pushing the boundaries a little bit and especially as it's LND, whether we like it or not, they are a vast majority of,

certainly the public lighting the network at least anyway, just because they have been for a long time, the default within all the node implementations. So the fact that they're making that the default is going to start to grow that taproot anonymity set if I could put it that way.

- Yeah, exactly. That was always like kind of the fear also with them. I mean, just generally when there's like a change like that, you don't want to be the first person 'cause it's kind of a bit of a privacy thing as well.

'Cause you want to hide in the crowd of a lot of people who are using that. But this way you're kind of just going around it and people are just going to be using it maybe without even knowing or they'll just push people to people who don't really care.

Either way, I think it would drive adoption quite a bit faster than we would have thought. - So do you know if, let's say you and I have already got a channel that we've had open for 12 months, obviously that will be a native segment multi-sig address.

If we did a collaborative close on that channel, would that go to a taproot address as well? Or is it only channels that are open subsequent to this release that would have that benefit? - I guess it would also be for open channels.

I'm not 100% sure, but the thing is that I don't think that the address like for a collaborative close is generated when you open the channel, because I thought, I mean, maybe it is, but I would have thought that if you have the channel open for years, like the gap limit would be just be huge.

So I guess the one I'll just create a new address, or maybe it has to be put back there so that if you're not online that it can pay out to an address. - Yeah, I'd love to look into that one because that could be, although we see this as potentially the green light for increasing visual

on chain taproot usage that if everybody's already got legacy channels open, then it might be a fair bit longer because people aren't just gonna close them just because their funds are gonna go back into a taproot address because the savings are negligible anyway with taproot.

So the incentive isn't just there to move to a taproot-based channel yet, but if it becomes the default for change addresses and channel closures, then it may sort of start to happen a little bit quicker.

- Yeah, 'cause I'm not quite sure, 'cause I didn't see, and I don't think that's the case, the actual like two more to seek of the channels. They're not taproot addresses 'cause I'd be like the music, and I don't think that's that far off and I haven't seen anything about that in the release notes.

I don't know if you have any more information on like the development of music, and like if that has been integrated anywhere 'cause I haven't seen like world to seek option on taproot in any out.

- No, again, not to my knowledge. That will be a big catalyst for it. That's when we start to see that sort of taproot and an image set really start to explode because presumably once this is in LND and hopefully see lightning as the default, every lightning channel then becomes a taproot address,

and that's when we're gonna start to see the number of taproot addresses, be they single-sig or multi-sig, the beauty is we won't know. That pool's gonna start to grow and grow, and then the incentive for wallets, single-sig wallets to move towards that becomes greater than because it's like you correctly alluded to earlier.

It's the first move as in shake is onto the new technology, even if there are some minor fee benefits that you can just stick out from a privacy perspective. So yeah, it's gonna be an interesting dynamic to watch unfold.

- Okay, so we can go over to just in this light as a side note, PhoenixV 1.4.23. They just brought out that new release because LND used the same bit, which was just bit 50 for, and Phoenix was using it for trampoline routing, and LND used it now for these zero conf channels.

So they had to put out the new release 'cause it was not possible with LND, with the new release from LND, it was not possible to receive payments anymore via Phoenix. - All right, I have to, now you mentioned Phoenix, I have to give them a shout out actually.

Phoenix is like, I'll tell the story, I was in Riga, got a taxi to the conference, this was before we discovered the joys of electric scooters. She had a taxi to the conference with Black Coffee, as we got out, well, he paid for the taxi, tried to offer him some dirty fear to pay him back.

And he's, as a tribute corner asked me to pay him in Sats, obviously I was happy to oblige, so. So he sent me a lightning invoice that showed it to me on his phone. So I whipped out Zeus, which is connected to me, connected to my Raspberry Blitz at home, over tour, waited probably a good 60 to 90 seconds

for tour to wake up and Zeus to connect to my node, scanned his QR code to pay him back, then waited for another 60 seconds for the talk back to my node to try and decipher the invoice and to get ready to pay him, then it failed.

So then I had to reboot Zeus and start all over again. Anyway, long story short, it took me about six or seven minutes to pay him back, which doesn't sound like a long time. Yeah, it doesn't sound like a long time, but when you imagine that in a merchant situation where I was still at the front of a queue

trying to pay for a pair of training, it's horrifying. And I say all of this, this is absolutely no shade at Zeus. The issue here was absolutely the tour network. I'm a massive fan of Zeus.

I think it's easily the best self-solving lightning application out there, and I will continue to use it, but yeah, tour network when it was just fucking killing me. So to tie it back into Phoenix, pull that Phoenix, which ironically also does work over tour.

So the probably is an element of what the hardware that I'm running here that's causing the issue as well. But pull that Phoenix, which is obviously like a standalone mini lightning node in your phone, and yeah, paid him in less than 30 seconds.

So it's always the dependable one that you can rely on when you're at a conference channel actually spend some Bitcoin. You know, it's going to work and yeah, it didn't let me down. So I was actually fairly horrified at the amount of people that were working on using wallet as a Toshi, which was a real shame.

So I just can't bring myself to do it. And I understand why people do it because they haven't got the patience to go spend eight and nine minutes trying to pay their mate back for a taxi.

So sometimes I can understand where they're coming from. - Will you slap me if I say that I use it? - I knew you were going to say that. I just didn't know whether you were going to help yourself.

- No, I'm always honest about how retarded I am. - No, but I get it. I completely understand why people do it. It's just, yeah, I just can't bring myself to do it. - It works. - Yeah, exactly.

- I only ever put post-mix sat in there, I run a VPN. I only ever do tiny, tiny payments, like fucking around on lightning, like those sort of things paying someone back for a beer or something.

It's like, it's not mission critical. And it works. So like, I know it's not perfect, but I don't really see the beef with people. I know it's like everyone always attacks the wallet of Satoshi users.

I get it. Like my money can go like that. It could go now, but I also don't care because it's like 15 quid. - Yeah, that's exactly the trade off. I mean, I can understand people using it at like a conference or something where you really don't want to spend your time doing that.

On the other hand, it can be a quite good like conversation starter. If you're sitting around for seven minutes, you can, if you want to do that at the end of the pitch, you're like, what?

- Just get some of these life story when you're waiting to talk to me. - Exactly. But I was about to say, I mean, I was using, I had a few different wallets on my phone and I had problems with pretty much all of them at the beginning and then Zap was the only one that really worked reliably.

And I did a maybe two dozen like transactions and none of them failed and it all by a tour on my own node at home. And it was wonderful. I mean, maybe like a minute, a minute and a half max, but that was absolutely sweet.

I was not expecting that at all. - I fed you, is Zap still being maintained? Or are you just hoping and praying that it just continues working? I'm pretty sure there's nobody working right now.

- Yeah, I think Shane, it was a good wallet, but you know, back when it first came out, it was well-heard of its time. - Yeah, the last releases was in March, I think March or April or something this year.

So that, but I'm not sure if people are still working on it. I've definitely heard people say that it's been discontinued, I don't know. Like, because I mean, it is open source. I mean, pretty much anyone can pick it up and go on with it.

I don't know what the, like, who's got access to the repose and stuff. So I can't say much to that. But the last update was from March or April. - That's more recent than I thought you were going to say.

Actually, I thought it'd been years. Just never hear it mentioned the things Zeus has firmly taken over in that, you know, within the hearts and minds of the more hardcore lightning users.

- Yeah, especially since the last big update a few months ago, before that, I couldn't really understand it 'cause Zapp was just so, like, I mean, it's pretty simple, but it just works. And with the old Zeus, like the pre, the big update, I was having loads of problems, loads of issues, connection, especially.

But the new update is absolutely fire. - Okay, so we can go on to the next, which is my node. So they've brought out the 0.3.0, which is a brief update. One of the larger ones in the last year or two, maybe even.

It's like over the past year, at least they've mainly been doing, like just maintaining all the different apps on there. And quite a few different like settings in the background and stuff.

So you can like connect and merge to a new hard drive and stuff like that. But now they've redone the whole design, they've put up a new marketplace model, a bit like, we see with other node implementations as well, that's kind of the way they're all going now.

And they've also introduced premium plus, which, I mean, up 'til now they already had like premium model kind of where you like pay, it's more or less like donation. I think it was like $99 or something, lifetime.

And then you get an access key and that unlocks a few apps on my node. So like remote access via tour and stuff like that. And now they've got this premium plus, which you also get if you had the premium before.

And this is now like an automatic backup thing and also remote access. So you sign up on my node website, you create an account. And then they do like encrypted automatic backups to their servers.

And if you have node crashes or whatever, you can log into their website and download your encrypted backup from there. And you can also, if you're somewhere out and about, you can just go onto the website and then get remote access to your node via your account there.

So it's quite cool feature, especially the backups, having those like kind of a safety net. One thing I haven't looked into and I don't know, is it like how transparent that process is? 'Cause like how it's encrypted on your node and so on in the code, I mean, obviously it's all open source.

So someone who can understand that and could look it, look it up and see like how it's encrypted. So that you can be sure that whatever they tried to do with your encrypted backups, they can't actually access it.

- Yeah, it's an interesting model. I'm pretty sure Umbral does something similar as well with the backups, which becomes especially useful if you're starting to use this software as managing more significant amounts of lightning funds or potentially becoming a routing node as well, where the stakes tend to get a little bit higher

and you've generally got a little bit more, you've got more Bitcoin on the line. So having an extra backup aside from your static channel backup, if you're running LND, just to have that extra layer of something to sort of fall back on, just in case that were to go wrong, I think is fairly beneficial.

But yeah, I'm not sure how they're implementing it, but yeah, like you say, they tend to develop out in the open. And so I'd imagine anybody that's got the technical know-how could go in there and see how and where that's being stored.

But the key thing is, as long as it's encrypted with a good, you know, a basic level of encryption, then you can be fairly sure that there's nothing being leaked there, so yeah, interesting concept.

And nice to see that they're looking for alternative ways to keep that revenue coming in, which is notoriously difficult for no projects. - Absolutely, yeah, 'cause I think they beforehand, the benefits of this premium model were not massive.

And I did it at the beginning, also, just to support the project, mainly, it was nice to have the other features, but hardly ever use them. But now there is a big incentive to do so. One thing I would mention is, yeah, if it is encrypted, you're back up on your node and you then send it over, sure they won't be able to access it,

but you should still periodically do your own backups, because one thing that you can't be sure of is that you'll have access to their servers or two-door account on their website, like in perpetuity.

So at some point, you'll still be good to do, like, regular backups, so that you've got an additional layer of security there. - Yeah, completely agree, you know, backups, be that, for anything, even if it's not Bitcoin related, it's always good to have redundancy and have multiple copies in different locations.

Yeah, completely agree, cosign that. - Okay, so the next on the list is Passport V1.1.0. I guess you could dive into that in more detail than I could. - There we go, I'm on mute again, sorry.

I think we might have covered this last time, but yeah, this is V1.1.0 is for the founders edition, the original Passport, just a small release, the main one being support for pairing with Envoy our mobile companion app.

So if you don't want to use something like Blue Wallet on your phone or something like Spyro World on your computer, we've produced our, sort of, Passport-centric alternative that's native to the mobile operating systems available from App Store, Play Store, EfDroid, direct APK from our website, wherever you want to grab it from.

And obviously we've built that to be a simple user interface that you can interact with your Passport, be that the new one or the old one, and then there was just a minor bug fix. The next one will be a much bigger release, so for those of you that have seen the new user interface on the Batch 2 Passport that we're shipping right now,

all of that new menu system, which has been much more modern, and obviously it's on a color screen on the new device, we're porting all of that, so you'll have an identical interface, albeit a monochromatic one onto the original Passport, the Founder's Edition devices, so if you are one of those device holders rest assured,

you're not being left behind, all of the features in the menu systems are all coming back to the original device as well. - Good to hear. We go into some of the features and bits on a pod we did, Q&A, me and Lily, for the pleb minor month we go, pretty deep into some of the stuff Foundation are doing on that one, and we have two passports

that are gonna be given away for pleb minor month, so yeah, big thank you to you guys. - Absolutely, pleasure, thank you for allowing us on to do some Passport talk, appreciate it. - That'll be released properly after this pod, but yeah, everyone go and have a listen to that one when it goes live, and be in for a chance

of winning two passports are gonna go. - Now looking forward to hearing that. - And all your multi-sig dreams can come true. (laughing) - One thing the Envoy app is also open source. - Of course, what do you take us for?

- Wonderful. (laughing) - Yeah, fully open source, we're building, we're actually building on top of a framework called BDK Bitcoin Development Kit, which is, I forget who backs it now, but that's like an open source Bitcoin wallet framework, it's not necessarily a wallet itself, but it kind of has all the nuts and bolts underneath

so that teams like us or anybody else, you know, it's fully open source, you can kind of use that as a step in point, like a standardized step in off point two to build a Bitcoin wallet so that they don't have to start from scratch.

So we just implement some best practices for other teams to kind of build on top of. So we're using that and we're also using Florida, which is kind of like a UI framework built by Google for people, but surprisingly it is open source.

So yeah, we're building on open source and obviously maintaining that ourselves as well. So anybody's free to fork Envoy and take what they want to do with it, you know, make their own copy, change the colors, change the writing, whatever they want to do.

Yeah, completely fully transparent and available from our GitHub. - Hell yeah. So we've got the next one that is Sparrow V 1.6.6, Craig as usual, putting out brutal release notes to read through and very details, wonderful.

But here in this one, the main takeaways were LN URL auth, which I have not tried out for self yet, but I guess that that would be a way to authenticate yourself to log into your different wallets.

I don't know if you have more details on that. - It's exactly that. Yeah, so you can log into websites like stacker.news without actually having to have a lightning note 'cause obviously Sparrow doesn't speak lightning.

So yeah, it's just a way that you can do that without having to actually run a lightning node if you don't want to do that. It's just cryptography at the end of the day. It's just it's been adopted by the lightning crowd, but you don't actually need a physical node running alive to be able to use that interface.

- Okay, that makes sense. And the other thing I was not sure about, but you know you're aware of our paintings as well, better than I do. So it said that notification transactions, usually the way I understood it was that you do one notification transaction and then the payment channels kind of was set up

or there's not a payment channel, but the connection is set up so that both parties can send to each other. And here he's only done it like one way. So both sides have to do a payment transaction and it's not by default that the information is shared.

So you can send in both directions or do they misunderstand that, you know? - Yeah, so I think the issue here isn't with actually being able to send one transaction in either direction is enough for both parties to be able to transact, but the issue is with the backups.

So if only one transaction is gone one way, then there's only an on-chain record. Let's say you only have your seed word as a backup, there's no metadata. Depending on if I was the one that sent the notification transaction to you, then I'd be able to recover those that transaction history in one way,

whereas for us both to be able to have just a seed backup and rely on the chain and that up return that is what's within the notification transaction to be able to derive those subsequent addresses.

That's where the extra transaction is required. It's just for on-chain only wallet recovery. - Okay, that's a high level. I know I rambled a bit there, but I think that's the nuts and bolts of it.

We're at the technical edge of my abilities here. - But in samurai, you don't do that, right? Do you even have the option to do that? - Yeah, well, all you see in samurai is if I want to pay you, I'd do a notification transaction to you, don't I?

If you wanted to pay me, it would prompt you to do one back to me. - Ah, okay, 'cause I've always thought that if I, 'cause I've only ever sent, I've never received by a payment. So I always assumed that when I did like the one notification transaction, the other party could also send back, but that, that makes sense.

Good, well, the next one on the list is Trezacy, the 22.9.2. We have not mentioned them a lot over the last month here, but this is pretty nice to see. They've got quite a troll which most good wallets should have,

but it's definitely good to see that there's eventually been implemented, I can remember people's screen for that for quite a while now. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They also announced in Riga that they're gonna be integrating Wasabi 2.0 into Trezacy as well.

I don't think there's any definite timeline yet, but I definitely heard that it was announced in Riga so, not sure how that's going to work per se because obviously Trezacy is for interactive with Trezacy, which is a hardware wallet, those your keys are offline.

So not sure sort of how it's going to be able to interact with a live or online coin during coordinator. So not something I've looked into, I just thought I'd make mention of it as we were talking about Trezacy and it was topical because it was spoken about in Riga, but hopefully back come next month, there'll be a bit more information

as to how that's going to work. - I mean, Trezacy obviously also has the option to just like plug it in. So I mean, that could kind of work, but you just like have it plugged into your computer or whatever and have it sitting there when it runs through, I guess.

But maybe they've got a clever way to deal with that. We'll see. - We shall see. - And the other update from Trezacy as well is that you can now use SATs as a denomination, which is also good.

So it's two good developments there. Next and last from the update is Zeus V0.6.6. And here the update is nothing technical directly from the user perspective, but they now offer reproducible builds.

So verify that if you're building yourself. And that was it for all the updates for this month. I don't know if you've got anything to add to that list. Otherwise we've got one more topic coming up.

- All good on my behalf, just get well soon to the sickly guy in the corner. - This fucking radar, just sitting here saying nothing, listening, like really lurking. It feels a bit dirty, but I quite like it.

Yeah, nothing from me, the brain's not functioning. Thank you both for carrying the conversation. Nothing I can think of. - No, it's fine. I mean, the one last topic we have here is Mashankura.

I hope I didn't butcher that name. But I think the guy on Twitter is called Mashankura. And then it's eight, three, three, three. I'm not 100% sure, I have one second, just before I'm really intrigued.

Yeah, I've got no idea where this is going. - Okay, nobody does not even answer us. - One second, here we go. It is Mashankura, eight, three, three, three, exactly. On Twitter. And this is a way to spend and receive Bitcoin by your phone, and it doesn't even have to be a smartphone.

So what it does is it basically uses these GSM USSD codes. So the people who still add like an old Nokia or something, like the star 100 hashtag or something, you get your prepaid balance or something, that these codes that you can use.

And there are a bunch of African countries that have now access to trading Bitcoin via their phone number basically. So it's in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

And this is pretty nice. It's kind of like, I mean, in a lot of African countries like the phone balance is kind of like a quasi currency.

- It's like a lot of peso or something like that, isn't it? - Yes, I'm not 100% sure about that. - I think that's what it's called. - Yeah, they use it. - They use credits as currency. - Exactly.

And you can like pay for like electricity bills and all these kinds of different stuff. And now you can also receive and send Bitcoin. The thing is that it is obviously custodial. So you're not holding your own keys there.

But what you can do is that you can only receive from other users of Mashankura. But you can send to all users from Mashankura, but also to any lightning or where you pay any lightning inbox.

So that way you can also kind of withdraw to, yeah, a lightning note or you can pay other people outside of that Mashankura network. - Sounds a bit like Fediment to me. - Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how a light works on the back end, it kind of relies on this system

that's kind of set up anywhere with like credits on the mobile phone, but obviously then at the back end, they've got their own lightning node set up. So I don't think they've, I mean, I didn't read any mention of an actual Fediment, but this would be a prime example kind of to him.

- Yeah, yeah, sorry. I was just sort of talking generally in the fact that it's kind of like there's one big custodian in the middle and then, but it's still interoperable with like the wider lightning network, if you like.

- Exactly. - Yeah, yeah, and that's, that's just brilliant. - Yeah, and fortunately we can't test it here, but I've seen that videos and anyone can go and check out on Twitter, it's Mashankura, which is M-A-C-H-A-N-K-U-R-A, and then 8333.

Yeah. - Sounds interesting. Well, I'm sure it has its trade offs, but, you know, for a lot of people, if they're not able to run nodes and they don't have smartphones and stuff, then maybe these trade offs are worth it.

- Yeah, the only thing I will say, and obviously given where this is being used and become popular, it's probably not a massive concern to the people that are using it, but it sounds fucking terrible from a privacy perspective by doing it with your phone number.

- Yeah, that's true. - But yeah, given that it's like Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Namibia, et cetera, then yeah, that's probably not a massive concern for people in those parts of the world.

They just probably feel anything to try and escape the shit show that is their local currency is probably a benefit, so yeah. - Exactly. - It's to see alternatives being used. - And at the end of the day, you can just use like a pre-made phone, just for that, I'd guess, that's not connected to any kind of identity.

So I think you can, I mean, obviously the question is if that's actually used. - That's true, I'm sure. - I'm sure the KYC requirements in deepest, darkest, Malawi are not quite as stringent as us in Europe or the US.

- Absolutely. Well, they're probably unlikely to have phone contracts. It will probably all be pay as you go, 'cause most of them do not have bank accounts. Other people who don't have smartphones probably don't have bank accounts, so that's a good point.

If they're doing it that way, then maybe it's not so bad. - Yeah, I think also, I don't know if you had her on the show as well, her Anita Posh, I think she's been involved in that as well.

- Yeah, I think she's been doing those of pretty amazing works down there as well, so. - Yeah, you should get her on, she did a talk at the new day where I presented as well. Really interesting. - Okay.

- Really interesting what she's been doing out there and I'm sure there'll be a lot to cover, so yeah, yeah, plus one there. - I'll put that on the list then. I haven't really lifted my head up this month.

It's been a bit fucking crazy, but yeah, that sounds like a good one for next month or the one after. - Okay, guys, well then, I think well, we'd definitely do through the list. I don't know if you want to riff on anything.

- I think we'd better let Matt go to bed, aren't you? - Yeah, I'll just say, big shout out to Lemsit Mac's strength, lemon flavor. - You're a Lemsit Mac's-y, are you? - Lemsit Mac's-y, big shout out to the Fix It Honey from Waitrose, we've been mixing that in with Whiskey and the Lemsit and organic lemons,

just squeezing that in and just smashing those all day, so yeah, very promising. - Well, I'll get well soon, mate. - Thank you very much, and everyone who hasn't already check out plebminermonth and if you want a chance to win some S9s or foundation devices, passports and other swag, check it out.

- Is that the S9 that you said, if I answered it, yeah? - Yeah, except- - Oh, shit, are we still? - Oh, fuck, we're still recording. - Yeah, that's all right. (laughing) Just before anybody loses their shit, I am joking.

- Yeah, do you know why it's all right as well? You can only win if you're in North America, so yeah. - Good day. - On that specific one, but a lot of the other prizes are for the rest of the world as well.

- Do you know what the ironic thing is that even if I did win it, even if I plugged it in here, I'd still be pissing money down the drain. (laughing) - Losing money, hand-o-face. - One thing, before I do forget it, I wanna do a quick, quick show that we now eventually, I mean, it's taken about three months of scraping

everything available. We now have the seed signers available at ballcon21.com. It's just, I mean, it's been a tough ride to get a few of these, the Raspberry Pies together, but they are now eventually available.

So a lot of people have been waiting for that, just to say how quickly. - Very nice. Do you wanna just do a little website show? - Yeah, well, we spoke about that last time as well, like the seed mint that was in production last time is now available.

We got that there as well eventually. So we were stocking up, getting the portfolio together that we were looking for, which is really nice to see. And this week, especially for anyone who has already got a seed signer or is thinking about doing it, we're gonna do like what started two days ago, like for this whole week, one guide a day

of going through all the different steps of how to set up, build and use your seed signer. So all the different steps for people who have one of these devices, but wanna have another run through it or thinking about getting one and just wanna see what it's all about.

So check that out if you come to. - Awesome. If you send me a link for it, mate, I can forget to put that in the show notes. (laughing) - Cheers. (laughing) - All right, cool. Well, yeah, thanks guys.

Good to catch up. I'm gonna go and smash another LEMCIP. You did the recording. So we're gonna have to make sure we get it and you'll have to send it over to me, aren't you? - We'll do that.

- Cool. - Pleasure, guys. Catch you later. (upbeat music) Thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed that one. If you have any questions, do feel free to reach out and I will answer anything that I can.

I really appreciate everyone who's been streaming Sats, sharing this with friends and family, retweeting and contributing. If you haven't already seen all the work that we've been putting in for Pledmine a month, the best place to go is ungovernable misfits.com.

Mr. Crown has been working really hard to create a beautiful page dedicated to Pledmine a month. Check it out at ungovernable misfits.com and we'll catch you on the next one.