Blockchain spies call Bitcoin Core Contributor “Unqualified” (Bitcoin monthly episode 0029)

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 this space, and deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back. It's another episode of Bitcoin Monthly. Bitcoin Q&A. Antimus and I discuss some of the recent news in Bitcoin. I won't go through the whole list now, 'cause we're about to get into it.

I've got to be up in a few hours, so I'll make this quick. I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who's been sharing the show with friends and family, sending Sats in via podcasting 2.0 apps, and sending in questions.

I really do appreciate the support, and I also appreciate the support of my sponsors. So please, I'll be quick on this one, but do me a favor and have a listen. First up, not technically a sponsor, but they have given me a very nice shell code that gives you money off and me some Sats back to help support the show.

This is not from some shitty, shitty company, like most other podcasters are using. This is from the beautifully designed and fucking amazing Ronan Dojo. Yes, that is right. You can go and get a Ronan Dojo Tanto, get some Sats off, protect your privacy, support proper builders using open source code, and you can help support the show.

If you're listening and you're thinking, "Oh, I don't know what this Ronan Dojo thinks about." Well, firstly, you need to sort your fucking life out, and secondly, you can go and listen to the many, many podcasts I have recorded with ZELCO and the rest of the team.

The shell code is ungovernable, and the link is in the show notes. Any questions at all, you can reach out to me. Next up is Foundation Devices. If you haven't already seen the passport, I suggest you go and have a look at foundationdevices.com.

The design is absolutely beautiful. And not only this, it's easy to use. It's fully open source. They have the best team out there. Bitcoin Q&A is working with them all the time, trying to push privacy-preserving features, and make this cypherpunk tool accessible to fuck wits like me.

They've also just dropped the price to $199. And again, if anyone has any questions, you can reach out. You probably see a theme here, open source. It matters. Stop fucking around with companies that don't care about you or Bitcoin or open source.

It's bullshit. Use a signing device. Foundationdevices.com. Right, final one. I'm going to do this one quickly because I'm running out of energy here. (exhales) SX-6.store. They make still backup plates.

You need to buy still backup plates. They're some of the most reasonably priced still backup plates. In the world, go to SX-6.store, buy them, stamp your seats on them, and be confident if there's a fire or a flood.

You still have your sats. SX-6.store. Tell them I sent you. Enjoy the show. - We were just slacking you off there, and then I realised you were in the same chat. - I would expect nothing less guys keep up the good work.

- That gay little robot bloke. Always running late. What'd you do with your time? Always late. Three minutes. Can't believe it. (laughs) - These coffees don't make themselves. (laughs) I don't have a butler unfortunately.

Not yet, at least. - I'll lend you my spare. - There we go. It's not body, is it? - No, fuck that guy. I hate that little prick. (laughs) He thinks he's all tough. (laughs) - It was good to see you in Regan, man.

- It was absolutely pleasure, and one year removed from last time. - Yeah, indeed. Indeed, how was your Regan experience? - Oh, man. - It was very different from last year, but it was actually pretty cool.

Like last year, I mean, we had the booth with a seat signer, and so it was just like full on behind the booth and just chatting with people, and there was like huge crowd there. So I didn't get to see anything or like hardly get to meet up with other people apart from the stand.

But this year, it was pretty cool. It was a lot more relaxed, the feeling, and I mean, we had the workshops for seat signer and seed hammer on the Saturday, which was cool, but otherwise it just got around, it's got to go around, meet you up with people, just chat and hang out, and it was a lot more social,

and less business than last time. - Mine was kind of reversed, basically. So mine was a lot more social last year, and this year was a lot more business. It was a lot quieter than I was expecting.

It started a great time. The footfall going past our booth on the ground floor was significantly less than I thought it was going to be. I think the bear market vibes were, you could see that in the amount of people that were in attendance, but it started a totally great time.

Did not see a single talk, because I was a busy man in the booth with the rest of the guys. But yeah, I actually gave my own talk as well, which I think went really well about, well, no shock, but good privacy.

I got some great feedback on there, so it was good to get up there and talk about stuff like that. And Matt should be pleased to know there were no scooter incidents this year either. - Oh, I'm not necessarily pleased to know that.

I thought that was quite funny. I think 'cause I knew who it happened to. That's why it was funny. - Yes, I was just gonna say. Yeah, and he was not in attendance this year, so shout out to that guy, you were sorely missed.

So, one was off the leash, Antimus, and one was on the leash, Q&A, all business. - I didn't see Antimus without a can of beer in his hand the whole weekend. - Really? - Yeah. Just staggering about the place.

I also taught him how to play pool as well. - Ooh, that was competitive fun. - I have a feeling you'd be a bit of a hustler. That's what I get from you, Q&A. But yeah, I've played it a couple of times, and then actually you're really skilled, and you just end up taking sats off people.

Is that basically how it went? - So, what I infer, what you really mean is that you think that I'd probably spend a lot more time than I should do in a pub? - No, more that you're dishonest.

(laughing) - We're all from nature of the two. - To your final point about me being a hustler and a bit of a pool, absolutely not. It was me versus Antimus, and his friend, I don't know whether I can mention his name, so I'll leave that down to Antimus.

And it was two on one, and it was the longest game of pool in the whole of eternity. We were all absolutely shocking, but I managed to just about scrape away. - Congrats. - Yeah, that was the first evening.

We had a rematch planned, but someone didn't show up. - I was in one of these, so in Riga, a lot of the bars are underground in these crypts, I suppose you'd call them. And I was in there with a couple of other guys, and then I came out after about an hour to like 17 different messages from Antimus

and his friend challenging me to a rematch. Clearly I didn't get them all, and then it was inferred that I was too scared to turn off to the pool. - Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, yeah. - That's the story, I'm sticking with it.

- So Riga, is it still up there, like top for both of you? Or still never been, but? - Yeah, absolutely. Still had a really great time, despite it being a little bit quieter. The guys from Huddle Huddle put on a great not show, is it?

They've just, they've thought about everything. Yeah, great events. They thought about everything. It was really fun being able to pay for pretty much everything in Bitcoin with the exception of like beers in bars that are not associated with the comfort itself, but yeah, really great.

Great to meet some of the usual faces and to meet some new ones, and shout out to all the people that came down and stuck by the booth to say hi to me to get the rest of the team from foundation as well.

- Was your talk recorded in any way or? - Yeah, audio only. So I was on the cypherpunk stage, which is strictly no camera policy as soon as you walked through the door. All of the doors were literally covered up.

You had to go in to see what was going on. You couldn't just pay through the windows or anything like that. So another great shout out to the Huddle Huddle guys the way they set that up. And the window coverings were literally saying, don't use your phone or your camera in here.

Like this is strictly, you know, do not record, so. - I like it. - Each one was optionally audio recorded. Obviously, which, you know, everybody knows what my voice sounds like. So yeah, this should be an audio recording floating around somewhere once.

Once the guys from Huddle Huddle have had a rest and get chance to do all the editing and whatnot. Excellent, I look forward to listening to that. So we've got a long list today, just browsing through it.

But before we get into the meat of it and the smart stuff, can I throw you an 80 IQ stupid question? - Only after you tell me what 80 IQ means. - Oh, 80 IQ. (laughing) I thought that was an abbreviation.

- There we go. - You thought that was something technical. - Jesus Christ. - You're like, is that a speck I've missed? - 80 IQ, yeah, 80 IQ. - Okay, yeah, hit me with it. - So this is from probably the most 80 IQ of everyone I've ever met.

This is from Ben Gunn. And he is asking me to ask you to, is Proveno any good? Is there anything that he should worry about? 'Cause he can't be fucked with PGP and messing around with all the stuff that you guys might want to do?

He just says, does it work? Is it shit? - So when you sent it into the chat yesterday, it's the first time I've ever heard of it. So it's going to be difficult for me to, yeah, to give like an educated thing up.

I'm literally, as we're talking, I'm poking around with it now. So for people that have never heard of it, it looks like this is kind of a, basically just a website where you can type a note and then you can set like a self-destruct timer.

Presumably it's end to end encrypted. And only the person with the specific URL that gets generated will be able to read the note. And then after a certain amount of time, it could be a single reader.

It could be like a week or whatever you, however you predefine it, then it'll self-destruct and it will no longer be. - Excellent. - Yeah, and you can also set a custom password as well for it.

So in terms of the specifics of this, I don't see a link to a GitHub, so I don't know whether it's open source or not. So that'll be the first kind of flag to me. That's not to say that there isn't one.

But generally speaking, yeah, if you want to just send, let's say maybe send yourself a Bitcoin address to get from what, from a laptop to a computer or something like that, or to send an address to a friend so they want to send you some stuff that maybe this sort of stuff is fine.

I would be hesitant to recommend this until I could see the source code. Not like a verify example of an idiot, but at least, you know, if it's open source, the whole thing with open source is that, you know, yeah, exactly, yeah.

So I'm struggling to find a GitHub repo. - Yeah, I'm just having a look too. I can't find anything. I do actually host my own version of this called Private Bin. - Of course you do. - If anybody wants to test it out, it's just that bin.Bitcoin.guide works on exactly the same premise as the way I've just described.

Privno, the one we're talking about. I know that Private Bin is definitely open source, so. - Oh, there we are. - These can be useful, but in terms of Privno, like just check whether it's open source or not first.

- Well, so there's no need. If you've got your own open source one, then there's your answer, Ben, go and use that. - Yeah, use mine. - The reason I asked as well was because I've seen two or three times other people in this space use it with me, sending me stuff.

So I was like, oh, maybe it's good, but okay, use the open source one as the answer. - Yeah, I mean, it does depend on like what you want to get out of it. So for like, there's better options.

Like say if you want to send yourself something, like to say a Bitcoin address from desktop to laptop, like there's better ways to do that. You can achieve that with an application called KDE Connect, which like uses your own wifi network to basically be able to communicate from say a Google Pixel tablet to your Linux desktop

or something like that. And as soon as it all happens automatically, so as soon as you copy something on your laptop, you can choose to send that over your and local wifi network to whichever other devices you've got KDE installed.

Obviously that completely cuts out the rest of the whole internet encryption or not. But if you wanted to send stuff to somebody else, like from me to UMAX, then again, it depends what you're trying to send, I guess.

If it's just a quick note, maybe these are fine. But there's other great tools like Simplex Chat, which is like quickly becoming one of the gold standards in kind of entering encrypted peer-to-peer chats.

So yeah, it ultimately just comes back to what it is you're trying to send. You know, if it's, yeah, horses for courses. - Okay. Any thoughts on some of us? - Yeah. I've had a few people mention Provenote to me as well or asking to send stuff via that.

And I, yeah, I mean, it's basically just echoing what you just said, open source. There's definitely a red flag or that it's not open source. Even if it were, obviously this is a hosted service so you're never quite sure what's running there anyway.

So if you can host something yourself or you know someone who's hosting a solution, there's always the better way to go. There's also, there's been an update. I think it's a while back already from Bitwarden as well, they have like these notes sections while for sending yourself stuff or just store it like for, I use that for sending

like Bitcoin addresses or something from one device to the other or just storing it for a while. That's quite cool. If you're using Bitwarden anyway, then that's a quite good solution. Yeah, but I, yeah, just stay with the same recommendations, thank you, be wary of this 'cause it's not very transparent.

We had this pretty fun incident a while back. I don't actually know exactly in the pro two weeks, three weeks, not quite sure exactly when it was, but this was quite a scene on Twitter and probably Noster2 that there was someone who pretty egregiously fat fingered a fee on a transaction.

Quite fun to see people racing around the check-in, trying to find out who this was and the miner that mined it. I'm not 100% sure who it was. F2 pool. F2 pool was, they even came out to say they'd return it if someone could provide proof.

Quite a journey, that whole ride. But I don't know if one of you got the exact chronology 'cause I'll probably mess that up. I can tell you a few things 'cause we covered it on our latest Klebminer Monthly.

First he said he was gonna give it back the F2 pool guy. He said, oh, I'm gonna give it back. And then he got annoyed that they didn't understand the time zone that he was in. So he got all stressed about that and then put a poll up basically saying, "Shall I return it, give it to the miners, "or should I freeze it?"

I think with the three options. And give it to miners was what, one on the poll, but then like a little bitch, he gave it back anyway. So the miners didn't get it. - Okay, I didn't actually get that resolution.

Wow, okay, 'cause that's all the poll, but I thought that it would just go that way, okay. - Yeah, so for a bit of context for people who aren't sure exactly what we're talking about, oh, how terrible this fat finger was.

The transaction in question was on the 10th of September and it paid a fee of $1,982,100,600,000, 32 cents, or essentially 20 Bitcoin. - Well, half a million quid. - Yeah, it's gonna say, which at the time had a USD value of $510,000 and the fee rate was 8,182,079 cents per price.

So they overpaid by, according to mempool.space, by 481,299 X. - That's a serious tip. - That is not just the tip, is it? (laughing) So yeah, it later transpired that the people in question who did this fat finger were Paxos.

They overpaid the network fee. And I believe they were doing it on behalf of PayPal. So PayPal do some form of Bitcoin stuff. I'm sure it's a cooked version. - It is. - And then Paxos is like the backend for them.

It does all the Bitcoin operations for them. And it was Paxos that were the culprits. But yeah, like you said, Max, they've since given it back. I don't know if there's any details on exactly what went wrong, but my guess is that they're doing some form of manual shit somewhere along the line and somebody's not been paying attention.

But if my assumption is correct that they are doing manual stuff, like why? Paxos has been around for a long, long time. Surely they should be able to automate this shit by now. - Probably some smart ass who just thinks that they can do things better than the normal standards.

And they can't be like, we saw with Luke Dash Jr. - Yeah. - A bit of arrogance, like I'm smarter than everyone. So I'm in a different way. And then it all goes wrong for you very quickly.

- Yeah, I mean, I'm just making assumptions here. It could well be a software bug. They could have it all automated, who knows? But for it to happen, just as a single one off, just it's a little bit strange to me, like, yeah.

But they've got the fees back. I share your thoughts, Max, around, whether they should or shouldn't have, in the end. Would have been a bit of a Chad move to keep it, especially as soon as I heard that it was PayPal, I was like, this is absolutely beautiful, like four of those guys.

(laughing) - Yeah, it would have been nice, a little break for some of the miners as well. And did you see how boring his fucking tweet was? I couldn't get over that. - Oh, I heard you talking about this on the plug mine a monthly.

- Oh my God. God, give us the TLDR. - I can't remember it exactly now. John was reading it to me. It was so fucking autistic. It was like, today is my 853rd flight of the year. I'm on a Boeing 8429 serial number is da, da, da, da, da.

I'll be arriving at this time. And it like just went on and on to all these fucking numbers that was totally irrelevant. And it basically was like, oh, and I'm not actually going to give them money back.

And it was just like, you fucking weirdo. Why do we need to know all of that information about your travels? You fucking idiot. - Nice. And this was the head of F2 Paul. - I don't know if he's the head, but he's, you know.

- The face off. - Yeah, I think so, yeah. - Am I right in saying that this was the biggest fee paid in the whole history of Bitcoin? I mean, it's gotta be sure. - It is the biggest fee in-- - Total tax in fiat terms, I believe, yeah.

- Right, right. - There was another one that we read off again in that show that was some-- - Ah, yes, you did. - An almost fucking number. I can't remember what it was. - So, with that thousand or something?

- Would that be like a bigger set per byte maybe? But at the time, Bitcoin was probably worth about 10p. - Yeah, I think that's it, yeah. - Yeah, I'm with you, yeah. - Yeah, but in in in SAT terms, there has been a bigger one.

And it was quite a lot bigger. It was like not 20 Bitcoin. It was like 2,600, I think, I want to say. - That must have been worth about that. - 50 quid at the time. (laughing) - Yeah, oh well.

- Yeah, so next on the list, we've got Nunchuk Byzantine, Byzantine, how do you pronounce that? - Byzantine. - Byzantine? - Yeah, I'm with you. - Byzantine, all right, okay. - Yeah, so this is from Nunchuk, a new model that they've come out with is a while back.

I think we covered this in the last one or last or previous to last Bitcoin monthly, that they've now got this collaborative custody model, so you can get like different packages where they hold one of your keys for you, but like Manchin Capital or CASA.

And now they've come up with a new product and this is a collaborative custody as like platform as a service. So if you are like an advisor or if you're a company that wants to do collaborative custody, you can use Nunchuk for your clients, basically.

So they can get like a, you can set this up with your clients and hold one of their keys for them. That's like the high level that I took here, but yeah. Yeah, this is very, very cool. Like I got a big respect for the way that the Nunchuk guys operate like all of their features and sort of solutions like this

that are always seem really well thought out. They've done a lot of great work around multi-sig and collaborative custody and even like social stuff where you can have like multi-sig with your friends or something, make that very, very easy.

I got a couple of open questions in, not that I'm asking you guys to kind of answer it, just kind of, I guess maybe if anybody knows the answers, but like if I used to set this up as an advisor, how do I charge my clients?

And does Nunchuk then take a fee? And presumably Nunchuk wants to get something out of this. There doesn't seem to be anything that explains how that side of things works yet. I mean, admittedly, this is only like a week or two old and it's only kind of restricted access at the moment, but those would be some of the questions

that I'd be interested in learning the answers to. But nonetheless, this is a very cool solution. And to be able to have, you know, if you wanted to spin up your own collaborative custody business, then you've got like a turnkey solution now.

But yeah, we'll be keen to learn some more information about it as an, I'm sure that I'll come out in there in the coming weeks and months. But yeah, shout out to Nunchuk guys. This is a very cool solution for people to look at.

- Pretty cool also that I, in Riga, I had a conversation with a couple of guys about like collaborative custody, especially for advisors. And they were saying also that in a lot of countries, it is possible to hold keys for your clients but not to have the expub or like just to have access

to the funds or like visible access to the funds. 'Cause that would basically give you the responsibility that if you see any kind of criminal activity on that account that you would be liable for that for not reporting that.

But here I don't know if that would be possible as well. So kind of just hold the key but not have access to actually seeing the movement of the funds. But I think there are quite a lot of advisors that do offer that at the moment to hold a key for their clients.

So I think this could be a game changer and to have someone providing this software that you can go to for additional features about fixes and someone who just oversees that whole portion, I think is a huge benefit for them.

- Yeah, definitely. One of the main reasons that I've always kind of refrained from heavily advising these collaborative custody services is exactly like you say, the custodian of the third key.

So, you know, it could be Casa, it could be on chain, could be, you know, whoever the advisor is in this non-juke model, they, keeping a key, they also have obviously the wallet descriptive file, which basically gives them view access into the whole wallet.

So they can see all of your UTEXOs, all of your transactions, et cetera, which if you're not bothered about privacy is absolutely fine. And it makes this model very, very simple so that the collaborative custodian can help you out when the shit hits the fan.

But yeah, there are many different ways that you can approach being a third party with a key that doesn't have access. And I think that's going to be the next big iteration of this that there's a couple of fringe projects out there that do start to address this, but I think that the next big wave of this type of thing,

which will unlock the door for me to be able to recommend this type of stuff more frequently is the private option where you're just holding a key and via whatever method be that, taproot be that, mini script be that something else, you're kind of in the dark basically.

That's not only good from a privacy perspective, it's also good from a, I guess a regulation perspective. So if I'm the third party, if I don't know shit, I can't be subpoenaed or can't have a strongly worded government letter saying, tell me all about this person GTX because you literally don't know.

And companies that are looking to do this should architect their solution. It's just going to save you a lot of headache in the future. And I certainly, if I was going to do this, that's definitely the way that I would do it.

And the final benefit is that the third party, the advisor or whatever you want to call them, can't deny the service you as the user, well, technically they still could, but they can't based on specific transactions because they don't know about them.

So if you find yourself on a government watchlist and the government says, if you're involved with this transaction and you are helping a person spend that UTXO, you can't do it. You're breaking a law if you do that.

But if you don't know that and you're not part of that transaction, you're just a key holder, then that removes that threat model as well. So lots of promising implementations coming out.

So definitely a part of the market to keep your eye on. - One of the surprising news was that fortress was acquired by Ripple. - Has that gone through? - Yep, yep. - It has, yep. - Quality.

- Announced on the 8th of September. Yeah, so this fortress is a trust, holds Bitcoin for multiple companies that holds their Bitcoin. And I think even Suwan Bitcoin is with them, has their funds with them.

And Ripple, the company acquired the entire company. So this is definitely a big move. It wasn't public exactly how much they paid, but somewhere up to 250 million. And with this move, they gained a whole bunch of different regulatory licenses for operating in the US.

So the bit license from New York was in there and a whole bunch of other licenses. So this was definitely a big step for them. But, and I think even Suwan already came out with a statement saying that they'll be looking to move for the time being, they're still there at the moment.

But yeah, that's how it goes, right? - Yeah, I think Suwan might have already moved. I'm just trying to verify that now. I'm pretty sure I saw a tweet from Corey to say that they didn't move to BitGo or something like that.

Pretty sure there was some quick action. - Okay, near term no change. Fortress trust will be run as autonomous unit. Mid-term will have some news out very soon. So maybe that announcement has been made and I missed it.

Also calls, you see, DM me with a screenshot showing you sold your XRP and I'll give you a year of Suwan Premium for free. There we go. Have you sold yours or you're hodling that? - No, I fact no.

- Suwan Premium, I'm not selling that. (laughing) - Yeah, it looks like they have just found a tweet from a Suwan account saying, "Swan client coins are insured in cold wallets at BitGo and did not move during the reported incident at Fortress."

So I think they're with BitGo now. Oh no, Suwan set up this agreement with Fortress to use BitGo as cold storage. So it kind of looks like they've got exposure to both I think. Yeah, seems a bit messy.

- Isn't it sort of whatever they do, they're just jumping in bed with someone else who's in charge of their client's SATs? Is it not a better option just to say there is no option other than you to take it into cold storage, we just cut all this shit out or am I missing a piece?

- What do you mean that so you can't have Bitcoin in your account, so to speak? - Yeah, so like you'd say, I wanna buy 100 pounds worth of Bitcoin, $100, whatever. You go on there and then the only option is for you to give your, either they have an expub or you put an individual address in or they do pay names or whatever they have.

You send them the fiat and they send you the Bitcoin and there is no custody. So that you cut out all this concern and all this shit and you do things the proper way, would this not resolve all of these problems?

- Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that's like the model that like relay and like a pocket Bitcoin and stuff like that kind of model where they don't hold any customer finds at any point. So you just like pay the money in and then as soon as it, your money arrives, you get paid out your Bitcoin.

That's obviously the ideal solution but I mean, we all here are proponents of self custody but I think especially for larger holders, for people who are not too deep into the whole Bitcoin scene but just wanna hold their stuff.

This is, I mean, they'll always be custodial solutions out there. - But it's a shit one. It's just like a feel as though you can do a tweet and you can say, oh, we care about Bitcoin, blah, blah.

You can do all that stuff and do all your marketing but at the end of the day, it's not like a black and white thing. Even if they said, oh, it's just too hard for someone to fucking have their own sat, which it isn't.

That's just not true. Like with the right education, it's piss easy. I'm capable of doing it. So like, it's not that fucking hard. And then there's like the middle ground where why can't they team up with something like Nunchuk or have their own solution where there is a different custody model

but they're not trusting it with fortress or whoever else. Like, I just think it's bullshit. That's what it smells like to me. I just feel like it's theater. - Well, it's money, isn't it?

Like they make their money by selling Bitcoin. They take fees. So the more often that you buy Bitcoin, the more money that they make. So they want the barrier to entry for that to be as low as physically possible.

If that means that they don't force self custody, then they're gonna do it, aren't they? They do it to increase those fees. So that's exactly why they do it. And they do all, don't forget, they do a lot weird shit.

Like, allow you to auto DCA every fucking eight seconds and shit like that, which people seem to love. Which, you know, if you started withdrawing every, you know, even if it was like once a day, it's gonna start costing you in Nunchane fees.

So having that account there, you know, removes that a little bit, but obviously increases trust significantly. - I just still, I get you, I understand, but there's so many options in between.

Even if it's, oh, you can stack every fucking eight seconds, whatever Nonsense someone wants to do. You could do that, but then it pays out every week. So you have some trust to some level, but not ever more than X amount, like, you know, not ever more than $500 or something like that.

Because, you know, and I'm not having like a particular ago at SWOM here, because I feel like maybe they get it harder than anyone else. And at the end of the day, there's so many different people doing a similar thing.

But like, I just feel they're always saying they're doing education and they're doing this and they're there for the plebs and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, if you really care and we know this, if you really care and you want Bitcoin to work and to make it less attackable, stop fucking holding funds for people

and teach people to hold their own keys, even if it's multi-seag or there's someone else involved like Nunchuck or whatever it is, there are options. And I just think that at this stage, stop fucking around and actually do something, not just talk about it, go and do something that makes people think they actually care

and they're doing things right. - Yeah, I agree. I mean, I wouldn't hold your breath 'cause it would significantly use the revenue, but yeah, I agree in principle. Next on the list. So yeah, next on the list is a seed sign of the 0.7.0.

This was a large release that came out, has been working behind the scenes for quite a long time. It's been a huge contributor base this time. There've never been so many people working on a release.

It's been wonderful to just view from the outside and see this progress over the last few months. One of the big updates was reproducible builds. So that's been something that a lot of people have been shouting for for quite a long time.

And that's been a big breakthrough. They were working on that for quite a while, especially since in the last update, the 0.6.0. They introduced the seed sign of OS. So this was now possible to build with that, the reproducibility.

So there've been quite a few people who've done that already. So if anyone wants to try that out, there's some guides to follow along with to do that. They've also now introduced faster startup.

So this was actually some help from the guys at Seed Hammer who also used the same hardware. They helped out to reduce the startup speed by close to 70%, which is pretty significant. So now it's down from about 40 seconds to 12 seconds.

And also faster live camera display. So like the refresh or frame rate of the live camera view when you're scanning something is a lot faster. There was quite like a stuttery until now. So it's much easier to point and scan.

And then lastly, this will probably only be something that's important for people like myself with the Vorkin 21 that when we like sell these units, you can have like a settings QR generator.

So there are like a whole bunch of different settings that you can preset on the seed signer. And like for instance, camera rotation or if you want to have like a specific QR code format and like what address types you want to have and all that kind of stuff.

So up to now we always had to include a sheet of paper where people had to go through and do all the presets so that it worked for specific use cases. And now you can just generate a QR code that you scan with the seed signer on setup and it automatically sets up all the right settings for whatever you want to do.

Because like the different cameras you can use, they have different like automated or like preset rotations. So at the moment, like all seed signers that we ship out when you get them the cameras on its head.

So you have to go into the settings and then like change around. This way you can just scan this QR code and everything, yes, up. So like if you want to use your seed signer with Sparrow for instance and Taproot and Sparrow could in theory just show a QR code and you could scan that.

And then all seed signer settings would be geared towards using it with Sparrow. So you don't have to select it every time you export something for Sparrow for instance. - Very slick. - Yeah, next, this is also cool to see Peach Bitcoin, the 0.3.0.

So they, I think, I want to say it was last year in Riga, right, that they announced and that they opened up or am I missing? Yeah, it feels like ages ago. And one of the, I mean, it's been a huge success at least from what I can gauge from the outside.

But one of the Knox was always that it was still close source. So they have now open sourced the entire code base. And I can't see exactly what license it is but from what I can see is pretty much do whatever you want.

And even with commercial, there we go. - Well done. - Yeah, we love to see it. - Pretty amazing. - Yeah, yeah. I love the Peach team. Spent a bit of time with them in Riga actually and obviously love what they're building used their product regularly.

In answer to what is the license, I hate to be that actually guy that's the ultimate job. It technically doesn't meet the open source standard. Their license is MIT plus common to close. So it means the bare minimum of like it's source viewable.

You can go, you can read the code. You can build it for yourself. Basically you can do everything apart from make some profit off the code and sell it. - Okay. - Which for most users is absolutely fine.

If you just want to be sure that, you know, Peach isn't kind of logging all of your information and everything's being done client side, which is probably one of the most important things for a peer to peer application like this.

And then this is more than enough to get that reassurance. But technically speaking, it doesn't meet the quote unquote open source standard, but it's a kind of common license option that some companies in the space use to prevent, I guess, competition.

- So this would be when you hear people say things like source viewable, this is what this would be. Okay. - I get what you're saying though, it's better. It's a lot better because people can be more confident in what they're running.

- For sure. Yeah. And I don't want people to misconstrue what I'm saying. Like I'm not, I'm not shitting on the Peach team. I love the product and I will continue to use it. And this is a massive improvement.

And I recommend them for making it. I just open source is something that I'm very particular about and I just want to make sure that it's clear that technically speaking, this is not truly open source because you can't do absolutely anything that you want with it.

But it's distinctly better than just completely closed source, which is what it was until fairly recently. So hats off guys, keep up the good work. - Yeah, congrats. Yeah, that is a big step.

- Am I missing something? 'Cause in the license here on GitHub, it says, permission is here by granted, free of charge to any person obtaining a copy of the software and associated to documentation files to deal in the software without restrictions, including without limitations, the right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute,

sub license, and or sell copies of the software. And to permit persons to whom the software is furnished to do so subject to the following conditions. - Yeah, read the comments clause bit at the bottom.

- Not really, you can't really use it, are you fucks? - The license does not grant you the right to sell the software. - What? - Okay, but what? Okay. - Well, however it's worded, is still a step in the right direction.

That is good to see. I had a question about Peach, actually, and you two will probably be able to answer this. So I was speaking to Crown the other day, and obviously we've got the new website up, and we're very fucking close.

We've been saying it forever now, but we are very, very close to having all of our clothing ready. And we were chatting, he was like, well, you know, do we allow fiat, 'cause a lot of the clothing that we're gonna be doing is not like obvious Bitcoin stuff, like people who aren't so into Bitcoin might also want it.

Should we allow fiat? And I was like, no, we definitely can't have fiat. And he's like, I know, but a lot more people would want to buy if we could have fiat as I know, and not doing it. And he said, well, what about if we had an option where we could hold their hand and walk them through using not an exchange, but something else.

And I was like, yeah, I suppose we could do something, you know, we could think about Bisk or something, but it's too difficult. And I was like, I wonder whether there'd be a way that Peach could have some sort of walkthrough or way that someone could easily through the website who's like, oh, fucking out of Bitcoin,

all I've got is this dirty fiat, but I really want this hoodie, that it could be easy for them. Like, can you think of a way that would be slicker than just like a guide and then go and do this?

And people are like, oh, I've only got five minutes. I'm not doing that. Like, is there a way it can be built into like a web browser almost? - So just so I'm clear, you want the idea is that you want somebody like that that doesn't have Bitcoin to do a purchase through Peach that essentially pays you for the product.

- Yes, I don't want to accept fiat and I want people to buy our stuff and I want them to have Bitcoin and use Bitcoin, but I don't want to put them off by going, oh, go to Bisk and download this and they're like, fuck that, I haven't got time.

I want it to be easy, but I don't want it to integrate with some service where they're KY seeing themselves. So is there this middle ground where it could be easy-ish and they can still buy our stuff and be exposed to Bitcoin?

- I think I'd say this quite often like anything's possible if you throw enough time and money at it. - Got neither. (laughing) - But I still think that that would be enough of a hurdle for somebody to go, do you know what?

I don't actually need that t-shirt or that hoodie that badly, I'm going to go through, jump through those hoops. I see that the intention, I just think it's probably, even if you've got the Peach guys on board and this became as slick as possible, if it doesn't happen in two minutes, which most trades don't,

then it's just going to be too much of a barrier. - Okay, well, if you're listening to Peach team, think about it, think about it and message me if you come up with something clever. - What's the motivation for not taking fiat?

Is it just-- - There's a few. Okay. - So number one is I don't want to dox myself. - Yeah. - As soon as you touch fiat rails, it comes with all these different complications and I've worked really hard to get away from all of that with everything on the clothing side, including the shipping and all sorts of things,

as long as it's gone into it. So I don't want to touch fiat rails for that reason. And even if I could find a workaround and do something clever in fiat land so that it doesn't link to me or crown or anything else, the site is ungovernable misfits and then someone's coming on and buying with fiat

and I'm like, nah, I just don't want to touch it. Like I like to think of this as like, there's two worlds, there's the Bitcoin world and there's the old world and I don't want the two touching.

- Yeah, I think, I mean, that could be like quite a cool kind of feature if there were some kind of order book, like a centralized order book for people who want to buy stuff and other people that pay their orders and get paid in here.

It's actually quite a cool idea. But the issue is that you usually, I mean, it's very time sensitive, right? So if like someone comes and wants to order on your site or I presume if you have like a BTC pay server or something, the invoice will only be active for a certain amount of time, right?

I mean, you can change that, but you don't want to do it for days 'cause then you'll be subject to like volatility with price and stuff like that. So you kind of want to have it in a range of like half an hour to an hour or something and then it has to be paid.

- But like you're saying about having the order book, you know, 'cause it wouldn't just be me who wants it. Like I think a lot of these smaller Bitcoin businesses that are like, I don't really want to touch the fiat rails, but I do want to have exposure to the rest of the fucking 99.9% of the world who might want to buy something.

If it became a slick tool, if someone like Peach was like, we're going to actually build this into the browser and you did have an order book and you have someone saying, okay, well, I'm happy to sell some Bitcoin and get some fear.

So I'm going to put this offer up here. And, you know, as long as it doesn't fluctuate between these two prices, then it's a go. And then anyone who goes on there, you should have then like a deep order book of people who are looking to sell rather than them having to download the app and then put their offer on there.

I want specifically this. The offer's made by what products they're buying and then it will just automatically match, okay, someone's spending $100 on this thing, right? There's someone else who wants in the range and they'll do any trade between $50 to $500, right?

Done, bang, zip it across the money. Like, I know like I'm simplifying it. I'm sure there's much more that goes into it, but I just feel it would be a cool tool and Peach, you should probably build it and then like test it on on Governor on Misfits first and then just like buying me a drink for coming up with the idea.

- Yeah, I mean, I think one caveat would definitely be that it's because I was also thinking as like a company, you could do that as a service, but then you, I think from the regulatory perspective, it is pretty dodgy.

'Cause you're not, if I were doing this, even privately for someone else, you are providing a service, right? 'Cause they're paying you and you're passing on the money to someone else. So you could get into like your money laundering territory pretty quickly from a regulatory perspective.

So, I mean, that's the great thing with all of these like peer-to-peer exchanges that like Peach that you don't have that issue, right? 'Cause you're just exchanging backwards or forwards between two parties and there's no like middle man who's who's doing like creating a service.

- I got you. - I think I might have a kind of workaround for you that lowers the area to entry a little bit. I'm pretty sure the Bitcoin company, the gift card company, allows you to top up your account there with fiat.

- Okay. - And you guys could just have gift cards on there so that they could go and put 50 quid, 50 dollars in and then buy an ungovernable misfits gift voucher and then just use that as a code on your store.

- You see? - And there we go. - No, he's not a useless bastard. He does know what he's talking about. - That is actually pretty sweet. - That is sweet. Yeah, that's a really good idea and I think that could be used by a lot of different people.

Right, the Bitcoin company, we need to speak. I'm happy to trial this and be the first to fuck around with it. - Do they have like direct integration? Like that you can just like, whatever like a WordPress plugin or something that you can put into your checkout and they automatically redirects to them.

You can pay them basically and it automatically integrates. - I don't think they do, but they could. - Yeah, I mean, they have a very slick app and so you've now lowered the barrier to entry if you went down this route to basically just setting up a Bitcoin company account and then just topping it up.

- There we are. - So not perfect, but it should hopefully get you some way towards what you wanna do. - Oh, I like that. That's good. That's much better than my idea. - And that'd be significantly easier to communicate to your customers.

You can have a simple guide or a video showing exactly how to set up an account with them and send some fiat across. - Love it. While we're on that topic, we might as well jump a few steps in our list to tell you how great the Bitcoin company is in general.

(laughing) So they've now added, I think they announced this a while back already that they'll be doing this, but now the auth 47 is now live. So this is like a login via Paynims. So you won't need like a username password, but you can login using your Paynim like with a samurai wallet or something like that.

This is definitely a cool application for using this. - That's really fucking good to see. - Yeah, beautiful. I mean, no username, no passwords. Just sign in with a scan of a QR code like pretty, like it doesn't get any better than that, does it?

No personal information. Yeah, just kudos to getting these guys getting this over the line. Very great to see and even more validation for Bit.47, love it. - The one question I had, do you still, is that the only information you need to give them to get to sign up and to use their service?

Or do you still have to give them like additional information in the account so that you can actually get those cards? - I think you'd have to if you used fiat though, wouldn't you? - Yes.

- If you're buying gift cards with Bitcoin, then I believe it's just that there's no personal information. But again, as soon as you touch this fiat world, you have to give all your chaos information.

- I get it, okay. And probably if also if you, or someone said that if you get like those prepaid credit cards, you can put any name on there you want, is that correct? - Yeah, so you could sign into the Bitcoin company with your pay name, QR code scan.

Then you could deposit up to $1,000 worth of Bitcoin, purchase a Visa, like a virtual Visa card, load up to $1,000 worth of Bitcoin onto that and then go and spend that. Pretty much universally at online retailers, although I know it does become a bit more kind of spotty as to where they're accepted at in-person stores.

So if you're spending online, I don't think you're gonna have much of an issue here and a great way to, number one, avoid having to go through selling Bitcoin a regulated exchange. And number two, to have to go and set up a trade on Peach or base, et cetera, like you literally just send the Bitcoin company some stats

and have a virtual Visa card that you can just go and plug into a traditional shop online storefront. - That's fucking cool. Do they work in the UK? Like if you got one of these Visa cards, presumably it doesn't 'cause nothing fucking works here.

(laughs) - So yeah, again, online pretty wide coverage. I think it does become a bit more difficult in person. I believe I'd have to speak to some of my confidential contacts that use this more frequently than I do.

I believe the kind of workaround is that you can add these cards to your Apple or Google Pay and that somehow makes them work at more places, presumably because there's inbuilt protections there by a Google and Apple surprisingly that kind of almost mask the origin of this.

So I believe that at least used to make them work in more places, but I should be able to ask if you contact sister whether that's still a case or not. - Yeah, I tried doing that at some point.

I had issues with like the name and like I had to enter an address and a name and stuff and that was like verified. So it worked with a card that I bought under my like real name and address 'cause it's like connected with your Google account.

So I often tried it with Apple Pay, but with Google Pay I tried and that didn't let me enter a different like made up name and address so it had to be like the same as my Google account. - Yeah, there's definitely a lot of kind of catch 22s.

It's not like a panacea that works everywhere unfortunately and ultimately you're probably not gonna know until you go and try and it doesn't work at a specific store. So what I would say is, you know, find somebody in your local area that's used before and get some advice from them.

One thing I will say though is like, if you go on the Bitcoin company website, like there are hundreds of specific vouchers for specific stores, there's a very high likelihood that if this Visa card doesn't work, that the store that you wanna spend that anyway probably has their own voucher that you can just buy.

Obviously I know that's a little bit more friction that you're gonna have voucher codes for individual stores, but if you're somewhere that you shop up regularly, then it's not really that much of a hardship is it, especially if you're hell bent and I wanted to spend some Bitcoin instead of fiat.

- Yeah, there's loads of options. The only reason I feel the Visa cards would be particularly useful and I don't know if this is possible is whether you could make payments to other people or companies, for example, if you've got to pay your rent, there's not like a rent gift card.

So you need to somehow send fear to your landlord

or repay your mortgage or whatever it is. There's some stuff where there's a gap there and you can't pay in cash. So it's like, well, what's the best option? And so is this something that can fill that role?

'Cause otherwise, especially if people are earning Bitcoin and they're like, okay, I've got to pay for these things. They can't send cash, they can't do it with a gift card. So then they're like, okay, well then the only option is sell and get someone to pay into my account, which could flag things.

Is it possible to do this and have a separate card that you then pay your landlord? - I don't think so. I know in the US only, they were looking at, it may actually be live now, I don't know, at physical cards, that presumably would give you a bit more flexibility, but again, you kind of, in your like paying the rent thing,

like you don't have a physical account or an app that you can go into to say, right, send this much to this account number, like it doesn't work like that, it's just a virtual card. So yeah, I'm gonna say probably not.

- Okay. - And unfix the problem. Next on the list, we've got Sparrow Wallet V1.7.9. They added wallet accounts summary. So especially for like wallets if you have like a samurai well pool running with like different accounts in there, like a deposit, premix, post-mix and bad bank.

They'll, now you can see like a summary of all the funds in these different accounts. So it's just got a bit more transparency there. And also if you just create different accounts for yourself in your own wallet with the different derivation parts, you can also see the entire summary on one click.

And the other change they made, which was wonderful because I've had that issue multiple times. If you wanna change your labels at some point, then you have to look for every related transaction for this one transaction you wanna change the label for and change all the labels manually.

So just as an example, if you have, if you're sending one a transaction and you've got two outputs, you've got the one spend output and you've got the change, then these will show up in different lists on different pages or different tabs in the Sparrow Wallet.

So you'll have to go into each one and change the labels there manually. And now this will propagate throughout the entire software. So everywhere where this like the transaction or any part of that transaction is referenced, it will automatically change.

So this is a huge time saver. This is the first time I've learned about the account summary. I haven't actually poked around in Sparrow for a good couple of weeks. It's been busy with other stuff.

So where is the account summary? Where do you see it? I have not updated yet. So I haven't seen, I've only seen their announcement in one second, I'll just have a look here. - Very slick though.

- No, I can't see anything here in the release notes exactly where you pull that up. There's only like a screenshot, but it doesn't show exactly where you've accessed that. - Oh, a view show wallet summary.

- Ah, okay. - Ooh, graphs and everything, very nice. Okay, very slick. Nice work, Mr. Raw, once again. - We've now also got... - Can't wait, from software updates, we've got Samurai V 0.99.98H, got.

When are they doing this jump? And this is painful. - It's a version one. - Yeah, I can somewhere around like 2140. Lots of numbers and letters to go yet. Yeah, but I have not looked into that myself, so I don't know, Q, if you can fill us in there.

- Yeah, yeah, what's new? So there's improved Joinbot UX. So Joinbot is the kind of inbuilt service that allows you to do privacy preserving Stonewall X2, collaborative transactions when you're sending to a third party.

So if you are like Max and you don't have any friends, you can use Joinbot to... - Painful. - I felt instantly bad about that, you know. (laughing) - Yeah. - Anyway, so yeah, if you're like Max and you don't have any friends, you can use Joinbot as a collaborator with your spend, which will use some of Samurai's UTXOs,

as well as some of yours, so that you can create an ambiguous spend to an unsuspecting third party. Obviously there's a fee involved with that, but I believe it's fairly minimal. So if you don't have any friends online and you're in a pinch and you need to make a spend that you want to be a Stonewall X2,

just enable the Joinbot toggle and you can do one anyway. Outside of that, they've just got some quality of life improvements, so verify message feature, UTXO management improvements and they now allow you to sweep Join Market time-locked fidelity bonds.

Quote, "We have decided to implement the ability "for Join Market users who find themselves "with Bitcoin in a time-locked fidelity bond address "to sweep their private key into Samurai wallet "after the bond expires."

Nice. And then outside of that, just some bug fixes as well. So good to see. I haven't actually upgraded to this one, which I'm almost embarrassed to admit, so I did that to my to-do list today.

And then we've also got Samurai Dojo V1.2, 1.0, one dollar fee estimator. So this is a new fee estimation that relies on a bunch of different inputs there. I mean, most people know these fee estimators like from memple.space and so on.

So I don't know if they're doing anything real special about that, but this is their own implementation. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to some Twitter autists doing an analysis of the accuracy of this one compared to memple.space and any of those would be very interested to see once this has been out there for some period of time,

but good to see that the estimations, they've worked on an algorithm here to make that more accurate, because I think happy to be corrected here, I'm pretty sure the old Dojo fee estimation was using Bitcoin Core on a rolling, something like 72-hour basis, which in periods of high fee, what's the word I'm looking for?

Well, it goes up and down quite a lot. That could become quite inaccurate fairly quickly. So good to see that they've gone with what looks like a very technical approach to fixing this. So yeah, shout out to Team Dojo.

So I think that was it for the software updates. I know we've also got Ronin UI is now pairing page. What's that all about? Yeah, so V2.3.0 of Ronin Dojo UI allows a simple pairing of, basically you get an option to say, do you want to pair with your Dojo, which is specific to some of my wallet?

Or do you want to pair to your Electrum server, which obviously is for pretty much any other wallet that allows you to connect to your own node? So yeah, just a streamline way that you can kind of go to Ronin Dojo.local and to just scan a QR code to connect your Samurai, well, literally any wallet,

as long as it speaks to Dojo or it speaks to Electrum server, then you can just scan a QR code and connect to it. I'm pretty sure I read in the notes that they also now allow local connections to Electrum server.

Yes, display local network pair of values for Fulcrum. So if you're a wallet user that uses an Electrum server backend, previously Ronin Dojo only allowed you to connect to that over tour, which brings with it, obviously, all of its problems in terms of latency and denial of service attacks, et cetera.

So if you were somebody that interacted with your Bitcoin, well, it's predominantly at home and wanted to connect locally just within your own home network, you weren't able to do that with Ronin Dojo and this update fixes that so you can just now connect to like, you know, 192.168.7.7, duh.

Shut up, that's nice. All right. We've also got a few announcements here from Robosatz that they will be publishing a in their new release, upcoming release, a federated model for their clients.

So this is like in an attempt to decentralize the entire process because at the moment, like there's the one coordinator in the middle and this will allow anyone to become a coordinator for a bunch of Robosatz traits.

So this will be like on a reputation basis so that you, if you want to participate, I think the way I understood it, you have to sign up with a pull request on GitHub if you want to participate so that you are then also listed in the upcoming release as a coordinator and then there'll be some kind of reputation system

so that people can kind of pick and choose who they want to have as a coordinator. - Very cool. Yeah, I love this. Yeah, this is the problem with kind of centralized peer-to-peer markets, I know that's kind of a bit of a weird sentence centralized peer-to-peer but yeah, obviously currently there's a centralized

coordinator within Robosatz which is somewhat of a big target. I mean, or could become a big target in the future and you take down that single coordinator and Robosatz ceases to work. So obviously the guys behind this have recognized that and have put steps in place to kind of allow anybody else

to become a coordinator so that it becomes a game of whack-a-mole thereafter, you know, if you take one down there's hopefully gonna be some others to continue that work in it. My main worry is that this could, but any new coordinator that come on are gonna, number one struggle to gain reputation

and number two, they're gonna struggle to gain liquidity as well. So gonna be interested to see how this one pans out but yeah, definitely a step in the right direction. I just not sure how many ready and willing coordinators they're gonna come online, at least in the first instance but I guess when they're sat to be made,

people will get drawn to this. - What I'm not quite sure about is there still one order book or will there be one order book for each coordinator? - No, I think there is a singular order book and then you would be able to just go in and add the different coordinators.

Presumably you'll be able to filter out offers from all or specific coordinators but they should all be within a specific order book is my understanding. - Okay. - Which would be the absolute best way to approach this.

- Absolutely. 'Cause then like liquidity from like a usability standpoint isn't that critical, right? 'Cause even if you've got low liquidity, you'll still pop up in someone else's order book if they've got yours selected.

The only issue is obviously with like your anonymity set for the coordinator. I don't have that deep into like how much information the coordinator gets anyway but I could imagine that there's some kind of issue there with low liquidity.

- Yeah, I mean, this is more for pits bit buying, isn't it? I mean, anonymity sets are kind of not that relevant here but yeah, I get what you're saying but I think yeah, like if you're a single buyer from a single order on a new coordinator then maybe there's some information that you can gain but like this is, the RoboSats is structured

in such a way that as long as there is, it's a happy path for the trade and there's no dispute then the coordinator shouldn't learn anything. Everything's encrypted and done over so cool.

- We've also got ZapLocker, a non-custodial lightning address server. So I haven't looked into this one exactly but what's this about? - This is by a fairly prolific dev called SuperTestNet.

ZapLocker is free and open source software. You can run it yourself and you can provide a service with a lightning for a lightning address without taking custody of user funds. So lightning address is a really cool lightning feature where you can instead of having to, you know, if I want to pay Max, I have to DM him on Telegram

say, hey, I want to pay you back for those beers. Can you send me a lightning invoice for 25,000 sats? Obviously that's horrible UX and is never going to go mainstream. With lightning address, as long as I know what Max's lightning address is and his node is online, I can just go into my compatible wallet

and say pay to Max@ungovernablemissfits.com and then in the background, our nodes would talk to each other, generate an invoice for however much I specified. Max doesn't need to do anything.

It's all his node does it all for him. But to get a lightning address, you need like an online web server, which most people don't have and probably never will have. So the main solution, there's two solutions to that.

Number one, you run your own if you're technically minded enough or you ask somebody else to do it for you and hope that they don't rub all your funds, like most of the people are not today, unfortunately.

So this ZappLocker does the lightning address for you. So they have the web server, but they use HODL contracts, which is kind of like a temporarily postponed lightning invoice that kind of temporarily holds funds that are in a HCLC hashtag contract so that the ZappLocker custodian, they're holding the HCLC,

but like the way that these are built is like they can't do anything with it. They basically just hold that and then they wait for you to come back online and go, hey, by the way, somebody's trying to pay you here.

Do you want to receive it? Yes or no? So it does it in such a way where there's still a little bit of trust because if the ZappLocker server is down, then you ain't receiving any stats via lightning address, but they can't steal your shit.

- But they don't like pre-broadcast or anything. So it's like they could deny broadcasting that, right? So they could hold your funds, but they can't actually spend them. - Correct. - Yeah, still a denial of service risk but there's no theft risk.

Oh yeah, this was also a big announcement that came in Riga. Unfortunately, I was not there on Monday anymore. The BTC pay server day but they announced a new BTC pay server app and this will be in operation with spiral and LDK.

And so this will be a solution for small business owners for people with some kind of point of sale need and this will eliminate the requirement to have a server running the whole time. So this is a fully functional lightning node on mobile.

So there, I haven't seen too many details on exactly how it'll be working, but at the end of the day, the idea is that you can just download this app, set it up and receive Bitcoin and lightning payments directly on mobile without the need of running server.

- Yeah, super cool. I mean, there's very low on details. They just announced the intention to do this. I don't even think they've started to work on it yet. So this could potentially be like a couple of years out yet.

So let's not get too excited but the kind of summary of this is if you imagine that Phoenix on your phone and BTC pay server on your server came together and had a baby. This is what it would look like.

So it would literally, the way it would look like for a new merchant is you download the BTC payout and you can configure your storefront. You can type in, you know, I'm a hairdresser and these are my prices.

It would put that in the way that BTC pay already does with you could have individual items with individual prices, with stock levels, blah, blah, blah, all that sort of stuff. And then it just talks to an LSP lightning service provider in the background, which they haven't said who that's gonna be.

Maybe you'll be able to configure it, who knows? And then they'll manage all of the horrible lightning stuff for you, presumably for a small fee. And then all of the, the on chain stuff, once again, you'll just be able to plug an expub in there so that all of your on JVs just go straight

to your hardware wallet or wherever you predefined that. So if they pull this off, like this could be pretty big. Hello? Oh, I was muted there. (laughing) The unanimous just fucked off. (laughing) Thanks for that, guys.

- So about that, I was in the other room stroking my dog. (laughing) I can still hear you 'cause I have my headphones on. - Yeah, yeah. - He's been left alone a lot recently, so he needed a little bit of love.

- Yeah, I was already getting back to you on that, but muted. Right. (laughing) Yeah. No, but especially for people like on the move, people who don't have either technical capabilities to set up a BDC pay server somewhere on a VPS or something, but want to be able to privately receive lightning payments.

This is a huge step, so yeah. Well, hopefully we'll see it in not too far of a distance, but let's wait and see. Yeah, we've also got Tor introducing proof of work for their traffic. This is like an attempt to reduce the risk of denial of service attacks.

So Tor's been rough over the past couple of years and probably before that as well, of just having major issues with DOS attacks. So this could potentially alleviate that to some degree. I have not looked into the exact technical implementation.

I don't know how many information is out there yet, but this would prioritize the rarefied network of traffic. That's the way they describe it. So it basically brings some cost to an attacker is the idea.

That grows exponentially as they continue to try and do it. When you say it grows exponentially when they continue to try and do it, you mean someone's just pinging the same service just over and over again to slow things down.

If I was using Tor on my laptop and I started just like fucking around refreshing and like doing a million things on a website, what it would do is it my CPU or whatever would have to work harder and that would cost me electricity.

Exactly. Yeah. And that's pretty clever. Yeah. Yeah, we should do that with money, shouldn't we? Yeah, that would be a really good idea. Yeah, so there's a quote here. Tor's proof of work defense is a dynamic and reactive mechanism remaining dormant under normal use conditions to ensure a seamless user experience.

But when an onion service is under stress, the mechanism will prompt incoming client connections to perform a number of successfully more complex operations. The onion service will then prioritize these connections based on the effort level demonstrated by the client.

So it's like, yeah, I'm not gonna listen to you unless you show me that you've done this. And then if the attacker says, yeah, okay, here you go. And then try and do that again. Then the onion service will say, yeah, okay, right.

Now I'm gonna make it 10 times more complicated. See you in a minute, come back. And it just takes longer and longer and longer to do each ping. That's clever. Is there any draw back to this or like, 'cause it seems, I'm not gonna say it seems obvious, but like, it seems obvious that this should have been done

a while ago if there's no draw back. Yeah, obviously I've got no idea how technically difficult this is to implement, I'm guessing very. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm trying to think of the implications to, so let's say I'm governable misfits has known insight and it's getting denial of service attacked under this new landscape.

Presumably the main impact will be, obviously the cost to the attacker that's trying to deny it, denial of service you. But me as a genuine user, presumably the foreback would be, it would just take me longer to connect to you because my laptop would have to do the same level of CPU computations.

So for me as a normal user, I'd just see longer connection times. But the crucial bit is that it wouldn't just grind to a halt, presumably. Longer connection times is better than no connection.

Yeah, exactly. And presumably if you're an attacker and there's practically zero cost, you're gonna just keep doing it. But if you're an attacker and as you attack, it gets more costly, you're incentive to do it.

Especially for like ungovernable misfits 'cause noncoos are fuck. Like maybe if it's like a big, a site they really wanna attack, then maybe they'll wear that cost. But for a lot of other sites, they'd be like, "Oh, it's just not worth it."

And then the time drops for normal users as well. Yep, yep, good to see. Well done, Tor, very smart. Next on the list is the whole, I mean, we've got two different topics here coming up to do with different lawsuits that are currently underway.

So one of them is the tornado cache indictments. Q, can you fill it in there? Yeah, so this has been ongoing for quite some time. We've covered it multiple times, but I just kind of, I guess, wanted to have a moan about like these indictments of these guys.

So an indictment is like an accusation, basically. Anybody can make an accusation. So the new tornado cache indictments, they run completely counter to the Fincent guidance. So if coin center have covered this, basically these guys have been indicted for lots of different accusations

that run completely counter to the existing Fincent regulations. So the tornado cache is like a coinjune protocol, non-crystodial, crucially, coinjune protocol for Ethereum. And currently the guidance for Fincent is an anonymizing software provider is not a money transmitter, but these accusations are making out that these guys

or this software was acting as such, which is forming, I think, the basis for these indictments. Some quotes here, "The indictment provides various factual allegations "described in the activities the defendant's performed, "put all of those facts point to the defendant's fitting squarely

"within Fincent's guidance on anonymizing software providers "rather than them being money transmitters." So the people behind these indictments are throwing a lot of shit at the wall that run completely counter to all of the rules and regulations that anybody that's been operating such a thing have been abiding by.

My guess and the commonly shared thought process here is that most people are thinking that these guys are trying to set a law precedent here to kind of change what is and what isn't classified as a money transmitter.

So if you're interested in broadly echoed crypto privacy, because this is an Ethereum thing, but the ramifications of the rulings here will be felt across the whole of the crypto industry, Bitcoin included.

So the fact that this is completely non-crystodial and the guys that have been indicted with this had very little control, if not no control, once they kind of set this smart contract going is very worrisome.

And yeah, it's going to be not going to be interesting. It's going to be kind of an interesting one to see how it unfolds because the ramifications are going to be felt industry wide. Yeah, like you say, it's setting a precedent and it doesn't really make any sense.

But as we know, things don't actually have to make sense or be reasonable in any way. Because if you write the laws, you make the decisions, you can do what the fuck you want. So it is worrying.

Yeah, like in the same kind of vein here, we've also got the whole lawsuit around Bitcoin fog. This was not a coin joined service, but an actual mixer. And one of those sterling off is his name.

He's being accused of having run this mixer. And he's currently the trial is ongoing. And chain analysis is the one who's basically providing the "evidence" of his involvement with this mixing service.

And the issue here is obviously that the way that chain analysis does this analysis is not open knowledge. So there has been now from the defense. They have offered a Bitcoin core contributor to do an audit of the chain analysis code.

And they've been fighting against this. So this would be Brian Bishop. And they now try to get him disqualified because he does not have a computer science degree and may have some kind of conflict of interest.

Amazing. This is completely ridiculous to me. Law pretty much worldwide, right? If you're trying to get somebody convicted of something, you have to prove it. You have to show evidence. The fact that these vermin chain analysis are allowed to present their "evidence" but not share how they got to their assumption is absolutely ridiculous.

The fact that this hasn't been thrown out of court immediately is very, very worrisome because once again, if this guy gets convicted, it adds weight to the fact that chain analysis are legitimate and that the tools that they're using stand up in law.

But the fact that nobody's able to verify this is ridiculous. It's like me saying Max is a murderer and that I saw him do it, I filmed it on my phone but you're not allowed to see the video.

Fuckin' ridiculous. - Yeah, it is sickening. And also even what they potentially have that you can't see is only assumptions anyway. It's like it's also fuckin' airy, fairy, like you say, not evidence.

They're treating it like guilty until proven innocent but you can't be proven innocent and we can't show any of the evidence is basically just a fucking witch hunt. - Yep, yeah, it literally is.

And if you wanna learn how to fuck with these guys and the assumptions that we think that they use, check out my talk from Riga 'cause that's exactly what I talked about. - There we go. - Can I post it on this show when it goes live?

- If the audio is out, yeah, I'm just waiting on the whole guys to publish it so it hasn't won it's available, I'll send it over. - And it's important people think about with everything that's going on and these type of attacks.

To get your shit straight now and use the tools that are available now, if you actually care about your privacy and you actually care about being able to use Bitcoin in the future and use it in the way, the free, proper way.

And I'm sure your talk goes into that. Not shit yourself because this sort of stuff is happening more, use it to spur yourself on and be like, no, fuck this, this can't happen. We can't let them do this.

And then you've got two options from there. You can go and use something like Samurai and do things properly and fight against them or you can go and use other options out there and actually fund them.

You can make the decision. - Nice. - Do you like that little dig? - I love it. - Subtle. - Yes. - Fuck you, Asabi, stop funding these cums. (laughing) - It's disgusting. - Yeah. - Yeah. (laughing) - I can't think of a better way to (laughing) - Also, yeah.

Shout out to in this case, Lola, who's been doing the reporting on this case. So she's written a few articles on this. Yeah, there's a whole backstory to that as well. But we don't have to go into all of that.

- If you remember, you can send me, if there's any links and I'll put them in the show notes so people can read through. - There we go. So the last point on the list we have today is OpenSats has made a bunch of grants to Bitcoin Core developers, which is fucking amazing.

So there's the first in July that went to Marco Falcon and then in August to Josie Baker. And now in September, they've now announced that they'll be supporting source provost, if I pronounce that correctly.

- That's very good. Where he's, yeah, for those who don't know, he also does the podcast Bitcoin Explained, I think. That's one. And he's also written a book that is called Bitcoin and Work in Progress, I think.

I hope I didn't mess that up. Yeah, but he's been a contributor for a number of years and he's doing good work. He's read somewhere that he has close to a thousand reviews on GitHub for different pull requests and issues.

So this guy's definitely putting out the work. So yeah, shout out to OpenSats for doing that. - Sweet, good job guys. - Yeah, thank you very much. That was a good one. I'll catch you on the next month.

I still don't know ever what one we're on. Are we on 28 or on 29? - I've only just clocked the URL for this recording actually. It's Bitcoin-monthly-28-I-think. (laughing) - I'm never fucking low.

- I also have no idea. Let's just call it September 23, eh? - Yeah, oh yeah, good idea. All right, cool. Well, yeah, thank you and we will catch up. We need to catch up in-person sync 'cause I never get to go to these meetups and all the cool places you guys go.

So maybe a local beer would be good. - Sounds good to me. - Oh, yeah, answer me, so you go into Amsterdam. Well, it's still up in the air. We're still waiting on confirmation if we can go there with Seed Hammer.

So if so, then we will, if not, then I won't. But it'll probably be a last minute decision. - Cool, I'll get us booked into a pool hall. - Ooh, you can be there, nice. - Yeah, foundation have got a booth.

So if anybody listening is attending Amsterdam, come and say hello. - Hell yeah.