Build an air-gapped, stateless Bitcoin signing device with the SeedSigner team.

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. Today's episode is with seed signer Nick and Keith, the team behind the seed signer project.

I actually recorded this with them, I think over a month ago now, I've been really slow getting this edited and out, so apologies for that. But this one is amazing. I really enjoyed chatting to all three of them, and we talked about how they've built this project.

There is so much development with seed signer since I last spoke, and it really is incredible to see what an open source project is capable of. I love the fact that anyone can build one of these with off-the-shelf parts.

It's especially useful for people living in countries where freedom money is not to welcome. So a huge thank you to the seed signer team, and I hope you enjoy the show. Before we dive in, I just want to say a brief thank you to my sponsors.

First up, we have my new sponsor. The man, the myth, the legend, black coffee is behind this. He's a good friend of mine, and he's been on the show multiple times. He has started SX6.store, where he's selling Marine Grade 316L stainless steel plates.

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Foundation make ultra premium signing devices. They are fucking beautiful. The quality really is unmatched and they have an incredible team. If you haven't checked them out already, go to foundation devices.com.

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You do not want to be trusting your SATs with code that you cannot see and that is not out in the open. We talk a lot in this episode about the importance of open source and it's great to see foundation pushing this.

Go to foundation devices.com and you can reach out and ask me if you have any questions and trade offs with this product or anything else. And finally, fast bitcoins. A huge thank you to fast bitcoins for supporting this show despite me constantly bashing them, shitting on them from a great height

and telling everyone not to use KYC services. So if you are listening to the show and you think fuck off max, I don't care. I'm gonna use KYC service. Then please, please, please, make sure that you go to the best team out there.

A team that's gonna do everything that they can to keep you safe. You're still gonna be giving over all your details. You still are trusting a company and you might end up on a list, but you are less likely to have issues if you go to a quality outfit and they have a lot of trust and respect for these guys.

So if you are going to stack in a KYC fashion, then look no further, go to fastbickcoins.com and if you have any questions about the trade-offs of KYC versus non KYC and I haven't bashed you over the head hard enough about this, then you can reach out to me personally.

I'll be open and honest about all the trade-offs and yeah, I can pass you their way if you decide to do that. Fastbickcoins.com. Final, final message is to say a huge thank you to everyone who's been sharing the show with friends and family.

I really do appreciate it. It means a lot and it really helps the show in the rankings and everyone who's been sending fountain boosts. I still cannot respond to you. I can't respond or see the messages or do anything in fountain.

I am in contact with Oscar Mary to try and fix this. So hopefully this will get sorted soon, but I really appreciate it. I do see the stats rolling in and it means a lot. Right, on with the show.

We're all seeing each other and hearing each other, I think. All right, lovely. Well, seed signer, we've obviously spoken a couple of times. We had you on 21ism, very early days and we've spoken since then a fair few times, but Keith and Nick, we haven't spoken before.

I want to start by saying I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing, despite not yet building a seed signer for myself. What? I know, I just have to come out and be honest, I should probably get a slap from that.

So he can say in the foundation ads that like foundation is the best thing he's used. Exactly that, yeah. No, I'm a massive fan. It's been on my list to do for a long time, but family life and just fucking carnage all the time.

So it's very powerful what you guys are building. And I hope today that we can sort of lead on from the conversations we've had previously and sort of dive into where you guys are with the project now.

A lot of people that I respect use it, and to us being one of them that we do the monthly show with, he's forever singing the praises of what you guys are doing. So the fact that people can go out there and build something with off the shelf parts without being tracked and traced for me is probably the most powerful thing about it.

But it seems like this is a bit of a Swiss Army knife and people are using it for all sorts. So yeah, just wanted to say that first and then sort of dive into Nick and Keith, what it's been like and what your roles are and how you've been working with the project.

And I think it like, Phos is kind of a timely sort of topic right now in the Bitcoin space outside of the crazy fee market, but there has been a fair amount of chatter about Phos lately. So it seems, finally, yes there has.

We mentioned foundation earlier and they've had the brunt of a lot of bullshit going on recently, but yes, it's very important. And to me, that's what Bitcoin's about. And that's why I'm such a big fan of what you guys are doing.

Let's talk through from, I think anyone who hasn't yet heard of the project and they most of my listeners will have, anyone who hasn't, I'd suggest maybe going back and listening to that more of the origin story of how it started and seats on the menu have gone quite deep into that previously.

But maybe we can just do like a quick version for people and then jump into Nick and Keith coming on board and what's changed since then. - So, SeedSiner was born out of my search for a way to do cold storage that I felt comfortable with given a kind of unique background as a former law enforcement officer

as well as with a background in digital forensics and a little bit of incident response and cyber security kind of sprinkled in there. So, I just wasn't satisfied with some of the products and strategies that were on the market and I was looking for a different way.

And I, as I mentioned, have a technical background and was inspired by the Spectre DIY which is another DIY wallet/science device that I built and had been tickering around with and this was kind of at the dawn of air gapped QR transmission of PSBTs and that was something that really struck me as an elegant solution

to not have to plug a hardware wallet into your laptop which always made me uncomfortable by virtue of my forensic background. I didn't like plugging a hardware wallet into a computer that was connected to the internet.

So, air gapped QRs were a very elegant solution and then this idea of statelessness which we weren't the first to do. I don't know if Spectre DIY was the first to do it either but it wasn't something that was really emphasized in the Bitcoin cold storage space and we have embraced statelessness as a viable approach

to managing private keys especially in the context of a multi-signature Bitcoin cold storage setup. So, the real short story and seed signer is that it's basically a DIY sort of hardware wallet that you can build yourself but it intentionally does not store private keys.

So, you have to keep those private keys stored either on paper or on metal or one of the kind of conventional ways that people do backups but with seed signer that copy of your private key or backup can be the only copy of a given private key.

So, you don't have to worry about it living on a digital device and then also having a backup of that as well to manage with. So, it's built from off the shelf, electronic components, the central kind of piece is a Raspberry Pi Zero ideally a version 1.3 that doesn't have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth functionality built into it.

So, it's this very naturally air gapped kind of environment where you can create and work with private keys costs about it. When I started out, it was about $30, now probably 50 is a reasonable number to be able to build a seed signer but the parts are all not Bitcoin specific so there's a diminished concern of supply chain attacks

if you order it from neutral vendors that don't have anything to do with Bitcoin. You can order these parts, generally put it together in the privacy of your own home and then start experimenting with different single and multi-sig setups.

One of the innovative things about it is because it's stateless, the cost associated with creating a new private key and using it is virtually zero because you can create and manage virtually unlimited number of private keys.

So, really I'd like to say encourages users to just get on test net, get on reg test, play around with main net, try a multi-sig, whatever you're comfortable with experimenting with, there's a very low bar to experiment with different cold storage configurations.

So, that's one of the advantages but I think that probably unless Keith or Nick have anything to add, I think that sums up kind of the basic value proposition of seed cider. - Yeah, I agree.

- Yeah, and I'd urge anyone, I'm gonna put in the show notes our original conversations 'cause we go much deeper into all of that but I think that sums up the project really nicely and I wanna go back to that point that you said about being able to build this with off-the-shelf parts.

It's so fucking important, especially in certain parts of the world where it can be probably life or death for people. It's a big problem when you are having wallet center or hardware sent out to you, which is obviously for Bitcoin, it can make you a target.

We don't know where all this goes. We don't know how difficult things are gonna be made for Bitcoin as so having that as an option is massive in my opinion. And the stateless nature is something that's really interesting as well.

So, I know when we last spoke, you were having some issues with actually getting hold of these Raspberry Pi's, especially the specific model that you're talking about, the dumb one without the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Is that still an issue? I think sort of eased up a little bit more now since COVID supply chains are fixed a little bit. - It is, it is still an issue. That's like admittedly true. However, it's been, the Pi foundation is kind of promised that things would be improving over the course of the year

and so far they've been true to their word. Like, if you want to buy one now from a retailer that they're out there, you might have to order from, you know, if you're in the US, you might have to order from Canada or Europe.

But regular, there's a website that I keep an eye on called rpilocator.com. And any given day when you open up that website these days, you can find three or four retailers that have the zeros in stock.

They may not yet be the desired ones that have the, sorry, that come from the factory without Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. But it's actually very simple to permanently disabled. The Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, we have another contributor who figured out a very specific electronic component on the board that you can remove with a tweezers.

And when you pop that off, it effectively makes the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth non-functional. So the ones that are out there and available are definitely viable. But I wanted to circle back real quick on another advantage other than your absolutely spot on about supply chain attack and making yourself a target technically by ordering

a device that's specifically intended for Bitcoin use. But another advantage that I'd point out is building a seed center for non-specific parts, non-Bitcoin specific parts, lets you avoid landing yourself on yet another list of Bitcoiners that subject a lot of people to phishing attacks and spear phishing attacks.

And Bitcoin is still in its infancy, but none of us want our personal details to get out there, especially our home address or anything like that, by virtue of companies that cuss the order information and either don't purge that periodically or don't safeguard it responsibly.

That's something that we periodically hear about in the Bitcoin space is a second-hand email marketing firm commonly has access to a bunch of people's names and email addresses, which makes that spear phishing stuff impossible, but everybody knows about the ledger leak where there are a bunch of names and residential addresses

that went out and that's just kind of an nightmare scenario. So just another minor advantage of building a seed center. - It's a nightmare scenario now, but how much of a nightmare could it be in a few years?

It doesn't bear thinking about. So yeah, it's very nice to have that as an option. And Keith, we haven't spoken. You've come on as lead developer, is that right? - Yeah, although you earlier asked about how Nick and I joined and if we're gonna go in chronological order, then I'll pass it off to Dick first 'cause he was in wave of for me.

- Okay, Nick, fill me in please, mate. - Sure, sure. So I'm a relatively new Bitcoiner compared to these guys. I got involved in Bitcoin in 2020 and just being more in the tech scene I'm a software engineer by trade.

I got my acquired my first Bitcoin and I wanted to get it into cold storage. And so I went out looking for options and I stumbled across seed center and GitHub and I kind of understood the base technologies, right?

I understood, oh, it's a Raspberry Pi and it doesn't have any of these wireless devices and it's running on a pretty simple Linux operating system and it's written in Python and at that time it was a single script.

It was just like a single script so you could scroll through a few thousand lines of code and I could just read through it and in a few minutes and understand what was going on, you know, at least at high level.

And so anyway, my first contribution was looking at that code as a software engineer and thinking, "Well, I can do better." No offense, seed center, but none taken at all. So that was where I got started.

So in the price at that point was also very appealing because I could just walk into a micro center and literally buy a Pi zero for five dollars plus tax off the shelf and the cash. And so it was very easy at that point to just acquire the parts.

I didn't have a 3D printer, but I didn't need it. I was just like, okay, I can get this, you know, LCD hat and a camera and this Pi zero and for less than 50 bucks, I had a hardware selling device.

And at that point I had very little Bitcoin. So it didn't make a lot of sense for me to go out and spend 150 bucks for a cold card or whatever that was popular at the time that I was reading about.

And so yeah, so anyway, back to the GitHub stuff, I looked at the Python code and I said, I think I can organize this in a better way. And so that was my first contribution is I restructured the code keeping feature parity so that it could be expanded on and kind of things went from there.

So my first PR request, I think I sent out on Twitter and asked for some feedback and things got merged. - As I remember, you'd also posted a demo video that you had made seed center compatible with Blue Wallet or shown it was compatible with Blue Wallet and that instantly put you on my radar

because I knew that the project was only gonna go so far with my coding abilities. So like I probably was instantly glued to you. - Yeah, no, that's a great point. So right after I started to kind of restructure in the code, I, as much as I like Spectre desktop, I wanted to use other coordinators.

And so Spectre desktop was the only coordinator that seed center supported at first. And it was kind of using its own proprietary format. And as I dug into things and I had no idea that I would have to learn so many things about QR codes.

But as I dug into it, I quickly realized that there was a common format that was being established through SNR and made popularized proper low rise by Sparrow and Blue Wallet. And so I kind of latched onto that.

I first implemented that format for PSBT signing in Blue Wallet and then got it to also work in Sparrow. But the Sparrow part was without going into the tech details. It was an adventure.

But yeah, those, I think that was my biggest contribution was adding the additional coordinators on top of the Spectre desktop. - I remember a seed center when we first spoke. You had said you kind of had hacked this together and you could only take it so far.

So it sounds like this was very welcome. - Oh, yeah. It was, yeah, Nick being a programmer by trade, even if he's not a Python native, he still has an immense more knowledge than I do on code structure and efficient code use and different mechanisms that can streamline and find efficiencies.

And like I, there was, I'm sure in our previous conversation we talked about Michael Flaxman, who's a security researcher. I think he's an advisor on chain and he wrote this 10x Bitcoin security guide.

And I'd been interacting with him early on when I was coding seed siren and releasing the very first initial versions. And I remember he looked at the repo and he didn't even know like a nice way to put it, but he was just like, there is no way that I would use this spaghetti code for anything that was like mission protocol.

So yeah, Nick was definitely a welcome, welcome contributor when he found the project. - Yeah. And I'll add to the, especially in the false world, right? When you approach a project and you're like, hmm, I'd like to contribute, especially if you're like a software developer, at least in my experience,

that people are very passionate about the projects and the code that they write. And so when you want to approach somebody and you're like, hey, I want to make your code better. Like I'm not looking to offend anybody, but like, you know, but in the spirit of false, it's all about like improving things, right?

And being open, but like when you write code, sometimes it's like, it's your baby, it's your child. It's the thing you care a lot about. So there is, there's like dynamics of just like working with humans that makes Phos actually really difficult, unlike like corporate structures or company structures

where you have a hierarchy in the false world when you're a contributor, you're trying to work through all these, it's like human dynamics that makes things a little more challenging through contribution.

And so it took a while for like Seed Center and I to just kind of, you know, connect in a telegram and kind of get to know each other a little bit and figure out how we can work together.

So that doesn't just happen overnight. It's not just easy. That takes a lot of time. I would add with Nick, one of the things I noticed immediately in interacting with Nick and eventually with Keith as well, is they are both like extremely good at leaving their egos at the door when we're, you know, talking about features

or the right way to do things or things that they're more experts in or things that I have more knowledge in like 3D printing or something like that. Like they are interested in producing the best possible outcome and the best possible product.

And that was something that really struck me coming from being in law enforcement as a very kind of alpha dominated environment. And everybody wants to be the top dog and sometimes for a lot of people in this, you know, I don't want to say this is a knock on cops because I still have a lot of friends who are cops

but even they will probably admit over a beer that like there's a lot of ego in law enforcement. And so when interacting with Nick and Keith, like for them it was so refreshing how ego was so little a part of the interaction because we recognize that, you know, we have certain strengths and areas where we're less strong

and we just wanted to collaborate to build this thing into the best Bitcoin tool that we could. And that is something that I've also found like the collaborators that I enjoy working with the most and that I'm the most productive with.

It's the same way. It's the people who just kind of leave their ego at the door and it's about getting the best ideas into whatever you're trying to build or collaborate on. - Yeah, that's really nice to hear.

The thing is Bitcoin is so much bigger than any of us. And I think there is a lot of ego in this space actually. So to find people who are doing what's best and listening rather than just talking is rare, I think.

And I can see why you appreciate that. It just gets so much more done. Nick, had you already worked in Phos at all? Or was this kind of new not stepping on people's toes and working in this way?

- I had never contributed to this level in any Phos project. Maybe some tiny PRs here and there in the past, or just putting out my own work that I thought someone else might find applicable to whatever they were doing.

But this was the first time where I worked in collaboration with like a lead maintainer of a repo to actually develop features. And it's gone so much farther than I ever imagined from that first PR.

Nick and I first met in person for the first time last fall at Tab Comp, which is a conference here in Atlanta. And I think around that time he had also gone to a Bitcoin meetup, maybe for the first time, or is a new Bitcoin meetup or something like that.

And he was, I remember him telling me about the meetup and he was so excited because he said they went to this meetup and they actually talked about seed signer there and he was like, oh, by the way.

- Yeah, totally, that happened. And the organizer, he didn't really quite understand that I was a contributor, it was fine and he didn't need to, but it was so amazing to see, oh, here's this thing that I had contributed to.

And it was being demonstrated to other Bitcoiners and they were kind of, you know, ooing and eyeing and trying to figure out, all right, how could this work into my workflow? Or how could this make my Bitcoin security and privacy better?

- Well, I mean, as I said at the beginning, it's a project that has the respect of everybody that I respect in this space. Everybody who's opinion matters to me has a huge amount of respect for it and understands how important it is as a tool, whether it's what they want to use for all of their storage

or whether it's part of a multi-six setup and it's multi-vendor or whatever it is that they're doing with it. It's becoming a bit of like, it's got a bit of a cult following almost now. - Yeah, there are some seed signer maxis out there.

(laughing) I think it's partly, and we'll get into this, I want to hear more about how Keith and I and Nick started first interacting, but I will say that I think part of it has to do with how we've approached the project in terms of being welcoming to anyone who wants to contribute or who is just excited to learn about it.

We try that we have a telegram community, we try to be extremely welcoming there, even when people come in and they maybe misunderstand the value proposition or they're starting from a place where they don't know a lot about cult storage, we have tried to shape the ethos of the project as being an extremely welcoming and friendly one,

and I think that maybe has part of the formula for the recognition that we've gotten, but anyhow. - Nick, since you've joined, what has it you've been focusing on? - Yeah, so I've taken on the role of trying to organize a little bit of the GitHub PRs in Seed Center or kind of the only two that actually have merged privileges in the repo,

and we do that on purpose, right? We try to make sure that all code that it's merged into Seed Center has been reviewed by multiple eyes and is public, right? That's very important to us.

And I do a poor job of keeping up with all the issues and PRs in GitHub for sure, but it's a big task and I definitely don't do this full time. I have a family myself and a job and lots of other things to do, but I do love to contribute and I love working on specifically working on pieces

of Seed Center that I'm most passionate about, right? So there might be functionality that others are asking for, but if I'm not super passionate about it, I might just defer and wait for someone else to contribute.

That's not because I don't like that feature, it's just because I feel like those who are most passionate about specific features or kind of experimentation with the platform will create the best results, right?

Because I think passion really just breeds inspiration. And so if I'm just doing something because I'm working or writing a program simply because someone else is asking for it, it might turn out okay, but I feel like my experiences taught me that passion will, if I'm really passionate about a feature,

it will drive to kind of a better outcome. So that's what I like to work on. But there is a little overhead and maintaining the repo, which is not the most fun. That's not like a super passionate thing, so that's why it gets neglected.

I have most lately been super passionate about kind of creating this seed center OS, which is there, it's live in version zero dot six. But I feel like there's so much more that can be accomplished faster boot times, et cetera.

But the idea there, the big kind of feature was getting off the Raspberry Pi OS, which is a huge mammoth of Linux justro, right? It's like two plus gigs, I think is like the image size. And we don't use hardly a fraction of it in terms of functionality.

And so when we built the seed center OS, seed center OS with build root, which is just a tool for creating custom Linux distros, we minimized it dramatically. I think the image size is something like 35 megabytes instead of being like two gigabytes.

So yeah, it's a huge improvement there. - Presumably this means it's less of an attack surface. - Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's a few aspects to kind of unpack there, because I mean, ultimately, if someone gets a hold of your seed center physically and alters it, it doesn't, like, there's only so much you can prevent there.

There's no secure element by design. That's, you know, so in those kinds of cases, we always recommend reflash your image to your micro SD card and just kind of inspect the board for any changes.

And, you know, that's pretty good. But anyway, the, yeah, the reduced attack vector is definitely there by having the smaller distro. But there's also one of the big like features that we were going for, and this was running everything from RAM.

So if you're familiar with how a computer works, the operating system boots, right? And then it runs the application. So the application is the thing that's running, you know, controlling the buttons and the screen and seed center.

And what we wanted to do was get the entire operating system to boot into RAM and be able to remove the storage, the micro SD card, so that there's no chance that once I input my private key or my seed into the seed center device, that it could be written back to the micro SD.

And so that prevents, right, that's an attack vector. And so we reduced one more attack vector. And so there's always a mindset, at least within our project, to reduce those attack vectors as best as we can.

And so that was one avenue that things could be improved. It took a lot of work and got done. So I think there's still some like faster boot times, like I mentioned, is not really an attack vector, but it's more of like a nice to have where people dislike the plug things in and have things turn on immediately, including myself.

But hopefully that answers your question. - It does. And Keith, where do you join the mix? - Yeah, so in those early days, I don't think I noticed the project until after Nick had come on, but seed signer the man, he had done a good job of just talking up the progress on Twitter.

And I got intrigued. And that was just a couple of weeks before the Miami 2021 conference. And you know, seed signer said that he'll be in the open source dome doing a presentation. So the only thing on my must do agenda for Miami was to go to seed signer's presentation.

In the tiny little open source dome, where like the air conditioning broke and it's just a miserable experience. And there were like eight, 10 people in the audience in that tiny dome. You know, kind of imagine a kid's like bouncy castle that you can rent for a birthday, except there's no, you know, bouncy floor.

It's just this inflated giant ball that everyone's inside. And like greenhouse effect happening in the Miami sun. But so I got to see seed signer's presentation, introduce myself to him briefly, and just said, hey, the project seems really cool.

When I get back home, I'm going to try to build one and tinker with it. And, you know, maybe see if there's a place where I can contribute some code. And it's so funny, like during his presentation, I asked him all of the seed signer newbie questions that people to this day keep asking us.

Like, oh, it doesn't store your seed. Well, couldn't you just make a version that does store the seed? You know, and then he had to explain why, like, well, the whole point is that we want to build something different that has like different capabilities and different use cases.

And then I was like, oh, well, okay, why can't you also build a battery into the system? Like, well, you kind of want the guarantee that when you turn the thing off, it's blanked. If it's connected to a battery, the ram could still be alive.

Like, oh, okay, that's a good point. So I was a total seed signer newbie. But when I got home, I built it and was really fascinated by it. And like Nick, I started looking at the code. And so, you know, for all the work that Nick had done to reorganize and professionalize it.

So this is kind of like, I don't know how to say that, the three stages of seed signer code dev for like stage one is seed signer the man taking a like Udemy course on how to program Python and like, you know, cobbling together this thing.

And he has a little bit of a deeper programming background from ages ago too, but admittedly raw. And then professionalized, so phase two with Nick. But Nick, even though he's a professional programmer, he's not coding in Python for his day job.

Right, so he's proficient enough, knowledgeable enough in Python, but not, you know, a working professional. And then I come in and, you know, I have maybe 10 years of Python experience at this point.

And so, no offense to Nick, but I saw Nick's upgrade of the code and I was like, oh man, I can do better. So, and so it was on my wish list to refactor the code. And there were certain kind of Python conventions that if you're not spending all your days in Python, you just either wouldn't be aware of or you wouldn't value in the same way.

Whereas if you're a Python guy, you jump in and if you see these conventions, it's just, it's such a helpful shortcut. Like you know what to expect, right? You don't have to read all of the code 'cause you can just see from the structure, like, okay, given that this person obviously has a certain type of background in the Python world,

I can just jump immediately to a file named, you know, models or views, you know, whatever it is, right? And I just know what to expect in there. And then at the same time as I'm using that version of seed signer, you had to still manually type in your seed word by word every time you turned it on to load in your seed.

And so I was looking back to my Twitter history and like, it's crazy, but basically, I think there's five days separating my first post showing off my seed signer build that I kept together with like a piece of tape.

And then five days later, I was prototyping the initial seed QR attempts to just to see if it could work. You know, for the seed QR concept, I have to credit Brecky, the Bitcoin artist who works with Swan two or three years before then, he had tried to create a QR code out of pepperoni pieces on a pizza at some Bitcoin event.

And so the goal was that he was like cutting pepperoni into like squares and placing them, you know, precisely on this giant pizza. And he was hoping that you could like, you know, scan the pizza and I don't do something.

I don't remember what the point of it was. But unfortunately, he said the hot sun dried up the pepperoni and made it curl up. And so it lost its square edges. So it never actually scanned.

But anyway, I always had that in the back of my mind. I'm like, well, hell, if Brecky can come close to making a QR code by hand with pepperoni, we could probably do that for seed signer.

So that was the birth of the seed QR concept. Not having to sit and type everything in manually, which I understand is a pretty painful process to be able to do this with the, be able to show my friend here, Antimus with his Vulcan seed QR plates.

And with these sort of options, it's just so fucking slick. - Yeah. And just, you know, like Nick said himself, like as a user, you don't want to sit through a 45 minute boot time or 45 second boot time.

And I don't want to have to type in 24 damn words on a tiny little screen with a stabby joystick nub, you know, every time I turn this thing on. And so it was just like, I love this project, but the UX is not acceptable for me as a user.

And so what can we do to cross that threshold of usability? So yeah, seed QR was like completely, you know, like Nick said, something like that you're passionate about that if we can't improve this experience of entering your seed, then this for me, this is dead on arrival.

It's just it would be something for nerds to tinker with, but no sane person would put up with it, you know, over time. And then so over those first couple of months, it was really just making those quality of life improvements, upgrading the keyboard entry code UI to make it faster

to enter those words and when you do have to enter them in, I'm already forgetting some other things. Oh, the image entropy to create a new seed. And you know, we'd briefly mentioned that seed signers is kind of also just a broader Bitcoin toolkit.

And one of the most important things that it does is it can create a new seed with user supplied entropy. I don't even know what hardware is on board, but we don't use any sort of on board hardware, random number generator.

We only support methods that the user brings the entropy. So either you roll dice. I think eventually we'll have coin flips. We just haven't implemented that. Somebody who's passionate about coin flips, make a PR.

It wouldn't be that hard because it's, the code wouldn't be that different from dice rolls. I see a lot of people with the cutout bits of paper and then doing like a Tom Bowler and pulling them out in bits and pieces as well.

Yeah, exactly pulling words. You know, seed thinner has the really cool entropy pills. You can pick out a word at random. And then image entropy, use the on board camera, take a photo and then the pixels of that photo become the majority of your input entropy for your new key.

And you know, unless like if it's possible to take the exact same pixel for pixel photo, then okay, the method is no longer that trustworthy. But I mean, I have a background in photography.

I have a eight inch reflector telescope in my backyard. I've done tons of astrophotography. And so like I'm very well familiar with camera sensor noise and how to mitigate it and all that.

And sensor noise is like the enemy of astrophotography 'cause you're doing a 15 minute exposure. And so all that noise adds up and it pollutes your signal. And so a cheap Raspberry Pi camera is gonna be full of noise.

Like it's impossible to get a clean image out of a sensor like that. And every time you take a frame, the noise pattern is gonna be different. It's just random noise if the temperature of the sensor changes and the longer the sensor is on, the hotter and hotter it's gonna get.

And so it's gonna get noisier and noisier. And so there's just so much randomness. Even if you point it at a blank wall or you put it in total darkness, there's just always gonna be built in noise.

And so the entropy that you get is like literally noise entropy from the universe being read into the sensor that can never be repeated. - Yeah, a lot of these like theoretical attacks and things like that are a little bit out there.

I mean, the open dimes have this for ages like dragging a picture across and that's what's creating the randomness and mine have all been fine. I haven't been hacked. I haven't heard of anyone else having a problem but people like to sort of pick at these things.

But the key here for me is like, you have options. That's what matters. And then it's down to the user, what they wanna use and what they wanna trust. - Yeah, that's actually one of my favorite conversations that we tend to have every couple of weeks in the seed center telegram group as people ask.

And it's like, okay, well, right now we support three options. Dice, pick words at random or image entropy or actually four, make your seeds somehow somewhere outside of the seed signer and import those words.

- You can do that from the passport. I think Q&A was saying to me on our last monthly they can create a seed in there and then put that out to the seed signer. Is that right? - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anything that ends up as a BIP 39 mnemonic can be imported into seed signer. So like my first multi-sig that I ever made consisted of cold card ledger and keep key. And to this day, I'm still using at least part of that using the exact same keys, but those keys just get loaded into my seed signer now

and I've blamed the actual hardware devices. So I'm still using the exact same key that was generated from these other consumer hardware wallets. But yeah, so when people ask like, which method of key generation should I use?

You know, part of the ethos of this project is that we're just always totally upfront about the trade-offs, you know? Like, yeah, if you roll dice, you get these properties. If you pick words out of a hat, you get these properties, if you use image entropy, I think it's the best, but you have to trust the code the most

unless you're willing to read Python and inspect the actual code running on your SD card. - Combination of all of them in multi-sig is probably the, the perfect solution, isn't it? - Yeah, and then if you put a complex passphrase, you know, in front of any of them, it doesn't even matter what your key is.

- Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love the optionality and the whole thing with Bitcoin is don't trust verify and then to take personal responsibility. So options is key. I think that's really important.

- Yeah, and then just to wrap up my piece of it about, oh man, how long has it been? A year and a half ago, we started working on the big UI update. - Yeah. - So we had this amazing UI designer.

He goes by easy, is his pseudonym. At some point he had reached out to SeedSigner and said, hey, like I think we can do something really ambitious and cool with the SeedSigner UI 'cause at the time it looked like a DOS prompt, right?

Like here's your five menu options. You know, highlight, highlight, highlight, click. It's just purely text based menu UI and easy put together these incredible just UI designs. There were just designs in Photoshop but to like per pixel accuracy that would work on the small SeedSigner screen.

And we all just got so excited. I'm like, oh my God, this is just a whole different universe. Like it just makes this thing look like a real product and not just a project that some people, you know, hacked together.

And so along the way, SeedSigner had accumulated so many new features that not only was the code getting kind of spaghetti-ized, 'cause you can imagine like as you add one minor new feature, you'd say like, well, I could put in a lot of work to carve out a special space for this new feature or we could just kind of add it here

even though it kind of sort of doesn't make sense, but it's good enough. But you do that with enough features and you know, you step back and look at the whole and you're like, yeah, a lot of this doesn't really make sense the way things are right now.

And so if we were gonna revamp the whole UI, it made sense to also revamp the internal code. So that process is really when, you know, I made my biggest imprint on the code base where it was basically not a whole rewrite.

There was still a lot of copying and pasting, but structurally, there's zero similarity with how it was before this 0.5 release. And the restructuring is like the, I don't know how to say it.

It's the single most, I can't speak. I'm so freaking proud of it. Let me put it that way. It's, I think it's the best code I've ever had a hand in writing. It's the best organization I've ever helped to bring into a project.

Whether it's my own personal things or open source or professionally, you know, took my 20 something years of coding experience to be able to produce that structure. And the cool thing is, as it's launched and as we add new features and as we try to modify things, the really rewarding thing is that at least so far,

it's been really easy to make the next change or to add the newest features. Even when some of the changes are significant, you know, the whole goal of code organization is to isolate functionality in sensible ways so that a change in one place doesn't necessarily have to affect all the other places and where it's almost like, you know,

kind of more plug and play components. So you're free to make massive changes within one component and the rest of the code doesn't even know, doesn't care that anything has changed. And so there have been times where I've taken on the more ambitious code changes, you know, in this modern recent era of the seed signer code

and I've been kind of scared. I'm like, oh my God, how am I gonna find a way to do this? And then I realized like, oh, it actually just fits really nicely, it just sits in right here and it doesn't blow up the rest of the code like I thought it was going to.

So that's just been really cool. And I've just been so proud of it. You know, I know it like, it seems immodest for me to say that, but my justification is that I'm also super public about everything that I screw up and everything that I make that's terrible.

And so my, my deal is I just, I share how I feel about everything. So when I make a huge mistake, I'm like, oh my God, guys, look at this horrible result that I made. But then when I do something good, I'm like, holy cow, guys, look how well this worked out.

You know, so I'm just an open book. - It's nice to see you're excited about it. It's cool to be excited about something like this and I can feel it, you know, it's genuine. So we should be proud about what's happening here and everyone who's involved in doing something like this and then open source and putting as many hours

as you guys are putting into it should be fucking proud of it. It's exciting and Bitcoin doesn't move forward unless we have projects like this. So it's cool to see you're excited. And Nick, now that Keith has come along and redone all of your code after you've redone all of seed signers,

what happens there is there ever any beefs between you or is it all nice and icy? - No, it's all nice and icy. I love that Keith came in with his experience because I'm not a Python developer.

Like he said, like that's not my trade. Like I've learned a lot of other languages throughout my career and, you know, I knew enough to throw together some object or into code and even I picked like a structure that I was just familiar with from building websites called the NBC and we kind of ran with that for a while.

But yeah, totally happy that Keith did that. And just he has every right to be proud of that structure. It's been awesome for the project. Awesome for other contributors. It's just been such a relief to him bringing the expertise.

So yeah. - And I think it's also been a learning tool. Keith has done a really great job of having some webinars where if someone is curious about seed signers specifically or curious just to learn more about a Python project that's well-organized and he's recorded several webinars with another contributor whose name is Mark

and they have talked through setting up a seed signer development environment and then talked through kind of the underlying larger structures in the code and how things work. And that's that we're starting now to see kind of the initial benefits of that effort because there's a newer generation of seed signer developers.

There's maybe two, three, four of them who are not as involved or committed in the project but they're starting to do PR reviews and they're starting to make small changes and they're getting more familiar with the code base.

And so Keith is really kind of serving as in a way a mentor to them at least in a Python sense for them to contribute not just our project but if there are other projects out there that are written in Python who can benefit from some of the conventions that we're using and stuff that's I think that's also kind of big.

- Yeah, I'm not that aware of what other FOS projects do to help onboard potential new contributors but I really wanna make seed signer the gold standard of bringing in and encouraging new devs.

I mean, first of all, it's Python, right? Python is easy. Even if you're not an expert with the structure in place it's easy to read the code and because of the structure you're really just repeating existing patterns over and over again for new features, new screens, things like that.

So even a modest, a fairly neophyte Python dev should be able to look at our code base and say, okay, if I wanna add a screen that says this or does that, how do I do it? And they should be able to get 75, 80% of the way without any help at all.

And then each screen or each task has certain unique requirements and maybe they get stuck and then they reach out to us and we can help talk them through it. But yeah, I mean, I would, again, I don't know what other projects are doing but I remember when I was just getting started in the Bitcoin world and being a programmer,

I wanted to contribute to projects but I was always very intimidated and I didn't know how to find my way into the front door and I ended up initially contributing to the Spectre desktop and working with Stephon Sneager-F.

And again, it's Python so that made it easier and Stephon is great but it was also really intimidating. Like the guy is a freakin' genius. He's got like, his training is in something like nuclear particle physics.

You know, so like a bit. - You've got a horrible physicist or something. - Yeah. - I heard him speak at the London Bitcoin dev meetup about a year ago and honestly, I understood about 5% of what he said.

It was just like, and I was sat next to Bitcoin Q&A and I was like, you getting this mate? You understand of this? He's like, nope. (laughing) Exactly. So like, for me as a new dev, I'm like, okay, A, it's amazing that I'm interacting with Stephon, you know, and looking at his code base but B, like, I'm an idiot.

I'm so dumb. Like, I'm scared to ask him the dumb questions but to his credit, he's just incredibly patient and incredibly generous, like with his time and his intellect that made that process of contributing to Spectre desktop in the early days.

It was like October, 2019, and it had barely been out. It was just so welcoming, you know? So, you know, I don't know if people find, I hope people don't find seed signer intimidating. I hope people don't find me intimidating or Nick or seed signer.

Like, we are like the most like mildest, most open, most friendly people. So, but I just think it's important for us to go out of our way to say like, you know, come, come. Like, this is easy, this is fun, this is cool, you know?

And we'll help you. - What's it been like running this project, Fos, and sticking to Fos? It obviously comes with its trade-offs. It's what we want to see, but I know it's not easy. Like, what's been the highs and lows of running this as a Fos project?

- I think as a Fos project, like the beauty of it is that anybody can build one of these, you know, everything we do, including the code, but also including like people who create 3D printable enclosures and everything.

It's associated with the project, it's just out there. And so, one of the neat things about it is like anybody in the world, as long as they can get their hands on the parts, can, you know, build and put the software together and have one of these, we did it the right way.

And I remember when we announced a license, we were getting to that kind of point where I think it was Nick who had kind of poked me and said like, I think we're probably, we should probably announce a license for this thing.

And so, I started reading about different licenses and I still don't consider myself by any means an expert on licenses, but once you start to dip a toe in that water man, the sharks really like start to circle.

And I remember putting a tweet out there, you know, that I was kind of looking at the copy left license or the new public license as opposed to the MIT license and instantly my DMs were full with people on both sides of the like coin who were extremely passionate and trying to convince me that their license or saying

that, you know, I'll never make a PR to your project if you don't have X license or blah, blah, blah. And it was just suddenly very intimidating. Ultimately, like it's probably oversimplified rubric, but if MIT is good enough for Bitcoin Core and MIT is good enough for Spectre, which, you know,

as we kind of said, we have a lot of respect for them, MIT seems good enough for us. And it's the most permissive free license. So it was kind of, you know, just a logical next step in making this an extremely open project that other people could interact with.

I think, you know, that is encouraged contributors to come in and make use of the code or contribute to the code. I think it's also being false was an attractive part of what EZ, our UX designer, was attracted to to come in and help build something that is truly free and open and available.

We haven't mentioned yet, but his Twitter handle is desobediante, Technological, who is kind of the father of Seedson or OS and got the ball rolling with that. I think, plus being a false project was meaningful for him.

And being false in that way, you know, it's still very early days, but, you know, it's a double-edged sword. We do accept donations and we've received a couple of grants from Human Rights Foundation, received a grant from Blockstream, definitely throughout, I thank you too.

There's a Twitter handle called CoinATMRadar, who is not just a bit coiner, but he was very generous and we were trying to solicit donations for Keith to be able to focus on the new UI and he made a generous donation then.

And then we've also had tons of community support, like small one, two, three dollar donations that come in through BTP pay server. We also, MedoDel very generously, shares a part of the Citadel Dispatch, streaming live, you know, streaming stats split with us that we periodically pass those rewards out to contributors

and we can talk more about how we do that. But it's also a double-edged sword because, you know, you're relying on donations. It's great to get donations if you're getting them, but, you know, sometimes donations are elusive.

Grants especially can be elusive, depending on which organizations you're applying with, but I'm kind of all over the place here. But another advantage of Phos has been, there have been a few small, kind of like cottage style companies that have also committed to supporting the project, which has been really humbling to see.

There's, I think you probably either know or know of him Printergo Burr as a store. He 3D prints various things and Seed Center's one of the things that he offers within his online shop and much to his credit for every Seed Center that he sells, he donates a portion of his proceeds to support our contributors and our developers.

The same with Antimus and what he's doing with the Steel QRs and some of the Seed Center devices that he's selling. So as a Phos project, like, if we were a for-profit project, we don't know that people would be as willing to donate proceeds from their businesses to us.

So it's, my hope is that as the Seed Center ecosystem hopefully grows and there are more products and more kind of cottage businesses that are created that rely on our code base, my hope is that they will too kind of be willing to share a portion of what their revenue is to help reward and motivate our contributors 'cause that's,

you know, to get into the flip side of what's Phos and open source, a good choice. Like, I say this probably at least once a week when people ask me about new features or things that we could add to the project.

Like, I have to be very calm and say, I'm nobody's boss. It would be a lot easier if I could say, like, hey, employee, we're interested in this feature. Would you spend some time next week coding this up and we'll, you know, look at adding it.

But as Nick alluded, like it is, comes down to people scratching their own itch and he's been very generous with his time and is willing to do as his keys, you know, work on some features that maybe we've decided we're worth having on the platform, but none of us, you know, we're super excited about.

I think that 85 is probably one that's cited as one of those that none of us were personally excited about it, but there had been enough people asking about it. Maybe there are some use cases for it.

So motivating and coordinating contributors sometimes can be a challenge and donations help with that, but they also, you know, the scale of the donations and grants that we bring in isn't to where any of us are going to, you know, get rich or even come close to recouping the value of the time that we put in the project.

It's just kind of like a nice thank you ever once in a while, you know, to get some SATs for the time and effort that we put into this. I've been rambling for a minute, so I'm sure these guys probably have things to add, but there's drawbacks and advantages of the FOS thing.

It's a double-edged sword. - Yeah, if you guys go anything to add to that? - I mean, I think Seed Center covered it pretty well, honestly, I covered a lot of things there, but I don't know if I have anything else to add to it.

Yeah. - Okay. - Yeah, I mean, well, Seed Center just wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the FOS resources, the FOS community, the FOS ethos, you know, Nick having a full-time job and his own family.

It's not like he would have picked up an extra hourly contract job if there was some Seed Center company looking to hire, you know, a dev. In June, I'll be at my like two-year anniversary contributing to the project.

And in that time, I've been lucky and, you know, blessed to get full-time funding to work on the project for five months out of those two years. And that was amazing. We got so much done in the time where I could focus full-time, not have to build fiat, normy job contract hours and just dedicate, you know, all of my time and energy

into Seed Center. Like actually, what I find is I have time to do more things, but I don't have the brain space for it. Like certain programming tasks are just such a heavy lift. Unless I know that I've got like a three, four, five-day span to just really dig into it and stay focused on it, like I can't even start it.

'Cause like it's just, it's too hard to start, stop, start, stop. - Yeah, like if I'm like, okay, I've got an hour and a half tonight, I'll have two hours tomorrow, nothing, nothing, and then six hours on the weekend.

It just changes what you're able to work on. But anyway, so it's, you know, on the one hand, I'm incredibly lucky that I got five months of that sort of time to dedicate to the project. Most FOS developers, you know, the vast, vast majority don't get paid to do full-time work like that.

But then on the flip side, Seed Center is still my highest priority. It's the most important thing that I can spend my time on, you know, outside of like taking my dog for a walk every day or spending time, you know, with my nieces.

But again, because of that, you know, brain space ability and, you know, other things in my life, like there are times where I just can't focus on it the way I'd want to. And so, yeah, like the problem with FOS being like just the community, the ethos of FOS is so important.

It's so built into this project, but then it just comes with limitations and things that can't be, right? Like if I was a full-time employee, we would have to get VC or angel money, you know, 'cause even working at a discount, hiring programmers is expensive.

And then how do you make that VC money back? Well, we'd have to start selling Seed Signer as a retail product with enough of a profit margin to cover my salary expenses, to cover other people's expenses and to eventually pay back the VCs with profit, right?

Like it changes everything. - Which time it goes, kind of goes against what you guys have started as well. In a sense, it's like you're getting people to build this stuff themselves for the reasons we've discussed.

So it's very difficult and to have the margins now with the boards being as expensive as they are and everything else, it's a challenge. And so it shows the dedication that you will have to this project to spend your time doing something that is not just unprofitable, but actually costs you a huge amount of your time and energy.

So why do it? - I mean, I'm very, very happy you do, but what is it about Bitcoin and this space that makes you bother to do this rather than a million other things you could be doing with your time?

- Well, I always say I'm not a saint. You know, I'm like, we all get an enormous amount of not personal gain in terms of finances, but like Bitcoiners know who I am now. Bitcoiners are grateful for the work I've done.

I get invited to cool conferences and meetups and podcasts, right? Like I was a nobody in Bitcoin. Nobody cared about me or what I did. And so, you know, just from like becoming somebody at least a little bit known and valued in the space, you know, that is just a pure personal benefit.

You know, it's just pure ego, pure self-interest, right? Like you don't have to be a saint to be aligned with doing open source dev. It can be like, I want to be somebody that is known and respected in the space and I'm going to do it through Phos, right?

There's a totally selfish narrative that you can create that is at least partially true. And, you know, for me, yeah, like I love, you know, people like and appreciate my work and feel that it's important.

It makes me feel important. And I'm just a guy sitting at his breakfast table, you know, in front of a laptop, coding stuff. - I love the honesty. Nick, you also completely selfish in just doing it fully for the ego and parties.

(both laughing) - I feel like we all have different personal reasons why that we contribute that are probably way too complicated to get into in detail. But yeah, I mean, there's definitely, I mean, the whole reason I started contributing to Seed Center is because I wanted to use it.

So there's definitely selfish aspects to it. I will also add though, I think in addition to, it's been the non-saint motivations. There are, like, every once in a while, Seed Center will send these screenshots to some of the private groups that Keith and I are in of people who have used Seed Center or helping others use Seed Center.

And it's amazing, just like it's really inspiring to hear how like places like in Africa and places all over the world, they need access to tools to be able to use Bitcoin safely and privately and that, it's like, how can me just spending a few hours in a week writing some code or reviewing some code contribute to someone

across the world? Well, in Bitcoin allows that to happen and it's pretty amazing and that is inspiring. And I think that's, it's pretty cool to be part of that. Even if my name goes nowhere in terms of like, you know, I'm not looking for any type of legacy through Bitcoin but it's very cool to be a small part of that

and just, yeah, I don't know how to express it in words but it's very cool to be able to contribute in a way that impacts people around the world, even if the people on the other side of the world don't know it, I think it's awesome.

Well, it's something that actually matters. I mean, how many people do a job that earns the money but when they're on their deathbed, they can think to themselves, what the fuck have I done to make the world a better place?

And there's a huge amount of value in that. There's a huge amount of value to know that you're doing something that's actually helping people. It's pretty rare that people do something like that.

Well, I'll say. If I can jump in, I'm also, and maybe this is ego driven as well but I'm also proud of some of the ways that I feel like SeedSigner is a part of pushing the cold storage ecosystem within Bitcoin forward in terms of some of the features that we didn't create but what we did do is kind of create this testbed

of people who were interested and excited to try different ways of managing a cold storage quorum and some of the features or ways that we've been working on are starting to find their way into some of the more conventional and commercially available hardware.

So I'm personally really proud to feel like our work has had an impact on moving the ball forward with cold storage because it's, a lot of people tend to seek cold storage as a destination and not a journey but it's something that best practices have been refined over the last, what is it, 13 years that Bitcoin has been in existence

and they're gonna continue to be revised for the next 20 or 30 years, probably longer. I don't think we'll ever get it perfect but as with any human endeavor, like private keys have existed for what, since Diffie-Hellman in the 60s and 70s and corporations have been really bad at private key management historically.

There just haven't been really great practices that have been established and followed and Bitcoin actually in and of itself has done a tremendous amount for teaching the world and organizations how to manage secrets and because they put money on the table and say, if you don't manage the secret correctly, you're gonna lose money.

And so yeah, that's something that I'm particularly proud of and what Keith talks about with the kind of unique social currency that comes with being involved with the project is something that I enjoy too and that's a selfish thing but it's human beings have this sort of instinctive desire

to have the respect of their peers and to be loved and have other people think that what you're doing is worthwhile. But scratch is that it's just well for me too and it's kind of fun to my kids and my wife don't always understand why I'm looking forward to the next Bitcoin conference that I can meet at.

And they, I don't think they still like, I will jokingly say like, I go to these things and there's a few people there who are actually kind of excited to talk to me (laughing) and they're like, yeah. (laughing) But yeah, it's been an adventure to say the least.

Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm joking a little bit but I'm just a big believer in win-wins, right? Like we can write impactful, maybe important code contributions that can, you know, impact people's lives and we can enjoy some of the personal benefits from doing so and I just, you know, I almost viewed as a, well, for anyone who isn't

fiercely protecting their anonymity, right? Like I've done it all wrong, I'm Keith Mukai, my face is docked, my name is docked, my voice is docked, right? I have no secrets out there. But as a kind of enticement to other contributors, other people, you know, joining the Fos community, like, yeah, it's a win-win, you know?

It shouldn't have to be this like, selfless sacrifice that you're making, you know, in your basement, right? It should be like, it should be like, holy shit, guys, I did this awesome thing and then you get a high five for doing that awesome thing, like, it's great.

- Yeah, and being able to meet other Bitcoiners and like you say, like, if you're in the background and you're not really getting to know people, it can be difficult and I mean, that's why I started this podcast in the first place and it's the reason I've continued it as well.

I get to speak to people who are interesting and I get to learn and I get to ask questions 'cause I'm too dumb to work out myself and so it's all a form of currency. - Well, there's, I mean, there's also though, like what I found as I've met more and more builders in the space and I mean, that's really been the coolest thing.

Like I get to meet people that have been following, you know, for years and admiring for years and they're like, oh, hey, Keith, what's up? You know, and then we go grab a beer. But as part of that FOS community or even with, you know, with the for-profit companies and those builders, I'm finding that just by making these connections

and, you know, I'm sure you've experienced this, where you can start to become like a glue layer or a intermediary where you're talking with one person and they're talking about some need or some problem and you're like, oh, you know, I bet, I know who could help with that.

Let me go call this guy, you know, put you guys in touch. - Oh yeah, all the time that happens and it's really fucking rewarding when it does. - Yeah, and you just, you know, that's the FOS community to me.

Like we're all on the same mission. Some people are trying to, you know, run profit generating businesses, many aren't, but you know, we see that like with strike, with Jack Mallard's, right?

Like he's trying to run a for-profit business and he's like encouraging competition. He's like, I'm desperate for my competition to integrate lightning and compete with us. That it's just, you know, that's the great thing about Bitcoin, that the top layer of everything is this global network that no one controls,

but we all want to see, improve and get stronger and get easier to use. And so we all have this like common foundation and common motivation that, that links us all. And so, you know, we do see the for-profit companies getting into sniping matches from time to time.

- That was very tastefully put. - Well, but you know, but also like, this is like the world's dumbest observation, but you know, a couple of weeks ago, I was like, you know, the only Bitcoiners who really like attack each other are connected with for-profit businesses, you know, whether it's wallet spaces or mixers or whatever, right?

And yes, I understand, you know, I'm not gonna like discount their passionate discipline stances, like where they're coming from, but I mean, it's like these two for-profit companies are savagely attacking each other.

These two for-profit mixers are savagely attacking each other. And the rest of us, we're just like building shit and cooperating. So, you know, hey, there's a correlation there. - Yeah, and to me, it's pretty clear.

I mean, if something is fast and someone builds on top of it, it was fast. So, just shut the fuck up. With all this stuff of wasabi working with surveillance companies, to me, it's just like it's antithetical to Bitcoin.

So, am I gonna argue with them online? Or like, if I saw them in person, am I gonna give them a slap? No. But you have to have your line and you have to have your ethics. And it's generally just like a fucking waste of time or this fighting all the time.

I just use the tools that I think are good. And if someone doesn't agree with me, that's fine. 'Cause I'm just gonna use what I like. I don't have to like explain to someone why I use what I use and I don't know.

Maybe more people could do that. It could be a nicer space. - I'd agree with that. Like we, I think it's Bellagie. Shrinivasan says exit his voice. The market sorts it out. If we all use the tools that we believe in and that we think are quality or useful or reflecting your values as a portion of that too, like the market sorts it out.

That's the beautiful thing. - Absolutely. So, have we got any other updates with the code that we haven't covered? I know we've gone through this huge update for the operating system, which is obviously a massive change and the boot speed and user interface.

Are there any other things that I've missed out and that you particularly wanted to cover? - There's a ongoing and somewhat languishing effort to get us off of the Raspberry Pi hardware onto more easily sourced consumer microcontrollers.

That process is, I don't know, that we're about a year into that too. I can't even remember how long it's been, but it's been very difficult, very slow. And then as I've been pulled away to other things in my life, the last couple of months, it's kind of been just in stasis.

But hopefully in the coming months, I'll be able to dedicate time to it again. And the goal is so that all the core seed sign or code that we're currently running will remain the same. And it's only when we have to talk to the hardware level, like talk to the screen, talk to the camera, receive input from the buttons.

That has to change how it communicates with the hardware when we're on a different hardware platform. But so that basically the code base would almost have like three components. One would be like seed center core, like the main logic that never changes.

Two would be the Raspberry Pi hardware version, and then three would be the microcontroller modified hardware code. So that, 'cause it's always a nightmare in development if you have to maintain two separate code bases that are supposed to sort of do the same thing.

And so that's just not viable. But long run, if we can get off the Raspberry Pi hardware, then we can start doing some really interesting things like manufacturing our own dedicated device for very cheap and not being constrained by the Raspberry Pi supply chain.

You know, the long term vision is by some way get super affordable seed signers into as many corners of the planet as possible. And right now, yeah, the Raspberry Pi foundation is producing more Pi zeros by like the tens, hundreds, low thousands.

But, you know, a year ago, Fadi El-Salamin asked us, "Hey, can we send 2,000 seed signers to Palestine?" And, you know, the answer had to be no, 'cause ain't no one got 2,000 Pi zeros, you know, period.

- It was true. - Right, whereas if when this code is done to run on a different hardware platform, the answer can start to become, yes, we can send, you know, we can help build 2,000 seed signers to send to Palestine.

Yes, we can help build 5,000 to send to El Salvador. You know, yes, we can send 10,000 to Africa. But right now, the answer is, we have a slightly better supply of Raspberry Pi zeros. We always encourage you to build your own, but if you wanna lean on us to help, you know, supply massive quantities,

finishing this modification to work on other hardware is the only way we're gonna get there. - And this would be in addition to, too. It's not like this new adding this additional hardware would be replacing Raspberry Pi.

We would just like Keith alluded to, the code would work on both. It would be a hardware independent, the application would work on both. - Brilliant. And the hardware that you're looking to, hopefully have as an additional option, what sort of price point is that for people to be able to get hold of?

- Well, we'll see. It's like the Raspberry Pi's are, like even the zero board is kind of a weird version of a Raspberry Pi, right? When you say Raspberry Pi, I think people think about the playing card sized board.

So the Pi zero is about the size of a stick gum. So it's kind of a lesser known Pi, but just by virtue of being a Raspberry Pi, there's really broad ecosystem support out there for different modules that connect to it and all of that.

So it's really easy to build, to source these parts from anywhere and build the Pi version of it. In the microcontroller world, there are off the shelf pre-built microcontroller boards that you could buy, but there's almost no standardization.

And so, we can help identify like, oh, if you buy this specific one, and then you'll need this specific other piece, and maybe we can kind of sorta Lego it together, but the reality is in the microcontroller world, it's more like we're gonna have to produce an open source board with a components list that the majority of people

just aren't gonna be able to assemble themselves. Like, yeah, you could send the board schematics to your local fabrication plant and have them pick in place and mount the components, but how many people are really gonna do that?

And you have to do an order of like, a hundred or a thousand to make it economical. So it's gonna be more that we have open source hardware plans and fewer people will be producing those themselves.

And maybe we have, end up with some manufacturing arm, or maybe people like Printergober, take those open source plans and do those orders to produce this new generation device. But it definitely is gonna be a trade off where if you really wanna build your own, the Raspberry Pi version is still gonna be the most sensible route.

And then the microcontroller version is just gonna resemble more and more a consumer retail product that you buy off the shelves, but with more open sourcing and flexibility than buying a treasure, let's say.

- The ultimate goal of, you know, if an organization like built with Bitcoin or even Rides Foundation or any of these other Bitcoin not for profit says, "We really see that seed center could be a valuable tool "in this locale or in this country."

With an open source F-O-S-H, free and open source hardware design, with the design out there, as well as software that's compatible with it, it makes it much more feasible that coming back to that Fatty, I'll saw a mean question of how do I get 2,000 seed signers and two, I'm blanking, I'm sorry.

- Palestine. - Palestine, correct. How do we get 2,000 seed signers into Palestine? It suddenly becomes a much more realistic and scalable thing to pursue. And so that's I think a big part of the dream behind that initiative, but we'll see.

- Very cool. Well, like we said before, options. It's better for everyone, the more options we have. One thing that I forgot to ask you about, a bit random here, but I saw you had bought that seed hammer.

I think I messaged you about it. It looks really fucking cool. Can you tell me a bit about that and the integration with what you guys are doing? - Right, that's what I really think is very cool that seed signer is part of the Genesis story for the seed hammer.

They're trying to address this problem of, it's freaking hard to put seed words and a QR code into steel. It's just physically a laborious, time consuming, difficult thing to do. - Leave some fingers.

- Right, and there have been different products that have, I think, diminished some of the friction, but I think maybe what they're targeting is to be almost the ultimate friction reducer of getting your private keys into a long-term durable steel backup.

And so, those hammering devices, I didn't understand kind of what the industrial use case for those was, but if you can think of like a factory where they make back hose and the buckets for the back hose, everyone that goes out the door gets a plate on it that has, you know, the serial number,

the manufacturing information where it was made, that kind of stuff. And everyone that goes out the door of these huge equipment pieces gets an engraved metal plate. And so, somewhere in their factory floor, they have, you know, whatever the industrial, pre-existent version of a seed hammer is,

and they have a program to punch out the serial number and whatever information is relevant to the product. And somehow one of the two principles who are beginning that company were aware of this thing is an industrial tool and thought, man, that could be really useful to automate the process

of putting a seed phrase and perhaps a QR code, it's a metal as a long-term cold storage private key solution. And so, they initially started experimenting with punching out seed phrases and QR codes.

And then Nick, I'm sorry, Nick, Keith and I actually met one of the two founders, no Salvador, last fall. And he was still kind of figuring out what is the best controller 'cause the seed hammer, the industrial device that that's made with is just a dumb industrial device.

It has to have some sort of controller that's an electronic component that gives it the instructions of where to hammer and how long and what pressure and all that kind of stuff. And he was still in the process of trying to figure out what would make the best controller for this seed hammer concept.

And at the time he'd been looking at maybe a dedicated, inexpensive mobile phone, or maybe even like a laptop computer or something that was USB connected. But after kind of thinking more about the ecosystem that we have built with the seed center project and the specific characteristics of Raspberry Pi Zero and the air gap nature of it,

as well as some of the work that we've already done in terms of building out an ecosystem where they're available in various parts of the world and the work that we put in the software, he decided that the seed signer's hardware profile made a lot of sense as a controller for the seed hammer

because it's stateless and air gap, et cetera, et cetera. So like I said, Keith and I got to meet him in El Salvador and it was just a miserable afternoon of spitballing at a cafe on Bitcoin beach.

But we kind of, it was needs to interact with him. He's very passionate. Both those two founders are very passionate. And if you've seen some of the images and videos, like it's a very compelling idea, I think they're still in the process of refining it to make it even more approachable to users.

But it is exciting and it's pretty cool. I was one of the early pre-orders and I haven't pre-ordered anything since probably like an ASIC in 2014, but it was cool enough that I ordered one and it shipped and I'm playing around with it.

And it is an exciting, compelling sort of option to do long-term documentation in your private keys. So yeah. - Yeah, that experience is, it's like one of my favorite Bitcoiner moments. So like, yeah, we were literally in El Zante on the second floor of a bar, drinking margaritas and talking with this co-founder of the project.

And he is crazy smart and very like intense, you know? And so, and he and I were just like almost off to the side for like two hours. - I don't want to use the word arguing. We're like debating with each other on like the best approach and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And it was like, it was like two hours of trying to wear him down and convince him that, you know, oh, you should do it this way. You should do it that way. And he's like, no, but what about this?

What about that? No, we should do it this way. And like I said, he's just, he's so smart. And he's like, you know, in a way, he's very intimidating to debate with, you know? 'Cause he just has like such like conviction and like expertise, you know?

Like you better know what you're talking about if you're going to disagree with him. And it was great. We're like, you know, talking about how best to run his Bitcoin steel backup solution from El Zante drinking margaritas.

Like that's just awesome. And he's a guy that I never would have met if we hadn't traveled to El Salvador, you know? And so props to El Zante props to the adopting Bitcoin conference that drew all these people together.

And yeah, I mean, that's how, that's what I love about that this, of this community. Like we could have just had margaritas and enjoyed the view, but instead we're like digging through, like, no Python, no rust, no this, like two hours.

- And that was, that conference was a really neat experience. And I didn't realize that it's still, especially for a lot of Europeans, it's still very difficult to get into America. So especially if you're not vaccinated or with whatever restrictions, it was very neat that we had this kind of neutral place that didn't have a lot of rules

about what you needed to get into the country. And, you know, I got to meet open noms there and I got to meet Moritz. - Oh, I love hypnosis. - I grew up the first time ever. And it was a really neat experience.

But what I'll also say about the seat hammer guys is in the spirit of Phos, like I really do think we're gonna see some upstream improvements from some of the things that they're doing at seats on our own at OS was like a pretty big leap forward for us, but they are doing something with seat hammer

with the boot time on that thing to where they are. They have it set up to where it boots extremely fast and it's putting some pressure on us to kind of up our game in that regard. But they're signaling that they're very open to helping us bring some of their optimizations and improvements into seat center,

which I think is like one of these beautiful things about free and open source software and being able to benefit from someone else's expertise and, you know, intelligence. - That's incredible.

- Yeah, I would love one of those things. Being the kind of Bitcoiner and the family and friendship group, if I was setting people up, it would be nice to have something like that. It'd be pretty cool.

It's amazing to see that sort of interplay between these different projects and it's nice to see everyone helping each other out. Nick Keith, it's been really good to get to know you a little bit and, as I said at the beginning and throughout the pod, it's incredible to see where seat sign of the project has gone.

And I'm here in any way that I can help you guys. I promise that I will, at some point, get my fucking ass into gear and build one of these things to start playing around, but huge respect for what you guys are doing.

And I do try and show the project where I can and it is anything I can do to help just reach out. I'm here. - Just keep bringing Antimus on. He's a great representative for a problem. - He's a fucking pain in the ass, that guy.

(both laughing) Yeah, no, he's always chilling. So yeah, we'll keep doing that. And thank you for having us. And I don't say it enough, but thank you to seat signer, the man, for running such a phenomenal, welcoming, friendly, good vibe project.

That's just, we've gotten a lot of good mojo from it, but a lot of that is because of the tone that you've set. I'm super grateful for that. And thank you to Nick. I was hesitant to call myself the lead developer 'cause I didn't want to, and we don't have a hierarchy in that sense.

But I was only comfortable with it once Nick moved into this role of running the GitHub. And so I make sure that we call him the lead maintainer of the project. And then I'm comfortable being called the lead dev and then seat signer, the man is just the project lead.

So we're a three-headed monster. - Yeah, it's been such a great experience like meeting and getting low and interacting with both Keith and Nick. And the ethos of the project largely arises from their personalities too in the spirit of our collaboration.

So it's just, no matter what happens, the seat signer grows, keeps growing, whatever happens, like this period of my life will be a pretty exciting and treasured one, regardless. - Yeah, appreciate you, Max, for inviting us in.

And it's just, I love your podcast, it's great. So being able to be on this pod was pretty terrific. Long time listener, first time guest. So it's pretty great. - Well, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Always, always pleasure to have you on seat signer and Nick and Keith, you are always welcome. So just, you know, any updates or anything you think that the listeners should know about or I should know about, just reach out and open invite.

- Appreciate that. - We'll speak again soon. - Cool.