Bitcoin monthly updates, Mempool, Ledger and open source tech.

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

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

Yeah.

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

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Welcome back to Bitcoin Monthly. In this episode, Q&A tells me I'm perfect.

Exactly how I am. Antimasco's offline to trade shitcoins, mid-show, and we reminisce about tone vase. He has world-class hair and trading strategies. Don't worry, we also dive into the weird and wonderful world of Bitcoin, open source, and freedom tech.

This month's updates include Bitcoin Core, Envoy, Raspberry Blitz, Nunchuck, and Whirlpool Surdrands. We also go into detail about the recent fuck-up from Ledger and why open-source software matters.

If you're one of the incredible listeners who's been sending this show to friends and family or supporting the show with boosts or sending to my Paynim, I wanna say a huge thank you. It really is amazing to see this show grow.

It's amazing to see us constantly in the top 10 on Fountain and it wouldn't be done without all of you. It also wouldn't be done without the show sponsors and I'm very happy to announce I have a new sponsor for the show.

This new sponsor has been on the show a couple of times. He is a personal friend and I have a huge amount of respect for what he's building. He's involved in multiple projects, like LN bits and working with crypto cloaks.

I will be getting him back on the show and this Nim is Black Coffee. Black Coffee has started a new store, S-X-6.store. He's a great guy but I have to be honest, it's not the best website.

S-X-6.store. Not the best website but a fucking incredible product. I caught up with him for a beer the other day and he kindly gave me one of these seed plates. They are Marine Grade 316L stainless steel.

They're simple to stamp, simple to use and at a great price point, especially if you're in the UK as it's a UK company. If you have any questions at all, you can reach out to me or Black Coffee but check them out today and you can use, I have a shill code, let me just find it.

Fucking hell, I can't find it now. Anyway, there is a shill code. It is, here we are. Use shill code MAXB to get 10% off. A huge thank you also goes out to foundation devices. Bitcoin Q&A actually does an incredible job of shilling them in this episode.

We talk about Envoy, their new mobile app and the fact that they have dropped the price permanently to $200. You can use the code bit by bit to get $10 off. If that wasn't enough to sell one of these devices to you, how about this?

They are fully open source. They are fucking beautifully designed. They have the best team in the game and they're a cypherpunk tool that even this fuck we can use. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation devices.com and if you want to ask any questions you can reach out to me,

I'll be open and honest about all the trade offs but I love these things and I love the team. Thank you Foundation for sponsoring the show and making such amazing hardware. And finally, before we jump into the show, a big thank you to FastBitcoins.

They are a KYC exchange that actually sponsors this show despite me shitting on them every single episode. To be fair, our shit on KYC service is not specifically FastBitcoins. If you are going to go to a KYC exchange, if you're going to ignore all of my rants, if you're going to ignore all of my advice,

you're going to give your details over, you're going to have it stored on servers, then you need to make sure that you go to the best exchange out there. You need to make sure that you go to a team that actually cares and does everything that they can to keep you safe.

FastBitcoins has an incredible team and if you are going to go to a KYC exchange, I can strongly suggest them. Go to fastBitcoins.com and if you have any questions about the trade offs or you want any information, you can reach out to me and I'll be open and honest about the trade offs.

Shilling done. Enjoy the show. - My voice is perfect or... - Just you? - Yeah, everyone says that. I get tired of hearing it sometimes, but it's good to hear the truth, I suppose. - Nice for me to have some technical issues for change rather than you.

- Yeah, it makes it up a little bit. - Oh, you've ninja launched on as well. - You see, this is my technical skill. - Hi, everyone. - Antimus is just lurking in the background saying nothing.

- That's gonna say. - Yeah, I haven't heard him. He's probably buying some doge or something. - Yeah. - Oh, maybe he's having technical issues too. - Oh, he's gone offline again now. - Oh God.

- Yeah, he probably is buying some fucking doge, isn't he? - He's like, wait a minute, the 15 minute candle on XRP looks good. Be right back. - Did you ever used to do that for candles? - Yes, I did and I lost a lot of money.

- Yeah, me too. Do you ever think you should listen to Tone Vaze? - Oh, yes, yeah, I can excellent. - You know what though, right? I give Tone Vaze for all his faults, I give him a fair amount of credit.

- 'Cause her. - To be in part of turning me away from shit coins. - Yeah. - Because he used to repeat every single day, the bear market's not over until the shit coins go to zero, which clearly hasn't happened and probably never will happen, but somewhere that resonated after hearing it for like the 97th time, I was like,

hmm, maybe I should look into this Bitcoin only thing and yeah, here we are. So yeah, he does have a lot of faults, but, and you know, I tried to follow his training strategy, which was completely fucking disastrous, but it, you know, played a part in getting me where I am today in terms of Bitcoin.

So yeah, shout out to Tone Vaze. I never thought to say that. (laughing) - Good morning. - Hey, can you hear me? - Can you hear us, I'll follow your shit coining? - Yes. - Excellent. (laughing) - Yeah, that's always a danger when you miss the first minute of the podcast.

- That people slack you off. - He like, where exactly? That's the way it goes. - Yeah. - Deserved. (laughing) - Good morning. How you doing? - Very well, thank you. - Yeah, good one. - We were just talking about Tone Vaze.

- Wonderful. - As you do. - Oh boy. (laughing) That's too early for that, man. - Need a little cold shower for that one, dear. - Yeah, exactly. - Quite the couple of weeks. - Oh yeah. - Have we got any shower talk before we head into the list?

- I think we covered most of it last time and if anyone is interested, they can go back and listen to that one. I'll keep it up for a while. (laughing) - I'll just put the little-- - Exactly thanks.

- The little info out. (laughing) - People are gonna go from just skipping the ad to the start of podcasts to skipping the ads and the shower talk now. - What you've really got to strive for is they skip the whole thing.

That's when you know you've won. (laughing) - As long as they send a booster ground, isn't that right, Max? - Yeah, well, I can't even access them at the moment and haven't been able to for the last month or six weeks or something like that.

- What, have you broken now? - Well, fountain, lightning, just everything. - I mean, to be fair, it doesn't take much to break lightning, does it? - No, it doesn't seem so. To their credit, though, I had a right winch on Twitter and then Oscar Mary reached out to me and we had a phone call and he talked me through

that they're gonna do some updates and that it's coming soon and he was very helpful and he was like, "Look, just let us know what issues you have and we'll work together." So to be fair, they've been really on the ball, but yeah, I can't use it.

I can't access any comments. I can't reply to anyone. I can't like anything. I can't play anything. I can't send any sats in or out. I can't do anything. All I can do is just see the main screen occasionally and then if I do anything else, it says, "Oops, something went wrong."

(laughing) - Nice and descriptive so that you can light start troubleshooting. - Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I can't fucking use fountain, but anyone who is sending in boost, I very much appreciate it, although I can't read them.

- So the 50 million sat booster gram, is that missing now, is it? Have you told Oscar about that? - Which 50 million? Oh, the one that you sent in. - Yeah, is he gonna reimburse you for that?

- I would hope so. Oscar, I hope you're listening to this and that you will sort us out on that, please, mate. - Smooth. - Any non-fraudulent Bitcoin chat? (laughing) - It's only four criminals.

(laughing) I was like, literally, this is like the first year where I've seen basically nothing from the Bitcoin 2023 conference or from the Bitcoin conference. It was a blast, it was wonderful.

So Q&A, can you fill us in or were you blanked out too? - Yeah, so I didn't go to the conference, I haven't seen any of the talks and from what I have seen, it doesn't sound like we missed a great deal.

From the people I spoke to that were there, apparently it was much smaller than last year, but there's still a fair amount of non-Bitcoin related stuff there, some questionable stuff going on on some of the various stages.

I saw some clips of a guy called Hotep Jesus saying that he wants to pay somebody to hold his keys for him. - I'll do it for him. - And he said 5%, I'll do it for 4%. - There you go. Yeah, I mean, I know that they're obviously trying to draw a wide crowd.

Bitcoin magazine is a business at the end of the day. So if you're getting upset about the types of content there, then maybe just, I don't know, don't go if you don't agree with it. But yeah, sounds like it was a lot smaller.

As always, the main signal was on the open source stage. I am looking forward to catching up on some chats from Zellco and from Craig Rowe, and there is a Leech 1 announcement, I think, regarding Mempool that we've got later on in the list.

Other than that, it doesn't seem like there was any groundbreaking announcements. There's been some, another questionable, how can I put it, a large promise from Mr. Mallers again, but we've still yet to see the outputs from last year's announcement, so take that one with a pinch of salt as well.

Other than that, yeah, it doesn't sound like we've missed a great deal, so. What about wizards? Oh, fuck yeah, yeah. Can we talk about wizards? I don't still understand what it's actually about.

I just see a lot of people really angry, and then two cunts wearing wizard hats, and I'm thinking, what is this all about? What are they doing, and why does it matter if they're just putting data on the chain and they're paying for it?

Like, I don't understand. So there's two guys called Udi and Eric Wall, who basically make it their life's mission to piss off all of the maxis, and they're really, really, really good at it.

So they just love winding people up. They love making a mockery of the Bitcoin only ethos. They were on stage in wizard hats, doing some atrocious dancing, and yeah, poking fun. Trying to make Bitcoin a little bit less serious, and yeah, just poking fun at people who take them far too seriously, basically.

And that's about it. The less attention they get, the better. - So they're not really saying anything. They're just going, look, we're wizards. Here's our wizard dance and hat. They're annoying everyone, and it seems to be working, but they're not actually doing anything, it seems.

They're just annoying little fucks who are just lurking around. I don't understand what they're, like, what's their mission? - They're just internet trolls, they're like pissing off. - So why are they there? - The maxi crowd.

Yeah, well, that's a good question. Why are they on stage, yeah. Again, and another reason why I wasn't devastated I couldn't go because they have people like this on stage and it's just not what I'm interested in in terms of Bitcoin.

So once again, signals on the open source stage, open sourcing in quotes, there's a lot of tongue in cheek joke for the end crowd there. And yeah, I mean, yeah, it's just a joke that they're on stage, but ultimately Bitcoin magazine can put on whoever they think are going to sell tickets.

- And to me, I think it's like-- - Shit coins, sorry. (laughs) - We keep talking every time. - Yeah, inside the knowledge, man. - You're a man on the inside. - What's your view on the whole?

- I mean, from what I gathered, I mean, I only saw a few clips and a tweet here and there on this. And from what I gathered, the fact that they were there was kind of their point as well.

It was like kind of saying like the you Bitcoin maxis are like putting yourself on a pedestal and like making fun of other conferences and other shit coins and all that kind of stuff. But like, we're sitting here and that's proof that like kind of this space is just as shit as every other space as well.

And it was kind of like, I don't know, they're like sitting on stage and saying like, yeah, fuck this conference. And like, if they put us on stage, then it's their fault for what we're saying and all that kind of stuff.

I don't know, it was, at the end of the day, I don't know if it was calculated also from Bitcoin magazine 'cause like kind of any publicities, good publicity and on their side, I mean, it's kind of the same thing and they just wanna piss people off.

And I mean, I think they've got quite a fan base behind them as well, I don't really care. At the end of the day, I think, yeah, it doesn't really matter at all. And it's kind of dominating the discussion here as well.

So at the end of the day, I think we just, this one pass and then move on. - Fair enough. - Concentrate on the signal. - Talking of signal, what have we got? - Yeah, the list of updates this month is not as long as it has been in the past couple of months.

Starting off, there's Bitcoin Core 24.1. This is just bug fixes, performance improvements, updated translations, so nothing major there. And then there was the release of Envoy V1.1.3 and this was a big one with TZ last week, last month.

♪ She'll alert ♪ - Oh my God. - She'll alert. - Dude! (laughing) - I love the fact that you just started out with your finger before the last 12 minutes waiting to do that. (laughing) ♪ She'll alert ♪ (laughing) - Hello.

(laughing) - We did it! - So the listeners, neither of us had any idea where we could do that, hand on heart. (laughing) - I think we could not have faked that really. - I finally paid for my subscription and it's got this little hat on where I can put things in there, so I've made that just for you and I...

- That was absolutely brilliant. Can you do it one more time? - Yeah, okay. ♪ She'll alert ♪ ♪ She'll alert ♪ ♪ She'll alert ♪ - I feel like this podcast has gone to the next level now. - Yeah, I know.

I made that myself. - That's incredible. - You're welcome. (laughing) - Oh, man. I've completely lost my trailer thought now. Anyway, yeah, she'll alert. So yeah, big release for Foundation.

We've now released Envoy our mobile app as a standalone Bitcoin wallet, so no need for you to have a passport now to be able to interact with this application. Anybody that's got a phone can download this and start securing smaller amounts of Bitcoin on their phone as you would with any other traditional hot wallet.

Some of the highlights with here is that whilst we have the traditional approach to slightly more advanced users that understand what seed words are, you can generate some seed words for you and you can then back them up in the usual way that you would write them down, stamp them into sale, et cetera, et cetera,

and it works just as a normal hot wallet would. But we've also got a super cool new onboarding tool for absolute beginners that we're calling magic backups. The way that the magic backups work is essentially to get you from zero to your own Bitcoin wallet that's securely backed up in four taps or 30 seconds.

And that's not an exaggeration. It is four taps from when you open the application that you can have your own Bitcoin wallet. So the way it works is obviously Envoy generates a seed for you on your phone.

It's secured in the secure enclave on your phone where all of the other types of secrets are stored. And it's also encrypted and backed up to your iCloud or Google account if you have one and that you're signed in with that.

And then we send an encrypted backup file to the foundation server, which is gonna contain things like wallet metadata, so your labels when we add that in a subsequent release, your account names, if you've got more than one account, your connected devices, if you are a passport user and you use it through Envoy.

So it's orders metadata and stuff that's useful to keep backed up. That's encrypted and sent to our server. And you can do all of that, like I say, in four taps and with literally 30 seconds of your time.

Then if you continue to use the application and then somebody steals your phone or somebody, you accidentally just delete the Envoy app, all you need to do is re-download the app onto the new phone or the existing phone.

Make sure you're signed into Apple or Google and just open the app and it'll automatically recover all of that stuff for you. All the wallet metadata, all your seeds, all your transactions, all of your accounts, et cetera, again, in under 30 seconds.

So obviously, there's some trust trade-offs here. Whilst everything is encrypted that's sent to the two different cloud storage providers, being Apple, Google and the foundation one. So neither of those people can access your data.

We're obviously trusting that. Obviously Apple is a completely closed box. So whilst they say everything is entered and encrypted, we can't verify that. So it's good to be kind of cognizant of that.

This solution is not gonna be for the sovereign team axes and the people who are more than capable of backing up their own seed words. This is more of an onboarding tool. Essentially, it's a Bitcoin wallet that your mom can use.

We see it as a fantastic step in stone to get people onboarded that doesn't take the trade-offs that say other custodial solutions like a custodial wallet where you're completely offloading the trust and your Bitcoin seeds to a third party where you can be rug-pulled at any point.

With this Envoy app, when you're encrypting that back up and the other metadata, and let's say it's being sent to your server, then can people verify that there's no way for you to view it?

Although Apple, you can't because it's a black box. Can they, if they set it to just do it to a foundation? - So just to be clear, the seed is never ever sent to a foundation server. It's only ever sent in an encrypted form and to end to either your iCloud keychain to be specific, which again is where all of your,

if you use a password manager on iOS, the keychain is where all that sort of stuff is stored. And if you use Google, it's called Android Auto Backup, which again is slightly more open, but again is end-to-end encrypted.

So that's where the seed goes, as well as being stored locally on your phone. The only stuff that gets sent to the foundation server is an encrypted file, basically, that's encrypted by your seed that just contains wallet metadata, so accounts, account names, device, information.

- Full KYC details. (laughing) - Yeah, no, definitely not. So it's kind of like the secrets are split, basically, and whenever you ever need to recover, it all just happens magically in the background.

So Envoy checks that you're signed into your iCloud account. It pings the iCloud keychain and says, give me the information that's related to Envoy. Pull the seed back down. Once the seed is back onto the phone, it's hashed.

And then the hash of that seed, which is used as the identifier, is sent to the foundation server to say, here's a hash of a seed. Have you got any encrypted files that match this hash? The Envoy server will check it and it'll go, yep, here we go, here's the file.

That's how we're able to achieve this without us having any personal information on you whatsoever. - Okay, that's pretty clever actually. I like the idea of the labels are backed up. - Yep, which, to be clear, is not active.

The labels are not active in Envoy right now. That'll be in a very soon coming update. But obviously we're laying the groundwork first so that we, as soon as they are active, they're automatically gonna be backed up.

And just to stress, again, no personal information here, you know, it's going to foundation at all, and it's completely optional. If you don't want to use any of the magic backups and you just want to manually manage your own seed words, you can absolutely do that as well.

- And one thing, obviously, to add in this context, excuse me, is that it's entirely open source, right? So anyone can check and verify. - Absolutely, you can see what's getting sent to wear and what format it's been sent in in terms of encryption, hashes, blah, blah, blah, all that sort of stuff yet.

As always, anything we do is completely open source so you can hop onto the GitHub and see how it all works. - And does it run over tool? - Yep, so part of the new onboarding process, literally the second screen, after you decide whether you want to set up a hot wallet or passport or connect the passport, sorry,

the second screen is, you know, how do you want to connect to the internet? Do you want to do it over-tool or do you want to do it over-clitting it? So it's literally the first thing that you do, you have a choice.

- So in theory, if someone uses this and runs it over-tool, there's no leaching of IP or any personal. - Nothing in a tool. - And it's pretty good. It's like, what you say, it's not for everyone 'cause a lot of people can do things themselves, but it's, yeah, I might test that out when I'm shilling Bitcoin to noobs.

- Yeah, we see it as a fantastic way to get started with self custody that kind of offload some of the heavy lifting stuff, like being able to manage your seed words, physically manage your seed words so that you can just go tap, tap, tap, you've got a wallet, great, once you've done a few transactions,

we're going to have some warnings in to say, right, you know, we can see that you're a magic backup user, you know, do you want to manually back up your seed words? That sort of stuff so that we can, the user can grow within the app and become more sovereign over time.

That's the plan. - Nice. - 'Cause, you know, the whole concept of seed words to somebody who's completely new to the space is, you know, it's an alien concept and throwing them into that might not work for everybody from step zero.

So if you are a magic backup user, then you can view your seed words in the settings at any time, you know, they're not kind of hidden from you. They're just taking care of from step zero.

- One question I have is, is this only in combination with a hot wallet on your phone? Or can you also use this if you're using Envoy as a watch only wallet and you have your seed on your passport?

And then you, so you don't need to back up your seed in the cloud or, yeah, so Google or Apple. And then if you just read flash your phone or get a new phone or whatever, and then you can just ping the server again by authenticating with the passport.

So the prerequisite right now to enable the magic backups is that you have a hot wallet, whether you use that or not is completely up to you. So let's say that you just go through the four taps and you set up a magic backup wallet and you'll have an empty account there where the seed is on your phone.

If you've already got passports connected and you've, let's see, you've got a couple of different accounts. You've got an OKOS account, you've got a business account and obviously the device itself is connected so that you can do firmware updates.

As soon as you do the magic backup to create the hot wallet, all of that other metadata and all of your account info is encrypted within that file that comes to the foundation server. So then if you lose your phone or want to recover or switch to a new phone, all you need to do is the recovery process

that I mentioned earlier by making sure that you're signed in and then Envoy will do the rest. Then all of that metadata including all your passport accounts will all be pulled back down.

Crucially here, just want to make it very, very clear that in that scenario, the passport seed is still only on passport. It never ever leaves passport. It's only like the public account information so that you can receive transactions that is already within the Envoy app is what gets back built to the encrypted fashion

to the foundation servers. There's an answer to your question. - Yeah, absolutely. There's the last question I have on this. If I don't have a Apple Google account with a cloud, so if I'm using like a de-Google phone or something like that, can I store this file locally or back it up on a hard drive or whatever in my own setup?

So can I export it? - Yes, so there's two answers to that. The first and foremost is that the official support for the Magic backups is to iOS Keychain or to Google Android or to backup. You can if you're an Android user, the way that the backups work on Android is that it's through the device-wide system backup.

So when you create it, you're prompted to go to your settings and create a device-wide backup. If you've got that configured to go to your own personal next cloud or any other personal cloud storage, then yes, it would go there.

Or yes, you can download that to a SD card, USB drive, wherever you wanna put it. So you've got a bit more optionality with Android as is generally the case, but with iOS, you are a little bit more tied in with the iOS Keychain.

However, if you go with the more manual setup where you choose to leverage your own seed words, as part of that, you will create your own offline backup anyway, where you can store that wherever you want.

So it's exactly the same file format. It's just not automatically backed up to the cloud storage service. So you can, again, put that wherever you want. So we kind of got everybody covered and it's kind of a choose your own journey depending on how self-sufficient and sovereign you want to make the experience basically.

- All right, nice. Yeah, that's a pretty cool feature. - Yep, lots of other cool stuff to come as well. Oh, the other thing that came, small additions that came with this release was biometric or pin authentication.

Obviously now that we've got funds live as a hot wallet within the application, we wanted to be able to secure that. So you can now lock the app by, well, any of the normal methods you would lock your phone.

So Face ID, pin, fingerprint, blah, blah, blah. And you can also now swipe left and right to kind of hide the account balances of specific accounts when you're on the go. So let's say you've got a hot wallet when you've got a couple of passport accounts and you want to use your hot wallet when you're out and about.

Last thing you want to do is open Envoy and you can see that you've got like 2.5 Bitcoin in your cold storage. So you can hide that just with a simple swipe, just left or right so that you can only display the balance information that you kind of want to display if somebody was to look over your shoulder and be like,

you know, oh, you can see he's got a lot of Bitcoin. - Cool, okay. Moving on, we've got the Raspy Blitz V1.9.0. This was released, I think the last one's been quite a while back. They always do, they take their time, don't do a lot of like minor backups in between, yeah, like small incremental steps.

That's definitely nice. This one includes I2P support for Bitcoin Core and also Core Lightning Watchtower. And there's also a couple new apps like Jam for Joymarket and also Lightning Tip Bot.

Quite a few new features to test out there and play around with. It's nice to see their trading. - Now we're on Lightning Chat. Why are channels closing by themselves? What is the technical reason for that?

And is that just one implementation that's doing it? Or is that a problem for everyone on Lightning? Because it seems like that's a pretty massive problem to have if it's for everyone using Lightning.

- So my understanding is that it's an issue you need to LND and I've not heard of it happening with Core Lightning or any of the other Lightning implementations. The reasons for which I don't know if they're clear at the moment, but there have been multiple different personalities on Twitter that have been complaining about this.

Thankfully it hasn't happened to me, but yeah, the only complaint I've ever heard are about LND and yet this could be very, very disastrous, especially if we're in a super high fee environment, like we were last month.

I think when we recorded last month, like the net block fee rate was like 200 sat per bite. So if you get an unplanned force close, that could cost you a hell of a lot of sats and be a massive, massive inconvenience.

So yeah, not a great thing. And I don't know whether there's been a solution worked on, but there seems to be a lot of chatter on it on Twitter, at least in the last month or so. - Yeah, 'cause it would put me up, I'd think, well, okay, I'm using Lightning, although it's a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes

because it's gonna save me on fees, so I'll do that. But then actually, if you do have these force closes in high fee environments, then all of those savings you would otherwise have are then wiped out.

So you think, well, fuck this. It's a pretty frustrating thing to have. And if it is only happening on LND, it would be nice to know what the reason is 'cause I need to set up my Raspberry Blitz again, and I'm thinking, well, I'm not gonna fucking wanna use LND if that's the case.

Why would I wanna set up channels and spend my time and fuck around if it's gonna do that? - No, I completely agree. And just again, Hark's back to the saying that it is Lightning ready for the masses.

When a situation like this arise, I would err on the side of saying, no, it's not great UX, that's for sure. But what I would say is, if you do set up your Raspberry Blitz again, just go for C Lightning.

You're still gonna be able to talk to LND nodes and all of the other implementations, but C Lightning, in my experience, still seem a little bit more stable, and you do get the nice fancy Bolt 12 stuff that you can play around with as well.

- Yeah, I remember you switching over whenever it was a couple of years ago or something like that, for that reason. Okay, all right, I could let it go. Any thoughts on it, Antimus? - No, nothing really to add.

The only question I had there, is it obvious if it was like a kind of error that forced the close, or would you have to know your counterpart to know that they didn't trigger a force close?

'Cause wouldn't it look exactly the same if someone just initiated a force close from one side? - You'd have to know them. - Yeah, you're right, yeah, you'd have to know them, but some of the reports have been where people have had channels between their own nodes, so they're both counterparties, so they know that they have done it,

which is why it's blatantly obvious that they clearly is an issue here somewhere, because you wouldn't force close on yourself, especially if it's like 200 sample pipe for the next block.

- Oh boy, okay. - Next on the list is Nunchuk Android, V1.9.31, and here we have support for batched transactions, as well as ability to configure gap limit. They've been pumping out features over the last couple of months.

It's been wonderful since they open sourced the Android version of their mobile software, so this is just adding to that portfolio of standard features that are good state-of-the-art wallet should have, so here support for batched transactions definitely gives you a lot more flexibility and with the gap limit also,

if you have a deep wallet, definitely something that's important. - Definitely, the batched one's really cool for it, 'cause there's not that many mobile wallets that support this, to my knowledge.

Batch transactions, for those that don't know are the ability to fee to pay multiple people from a single transaction, so you might be spending one UTXO, and then I could pay Antimus Max, Samurai Wallet Foundation, et cetera, all in one single transaction, such that I would save significantly on fees

to be able to do that versus making individual transactions to all of those individual people, which again, especially important, if those transactions are urgent and you need to get them into a next block where the next block fee rate might be a couple of hundred cents per byte, that's soon gonna eat into your Bitcoin stash.

The gap limit is really surprising and good to see. Again, mobile wallets, generally speaking, don't allow you to configure this, so the gap limit is kind of, you can look at it as the window in which the node that you're connected to will search for transactions, so if you have a gap limit of say 20, what that means is the wallet,

after it's searched the address list in order and found a gap of 20 addresses where there are no transactions, it assumes that the wallet is empty there after a little stops searching. Now, sometimes you can have wallets where, for whatever reason, be that intentional or non-intentional, that there are larger gap limits

than that where address indexes are skipped, so you might have some sat to address index one and then nothing until address index 30, depending on how or why you use your wallet for. Merchants are a great example of this where I could go on to a BTC pay server now and generate 50 addresses and not send anything to them,

that would make a massive gap limit for whoever runs that wallet, so being able to configure your gap limit based on how you use it so that the wallet is able to find all of your funds is super useful and it's great to see a mobile wallet adding this one.

- Question on batch transactions, could this be used to gain better privacy in some weird ways? Although you're using the say the same UTXO, but sending out to multiple parties, could you do it in such a way that you split into equal size or relatively equal size amounts and make it more difficult to know what a change address would be?

Be less obvious on chain, which would be the change address. - Yeah, yeah, you could do that. I mean, that's kind of what Stonewall does within Samurai and Sparrow. There's extra outputs.

Some of them have the same size UTXOs, again, all designed to kind of confuse what's going on in the transaction, so batch transactions do kind of achieve that, but the nature of why and when you would use them generally is to pay multiple parties.

So you wouldn't have the same amount go into the same to each different recipient, generally speaking, but yeah, in a roundabout way, yeah, you kind of onto something there. - Would there be a way to like, for a program to run where, if someone's using like Paynims or if you have something where effectively

you can get multiple addresses for the same person, could you do it so that it splits as close to equal amounts as possible by sending multiple payments sometimes to the same person, almost like splitting their payments so that it's more equal to the others?

- I don't see why not. I don't think there's anything that automates that, but yeah, in theory, you know, that's possible and probably wouldn't be that hard to do. - And then final question, when you get the change address, is there any way that you can have more than one change address going back to yourself or is that not possible?

- Yeah, that's what Stonewall is. - Ah, that's what it is, so you have multiple the same. - If I paid you with the Stonewall transaction, the wallet would pick multiple of my UTXOs to be used as inputs, it would pay you one output and then there would be three decoy outputs that all go back to my wallet.

- Ah, okay. And it's always done that same way, it's always three. - I think so, I'm pretty sure there is. And I know that there's always at least two of the exact same amount as well. - 'Cause what I'm wondering is, say I had a UTXO that was one Bitcoin and I wanted to pay you five million SATs,

what I'm wondering is, could I have it set up so that I pay you five million SATs? But I also get 19 five million SAT payments back to myself because now I've got more usable UTXO outputs anyway and it's really fucking confusing 'cause you've just had one Bitcoin go into 20 pieces, which are all basically the same minus fees

and you're like, I don't know what the fuck's happened here. - Yeah, you could do that with the best transaction, definitely. - Is that dumb or is it useful? - Well, in the scenario that you mentioned, you're gonna pay a lot in fees 'cause creating outputs is one of the more expensive parts

of the transaction and obviously you've now got more UTXOs in the future to sign for, which is gonna cost you more in fees again. But if you are okay with that and you think they're having smaller UTXOs, even though it's gonna cost you slightly more in fees, it's better for you, then yeah, absolutely, doesn't seem like a bad idea.

- But not great. - Yeah, I mean, I think one thing to look for there is you're obviously doxing that large UTXO to the person you're paying. So depending on how large that is and if you wanna break that down, you're also doxing all of those outroaches.

- Yeah, so you wanna keep that in mind. And the other thing is also if you're doing that setup that you get multiple addresses from the person you're paying to split up that amount you're paying over, you're relying on that person also not combining the UTXOs afterwards.

'Cause if they do that again, sometimes in the future, it's obvious that that was one payment point. - So with all the fees, you'd be better off just using Whirlpool, putting it through Whirlpool 'cause then it's gonna split them down anyway and sending one of those, yeah.

- I was just wondering if there was a better way of doing it, but obviously no, that is worse. - One thing, I mean, obviously what you can do with this batch transactions is you can also in the wallet just go to your receive addresses or I don't know if in an unchuck you can actually see your receive addresses

and then just copy them out and import them into your batch transaction. So you can build your own Stonewall transaction kind of by yourself if the wallet doesn't support it. But it is pretty complicated and I don't know if I think you kind of do have to get it right so it even makes sense.

So you have the right, 'cause one of the heuristics that's used is that usually the round payment. So if it's like 100,000 sats, that's usually the payment and then if you have like whatever 250,729 sats coming back, that's the change.

That's usually how this is done. So to kind of counteract that, you'd have to have multiple transactions coming back to you or going somewhere else that kind of are all not a round number kind of.

What you can do if you're paying like a merchant or paying online or something like that, you can in most cases also just slightly overpay so that you, I mean, usually they weren't fuss about it, but that way you don't have like a fixed amount or like a round amount.

Good point. That was the perfect segue into the next point, by the way, nicely done. Yeah, well, that was my chance. I can't take credit for that. Well, Paul, server, V0.23.36. And yeah, so this is surge rounds.

This has been going around on Twitter as well. And it's definitely a nice feature set up this just for anyone wondering that they didn't see an update for their dojo or samurai wallet. This is just an update on the well-pulled server.

So there's no change to the clients. This is just a change to the way or to the options that the server has of creating the well-pulled transactions. But Q&A, you've probably got more details on this.

Yeah, so surge cycles. When there's a lot of volatility in the Mempool and fees are kind of going up and down quite a lot. Basically, when you enter a well-pulled round, you have to pledge some, what we call premix fees, which are the minor fees to get your UTX codes included into their first mix.

If you pay, let's say you pay 20 set per byte because that was the current minor fee, but then the minor fees quickly drop thereafter while you're kind of waiting to be included into the first mix.

There's a surplus there where you don't actually need 20 set per byte, let's say you need 10 set per byte now to get into the next block. The well-pulled coordinator will recognize that and go, oh, okay, we can use the surplus of fees here to throw a few more remixes into the mix.

So rather than it being a standard five in five out well-pulled mix, which is how all well-pulled mix is, if there is a surplus, the coordinator will construct what's called a surge cycle where because of the surplus of fees from the people who are entering the pool for the first time, we can afford to use those set

to pay for extra remixes. So that means that rather than it being five in five out, it might be six in six out, seven in seven out, when I think the limit is eight in eight out so far. So if you're in sparrow or samurai wallet and you're looking at some of your recent mixes and you'll go and hang on a minute,

why is there seven people in this mix? Then that's why. The beautiful thing about this is, as Antima said, is you don't need to do anything if you're a spiral wallet user or a samurai wallet user.

You don't even need to update your software. This is all on the coordinator side and based on the mempool fees. So it just sits there monitoring the mempool and if there's enough surplus fees, then it'll throw a few extra remixes in.

So everybody's a winner from this. The people entering the pool aren't paying any more than they normally would anyway, because the sort of algorithm as to how we calculate what's required to get into the mix included into the next block based on the priority.

That's still the same. It's just if the mempool moves one way or the other very quickly, there is a surplus. Boom, we can use those fees and put them to good use. There's one thing that I was thinking about in this context.

When using samurai, this isn't an issue, I think, because there you can't actually explicitly enter a certain fee. You can either choose slow or medium or fast. I don't know exactly what the terms are, but basically those three categories.

And then it kind of chooses a certain fee rate depending on that choice. In Sparrow, can you there choose a specific fee rate for your like premix transaction and then for the first round?

- Yeah, it's part of the, when you do the TX0, which is like the mix set up, you'll be asked what fee rate you wanna choose there, yeah. 'Cause that, I'm just thinking through this. 'Cause if I were like in a situation where I want to be like 110% sure that it'll be in the next block, I might want to overpay double

'cause I just don't care, but I want it definitely to be done. And then I could have done that up 'til now using Sparrow, but now if I do that, that will be used to add additional mixes and then it will be throttled down to kind of the estimated next block fee, but that might not kind of work out.

- Yeah, so I see what you're saying. And I think that's probably just a balancing act that the coordinator needs to find. I haven't had any report yet that mixes have slowed down significantly because of the scenario that you've just played out, but it's a good point.

My guess is that they would only err on the side of caution and only take those extra fees to include those additional remixes using those fees if they're fairly confident that, you know, that the memo is not going to run away with them.

Obviously with the memo, there's no guarantees. And I'd imagine that that is probably a parameter that they're going to play around with and monitor such that, you know, mixes aren't significantly or mixed cadence at least isn't significantly affected and you're not paying a high fee and then still having to wait for ages.

- Okay, right, yeah, that makes sense. And probably the amount of people who have just like fat fingered the fee is a lot higher than the people that intentionally overpay to get it into their next talk.

- Yeah, okay. All right, yeah, I think we're finished up with the updates specifically. If there are people in the back row shouting like, "Ah, there's one topic we were waiting for." This, we've put this under releases.

So obviously what we're talking about is ledger recover, which was included in the update V2.2.1 for their Nano X. So this was on the 16th of May, so last week. And yeah, this caused quite a commotion on Twitter and everywhere else.

Exactly, it was perfect timing to the, I don't know if this was timed or not, but I mean, to quickly break this down, the idea is that they've released a new service called Ledger Recover.

With this, they intend to simplify the onboarding process for new users as they see the largest risk that people or the biggest hindrance for users to take self custody is storing the seat and setting up like a security setup for themselves.

So they kind of wanted to eliminate that. So they have come up with an idea and this is to break up their users' seat into three shards and each of these shards will be sent to one of three collaborators they have or the companies they're working together with.

So it was Ledger and then the two other companies and each of these individual companies will hold one of these shards. So this is a service that you have to sign up for. So it's an opt-in service and it's also paid for, I think the first indication or something around $10 a month or something.

And then if at some point you lose your wallet, your seeds, whatever you cannot recover, you can then authenticate yourself with Ledger and then regain access to your seat. Obviously, you'll have to authenticate yourself at the beginning when signing up so that they can identify you and there's a relation between the seed and yourself.

Yeah, so for most people listening to this, be aware of the criticism. But yeah, I think we can go through the different points that Robert just the wrong way on this, they're quite a lot of them.

- Yeah, yeah, good summary. Seth, for privacy who worked with me at the foundation, did an awesome thread about this. I think it's really useful if I'd kind of run through it as a bit of a more detailed kind of explainer on what's happening and the issues if you guys are all right with that

'cause I think he absolutely nailed it with this thread. So last night Ledger accidentally leaked some of their info on a new recovery subscription service and today they revealed the details.

The core premise of the offering is the ability to supposedly in brackets encrypt shards of your seed phrase into three pieces. Give over your identity and a selfie recording and then trust three different custodians to secure those seed shards for you.

Here is why that is problematic, just in case you need that spelling out for you. In order to use assistance or you have to connect your identity to your Ledger account, giving yet another KYC data from data leaks, which as we know Ledger are not great at securing their customer data.

So now you're trusting a third party with your ID and all of the information on your crypto. Not only can leaks and hacks occur, but the sale of data on users of Ledger will be extremely valuable now and in the future.

Yeah, so it's not just a case of his name and address. It's a case of his, how much crypto you've got and his where it's this seed shards are stored. Isn't that already available? What do you mean, sorry?

Didn't they put this all out into the open? Yeah, they had the big data hack, didn't they? Where everybody, all of their customers' names and addresses and phone numbers were leaked. Yeah, that was what I'd refer into with them being very bad at storing as a customer data.

But to be clear, they were no, like, balance. Correct. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, if I engine that apologies. Yeah, that's correct. So now not only trust in Ledger and authorize third parties with your identity data.

So basically these three entities, I think I believe there's one in America, one in France and one in the UK. So they've got each got a piece of your seed and only two of them need to come together to recover your seed.

So if any two of those parties are subpoenaed by a government and said Ledger, give us that part of the seed and Ledger's partner in the US, give us that part of the seed, your crypto's just gone.

Like it can be swept immediately, subpoenaed, frozen, whatever you want to call it. So the mind-boggling thing here is that Ledger customers are paying 100, however much of their devices are, to generate their seed offline and to store it themselves.

They then offer a service that they pay $10, $11 a month to then give away that seed so that it can be stored on a server somewhere with a regulated entity that is not gonna protect them from a government if they get subpoenaed.

So the whole premise of this service is number one, completely antithetical to why you would buy a Ledger in the first place. And number two, leaves you very, very exposed to a couple of swift flicks of a pen to say bye-bye to your crypto.

And I'm saying crypto because Ledger sports all sorts of shit coins. So yeah, it's just completely mind-boggling as to why anybody would ever use this and why Ledger thought it was a good idea.

The other thing to mention here is that obviously, everything that Ledger does is, or 99% of the stuff that Ledger does is completely closed source. So they've baked in something that sends your seed off the device when a hardware wallet is a device that's supposed to secure your seed and not send it anywhere.

So again, completely antithetical to their business model and it's just left me rarely scratching my head and there's been understandable amounts of uproar on this, hundreds, if not thousands of people who have been ditching their Ledgers.

And I know that all of the Bitcoin only hardware wallet companies in the space have had literally the best week on their record and foundation is no different. - You should be thanking them.

Have you got on your left? - Nope, all gone. Literally, we sold out of every single unit we had. It's gone, it's been the craziest week we've ever had since foundation started. And I'm sure all of the other manufacturers have been exactly the same.

And we've still got orders flying through for when we restocking four to six weeks time. So yeah, I mean, it doesn't take a genius to work out that this is a terrible, terrible idea. I'm sure there's gonna be people who look at Bitcoin crypto and have a ledger as purely an investment strategy

and they're not bothered about censorship resistance and stuff that would look at this and go, Oh, cool, okay, I can offload some personal responsibility because as we know, most of the general population doesn't like personal responsibility.

So they might see this and look at it as a good idea. For anybody who's remotely interested in buying some Bitcoin as a hedge against the government being tyrannical, then don't touch this with a shitty stick.

And actually some developments since the thread and the original announcement, I believe they've now paused this. - Oh, that's right. - My guess is they've had a lot of pushback on it. I mean, there's obviously been, you know, there's pushback on anything on Twitter, but there's clearly been a significant portion

of their customer base that has pushed back against this and said, you know, what the hell is going on? Just going back to the whole closed source thing. Like even if you are a ledger user and you don't opt into this, you're now using a device knowing that there is a capability of that device to send your seed off the device.

Like that would not sit comfortable with me whatsoever. Even if I didn't opt into this service. And again, closed source, you can't verify what's going on on that device. So yeah, the mind boggles as to why they thought this was a good business strategy.

- I do feel we've been overdue for a rug pull from ledger. I keep looking every month and thinking, why does this not happen? Because they've been supporting the Cormack show for a couple of years now.

And I think they're the only sponsor that hasn't rugged everyone. Just like the inverse Kramer, it's long overdue. - He's not got a good track record with his sponsors as a... - He's got a perfect track record.

It's 100% if you take that trial. - Oh man. Yeah, I mean, for me, I think there are a couple of points that were like my biggest issues with this and even aside from like the actual technical risks that you just laid out wonderfully.

The first would definitely be there. And all of these points kind of reflect badly on the company and the way that it's run. Like the communication of this update was an absolute disaster.

They released the update before communicating about this. So everyone who kind of immediately updated and this happens more or less automatically when you plug in your ledger. So they got this update without any announcement by Ledger beforehand.

So the first tweets about this came out from users who were just like, what the fuck's going on? Like, what's this new feature? Then only after that did they actually communicate about this and explained what was going on.

So this was definitely a huge breach in, yeah, any kind of trust towards their customers. They've explained and I'll try to explain how this happened and apparently there was a different update scheduled beforehand and the wrong one was published.

Yeah, take that for what you will. But that's the official statement towards that. So yeah, the communication, that was definitely a huge issue that I had. And then the next point and you've touched on this is the part that this is close source.

So I don't know, I think that's something that we're also still lacking in this space and we're also kind of in our bubble on Twitter and they, I think in the talk you mentioned, they've sold 6 million devices over the last years.

It's absolutely crazy how many people own one of these that have nothing to do with Bitcoin Twitter who will probably never hear about this. But the issue here is that at the end of the day, this was always possible.

Yeah, and that's crazy for me. Like because it's close source at any point in the past, could they have had code in there that sent your keys out? So now kind of being in uproar that their functionality is officially in there doesn't really change the trust model because you don't know what the code is actually doing.

If you opt in or don't, or if it's not announced and you don't know that this feature is there, they can do whatever they want. There's really not much of a difference from beforehand only now you know for sure that that functionality is built in.

So that's my second point. And the third is that you don't have an alternative. So I mean, at the moment it's for the Nano X but the firmware for all the devices will have this included even if you can only actually use it with the Nano X.

Is that so? Oh, I didn't know that. That's the way I understand it. I mean, I'll maybe correct myself if this is false. But even if it is just the Nano X, the thing is if you have one of these devices, you'll have to refrain from updating into the future if you don't want to have this software on your device.

You don't know if it's possible anyway. Yeah, sure. But also, I mean, there will obviously be bug fixes, there will be security holes that will be patched in the future. So if you just don't update at some point, you'll definitely be in a vulnerable situation against hacks or any other vulnerabilities that are in the software,

not just towards ledger, which will be anyway, but against any other. And if you do, damned if you don't then. This has fucked me and to mustn't quite upset about it because I had loads of ledgers and I've given every single person that I've orange pills, not every single person.

A couple of people have had other devices, but everyone who I've just given a device to, friends and family has a ledger 'cause I had a shit load of them and I was like, "Right, here you are, you get set up.

"It's not perfect, but this is much better "than keeping it on the exchange." So now, I've got to go around to all these people and redo their setups for them. Oh, boy. There's quite a few and I'm fucking...

It's the time you're going round and doing this now. Do you know what I failed to mention earlier with the whole foundation update is that on the exact day that this happened, we permanently dropped the price of passport by $59.

So it was like $199. So it was like the perfect storm of one of our biggest competitors blowing their own heads off. And us massively and permanently slashing the price of the device. Like they sold out so damn quick.

It was unbelievable. It was like, I was just sitting there watching the orders rolling. It looked like a shit coin ticker. Yeah. I can relate how long until you haven't back in stock then.

Four to six weeks. Oh, okay. So I can't even get these people set up. What am I going to do in the meantime? I just have to hope and pray that ledger don't rape everyone that I've onboarded and then it's going to be my fault 'cause I've told them to use it.

Some of our resellers do have stock. So if you just had to foundation device.com/resellers, there's people that have got batch twos in stock. But yeah, just to cap off this ledger thing, like the whole story, if you were to design a game of like red flag bingo, like this covers them all, doesn't it?

It's like trusted third parties, KYC making you call storage seed hot. Like the list goes on and it's just horrible. Oh, close source, there's another one. It's just horrible from start to finish.

And judging by the sales, people are waking up to this and this has obviously crossed a line with many people. Absolutely. And one thing to add also, they have announced now that they intend to open source the code from this specific service, which on a close source device is exactly.

So you can definitely be sure that they've done their homework and know how it could potentially be done, but you still have no idea if it's actually been done. Open source theater. There we go.

Yeah. And also in that he was on an interview now during the conference with Peter McCormack. And it was on there as well, MVK and Odell and Harry Suddock. Exactly. That was him. And they were going through this and they hit there.

He also mentioned that, 'cause they distributed this like in from the jurisdiction. So as mentioned before, like France, UK and the US. And therefore the like subpoena risk is like kind of mitigated.

One thing to add here definitely is that all of these jurisdictions kind of follow also like suggestions and guidelines by like the FATF and so on. So like the working relationship between these specific jurisdictions is not much more than theater theater too.

So I would not rely on any of that, even if you were perfectly comfortable with everything else that we spoke about. They should have invited you Q&A so that they had someone who actually built open source hardware.

Yeah. No comment. I've tried enough. Yeah. The panel on that talk was not the best choice. Anyway. Thank you, Ledger. Yes. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Ledger. Yeah. You may be very, very fucking busy for a week though.

Oh boy. All right. Yeah. So we covered that. Oh, there was another announcement at the conference and that was Mempool coming out with their service for transaction acceleration marketplace.

This was something that I think they've been hinting at this on various, like Wiz has been hinting on this on various podcasts like over the last years that they've been looking into ways to monetize the site and this is now their product that they're brought out.

So in a way, it's a service that they offer for you to broadcast your transaction via their site and you can then pay a fee to boost your transaction. I don't know if you have to broadcast via Mempool or if you can broadcast beforehand and then I'm not 100% sure about that.

But the idea in general is if you want to boost your transaction, you can do this via paying a fixed fee that they calculate and they work directly with miners together to have to guarantee more or less that it will be in the next block that their partner, miners, mine.

So obviously you can't be sure that it will be the exact next block because there will be other miners out there too that are not cooperating with them but they'll probably have a range of miners, of large miners that will be working together with them.

So it will ensure that your transaction will be included in one of the next blocks. Obviously you can do this with replaced by fee or if you know the person receiving this or if you're the recipient yourself, you can do this with the child pays for parent but here you don't have the same kind of guarantee or the same kind of assurance.

So you kind of have to ballpark the additional fee that you want to add on to your transaction and hope that that will go through and here they tell you exactly what it will cost to get into the next block from one of their partner miners.

There has been some pushback on this as well by regarding centralization and so on because so many people use the block explorer that they have. So this could at some point lead to a less efficient mempool and to a centralization but obviously now the service is just starting out.

So we're still a long ways away from that but we'll see that's definitely a concern that I share too. - Yeah, it's a couple of pros and cons to this. The pro obviously mempool space is an open source project which are notoriously difficult to monetize.

So this is clearly their first way to be able to monetize to support the project and continue building. So good to see that they're exploring options like that. The difficult part for me is that obviously they've got relationships with different mining pools.

I don't think that that's kind of out in the open at the moment but anytime that somebody uses this service it's done what's called out of band. So if I go and use this service and say, right, I'm willing to pay $15 worth of sats for you and your partners to boost my transaction, nobody else in the mempool can see that.

So they can't take him, take my boosted transaction into their fee estimation. So everybody else's fee estimation that doesn't use mempool space is gonna be hampered by this. If there's not that many people doing it, then the impact to that is gonna be fairly small.

But if it becomes common practice, then you're gonna have like black box mempools essentially so that anybody else that's using a different fee estimation is gonna struggle a little bit because there may be thousands of transactions that have secretly offered to boost their transaction but in the mempool it's just sat at one sat per bite.

So it's gonna make that sort of fee estimation for those types of people a little bit more difficult. I guess that comes back to how often this is gonna be used. And one thing we have seen in the recent months is that there are lots and lots of de-gens that like to use the chain for different purposes

that are more than willing to pay exorbitant fees to be included into the next block for whatever reason. So I can see that there may be a big uptake on this. Ultimately, we'll never know unless they publish the stats.

The other bit is boosting or promoting out-of-band payments to miners puts people who mine in a pool potentially at risk because if I'm, let's say I'm the owner of F2 pool, I'm a mempool space partner and they say, right, we've got this transaction, we're gonna put you $15 worth of sat to boost it.

Then they may or may not pass those fees onto their miners because it's done out of band and their miners haven't necessarily created that block template. They don't know whether they're getting the true share of that additional transaction and the extra revenue that the pool has got by taking the out-of-band transaction.

There is mitigations to this in terms of decentralized block generation called Stratum V2, I believe, but that's not implemented anywhere that I know of. But what that does is pushes the block construction off to the individual miners.

So if you're in a pool, you'd create your own block and then contribute on that and then throw that to the pool. So you still get the same amount of fees, et cetera, based on your hash rate, but it removes that risk that the mining pool itself, the operator, is taking out a band payment to not passing on that revenue

to the people that are participating in that pool. - Exactly, yeah, that's a really good point that with Stratum V2, that would kind of break this system, at least for those pools that would implement that.

One thing I would like to see and I don't, obviously, you'd have to kind of trust mempool with their like announcements of this, but what they could do is they could kind of announce those out of bound payments, so have like a complete transparent book on this, so that if you're a part of a pool, you know how much was paid to that pool

for a specific transaction in a block that was mined by your pool, so you know what your share would have been. Obviously, this, because they're out of band payments that could also be done with just like a PayPal transaction, there's no way of actually verifying this, so you'd have to trust them,

but this would be a huge step towards kind of mitigating the pools, yeah, like fuck over there, their users. - Do you know if, because there's quite a few different sites, mempool space is one of those, where it has like what they call block health, where it generates what the expected block is, and the transaction that would be included

based on those paying the highest fees, and then it compares that with the actual block that was mined so that you can see the disparity between the two. Would that catch the out of band payments?

Would you be able to see that there, because you know in my scenario where I broadcast the ones that by transaction, then use the accelerator to boost it with whichever pool they, that mines the block.

Surely that would, the comparison of the actual block and the expected block, my transaction would show up as an exception there surely. - Definitely, yeah, I mean they could do that if they include their own knowledge of how much they paid out of band, 'cause I mean they have the data, so they would know that like,

the disparage there between the two. Other block explorers do not have that information, so they wouldn't know, 'cause the block looks exactly the same, doesn't it? I mean it doesn't, you don't know that they're, although I mean if you have higher fee transactions in the block pending, and then the block that was just mined

only has one set per byte, yeah you'd know that shouldn't be there. - Exactly, yeah, so you can definitely calculate that, but to know how many fees were actually paid for that block, that's information that only Mempool would have, so they could obviously include that and say, right it looks like there's like a huge difference

between the two, but actually it's a lot closer and it was like this and there was so and so many fees actually paid for this block, but I don't, at least I have not heard that they're planning on releasing that information or somehow incorporating into their block explorer, I may have missed this, but yeah, I haven't seen this.

- It's also worth noting that this whole acceleration thing has been possible for years with individual mining pools. You could go to whichever pool and pay them out of band that a lot of them do have that individual service.

The kind of innovation here is that I'm guessing Mempool.Space is gonna have multiple pools onboarded, so the likelihood that you can get included into the next block increases because you're not waiting for an individual pool to mine the next block, it could be any one of those pools.

I'm guessing Mempool.Space is gonna go right, here's transaction X, they're willing to pay $15 worth of Sats, if any of you mine it, you can have this much and we're gonna take it cut, so I think that's the innovation, but it's also somewhat centralizing as well, so it's gonna be quite interesting to see

sort of how this plays out really 'cause I do worry that this is gonna become a centralizing factor for especially in high fee environments, do you think? - Yeah, I mean, one thing that was, 'cause that was my first thought as well, that that's how they would kind of use it, that they kind of create just a marketplace

and they have different takers, kind of like their pools, and if someone wants to include that, they can take the out of band fee and then include it, but that would just kind of push the fee estimation to Mempool and would not really change, I mean, obviously like we wouldn't see it,

but it wouldn't change the actual mechanics of fee market. - I presume, obviously I don't have any inside information here, but I presume that they have a certain deal set up beforehand with the mining pools to say, okay, if we've got this kind of a situation in the Mempool, then this will be our price for getting into the next one,

so that it's kind of guaranteed that they will do that if someone takes that offer, 'cause only that way can you ensure that if a user comes along and pays for this, that it actually happens, 'cause otherwise if you don't have a taker, then the service doesn't really give a huge benefit.

I thought that the benefit was kind of that you are more or less assured that it will be in the next block of one of their partners. - We can probably find out. I can ask the plebminer. (beep) - I can't get with your trading view taking up too much bandwidth.

(laughing) - I don't know that. (laughing) - What did you do with that? - I don't know what happened. - No idea. I have no idea. It was his doge miners. (laughing) - How much hash have you got now on those things?

(laughing) He's got half the network. He's got one terahatch and that's half the network. - He's with the network. (laughing) - Oh man, where were we? I think we pretty much covered off all of that, then Paul, didn't we?

- He thinks so. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got the gist. - See if I can get inside scoops on it. I'll ask the plebminers. - Yeah, I'm sure that'll be a good discussion actually seeing you and John on plebminer monthly.

It's quite topical. - Mm-hmm, I should ask. We've also got Start 9. They've launched a new offering and that's actually quite cool for people who want to get into the space and earn a bit of, earn some Sats.

Well, they want to get some support agents for their check groups and stuff 'cause I think they've been growing pretty rapidly over the past year. So they want to build out their support team but this will be a different, bit of a different model than like the conventional where you actually employ support agents here.

You will apply and then if you are accepted, you will go through a two day training and from that point onwards, you can sign up for specific shifts, then you get a fixed rate of $21 an hour.

And if you want to work then you can work and if you don't, so there's no obligation to do so. But this way I think they're aiming to get a large pool of support agents who just want to earn something on the side.

And as I have seen in so many different like telegram support groups for various different projects, there's so many people who are doing this in their free time kind of just running through there, answering people's questions and more or less doing like support work. This is quite a cool idea

of getting a large number of people into that group or into their pool and actually then financially reimbursing them. So I quite like the idea. - Yeah, I love this. I think it's a fantastic idea and is how I started out, I guess kind of making a name for myself, like doing free support,

like you said, on telegram in various different chats. So if this was around two years ago and I was still in my fiat job, I'd be jumping on this to kind of well, not only in some sets, but to kind of get some experience in, you know, if you want to move into the Bitcoin space in a support role or customer facing role,

then this is a fantastic opportunity that comes with very little obligations. Like you say, you know, you can sign up for the shifts that you want to do. So yeah, just fantastic idea, loved it.

- Maybe it'll be the new standard. - I think the difficulty they might have is obviously depends on the uptake, but around like the regularity and coverage, they're going to have customers from all over the world.

So they're going to need to attract people or support agents from all over the world to make sure that they've got kind of round o'clock support, especially if they continue to grow at a pace, this, you know, their customer base is going to increase, so is their support traffic.

So being able to attract people in different part, you know, all four corners of the globe is going to be crucial to making this a success, I think. - What's your view on start nine? Have you ever used any of their products?

- I haven't, no, I've never used it. For two reasons, number one, the hardware, you know, if you buy it ready to go is very, very expensive. And number two, last time I checked, being able to do it DIY, you kind of had to build all the binaries from source code, which is, I could probably do it,

but I just didn't want to dedicate the time to it. It just seemed like a bit of a headache. So can't speak from any great experience, unfortunately. - Yeah, same for me here. I have not got one here, but I mean, yeah, I mean, the hardware that is, I mean, it's a full-fledged computer that you've got there, really powerful,

which obviously in this setup is great because they have so many additional apps that you can have running on there. You can use this as your kind of personal server. You can have like your next cloud on there and store files and this can stream videos.

And I mean, this can do it all with the power. Generally, not a huge fan of combining all of this stuff together with my Bitcoin stuff. That's like the bigger issue I have with their setup.

So I was kind of thinking of maybe just getting one of these as a personal server. So for like a bit Warden server and a next cloud server and have like a whole bunch of different stuff just running on there, but having a dedicated node for my Bitcoin stuff, I'd prefer to keep that segregated

if there's so many different non-Bitcoin related apps running on there, just the dependencies and so on. I think they've got a good security team there and they've been getting quite a lot of funding, I think over the last year or two.

So I think they are doing their due diligence on this, but just the nature of the setup, I'm just more comfortable on segregating those tasks. - Yeah, I'm just looking at their server pro the one you're talking about is like $1,700, pretty expensive, but then they do obviously the server light

and the server one, which like lower powered devices, I'm guessing like Raspberry Pi's or something like that. The thing is, even if it is expensive hardware, you know, you're like, oh, I can build it from source and I could probably do it.

Well, you probably could but can't be bothered. And I definitely couldn't and wouldn't be bothered even if I could either. So if someone has a few sets and they're thinking, well, I'd just like something that just works out of the box.

It does seem. - Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you're paying for convenience at the end of the day and proper hardware if you go for the server pro, you know, this isn't some, you know, fake computer this, sorry, this, you know, Raspberry Pi that's kind of as a quote unquote computer, like this is proper hardware

that will be able to run all of the apps that it ships. So yeah, you're absolutely paying the $1,700 is for the convenience of it just plugs in and, you know, you've got all your fancy UI and stuff.

That's absolutely what you're paying for. So if you value that, then go for it. However priced is this realistically. Like in terms of, I think for my laptop, my Starbucks, I paid like 1600 quid or something like that.

And it looks to be relatively similar spec, but obviously it's a laptop with the screen and all the rest of it. If you built this yourself, would it be half the price or like how much different?

- I'm not a massive hardware nerd, but I'm just looking at the site now and it defaults with a two terabyte NVMe storage, it's just NVMe is like the most modern type of like storage you can get runs on an Intel Core i7 with 32 gigs of RAM.

So it's, you know, it's a beefy machine, but as an estimate, I guess you could probably build on a these for like a grand. - Okay. All right. - Yeah. And I think this form factor of these like mini PCs, there are like quite a few providers out there.

I did a bit of research into this like about a year or a year and a half ago when I was looking at new computers. And I think, yeah, you could probably get this for around a grand, but then you'd have to kind of do the whole setup and so on yourself.

There are like other options now with like the mini or something, which is like insane power for what's it selling at like 699 or something, which is absurd. But I obviously like you'd have to do that the entire setup or you can obviously just get like an old computer.

I mean, this is like kind of the cation way of just getting an old desktop, putting it in your closet and having that run, which would be powerful enough. And you can get these for whatever 150, 200 bucks.

- It's the software side though, isn't it? Because then you have, it has its own operating system, which is like made to be simple for running all of the stuff. Whereas if you get a Mac mini or you get something else, then you've got to do all of that yourself, which obviously you can do is just when you have

something out the box, I wonder whether there could be someone sort of sitting in the middle where they could create software that makes it simple to use on a Mac mini or use on something else like that for people who just want something that works out the box.

Because you can obviously do it with like some of these node packages, but then with all of this stuff, you're running it on fucking Raspberry Pi's, which just doesn't seem to make any sense.

- So yeah, I agree, Raspberry Pi's a dead in the water now for me, I wouldn't recommend them for anybody that's kind of starting out now, especially if you're going to be playing around with lightning or co-enjoying.

To correct my earlier self, where I mentioned about like building binaries from source and stuff, it looks like you don't even need to do that anymore. If you go to their doc page, you can download an ISO file and just kind of run this yourself with fairly minimal setup on any hardware that you want.

So yeah, in theory, now you could run a Start9 on some Catan Lite hardware, an old desktop, you could probably get this up and running for like $300, $400, maybe. Clearly again, you've got to do some legwork yourself, you've got to source the hardware, you've got to download the files and get them into the right place, blah, blah, blah.

But there's no kind of terminal stuff from what I can see. It's all kind of GUI based, so it seems like they've made some good strides to help with DIY crowders again. So yeah, if you wanted to, and you put your mind to it, you could probably do this for three, $400.

- Okay, cool. - Which is mental when you think like a Raspberry Pi, I haven't checked the prices lately, but I think, aren't they upwards of $100 each now? - Something like that. - Yeah, I mean, it depends on like the capacity.

But if you want to get, I think you can hardly get the eight gigs, but even for the four or something, you'll be looking at like 80 to 120 or something, which is pretty crazy. - Well, if anyone's listening and they want an eight gig model, reach out to me if you want hardware that is underpowered

and doesn't work properly and that we don't recommend, then reach out and I'll say you want. - You should go into sales, so it was beautiful. - Yeah, it was good. - All right, so last on the list for today, there was a beautiful new guide on Robosets that came out on bitcoin.guide and that was a new one

and it's been a while and it's absolutely wonderful to see that there are new content coming out there. - Yeah, a bit disappointed that you didn't use the, press the button again, Max. - Ah, I'll wait.

(laughing) - How many have you got gone, Spill? How many different books have you got? - Literally two at the moment. - Okay, can you add four? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, awesome. - I don't know, I don't know.

- On last month, I gave an update around the facelift or revamp of bitcoin a guide. Part of that revamp was a community vote that happens roughly once a month where I'll pick three projects or topics that I want to cover off and Robosets won the first ever vote.

So yeah, I put pen to paper or started typing, should I say, and produced a Robosets guide so that you can learn from step zero, you know, an introduction to what no KOC Bitcoin is, why it's important, all the way through, all about Robosets, what it is, how to use it, step-by-step guide on how to buy your first sets,

using Robosets and a full kind of feature set, as well as some frequently asked questions. So felt really, really good to get back into doing some guide writing again. And it was the first time I'd used Robosets for a long, long time, actually I tested it out when they first released and that has come on a long way

as a software project since I first tried it. I would say that the trade that I did in the demonstration for this guide, so I could get all the screenshots and whatnot, was probably under 10 minutes start to finish.

So yeah, it was just really, really seamless. And I guess, you know, lightning is a big part of that way. You're not waiting for block confirmations to for escrows and whatnot at all, almost instantaneous.

So yeah, very bullish and we'll definitely be exploring more with Robosets. So if you want to go and have a read of the guiding question, just head to Bitcoin.gov/Robosets to check it out.

Before we sign off, oh, this week's, this month folks, sorry, should I say, is ongoing for the next almost two weeks. And you can vote between Phoenix, Blixed Wallet, and why am I so bad at remembering these?

I fucked it up last time as well. Phoenix Blixed and Peach Bitcoin, which is another pay to pay market again. So you can head up if you're interested in any one of those, go and pledge a couple of sats to cast your voters to which one you want to vote for.

At the time of recording, Blixed Wallet is massively in the lead. So they're going to take some knocking off the top spot. Just before we sign off on the subject of Bitcoin, a guide, I just wanted to give a massive shout out because I've had, since we last recorded, two community contributions in the forms of guides

from a guy called, or a name, should I say, called BitLevy, not to handle on Noster, and it's also a handle on Twitter as well. Completely out of the blue, he just DM me and said, hey, I've made this pull request and I've done a guide on StackDuo.

I had a lot of it and it was like, it was better than anything I could have done. Screenshot's a really professional, the writing is top-notch. So yeah, he just came out of the blue and said, I've made this guide on StackDuo, kind of put it on the website.

So obviously I was all too welcome for that and really good to see that the kind of revamp and the sort of more community push that I've had with the website to get more people involved is resonated with at least one person in the form of a pull request.

So massive shout out to him for the StackDuo one. And also last week, again, completely out of the blue, he's put together a guide on how to fork an open source project. So in this one, he uses Bitcoiner.guide as an example of an open source project and the steps that you would take when using GitHub and a program called VS Code,

which is like how you would interact locally with different open source projects. He taught you through what it all is, how to do it and how to make your first pull request to any open source project.

It doesn't have to necessarily be Bitcoiner. Guide, he just used that as an example so that he could make a contribution as he has as well. So yeah, dudes fast becoming a legend in my eyes and he's just doing all this stuff completely off his own back and a bit of a spoiler alert.

There's another one in the works for another one of the peer-to-peer markets. So that will probably, that will definitely be published by the next time we record as well. So just wanted to give him a massive shout out and I've also made an addition to all of the contributions that he's done where there's a button at the bottom

of each guide where you can send him some tips directly to his wallet. So if you read the guide, you like it, please share it and please send him some stats because, you know, he's clearly put a lot of time and effort into these.

- Man, that is absolutely wonderful to see. - That one's my heart, wonderful, cold shit coin of heart. (laughing) - Any shields from you, Antomist? I saw you were possibly releasing something new the other day.

- Oh yeah, I like this, I like the look of this one. - Yeah, I mean, just playing around with some ideas of releasing a new product for a backup steel plate. Next to the steel QRs that we offer at Volcan 21 and this maybe with a base two encoding.

So like a binary, which obviously is a very small form factor which is great so we could use it with the same plate dimensions so that all the accessories will be compatible and this would just be nice for people who have gotten a lot of requests over the last year from people who want

to have a backup solution from us that it does not rely on the CQR standard so just to have an alternative there that can be easily encoded or decoded manually. - So could you spell out the differences between, keep it at high level but what the differences between, what you guys currently offer in terms of the CQR,

what the more familiar option, I guess, or more commonly used option where people would just kind of stamp their words in and what this new solution is looking to do? - Yeah, so what we currently offer is the steel QR so this is a steel plate and it has like a laser engraving of a CQR or of a QR code template

and then the seed signer and also now a whole range of other hardware wallets and signing devices export a QR code and the standard is called CQR and that you can then manually punch onto these plates and then scan it with the device.

So it's a very rapid importing process but obviously it's not very easy to manually decode so you'll need a device to retrieve your seed from that. And obviously there are a few other solutions that are pretty common.

The most standard is just actually physically hammering each letter of each word into a steel plate. There are also solutions where you have like a grid, like a matrix on one axis, you'll have the one to 12 words or one to 24 words and on the other axis you'll have the alphabet and then you'll just kind of punch each character

for each word into this matrix. That obviously is not very space efficient and you'll need a big plate to do this. And so there is another concept and I definitely will not take credit here for the idea.

This is a concept that's been around for a while and there are also other providers of backup solutions that rely on this method but it is a base two encoding so... - Fucking cloner. (laughing) - Can we please have a button that says cloner?

(laughing) - Yeah, I'll make one. - Be real good at the answer, continue, sorry. - I'm a cloner as well because I'm not the first podcast to ever use a microphone. - Exactly, that's the way it goes in a year.

- I don't know. - Yeah, so how this works is with a bit 39 word list, I've got the range of seed words that are available for 2048 words in total and each word has its own index number. So this is a four digit number.

So you can identify each word by its specific number and here the idea is to secure this number instead of the word and you can represent each number not just by writing down the four digits but encoding it in a base two encoding.

So what you'd have is basically you have on this plate, you have a also a matrix grid on the one axis, you have the words from one to 12 or one to 24 and on the other axis, you basically got the, always the square of two all the way up to 2048.

So you've got two or something with one and then two, four, eight, 16, 32 and so on all the way up to 2048. And here you can punch then each grid box that represents that number on the bit 39 word list onto this grid.

It's pretty, it's not that easy to explain but it's a very simple process, you just have to like kind of look up the number. If it were, for instance, the word 49, here you'd say, all right, I'll punch the 32 and then plus the four, so then you're up to 36 and then you need another three so you punch the two and the one

and then you add up those numbers and then you get to the 39 and then you're ready to go then you move on to the next word. So this is quite a bit of a roundabout to explain but this is an idea that I've put out there on Twitter.

This is not a product that we're providing at the moment but we are thinking about coming up with it. An alternative solution, if it will be this or something else to complement the steel QRs and let's see where that takes us.

- So do you see the main benefit of the latter approach with the binary numbers as being plausible deniability or is there something else that I'm kind of missing? - And obviously, the size of the plate you can get this a lot more compact.

- Yeah, no, the plausible deniability is not really a big thing. Obviously there is maybe one layer of that but I think in the combination we'll also have like a notes field on there and you'll import like the master fingerprint and so on.

So I think that is not a huge leap to encode this and to decode this but I think the main reason for going for this was the form factor that just that we can use the same plate size and that it is a way to relatively simply like retrieve your seed without like relying on a device that can actually scan the code.

With like the other plates that you see out there that have like this alphabet grid or so on, they tend to be very large. And also those where you stamp the actual characters of each word into them, you'll need like a whole punch set and so on to go along with this.

So like the price escalates pretty quickly. So this is like a good trade off in my view of something that kind of has the best of all worlds. - So if you're in a pinch and the government turns tyrannical you need to hop across a border.

This one will be fine for nature's pocket. - Yeah, I guess so. I mean it looks at the moment. - You can't really seriously really thought about it. - Yeah, I was like, did he not get what I was saying or?

(laughing) - Yeah, I guess so, yeah. - Maybe that could be a tutorial video for you for the website. - Finally enough. (laughing) - Here's one I made earlier. - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah, well, I'll think about that.

I'll come back as you will speak about that next week. I mean it's probably fitting for my activities over the last couple of months. (laughing) - Love to see it. And yeah, they love to see the innovation from you guys over there.

So keep up the good work. - Right, well, on that bombshell, shall we end the show? - Before we do, can you just press the button one more time? - Which one, the ballpark or the shit was that?

- Surprise me. (whimsical music) - Chill, I'm out. (laughing) - Let's go. (laughing) - Thanks guys. (laughing) - Adios. - Bye. (laughing)