EP64 Bitcoin podcast with Bitcoin Q+A.

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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.

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

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in this space and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome, Bitcoin Q&A. Nice to have you back on the show. It's been a little while since you've been on. And in the background, a few people might have noticed we've been having a bit of a discussion on Twitter.

And I had checked out your Bitcoin monthly website and reached out to you and basically said, "Look, I think this is really cool. I think it's really important. There's a lot in there that I don't really fully understand, and I think I'm probably not the only person, but I want to."

And said, "Look, can we make a show around this?" And obviously, you've put out a thread on Twitter to let people know what's going on. And we're sort of trialling it and seeing how it goes.

But I'm excited to dive in and excited to have you back on the show. So welcome. Afternoon, Max. Nice to be back. I've been looking forward to this one. Yeah, I'll just give a bit of a background on Bitcoin monthly.

Obviously, those that have read the Twitter thread will be aware of how it came about. But for those that have just stumbled across his podcast, I'll just sort of cover that off. So one of my New Year's resolutions for 2021 was to spend less time on Twitter, which, I'll be honest, is not going too great at the moment.

But to help out with that, to sort of help out with that, I've been trying to make a conscious effort of when I am on Twitter, rather than sitting and just scrolling mindlessly like we all do.

I started just, you know, if I saw a good link from somebody that I followed or somebody retweeted, I was just adding it to my bookmarks and thinking, "You know, I'll get to that later. I'll get to that later."

And then when I was bored, so on and so forth or anything like that, instead of going back onto Twitter and mindlessly scrolling for another hour, I had like a good list of links that were actually, you know, worth while me reading rather than just scrolling through people's shit posting on Twitter.

And so then I thought, "Well, you know, I've got a pretty good list of links here. You know, there might be people who want to do the same." And so I thought, you know, "Why not just curate it into a bit of a list?"

So I just spun up a quick website on GitHub. It's just a simple single-page website. I've broken down all of the links that I sort of collect over the course of the month into, like, five different sections, so we've got like protocol and infrastructure updates, so anything like wallets, nodes and all that sort of stuff.

We've got new releases, also cover any noticeable podcasts, educational resources and, lastly, articles, you know, news articles or something like that. I tried to keep it sort of away from all the hypey sort of stuff, because that, you know, all other price talks and headphones and all that.

There's stuff that's really well-covered because that's what gets the clicks and the listens at the end of the day, isn't it? And I think there is a place for a more focused, sort of, you know, list of what's actually going on at the heart of the space, and I think the guys at No Bullshit Bitcoin do a fantastic job of this.

But obviously, there's kind of like a feed, there's no sort of hub where you can go and visit that, so I thought, you know, there's a bit of a gap in the market. I'll throw it together, see what happens.

And then obviously, like you say, yeah, you saw it, reached out and thought it'd be good to have, you know, an audio recap of that once a month, so here we are. Yeah, here we are, and yeah, like you said, I think it is really important that this is accessible to people.

The reason I reached out to you is like anyone who listens to the show will know, like I'm a dyslexic fuck and reading anything for me just takes so much longer than listening to something by audio.

And I don't really take it in, so I was like, you know, again, I'm not the only person probably who likes to take in their information audio. You can do it while you're driving or getting on with something.

And I think this is all stuff that you're writing is what really, really matters. And like you're saying, there's all the hype about price. There's all the stuff on a million different podcasts and that everyone's writing and ship posting about it.

But without this stuff, nothing fucking works. And this is stuff that you can actually do to help yourself and to help the network and not just ship post on Twitter. So I'm very excited to learn more and I hope that listeners find this useful as well.

So this is the first episode we'll be finding our feet a little bit. But should we just dive straight in and start going through these updates? Yeah, definitely. Just just quickly before we get started, I just want to echo what you just said, you know,

neither of us are coming on this, you have started this podcast to wax lyrical about all these updates as if we understand them all. This is very much about, well, firstly, for me. Anyway, for me personally, this is about, I want to, it's a perfect excuse to dive a little bit deeper and try and make sense of it all.

So, expect some bad takes, probably expect some corrections next time, but yeah, that's why we're here. And yeah, this is kind of the stuff that to me anyway, that matters and hopefully some people can find some value in it.

Yeah, we're all here to learn. Definitely. Have I lost you? No, no, I'm still here. I think it went dead for a second there, but I think we're good. All right, so we kick off with probably the main one for the month Bitcoin core, new release version 0.2.1.

They've got, well, this is a massive release. It probably takes a couple hours to go through the whole thing. So, I've just picked out some couple of the headlines really to cover off and some of the stuff that node runners might be interested in.

First one, there's been a change to the broadcast logic of Bitcoin core in the fact that previously the node would, if it was trying to broadcast the transaction and struggling or if it was fed a transaction while it was in an offline status.

It had like a fail safe in it that would repeatedly broadcast, or sorry, repeatedly try to broadcast that transaction time after time. It's like a fail safe really to make sure that that transaction got propagated out to the network and so that the transaction was successful at the end of the day.

So it was, it was putting for a reason. Now, the caveat to that is it's quite bad for privacy because if there was somebody that was surveilling your node max and they kept seeing that this same transaction getting, trying to get

pumped into the network time after time, there's a pretty good chance that that transaction belongs to that node. And if you're running, if you're not running your node over Tor and that transaction could be tied to your IP address, your IP address could be tied to your real name.

They know that that's your transaction, not good for privacy. So there's been a change in the broadcast logic and so that it's these transactions are broadcast from their own node less often, kind of like I say just to improve privacy for anybody that's, you know, if somebody was to try and do this attack on your node,

they would have to surveil your node for a hell of a lot longer rather than seeing it repeatedly time after time and it would make it quite easy for them. Okay, and is this only something that affects them people who aren't running over Tor, or does it make a difference to them as well?

To my knowledge, it should just be clear net nodes that would be affected because obviously if you're running it over Tor, your IP address is hidden.

Speaking of Tor, the next one is Bitcoin now uses Tor V3 onion addresses as standard instead of Tor V2, not really got any massive amounts of information other than I believe it's just a more efficient way of using Tor and the V2 addresses are going to be depreciated.

It's going to be depreciated towards the back end of next year, I believe. So yeah, that's kind of a standard now, which quite good timing really. Only today, I don't know that you've seen the Tor V3 attacks a back again. Not sure whether you've experienced any issues with it, Max.

No, I haven't really. I mean, well, I may have, I've experienced lots of issues in the last couple of weeks, but I tend to think it's more likely just my shitty internet. Which is just a constant headache. So I don't know if it's actually down to Tor or if it's down to that, but yeah, I have had some connection issues.

Yeah, so probably I wouldn't say anything worth panicking about, but obviously if Bitcoin is becoming increasingly reliant on Tor V3, especially with this new update.

So these ongoing attacks are a little bit of a worry and certainly something to keep an eye on because obviously a big part of the network was took down a couple of weeks ago. You know, it's Tor V3 is the main way that people talk back to their nodes from their wallets if they're not on the local network.

So certainly when I'll be monitoring, keeping an eye on going forward. Yeah, it's interesting all that this tour stuff is not something I know that much about. I get the basics of how it works, but I don't really understand what these attacks are doing and what is the benefit of doing them for the person who's doing them.

Because it seems like everything that we're trying to build and certainly everything I ever try and run, I don't like to run something if it's not running over Tor or anything to do with Bitcoin.

So it concerns me that we are having these sort of issues and it also concerns me more that I don't really understand what the issues are. Can you sort of shed a little bit of light on why would someone be doing these attacks and how are they doing it and how is it sort of affecting us?

Yeah, in terms of a motive, not really sure other than to potentially just disrupt the network. In terms of how they do it, basically it's just it's what's known as a denial of service attack.

So whoever's attacking the network will just send loads of spam requests to the somewhat centralized, I forget what they call now, I think they call registries. They'll sort of send loads of spoofing attacks to them and just basically just bombard them so that they go offline.

Obviously the fallout from that is that people trying to access onion addresses that are routed through these, again, I think they call registries. They can't get through basically, so it has the effect of kind of choking the network.

But yeah, in terms of a narrative, it's difficult to say because we don't know who's behind it. And so these spam attacks or DDoS or whatever they call them, presumably then there's no cost for the people who are spamming other than they're having to actually do them, but there's no cost for it.

Is there not a way of having some sort of mechanism put in place where it costs to spam the network? Like Bitcoin, you mean with fees? Well, yeah, so I think an example of it, yeah.

Can we not then do something where we adapt the way that we use Tor or that Tor works and that maybe there is a cost to do these so that it would prevent these sort of attacks? You know, I'm not sure how the hell you actually do that, but it seems like it would be logical.

That makes two of us, but for me personally, if it meant me making an anonymous donation to the Tor Foundation, which everybody should do, by the way, if that was, you know, if the fallout from that was that Tor was more robust and more decentralized, small price to pay for me.

Ultimately, Bitcoin relies heavily on Tor, if these attacks continue, a solution is going to have to be come up with and Bitcoin is a great throw in their weight behind a good cause, especially if it's going to help them out as well.

So I think we probably will see something like that in the future, but what shape that takes or what I suppose we'll just have to wait and see. Well, we'll find out in next month's updates.

Fingers crossed, yeah, whether they'll fix it that fast or not, I don't know. I'm joking, but yeah, hopefully soon. It's still on Bitcoin core update. This one is called anchors. So this basically is where a node will save some of its peer contacts, basically, when it goes, just before it goes offline.

And the reason it will do this is to prevent against what's called eclipse attacks. So what an eclipse attack is basically where your node gets surrounded on the network so that it is only connected to bad actors.

And what that would allow the bad actors to do is basically feed your node rubbish information to basically be able to stifle it and not allow it to function properly. Now, obviously, I've never seen any sort of live this sort of happening in real life.

Perhaps that's because it's a good way, a good example of why, or sorry, the way that Bitcoin's built in a censorship resistant way.

But I think this method, so that if your node goes offline, when it comes back online, it's not asking the network for new peers to connect to it's got, it's already got a couple of those trusted peers saved.

So the first couple of people it'll connect to when it comes back online is those two people that it's saved in its memory. So it's just kind of to mitigate against those eclipse attacks.

Can I ask a question on this? When it comes back online, you're saying it has its like connections or trusted connections. Is it possible, I assume it probably is, to connect to specific nodes that you trust more than others?

For example, if I spun up a node and I was like, "Well, I trust you more than I trust a random and I have a few other people that I trust more than a random." Or I might have my own other nodes that I trust more than a random.

Can I specifically choose those? Or is it always done on a completely randomized setting? Yes, randomized is the default, but I believe you can connect to specific nodes. I think it might be a command line only task, but yeah, it's definitely possible, but never done it myself.

Next one is bit 157 new Treno filters. These are now being shared over the peer-to-peer network. I'm not even going to pretend to know why that's a benefit, but a bit of an update on what new Treno filters are.

They've been around for a long time. Basically, they are used in mainly enlightening wallets to mitigate the need to do a full block download. So what the wallet will do is download these filters from other nodes.

It's just like a light version where they will query is this transaction in this block header and there's a little bit of trust involved, quite a lot of trust involved, which is why they're not massively widely adopted anywhere outside of lightning wallets where speed is key.

But yeah, so they're now being shared over the peer-to-peer network, but as I say, not even going to pretend to know why that's a good thing. That's okay. We can't all know everything. Maybe if anyone has any questions on it, the purr wants to know.

They can ask for the questions for next week and we can find from someone who does know. Sounds good to me. Next one, Signet is just basically another test net environment that's now been included into Bitcoin Core.

Taproot, big one, getting a lot of headlines and a lot of hype. That's now in the code of Bitcoin Core, but not yet activated. Again, not going to pretend to be an expert, but Taproot basically, when it's activated, it allows the devs to build lots of efficiency improvements, scripting types.

Basically, what it means for the end-user is that the devs can build a lot more tools on top of Bitcoin without affecting the underlying protocol and needing frequent changes at the protocol level, which, as we know, takes quite a long time.

Unrightly so, so Taproot kind of opens the door for the devs to do this in a way that they can still build on top of Bitcoin, but not require any consensus changes or any big card forks or anything stupid like that.

Can you give any examples of what this might allow for if we are to get Taproot, like what kind of things could be built and how it will change?

Because I've heard people talk about, for like multi-sig, it will make a difference and a few other bits and pieces, but, you know, being completely honest, I'm still not sure much outside of that.

Yeah, I mean, that's the big one that gets spoken about is the privacy improvements that it would allow, called cross-import signature aggregation, which sounds really complicated, I'm sure it is, but at a high level, I use an example of a lightning channel.

That essentially is a two of two multi-sig on-chain, they stand out like a sore thumb, you can tell that that transaction is a lightning channel open or a lightning channel close, you know, that's exactly the way that we know the capacity of the lightning network is by looking for these transactions on the blockchain.

And what the cross-input signature aggregation will do is, rather than having too blatantly obvious signatures, they will just be the one. So basically, any transaction that uses this improvement will look like any other transaction.

So it doesn't matter whether it's me sending from my single-sig Samurai wallet, or me sending from my seven of ten multi-sig core room for my business, it will all look absolutely identical, which obviously brings with it some good privacy improvements that basically anybody looking on chain is just going to see a single signature

and they didn't really know the make-up of that transaction and how many parties are involved in it. That's kind of the big one that's been getting all the headlines. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Last two quick updates before we move on. RPC updates, there's been quite a lot of additional RPC commands, which stands for remote procedure core. Basically, that's one of the ways that you can communicate with the underlying Bitcoin core by running these commands. There's been some, I'll give you an example.

The one that you see post on Twitter quite a lot is get TX, outset info. That's basically a command where you run the numbers. Yeah, yeah, exactly so. So you can run that command and it will give you the exact amount of how many bitcoins are in circulation that have been mined.

So that's an example of an RPC command. There's been quite a significant increase in the amounts of those that have been added to core in this release.

But for the average user, most of the time it's obviously gated away and it's just will potentially add additional wallet functionality in the future depending on what those commands are capable of.

Last one, descriptive wallets. This is, I believe it's been added as a experimental sort of option. Again, not really a lot of info on it other than the fact that it's a wallet type that sort of categorizes what's inside that wallet.

I believe it adds some uniformity. But what that means for the end user is unclear to me at the moment, but I thought it was worth mentioning regardless. Okay, cool software updates. Do you want to pick a couple of them, Max, and we'll couple of the notable ones.

Let's start from, because I use one cold card multi-sig address verification page on signing in previous release. Yeah, so pretty big one, so a bit of background of when you obviously, let's say, using example, you've got a two or three multi-sig, one's a cold card, one's a treasure, and one is a cobalt vault.

If you want to send some satin to that wallet, you want to be able to verify that address. It is one of your addresses before that you do that because, you know, if there's a man in the middle of the tack or something like that, or your hardware's been compromised,

or your software wallet's been compromised, let's say you've got a dodgy version of Electrum that said, right, yeah, send it to this address. I promise this is part of your multi-sig column. If you just trusted that and you had a dodgy version of Electrum, you can wave buy buy to those sats.

Now, cold card, the deleted stop date of cold card allows you to verify the address is actually one of your multi-sig addresses on the device, which obviously we know is 10 times more secure than potentially a piece of software.

You can now verify that on the device itself, which everybody should be doing, whether it's single-sig or multi-sig. It's just been inherently more difficult to implement with multi-sig setups.

Did it not do this before? Because I remember when I was setting up Spectre and then I was importing that file on the little micro USB, I was then checking that the wallet that that spat out was the same wallet that it was showing me on the cold card.

Is that you basically saying it's the same thing, but now it can do multi-sig as well? Exactly, yeah, so I'm guessing when you did it, that was for single-sig, was it? It was, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so basically the same thing, but you can check it on the device now for multi-sig wallet that you've set up.

Yeah, they've also introduced the ability to sign Peugeot transactions. Peugeot transactions are two-person coin joins, so it's quite nice that they've sort of introduced that on cold card as well, obviously using the PSBT, partially signed Bitcoin transaction standard.

So, any increase the adoption of coin join and surrounded technologies have been for me? Yep, that sounds great. Yeah, next one, Blue Wallet. They've introduced coin control in their vaults, which again is their implementation of multi-sig.

I don't know if you've had the chance to try a Blue Wallet multi-sig setup yet, Max, or had a play around? I haven't, but I've only heard good things that everyone seems to be raving about it. It's pretty slick, actually, yeah.

I've only used it just to play around really with some spare phones that I've got, but, yeah, it's a pretty slick setup, to be honest with you, and the update is that they've now introduced coin control into that setup.

So, that's basically the ability for you to select specific UTXOs when you're constructing your transactions, which, again, is a boost for privacy, so, yeah, good stuff. Has it got, like, address labeling and that kind of stuff in it already? Yeah, Blue Wallet. That was added, I believe, at the same time that they added coin control.

So, it's had coin control for its single-sig for a couple of months, but they've, like you say, they've now introduced it for their multi-sig setups as well. Next one, Hexa Wallet. Not one I've used massively, mainly for the reason that you can't connect it to, oh, until now you couldn't connect it to your own node.

They've now introduced that feature, which, again, massive increase in privacy. I think there's a theme emerging here, Max. Yeah, you can now connect that to your own Bitcoin Core Wallet. I've not had to play with it yet, but it's always good when wallets introduce that feature.

Big improvement in transactional level privacy. Spectre, finally, they've released version 1.0. I'm a big fan of Spectre, and I know you use it as well, Max. But, yeah, the main headlines there, there's a massive list. We'll probably link it in the show notes, but they've now introduced a tool-only mode.

Again, great for privacy. I sound like I'm repeating myself here. And they've also added the ability to label your addresses from, basically, from any screen within the wallet, rather than having to go to a specific one.

Address labeling, again, important for being able to identify where all of your transactions are coming from, so that in the future you don't merge UTXOs that you might have received as change from a porn website, compared with the change that you receive from your church donation.

Probably might not be too that you want to mix in the future, just to give away the fact that you might be an only fans user. Yeah, and just to touch on what you were saying there, there's a common theme here.

Yeah, there will be a common theme. I think both of us are focusing on privacy and think that for Bitcoin to move forward and for us to be able to use it in the way we want, it's really important.

So, it's just nice to see how much is going on all the time, and it's not just a small group, it seems that there is more of a privacy focus happening, and that's exciting to see. I think it's probably a fallout from, obviously, the increased censorship and whatnot that we're seeing.

Obviously, the tools are improving as well, and it's really encouraging to see more people. Well, personally, for me, anyway, it's encouraging to see more people reaching out, asking for advice on privacy, or asking what the best tools are to use.

Yeah, really encouraging. It's really good to see. Who we got next, Barrow? Barrow wallet. Yeah, another one. I really, it's quite an underrated wallet, Barrow wallet.

When it came out, it used to, it only worked connected to your own node, but it didn't connect directly to Bitcoin Core, it connected to an Electrum server, which, to be fair, comes packaged in most of these DIY node setups like running Dojo, my node, et cetera.

But you needed that Electrum server setup, so it was another hurdle to get over. Anyway, they've now introduced that you can connect directly to Bitcoin Core, basically in the same way that Spectre does, which, again, just removes that hurdle.

So you could quite easily spin up Bitcoin Core on your laptop, download Sparrow wallet, connect it to Bitcoin Core in a couple of clicks, and then you've got your own multi-sick coordinator again.

It's a very similar functionality to Spectre, just packaged in a different way, but I believe Sparrow sort of gives you a lot more transactional level. It's slightly more advanced and gives the user a little bit more information than perhaps the average Sparrow, the average Spectre user might appreciate.

Obviously, you've used both. Do you have a preference on them or do you literally use both of them and you're happy with both of them? What is the main differences like someone would see other than, like you're saying, how much information you're going to see? Is it just maybe slightly less friendly UX, but you can do more on Sparrow?

Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, they're both now that Sparrow's got the Bitcoin Core connectivity, they're both very similar.

I would say 99% of the use cases they do the same thing, say Sparrow gives you perhaps a little bit more information on the way your transaction are constructed, whereas that sort of stuff in Spectre is kind of hidden away by design, because it's designed to be the intro to multi-sick setup,

and that's where the Excel is. Spectre makes setting up multi-sick or single-sick. Wallet's just really, really slick. It's really intuitive. Both very good wallets. I would probably say if you're just starting out, give Spectre a whirl, but both very, very capable. Umbrell, another one I recently spun up over Christmas.

This is a DIY node implementation. You've probably seen the screen prints all over Twitter. It seems to have taken Bitcoin, Twitter, by storm. Really, really what they've achieved and the way that the setup process works for Umbrell, it's the simplest setup I've ever gone through so far.

Literally, build your Raspberry Pi hardware, flash the SD card, put it in and press go, and then it just goes and does everything for you. You come back in a couple of days and you've got your own Bitcoin core node.

The main update for this month is they've released their App Store, which is basically, well, what it says on the tin, basically, you can go on to your node and just browse through essentially an App Store and just pick the apps that you want to include.

You've got things like SphinctChat, BTC Pay Server, all of the usual stuff, but again, it's just packaged in a really slick way and I know a lot of it's becoming the go-to choice for a lot of first-time node runners.

From what I've heard, I've not yet run it, but I am going to, so Arthur and Self Bank is a massive fan of it. He's been telling me for some time now, you've got to try this thing out.

And quite a few other people in the background are just saying it's slick, it works, and it seems as though it's kind of what I thought my node was going to be.

And that was like my first node was the my node and it kind of seemed like it could do everything and it'd be really simple, but I did find I had to then run other nodes to do the things that it was supposed to be doing.

And now pretty much it just, I have links to my Spectre and that's all it does, that's all I use it for. I don't do anything else with it and Whirlpool didn't work or any of the things that I wanted to do.

So maybe this is what Umbral is trying to do now and sort of be like a Swiss Army knife that works, it seems.

Yes, see this is where I have my reservations is that obviously in the past, no implementation that I've tried to take the kitchen sink approach and package everything because it's people like toys to play with at the end of the day, don't they, people like the latest stuff.

I just have a worry that if more and more apps are packaged into it, whether it's going to cause hardware issues, because at the end of the day, we're only running it on a Raspberry Pi 4, it's a credit card sized computer.

They do have their limits. I'll be honest, when I run it, it was absolutely, it was flawless. Perhaps it's just one to watch for the future as to whether these throw in more and more stuff at it.

If you're running the absolute full stack and installing everything, it may struggle, but so far, so good for me anyway. Let's find out. We'll see. We will indeed. We will indeed. Next, joining box.

Now, this is an implementation by Openoms to make join, join market easier to use. You can run it on a dedicated box or you can also connect to a remote node.

It doesn't get much publicity, probably because of the fact that join market doesn't get that much publicity, because personally, in my opinion, it looks, I've never tried it home hands up, but it looks quite difficult to use.

There's not a great deal of documentation out there. Openoms has created joining box, which is not a new thing, but he's created this sort of command line interface or menu system to try and make it a little bit easier to use.

This month, he also added Boltzmann Calculator, which is a Samurai-born Python tool, which basically enables you to calculate the entropy of your transactions so that you can see, sort of gives you a kind of a gauge of the privacy of a transaction or that, you know, how well, sort of hidden that transaction is.

So, again, home hands up, I haven't used it, I'm sorry, Openoms, but it's one on my list to delve into join market and just give it a will because I feel bad saying that it's not easy to use, having never tried it.

So, I think if I was going to do it, joining box might be the way to do it. I don't know whether you've had any mix-ins with join market, Max.

It was definitely like there was a long time before I'd really got involved in doing any sort of mixing or coin joins or anything like that, and it was definitely one that sounded really interesting.

It sounded really promising, like the team who are working behind it, I have massive respect for, and it sounds great, but I have heard a lot of people saying it's not that user friendly, it is difficult to use, and these are people who are much, much more technically competent than I am.

So, it has put me off, and then I started using Samurai, and I have no complaints.

I was just about to say, yeah, you know what my problem is, is that Samurai will pull is just too easy to use, so it's kind of like, do I really want to give myself all this extra stress to join market or will, but I feel like you should try everything once, shouldn't you?

Yeah, definitely, I lost you there for a little second, but yeah, I think you're right, we should all try these things, but it's just time at the end of the day.

I'd like to try it as well, but I'm comfy with what I'm using, and that took me long enough to mess around with, and for the moment I'm not jumping in, but it does sound very useful, and the fact that you can calculate these things and find out how much entropy you have, et cetera, is great.

Yeah, because just to cap that off, Bitcoin privacy is a difficult one to master. It can seem a bit like witchcraft sometimes, so having something tangible that you can see on the screen, to say, right, okay, this is the level of an estimate of your transaction privacy can only help.

Yeah, where are we, mempool, mempoolspace.space, big fan of this, they've introduced their version 2.0 for single board computers again, like Unbreld. I believe Raspai Blitz were the first guys to implement this.

I'm not sure whether any of the other implementations have caught up yet. Essentially what 2.0 is, is what you see if you go to the normal mempool.space. Again, just a better UI. It's got some more details on, well, the mempool, obviously.

So yeah, it's nice that they've, I think it wasn't introduced to, because mempoolspace version 2 has been out for ages on their core website. But it's, until now, it's been quite resource heavy, which doesn't lend itself that well to no implementations that run on Raspberry Pi's because it was quickly chewing up the resources

and, you know, causing issues from, from a, a load perspective. And so I believe what they've done is, is optimize the code. They have made it so that it's able to run on low powered PCs, which is good because mempoolspace is fantastic, I love it.

Yeah, it's very cool and so useful to have some of these tools out there. It's, especially as we're going to see fees rising, most likely, and we need to think a little bit more carefully about how we do things.

It's great to have those sort of tools. Yeah, and, and just to break it down for why it would be important to have that on your own node rather than just go into mempool.space is, let's say I was sending you a transaction.

Max, the mempool is busy as it seems to be cut off in these days. I could grab the transaction ID from my, from the wallet that I send it from, and open up my locally hosted mempool.space.

That is basically a visual representation of the mempool that is on my own hardware. I could paste in that transaction ID and it'd show me where it is in the queue.

It would let me know when it's been confirmed into a block or it would, you know, if there's been a fee spike, it could laugh at me a little bit and say, "Hi, you're not going to, you've got no chance to see you in four hours."

So, yeah, it just, again, back to that privacy thing, having it on your own hardware, not querying somebody else's node, basically, is just an increase in privacy. So, good to see that that's been well supported on, on low powered hardware.

Right, last one on the software updates, C Lightning, which is the block stream implementation of Lightning. They've had a quite big update, 0.9.3. Two main headlines, onion messages. Now, Max, you'll be familiar with Sphinx chat, I believe.

I know we've spoken on it before. So, the way that that works, that works on LND, which is the most popular implementation of Lightning, again, comes packaged on all of the common node implementations.

So, Sphinx chat works by sending really small, one-side payments backwards and forwards and attached to those payments between our nodes is a message, that's how, you know, at a very high level how it works.

What the guys at C Lightning have managed to do is to do that, but without the payment part. So, they're basically just sending these messages across the Lightning network without affecting any of the liquidity in any of the channels, which is a big step forward for me.

And no idea how the wizards have done it, to be honest with you, but again, a good improvement in terms of, you know, you don't need to send any payments, it's just sending an onion encrypted message across the Lightning network.

And I think, again, going back to, we touched on earlier about censorship and stuff like that. I think in the future, if these implementations like C Lightning, Sphinx chat and all that sort of continue to make this stuff easier to use.

I think this standard chance of being a very well-adopted messaging format. Definitely. Let's just unpack where you said there a little bit. So, instantly, my mind goes to like, if it's free and it costs nothing, you don't have to send one sat back and forth.

Then does that not potentially cause problems for like a spam attack or like someone just going in and just clogging up the Lightning network with just a load of bullshit? Or is that something that isn't a problem because they've done something else that's very clever that we, you know, I don't understand.

Yeah, good question, good question. Honestly, not one I know the answer to at this present time, certainly one to look for because that, like you say, that was the way I saw the fact that people like Sphinx chat, the way they sort of got around the spam resistance, if you like, was to attach a payment to it.

Or be it a very small one. But if you were the spam attacks, that could get costly very quick. How the guys at sea Lightning have got around that without this remain to be seen for me at the moment, whether there's any resistance to it at all or not, I'm not sure yet.

But again, one to watch in the future, I think. Certainly a good point. Yeah, the second part of this update is called, they just called it offers, which is basically the ability to sort of, well, it's in experimental mode at the moment, I should preface that with.

But it enables a couple of things that have not been easy to do on the Lightning network until now. First one is static invoices, so you'll know that aside from key send, which are invoiceless payments, I couldn't go on to my website and put down and put a an invoice on there for anybody to pay.

I would have to serve out a fresh invoice to anybody that wanted to pay me, which again is, which is exactly what like BTC paid server does if you've got lightning activated. So with this update for the sea lightning guys that they've somehow managed

to get static invoices whereby I could just put one static invoice on my website and any number of people could pay that with any sort of value without me needing to do anything and without me needing to serve in the background to repeatedly serve a new one time

after time after time, which is a bit of a, you know, how it compares to key send, I'll be honest, I'm not sure, they sound like they do similar sort of things, but again, this is C lightning, this is the block stream implementation of lightning, which is slightly different, albeit

they sort of work to the same course back, although they do have some slight implementation differences, but yeah, yeah, it's, and what it also allows is recurring payments and subscriptions, so you could set up streaming

payments again to a fixed invoice, which, you know, you could open up quite a lot of different use cases there where I could, you could sign up to a subscription for me for what, for any reason whatsoever, Max, and I could sort of

your wallet could repeatedly, over a certain amount of time, just push small amount of payments every day, every week, every month, whatever it may be, depending on the subscription criteria, so yeah, a pretty promising update there

always been a bit of a mystery to me as to why C lightning isn't as well adopted as LND, I don't know whether LND just came out of the box first, or whether they made it easier at developer level, but it seems to be a bit of an outsider the C lightning implementation

Yeah, it's not something like I really thought about choosing, it was just that I was running a Raspberry Blitz, and I think that comes with running LND with that, it's not something I even thought about, really the different options, but I did have a question on the recurring subscriptions

bit, so obviously I'm running LND, but I've got a recurring subscription to IP2 Tour for whatever it is, 40 sats a day, or I can't remember off the top of my head now, so that's doing recurring subscriptions, is it doing it in a different way than to C lightning

I believe it's pretty much the same way, but again, like I say, just a different implementation, so it certainly looks as though LND has had this sort of functionality in it already, and this looks to me like the C lightning guys just catching up a little bit

But yeah, you're right, I've got exactly the same subscription for my BTC pay server as well, works pretty well, I think you'll agree? Yeah, well the difference is that we're both paying it, but you've actually managed to get it working and there's a point to it

I'm just literally throwing 40 sats a day at it and not doing the next bit, just fucking wasting my money, but we'll get it done one day. I thought yours was up, it's live, isn't it, you just haven't created the store, is that right?

Yeah, I have a great store, and we haven't linked it to the store, but it's just on a long list of other things that need to be done first, so I'll get there at some point

Right, so that covers off the main software updates and countries that I've been grabbing quite a lot, so I'm going to let you take the next one and talk about Strike Global

Strike is something that's really interesting to me, I know a lot of people will say it's not the most private way to use lightning network, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I do see it as a massive use case, I do see it as something that's really interesting

It's something that doesn't just marginally increase the ability for people to send money around the world at zero cost, it's just completely fucking smashing its competitors or I think it will do

And yes, we want more privacy in the space, but I do also think it's important that there is more open finance and more ability for people to send money around the world

And that's what is being allowed here from what I understand, like I don't understand like to go too technical into it, but it seems as though it's going to help a lot of people around the world and that excites me

Yeah, so the two main use cases that I see for Strike, first one is for allowing non-Bitcoin users to interact with Bitcoin, so let's say I'm a merchant, I only accept Bitcoin, you don't even know what Bitcoin is, but you want my services

You could download Strike, link it to your bank card and pay me what gets taken out of your bank account is pounds, what gets put into my Bitcoin wallet is Bitcoin, be that on-chain or lightning

So it kind of removes that barrier a little bit, so as long as people are aware of the trade-offs is that basically obviously you're still interacting with the legacy system, you know, strike knows exactly where you're sending that, or where they're sending that Bitcoin on your behalf

It definitely removes the barrier, as long as people are aware of the trade-offs, and probably the main use case for me that it kind of unlocks and is cross-border payments, so let's say I'm in the UK, Max, and you are in Venezuela

I could pay you in any currency that you want instantly, and all that I interact with is pounds, because I'm in the UK, and then you can receive Bitcoin, you can receive Venezuelan currency, you can receive stablecoins I believe

So they kind of do that swap again on your behalf, so you can imagine the transfer-wise is all the money grams of the world, seeing this and being quite worried by it

Again, the big thing here is that the underlying actual transfer is done over Bitcoin, some of it's on-chain, some of it's off-chain and lightning, and that's why he can do this very cheaply at no cost

I believe that's only the absolute nil cost is kind of like an introductory thing, and there will be a spread introduced in the future, no idea what that looks like yet, but again, one to keep your eye on, but those are the two main use cases that I see that this unlocks

It's massive, these leeches who take advantage of the poorest people on the planet, and the poorer you are, and the less access to banking, you have the more you pay to send what little money you have somewhere else, and it's like a real disgusting system, and they just take advantage of so many people

And it's just exciting to see Bitcoin and the technologies around it, lightning being used to fuck those businesses up, because they shouldn't be doing what they're doing, they shouldn't be able to do what they're doing, and they cannot compete with this, even if there is a slight increase, there is some fees

Obviously they're going to have to come at some point, but they're going to be vastly different to what is already out there, so yeah, fuck those businesses, and I'm very, very glad to see what Jack is doing

Yeah, it looks as though it's going to be a big in the remittance space for sure, one to watch I think, right, next big release that we wanted to cover Blockstream Jade, this is a new hardware wallet from No Surprises Blockstream

Priced at just $40, which I was quite surprised at, it's fully open source, it's built on what's known as the M5 stack, which is kind of like a open source modular hardware set up, bit like kind of like the Raspberry Pi is, you know, it's sort of, you can kind of like roll your own, so it's based on that stack

You can actually build your own if you wanted to, and flash the Blockstream software onto it if you wanted to, one thing to know is that it's got no secure element, bit like the Trezza, so it shouldn't, you know, anybody with physical access to the device

Maybe be able to retrieve the keys, so it's, you know, as long as it's approached in that manner, something to bear in mind, currently only connects to Android phones running Blockstream Green at the moment, it's designed to be like a companion for that, so it only works over USB

You can share addresses via QR code, so it's a good cheap option, some things that I don't like about it, it's got Bluetooth built in, always a bit of a strange one for me, personally speaking, if I want, you know, if I'm going for a hardware wallet, I want it to be secure but stupid

I don't want it to be able to talk to the outside world easily, you know, that's kind of the whole point of cold storage, obviously no iOS support at the moment, I believe that's coming alongside desktop support

It does have a built-in camera, but they haven't utilised it yet, I presume that's coming down the line if they implement PSBT, but they haven't activated that yet and I don't know whether or how far out on the roadmap it is at the moment, so it's, it's, I'm looking at this as kind of a bit of a walled garden,

and I think the price point tells a lot that it's designed to get people into the Blockstream ecosystem and potentially, you know, funnel people towards liquid or anything like that, what's your thoughts?

Well, my thoughts with anything to do with new hardware coming out is the more options, the better, and everything has trade-offs, and like you said, it's cheap, like really cheap, really accessible to people, but then it has those other trade-offs

and yeah, am I going to trust that as much as I trust my coldcard? Nope, would I think that it would be cool to have in maybe like a multi-sick setup or something like that, where you have different hardware wallets

so that you don't have just like one point of failure, you have like four or five or have many you choose to go for, is it useful for that? I think, yeah, definitely.

So, yeah, like I say, for me, the more options the better, the shit stuff will fall to the bottom and the cream will come to the top and people will choose what they think is best for them.

Yeah, exactly. I think if they do introduce PSBT in the future, I think, you know, and utilize that camera, it could have its place, but right now with its current functionality, it's not for me.

I'm always wary of new hardware. I like to let other people do all the testing first and find all the bugs. So here's the thing with the hardware, right? What actually is there out there? Like, if you're using Ledger, stop it. It's fucking crazy.

And I'm someone who started off with Ledger, like that was all that was shilled to me. So, for somebody that's just never heard of either of us before that's got a Ledger, why do you say that?

Well, I say that for a few reasons. Like, the first main big one is that they have just leaked so much data of all their users, everyone who has bought from them.

They have been not particularly upfront about it all. And what it really boils down to and like one of the main reasons that you and I and so many people in the space push back against KYC and push back against storing personal information is because when it is stored, it generally ends up getting leaked.

And that means that everyone who has bought these things or used these things and hasn't either got it sent to a work address or been clever and sent it to somebody else.

Now there are information out there for anyone. And that means someone can just come and knock on their door and say, right, I know that you have one of these ledgers, give me your fucking money or I'm going to smash you over the head with this rock until you do.

And, you know, maybe you can get away with saying, Oh, yeah, well, I do. And I bought loads of fucking XRP. And maybe they'll leave you alone. But you don't know that. And it's dangerous.

So for that reason, like fuck ledger, I really just I'm done with it. And secondly, when I first bought one, like, I didn't really run like a no about running a node. I didn't know any of that sort of stuff.

It just hadn't even learned enough to know to do it. And they had some software, which I got quite comfortable with. And then they brought out this led ledger live software, which is fucking horrible, like really, really horrible.

And you couldn't connect to your own. No. So, yeah, it should be fair. They have fixed now, eventually. Yeah. But I mean, only just, isn't it? I mean, this is fairly recent. They've done that.

Yeah, yeah, it's I think it was just before Christmas from memory. But yeah, completely echo all of your points. Don't buy a ledger.

That said, though, they are the most user friendly one that I've come across. And so like I had a friend come to me the other day and he was like, Oh, yeah, I want to use Casa and so what hardware wallet should I use and all this.

And like love the guards pieces, but he would never ever work out how to use a cold card. He just wouldn't. And loads of people say, Oh, well, anyone can work out. I'm telling you, no, he would not.

So my options are like, his name's not Peter, is it? Yeah, yeah, it was Peter and he was asking me how to use Casa. So I said, you know, what do you use? Trezor, from what I understand, not really secure if someone gets their hands on one user interface. Isn't that great?

And Ledger horrible for all the reasons we've said, but slightly easier to use or cold card, which he wouldn't be able to use. It's just nice to see that there's more hardware coming on. And like, there's more options out there because not everyone is that great with tech and it would be good to have more options for them.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, optionality and competition is always good, particularly when there's high stakes, money involved. So the more options, the better, you know, they're going to keep each other honest and these guys are actively trying to hack each other's hardware and stuff. So it's good to see.

Yeah. All right. Where were we? Education, just one piece that I want to highlight of, you know, the best education that's come out in the last month is the man, the myth, woman, legend, the legend, 6102 has dropped a backup wallet backup guide, which is a super comprehensive

list of why backing up your wallet is important. What sort of methods you can use to do that, be it stamping it into steel, putting it on an SD card, writing on a bit of paper, he covers all of that.

He goes into encrypted backups and how to check your backups, what methods you can use to recover your backups. Just basically, I've said backup a lot, but a very in-depth look at all of the ways, you know, the ins and outs of the do's and don'ts and best practices of backing up your wallet.

And then that's at bitcoin-intro.com/backup and definitely worth checking out. I don't know whether you've had a chance to see it, Max.

In all honesty, no, I haven't, but it's something that is very, very important and it is something that I want to go through again. I have sort of tested my backups and done all of that recently as we were starting to see that price pump because I started getting a little bit worried

and wanted to just double check. So I've gone through some of it already, but it is something I will have a read through because don't test your backups. You can have a real shock in a couple of years when you think you want to access that and get all excited and then you realise actually, no, I've got nothing.

Yes, so the obvious one for people listening is, you know, if you get your hands on a call card or any mobile wallet or anything like before you send any stats into it, create the wallet, write down the seed words.

I like to make a note of the first two or three addresses, even if it's just like the last five or six characters of each address.

Wipe that wallet completely and then go through the restore process where you enter your seed words and your passphrase if you've got one and then go to hit receive again and just check that those addresses match, you know, those ones that you noted down

earlier, if the addresses are an exact match, great, you've recovered that exact same wallet because the crux of the matter is if you get one of those words wrong in that seed word or you get one letter wrong in your passphrase, when you restore it, you've got a completely

different wallet and if you don't know that you've done that, you might send your life savings in and then if you go to recover using your actual seed in two years time, you might be met with a bit of a shock that there's nothing there.

That said, shivers down my spine, just the thought of that is just like, fuck, it's pretty scary. So yeah, it's definitely worth sort of checking and double checking and triple checking because if you're taking on the responsibility of holding your life savings, you need to make sure you're doing it properly.

Yeah, definitely. And last one, I can't believe we've on the last piece already we've only been on an hour, we've kept that concise.

Andrew Chow is a Bitcoin call contributor, he's created a Bitcoin call usage survey, which is obviously a survey on anybody that uses Bitcoin call as to find out how to use it, why they use it, which way they use it, you know, do they, did they download

the call onto their laptop, do they run a running dojo, basically geared towards finding out what the users actually, the way that they interact with Bitcoin call geared towards so that the developers in the future can find out what's important, what's not important, what do they need to focus on, what needs improving.

So yeah, if everybody should go and fill out that survey and do it over tour so that your IP address isn't leaked. But yeah, let's, let's arm the developers with with some powerful information because, ultimately, you know, we all want to be private so that's why it's difficult to try and get this sort of information

out of Bitcoin as you are inherently, and for obvious reasons, you know, the one of the more private parts of the world. But I think it's important that we give that feedback so that the core devs can find out what's important and what they need to work on in the future.

I think it might be worth linking that one in the show notes, Max, so people can go and contribute. Yeah, definitely will do that. Sorry, come on. I was going to say is that takes us to the end of our updates, doesn't it?

It does. It does. I can't believe we got through it in an hour. I was looking at the less thinking that's going to take us like three hours. No, I think that's good, though. I think it's good to keep these concise. And then if people have questions off it, then we can add them into the next month or all that kind of thing.

Yeah. One thing a little jump in and say is that what we just covered there was about 5% of what's on Bitcoin Monthly.News. I just realized that we were talking about it at the start and we didn't even tell people where to go so they can see it.

You can find it at bitcoinmonthly.News. What we just covered there was literally 5% of what's in there. That's what I've personally found important and hopefully you do too. If you want to go and have a look at what we've just been jabbering on about, everything is linked from there.

Yeah. No, I think it was good to sort of refine it down a little bit and there's so much information on there and it's fucking brilliant, the website. But like you said, we'd be here for the rest of our lives going through it, I think, if we broke down every single bit.

So we'd sort of cherry-picked a few bits there, but they were really interesting and it helped me dig in and learn a little bit more about some of those. And hopefully people are listening. It has done as well.

Cool. So, should we hit some of the questions that we've had through Twitter and whatnot? Yeah. I'm pleased to see we got some because I was a bit worried. I was like, fuck, what if people don't ask any questions?

What if people are being a bit shy or can see the tweet? But no, we've had some really good ones, so that's great. Yeah, we got some too. So thank you to everybody that did contribute some questions.

We're probably going to have time to get through them all to be honest with you. Actually, there wasn't a great deal. There was a few. I'll let you hit me for the first one. Okay. So everyone will have to excuse my poor reading here, but let's start from the top.

So we've got one from an anon on Twitter. I don't know if this fits in your podcast topics, but I have a request. I'm looking for guidance on creating a secure and private Linux laptop.

Thinking about a dual boot, but on the fence about that at this point, it seems like the most secure way to do Spectre or to generally separate Bitcoin from a primary laptop thoughts. Right. So there's two things here for me. This kind of don't want to split this into two questions because he's kind of talked about.

He wants a Linux laptop and is dual boot a good idea. And then they've also talked about downloading Bitcoin onto it. So I'm of the opinion with the Bitcoin piece that if you can run have a dedicated device for your Bitcoin software as in the actual node itself.

And I would also, you know, perfect example is a as a Raspberry Pi running umbrella or whatever. I also, I just like to sandbox that away from everything else so that I know that that is my Bitcoin hardware.

So if you can do that, I would say go for it. These things are generally quite inexpensive for most people. So I would say if you can segregate, do it to answer the first question about Linux and dual boot definitely possible.

I'm guessing that the reason that you want to do a dual boot is because you can't cut ties with whatever you're using at the moment. Hopefully not windows.

But it's probably a good way so that you can, you know, you can try out Linux before actually committing to it and wiping your hard drive and going in full bore and going fully straight down the rabbit hole.

So yeah, dual boot is an option. I personally, you know, I'm fully down the Linux rabbit hole now. So I would move forward now. Anytime I get a new laptop. PopOS will be going straight on it. But yeah, dual boot definitely a good option. What's your thoughts Max?

Yeah, I mean, this is something that I've actually been asking you and self banked quite a lot about in the background and guitar as well. And I'm still using a Mac and I want to move across and I want to run Linux.

And it's just, it seems to be the best way to do things. So I'm going to be using PopOS. I haven't done it yet. But yeah, it seems like the best thing to do. And like you're saying, like segregating things does seem to be probably the most logical way. Like I do it with everything is just to try and split risk.

So if you have a few different nodes on different hardware, you're less likely to get fucked the same with your funds, like, you know, a lot of people are like, Oh, well, you're safe enough just having single sick and just having one.

Well, for me, I'd like to split my wrist. So I have a few. So you never risk losing everything. So the idea of having a separate laptop. Yeah, makes sense to me.

Yeah. So, so just to rewind as well is that the reason that you're seeing an increase in Linux adoption, I think is obviously it's open source software, which means much like most of the Bitcoin spaces that

there's a lot of eyes on the code. You know, you and I wouldn't understand it. Max, obviously, but that it gives us confidence. The fact knowing that anybody with the skills and knowledge can look at the code and be able to audit it and say, I would say with a fairly good degree of certainty that there isn't anything malicious in there.

Whereas, you know, Windows, Mac, or closed loop, it's difficult to know what's going on under the hood. Now coupling, you know, a closed loop system with something like Bitcoin where you're managing potentially significant amounts of funds.

But, you know, that's why there's the big push to go open source. Yes, I'll be the first one to say that while it has improved massively. I believe over the last couple of years, Linux is still probably not as intuitive as Mac or Windows because that's what most people

know what we don't know. They're familiar with it. So Linux does seem like a big step for most. But I promise you, it's really not as difficult as it looks. And there's quite a lot of good resources coming out there now as well to help people make the switch.

I think a lot of people are scared of it and is one of those things that probably takes time. So like my, my way I'm going to do it is buy a separate laptop, put pop on it and run the two in parallel just for a little bit of time while I get used to it because I need to use my laptop all the time.

I'm content like I'm on it constantly. So if I suddenly just like sold my other one by this new one and then I can't get something done, then I'm fucked. So, so I'll just have a little bit of time to ease myself in and get used to it.

Wean yourself off that Mac. Yeah, I have to. It's pathetic. Like I'm sat here talking about privacy and how important it is and I'm sat on a Mac. It's fucking stupid. Step by step, bit by bit. There we go. Nice plug. Thank you.

All right, do you want to hit the next one as well? Yes, so here we are. I've got one from Mr Crown, friend of the show. Good friend of mine and our web designer for everything for 21 ism. So shout out to Mr Crown. He has a question as well, which is kind of a longer same theme.

So as I get a new laptop, can I use my old Mac book to install Ubuntu, then create multiple virtual machines here to run different nodes.

So two questions again, answer to the first question. Can I use my old Mac book to install Ubuntu? Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing right now. I've got a MacBook Air running PopOS, which is kind of like a fork of Ubuntu.

It's easy to do. I will dig out the guide that I used for him and you can either include that in the show notes Max or I'll send it to him. Yeah. The second question, can I create multiple VMs to run different nodes? Yes, absolutely.

I'm not a virtual machine expert, but all the little say is when you create these virtual machines, you have to assign some of your actual physical machines resources. So depending on the power of your laptop and the RAM and everything like that, there may be an upper limit to how many you could run.

I'm not even going to try and hazard a guess at how many that would be, but I'm going to guess and say you probably get away with a couple at least. But yeah, be interested and see some feedback on that if he does do it to see how many you can actually run. I think probably going to come down a lot to the spec of his Mac book.

Yeah, okay. Sorry, it's a good way to try out different node implementations without spending a fortune on hardware. Obviously, for those node implementations that do support virtual machines.

Yeah. Oh, well, I'll be interested to see how he gets on. He seems to work most things out, so I'm sure he will work this out. And yeah, maybe there are other people who are listening who have the same thing. They've got an old MacBook lying around and thinking, "Oh, is there a way to use this?"

And watch this space. We'll find out. One thing I will say as well before I ask you the next question, Max, is that keep it simple. Bitcoin actually did a guide on turning your old MacBook into a Bitcoin machine.

It's not specific to virtual machines, but he's done quite a comprehensive guide on repurposing an old MacBook. So again, one to link in the show notes, Max. I'll dig that out for you. Cool. Perfect. Thank you.

Alright, so we've got a question from Crypto Kids. And basically, nice and short one. Thoughts on Spectre DIY? Yeah, he sent me this link before I've checked him a few times. He's got some good guides and bits and pieces and likes to fuck around with these things.

So good to hear from him. Thanks for reaching out with a question. Thoughts on Spectre DIY? All I know is it looks cool. I know fuck all else other than that. What about you? Right. So Spectre DIY basically is they've basically released some software that allows you to build your own hardware wallet.

It's designed so that you buy your own hardware and there's two or three different places that you can get these chipboards and that you buy yourself from just a hardware store. You can put them together quite simply. It doesn't really take much in the way of scale. I believe there's only two or three pieces to it.

Pushed them together, download this software that the guys have created and basically, like say, build your own hardware wallet. So why would you want to do that, I suppose, when there's already a plethora of hardware wallets on there?

So one thing that building your own does is it reduces. The two main things for me is that, number one, if I'm buying from a cold card and somebody intercepts that package and they know, you know, they might swap out that for a, they'll know it's a Bitcoin hardware wallet.

They might swap it out with a dodgy device to be able to try and steal my phone's now cold card. Again, just use them as an example. They do have options in place to combat that sort of stuff.

What I'm just using as an example, whereas if I was to just order an inanimate processing board off the internet, nobody knows what I'm going to use that for. It could be used to build pretty much anything. It's kind of like a generic piece of hardware.

So the chances of you, if somebody intercepting that and going, right, I know that Max is going to build a Bitcoin hardware wallet with this, I'm going to put something dodgy on it trying to steal his Bitcoin.

It almost nullifies that attack. And then you've also got, obviously, the KYC aspect of it. Obviously, you know, you don't strictly KYC for a hardware device, but you are kind of tagging your personal name with the fact that you've bought some Bitcoin hardware.

Obviously, doing that with generic hardware, it could be for anything. So this, again, kind of gives that a bit of an eye ability. And in terms of what's it compatible with, I believe at the moment, it's only used with Spectre desktop.

And I think I don't think because of obviously it's a DIY option that it doesn't come with a secure element, like, say the call card does. So it should be treated with the same protection that you would any of the other hardware wallets that don't come with secure elements.

But I think as a, other than a bit of fun for a nerd like me, I think it has its place in a multi-seat quorum, where you could, you know, knock it together quite simply.

I don't think it was a great deal to it. And the thing I like about it as well is it completely air-gapped, communicates, it's PSBT compatible, and it communicates via QR codes, again, so a good addition to those wanting to tinker a little bit.

And perhaps add it to their multi-sig two or three or three or five setup. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And like, I really like that idea of building something yourself for the reason you've just gone through.

And it seems like it just, it takes another attack vector off the table because, yeah, you're not storing, well, we've just heard what's happened with Ledger, you know, if you ordered one of those, then your information's out there.

Whereas if you did it with this and build this, then it wouldn't really matter because it could be anything like you said. And using it in multi-sig, like we said before, the more options there are available, the better.

It seems like it spreads some risk and there's trade-offs for all of it, but more, more, more, the better. Yeah, definitely. Right. Next question we've got from somebody you had on the show a couple of weeks ago, I believe.

An economist, if you're not following this deed on Twitter, you should be. He is a fucking legend. He's actually asked a couple of questions, so I'll let you riff on the first one if you want, Max.

He said, could you talk about Bisk and their recent decision to remove the reason code from the transactions? How do you see that playing out? Basically, why do you think that they've done this?

To be completely upfront, I don't know what reason code means. I use Bisk quite a lot, but what is the reason code part of the transaction? Is that just literally when you're doing a trade?

Yeah, so if I'm doing a trade with you, the Bisk will give our trade on the app a number, and previously it was advised that you would include that. Yeah, exactly. And I believe, I've not personally experienced this, but I believe that some banks have been picking up on that and they've been blocking these transactions.

So they're taking the move now to say that just don't include anything, which for me seems logical. I can't really see why it would cause any issues going forward.

The only reason I can is if someone is a seller on there, let's say, and they're doing a lot of trades, it could make it complicated for them to know who they're receiving for what trade and just for their accounts on their side, possibly.

You'd have to be doing a huge amount of volume and a lot of trades every day, and also they're normally for different amounts, so you could easily tally it up like that. I think there's more to gain than there is to lose from it.

Yeah, definitely. Just to come back on what you said about the huge volumes, I'd be surprised if there was somebody on Bisk doing a lot of trade volume through their bank. I would imagine that if the volumes did start to get large, the bank would probably start asking questions about where this money's coming from.

So that's the general reason for that one. Can you talk about the mechanics of the new Jade hardware wallet, which we've covered? But he's asking a question around, do blockstream need to sign off on transactions as well?

So this is something that's always put me off blockchain green, is that their standard setup is a two or two multi-sick, whereby one of the keys is obviously in the wallet that's protected by a passcode on your phone.

The second key is you use a two factor authentication, which when you pass that, they give a signature from their server.

So you are reliant, and I think it happened this week, actually, you're reliant on their servers. So if their servers down, you can't easily transact through the wallet because you need that second signature, and if their servers down, they can't provide that for you.

They do provide a backup tool called Green Address Recovery, never used it, but never used blockchain green in any great detail. So let's say blockchain completely just went away. Your funds wouldn't be lost, you would still be able to access them after a time lock period, but you'd have to use this desktop recovery tool.

So that's kind of the way it's been interlinked. And yeah, like I say, something that's always put me off is the fact that, you know, there's never a risk that blockchain can steal your funds, but needing them to be a second sign or has always been a bit of a strange one for me.

I don't know what your thoughts are, Max, as to whether you've ever used it. I haven't ever used it. I've never really been that interested to use it. That sort of stuff concerns me. It doesn't feel as self-suffering as it should be.

I'm sure they have their reasons. I'm sure there's like trade-offs and all this sort of stuff, but it would feel like a bit of a step backwards for me to be using that and sort of relying on their server to sign it.

Because of the reasons you just said. So, I don't know. I'm not that interested in using it personally, but I'm sure it's great. Alright, and do you want to take the last one?

Okay, so we've got, what are the Paynim UI improvements with Samurai Wallet? Is this where he showed you, you could log into an account using a Paynim? This might be best that you answer this one. You are the right master.

Yeah, so the updates that I mentioned on Bitcoin Monthly, they're mainly, I'm just looking at the release notes now, they're mainly kind of UI fixes. I don't think there's any major sort of changes in terms of the way that you interact stuff.

It's kind of the fact that data is saved when you back out the wallet, just minor implementations like that. I will just touch on the bit that he mentioned there about when you can log into an account using Paynim.

I believe from what I can infer that some of the chatter in the Telegram chats that the Samurai team are looking to increase the functionality of what Paynim can do aside from payments, obviously.

And coach transactions and things like that. They did tease a little bit that you could potentially use it as an ID basically to log into services. Now, my interpretation is that that would need any of the services where this was implemented to be compatible with that.

But again, very early days at the moment, I don't know how far along the guys are implementing that. But I think I can see a world in the future where you have a single ID that allows you to receive Bitcoin privately, like Paynim has already do,

but also can provide an online identity for you that allows you to securely identify yourself, be that logging into websites or anything like that. Again, I keep saying it, but want to watch for the future, I think, but that information on that front is a bit sparse at the moment.

Yeah, that sounds, you know, that idea of like having it as like an identity is something that really interests me because I think, you know, I think we're all pretty fucking sick of like how women treated with Twitter and all the stuff that's going on.

And I'm pretty sure that somehow these kind of technologies working together, we're going to come up with something where people not only have full control of their own money and where they send it and when they send it into who, but also the same with the information that they can control and own that as well.

So I don't know if there's some sort of crossover with that kind of stuff or whether it's going to be possible, but that's what it feels like to me like it feels like that could be where these things go.

Definitely. I'm excited for what this could lead to in the future. Certainly want that I will be keeping my eye on it definitely. I'm saying this next bit with a smile on my face. We've got a bit of fun to finish off from the absolute Twitter savage that is Elmo,

who is his handle is, let me get it now, it's at crypto hangover. Do not follow if you are offended easily, but do follow if you quite like a laugh.

We posted out asking for questions and he has come back with some quite interesting ones. Do you want to hit me with them? Max and I'll give you some rapid fire answers.

I think that's the best we're going to go. We're going to dig so deep. We're going to be here for the rest of our lives. Yeah, we'll dive in rapid fire and we'll try and hopefully this covers what you need to know Elmo.

Before you start, I will apologize to all of the Americans listening that are not going to have a clue what's coming. Yeah, yeah. Right, he starts with, I want to know what kind of men you are.

Gravy on chips or curry on chips? I mean, I'm a Northern. It's going to be gravy on chips. Gravy on chips? I thought you'd go curry. All the Northerners, I know they always go curry. I am partial to a bit of curry on chips, but yeah, it's got to be gravy for me.

Okay, fair enough. I would go curry, salt and vinegar or cheese and onion. No contest, salt and vinegar. Nice. Mints and dumplings or panicality? I have no fucking clue what he's talking about here.

Dumplings or panicality? It's like some sort of potato-y dish. I'll choose the first one. Dumplings. Marsboro Snickers. Snickers, easy. A6 or Puma? See, these have got different use cases. A6 for running, Puma for if I'm going out with the boys.

Okay. Sports director JD sport. I'm going to say JD sport. Okay, 4descort or Citroen AX? I mean, nobody should ever own a Citroen. I'm going to say 4descort. Yeah, I agree with you there. VW Golf or Subaru? Golf, I'm a golf man.

Okay, nice me too. Do you like buenos? Is the big fucking one dot dot dot? Let's cut the bullshit and get down to the nitty gritty. Do you like buenos? I assume it means kind of buenos. Kind of buenos, yeah. That's what I took from it. And I'm risking an unfollow from Elmo here, but no.

No. Oh, I fuck with them. I really, really enjoy it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. See, I look at as a bueno as like the Z list of the chocolate bar world. Yeah, it is, but it's still delicious. I really like them. They are shit, but they're good if that makes sense.

They're like, you don't really get much from them, but there's something special about the packaging. Makes you feel like a kid again. Yeah, buenos all day long from me. Wine or weed? I'm a Laura Biden citizen for anybody that's listening, so I'm going to say wine.

Okay, and I would say why not both? Very good point. Broccoli or cauliflower. This is fucking, this is very detailed here. We've only got a couple more broccoli or cauliflower. Yeah, if you're still with us, by the way, thank you.

But for me, broccoli, I can't stand cauliflower. Okay, MSN messenger or AOL? I'm a millennial, so it's got to be MSN messenger, Yorkshire tea or PG tips. This is probably going to get me some more on the follows, but I don't drink tea.

Yeah, me neither. Fuck tea. Short tea. I've got no interest in tea. It's coffee all day long, so neither. Tune in again for the next installment of Elmo's Weird Questions. That's so fucking weird. But yeah, I hope that helped. Yeah, I hope that we answered everyone's questions adequately.

I think that went quite well. I certainly enjoyed it. I really thought that I've learned some bits there and I really hope it is helpful for people. And yeah, anyone who has any questions for the next show, just reach out and yeah, it's been great going through those.

Is there anything else that you wanted to riff on or anything that particularly piqued your interest with those questions? I think we covered the crux of it. I just wanted to say thank you for those that did send the questions in.

Yeah, we did have a mild panic this afternoon that we were just going to have to just read Elmo's questions. That's all we had for a while. I'll be happy to do this. So thank you to those that contributed and we will be doing the same thing again next month.

So if you're listening to this, just keep an eye out on Twitter for when we're asking for the questions on next month's subjects. It'd be good to get some questions from some different guys and make it as interactive as possible. I think this section worked quite well.

Actually, I enjoyed it. It was a good bit of fun. Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you, mate. Thanks for continuing to teach me all these lessons I need to learn and helping everyone out there.

It's a great show. I'm really looking forward to doing more of them. Yeah, it's been good. Final Shield. We've just been talking about all the topics from bitcoinmonthly.news. Yes, I am a domain whore. But yeah, thoroughly enjoyed it, Max. Thank you very much. Look forward to next month.

Brilliant. And just before we go, can you just give me a rough idea on how many domains you do have? Because you have got a serious fucking problem. There is absolutely no scarcity here. You just collect.

So you can actually see most of them. I'll use another shield opportunity. If you go to bitcoin.guide, that's like my index of all of my resources. So have a quick count. One, two, three, four, five, six, eight, nine, ten, eleven that I've published.

And I'm not willing to disclose the ones that I've bought that I haven't yet done anything with. Let's just say it's more than eleven. You were a disgusting man, but I very much look forward to next month about it.

Matt Odell is a bad, bad influence, but yeah, look forward to it. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. All right. Speak soon. Cheers, mate.