Bitcoin monthly 0025 Privacy phones and whirlpool for apple fan girls.

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of Bitcoin Monthly, Privacy Phones, and Whirlpool for Apple Fan Girls. We discussed this and much more. We don't have Antomist joining us today, and we do get into why.

As always, it was great to catch up with Q&A, and a big thank you before we start to everyone who's been screaming sats, sending in messages, sending articles, and interacting with the show.

Everyone who's liked, subscribed, and shared with friends have really been helping the show recently, and it's amazing to see it consistently in the top 10 of the charts for Fountain. I'd also like to say a massive thank you to our show sponsors.

Foundation devices not only make my favorite hardware, that is beautifully designed and built, but they have also stuck to the open source ethos. They are incredibly easy to use, and they really do put you in the driving scene.

If you haven't checked them out already, make sure to go to foundation devices.com, and if you are gonna buy one of these, use the code bit by bit. It will let them know that I'm shilling hard, and it will also give you $10 off your purchase.

I'd also like to say a big thank you to the team at FastBitcoins. Despite me consistently slagging off KYC services, consistently telling all my listeners not to use them, they still support the show.

This shows me that they actually care about Bitcoin, and they are there for the people who either don't wanna listen, and they just feel more comfortable with a KYC service, or for the people who just can't find the liquidity thereafter on the decentralized exchanges.

Either way, if you are gonna use a KYC exchange, I can only suggest these guys, and I'm gonna have some more members of the team on very soon. They're doing a lot of big things behind the scenes, and I look forward to chatting to them.

Check them out at fastbitcoins.com, and enjoy the show. Hey, mate, nice to have you back on. Pleasure to be back on. It seems like five minutes ago, but I did check, and it has been nearly a month, so with all of the madness that's going on in the legacy finance world, time seems to be speeding up somewhat.

But yeah, nice to be back. Just the two of us today as well. I know, well, as we said, there's a lot of craziness going on in the world, and one of those crazy things is we caught Antimus shit-coining, so he is now off the team.

Yeah, he had me out of the blue, and said, if I was interested in buying any Ripple-- Oh, really? Yeah, needless to say, I had to kind of... Well, obviously let you know first and foremost as the host of the show, but yeah, I passed on his offer for now, so maybe if he repents, we might see him back next month, maybe.

Well, it was funny because we both texted each other at the exact same time. He'd been trying to sell me dick pics, but on the blockchain, and I was like, "May I?" I wouldn't even want them if they're free, you just fuck off.

And then you write to me saying, "Oh, he's trying to sell me Ripple, so I don't know." It was weird the way that he did it as well. Like, he just sent me a picture. You know, like, the trace may have thing with a nimble windball.

He didn't text me or anything. There was no text, he just sent me a photo, just saying, "Ripple, go into the moon." So I just thought it was a really weird way to go about it, but yeah, I hope you're okay anyway, Antimas, and if you've been compromised, just blink twice.

Right, well, moving on from that shit, Coinner. What else have we got on the news today? I suppose the main news we should probably briefly talk about is that impending banking collapse, we've had three US-based banks fail, well, in the space of two week leading up to us recording today on the 16th of March.

The frightening thing is that these three banks combined in terms of monetary value are the total size of what collapsed in 2008. And there's been not much coverage about it. And back then, that monetary value, I think, was like 300 billion or something like that.

Brought the whole financial economy to its knees, and here we are now, and nobody's back in an alley, that three US banks have kind of just gone under with an equivalent value. So, feels like it might be the tip of a not very nice iceberg.

There's been lots of accusations thrown around around. Some of the banks that have actually folded have been more focused on the tech world and VCs and some of them around cryptocurrency.

And there's been some speculation as to whether this is part of Choke Point 2.0 where Mr. Biden's plan to kind of over regulate the crypto industry. And there's been some speculation to say that, you know, perhaps the banks weren't in as bad as status, people are saying they are,

and that this is kind of like a targeted attack or takeover. - I think that's bullshit. - Yeah, we're never gonna know, but I think it sounds a bit far-fetched. I mean, there is reports coming out to say that, you know, these banks were mismanaging their capital and they were overexposed to treasury bills,

which used to be a safe thing to do if you had a lot of money. And it was, we were in a low interest environment, but the Fed's been raising rates, and that has the opposite effect if you're holding treasury bills.

At least that's my understanding of it anyway. So, these banks kind of got fucked by the Fed, and the nature of the business that they do is that they're supporting startup companies that kind of draw a lot of their reserves fairly quickly to kind of build a company and pay wages, et cetera.

So, they quickly ran out of money and had to fall. That's the very sort of simple step version of what's gone on. So, yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's probably gonna be a more contagion after this because banks tend to be quite interlinked, and I know yesterday I was seeing Credit Suisse, obviously a Swiss bank creaking as well.

So, yeah, gonna be an interesting one to see unfold. The interesting thing was that the Fed, I think it was the Fed, have stepped in and said that they're gonna make all depositors completely whole again, even if their account balance was over the $250,000.

Yeah, even if it was over that. It's like, yeah, we'll sort you out. And so, I don't think they're gonna do that for shareholders, but for depositors, so if you're a company that has an account with these and you've got maybe a couple of million in there, it sounds as though you're gonna be saved.

The flip side to that is obviously where's that money coming from? It's gonna be the taxpayer, whether they admit it or not. So, they're just socializing all these losses. The banks get bailed out once again, and everybody pays for it.

It sounds a lot like 2008. - I wonder why Satoshi made Bitcoin. - Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense. When you see all of this going on in, it's like, oh yeah, daddy Fed will just save me.

Why do we need an alternative? - It's useless. There's no need for it. It's just this token. There's no actual use case for it, and I think these banks failing just prove that. - Yeah, exactly.

But in all seriousness, having a larger proportion of your wealth stored in an asset that can't be fucked around with like this does help you sleep at night. I don't know about you, but it gives you a bit of a smug smile.

I mean, don't be wrong. I don't want a financial collapse, but having put in the work to understand how Bitcoin works and to see the value in it and to work in it day to day or in and around it, when you start to see the creaks of the legacy system starting to grow and the cracks down to grow,

it does give you a little bit of like sly satisfaction. I know that sounds a bit, a bit significant. - Do you feel like, oh, I'm so fucking smart? Do you know what I mean? You just pat yourself on the back and go, oh, fuck I'm smart.

Unbelievably intelligent. You're so clever. - But yeah, obviously, you know, Bitcoin's got so many naysayers over the years and you know, this thing's died according to the media, God knows how many times, hundreds of times and you know, it's, here we are, you know, and ironically, the price actually pumped a good amount

in the last couple of weeks since the year. - Like 25%. - Yeah, yeah, we've seen a good little uptick. So yeah, long may it continue. - I was surprised by that, to be honest. I thought people are just gonna start panic selling and you know, when everything's going to shit and not really understand the difference

of what this thing is, but it seems at the moment, at least that potentially people are slowly waking up and maybe sellers are exhausted and you know. - I think it's still time for that. Like I said at the start of the show, I think there's three banks at the tip of the iceberg.

When the shit really hits the fan, I do think we'll see a fairly big sell off because especially if you've got a lot of money in it, it's one of the most liquid assets in the world and you can offload into quote unquote safe cash, almost instantly, especially if you're willing to go through a regulated exchange

if you're somebody with a high net worth. So it's understandable and I do think we'll see it. It's just a case of as and when, depending on which bank's going to go down next and it certainly seems like Credit Suisse might be hot favorite at the moment.

- Hot favorite. Well, it just reminds everyone to hold your own keys, not fuck around, don't leave your money in banks. They're not safe. The only person you can trust is yourself. So Q&A has got loads of guides on it and we talk about it on the show all the time and if anyone wants any help, they can reach out.

So yeah, let's get that done. - 100% and if you're going to do it in cold storage, head to foundation devices.com. - Oh yeah, here they're quite good. - Yeah, they're all right, you know.

But in all seriousness, like if you do have custodial Bitcoin with an exchange, don't wait around. Just get it in any wallet where you control the seed words first, reduce that custodian risk and then look to buy fancy hardware wallets thereafter.

- 100%. - Let's head on to the actual Bitcoin list, shall we? - Yes. - So Blue Wallet is shutting down their custodial wallet functionality as of April 30th. So you've got another month and a half before you do that.

So if you download Blue Wallet today and you add the Lightning feature, by default that is a custodial solution where Blue Wallet through their own servers and their own Lightning node, custody, all of your funds.

So you can send them a seed to whoever you want as long as they've got a Lightning Wallet. Super simple setup, dead easy. The crunch here is that you're not in control of that Bitcoin. It's under the control of Blue Wallet.

So obviously a huge trade off between usability and, you know, 'cause it is a massive headache in terms of running your Lightning node and whatnot. So there are some gray areas in between where you can use like a great wallet like Phoenix where you are more in control of your Bitcoin, but Blue Wallet's been a hot favorite

for Lightning in a custodial fashion. Now for whatever reason, they haven't actually come out and said exactly why. I can probably make some assumptions in a second, but yeah, they're sunsetting the custodial Lightning aspect of their wallet.

So if you do have any funds on Blue Wallet that are in a Lightning Wallet, please get them shipped off to another solution. Again, I would recommend Phoenix if you're not running your own node and that's available on iOS and Android.

So I think, again, I have nothing to back this on, but my guess is that they're doing this so that they are less in the crosshairs of regulators because essentially they're custodians of other people's Bitcoin at the moment.

So I think that's probably one factor, probably stressful as well. Yeah, the other one is like, you know, it makes them a target for attack, doesn't it? You know, anybody that knows what Blue Wallet does knows that somewhere there's a server that's probably got a significant amount of Bitcoin that doesn't belong to them.

So would make them a juicy target for an attack. So I just hope that it's replaced by something like the functionality that you have in Phoenix where you can kind of be the custodian of the stats that are on Lightning, but the app and the background kind of does all of the magic headache shit for you.

- Like rebalancing and all that. - Yeah, rebalancing, opening and closing channels. I mean, don't get me wrong, you'll pay a fairly higher fee for that, but you do have a lot more sovereignty to boot with it.

So it's a good sort of gateway drug to go in from a custodial solution to before you do, you know, go to set up your own Lightning node on something like a Raspberry Blitz. If you are going to move, I'd highly recommend Phoenix.

I think it's great. So hopefully Blue Wallet are going to implement something that, you know, their own sort of take on that in the future where they're sort of not the custodian, but they do still offer the great UX that you get for the rest of the app as well.

So we will see. - Yeah, that'd be good. Not to bash on Lightning, but just to be completely honest with listeners, I barely fucking use it anymore. It ended up annoying me. I've run the nodes.

I've messed around. I've tried doing everything. And after like a year of fucking around, I was like, especially when fees are low, I just use on chain for everything. And if someone desperately wants Lightning, I'll just send that into a fucking custodial thing and then just bang it out straight away.

And then I'm back to one chain in all honesty, 'cause I just find it a little bit too fiddly and irritating at the moment. - Yeah, so I'm a lot like Odell, where my bullishness on Lightning kind of goes up and down, a lot like the Bitcoin price.

I'll go through months where my nodes just don't work. They're unreliable. I can't get a talk connection, payments are failing. And I'll just think, fuck it. I'll just give it all up, shut it all down and think sod it.

I'm just not going to use Lightning. Cosign your message around on chain still king for me, especially when we got relatively low fees. However, when I do go through those trough periods of hating, you know, sovereign Lightning, Phoenix is always there and always very, very reliable.

Like I say, you'll have to chew through a few more fees to do it, but essentially you're paying for service for them to kind of take all of that headache away. And it's fairly straightforward to kind of just download the app and just hit receive and it'll do it all in the background.

So if you are in that sort of position and you've fed up with Lightning or you're just scared of running your own nodes, again, I know I've said it a lot here, but Phoenix is a great option.

- I might have to try it. - Yeah, it's fantastic. - It'd be a nice option because it's stupid. I mean, I've got two or three nodes sat here all with Lightning and I'm just like, I can't be bothered to set it up again because every fucking time I get it working.

And then because I don't use it a lot, I don't use it other than I receive some stats for the show. That comes into the custodial wallet. I'll send it out once every few months where I'm like, okay, here's 50 quid or here's whatever and I'll send it out.

Other than that, I'll use it maybe once every three months or something, someone will be like, oh yeah, can you pay with Lightning? And they particularly want that. I'm like, yeah, all right.

And then I'll go to use Lightning and I'm like, ah, my fucking node is down. Nothing's working. And then I've got to sit for hours messing around and reading through guides and I'm like, this is not for me.

So just on chain, but that sounds like a nice option. And if I have more time, then yeah, I'll get these nodes up and running again. But yeah, people will probably attack me for this, but I'm just going to be honest.

- Yeah, so the other thing I was going to mention about Lightning is, and I'm currently on the bullish tip of my never ending journey with Lightning, is I've completely fucked off tour lately and I've installed tail scale on my node and on my phone as well.

So I use Zeus on my phone with tail scale, which is like just your own little VPN basically that if you're not home, you can flick on the VPN and connect directly back to the node at home, which is, you know, there's almost no latency.

It's basically running over an encrypted tunnel and it's just transformed the Lightning experience. Like obviously when I'm at home, I don't even need tail scale. I just open Zeus and it connects via the local network and it's lightning, pardon the pun, it's lightning fast.

When I'm away from home, flick on tail scale, just like turning on a VPN, open Zeus loads in like two seconds, payments don't fail. It's been transformational in my personal experience with lightning and I've been using it a lot just kind of dicking about with Noster been going down the Noster rabbit hole quite heavily

in the last couple of weeks. And obviously they've got a feature called Zaps, which is just like lightning tipping for each little note or tweet that you send. And it just doesn't fail anymore.

So that's testament to obviously tail scale, removing tour, Zeus has been fantastic. That's come on leaps and bounds. Long may it continue and I know I'm only doing, I'm throwing like 20 sats here and there receiving 20 sats here and there.

So it's not exactly, you know, I'm not paying my mortgage with this stuff for anything. So very, very much still kind of very small amount. So it's not exactly stress testing it, but the main bug bear I had back in the day when I used to initially set out to do this was eat open Zeus, wait for tour to boot up,

hope that tour was able to talk back to your node, you know, then you're talking 30 seconds, then you're scanning invoice and wait for that kind of handshake or communication to go on. That's another 30 seconds.

All I mean, while somebody's like waiting for a payment and if this is in person, it's fucking embarrassing. Where I'd feel absolutely confident now to walk into a coffee shop, turn on tail scale, open Zeus and have that payment done in 15 seconds.

- Okay, well that's a game changer then. - Big, big change. And tail scale sounds really complicated, but depending on which node you run, a lot of them come packaged with it now. So you kind of just turn it on on your node, download the app on your phone, which is essentially just like downloading Mulvad or IVPN or anything like that.

It's just a different type of VPN. Punching your kind of user ID and you're away. It's literally transformational. So don't get me wrong, there is kind of a middleman. So if tail scale decide that they don't like your account, then they could probably shut you off.

They can't kind of hold to your traffic or anything like that, but they could literally just cut you off if they wanted to. Whereas obviously, Tor, you've got some better guarantees there where if you find a dodgy peer, you can pick up another one, but for the time being, working absolutely great and it's all completely free.

- Any good guides on this? - I think Orange Surf has done one actually. His is geared towards Umbrell, but the concept is identical for any other node package, as long as it's got tail scale on there.

And even if it hasn't, you can install it yourself. Like tail scale is like one command to install. So yeah, if you head to orange.surf, I'm almost certain he's got a tail scale tutorial on there.

And I think it covers Zeus as well. So basically the whole setup I've just talked about. - Okay, maybe I'm gonna go back down to rabbit hole again and waste some more time. (both laugh) - Not only like payment reliability, but the whole like connection thing, once it's set up, I've never had to reconfigure it or anything, it just works.

And if you've got like multiple phones, if you're a weirdo like me, you can install tail scale on multiple phones and multiple, you can have Zeus on all of your phones if you wanted to, so that if you're going out with your main phone, you can still access your lightning node, or if you're going out with your burner phone.

- Yeah, so, great, really great option. - I love lightning again. - I look forward to next month when you, - Definitely haven't done it. - And you've written a guide on it. - We've been, me and Mr. Crown are up to our fucking eyeballs and stuff at the moment, so no room for that, but if I do get some time, we'll fuck around with that.

- All right, I look forward to the DMs, let's give it a little bit. (both laugh) All right, next on the less seed sign of version 0.6.0. I think the name of this one is literally just seed sign at OS.

The headline here is that they have now, rather than kind of bootstrap on top of an existing Linux operating system and kind of throwing all that code on top of it, they've kind of built their own custom operating system that's customized and slimmed down, purposefully for just what they need to do on the device.

So, you know, you've got reduced attack factors there, and I would imagine a significantly improved performance as well. So good to see that they're heading down that path and removing dependencies and whatnot.

For some other parts of the updates, you can now actually remove the micro SD card after you start up. So if you are off the super paranoid variety and you're kind of always had a worry where you had the seed signer operating system on the SD card and you booted the thing up, you had to leave the SD card on there

because that's where what it was using for like the storage and whatnot. If you were super paranoid, you'd be like, well, hang on a minute, how do I know that this code isn't gonna write the seed to this SD card?

And then what if somebody nicked my SD card? So very paranoid, very hypothetical, but it's definitely possible. And in fact, somebody has done it just to prove that it's possible. So now with this update, once you've booted the device, you can rip the SD card out.

So before you even load any seeds into it, after it's powered on, take the SD card out and everything runs in memory on the device itself. So again, just another step to kind of remove a theoretical attack factor.

So good to see. They've also added BIP-85 deterministic seed duration. So something that we talked about quite a lot on the podcast, where you can have one master seed and then go ahead and generate any number of child seeds so that you can un-call gym your friends and family and know that full well that they're not gonna back up

that seed because they don't understand the importance of it when they're starting out. And you can kind of help them recover in the event that they lose access to their phone or whatever.

So great option, good to see more while it's supporting that one. - Do you have any sort of insight on how many people are using BIP-85? - Ultimately, we'll never know because any BIP-85 child seed is just a normal seed.

It's just a bin derived from a master one. So if you looked at child seed number three from my master seed, it looks identical to my master seed seed. You can't tell. My gut feeling is that until now, the only place you can access that is call card, my seed tool that I built with super farro while now seed signer, obviously.

I think that's it. So by the very nature of how limited access it is, then I'm gonna say there's not that many people using it. So I think it will become more and more important as we head towards the proverbial mass adoption, if you like.

The onus is on us as existing Bitcoin is to start to leverage this. So I think as more and more tools start to add the features and functionalities and make it easier to do that, I think we will start to see it start to grow.

- With all this banking stuff going on, a couple of the people who I've managed to orange pill have reached out to me and they're like, okay, no, I do actually want to hold my own keys now.

And one of them's got like a large amount more than I would ever imagine holding. And they're like, can you help me set it up? And I'm a bit like, I don't really want the responsibility because if you fucking lose your seed words or you don't hide them properly and someone sees them and gets access to them,

I don't want them to keep it on exchange. But I'm like, if it all goes wrong, it's gonna be on me, even though it's not really, it's gonna be on me that they've lost everything. And so if you had something like that, well, I suppose then they're still storing their seed words, they can still fuck up and then you could still be blamed

actually, in that case, there's no way around that. - Yeah, the way I look at BIP85 is it should be additional. So in your scenario where they should still have their own seed back up and then you are just there in a doomsday where they've lost their coal card and they've lost their seed back up,

you're there as the third option to kind of help them recover. So that's the way I see it. I mean, obviously, if somebody comes into their house caves their head in and takes their seed words, then the fact that it's a BIP85 child seed of yours makes no odds, does it?

Because the attacker's just gonna throw their seed into a wallet and sweep it. - I don't know if I'm explaining myself very well. I don't know if you get the same fear. If you're onboarding somebody and they're in control of their keys and they have their seed words and they're responsible for keeping them safe

and they're a boomer, do you ever get worried like, if they fuck it up, like, I don't know, they stupid, even though you tell them not to, do they take a photo of it or they leave it lying around somewhere and for some reason someone sweeps it because you help them set it up, they're gonna come to you and be like, oh, everything's gone.

And they're gonna sort of, in the back of their head, think, oh, was it them? You know, there's gonna be that mistrust of like, well, they're the only person who set it up with me. Do you ever get that worry?

- Yeah, definitely. I mean, this is only ever to be used in a trusted environment and you should be, you know, if you are an Uncle Jim is somebody, you should explain the trade-offs with BIP85 and say, look, this is being derived from my child's seed and this is how it works, you know.

- I don't mean BIP85, I just mean any scenario. You go and set someone up and you explain to them, fucking keep your seeds safe. And for whatever reason, someone sees them and sweeps their wallet because they haven't been careful enough, they're going to be mistrusting of you.

They're gonna think, well, you set me up, so it's gone and they're gonna think it's you. It's not actually you, but they're gonna think it's you. - Do you ever get worried about that scenario and it's not really a way round it?

- There isn't really a way round it, but if and when I ever do do it, I don't want to see the seed words. You know, if they're confident that they want to do it on their own, I'll just say, right, write these down.

I'm just gonna walk out the room. I've got no interest in seeing them. You know that I've never seen them take them with you. You're on your own then. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But ultimately, it is quite an intimate thing to do is help somebody set up a Bitcoin wallet, isn't it?

So, you know, it's still gonna be some level of trust. Like, I'm not gonna do it with some random or in a coffee shop. So, yeah, difficult one, but I think, you know, you can mitigate a little bit by just explaining these 12 or 24 words are the keys to the kingdom.

Only you should see them, you know, we're best pals and I still don't want to see them. So, you know, write them down, take them away. You're on your own. - Yeah. - It's just an education piece, isn't it?

- Yeah, okay, that was a tangent. - And the last part, the seed signer update is they've got, now got support for pay to tap root signing. So, you can, you see signer to send two tap root addresses, not used for receiving just yet, but most wallets are just doing the sending two first, as it's much easier to implement.

So, good to see that they jumped on the bandwagon there. And yeah, good to see the project going from strength to strength. Next on the list, we've got stack wallet V1.5.44, which is a wallet that we've never talked about before.

It's a multi-coin wallet and no idea how many different coins they support. They do support Bitcoin and they've just added support for Bit.47 Paynims. The interesting part about this, other than the fact that it's another Bit.47 wallet, is that stack wallet is cross-platform.

So, this means that we now have Bit.47 on iOS, the first ever wallet to do. So, we now have all of the bases covered. If you want to interact with Paynims, you can use stack wallet on iOS, you can use Samurai wallet on Android, or you can use spiral wallet on desktop.

Spiral wallet obviously works on Mac Linux and Linux. So, literally, all of the common platforms that are used on both desktop and mobile now have at least one option to interact with Paynims.

Fantastic to see. I actually had a play around with stack wallet and I do quite like their user interface. It looks, I don't know if it is actually a fork of blue wallet, but it looks fairly similar in respect of, you know, they've got like the cards across the top that represent your different wallets

with your transactions listed underneath. Fairly clean UI and, yeah, just huge news that they've implemented Paynims. So, for, you know, quick teal, the R&Paynims, is it a simple way to be able to send and receive Bitcoin to a new address each time without having to directly interact with the person that you want to pay.

So, let's say Max is one of my employees. He could send me his payment code and from that payment code, I would be able to privately derive as many addresses that I wanted to, you know, so to pay his wages each month.

I don't even need to interact with Max. His payment code is enough for me to say, right, his is addressed for January, I'm gonna pay to that. His is addressed for February and so on and so forth.

So, a really great way for repeat payments and also for donations as well, where, you know, if you're a popular project that wants to receive donations and you might have thousands of people wanting to donate to you, there's quite a big overhead to manually generate a new address each time to make all of those Bitcoin receives,

whereas if you just posted a static payment code, anybody else with a Bit47 compatible wallet, the ones I just listed, will be able to pay to you without any direct interactions. So, yeah, just love to see it.

- Yeah, by the way, you know, you asked last month, pay name logins on Linkoin Pool, is it possible? - All 47, yeah? - Yeah, I don't know. (laughing) - No, I asked Maggie and he said he's gonna look into it.

He's not sure, but he's gonna look into it. - Yeah, there is an existing standard, not being implemented widely yet, 'cause it's pretty new, but, if you are listening to this MediEd, there is a standard somewhere, I just, I'm not exactly sure where it is at the moment, but it would be cool to see it,

especially 'cause they've got that existing payment payout functionality, so. - Also, on the mining tip, block are gonna be bringing out an MDK, a mining development kit, and this comes off the back of, do you remember back in, it was like 2021?

They had a tweet come out from Jack Dorsey, basically saying they were gonna start building a mining system based on custom silicon, they said that it was gonna be built in the open, and be all open source.

And so, since then, they have started to build their own semiconductor chips, and now they're talking about bringing out an MDK, so that would be like the BDK or LDK, Bitcoin development kit, and Lightning development kit, all open source, and they are looking for people to get in touch with them, to sort of give suggestions for any devs,

or home miners, or people who want to build in a space. They could be contacted at mining@block.xy said. So, that's pretty exciting to see. - Yeah, definitely, block are quickly becoming kind of a bit of a behemoth in the space, aren't they, with their fingers in lots of pies, so they've got the upcoming MDK that you just mentioned,

we've got LDK, BDK, they've got their hardware while they're coming out. - Got a design thing as well, haven't they, like a. - Yeah, I think they've got their finger in that pie as well, so yeah, they're kind of branching out, and they seem to be doing things with their best intentions as well, especially with like BDK and LDK,

that's completely open source, and kind of laying the building blocks for wallets to come in years to come. So, yeah, they've seemed to be making some quite big strides in the last couple of years.

- Yeah, it's exciting to see. I mean, they say the MDK will consist of a hashboard, control board, open source firmware, a software API, and a web front end. The goal with the MDK is to help developers integrate Bitcoin mining into heating systems, optimize Bitcoin mining hardware, and help intermittent power applications.

And like I said, they're building it in the open and trying to get people involved, so it definitely looks like it's going in the right direction, it's pretty exciting to see. - Love it, the way to see how it unfolds.

Yeah, so next on the list, we have Craig wallets, finally Craig wallet. - Craig wallet. - Craig grows, finally pull this finger out and give us another release. He has released Sparrow Wallet 1.7.3.

Headlines for this one, we have the implementation of Bitcoin Secure Multi-Sig Setup, or BSMS, for key store, export, and wallet, import, export. My understanding of BSMS is it's a, well, it's an import and export wallet format so that you can go from Sparrow to Nunchuk to Keeper to whatever, take all of your shit with you,

all of the wallet metadata and whatnot. And I believe it's kind of more geared towards if you have like collaborative solutions where you're not the sole key holder. Obviously it does work for a traditional multi-sig as well, but it all encompasses with the extra information required if you're kind of like one of four different people

in the multi-sig or whatever, so. So that's good to see. I know Nunchuk uses that, obviously, Sparrow Wallet do now. I'm pretty sure Keeper Wallet have that on the horizon as well, so we'll be looking to see that the hardware wallet is also kind of moved to support this as well.

Another core part of this update was that you are now able with Insparo to configure a custom block explorer URL in the preferences, so when you double click on a transaction within Sparrow Wallet, you can have it open to your local copy of mempool.space, which is super cool.

I think that request came from our boy, Mr. Finch, who's a regular on Twitter and Nostra, so yeah, a really great feature and love to see it. Yeah, there's nothing worse than having the most private setup and then double clicking on a transaction, and you realize you haven't got your VPN turned on

and you ping in mempool.space with your transaction of 10 million cents or whatever. So you can now configure this to, so that it goes directly to your own custom block explorer URL, so that could be on a local network, or I'm not sure whether it works over tour, actually.

I'm guessing probably not, but yeah, most people are gonna be using Sparrow when they're at home anyway, so local URLs will, probably just fine. There's loads of others in this one. The last one I wanna mention is as a warning and request user of confirmation before enabling the use of a bit 39 passphrase.

So I don't know whether you spend much time in the Sparrow Wallet Telegram, Macs, but aside from all of the inscription questions that have completely wrecked the chat in the last couple of moments, the most common headache that new users have when they're coming in and using Sparrow is that they don't fully understand the difference

between a passphrase and a password. Obviously, one is crucial for access to your wallet if you apply it. Well, they're both crucial for access to your wallet, but they kind of interact in different ways.

One's a key to a lock and the other one is kind of the map to your Bitcoin. So he's added an additional, very explicit warning around, you know, before you enable the use of a passphrase to hopefully mitigate some of this.

So if you are a new user that doesn't use passphrase and you know, you're hitting people like us talking about passphrases, please, please, please be very, very careful when you're doing that.

There are literally no incorrect passphrases that doesn't exist. So if your passphrase is Bob123 and when you actually create the wallet, you enter Bob124, you're gonna create a valid wallet with that passphrase, Bob124.

You know, you might send all your funds in thinking that your passphrase is 123 and then come to recovery in a year time and yeah, be completely locked out of your Bitcoin. We'll see it all too regularly.

So big fan of passphrases, they just, you just need to be super, super careful. And just like with any new wallet, when you apply a passphrase, send the tiny, tiny amount in, wipe all that shit and then recover it, enter your seed words, enter your, the passphrase that you've just created, check that you can see your funds again.

That will guarantee you that you have the passphrase recorded correctly and yeah, for the love of God, make sure that you back it up as securely as you do your seed words as well. - His little image thing that he was talking to me about, this should help people know that they're in the right wallet, shouldn't they?

- Yeah, so that was, we talked about that briefly last month where he's introduced a thing called Life Hash, which is essentially a visual representation of your wallet. So like I say, there's no incorrect passphrases.

So each time you add a letter or a number to your passphrase field, it will change this image slightly. So let's say again, you type in Bob123 as your passphrase. In Sparrow, when you do that, you'll see a little square image that'll have lots of different vibrant colors.

You're like, okay, well, it's like a green background. It's got a red circle in the center and there's some dots around the outside. That's kind of like my visual representation of my passphrase, Bob123.

Every time that you reopen Sparrow and to access that wallet, you'll be asked to enter your passphrase. And if you enter Bob124, that image will look completely different. So it's your visual indicator to go, oh shit, something's wrong here.

Let me delete that passphrase, re-type again, Bob123. Oh shit, yeah, I recognize that image. Good to go, let's open the wallet. So yeah, it really great implementation. That was out in previous 1.7.2 and then the additional warning now in 1.7.3.

So once again, yeah, Mr. Raw taking very sensible steps to make a very usable wallet that's also very feature-rich as well. - He said to me when I had him on the show, he feels passphrases should be seen as an advanced feature.

He feels that a lot of people trip up with it. So I guess that's why he's doing that. And I've never really seen it as that because I've managed it. So I'm like, well, it's obviously not that fucking hard.

But I do understand his point. It's like, well, it's just one extra thing to trip someone up with. And maybe when someone's starting out, unless you're gonna be constantly there to hold their hand and double check and make sure they don't fuck things up, maybe it's best that they don't start with one.

- Yeah, definitely. I wouldn't urge people to go for it from the off. Just get used to handling 12 or 24 words first, get used to recovering and then further down the line, then start to look to a passphrase and just be cognizant of the risk involved.

And I could say practice, practice, practice, test net or just send a small amount in, wipe it, recover. Do that a couple of times. Get really comfortable with how all this stuff works before you start sending your life savings in there.

- Yeah, yeah, agreed. Can I pick your brains on something, please, mate? - Fire away. We've talked about this before. Seed splitting. You've told me, I think in the past, don't do it. It's a bad idea.

Andreas Antonopoulos has told me, don't do it. It's a bad idea. It's stupid. I've never really, really understood why. Antonopoulos said, don't do it. More importantly, Q&A has said, don't do it.

Just don't fucking do it. But then the other day, someone was talking in one of the grips, think of a seed signer. Someone said, oh yeah, what I'm gonna do is split the seed and I'd written, I don't think this is a good idea.

I sent you a link and I sent him the Andreas video. I don't really understand why, but his explainer and they were like, no, you're wrong. Here's a link to something else and blah, blah, blah, blah.

You're wrong. And I was like, probably am. I haven't got time to fucking look at all this stuff. So I thought I'd ask you, why is it a bad idea if you're setting somebody up? Is it actually or is this just like something that people say and it's wrong?

- So it depends on the implementation, as always with Bitcoin stuff. So if you're just naively, you've got 24 seed words and you split them in two. So you give me 12 words and you keep 12 words, separate locations, you think, great, super secure.

What you do there is rather than having one single point of failure, which is 24 words, what you've now got is two single points of failure that if you lose your half, we're fucked. And if I lose my half, we're fucked.

So if you just do it like that, then it's a ridiculous idea and nobody should do it. - Yes. - The next way to do it is with a scheme called Schimers Secret Sharing, which is essentially you can look at it like multisig for your seed words, where you can use this scheme to split your seed in such a way that, let's say it splits it

into four different parts and the way the scheme works is that you would require to reconstruct that seed, you'd require three of those four parts to get back to the main seed, which obviously is significantly better than the example I just gave.

The problem is that this isn't widely adopted, I think only Trezor implements Schimers Secret Sharing. So if you are gonna go down that route, then you're kind of somewhat limited in terms of the tools that you have to kind of easily reconstruct that seed in a doomsday scenario where somebody does lose

one of the pieces and you're down to three and you think shit, right, okay, I need to sweep this wallet now and start fresh. So that's generally speaking why it's not that recommended is because just not that many wallets have adopted it.

That's basically it, you do have some other advanced stuff called like multi-party computation where you can, which is, it's not necessarily seed splitting, but it's kind of using a single seed, but splitting the access to any number of people so that you need a threshold of them to be able to sign a transaction.

I don't really know a lot about that scheme, but it's not strictly seed split-ins. - But that's all complicated stuff, mate. What I'm talking about is like your first example of splitting a seed and only having one copy is fucking stupid, totally with you.

The other stuff you're talking about there and Schimers Secret Sharing and whatever the other second thing you just said, just sounds complicated. - It is, yeah. - The other option someone would have is okay, you have your 24 words and you also have passphrase and you could keep those in separate locations, right?

That's the other option where you'd be like, okay, that's an extra step where someone needs not only seed words, but also your passphrase. They could be in separate locations and you could have multiple copies just to be on the safe side.

So you're like, okay, that's a pretty secure thing. But if someone was like, okay, I like the idea of that, but I want to go a step further, literally split my seed word so it's like 12 in one location, 12 in another location and I have multiple copies.

I'm pretty sure people have said, oh, it's less secure because if someone gets hold of the 12, then actually they could then guess the other 12 by doing some computation stuff, blah, blah, blah.

It's like, well, maybe, but they still have to find the 12 so it's no different to them to find in the 24 'cause if they find the 24, they've definitely got it. Whereas if they find the 12, it's a lot fucking, like if I found 12, I'd be like, well, that fucking guess he had the 12.

Jesus, I have no idea how to do that. So most people wouldn't. So is that not safer other than the fact that you now have more locations, but you'd have that with multi-sig or whatever anyway?

Do you get what I'm asking? - Yeah, yeah, I agree. So in the example you gave where you're doing this over multiple locations, so you've got the first 12 words, three copies of that, ones at my house, ones at your house, ones at your parents' house, then yes, you're removing that you've just introduced more single points of failure.

The flip side to that is that you've got shitting more locations that's exposed to more people, that's more at risk of theft. Obviously, if you have split it, like you say, just getting 12 of those words doesn't give you a lot, but it gives you something.

So for me personally, still wouldn't recommend it. If you're gonna go to that trouble where you've got access to multiple storage locations, then just use multi-sig. It's a far more widely adopted standard.

You've got more threshold for... - Maybe it has its issues, doesn't it? Because you're hiding in a smaller crowd. It's, I don't know, it comes with trade-offs, doesn't it? Whereas I feel like this, it's still single-sig.

You're just splitting your risk a bit more. I don't see that it's more dangerous as long as you understand how to keep physical property secure, which I think more people have an understanding of.

- Yeah, possibly, I mean, let's say, I personally would still favor multi-sig in that scenario because you can, most people don't have access to more than two or three safe locations where they can keep stuff.

And I'd feel far more confident leaving a secure hardware wallet at an off-site location that's one of three keys in my multi-sig than I would some bare-seed words. So yes, you've got extra stuff with multi-sig, obviously, backup descriptors and whatnot, but we are edging closer and closer towards a unified standard for that.

So I don't know, seed splitting just feels a pretty archaic way of doing it for me, especially when, as much as I don't urge newcomers to go towards multi-sig, but especially as easy as it is getting now with tools like Sparrow and Spectre and whatnot, to kind of spin this up.

It just feels like a more robust setup that's got a lot more fault tolerance so that you can quickly rotate out and you haven't got loads of just seed words in plain sight here and everywhere.

That is fair, one final, and then we will close this, I promise. This specific case where I'm saying, I've got a bit of a specialist who is much older and I'm worried about them storing 24 words somewhere on a bit of metal and someone seeing them, but they do have access to lots of locations.

They have many, many properties. They have loads of different warehouses all over the country. They're much more comfortable in the physical world. In that one specific scenario, is it still a bad idea to say right, rather than storing 24 words in just one location, split it and keep multiple copies.

Two copies of these 12 and two copies of these 12, you've got four locations, and as long as you don't have a problem and people don't find all of them or two of them, the right two, you're better off.

Is that still, would you still be like an add-under? - I'll tell you what I'd rather do, just popped into my head and I can't believe I didn't mention it earlier. Encrypted backups. Get yourself a hardware while at like a passport.

That has an encrypted backup feature, right? So what you do, passport obviously holds your seed words. You can pop an SD card into the top and save an encrypted file that contains your seed words on that microSD card.

It'll then give you a 20-digit code, which is the password to access it. So you can make 20 copies, 20 encrypted copies of your seed words, each on a different microSD card, litter them around the globe.

The physical SD card is useless without that password. Because to do that password, put it in your password manager, keep it on some paper and you're safe, and you'll get it tattooed on the inside of your leg.

I don't know, keep it wherever you wanna keep it. You can then, with some encryption guarantees, keep those SD cards at all of your 20 different houses if you're that rich. Anybody that sees it, first and foremost, is gonna see an SD card thing.

Oh, it's probably got some pictures on it from a holiday somewhere. Not gonna think of Bitcoin. Pepper them everywhere if you want to. All you gotta do is keep that 20-digit code safe. Let's say 15 of your houses burned to the ground at the same time.

You still got encrypted backups at five different locations, taken to the extremes here, obviously. So just go to the fifth house, grab the SD card, pop it into your passport, you've recovered your Bitcoin.

Brilliant. You haven't got loads of plain seeds in plain sight. You haven't got to worry about which order the seed words go. What was the passphrase on the wallet? It's, yeah, far simpler option for me.

Brilliant, yeah, that is better. Okay, we sorted it. Job done. (laughing) That was a good exercise, actually, and yeah, what we got on the next on the list. Oh, this is a cool one. Literally, hot off the press as of yesterday.

Ronin Dojo, the team behind the Tanto, the beautiful Bitcoin node, privacy focus, Bitcoin node, have now expanded their sovereignty offerings, I guess. And they've started selling Google Pixel phones, running Grafino S or Calx OS, you can kind of choose in the store.

So if you, again, one of the many rabbit holes that people go down when they get into the Bitcoin space is kind of, they realize that Google and Apple are knobheads and they want to kind of, you know, take back a little bit of digital sovereignty with their phone because it's probably the device

that all of us interact with way too much day to day. So if we can, you know, still have a great usable phone that comes with the good security that kind of Google spends millions on each year to make their phone secure, but do that in a way that Google software doesn't have its tentacles in every single thing that you do on your phone,

then this is a fantastic option if you want to do that. So it runs completely open source software by two independent teams called Grafine and Calx. What they do basically is they take Android and they strip out all the Google shit and give you a more privacy preserving option.

So to touch and feel these feel like standard Pixel phones running Android, but in the background, there's a lot of the tracking stuff all stripped out. So if you don't kind of want to buy a Pixel and build this yourself and put the software on it yourself, you can go to the Ronan Dojo shop and they kind of have prebuilt ones

that they'll just ship straight to you. So yeah, really great option. I've been running, well, I've ran both Calx and Grafine OS. I run a Pixel 5 with Calx OS as my daily driver. So yeah, good to see that there's some more sort of plug and play options for people that don't want, you know, don't have the time or the patience

to kind of go through the flashing process to, you know, to buy a Pixel from Argos and then go and put the software on it themselves, which is very easy, I must add, you know, take, you know, more than half an hour, but some people just don't want to go through that.

So if you're one of those people, head to the Ronan Dojo website and get yourself one of these devices. - There's one extra reason I think this is quite nice. I haven't checked, but I presume they accept Bitcoin only for these devices.

And that does mean that as long as you're doing things privately and you're using like post mix or stats that aren't linked to your identity, then ordering one of these is much better than going to a shop like most people would do and buying something with your credit or debit card because it's getting harder and harder to buy with cash

and not have things linked to your identity. So it's quite nice to have that option where you can have something delivered and it's not linked to you other than Ronan Dojo have your details, but you could also send it to somebody else and have that link broken.

- Yeah, definitely. And if I was a betting man, almost certain that Ronan, the team will be purging their customer data. They're clearly, you know, a privacy focused team. That's at the heart of everything that they do.

So I'm sure that they'll be purging those all the details very quickly after they ship. So fantastic option. My only gripe is that they're not shipping to Europe as of right now. I know that's coming soon.

So if you're in the US, get your hands on one of these right now. - Okay, for the people in Europe, just go with cash is probably the best thing or get gift cards with cash and then go into an alcohol or something like that and buy it.

- Yeah, definitely. It's still possible, but as you say, it's getting more and more difficult to get a phone that isn't tied to your physical identity. So fantastic option. The final thing I have on the list, which is probably going to be a bit of a pill to swallow for some people listening to this because by the time that you release it,

I'm sure it's probably going to help out. - You're such a come. (laughing) When you're listening to this, just know that none of this information is useful. - Yeah, yeah. There is a Samurai wallet escode, a Wilpool discount code that can also be used in spiral wallet to get 25% off your Wilpool fees up until March 17th,

which as we record, this is tomorrow. So if you're reading this thing in O shit, then maybe keep your eyes on Twitter a little bit more or in the telegram room as well and keep your eyes peeled for the next one.

But yeah, you just missed 25% off your Wilpool mixing fees. So yeah, sorry. The pool was lovely, I've been dipping in. - Likewise. - Unbanked is the code which you're not going to be able to use.

So. (laughing) - I, yeah, actually, I'm just going to check what the post mix liquidity is doing. I haven't seen an update on that lately. Let me just quickly pull the number up. 'Cause I know we mention it pretty much every month.

Typical, I can't find it. I'm glad we need these dashboard now. Wilpool, Wilpool. On spec capacity, 6702 Bitcoin. Oh, so we are, yeah, we're still in it. I can't remember what the all-time high was, but I don't think we're that far off that.

So I still think we're on for the 10,000 Bitcoin by the end of the year, especially with stray light and whatnot, which we've talked about before. I'm sure there's going to be a few more Wilpool clients come in on board this year.

I know stack wallet are working on it. You know, we were talking about them before with bit 47. So that'll bring Wilpool to iOS as well. So I think 10K Bitcoin post mix liquidity is going to be a fairly safe bet.

- Exciting stuff. Well, yeah, as I said, gutted, you can't use it, but keep your eye open. They seem to come around sort of every couple of months, generally, that's when I tend to see them every few months.

- The Samurai team are great at leveraging current affairs to tie into their S-code. So this S-code is the image that she says, "Well, a financial system melts down. Enjoy 25% off your Wilpool fees with discount code unbanked."

- Very nice. - Honestly, poking a bit of fun at the fact that three of these banks have gone down. So yeah, great to see. And yeah, hopping the pool. - Well, we just wait for the next bank failure.

So you won't be waiting long. - Yeah, see you next week. (laughing) - All right, mate. Have we covered everything there? - Yeah, ticked all my list off. So I'll just wait for the next text off.

Antimus, I guess, to see if he wants to buy any Dogecoin. - NFT dick pics. Yeah, fuck my god. Selling me that shit. All right, mate. Well, yeah, I'll catch you on the next one. And we may or may not have Antimus back.

- Awesome, see you next month, mate. - Cheers, mate.