Bitcoin monthly News with BQA and Antomous 0010

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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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.

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, everyone. Today's episode is with Bitcoin Q&A and Antimus. This is our monthly show, and I promise, next month, it will be on time. We're going to get it towards the end of the month.

It's now halfway through, and I feel bad. I'm going to rush through all of this quickly now, because I'm running out the door, got an eight-hour drive ahead of me, and feel like absolute shit.

So, yeah, wish me luck, and thanks, everyone, for listening. Before we dive in, I do want to say thank you to my show sponsors. We'll start with CASA. CASA are making it incredibly easy for people to use multi-sig.

You can do three of five or two of three. They have all different tiers for different needs, and if you go to Keys.CASA, you can find out more. You can reach out to me if you have any questions.

All I'll say is I've been running this for over a year now, and I've been very, very happy. Next up is FastBitcoins. I'm going to drop an episode with Danny Brewster in a couple of days. Really enjoyed chatting to him, and FastBitcoins have been expanding very, very fast.

They are doing things differently, as usual. These guys were the first people to ever integrate Lightning, and they're always just a few steps ahead. I love the team, I love what they're doing.

And if you want to stack stats, if you want to buy Bitcoin at any of their retailers or online, you can go to FastBitcoins.com. Next up, we have Foundation Devices. Bitcoin Q&A is actually working with Foundation Devices, which fills me with confidence, and we've both been using these for,

well, a few months now, both absolutely love them. And some amazing new news has dropped in this episode, so I won't read it in the ad read, but just have a listen out, and very, very exciting news from Foundation Devices.

You may actually have your arm twisted a little bit more than usual, so go to foundation devices.com, and use bit by bit in the checkout for a $10 discount. Enjoy the show, and I apologize for my sniffing, my illness, and my dog in the background.

Nevertheless, this was really enjoyable, and I always love chatting to these guys. So let's turn that to full volume. I don't know, I'll turn the volume down. Does that do anything, or is it the same?

It's the same. It's the same, on the input side, if you go to the audio bit, you can't boost that up any more. - On Zincaster? - No, do you say you're running a Mac? - No, Windows. - Oh, fuck.

- I don't know, mate, it's all right, don't worry. I mean, Q&A, you can hear him enough to have the conversation, fine, I can just boost you up afterwards, it's fine. - So, it feels like for ever since we sat down, did this?

- Absolutely, but yeah, we're kind of like halfway through the month now, aren't we? - Yeah, proper bit by bit quality, this is. But yeah, lots going on. I'm a little bit rough at the moment, so.

- You sound full of it? - Yeah, full of shit. - Your word's not mine. - No, I do, I feel really, really rough. So, I haven't read through everything and my brain is not functioning properly, so do excuse my stupidity today.

But it's nice to speak to you both. - Any news outside of the Bitcoin news, any banter that's going on? - Not a lot for me. We, well, on the foundation front, we sold out this week of the first batch of hotspots, and Zach dropped the blog post yesterday and out in batch number two with a 33% price drop,

which has been, I just been catching up on two emails this morning and nice one. - Nice one. - It's been greatly received by the volume of pre-orders that have flown through the doors in the last sort of while hours.

- Very nice. - That was absolutely amazing to see. I think definitely one thing to highlight is the price structure that you announced. That was really amazing to see. I mean, that is real customer service right there.

I don't know if you want to go ahead with that. - Yeah, so for anybody who hasn't seen the blog post, basically we've opened pre-orders for batch two. Details on that are loose at the moment and will be revealed over the course of the next couple of weeks.

We dropped the price, 33%, so batch one was $299. Batch two is $199. We're hoping to ship in February and if you pre-order now, or anywhere between now and February, before we ship and you do so with Sats, and let's say you pre-order today with $200 worth of Sats.

If by the time we come to ship in February, those Sats are now worth $400 and Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does, then we'll refund you the difference so you haven't lost that on your Bitcoin gains.

- Ooh, that's really nice. - Pretty unique model, I suppose. I've not seen anybody do it before, and it was actually a nice, I'll give him credit for that, and yeah, really interesting. And I haven't seen the split of, 'cause it's only been 12 hours, I haven't seen the split of who's used credit cards and who's used Bitcoin,

but it'd be really interesting to see who's kind of took us up on this. The other interesting thing with it as well. Yeah, I think so, because the other interesting thing is, you can kind of gain this a little bit in the fact that, especially the US market, if you use strike, you can have dollars taken out of your account.

It lands with us as Sats, so you've spent dollars, but then you still, because we've received Bitcoin, you're still eligible for the difference if Bitcoin goes up. - Yeah. - So I'm kind of a little bit gutted that we haven't got access to that, because it's kind of a win-win, if you've got access to that.

- Yeah, it's a perfectly safe bet, isn't it, that? - Mm-hmm. - I wonder when we will get something like that happen, when we will get the ability to use strike. I'm sure I saw something like, someone posted that it was three months away, or something like that.

And I kind of ignored it, 'cause I was like, oh, well, I believe it when I say it, but is that right? Is either of you know if that's true? - No, I don't. I just, I remember seeing, I mean, when they launched in the US last year, they said that that was like kind of on there, on the horizon, but then at some point,

they switched to focusing more on, well, obviously with the whole El Salvador news, and so on, like Latin American countries. And so, and I haven't seen a prediction, or a timeline on when that will come out, but presume.

- It would be nice, just for certain situations like that, where it's like, okay, this makes a lot of sense. - Yeah, I agree. And it's probably a really good segue into the first one on the list really, because Bisch has added a load of new payment methods, strike being one of them, which I thought again was kind of a unique sort of,

thing to think about, because I had a discussion with somebody on Twitter the other day, and they were saying that, and, well, you know, if I use strike to buy Bitcoin on Bisch, then isn't it KYC?

And I'm like, well, no, was it, you know, you've absolutely got the ability to buy KYC Bitcoin through strike, you know, that's one of the main telling points for people who like that sort of stuff.

But if you use it to just send fiat to another strike user, you've got the sort of instant settlement that strike offers, but you're, you know, the bank or the bank behind strike, just sees a fiat transfer, don't they?

And you've got to set yourself some no KYC sat. So it's analogous to using something like revolution in the European sector. - Yeah, it just, it breaks one more link, doesn't it? It's not perfect.

Presumably it can be unwound if it was like really, if they really wanted to. If you're being investigated or something like that, presumably that can be unwound without too much trouble.

- Well, there's always a risk when if you're, you know, using Bisch or HODL HODL or anything like that, with, and you're using bank transfers, you know, strike, revelate or Barclays, whatever, then there's always a risk that they're going to, all they see is a fiat transfer, but, you know, if it's, if it's regular or sizable,

then, you know, that it has been known that people have had questions asked of them. And unfortunately, sometimes banks can like to err on the side of caution when it comes to compliance.

And it's not, it's not unheard of for people to get account closed unfortunately. So best advice, best advice I could give anybody, if you're going to go down that route, is to have like a second bank account where you kind of just do your Bitcoin stuff from.

So, and you're only keeping up in there to send or, you know, say if you're going to buy a million sacks, you've done, you put that much money in there, do your send, and then you, you know, if they start asking questions, or decide to close your account because they didn't like your answer, then,

you can, you know, you can't close anything. Yeah, and you've still got, you've still got a bank account for your wages to go into, except it's not going to turn your life upside down. Just one tip from someone who has had this repeatedly over the last few years.

Just, yeah, keep as many open as you can. Do exactly what you've just said there. And then when they ask for your inside leg measurement and your answer's favorite color, just close the account down.

That's the most simple way. Because once you start to give some information, they're going to want more and more and more and more. This sort of neo banks are pretty much disposable. Like you can, which ones are, there's like N26, Reverlu, what's the other one?

Yeah, there's quite a few in the UK. I think they do a lot of European Union as well. Starling, they've got Monzo, there's loads of them. So just, if you just have a few, and then exactly, like you said, don't keep a large amount in there.

Just transfer in what you want to buy on Bisk and do it like that. And then worse comes to worse, you just close it down. Because it doesn't cost them things to open these things up. But obviously doing cash if you can.

One thing to look out for, I don't know what the regulation landscape is in in other countries, but here in Germany, we've got a regulation or basically like the credit score is also influenced by the number of bank accounts you have.

Oh, really? Excuse me. Excuse me, sorry. I'll edit that out as well. Yeah, and I mean, it's not public knowledge exactly how that factors in, but it does factor in. So I think it's presumed that with a threshold of two, three, maybe four accounts, that should be okay.

But if you have like five to 10 accounts that can have a significant impact on your credit score. So interesting. Not quite sure what that's like in other countries, but definitely saying to watch out.

Yeah, I didn't know that. I'm sure it's the same here. I would have thought. So the regulator's going to regulate, eh? They love it, they love it. Answer me. Kickers off and carry on with the list.

Exactly. One more thing to Bisk. They now officially stopped support for V3, 12 V3 addresses. There was a deadline. I think it was 15th of October that they turned that off. So as from now, it's exclusively V3 addresses.

Yeah. So next on the list is boxing green. They updated to V3.7.5. Just I'm not 100% sure what the update is on that. It's pretty technical there. So I haven't dove into that one. Blockstream green desktop V1.0.3.

There's a new release of the blockchain green desktop app. They already brought that one out last month. We covered that there. And there are now additional feature updates for that. Blue wallet, V6.2.12.

Minor bug fixes. And then one of the biggest news of the month was BGC peso, server of the 1.3.0. And that was a pretty big update, a lot of new features. This is where I jump in and have my playing stream.

Please, that I got an absolutely massive PR that took me week to week and weeks. I got that merged. Now I'm joking, it took me like 10 minutes to get the... So when you use BGC peso you can use a watch only wallet, you can use it as a hot wallet, you've got lightning,

or you can have the payments that come through to your store sent to a hardware wallet. So it's got a nice interface where you can connect your call card ledger, Trezza, anything like that.

I was just playing around and noticed that Passport was missing. So I spent 10 minutes and got that added. So that's my claim to fame for a non-dev like me. But yeah, you're absolutely right, there's loads of...

This is a monster release. So they got taproot support, lightning address support, which I've been playing around with, which is pretty slick actually. I know we were talking about it last time.

What else have they got? Lightning pull payments, email notifications, there's loads of stuff. Have I missed anything big there, I'm sorry. - Well, generally just like the PSBT, a user interface has been improved in a big way.

So that's a lot easier now. Yeah, last month we were playing around with it quite a bit, setting up stores and so on. So that's definitely a big improvement there. Although interestingly, I think, and probably understandably given the size of the release, the one we're talking about is 1.3.0

and already up to, at the time of recording, 1.3.4 because I think it introduced quite a number of bugs. So make sure you're running, if you listen to this shortly, after release, make sure you're on 1.3.4 because there's quite a number of small bugs that got added alongside the monster release, unfortunately.

Then we have C Lightning V0.10.2 RC1. Unfortunately, no release notes there, but anyone running C Lightning could check that up. I'm not quite sure where to find the release notes, if there are any at all.

Electrous V0.9.1, they had a major release last month that we covered in more detail. And now a few bug fixes and simplifications improved. - Has either of you done any wallet imports with the new Electrous?

- No. - No, I haven't yet. - It's a fucking monster. - Yeah? - Like I've got some pretty, I was just testing it out and I've got some, I've got a song right wallet that's got a pretty deep post-mix index.

You know, it's had loads and loads of remixes. And it just chews through it in minutes, I can't wear as previously or what it took. I don't know, anywhere up to an hour maybe, giving the depth of the wallet.

And it just absolutely mashes straight through it. It's, I don't know what they've done under the hood, obviously it's completely beyond my technical expertise, but the end result for the end user is massive.

- Do you mean to recover one, mate? Like are you talking about recovering wallet? - Yeah, so got my, it's a samurai wallet, generated wallet, but just to test it out, because I knew it was a really heavy wallet that had, had chewed through thousands of thousands of addresses in the post-mix wallet.

Obviously it's got to pick each, it's got to check all of them to get an accurate description of the state of the wallet and the balances and what addresses have got funds in and what are empty.

So to do that, pretty used to take, you know, anywhere up to an hour with a wallet of the size I'm talking about. And now it's a couple of minutes and it's done. So it's an absolutely exponential improvement in, you know, wallet imports.

- And this is like the same sort of thing as if I was in, sorry, my fucking brain today. If I was on my Ronan Dojo and I was doing that scanning, what's, oh, what am I trying to say? - It's same thing.

- That's what it's doing, right? But it's just very fast. - Yeah. - Okay, basically. - We can trigger that and whereas it used to take a long time, if the node that you're running runs the latest, the electricity, which probably by now most of them are doing, then yeah, just all you're going to see is it just happens

10 times quicker than it used to. - Nice. So if I understand correctly, like with Sparrow, if I'm using Sparrow and I have that hook up to my node, I mean, I have it hooked up to my my node, they have updated to electricity.

- That should be using that indexing system, right? - Correct, yep. - Okay. Well, technically with Sparrow, you can connect to Electrous or you can connect directly to Bitcoin Core. So it depends on how you've got it set up.

- Yeah, no, no, it's Electrous, yeah. - But generally speaking, if you've got the choice, go for Electrous, it'll be loads faster than Core. - Okay. Then we have a fully-noted V0.2.28. They have two-factor authentication, which is big, and wallet import improvements.

I've not used fully-noted, so I'm not quite sure they have this iCloud backup system. Have you, any of you used it yet? - No. - Okay. - No, I'm not an iOS user, but the iCloud backup thing is similar to, I think CASA does it as well for the mobile key.

I think it might, especially for multi-sig stuff, which obviously fully-noted it does. I think this might become a lot more prevalent in the years to come. As a, you know, it's probably not gonna be something that kind of the hardcore people would prefer to use, but if you're, well, I used the CASA model as an example

for it to be automatically backed up to your iCloud if you're just a normal user that's already got an iCloud account, and then you were to lose your phone, then you can recover that key really easily by just signing into your account.

So I'll presume, before you know, it works in exactly the same way. And I think, you know, whilst you wouldn't want it to be your only key, it's obviously it's encrypted as well, so Apple wouldn't be able to be malicious with it.

I just feel more comfortable if it was part of a multi-sig setup like CASA. So I think we're gonna see more and more of this as time goes on as well. I think it's quite unique. - So they implemented like a health check tool.

So I presume that something like, you have that with Samurai wallet as well, that in a running instance, you can check your backups to see if everything's okay. - Is this fully noted, it's done the help?

- Exactly. - Exactly. - Ah, cool, yeah, again, so it's similar to CASA, so what they'll do basically is they'll just check, they'll just like ping the iCloud server and check that it's there, that hasn't changed and that they can decrypt it, so.

- Yeah, good idea. - Yeah. Then we have Immortan V0.3.6, passing amount addresses and amounts. We went through Immortan last month as well, in more detail. - Yeah, I actually had it, so we circled back, didn't we later in the episode to say that a simple Bitcoin wallet was the,

currently the only wallet that's implemented in Immortan and I had a little play around with it and seems to work pretty well actually. It just had sort of similar flows to Phoenix where it's, you know, tunnel management and just sort of, I guess, just it just worked.

So it was quite impressed with it, really. - No, it's still on my to-do list. - We've got Joining Box, V0.6.3, updates Bitcoin Core 22.0 and Join Market V0.9.3. Last month I had the big update to V0.9 and now there is a urgent bug fix.

So anyone listening to this who has not updated yet, please do, there's some kind of security issue there that should be updated to. - Then we have Ledger Live Desktop fee 2.34.4. I'm not familiar with the Ledger Live desktop.

- That's probably a good thing. - Yeah, I've used it in the past. It's actually quite slick, but it's also shit in terms of your privacy and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's pretty slick interface.

- Does it have like three million different coins in if you choose from as well? - You can turn on or off which ones you have though. So you can just have it just running Bitcoin and then you don't have all the other ones.

But yeah, you can have, I mean, there's like a million different shit coins that you can have, but it caught me out. I don't know if you remember this, mate, but like ages ago I had different amounts on different ledgers and I called you up and I was like, mate, I've lost however much it was.

I can't find it. Like I'm sure I had more, I don't know what's going on. And what had happened was Ledger Live had no matter how many ledgers I had on that new software, it just like collected all of them and put them into one place.

So like my balance would be what I had for all of them, which obviously is not what you want. And so then I'd written down with pen and paper like, oh, this is what I've got, you know? It's basically just like collecting all your data and all your info off any device you put on there.

Whereas when I originally had a Ledger, it was much more simple and I just had different amounts on different ones. So it's a bit shit, basically. - Yeah, I remember the panicked phone call quite well.

- Oh my God, I pulled myself a large whiskey and was like, fucking hell, this was not good. But yeah, that was all fine at the end. But it was confusing. - Okay, moving on, we've got LND V0.14.1, better RC1.

Yeah, we've got the health check for tour connectivity. And then Minode V0.2.44, a bunch of software updates included. Next Bitcoin. - You still run Minode, sorry to jump in. - I do. - You still run Minode, don't you?

- I haven't played with it for a while. Are they still adding different applications at a rate of not? What's the new stuff that's on there? - Yeah, like in the last months, they haven't put on too many new applications.

One really cool feature is that they've introduced like an app manager. So you can install and de-install applications as you choose. 'Cause before you could enable or disable different apps, but they were still installed.

So you can free up a lot more space and get more performance out of it by just installing. Yeah, the ones that you want. And you can also do manual updates for specific apps or like downgrade them again if you want.

So that's pretty cool. But other than that, I mean, there have been a lot of like UI improvements over the last months. And yeah, just general like also for the backups that will go smoother.

Yeah, so it's all in all, it's gotten easier to use, but not too many new features or new apps. - Cool. - Good to know. - Then we have, where are we here? - Nick's Bitcoin V0.0.55, that's also the join market.

Urgent bug fix is also implemented there. So update your Nick's Bitcoin. If you're using join market for anyone interested in Nick's Bitcoin, they were on Citadel Dispatch with Matt, a few weeks back, which was an amazing episode as well.

First time I had a real in-depth look into Nick's Bitcoin. - It was a good episode that, but what I would say is that they didn't exactly do much to entice me to try it out. I think I came away a little bit more confused about what it actually is and how it works than what I thought I was before.

And maybe that was just me and you're gonna say, you're an idiot, but I don't know, it just seemed, I get what they're trying to achieve with it and to try and keep it stripped down and really focused.

The whole thing just baffled me a little bit. - Yeah, it sounds like a lot of work and a lot of time you have to put into that if you're not like a super level dev there. So yeah, beforehand I didn't really understand the concept at all, so it was valuable for me to listen to that.

So I've got a better picture of what it is they're trying to achieve, but it is very bare-bone like foundation level approach there they're going, which I think is really good. - Yeah, which to that credit, like say they're not trying to be an umbrella or anything like that. - Exactly.

- Yeah. - Yeah. Then we have Phoenix V1.4.19. There's also smaller updates there. Raspberry Blitz V1.7.1, that's pretty nice. They are preparing for an upcoming web UI.

So I think they're really included a few updates to prepare for that. - I think that's gonna be a bit of a game changer for them because I feel like Raspberry Blitz are always like the forgotten cousin in the corner, which isn't justified in my opinion.

I don't know, I think we all run one. And I think the web UI is gonna open them up to a much larger market and make it a lot more approachable for people. So I'm really looking forward to seeing that and how they implement it, because it's a very, very capable and stable node.

And I think, again, I'm talking a little bit out of my depth here, but I'm trying to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they use Docker, do they? Which a lot of other node implementations do, which is like a way to sort of containerize all of the different stuff that's running on the node.

I don't know whether that's why they're more stable than anybody else, but yeah, I've had really, really good sort of uptime with my Blitz. - Me too. - It's my only node that I haven't had problems with, other than the set up, like it took me a little bit of time just messing around, but since then it's been absolutely solid.

- Yeah, yeah, rock solid. It's amazing. I mean, I remember like when now there's a, yeah, Ronin Dojo brought out the web UI interface. I mean, like the amount of features or like interaction you can have with the node itself on there is not massive, but it just, for just smaller checkups, it just makes it so much easier

than having to SSH in every time. And yeah, really looking forward to that for us, we blitz. We have Ronin Dojo, the 1.12.0 updates, Suspector, Dojo, and Mempool, the two. It's definitely cool, Rust Lightning V0.0.0.1.0.2.

API updates and bug fixes. Samurai Dojo V1.12.1 bug fixes. That's all one minor updates here. - Just while we're on the S's of the list and I have it on good authority, there's a pretty tasty Samurai wallet release coming out in the next seven days.

So keep your eyes peeled for that one if you're listening to this. - I saw some on Twitter a few weeks back. I think you're like a few screenshots. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, looking forward to that.

Okay. Simple Bitcoin wallet V2.2.17 bug fixes and UI improvements.

Sparrow wallet V1.5.2, we've got automatic account discovery. I've not tested that. I don't know exactly what the workflow is there. - I think that the point is that there isn't it automatic.

And so if you're importing your Samurai wallet, for example, where there's multiple accounts, you throw your seed in, refresh the wallet and it'll just find, if you've got funds in premix, post-mix, or whatever, it'll find all that automatically for you.

I know I simp for Craig Roth every month for me to do this podcast, but just look at that release list and he's one guy and it still baffles me to this day. So I think I'm gearing up to give him a marriage proposal.

(laughs) - Yeah, it is awesome. Do you think some of that comes down to working alone, you have a vision, you know what you need to do and you just crack on and there's no sort of organization of other people and that kind of thing?

Do you think sometimes like running lean like that? I mean, it is like incredibly lean 'cause it is literally one man. But do you think that helps in some way or is he just some sort of freak who just manages things that other humans can't?

- No, I think there's definitely some truth in what you just said, the problem I've noticed that he's got now is that with the world pool implementation, his user base has grown massively.

So there's been a huge influx of people coming into the telegram room where I spend a fair bit of time and obviously with more users, come more problems, there's plenty of people in there just coming in members that try and help out as well.

But he's kind of stuck in that situation now where he feels obliged to look after the support, not support tickets but the people coming into the chat as well as it used to do easily because there was so few users.

Whereas I just hope and pray that that doesn't affect the sort of speed and cadence at which he's implementing new features and which has been, you know, lightning fast. - I guess maybe he needs someone to manage that side while he cracks on with what he does, maybe in the future.

'Cause I mean, as soon as my laptop arrives, which we might get onto later, which we went from a fucking year now, that's what I wanna do is put that on and start running Sparrow. So I'll be in that room almost guaranteed asking him some questions.

So he's gonna need some support. - Yeah, I mean, hopefully the Whirlpool implementation works out well for him and that he gets a steady stream of income. If it continues to grow, that maybe that will fund, you know, him to grow his team as well and maybe bring somebody on a support if he deems it necessary.

So that's the beauty of the Whirlpool incentive that, you know, he gets a cut of the fee. So he's gone from no income doing this completely for free in his own time to now continue to do that and get paid for as well.

- It's such a good incentive structure. - Yeah, who's next? Who's next wallet developers? - Yeah, exactly. And who's next to Jumpwall? Who's the first to jump on that project? I mean, that's something that baffles me as well.

I mean, obviously there are thousands of open source projects out there. So there's wanting to support someone. I've got a huge choice there, but still, I mean, it's not a, it's pretty well-known wallet by now.

It baffles me that there's no one jumping in there on a larger scale. I mean, obviously I don't know the background, maybe. That's also something that, you know, he'd be preferred to have it that way.

But, yeah, looking forward to seeing more contributions there. We've got a Spectre Desktop V1.7.0, Auto Privacy Settings and Uncle Jim Paper Wallet. That's quite cool, you can, on the export, you can have different options to export backups for the wallet, and you can export a paper wallet there now.

Then I was wondering how that was gonna work. So it's literally just in the UI where it'll create a hot wallet and you can print it out. Is that essentially how it works? - Exactly. - Yeah.

- Yeah. - So you can then export it. - Yeah, that's quite cool. - Christmas is coming, guys. There's your idea, sort of. (laughing) Thunder Hub V0.12.30, edit Social Info. Seem exactly where that is implemented.

Trezis Suite V2.1.10.2. Bitcoin payment links now open in Suite. Yeah, I've also not used the Trezis Suite. So anyone from Czech Republic, it's wonderful. You've got it in your native language now.

UmbrellV0.4.6. They've been having issues implementing, or with their implementation of Samurai Server. - Can confirm. - Yeah, so apparently they've fixed that now, like finally. I think they've had that in the updates for the last few months, a few times.

So hopefully that's worked out by now. We'll see. - I think we know why now, don't we? Because they've clearly been focused on drumming up some investor interest. Did you see that? We didn't speak about this last time, did we?

- No. - Don't think so. - No. - They got a three million pound, three million dollar investment from some VC firm, presumably to grow and expand the business, I guess. - Interesting. - I can't remember the name of the firm that invested in that now.

- Okay. Yeah, so probably cleaning up to get that sorted. Yeah, we've got Zapp Android V0.5.2, better, better. Lightning Address Support, we had that last month that quite a few Lightning wallets that implemented that.

And now Zapp, and also Zeus V0.6.0, alpha, also Lightning Address Support. Couple of other big ones in there as well for Zeus. They've got coin control for the LND wallet. You've got multi-path payment support.

I think that's on the sense side now for the latest LND. And I question for the two of you, because I've never dug into this one. And understood it. LN URL auth, is that essentially where you can log into a service using your Lightning nodes pub key?

I got that right. - That's how I understood it. Yeah. So you can like with all these services with like login with Facebook or login with whatever you can basically sign a message and log it or like, yeah.

- Which begs the next question, other than AMBOS.space or a one ML? Where the hell can you do that? I don't know of anywhere, can it do you? - I've not seen it. I haven't even seen it from those two of them.

I've only heard of the concept itself, so I haven't seen it implemented at all. I guess it's a chicken and egg problem that, you know, they've got to build it first, haven't they, sir? Yeah.

- Yeah, but it's a cool concept. I mean, yeah. The only thing is, I mean, if you don't only have one wallet, so I mean, you might have a lot of different wallets and then have be signed up somewhere with one wallet and then you might ditch that wallet at some point and having to transfer, I think.

- Yeah, how would you transfer like the reputation and stuff over to the internet? And yeah, early days, I guess. - Yeah. Okay, but that's for the updates. We've got a few nice releases over the last month as well.

And the bigger ones was River now, also offering a hosted mining service. They were also on TFTC, was it? I think, I'm not. - Oh yeah, I heard that one explaining their service there. - While we're on hosted mining might actually any updates on Compass?

- Not really, no. What I can tell you is they've gone for a very different setup than foundation. Instead of doing it so that you sort of pay your SATs and then if you have an increase in the value of Bitcoin, they cover you.

They've really gone for something that's quite the opposite, which is that you pay your money, but what they do is they don't give you what you've paid for. So it's interesting. I mean, we get to see how this plays out for them, but I'm not a massive fan.

I'll put it that way. - Yeah, they've been getting quite a lot of heat for it as an anime, so, have you even got a date for when you go in live yet? - Well, I had a few, haven't I? - Yeah, I think I've had five or six now.

How many of you heard? - Yeah, it's on my fourth now. - Okay, no, you were on it as well, Artemis. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a big one. I mean, the timeline just for anyone who missed this.

It's basically in June and July, you could pre-order miners for their South Carolina facility, due dates were the end of August and the end of September. And then mid-August, they came out with a notice saying that they had issues with the facility and that the due dates would be postponed

and they'd be trying to get them online as soon as possible, but the maximum would be the end of October. So for some people, that was a one month and for others, a two month delay, which is obviously in the environment of the more difficulty periods at the time.

Pretty brutal after the China crackdowns and so on, difficulty dropped significantly increasing profitability. So we'll see if we'll ever see conditions like that again.

- Yeah, and then about 10 days before the end of October, they came out with a new message saying that they'd delay again between one and three weeks, so between the 7th and 21st of November.

Some are still in that period and others have now, a few days ago, being pushed to the 30th of November. Yeah, so that's the timeline. - Yeah. - And interestingly, you're at the same host of Siltimax as well.

- No, what's happened is for each machine that I bought for whichever hosting facility I bought for, none of them have gone online at the times I was supposed to and they're also not going to where I'd agreed them to go.

But what's really magical is that they've also decided that the rate of electricity that was in the agreement is also not going to be honored. So what I've got is a machine that may or may not go online somewhere that I didn't agree at a price, I didn't agree, maybe if I'm lucky.

- Fuck, I didn't realize it was that bad. - Oh yeah. - It's brutal. - Yeah, I mean, at the beginning, like in the first, after the first delay, they seemed as if they were putting in an effort to communicate pretty transparently.

But then like that was in the first one or two weeks after the first delay and from then until mid October, it was basically zero communication, which was brutal. With the heightened electricity costs, they have given a kind of credit

for the first, for each miner. There was a $500 credit for each miner that you bought to cover the increase in electricity costs. And I did the calculations on what that means that would cover about or just under three and a half years of, yeah, the half the increase.

- Exactly, yeah. - So that kind of gives an idea of what they're guessing how long the miners will run for, maybe. - Not sure, I mean, but do you hear estimations with the new generation miners between three and five years?

That obviously depends on non-difficulty if they're even competitive at that time. Yeah, but that has been covered to a degree. But there has been absolutely no compensation or help with the delay of now, yeah, three months for some people.

- Yeah, that's, it's been three months for me and now it's gonna be supposedly the end of the month. And I've spoken to, the same as you, like I was kind of thinking, well, you know, they might be sort of semi-reasonable here at the beginning and I spoke to a couple of people at Compass and I said, look, shit happens.

If you've had an issue with the facility, I get it. What I'd expect though is some form of compensation for either loss of earnings or depending on how long these machines are off 'cause we really want them to be running now.

That's why I've bought them because of what had happened to the hash ray, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. I'd have just stacked sat. And after sort of, well, just months of speaking to all different people in the team, trying to see if I can get it sorted because it's not just us.

I mean, there are so many people who have been affected by this. So I was trying to see if there was something that could be done and I was saying to them, like, do you know what? You're spending a huge amount of money on marketing with different podcasts and everything else you're doing and yacht parties and whatever else you're doing.

You know what would be the best form of advertising you could do is actually to honor the agreements that you've made with customers and where some, if not all of the cost of the mistakes that have been made because at the end of the day, yeah, sure, maybe they've had an issue with a hosting facility,

but I don't think that's the customer's fault. You know, the customer has agreed a price and a time and then they've calculated and said, well, do I stack sats or do I buy one of these miners?

And so you and I have bought the miners doing our calculation and weighing things up. Well, companies have done their calculations and then they've priced it and then they've gone into an agreement.

And then what's happened, they've fucked up or someone in their chain has fucked up, not the customer, but they want the customer to wear all the cost. And there's not even really an apology.

Most people haven't got back to me. Most people haven't sorted anything. And when anyone writes in the comments section when they're doing their social media posts, if anyone writes, you know, anything about this, they just get completely ignored.

It's like, well, you're no longer a customer. You don't matter to us. Yeah, you've spent thousands of pounds and you've lost thousands of pounds, but we don't really give a fuck. That's how it feels now.

And like I kept my mouth shut for a couple of months because I thought they might rectify this and I love the model. I think that the idea is brilliant and it's a sort of is KYC light. I love the idea of what they were trying to do.

But if I was seen to behave this way by my grandparents, they would come out of their grave and they would slap the shit out of me because it's not acceptable. It's not how you treat people in business.

It's horrible to see as well. Like just going into Discord, into the chat there, like how many people are on there active, then you'd have to think that there are quite a few more just reading alongside and not actively jumping in.

And then a whole bunch of people as well that don't even know that there's the conversation going on on Discord. So the number of people affected by this is massive. And that is shocking to see.

Holy shit, I'm shocked by what I've just, genuinely shocked by what I've just heard. I knew there was problems but I didn't realize it was to the extent that YouTube was outlined in awhile.

So anyway, this is sponsored by Compass. Go to compass.com by your miners now. Can't recommend them enough. Really, really awesome company. Yeah, head over now, use bit by bit in the checkout.

One thing that's, one thing that's not in a list and I don't know how it's, why or how it's not in a list is seed mint. Did that release this month or last month? Is that why, I can't understand why it's not in a list.

Anthony, do you wanna give us a bit of info? That was last month, it was. Yeah, there's a project that's been going on for a few months now, Nick from, what, with this, who created the seed mint about close to a year ago, just for himself and his buddies and at some point in the summer,

just posted on Twitter and got quite a bit more engagement that he expected and people having genuine interest. It's a great product. I mean, I love it and I saw it the first time and I contacted him to contribute and it's a device to stamp your seed words into under washes and we have now done the first round

of sales, which was great and in production phase now. And yeah, looking forward to more developments for that in the future. Yeah, I must admit, it looks really cool actually. I described it to somebody the other day as like, people be familiar with the block mitts, which is like a 3D printed solution

to do the same sort of seed stamping. So this is like a ball of version of that, isn't it? That really looks the dog's bollocks. They're so nice. I've ordered one. I cannot wait for that to arrive.

It's something that like, I look at that and I think that can be passed down through generations like it's solid brass. It's beautifully made. It's so well engineered and you can create, you can use it and end this amount of times, presumably.

You look after this thing and pass it down and you can have them personalized, which I've done. Yeah, it is baller. It's fucking beautiful. Yeah, Nick's amazing. I mean, he's got such an like an eye for detail and really just also, I think it's great that he chose the path to go down, like just releasing now and not developing for years,

getting the perfect packaging and model and website and everything up, just having a lot of conversations with the community and now bring out the first version that where the product is solid and everything else around it can be built from there.

It's been amazing working with him together. It's been huge. Yeah, great, last few months. It's just really cool to see people that have clearly got like a quite a unique technical skill just building really cool shit that looks like that.

And yeah, so what's the website? People wanna check it out. I can't remember what it is. That's siemint21.com. Beautiful, yeah. We also featured them, I think three, four months ago on 21ism and we've done an article on here and the process and some photos and video and all that kind of stuff as well.

Anapod. Did I see yesterday that was the 12 month anniversary of 21ism style? Correct, yes it was. Wow, that's gone quick. Okay, it's gone really, thank you. Yeah, it's gone really, really quick.

Quite a journey, so many amazing people. I mean, half the people that we've mentioned during the show, people like Craig have been featured and it's such a good way that we can just shine light on some of the best talent out there.

People building the most unique and interesting things and that's what, you know, when we saw Seidman, we were like, right, this thing's fucking awesome, we need to get this on and talk about it.

It's nice because we can do, you know, it's different to just doing a pod, like being able to have an article, have the beautiful website, have people get a bit of an insight into the people behind the project.

It's just really nice, I really enjoy it. Awesome, and let's just finish this list off before I start sleep in our laptop company that we're waiting for. We're really fucking, we're right bitches today, aren't we?

(laughing) Just fucking abusing everyone, pulling them all out. Yeah, educational pieces, as always, BCC sessions has done a couple multi-sig backups and using Whirlpool within Sparrow Wallet, which we were talking about earlier.

And then finally, I just wanted to highlight Alex Gladstein did a piece last month called The Quest for Digital Cash, which is sort of a look back at the early days of sort of the days that predate Bitcoin that were sort of influential in helping Bitcoin come about.

Obviously, add and back features heavily within that. It's quite a long read, but it's absolutely fantastic for those of you that are sort of interested in the sort of history and the early days of Bitcoin, which it's featured on in Bitcoin magazine, of course.

So if you've got sort of 20 minutes for yourself on a slightly morning or something, sit down with a coffee and read that. Have you read this? Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah, I loved it. I haven't, my next question is, I have eight hours in the car in a couple of days.

Has Guy Swan read this, or has anyone done it? I would go version for fuckwits like me. All right, that's me then, that's me. I'm gonna queue up, I'm gonna queue up all the articles like that. Okay, awesome.

One more thing I want to highlight is if you have onboarded anyone like in the last year or if you're still the beginning of your own journey in down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, something that will be highlighting next month in the monthly, but just dropped a few days ago, was the pod with Q&A on Citadel Dispatch with Matt.

An absolutely amazing guide and tutorial, going through step by step, everything. You have to consider while starting off and taking the right steps, while starting off on your journey, a really, really good listen for anyone starting off, but also for those who are ready, taking a lot of those steps.

Yeah, it was a wonderful listen. Yeah, I enjoyed doing that one actually. It was, this batch is renowned for really getting into the weeds on a specific topic, so it was nice to see Matt do a sort of beginner-focused episode.

And yeah, we kind of just, we sort of structured it quite intentionally to start with sort of no care I see and then holding your own keys and, you know, we structured it in the way at which the sort of perfect, you know, if there is such a thing, but the perfect journey you could take

from a sort of privacy and sovereignty best practices. So it's a long one, I think it was just over two hours. So again, you might need a couple of cups of coffee for that one, but definitely want to bookmark and send out to your new coiner friends.

Well worth it, definitely. Right, should we slag off Starlabs now, Max? So what's going on there? I know this is certainly a Bitcoin podcast, but we seem to be on a roll slagging people off.

So sounds pretty similar to the compass story, really. Max and I and Katan and Brother Rabbit, we've all pre-ordered a Linux first laptop from a UK company called Starlabs. Katan and I originally were the first ones to go for it.

And we pre-ordered back in April, I think, and we had an initial ship date of the end of June or start of July. So here we are at the 12th of November, waiting still for these devices to turn up at our doors.

The frustrating thing is, I don't know about you, Max, but it's been the lack of communication. They've been giving periodic updates on the support website that say, literally nothing. So you go on there, don't you?

And you want sort of an estimate of, when's it going to arrive at my door? And also we're getting where we think it might be leaving China in the next few weeks. So it's just been really, really frustrating and very analogous to the situation that you just described with compass.

I suppose the only saving grace with this is that I haven't lost out on any stats and I'm not losing potential mining revenue with this one. But what I am doing is losing hair but I haven't to deal with this fucking MacBook Air that's on its last leg.

Me too. Well, my laptop now, it crashes normally when it gets to 20% charge. It crashes just generally anyway. The charger broke three days ago, so that doesn't work. So I can only charge my laptop from my phone charger which doesn't put enough charge in it.

So you can only actually run it even with a charger in for like a couple of hours. Without the charger in, it's like an hour. The battery life is terrible. And I'm just, you know, I'm trying to use this thing pretty much all day long and it's a fucking pain in the ass.

And I'm just like, please, I want this laptop to arrive. But yeah, I've heard nothing and it is frustrating. I hope that it, I mean, it looks beautiful and it looks like it's pretty well made.

And I hope that when it arrives, it's worth the wait. And, you know, it seems like it's a fairly small company. It's very niche product. It seems like they have had issues that maybe they couldn't get around.

But yeah, the communication has been poor. Compass has cost me thousands of pounds and basically said fuck you, tough shit. Starbook, well, yeah, okay, other than it's just inconvenient. It's not really cost me the money.

I assume that the cost of these things is probably gonna go up from what we paid anyway. And one good thing I'll tell you is I did order the USB hub thing from them. That arrived the next day.

- Yeah, see me, see me. - It's fuck all use. I look at it every day and go, are you bastard? Like, I can't actually have this with my laptop. But I can say that if you wanna buy something from Starbook, don't buy a laptop, you probably won't get it.

But you can buy a USB hub and you'll get it the next day. - All joking aside, the most recent update says that if you're in Batch1, they should be being shipped from the UK to wherever you are, obviously I'm in the UK.

So hopefully by, in fact, you're in Batch1 as well, and you're in your max. - I think so, yeah, I think I am. - So hopefully within seven days, I should have, we should have our hands on it.

I'm gonna flash PopOS on that bad boy straight away and I'll give a full sort of balance review next time we record, hopefully. - Me too, if it arrives. - Yeah, hopefully we'd say the same thing about Compass and then the next-- - Fucking explode.

(laughing) - Or be a blast, yeah. (laughing) - What would you, just to wrap up the Compass thing, what would it take for you to feel like you as a customer had been treated with some respect?

Like what could they do now? Is there anything they could do now where you'd go? Okay, that's acceptable. Not like, oh great, they're gonna give you a load of money back and a trip on a yacht and a massage and whatever.

But just something where you'd go, I feel like they've treated me like less of a cunt. - I think like the window of opportunity was there when they announced the second delay, so from the end of October to now mid-November, 'cause that was their maximum date that they'd set.

And that was their choice to make, to set that date. They could have just set indefinitely or given themselves more room and that is on them. The first delay was the facility, presumably.

So I feel the second one was solely on them. And at that point, even a small contribution or like a small, yeah, something, not even, I mean, the first time we got there, the 500 per machine to cover the electricity costs, it could have been a much smaller amount,

but just a gesture to show that they are, they at least acknowledge that they're in this together with their customers and some kind of investment in a mutually successful future. I think at the moment, they're flying high in a bull market but people don't tend to forget stuff like this

in a year or two, if we're in a bear, I'm not quite so sure. Yeah, I think this will have a big impact. So I'm not convinced there is something that they could do at the moment. Just an effort would be a first step, acknowledging that they've made a mistake, that they'd do it differently if they had the chance

and maybe come up with some kind of solution now to at least meet the customers somewhere in the middle. That would be a first step, but that is, yeah, a long way from way here. Mine would be literally just even just an apology for their behavior would go a long way.

Even just saying, look, I'm sorry, what we've done here, the way that we've managed our expectations has been piss poor, like you said, like we've told you definitely that it's gonna be now and now we've pushed it again.

That's really dumb and we're sorry. Would be something, even if it's not, we're gonna cover your loss of earnings because we fucked up or even we're gonna cover half of it or do something.

It's just, it's more accepting some responsibility for your actions and then trying to make it right in some way. I think what's pissing me off the most is that there is zero attempt like at all and no acceptance of fault and that just doesn't.

I think that's the bit that pisses me off more even than the money is just like, just fucking grow up and just accept responsibility. It's almost like we don't exist anymore and they've got bigger fish to fry and it's like, well, hold on, without these customers and there's a lot of us, what would you be?

And then why are you spending all the money on the advertising? You could, the best advertising you could do is to try and do something for the customers that have supported your business and entered into an agreement and that would be great advertising to come out and say, "Do you know what, we're sorry, we hold our hands up

and we're gonna work with you." But yeah, I'm not holding my breath. - Absolutely, I think one thing that would make a huge difference now would be, I mean, better earlier, but now would not be too late in my eyes, would to publish transparent data on their progress, to actually say, okay, we're plugging in this amount of miners each day

to these and these facilities. Yours is this and this number on the list and you can actually track your progress and that they actually show they're doing something. I mean, obviously that is difficult to verify that, but at least you can have people comment on that and say, yeah, my machine actually went online

on the date when it was supposed to in this timeline and they're at least showing an effort to be more transparent. They have in the past, this has come up as a request from people on Discord.

Their answer was it would be too much work for them to do that. Taking time away from actually plugging them in and the response rightfully so was, well, I hope you have that information yourself already 'cause otherwise you're doing an even, I mean, otherwise the project management there is doing a pretty rotten job.

If you don't have that information readily available and it's just an issue of releasing it or not. So, yeah, we should still like to see that, but yeah. I think, I just want to come in here and I know we've given them a justifiable, really hard time, but I really love the model and I do hope they turn it around.

- Me too, I think it'll go a long way to somewhat decentralizing the hash power if it continues to grow successfully. So, yeah, they deserve everything you've said but I do hope they turn it around.

- And especially competition is good in that market. I mean, seeing river coming out now and hopefully more of these solutions in the future will also on the one side on the cost aspect but also just generally decentralization of the network and also in the way they treat their customers that will bring more competition into the space

which is needed, definitely. - And if they do turn things around, then, you know, we'll be sitting here in a few months and saying, well, you know, they've pulled their socks up and they've accepted the responsibility and we can all move on.

And like you said, Gune, I hope that as well 'cause I think it is a really good model. Let's see what happens. - Yeah, agreed. Like I say, fingers crossed they fix it and it'll be good for everybody if they do.

- Yeah. - Exactly. - Right then, boys. I think we've done enough slagging off there. Was there any other topics that we haven't covered? I think we went through all of the list. Anything else?

- Nothing from me. - No, from my side also, there's already quite a few things for the upcoming month to include then. So really looking forward to that and catching up with you again. - Should we make a commitment on air this time to see if we can get it a bit closer to the first of the month when the index releases

or a bit more on topic. We, yeah, let's just say it publicly and that we can then get slated if we don't pick a date. - I don't know. - The first is Wednesday. So, what are we doing? - This is gonna make you laugh now but I can't do Wednesday evenings.

I could do Wednesday morning. (laughing) - Here we go. Here we go. - First, is it Wednesday? What about the, oh, do you know what? I'm gonna be the difficult one here now. I actually know all of that week.

No, I'll make it happen. What works for you two? - Wednesday, Wednesday. - Or Thursday? - I could do the Wednesday just earlier on. - Okay, fine. - That Wednesday morning. - Okay, this sort of time would be perfect.

- Wednesday morning. - And then I can sort of bang through the editing for the rest of the day, get it out, maybe Wednesday evening. - Edit the dog snoring out. - Yeah, I know, he's such a prick.

(laughing) I'm living in a shoe box at the moment. So, there's literally, there's no actual doors that I can put him anywhere else. So, the furthest away I can get him is about eight feet.

- And that's how far away he is now, just snoring away on his back. (laughing) - I'll edit that out, little bastards. - We'll just bring him a bit closer and we'll just bring him on as a guest.

(laughing) - He can switch with me, yeah. All right then boys, well, good to catch up. I'm gonna get myself back into bed now with the hot toddy and do this editing and get the show out. Cheers guys, speak to you next time.

- Cheers. - Take care, speak to you later.