Bitcoin monthly 0027 software updates and censorship.

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

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

Yeah.

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

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

Welcome back to Bitcoin Monthly. Every month, Antimus, Bitcoin Q&A and I all meet and discuss everything that we think matters in Bitcoin. In this episode, Bitcoin Q&A fills us in on what happened at the Oslo Freedom Forum, and how people are actually using Bitcoin.

We also talk about new node boxes from Ministry of Nodes and others' software updates, and whether or not the way people are measuring illiquid supply is reasonable and correct. I'm thinking about starting taking questions.

Maybe we can do this on fountain if I get that working again. If anyone thinks this is a good idea or it'd be useful, maybe I can work this in, have a little section on there. So let me know.

Outside of that, I hope you enjoy listening and reach out if you have any questions. Before we start, I just want to say a big thank you to my sponsors. Let's start with my newest sponsor, SX6 Metal Bitcoin Seed Phrase Backup Plates.

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All right, on with the show. - Hello, fellas. - Good morning. - How are we doing? - Oh, wonderful, how are you? - Very good. Just having my morning coffee. Nice cold water, keeping cool. - Is that why you were late?

- I wasn't late. It was Antimus who was late and then I added to the lateness. - Stacking lateness here. - Was it taking care of the portfolio again, Antimus? - Yeah, man, pogaducts, pumping.

- Don't take that as financial advice, anyone? Okay. - I could hear some buzzing in the background. What was that? - Not quite sure. - Here? - Yeah, just before Q and A jumped on, it was like...

- Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. - I'm gonna have a guess before he answers and say that it's probably the shittiest. - No, he's 3D printer. (laughing) - No, actually, I'm not.

I'm in someone else's office here. Just jumping in quickly to do this. And I presume it was just that I was unplugged and plugged in my mic again. That was probably it. - I wondered if it was some sort of shitty German trance music or something.

(laughing) You should have sampled that. Gotta go on your board, man. - Yeah, I haven't made any additions, I'm afraid this week. - Ah, boy, I'm looking forward to that. - So what's been going on, Bitcoin land?

I've been basically stepped away from Twitter and everything for the last month. - Yeah, for me, I have been away a little bit as well, actually, I've not been on Twitter or not so much, which has been kind of a welcome break.

I had a week out in Oslo for the Freedom Forum, which is a conference put on by the HRF Human Rights Foundation. Went out there with one of the guys from foundation to, yeah, basically just to see what it's all about, to meet some people and we were fortunate enough to be able to give away a few passports

to a couple of people as well who've, - Nice. - Who've, let's just put it very, very lightly and say that they've had a bit of a tough time in life and they've started to see the benefits of Bitcoin.

Some of the talks that were on as part of the main sort of track of talks on the financial freedom was really, really hard hitting stuff. There's people telling their stories about, who've been through all sorts of untold amounts of oppression, abuse, torture, simply for having a dissenting opinion in the country that they come from

and not going with the status quo. They were brave enough to stand up and they've been put through the ringer to put it lightly. There's many different stories and I guess if you wanna hear some more details on that, probably check out Journey to Soft and See the Foundation podcast 'cause Seth, Jack, and I go into that in greater detail,

but it was a very good, enjoyable week, but some of it was really hard hitting and yeah, I was almost moved to say it was quite a few times here in some of the stuff. Really put it into perspective, you know, we kind of run around lapping in our Bitcoin, Twitter, bubble week after week thinking that we're changing the world,

but when you hear stories like this and you hear that there was a small percentage of those people that are actually using Bitcoin day-to-day to root around censorship or financial oppression, it really does like a fire on DRASTA to think, you know, aside from all the lapping and the data fighting on Twitter, et cetera,

that we are doing this for the right reasons and that we are edging slowly towards, you know, a place where Bitcoin's gonna become more and more usable. But hearing the stories of people using it right now today, as intended, as Pitt's Bid Digital Cash to root around censorship of governments and stuff is, you know, awesome to hear.

So had a thoroughly enjoyable week and did, had no idea that Norway could get up to 30 degrees Celsius, so glad to pack some shorts. - That sounds amazing. One question I had on that was like, I mean, there's so much talk about like using the tools and building all this like sovereignty tech and stuff.

Like, did you get a sense that these tools are actually reaching those people who needed it most? Or was it just like they use Bitcoin kind of in the absolute most rudimentary way? Or are they actually using like the tools that are built in the community for this kind of purpose?

- It's definitely more weighted towards the latter. They'll just use kind of the first thing that they can get ahold of that's usable to give them access to Bitcoin. So most of the people that we spoke to that were using Bitcoin as a tool were, they were very, very surface levels.

Their understanding was bare minimum. They knew enough to kind of get the job done. But in terms of like the stuff that we talk about on this podcast and that we talk about on social media week after week, like we need to do a better job of getting that word out there and educating those people.

And I guess, you know, initiatives like the HRF and the Oslo Freedom Forum are a part of that. But yeah, one of the start realizations I had was that like the little bubble that we kind of run around in is so far detached from the real world.

So some people will probably push back against that and say, yeah, yeah, but we're early. Which there's probably some truth in that as well. But I think we could probably do a better job of kind of reaching out and kind of knocking down the walls of the echo chamber a little bit to kind of make sure that,

you know, there's thousands of hours going in every week to build all these awesome tools that we talk about. And, you know, we just need to get them out there. - Do you think some of it comes down to just like, access a financially and B to like being able to do things like run a node or, you know, actually have hardware

dedicated maybe in some of these situations that's just not possible for them? Or do you mean kind of like, are you talking more, you know, still having a wallet on their phone but rather than using a custodial shitty wallet, they're using Samurai or Envoy or something like that?

Is that more what you mean? - Yeah, for most people like a mobile wallet on their phone where they control the keys is a huge, it's a massive step. So I think, you know, that needs to be the kind of user experience around that and the ease of use around that sort of ecosystem is definitely getting better.

You know, we're all playing our part in that. But concepts like nodes, hardware wallets, just completely alien and like a stretch too far, be that from an understanding standpoint or from a financial standpoint.

You know, there's different facets that you can look at it at, but I think mobile wallets need to be the first thing and you know, the tools are getting much better in that respect. So I think that needs to be the first kind of push for these types of people mainly because of a financial thing.

I think everything else is just way too much too soon. And it's easy to forget that when you kind of run around in the circles that we do because you forget what you already know and then you start having conversations with people who just about understand what Bitcoin is and then you mentioned the term hardware wallet

and they just glaze over and you've lost interest already. - Yeah, I can understand, especially for a lot of people in those kinds of situations, it's supposed to be a tool that they can just use and not put too much thought into.

I mean, the amount of hours that we've put into all of this to understand it, it's more or less like occupied all of our time over the last couple of years. And if you're like running some kind of, yeah, or just if you're in a situation where you're actually like your day like occupation is something completely different

on a completely different relevancy scale, you won't have the time to read into stuff and learn about stuff and watch tutorials for hours on end to get all of this set up. So I think that's something that we're pushing to anyway in the ecosystem, but here you really see the results

of getting things easier to use and pushing user experience and intuitiveness, so I hope to see that grow. - Did you find it was more that people were using it for payments or was it to escape like hyper-inflation?

Was it to store value to cross borders or like a complete mix? My concern and we will obviously cover it all the time is if people are using it for payments and in countries where they don't have a lot of money, then presumably they're not gonna be wanting to use on-chain and then if they're not using on-chain,

they're probably gonna be using lightning and if they're using lightning, then they're gonna be using something custodial. Do you see that as an issue or is it more store of value kind of thing?

- We had smatterings of all of that. There was people using it for donations. They kind of spoke to one lady who's head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, I think that's the name of it, based out what originally based out of Russia, kind of pushing back against the corruption in Russia and they use it to kind of run their operation

so people who donate to that foundation, they hold it all in Bitcoin, they have their expenses in Bitcoin because within Russia, they can't have a bank account and anybody that is even in the time when they did have a bank account, anybody that they were to pay, let's say they tried to print some flyers off and they paid a printing shop.

The printing shop would then also get, they'd be censored and ask lots of questions of them as well because they were dealing with this known quote unquote, terrorist organization that was just pushing back against it.

So there was that, there was people in Africa that were using it to pay people for small tasks, same with Afghanistan. There was a lady that gave a talk who I think she was from Ghana and her business before they discovered Bitcoin was having to cross a border into another African country.

Apologies, my African geography is not great but they were crossing the border into a neighboring country because in their own country, they were being financially oppressed. They were drawing out bags of cash from ATMs and then carrying it back across the border.

And you can imagine what would happen if somebody discovers that. Anyway, it turns out in the end that the country that they were from was also kind of pally with the country that they were going to draw the cash out from the ATMs.

So the bank account in the secondary country got closed down as well and they were left with no choice but to look into a bit, operating on a Bitcoin standard. Loads of stuff like that. So it was a bit of everything really.

There was definitely a lot of people that, you know, the people that were familiar with Bitcoin, you know, when you spoke to them and said, you know, what do you use? It was, there was a lot of moon wallet, there was a lot of wallet Satoshi, things like that.

So it was a good mixture. But yeah, we've definitely still got a lot of work to do. All right. Yeah, I mean, we've got a list today to go through with a couple of, I mean, not too many actual like updates of software, software, just a few different topics of releases and so on to go through should be interesting.

In the first one, we've got on the list by request. Let's see how we fair through this topic. There was a tweet by the rational route. - This is my request. So I'll jump on this from the show. - Hooray.

Please. It's only a request because I saw, I know we don't talk about the financial side on this pod really, but I kind of think it's important because I saw a tweet the other day from a listener saying, with like a sub tweet of rational route with his charts and all that, basically saying, there's less and less supply that can be traded.

It's becoming more and more liquid. And basically saying, well, that's bullish because when there's people running to buy Bitcoin, there's not going to be enough on exchanges. And I was like, I wonder how you're sort of, I wonder how you're getting this number.

Is this just what's available on exchanges? Is this just the liquid supply on the exchanges that's going down or what is it? And then so I looked through the tweets and basically they're saying, or he's saying, total supply minus illiquid supply and illiquid supply is defined as entities that spend less than 25% of their holdings.

I've read it quite a few times and I am a dyslexic fuck. So it might be missing something, but to me, the way I read that is like, he's probably classing entities as addresses. And he's saying illiquid supply is defined as entities that spend less than 25% of their holdings.

So he's saying that if an address spends less or pays out less than 25% of their holdings, then that's classed as illiquid. And to me, that just sounds unbelievably weak. That doesn't sound bullish in any way, shape or form.

And I just feel like that's a very bad metric, but I was wondering if you guys had any sort of insight on that or what an entity might be because I feel like this is going to be like S2F all over again, otherwise, where people are going to get all excited and sort of banding this term around of, oh, liquidity is going down,

there's less and less supply on the market. And it's like, don't know about that. - Yeah, I think the thing with these charts and they're this whole macro thing where people kind of have a certain narrative, the data can be kind of adjusted to fit whatever narrative you're trying to spin in my personal opinion,

especially when you're looking at a blockchain or a ledger like Bitcoins, where there are no known entities. There are clusters of addresses or single addresses that are known entities, like exchanges, things like that.

And if you look at it from a chain analysis standpoint, then yeah, maybe you can cluster specific entities based on their spending habits. I've no idea who this rational route is, whether he is part of chain analysis or not, but.

He's just an analyst, he's like an S2 FE guy. Like, I've listened to him on a pop before, he sounds like a nice guy and all that. And a lot of what he says makes sense, but just this particular thing, I thought this doesn't make sense and I keep hearing people band it around.

And I almost did the other day, I was like, oh, there's less and less liquid supply. And then I was like, hmm, how do I actually know that? I actually only know that 'cause I heard sub-carrot on fucking Twitter say it.

Let's look into this a little bit. I looked into it a little bit and I'm like, this makes no fucking sense. - So I think the only thing you can say for sure is when was the last time a coin moved?

And if you want to say that coins that haven't moved over a set period of time are quote unquote a liquid, then yes, you can give a certain degree of certainty to that. But knowing how many of those coins are controlled by how many people, it could be one person, it could be 10 million people, you can kind of only make assumptions.

And that's where these kind of large scale macro assumptions for me just break down. And all of them should be looked at as just assumptions and best guesses because there's, you know, for the reasons I've just stated there are no kind of definitive people or entities on the blockchain.

You can only have a good guess based on, you know, some basic, somewhat weak heuristics that can be easily subverted if you use the right tool. So I never really carry much weight on this and if, you know, most people listen to this are kind of just buying Bitcoin, holding it for the long term,

they might be spending a little bit to, you know, to access various different tools or services that they might want to use Bitcoin for over the fiat system, then all of this shit is just pying this guy number's bollocks and doesn't really mean anything.

- No, it doesn't. It's just interesting to see when something is believed by a large amount of people on Twitter, it's interesting to just to dig into it. And yeah, it just doesn't seem like a strong metric.

The only way I would see that it's like, you could be confident on something like that is if someone either has locked up coins, there's some sort of time lock on something because otherwise it's like, well, it's illiquid until it's liquid, you know, it's like, it's not gonna be sold until it is gonna be sold

and there's zero barrier, you can still move it. It doesn't mean anything. So, I don't know, it's like you say, it's irrelevant. It's just something that I saw and I thought, mmm. - The only thing I will say that kind of would add some weight to the tweet that you're talking about is the number of Bitcoin on exchanges

has been in decline since roughly around the same time period, I think. So, you know, that would add some weight and that is for me a far more tangible number because all of the popular exchanges have the all reuse addresses 'cause it makes their life easier.

So they're all kind of, they are known entities on the blockchain. It's trivial for anybody to kind of see roughly how much Bitcoin Binance has or Coinbase has, et cetera. Yes, there'd be some slippage in the numbers as they rotate to new addresses, but you can get a really good feel

for roughly how many Bitcoin they're holding at any one time if they don't publish that. And that would seem to corroborate somewhat with what this chart is saying to be like, yeah, the number of Bitcoin on the exchanges, which you would class as liquid because it's relatively being bought and sold is in decline.

And so is the available supply for trade as it's termed in this chart as well. So, you know, I'm sure there's probably, you know, at least a sliver of truth in this, but like, would I make my purchase or sale of Bitcoin based upon this?

Hell no. Yeah, to be fair, Antimus, this is really more your world for trading side. What can you think? Yeah, I was just holding back here. No, I mean, more or less cosign, everything that's been said.

I mean, one thing to keep in mind with all of these metrics is that like the values are kind of, we have pretty much arbitrary of like Y25% and then what 25% over what time period and all that kind of stuff.

Self spends, address, reuse, all these kinds of stuff, all of these different things come in. So, I mean, obviously for the traders out there, I mean, they'll have their scheme and they'll probably have a bunch of different metrics to pull on stuff.

So this may be one more to add in there, I don't know, but I don't really, I mean, I haven't looked into this a lot. So I don't really know what the takeaway is from this either. So, what like the rationale would be to follow with action on this.

So, yeah, I mean, there are probably some geeks out there who love to correct us on that, but I don't see huge value in this. Good point. Right, we can move on. Yeah, I mean, there was a big Twitter uproar a couple of weeks ago, I think it was, that there were a couple of Bitcoin

and also like social related apps that were banned from the Apple app store, and that was due to facilitating payments within the app. So there was, well, Noster, the client was a Damas and then also Zeus wallet and also Blickst.

They were hit by this and were not, or removed from the app store. Yeah, I mean, there was quite a big shit storm that came out of that. And I definitely saw that Zeus was one that managed to alleviate it.

I'm not quite sure about the other two. Maybe you can fill in some more details on this. Yeah, Blickst and Zeus were kind of temporary, like 24 hour things and they're banned there now. I think that was more of a misunderstanding of how they operate more than anything else.

The big high profile one is Damas or Damas, however you wanna say it, which is the kind of Noster Twitter clone for iOS. It's like the main client that anybody that's got an iPhone will use to interact with the Noster protocol.

They had a note from Apple basically saying that we can see that your, I forget the terminology now, it's something like you're facilitating payments to content creators within the app, which notoriously Apple doesn't like anybody doing payments in the iOS ecosystem without going through them so that they can take their cup.

So I believe they even hopped on a call with Wilner, the lead dev for Damas. He explained like how it works and that it's not really selling content. It's like tipping your friends analogous to a like.

They seem to be pacified by that, but a couple of days later, they said, no, actually, you can't have tipping on a specific post because that is digital content that's being sold. So you couldn't like zap a specific post.

So Wil said, okay, well, we'll just remove that. And then if you want to zap somebody or tip them via lightning essentially, then you have to go to their profile and then press it. And that was his way of working around that.

But in the last 24, 48 hours, they've said that that's still not good enough. And it looks like if he doesn't back down on the change that he made to moving it to the profile, then they're gonna be removed from the app store completely.

And that will be the end of Damas, Damas. So there's been a lot of uproar around it. You know, I'm sympathetic to Wil being in that situation or anybody that's got an iOS app that is getting censored.

But for me, like this has the right in for this has always been on the war. You're building freedom tech inside a walled garden where you have to ask permission to do anything. So especially when you're starting fraternizing with Bitcoin and alternatives to the big tech conglomerates like Twitter,

it was inevitable eventually that they're gonna come for you and the fact that a click of a button, they can just take your app off the app store and that removes it from, you know, that removes access from millions and millions of people all around the world is a gaping hole in your kind of freedom tech strategy for me.

And, you know, one of the reasons why I don't run an iPhone. So hardly surprising. The biggest surprise to me was that many people were shocked by this decision by Apple. So maybe, I don't know, maybe they didn't understand how the app store works.

Maybe they didn't understand that Apple is a completely walled garden, who knows. But yeah, so it's still kind of an unfolding story at the moment. Don't know whether Will's gonna kind of make a switch to Android or whether he's gonna back down on the whole zap thing completely.

And then you just don't have zaps within his application. If I was a betting man, I'd imagine he'll probably take that at least in the short term, just to keep the app within the app store.

So unsurprising for me. But yeah, I expect to see more of this as we enter the then the fight you face. - Obviously, country, all that sort of stuff, frustrating. Just have a thought while you're saying that.

Is there not a way that within the app, there can be like a ledger catch where there's no value exchange. And then there's like a sort of settlement or that data gets passed to another application on like a weekly basis or like at some sort of set time where it's a transfer of data rather than sat and it gets settled.

Do you see what I'm trying to say? So it's like you have a certain amount of likes and once you've liked a bit like a payment channel, I suppose, but like where it's keeping a ledger and there's nothing actually done on that app and then that payment is done elsewhere once it reaches a certain limit of transactions or amounts.

So the Apple's not actually involved in that. Could you get away with it like that? I mean, in terms of practicality, yeah, you could definitely do something like that. It just sounds like a kind of off the books custodial wallet that does weekly withdrawals or something like that, yeah.

Whether Apple would buy it, who knows? I mean, the weird kind of dichotomy we've got here is that like wallet of Satoshi has been in the app store for years and it's not been targeted and to my knowledge has never been taken down and they're a custodian, basically it's a custodial wallet

and they've settled in payments between anybody else with a lightning wallet and I'm sure there's probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of users of wallet is Satoshi because it's the easy option that most people get to people on board it.

So they've never been targeted to my knowledge. So I think this is kind of more of a targeted approach, potentially, who knows? So I don't know whether it's gonna be more widespread. I'm sure there's probably some crafty ways that the Deimis team can do to get around it but now that they are in the Apple's crosshairs,

so to speak, then maybe there'll be more scrutiny on everything that they do. I mean, ultimately we have no idea. Yeah, and it kind of also does sound like it's not just a thing that you have to play by the specific rules that they've set, like they just like kind of shift the goalposts if you like here in this instance

when they said like, you know, it's selling content if it's on the tweet, but not if it's in the profile and then you make that change and then they're like, I know actually that's also not an option.

We won't allow that. So doing some kind of work around like that, I don't really see them like falling for that and not seeing what you're trying to do 'cause I think it's more of a conceptual kind of issue they have than like a specific implementation of the way you're actually facilitating the transactions.

- Yeah, frustrating. Like you said, the obvious thing to say is, well, don't use Apple, but amen, half the world does. So it's easy to say, but at the same time like half the world uses it and, you know, it would be nice to be able to find workarounds for this kind of stuff because you want to onboard people.

And I think like once people get onboarded in some way to freedom tech, even if they're using Apple products, they're more likely to start sliding across to becoming more free because maybe they're not aware that it exists before, if that makes sense.

So in some ways you want to say, I'll just throw your hands up and go fuck it. Just don't even bother doing anything with Apple, but at the same time, you carve half the world. - Yeah, there's been, since all this started kicking off, there's been a lot more talk about progressive web apps, which is essentially kind of like a webpage

that's saved to your home screen of your phone that kind of gets rid of all the URL bar, et cetera. So it looks like a native app on your phone. There seems to be a shift in focus on these.

And well, I think they do have some benefits to certain types of applications. They do have their limitations as well, which I can have a little bit of my pay grade really, but I know for a fact that you can't access like the secure element on your phone.

So they're not really great for things like Bitcoin wallets, progressive web apps would not be that secure, but they do offer a simple way to kind of get that app experience without having to go through the app store.

However, I will caveat that I'd be saying, I'm sure Apple probably has a way to prevent progressive web apps being saved to the home screen of their ecosystem as well. So I don't think that they are the kind of be all and end all and the quick fix that a lot of people are kind of touting them to be.

But I think at least in the short term, maybe it's something that might be worth exploring. You know, there has been quite a lot of nostro apps that are coming out with PWAs for, you know, because they're also an iOS and they're worried that they're gonna get the same treatment.

So I think within certain specific applications, they might be the right, you know, there might be a viable option, but it's certainly not the holy grail, especially when we're talking about private key material and Bitcoin wallets, et cetera.

- Well, we're on that topic. That's probably a good segue into one of the new announcements from Grafino S. So if you're using like mobile devices and want to up your security and privacy, Grafino S is one of the options and they now support also the Pixel tablet.

So you can have this operating system running on your tablet if you have one of those next to your Android mobile devices. - Well, so I mean, this is one of the two largest like security, privacy focused, like mobile operating systems next to CalX.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know like if you, any of you to use both, can you do like a bit of a comparison? Yeah, any comparisons there or anything you prefer? - Maybe just slightly prefer CalX is just like interface.

That's a bit nicer, but to be fair, my Grafino phone, I've only ever used just for Samurai wallet pretty much. Like I don't really use it for anything else, whereas the CalX one I've used a bit more.

So it might just be that I've used it more. But the other thing was Q&A, you'll know this. I'm pretty sure Grafino is a more simple, simple one to install on the phone now. Like you could, or you can do it through some sort of QR to another phone or something clever like that, isn't it?

- Yeah, so Grafine allows you to do it phone to phone. So if you, let's say I had Grafine on my phone, you'd be able to install Grafine onto your pixel from my phone, I've never tried that, but I know they also have a very popular web installer as well, which kind of take all of the super technical stuff

and you're just clicking some buttons from within a web browser to get it all installed. Again, I haven't tried that. The, I've run both operating systems, but I only ran Grafine probably about two years ago, if not more than that, where there was much larger disparity between CalX and Grafine, where Grafine was much more locked down

and kind of had more compatibility issues that came with that inherent, you know, improved security. CalX had, at the time, much better compatibility. They had something called Micro-G, which enabled you to access a private version of Google services, which made the user experience a little bit better.

However, in the last sort of six to 12 months, a lot of people in the privacy circles that I kind of mix in, all run Grafine have said that it's much better than it ever used to be, and most people are touting it to be better and more stable than CalX these days.

So it sounds from where I'm sat, that the gap has narrowed significantly, and the time that I upgrade one of my pixel devices, I will be giving Grafine a try because everybody that I speak to says it's, you know, world apart from what it used to be.

On the topic of the tablet, I've been trying really, really, really hard to justify buying one of these and chucking Grafine OS on it, but there's a couple of things that are holding me back.

The first one being, you know, it's a first gen device. This is the first pixel tablet that Google's ever done. First gen devices are generally kind of a little bit rough around the edges.

Also, because it's the first tablet that they've ever done, 99% of the non-Google apps that you install will probably gonna look like shit on the screen because they won't be optimized for the, you know, the seven of what, I think it's an eight inch screen on it.

So it's just gonna look like a blown up phone app that's in the middle of the screen, loads of black around it, which kind of defeats the object if I'm in a tablet in the first place. I don't doubt for one minute that like Google Calendar, Gmail has opened optimized and probably looked beautiful,

but if you're gonna buy this and put Grafine OS on it, then you're not gonna be able to leverage all that stuff. Anyway, so I've decided to hold fire for now and just kind of wait and see what the app ecosystem looks like over the course of the next six months.

If it gets wide adoption and, you know, a lot of the apps that I use more commonly on a day-to-day basis are gonna be more optimized for this than I might take the plunge in and give it a go, but for the time being, I'm gonna refrain and save some stats.

- That's a way to go. Yeah, while we're on hardware, there's also been a couple of releases and announcements for node boxes. I mean, like now over the last year or so, there's been quite a big push from various different node box implementations to bring out like a pre-built version.

So like there's obviously the Tanzo from Bronen Dojo and then also my node also offers one and there's now one under also obviously a star nine. That's been a pretty powerful one from them.

And now there's one from Umbral II. So this was a pretty big release. It's not based on Raspberry Pi or Rock Pro. This is like a pretty powerful beefy machine. It'll cost you $699, but Umbral now supports so many different apps in this App Store that you can now use this

as not just your like Bitcoin Lightning node, but also as your home server and all this kind of stuff we've touched on this a few times in this part over the past year, the pros and cons of that.

But Umbral has now there, their vision of this solution out there too. Yeah, I think we're talking about start nine offerings last time we recorded, weren't we? So Umbral have now come out with their own version, which looks pretty good actually.

It's quite compact, runs on some, well much beefier hardware than a Raspberry Pi. I think these specs are very, very similar to the offering from start nine. And I think the cost is also pretty similar as well.

So you can get your hands on one of these for six, nine, nine dollars. I dare say you'll, again, as we touched on last time that you can, if you wanted a DIY this, you could do it much cheaper than that.

But again, you're paying for convenience and the types of people that are gonna buy this are the ones that don't want to be kind of messing around with SSDs and all that sort of stuff to kind of, they want to plug and play option.

And I'm sure that this will be far more stable than any of the Raspberry Pi solutions. So good to see. And I really appreciate the push for kind of self-hosting and making self-hosting much easier so that you can opt out of all the close source ecosystems that kind of pen you in and try and siphon off

and make middleman some money from you. - Hasn't Catan released a node box? - Certainly has, yeah. So he's just quite ironic really because he was probably single-handedly the main person responsible for the massive uptick in people using Raspberry Pi's as nodes.

His infamous My Node guide from back in 2020 maybe, 2019? Something like that. - Yeah, I'm one of those from that class. - That's fine, yeah, so that was widely touted as the Bitcoin node guide and consequently hundreds if not thousands of people went out and bought Raspberry Pi's.

And clearly as the Bitcoin node app ecosystem has evolved, people want to do more with their nodes, so they want a coin join, they want to use lightning, et cetera. Raspberry Pi's quickly fell over and became very unreliable.

And now the biggest proponent of people ditching their Raspberry Pi's is Mr. Catan. And he's now got his own option, the Ministry of Nodes Bitcoin node box, which is essentially a refurbished Dell OptiPlex Micro PC, or I think they do a Lenovo version as well, also a mini PC.

It comes with a hard drive. Again, it's just a proper computer, a small form factor computer that isn't gonna fall over when you open some lightning channels. So he's basically buying these boxes refurbished off the second-hand market, pre-installing with some software, and then boxing them up and selling them onto people

that kind of want a much more stable option to run. And these are significantly cheaper than the Start9 and the Bumbrel offerings. They start at $450 Aussie dollars. So that's probably like three quid is it, something like that.

(laughs) I don't know if it's that much. (laughs) - I'm just gonna convert that now. So the Americans that listen to this can get a good costy price. - It's a pint and a bag of pork scratchings.

(laughs) - Yeah, but yeah, good to see more options. I dare say that this is gonna be from a user interface perspective is you're not gonna have the flashy point-and-click UI that you're gonna get with something like Umbrel or Start9, but you are saving significant amounts of money.

- And supporting Catan. - Indeed, yeah, which is a bit of a legend in the space and somebody that I personally learned a hell of a lot from. - Hmm, yeah, it's cool to have all these different options.

It is a bit of a divide between some of them I feel 'cause some are kind of trying to do it all. And then you've got like Ronan Dojo that's much more of like a dedicated specific one or two jobs.

I don't know how you guys feel about it, but I think maybe I feel a bit uncomfortable having everything on one device. - Absolutely, yeah. If you've got a particular focus on privacy or lightning, for me it makes absolute sense to have a dedicated node for the job.

I run a Tanto for my mixing. I've got a Raspberry Blitz for messing around with lightning and then I've got a proper computer mini PC that I do some of my self-hosting stuff on there and it all runs separately and independently.

So, you know, if my self-hosts computer falls over which touch what it never has, then it doesn't take down my lightning channels with it. - Yeah, yeah, and obviously I mean, there's a whole bunch of dependencies that just increases the attack surface there.

Obviously they're trying to prevent that with like different like Docker structures and all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, you're on the safe side if you really split that up.

You'll obviously run into maybe some budget issues if you want to separate everything out and that kind of at least separating the Bitcoin stuff from your like next cloud and Bitwarden or something.

That will probably be a good idea. - Yeah, as much as I'm not a huge fan of like the kitchen sink approach, like the Unreal Solution where you can install hundreds of apps, they will definitely act as a good gateway drug for people to start.

Let's say they want a Bitcoin node and they get that up and running and then they get think, oh, what's Bitwarden? It would be a perfect gateway drug tip for people to start using their own password manager or next cloud that they never would have even thought of or even come across before.

The very nature that it's there and it's shoved under their nose even if their only interest at the start was to grab a Bitcoin node. I think it's going to be a net positive for just generally people using Freedom Tech and opting out of their reliance of Google, Apple, et cetera.

- Yeah, that's definitely true. And I suppose if they're getting more involved in that kind of stuff and then they decide I'd like to separate things out, then they budget for another one.

- Exactly. - Yeah, it's a progression. Yeah, it's nice to see all of these things coming onto the market. And it also is nice to have like such smooth interfaces, you know, it's for people who aren't quite so techy, just being able to have something that feels, you know, like, I always appreciate that with Umbral.

Like it really is like a simple operating system. It looks like you're on a Mac or something like that. And if that's what you're used to, it just feels comfortable and not so scary. - Yeah, there's a reason that they shot straight to the top of the most used node list.

And I'm sure user interface was probably one of the main reasons for that. You see that all over the place, don't you? Easy to use apps are the ones that get adopted the most regardless of what, you know, more hardcore Bitcoin is like your suite.

Think of them, you know, wallet is a tosy prime example. You know, it's a custodial wallet that I would never push anybody to use, but so many people use it because it's, there's no, there's almost no barrier to entry to get started.

So, you know, I understand why people do it. And we see that all over the place with node wallet, et cetera, it's just the way of the world. People want simplicity and the people that aren't fully entrenched into the whole Bitcoin space and that wanna pursue like the free and open source ones or the fully custodial, non-custodial stuff,

they don't have the time or the effort to do that. Then I can see why people take the easier options and make those trade offs. On that note, there's also four-start 9OS, there's simplex server, so simplex is a chat messenger.

And this can now let your node can act as a server. For this, I have not used it myself. I don't know if you have any experiences with this. - Yeah, I've been using simplex for three or four months now.

And it's basically just an end-to-end encrypted chat messenger. You can do calls, voice messages, video calls, group chats, or just traditional DMs as well. Everything's end-to-end encrypted.

And it seems really good, really stable, even when you get into the group chat sort of stuff. Very simple onboarding, no personal information. It's just you have a random identity, and then you can choose to connect with whoever you want.

The reason I threw this on the list is, it's the first simplex server app that I've seen on any of the no projects that we've just been discussing. So being able to host your own version of this with just a couple of clicks on your start 9, or I forget what they call it now, but on your start 9 node, it is a great thing

so that you can kind of host your own and remove that even more trust from the kind of blinded default simplex server as well. So even though they can't see who's talking to who, et cetera, it's absolutely an improvement to be able to host your own.

And also the cool thing here that caught my eye is that previously when people like Start 9 or Umbrella have implemented like a server thing like this that's kind of designed to do chat, like matrix or anything like that, they were always defaulting over tour, which meant that you couldn't talk to anybody else

that was using, let's say, the default matrix solution, which was over clearnet, there was, there was no interoperability there whatsoever. With simplex, even if you just download the app and start chatting, you're using tour in the background.

So what that means is that if you choose this option and you run your own server on your node, it defaults at all anyway, but so does every other simplex user. So there's kind of no additional hurdles that you need to get over that to be able to connect with somebody else, like your friend, you're just on a one board

that doesn't want to run their own server. They can just connect to the default one. You can start chatting to them straight away through your own server and not have to do any weird and wonderful networking things to try and get it to work.

So much easier for onboarding and is a great thing. So I would imagine we'll probably see this being added to more and more of the kitchen to no plant. - One quick question on the start OS, I had a thought of running it on a laptop that I don't particularly use that much.

And then I was looking through, I saw, you know, what applications they had. And one I noticed was they don't have sparrow on there because they don't have it in the app store. Is it something that you could still put on that machine?

Or is it like it's locked down to only specifically their apps? - No, you could run that on the same machine. Yeah, definitely. - You could. - Yep, absolutely. - Okay. - I think actually, yeah.

'Cause they run a complete operating system, don't they? So I don't know whether you'd be able to access, like, let's say you did it on a bunch or whether you'd be able to access the main Ubuntu stuff.

Having never ran it, I'm not sure, but I don't see why not. I would guess at the very minimum, you'd be able to get sparrow server, the CLI version running, but providing that the start OS doesn't take over the whole operating system of your laptop and you can still access like all the other apps and absolutely be able to install Sparrow.

- That's what I was thinking is that it would be the whole operating system for that laptop. 'Cause I was running pop before, but I cannot update my pop and it's really pissing me off. And then I was like, I have to wipe the whole thing and start again.

And I thought, well, if I'm literally running it, 'cause I'm literally just running it for like sparrow and a couple of other Bitcoin related things, that's all it's used for. I was like, ah, maybe it makes sense just to use this and it's a bit slicker and whatever.

But then I thought, well, it's only got spectra as an option, not sparrow. And so I was like, ah, maybe that's the, it'd be interesting to know whether that's, whether it is the whole operating system or not.

- I will find out and come back to you on that one. - Gracias. - One wallet that we've been now speaking about quite a lot over the past couple of months and they've been putting in a ton of progress as a Bitcoin keeper.

And they've had two updates over the past month. One was the 1.0.4 and one was the 1.0.5. And the former was introduced well pool and this is the first implementation on iOS. So now for all of you, iOS users out there, you now have access to well pool, which is huge obviously.

Something we've been hoping for for quite a while and now with keeper, that is possible. And then they've also now with the next update, brought out a subscription plan for like inheritance which also gives a quite bit of different optionality for the users if you wanna pay a bit

and gives them a way to monetize their project as well which is always something that's important for these projects to sustain. So yeah, it's all wonderful to see many thoughts on this. - No, again, echo your thoughts on the fact that they've got two forms of monetization now in the subscription plans for the multi-sick inheritance

and also they recently added world pool as well. So I'm not sure whether we covered that. But yeah, so they've got now two revenue streams, the very first application to get world pool running on iOS.

Given what we've just been talking about over the course of the last 20 minutes throughout App Store's censorship, who knows how long that's gonna last, but true. So far so good and good to see that they're pushing the fold here and leveraging some great open source libraries.

We've probably spoken about the stray light team who built a rust world pool client. I think we've probably covered that quite a while ago. So the keeper is as leveraged that world pool client because it's completely open source and have got the first world pool iOS implementation over the line.

I've given it a go. It's a little bit bare bones at the moment. It's the they're very open about it that the fact that this is in beta and you should tread carefully. I'm sure the UX is gonna continue to improve 'cause they've got a good team there and got the head screwed on around how to build an app.

So looking forward to seeing how that unfolds. The one thing I will say aside from it being a beta is the code's not open sourced just yet either. So you're operating inside a black box right now.

So if that was gonna be enough to put you off then kind of just hold fire. They are very open and said that it's not open source yet but they will definitely be doing that soon. And they've also shared a bit of their roadmap to say that they're gonna be adding tour support 'cause that's not currently available

with the world pool client in the app. And you can also gonna be able to mix multiple UTXOs, give you full UTXO labeling and then the option to mix out to one of the vaults that we, the answer was mentioned earlier but as part of that subscription plan as well.

So you can get a mix directly to cold storage as you would in something like Sparrow. So got grand plans. I look forward to seeing them implement it all and huts off for them being the first ones on iOS.

- The one point on the list which was really great to see has really called to make this kind of more accessible and easier is a beginner friendly guide to modifying open source projects.

And obviously I think for a lot of people who haven't done a ton of work in this space but can or have some time to spare and want to contribute back, it can be kind of daunting of like how to get involved in an open source project.

And there is now a guide that goes through different steps of how you can contribute. And for everyone out there or for anyone out there who may be contemplating this, there are so many different things that you can do, not just coding itself that you can always support with.

And there are always people there who are happy to help out. So this may be something that we can also link in the show notes for people to have a read through. - Definitely, yeah. Another big shout out to BitLavy who's been a massive help in the last month or so with bitcunner.guide.

He's the one behind this and yeah, he's really made a huge impact to the site so far. So, yeah, definitely check this guide out, it's a good read. Any housekeeping on your side of things, once before we sign off?

- Yeah, it was a busy month which was pretty cool. We had a standard Prague together with the Seedhammer Boys which was cool. We've been starting a collaboration there between Vulcan and Seedhammer and the Seedhammer for those who haven't heard.

It's like an automated version of the seed mint. So it's basically like a stamping jig but you can actually stamp like your seed QR as well as your seed words as well as the wallet descriptor.

And that's the big differentiator here on Disteal Plates. So this is quite a hefty machine that you can buy directly from their site if you're in the US or anywhere else globally and now also via Vulcan in the EU.

So we'll be doing the EU distribution as from now. So this is now live also in our shop at Vulcan21.com. Yeah, so this is pretty exciting to get this all set up that's been in the works for a while to get this going and they're doing pretty amazing work on the machine and got quite a few plans coming up.

It's one of the coolest things that I've seen in Bitcoin land for a long time. I know maybe it's just me being a bit of a nerd but fucking hell I want one of those things. Yeah, it's pretty, I mean, like seeing one live in action is pretty amazing.

I mean, they're quite loud. Obviously, there's a stamp in strain to steal but quite fast and easy to use. They've got like a controller which is built on the hardware of the... It's on the...

Exactly, it's the identical hardware from the seed signer so you can like repurpose that and use it for your transactions but also for controlling this device and it's completely air gapped as well.

So that's cool. So you don't have to have any connection to the internet at all. You just plug in your seed sign and do everything directly from that. You'll obviously need different like software so you'll have a different micro SD card but that's the only thing you'll need to switch between the two.

Any potential attack vectors that you see? Somehow, I know you're saying it's air gapped and all this kind of stuff but like the way I'd assume something like this would be used or the way I like pictured it was maybe you'd have like meetups or places might have one.

You might have a booth where people could use it or something like that but then I was thinking, oh well, what if someone had something within the machine where they could then take a copy of those seed words or whatever?

Is there anything like that? 'Cause if not, then I'd think if you're doing it especially if you're doing like multi-sick or something like that, it's such a nice way of doing it but you're probably not gonna wanna buy the whole machine just to do it once.

- Exactly, I mean there are multiple points in that. I mean obviously from the like security standpoint side they've like removed any like controller units within the machine. Obviously like if you're using someone else's machine you'll have to kind of check that they haven't modified it but the way that it's shipped

is completely without a controller. So the only controller is the seed signer itself. So if you trust the seed signer that you've got then you're good to go. They've also put a ton of work into like modifying the actual controller of the stamping head to be like more or less randomised in the sequence and speed of stamping

so that you can't extract the information that's being stamped from the audio. So if you've like whatever in a room next door or something and just record the audio of the stamping you can't like extract the information that's been stamped 'cause that was one of the bigger issues that if it always goes through the same sequence

and has the same speed, then you'll be, if you know what information's been stamped and you record that you can then like re-engineer that and then transfer that to just simple audio tracks.

So if they've kind of negated that which is definitely cool. And yeah, I'm into to the multi-sig part. Obviously this machine, I mean up till the end of this week, up to the 1st of July we're offering the machine for 6.99 on our shop and then as from July, it'll be 7.99.

And so obviously if you're only doing one of these, if you've only got one wallet to back up on single-seat you'll be a lot better off just getting a steel QR or something, a lot lower costs and you'll do it manually.

But if you wanna do multi-sig or if you have, if you like the Uncle Jim in your surroundings and or if for a meetup or something like that this is definitely a cool solution. And even for like business users for companies who may be creating a lot of seeds and wanting to back these up in steel as well.

This could be a pretty interesting solution. - Thoughts, Q&A? - Yeah, very exciting. And I had no idea that at the level of thought and attention it's been given. So it's great to get that insight.

I think the main kind of barrier to this and I know the guys have already done some work on this is that the buy to entry would be the price to this isn't gonna be something that I think everybody's gonna buy at least at the current price point.

And I know the guys are actively working on a solution to that. So, but yeah, QR codes are a great UX improvement especially when we turn in like important for seed time and things like that.

Just scanning a QR code is super simple. So having something that kind of automates that process because the stamping sometimes can be a little bit of a headache if you've never done it before.

Yeah, I'm all for it. That was also always the perfect segue actually. Quick housekeeping for me. And passport 220 and envoy 12 hour are almost at the end of the QA testing cycle. So it should be out within the next couple of weeks.

Headline for passport is the ability to import or populate your passport via a CQR. So very excited about that one. We're gonna be supporting CQR, a compact CQR and the standard CQR as well.

So if you are a C tiny user or just have a CQR from a different wallet, then you can now import that into passport with a simple QR code scan. Over on the envoy side, the main headlines for 120 will be some UI polishes and what was either one.

Oh, where you can now natively re-sweep as tech or vouchers directly into any of your accounts. So you can do that to the envoy hot wallet or directly into one of your passport accounts as well if you are an as tech or user.

So simple QR code scan of your attacker receipt and then the Bitcoin is sent automatically into whichever account you define. And that's sweet to see. I mean, the amount of upgrades you've been pumping out over the last year, that's pretty amazing.

I mean, the hats off to all you guys there in the team. Yeah, lots more to come. 1304 IOS on the brain today. 1304 for the envoy is going to be a big one. There's lots of big features that we've been working on for a long time in there.

So that should be a good one and should be, well, we're already well on the way with it in terms of design. So I'd imagine by the next time we speak, I have a lot more information to be able to share on that one.

So yeah, lots going on. We're working very hard and yeah, excited about the releases that are coming up soon. Perfect. Well, that brings us, I think, exactly to our hard stop. Artemis has got things to do.

We won't share what it is. I think you can guess. But yeah, it was good to catch up with you guys and hear all the updates. And yeah, catch up next month. Cheers, guys. Hell yeah, see you.