Bitcoin privacy defenders. Samourai community discussion on using the tools and never bending the knee.

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.

I'm trying something new here, so I don't waffle on in the intro. I am setting a two-minute timer, so please bear with me. It's going on now. Right, quick intro. This episode was recorded with samurai, Zelko, and the whole Ronan Dojo and Samurai community.

After our recent episode talking about Sentinel, we decided to open this up so that everyone can get involved. I know from personal experience how daunting it can be to get involved in Bitcoin, privacy, and security.

You're scared to ask stupid questions, and you don't want to get this stuff wrong because it is important. I want as many people as possible to use the best tools available. I want people to use Bitcoin privately.

I want people to be secure, and I want people to take control of their lives. I really do think that the samurai and Ronan Dojo stack is fucking incredible, and I've been using it for many years now.

But I do know that some people have questions, and I think this is the best way to get them answered. I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who got involved in this space, and everyone who's been reaching out and asking questions since.

It really is appreciated, and it's great to see so many people get involved. I also want to say a big thank you to everyone who is building this incredible open source software. I want to say a huge thank you to all of my listeners, and a big thank you to my show sponsors.

We got into it a little bit on this episode, talking about key generation, hardware wallets, and what is and what isn't useful. Everyone has to take in all the information they can and make up their own minds, but as I said in this episode, for me, the perfect stack is samurai wallet for mobile, Ronan Dojo, as my node.

Sparrow wallet has a desktop wallet, foundation devices passport as a signing device, and steel backup plates for your past phrases, and 12 or 24 words. I'm running out of time on this timer so very quickly.

If you'd like a Ronan Dojo Tanto and haven't already checked one of these out, you can go to RonanDojo.com. You can use the code ungovernable. That will give you a discount, and it will also help me support this show.

If you would like steel backup plates, you can go to SX6.store. This is run by my good friend, Black Coffee. These things are very high quality. I've used them, and they are only £16.99, which is incredible value.

If you decide to use a hardware wallet, I strongly suggest foundation devices at foundation devices.com. You can use the code ungovernable. You will get three months of VPN usage for free, and if you have any questions, you can reach out to me.

Finally, if you are inspired after listening to this and you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. You can also go to ungovernable misfits.com. We have articles, podcasts, and everything you need on there, and you can also buy the privacy defenders, t-shirt, hoodie, and artwork that we have done in collaboration

with Samurai and RonanDojo. Enjoy the episode. We will catch you next month for another topic and another open discussion.

- I'm just trying to work out how to add people now. Have I just given you speaker privileges? - Do you hear me? - Ah, yeah, that's working. - Okay, great. I'm gonna mute myself for now. - Okay, mate.

Let me now add Selco, add a speaker, right, added. - Okay, can you hear me? - I can hear you, mate. - Do they get in here? - Yeah, people actually care about it. - What are you doing there?

Sounds like a Rubik's cube. - Oh, that's my master's, I apologize. Fucking asshole. - That's your mouse. - Yeah. - That's unbelievable. - It's a shitty mouse. - That sounds like it, it sounds terrible.

- Wow, fuck off. (laughing) - I'm feeling sickly today, so I'm just being a cunt to everyone. - Oh, that's good. - Some familiar faces in here. Barn miner, the worst beef jerky in the world.

John. - It's pretty good. - Base lurking as well. - 100. - We've got about an hour and a half, and it was to carry on our conversation from the pod. Who listened to the pod that me, Selco, and Samurai did?

- If you can raise your hand, Urban, beautiful hand of mine, very nice. (laughing) No one else listened. - Thumbs up works. - I can just do a reaction. (laughing) - Yeah, reaction. - All right.

- That's good. - Yeah, 'cause we can just search for talking in a minute. I invited Samurai, I don't know where he's at, but... - We'll turn up. - Oh, here it goes. Yes, it pulled him like 12 times, that's okay.

- 13 is the lucky number. - Oh, lucky areas. - Here it is. - Nice thing. - Let me give him privileges, hold on. There we go. If no one else has got a question, I had a question that popped up.

I think I saw it today. You know, we were talking in the episode, we were saying, "Oh yeah, you can just whack graphene on a Pixel 3A." And you're good to go. And then I saw graphene actually jumped into a conversation, and we're basically saying, like, don't do that, because it's not supported.

- Yeah, I was in that thread. So later on, they ended up coming back, and I'm like, oh, well, if you're just using it as a signing device, or like a dedicated hardware, then it was fine. And then what would be even better is if they did what they never thought, they were like, oh, sideloading updates, we could do that,

but we've never like had the use case. Having that would be pretty legit, but ultimately the device is offline. Like the whole point is to create the wallet. I think Samurai said that last time, but it's creating that offline storage.

And then from there, all you're really using it for is if you wanted to sign a transaction, like create an offline transaction, and then do the PSBTs with Sentinel. I don't know, I feel like the threat model behind what they were trying to say.

You also have to take it for a grain of salt that they are phone OS developers, phone software developers first and foremost, and they're not like Bitcoin experts. You know what I mean? - Yeah, yeah, it just shapped me up, because literally like the day before I saw that, I'd just given a mate of mine, like a really good mate of mine,

a Pixel 3a, which had a graphene on it. And I was like, yeah, yeah, cool, just run this with your wallet. And then I saw that thread and I was like, ah fuck, maybe I messed him up here. But it seems like it's fine.

I mean, my one that I've been running forever is fine. - I still run two Pixel 3a's, I'm not giving them up. It's completely fine. - Okay, all right. Good to know. - Well, I guess what we can do.

If you all have questions, drop them in the comments. So I'll keep that up in front of me. But I did have a question and it kind of goes just 'cause I like story time, it's for samurai. But, you know, we talked about briefly, talked about the history of Sentinel, but like how much the space has changed?

Or I think you said that the era of Bitcoin that you grew up in, everyone just used mobile. Could you kind of talk about how you've seen the space change for better or worse or whatnot? 'Cause I think most people have not been in the length of time that you've been in Bitcoin.

- Sure. Yes, I mean, most people who were transacting were either doing so via mobile or web wallet. At the time, blockchain.info was the only web wallet kind of choice if you wanted to keep control of your keys.

Otherwise, you would use something like Coinbase or something which was the same story as it is today. You don't use Coinbase for transacting, right? So yeah, it was really, the main game in town was blockchain.info on web and mycelium on mobile.

And iOS users had nothing 'cause mycelium was pretty much Android only until they did come up with an iPhone version that included a devastating seed bug. So that kind of was short-lived.

And I think, you know, rightfully so, people started to move away from web wallets 'cause it's not the brightest idea to rely on JavaScript in your browser for securing your keys. That's true back then and it's true today.

So really, you know, no one back then was using Core to transact, well, it wasn't even called Core, but using Bitcoin D to transact. And I don't think they are really today either. So in some ways, it hasn't changed all that much.

The landscape, you know, there's more options now. There's more mobile wallets now. And there's slightly better options on desktop, right? You have Sparrow now instead of having to rely on Electrum, which is kind of a beast.

So yeah, in some ways, it's not all that different. But if you're talking about actually using this to transact on a day-to-day basis, I mean, it's mobile. You use mobile for everything else.

You know, it's crazy to think that you won't use mobile to interact with your Bitcoin when you use mobile to interact with, you know, everything. And that's only going to, I think, move more in that direction.

- What really like spiked the, I don't know, I feel like there was, there has been a spike in the last, I don't know, like five years or so of just like the fear-mongering behind dedicated hardware wallets are by my stuff.

Because if you don't, you're gonna lose everything, right? Like if you don't use this whatever hardware wallet and certain name, your Bitcoin's not safe. Like you're risking everything and you have to do all this.

Like there's, I feel like there was so much development and like wasted money put into this concept of like multi-sig or different, like how many companies have just like spawned up out of the like fear-mongering behind, oh, if you don't do this exact thing, you're gonna lose it all, right?

- Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't know where, or the genesis of that is. I mean, just before you go on, are you boiling a kettle? - No. - There's like a proper squeak in the background. I don't know if it's just me that you can hear that or anyone else.

- No, I know, I thought it was my tinnitus. - Okay. - So you were saying, just in general, I feel like there's a sense of like, if you don't do, it kind of goes with everything, but like, if you don't do this exact setup, you know, you're gonna lose all your Bitcoin.

I mean, that's my take, I did see Barnliner raise his hand, but yeah, I mean, me personally, I think that it's gotten like progressively worse. Like we've seen just consistency in this idea.

I think you even said it, Max, where you said, you said it really well, where it's like, people are told, you just started in Bitcoin, you have $100 and now of like Bitcoin that you've acquired.

Oh yeah, so the only way to store it now is to put it into a hardware wallet. Then they have to spend more money on it. What are we actually doing, you know? - Which is crazy. It's the same theme with everything.

It's just like, you know, the most important thing is to go and buy yourself some Bitcoin, go and do it on an exchange and use my ref code and whatever. And so like, that's most people's entrance in.

And then it's, you know, now going to spend $200 on a hardware wallet, you know, maybe even consider going to one of the companies that will hold a key in a multi-sig and blah, blah, blah.

And you're like, listen, just fucking use it for a bit. And earn some. And then you can decide what you want to do from there. But I think maybe it's not understood enough. The fact, you know, we talked about the key generation.

And for someone less tech savvy, they're like, oh, well, how do I do that? How do I do it offline? You know, they might not know they can run it offline on a phone and all these things. And so I understand why people are concerned.

I think I said as well, you know, I don't keep all my eggs in one basket because I'm not confident enough about anything. But I certainly wouldn't be suggesting to someone to go and buy hardware if they've got a small amount of Bitcoin, I'd say, exactly what we're talking about, run Sentinel.

Now that you said the Pixel 3a is more than good enough, it makes me think, well, as we said in the pod, it's fucking, it's like $50 or less. - Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's, I get kind of frustrated sometimes with the space and between whether it's the news or whether it's, you know,

the latest politician that we want to fucking hold up as a-- - Mate, he's going to change the world, trust me. - Oh, I know. It's, like, honestly, like between that and all the news with Swan and Vincent and I'll let, I know Sam is definitely very apt on that, but it's, it's fucking like, just kind of pathetic.

It's pathetic in the fact that like, as a community, here as a whole, and obviously as where the sub-communities kind of come into play, but like, there's too many people and there's too many companies that are willing to live on their knees and die on their feet, right?

Like, there's not enough people who are willing to give the middle finger to everybody and do what they know that they need to do and do what's right and have some sort of fucking backbone and principles yet we sit here and, you know, the same people are like, oh, they're trying to hand wave and say, oh, it's okay, it's, you know,

they're just, they're showing you a way around it. They're doing this and like, that's, that's literally them trying to save their ass and make you forget about the fact that they just compromised everything for nothing for no reason.

We saw it with Wasabi. We saw it with, we now see it with Swan. We've seen it with people even back with the AOPP, right? Like, and people just like complying before it's even, they're enforcing anything.

A proposed law and you wanna bend over backwards for what? What's the net gain? You're only hurting Bitcoin. Samuel, what's your thoughts on all the, the Fincin News and anything like that?

- Well, I mean, I think my thoughts are pretty well known. I've been writing about it and speaking about this type of thing since 2015, I think you can pretty much accurately predict what my thoughts are gonna be.

You know, I'm not surprised regarding Swan and their pre-compliance. I was surprised, honestly, when, when Wasabi did it, pre-complied with, because there wasn't even a lawn, like they were trying to comply with, like they got spooked by a journalist who was asking questions.

We got the same questions from the same journalist and, you know, we published our response to the journalist and Wasabi's response was to, you know, contract with chain surveillance firms.

That actually did surprise me. I shouldn't, it shouldn't have, but it did. Swan doing so didn't surprise me. They talk a good game, like a lot of people in the space, but when push comes to shove, you know, they're interested in one thing and one thing only.

If they need to comply to do that, then they will. They'll sell everyone out to do so. So there's no surprise there. As for the previous question, I think when my mic went bad, I don't know where the genesis of the, you know, the hardware wallet fetish came from, I kind of forgot, but if you look back at all of the either hacks

or big cases of people losing their Bitcoin, it's not a mobile, it's all on desktop or on web, 'cause desktop is a huge insecure surface and web is a huge insecure surface. By default, both Android and iPhone, iOS are really secure because everything is sandboxed.

That's not the case on a desktop computer. That's not the case on, you know, a server. That's not the case for anything else. So I think when people find it easy to kind of point to a package solution, which a desktop, sorry, which a hardware wallet kind of is and say here, just use this thing and you won't have to worry about, you know,

losing your coins. Well, in fact, that's not entirely true 'cause as I said on the podcast we had, like you still need to back up your seed phrase, right? You still need to back up those 12 words somewhere.

And if you just point someone to, hey, get this, you know, get this treasure and you're good. And they back up their seed phrase in their email, which happens a lot, they're not good, you know?

And so you're selling like a false sense of security there. But I think that's why they kind of became popular is because you can kind of a package solution to something. Obviously I disagree, like I said on the podcast we did, I wouldn't use a desktop wallet if you paid me.

I know about desktops, I know how insecure they are. Even if you have the best setup in the world, you're running Linux, you're running this and that, it's too risky in my view. I'm far more comfortable using a Android device, even a Google pixel, like, you know, a stock version of Android connected to a Google account

is far better, I wouldn't recommend it, but it's far better than keeping your private keys on a desktop computer. I think that's very dangerous. - Urban, you've had to hand up some time. - Yeah, I think samurai pretty much summarized.

One of the points that I wanted to say, there is also some thought about phones. And I was listening recently to a podcast about the Monero wallet hack, which of course is not really related to Bitcoin, but in there, there was some expert recommending to use a laptop with Linux installed.

And I was like, no, you should really use a phone. If you want to use a connected device, you should go with a phone. And it's incredible how much fun there is around phones. Like people don't realize, but like, yeah, a default phone is usually much, much, much better than any other scheme you could come up with a laptop

or a computer, however secure you put it. And the other point that I wanted to mention that saddens me a bit is before this podcast in preparation, I did a simple search, best phone wallet on Google and YouTube for storing Bitcoin.

And sadly, I mean, we all know the result. There is no mention of some ride, there is no mention of Sentinel. And I think this also plays a bit, like when you're a beginner and you're like, okay, how do I store this on my phone?

You search on YouTube and then you end up with, I don't know, just wallet or something that you use address that has no safety and no advanced safety feature. And you end up in a situation where, you know, then you search a bit more.

Oh, there is this shiny USB device that you can use and then you buy a hardware wallet. And to me, this is a big part because it doesn't help that most mainstream solutions, when you search for like phone wallet or like subpart that we would never recommend in this place.

So those would be my two point. And question, not really question, but like, how do we get people to notice something like those wallets that keep getting hacked? Because the other thing that you have to realize, most of them can store like 1000 and 1000 of shit coins.

And basically with all the shit coin you implement, you have like more ethics or face, more bugs and more potential to get hacked. And in the research I did about people who got their phone wallet hacked, most of them were running those wallets that have like DeFi and stuff.

And of course they got hacked. So yeah. - Yeah, I don't know that there is really a solution other than keep talking about the things that matter, why I do the show, it's why everyone's on this call, it's why everyone tries to push people to do things properly.

But I think, I don't know, I don't know if there's a solution to it. - Trust wallet for example, or are they pay to Google hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, you know, to be at the top of the results to be featured, the ads, all this and that.

It's really hard to organically compete with that. You know, if not impossible, you just gotta do, hope that people eventually find their way. And, you know, people are, they do find their way to samurai and sentinel.

We've grown every month since we started, you know, so it's all organic, we don't pay for advertising, we don't do sponsorships, we don't do anything like that, probably could grow faster if we did that.

But I'm not necessarily interested in paying Google to, you know, compete with keywords for trust wallet. It's just not a game that I wanna play. So, you know, how to solve for that, I don't really know.

But you're absolutely right. Anyone who's advising you to, you know, just use Linux 'cause it's secure is, they have no idea what they're talking about 'cause out, you know, out the box Linux, it's not that secure.

You have to do a lot of work to secure your desktop environment. And even then, there's a lot of money in zero days and all of this stuff that puts you at a disadvantage. Whereas on the mobile environment, whether it be iOS or Android, as you said, it's more secure out the box by default,

because everything is sandboxed and apps can't talk to each other. One app can't access the private app space of another app. The only time this isn't true is if you root your device. So, you know, we've always, and then you have to specifically do that, you have to kind of know what you're doing to do that.

But we've always told people, don't install a Bitcoin wallet on a rooted device. It's insecure, it's dangerous. And the fact is, all computers are rooted devices 'cause you can access root.

So, it's kind of the same thing. Don't, don't install a Bitcoin wallet on a rooted device, AKA your computer, your desktop. So, anyone who's saying to do that, they don't know what they're talking about.

Anyone who's saying, oh, you know, the phones are insecure by default. They don't really understand what they're talking about either. And as for people losing their funds on shitcoin wallets, I don't even know that they would, they lost their funds due to hacks.

I'd be very surprised if that was the case. It's more likely that they've lost their funds due to the wallet architecture allowing for it, meaning their private keys are on a server somewhere.

So, I don't think the phone wallet is being compromised. I think the private key is being compromised because it's being transmitted from the phone elsewhere, you know? So, all in all, for most people, a phone wallet is far more secure than anything they can do on their desktop.

And I would strongly recommend doing it that way. And, you know, if you want to go hardware wallet, like the USB hardware wallet, okay, fine. I find them unnecessary, but if that's what makes people feel good, and by all means go for it, you know, we have a whole app that allows you to --

Sentinel that allows you to interact with your wallet, your hardware wallet on a software device. But that said, you're not, like, invulnerable, right? You still need to securely store your seed.

You still need to make sure that that's not in a place that can be accessed online by people who get into your email or people get into your last pass or whatever you use. You know, so there's still considerations that you need to take.

It's not a silver bullet. Rev Huddle, you've had your hand up for a while. You got a question? Yeah, hey, guys. My first question was kind of just answered about what the difference is between the mobile sandboxing and then being on a PC or a Mac.

But then the second question I have is, what are the common or what are some common attack surfaces, like, if the keys were to get compromised, what's a typical way for that to happen? I think the most likely way on mobile would be you install some sort of malicious app unknowingly and there's a screen recording component to that app

or key logger component to that app. And you then restore by entering your seed and they can capture that seed through key logging. I would think that's the most likely in common. But again, I don't think it's very common.

We really don't hear about mobile-based lawsuits very often. You know, I can't really even think of any in the last few years that I've heard about. Most of the time, when you have a loss of funds, it's because hackers have been able to obtain your seed through other means.

Like, you've backed up your seed in your email, for example. But key logging, I think, and screen recording would be the greatest threat and all of those things are possible on mobile as they are on desktop.

It also kind of goes into the 39, like the passphrase, right? Like they recently had that, there was whatever that big threat was about the guy that used last pass. You backed everything up, had, quote unquote, done everything right, but wasn't using the passphrase.

And being able to still key log or do whatever, what happened, had it been backed up by-- had his wallet been generated with 539, as long as your passphrase is stored ahead. And also the key logging is kind of protected in Xamarin wallet right as far as the passphrase goes, because it's rare inside of the wallet,

unless you're testing your passphrase. Yes, that's the only time. Yeah, that's the only time. And there's plenty that we could do in Xamarin wallet to even harden further against key logging attacks and screen recorder attacks.

We don't do everything that we could yet. We have thought about these things, just because it's such an unlikely attack. So it's just rewinding us a bit. The guy here, you're referencing, the guy who lost his Bitcoin.

And it wasn't a key logger attack, and it wasn't a screen recording attack. It was him putting his 12-word seed in his password manager. That was accessible online. And whoever, the attacker, the hacker, gained access to his-- I think it was key pass or last pass or something-- gained access to it and had his 12-word seed.

So the advice that the smooth grains gave him was, oh, you should have kept it in a hardware wallet. But that wouldn't have done anything for him, because he still would have kept his seed in his last pass.

And as soon as the hacker had access to those 12 words or 24 words, that's it. It's done. So the only thing that would have actually protected him is if he did have a passphrase associated-- so a bit 39 passphrase-- and he didn't keep the passphrase in his last pass.

Or if he did keep it in his last pass, he was separate from the seed and not entirely obvious what it was. So really, the bit 39 passphrase is one of the best-- one of the best things you can do.

I wish more people did it. I think samurai is the only wallet that acquires you to do it. But any time you're able to-- I know it's an optional thing on sparrow and other wallets, you should definitely do it.

And even if you don't want to keep that in your head only, which is totally understandable, write it down, put it into metal, do it however you store your stuff, but do it separately from your seed, from your 12 words.

Samurai, am I being too basic in thinking that's the original multi-sick? When I think about storage, I always think if you have separate locations for the two of those things, and if you don't memorize it, then even if someone puts a gun to your head, you're like, well, I can't spend.

I can't move. I would say the exact same thought. I literally was just about thinking that. I would think about it more instead of multi-sitting more like the second factor, like two FA. That's how I would think about it.

So yeah, unless you have the two pieces of information, piece one being the 12 word seed, and piece two being the custom defined passphrase, you can't generate the keys. And if you keep the two parts separate from each other, you have a very good setup, a very secure setup.

And then it just comes down to how do you keep those things backed up? And some people do stamp in the middle, some people are fine just writing it on a piece of paper and storing the seed at their house and the passphrase at the friend's house or the parent's house or somewhere else.

So it's sort of you can think of it like two (indistinct) in that regard. I can't, I don't understand why people continuously flood the passphrase. It really makes no sense to me. - What is the flood?

It's just even Craig when I was chatting to him, he said, he doesn't always necessarily suggest it. And I was like, why, why wouldn't you? And he's like, oh, it just adds complexity. I was thinking.

- Yeah, that's the fact that adds complexity. I was like, okay, I manage it. - Let me break it to you, Bitcoin is complex. Self custody is complex. If you can't handle a passphrase, which everyone deals with passwords all the time, it's not that unusual.

It's a concept, I think it's the concept that most new people will actually understand about Bitcoin. Yeah, I mean, the flood is it's too complex or you might lose access to your phones because you won't remember your passphrase.

And to all of that, I say, yeah, exactly. You know, so don't lose it. (laughs) - They're fucked up. - Sorry, if I may just jump in. First of all, great respect for you guys. I've been using you for years and especially our mixing services, but I just got to go back to something what you said before you were like against the web

and understand why. I'm not sure so much about the desktop wallets you said because you guys cooperate with Sparrow, who as we know is a desktop only wallet. I mean, my current setup is, you know, tail OS backed up with my, you know, Sparrow seed into a lecture and so on.

So whenever I go somewhere, I can take that with me, you know, and I got it on USB keys. It's encrypted, password protected, whatever. I cannot do that something with Samurai, you know, I cannot import it into tail OS or something like that.

Is there plans? - I know you explained, I mean, there is a backup in terms of encrypted file, which you can then re-import. So I guess I could just take the encrypted file with me, which gets saved when you exit the app, right?

Is there plans to kind of, first of all, why did you say you against desktop wallets? Yes, you work, that's question number one. Yet, you know, you kind of incorporate with Sparrow, at least the mixing.

And secondly, yeah, what would be the safest way to backup, let's say when you USB stick, is that the, what do you call them, the encrypted backup file, which you can then import because that's been my concern over the years.

And just another thing, last month I met Jameson Lock somewhere, it doesn't matter where, and he pulled out the Google phone. So if that guy is using it to keep his stash, then mobile is definitely the way to go.

Yeah, so yeah, that's all for me. - So just to be clear, I'm not against desktop wallets. I just wouldn't create my wallet on desktop. The tax surface, in my view, is too big. It has nothing to do with Sparrow, with Electrum, with the coin, but it has nothing to do with the software of the wallet.

It's to do with desktop environment itself. - Yeah, so my spare is also, password protected, plus there is a passphrase, just like, you know, in a samurai. So it's got to be protection. And somebody accesses those files, you know, they're stored in dot DB files.

You can fuck off, I mean, basically, because it's encrypted. You cannot do anything with that, right? - Sure, you have a very specific setup that is unlikely to be replicated for most people.

Most people aren't using Tails. Most people aren't using encrypted operating systems at all. So, you know, it sounds like you have a nice setup. That's great, but I'm talking generally. The general Linux install, general Windows or Mac OS install, I wouldn't personally use a wallet on there.

That's just my personal opinion. As for the second part of your question, you can, in the exact same way, reconstitute your samurai wallet using the Bit 39 seed and your passphrase, in Sparrow or Electrum or wherever.

You can also use the encrypted backup, but the only difference the encrypted backup has over just using your 12 words and passphrase to restore is that the encrypted backup will contain your metadata.

So, any labels that you've added to your UTXOs or transactions, settings, your pin code, all that kind of stuff is incorporated into that backup, encrypted backup that gets saved when you exit the wallet.

So, yet you can put that on the USB stick. Mind you, it's encrypted using your passphrase, so make sure you have a good passphrase, but it's not like a samurai wallet, created wallet will only work in samurai wallet.

That's not how it works. You will work anywhere, that Bit 32, 44, 39, all of the bits that are important to this sort of thing are used, so that means Sparrow. I forget if you can restore Bit 39 into Electrum, I think you can, I don't think you can create Bit 39 on Electrum, but I think you can restore it.

But yeah, so your samurai wallet will work anywhere. It's not just gonna own, you're not tied to samurai wallet. Does that answer your question? - It kind of with us, but what about the pasta mix and all those things?

You cannot restore those in samurai, in Electrum, right? - Yes, you can, actually. You just need to know the derivation path and the paths are known. And I believe, actually, someone made it so that when you restore a wallet in Electrum, you can actually have it searched for Whirlpool derivation paths.

So yes, you can restore, and of course Sparrow, obviously, will find the Whirlpool derivation paths as well. 'Cause that post mix part of your wallet, it's still part of your wallet seed.

It's not like it's something else entirely. It's part of your wallet seed. So when you restore it in another software, depending on how much control this software gives you, you'll be able to find them.

So if you, for example, restored in, let me think of what's a wallet out there, desktop wallet? - We'll do a web wallet. If you restored your 12 words and passphrase in blockchain.com, you would not see the post mix because blockchain.com doesn't allow you to look for custom derivation path, right?

But if you restored your 12 words and passphrase in Sparrow or Electrum or some other wallet, that gives you the ability to define custom derivation paths, then you would find it. - Hopefully, that answers your question there.

My LTP, Mindy, you've had your hand up for a while to ask your question. - Yeah, trust while it got brought up before and the competitiveness of trying to beat their keywords. I had an experience with trust when I first started getting into mining and I was mining shit coins to flip into Bitcoin and fucking around with NFTs.

My trust while it got compromised and my thinking is that it was probably just like a bad smart contract that I, I guess, opted into. But I was wondering if you might be able to enlighten me on if there's something else that I should check.

And this happened like three and a half, four years ago. So it's, it's not recent, but it does make me ponder, you know, what other type of security measures that I take place specifically regarding my Bitcoin holdings.

Fortunately, not that it's happened with my Bitcoin stuff. So that's why I stick to it. But you can never be too sure of yourself, right? - Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I would be very surprised if that breach of your trust while it had anything to do with your actual operating system on your phone, you know,

like you said, it's more likely a rogue smart contract that you opted into for lack of a better term. Or, you know, I don't know the architecture of trust wallet and what they, how they handle key generation and such, but you want to determine whether the private key is on the device or is on the server, a trust wallet server,

you want to determine that kind of thing because that would definitely be a way for you to lose your stuff if your private key is on a server as opposed to on the physical, you know, your physical device.

I would be very, very surprised if there was some sort of a OS level breach on your end. It would be pretty big news. - That's why I kind of came to the conclusion that the smart contract is most likely where I went wrong.

- Yeah. - And that's one of what Urban Hacker was saying about increasing the attack surface. The more all these coins, you know, the Ethereum coins with their smart contracts or whatever other ones that do the smart contracts, it's like, unless you can actually read that programming language

and you audit those smart contracts line by line, you have no idea what they're doing and what you're agreeing to. And there's been, you know, there's been cases where smart contracts have been audited by, you know, actual firms that have still included tons of, you know, clauses that it would allow the pounder

or whoever to make off with everyone's coin. So, you know, that's what I think he meant and I agree with by increasing the attack surface. And that's one of the primary reasons that we've only ever wanted a samurai wallet to be a Bitcoin wallet.

One of the first ideas we had really going back 2015 was to have a Monero aspect of the wallet, samurai wallet, so that you could jump between Bitcoin and Monero. And we eventually sold that idea, one because Monero is really different than Bitcoin.

It's not like the other altcoins that are kind of copy pastes of Bitcoin, Monero has a whole different kind of setup. So it would have been a lot of work to do it and do it properly. But two, it just increases the attack surface.

The more stuff you have in the wallet, it's kind of like the nodes, right? Like you have Ronan Dojo that really just focus on one thing and do it really well. And then you have like the unrolls, which are more like, let's do it all.

Let's, you know, power your fridge off of this thing. Let's, you know, power your toaster off of this thing. And okay, cool. It's nice and theory and idea, but it just increases your attack surface and increases areas to go wrong.

So that's, you know, that's a good argument for sticking to one thing and doing it well. - Yeah, shout out to Ronan Dojo, that makes 6.5. - Yeah, they do. - They're okay. (all laughing) - Definitely appreciate that.

- It is, it is and like that's, I'll just add onto that really fast. I think people don't really under, it's from the node side, you know, lightning was always one of those things that people just love to hear about.

But like, I don't think people truly understand the added complexities and then talk about updates and every other update ends up having a bug that you can lose all your funds, right? Like who wants to be responsible for staying up to date with every latest, like lightning app and lightning thing

that can go good or bad and then, you know, next thing you know, your stuff's compromised. There's no, there was never really a reason, even with us being like the privacy focus one, there was never like a good reason other than a so-called like hype, you know, hyped up period where like everybody wanted it.

And so like being the only ones that didn't want it and didn't refuse to add it was always interesting. And, you know, even when investors would come up, they would ask like, oh, so lightning's on the roadmap and now they're like, okay, well, like, good luck.

And like, so I'm building a deep product is the ability to say no. And that's true, you know, so being able to say no to features and things that you wanna do for other people wanna do. And that's how you build a good product.

So good on you guys for, you know, realizing that it would just serve for hype and not actual utility. 'Cause that's a true distraction. - No, exactly. But thank you, LTP mining was the last one to go.

Appreciate you. Max, do you want me to read the question really quick and then we can jump in the next person here? - Yes, please, mate. As you know, I can't read. So that would be very helpful.

- Yeah, no, me neither. It's a struggle. Trying to teach my son to read is always difficult. So this is from someone on Twitter, VR1857. He has two questions. First one is, do you use Whirlpool and I would assume this can be to either one of us, but do you use Whirlpool separately via Sam or I on your daily drive or smartphone

if you have cold storage on a Pixel as an offline device? I know that the reality is that you really aren't gonna be mixing. Like with cold storage, you're not doing any mixing. The keys have to be hot to be able to do that.

So likely you'd be running Whirlpool ideally on running Dojo or whatever Dojo that you're running and having Whirlpool running 24/7 and then mix to X-Bub and have it sent directly to that cold storage device.

It won't be able to utilize. The keys will not be cold if you're actively mixing. They have to be hot. - Just to jump in on that, Velco, you can kind of think of it as like a three. You can do a three stage thing, right?

Where you have Hot Wallet, which is your daily driver on your phone, keys are hot, and maybe you use this wallet to transact. Then you can think of medium, like lukewarm and then cold. So the lukewarm maybe is, you know, you only are running this on your Whirlpool CLI or your Ronin Dojo or something like that

where you're getting continuous mixes. And after a certain number of mixes or after a certain point, they get mixed to your cold. So you have Hot Medium and Cold. That's how some people do it.

I mean, I personally don't. I pretty much have everything hot. So, so to speak on various pixels and they're mixing using a CLI. I don't run a Dojo because I trust my backend, you know, but you all should run a Dojo 'cause I don't want you to trust my backend.

You don't even need Dojo to actually mix to Xbox or do continuous CLI mixing. You can just use the Whirlpool CLI tool for that. You don't really have to complicate things. It's all pretty straightforward.

- The second question is a central question. And I was just checking to see if it's on the built way of this release, but how do I see in Sentinel, which Dojo I am connected to? Which I'm not sure if it's in there right now.

- Yeah, I'm not sure if it's on the same. - I think we just kind of kept the same network view that Samurai has. It's probably slated for a future release. I can speak definitely for Samurai Wallet.

We have plans to kind of rehaul the networking screen where you connect and you can see I'm connected to Dojo, I'm connected to Tor, et cetera. It's less than ideal right now where you can't see which Dojo you're connected to.

You can't really even tell if the Dojo is online or offline properly. And as anyone who's tried to change Dojo's know, you can't actually change your Dojo without having to essentially wipe the wallet and connect right from the start.

So yeah, these are obviously not ideal conditions for UX. And we do have improved networking screens that allow you to kind of do that stuff. It just hasn't made its way into the wallet yet.

But once it reaches the wallet, I assume it will filter into Sentinel pretty shortly after. - I mean, on that note, it's definitely, so in Sentinel, you can change your Dojo, so which is awesome for people that are migrating from something subpar to running Dojo, but...

- Yeah, it's a little bit out there. - It's a little bit current. - Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the point though, is that you guys kind of feed off each other, the two projects, so that's pretty awesome.

I think that answered that question. Max, did you... I don't know who was next in our line. - Professor BA had his hand up and Urban Harper had his hand up. - But he's had his hand up for a long time, as well.

- Yeah, let's look at the bass drum. - Yeah, come on, base. - Mike, Mike, how the hell are you? - How fucking that area is? - Well, yeah, I'm like... It's good to be with you all today. I have a question there.

You guys, for the Ronin folks, I guess, Elko. You know, and it's funny because you use the same adjective, I use describes things, as you know. In fact, I use a freaking name with name of it.

There is a, you said repurpose an old pixel or Android, one, flash graphing, two, network data, and keep network and data off, and then three, it's a side load, see, side load, samurai wallet.

- You're getting better, mate. (laughing) - Can y'all just clarify that, please, and thank you much, love. - Yeah, well, actually, I just published a blog on it, so I'll drop that link in the comments in here, but sideloading is just referring to your download on your desktop, so the samurai APK, or whatever you wanted, in this case,

but where we'll just use samurai wallet, so you'll download the APK directly from their website, and then you'll go through the process, and it's really up to you, I guess, but you should be verifying the APK that it's signed by TDEV, who's in here, shout out to TDEV, and then once you've confirmed that it is exactly

the software that you are expecting, you would load it onto, you know, it could be a micro USB or a USB device, or it could be like a micro SD, and then you connect it to the phone, and you'll be able to transfer that file over, and so now you have the APK onto a device that was never online.

That's what sideloading is, it's really just like transferring a file from one place to another. - I mean, I have to use the internet to do this, right, Zoka? - So, well, you have to have the internet to, like, on your desktop to be able to download it.

- Get the file, get the file. - Yeah, to get the file, but not to transfer it, not the actual process of putting it on the Pixel. You don't need to put it online for that. You've already done the process of downloading it and verifying it, and then you, all you have to do at that point is install it,

and so there's no internet required for that. That's so much sense for it to buy. - I have one more question, and then I'll go away from you all. Using a Pixel and having something like Mulvat and tethering into another phone or some other type of random internet service or whatever, is that considered, I guess, good privacy, I guess,

if you will, on trying to, didn't say, for example, you wanted to do a Bitcoin transaction, right? Is that good, bad, like, is there a better way? - You're going to connect to the tool anyway, his mind is nothing. - Yes, so it doesn't matter, the, you know, it doesn't matter what internet is.

VPN doesn't matter. - I think as long as you're, especially if you're using your own, like if you're using run and dojo, you're going to end up talking directly to that and connecting over the tool.

- That's right, isn't it, Zilco? - Yeah, I mean, it depends, are you talking about having a device that's tethered, but you're, it's supposed to be your old storage? - Did it, well, not, not, not, not, not, not necessarily cold storage, but, you know, something that's kind of an honest, there's no, what do you call it?

There's no Verizon AT&T, anything linked to that. It's just a pure phone, no cellular service on it, right? - Oh, yeah, I mean, that's, that's definitely better. And if you're going to do that, like I said, like if you're going to use your phone on Wi-Fi only, right, like having the VPN of your choice, like is significantly a better,

you're not having an ISP or ISP trying to tell you, like what, or what you kind of can't do or ping your traffic, even if it's going through tour, it's still, you know, it's one less tech surface.

It's not saying that it's necessarily required all the time or anything like that, but, you know, same idea of anything to add to that piece. - I didn't really understand the question. - He's just asking, is it good privacy to have a, a phone, I mean, the answer is yes, but is it good privacy to have a phone that's not using mobile,

like a mobile service provider, you know, and using other means to which to do that, is that still good to go, you know, whether it's tethering to another phone that's using a mobile network or whatnot.

But I know- - If you trust the VPN, you sure. - Yeah, I mean, it's- - Can you say that again? Sam or I'm sorry. - I said if you trust the VPN provider, then sure. - Okay, yeah. - You know, there's an element of trust involved there.

I know that more that has done some good work in, you know, trying to prove, prove we say they don't log. I don't know if they're 100% there yet, 'cause it's kind of a hard thing to prove.

- Right. - But, you know, if your goal is to have a phone that is, you know, not connected to the internet ever, then just keep it that way. You know, even if- - I mean, only certain times, right?

Only certain times. - Sure. If you're, yeah, if your goal is to have a device that is a general purpose device, which a phone would be, that is unconnected to the internet, then I would just say leave it unconnected, you know, and don't bother trying to figure out a little work around here or there.

You know, as Elko said in the last question, you can move files onto this device without bringing it online. - Yeah, and that's the part that ultimately I was interested in, so thanks for- - Yeah, so all that, what you would need, like if you just get yourself like a, for example, a OTG on-the-go USB reader,

you can just plug that right into your USB-C port on your phone and transfer files that way, and that's kind of probably the easiest way of doing it. You know, if you're ultra paranoid, you don't really want to plug in the phone into your computer, though you could do that as a way, as it means to transfer in files.

- Downloading it from, like, F-Droid, for example, is that decent? - Well, you wouldn't be able to get F-Droid onto the phone because the phone is not online. - I do. - Samurai wallet website, the APK, and then- - Yeah.

- Shuffler over. - Got it. - Yeah, you could- - Okay, very good deal. - Yeah, cool. - That's good. That's a rabbit hole, I know, but thanks for putting up with me. Pretty good. - No problem.

- Did you like mine? - Love y'all. - I guess Urban Hacker is next. - Yeah. - Hey Roman. - Yeah, so the first thing is, if you don't trust people who tell you that phone are better than laptop, just believe in the free market, go to zerojom.com, I think.

But anyway, search zerojom and you should find it. It's a zero-day broker and they buy, like, zero-day and sell it to shady entities. And you can look at their price catalog, how much it costs to buy and exploit for, like, phones, laptop, there is, like, different software.

And currently, the iPhone and Android are beating everything else. They are more than $1 million that they are willing to pay if you find somehow a problem. But now, if you go to the desktop, like the windows and the Linux, it's an order, if not to order, of magnitude less money.

And I think this gives a good indication on which one is harder to get in than the other. Another thing maybe to consider is you could rotate phones from cold to hot. So, like, let's say you do a mix to expub to your cold storage, right?

And you get a distant stack and then you start a new one because you don't want to store everything in the same device. What you could do eventually after a while is you could say, well, I have, like, I don't know, three phones.

They were all cold. And now you can take the oldest one or one of them. You can connect them, mix again. So now you're back in Whirlpool and because you, you're already in Samurai, you can do this, right?

And you could like this rotate your wallets. So you would still get most of it into cold storage, but you would basically recycle constantly inside Whirlpool, which is quite good if you don't want to have everything hot.

Then as for questions, my question was, what about old phones, so Pixel versus other Android phone? And if you buy second-hand, how scared you are of a tempered bootloader or something like this?

I know it's pretty, like, it's pretty unlikely. If you buy, you know, from some random, I don't know, Craigslist or something that you're going to be personally targeted, but I just wanted to know if this is something you worry about or that people should be worried.

And yeah, what if they have an old, I don't know, sunny phone or something, and then they want to use this instead of a Pixel? Yeah, those are my questions. The other way or more like general advice?

Yeah, I mean, regarding the older phones, the reason I recommend pixels and have recommended pixels is because they're just such a superior experience on Android. Motorola, Samsung, all of these, they bloat where the hell out of their operating systems and ends up running really shitty, really slow and laggy,

where pixels don't have that problem because it's just stock Android. That's the reason why I just tend to just say pixel, go pixel, even if you're not going to put graphene on it, for example.

If I was buying a phone second-hand personally, I would absolutely put a different bootloader on it or make sure it's the stock bootloader and AOSP personally. I wouldn't even probably buy a second-hand phone, to be honest, because pixels are so cheap.

But yeah, I would say it's a concern, but probably not that big of a deal. But if you're going to go that route, then maybe learn how to, or maybe gen flash AOSP onto it, if not graphene.

I think why a lot of people go for a second-hand phone is because you can do it in cash and you don't have to tie your identity to it. You can do that depending with a new phone as well. Yeah, I was just going to say what my experience has been is to buy gift cards in cash and then to go into RGO or so, whatever,

just where your COVID-safe mask and hat and all that, and just go in, buy the phone with the gift cards. Yeah, you just need to buy an unlocked phone. So they're always going to try to get you to sign up for some contract or something like that.

And all you have to do is say, no, I'm not interested. Thank you very much. I just want an unlocked phone. And pixels are a good deal, even the new ones. Usually you can get one generation behind.

So I guess what the new pixel is, eight, is that right? I think so, yeah. Right, so you can still get sevens at the store, if you want. And if you don't want to spend that much, you want to only spend $50 to $80 or whatever, and you want to get a pixel four, which were beautiful phones, one of my favorite pixels,

then if you flash graphing, for example, the bootloader, everything is going to come with it. So you're not going to have to worry about a compromised bootloader. Even if you flash lineage onto it or just stock AOSP, you're going to be fine.

If you're going to put a Samsung or something like that or a Motorola or something, one, check to make sure that you can even access the bootloader to flash something else onto it, because sometimes they lock that down.

And if you try to unlock it, you'll brick your phone. So make sure the model that you're getting allows for that. And make sure that you can get a AOSP build, which AOSP is Android open source project.

It's kind of just like this stock version of Android without Google shit and without everything else. It's not hardened like graphing is, but it's what graphing builds from, right? So graphing starts with AOSP and then hardens from there.

- All right. Do we have at least two more people that want to chime in? I don't know. It's got damn cool, cool, damn cool. - Never out of them. - Me neither. Oh no, it's just got a dog on us thing.

- You'll get it right someday. - Wonder. - I got a question for samurai wall, because I don't think I've heard your opinion on this yet. There's this idea sometimes I see popping up about using a random custom derivation path.

I suppose you could call it like turning your 2FA into a 3FA or pseudo 3FA with the entropy that the full derivation path can have. And an extended question to that is, what's your opinion on combining that with decoy amounts at the start of the derivation path?

- Hmm. I haven't heard that custom derivation pass. You would need a wallet software that allows you to define custom derivation paths for one, which samurai doesn't. But yeah, I mean, I guess that's a strategy.

And as for decoy amounts, I think that's a pretty solid idea. If you do use a samurai wallet, for example, and you have a enforced passphrase, maybe it makes sense to throw a small value amount of Bitcoin onto the seed without passphrase, right?

And so in the event that I think someone earlier said, you know, if someone put a gun to your head and tried to force you to give him the passphrase, you wouldn't have that situation, right?

You can say here the 12 words, and there would be some small amount of Bitcoin there. - They go away happy with something. - They go away happy with something, but you haven't revealed your whole stack.

I mean, yeah, that's certainly something that you can do. And you can do that today if you wanted to. But I have to think more about the custom derivation pass. I mean, it's not like there's anything wrong with it.

It's just that I don't know what software allows you to find custom derivation paths to look through and interact with. But it's certainly a strategy for sure. - That was a weird question.

Leave it up to Mr. Cool. - Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but is that something that is being talked about? Because I've never thought of doing that. - I think I've heard it like over the last four years, like two or three times, popping up random and then people are like, well, that's more complicated than the passphrase.

So just use the passphrase instead. - Right. - Sorry, if I may jump in. I promise my last question since I've been already, I have a question regarding builds. There is a website. They can't remember for the life of me what it was.

I visited the other day. They actually check all the wallets that builds a reproducible, right? So the compilation code matches what's on the Google play, right? So that, you know, you guys or somebody else doesn't put some extra code or something like that.

That's basically the gist of it. And what I saw somewhere, the builds are not very viable. Actually, maybe the last one was, but previous builds weren't. Also, my question is, is there a way, like, you know, whenever I have a great sparrow, I always, you know, I got Craig Rose public key, you know,

I always check the builds, what I'm showing case, you know, it hasn't been tampered with and so on. Is there, since I'm already up, I mean, I trust you guys. I haven't pretty much sold my retirement with you.

So, you know, it automatically updates through Google play. Is there a way that I can, you know, you guys can introduce something where I can, you know, verify those builds, you know, download the APK, check the signatures and all that stuff.

That sparrow is there. - Yes, it's been on there since 2015. We have our public keys on our website. You can download the public keys and then you can verify that the checksum of the APK matches, what we say it should match.

And if you want to build from source, you can do that as well. - I'll just add that a tropic, if I think it was tropic, there was asking a question. The link that I posted, blog posts about installing samurai offline, the first like half of that is how to download the APK and verify it.

So exactly what you're asking about, it's right there. And it is, it is really easy. And you can do the same thing on your phone. That's actually how if you go into samuraiwell.com/download, you'll see the Android APK and you'll also see the SIG.

When you click on that and you go down, this is like a verify on Cubase, it'll take you to go do this like in the browser. So you can see and you can check those directly. - Every release we do, we sign, we provide a signed message of the expected checksum of the APK, meaning this is the APK as we down,

as we published it, meaning it hasn't been tampered with. So you can then, once you download that APK, you can verify yourself that the checksum matches and you can verify that against the PGP key of TDef, who signed the message in the first place and built the APK.

As for the deterministic, the builds, as far as I know, the last one is quote unquote, to verifiable, this really doesn't mean all that much. It doesn't mean it will probably what you think it means.

And it's not a currently a priority for us to provide deterministic builds to Google Play. If you're concerned about there being some sort of backdoor in the software, a deterministic build won't help you because you can have a deterministic build of a malicious software.

What will help you is if you go line by line in the code or have someone you trust go line by line in the code and then build from that code yourself, which is obviously a lot to do. But that's how you solve for that issue.

- Right, okay, yeah, thanks, thanks very much. Thanks. - Let's see, do we have anyone else, Max? Otherwise I'll double check the comments, see if there's anything else. Okay, well actually there was one.

Jack, billions, billions like Williams. He asked about run a dojo partnering with meetups and doing stuff like that. So that is still a program that we wanted to build out. So just kind of the background behind it, the whole reason that run a dojo even started was we were samurai community members

who wanted to help other community members with that really being the principal and like why are we doing what we do? You know, none of us are by any means getting rich, but we're definitely at the passion is to help the community to be more private and sovereign and have tools that make it easier for you.

And so starting to think about it like that was, that's a big driving force as to why we wanted to start looking into like how can we best partner with meetups to one, help them, help themselves and also with like a, you know, some sort of commission and then also helping community members.

Like that's the best way to get people to actually like adopt tools, right? When you go to a meetup and you decide to do one where it's like, hey, everyone bring your Android phone and we're gonna do live cahoots or like old school PSBTs.

You know, like the old school, I don't know, anybody that was around when Samurai first released the cahoots before Sorbon was the thing. You had to transfer back and forth these scam QR codes or transfer payloads if you were doing it online.

- You can still do that on you. - Yeah, you can. - Yeah, you can still do it. - Yeah, it's a good, I love Sorbon. Let me just start by just saying that. Like what's a code success, Pepe meme is always worth it but Sorbon really did change the game for that.

And but having to do it manually is, it's a lot of fun but it also helps you appreciate like what's going on. So if you haven't done that, I recommend it. But doing it at a meetup, that was the first time I did one and person was at a meetup.

And that's how people learn. That's how tools get adopted. And so that's kind of why we wanted to work on building that out. And we were still in the process but that's kind of like what one of our new missions is.

- Bitcoin shop.biz on Next but before I do, I just had a question on pass phrases. A lot of people have said to me, your pass phrase should only ever be words that are in the 2024 words, whatever it is.

And I've always said, to me just logically in my head that seems dumb because it means that it's more attackable 'cause it can only be of those words. I know that it still can have a lot of entropy but blah, but I've been told never ever do anything other than that.

Why? - Well, this is what I think is like that sounds dumb to me but I just wanted to know am I alone? - No, your pass phrase, it's a custom word. Think of it as a 13th or 25th custom word or words.

And you should choose something that you can remember but also is sufficiently high in entropy. - What about what I said earlier where I'm saying, I don't want to actually remember my pass phrase 'cause I'm getting you in there if someone puts a gun to my head, I actually don't want to know that.

They're like, tell me if I can pass phrase and I'm like, I can't. - To be fair, just to be fair in that situation and when a gun is actually to your head, you probably won't remember your pass phrase anyways.

To be quite honest. - I can't actually remember it, genuinely can't. And it's by design, it's that way because it's like, well then, I actually can't, I have to get in a car and go a long way and it's a fucking assay, you can blub a blunt.

So it's like, for me, I'm thinking, well, if I already have to make all of those moves anyway, why not have special characters? Why not have a mix of numbers? And let's just why not have it different to what is suggested and well, it sounds like, you're saying it's not done to do that, so that's fun.

- Yeah, I mean, your pass phrase can be whatever whatever you want it to be. Everyone has different strategies for making a pass phrase. Some people will use the same pass phrase over and over which they shouldn't do, but they'll do it because that's where humans and that's what humans do.

- I like to use the EFF board with and throw a couple dice to generate a pass phrase that way. But everyone's gonna have their own situation and you are infinitely better with even the simplest of pass phrases than without a pass phrase at all.

- Sounds like you like the real dice in gamble. It's like something Bitcoin was meant for in the beginning, I don't know. - Hand and hand. - Yeah. - Oh, back in the old days, there was plenty of ways to actually gamble with Bitcoin, plenty of sports betting and poker sites and things like that.

They've all kind of gone away these days, it was just sad, but it was a lot of fun. - 'Cause people comply and they're scared, but it is what it is, right? Yeah, no, the pass phrase, I always thought that was stupid when people were trying to tell us that you can't do that or that it's stupid to not use these words

that are not on the word list. - I will, they're just back in stupid. - For you, Max, since I know you're a foundation user, I think this is also true for cold card as well, but I could be mistaken.

When you want to access your wallet on your hardware device, the foundation of the cold card, you need to enter the pass phrase in. The pass phrase isn't remembered, right? You need to always enter it in when you want to launch that wallet.

So you may want to choose something that is easy to type on the small keyboard and a bunch of characters, special characters might be kind of a pain in the ass, so you might want to consider that when you're choosing a pass.

- It depends how often you're using them. Like I said, I don't like to get in one basket, so for anything I spend and use, I use Sam Rine. But when it's cold, then yeah, I use foundation.

So it's kind of like that stuff that I will very, very, very rarely have to touch. - Yeah, yeah, I'm just saying that's a consideration that maybe you don't want a bunch of special characters 'cause it will take three time of long.

- Yeah, that makes sense. Bitcoin's shop.biz, you had your hand raised. - Hey, how's it going, guys? What's up? - Hello, Rine. - Hey, this is awesome. I'm glad that you're having this space and that you brought all those people together to talk about this stuff.

Just for head, thanks. - Yeah, I got a question. It's a little off topic, but I was interested to know now that lightning has kind of been, or is being widely deemed as not a solution to scaling and forgive me if this is a new question.

What are your guys' thoughts on scaling, on possibility of it? And if it's even needed, you know, I think in terms of like metaphorically, like a samurai sword, like not everybody has a samurai sword, but some people are gonna have one to protect themselves and their families.

Is that what's going on with Bitcoin? - Good question. You know, I've always said that lightning was a solution to a problem that never existed. And that was, you know, brought about by the 2016, 2017 for wars and a huge amount of non-legitimate transactions.

Some people would call them spam. I would call them spam being pumped out by one or two parties to kind of make the case for larger blocks. It was never organic and it was never a real scaling crisis.

Like it was painted to be, but lightning was there as the answer to say, oh, well, yeah, we concede your point that scaling is in crisis and here's the solution. And I think that that resulted in serious malinvestment.

I don't think it was the right solution, but it was the solution that was kind of crammed down everyone's throat. And I see, I think where we're at now is one, the usage of lightning hasn't gone anywhere, you know, over the, it's been now four years, five years and it's kind of a dead end.

And the small amount of usage it has received, more and more people are realizing, wait, this is ridiculous that there's no privacy, there, you know, and it was supposed to be privacy tech.

There's no, you know, in the event of actual mempool congestion, it's not really doing the job. We don't see increased lightning usage or anything like that during these mempool events now.

And it's not fit for purpose, you know, and it's gonna take major, major engineering rewrites and refactoring to get it to fit for purpose. So I think that, you know, there was a lot of malinvestment and scaling will have to be thought about, of course, if this thing is gonna be successful.

But I don't think we're in the situation where it has to happen and it has to happen right this second or we're all doomed, you know, because besides these ordinal things, there's not a lot of use on Bitcoin.

And these ordinal things, you know, it's short lived. We have a periods of high mempool congestion as we've seen over the last couple of days, a week or so. And then it peters out and it's backed down to like one, two sats a bite.

So we're not seeing the transactions on Bitcoin increasing in a way that would suggest we're in a hyper adoption phase or anything like that. So I think, you know, they're smarter people than I will come up with various solutions and that will be thought about as everything is.

And maybe a better solution than lightning is out there. And I think there is, but I think there's a lot of people who have put a house on lightning, you know, and it's kind of a sunk-cost fallacy at this point.

- Yeah, I was about to say that. I mean, I think we've all been saying that for years and I'm a self-proclaimed and admittedly, I was a very early lightning user. I think I even have a guy that's probably out there somewhere on the internet of like, how to connect, like run your own lightning node or your LND with the dojo.

So don't do that. But I think it's very clearly obvious. It's a sunk hole fallacy. Like it's the best way and most usable way to use lightning is through custodial means. If that's the case, then like it's failed.

- Yeah. And that's exactly what we said that happened back in 2016. That it's going to be a middleman network. It's going to be the compliance layer. It's going to be a choke point. And it's kind of what it's turning into.

It's what it's coming into being. I saw someone talking about how lightning is going to allow banks to onboard. Like who, well, okay, maybe, but probably not. And who fucking cares? You know. - Why?

Isn't that the law? That's the opposite of what fucking Bitcoin says. - And now the next thing is the Chongian Mints, which are just, it's a fancy word for custodial, you know? It's like the liquid federation.

The federation is a fancy word for custodial. Someone has to approve. And if someone has to approve, they can be choked out. - I thought for sure you were about to say the cucked layer. And I was like, wow, all right.

Yeah. - But if someone has to approve something, that's where the compliance layer creeps in, you know? And it's like, well, if you approve this, you're going to jail. You know, if you approve this without AML, you're fucked.

You know? And very few people are going to be willing to do that. You know, to put themselves at that risk. And the few that are willing to put themselves at that risk, they're going to have to remain anonymous.

And the last thing you want to do is trust an anonymous entity to, you know, not rug you. - I mean, it is. - So they're way off on that. So it's not going to be Chongian Mints. It's not going to be lightning.

It's going to be something. If this thing is going to succeed, and this thing, I mean, Bitcoin, then yes, scaling is going to have to be a lot about, but we certainly have time. And, you know, we should take all the time we need.

We don't need to rush it. - I mean, I think the key into that, 'cause I was actually like one of my last questions for this was gonna be like, what did you think is a path forward for Bitcoin?

But honestly, it takes people similar to the samurai team to not fucking comply, to not bend the knee, to not go kiss the boots and are willing to stick to the ethos of Bitcoin. Like you have to take a risk.

'Cause at the end of the day, like, why would any institution, why would the current institution, the people that have all the power and all of quote unquote money, right? Like, why would they just like give up and just roll over to Bitcoin, roll over to things instead of trying to control something, right?

They can control it, right, and force people to comply. And then, you know, eventually, 'cause I mean, if you look at it over the years, and that's why I really like that Ronald Reagan quote of just after so long, they won't need to ban Bitcoin, right?

Because we'll already be broken. If people aren't willing to stand up and fight, if people aren't willing to take a fucking risk, if people aren't willing to build the tools and do the things and make the layer twos that need to be made, whether it's layer two or scaling solution, let me rephrase that.

If we don't have people like the samurai team who are willing to fight, right, into not handwave and to not do those things, eventually, they're just going to take over Bitcoin anyways. And then there's this whole-- - Well, they won't do all we have.

- Exactly. - You don't need to ban Bitcoin. I mean, if they ban Bitcoin, I would rejoice. It would be one of the best things that ever happened. But they won't do that. 'Cause they don't need to do that.

They've captured entirely on ramps and off ramps, right? And if you can capture the on ramps and off ramps, then you pretty much have a good handle on things. And people have been conditioned to expect and to tolerate and to even celebrate KYC and AML policies.

Most people don't remember a time where you didn't have to identify yourself to open a bank account or to do something like this. This is just normalized. And with all of that, I talk about this in my reflections of Bitcoin as peer-to-peer cash.

But if you've captured the on ramps and off ramps, if you have this culture of normalization of KYC, AML, of custodianship, of all of this stuff, why would you try to ban Bitcoin? It's going to work for what you want anyway, which is a cash-free society, which is a CBDC, which is surveilled technology.

It's here and it's called Bitcoin. And there's very few of us who are using it in a way that they would deem inappropriate. And we would deem absolutely necessary. - I wanted to just ask 'cause exactly what you're saying is what Zilco was saying.

There doesn't seem to be much of that around most of the groups and companies that I see, they have our kind of existing in this bent vene space. So there's not like that many summarize and Roan and Dojo Nodes and stuff like that.

Maybe you guys can rail off a few for everybody listening to add to the list of, you know, - You have to judge them based on their actions. I can always speak for ourselves. And you know, we didn't get into this for bending the knee and we haven't bent the knee and will not bend the knee.

And that's, you know, the beauty of Bitcoin still in itself is that it is permissionless. It is censorship-resistant, but it may, I mean, you have to do the work to make it so, you know? So if you get into this and you go in through a KYC source, you have to understand what that actually means for you.

And yes, you can mix. You can break the link of future activity, but you're still on a list and you will be on that list forever, you know? And it's important to understand the limitations of the system and what you can get out of the system.

And if it is still very possible to interact with Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way in a censorship-resistant way and in a private way, but it does take a lot of work, you know? And it's not an easy thing.

It's not like a plug and play for lack of a better term solution, you know? It takes work. It takes work, but anything worthwhile takes work. You know, so I can only speak for us, for Sam and I.

I'm sure there's others out there that are doing good work and important work, but as soon as you bend the knee, as soon as you hand wave away K-Y-C, AML-ish policies, as soon as you start justifying, as soon as you start doing that, you're fucking dead to me and I don't wanna hear it, you know?

I'm done with you. I won't, you know, I'm not gonna get aggressive. I'm not gonna berate you this and that. I just will ignore you because your opinion is worthless to me now. And I'm gonna continue building what I'm building.

- I think that wraps it up really nicely. We said we'd keep it to an hour and a half, we've gotten slightly over there. But exactly as Samara has just said there, bending the knee is not an option.

That's not what this is about. That is why both Ron and Dojo and Samara are so important to me. And I hope that we can continue this conversation probably in a month's time. We're gonna do some more of this and be good to hear from more of you.

Anyone who didn't get a chance to speak today, send a message and we'll let you know when we're gonna go live again. But the idea is that people can start to use these tools, push back and yeah, use this privately and securely.

- Just wanted to say thanks Max for putting this on. You know, this is the first time that I think we've organized a actual spaces for this. And having people engage again, that's kind of, I've been saying it for a while, but that was the whole point.

Like, I mean, I could have, I've known Samara now for years and I still have millions of questions that I could ask him. But the whole point is that like, it's not about me. Like, we wanna hear from you all and have your questions.

And there's a lot of times that people don't necessarily get a chance or maybe you get too nervous to ask, maybe a quote unquote, you know, plea or noob question or don't wanna look stupid and telegram and people think you're dumb, which I've definitely been that person as well.

So hopefully no one was made to feel like you're dumb 'cause there are no, you know, stupid questions. And that was the one thing that I learned in the Samara community was that once you get over the fear of sounding stupid, everyone's here to help you.

And that's the only way that these tools get adopted. And hopefully everyone takes that forward and continues to use the tools, arms yourselves for when the time, when it continues to get worse.

So thanks again, Max, I appreciate it. Now I appreciate you guys joining us and everyone else. And yeah, I look forward to the next one. And we'll do a pod before it as well so that we can dig into another topic.

But yeah, appreciate you all. And we'll catch you on the next one. Peace. - Cheers. - Thanks for listening. And for anyone who now wants to go and use Samarai that hasn't already or wants to go and use Ronan Dojo that hasn't already, you can click on the links in the show notes. And if you do decide you want to buy a Ronan Dojo Tanto,

you can go to RonanDojo.com and use the code ungovernable. That will give you a discount and it will help me support the show. Thank you again to Samarai, Zelko, and the whole Ronan Dojo and Samarai team.

I really appreciate the fact that you put out such incredible software and hardware and that you refuse to bend the knee.