Bitcoin not buttcoin. Demonetising butt plugs with MTC

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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.

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

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

During the last Bitcoin monthly, I spoke to Brother Rabbit and Antimus about border wallets. This was a talk that MTC gave at the Bitcoin Vitra Tree. It absolutely blew me away. I immediately wanted to get the exclusive scoop on this and speak to MTC about it.

I'm really excited about what this can do for people who desperately need to leave their country and need to keep their wealth in their heads. This makes things so much easier, and it allows people to be very, very creative going forward.

MTC has teamed up with Super Fat Arrow. Super Fat Arrow, you have heard of previously on this show because he teamed up with Bitcoin Q&A for a previous project that we covered, which I will put in the show notes.

It blows me away to see people of this caliber giving their time to Bitcoin. This is an open source project, and although there's a lot of bullshit going on in the space right now, these guys are giving me hope.

Before we dive in, I just want to say a couple of things. Firstly, fuck you MTC. You didn't use headphones during our entire recording, which means that my editing was disgusting. It is now 10 o'clock at night on a Saturday, and I have been working on this editing since 9 o'clock this morning, non-stop.

So fuck you MTC, but also thank you for creating border wallets. I'd also like to say thank you to everyone who has been reaching out and giving feedback on the ungovernable misfits site and clothing, and also everyone who has been sending boosts and messages on fountain and breeze.

I really do appreciate it. It is awesome to hear from you guys. I'd also like to thank my sponsors. I'd like to start with my anonymous sponsor. This is absolutely incredible to me. I don't know who you are, where you're from, or why you've done this really, but it has made a massive difference to my life.

It is incredible to see the support and it really helps me build and improve this show. More than anything else, it just shows me that this show is appreciated, and that means the world to me.

So thank you so much, and although you've said no, if you ever do want your 20 seconds slot, you are welcome to it, you have paid for it, so just send me in some text, and I will be happy to read.

Next up is FastBitcoins. FastBitcoins have been sponsoring this show for over six months now, and they have such an awesome team. I know I slagged off all these KYC services all the time, and yes, I do suggest if you're listening to this show, honestly, you should try and mine at home, or buy KYC free,

that really is the best way to start going forward. However, I know not everyone's gonna do that, and if you're not gonna do that, and you do want those gorgeous, tasty sounds, especially at these prices, there really is one place that I suggest, and that is FastBitcoins.

I approach FastBitcoins because I know that their team are solid, and they are proper Bitcoiners. They do everything that they can to make you get your sats off exchange. They do not want to custody your sats, they want you to hold your own keys, and they want to push this whole space forward.

They are also always at the bleeding edge, they were the first exchange in the world to integrate lightning, and I have a huge amount of respect for them. If you want to stack sats today, go to FastBitcoins.com, and if you want to reach out to me and ask me about the trade-offs, or get me to introduce you to the team,

you can do that as well. I'll always be happy to help any of my listeners. And last but not least, foundation devices. Foundation devices are making my favorite hardware. They make the passport, which is a beautiful signing device.

It is fully open source, which is so important to me, and a topic that we cover at length in this episode. Without open source, this whole space does not move forward. It is so important, and this team is dedicated to keeping all of their products open source now and going forward.

They also make it incredibly easy to use, they give you an amazing UX and a beautiful design. I recommend these to all of my friends and family, and I've not had any issues onboarding them.

It is so simple to allow someone to secure their keys, get those sats off exchange and onto a passport today. Go to foundation devices.com, and you can get an additional $10 off if you use the code bit by bit.

Again, if anyone has any questions, you want to know the trade-offs, you want to hear from my experience using this product, I would be very happy to share, and if there's anything that I can't answer, I will pass you on to the team.

That's foundation devices.com. Enjoy the show. Sweet. We're recording. We should be fine if we're recording locally. Do you know, it's good to see you've got all your audio technical problems sorted out, mate.

Finally. Do you know what, I jinxed it yesterday 'cause I recorded with John, and then I was like, "Fuckin' hell. "That all worked nice and smooth. "Everything's fine. "I've got a new router, "got a new internet provider, "running two laptops, "got all the different stuff.

"I've got everything. "I've got all the gear, "and no fucking idea." There we go. Yeah, well, some things should never change, Max, and you having technical issues is one of them. (both laugh) Well, I'm now running this from my phone, tethering from my phone, 'cause the new router obviously just doesn't want to work at all,

so I think that was my problem there. But anyway, I wish I could say it was nice to see your face, but... Well, I have a video and you're not... What are you doing? Yeah, I know. Are you recording on the buff again?

Yes, always. Fair enough. I could have my video on, but my laptop is closed, and I've got this nice big screen and this set up, and you're not missing much, as you know. That's fine. Do you want me to stop my video so that you don't have to...

No, it would be preferable. It's quite disturbing. (both laugh) (both laugh) Okay. Don't you pass it. Yeah. No, in all seriousness, it was really nice to see you, mate. It was really fucking nice to just catch up and just be around proper people.

It's been a while. It has been basically a year since last meetup, really. Yeah, yeah, it was awesome to see, mate, and hang out with everybody. What a glorious weekend. It was awesome, wasn't it?

It was so good. How were all my bits that Snick gave you to give to me and the fucking start? Yeah, they're currently bidding pretty nicely on... Play the market. So, yeah, looking forward to...

Oh, then enough to take the wife out for dinner, so thanks for that. Now, there's been tips, hopefully, for you, don't worry. You'll get them, just, you know, if you've got an address that you want me to pig them over to, or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, no, I don't. But one day, that's what I aspire to, is one day having, like, a home and a bed and, you know, all those sort of things, all those luxuries, maybe even a chair. Keep dreaming, mate, you know, and it'll happen for you.

(both laugh) We'll see. We're talking for a reason. You did an incredible talk. Thank you, brother. Incredibly long and dull. (both laugh) No, yeah, blew my mind, honestly. 'Cause you sort of told me in the background that you had something going on, and you sent me the website thing in, like, typical max fashion.

Like, I clicked on it just, like, made an assumption within, like, one second. I was like, yeah, seems cool, I didn't really look into it. Then you did the talk, and this border wallets thing is something that is a real issue for millions of people, hundreds of millions of people.

And it seems like you've come up with a very clever way of helping people move and install their wealth, and, yeah, I just wanted to get into a little bit of, firstly, how you came up with this idea, and then maybe we can go into how you've managed to rope in Super Fat Arrow, because it's a pretty difficult thing to do, technically,

and you obviously need a dev like that, and he seems to be doing some incredible stuff in the space at the moment. He is a terrific asset. So, yeah, love to talk about that. Okay, so winding back to how did I have the idea?

I guess I'd been mulling on it for a few years. I am what, I think, Marty Bent would describe as a visual learner in a map, mentioned this on our show this week, and he called out this idea of border wallets being applicable for those kinds of people, and I guess it's, therefore, stands to reason

that I'm the type of person that the idea is suited to, and why I would have come up with it, or someone like me would have come up with it. I suppose I'd been thinking for a while about how it might be possible to hide stuff in plain sight, and I kind of want to caveat that straight away by saying that what we've come up with

is a solution for border wallets, so we can explore what this idea is, but what we've come up with is built on a tool called the egg, the entropy grid generator that creates what we've classified as entropy grids.

And I suppose, when I talk about the fact that I was thinking about how I potentially hide my words in plain sight, the entropy grid was the solution to that, but we can explore why it's not a good idea to put it in plain sight and disclose your injury grid to people.

But I've been thinking about, you know, whether or not, as you kind of become familiar with how Bitcoin seed words are used to build seed phrases and that you have the ability to generate these things yourself.

I mean, for a while, as a Bitcoin user for the first couple of years, I had been using a, I think it was a Trezor was my first one, and Trezor had generated a seed phrase for me. And to me, it just looked like, I can't remember whether it was 11 words or 24 words, but sorry, 12 words or 24 words,

but it's just this series of non-contiguous words that don't have any relational bearing to one another. And therefore, if you want to be able to memorize them, then you have to apply yourself to memorizing these words and making sure you write them down in the right order, you know, making sure you store them correctly.

And when I came up with the idea of the entropy grid, which was way before I'd go out in touch with a super for our area and he'd created the basis for us to generate these things really easily and with extremely high degrees of entropy, I was thinking about how I could create them myself.

It was never really something that I had thought I would end up solving and releasing a product for. Back then, it was just, you know, how could I have something that I could put maybe on my fridge that had a load of jumbled up seed words on it?

But actually, I knew that what pattern could potentially unlock a viable seed phrase. And it was only, I suppose when I learned that you could put these seed phrases together yourself that the idea started to stick a little bit and then it really kind of made me think that it might be a problem worth solving

when as a chap on Twitter, Igor Petrov had blasted out on his, in fact, I responded to it on a nuked account and his accounts nuked as well. So there's no evidence this exchange happened now, unfortunately, but he lives out in the US and he wanted to travel to another farflung part of the world.

And he expressed the problem that he had, which was he didn't want to carry a hardware wallet with him and he didn't want to carry his backup seed phrase with him in physical format and didn't want to, you know, expose that to, you know, cloud storage or USB or anything.

So how could he do it? And I just, you know, on my phone, kind of back at the fag packet type diagram laid out the concept of what I was thinking an entropy grid could do and how if you were able to jumble up all 2048 Bitcoin seed words, sufficiently, randomly enough, you could then create just a pretty simple pattern

if you wanted to amongst that seemingly jumbled mess of seed words to create a viable seed phrase that could be used to carry a wealth. And therefore, if you were able to securely store that entropy grid, that list of jumbled up seed words from one place to another, if it's discovered by, let's say, a border agent

or somebody, you know, the quintessential evil-made attack, then you have an extra layer of defense before your seed words are essentially exposed. So you can kind of think of it as a significant upward difficulty adjustment for an evil-made, but a significant downward difficulty adjustment for you to memorize.

And after I heard explain this to you, or he seemed to be quite excited about this idea, but then COVID struck and you and I spent a lot of time chatting over that period with both kind of how things sort of played out and, you know, life kind of gets in the way.

And I didn't, well, to be frank, I didn't know how I could get potentially this solution built. I'm not a coder and I didn't know what kind of coder I would have to find to put together some kind of tool that could allow me to generate entropy grids easily and securely and repeatedly, you know,

on the basis that it could be something I could release and other people could use. But then our mutual friend, Bitcoin Q&A, announced the launch of the seed tool and props to him and Superaro for that.

They've put together a really cool tool that you can use to just explore all sorts of different aspects associated with building seed phrases, checking addresses, et cetera. Just a brilliant, brilliant tool with lots of very cool features and functionality built into it.

Again, another FOS project. - Anyone listening who hasn't checked it out, I've done a whole show on this. And it is just like a mind-bendingly useful tool. It's the first time I'd heard of Superaro.

Again, like most things Q&A said to me, "Oh, I've done this cool thing." And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I'll check it out." Whatever, it didn't really look at it properly. And then once we'd finished the show and he's explained quite how powerful this thing is, I was like, "Holy fuck, this is like a proper game changer."

And I think that is the first time that many people had heard from Superaro. So, yeah, I'm glad that that has happened. And then that's led to this. - Yeah, well, as soon as I saw it and started playing with the tool, I thought whoever has built this will be able to build what I've got in mind for this border, what it's idea.

So I reached out to Bitcoin Q&A and I said, "Look, this is the idea." He seemed pretty excited about it. Hopefully he wouldn't mind me saying. And kind of said, "You should have approached me sooner and you could have had this out earlier."

But it's just how things kind of turn out sometimes. But yeah, so we... He Julie did reach out to Superaro for me and SPA responded, seemed keen. And for the last three months, we've been knocking this tool together, the egg, and we just released it.

So, I mean, for the benefit of anyone who hasn't kind of seen my tweet thread on it, or the border while it's website, what we're essentially tapping into is this phenomenon known as the picture superiority effect.

I mean, the bottom line is, humans have got the ability to recognize patterns and shapes far more easily than they're able to remember words, sorry, not recognize. So, I have the ability to remember patterns and shapes far more easily than they're able to remember words.

So, I've got, I put a little test in my thread as well, but like anyone who's trying to kind of test out an idea, I went to see whether or not this thinking that I had that it would be easier to remember patterns than words.

And I found some evidence of it in this picture superiority effect. And I've linked on our website to some studies that have shown that we are much more able to remember patterns or shapes than we are words.

And one of the studies looked at the fact that, you know, if you showed a group of people a bunch of random words, including the word circle, after 72 hours or more, 10% of them would be able to recall that they had seen the word circle.

Whereas if you showed them a group of shapes, including a circle, 65% of them would be able to recall that they'd seen the circle more than 72 hours later. So, you know, anecdotally, this bears out as well, because, you know, we tend to remember faces far more easily than names, which makes sense,

given that our eyesight and facial recognition capabilities predated our use of language. So, if you wanna test that out on yourself, you know, have a look on our website at boardawallist.com and you'll see a little test and see whether or not, you know, that applies for you.

So, yeah, so that was kind of how the idea was born. And yeah, finding Super Fat Arrow was just, I struck gold there, really. To say, you know, I was kind of blown away by his abilities would be a massive understatement.

And, you know, example being by the end of the first weekend, so I think we got in touch like on the Friday. And by the Sunday afternoon, he'd created a version 0.1 prototype of the entropy grid generator.

And yes, which was awesome. And then over the next few months, he not only helped to flesh out more features and capabilities in the tool, but massively helped with my understanding of things as well.

So, I know he'll be listening to this. I just wanna take the opportunity to say thank you, mate. I feel really, really fucking lucky that our paths ended up crossing and big thanks to BitCon Q&A for putting us in touch.

I feel like this was just made to be actually and it's been so cool working with him. He's a really generous guy with his knowledge and his time and his talent is just extraordinary. So if anybody's looking for a developer, he I'm sure is absolutely best in class for this kind of thing, then reach out to him.

You wouldn't hesitate to recommend him. He's been so, so good to work with. So, yeah. So three months later, we've released a tool which is now available free of charge on borderwallets.com.

It's free open source software. You download it onto your machine. You can download it onto the laptop, desktop. You can download it and use it on Tails. You can use on Linux, Mac, Windows.

You could use it on an Android phone if you wanted to. We've got an iPhone kind of what's called a progressive web app version coming out soon as well. But you wanna use it in an air-gapped environment, air-gapped offline setting.

It runs in the browser, but it runs offline. So, you don't need to be connected to the internet and we don't recommend you connect it to the internet while you're using it or, indeed, necessarily at any point afterwards either.

It just doesn't need to connect to the web after you've downloaded it, even though it uses the browser. And using some really clever shit that SPA built in, a tool from Gibson Research and another called the Aadam, what's it called, the Yates Something Shuffle Algorithm?

I'll figure it out in a minute. But we are able to create on-the-fly... - Fishy eights, my ears. - Fishy eights shuffle algorithm. Yeah, we're able to create almost instantaneously entropy grids, which is a effectively two-page PDF that gets produced that is 128 rows deep and 16 columns wide.

So, all 2048 bit 39 compliant seed words, although, in fact, it's the first four letters of them, all three letters if it's a three-letter word, 'cause some of them are. Gets spat out onto a two-page PDF in a completely randomized and massively and tropically secured way.

And that then does the heavy lifting of finding the entropy for you, the randomness for you. You know, humans, despite the fact that we like to think that we are unpredictable in many ways, are just tragically not able to create randomness really at all.

And so, instead of placing the burden on the user to try to create entropy in the seed phrase and putting the words together themselves, we create the entropy in generating the grid and there's two types of grid that we produce, and I'll talk about those in a second.

And then the user applies, whatever complexity of pattern they deem appropriate, something they can remember. I provided an example in a demo video that I've put together on our homepage.

But maybe something that's meaningful to you, maybe that you might think is not too easy for somebody to guess if they were to find your entropy grid. For example, you know, the evil mode attack, you wouldn't wanna, for example, start at cell A1 and go down 11 cells or 23 cells to get the first 11 or 23 words of your seed phrase.

And then, of course, the last word is your checksum, which needs to be calculated. And again, that's something we provide within the tool. But the, the, the, the entropy grid provides massive entropy in the case of deterministic grids.

We have 128 bits of entropy, which is, I think, a bit kind standard. So effectively, like flipping a coin 128 times. And with the non-deterministic or maximum entropy grids, we have 19,580 bits of entropy, which is just astonishingly high.

My preference is using the deterministic grids because they provide, at the bottom, a 12-word recovery phrase that you can use to regenerate the grid at a later date if you want to, which may sound a little bit counterintuitive because we're providing you with a means to carry your Bitcoin across borders more safely,

using a pattern that's in your head, an entropy grid that's either stored securely digitally or maybe printed physically. But for me, it would be maybe secure digital storage with an encrypted file sitting on something like Bitwarden or another secure online storage service.

The option with determinism is that you can use this 12-word recovery phrase to recreate the grid if you don't want to have to carry a digital file. - And because we are-- - Yes, and you can, yeah.

- Sorry mate. - Go ahead, yeah, yeah. - No, I'm rumbling on anyway, so you-- - Yeah, just before we get too deep into the weeds, so a few things, the fact that you can back it up and you can recreate it. - Yeah.

- Although, like you're saying, it sounds counterintuitive, actually, that's really fucking good because just as like belt embraces, you can then have that stamped into steel or printed out or wherever you want, and that could go to a location just if shit really hits the fan, you have that backed up.

- Yeah. - So I think that's important. And then what's nice as well is you can then have your pattern for that grid backed up either in a separate location or in some clever way or encrypted, however it is you want to do it physically or digitally and you can separate these out.

So as long as that's done correctly, then that's very secure and you know that even if you forget or you lose your copy, then you're still fine. You can always get that back, which I think, especially if you're traveling with all your wealth, which some people have to do, then that's really important.

So that's a nice feature. And then to take another step back is really why this is useful for people. 'Cause I think some people, especially if they're not in this space or they're like new listening to the show, they might be thinking, well, this sounds a bit of a fucking faff, doesn't it?

You know, why would I bother doing that when I can just, you know, use my sign in device, I can just use my passport, whatever it is that I'm using seat sign there. That just sounds a lot easier.

And like, yeah, potentially it is. But the fact is that there are millions of people around the world who are either fleeing nightmare governments or fleeing domestic abuse or fleeing God knows what other reasons.

- Yeah. - We've just had two years or more of seeing exactly how bad some of these governments can be. Our conversations over the last few years you know, I know personally, myself, I was thinking, I think I might have to leave this country, which is like a crazy thing to say the UK, like relatively speaking, it's very, very safe here.

But, you know, you can see how bad things can get. You can see that at the drop of a hat, you can suddenly become a criminal. You can suddenly become hunted. You can suddenly become an outlaw.

And what are you doing that situation? And, you know, it's something that I've thought about for a long time when I'm thinking, how would I do it? Because I'm comfortable with my setup as long as I don't have to leave.

If I've suddenly got to leave in a panic, I'd be fucked. That's why this is so important. Having it reviewed and used by more people over the coming months, having people come up with techniques and maybe having a sort of bit of a guideline of like, how would you do this?

And then maybe to practice it, okay, it's probably not a good idea to put every single sat straight into this like day one. But you could say, let's do a trial run. UK government suddenly mandates something fucking mental.

You're no longer in control of your body. And anyone who stands up and tries to fight for freedom is either gonna be put in jail or God knows what else. What do you do? And people can practice and get good at this so that you have that comfort that in the back of your head, you can say there is a fucking amazing tool here

that is available and I can flee if I need to. And so can everyone else in the world. And I don't think we can overstate quite how powerful and important that is. - Well, I've got to say, I agree.

But you know, the market will help us figure that out. You know, and I welcome all kinds of feedback on this and hopefully we can make it as good as it possibly can be. You know, you talk about how much of a faff this might be compared to other more established solutions.

I'd say, yeah, this has got use cases for those that need it. And if people who live in very politically secure countries and you have very secure personal home situations, then they probably don't need to worry about memorizing their seed phrase or anything like that.

And therefore, you know. - Until they do. - Well, that's the thing, you know, as you say, things can change quickly. And this, because, you know, we're building this on Bitcoin, right? We're building it around bit 39 with the seed words we're using, all of the seed words are available within bit 39.

And, you know, hopefully faithfully, you know, recreating it in an intropically secured way. And hopefully as more eyeballs come on to this, that will be proven out. And as the code gets reviewed, you know, it's there to be inspected and commented on.

But there's no reason why you can't have this set up for yourself to have as a backup should you need it. You know, you can carry on using your cold card or your passport or your seed sign or whatever.

And have this in your sock drawer for when you need it, if the shit does hit the fan. But for some people, yeah, I mean, I tried to run the numbers on this, Max. And I found that there were, by mid-2021, so mid-last year around about 85 million people had been forcibly displaced worldwide.

Now, clearly, a small proportion of those people would be Bitcoiners, you know, but possibly a very timely number of those people. But displacement happens. And if you are somebody that's trying to carry just the shit that you own on your back and any wealth that you have, then there's a very small chance you're going to be able

to get any meaningful wealth out with you and carry with you and transported across borders successfully. But if you use a border wallet, then your chances of being able to carry a wealth in its entirety, in your head, and on an encrypted entropy grid that's stored on a secure server somewhere, are massively high.

In fact, just even carrying a 12-word recovery phrase to your entropy grid that looks like a Bitcoin seed phrase. And it could actually work like a Bitcoin seed phrase if you want it to. It's actually a valid wallet.

You could put a little bit of dummy money in there, right? So, you know, and potentially you could give a copy of this to each member of your family or people that you leave behind and a copy of the patent in each family member's head as well.

You know, Uncle Jimmy, cousin Stevie, whoever, depends, they could each have their own wallets from, you know, the same grid. So, the options are pretty unlimited, actually. But, you know, so that's forcible displacement.

You've then got around five million people in the state currently who identify as digital nomads. And about 17 million who aspire to have that kind of roving lifestyle. So, if you're constantly on the move, how are you securing your stack?

Well, you could potentially memorize your seed words, but it's not that easy to do that, right? Memorizing 12 is obviously a lot easier than memorizing 24. But 15% of the population are dyslexic.

So, how easy are they gonna find memorizing 12 or 24 seed words? I would posit not particularly easy, whereas if you're trying to memorize a shape or a patent or a series of cell coordinates that you define through whatever meaningful numbers or letters there are to you, there's probably a much higher chance of somebody who is dyslexic

or doesn't have much time on their hands to be able to memorize things or doesn't have the discipline or who, you know, succumbs to this picture superiority effect and the memory of words atrophies quite significantly after, you know, a long period of time compared to patterns and shapes.

Then you might wanna think about using this instead or as well as whatever other options you think may be preferable to you. You know, again, this is an option for people to be able to use as well as what they already use.

It doesn't necessarily mean it has to be an instead-off by any means. But for people who are in the kind of circumstances like we define with potentially being forcibly displaced or needing to get out of dodge quickly or who live in shared accommodation or who are digital nomads, then yeah, I'd say this provides a potentially

a good primary solution for them to be able to secure their stack in their head more easily. - Definitely. Unfortunately for the population, there's gonna be, I think, more and more people in that situation, you know, whether like you said there, they're looking actively to become a digital nomad.

That's very attractive to a lot of people and you can see that's a definite trend. But also if we look at the trajectory we've been on, we've had a little sneak peek over the last few years.

So I think more and more people are gonna be in this situation where they need it. Having a random pattern in a random sketchbook or a random place that, you know, can be completely, mean nothing to anybody.

But it means something to you and you can have multiple copies because that's separated from the grid. People can see it, people can look at it, they can be in a painting, they can look at it all day and they wouldn't mean anything to them.

So it is unlimited what you can do with this. And I think we're gonna see more and more creative ways as time goes on. I think it's really exciting. And, you know, being one of those dyslexic fucks myself, as soon as you started saying about this, I was like, you know, before I was thinking,

there's no way I'd even try to memorize 12 or 24 words. There's no point. But with this, I'm like, well, I can see patterns. I can close my eyes, I can see patterns. I can picture things very well.

So this, for me, like, just makes so much more sense. Can we talk a little bit about what the experience has been like with Super Fat Arrow? 'Cause a real thread, I guess, of this show is like really trying to lean into and push open-source software and these kind of collaborations.

So when I see one with a friend where something's actually happening in front of my eyes and it's a very, very exciting process to see this unfolding and hear about it. What always amazes me is people are so creative and willing to give their time to do something like this and what's in it for you guys?

Do you know what I mean? Obviously you were creating something that's really cool and you were helping loads of people and that's awesome. But is there any way of monetizing it for you guys?

Is there anything in the works in that respect or some sort of way that people can fund this or help you continue it? Like what are you thinking of for the future? - So in answer to the first part, I guess, of your question and the lead in there about the process of working with SPA and how it kind of started.

So like I said, I pinged Bitcoin Q&A, we had a conversation about it. He seemed pretty stoked and then reached out to SPA for me. SPA thought it was a really interesting concept. And to be honest, I don't quite remember, you know, the initial parts of the conversation.

With him, in fact, it was funny. The first part of how we were trying to meet online about this, we were trying to figure out how to connect. I needed to set up like Matrix. I wasn't on Matrix and we ended up figuring something out, you know, he's got good opposite hats off to the guy.

So we ended up speaking, no, not speaking, chatting by a particular platform that we ended up agreeing on. And yeah, he liked the idea and like I said, just turned around a proof of concept in a weekend.

But then, I mean, we have exchanged so many messages over the last three months. And I'm not sure I'm gonna have all of them archived. I'd love to go back and just keep them for posterity sake because he has helped me to get, you know, a kind of novice's understanding, maybe beyond that actually,

of everything from node JS to elliptic curve cryptography. And it's been fucking mind-blowing. It really has, you know, I have enjoyed the process of working with him so damn much. And like I said, he's been, you know, generous with his time and I think he's actually a great teacher.

He describes himself as a code monkey, you know, tongue in cheek. But he's a fucking genius. You know, he's a really, really clever lad or lass. I don't know which. I think it's a bloke. But anyway, he is a great teacher.

You know, he's a great coder and he's an auto-died act as well. So if he hasn't known how to do something, he's gone away and learned how to do it. And, you know, being able to turn stuff around really quickly, we find out bugs.

You know, we ironed out a load of bugs before we went live with the tool as well. He really, really bloody knows his stuff. So from my perspective, I've got just a ton of enjoyment out of this whole thing as we've built it.

You know, we've seen this thing coming together and he describes it as my baby, but I see it as that was. Yeah, because of what he has put into this, I'm sure that without him, I wouldn't have been able to do this or it would have taken me just an immeasurably longer amount of time to find somebody of his caliber to do it with,

but I don't think I would have been able to find anyone who comes close to him in terms of his generosity with his time, his teaching abilities. But his coding abilities, just, you know, are exemplary as well.

So from that point of view, it's been amazing. He's obviously had a shit show working with me, but, you know, that's... (laughing) - He's now a counseling- - He's now a counseling life. - Yeah, and he's given up coding to go and work as a dolphin trainer or so, yeah.

So anyway, that's aside. It's been brilliant. I mean, it's been pretty well received. I've been really happy with how it's been received. We've had some kudos thrown at us from various corners, but we want to remain sharp, iron sharpens iron, and we welcome all feedback.

We've had a little bit of pushback as people who either don't have this kind of issue, don't have this use case, kind of maybe questioning the value of it, but that's fine. Not everybody is gonna like it or think it's valuable.

The world is a big, bad place. And as it should be, it's certain things aren't gonna be for everybody, so no issue with that. But yeah, as far as monetizing it goes, there, no, we don't really have any kind of concrete plans for that.

It's a FOS project, so it's available for you to go and download and as we save it, you can freely use it until the cows come home. You know, there's no reason why you can't actually keep a copy of the border while it's the HTML file that the tool is built in on the same USB key

or digital cloud storage solution as the entropy grid as well. In fact, there may be a case for doing that because there are some features within the tool that you'll potentially want to reuse later.

If I could talk about those quickly. - Yeah, yeah. - So the first one is the checksum. So the onus is on the user to generate a pattern ideally before their entropy grid is generated. We give you the means to generate a pattern grid, a blank pattern grid, which is just the same as the entropy grid, but with none of the words on it.

And you then determine whether your pattern is gonna be on page one or page two or a combination of the two, maybe floating from one to the other and back and forth, if you like. The possibilities, like I said, are endless, but you'll want to create either an 11 or 23 cell pattern.

And the reason for that is you'll map that pattern, transpose it or trace it, whatever you want to call it, onto the entropy grid once that is generated. That's done within the same tab within the tool.

So once you've clicked on generate entropy grid and you go to your downloads folder and you see your lovely little entropy grid that's there is a PDF file for you. You'll transpose the pattern onto it, but the final word of a Bitcoin seed phrase is known as a check sum.

So the second tab within the tool allows you to calculate that check sum with an 11-cell pattern, or let's say an 11-word that's been generated from the entropy grid, there are 128 possible check sums that come with an 11-word seed phrase, making it a valid 12-word seed phrase.

So in a 12-word seed phrase, the final word is a check sum. So you take your first 11 words, does that sound actually or you? - No, that's my chair. - Oh, right, okay. So you'll take your way.

- Yeah. - Take the 11 words, you throw it into the check sum calculator and it will then provide you with a valid check sum. You can actually use something called a final word number, if you like.

So instead of having to, so, okay, let me, let me rewind. Once you've generated the check sum, that's the only word that you need to remember. You need to remember your pattern and the check sum.

Otherwise, if you use a different check sum next time, it will generate a different wallet, right? So you have to remember your check sum, final check sum word. But if you want to make that process easier for yourself, you could remember it as a number.

And the tool is a feature that we developed, SPA developed, that you can use, if you change the number just below where your check sum is shown, it will generate a new check sum for you. So you can literally scroll up or down, go one up to 128, and it will give you a new check sum.

So you can do that next time. Yeah. So you can use it to remember the check sum more easily. If you generate a 23 cell pattern, the number of possible check sums is eight. So a little bit smaller.

But again, you can memorize a number between one and eight. You can even write that on your entry grid if you want, because without the 23 words, those numbers are completely meaningless.

Write it in the entry, go ahead, write it in your phone, wherever. So that's the check sum. So yeah, where will we go in with that? - You tell me. - Okay, so we were talking about features.

So that's the second tab. The third tab is the regeneration capability, which allows you to import the recovery code, which is made up of 12 seed words effectively that's printed at the bottom of each page of your entry grid.

You can import those 12 words into the regenerate tab, and it will recreate your entry grid for you. So that's that feature. And then the final feature at the moment is encryption and decryption.

So if you want to encrypt your entry grid PDF and safeguard it behind a passphrase, then you can bring that into the tool. It will encrypt it, output it as a JSON file, and then your entropy grid is encrypted.

And then again, you can upload that to a whatever cloud storage, pure cloud storage. Again, it provides an additional level of security for you when you're traveling over the border and then decrypt it using the same passphrase later on.

So yeah, I was saying that you could save the egg, the border watch.html file on the same digital storage medium and it will include all those features in there. So, and you can do that until the cows come home.

I might put together a book later on, down the line for like the ultimate guide to using these things as we maybe add more features or get more feedback from people. But at the moment, we're just wanting to see how this gets tested out and how it gets adopted and if people like it and want to use it.

But for now, yeah, we're just seeing how things go, responding to any feedback, criticism, praise, et cetera and yeah, seeing where we might go next with it. - Have you guys got a donation address or like a payment or anything like that, yeah?

- SPA's got a samurai payment, I don't. - If you have anything that you can send me over, I'll put it all in the show notes and anyone listening to this who likes the idea or thinks this is gonna be useful, I'd urge them to do it because, you know, someone like Super Fat Arrow putting his time into this is obviously an exceptional dev.

These kind of guys can go and earn a lot of money doing other stuff for fiat and they don't, they choose to do this. - Yeah. - It's important to support, it's important to give back to these guys and push these ideas forward.

- Yeah, if there's any companies out there that like this idea and maybe want to syndicate it or use it in their own tools, hopefully it gets adoption in that way as well and kind of gets to spread via other means, not just through, you know, organic word of mouth.

We'd love to see this being adopted and used in other tools and by the makers and mavericks out there. But if any companies think, you know, like the idea and want to sponsor it, then we'd love to hear from them as well.

But just for regular plabs, if you like the idea, then please tell people about it. We wanted to make this to help people. Both SPA and I are both keen to see this help people and we'll think that it's been worth it if we're just able to help some humble plabs keep hold of their SATs, particularly those that fit into this kind of category

of users who struggle to either maintain their property rights in this crazy world that we live in at the moment. So, yeah, spread the word. That would be appreciated as well, if nothing else.

- Definitely. And so we had some questions on Twitter. I put out a tweet because I thought people will come up with much smarter questions than I will. Some of them actually were less smart than what I've come up with.

(all laughing) We had from Antimus with the endless options available. What are the best practices when setting up a more complicated scheme and are there any guidelines or examples set up planned?

- Great question. All right, my first part of my answer is we've got a best practices section in the resources tab on our website, so go and have a look at that. In fact, the website has got stacks of information on it.

We walk through every element of this in detail, starting with the problem, the words versus patterns, the solution in a nutshell, we've got workflow in elements, how it all comes together, download link for the entry grid generator, how you generate entry grids, how you create the border wallet.

We've got an exploration of features which firstly, the grid generation patterns and entry grid, we've got four types of entry grid that you can generate. One is based on words, so the bit 39 words.

One is based on numbers, which is the corresponding bit 39 numbers, so for example, abandoned, which is the first word. Instead of seeing that or a ban on your entry grid, you would see zero, zero, zero, one.

You could produce an index grid, which is actually where the index is zero, so abandoned is double zero, double zero, and there's a hexadecimal grid as well. And for anybody that uses hexadecimal format, they won't need that explained, but that's another option for you as well.

We walked through final word generation, regeneration and recovery, encryption and decryption. We've got all the different use cases covered, bought for border crossings, legacy planning.

This has applications too as well, so if you're somebody who's concerned about leaving seed words with either a relative or a solicitor, for example, in your last one in the testament, you might be a bit more comfortable leaving an encrypted copy of your entry grid or 12 recovery words to regenerate the grid, but not the pattern.

Third parties, gifting Bitcoin and gridception as well, which I'll talk about in a second. So then we've got best practices, gotches, a small number of FAQs at the minute, and then the PGP keys for SPA and myself, so you can verify the software.

I've got a complete walkthrough of how you verify the software installs as well, and make sure that it's what you're downloading and installing is legit and is from us. So I'd encourage everybody to read this, particularly if you're looking at putting anything meaningful on this, using this solution, go through it with a fine tooth comb

and become familiar with it and see how you can use it as well, because, like I say, there are multiple applications for this across multiple different types of users who might wanna use it.

So thanks for the question, Antimus. The second part, then, is how, can you remind me, Max, what the second part of it was? It was more complicated setups. - Or more complicated scheme, are there any guidelines or examples setups planned?

- Okay, one way that I think you could start getting a bit clever with this, if you're thinking about, you don't wanna make it too complicated that you forget it. The idea here is that the entry grid generator does the heavy lifting on generating entropy.

You just have to do a good job of securely storing that entry grid and choosing a pattern that's easy enough for you to remember, but difficult enough for an evil maid to guess if it potentially gets compromised.

But I would say that you will want to have a kind of mindset of treating the entry grid with the same degree of security that you would do plain text seed words. Right? So don't start thinking that you can go and plaster the entry grid on a t-shirt or blasting it out on Twitter.

Because you are, if you do that, you're making, attacking your grid for an nefarious actor far, far easier than if they don't have the grid. Right, there's a reason why Bitcoin uses a massively high amount of entropy and humans are shit at generating entropy.

It's why password 123 is the most common fucking password and 1066 is the most common pin in the UK, right? We are, and I'll credit SPA again for helping me to understand this. We are terrible at generating randomness, right?

So think before you disclose your entry grid to anybody. But if you wanting to leave, let's say a copy, if you are the kind of person that might want to leave a copy of your seed words with family, then you might want to leave a copy of an entry grid with them instead in order to just create a higher level of difficulty

for attacking the grid if it's found. And it may be that you trust your family members implicitly but from my perspective, I know that there isn't a single person in my family that treats Bitcoin or would treat my seed words with the same degree of security that I would.

Therefore, it's not that I don't trust them, it's that I wouldn't trust their process for securing my seed words. But if I'm in a pickle, I would be more comfortable trusting them with a copy of an entry grid.

Or, then this is where you can start to get clever because we have this regeneration capability, this deterministic grid generation feature that can be used to regenerate the grid later, you can use any 12 words to create a grid.

So if you think, hmm, I don't actually want to leave a copy of my grid with, let's listen to it either, because they might try and attack it, and brute forcing a pattern might be a bit easier than, you know, brute, well, certainly than brute forcing 12 random words, because we're much more likely to create

a memorable pattern or a cohesive pattern. But what about if you left a 12 word recovery phrase that was generated via another grid? And actually, if your solicitor imported that recovery phrase into the tool, it could present a grid to them.

But what they don't know is that you have created a pattern on this grid that actually leads to another grid. They don't know where, and that might be multiple grids deep, so SPA calls this what you called.

- Oh yeah, that's awesome. - Yeah, he named it gridception. So like this Christopher Nolan film, where you've got dreams within a dream, and you don't know whether you're still dreaming or not.

Then here, an attacker would not know which grid they're attacking, and whether or not they're gonna generate, I mean, there's lots of C phrases that they could potentially generate here, you know, hashing out either 11 or 23 cell patterns, and then hashing out each of the check sums for it.

But suddenly, it's just inordinately, exponentially more difficult to attack that. If you've gone, well, fuck you, I'm actually gonna use a grid within a grid here. So there's no reason why you can't do that, as well.

So if, if, Antimos, if you're thinking about, you know, how you potentially get smart with this, and add a little bit of complexity. Which, yeah, fine. Just be careful, you know. The balance of how you do this is gonna be up to you and your own use case.

If you're wanting to get out of dodge right now, you know, you've gotta go, go tonight, and you're gonna, hopefully, be in safe harbor within 42 hours or a week or whatever. Then you're probably gonna opt for a more simple way of doing it.

Your grid isn't gonna be stored for that long, and your pattern you wanna keep in your head fresh, and it's easy to memorize, and potentially you give, you know, to your wife and your teenage kids, as well.

And it's easy for them to memorize, right, and recover. But if you're thinking, actually, I wanna store this grid much longer term, and have it for that kind of rainy day, or I wanna store it with a lawyer, it doesn't even need to be a pattern in that case, because you can just tell your kids, for example.

Let's say you don't wanna leave your kids with the keys to the kingdom before you die, but you wanna give them the keys to the kingdom when you do. You could give them those keys right now, but not tell them what the door is.

You know, the door is the entry grid that you leave with a solicitor. But actually, you could just tell them, right, the first seed word is D14. The second seed word is P27, and there could be seemingly no cohesion between them at all.

But without the grid, they don't know what the seed words are. And likewise, the lawyer without the pattern or the coordinates doesn't know what the seed words are either. So how complicated you make it is gonna be up to you.

- Okay, thank you, Antimus. Slightly more technical question now. Please, sir, I have a question. - How many open dimes can he fit in his prison wallet? Thank you. - That's from Ben, but I assume he's asking.

- When he says he, I assume that means you, not me, but yeah, as I say, slightly more technical, but I think worth exploring. Max, I have officially, well, SPA now, they have officially demonetized people's a-holes now.

There is no longer a need, like Matt Odell said, there is no longer a need unless you enjoy it to carry an open dime and a butt plug anymore. So the answer's zero, thank goodness. - Okay, well, I'm sure he'll be, I don't know what I don't know, I was gonna say sure he'll be pleased to hear that.

And if he will. - Well, we know what he's like. - Yeah, I think we'll leave it there. - Yeah, I think we'll leave it there. - Thanks, Ben, that's a shout out, Ben. It's great to see him in the weekend as well.

- Then we've got Bitcoin Brit. Has there been an attempt to quantify the entropy being added by the pattern? It could be giving a false sense of security. I saw you responded with another post there, but can we have a sort of summary?

- Yeah. - Of that one, please go to saw that sort of went on. There was a few back and forths and more questions, but it's to be honest, it goes over my head. - Yeah, hopefully I've made it clear that what's doing the hard work of generating entropy and true randomness here is the entropy grid generator

because humans are terrible at creating randomness. If there's one thing I want to give people a takeaway on, it's treat your entropy grid security with the same kind of respect that you would treat regular seed phrase security with.

And there's no reason why you can't given the deterministic grid regeneration capability, which allows you to store 12 words to regenerate your grid on demand if you don't want to store it as a digital file or a printed PDF, right?

So treat it with a great deal of respect and security because if somebody finds your entry grid, well, it's gonna be up to you to determine how likely that is to happen through your own security practices.

But in my mind, if you treat this with the same degree of respect as you do your regular Bitcoin seed phrases currently, this provides an extra level of protection. It's like a firewall from an evil-made attack, right?

So that would be key takeaway. I'm not sure I can speculate on or quantify the degree to which users can introduce randomness because it's gonna vary from one person to the next. And like I said, there are commonly used passwords.

There's lists of passwords online and we repeatedly see time and again, examples of people using the same passwords. So in all likelihood, some people are gonna end up using the same patterns.

So you'll want to give thought to what kind of pattern you apply to your grid or patterns. There's no reason why you can't use multiple patterns here as well, right? Placed in a particular way or, in fact, multiple patterns on multiple grids.

So yeah, it's hard for us to quantify. I did ask SPO about this and it is just very hard to put a number on it. I guess we'd have to say don't think about the users as adding any particularly higher amount of entropy to the mix.

We all think that we can probably be super, super clever. But in reality, when you actually look at the staggering numbers, right, I saw an example the other day of, I think I mentioned this in my talk at the weekend as well, somebody posting their seed words online and saying, you know, just for the record, here are my seed words,

but there is effectively an infinite number of pass raises that can be used to generate an infinite number of wallets. Well, you're a human, so there's no way you're gonna generate an infinite number of wallets, right?

And also because you're human, there's almost certainly gonna be some predictability and potentially quite a high degree of predictability when you apply brute force computing power to the mix to be able to crack your passphrase.

So you're literally playing with fire by posting your seed words online and I would strongly advise people don't do this. There's a reason why Bitcoin uses 12 or 24 seed words and a passphrase, you know, and you can add that 25th passphrase if you want to.

If just one user password was strong enough, it had used that, but it isn't, so it doesn't, right? So we are super predictable and if you want to have an example of the kind of staggering computing power that's available to brute force pass raises, I think the IEEE or how secure is my password.com?

There's a website like that. I think it's the IEEE that put it together or a similar organization and you will be blown away by how quickly what you think is a secure password can be cracked, so don't do that.

- Yeah, don't do that, please. Cool, well, that's all the questions. I want to say from me, really fucking proud of what you've done here, mate, not to get a soppy or anything like that, but you've become a good friend over the years and to see what you've done and I really think this can save people's lives literally congratulations.

And to super for Arrow, whoever you are, wherever you are, thank you for allowing MTC, my fuckwit of a friend to come up with this idea and actually implement it and make it possible. I really mean that.

I think that you guys are going to save lives and make some real changes here, so it's amazing to see. - Thanks, brother. - Is there anything that we didn't cover? We got sort of a little bit into the weeds, fairly technical, but I think or I hope that everyone will follow along and understand how it works and why it's here.

But is there anything that we missed that's sort of like really important? - I don't think so. I think we got a fair amount covered. Hopefully I didn't ramble on too long. - No, no, you did, it was fucking boring.

- Yeah, bastard. You what you take with one hand, or what you give one hand, you take with another, you fucker. - I think that's pretty much most of it covered. If anyone's got any comments or other questions, reach out to me, go to the MTC on Twitter or super fat arrow, fat with a pH on Twitter as well.

That's SPA's handle. We're on GitHub, you find everything that we've covered here and more on borderwallets.com and @borderwallets. Love to hear from you. Particularly love to hear about any places or anyone who has applied this and started using it or has any funky ideas that we can use to either build on this

or who wants to build on it. Yeah, then just reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. But thanks Max for putting a stake in the ground with this and getting me on and giving it as some exposure.

It's much appreciated and plebs together strong. - Pleasure as always. And yeah, I'll put all the links in the show notes and make sure that you send some addresses and pay names and all that sort of stuff so people can send some stats your way.

But yeah, good place to close it out. Thanks again, mate. Cheers, dude. Thanks for listening. Hopefully you will be able to get in contact with MTC after this drops. I know he has been banned from Twitter for the millionth time.

MTC, you need to learn. You can't talk about COVID. You can't talk about monkeypox. You can't talk about inflation. You can't talk about anything that is an inconvenient truth. However, although Twitter don't want us to believe it, two plus two still equals four.

And this project that MTC and Super Fat Arrow has put out is fucking incredible. On top of that, Bitcoin is gonna win. This is all worth the time. And thank you so much to everyone who is involved in this movement.

Thank you also to everyone who has reached out to me, everyone who's been sending feedback on ungovernable misfits. If you haven't yet checked it out, go to ungovernable misfits.com and I'd love to hear your feedback.

Thanks again for listening and I'll catch you on the next one.