EP47 Bitcoin podcast with Samourai Wallet

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Now what's the Bitcoin? >> Bitcoin's like rat poison. >> Yeah. >> The greatest scam in history. >> Let's get it. >> Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

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

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space and deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Welcome back to BitByBit. Today I speak to Samurai Wallet.

This was a great conversation for me. I absolutely love their product, and I hope you're enjoying it as well. I shill it enough on this podcast for anyone who's running Android. And isn't already running this, go and do it now.

It's the best wallet out there. I also just like to say, although I obviously push privacy and I want everyone to go out and buy KYC free Bitcoin. I know that not everyone's going to do that.

So if you're not going to do that and you are going to go to an exchange, I suggest you go to one you can trust. CoinFlow UK is the only exchange that I trust. I've had a recent episode with OB, the CEO, and they do things properly.

For everyone who's listening, who already owns some Bitcoin, listen to this and get mixing. I'm right. Can you hear me? Okay, hello. Hello, can you hear me? Hey, yeah, I can hear you now.

There we go. Yeah, I got you clear. Sorry about that. That's all right. This is the podcast with the most technical issues of, I think, any podcast on the planet I'm forever having issues.

Okay, no, this one was all me, it was all me. Okay, that makes a nice change. Yeah, how's the coffee? Yeah, good, good, got a fresh part on the desk. So we should be good to go. What have you gone for?

Just a cafeteria sort of thing, have you? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Very nice. I've had a few too many today. So it's on the biz, time to relax. And yeah, I'm really excited for our conversation today.

I love what you've built. And although I'm not the most technical guy, I'm spending more and more time just playing around with the features, setting up the dojo, and just like really getting to grips with it.

So firstly, before we sort of dive into anything, I just want to say thank you so much for building this. It's fucking awesome. Now I'm really happy to hear it, I'm happy to hear it. You've been on the Bitcoin Q&A pilgrimage journey, right?

Yeah. Following what he's been, his guides and what he's been doing. He's been doing such great work. And that's how I found your podcast, actually. It was through him. Yeah, he's been amazing.

He's really helped me. Because a lot of this stuff, I get a little bit worried about making a mistake, especially when privacy is concerned. I'm thinking, oh, if I do something wrong and something's not running over tour, or I'm exposing an address or doing something that I almost am too scared to make a move.

So 99% of the time, he's like, yeah, yeah, that's fine. That's fine, just do that. But it was just so helpful to have him there to just double check things with. Yeah, it puts your mind at ease.

Exactly. Yeah, well, I mean, like we, for the most part, we make it so it's either impossible or difficult, or we warn you a lot before you do something really bad. So, you know, it's really hard not to lose your funds, for example, almost or impossible to lose funds as long as you write down your 12 words.

I remember your passphrase. And as, in terms of privacy stuff, if you're gonna do something that's detrimental to your privacy on chain, where we think it's the most serious because that exists forever, we warn you.

And in some cases prevent you from doing that sort of thing. So I think that the reassurance that you mentioned is actually pretty, it's a pretty big deal. And it's a big part of the UX of a wallet is to increase that feeling of being assured that you're not screwing yourself over.

Yeah, definitely, 'cause it's so easy to do. Yes. It's just like, you know, you put one foot wrong and you can really cause issues for yourself. And I think, to be honest, that's what puts a lot of people off.

And I was sitting on the sidelines for ages. You know, I knew about the wallet, I knew about the mixing, and I was like, you know, this is gonna be best practice, but I was just sort of a bit scared of doing it, and then actually making things worse for myself.

So, but like you say, now I'm actually using this stuff. It's really straightforward. It's pretty easy to get through once it's all set up. And I haven't had any issues with it or had any sort of moments of fear since having it set up.

So yeah, no, I'm really happy with it. This podcast is definitely trying to go more privacy focused and help newcomers do things correctly. I wish that I had been told not to buy KYC. I wish I'd been told all this sort of stuff coming in originally.

So I'm trying to help people who are coming into the space and make it easier. Anyone who is already into Bitcoin and fairly down the rabbit hole will know who you are. They will know about your product.

But for anyone who might be new listening, do you mind just doing a little bit of an introduction and tell people firstly what it is that you've built and a little bit of a background? - Yeah, sure.

So we started just me and my co-founder, T DevD. We started in 2015's project Samurai Wallet project in order to increase the level of on-chain privacy that was available to Bitcoin users.

We weren't happy with kind of the direction things were going and the lack of focus on the privacy side of things. So we just decided to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak, and build something.

And that's what Samurai Wallet is. And so for the last five years, we've been doing this. We're a really small team. I think we have a total of eight people now, but only four developers.

So we were able to put out a lot of high quality software with such a small team because it's a pure passion play. We're really into the privacy angle and we're really into the promise that Bitcoin can provide.

But we see that that promise can really only be reached with really good privacy tools and a good base layer of users who haven't, for example, KYC themselves and have a stash of private money.

We think that's really powerful. So Samurai Wallet is our contribution to that and our way of making that vision a reality. It's one small part in this whole thing. - Well, you say it's a small part in the whole thing.

And to my mind, I've only been involved for sort of coming up to three years now, but it's really hit home the last sort of year and a half where I've sort of been thinking, like you just said, if we don't have the privacy, yeah, it's cool.

There's no denying that this is a better money than what is currently available. But if we don't have privacy, it really, it's my biggest fear, like if we're moving forward and everyone's KYC and no one's using wallets like Samurai and nobody's caring about their privacy, then we're kind of just, in some ways,

creating the old system and-- - It's a glorified pay pattern. - Yeah, it really pisses me off because this whole thing is kind of supposed to be about moving away from that and creating a parallel society and being able to be outside of a system that we all know is fucked.

And then if we're not actually taking this stuff seriously, then what are we really doing? Like, yeah, numbers go up and that's great. And I'd be lying if I said I don't care about that, but I don't think the number will go up as much if you don't have the fungibility because it's a major part of it.

So, yeah, is this something that's shared by the majority of people you speak to? And most people very much on board and just like, yeah, this is an obvious thing or is there still some pushback and people not understanding the importance of the privacy?

- I think it kind of depends really on when you got involved. When you got involved at Bitcoin. So, if you were kind of around pre-2013 and earlier, it was more into the ideological aspect of it, more into the privacy aspect of it, less about the investment side of things or number go up side of things

because it was really a still a massive gamble. You know, the market price was very volatile and relatively low. So, number go up wasn't really in your kind of view set if you're in that time.

As the price started skyrocketing after Silk Road was shut down, then you had more speculative investors, more retail investors coming in, less interested in the privacy and anonymity, more interested in making fat stacks.

And that's not to say that's a bad thing per se 'cause we were all really happy when the price went up. We were all making fat stacks, right? No, one was complaining. - No complaints. - No, of course not, and it was great fun.

I mean, I remember, you know, Silk Road, when that got shut down, then the price dropped significantly 'cause it was assumed that that was the only economic activity that was going on and it would crash the price and then rebounded at the same day or next day to a new highest and that was just exhilarating,

exciting to see, but so once that happened, then you had a new class new year of people interested and they were more interested in the money, the number go up side of things. And it was actually that jumping back to why we started Samurai, it was just that inkling that we started to see those number go up types of things

where we said, okay, we need to do something because ultimately we realized that that's kind of a dangerous thing long term because you're willing to sacrifice really important fundamental aspects of the system in order to make that number go up, right?

And it was something we identified early today. I think that it's, like I said, it depends on when you got in and it's pretty, in our community, we don't really attract the number go up kind.

We attract, obviously, on the nature of our product. We attract people who are interested in privacy. Sometimes those paths intersect and there's nothing wrong with that. But generally, the main thing is about increasing your privacy when you're interacting with the economic system.

That's what your big interest is when you're a Samurai user. - Yeah, so it's almost like you're saying that sort of early time, 12, 13, maybe 14, you had the sort of libertarians, dark markets, all of these sort of people coming in because it was useful for them or they looked at it in a different way.

And then maybe after these bull runs, like you say, you have people coming in just because they see this thing just skyrocketing. And it's almost like two separate groups of people. But I don't understand why long term the number go up crowd don't realize that without fungibility, the thing is less valuable.

Like, when you really think about it, if you did have, you know, you always hear these people saying, you know, oh, were you gonna have sort of whitelises coins and blacklisted coins and all this sort of stuff?

And you think, well, okay, fine. If there was, what are you gonna want? What's gonna be more valuable? And I can't see any reason that ever a whitelises coin would be as valuable as something that was actually, that couldn't be tracked.

Like, why would anyone want that? - Yeah. - So if anyone's to agree with that, they would surely think, well, the most important thing now is privacy. So are you seeing these numbers go up?

Are you seeing, not number go up in price, but you've seen the number of users increase, you know, especially over the last couple of years, or is it remaining fairly constant? - Oh, definitely.

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing an increase, and we've been very happy with the amount of increase we've seen. So one of the, you know, one of the cool things of building samurai, the way we did, where we didn't take venture capital investment, we took very, very small amount of investment from private individuals for the most part.

We had to, we had to create a product that we were able to extract revenue from. So we had to create something that users paid for, wanted to pay for, and if they didn't pay for it, you know, that was the ultimate feedback that we could receive saying, okay, it's not good.

Or if they were paying for it, and now they're not paying for it, I mean, we thought it was good, but now it's not good. And so we went through a lot of these things, trying different things out, seeing what people would, what kind of things people would pay for.

And we've been very, very happy and surprised with the uptake in all of our functionality and features that we've made available, whether they're free or paid. So I think 2020 has opened a lot of people's eyes.

The response of governments worldwide and to the COVID-19 has been extremely, extremely swift and heavy-handed. And I think it took a lot of people by surprise and what they thought could never happen, happened right in front of them and then with zero resistance for the most part.

So privacy is on people's minds now. And I think anything, even going to VPNs, I think VPNs are seeing an uptick in interest and usage. People, ordinary people are looking to increase their privacy.

I saw, you know, a fairly conservative newspaper here in the UK, in the comments section, you have old men talking about buying burner phones to avoid, you know, a location tracking and tracking trace apps and stuff like that, which is incredible.

You know, these are the 67, 70 year old men talking about that. - I love that, I love that. - I think the burners. - Just going out with their walking sticks, getting a burner. - Yeah, it's incredible.

But, you know, so it's definitely the public perception of privacy enhancing technologies has shifted this year, specifically, and samurai specifically has didn't see any sort of negative impact from Corona or anything like that.

If anything, we've seen an uptick in usage. - I mean, yeah, I'm not surprised by that. It's been a just a fucking crazy time. And sort of, it's been in a way like you're saying, it's becoming a little bit more mainstream.

But I remember when this all kicked off and like I'm usually the kind of combative person in the room that will argue a point and people get pretty annoyed with me. Like anyone who's close to me gets pretty annoyed with me because day one, I was like, it's fucking bullshit.

Forget it, ignore it, it's shit, do what you want. Don't fucking wear a mask. But, you know, and everyone was really frustrated with it. But what I've seen is that, especially now, at least half the people who were really getting emotional about it and telling me that like I was gonna kill people by not wearing a mask and,

and like that I was a disgrace and how dare I think I know more about this than doctors and blah, blah, blah. Now actually half of them are like, hang on a minute. This is a little bit stupid.

Like what's going on? Like I don't know anyone who's died of this. I don't know anyone who's sick from this. And I'm losing my business and I can't go out and my wedding's been canceled. And yeah, did you feel that?

Like there's a bit of a shift in the tide. Like there's people are changing. Yeah, definitely, definitely here in this country. So we're in the same country, despite my accent. - Yeah, I didn't want to dox you.

- No, no, no, no, it's a known. Yeah, I think so in this country specifically, yes. I think people in general know inherently know what tyranny is and I think the majority of people will put up with a little bit.

If they feel it's where the quote unquote great are good. So right at the beginning, it was such an unknown thing. Most people just didn't know anything about it and they were scared and worried.

So they looked at whatever the government was doing, right or wrong as well, they're doing something they're trying, you know, and we'll go along with it. And, you know, the second time around is they don't get that luxury as much because people know more.

And people are less willing to accept unjust tyranny. Unjust tyrannies. So I do think that there is discontent but I don't know that that will translate into anything. What I do think it does translate to like I was saying is the shift in perception, whether they make that publicly known or not,

but internally, certainly, shift in perception to privacy enhancing technologies. It's no longer, well, if you have nothing to hide, what do you, you know, what are you worried about? If you didn't do anything wrong, what do you have to hide?

That's no longer kind of the public mantra, which it was for a lot of people in the past. So I think that that's improving and I think that's a good thing. - You make a really good point there.

I think especially in this country, what people feel inside and what people think inside is very different to what they will display in public. - Definitely. - I do think that's a very British thing and I think you're right.

I think inside, you know, a lot of people, I've spoken to doctors who are like, this is fucking bullshit. It's absolute bullshit. And all their hospitals are empty and they'll tell me that in private, but they won't say it in public, they won't say it to their coworkers because they're so scared of the backlash

and being called everything under the sun. And, you know, I just think most people just don't want to be, have abuse held at them. But yeah, it's good to hear that people are sort of shifting that way.

- I think so. I hope so anyway, you know. - Yeah. - Yeah, I mean, what more could you, could you like, need, you know, just look around everything else?

- It's not even, it's not really theoretical, you know. - Yeah, it's crazy. It's proper 1984 stuff at the moment. And that's why I'm so happy to have you on and have the tools that you built available because, you know, like I said before, I'm not a very technical guy.

I know all this stuff is bullshit. I don't want all this surveillance. I can see the way it's sliding, but, you know, six months a year ago, the idea of being able to use these technologies, you know, even like running tall or a VPN or mixing coins or any of this stuff was just it felt out of reach.

But what I'm really excited about is that it's not even for like a fuckwit like me, even for someone who that, you know, six months ago could barely send an email. I can use this stuff and that gives me a lot of hope because if I can do it, anyone listening to this can as well.

And, you know, that's 75 year old going to get his burner phone. He can probably do it as well. - Definitely, definitely. Yeah, and that's what we want to do, right? We want to give you, you know, people the tools to interact, like I said, or transact privately.

Honestly, I brought up the point before, but the ability to transact privately to me is one of the fundamental freedoms. It's tied into freedom of speech. It is freedom of speech. So when you would, you know, it has to be, it has to be maintained.

And that's what we want to do is provide those tools. If you want it, you can obtain it. It does require a little work on your end, right? Like on your end, the work required is to acquire a Bitcoin, ideally without KYC.

But once you do that, if you put it into our, you know, our software, if you store your Bitcoin and Samurai wallet, you pretty much can access all the tools that you said, Tor, coin mixing, everything, everything like that, pretty much from a click of a button.

You know, it's not as simple as it could be. I'm the first to admit it, but we're working on it to make it even more simple, but it's pretty damn simple. Mm. That's certainly the phone, the phone wallet.

Yeah. That is simple. Like that, I've, a couple of friends who've been, oh, what do I use my Bitcoin wallet? Oh, yeah, I'm just like, OK, download this. Talk them through it, it's five minutes, they're using it done.

It really is simple, but I have to say with the other stuff, like setting up the GUI and setting up the Ronan, Dojo, and doing all that sort of stuff, I was a little bit intimidated trying to use the command line and, you know, setting this thing up and building the Raspberry Pi and all that stuff.

You know, realistically, most people, most normal people, unless they really care about this stuff, probably aren't going to do that. But the fact that they can pick up this phone and just download an app and they're ready to go is amazing.

Yeah, yeah, well, exactly. And that's, that's, that's what it is, right? So we want you to be able to just get an app and obtain at the very least transaction-level privacy, because that's what you obtain with saying right well, like whether you use Dojo, whether you use, you know, the Ronan or Raspberry Pi thing,

because that has nothing to do with transactional privacy. Transactional privacy is what's left on the blockchain, which is a public ledger and completely open and irreversible. So what's on the blockchain and what we're making on there, forever, that's transactional privacy.

And you obtain that just with the mobile app. So then that's what we, we decided very early on was the most important thing to make as simple as possible. What's come after the Dojo side, which you're right, it involves a little bit of command line work and still not the, still not out-the-box type of, type of thing, yeah.

What that provides is extra privacy from Samurai, from us. So this isn't transactional privacy. This isn't stuff that happens on chain in public. This is by default, if you don't run Dojo, you trust us to store your public key, for example.

You're trusting with your information that could be sensitive rather than running it through your own node, basically, is what's going on. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. And this is a suitable trade-off for a lot of people, you know, especially when you, like, you identify when you're newer to this thing.

You may not realize the benefit of running your own node yet. It's certainly less of a trade-off than buying with KYC, right? The public key that you need to store and use Samurai's notes for has no name or ID or email or phone number or anything attached to it.

It's just a public key. What Samurai does with that public key is derive balances and transactions using our node and display them to you. All of this is acceptable from a privacy point of view for some people, for most people, I would say.

For people who don't trust us to secure their public key,

they think that we're either spies or we're going to get hacked and lose their public key. They want to run the same software we do to track those public keys. And they can, and you're doing it with Dojo.

So that came a little bit after 'cause that was a lot of development, a lot of work to make that product and test it and make sure it was ready for the public. But at the beginning of last 2019, yeah, last year we released that.

And upticks been really positive on that. People are using it, we saw implementations on my node and Ronin and Nod also. It's good. - One thing I'll just say on that, with the my node, and I really like my node.

I have one, I run it, it's cool. I use it with Spectre, I appreciate what the team have done. But the reason I set up my Ronin Dojo was world pool just would not work with it. I had it all set up and I kept having connection issues.

Then I couldn't get the thing to connect. And I was like, ah, all right, it's just me being stupid. So I contacted Bitcoin Q&A and I was like, look mate, sorry to disturb you, but I can't get this thing to work.

And he's like, all right, I'll jump on. He spent about an hour messing around with it. It was like, look, I don't know what's going on. I know someone else has had a similar issue. So the best thing I can say is set up Ronin Dojo because I know other people have had issues.

And since I've done that, no problems at all. But yeah, there's obviously, I don't know if it's just me and just this one other person. - No, it's not just you. Unfortunately, it's a common issue with my node implementation.

We don't maintain that. That's one of the downsides of people implementing your stuff on their platforms is you kind of are at their, you know, at their whim. I think that there are like three versions behind on Dojo as well, so.

- Right. - I think that they, the my node is a great product and they have a lot of stuff going on and a very, very small team. I think they're even smaller than our team. So yeah, no. - Yeah, exactly.

You can't do everything. And they do a lot very well and they do a lot. Like, there's so much on there. There's so many different options. - Yeah. - I've heard a lot of people sort of call it the Swiss Army knife of nodes and, you know, I can see why.

But yeah, for running this, once I've had it set up, I've had no issues, it's spot on, it is brilliant. And the community around this, I got invited into the Telegram group and everyone's been so helpful.

- Yeah. - You don't get that with other projects. So it is brilliant. - Yeah, I noticed that with the Ronin Telegram group as well. It's nice 'cause we have that in our Telegram rooms. It's kind of a very helpful community.

There's always someone around to answer your basic Bitcoin privacy questions or more advanced questions, even if it's not really related to Samurai. And it's nice to see that extended to the Dojo room or the Ronin room, which is, I think, because it's kind of born from our community members.

Ronin, as a project, was born from Samurai Wallen users who were kind of tired of all the command line work of getting Dojo installed. So they created, tried to create something easier. And they don't focus on really anything else, but the Samurai kind of stack, and I think that's why it works so well.

It's 'cause it's just such a focused product. - Yeah, well, like I say, they've been very helpful with me and it's very much appreciated. And I just wanted to say, for anyone who's listening to this now and maybe some of the stuff we're talking about, you're a little bit lost and you're not running any of this stuff,

I suggest you go back and have a listen to the episode I had with Bitcoin Q&A 'cause we did a whole episode on Samurai and CoinJoin and going through from sort of start to finish. But for me, now I've got you here.

I'd really like to pick your brains on a couple of things because I'm trying to learn and do things in the best possible way. And I had a few issues, not issues, but like questions where, for example, when I'm sending transactions into Samurai wallet, let's just say, for example, I had five different addresses

and I wanted to send all of those five into Samurai. I wanted to put them through Whirlpool. Half of me is saying, okay, I want to have these all separate and put them into the Whirlpool separately because that feels natural to sort of segregate things and have them not touch each other.

That's what I've kind of got used to is keep everything separate. And the other side of me is saying, well, your fees are going to be much, much less if you combine all of these into one transaction and create, I think you call it a TX0 and then put it through Whirlpool.

Can you tell me, like, am I being ultra paranoid by-- - No, it's an excellent question. It's an excellent question and the first option is the safest option, right? You keep everything separate, right?

Source or fund, everything is in out one one. That's the safe bet. However, I think that you should be pragmatic when you think about this stuff and it needs to be on a case-by-case basis.

What is the source of these funds? That's the first question. So you have five addresses. Did they all come from one location? Did they all come from Coinbase? Let's say they all came from five separate places.

They came from five separate places and do any of these places have your KYC information. Let's say for arguments sake, all five of them had it. They don't, but if they did, all five of them had it.

And you're thinking, okay, well, I've sent them to five different addresses so that these coins don't touch and so that they don't know I've bought from here and blah, blah, blah, in that situation.

So, I mean, personally, this is how I would think about it. I would assume that any KYC information that I've provided to Exchange A is shared with Exchange B, C, and D. If not by agreement with data sharing in chain analytics licenses, then by FATF enforcement through the travel rule.

It will happen eventually. Yeah, so I would say that with that assumption that any data you share with one KYC Exchange is shared with all of them, that it's okay to merge KYC UTXOs together to enter Whirlpool and save yourself on the TX0 fees.

If what I wouldn't do is merge any UTXOs that aren't KYC into a KYC source, right? So, I wouldn't merge my Coinbase UTXOs with my UTXOs that were changed from a donation to only fans or something

because that might be something that Coinbase doesn't like. Yeah, that makes sense. So, yeah, so you would do it if it's already KYC because I think you're right in saying all of this is gonna be shared anyway.

So, you might as well take advantage of the lower fees, but yeah, so if you've then got some from Bisk and some from Hoddle Hoddle, don't merge them, do them separately and just accept that there's a cost for this privacy and you just have to suck it up.

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Well, I guess the other exception is if they're all from non KYC sources, then I don't think it really, it's a big deal if you merge them as well. And they're not mission critical.

They're not very sensitive. I think the real issue comes into play is when you start to merge KYC and non KYC, UTXOs. No, that makes perfect sense. Okay, so once they're in there, and obviously I've got like Whirlpool and all of that stuff running constantly now through my Ronan Dojo, the other thing that I think about all the time

and I've asked Bitcoin Q&A this a few times, I'm like, ah, you know, I've got some on there and I feel a bit uncomfortable 'cause it's a hot wallet technically. I think I'm right in saying and, you know, I've always been told, you know, don't, you know, keep everything cold and you want everything offline

and it makes me feel a bit nervous. How many mixes would you say? Like if you're doing this yourself, you know, you build this stuff. How many mixes would you want before you're really confident and comfortable to come back out?

And I know you're probably gonna say like, leave it in there as long as you can, but is there sort of a magic number where you feel like, okay, now this is pretty damn good. - It's hard to say it's, again, it's a real personal thing.

You know, in your case, you're right, it is a hot wallet because your keys have to be hot so they can sign the transaction, broadcast the transaction. You know, each person's gonna be different with how much they keep and running.

I think ideally you keep as much as you can running in Whirlpool because the privacy benefit to you grows exponentially as you remix. So it's a really good practice to remix as much as you can, not just for yourself, but also for the health of the pool in general and anyone who is in your transaction with you.

Also benefits from your remix. It's a very powerful concept. I think at minimum, you wanna maybe aim for two or three, two at the low end, three is a good number. I mean, once you've had one mix, which is the first one which tends to happen very quickly, the deterministic links of the past are broken.

You know, we advise you to leave them mixing 'cause it can only increase your privacy dramatically, but the links of the past have been broken. And what matters is the future history. So aim for three, five, I think what I tend to do for the coins that I like to move aside,

I aim for 25, sometimes that happens really quickly, quicker than you would think other times it takes a little while. So I just let those ride until they've hit their target and then move them off.

- Yeah, that's what I was sort of initially in my head. I was like, oh, well, it goes to infinite. And then 50 was another option. I was like, oh, well, I aim for 50. But then what I found is that sort of 80% of the ones that have been remixing for roughly 30 days, 80% of them have only ever had one mix.

Then maybe the rest is split between two mixes, three mixes and I've got a couple of fours. So then I'm extrapolating that out and I'm like, okay, well, how many years am I going to have to leave this stuff in here before it gets to 50?

Or is it just a complete random? - It's complete random. Yeah. - So it's 30 days where I've just not really had that many mixes. And then one day I might suddenly have loads banging through sort of.

- Basically, yeah, it depends on the pool, first of all. So the zero one pool is fairly popular. Usually every month, the zero 0.5 pool is the least popular pool, most thirsty. So you get liquidity comes in big bursts there.

And zero 0.05 pool, which is gaining in popularity close to that of the zero 0.01, but not quite yet. So with all of them, what you do have is a very bursty pattern of liquidity coming in, getting mixed, the first mix getting done very quickly.

And anyone who's connected like you are with PostMix UTXO is available to be remixed, is chosen randomly from that pool. Yeah, so I've had the same experience. Some days you'll have one or two remixes.

And then other days you'll have 10, 20, it's completely random. That's why I say you have the best setup that you can have with the CLI running constantly. So you're available for selection constantly.

The only thing you need to do is just check on it every once in a while to make sure it didn't crash or something like that. Yeah, I'm an absolute loser. So I'm in there like 20 times a day, just like, oh, yeah, look at this.

OK, that's why it goes. That's why it feels like it's going slow. [LAUGHTER] Trust me, I know. I know how that works. It's good to know that because, yeah, I was thinking, oh, how long is it going to take?

But it's good to know that it sort of happens in spurts like that. And then the other thing, just playing around with the wallet, I've looked at, obviously, when sending transactions, which I've done a couple of times, just sending them to open dimes and different stuff like that, you have the options where you've got ricochet, gahoots,

you've got your stone wall. And then you've got a few different options to increase the privacy, not just from the mixing, but from actually your post-mix in your spending. Yeah. What's your best practice with this?

Is it just like whack everything on, use everything, or-- No, no. Like, well, for ricochet-- so ricochet is out of all of our post-mix tools, and it's actually available as a non-post-mix spend as well-- is the only one that's premium.

So you pay for that. You pay us for that. I don't recommend you using that unless you're actually sending to an exchange, or some service that's known to be picky about things. Because what ricochet does is it simply adds hops of history between the send and the receive.

So if the last transaction you did was Whirlpool, and you're worried that Coinbase, maybe, is discriminating against Whirlpool transactions, which we can't say they are right now because we haven't seen any evidence of that.

But let's say you're just worried about it. Maybe their policy is going to change. You may want to enable ricochet. And what that will do is it will add four hops of additional transactional history between Whirlpool and your ultimate Coinbase send.

With the same amount, or does it split it? Because surely, if I was trying analysis, I'd look at it and I'd go like, well, let's just say 0.5 BTC has moved, and then it's moved again, and then it's moved again, and minus the fees, and then it's moved again, and now it's there.

Do they split it into smaller amounts and then join again? Or is it just that, OK, there's plausible deniability here because it has moved X amount of times, and therefore there's enough distance between that transaction?

Yeah, it's a little bit of both. Actually, it's a good question. It's a little bit of both. We do break off the fee and pay it in what appears to be a change output transaction. We also can optionally, at your decision, stagger the transactions in different blocks, so they're not all sequential.

Come in and run after the other. There's a little bit of time and other space between each transaction. But also, it's just a known reality of how the tools work and how the heuristics work, where you have to understand that they're not doing targeted analysis on you in particular.

They have an algorithm working to take a checkbox. And if you can provide sufficient distance, as you rightly call it, between something that may be questionable and the final destination, if you can make sufficient distance there, that makes the algorithm happy that you're in.

It's solved, and our experimentation has determined that four to five hops is the right number. We can always increase it fairly easily if things change. But it's a fairly simple tool, but it has been effective.

And that's our longest running premium tool transaction. So people have been using that since late 2015, early 2016, and we have a lot of-- it has a lot of use, and we get good feedback on it all the time, so we know it's working.

Cool. Yeah. OK, so Ricochet, that makes sense. I only use it if you send it to Exchange, which I'm not doing, so I can leave that one off. And then Kahootz, I haven't used that yet. This is something I do with other samurai users.

Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So these are free for you to use. They don't cost you any extra. And you should use Kahootz, if possible, if you can't. There's really-- there's no kind of a reason not to use it, other than you don't have anyone around to do it, and it's a little bit of a hassle right now to do it.

Though we have something coming in the next few weeks, which is going to make it dramatically easier for users to perform Kahootz transactions in particular with each other. Is this Saurabong thing?

Yeah. Yeah, so that's an active testing right now. OK, all right. But yeah, that sounds really cool. OK, so-- So yeah, I guess we can go a quick overview on to Kahootz is kind of a catch-all for collaborative transactions.

And so collaborative transactions being you and someone else working together to perform a transaction that increases both of your privacy. So we have two of those transactions currently.

Two Kahootz transactions currently. The first one is called Stonewall X2. So this builds off of one of our existing features in the wallet that's been around for a long time now called Stonewall.

And Stonewall has, like I said, has existed, I think, since mid-2016 in some form-- are actually even earlier in some form. And what it does is Stonewall creates a decoy coin joint, a decoy transaction that looks like, if you're an analysis, looks like it's two participants, two entities.

But in fact, it's just one. It's just you. Now Stonewall X2, which is a Kahootz transaction, is a Stonewall, but actually two entities, not a decoy. So these are cool because ever since we launched Stonewall X2 publicly in the wallet, it means from that point forward, every Stonewall could be a Stonewall X2.

So the anonymity set for Stonewalls in general from that date onward has increased because it's no longer assumed to be a decoy. It could be a real two participant transaction. There's no way to tell from the blockchain.

Is this kind of like-- I had Chris Belcher on recently, and he was talking to me about pay join. This sounds similar to that. Is it a kind of a similar idea or setting up? So almost, not quite, Stonewall X2 isn't a pay join, but it is a type of transaction where you're working with a participant to construct a transaction.

Now, a pay join-- so we implemented Stonewall in the wallet, which is a form of pay join in 2016. So it predates pay join, but this is the same thing. And both Stonewall and pay join require you to work with the person that you're paying, the person that you're sending to.

So you swap UTXOs with the person that you're paying to in a pay join transaction. In a Stonewall X2, you're paying to someone completely unrelated, so they can be any merchant, they can be any Bitcoin address.

They have no idea that you're doing this collaborative transaction, their third party. And it's just you and someone else in a Stonewall X2. In a Stonewall way or pay join, it's you and the person that you're paying, working together.

OK. Yeah. All of these features sound amazing, and it's good to know which ones I should and shouldn't use. I think I use Stonewall. I've only sent a few off, but I think I use Stonewall anyway.

Yeah, so here's a rule of thumb. So in Postmix, if possible, the wallet will always default to Stonewall when you're doing a Stonewall, a Postmix spend. If it can't do a Stonewall, it will warn you.

It will tell you that it can't do a Stonewall. We say that's the minimum that you should aim for. Now, if you can do a Stonewall X2, then you should do that whenever you need to spend to a third party.

So you're buying a month of VPN service. You're buying a domain name, whatever. You're spending some Bitcoin somewhere. You can do a Stonewall X2 to do that transaction. Let's say that you want to buy Bitcoin Q&A a beer.

I think it needs to be more than a beer at this point. Right. Yeah. A beer or-- A nice bottle of whiskey or something. A nice bottle of whiskey. You want to send him Bitcoin for that? You could do that in a stowaway or a page art, because you're sending it to that person.

That's the person that you want to spend to. That's the rule of thumb there. And those are always great to do. Basically, the long story short of them is they both break heuristics. They're just-- they're two different types of the heuristic.

The Stonewall X2 is basically a giant fuck you to the heuristic and saying, you know, it's brash. It's bold. It's brash. It's out there saying, look at me. I'm different than other transactions.

Try to figure me out. You piece of crap. You know, like, it's really out there. Whereas a stowaway, as the name would imply, you can't tell that it's a coin joint. It looks like a simple, normal, ordinary transaction.

It blends in. You know, it's very-- it's subversive. So there are two types of transactions. Right. And presumably, it's difficult to tell the difference between some of these things. And therefore, it is breaking these heuristics that you're talking about.

It is making it difficult for these chain surveillance companies to know what something is. They don't know for certain. That's absolutely it. And does there come a point where, like, you really can just be like, yeah, fuck you.

Your whole business model is destroyed. You piece of shit. Stop spying on everybody and let people live their lives. Where is that? Like, can that ever be achieved? And if so, how many people need to be using these tools?

Or can it just be a fringe group who are doing it? And then it breaks the heuristics for everybody else because they can no longer be certain on anything. Well, more is definitely better.

It definitely will never hurt to have more. But it doesn't require a majority to tip the balance in our favor. So we need to keep aiming to get people to use these tools and understand why they want it or they should use these tools.

But really, like you said, since the introduction of Stowaway, for example, any simple looking transaction is suspect now. Doesn't matter what you think about it, it could be a two-person simple looking transaction.

So you really can't know. And so what we have, our research into what chain analysis is, how they're working, is that they have what's called a samurai cluster. And this is specifically a cluster of Stowaway and Stonewalls that come from either Postmix or outside of Postmix

but are connected into a different kind of cluster. But they call it the samurai cluster. And essentially, what it means is anything that is connected to that cluster, you don't know. What you think is probably not true.

And as a result, it's just a question mark. They don't mark it as one way or the other because they have zero certainty. And marking it one way or the other would essentially pollute the accuracy and score of their entire system.

Like if you did it too much. So it just gets put to the side. It doesn't trip anything. It doesn't look bad. It doesn't say, oh, this is connected to anything nefarious because, again, the whole idea of whirlpool and the whole idea of coin join is it's supposed to be a rebirth.

So to speak, there is no past links to anything. These are brand new. There's no history attached. So it's satisfied as everything they need. There's just a big question mark on anything about it.

And the more that those grow, the bigger that cluster becomes, the more powerful it becomes. And the less subject to censorship and other things that could happen. Well, that's good. I'm sure they're very happy with you then.

Yeah. I think I like to look at it like we're giving them a justification for existing because, you know-- I think they talk a much bigger game than they really let on. And they really have going on.

I honestly think that. I think that whenever we've seen any of the analysis that they've released publicly about things, various chain analysis companies, and some are better than others, obviously.

But just on aggregate, have been extremely underwhelming. Extremely, extremely underwhelming. And I think in one case, largely plagiarized some of the work we had done on OXT research. So I think without us, it'd be really, really bored.

Well, it's in their best interest to talk a good game and say that they can do everything and track everything. It would be stupid for them to do anything else. But it's just nice to see that there is a spanner in the works and making whatever it is they think they're able to do even harder.

And I hope that continues. Yeah. Well, there's very few people doing it, which is sad. I think more people need to-- who are developers and then builders need to do it. They need to stand up and build tools that are up subversive in nature.

Because they have to reconcile that and say, these are subversive tools in nature. And I have to be OK with building that type of thing. And people need that. If the cypherpunks originally hadn't built the tools that they built, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all today.

And they were threatened with all sorts of things. That's why Adam back ended up printing the T-shirt, the famous T-shirt. Because the US government had classified the encryption as a national security technology.

So it couldn't be exported. These stakes were high back then. They're much higher than they are today for what we're doing. And those people were strong. And they didn't cave. And they had a strong backbone.

And we want to see that in Bitcoin. We want to see more of that in Bitcoin, I think I say. Yeah, it was incredible. And like you say, without people putting their neck out and without people caring about this stuff, we slide into this sort of digital totality and having the connector come.

And just like everyone is, everyone is going to be surveilled. And that's why I applaud what you guys are doing. And I'm very thankful for it. I mean, what made you do sounds horrible. But what made you the way you are?

Like, what are you there about this stuff? Like, why are you going around pissing off the nice chain surveillance companies? And why do you care so much about this stuff? Because it can't be easy doing what you're doing.

It must take a phenomenal amount of time. There must be something deeper while you are dedicating your life to this. I think the American South would be like, what's your major malfunction?

I don't know, man. I think it's just the way I am. I really don't know. It's not been the easiest route to say the least. But it's certainly fulfilling. I'm working on something that I like to work on that I want to work on.

And I'm building tools that I think are useful. And people are finding use in talking to people like you. We iterate that. That there are people that are using these tools. And when I got into Bitcoin, I was so enthralled by the promise of the entire system that I went all in.

And this was really early. This was at a time when most people were going all in. And I went all in. And I got employment in a company that was paid in Bitcoin. And since that point, I've been working and spending and saving in Bitcoin.

And it wasn't for, you know, number go up purposes. Although there was an expectation that if this worked out and we created what this had, the promise to create the number would go up just because of the value of what was being created.

And I don't think I've been able to let that kind of go. I still want to see it, and I still think that there's the ability to make some of that happen. I don't think all of it, but I think some of it's still as possible.

So was it at the allure of, OK, we can actually have freedom of speech and money that can't be controlled by governments? Oh, was it something you saw that and you were just like, right, I don't care if this is risky.

I'm all in, because this is fucking important. And then that's what drew you in. And then by the sounds of things, you've got a little bit further down the line. And you're like, hold on, this dream that I've painted-- this picture that I painted in my mind of being able to eradicate totalitarian governments

and being able to allow freedom of speech and be able to basically stop them in their tracks of the bullshit they're trying to do was kind of fading because you couldn't see that there was enough projects actually caring about this.

And you went right along and build it myself. Is that roughly sort of how it went down? Yeah, I mean, yeah, for the most part. It wasn't that it was fading, though. It was just that being where I was on the inside of a very nascent industry, there wasn't a lot of people being paid in Bitcoin.

And most of the companies don't even exist anymore today. And many of the company founders went to jail for various, various just securities related crimes, but that's unrelated. It was just that the direction of investment was pushing things to a place that I saw as kind of leading to a dangerous situation.

So what I didn't want was Bitcoin to be captured in the same way that the internet ended up being captured. Because the internet had the World Wide Web, the network, had extremely, extremely great promise in terms of the decentralization of information and the spread of information and being an unregulated space.

And that was quickly, quickly captured by various corporations. You have the IETF, you have the W3C, you have various private, public kind of bodies that wrap a layer of bureaucracy that are tied in with various corporate interests and slip various things into make tracking easier or to make privacy less desirable

for users over the long term. So I didn't want to see that happen in Bitcoin. So I realized that I'm not one just to complain. I'm happy to complain about stuff, but if I don't back it up with action, I think it's useless.

So Samara is a protest, it was a, right from the get goes, okay, I see what's happening here. So we're just going to do it a little differently because we needed that tool, we needed that tool set.

And we hope that other people needed it as well, which they ended up, they ended up needing. - How do you feel now? Now you're seeing what's playing out with all this COVID stuff and you're saying about slipping things in to take away freedoms and to allow more tracking and tracing and all this sort of stuff.

What's your outlook now? How confident are you? Are you scared? Are you thinking actually nowhere? We're going in the right direction. Like, is there anything that keeps you up at night with all of this stuff?

Were you thinking, no, do you know what? This protest is going the right way and we're building some amazing stuff and if people just wake up and stop fucking around, actually, that we're going to do all right.

- Well, no, I think with the situation that everything's in now, I think it's all the more important that we're building. What we're building, I think it's proven to an extent what we've been saying to a large part about the state of things and surveillance and how you want to be careful with what you reveal

about yourself, especially when you're dealing with Bitcoin, which again, is a subversive technology. And you shouldn't be fooling yourself about that. So you shouldn't be so quick to tell everyone, including the entity that you're trying to subvert, that you've acquired this technology.

And here's my ID and here's where you can find me. And here's the last three years of my residential history. So here's all my information. You know what I mean, so. - Yeah, for sure. I struggle with it all the time because I'm trying to be, like, I think a lot of people have had the same experience as me.

I came into this, I got absolutely fucking obsessed within about eight to 10 weeks. Then I quit my job and all I did is read and research and just learn everything I could and listen to everything I could and couldn't think about anything else.

And then I got really lonely because no one else cared at all. Like not one person that I knew cared at all and just thought I was an idiot and just wanted me to shut up. And then I started going on to Twitter and finding some people on there.

And then I started the podcast 'cause I was like, I just want to speak to people who care about this stuff. Like I want to speak to people who actually have the same views as me and sort of interested in the same stuff.

And I started this and I'm always on the edge of like, okay, well, I'm spending all my time doing this. I've got to earn something from it. But then I've also got to try and protect my identity.

And it's a really difficult balance of how much can you say, how much can you promote and who can you talk to? And yeah, it's always like, I'm always sort of halfway I'm on the fence the whole time, which is frustrating because I shouldn't have to, like what pisses me off is all I want is money

that doesn't get devalued and isn't controlled by a government. And to be able to speak freely. Like I don't feel that that is a lot to ask. And I don't think that anything bad should happen to me for saying these things or suggesting that there's a better money.

The reality is they might. So I don't know, it's a weird situation. - Definitely. - Yeah, definitely a feeling of that. We, you know, we're not kidding ourselves. We understand that what we're doing, while completely legal and should be encouraged, especially in any sort of free society,

especially considering that we're contributing everything that we do to the public domain. All of our code is in the public domain, which is a contribution to, you know, not only us, but our future as well.

Instead of that being celebrated, we're concerned that that could shift in the future. And as such, we've made, we've started to make preparations and plans for in a case that any sort of hosting provider or government turns hostile.

For example, orders GitHub to shut down a code repository, which we've seen happen already. That's already started to happen. It's one of the reasons why, you know, a more astute users will notice that we're no longer on GitLab.

We're actually self-hosting all of our code repositories now. This is just one step that we've taken this year as a response to just viewing the landscape changing around us and needing to, you know, not taking for granted anything, you know, just because you can publish your source code

on GitHub today doesn't mean you'll be able to tomorrow. And that's, you know, it's a sad state of affairs, but it is a state of affairs. - Yeah, we have to be realistic. And, you know, again, like on one side of me, I think, well, it just makes sense that more and more people will adopt this technology

and also people within government will adopt this technology because it is a better money and it's in their best interest to do so. The game theory works in that way that incentivizes greed.

And if I look at that, like, where it plays out logically, it's that Bitcoin gets adopted to a point where it's very difficult to ban it or make any rash decisions or like really criminalize it.

But I do think it's probably realistic to say they're gonna try and keep controlling this in every way they can and that this sort of bullshit, like whiteless and blacklist and all this stuff will probably come down the line and they'll probably try and make examples of as many people as they can and scare people as much as they can.

'Cause that's just kind of what they do. That's their play. - Yeah, I mean, I don't even think they need to, most governments need to do anything as drastic as it's banning or anything like that.

I mean, with almost every country in the world has the on-ramps and off-ramps, for the most part, lockdown, KYC, very, very difficult for the most part to get non-KYC coins in most countries.

And if you have the on-ramps and the off-ramps completely, completely surveilled, I don't know, and a large part of the activity in between deterministic and easily traceable because people are making use of the tools that are available, like coin join and post-maspending tools that we have,

for example, page joins and other privacy technologies. They don't need to ban it. Why would they need to do that? It's a public ledger that they can refer back to it anytime, and I think I would be more concerned about capture than extinguish.

If they capture the network in the form of making sure that everyone's KYC who enters the network and all that KYC data is shared between each other, it's just like any other asset exchange.

It's not a big deal. They can just subsume it. It's just part of the system now. And that's my worry. It's not really about the shutting down or trying to ban things. I think maybe some jurisdiction somewhere will try that and it will be a pretty big failure, most likely.

But I don't think a sophisticated western nation would need to do that. I think they have 25, 30 years of KYC and AML compliance under their belt now. They have the super national organizations to come up with the concepts of legislation with the FATF

and enforce that it gets adopted and it just gets adopted. It just happens. Like there's really no voting on it or anything like that. So that's just the world that we live in. And that's why we have to look at it and go, okay, well, we're in a worse spot, really, than we were in 2013 or '14,

because none of the on-ramps or off-ramps were. Work KYC, there you can get into Bitcoin and out of Bitcoin really easily. So we don't have bad anymore. What can we do? Well, we can build tools that are on-chain and provide a good level of privacy between those ramps, so that maybe, okay, maybe your KYC done the on-ramp

and maybe your KYC done the off-ramp, but you don't know what the hell's going on in between. And I mean, for us, we won't even engage in the whole KYC, we won't buy Bitcoin but KYC, that's crazy to us.

But we recognize that a lot of people do and have and they deserve privacy tools as well, they deserve privacy, technology as well. Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you say most people will use in exchange, most people use KYC, I think that's just because you don't know any better.

I didn't know any better. It's just ingrained at this point. Yeah, no one knew any better, but there are some amazing things, BISC and HODL HODL and just general cash transactions or mining if people want to get involved with that.

There are still ways, I know it's not easy. Yes, there are absolutely ways to do it. And they should be encouraged and you should do it if you can. But the reality of the situation is most people don't and most people won't and it is an ingrained thing.

KYC is now the cultural norm, but it really wasn't that way, not that long ago. It's a relatively recent development and it's unfortunate that it's taken root so firmly in Bitcoin. And over the last few years, it's not just Bitcoin, it's globally.

It's really not a Bitcoin problem. Like I said, it's a global, you know, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism financing. That's what it's called, quote unquote terrorism violence. So it's just the way things are moving.

Financial surveillance is where we're going and we want to build tools that are going to culture that. No, well, like I said, probably about a hundred times during this interview, but I really am grateful for what you've built for that exact reason.

And yeah, it's so important and anyone who's listening to this now and doesn't already have Samurai Wallet go and download it. If you then not sure what you're doing, you can listen to the other CoinJoin episode.

But yeah, thank you so much for what you do and thank you for coming to the show. Yeah, I'm really excited to learn more about the Soroban stuff and all the stuff that's coming up and sort of digging in more and more over time.

And yeah, it's been brilliant speaking to you and it's amazing to know that there are other people out there who really care about freedom of speech and not just number go up. Oh, I think a lot of people do.

And hopefully more and more people are realizing that it's an important thing they should maybe pay attention to as things develop around that. And again, thank you for your comments because it does mean a lot.

That's why we do these things. We do this work because we think it is solving problems for people and it is providing tools for people. So to hear it is great. No need to apologize. And before we close out the interview, is there anything that I haven't covered, any new features or anything that you wanted to cover or have we sort of gone

through the main bit? Well, I think we went through the main stuff. We mentioned Soroban. That's a tool or communication tool that will make the process of doing collaborative Kahoots transactions much, much easier than they are today.

Right now you have to share QR code with your counterparty like five times. There's a little bit of a song and dance. But it's cool to see the resulting transaction. With Soroban, it takes 10 seconds and it happens automatically and you don't have to share anything with anyone.

You just have to say who you want to work with. So it's a significant improvement. It should make performing these transactions much easier for the average person, meaning that there will be more of these transactions on the blockchain, which is better for everyone.

Very cool. So I think that's it. OK, perfect. All right, well, yeah, thank you again. And it's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. And I'm sure we'll speak again in the chat rooms and all that sort of stuff.

My pleasure. Happy to be here.