
Dont trust. Verify with Bitcoin QNA
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Show Notes
I spoke to Bitcoin QNA to talk about bitcoin Seeds and a new Seed Tool he created with SuperPhatArrow. This tool helps users verify rather than trust, it also helps users to understand a little more about how a bitcoin wallet works in the background. We discuss entropy, seed words, Passphrases and much more. After learning about how this project came about and the work QNA and SPA put into this it was another reminder of just how powerful and important open source is. Please consider donating if you find the tools useful.
twitter - @superphatarrow
twitter - @BitcoinQ_A
Website - https://bitcoiner.guide/seed
Github - https://github.com/BitcoinQnA/seedtool
As always please feel free to reach out and ask me any questions.
twitter - @MaxBitbuybit
twitter - @bitbuybitpod
Website - https://ungovernablemisfits.com
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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! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! 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 world. Join in the space, and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
Welcome back. I recorded with Bitcoin Q&A a couple of days ago to run through his new seed tool website. It's really impressive. I didn't really grasp it the first time he explained it to me or quite how important it would be, but after having a play and especially now after recording with him, I
would suggest to anyone listening to this to go and check it out. I've put the link in the show notes, and I just want to say thank you to Superfat Arrow for helping Bitcoin Q&A with this.
This is going to be useful for so many Bitcoiners, so I really do appreciate it. If you find the tool useful, please consider donating. It's really important that we support these open source projects.
Before we start the show, I want to thank everyone who's reached out, asked me questions, streamed me sats, and everyone who's been giving feedback on the website and the merch. If you haven't checked it out already, go to ungovernable misfits.com.
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Go to fastbitcoins.com. Enjoy the show. Morning mate, you all right? Morning sir. Yeah, do well yourself. I can't hear you. Hold on. Oh, good. Nah. Great start, as always. Yeah, quality. No, I've got you, I just turned up my headphones.
How are you doing? Not too bad. Mate yourself. Yeah, good. I've been playing around with the seat tool this morning, so I didn't sound like a complete idiot. So you can answer all the questions.
Shall we switch it? I'll ask all the questions this time, then, yeah. Yeah, yeah, let's try it, and then when that fails, we'll switch it around again. But no, it's really cool, mate. It's really, really cool.
Because you were explaining it the other day, and I was like, I think it was the end we just recorded, and then you were like explaining it quickly. I was having a look. I was like, yeah, I get sort of like half of what you're saying.
I didn't really think about it too much. And then before we were getting ready for this call, I was like, oh, just check it out. And it makes a lot more sense to me now why somebody would find this useful.
So yeah, that's what I reached out. I was just like, I think we should do a call on this because as people are getting deeper into Bitcoin, I think a lot of the people who are listening to this show, especially if they're like trying to do things the correct way, trying to use the tools as they should be used.
And I think this is going to be like a massive part of that, a really useful thing to help people wrap their heads around, like hearing things in theory and actually getting to play with something like this is very different.
Yeah, it's, I'm on the no illusions that this isn't kind of a beginner tour really, but it's to, as you said, really, it's sort of to, for those, the more curious Bitcoin that might sort of want to start to understand or try to understand the nuts and bolts of
what's going on underneath with the various different wallet standards that we've got. And, you know, just plain and simple, what's actually happening when they download, say Samurai Wallet and they click generate wallet or generate seed.
I can't remember how they badge it, but yeah, it's kind of, I see this too. I decided to, to this tour early ones, the main one is kind of an education piece, which is easily accessible via my website at Bitcoiner.guide/seed and you can just go online and onto that
website and play around for hours and generate 3 million seeds if you want, not have to worry about backups, et cetera, et cetera, and just sort of see how the different, the different features kind of are all interlinked to one another.
And then the, the other sort of side to that is where the more advanced user that is comfortable taking that, you know, clicking a big fat orange download link that we've got on the page and using this securely offline on a, on a sort of computer that's, that's offline
or even, you know, taking it a step further and installing it on something like Tails, which is like an amnesic sort of operating system and they can use that in a bit more of a secure way, I guess.
There's two kind of sides to it and obviously the second one is far more advanced, but that sort of enables them to take advantage of this tour to be actually used for, if they wanted to, for more, for actual live seed and seed generation and stuff like that, which I'm sure we're going to get into throughout the next hour.
Yeah, well, like you said about having an offline option, I mean, I've been playing around with it just online on the website, but obviously then I'm not keeping anything, it's just like to see how stuff works, but yeah, something like Tails is really interesting, but I guess
like in without going too much into detail, but like, for me, I would still be thinking, I know Tails is supposed to forget everything when you pull it out, I know like in theory that that should work, but I still somehow wouldn't feel as comfortable generating a seed
that I was going to say have like my deep cold storage using it, I'd still feel more comfortable with a hardware wallet, I don't know why I just feel like, ah, because it's specifically designed for that job and that job only and I don't know his degree, 100% degree, this
tool is there's been a lot of chatter on Twitter in the last sort of 24 hours of people putting out that I think people kind of got the impression that I was trying to present this to maybe like replace their cold storage and that's absolutely the point here, the most secure way
for you to generate a seed is on a permanently offline device like a passport or a cold card or any hardware wallet that physically can't connect to the internet, this tool is not to replace that, I kind of see it as working in tandem, there's a couple of use cases that
are outlined at the top of the page and I'll just kind of check them off as to where this tool can come in and maybe when you're using some of the features on some of these hardware wallets that you can use this tool as like a check piece maybe sometimes like to check
that I use the example of let's say you're using seed signer to and you're using it to generate a seed using dice rolls, so seed sign is great for this where through the UI you can say yep I want to generate a 12 word seed and it'll say okay give me 99 dice rolls,
so you roll your dice 99 times one by one and every time you get a dice result you put that into the seed signer it takes that entropy and turns it into a seed word for you which is fantastic and it's really great and I urge anybody who's a little bit curious about the
process to give it a will, the problem is is how do you know that that seed signer is taking the inputs that you're actually giving it and producing the correct seed, you kind of got to trust it unless you're qualified enough to go delving through the code to check
what's going on. Before this tool existed there was a way that you could, I think it was call card that produced like a command line tool where you can kind of put the entropy in again, it's obviously it's an open source tool and you can put the entropy in and check
that you get the same seed so you know that you haven't got like a compromised device, you could use that to check any seed signer dice rolled seed as well. But the problem is it's a command line tool and you know there's probably like 0.5% of people that are comfortable
enough to use it that are actually going to go to the trouble of checking that their dice rolls are correct. Well with this tool you could generate a seed using the method I've just said using the seed signer and input the exact same dice rolls into this seed tool,
it doesn't need to be a seed that you're going to use, you know you could just use it as a test run to check that the outputs match one another. I want you, you might do that once or twice and you go yeah I'm inputting the same dice rolls here and I'm getting exactly
the same seed on the other side. I'm pretty comfortable that seed signer is following the same sort of standard. Now I'm going to get rid of seed tool and I'm just going to do my dice rolls and generate my actual seed that I'm going to use my cold storage. So that's
just one example of where this tool can be used sort of in tandem in a safe manner without actually having to interact with any sort of live actual cold storage seeds etcetera. Yeah it's a good point you raised there about like if something's in command line the average
person isn't going to do it. Even me like when I was you know how ultra paranoid I was when I was doing my setup I'd listened and found out oh okay I could actually do this and there's a way to verify it and all that and then it came down to it and I was like
even though I did have many dice rolls and stuff I was like I'm just not even going to attempt fucking around with this to verify because it just felt too far for me and so I think that you say a lot of people are going to be like that and this just kind of makes
it a lot more approachable and it's something we should be doing because it's like it's still trusting you know the whole thing is don't trust verify in the space and then it's like well even if you're doing the dice rolls you're still trusting that whatever software
you're using actually inputs them correctly and it actually means that you know there's no way of trying to say like there's no way of the hardware wallet supplier or whoever to be able to to get your Bitcoin from you and so you are completely trusting whereas
with this at least you can sort of verify that whatever bit of code is being run or whatever it is is actually doing what it tells you it's doing yeah 100% I mean the the difference between verifying using a command line tool that that barrier to entry is just
too high for most people and they're just not going to do it they're just going to feel good that they've generated the dice roll their seed with dice rolls and you know 99.9% of the time it's going to be absolutely fine but this will let you say we should be we
should be verifying and not trusting so the difference between booting up a command line tool and you learning how to use that versus loading this website downloading it offline and just pressing one three six four into the correct box and checking the output is
you know it's world apart so hopefully it's going to make that verification a little bit easier and hopefully help people sort of understand that it doesn't need to be as scary as they think it is yeah especially for deep cold storage is something we should be doing to
take it one step further you know in terms of verifying what your signing device or hardware while it's doing you could go through that process check that the check that that you get in the seed outputs that are matching then you can get the device to generate a couple
of addresses and just check that the address is matched in what's shown in the seed tool again you know it doesn't have to be your actual seed you could just do this with a dummy seed check that the the addresses are matching on the dummy seed that you just generated with
99 dice rolls and check that those are being derived correctly you haven't got some dodgy software or hardware or combination of both and get cooked and be be sure that everything's working as it should and you're getting matches and then disregard the seed tool and then go
to your seed sign a passport whatever you know sign advice you use and then generate your real wallet in a truly offline fashion with you know not interacting with anything else at all yeah because I mean that was one thing when I was first thinking about this when you
first explaining I was like this is cool but I'm not going to use it because I don't trust even if it was on tails enough to input my real seed to check but you make a good point which is like just test it all you're doing is you're testing that the system works in
the way that it's been sold to or that the way that you think it works is how it's actually working and then if you test that on your seed sign or a passport whatever you're testing and then you know okay this system does actually work I've tested it it's okay then you do it
and then you don't put that data into the seed tool after that because you already tested the system you know it works and now you're good to go it's like a belt and braces approach just to make a hundred percent sure yeah absolutely it's kind of a yeah a belt and braces check
really that your your this chosen hardware slash software combo is acting as you assume that it's going to and and then obviously hopefully educating yourself along the way you know the we we've spoken about dice rolls but you can use this tool to play around and
generate seeds with coin flips pulling playing cards out of a deck there's various different ways and you can kind of as you sort of your input in that what we call entropy which is basically like the the result of a dice roll or the result of a coin flip or the card that
you've picked out as you're entering that you'll you'll see slowly that the seed kind of starts to be built from the ground up and you can and it'll kind of educate you as to okay so the tools sort of taking this input that I've given it and it's translating it into this information and
after you know after you spent 10 minutes flipping coins or pulling cards or whatever entropy method that you choose you'll be met with a 12 or 24 word seed and and you can I guess it's just like a bit of a nice sort of educational piece really obviously you don't need to use that seed at all
and yeah it's just hopefully going to be a great educational piece to for the more curious bit cleaner so when I was having look through it I went on to the little at the top there's like a little generate your mnemonic and there's a little robot at the top left so I pressed generate
after and then I went to 24 words and then press generate and then it obviously comes up with my seed words and then there's like a little option to put in passphrase and different options and then if I put in just like one word it says I'll time to crack less than a second so I can
you know I can add to that and it sort of seems like it nudges me and lets me know okay that's maybe not a good idea the bit I couldn't work out was next to the little robot there's a dice or a die when I click on that it then gives me loads more information it's like showing the raw binary
and filtered entropy and all loads of things that I have no fucking idea what it means but what I couldn't work out is where would I put these dice rolls let's say I've created that seed and now I want to add more entropy I want to do that myself I roll the die it comes up with a four
where would I enter that in this site yes so all you would do is go to that dice the entropy section denoted by the dice before you breast generate and then you'll just see a load of blank boxes so if you reload the site go to that section it'll all be blank and then it says
enter your own entropy and then you can enter whatever you know method that you're using in there and it'll the tool will detect what it is whether it's dice or coin flips etc so if you just go into there and start mashing the number keypad on your on your keyboard you'll see it start to
populate all of the the different entropy bits and it won't give you a seed until it's got enough entropy or randomness to make the seed word of the length that you've chosen so it defaults to 12 words so that will mean that you need the specific level of entropy so it'll be 128 bits
it's called so you'll need to sort of populate 128 numbers if you're using dice rolls of one to six and then a seed where the seed words will pop up based on the entropy that you've given it right okay yeah i'm doing that now and i can see it then change something all the different
numbers in and can i does it have to then be all numbers i assume so because it's dice rolls i can't then start putting letters in or anything like that yes you can put whatever you want in there but the tool will detect what you're putting in the entropy method so if you start
putting in like the results one to six it'll go okay this is dice rolls and then you put in the word max it's just going to disregard that because it's like well hang on a minute you can't give me dice rolls and some random text etc so it will filter that out and that you'll actually see
that there there's a box called filtered entropy which is essentially the entropy that it's actually using to create the seed so anything you put in there that's like the word max and it'll disregard that and you won't see that within the filtered entropy so yeah and as i say you won't see a seed
until you've given it enough randomness obviously in this example the randomness is the result of the dice roll which is then being converted into your bitcoin seed okay fine i like as well where it says time to crack and then as you start adding more it starts going from like seconds to minutes
to days to weeks now i'm on like centuries as you start adding you're like oh that's cool so i'll tell you where that's really useful because obviously the tool won't give you a seed until you've given it enough randomness and by that time it will say centuries which is obvious you know
we want that for a um for a bitcoin seed but if you head down to the passphrase section um obviously you can uh type in the passphrases like kind of like an open text field where you can put whatever you want in there but the tool also if you click on select bit 39 tool
and click on passphrase generator we've actually added like a helper tool to be able to generate a secure passphrase so there's a bit of text basically that just says that we've used the electronic freedom foundational frontier there they've got like a long dice word list which is
used to help people again quite similar rolled roll dice to generate a random passphrase okay so you can either input this there's another box here for dice rolls and it will cross-reference those dice rolls to that that long diceware list and it'll as you populate that field it'll cross-reference
those and put some words into the passphrase box we've also included the time to crack there as well so i'm going to go out on a limier and say that there's a lot of people listening to this that might use like a one or two word passphrase uh probably so that they can remember it
um so if you were to just type in two random words into that bit 39 passphrase box just see what it tells you so and you might be shocked to to work it out to see what happens uh less than a second yeah so so what that means essentially is if somebody was to find your seed words that
are presumably written down or stamped into metal and you had a two word passphrase and a attacker with some brute forcing um software could obviously plug in your seed words because they're in plain text and then it'll start brute forcing uh all of the easy-to-guess passphrases or the short ones
and obviously two words is pretty short and the likelihood is it's going to take them not longer total to crack that passphrase now if you add a third word you'll see that jump to something like you know 10 years so there's a massive difference between the length of a two word passphrase
and the length of a three word passphrase no wrong time to crack three minutes it yeah so it depends what words you've typed in there as well of course because if those words are even loosely can be sort of deemed like common use or might be formed in a sentence or phrase then that would make it far
easier to crack than some three random words which i've just added mine says 12 years and that's because they've been added completely randomly so so out of interest what words did you use weasel word and walk maybe because they're all w's or something like that and obviously this let me
put another i've just put in tart and that's 12 minutes weasel word tart nice choice um so yeah the tools obviously um dictated it's got an algorithm in the background as to how long it would you know on average take to crack that so it's obviously deeming that those words aren't that random from
one another and which is why using dice rolls or if we've actually the tool will add it at random using a random number generator as well we've got an adword button as well so i've just added the words drove legible and coastland and my past phrase is going to take 12 years on it as an
estimate to crack those are long words that i can't spell exactly so this is the things i need to think about yeah and it also demonstrates the importance of randomness that you know randomness isn't necessarily equal so the three words you've just chosen versus the three words that i've just
let the tool choose at random for me clearly there's quite a big difference in terms of the likelihood that they are going to be cracked or brute forced if you like and as soon as you add a fourth word it jumps up to a century so four to five words seems to be the
kind of sweet spot for the length of a past phrase now of course you can make it even more complex slash secure if you added something like special characters or numbers as well obviously that's going to increase the complexity of it again but again just about an education piece that you know
if you were to get 12 words and then add in like a past phrase that might be you know people are lazy aren't they that they might add their common password that they use to log into twitter with or something like that the tool is hopefully going to you know in big orange letters say that's
insufficient you need to sort of add some more randomness to that because you might feel secure that oh i've got a passphrase on my seed but in reality you've got a highly uh a passphrase that's very likely to be guessed by somebody who has the right sort of brute forcing software which is
easy to obtain again just to so people aren't sort of sat there listening as they're shitting themselves all of this is working on the assumption that your seed words are also compromised as well so if someone has this brute forcing software that amazes me that they can crack something so
quickly because it's like the software is having to guess like if you're doing three words for example where i did there and it's like 12 minutes is it just constantly just pushing combinations of words and letters and numbers and special characters until it randomly just
finds the right one and also if it's doing that then how uh because they're not doing it on the hardware wallet i was just thinking like it's not like you're actually they're just running it in a bit of software with the 12 or 24 words they've already got and then what will happen how are they
then going to know that it's correct there's going to be some something that's going to show them okay right we've got it yeah so my guess would be i've never actually used some of this software and just working on put on their theory here but my guess would be that with each seed which they
know plus the passphrase guess that the software gives them they'll check like the first 10 or 15 addresses and see if there's any funds in them you know could obviously the seed plus passphrase combination derives a specific list of addresses the tool will probably automatically just check
the first couple and if it detects any activity whatsoever it'll probably flag it to say there's activity on this one check it out see if it's a live seed and there's any funds okay all right yeah that's really clever okay so um so basically anyone who's going to have a passphrase needs to
have that because if there's presumably if someone's actually coming after hardware wallets or they're coming after people see words and phrases they probably are going to have this sort of software because otherwise they realize they're going to be fucked because most people who have any sort of
serious funds do have a passphrase so they're likely to have this kind of stuff yeah yeah absolutely and the point of this section of the tool that we've just been talking about is just to demonstrate that a one or two word passphrase that the likelihood is most people are going to be using is pretty
insufficient if you're the if you're the subject of a target is a tack where somebody you know is trying to obtain your seed words and you think you know the passphrase is kind of the last line of defenses and it against if so if your seed words are compromised so it's just to demonstrate that
whilst you know a one or two word that you might try and remember is easy to remember and you might not write it down or something like that then it's just to demonstrate that you know that that's probably not going to be sufficient if you're the result of a targeted tack okay yeah that makes
sense and then presumably it's the same if someone say I don't know why this would ever happen but if like say someone finds 10 of your 12 words then presumably they can do the same thing and they can guess it relatively quickly with the same sort of software like let's say you're not using a
passphrase and they're just like okay I find 10 of the 12 words they can do the same yes and the the tool if you click on the bit 39 tool drop down there's actually a section they call split mnemonic which is a very infrequently used method of kind of splitting your seed words up into three different
cards so that you need it's just a way of secure so there isn't like a single point of failure if you like if you click on that again we've got that same algorithm as to I can't say split so where it says select the bit 39 tool that to drop down menu and in there it's let's say split
mnemonic ah yeah yeah yeah split mnemonic okay so that's like kind of thankfully it's not used very often because I'm really not a big fan of it but it's again it's to demonstrate that if somebody has a portion of your seed like a third of it then the likelihood that they can brute force the
rest of the seed grows exponentially with every increased word that they get so in your example of ten words then yeah it's um because uh it's very likely that that could be brute forced I'm not sure how soon you would discover ten words of your seed and not the final two but
yeah well I was just it's just like a random thought but then okay so this bit 39 split mnemonic they split it into three cards what if they find because on this example that they show is card one card two and card three and like half of each card or part of each card they have the word for and
then half is like crossed out where they don't that's if they have like a proportion of all of them does it make any different I assume it doesn't make any difference if they just find one card because it's saying only 109 seconds to brute force it which seems pretty fucking quick so
so it's basically like if they find one card and they have this software you're fucked so you might as well just have one card because yeah but don't forget in this example where we've got a 12 word seed one card equals eight words so that they've got they've got two thirds of your seed
there so the only need actually need to guess four words so that I guess the the point that I just want to drive home is that split mnemonics on cards is a shit idea especially for 12 words seeds and you shouldn't do it that's why it was left in really I did um the the with the lead
developers kind of the brains behind all this so I'll give credit to before we finish um I actually said to him look let's just take this out but he was he was quite adamant about keeping in just to demonstrate that this is a really shit idea and you probably shouldn't do it and that big orange
box where it says time to hack with only one card um he kind of drives that point home really yeah okay interesting no I'm glad it's all in there like this is all stuff that people should know because it's like a lot of the time this kind of stuff if you're not used to bitcoin and playing
around this sort of stuff you'd be like oh well I split it in three then they have to find at least two or three of them you almost think of it like oh that's kind of like multi-sick but then actually you realize no that's really fucking dumb because they are gonna hack they're gonna hack you and
get it regardless so you're just adding a load of complexity uh with no real benefit yeah definitely uh agreed and while we're on this final the final section of this kind of bit 39 tool that we added just a couple of days ago is called the passphrase tester and so this tool
essentially is aimed to help people and I've had a couple of people over the the years I've been sort of uh I guess public bitcoin that have come to me and said that they've applied a passphrase to their wallet they've sent some funds in and then they've tried to recover it and when they put their
passphrase into whatever wallet they are producing a completely different set of addresses and they don't see their bitcoin which is obviously a really scary experience and nine times out of 10 what they've done is that when they've say set the wallet up initially and let's say that they wanted to use
the passphrase max bit by bit or one or one word they've kind of fat-fingered one of them and let's say the final t and max bit by bit uh they actually pressed it twice without knowing that could result potentially in this scenario when they're trying to recover their funds if they didn't know that
they fat-fingered that titla that letter t twice when they try to recover and they think that their passphrase is just max bit by bit spelled correctly they're going to see a completely different wallet that's absolutely empty yeah so with this tool what you can do if you find yourself in that
situation or a similar situation um is you can again do this offline don't do it in on the online version is enter your seed words um open the passphrase tester which is in that same bit 39 tool drop-down you can input a known address from the wallet that you kind of initially created
presumably you would know an address because you've sent some bitcoin to it so you can plug that address in and then you can just try different iterations of what you think your passphrase is and then just press search the tool will um then sort of take your seed word your passphrase
generate the list of addresses in the background and check for any of them that match the address that you've provided that you know is a true address from the wallet that you kind of screwed up and and you can try different iteration to the passphrases with different spacing and
capitalization and different spellings to try and work out where you've gone wrong essentially to try and recover that to get yeah to guess what was wrong with the passphrase in the first place so that you can get your funds back essentially okay so yeah i'll pause there for questions
yeah no i i think i i think i understand so because you've got the address you're going to at some point you're going to actually see if there's any funds and you're only going to see the funds if you put the right passphrase in the reason you do it on here rather than the hardware wallet is
because you'd be doing it for the rest of your fucking life if you did it on the hardware wallet because it's so slow yeah definitely yeah and if you were to do it on a hardware well obviously depending on the hardware well it used that can and if you've got a long passphrase that can take
a long time to input but then once you've done that and you tried you know you're on passphrase test number three thousand you've then got to actually get the list of addresses and then manually compare it to the address that you know visually and obviously that introduces margin for error whereas
this tool you've cut your kind of copy and paste in that in that address and it's searching and the search takes like 10 seconds for each passphrase so it's significantly faster if you find yourself in this position than it is like you say doing it on a hardware wallet and doing like a manual
comparison yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's really cool i really like it so um you're working on this with someone else how did it come about yeah so i had the um so credit where it's due that this tool takes very heavy influence from a tool by a guy called Ian Coleman and i think i think he
actually calls his the BIP 39 tool and so his tool has quite a lot of the same functionalities and it's something that i've used especially when i'm helping trying to educate people on support calls and stuff around you know people that are interested in this sort of stuff and seeing like
the impact of a passphrase what what that does to you know it essentially creates a new wallet but sometimes some people can't kind of understand that just by hearing me say it so tools like Ian Coleman's have been crucial for me to kind of go on there just say right screen share with me and
watch what happens when i import a passphrase lot it's got a completely new list of addresses so it's something that i've used previously but i thought if anybody goes onto the the in common tool it's just it looks it's like kind of a white page background and there's a lot of jog well
there's a lot of functionality in there don't be wrong it's a great tool but it can be really sort of intimidating for people who don't really know what they're doing there's not really that many explainers in there so you kind of expected to have a certain level of knowledge of what BIP 39
is what BIP 85 is to know what's going on so i thought all i really love the functionality of this tool but i really want to make it a little bit more approachable i want to make it look a bit nicer and i want to add some extra features as well which i'm sure will come on to in a sec so i
started to try and make the tool myself and make make it look nicer first and foremost which i was okay with doing my limited sort of um html and css knowledge is just about um able to do that but when it came to sort of adding the extra functionalities like the passphrase tester that
we've just spoken about and stuff like that that's way beyond me and so i just kind of um drop the message into one of the matrix rooms that i was in and see if anybody was interested in working with me on this and and a super shadowy coder called super fat arrow um reached out and said yeah you
know i'm looking to get involved in this and we kind of it kind of went from there really and i sort of shared within the vision that i had for the tool and what i wanted to um to make it you know what functionality i wanted to add and what how i wanted to make it look um and what the goal was
and to be fair to him he's you know absolutely ran with it and and aside from contributing all of the technical coding in the background for this he's come up with some great um ideas along the way in terms of features and the way that stuff's presented so yeah i've got no idea who this
guy is i've never met him in my life and i guess that's you know i quite often harp on about how beautiful like the open source community is and stuff like that and you know some guy that i've never met um reached out and said yeah i'm willing to give up my time to to help you you do this and
um it's just been yeah we speak every day now and we're still working on adding new features to this day um and it's just really uh great to i don't know it's just been really really organic and i just love the way that it's come about and i'm really thankful to him because
without him this tool wouldn't um probably wouldn't ever have existed because i probably would have given up halfway um because of you know reached the end of my uh my my knowledge and would have uh just kind of given up so yeah without him um this we wouldn't even probably be having
this conversation so big massive shout out to him and his uh if anybody uses this tool and then finds it valuable and you know using it day to day or whatever and you want to send some tips or anything then his donation link is at the top of the page so feel free to
send shout out him some stats via his uh his painting yeah i was just about to ask that um i imagine this has taken a lot of time and effort to make something like this and it's going to be helpful for so many people and especially consider it if like you having access to your your sats and
then suddenly you're like fuck i need to use this tool and and do what we just went through like making sure that you get access again because you haven't written down your or inputted your your words correctly so then consider once you get access to those sats uh supporting super fat
arrow it's cool name as well maybe i think he maybe used this to create that name uh yeah see what you mean using the random number generator the random number generator yeah maybe you're on something now i think uh i think his github pre is github name predates this to
unfortunately but it's a nice idea okay yeah so and what other things can i do with this like we've gone through a few of them what other clever cool stuff can we do with this tool yeah so the next kind of uh sort of uh section of the tool uh after seed generation and input is uh derived addresses so
once you've um generated your seed or you know via dice rolls or input you can input a seed again don't do this online um you can head down to the derived addresses bit and you can you know let's say you wanted to see the native seguit addresses for the seed that you just created you can see that
in this section and if you wanted to add a passphrase again i use this example before if you wanted to add a passphrase and and if you're educating somebody you can say look if i add even just one character into the passphrase box i get a completely different list of addresses uh and that helped
strive home the point that that is actually a brand new wallet it might be exactly the same seed words but as soon as you put that single character into the passphrase box you've got a brand new wallet and you can also add various different accounts and and i guess kind of like
again back to an education piece as to the structure of these what's called hierarchical deterministic wallets so that um the best way to describe it is like a tree structure where you've got kind of your master secret at the top of the tree if you think of like a family tree and then
it branches out from that uh then on so you can add different accounts you can add a passphrase if you want to create any wallet and so that the the derived address is bit is essentially yeah it's just the direct the list of addresses based on the entropy and the seed that you've got in the top
of the tool so um you could use this as kind of again to cross reference against your hardware wallet or signing device so if that if you let that generate a seed for you and then look at the first address that it gives you you could enter the the test seed into this tool and
check that you get the same address just to check that it's generating the correct um addresses for the derivation that you've supplied again don't need to do that with with an actual seed you could just do it with the dummy want to start off just to test that the hardware is
or software is acting um as as um intended um and within each of these sections uh you'll see a little uh orange box that just says uh bit whatever number explained so um i've added like a little bit of an explainer here so based on the section that you're in what kind of what it is and what
it's about and and a link to a little bit more reading for those that are curious so that's the the address list and one this is kind of a and a bit of a uh i guess advanced feature but sometimes people want to get like a bulk list of addresses from from sort of um just for testing
purposes or things like that and you can download that into like a CSV file if you wanted to from the file as well as to as many as you wanted if you want a thousand addresses you can have a thousand address and it'll dump them all out for you you can do that on your hardware wallet as well
am i right in thinking like you can save that like move it across like you would with PSBT and then save your uh save like a oh maybe it's like a hundred you can do or something like that yeah i think the it differs from wallet to wallet but yeah you can absolutely do that again this
isn't to sort of uh replace that functionality uh it's just like an education slash testing piece but yeah you're absolutely right yeah okay so the next section which is one of the the ones i was sort of quite uh excited about adding this was one of the main ones that i wanted to add before i
linked up with uh super faro was uh bit 47 payment codes so we've spoken at length on our monthly podcast about bit 47 and how that work big fans of it and it's it's implemented uh into samurai wallet and and spiral wallet um so they again a bit of an education piece where you can uh enter or generate
a seed at the top of the page add a passphrase if you so desire and then see what sort of payment code that gives you and so you could generate your own payment code without having to even download samurai wallet or download spiral wallet so let's say you're i don't know let's use
the example of the the Canadian truckers and uh they need to you know quickly set up a donation thing well they could come onto this tool generate a seed uh via any method that they want copy that payment code and uh just share that with millions of people if they want and they can
receive millions of private donations um in a matter of seconds whether that would actually happen in real life i don't know and you know download in spiral wallet or samurai wallet isn't difficult again it's not used to replace them um but you could quite easily uh just generate quickly
generate a payment code if you wanted to uh generate uh an unlimited amount of private addresses for anybody that has a compatible wallet and there's a little checkbox at the top of that section which it says usepainim.is which is the samurai wallet server and if you tick that it will show you the
uh the robot that corresponds to your payment code or basically that corresponds to the seed that you just either generated or let the tool generate for you obviously that is an online feature will only work because it works over the internet so if you're using this tool offline that feature
is not going to work okay this final piece of this uh which is really cool is so let's say you generate a seed via dice rolls using the tool um you've got your payment code there it would be pre-populated for you and then you paste in uh the payment code there's a section there called
counterparty details if you were to paste in say my payment code that will then generate a list of private addresses for you to send my stats to again you don't need uh to do that with a compatible wallet so it's a method of generating those those addresses privately and in a method
that's outside of the samurai or spiral ecosystem obviously the easiest way to do that and the safest way to do that is through those tools so i do urge people to do that but again education pieces to oh a lot um i've generated a seed that's given me a payment code and if i put max's payment
code in these are the private addresses that are generated so that i can see and demonstrate that that's how this bit 47 works and only those addresses are only known to max and myself it's still i know like i'm not a dev and i should shut the fuck up because i'm not building anything
but it still amazes me that this isn't more widely used i just i'm sure it's hard to do it but i just still can't wrap my head around why can Craig do it and why can samurai do it and no one else does it like i know we've talked about it at length but like either
i'm missing something or uh i i don't know like is there a re like obviously there's going to be other things where people go oh okay well i see something else being more important or i have to you know i only have a certain amount of hours in a day or whatever it could be but is there not
a way of like having this so that it can be implemented across most wallets because there's some sort of like pre-written code or like that the works already been done so can't it just be like not copy and pasted but like put into other wallets without a huge amount of fuss or is that just
me just not understanding what the fuck i'm talking about no absolutely not no there's two things here um the you mentioned about you don't know why it's not been implemented i think that the main criticisms i hear at there's two things mainly um is number one that most wallets um are
not primarily focused on privacy and that their users of this are not asking for this so why would the devs go through the um go through the heartache of trying to implement this feature that likely isn't desired by most people that's changed a little bit this year thanks to the cluster
fuck of the um Canadian truckers and people sort of got a little bit woke up to the need for a a little bit more privacy within bitcoin and the other one is like you say is just that some people criticize the on-chain transaction requirement so if you were to don't want to donate
to me max you'd have to currently um there are proposals that get rid of this but currently you'd have to make an on-chain transaction as it's called a notification transaction um so you'd have to do that first and then you could donate to me so
if you're just going to make a single donation once only you have to make two on-chain transactions which depending on the fee uh market could be undesirable as i say there are plans uh being actively worked on to uh take that out and remove that requirement and there's also alternative
proposals that remove this as well but introduced various different trade-off but those are the two main criticisms that i hear of bit 47 so if we look at it today and at you know the last year or whatever it's been with very very low fees to do this first transaction and then the second
transaction if it's say it's like to the Canadian truckers presumably you can set the fee as low as you want and just why? like how much is it really costing to send a transaction if your sapper by is very very low is there any sort of like urgency on that transaction or not?
i guess probably not for a donation um within sparrow i think the the notification transaction is like the minimum possible allowed fee for an on-chain Bitcoin transaction so it's something like 500 SATs um now whether that gets processed immediately depends on the state of the memo but
if it's just a donation there isn't really a need for that to be an urgent transaction i completely understand but again donations is just one um one kind of facet to this you know if this was more of a merchant solution then that's where you get more difficulties where let's take
it to the extreme that i'm studying your shop and i need to pay for some chewing gum uh or chewing gums a bad example because it's so cheap but you know what i mean um then there's a little bit more urgency required there so that you know this might not be as well suited to that situation so
and i think it's yeah it's very situationally dependent and just to come back to your comment on why isn't the like pre-written code or you know also known as a library and so that somebody can just like bolt this into their app well that's actually being worked on um in bitcoin development
kit which is like a framework to to build uh wallets on top of so it's kind of like it's got all the or many of the difficult stuff kind of pre-written so that anybody that wants to build a bitcoin wallet an open source bitcoin wallet can kind of use that as their framework and then put
all the shiny you know the polish bits on top of it and make it all sort of speed up the development process significantly so that's actively being worked on and it's i'm really excited to say that it's the framework that we're using to build on-market foundation devices so yeah that exists uh it's
very early days and um i guess it's just a case of time or tell and and um but it is uh actively being worked on yeah yeah just like a final thought on all of that is like even if people who are developing these wallets don't really care about privacy i would think that it would
be a nice feature for people to have let's say like i on board five friends and they're like oh do you know what one of them's like i only want to use blue wallet because of this this samurai one i don't like for whatever reason i want to use blue wallet and someone else says oh i want
to use this other one well if they both had this implemented then it's almost like having a contact list because you have your pain in and they can just click me or i can click them and as long as you've done that first transaction which is whatever that is 20p to do that first transaction
like 20p is not gonna change most people's lives too much and then from that point they can just click it and it's done rather than send me an address and then pasting it across and all that kind of stuff which like you get used to if you're fucking around with bitcoin for a while you just
get used to that but for newcomers it's like it'd be much nicer just to press the name and then send and it's done like it's just a better flow yeah it's it's essentially you know if this was widely implemented and the kinks were ironed out it gives that revolute or venmo cash up style feel
to the bitcoin network doesn't it you know you know if you've got revolute i could go into my contact list tap on max and just press send max 50 quid i don't there's no interaction from you required nothing i just you know a couple of taps while paying him you know and and its
derivatives um have the potential to make bitcoin work just like that yeah cool right um yeah it would be nice so it happened yeah definitely so so the last section of the tool right at the bottom is uh BIP 85 deterministic entropy so i'm pretty sure we've covered this
uh you know monthly's again so a pretty high level BIP 85 is kind of um a bitcoin standard that uh i like to say one seed to to rule them all so it's let's say you've got your one master seed which is for your gold storage with BIP 85 you could use that one master seed to generate an unlimited
amount of what's known as child seeds from that so let's say you so you've got your cold storage seed which you generated with dice rolls and you're really happy with uh how it was created and where you've got it secured or anything like that you could then let's say you then want to um
generate a seed for your blue wallet because you don't want to trust the seed that blue wallet gives you well you could generate a child seed from that original master seed that you've got and then populate that into blue wallet you could do the same for samurai wallet green wallet your
lightning node and they would all be what's called deterministically generated from that one master seed so what this enables you to do if you choose to do so i'm not advocating for this but in theory it works is you could have your one master seed you've got that stamped into steel maybe you've
got a passphrase on it as well and it's buried in your underground bunker in your garden and you're really happy with that set up you could then generate those four child seeds that i've mentioned before for all of your different mobile wallets and lightning nodes etc never back any of those four
up and then we get the apocalypse and your laptop gets stolen your node gets catches fire and somebody steals your phone from you and you've lost all four of those devices and you've got no seed backups this bp85 it has a way for you to regenerate those seeds again all you need to know is the index number
which starts from zero and counts its way up so if you just generated the first four all you need to do is plug your master seed into a bp85 compatible tool or hardware wallet and say right give me here's my master secret give me child seed number one and then it would spit out at the 12 or 24 words
and you'd know oh shit yeah that's my seed for my samurai wallet and you had no backup of that whatsoever again just want to stress i'm not advocating that you don't make backups but in theory it works and potentially a more advanced user that fully understands the implications of this might
want to do that and equally another use case before i shut up and let you ask a question is let's say let's say your orange pilling family and you want to you're trying to orange pilling your dad so you you could generate him a bp85 child seed in let's say you give him index number five
and say here's that here's your bpicle wallet here's your 12 words put these into your wallet and then you can go away and make sure you back them up now if he's a typical newcomer he's probably not going to listen to you or he's probably going to write him on a bit of paper then he's going to lose
that bit of paper and then he gets a new phone and then he goes oh shit i had some bitcoin on that old phone and he's like i've lost that bit of paper oh fuck those satter gone well you could then regenerate that seed for him again and go here you go i've just saved your life you and me a couple
of beers and you you didn't need to take on any extra burden in terms of managing an extra backup because it's deterministically generated then as long as you know that single index number you can get the same seed over and over again for as often as you like yeah that's really cool i guess
my only question on that is let's say that exact scenario so you make you make it for your dad you say here you are that's yours blah blah blah he then presumably can put like a passphrase on top of it can he which you then don't know about because my thinking there would be my thinking there would
be like okay you've created them for all your friends and family just to make sure that they don't fuck up so you're looking out for them but then let's say that somehow they actually do write down their 12 or 24 words and they don't have a passphrase and not only do they lose that bit of
paper but someone actually finds it and then they sweep the funds then i know with my family what they would do is go you fucking it my money by that and then you go whoa whoa whoa i wouldn't do that and they'd be like well it's gone and so obviously you have and then you'd be in that awkward situation
where you'd be thinking fuck i was trying to do someone a favor they'd be in an idiot they've lost it it's been swept and now i effectively in their eyes owe them sat so do you not see that as an issue or is that just because i have a weird family no look this is this that that scenario is a
trusted one um you know i'm not advocating that you try and do this to total strangers to orange pill and because yeah um and i think you need to stress and make that clear to whoever you're doing but i i use the the example of a family member on purpose um you know it is absolutely a trusted
thing and you know i guess it's an easy way or or a full proof way to onboard them because if you know if you were to give somebody or tell some you know your orange pill in your dad and you say right go and download some of my wallet make sure you write down your seeds make sure you put a five
word passphrase on top of that wallet to make sure it's secure um you're gonna lose them aren't you it's it's kind of so it's it's i like to see it as like a a good start at all with good backups that doesn't uh for you as the uncle jim doesn't burden you so you you've got like 95 different seeds
dotted around your house for your aunties and uncles etc yeah yeah yeah so you maybe you say to them look this is yours understand that i do have access to it don't be a retard and leave these uh these words lying around and also if you suddenly start actually realizing wow
bitcoin's actually really fucking awesome and this is gonna become more valuable over time and you decide you're gonna put your pension into it then we need to rethink this because i'm only comfortable up to x amount because i don't want to be responsible right but if they if they get to that stage then
that you're already got the foot in the door haven't you and then yeah yeah they're going to be interested enough for you to have the more complex conversation of okay right now we need to look at getting your hardware wallet um this is you know how seed words work this is the implications
of losing this etc hmm well mate i think it's um really fucking cool what you've done here and obviously super fat hero it's a good name i like that yeah it's uh like you said it's like it really shows what open source can do and just the two randomers on the internet have thought you know
what this would be really useful for a load of other randomers on the internet let's put our time into it and make it because we want to help them which is just really fucking cool to see yeah agreed um you know i've made mention of being calmer's tool and obviously super fat hero
who's the lead dev on this but there's there's a fair few other libraries that have been used as well probably totally in like seven or eight different open source libraries so yeah it wouldn't be possible without all of them um so yeah i might be kind of the the the proverbial face to this but
without all of those other people they've put countless amount of hours in to build those different libraries and tools then it wouldn't have happened so yeah open source is beautiful and everybody should support their favorite open source tools wallets nodes whatever it is that
they use it's really important so um yeah just trying to do my my little bit i guess it's only really started properly clicking this last like 18 months with me open source like i i understood it a lot of it from like the security side and having lots of eyes on it and that kind
of stuff and and then i kind of i guess i was kind of looking at it like oh well it's like a nice thing it's like a i don't know it's more like a nicety than a necessity and now the more i think about it it's like because you can build on top of things that other people have like you've put
this together like you said you use seven other libraries or whatever and without those then how much harder could it have been for you to make this or would it even have been possible for you guys to make this and so it just seems like for anything to be great going forward we need to make
sure that we push open source as much as possible because especially in bitcoin world like a lot of these projects just don't have funding and so you can't then say oh well i'm going to dedicate my entire life to building something a lot of people are doing this like outside of their
working hours and they're doing it for no money at all they need other open source projects they can lean on yeah put put simply you know open source is how we continue to spread this virus information wants to be free and you know the viral nature of of truly open source licenses
ensures that that happens you know anybody admittedly that you know this tool that we've discussed since it's completely free anybody can take this and make their own version of it and sell it if they wanted to that's absolutely no skin of mine is whatsoever but the i guess the
crux of it is that if somebody was to do that then because of the open source license any kind of improvements that they make i'd be able to take back and put into my tool as well and it's that viral nature that ensures that the the bottom line is that the the users and the people that get
value from this tool gain and benefit from that because uh you know the the devs and the people behind each tool keep each other open and honest and work collaboratively well even if they don't work collaboratively then the nature of the license means that any improvements somebody else makes
to a fork of this tool they can take that back and make their tool better as well it's kind of good honest uh competition and yeah it's why i mean well me and many others in the space of big proponents of it and tried to shine a light on any open source tools and support them in
any which way that we can really it's like evolution really it's like someone could have something have an open source they make a load of adjustments and decisions and then that project dies or isn't used doesn't gain traction but it's still there and so everyone else can see it and
use it and someone else and go oh if i just tweak this little thing and that little thing then i think it'd be really useful and then it is really useful for loads of people so whereas if it's not open source and no one can then build off that project that's now died and no one is using
and all that energy and time has gone into it just the fact that it's open source or it's not open source makes all that difference of something potentially being world-changing for people yeah you know look at bitcoin as an example uh it's a shining example of that isn't it you know it's
a beacon of truth and hope for the open source space you know the one guy or group of people created it they're no longer to be seen and thousands hundreds of thousands of people have flocked around it and look what flourished around it and all of that wouldn't have been
possible if it wasn't open source yeah definitely well thank you mate for putting the time in to build this and thank you super for arrow it's really really cool and i urge anyone to check it out so bitcoin.guide/seed and i'll put links in in the show notes as well
yeah thanks for having me i just want to final sign off to massive shout out to super for arrow again like i said before wouldn't have been possible without him and just want to stress for anybody who's overly concerned on twitter about this tool do not use this tool with real seeds online
always download it offline and follow the best practices that are outlined at the top of the page and thanks for having me all right mate we'll speak soon cheers bye
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