Bitcoin monthly News with BQA and Antomous 0009

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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.

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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, guys. Not in person this time. But very nice to speak to you again. How are we both? Yeah, I'm good, man. No, no CD hotel room this time around. You'll even know what they're doing there.

They're doing well, doing well. What about you, Antimus, lurking in a CD hotel room? Yeah, that would be nice. That would be nice. Now, fortunately, that would be doing well. Well, yeah, nice to have you both back, and looking forward to going through this list.

It looks like a big list we've got this month. We do the same structure, if that's all right, with you, Antimus, and you can go through, and I can ask you for questions, and you both can school me.

Wonderful. Yeah, then we'll jump right in. Who's squeaky toy was that? That was, yeah, apologies, that was my office turn. I thought it was a dog toy. It sounds like my dog toy. No, no, I just decided that I wanted to stand up, so I put my chair up the way.

All right. OK, yeah, so we'll jump right in. First is Biscv1.7.4. That's definitely something to watch out for. They're switching from V2 to V3 tour addresses, and they've set the date for the 15th of October.

So at that point, they won't be supporting V2 addresses anymore. So definitely be sure to update by the 15th of October. So presumably, this will render all of the old firmware completely useless, essentially, when they do that update.

Is that right? I presume, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they also introduced new payment methods with Swift, PaySera, and Paxum. Not quite sure about the last two, but Swift is definitely a well-known payment method.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I had a question on Biscv, just because someone wrote out and asked me a question the other day. You know, they have these Bisc tokens, or whatever, they've got B SQ things.

I've never used them before, and someone was saying, where do I get some of these? Like, they tried in a couple of groups, and no one had got back to them. And I was like, oh, I thought you could just buy them on there.

I've never done it. Does either of you know what's the easiest way for people to get these tokens? Yeah, you can buy it on Biscv. So there are people-- Oh, OK. Trades. And then you pay in Bitcoin, and then you get Bisc tokens.

You can, obviously, put up offers yourself. It's basically, as I understand it, it's like colored Bitcoin. So it kind of does still run on the same block time.

But the one big advantage is that you can use it for your trade fees. And the fees are then a lot lower. If you are doing a lot of trades, you might have to pay a bit of a premium to get the tokens.

But once you have them, and you're doing a lot of trades, it is a lot of-- Brings the fees down. They're also used as incentives for bounties for improvements to the protocol and improvements to the code base and stuff as well.

So if you-- I think this is it for documentation as well. So if you were to create a good guide, you can sort of go to the Bisc DAO and say, look, this is what I've done. And if they recognize that as being valuable, then they can sometimes hand out somebody's DAO to it.

These B SQ tokens that you can ultimately return back into Bitcoin if you wanted to as well. That's cool. I think also the support team and the mediated so on, they get paid in that token.

So they obviously also want to sell. So there are always quite a few offers up. I think what it was, this guy was new to Bisc and then hadn't done a trade yet. But he wanted to do his first trade using the token.

I think that's the reason that he hadn't worked that out. So he was trying to buy them elsewhere. So maybe there are other places. But yeah, I've never used them. So I wasn't really sure.

- Yeah, we've got a big box O2 firm where the 9.7.0, just minor updates there. The next big one is Bitcoin Core 22.0. They changed the naming there, which takes a good use. We've gone from 0.22 to 22.

- Exactly. - What's the thinking there then? Is that normal? Why have they done that? - Yeah, I think that the reason it was 0.21, the previous version was that was because everybody was working on the provider that Bitcoin's kind of still in beta.

But in reality, it's not, is it? The network's been running 99.999% of the time for the last 12 years, then it's, we're here, it's working. So let's not beat your hand the bush and let's call it a proper number.

Why do they went from that to, instead of just going to version one, they've gone straight into one or two. No idea, who knows? - Or 20. Do you know, I had a theory on this when I heard it the day, just like a fleeting, stupid thought, which was maybe they thought that they started at 22

because 21 is our number and 22 is then going forward from that is everything worthwhile. And so I thought, well, maybe that's what's gone through their head 'cause there's no other logical reason is there?

- Not the, yeah, not that I can think of anyway. - Yeah, weird, but anyway, it works, that's all that matters. - Yeah, so they got quite a few notable changes in there. Maybe going to a few in a bit more detail.

The first one, like the networking level, they've got I2P, which is the invisible internet protocol, basically a tour substitute or alternative. I don't know if one of you've tried that out, how like what the infrastructure is like, is that used?

- Not yet, but I, fun fact, I actually downloaded Core for the first time this week for another project that I'm working on. So, and I'm on version 22, so I might have a play around with I2P just to see how many other sort of peers are out there on the network.

My guess is probably not a lot, but. - Is it different to what they have in Raspberry Blitz when you're trying to link to your BTC pay server, but have like one hop so they can't see your IP?

Isn't that called IP2 Tour or something very similar? - It is called IP2 Tour, but it's a completely different thing than I2P. I2P, like Antima said, is like a completely separate network, it's a bit network, whereas IP2 Tour that you're referring to is essentially sending your Tour traffic that's on your node at home

via a virtual private server that's ran by somebody at Raspberry Blitz to then turn that signal kind of into a clearnet address, so that if I wanted to go to your BTC pay store, that you're hosting at your node at home, I don't have to visit some stupid Tour address, I can go to the clearnet address.

- Right, right, right. - It's not like a bit of a workaround. - Okay. - Yeah, then they've also got the same as with Bisk as well, they're also dropping V2 addresses for V3 Tour addresses, and I think that is active as soon as you update to 22.0, so there's no date set for that.

They've also got quite a few updates to the RPC, there's a lot of technical stuff in there, I don't know if there's anything specific that you wanna jump in on there. - The big one here is the GUI change, so that you can now use in HWI hardware wallet interface, which is the sort of translator tool, I guess, that allows hardware wallets

to talk to Bitcoin Core. You can now use any hardware wallets that are compatible with HWI, so call card bitbox, I wanna say Trezor as well, you can use those directly with Bitcoin Core through the GUI now, until in previous versions, you had to, it was all command line stuff, now if you're using a compatible wallet,

you can just download Core and HWI to separate install, and then you can use your call card or your Trezor plugged, it has to be plugged in, but you can use it with Bitcoin Core, so for the hardcore amongst out there that are listening that don't like to install software, such as Spectre or Sparrow,

that is potentially another man in the middle, I guess, then you can now use your hardware wallet directly with Core. - Is it only possible if it's plugged in via USB? - Yeah, for HWI, yes, but you can still use PSBT on call card or passport as well, that works through the GUI as well.

- Okay. - So the big one here is the HWI bit, where you're plugged in and using an external signing device. - Yeah, I got it, okay. - Yeah, moving on, we've got Blockstream Green V3.7.2, they've set up a complete new UI, and also SPV for single-seq.

Single-seq's definitely a big update there, 'cause I've had the situation as well, having funds locked up for a year. (laughs) - Really? - Which I was, yeah. I mean, it wasn't dramatic, 'cause I mean, I wasn't planning on selling it anyway, but is this because of the HWI bit, two multi-six setup?

- Exactly, and if you had it set up with a two-factor authentication, and I lost my phone, and I didn't have the codes backed up, and that was the only two FA that I had, so I had to wait a year for the lock time to expire.

- Oh, well, at least they did a lock time, because otherwise you would have been fucked there, wouldn't you? Wow, I'd have been panicking. - Yeah, at the beginning I was pretty brutal. Now it was like in the first months, digging in, but yeah, that was fine.

At the end of the day, I mean, it worked perfectly. As it ended, you just have to wait a year, and then you get it sent out to an email address that you provide, and then you can sweep it.

- Cool. - Yeah, but now with single-seq, you definitely have the option to use it with just one key. They've also brought out Blockstream Green Desktop, the 1.0.0, which replaces Green Address app.

I don't know, I hadn't used that before, but that's basically a desktop version of Blockstream Green. Blue Wallet V6.2.8, which is also a big one. Q&A, you wanna jump in on that? - Yeah, so they've added the ability to import wallets while Blue Wallet is offline.

You can also now add custom derivation paths. So let's say you're using a wallet that uses custom derivation paths, like select Samurai Wallet, there's different accounts within that wallet.

And let's say you lose access to your dojo, which your backed, which your Samurai wallet is backed to, and you need to quickly access the funds in your Samurai wallet with your dojo's offline, then you can't.

You could import the wallet now into Blue Wallet, set the derivation path to it to absolutely public and they're on walletsrecovery.org. So if you were into a pinch, you could just import the seed and the passphrase into Blue Wallet, set the derivation path to say your post-mix account, and then create a spend from there,

if you were in a pinch. - That's cool. And they've also added, well, they'd already added the ability to add a passphrase, but I think they've kind of walked it back a little bit and moved it into the advanced bit.

So it was not to confuse people, new people coming in that might inadvertently add a passphrase when they're importing a wallet. - Right. - When they didn't really kind of intend to. So it's still there, they just hidden it away a little bit more.

- It's incredibly simple to use. I've found, when I set up my passport the other day and linked it to it, I was impressed just how ridiculously easy that was. - Yeah, the whole QR signing between a device like Passport on Blue Wallet, especially if it's on your phone, it shortens that whole signing process down

to literally a couple of seconds, isn't it? Compared to like the SD card shuffle, if you like, where you've got a fumble around for, especially if you're using your phone, you've got a fumble around for the adapter and stuff, and signing with the QR code back and forth is a bit of a game changer once you've done it,

especially on your phone as well. And I know that's not in everybody kind of threat model to have a watch only for their cold storage on their phone and you absolutely don't need to do that, but very, very slick.

Yeah, once you've tried it, I was massively impressed. - I only tried it just to try it so that I was like, oh, I've given it a go. But then I actually thought, well, this is quite nice because sometimes I do wanna keep a little bit more in my phone wallet than I'd probably want

without having a way to sort of secure it a little bit better. And I was like, it's actually quite a nice sort of middle ground. You wouldn't wanna keep all your funds on there, obviously, but yeah, it's quite a nice feature.

And I think it is one that I probably will use. So yeah, I was impressed with that. And definitely if I was setting people up, you know, when I'm onboarding people and they're just sort of dipping their toes in and playing around, but I want them to be secure, it's pretty slick, it's pretty usable.

- Yeah, definitely. There's a big gap between, you know, download this up to your phone and scan this QR code versus, you know, let's say, you know, download Spectre connected to your node and it just removes a lot of steps.

And obviously, you know, Spectre's got a lot more functionality and stuff, so it's, you know, apples and oranges. But in terms of, like you say, onboarding, it's pretty big. - Breeze 0.12 point LN address.

Zal, that's also a big one. Lightning addresses, there are quite a few wallets now integrating that, most of them unfortunately, just on the send side, but there are also a few now with also from the receive side.

- Do you want to cover off what lightning address is for those who have not experienced it? - Yeah, so lightning address is basically, it uses LN URL, which is basically a method to be able to pay someone without requesting an invoice directly from them beforehand or receiving an invoice beforehand.

So with lightning address, you set up like an email address. You have a username at domain and that is then linked to a server which sends out or sends back the LN URL to your wallet. So you can just save this lightning address

like an email address and pay anyone at any time as long as their server is running. - Yeah, so the server is, for me, is the weak link here, isn't it? Is that most people are gonna rely on somebody else's server?

I think you can self-host via some of the node implementations. So it's possible to do it yourself in a software manner. But it's, again, with the whole server thing, it's only accessible when your server is online or the server that you're connected to is online, so.

But it does seem to be gaining a lot of attraction. I will say that. - Yeah, I think it does have a lot of potential just so you don't need that exchange directly of both parties having to be active.

That does take out a lot of friction that you don't have to communicate directly beforehand. And it obviously makes it a lot easier to save that information and to have a better overview of who you're sending to and so on, just saving the addresses.

- Yeah, it's kind of like the next step from key send where you could send without an invoice. Well, this lightning address is that, but it also allows you to presumably sort of store a list of lightning contacts.

So you could send to maxoutbitbybit.com and add that to your contact list in Breeze. And then, you know, if I repeatedly wanted to pepper max with SATs, then it's gonna be easier than fumbling around for his lightning node pub key working out which one's his and then sending to that.

It's just that extra wrapper of UX around it that makes it a lot more approachable. - Feel free to do that. Yeah, having things like in a contact list would make a massive difference. I just think like for things, little things like that would make me personally use it more.

Just like the slicker it gets, the more I wanna use it. I still don't really use lightning unless it's like for tiny, tiny amounts. I still just prefer doing things on chain. But once these things are like, yeah, you have a little address book and you just click on someone's name and it's done.

As long as it's not glitchy, then that's really nice. Then how different is that to something like Revolut or something like that, you know, in terms of interface? Not really, is it? - Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, it's, yeah. Go ahead, Antsma, sorry. - Yeah, at the end of it, that's the workflow that you mean like also with PayPal and stuff. You just punch in an email address and send it off.

I mean, obviously as Q&A reference to at the beginning, it's all hinges on the how stable and secure that server is. - Sure, man. - But I think that is, that should be something that can be implemented in like no packages or something or you might have to set up like a VPS or something yourself.

- Yeah. - I'm not quite sure what the options are there, but that's something that will be built out in the coming months, I guess. - Cool. - Then we've got BTC Pay Server for 1.2.4. They also got bug fixes and especially recommend for people you're using shared hosting.

Caravan V0.3.11. They've got a fix for cold card. And then cold card V4.1.3. That's also a big update there. Yeah, Q&A, you wanna jump in there? - Yeah, the main one is they've added support for import descriptors so that you can use cold card,

air gapped with Bitcoin Core, which you could do anyway, but they're now supporting the descriptor base wallet exports, which is the direction that Bitcoin Core's heading to in terms of descriptor base wallets as kind of a unifying standard over and above the kind of legacy type.

The functionality is largely the same. I'm just reading the notes now, it's not desktop, yeah. So I'm not sure what in terms of end user experience the improvement here is, it's just they're supporting a different descriptor based export from cold card that you can use within Bitcoin Core.

But like I say, you could use PSBT in the previous version anyway with the old sort of export type. So probably gonna get peppered in the comments for this one and not understanding it but yeah, they're using descriptor based exports now anyway.

And they've also removed the derivation paths with M0.00, I'm not sure what M0.00 is. I mean it says that it's like an old derivation path that isn't being used by any wallets anymore. So you can still set it up manually but by default it's not supported in the public TXT.

Got it. Yeah, so I think it's just to save space there, an efficiency. Yeah, and then a whole bunch of bug fixes getting the UX a bit more smooth. Then we have Electron Rust server, the 0.9.0.

They've done quite a few enhancements to get the performance up. Yeah, so this one has been longer waited than I know Craig at Spire has been what keeping his eye on this one. So Electron Rust server is the kind of Electron server that's incorporated into 99% of the no packages that are out there today.

So that's kind of the index database if you like that allows for faster transaction referencing. So if you're importing a wallet that's already got transactional history, you know, the wallet software that you're using is likely going to use Electron Rust server to sort of look up the list of historical transactions for the addresses

that are on that wallet. Which it was fairly good that to be fair, Electron, it was much, much faster than Bitcoin core for doing the same task. However, with this release, we're talking exponential improvement in speed for sort of wallet lockups and also exponential improvement in database use.

So whereas I think the old Electron Rust server used to take like 70 gigs, maybe something like that on your hard drive, then the reports are they take 60% less now, which is absolutely huge.

So far more technical than me than as to how they've done it. I've spoken to Cray, Get Spyro and Katan from Ministry of Nodes who've already implemented this and they're sort of mind blown at the performance enhancement.

And obviously those of you that are running my node umbrella, running dojo, et cetera, you're gonna have to wait for those teams to update their end so that you can benefit from this. I'm sure they'll all be keen to, given the sort of massive performance enhancements, they'll all be keen to get that in as soon as possible.

And I think at time of writing that, my node is the only one, at the time of writing, at the time of recording, my node's the only one that's updated, but I'm happy to be corrected about that.

- I think, I mean, that's also the only one I've heard of. And also what it does is obviously with freeing up that much storage space, you're prolonging the lifetime of like a one terabyte.

- Absolutely. - Storage capacity. 'Cause I mean, we're now, we're coming up to, I mean, towards like the 500 gigs. I mean, that'll be like in the next year or something. - I think with Electrum server, we surpassed that last year, which most nodes implementation to run, which kind of ruled out a 500 gig hard drive for everybody,

well, for anybody running it on a Raspberry Pi, so. - Definitely, yeah. And at the beginning, when you're doing the initial block download, you basically need it doubled, don't you? I mean, you need, if you're doing like a, on my node, you've got that option to like rebroadcast as well for others.

- Oh, the quick sync feature, yeah. - And there you've got something like, they're like the double the amount. I mean, that definitely makes 60% of whatever there's 70 gigs, I mean, that's quite substantial.

I stand corrected as well. Umbrell really had a release this morning that's got the latest Electrum server in as well. - Fully noted, V0.2.27 has UX improvements and bug fixes. Immorton, V0.2.5, I've not used Immorton.

Can someone fill me in and what that is and what that is? - I'm not, I'm not either. I was hoping you weren't going to ask this. (all laughing) - All I know is it's essentially a lightning implementation geared towards mobile.

So it makes some trade offs to make sort of running your own lightning node on a phone, far more approachable, how they achieve that pass. But it's fairly new, I'm not actually sure if any wallets have implemented this protocol.

But I want to keep an eye on because it seems to be getting mentioned a lot more, especially in the sort of mobile space. - Maybe if anyone listening knows anything about it, they can reach out and I can see if I can speak to them.

Sounds quite interesting. - I'll do a multi-bench for you and read the header of the GitHub. Immorton is a minimal privacy focused, opinionated LN protocol implementation aimed to specifically power light LN nodes, which are mostly found to be on mobile phones or desktop computers and it only runs private channels.

So you ain't going to be doing any routing on this, but it's geared towards the end user that wants to spend and potentially receive some donations or whatever. - Cool, but that's then completely standalone.

So you just have that on your wallet or that integrated into your wallet on your phone and that's standalone. You don't have to connect to a node back somewhere. I understand you're right.

- Yeah, I think so, I think it is sort of its own. But then if you're only having private channels, like you said, there's no routing. So it's kind of, yeah, it has its use cases though. - Absolutely.

- Yeah, it's still interoperable with LND and C Lightning and everything like that. It's just like a lightweight one that doesn't do any routing and probably just sits on the edge of the network connecting, I would presume it'd be best practice to connect to a larger node.

If you're going to use it on a personal level, just for spending and maybe the odd receive as well. - Cool. - Then we have leverage a live desktop for 2.33.1 with UX improvements and bug fixes.

Mempool.space, 32.2.2, got quite cool. New enhancements for their graphical representation of the Mempool, which is quite cool. Moon Android V46.10 is out and they unfortunately don't release any-- - Top, top, top, release notes.

- What's the thinking there? Why is this that they don't release any? Is that just like they never do or just this month or this release? - No, they never do. I don't know if they have somewhere else where they post it.

I couldn't find anything. - No, you would have to go and look through all of the merge requests on GitHub to glean what's gone on there. Like Antima said, I've never been able to find where they did the release notes.

So maybe it's just the Twitter thing and they just announced that the big stuff, I guess. - Right, okay. - If it's unexciting, they might not deem it necessary to do any release notes. - It's not, yeah.

- They're on version 46, so they seem to work at a pretty quick pace. - Just saying, sorry, just to jump in as well, going back to Immorton, the only wallet that's out there in the wild at the moment that uses it is called Simple Bitcoin Wallet, which I believe is available on, yeah, it's just Android.

So if you're interested in trying it, you can go to lightning-wallet.com and give it a whirl. I have actually got that on my phone, just it's just reminded me maybe I'll have a play around with it, but that's the one that's actually put into practice, so sorry to jump in.

- Sure, cool. My node V0.2.42 is out with software updates, yeah, including the Electron Rust server, which is definitely worth implementing as we went over that. Nix Bitcoin V0.0.52 with software updates, Bitcoin, D, and Electron Rust server.

And then we have Passport V1.0.7. They released the same version in beta last month, and that is now a full release this month. As I could see, there's no changes to that, is that right? - Yeah, the big news is the Spectre support, so Spectre desktop now natively supports Passport wallet.

So if you were to download the actual desktop software, the Spectre desktop software from the website, you'll see Passport as an option in there. If you're using Spectre server, so on running dojo, my node or the node implementations, you'll need to wait for those guys to update their end to be able to benefit from this.

I know my node and Umbrell and Raspberry Blitz have already done their end. So if you're only dojo guys, it's gonna be the next release. I don't think anybody else packages Spectre server, do they?

So yeah, so that's a pretty big one because obviously Spectre's a very popular wallet, and there's also a testnet support in there, which I think we mentioned last month as well, so handy for people who wanna, you know, dick about and not worry about losing any stats.

- What was this passphrase swapping thing? Does that literally mean you can set the wallet up, have a passphrase and then decide to change the passphrase, but still have the same? - Yeah, previously you had to, if you applied a passphrase and you wanted to switch to another passphrase, you had to turn the device off and then start again.

Now that you just go into the passphrase menu and change to the next passphrase, you don't need to power cycle the device, so it just speeds the whole thing up. - That's interesting. I thought that if you were to gonna change your passphrase, you would have to just basically start from fresh

because like when I've set mine up on the cold card, I'd set up a new wallet. And then if I'm adding a passphrase, then it's obviously different. It changes my backup, my 24 words as soon as I've done that.

It's like completely separate. So I assumed if I ever wanted to change it again, I'd have to start completely from fresh. Is that only in passport? - No, it doesn't change. If you add a passphrase, it doesn't change your 24 words.

They're still the same. It just adds what the phrase, you know, obviously a passphrase can be word or words or numbers or combination of any of the above. They get added to your 24 words or 12 words.

It just essentially creates, it adds more entropy and creates a completely different master private key. So it's essentially a new wallet, but it doesn't change the 24 words. It just adds additional entropy generally.

- Yeah, you're right. - A new sort of really long string of numbers, which is your private key essentially, which is why you see new addresses when you apply a passphrase. So it is a separate wallet, it just uses some of the same entropy or adds some different stuff at the end, if that makes sense.

- Yeah, yeah, no, it does. I was getting myself confused there 'cause I was thinking when I'd set the thing up that you said the addresses are different. And if you then start it up and you don't put your passphrase in, it will show obviously zero balance, whereas 'cause it's a separate wallet.

So it's interesting to know you can change it after the fact. - Yeah, so it just saves you having to power the cycle of device. So handy, if let's say you're using a passport and you've got sort of passphrase one, don't use that obviously, but you've got that to manage your KYC Bitcoin and then you might have passphrase, no KYC.

- Two. - Yeah, you can do switch back and switch between the two and two easily manage those separate pots, literally in a matter of seconds. - Okay, so just to be clear so that I don't misunderstand this, it's not that you actually changing the passphrase for that one wallet basically.

- Correct, you're switching between the two. - Exactly, okay. - Ah, so I was confused again, yeah, that makes sense, fine. Okay, yeah, so you can just jump between wallets is the thing. - Exactly, yeah, yeah.

- So you can't in fact change your passphrase once it's been set up because it would change the private key. - Yes, yeah, so if you set a passphrase and then sent funds into that wallet, you can't change that wallet is, you know, you'd have to-- - Right, right, right, right, right.

- Enter the passphrase again and empty the wallet. - Right, yeah, fine, perfect. Back to where I was then, that was my original understanding. (laughing) Cool. - Okay, we've got Phoenix V1.4.17.

They've also implemented lightning addresses, which is also big there, but also just on the send side. So not on the receive side. - Does beg the question, with everybody implementing it on the send side, where can you actually receive use in lightning address?

Does anybody know? - Yeah, I took a look beforehand and under lightning address.com, you can see which wallets have implemented on the website.

But all the ones on the receive side, I had never heard of. So I'm not quite sure if these are wallets or just like service providers who have servers set up, but I had not heard of them before.

So, and then you can basically set up a lightning address with them using their domain. - Right, got it, yeah, I'm just looking at the website now. So there's coin OS, which is custodial, there's lightning tip bot, which is custodial, LNTX bot, which is custodial, and Zebedee, which is the gaming platform, I believe.

I'm gonna presume it's custodial, but I don't know, I've never played with it. - It is, I'm almost certain there's. - So, I mean, it's obvious that the custodial guys were gonna do that first, because it's much easier for them to implement, I guess.

So, what I'm gleaming from this is that unless you're running your own bridge server, then you have to use a custodial solution to receive. Again, happy to be corrected on that one for anybody listening.

- Yeah, I guess that's probably just a question of time now, how long that will take. That should probably be set up in the next month, I guess. I mean, that's just a wild guess, but if the whole system is supposed to work, I think there must be some kind of easy self-hosted solutions to come out.

- Yeah, it looks like LN bit is working on it, and I know that's implemented in my node, and on Raspi Blitz as well, so that'll probably be the first one that's sort of self-hosted, if you like.

- Yeah. Then we have Ride the Lightning V0.11.2 with the Hotfix, they had problems with the LND integration for the fix that. Ronin Dojo V1.11.1 with bug fixes, Rasp Lightning V0.0.101, API updates and bug fixes.

- 0.0.101 is a horrible release version, doesn't it? (laughing) Like, when does it get to 0.1? (laughing) Also, just want to jump back while we're talking about Ronin Dojo. Did anybody see the tweet last night with the teaser of the plug-and-play node?

- I did, yeah, I was quite aroused. (laughing) - Yeah, I remember hearing Matt Adele, he was talking about coming home from some conference with the like, milled node bonds, and he didn't mention Ronin, I think, but that makes sense probably now.

- Yeah, it looks so, so nice. Do we have any idea of a price point and also what it's going to be running? I assume it's not just a Raspberry Pi in there, I'm guessing they have something a bit more powerful.

- Yeah, it's a Rock Pro 64. By the point, I don't think it's been finalized yet, so I don't want to share that. And I think they're looking for a release before Christmas, so it's not too far away.

- Oh, it's a perfect Christmas gift, isn't it? - 100%, yeah, definitely. - Yeah. - Apparently it's a really sort of proper weighty bit of kit. I was speaking to Matt and he said it nearly fell out of his hands when Zalco put it dropped into his hands 'cause he was shot by heavy, heavy it was,

which makes sense if it's milled from a single block. - Yeah, yeah. - Which might be the first sort of node package that you'd be sort of proud to have on show, I think. - Yeah, it looks unbelievable.

And these sort of touches, like having something weighty just instantly makes you appreciate it more, like just that feel, I can imagine, if it's from one block, it's gonna be amazing. - Should help with cooling as well massively.

I don't think there's any plans to have fans in there because essentially the whole case is like a metal heat sink if you like. - Yeah, yeah. - It should be nice and quiet as well. - Very nice.

Anyway, your apologies to hijack the conversation. - No, looking forward to that. - Yeah, me too. - Yeah, then we've got Samurai Dojo V1.11.0, we've got post-mix decoy change addresses. I'm not quite sure.

Is that, 'cause when you're sending out to a different address type, that's pretty clear that you're, that is the spend. Is that the idea here that you just automatically use a different like pain address type?

- Yeah, so it ties in with the latest Samurai Wall update as well, the two go hand-in-hand. Basically, let's say from post-mix, you've got all of your UTXOs in post-mix, they're all on batch 32 BC1 addresses because that's what Samurai Wall it does.

And then you need to pay to a merchant that only uses native, sorry, wraps equity or the three addresses. Well, if you pay from BC1 address to a three address and then you get some change back to another BC1 address in your post-mix account, it's obvious that the payment is the one that's going to the three address.

Well, now the change in that sit scenario will come back to a three address rather than a BC1. So it's unclear as to which one, which one's the payment and which one's the change because they're both going to the same address type.

So it's just again undermining another heuristic that the change surveillance firms use to try and to sort of track the flow of funds because that's all they're trying to do at the end of the day is work out what's a payment and what's a sell spend to see when it's, when the set to sort of change in hands.

- And hasn't that been implemented before like with it in the deposit section of the time? - Yeah, it's been in for ages for the deposit account. Yeah. - Okay. - It was a bit more of work to do in the post-mix account because until now the post-mix account only knew of BC1 addresses, Segway addresses,

whereas the deposit account has always had the ability to receive from one three or BC1 addresses. So that was already there and has been for ages, but it's like say it was a bit more work to implement into post-mix because you need the other two addresses as well.

- Sure, 'cause you're never sending directly into post-mix, are you? - Exactly. - Of those going through, yeah, okay. - Samurai wallet has then directly the next 1V0.99.97A. That's the same thing post-mix spends can now make use of the light type change feature.

- Yeah. - Okay. So that's the same idea, right? - Yeah, exactly the same. Yeah, the two releases go hand in hand. - Yeah, then we have one of the biggest news of the month with the Sparrow wallet V1.5.0 huge update with integrating Wellpool.

It's been teased for a few months now and everyone's been high on on waiting for that. Yeah, but now it's out and a lot of people have been giving great feedback on that. It seems to be a being major hit.

- So this is, yeah, I don't think we can understate how big this is for the privacy space because previously, if you wanted to use, in my opinion and many others, the best coinage in implementation, Samurai, Wellpool, you had to have an Android phone.

That was the prerequisite to be able to use Wellpool, you have to have an Android phone. So that priced out, well, anybody that didn't have an Android phone, essentially. So this is opened up basically the iOS user and the desktop users, they can now download Sparrow wallet and take part in Wellpool transactions.

The coordinator is exactly the same between Samurai and Sparrow wallet. So what that means essentially is that users from both wallets are going into the same mixes and coming out into the same liquidity pool.

So there's no, there's nothing to kind of distinguish between the two. So there was a theory going around from some of the naysayers that sort of questioned the Samurai implementation. - Nobody questions Samurai implementations, do they?

- Never, ever. (laughing) So there was some criticism that, well, if you're not running your own dojo, then Samurai can quote unquote de-anonymize people who are using their service. Well, now we've just added into a mix.

If you're using the Sparrow implementation, you cannot use the Samurai servers. You either have to use a public electric server, please don't do that. You can connect to your own Bitcoin call or you can connect to your own Electrum Rust server.

So anybody that's entering the pool from Sparrow wallet, Samurai has no information on them whatsoever, like nothing. So it's just more people into the mix. Another option, like I say, it's opened it up to everybody, anybody that's got a computer can now use Walpole.

There's no Android prerequisite. And because he's a, go on. - No, I was just going to ask, have we seen an uptick in liquidity since this has come out? - Oh, yes. I'm just going to load up Clark's dashboard.

- I thought we might do. - Yeah, we are, we're up to, to do 4,246 Bitcoin. So in the week or so, it's been out. We've added about 250 Bitcoin to the pool. - Very nice. - Yeah, and like I said, I can't stress enough that the kicker here is that, because we're all in the same liquidity pool,

Samurai wallet uses benefit from Sparrow doing this and Sparrow benefits from more people into Samurai. So it's just a massive improvement all around. And also there's two other things as well, but because Craig Roy is an absolute boss is that he's also implemented Stonewall.

So if you've done your, you're mixing through Sparrow and you want to make a privacy preserving spend, you're not kind of left on your own to decide which UTXOs you want to spend. He's implemented the Stonewall algorithm, which is a, a fake coin join using just your own UTXOs.

So that it, when you're, if you want to leave the pool from Sparrow and spend to, well, to whoever, you can do so using, using Stonewall to add or to preserve your privacy when you're, you're leaving the pool.

And he's also gone sort of one up the Samurai team. I guess if you like, in that he's got mixed to cold storage, built into the user interface. So to spell that out, so let's say you start a mix with one bit coin in Sparrow wallet, you leave it running, you've got 10 remixes, and that's the number that you're happy with.

You can set Sparrow wallet to now, automatically send to another cold storage wallet. So let's say you've got Passport being managed by Sparrow. You can say, well, after the 10th mix, I will need to send these UTXOs one by one automatically into my Passport wallet.

No extra steps, no user input after you've set that. It just does it automatically, which is massive because previously what you needed to do if you wanted to do the same through the Samurai setup is that you got your remixes and then it was a case of, well, you can either do Stonewall spends, you can do Stonewall and two spends,

or you can do single UTXO spends. So there is, which absolutely works, and it's been the standard practice for ages. But there's more gotchas doing it that way than having it done automatically through Sparrow wallet with no further user input.

The other kicker here is that doing it that way through Sparrow means that on the final mix, when that UTXO lands into your cold storage wallet, it still looks exactly the same as every other UTXO that is within the liquidity pool.

So for anybody looking on chain, that .5 UTXO that you've just sent to your cold storage automatically, Max, could still be waiting for remixes 'cause it looks identical to everything else.

But you know that it's in your cold storage and you don't need to touch it for five, 10 years or whatever, but it looks absolutely identical, which you didn't have before because the very nature of making a spend meant that you either had to pay minor fees, so take a little bit off or you had to use like Stonewall

and stuff which would change the make-up of the UTXO. So it was, whilst it was privacy preserving, it was obvious that you'd left the pool, whereas you don't have that now because you still look identical to everybody else, so it's massive.

- It's so clever, and is there a way of sort of setting it so that obviously like a amount of mixes and also can you set like a fee rate so that, you know, for example, 10 remixes, then I want it to go to my cold storage but I don't wanna pay more than X or whatever it is.

- That's the amazing thing, isn't it? - Oh, 'cause you're not paying it 'cause it's already done. - It's free. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Okay, so then the only thing you're choosing is the amount of remixes and then it automatically goes which also means, yeah, like you just said,

you don't know if it's then going into be remixed again or not. It's impossible to tell that but also it would break the, like you're not gonna do a load of transactions at the same time 'cause I found that sort of, what I've done is to send things off there.

I'll kind of, if I'm doing them individually, I'll sit and do them all in a day or across a couple of days, which I know isn't as good. - Yeah, yeah, exactly, so it's better for that as well.

- There is a craze built in, well, I think it's in the protocol actually but there's built in, so let's say that you choose 10 remixes, it won't do that after every 10th remix that each UTXo gets, it will do it within a range.

So it might do some after 10, it might do some after 12, it might do some after 15 and that's again, just to break anybody sort of advanced attackers that might be sort of trying to follow certain UTXos and noticing that after the 10th one, they stop moving.

So it's built into a range so that it's not the same amount of remixes every single time, if that makes sense. - And I think what's really important also to point out with this whole world pour integration is that the incentives are aligned so perfectly for many other wallets to integrate it 'cause it's a way to monetize

your wallet as well, especially for, yeah, open source wallets who aren't relying on donations. This is an opportunity to collect fees on people coin joining but all contributing to the same liquidity pool.

So I think that the whole setup is so perfectly done to now hopefully the first of many to implement it. - Yeah, fingers crossed, like you say, everybody's a winner when that happens as well.

So I was just shocked at the speed at which he did it as well. It seemed as though, you mentioned it like, literally a matter of a month ago and it's done and I think there's a few people that think there's like a team behind Sparrow wallet as well.

Well, there's one guy in which is the other mind blowing thing. So yeah, if anybody listens to this and take anything from this whole podcast is download Sparrow wallet and try out world pour and you can do it with as little as just over 100,000 Sats which is what, like $60, $70 maybe at the time of recording.

You don't need to put up a lot of capital just to test it and see if you like it. - Wonderful. Yeah, moving on. We've got Spectre Desktop, V1.6.1 pre-release. They explicitly say, don't use it if you don't know why.

(laughing) Hopefully wait 'til next month, see about that. We've got Sphinx Relay, V2.2.1 introducing contact blocking. Thunderhub, V0.12.28 with some fixes. Treziswee, V21.9.2 and then Umbrell, V0.4.2

with some updates. And then probably today Q&A you mentioned they brought our new release. Today is probably the 4.3 with Electron Rust server. - Yeah, that was the big one. I think they rushed the release out as well because I think there's been a LND bug being discovered.

So I think there's a couple of, well, the node implementations that run LND, which is most of them have done a security update. So that was the main headline for the one that's just come out this morning.

LND 013.3, which includes an important security fix. Doesn't specify what it is, but they've put it in big bold letters to say security update. So if you're running a Lightning Network node, I would make sure that your LND is up to date.

- Okay. And then last one on the list is Zab Android V0.5.1 beta. Yeah, just minor changes there. Advanced channel details and bug fixes. Yeah. So that was the list of software updates. We've also got quite a few different releases

and articles and educational content in this month's list. A few things you want to jump in there and talk about. - The main one that I wanted to highlight was Econo Alchemist running a node at the Blockstream satellite guide.

And I know that kind of isn't going to be mainstream. I just thought it was really good, a really sort of robust guide, as is always the case with him to get a node set up and running with the Blockstream satellite so that you can, basically you don't need the internet to receive locks from the network.

I think that we're only 50% of the way there because obviously you can't broadcast through it. Although it's really simple these days to construct the transaction, save the sort of raw transaction and broadcast it through Tor via many of the different services.

So you can do so privately. I've got a feeling that with the sort of packages like this that Blockstream are putting together that this might sort of, might take off if they can sort of nail down the process and sort of wrap a shiny graphical user interface around it just to make it a bit more approachable.

I think it's got legs, especially given what we've seen in the last 24 hours where half of the internet seems to have disappeared. (laughing) Does anybody know if it's back up yet or all of the stuff that went down?

- I'm not sure actually. I know WhatsApp's back up again. I know that went down yesterday, along with a load of other stuff. Do we know what the reason was? No, not the sun clear to me yet.

- Yeah, some kind of certificates for the domain down but I'm definitely no expert on that. - I saw something onto it and again, it's onto it. So I take it with a pinch of salt. I just really, really, really hope it's true that the Facebook employees couldn't get into the building to try and fix the problem

because their passes were linked to somehow with the Facebook servers. So they couldn't get into the building. (laughing) - I think it's true or not, I don't know but it did really make me smile.

I just, and I hope there's some truth in it anyway. - That's funny. - Imagine like the entire communication in that entire organization. I mean, that's all running via their servers. I mean, that's all down.

Like no communication or email, nothing. Like that all has to be run via separate channels. I have no idea if they have some kind of backup system there to switch to, but otherwise you're just scrambling to find people on their private email addresses.

- Think about how many hundreds of thousands of people have opted to use that. You know, when you're signing up for it into a website and you can sign it with Facebook. - Yeah. - Presumably all of those people are completely fucked right now.

- Mm-hmm. Yeah. - Yeah. Did you see Jack trolling on Twitter? I thought that was good. That was good from him. - That was very funny. (laughs) - Was that real? That it was up for sale? Was that, I mean, I think it was because I saw a subsequent tweet saying that it's been fixed.

- Right. - Okay. It's funny though. - It's crazy. - Yeah. Yeah, we've got a few more things I'd like to highlight here. One, we spoke about that last month as well, but definitely worth going through all of the videos is the intro to Samurai Wallet, Q&A did with Brother Rabbit, who was also on last show, and it's definitely worth watching

for anyone new to the Samurai Stack. - BitcoinTV.com, if anybody wants to go and watch. - Then there's also the Ellen URL point of sale from Ben Arc, which is definitely a really cool little gadget.

It's basically a small point of sale that you can get set up with really cheap hardware for basically about 10, 15 euros, saying like that. And you have, it's completely offline, and it just provides, you have a small little keypad, little like numberpad, and you can punch in the amount that you want to charge.

And it spits out QR code that just provides the Ellen URL. So you scan that with your phone, and then you link up to the server to get the invoice. And that QR code is a lot smaller than actually transferring the entire invoice.

So it's a lot more lightweight, and can be used completely offline. - Right, I see, I saw the video that he did, and it looked really cool. The first thing that popped into my head was, well, this is online, and so how is it offline?

Because the very nature of lightning is that you need to be online. So is it that the actual point of sale device itself is offline, and it-- - It's offline, but the phone. I, funnily enough, are 12th edition of 21ism for code.

I featured Ben Arc, and we've gone into this in a bit more detail, how it works, he explained it all to me, and that's actually going live today, which means it's gonna be live when anyone's listening to this, so if they wanna dig in and learn a bit more about it, they can also go there and have a look at it.

- It was almost as if we planned that, wasn't it? That was beautiful. - It's nice, isn't it? And I can just say as well, he's a really fucking nice down-to-earth guy, like I had the pleasure of chatting to him, and he's done so much, and what he's doing with Ellen Bits, and all the other projects that he's done, but the guy is so humble,

really, really enjoyed that conversation. - Yeah, he seems like a proper tinkerer, doesn't he? - He loves it. - Especially for like El Salvador now, as well, like with people wanting to sell stuff, just with no big infrastructure, so on, you can just, you don't even have to have a cell connection, so that's pretty amazing.

- So do we know how it's doing the, I don't wanna steal the thunder from the podcast that you just referred to much, but how does it, how is the point of sale device communicating back to the server, do we know?

- Through the phone of the person who is using it, so the actual point of sale is offline, but whoever has a cell phone would be, any data be going through there. - Right, okay. - So as I understood it, there's like basically you set up a link between the point of sale device and the server, so they exchange a key pair,

so that the point of sale device can just regenerate - I don't know. - URLs, and that is then passed on through the phone, so that the server can authenticate that it comes from the point of sale device, and then send out an invoice.

- So the point of sale device is truly offline, it's not talking to the server, it's got a secret that it needs to generate exactly URLs. - Right, okay, perfect, that's cool. - Yeah. And then there's also Compass Mining, has now, they're also selling miners for at home mining, which is definitely cool,

I mean I guess you'll probably be getting them at a premium in comparison to like Telegram groups, but you've got them, I mean it's from a more reliable source, but that's definitely a cool addition to have that.

- I've got a feeling that the prices of miners are gonna skyrocket over the next 12 months with the way that the global supply chain's heading. Anybody agree? - Yeah, I feel that it's most likely, but then because it's general consensus, it also makes me think that's gonna be wrong.

- True, but yeah, it's most likely, I think the thing is with buying miners, if you can get reasonably priced electricity and you have somewhere to put them, even if the price doesn't go through the roof, it's still a good idea to do it.

So the risk reward is there, like if you buy them and they go through the roof and you decide to sell them on or keep them then you win, but even if the price doesn't go through the roof, you still win, so it's worth getting them if you can, I think.

- Yeah, I mean, the difficulty is absolutely going bonkers at the moment, that's crazy to see. I mean, a few months ago everyone was predicting it would take a year, maybe 80 months to reach all-time highs again, and we're basically there now, it's pretty crazy.

- Well, we've recovered the China stuff, we're back to the same hash rate already. - Nearly, I think we're, I mean, the thing is with hash rate, I mean, that's always kind of for me, you've got a moving average, which is always pretty difficult to determine exactly how high the hash rate is, but it's definitely gone up

considerably, and I think we've had five, six difficulty adjustments or positive difficulty adjustments in a row, which has been pretty crazy to see. - Just looking at Clark's dashboard now, and we must have just had a re-target, and the blocks are still coming in at eight minutes and 43 seconds, so that would indicate

that there's still more hash rate coming on now. Estimate difficulty change, I know it's early days in this mining epoch, but the estimated difficulty change right now is 16% increase. - Wow, that's amazing, yeah.

- Well, that's good, I'm glad my miners are not, yes, online, probably when they do come online, we're gonna be proper for all-time highs, aren't we? - Yeah, I mean, I've seen a lot of people ask the questions about compass mining, and I definitely don't want to dunk on them, but that's something that I'm still waiting on

to see how that's resolved. They had an issue in summer with hosting facilities so that the deploy dates for miners from August and September were postponed, like target date is now the end of October, so we're still, yeah, we'll still see if they keep that.

- We shall see, but that's definitely a big blow now the last two months, losing that. - We shall see, I'm sort of speaking to them in the background, I'm gonna try and resolve things and then report on it honestly, but I don't wanna speak on it until a solution has been found, so I'm not 100% sure yet, but hopefully it gets resolved.

- Absolutely, and I have to say like the communication has been amazing, they've been very upfront about it all, and yeah, like been available for questions, support's been good, so obviously at the end of the day what counts is the time the miner goes online, but in the meantime they've been doing everything they can

as far as I can tell. - Yeah, awesome, I think, are we done, gents, anything else? - No. - No, I think that was good, that was a big one, this month. - Absolutely, yeah, a lot of good stuff.

Fundamentals still making me very, very excited on a weekly basis. - Yeah, it's all good, isn't it, it's all good stuff. The most exciting one for me is this Sparrow stuff, that is really, really exciting, and as soon as I set my Sparrow up and get going, I'm gonna be playing around with it, it sounds amazing.

- Definitely, yeah, everybody go and try it, and donate to go2sparowallot.com/donate as well. - Yeah, cool, all right guys, thanks very much, enjoy the rest of your days, no one gets me out of bed as early in the morning as you two.

(laughing) - Just for everybody listening, just for everybody listening, it's 11.24 a.m. (laughing) - Only for you two, I don't normally get out of bed until at least two, so yeah, be honoured.

- Yeah, no thanks guys, it's been really good, and look forward to next month. - Cheers guys, cheers guys, speak later.