Bitcoin monthly 0022

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

Happy Christmas, you ungovernable fucks. I hope you've had a good one, and I hope you have a great new year. I sat down with Antimas and Bitcoin Q&A for a year in review of 2022. We talked about everything that we enjoyed from 2022, and everything we're excited about for 2023.

I always look forward to the news and updates with these guys. I always learn something, and I just want to say thank you to everyone who's been supporting this show. It's been a couple of years now, and it's really starting to gain some steam.

So thank you to everyone who's been supporting, sharing this with friends and family, rating, reviewing, and sending in messages on the podcasting 2.0 apps. It really means a lot. Before we start, I just want to say a big thank you to Mr. Crown, who's been helping support this show.

For the last, I don't know, maybe year and a half, something like that. He helped build the website. If anyone hasn't already checked that out, go to ungovernablemisfits.com. He's done a fucking awesome job, in my opinion.

And if anyone's looking for a web developer or a designer, Mr. Crown is the man to speak to. He also designed our beautiful plebminer monthly skull and fan. And yeah, just an all-round talented guy.

So if anyone is looking for those sort of services, give him a shout, and I can't recommend him highly enough. Also a massive thank you to Urban Hacker for donating to the show. If you haven't already checked out our episode, go and check it out now.

It was two or three episodes to go now. I'm gonna have him back on the show again soon. And if you haven't checked out his awesome projects, go and do it now. If you have any questions, you can reach out to him or me.

I'd also like to thank the sponsors who allowed this show to continue. So a huge thank you to Foundation Devices. The Foundation Devices Part 4 is not only beautifully designed, but it's fully open source, and it's piss easy to use.

Even this fuck-quick can do it. It's hard to imagine anyone being more special than I am, but if you are, you can also pay, I think it's $100 to have Bitcoin Q&A hold your hand for an hour and go through the process step by step.

He really is good at that, and honestly, I could recommend this to any friend or family member at any age and any level of skill. It really is that simple. Check them out at foundationdevices.com.

You can use my code bit by bit, and that'll get you an extra $10 off. They have them in stock and ready to go. Any questions, you can reach out to me or the team. Finally, a massive thank you to FastBitcoins who support this show, despite me, constantly telling people not to use their services.

Constantly telling people to go KYC free, but they still support me, and that tells me one thing. It tells me they actually care about Bitcoin, they actually care about people doing things the right way, and for people who do want to use KYC services, they do everything that they can to keep you safe.

They do not want to hold your SATs on their exchange. They want you to hold your keys. They will do anything to help you do that. And if you are gonna trust somebody with your personal information, you need to make sure that this team are on the ball and doing everything they can to keep you safe.

So if you're gonna use a KYC service, make sure to check them out at fastbitcoins.com. If you're still not 100% sure about the trade offs and you want me to go through them with you, I'll be open and honest about it, and you are more than welcome to reach out.

Enjoy the show and see you next year. - You both recovered and feeling well now? - Yeah, man, last week was rough for me. That was the roughest I've been for a long, long time. Got knocked sideways by a pretty hefty bout of the flu.

It was in bed for a couple of days. Literally didn't get vertical for like 48 hours. So yeah, pretty rough on the other side of it now. I've got a bit of a cough that I can't shift. So hopefully I can mute myself in time so that Max doesn't have to edit them all out.

But yeah, compared to last week, I feel like a new man. That's the unfortunate truth of living with the toddler. They seem to bring all of the diseases into the house and just like sat there like cannon fodder, just waiting to catch everything.

(laughing) I've just crawled out of bed as well. It's crazy here as well, like everyone's like down. So you can't get anything at like the pharmacy stuff at all. It's all empty. - Just on the whiskey now then, Max, yeah?

- Yes, at nine o'clock in the morning, that's right. (laughing) Whiskey rips, like it. - No, I'm having my first coffee for like three days, which is like rare, it's fucking weird for me.

I'd normally just get coffee themed, but I've just been too sick to even have that all whiskey. So yeah, I might treat myself today. So we're not here to talk about cults and flus. (laughing) 2022, although there was a lot of talk about viruses and the things around it, what was really interesting

was Bitcoin and everything that is happening with the development of it, especially in the open source scene. So this episode, we're doing like a year review rather than the months review, is that right?

- Yeah, just like jumping in and covering like a few topics. I mean, it's been a pretty long year, (laughing) just like thinking back of like what happened over the course of the last 12 months, it's been quite a challenge to get everything together, but I hope we don't miss too much, but it's been exciting.

- I have a little bit of a sidebar that kind of realization that it is Bitcoin related by the way that I had yesterday. Do you know how many mobile wallets there are that offer coin control in 2022?

- Probably like, oh mobile wallets, probably like four or something stupid. - Yeah, so it's a lot less than I thought there was basically. And if you're on iOS, then you're even more screwed.

So you've got Samurai on Android only, you've got Blue, which is cross-platform. And then I went to Twitter to ask everybody to help me out with the rest. And it turns out there's not that many more.

So there's like, you've got Open Bitcoin wallet, which is Fiat Jaff's kind of one that you keep renaming every six months that used to call a simple Bitcoin wallet. And I think that's Android only as well.

And then that's pretty much it for like standalone mobile wallets that you can kind of just download and start going with, which is a fucking travesty if you ask me. - It's horrendous. - I did upset a few people because a couple of people mentioned fully noted and I was like, well, yeah, I agree.

Yeah, it's got a coin control, very feature-rich. But it's not really a standalone wallet. You have to connect it to your own Bitcoin corner. So it's like kind of in that bit of a crossover bit.

So a few people got upset to that, which I absolutely am not going to apologize for. But so yeah, the, I was just shocked. And I just wanted to raise it to see if anybody else was like aware of how few wallets offer such basic, what I would deem as such basic functionality to use Bitcoin in a way that, you know,

we should all be striving to use. And the fact that if you're on iOS, you basically got blue wallet or you have to run your own node, then it's yeah, a bit of a poor show. So hopefully we'll see some more wallets to continue on with that.

And yeah, I just thought I'd share that bit of anecdote anyway. - What about like green doesn't support coin control and also Nanchak, they both don't? - No, not on mobile. They've both got desktop options, which I believe both of them do on desktop, but not on mobile.

- Is there a reasonable reason why they wouldn't do that? It seems as though it's just labeling. Like in my head, it's just like, I was just labeling and surely that's not that difficult.

Is it that it's just difficult and they haven't had time? Or is it just that they don't see it as a priority? And if they don't, that seems a bit fucking weird to me. - Yeah, I think there's a couple of things.

Number one, obviously it's harder to do stuff from a user interface perspective. It's hard to do that well on mobile because you've got a much smaller screen and you're trying to present a lot of information to a user in a really small space.

So I think that's one part of it. And I think the other part of it is sort of dev difficulty that it is more difficult to implement and most people still unfortunately, just don't really care about it.

They just want a mobile wallet that they can just kind of press send and let the wallet do the rest, which depending on what you want to get out of Bitcoin could be absolutely fine. But yeah, I think demand is a lot of the reason as well.

- Do you know if they even like display the UTXOs you've got in the wallet like with on green or Nanchak or some of the others? - Not in my test. I don't know, it's kind of you just press spend and the wallet will use whatever algorithm the devs have built in to create that spend.

You know what I've noticed as well? One thing on blue wallet and this you guys might know and it might just be like user error. But if I wanted to receive, there is a way that you can go in and you can see all your receive addresses like the next 99 or whatever.

I can't see a way that you could possibly mark those. Like for example, if someone was sending out invoices and you're like, okay, I've got 10 to send out, I don't want to just do the most recent one and then send that and then go receive again to send the next one and send the same one twice

and have people paying from different accounts into one. There doesn't seem to be a way to label it so you know when it comes in. Ah yeah, that's from that. Does that make sense? - Yeah, I don't think you can label ahead of time.

I think that's true of all of the wallets that do actually have coin control. I don't think you can kind of say share address index number 16 that's currently empty. You send it to me and at that time then you say, yeah, if anything arises here from Q and A, yeah, I don't think that's possible anywhere, which would.

- Yeah, that would be nice. That would be ideal. But what I'm thinking is even if it could be, don't show me this address again. Otherwise what you could do quite easily is you could send it to one person saying, all right, yeah, this is my invoice, can you pay me?

And then they take a month to pay you. You've pressed receive again and it's shown you that address again and then you've given that address to somebody else because there's no way of marking it or taking it out of eyeline even if it's not marked, even if it's not labeled 'cause you can always check it against your invoice

and go, oh, okay, that's that address fine. And then you're always gonna be able to tie it up at the end but just so that you don't send the same thing out twice even if you could just say a bit like in Samurai, like the bits where you can't spend them, basically.

It's like, don't show me, that would be nice. - Yeah, so like you just alluded to Samurai, every time you hit receive, you'll be given a new receive address. Now, whether you receive to that address is by the by, you'll only ever see it once.

We do the same on in Envoy, which I think kind of answers your question really but yeah, it's kind of like a fail safe of, every time you hit receive, you'll get a brand new address, irrespective of whether any funds have landed into that address or not, whereas all the wallets

and then a blue does this, is it'll stick on that same address until it sees some funds and then it'll surface a new one for you. So there's trade-offs to both. I mean, from a privacy perspective, seeing a new one every time is a really good fail safe and that's why the Samurai guys and us at foundation

have taken that approach with Envoy as well. It just removes that ability for users to foot gun themselves and reuse the addresses by sharing the same one twice and kind of forgetting about the first instance, if that makes sense.

The trade-off that you've got with that though is if you're doing that frequently and there is a long lag between the time at which your sharing these addresses, let's say you do it like 50 times, wallets have a notion of what's called a gap limit where they'll only look so far down the address list

before they'll stop searching for new transactions. So you can, if you take this to the absolute extremes, kind of go outside of that gap limit so that you might miss some transactions and then you have to do some manual stuff in the back end of the wallet to try and do it like a rescan of a wider range.

Doesn't happen very often and it very much depends on the settings of the wallet, but that is like a little bit of a trade-off of being shown a new receiver address every single time. - Yeah, I remember doing that many times with Ronan Dojo and going back and rescanning and pushing that number up and rescanning

and then finally finding funds. Maybe that's just a better default that's just what Envoy have got and Sam Rive got, it feels to me anyway. - Just quickly on that. Do you know if there are like in the different wallets, like a kind of standard for the gap limit?

- I mean, I know like Sparrow, I think defaults to something like 20 or something, but is that more or less consistent throughout all the different wallets or do they vary? - Yeah, I think 20 is the widely accepted number.

We just bumped it up in Envoy with the release that came out yesterday to 50, just because we did have some outlying use cases, but generally speaking, it's 20 in that sense to kind of cover most use cases.

- Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the things where I've always had it is like with BTC pay server, I mean, especially like having like an online shop or something, like over Vulcan. I mean, that's, they quickly exceed that gap limit, but I mean, obviously that's like a more, I mean, if you're receiving a lot of funds

and got like a BTC pay server running where people can generate their own invoices, that they then don't pay and stuff and that quickly goes up. But in the normal use case of your own wallet, I mean, it's pretty rare that you get up to something like 50.

I mean, that's a pretty reasonable height. - Yeah, I agree. And that's why that sort of 20 number is kind of generally deemed as a good sort of default where there isn't like, you're not waiting for ages to scan hundreds of addresses, but you're covered for most generic use cases.

So it makes sense to me. - Okay, well then, I mean, here there are a few suggestions for people to run out and do some pull requests. I mean, this would be nice to see if someone would take the initiative on that.

And while we're at it, everyone please bug blue wallet to implement test net. That would be pretty nice as well. I mean, I think there's discussions we're going on for like three years or something.

But it's a real shame that they don't want to do that. - Do you want to kick us off with the first of the sort of big talking points of the year onto us? I know you've put together a list for us.

- Yeah, there are a few things. I mean, we could just run through and see who's got a lot of highlights in a few different categories. I mean, we can start off with just like general updates for existing projects.

I mean, one of the big themes this year, especially for like node boxes, which was really great to see, was like the new web UIs that came out, especially for Ronan Dojo and for Raspberry Blitz.

That was great. I mean, especially Raspberry Blitz. There was like one of the things that made it like a project that was geared more towards technical users who were comfortable using command line and a lot of people who had no experience in that department were, yeah, there was a bit of a hurdle to go in there.

And people were pretty like nervous about playing round in terminal. So this was a great development, seeing this push towards web UIs, which just makes the whole interaction a lot more easy and accessible and just like navigating through it all and having it all on display was really nice.

So those were two really big updates that I was really happy to see. - Yeah, I think it's like the next natural progression for to make nodes more accessible, isn't it? To have everything to be able to be sort of point and click and because, you know, it's something we talk about a lot

on here about the importance of running your own node. The easier that we can make that, then the better and the more accessible that we can make it the better and we're gonna get more nodes into people's hands.

With that said, I think there's still a lot of work that we can do to make this more approachable. And it's really great to see now that we've got pretty much all of the major node implementation to be the DIY or plug and play.

Everybody's got now some form of graphical user interface to remove that sort of command line step, which was a sticking point for a lot of people. So with something like, well, Raspberry Blitz and Rona Dojo, they both offer plug and play options, we're broadening our horizons in terms of who's able to actually attain

and run these nodes without having to have a computer science degree. So yeah, really great to see huge fans of both of the teams and yeah, long make, continue. I know the Ronin guys have been flat out in terms of trying to fulfill orders and pretty much every release they've done has sold out really quickly

and they've just expanded into the EU market, which is also great to see. So yeah, more powers to the teams and excited to see what 2023 holds for the node world. - What are a few things that you'd like to see as improvements or things that can be done better in like just generally for like the node boxes?

I mean, there are a few different directions that people are going. I mean, like with Umbrell or something, with their like app store thing that they pushed, which others are adopting now.

But also, I mean, there are a few things that with like updates where people have been discussing different ways of doing that or also backups having different connections to either like a centralized server where you can have it like encrypted or to a different server that you're running, something like that.

I mean, are there like certain things that you'd really like to see more widely adopted or implemented even for the first time? - Yeah, there's a couple of things. I mean, we've seen massive improvements in user interface this year with the GUIs and stuff that we've just talked about.

I still think there's a long way to go to make that more, even more approachable and more understandable for people that are just starting out and running their first node. So I think I don't doubt for one minute that that'll continue to improve.

For me, running your own lightning node is still a bit of a shit show. So I think there's going to be a lot of progression in that and the tools built around that in the next 12 to 18 months.

And I think that's definitely needed because I work full time in Bitcoin. I'm on my computer all day. So, and I still get really frustrated about running lightning nodes. So I'm kind of like a best case scenario that somebody that's got the ability to spend the time on this.

And it's still, I sometimes just get to the point. I'm like, is it really working with it? Why am I doing this? So to be able to expect somebody who doesn't work full time in space, they've got a manual job.

They work nine till five, they've got two kids and they might have a couple of hours spare and I sat the afternoon to tinker with this stuff. It would just so far away from that being normal and accessible, which I think is probably why we see still so many people using custodial solutions for lightning.

So I think that's a lightning aspect of node running is a big one that still needs a lot of work. And in the last couple of years, there's already been great steps made. Even two, three years ago, I wouldn't have been able to run a lightning node.

And now I can, albeit not very reliably, thanks to tools like Root Air to Raspberry Blitz, et cetera. So yeah, we're getting there, just think we've still got a long way to go in terms of channel management and all that sort of stuff.

So I'm sure that the tool and we'll improve around that. And I also think that the whole, aside from the Bitcoin side of things, that the self-host aspect, so like the app stores that you see on umbrella and start nine, et cetera, where people can easily spin up their own next cloud or bitward and instance.

I think that will continue to proliferate. I think there's a need for that. And something that we talk about at foundation a lot is like personal sovereignty and tools like that are enabling people to be able to de-Google themselves, to reduce their reliance on Apple, et cetera.

And take back their own data and their own sovereignty and not have to rely on Google Docs and Google photos and all that Facebook horrible shit. So I think that will continue to proliferate.

I hope that that's in a way that is, that somewhat diverges from the Bitcoin node itself. I do think they have a place to be ran separately, but I do think that the reasoning for doing so, the two are kind of intertwined.

It's about sovereignty with your data and sovereignty with your money by a Bitcoin node. So yeah, I think that will continue to proliferate and grow in population. And again, we're gonna see the tool in around that continue to improve and be easier to use.

- Your point on like separating them out, I think that's a big one. For me, it feels a bit worrying to be adding a load of apps and bits and pieces. I like to just have things separate. So I like to have Ronan Dojo and then Raspberry Blitz for lightning and then nothing else.

Like I don't run anything else on them because I just feel like it's extra risk that you don't need. So for me, I would feel like having things contained off in some way would be nice if there's a way to do it in one machine that's sort of having it partitioned.

And this is way above like what I understand, but you know, like could things run in different virtual machines or like some sort of things like cubes OS or some sort of thing like that where you could have things partitioned and you have one machine that you go to and it has all of your self-sovereign stuff on there.

But it's not just running on one little Raspberry Pi with you node and everything else and your hot wallet for your lightning all on one little Raspberry Pi. Just, I don't know, it seems weird to me.

- Yeah, it's funny you're capped off with that because that was gonna be my next point was that we've already seen an increasing trend of people realizing that Raspberry Pi is actually garbage.

I fell down the trap and I've got three or four of them so I hear that I'm not being used and just unplugged in a drawer. Something else has to think that we'll see proliferate is the fact that people recognize that they can run nodes on spare computers that are actual real fully fledged in computers

that you can just kind of leave plugged in in the corner but they've got enough beef behind them that they're not gonna fall over if they try to run a lightning node or anything like that.

The problem we've got there is that the tooling around running stuff on a normal computer versus a Raspberry Pi is much further behind. Just because for the past sort of five years, everything's been running node, get a Raspberry Pi, doing all that.

So that's where all the tooling and all the man hours has been built towards. So I think we're gonna have to wait for a little bit of a catch up before you can just buy like a little mini desktop PC for, in all honesty, not much more than a Raspberry Pi cost these days.

And to be able to just have that ease, like the clicking point, ease of user interface that you get with something like Umbrella or Ronin Dojo UI. So I think we're gonna have to wait for that catch up for those to be made available on like the X86 or the desktop environment but I think a lot more people are gonna move towards that

and you can already see that in the likes of Start 9, like their flagship model now is an Intel processor that's basically a fully fledged in desktop mini PC. So people are recognizing the need for that.

And I think once we do make that shift and the tooling improves, then I'd be much more susceptible then to throw in more onto at that computer and maybe having it do my node, my full-come server, my C Lightning, and but also hosting a bit more than instance on there or something like that

because I know it's just gonna be far more able to be able to cope with that extra load that I'm gonna give it because it is just a proper computer. It's not like a builder's toy that we've adopted as a group of Bitcoin as to do it because it runs on low power.

- Yeah, I mean, in the same theme as like the GUIs that we've now had for Ronin Dojo and Raspberry Blitz, one of the things that was, I think they even put out a bounty a few years ago was for Join Market to set up a GUI and that now was released this year in this jam.

That's the name and that was built by a few people in the Join Market community. And they got the bounty and that's, I think, from all I've heard has been pushing up the numbers on Join Market quite a bit.

So that's definitely a really good improvement. It's the kind of the same benefits that we've now just discussed with the no boxes as well, just making everything a lot more accessible for people, just installing that and hooking it up to your Join Market instance and then navigating through it all.

It's just so much easier. - Do we have any numbers for Join Market? Is there any way that we can see how much Bitcoin is going through there and how many users? I was wondering, since they brought in that change, I can't remember what it was called now, bonds, some type of bonds or something like that.

- Fidelity bonds, yeah. - Fidelity bonds. Do we have any data on how that's changed things or if it's changed things? - We should do. I don't have anything here. I mean, the thing is with Join Market because it's not like an equal coin join like with Wellpool.

It's not that obvious on-chain, but you obviously still do have the order book and with the Fidelity bonds, that's definitely something that you can access with that data. - Yeah, you can, there's a cool website called bitcoinkpi.com that lists loads of different Bitcoin metrics.

It's got a privacy tab and you can look at Wellpool with RB1.0 or Join Market stats. And according to that, the last reading, which was on the 18th of December, the maker liquidity is two and a half thousand Bitcoin.

That looked pretty flat across the year. It looks about average. So it looks to be hovering, aside from all the peaks at around 3000 Bitcoin of maker liquidity that sat there waiting to be mixed in Join Market.

One interesting thing that we've seen is that the average liquidity per maker or per sort of person who's offering their coin join, that's their Bitcoin, to be coin join, took an absolute skyrocket in around about August time, which I presume might have been roughly when they introduced these Fidelity bonds,

which is probably not surprising to see that because of the way that the Fidelity bonds work. You have to lock up more Bitcoin. So you're incentivized to do fewer larger amounts of Bitcoin, is that right, Antimas?

- Yeah, although I think the Fidelity bond update was about a year ago, wasn't it? - I really am missing this, but it feels like it. I think in summertime, that was about when Jam came out.

So maybe that was something to do with that, that that was then just like more users came in. But the average amount per user went up, right? You said? - Yes, yeah, so in August of this year, it was 5.8 Bitcoin and then literally like a week or two, later it went up to 25.

- So there could be a couple of big whales that are skewing that obviously because we're talking averages here, but there's a massive step change and it stays quite high for thereafter. - But your reasoning was definitely right.

I mean, the Fidelity bonds were introduced to incentivize people to concentrate their funds onto like one user. So that was the desired effect. I mean, I'm not quite sure what happened there exactly in August, but that would be a reasonable conclusion that has had something to do with that.

- One final thing to cap this office, that there's a joint market volume in Bitcoin and that is trending up and it's been on average trending up since July of this year. It's gone up pretty much every month thereafter.

And the average volume is like 1,700 Bitcoin per week, I think that is, which is quite a lot again. - Yeah, but again, it's difficult to quantify that because of the way that the joint market model works.

It's not like you can say, oh, that was 5,000 users. It's because they could be like one or two stupidly large coin joints in there that are jacking up that average. But regardless, the average is creeping up.

So again, which is great to see because it means more people are leveraging privacy tools. - Yeah, so going on from those updates, there are a few more that came out this year when one of the big developments was the complete rewriting of the seed signer software.

That came out, I think that was the 0.5. I think that was in March or something this year. And they completely rooted their UI as well and a lot more functionalities. Also with the integration of the seed QR standards which has just really improved the user experience

with using these stateless signing devices. So I know also from like just following the project pretty closely that there are quite a few developments that are now coming up as well in a large release sometime next year.

But that was definitely a big step forward from the software side this year. Obviously with the whole difficulties with getting the Raspberry Pi's, the whole project's been a bit hampered this year but from like the information coming out from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, this should be resolved sometime Q1, Q2 next year.

So we're looking forward to that. But that was definitely a big update this year which was really nice. - Let's hope that when they flood the market with devices again, then the price is trending back down again because I think aside from the availability of the device itself, which is obviously

quite a difficult thing to deal with as an open source project, the other selling point or major selling point was that you could build this device if you could get your hands on one first, not a lot of money at all.

Clearly we saw the world that we've seen the price of everything go up but especially the boards because they were so hard to get hold of which kind of again nullified a little bit. One of the main benefits for seed signing for me which was that you could knock it together really cheaply.

So hopefully when they're in abundance again, we can see that price sort of start to trend back down towards the production cost. - Yeah, if you're trying to get one, like at the moment, even like second hand, you're paying about anywhere from 30 to 50 euros and you can't get them new at the moment.

So before the shortages, they were going for like five euros a piece and from what I'm hearing, it will be percentage wise, quite a bit more expensive when they come back out again. But even if it's like 100 to 100% more expensive, it's still a lot cheaper than they are now second hand.

So I'll probably, I'll be guessing they'll be coming out for like 10, 15, you know, even that. I mean, is still a really good price point. So then if you include the WaveShare LCD and the camera and an adapter cable and a micro SD card, you're still around like 40 euros or something in total if you can source them.

So that's pretty sweet. - Yeah, definitely. I think as soon as you start edging towards that 50, 60 dollar mark, you're entering into the territory of other devices, like the cheap Trezor or the Blockstream Jade.

And I know before anybody jumps on the throat, completely different threat model and the whole point is DIY here, but not everybody kind of understands that. And just purely from a price point, as soon as you creep over that 50 dollar mark, then you're sort of starting to play with the established names a little bit as well, aren't you?

- Exactly, yeah. And I mean, at the moment, I mean, we've still got a few in stock and we're selling them. There's like a DIY kit for, was in our 90 euros or something, which I mean, it's just, I mean, we're not making any profit on that.

So that's tough. I mean, obviously they're up, still people who just want to get their hands on them. And we definitely want to offer them, but it's just that, as you mentioned, like the whole ethos and the whole idea was to make it accessible and low cost.

So we're really looking forward to, hopefully pushing that number way down next year. - It still does serve one purpose for me, which is like, if someone doesn't want anyone to know that they're buying a hardware wallet or signing device, whatever you want to call it, you still have that, even though the cost has gone up

and it's harder to get the parts. Like if you really want to build one of these things and no one to know, you can still do that. Whereas it's much more difficult to get your hands on something without giving your address and sending Bitcoin to them, blah, blah, blah.

Like this still does that. And that's like a massive thing for me. I think, especially if people are in authoritarian countries or yeah, they're in some kind of trouble like that, then it's important that they can build one of these things and nobody know.

- Yeah, definitely. One of the main selling points, isn't it that you can build one off the radar? It's a fully no KYC hardware wallet or signing device, whatever terminology you choose to use for one of a better term.

Yeah, aside from the price, that's a very valid point and that doesn't change even if it was $200. - Is there ever gonna be a time where seed signer thinks about using a different board or is there anything else that it could be built on?

- Yeah, that's one of the things they've been working on this year. There's been quite a lot of work going into making it compatible with like ESP boards and they are widely accessible and like available at the moment and also very low cost, but there has to be quite a bit of adaptation to the code.

So Keith has been putting a lot of work into rewriting the code in MicroPython for those boards and yeah, hopefully they'll be able to release that in a working release next year so there's just a lot more optionality with the boards and there's also been like work done

to just being able to install it on other, like just computers, just regularly. I think we discussed that last time in the monthly as well was the seed sign or OS that they're working on which will be just like a full seed signer operating system that's not built on any other base operating system, like Linux operating system.

So that will make things a lot more easier to do like cross platform and install it on different devices. Yeah, so there's definitely a lot of work being done but at the moment we're still stuck with Raspberry Pi's.

I mean, it's not just the Raspberry Pi zeros, you can also install it on a full Raspberry Pi 4 or something but obviously the full factor there is not great but there are even some cases for that as stuff but ideally you wanna have it in a small form factor and low cost them because of getting hands on a full Raspberry Pi.

I mean, that's definitely more expensive and even different, more difficult than a zero at the moment. Yeah. So one of the other big updates this year and like releases of hardware was from the passport.

So that was great. I mean, I got mine in summer as well and that was really great to play around with that. And I was, I mean, unfortunately I didn't get my hand on the first batch of the passports but now working with the second batch, the onboarding is absolutely incredible.

I mean, that was, I think I was really blown away by that just like the experience, like the flow of setting it up especially with the Envoy app on your phone, updating firmware and stuff, that was really slick and also just the quality of the build itself, the weight of it with that copper alloy.

I mean, it's a real premium product. I mean, that was really nice getting that. Yeah, it's good to hear you say that actually, given that, you know, I've seen it be built from nothing from behind the scene.

Been a massive year for us at a foundation, obviously with the release of the second iteration of passport, the batch two. Wasn't without its significant hurdles, especially in terms of supply chains.

Again, we were talking about the shortfalls and shortcomings of Raspberry Pi's and things like that while we've been hit with similar stuff in terms of getting hold of different components required for passport due to the global supply chain squeeze that has pretty much hit most industries.

So yeah, it took us a lot longer than anticipated and we did have some supplier issues. You know, you mentioned the copper plate in there which looks absolutely fantastic but was the cause of one of our biggest headaches to get the finish right with the suppliers, trying to get that done and get that perfect look

in the way that we're happy with or definitely that Zach's happy with these are hardware QA guy and he's got very high standards as you can see from the device. That was the cause of a lot of headaches but to be able to now see, you know, that we're getting close towards a couple of thousand of these being in the hands of Bitcoin

as in getting all really great feedback particularly around onboarding and some simplicity of use is, you know, it's worth all of the headaches and the frustrated late night calls that we've had with suppliers and whatnot to get it, to get this out to market.

Yep, we're absolutely positioned ourselves as sort of a more premium device. We're definitely one of the most expensive but anybody that's actually held on in the hand will hopefully understand the reasoning for that.

And aside from the hardware build itself, we've placed a massive emphasis on design and usability both in the software and in the physical devices itself. We saw a massive gap in the market to be able to make this self custody stuff easier.

You know, everybody's always running around getting stuff off exchanges and whatnot. We forget how daunting that is for most people particularly to do that in cold storage let alone from downloading an app from the play store or whatever.

So yeah, we saw a gap in the market to make this easier but equally to do that in a truly open source way as well and stay true to what we're about and why the company was started long before I joined as well.

So, hot off the press this week, we just announced our first seed raise round of $7 million from the hedge council. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Which again was a long time in the making particularly in the bear market raising funds is not quite as easy as when Bitcoin's at $70,000 a coin.

But yeah, really happy. Obviously, we've got some great investors behind us and that's going to engage us to continue building awesome shit really. I wish I could talk about what we've got planned but clearly I can't.

But lots of software improvements. It's going to, you know, this year our teams are already grown by sort of 30%. Maybe I think we're around about 14 or 15 strong now. We've got a couple more highest planned to keep your eyes peeled for that if you're interested in joining us.

And obviously that's the new venture capital is going to give us that runway to continue along with our roadmap to build awesome hardware and software that's focused on Bitcoin and surrounding sovereignty technologies.

What does it feel like in your hand one of these? 'Cause I've got a picture of one on my desk framed. I may not have one in my hand but this fucking guy keeps dangling it in front like a carrot and then never actually hands it over.

Is it nice and to us? So for the listeners, what he's alluded to is the fact that I've got his device sat here with me. We were supposed to meet up last week 'cause there's a UK Bitcoin meter in London.

Neither of us can make it. Obviously, Mac was busy and I was, as we discussed at the start of the call, very ill. So still, yeah, hold my hands up. I haven't managed to get it across to him.

I'm just there. I'm doing my best to install the rug pull seed before you get old a bit Mac so that when you load it up, I can retire in a couple of years. - You'll be so fucking disappointed.

That's all I've got.

- Yeah, no, I can't wait to get my hands on it. I have obviously, I've seen them and I had all the demos and all that kind of stuff and they look fucking awesome. And I've obviously got the first one and that was a big step up for me.

I was like, oh, this thing is really nice and really simple to use. And back to what you said, it's like, you do need to have something that's simple for people and with someone who's just bought Bitcoin, they need something where they can sit down for an hour and set it up and not shit themselves.

So I think from everything I've seen, you guys are nailing that. - Yeah, I'll give you a great example actually. At foundation, we offer concierge onboarding which is like an hour call with me to kind of walk you through the setup process for those people are legit step zero and they need some help.

I had one a couple of weeks ago with a seven, well, she didn't tell me her age but she was on camera so I can guess that she's probably in her seventies and she can't- - That was my missus.

(laughing) - She can't miss it. - She basically, I didn't need to do any kind of hand holding. I was on the call answering the questions but she was kind of going through the setup process of this passport all on her own and just talking me through what she was doing and she was like, oh, that was nowhere near as scary

as I thought it was going to be. I was like, yeah, great, you know, that's exactly what we're going for. And she was actually, so we got to the end of the setup process really quickly in like half an hour.

She was like, right, I'm going to be withdrawing all my sons and daughters coins off their exchanges and I want to store it on here. So how can I do that? I want to do it all from the one device.

I was like, oh, yeah, great. We've got this accounts feature that you can segregate all the Bitcoin off so you can have, you know, Antomesis account, Max's account and they're all backed up by the same seed.

And she again, whizzed through that and had three or four different accounts for all of her sons and daughters all managed by the same device. So I guess, you know, a bit somewhat anecdotal but if I'm not going to do it then I believe, I firmly believe that most people can at least have a go

at this and for those people that do need the holding hand and then we've got the concierge onboarding. But yeah, it's good to have that real world validation that the fine details and the agonizing calls that you've had to discuss what might be a trivial point, you know, a decision point on an onboarding process

is worthwhile because you get the feedback and you're like, holy shit, this is actually quite easy. And I failed to mention one really important point before I finish my spiel about, you know, this year at foundation was that for the first time ever now we've got devices in stock on the shelf waiting to be shipped.

And previously we've operated purely on a pre-order basis which we did this year which caused us a lot of headaches because we missed a couple of deadlines and understandably people were, you know, wanting their devices to get their stuff off exchanges.

We're not going to be doing that anymore. Basically we've got inventory. It's on the shelf in the factory in the US. So as soon as you place your order it's going to be shipped within a couple of working days and we've never been in that position before.

So it's really exciting for us and particularly me from the support desk to not have to answer those questions of, you know, where's my device? So I'm personally really excited about that one.

One thing that Max and I spoke about on the show we did about self custody last week and we weren't sure about with the Envoy app, is it possible to use it with other devices as well? Like, is it cross compatible?

Not right now because we've got, obviously we built it to start off with, to be super simple to use with Passport. We, you know, we call it a companion app. We geared it around Passport. But Passport speaks the QR code framework, exactly the same as Blockstream Jade, SeedSiner.

They all speak the same, they all buy by the same standard. So it shouldn't take much for us to allow Envoy to be able to recognise that because currently we're looking for that standard plus some information about your Passport as well so that we can, like, tell you when your firmware updated you, et cetera, et cetera.

But it shouldn't be much for us to strip that out to just look for, you know, the X-pop because it's coming from SeedSiner or Blockstream Jade or anything like that because the core data's already there.

It's just that we just need to tell Envoy to look for it. - Exactly, yeah. 'Cause I mean, they're like two points that that would be really great for. I mean, on the one hand, just having like a multi-vendor, multi-sick using the Envoy app, like with the Passport as one of the signers would be wonderful.

And then also just mixing and matching like different software and devices to mitigate risk there. I mean, I know a lot of people are really keen on doing that. And so that would just like open up the Envoy app also for a lot of other users who have other hardware wallets that'd be really great to see.

- Yeah, 2023, Envoy is gonna be a massive focus for us. We're gonna be massively beefing up the functionality of it to make it a standalone wallet as well as just a companion app as well.

Lots of core privacy features that some listeners will be familiar with. I think the other thing that would be great as well from to be able to use it with SeedSiner and whatnot is that when you're kind of trying to orange peel to peel people and you wanna mess around with TestNet, there's no way you can do that on mobile right now

with anything like SeedSiner or Jade or anything. If you wanna start messing with TestNet, you've got to go on your computer, which is a bit of a headache if you're just trying to spend 10, 15 minutes showing somebody how it works.

So I think if we can open up that functionality, it'd be really cool because you can do some some great orange peel and pieces with some TestNet and just your mobile phone. - Actually, there's now been a month or something since Nunchuck opened up their mobile wallet, like open sourced it and they actually support TestNet.

So that's the first option that you can now use on mobile. - They do, you're right. Yeah, absolutely. - Absolutely amazing. - 'Cause that was always my problem like going to meetups here and just like showing the SeedSiner set up to new people.

And now the last meetup I went to a couple of weeks ago, we used the Nunchuck and because it's cross platform as well for iOS and Android, that's absolutely wonderful. I mean, there were still a few bugs in the, like, went through, I think I went through on that evening with about 15 people or something.

And we had like a few hiccups here and there, but I think those are things that are in their issues anyway. So that's a really good, really good option now with for mobile. 'Cause beforehand also when I was in Riga and stuff on the conferences, I always had to use Sparrow on my laptop, but this is wonderful.

Especially like with like signing backwards and forwards with the camera and the QR code. Like if you're doing that with your all over, with your signing device, like either the blockchain trade or the SeedSiner or something like that.

Like you're always rotating the device like to the camera of your laptop and stuff. And you always have to, or if you don't have a laptop with the camera, you need like an additional camera on your desktop PC and all that kind of stuff.

But if you're actually moving the phone just from front to back of the device, there's just so much easier and such a great user experience. Not only that as well, mobile phone cameras are so much better than computer webcams in general.

So the whole scanning process just is so much more slick, which is kind of important when you're trying to onboard people as well. You know, you don't want to have that awkward 10 or 15 seconds where you're like trying to scan a QR code off your webcam and it's like there's some glare because you're in direct sunlight

or something stupid like that where you don't tend to have those issues with phones. They're just better capable of being able to just deal with any lighting conditions and just picking up QR code really easily.

So yeah, I forgot about Nunchuk's apologies there. Yeah, I'll tell you what, actually, I've been doing a bit of testing with Nunchuk this weekend. Something else that impressed me was the collaborative wallets between Nunchuk clients and messing around setting one up just between two phones that I've gotten.

Actually really easy and really quite slick with the in-app messaging and all of the prompts that are done sort of directly within the app. So you don't need to like communicate out of band if you're on the other side of the world of somebody.

And let's say you wanted to make a, let's say we wanted to make it two or three for the Bitcoin monthly foundation or whatever, you know, just using it as an example. We could do all of that 100% within Nunchuk, including signing transactions, you know, we wouldn't need to get a hop on a call or anything like that.

So yeah, still a couple of little UI niggles and bugs like you mentioned on to miss, but still a fairly young wallet and you're really happy to be able to recommend them more widely now that they've open sourced it.

So I'm sure they'll continue to do great things in 2023. Yeah, so I think, I don't know if any of you've got any other like updates that you were really happy to see this year, like larger ones.

Yeah, you've got it on the list, but Peach was a big one for me. I thought that was a really needed step forward to have something that's usable. I know they got a really good team behind them as well.

And we always talk about don't use the exchanges if you can avoid it and use peer to peer services, et cetera. But it's not that easy. And I think it's so important that we can push people towards an option like that where it's simple.

It's got a nice user interface and gets people away from the coin bases and bullshit. Yeah, having that mobile first peer-to-peer experience that's been done so well, I might add, by the team at Peach, really is a game changer for making sure that people's first steps into buying Bitcoin is in a privacy-preserving way.

Yeah, a big huge fan of Peach. I've mentioned it a couple of times on the podcast and done it, did a couple of cash trades in Rega with it. I've used it subsequently as well to do some more remote trades with people via Revolut or anything like that.

And it just works really well. And they're shipping new updates all the time. Again, it's a great team behind it. And there's regular updates being coming out. And I think they're getting much closer towards a main release and making this widely open to everybody.

And I know that they're adding new payment methods all the time, which naturally will increase the liquidity and make it available to more people. So yeah, the great team iterating really fast.

So great to see what they've done. Because previously, there was no mobile option, was there for peer-to-peer markets that I am aware of anyway, or that was widely used. No, and it was a sort of awkward situation where I was always saying to people, "Oh yeah, will you want to buy peer-to-peer?"

And then they go, "Oh, okay, how do I do that?" They're like, "Right, what you want to do is download BISC, and then you've got to set this up, and then you've got to wait two weeks, and you've got to be verified and blah, blah, blah."

And the interface is like daunting. Like, I think it looks kind of cool inside for punk, but it's daunting for new users, and no one that I suggested it to ever used it. Like, even downloading it was too much.

And it's something like Peach. It looks like Tinder. I mean, like, it's just, it's like swipe. You find your buyer, you find your seller, and everything is, everything's in SATs. And I don't know, it just feels like it's training people to use Bitcoin the right way, and I love that.

Yeah, and I mean, it kind of came out of nowhere. I mean, I think there are a few rumblings behind the scenes, like, throughout the beginning of the year, but it really took off. Then I think with the announcement in Riga, and then they had like closed for like beta testers, and I don't know if they open it up now, or is it still--

- Soon, very soon. - Very soon, yeah. So, but I think like, from like, just following along a bit in the like, the Telegram chat and stuff, the response from users has been really great. And yeah, I think they're big things to look forward to there.

- Yeah, well, I know from-- Sorry, mate. - I was just gonna say, yeah, I was chatting with Stefan and Chino or Cino. I'm sorry for butchering that name. - Chino. - Yeah, they've got a pretty tasty roadmap as well.

So I think 2023 is gonna be exciting for them and what they've got planned. - Yeah, definitely. And I know from a lot of the guys who are involved in the plebminer month, because a lot of them are now having to sell a few sats to keep themselves afloat, because obviously the conditions are particularly tough.

I know a fair few of them are now actually selling some sats on there. And what's nice is it takes a little bit of pain away, 'cause they're getting a slight premium on their sat. So they're finding it easy.

They're finding it takes a little bit of pain away when the times are tough. - Tell you another one that exploded onto the scene this year was Robosats. I had to double check, actually, when they were released.

I've just gone on their GitHub and their first main release was the 31st of Jan. So definitely won this year. And again, for those not aware, Robosats is a paid-to-be marketplace that you access via the top browser.

You can also buy various paid-to-be markets directly. No KYC, but it's the crucial bit with Robosats is that it's all lightning-based. And so naturally the limits are a little bit lower than you would see with BISC, et cetera.

But really cool to see a new take on the paid-to-be market introduced and using lightning because there's clearly the man for it because the liquidity has gone from strength to strength this year, been loads of different contributors getting behind Robosats and contributing to the code.

And great to see it get a lot more stable and the functionality increase. And they actually, I found out this last week, I think, that there's also a mobile app. Did you guys know this? - No, I thought it was browser-based.

- Yeah, that's what I thought as well, but apparently, I don't know whether they're not publicly announcing this. So maybe I've just thrown them under the bus. - Yeah, no, I've got on GitHub actually in the change log.

It does mention Android. So yeah, it's not been well-publicized and I thought I would have heard maybe Matt and Marty talking about this, but yeah, there's a mobile app now and you can download it from GitHub.

- Very nice. - Okay, that's nice, yeah. 'Cause there's one thing definitely to mention still with Peach and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not open source at the moment. And I think at some point they're planning to maybe do that, but definitely keep that in mind that there's, yeah, there's a company behind that

and they're running it via their servers, which, and then it's not an open source code at the moment. So that is a big difference between the BISC and Robosats and so on. But I think at some point, I remember the mentioning that they're planning to.

Do you know if that's still their outlook? - I think I've seen one tweet from them ages ago that said they might look at it, but from what I can gather it's not something that's on the roadmap.

And I think obviously I'm a massive advocate of free and open source and I always prefer to recommend open source tools over non-open source tools. I think it's kind of slightly less important in this scenario where you're not really giving it your private keys, so to speak, you're kind of saying, I'm gonna do this trade

and send it to this address when it's done. So clearly there's still a little bit of risk there and a little bit of trust involved with the closed source app, but it's not like you're getting your wages paid into this app or anything like that.

It's a slightly different trade off, but I would absolutely love to see this open source eventually, but who knows? - Now there's one other thing that was being built over the last few years, which was the concept of like FEDIMENT, which was like federated, like I think it's the exact term.

I was just slipping in my mind. It's like, but at the end of the day, you can have like a setup where you have a bunch of people who federate a closed system, where you can create kind of an account in there and pay out of that via lightning, but also on chain and store your coins in there.

And so kind of there's a token system within the FEDIMENT itself. And there is obviously a big trade off 'cause it's not self custody, obviously, 'cause you're trusting this federation, but because it's split up it is kind of similar trade off system to like the liquid network.

The great advantage here is like privacy benefits because you're hiding within a big, and an images set what, I mean, obviously it depends on the amount of users within one of these FEDIMENTs.

But if they do pick up and there are more people using these, it will be a very private system to use. Obviously, these are pretty big trade offs. So, and it's a very new system. It's a very complicated system.

That's why they've been working out for ages and then this year, a colour from one of the devs here from Germany came out and built a similar system called Cashew like over the weekend and a little fun fire under there asked to bring it out this year as well, the FEDIMENT.

So they've both been released this year. The Cashew is not a federated system, so it's even more trust involved there, but it's, yeah, if you know what, the trade offs are. - No, I didn't know Cashew was not kind of abiding by the FEDIMENT of federating, I guess protocol.

- No. - Exactly. - So, is it essentially just a custodial wallet with blinded tokens? - Exactly, yes, I mean, it's this chomian e-cash, that was the word I was looking for, for an system and you can just spin it up as like an Uncle Jim for people to use and the good thing is, is that, I mean, you have, as a user,

you have privacy towards the operator of the Chomian e-cash system. So in the case of Cashew and FEDIMENT, but with Cashew, it's only one operator and with FEDIMENT, it's a federated system and that's why it's so much more complicated the whole setup with FEDIMENT because, obviously, you have to have all of these signers

online coordinating with each other and so on and there's a lot of interaction between the user and the operator with every transaction that you do. I mean, it says the way that it's set up is pretty complicated there.

That's why it's been so much more work getting the FEDIMENT system up and running and the Cashew implementation was pretty straightforward, but obviously the trade-offs and the risks are a lot higher with Cashew than with FEDIMENT.

- Yeah, 'cause that seems to me kind of just like a custodial lightning wallet or something like that, 'cause effectively you're just sending in tokens which are in a larger pool. I know that it's better privacy than that, but you've still got the same risks of like you could get rug pulled, you don't have the custody.

Like it, to me, the FEDIMENT seems interesting because although you do have the trade-off of you aren't completely in control, you do still have much less risk than you would say leaving it on exchange.

To me, it seems like an in-between of the two, especially if you have the federation set up properly, and then you also have the added benefit of privacy. For those reasons, it seems interesting, but the Cashew thing, do you see that as a big difference between just a custodial lightning and chucking something in and then chucking it out

in different amounts to a different address? Like, is it any different? - Yeah, I think it's a viable option in comparison to something like wallet of Satoshi. If you're really just going to a meetup and you've got whatever 10, 20 euros on there or something, you know, if you've just got like a small amount of SATs

sitting in there and you just want to have it for a short time, you're going to a conference meetup or something like that. I think that's pretty nice. Obviously not for long-term storage.

And I think one of the benefits is that you, it's really easy and simple to set up. You can have it running like on your Raspberry Pi, it could be included in like one of these app stores on your note box.

And this would allow you to do this for, let's say, your family and your close friends. So you're the only one who knows how to use all of this stuff. And instead of sending your brother and sister and best friend to wallet of Satoshi, you could just set up one of these cashier systems and onboard them onto that.

But they'd still have privacy. So you wouldn't know what they're spending their stuff on. If, I mean, obviously there's a bit of a trade-off again with the anonymity set. If there's only one user using it, then you know what they're doing.

But if you've got like five, six, 10 people using your system and they all know you, so they know who to store to knock on if it all shuts down. But they, you still can't monitor exactly what they're doing.

That's one use case. And even if it's someone you don't know and you're just using it with really small amount of funds for short-term use, I think it's a lot better than then wallet of Satoshi.

- Yeah, I initially started sitting on the fence about Fediment and Federated Custody, et cetera. But quickly came down on the side of seeing that there's a very, very, very, very niche use case where I think that this could be beneficial to somebody over and above what a Custodial solution already offers.

Yes, it's an improvement in terms of privacy because you get privacy from the Custodian. The issue that I draw a very, very hard line under is the attempted sort of blurring of the lines as to what this really is and what sort of Federated e-cash really is to say that it's like, I forget the terminology that's been used,

but it's something like second person Custody or something like that. And I think that's a bit disingenuous. And I think the main issue I have is that we should be making it very, very clear that there's still a lot of trust involved in these solutions, even more so with the cash you won

that you mentioned, I wasn't aware that it was just, it wasn't Federated. But even if we go to the main ferry mints or protocol where you're trusting a conglomerate of, I don't know, 10, 15 people, whatever it is that you still don't have self custody.

You have privacy from those people, those individuals, but they can rub-pull you whenever or denial of service you and prevent you from taking back your Bitcoin whenever you want. So I think, I just think that we need to be really, really clear about that and make sure that people, prospective people thinking that this is kind

of like a silver bullet that's going to fix everything, understand that self custody is absolutely binary. It's 01, you have it or you don't, you can spend your Bitcoin unequivocally at will to whenever you want, whenever you want, or you can't.

And I think Federated very much falls under that you can't bit, and you're just trusting that you can for as long as the ferry mint is open and is running. That's definitely true, but isn't it better than somebody having it on an exchange or not taking control in any way?

Because if this has a proper federation, you'd have to have the people in the federation collude. And if you had businesses that needed to keep a reputation, and if they were to fuck people over, they lose that reputation.

If you have a large enough federation, it does to me seem, it's not perfect, definitely like it's better just to have self custody, but it's a lot better than not taking any form of custody.

Like it does seem like it's a middle ground to me. - Yeah, I tend to agree with what you said. The bit where I would push back, you have this weird dichotomy where you're incentivized by two reasons to run your own federation, to be a federation member.

You've got the example that you said where you're a business and you wanna make self custody a little bit easier for people. Again, I fall into the trap, say self custody. With drawing from an exchange, you wanna make that a little bit easier.

You gain trust by being a public person, but by proxy, by doing that, you put a target on your head because you're making yourself a money transmitter and you're gonna put yourself in the regulators' crosshairs.

So the flip side to that is, well, okay, you do it anonymously and you get 10 anonymous people and then you're walking into rug pull territory where I'm like, okay, they might have a little bit of a reputation on Twitter or something, but am I gonna, do I really know them enough to trust them with my Bitcoin?

I'm not sure that I do. So you have this weird little bit where you're like, do I trust the regulated people and think that shit, they might KYC me because the regulator's gonna come down hard on them, or do I trust this random name on Twitter that's got a few thousand followers and knows how to run his own federation?

It's just a really weird gray area that I'm sure we're gonna be able to watch on fall, but my bet would be that it's all regulated stuff and it will eventually be targeted because it's very easy falls under the money transmitter umbrella.

- Exactly, yeah, I mean, I definitely 100% agree on the classification of this as definitely not self custody. So this is a custodial model. And as you were saying, like if these are companies doing this, I don't think this will be something that will be legal for a long time because it is private.

So that's not gonna be something that's gonna work long term. And one additional point with Nim's doing this, you don't even know if there's like a federation of five and it's like a three or five, you don't even know if they're five people, it could all be the person.

- Yeah, exactly. - So at the end of the day, I think like the, that's, 'cause I spoke to Callum who did the cashew system. And I think for his argument also was to say, at the end of the day, you don't really know if the fed and rated system gives you any additional security if you don't exactly know who these people are

and that's probably not gonna be the case because of regulatory concerns. So I think at the end of the day, if you wanna use this, the only viable situation would be if it's a very, very small amount for just a weekend, going to like a conference or something like that, or in like a very personal situation

where you're doing this for immediate friends and family. But as you said, I think it will remain niche for quite a while. Maybe there'll be some developments where this will be possible between large companies, which I think would be great, obviously.

I think that would be a wonderful development where you have very big company with, let's say, Unchained Capital and CASA and maybe a block stream or something. If they came together and did a federated system like this, I think this would be, that would be like the best case scenario, but I don't see that being an option

just from a regulatory standpoint. - I've got a positive to throw into the mix. - Go ahead. - SBF got arrested last week. - Woo! (laughing) - How long is that gonna last? - Well, I just read, I mean, I don't know.

I don't wanna put any info out there. I haven't checked this yet, but what I just read this morning in Glancing By was something about pleading guilty to some kind of charges. I don't know if you've seen any of this.

- I haven't. I sit on the fence with this anyway. I'm like, I don't really like seeing anyone go to prison, even if they are a little weasel fuck like him. Yes, he's a scamming bastard and he's stolen from people.

I'm also not excited to see him go to prison. I'd rather he just has to like clean streets or like go into, no, I want him to go and work a normal job where he hasn't had a silver spoon and he has to go and work on a checkout for the next 20 years, do something like that.

It would be a middle ground for me. Yeah, I'm happy to watch him rot. (laughing) - Yeah, I would do that. - Yeah, I think what you were leading to answer this was the Caroline Ellison, who was kind of like his, she was like the head of the Alameda research, which was supposedly a different company.

- A 12 year old. - Yeah, that we turned out it isn't a different company and they were all kind of literally in the shame in the same flight, just sending billions of dollars to each other.

And Gary Wang, who was actually the founder of FTX will be SPF. - Great, nice. - SPF was the poster child for it. They are both cooperating with the Fed to basically turn SPF into the scapegoat for all this.

So it looks like too much water's gone under the bridge now and SPF is gonna be the scapegoat for all this. They'll take guilty pleas to rat him out and I'm sure they'll probably get off quite lightly.

And SPF will be the one that gets the slap on the wrist and the big finds and hopefully some prison time. But I'm sure he seems very well connected with some powerful people. So I'm sure one or two things will probably happen.

He'll either get a really, really light sentence or he'll get Epstein. - I mean, I think like the biggest takeaway from that whole story as well as beforehand as well with like three hours capital and Terra Luna stuff in there.

I think it's just become blatantly clear once again, there's a big difference between Bitcoin and crypto. I think everyone listening to that here should, I think that's a preaching to the choir, but also that self custody is non-negotiable, that it's kind of the only way forward.

If you wanna hold long term, I'll define long term in this like instances like longer than a few days. Like that's the only way forward. And we spoke about this obviously on the other pod with about self custody for quite a while, but the last really big wave that went through the ecosystem was obviously then back in 2014

or something with Mount Gox. And since then there've been a few other exchanges that have been plotted, but this is a completely new scale. And this should be a massive wake up call. And I think it has been as well for a lot of people.

And I hope, I really sincerely hope that this realization will last longer than it has in the past. And that people don't like kind of wake up from their New Year's hangovers and just forget all about it.

- Forget it all. Do you know what was my favorite hack slash rug pull? Quadriga CX, remember that one? That was a good one. - Well they've been in the news this week, haven't they, that some of their fun, yeah, some of their, the funds from their supposedly dead CEO that miraculously disappeared alongside

the exchange collapsing with all the money has started to move again. - Shock horror. - And yeah, that's gone, that's must. - And hasn't it been pushed into Wozabi? That's what I want. - Yeah, this is it, this is the interesting bit.

So yeah, it's been tracked into Wozabi or out Wozabi. I forget which, which end it's been tracked. Probably both know him, Wozabi. And so Wozabi this year I've jumped into bed with Jane analysis to make themselves, attempt to make themselves this super nice, compliant coin joint.

So if you're paying your Wozabi fees, congrats your paying the bills of Jane analysis firms. So might wanna rethink that. Yeah, but one of the things that the CEO, Mac Tillibrand has gone on record to say is that this is to stop criminals and drug dealers, et cetera, from using their service.

Which is fair enough, you know, it's a service and you've gone on record to say that. And that was one of their main reasonings to make themselves compliant to ensure that these quote unquote bad actors were prevented from using the software, which clearly is not the case because the quadriga funds have been tracked going into it.

So I hope he's got a clause with the Jane analysis firm if and when they fail to ban stuff from his software because it's clearly not working very well. And this is a fucking obvious situation.

And these have been like known addresses that have been connected to that hack. So yeah, and from what I read, it actually went through Wozabi. So it wasn't just attempted and blocked or something, so yeah.

It makes you wonder about the chain analysis companies. I mean, it's a good thing that they're so shit. I mean, 'cause that is a very, very obvious one. Yeah, I would think maybe they don't have as much information as they'd like us to think because surely they have that on a list.

It's like someone goes away, was it to India and then they suddenly disappear and they're the only person who holds the keys to everyone's coins and everyone loses everything. And it was just such a fishy, obvious, scammy story that you would think they'd go, let's put a little mark next to those if they move.

Let's stop them going through. What I was thinking was like, 'cause obviously this, whoever's doing this, they've been sitting on this for quite a while and have now decided to do something about it and to get their money out.

They've had quite a lot of time to go through different scenarios and do their research on what's the best way to do this. And they must also, I mean, it must be clear that they do have this layer of protection in air quotes.

I mean, I don't know, I mean, obviously with Samurai Whirlpool, the pools are a lot smaller. So I mean, I think what do they push through? Something like 100 Bitcoin or something? - 100. - Yeah, 100 Bitcoin, yeah.

Which, to be fair, would take longer in Samurai because the largest pool is half a coin. So if you're in a rush, then I could see why people take the naive approach to just dump it into Wasabi 'cause you can get more volumes through.

- Why are you in a rush? Why are you in a rush? It was like two years ago, wasn't it? They've sat for two years or whatever it's been and then they're suddenly rushing. It just doesn't make any sense.

- No, I agree. Makes no sense whatsoever. But clearly, they're struggling in the market. And I mean, we spoke about this with joint market. I mean, the liquidity there is pretty high, like make a liquidity.

I mean, they could have easily pushed 100 Bitcoin into that. - I think maybe just some of these scammers and people who do these things just really aren't plugged in to what's going on. I think maybe we're naive in the fact that we're losers and spend a lot of time learning about this stuff and interested in this stuff.

And maybe people who have just scammed a load of Bitcoin all they care about is the fiat value. And they just, you know, they don't know where to look. So they just see, okay, this is a coin joint implementation.

They must all be the same. They must all be created equal. So I'll just use this. Listening to Peter McCormack's show and Kerriam Shil wasabi. And they've gone, ah, right, well, that must be good then.

- Exactly. I mean, maybe they came up with a brilliant solution and that's why they got through and didn't get caught by Chain Alice. I have no idea how you know. Yeah, definitely it's a weird situation, but it was funny to read.

- Anyway, I took us off topic there, but yeah, that was my favorite rock ball. - Nice. Yeah, so on other news, I mean, one of the other big developments this year, and we could have actually done this in the update or release department beforehand, it was like the old Bolt 12 LN URL situation, bringing a lot more usability to Lightning.

I mean, obviously the LN URL from Lightning Labs and the Bolt 12 from Core Lightning. These are two implementations that pretty much do the same from like a user perspective. They feel very similar at the end of the day.

It's a way to have like a static QR codes that allow you to communicate with like between two nodes to do like withdrawals or request an invoice and all this kind of stuff. It's just a very slick way of setting this up with LN URL that's been out for a bit longer and the adoption has been pretty high there.

Obviously that's got to do with LND being the dominant implementation at the moment. The communication goes via HTTP, so you scan the QR code and you get like a secret that you pass on and you connect just via the normal internet protocol to that server and request or pass on any information that you'd want there to pay or to withdraw

or something like that. So that's a very easy setup and it works pretty well, but it's not completely centered on the Lightning Network. You're like communicating outside of that via HTTP.

With Bolt 12, that would all be natively on the Lightning Network and there you'd communicate backwards and forwards via like a encrypted like onion messaging but between the nodes directly via the Lightning Network.

So that's pretty nice, there's a much more cleaner implementation but also a lot more complicated. So that's why it took a bit longer and I think it's still experimental at the moment but you can use it if you're using core Lightning.

But those have been definitely two really big steps towards making using Lightning a lot more easy. - Yeah, I'm quite excited about what's coming down the pipe in terms of blinding or trampoline roots and I think they're much of a quite similar approach is to make receiver privacy much better on Lightning.

I'm pretty sure that that's been implemented albeit in alpha form by async who are the guys behind the Phoenix wallet. They have their own Lightning implementation. I'm pretty sure C Lightning guys are pretty close as well.

So if we can get those two implementations up and running with that, that's gonna be a big plus for receivership privacy on Lightning such that you don't have to share your full node details with anybody that wants to pay you on Lightning.

The idea being with without Lightning is that you sort of tell the person that's paying you how to get like halfway along the roots to your node and then you'll tell that sort of, let's say the third hop in the roots or something how to get the rest of the way so that such that the receiver,

sorry, the sender doesn't learn the final destination but the person who's also helping along the root doesn't learn where it's coming from because of the nature of the onion routing. So if we can get that implemented, that's gonna be a major plus for something that's been a thorn in the side of Lightning implementation

since its inception really because it's been nigh on impossible to receive privately on Lightning. So hopeful for that one to be to come to fruition next year, I'm excited for that. - Yeah, speaking about next year, I don't know like what's for the two of you, like the main things you're looking forward to for the upcoming year.

I mean, we've gone over a lot of things that have been released or updated this year and mentioned a few stuff that we're looking for for the coming year but we're all like big topics. That would be like the biggest improvements for you.

- I'm just looking forward to seeing more rollout with peer to peer, whether that's peer to peer marketplaces or projects like Peach or Robosatz just looking forward to seeing more of that happen.

I think there's a lot of room for improvement still but it feels like it's going the right way and trying to, I don't know, do things the Bitcoin way. I think that's the most important for me.

- Yeah, cosine that one. We'd love to see continuation of peer to peer tools to make those easier to use. Yeah, for me, it's hard not to be excited about what we've got planned internally at foundation particularly around Envoy and the features there.

Obviously can't say too much for fear getting sacked but that's what's got me hyped because it's what I do eight, 10 hours a day every day so to be able to continue grinding on that and helping the team push out some awesome updates is exciting for me and having inventory on the shelf to continue making people self custody journey.

Much easier is, again, something else that I'm excited about. What about you, Antimas? - Yeah, I think for me, I mean now like Taproot came, I mean, I think it was, when was it launched so as in sometime this year, last year, August, this time, was it like, something like, October, November last year?

I think it was in the summer that we had like that, the signaling and then it was activated sometime, at the end of 2021, whatever. Anyway, there's been quite a push now over the last year that pretty much now all the big wallets, support, Taproot, which is good.

I mean, most of them support sending to Taproot. There are a few that don't support receive, yeah. But it's been implemented in most, which is definitely good. And we also spoke about that on one of the monthlies a few months ago, that was it LND or was it core lightning?

I'm not quite sure. One of them was planning to set Taproot addresses as the default for channel closes. I'm not quite sure. LND, yeah, I think that's live already. Yeah, yeah, so that's nice to see these initiatives from the wallet providers and stuff, these commutation providers that push Taproot adoption,

'cause obviously it's always the same issue when you're the only one using it. Yeah, you're not in a very big canon entity set there and so on. So yeah, it will be a gradual growth, but one of the main reasons why I was excited about Taproot was the ability for like signature aggregation and like the new music.

So the new like multi-sick set up for Taproot, which would be indistinguishable from normal single-sick transactions on chain would, yeah, like aggregate all the signatures together into one signature and broadcast that, which would obviously reduce the size of the transactions on the blockchain, so it'd be a lot cheaper

and major privacy improvements. And those would eliminate two of the big cons for multi-sick at the moment. It's just the price and the privacy there. So no one can see what kind of setup you're using if you're paying someone from your multi-sick address or multi-sick wallet at the moment.

They can see exactly, okay, you're using it two or three. So if you're a target, they know what they're looking for. And once we get music, that won't be the case anymore. So no one will know if you're using a single-sick, single-sick with passphrase or a three or five multi-sick and that'll be absolutely amazing.

So I really hope that will be something that will be available sometime next year, but who knows these things tend to take longer than we expect, so maybe it'll be a year later. - Yeah, the final one for me that I missed off about being excited about bullish about is World War push mix liquidity.

It's gone ballistic in the last couple of months. We're currently sitting at 6,326 Bitcoin in that push mix liquidity pool. So if we see the same trajectory next year, I will put my balls on the line here and say that I reckon if we can continue, get a couple more clients to come online from different wallets

and increase the adoption of World War further. I reckon 10Ks on the cards by this time next year. - I'd like to do a bet with you there, but I actually agree, so I don't know. (laughing) I don't want to be the bet.

- I'll take the overview, yeah. - There's going to be some more sets going in there very soon. I've got my Ronan Dojo Tanto set on my desk, ready to set up and some stats ready to go in. So I'll be able to- - That'll get to 10,000 alone then, won't it?

- Just about. Yeah, just about. - There we go, job done. Might not need to wait till next December. We'll be done in January. - But who would be a viable candidate to do that? - Blue wallet.

- Blue wallet? - Yeah. But then it will be, and then they'll just be able to connect back to your own node as well. It's the same set up as any just mobile mixing there. - Yeah, I mean, that's not going to happen, guys.

Let's be real. I'd love for it to happen, but. - You said ideal candidate, not who's going to do it. - Okay, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. - 'Cause loads of people use it. You can use it on iOS and it's pretty slick and simple.

If they just, if they added that. Also, they're going to make some money, so I don't know why you wouldn't do it. But who else outside of that would be an option? - I don't, I think we're going to get somebody to come out of left field that's going to do it.

You know, T-Dev's already been tweeting teasers to say that there's other clients running in testnet mode. So we know for a fact that he's publicly on records, stating that there's at least one other person in the works that's already doing some testing.

So we know there's one in the wing somewhere. I've got no idea who it is, but yeah, it would be cool if we could get another mobile option that's crossed platform. - Yeah, that'd be amazing.

I mean, obviously there's the Spectre wallet, but I mean, they have now integrated also with, what was that, Swan Bitcoin, wasn't it? - Yeah, Swan. - Vine and stuff. I mean, I don't know like how they want to set up that as well if they'd even consider doing something like that.

But I mean, that would be the same thing as with Sparrow. I mean, it would actually be a really good implementation there, but as they're also here from Germany, a lot of the team, I think they may have some closer ties to Wazabi than to Whirlpool.

But I'm not 100% sure about that. - No, I agree. - That ain't gonna happen, in my opinion. - Yeah. - I think the incentive's gone now as well, now that they've been bought out by Swan, like it's not like a purely open source project that is desperate for funding.

- Yeah. - So the incentive to go through and implement Whirlpool to keep the lights on is not there anymore. - It seems like for any open source project, the most obvious way to do it. It's a win-win because anyone who's using that service now or has the ability to be more private and they earn some Satsback.

Like it just seems like the perfect way to fund these projects. And that's why I'm so surprised we've only seen one step up to the plate. - Yeah, well, Samurai, what's mean, aren't they? So, to do is that.

(laughing) - That's true. Yeah, red wallet mean. - Yeah. - Well, one thing that I'm also excited about and we haven't actually spoken about this yet, they've been teasing a lot on Twitter, which is the KeyKeeper app, which is also like a mobile coordinator wallet, which is definitely looking pretty slick

and they've integrated a lot of things. And that's, I mean, I think they're just at the moment still just test net, but that might be something that we'll explode onto the scene next year.

- Yeah, actually I've been chatting with it. So this is the team that's behind another wallet in the space and the name is eluding me now, annoyingly. One of the simple ones that I think Matt Odell was an advisor for.

Hopefully one of you guys can save me and think of the name. Anyway, the company is BitHive that's behind it. This is like an off-brung pin. Forgive me, I'm gonna have to Google it now 'cause it's gonna annoy me.

Hexa, hexa, what's that? So it's the same team that's behind hexa. Obviously this is purely for or mainly for multi-sig with different signers. Yeah, I've been doing some testing this week.

They've integrated passport functionality. So I've been giving them some feedback there to, you know, iron out the user experience flow a little bit. But yeah, they again seem to be doing a lot in a very short space of time and to be able to have more mobile options to do multi-sig with different hardware while it is a good thing.

Again, very, very alpha software at the moment. The guys are open and I'm honest about that. But they seem to be taking on feedback and iterating on this quickly. So it could be another one to watch for for 2023 and is cross-platform as well, which is always a plus.

Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, I mean, definitely looking forward to that. I mean, especially like on mobile, having more options there. It can only get better from there. Yeah, so that's, yeah, those are the main points.

I'm looking forward to 2023. I mean, obviously there are quite a few more other points that will be very exciting, but that's the main thing for me there. Yeah, I don't know if you've got anything else to add.

- I don't think so. I think that was a very good list. It's hard to remember, like when I'm looking through the list I'm like, fuck, oh yeah, that happened. That was released. Like it's just all gone so quick.

It's been a fucking blur. Yeah, there's a lot going on in Bitcoin. It isn't stagnant, that's for sure. - Yeah, and it's been great that we've now been chatting for over one and a half hours and we haven't had a single mention of the price, which is wonderful.

And I think that's bear markets are for building, you know? So I think the next coming year could be a pretty productive year. And I really hope so that we get things sorted before we get a lot of distractions again.

- I just can't believe that we've been doing this for two, four years now. - Yeah, it's incredible. It was episode 22 was the last episode. This would be 23, is that right? - Yeah, so we must have missed one somewhere along the line across the two years, which...

- No, no, what it was, he said to me, oh, I just checked on the website as 21 that we'd done. What it was, I hadn't added an extra one onto the website. So we'd done one, but it just wasn't in the Bitcoin monthly section.

So we'd done one actually. But yeah, pretty incredible. - Yeah, it's been a great year. Looking forward to next year, very excited, still super bullish on the builders and the open-source space.

So yeah, I will sign off to say Merry Christmas to you guys, looking forward to meeting up again with you both next year at some conferences. And well, our conference is for you at Antimas and probably some pubs with you, Max.

- Yeah, that sounds good. (all laughing) - Let's hope you both have a great Christmas in the year and I'm sure we'll be back in January for more of the same. - Yeah, have a good Christmas in the new year.

- Yeah, it was an absolute pleasure with the two you men. It's been absolutely wonderful. So have good holidays in there with new energy into the new year. - Jingle bells and bar hump bug.

- Good guys, cheers. - Thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed that. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, Q&A or Antimas. We'll answer anything that we can. And again, a massive thank you to everyone who's been streaming Sats on the podcasting 2.0 apps and a massive thank you to Mr. Crown

and everyone who's been helping with the show. And I'll see you all next year.