EP84 DIY Bitcoin transaction signing device with Seed Signer

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.

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

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

Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is with SeedSigner. You might have already seen these devices on Twitter. They are really, really cool. They're devices that you can build yourself as part of a multi-sick setup.

They really do take away a lot of the attack possibilities. And it's cool to have all these different options. So, it was really good to speak to the man who started it all. He's a really interesting guy.

I loved learning about his Bitcoin rabbit hole story. And I think this is a project that really has some legs. So, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and I hope you enjoy listening. Thank you to Coin Floor UK for sponsoring the show.

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I've done it for a few family and friends. And, yeah, it's a great service. It's a great team. And I believe to this day they are the only exchange doing proof of reserves. Which I think is a pretty cool thing.

If you are going to store your coins in exchange, which I've advised against, but some people are going to do it anyway, it would be good to know they're actually there and not being fractionally reserved.

Next up is crypto cloaks. They have an incredible team. I'm very, very happy to have them as my new sponsor. Most of you are already going to know the different products that they have available.

A lot of you have already got them. I'm constantly seeing people sharing their own personalized node cases, trading cases, and I've got mine coming very soon. I'm excited to see how they've turned out.

And I was discussing this actually in this episode with SeedSigner, just saying like, it's really nice to have something that's tangible because obviously Bitcoin is digital and we're also passionate about this thing.

So when you've got a really cool node case or you've got a hardware wallet mount or any of the different things that are being built, you just feel a little bit more connected and it's really nice to, you know, if someone's going to come into your office, they're more likely to ask the question, "Oh, what's that?"

You know, looking at one of these cases, then they are to ask you about monetary policy. So it's a good way in and I'm really loving what the guys are doing. Anyway, that's enough of my babble.

Enjoy the show and anyone who has any questions do reach out and I can pass them along to SeedSigner or if I can answer myself, I will do. Enjoy. Hey, there, mate. Can you hear me? Yeah, just fine. Can you hear me?

Yeah, that's perfect. I just went and grabbed a beer while you were getting the laptop. Apologies for not telling you that. I keep doing that and not telling people. And they're like, "Oh, I was trying to get on my phone.

It's not working or have to run and get my laptop." So that's my problem. Sorry about that. Oh, it's no worries at all. Welcome to the show. Welcome to Bit by Bit. I'm really looking forward to this chat and just learning a little bit more about you and the project.

I have been told by Bitcoin Q&A that he is a massive fan of this project and I've had a look through your Twitter and everything you're doing. And it just seems really fucking interesting and cool and like a grassroots thing.

So yeah, looking forward to digging in. Yeah, I'm excited to talk more about it. Q&A has been like a lot of help in terms of, you know, we helped him get his setup going. I don't know if it was a week or two ago.

And I know he's kind of big in a hardware and stuff. And I was a little nervous to get feedback about his experience, but it seems like it was a good one. So I was excited that he liked the project and he's helping us out with some visibility for sure.

It's good to get these things out there because, you know, these smaller projects seem particularly interesting to me. I love from what I understand that this is built from hardware that people will put together themselves and that it would be fantastic for multi-sig.

It's fantastic to not rely on just one hardware manufacturer if you are in a multi-sig setup. And from my understanding, it's fairly low cost as well. Is that right? Yeah, the, you know, there's some variance depending where you are in the world, but the general kind of consensus is that for less than 50 US dollars,

you should be able to pretty easily get, you know, the necessary hardware and get into it. That's cool. And how did this idea come about? How did you, or why did you decide you wanted to start building this and it was a project worth your time?

Yeah, it was just kind of not to get too far into my backstory, but I guess... No, no, that's probably a logical place to start. So why don't we start there? What's the backstory? How did you find yourself in this crazy Bitcoin world?

So I first heard about Bitcoin in late 2012 or early 2013. I'm a retired police officer, as you can tell, from probably my accent. I'm from the United States. And I worked kind of just as a local cop, but spent the majority of my career doing digital forensics and, you know, more of what you consider a lab setting.

So not out driving in a police car, et cetera, et cetera, more just in a, an office kind of environment tinkering with hardware and doing forensic analysis on computers and phones and hard drives and all sorts of digital things.

Bitcoin had come up in a case that a coworker was working where... I've told the story before, but the reader's digest version is there was a local kid who had gotten a pretty high-end gaming computer for his birthday or Christmas or something like that that had a decent GPU on it.

And this was back during the period of time where you could still relatively profitably mine Bitcoin with a GPU. So he was mining Bitcoin from his parents' basement or wherever. And then taking the coins that he'd been mining and going on to the Silk Road

and purchasing smallish amounts of marijuana that he would have delivered to his doorstep, he'd repackage it, take it to school, sell it to friends and classmates, and was making probably a decent little pile of money on it.

Probably flag him as like a future entrepreneur. But Bitcoin was obviously a part of this and I'd heard about it at work and it didn't make sense to me. I googled it and tried to understand it.

I thought maybe it had to do with kind of like folding it home or SETI if you're familiar with those. So folding it home is kind of like a crowd-sourced compute project where... And I'm not into biochemistry, but it's where I believe it's...

I don't know if it's DNA sequences, but it's some sort of humanitarian effort where they use other people's CPU cycles to attempt to find cures for diseases or find medications or... I don't know.

And then SETI is an acronym for the search for extraterrestrial life at home. So they would... They have these microphones that, from what I understand, listen to outer space and they use other people's compute cycles to just run algorithms over the sound to see if they can pull out what sounds like intelligent chatter,

whether it's whatever kind of frequency of radio waves. If there are patterns that kind of would be consistent with some sort of extraterrestrial life. And so it's one of these things that you could just...

I think you load a little bit of software on your computer and it has access to your CPU and you're not using it just to do some compute work. So I wasn't sure. It didn't make sense to me why people would be donating their computers to this monetary network.

It just didn't make sense. So I put it down for a few months, came back to it and started reading more. I'd probably heard about it again through another case. And once I kind of understood it, it was down the rabbit hole and I was hooked.

I did a little bit of early ASIC mining and was on Bitcoin talk a lot and just kind of like kind of watching this whole movement sort of grow and develop. It was super fascinating to me. I was probably at a point in life where I was looking for some investments and had played around with something called Lending Club,

which is like one of the earlier peer-to-peer lending platforms, and just looking at different investments, kind of learning about investments. And it was just kind of exactly the right time that Bitcoin across my path.

That's an interesting way in. I wonder what was going through your head as a police officer at the time, working a case where it's being used by someone to buy and distribute drugs. Was your initial thought on it that this was something bad and that that changed?

Or were you just curious from the start? I think I was just more curious and there was a little bit of sense of wonder, like how does the game theory for this work? How does it play out? I think early on, one of the messages from the Bitcoin community has been that money like a lot of other things is a tool.

Groups, I guess, at the fringe of society sometimes are the first to adopt new technologies that seem sort of dicey to the rest of us. The early automotive industry was really brought forward in leaps and bounds here in the United States by people who were bootlegging and distributing alcohol.

There's where a lot of the early optimizations came in terms of cars that were faster and more reliable and the pornography industry was instrumental to the growth of not just the internet, but just the growth of video cassettes for consumers in the late '70s and early '80s.

So it kind of made sense that maybe the fringes of society kind of find and make use of these new technologies earlier than maybe the rest of people. It's like a need, like you're saying, about bootleggers.

They need the faster, more reliable cars because otherwise they're going to... Well, they're not going to be bootlegging anymore. And it's the same with Bitcoin and all of these things are absolutely right.

It's the people with need. Yeah, and that's the thing with Bitcoin is... I mean, that's the thing that's drawn to me and there's such a need. It's just like such a massive change that it's forever fascinating.

Like, there never seems to be a day where I wake up and I'm not fascinated by something that's happening in this space. There's always something and that's just people innovating because they find need for it.

And so is that how you got into what you're doing with the seed signer? Was it something you needed for yourself or were you just sort of tinkering? It was something I needed for myself to fast-forward a little bit.

I was kind of like enamored with Bitcoin, listen to podcasts. And it was on Reddit was at one point the Bitcoin Reddit was huge. So I followed all of that through the bear market of 2014, 15, 16.

And then 2017 came and I'd kind of just been buying coins a little bit here and there over time. And they were starting to grow in value and grow in value. And I kind of had made this mental agreement with myself that if the Bitcoin I was holding ever gave me the ability to pay off our house

so we could kind of start like a debt-free financial life, I'd always kind of put it in the back of my mind that if that opportunity arose that I would kind of, it would, it was something I should seriously consider.

So we get into 2017. The price is starting to rally. Yet there's this fork worth thanks to Roger Ver. And I started to get really nervous and probably part of it to fast-forward a little bit.

Part of it was that my security setup wasn't very good. It was starting to feel like I had a lot of money on some computer printouts like in my underwear drawer or something like that. And you start to wonder whether or not like the wealth that you have on paper is real.

So we cans freaked out, sold everything in, it was probably like March or April of 2017. And sold out kind of just as the bull run. And I decided that if I lost the ability to pay off my house because some developers were arguing about parameters and software, like I'd probably never forgive myself for that.

So we can sold everything and then the price just kept going up and up and I didn't want to think about Bitcoin for the rest of the whole year. I took a break from Bitcoin and started pursuing some other interests and kind of catching up on other areas of my life, whatever.

And then of course it peaked in late 2017, 2018. It's kind of like they say with the mafia like you tried to get out but you just kind of got pulled back in and Bitcoin crossed my radar again and over the next like six months I found myself listening to all the same podcasts again

and a lot of the kind of social aspect of it had migrated off of Bitcoin talk and read it onto Twitter so I started becoming more active on Twitter. And like this time it was obviously curious about where the markets headed but it was for much more ideological kind of reasons.

Like some things like once you become aware of inflation as a thing and how that works and how it really steals from people over time, once you see that it's tough to unsee it and you start framing a lot of your decisions and mental models along that.

So I don't want to digress too much. So I get back into Bitcoin, I start buying the dip a little bit in 2018 and 2019 and I wanted some sort of way to split up the private keys so they could be stored in multiple different locations and there was this website, it may still be in existence but it was called bitaddress.org.

And one of the things that they allowed you to do on this website was you could take a private key and split it up into multiple parts using a cryptographic trick called Shamir's Secret Sharing.

And I had gotten an offline computer, saved a local copy of this website and set up this whole thing. So I was storing Bitcoin in one of these broken apart private keys and I had the pieces in a few different geographic locations and I was kind of waiting for multi-sig to become more usable from an average user standpoint.

And there were tools that were starting to emerge. CASA, the custody service, it kind of emerged but I wasn't super keen on paying somebody a monthly fee to be holding Bitcoin over the long term.

And unshamed had come up with caravan. And I was kind of getting ready to look at and I'm kind of evaluating the different advantages of some of these different solutions that were emerging because I wanted to get away from the Shamir's Secret Sharing to more of like a native on the protocol multi-sig setup.

So I am listening to one of my usual podcasts and this one happened to be Stefan Lavera. And he's interviewing a guy called Michael Flaxman who has written this kind of like research paper called the 10x Bitcoin security guide.

And I have a background in forensics which I jokingly kind of call adversarial computing because it's not necessarily like you're doing information security where you're trying to lock down a network but you're still highly aware of the work you're doing and how it's going to be perceived

and you're usually trying to make sure that the information you're working with is nowhere near the internet is on a private segregated network and when you're working with mobile phones you're always trying to make sure that they're off of the cellular network and not connecting to Wi-Fi.

So I already had kind of a security minded kind of approach mentally and his paper just totally resonated with me in terms of some of the ideas and just simple things that you can do to increase your security and what kind of setup is the ideal setup and one of the products or projects I should say that he referenced in his paper

with Spectre desktop. I don't know. Are you familiar with Spectre? Yeah, yeah. I use Spectre every day and absolutely love it. I've had been on this show and we've just featured them for 21ism last block for our code block.

Massive fan. Yeah, me too. And so I just heard about this program called Spectre in the podcast that I referenced and so I downloaded it and started just kind of like, you know, peeking it.

I already had a full note up and running and kind of just started peeking at some of the features and started looking at their GitHub and that's how I came across that, you know, in addition to Spectre desktop, which is the multi-sig coordinating software, they had their own do-it-yourself signing device, too,

which there were some finer distinctions in terms of how that is different from a wallet. But I looked at their, the specs for the Spectre do-it-yourself signing device and I have, you know, a little bit of a hardware background, too, for my work in forensics and it looked like a do-able project.

So I built one and then I started, you know, tinkering with setting up just like a test, two of three wallet and moved some coins to it once I'd gotten everything set up. And the first time that I used part of the value proposition of the Spectre DIY is that it uses air gap signing with QR codes.

And the project itself has kind of like a development board which is very similar to like the main circuit board for a cell phone and then you attach a third-party scanning, like a barcode and QR code scanner to it.

And the first time that I scanned a transaction in from a QR code on my laptop screen and then all the information for the transaction was displayed on the Spectre DIY hardware wallet and I, you know, look through the details and approve it.

And then it displays a QR code on the screen that you show back to your laptop via the webcam. And the first time that I, you know, signed a transaction with that method was just like a revelation to me.

It was so cool. It was like the first time I sent a Bitcoin transaction or the first time I'd used the lightning network. It was one of these things where they say like sufficiently advanced technology is, you know, indistinguishable from magic.

And it was just like so cool. Yeah, it is a magical. I was just going to say still to this day, some of the things, just like lightning, especially because it's newer to me, just received like sending out an invoice and then a second later just seeing those sets come in still feels like magic.

No matter how many times I do it, I'm just like, fuck, this is cool. Someone's just sent that from America and it's here and I own it. That's amazing. And I'm not, I've not gone to the stage where I'm using multi-sig yet, but I can imagine that that is a lot of fun and you do feel a lot more secure with it.

Yeah, and yeah, totally like what you're saying about lightning resonates with me. My daughter, I pay her an allowance in Bitcoin using lightning and she'll like, you know, do whatever chores she's supposed to do and then she'll bring me a QR code and I scan it with my phone and like, bam, it's there.

That's so good. Does she have like a lightning wallet on her phone or something like that? Yeah, she's just using a custodial one called Blue Wallet, but then I use strike to kind of get a few bucks into the strike account that immediately gets converted into sets for her.

But it's super, super slick, super slick. So I probably still have a little, so I'm using Spectre. I've got this hardware wallet and I also have tinkered with 3D printing in the past and that same security researcher called Michael Flaxman put a tweet out and he was like, this is an amazing wallet from Spectre,

but there's no sort of case for it out there. So I saw his tweet and I, you know, got out the 3D design software I'd been using and came up with a relatively rudimentary case for it, but it looked nice and it did the job.

And I ended up offering to send him one and he graciously accepted and we started DMing a little bit back and forth about some of his research and he told me about a different idea that he'd had to use a very specific version of the Raspberry Pi 0.

So a lot of people who listen to your show are probably familiar with nodes from building them like what a Raspberry Pi is. There's a smaller version of the Raspberry Pi called a Raspberry Pi 0 and there's a very specific version of that Raspberry Pi 0, which is just a smaller version of the kind of stock Pi,

that doesn't have any sort of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth hardware built into it. So it's just a naturally network isolated kind of device. He talked about using one of these Raspberry Pi 0s with no Wi-Fi to attach a little screen and some controls to it and to be able to generate the either 12th or 24th word of a seed phrase

that you'd gone through, there's a few processes, but if you generated say the first 23 words of a seed phrase, you could have an offline machine that would generate that last word which acts as kind of a checksum for the first 23 words.

And you wouldn't have to worry about doing it on your laptop and having some of your seed words either get picked up by a key logger or maybe get sucked into temporary internet files or making sure your system's offline, not connecting the network or something leaking into memory, et cetera, et cetera.

You have this little standalone computer that you know for certain is not talking to the internet and not talking to anything. So I kind of was intrigued by that idea and ran with it and I had some history with programming.

I'd taken a couple of classes in Java like way back in the late 90s and I bought a little screen that, you know, it's a tiny screen that is like 240 pixels by 240 pixels and it has kind of like a joystick and a few buttons, basically like a little video game controller.

And I just went step by step to figure out like can I run the test code that's associated with this, that's provided by the manufacturer that's associated with this. And then, you know, instead of running the test code, can I get my own letters or pictures to appear on the screen?

And then can I use the controls to maybe cycle through some letters of the alphabet? And like little, little step, baby step by baby step, I got it to the point where you could enter 23 words into it and it would run some code that would calculate the 24th word so that if you were trying to come up with a seed phrase

in an entirely kind of independent sovereign way to where maybe you picked the first 23 words out of, you know, the fullest of 2048 out of a hat or something like that. There are some other methods, but using your own personal meat space entropy, you could generate the first 11 or 23 words of your seed,

and now you could use this little device to calculate the last word, and you could basically generate a private key in almost entirely a trustless manner. It's still the issue of, you know, have you reviewed the code that's being used on the little Raspberry Pi device, but a huge leap forward

in terms of instead of the typical process where when you initialize a hardware wallet, it runs some sort of code that creates randomness that might be based on, you know, the system clock or whatever it's based on.

There's a certain amount of trust involved that, so this is like being able to generate a private key to store Bitcoin in almost an entirely trustless manner. And so I kind of started sharing some of the interface and some of the concepts on Twitter, and it seemed to resonate with some people,

and so I started toying around the interface and thought like, "You know, I wrote a little program to where you could convert 100 dice rolls into a private key if you didn't want to go through the time of creating the list of the 2048 words, and you could just take 100 dice rolls and create a private key."

So I wrote a little module to do that, started sharing that, people seemed to like it, and then I got this idea, you know, I have the Spectre DIY that I love so much and this little Raspberry Pi with the screen and controls, if I was able to add a camera to it, like, it could probably function as a signing device,

but at a significantly lower price point than the DIY, and, you know, it kind of just a technical challenge, and I do this kind of thing. So I start going back to just testing things, and like, you know, it's 240 pixels by 240 pixels, enough to display a QR code

that it contains enough information to make it viable to work with your computer's laptop, and then like, can I write the code to get the camera working to where it'll automatically recognize one QR code, and then maybe animated QR code where, you know, something else will display a sequence of QR codes,

and you can pick up those in the sequence, logically organizing the code, and then decode, you know, the information that's conveyed through the text information that's embedded in the QR code.

So I start playing around with Warren, came up with a proof of concept that was clumsy, but basically did the exact same thing as the Spectre DIY, such that you could input a seed phrase, you could generate what's called an extended public key with it, communicate the extended public key to what I'd call a multi-sig coordination software,

and all that means is that this software does the job of communicating with a Bitcoin protocol, and it'll input your public keys and do the necessary calculations to combine them in such a way that it creates a multi-signature wallet.

So you can create the expubs, communicate them to your Spectre, in this case, multi-sig coordinator, and then once you have your multi-sig wallet set up, you can create transactions using Spectre, be able to ingest them into what I'll call now a seed signer, and review the transaction details,

and then basically all the seed signer does is proves that it knows the correct private key to authorize the transaction and communicates that back to Spectre in this case. And that's kind of a high-level overview of what it does, but I am super excited about Spectre and Ben, as well as one of their other developers.

I think he's one of the founders, Stepan, has been super supportive and helped me a lot, you know, and just kind of with some of the learning of coding that was necessary to get seed signer together, and seed signer relies on a Python library that Stepan wrote, and he was super generous with his time in, you know,

answering questions about how to integrate that into my code, and more, the other Spectre co-founder has been, you know, super supportive of kind of what I've been doing, and they're just great guys all around.

Yeah, it's a fantastic project. I love it. I don't use it for multi-sig yet, though. I only use it for single, but I just find it to be really slick, really usable, and it seems to have a lot of eyes on it as well, which gives me some confidence.

Right. But yeah, I was interested to hit. When you said about talking your seed signer talking to Spectre, and you're talking about it using a QR code, is this something that could possibly be done not just with a QR code, but also PSBT, or is that maybe something that could come down the line,

or you just thinking it would just be done by QR code, and then maybe other devices in that setup would use PSBT? No, that's a great question. Actually, it does use PSBT. What is being communicated between, you know, Spectre DIY or seed signer and Spectre desktop is just the QR are basically an optical version of the data

that's inside of a PSBT. So you can do the same thing like cold card does where you take that PSBT and you put it onto like a micro SD card swap between the two devices, but the QR codes are just another way of moving that data between the two devices.

And I'd argue it's a little bit more secure way to do it. I mean, I think that sending PSBTs back and forth with a micro SD card is already a huge jump, and it's like there are definite security advantages to that, but I think the QR codes are, you know, just a little bit, even better security model.

What's the thinking behind that? Is it just because nothing touches a computer that's online? You're thinking effectively that when I do it, because I use cold card, so if I was to do a PSBT, put that onto a micro SD and then transfer it across, I put it into my laptop.

It is your thinking that, well, because that's now inserted into a laptop that's online, there could be some sort of vulnerability or way something malicious could happen. Is that what you're saying?

That's basically it's like, like I said, with a background in forensics and a little bit of information security, it starts to get into like a tin foil hat thing. We like that though here.

We'll talk about like, when you use like a ledger or a trisor and you have it plugged into your computer's USB drive, it's just like devices that are not USB connected or just inherently more secure than devices that are.

It's just the USB protocol allows for kind of like maybe some kind of security vulnerabilities because that's how you're updating the firmware and code could execute. So something that's not connected via USB is just more secure than something that is.

And then have you ever heard of the story of Stuxnet and the Iranian nuclear centrifuges that were compromised that way? I haven't. So you can Google this or look it up on Wikipedia, but there was this this is kind of like a super interesting information security kind of case study or real world sort of thing that happened.

So Iran has a whole offline network of computers that managed their nuclear program and the way the story goes like this this whole system was offline. It was a system of network computers but it never touched the internet and that was a security precaution so that hackers or whatnot wouldn't be able to work their way into the network.

And no one knows where Stuxnet originated from whether it was from Israel or whether it was the CIA in America or somewhere else but obviously for some people in the world a lot of people in the world Iran having a nuclear problem is a security concern and so there was a big desire to somehow get into

their network and sabotage some of their nuclear reactors and what they eventually ended up doing was they did an airdrop of thumb drives over one or more of some of the Iranian nuclear facilities.

If it's like people patrolling the grounds or maybe in a parking area where people are going to their cars but anyhow they find like a few of these random thumb drives laying on the ground and somebody at some point takes them to their offline system that's on this Iranian nuclear network plugs it in and unbeknownst to them when they plug

that thumb drive in some code was able to execute and it got a foothold in the Iranian nuclear network and eventually this code I don't know the the super technical details as far as you know how the code propagated through the network or how it figured out which systems it needed to execute on but eventually the code that had got onto

the network from one or more of these thumb drives you know sabotaged the nuclear center fuses such that they overheated and it caused a bunch of their resources to overheat and be destroyed so that's kind of crazy it is and I'm probably not telling the story all that great but anybody who's listening can google it and there's some

interesting stories out there about it so that's kind of the idea of when you asked about QR codes versus QR codes versus moving that micro SD card back and forth it's pretty far fetched and you know the security vulnerability may realistically not be there but I think QR codes present a little bit of

a more secure model to move the data now that isn't to say could you leak a private key through QR codes absolutely I like to say that like for that to happen through a seed signer probably seed signer and specter would have to be colluding for you know my project to somehow make it such that private key representation

were to show up in a QR code and then specter would have to obviously be programmed to recognize it and exfiltrate it in some way but yeah that's again getting into the tinfoil kind of weeds but we kind of have to be there right if you want I'm sorry we kind of have to be there with this tinfoil hat stuff because you know certainly for me

and for a lot of people that I speak to in the Bitcoin space we are talking about generational wealth we are talking about this being a lifeline for freedom and that the thing that would scare me more than anything else would be a security breach and having an issue or losing my Bitcoin because

I believe this is the greatest asset on the planet and it can do amazing things so to think about it being taken from you is really scary and for that reason like we have to be responsible and think tinfoil hat wise and be as cautious as possible and I think you know that's a thing that

although I'm not set up with it yet multi-sick really makes a lot of sense to me because you're always going to have like you're always going to have with with single-sick different developers and different teams will say different things and believe in different security models so you know I'll speak to you and you'll say QR code

PSBT QR code is the best and then if I speak to Rodolfo he'll say no that's not the best PSBT over microSD is the best and being a non-developer non-techy I even just like well I don't bloody know then it would make sense is if I have a few different devices using different methods that all would have to be compromised

and Spectre desktop would have to be compromised for me to have a problem and that you know you talk about microflaxman saying 10x improvement on security you know I don't know whether it's 10x I couldn't possibly work out how to work something like that out but it definitely seems like a big big step up huge step up

and another thing to point out with multi-sig is it's a little bit more forgiving like if you should have some sort of data license where you would lose a private key you know say if you have a three of five set up if you screw up you know your custody of one or two of those keys or

just set them up wrong or something goes wrong multi-sig can be like a little bit more forgiving in terms of like with with one private key it's kind of like a little bit of having your eggs in one basket kind of thing. Yeah I think the thing is for me with multi-sig what's put me off is

I'm not hugely technical I'm getting better I'm doing my best I'm not someone who is willing to say well I'm not technical so I won't bother I'm always trying I'm just not particularly good over there but the thing that puts me off for now is speaking to people like Bitcoin Q&A who are far more technical than I am

and him saying I'm still not 100% comfortable I'm still I'm still not there and so when people like that aren't there it makes me think well if they're not there I'm certainly not but what I would be willing to try and I am soon to try for 21 is a many way with Sparrow this time is to do a multi-sig but just keep a tiny

amount of funds on it just to try and get comfortable with it and see how I get on because I think that's probably the best step is just like try it get comfortable if you make a mistake or you fuck up then it's going to be you know a few sats rather than your life savings right and I would even also say like even before

you put a tiny amount of money you know into a main net multi-sig you know getting a getting a pruned test net node setup is super easy and it only takes up you know potentially less than 5 gigabytes on a laptop or something like that so even like test net could be another baby step even before you get to the main net

thing just to move some coins around and get comfortable with the mechanics of how it works yeah good idea you have never used a test net I'm always just a little bit reckless and I've lost funds occasionally now doing things wrong but I guess it makes me focus a little bit more when it's real money on the

line I don't know if I'd take it as seriously somehow I should do obviously but I've never I've just never done it so what would I do I just download that software and then where would I get these test net coins from is there like a kind of like in the old school bitcoin days there are still

test net faucets out there where you can just go in and paste a deposit address in there and they'll send you like a small amount of test net coins and you can a lot of time send them back to the test net faucet just to kind of show that the transactions are working but yeah

good faucets are a little bit harder to find but they're out there I've tweeted out a few links to them okay yeah cool I might have to give you a shout when I get to that point I want to try it right and I like what you're saying with like you know it's all of this is a process when bitcoin first started

out and early people were holding coins you know a lot of them were holding coins just in their bitcoin core hot wallet that was on their laptop or their desktop or whatever and then you know hardware wallets kind of started to become a little bit you know more accessible and probably in the beginning people were like

yeah I don't trust you know those hardware wallets very much I think I'd just like to keep my coins here in my bitcoin core wallet because I can trust that code and I think it's just a process of the technology improves and over time as more people use it it's kind of like a Lindy effect and it gets more credibility

and gets smarter people you know building on top of these subsequent different kinds of innovations in terms of more and more secure securely storing your bitcoin but I think I think we're gonna start to I don't know make a prediction with a timeline but I think you're gonna start to see some of these

more traditional wallet manufacturers like Ledger, Trezor, Coldcar start coming up with products that will begin to integrate some of the QR standards that are emerging for different devices just as part of a progression towards you know just a little bit a little bit more secure model

and it's nice to have so many different options out there it's good I mean what I really like is with what you're doing is that these parts are off the shelf and it takes away that attack vector for me of someone knowing what you're storing because a device has been sent out to you you know you

have a coldcard sent out to you and if somehow somebody finds out that's been sent to you there's no question what you're using it for with Ledger you could be shit coining and they might not bother because you might be holding a load of nonsense but with something like that that is bitcoin only they know whereas with building something

yourself and you're getting parts that could be used for other devices you know ordering a Raspberry Zero and the other bits is not obvious to anyone it could be used for many different things and I like that idea I feel like that takes away an attack vector that other devices could potentially yeah you could

be found to be a Hodler basically I think it takes away a couple of attack vectors one is are you familiar with the retirement attack? somebody could covertly build some sort of predictable logic into a random number generator that was implemented in a hardware wallet and unbeknownst

to everyone this code is there for a number of years and then when they decide the timing is right they can walk away and via having knowledge of the vulnerability be able to start sweeping people's private keys that's one attack that I think this could mitigate because just like just like Spectre is a bring your own node program

the likely direction for Seed Signer is that it's a bring your own entropy kind of device so in terms of generating a private key just within the code on the device I don't think we're gonna ever do that because I think it's as long as you're doing it the correct way I think bringing your own entropy is probably

a better way to do it but the other one I was going to talk about was like you said you know if you're storing Bitcoin on a ledger they have a registration process whereby you provide them some amount of personal information and you know we saw through that sadly could open up some people to like a ten dollar wrench attack

is the ten dollar wrench attack is because of inflation it used to be five. yeah that's I mean that's a massive one it's really bad and you know for that I would never use ledger again I'm really that's pissed me off the whole way it was handled and everything else and it also feels just so backwards it feels

ledger was the first device I ever used it was just like when I came in it was what all the YouTube influencers and all that nonsense I was watching at the time were suggesting and it seemed easy enough and I used it I didn't know even what a node was or how to run it or any of that stuff so I just

you know took my coins off exchange and put them on this thing and that was it but the more I've got into this stuff I'm thinking how stupid was I to trust this device without adding any entropy I'm just completely trusting them and then how stupid was I given them all my details and how stupid was I

putting all my transactions through their node and and using a web interface and it just it seems to me that these guys should not be operating that way like it it just seems it seems dangerous and stupid and they should know better and you know I'm not saying tone deaf to the ethos of you know what Bitcoin is yeah

it really is and you know obviously I can't make anything myself so you know I can't really complain but yeah it just it doesn't fit with the ethos and I know they shit coin and they do all that sort of stuff so maybe they should stick to that and you know the Bitcoin wallets

should be along the lines of what you're building and what cold cards building and not having web interface is not having USB to have to talk through USB cable and all this stuff it just yeah it does not seem smart whatsoever so while we're well we've kind of talked a little bit about the hardware

maybe I could provide a little more detail on like the hardware components yeah that'd be cool overview of the process of building one looks like so I mentioned before a Raspberry Pi Zero version 1.3 that doesn't have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and there are two other primary components one of which is a very specific wave share brand combination

display screen and controls that runs about $15 depending on where you buy it and it has to be a very specific version of that like I mentioned before 240 pixels by 240 pixels because that just our code is written for that resolution so if you use something with a different resolution the text and everything

just isn't going to render correctly. The third component beyond the Raspberry Pi and the screen is just a very stock inexpensive Raspberry Pi Zero compatible digital camera and those you know you'll pay anywhere from less than $5 to you know maybe 10 depending on the retailer there's most cameras will work with it there's a couple that I

recommend in the github repo just because I've tried those and tested them and they also fit into the 3D printed exposure we've designed but other ones will work too it's just kind of a matter of just it being a camera that's designed to be compatible with the Pi so you have these these three things

and the one wrinkle with the Raspberry Pi is the screen connects to the Pi Zero using what are called GPIO pins so if you've seen a Raspberry Pi they have those pins that stick up I think there's 40 or 42 it's escaping right now but you know the pins that stick up that provide the interface for different

peripheral devices it's it's really hard to find really a Pi Zero much less a Pi Zero 1.3 with those pins installed so you have to go one of two routes to get the pins installed one is to you know buy the pins separately and get a soldering iron and teach yourself how to solder and which sounds intimidating to a

lot of people who haven't done hardware work but with a couple of YouTube videos I've talked to plenty of people that have never done soldering before in their life and after a little bit of practice and some YouTube videos like they were able to get it done just fine or the other

option is somebody in our seed siner telegram group came up with there's kind of a gadget where it's a set of these GPIO pins that come with a jig and you take a hammer and you kind of tap the pins into the Raspberry Pi gently and when you're tapping it it's causing a little bit of metal down at the bottom to expand

that makes the necessary contacts with the board and so that's kind of a way if you really don't want to have anything to do with soldering that's another way to get those pins attached to to be able to make the project work so you got these you got these pins attached to the Raspberry Pi Zero once those are attached you can just

kind of push the screen assembly on it just slides onto those pins and then it's just a matter of connecting the camera with a camera cable it's like a ribbon cable that's compatible with the Pi Zero and those are the three components you need to have the functioning device cool and it doesn't need a fan or anything like that

it doesn't get too hot yeah no there's no it doesn't overheat a required fan and I should mention like a micro SD card but usually people have those kind of laying around or can get their hands on one that's so what sort of time would it take for somebody to put this together it sounds I'm not going to say simple

but it sounds like a reasonable sort of weekend project where you can just say oh you know I'm going to build one of these and do a little bit of soldering it's not not the end of the world how long do you think the average person takes to build one of these I think definitely under an hour I have a I have a YouTube video in the

github repository where it's probably 10 or 15 minutes that goes from well but some of that video sped up that goes through the whole like starting with the soldering and I kind of sped the video up through that because it gets tedious watching you know soldering pin after pin but

definitely like an hour or less I think is a totally reasonable target to be able to do it and I'm super encouraged by I've kind of watched the whole Bitcoin standalone full node with the Raspberry Pi thing of all over time and I've been super impressed how the like get on roll and my node and some of these

other projects have really kind of distilled it down to a simple process of getting up and running with that from like giving a high degree of certainty that you're ordering the right parts to you know writing the full packaged image to the micro SD in the beginning I probably would have wondered like

how many people are going to sit down and order a Raspberry Pi and figure out how to get the opponents together and stuff but that has become like a very kind of almost like a rite of passage for a lot of Bitcoiners is to get their own standalone node running so I'm hopeful that once you've got your

node up it kind of becomes inevitable that the next thing you do is going to is going to put together you know do it yourself signing device so that you can store Bitcoin without having to rely on you know any third parties necessarily I think you're right I think that will be the next step and I think most people enjoy it I've certainly

enjoyed building nodes and you know not that kind of person who would normally think I would enjoy it but I really did and most people I speak to who have built them really enjoy it so this sounds like just a fun project that you can get your teeth stuck into and as multi-sig becomes more and more simple to use and

more sort of the standard where people feel confident because those around them are using it I can see this really taking off and I think it's nice as well that you've got the cases and I've seen on your Twitter I'm not sure if it's like a hideaway or something but it's like a little pill with like a screw on thing is that to hide it away

once it's built or something yeah that's essentially like once you've got these components at first I had the components like put together with like some double-sided tape and whatever yeah and like I mentioned I've dabbled with 3d printing in the past so the challenge was to take these three components

that are kind of this awkward pile of pieces and build it into something that like that might get people even more interested so that's how I came up with the orange pill design I think Bitcoiners because bitcoins themselves are you know kind of a virtual good that you can't put your hands on I think Bitcoiners kind of like

really treasure different devices and memorabilia and such like that so it the idea was to like something fun that people would see that and be like that I'd like to have one of those kind of a thing it's kind of been an interesting journey with the project because as you try to spread the word and get more people interested in it

you know at first you think this is an open source project I'm not really selling anything I don't need to focus on like you know marketing or you know anything like that but as you get more excited about the technology and you want to make more people aware of it you kind of realize that you are selling something except

it's even harder in a way because when you're selling like a hardware wall or something like that the proposition is like you send me money and I will send you this device and it will solve your problems but getting people excited about you know a do-it-yourself hardware project almost has like a little bit higher bar because

you're trying to get people excited about first going out and buying the hardware that they need and then like you know sitting down and actually like investing their time and what is you know not a hundred percent certain process that they're going to do it correctly and it's not a hard thing but

you know there's I've kind of shifted over time to I'm still active with development but I'm also focusing more energy on being active on Twitter and trying to raise awareness with you know different groups within Bitcoin and getting on podcasts and talking to people just because I think is more people

become aware of not just this project but optical signing as a security model and stuff like people with more talent not just programmers but people who you know can do everything from build websites to design logos you know I've had a lot of been really fortunate to have people

ping me and say how like how can I help and somebody recently just came with a logo for the project I've secured the seed signer.com domain it's not there's nothing there yet but there's a guy helping me build a website so we can kind of collect all the information into one place and it's just the more

people you get using it and excited about it I think just the better not just this but the better you know projects in general will become definitely definitely and so have you found as you've taken more time to jump on podcasts to spend time on Twitter have you had to take a back seat

on any of the development at all and get more people in or what's been that process like because Twitter and getting yourself out there is very very time consuming I imagine imagine it takes time away from the development for you to some degree right and I'm totally fine I didn't realize like

it sounds kind of dumb to say like oh it's so hard to build a Twitter following but like it does take time to like engage those people and produce content that is going to get people's attention and it's a little bit of a game but to answer your question about the development

so I've the project in general has been super fortunate the guy's kind of private so I'm just going to say his name's Nick but there was a guy who about a month or two ago reached out to me and I probably mentioned like I'm a little bit more of a novice programmer or a less experienced

programmer it's kind of like I I bang my head against the wall until it works kind of a thing but this other guy is a developer by trade Python isn't his first language but he's super sharp and after I made the initial push where you know we got seed signer to version 0.3.0 which is where I'd say

it was a viable signing device like you could pick it up and there were very few if any crashes and it just worked and it was a great proof of concept still rough around the edges in terms of user interface but it was a working proof of concept and that's when I shifted to getting the enclosure design finalized and trying to

set up some places where people be able to buy the enclosure and whatnot so I started focusing on some other things and he had pinged me with some modifications he'd done to the code to get seed signer working not just with specter but he'd written some code to get it working with blue wallet as well who I didn't even know that they had

air gapped QR as like a signing model but sure enough they do and he had made the correct modifications and sent me a little video of it working and it was like technically like super invigorating and as he and I started to interact more and started to talk about you know the various pain points

with where seed signer was um I expressed to him that startup time is is kind of a glaring pain point because seed signer is basically just a python script or a set of python scripts that runs on top of the Raspberry Pi operating system and the Raspberry Pi operating yeah just the just the it's a minimize I think it's

lesbian light so it's a minimize version that doesn't include a lot of the the GUI elements but it still has you know all the things that you expect from an operating system including all the drivers for wireless even though we don't use those to like the splash screen when you start it up

and there's a lot of overhead that isn't necessary in that particular distribution of Linux so it would take like when you build a seed signer the release that's in the the github right now it currently takes like 90 seconds for the thing from when you apply power to when you finally see the menu pop up on the screen and it's

understandably like a leap of faith thing for people who have you know maybe done soldering for the first time and put these hardware components and then when they're plugging it in for the first time to like wait 90 seconds kind of not knowing whether or not it's worked or not um once it's once the 90 seconds is passed and the menu

comes up like it's very seamless and then there's no lags with the menu or anything like that but that initial startup time is a pain point anyhow I digress so I was talking with this other developer about the startup time and had actually kind of pinged step on with specter on ways that we

might be able to reduce the startup time and the idea came up to break the code modules into different pieces so that they could run in a multi-threaded fact multi-threaded way such that you know the UX is prioritize so that the screen is the first thing that appears and then some of the the support libraries that that CSUNR uses

can kind of load in the background once the screen comes up well I won't say I couldn't have gotten there but it would have taken a lot of reading research and banging my head against the wall to get there whereas this other developer was like he just took the ball and ran with it he has taken

the code that I wrote initially and refactored a lot of it and broken it into modules that efficiently makes sense and added a lot of just programmatic convention to it and it's just it's going to be a huge step forward for the project just last week he kind of provided me with a compiled version of his

code and I got to play around with it for a couple of days and we sat down and had a little Q&A and went over some small things that it came up but I'm I'm super optimistic about this this direction and just with his code he was able to reduce the the startup time by about half and I think we can refine it down to get

up below 30 seconds hopefully which isn't like you know consumer electronics you pop it on and suddenly it's there but reducing it from 90 seconds to 30 is just I think it's just a huge leap in terms of usability and makes the whole concept much more viable plus he has also added just some

kind of obvious user experience tweaks and the workflow in terms of the menus as they appear and how you navigate through them it's going to be a huge leap forward I'm anxious to get the code out to get some other people testing with it right now it's kind of like he has the football and I'm not rushing him at all

to finish up with it because he's doing such great work so he's kind of addressing a few minor tweaks but I'm anxious to get that code out to other people to get testing and then kind of once we get more testing done with it to get it into a compiled release so anybody running a seed signer

can feel comfortable like you know upgrading to the newest version and you're getting all of these kind of enhancements like it's it's just gotten better and better. It's really cool. It's nice when these things happen organically and you have other Bitcoiners jump in and help with these projects

it's great to see. Yeah it's something that you have to take kind of a leap of faith but it's partly like they say I can't think of the same but like a good idea whose time has come like when you have an idea and it resonates with other people and they're willing to you know set aside time and effort to help

the idea grow. That's been you know a great experience from other people that I've interacted with who there's another guy named Richard who is kind of putting together he'd already had some 3D printing. He already had 3D printers and access to 3D printers but he's going to be helping me spin up

distribution in Europe so that anybody in Europe who you know would like to build one of these but would also like the 3D pendant orange pill case you know should be able to get one relatively quickly through the mail so he's been you know another huge boost in terms of like in terms of being able to get these things out there

he's he actually sent a Q&A the test unit that that he was able to put together and test with yeah nice nice yeah they having the cases is an important part and let you say because it is a digital thing people do like to have these something physical to have in their hands and some memorabilia

it is nice to have that. I wondered if you'd done anything in America have you maybe spoken to crypto cloaks about doing something similar or or anyone else out in the States? No it is I'm glad you mentioned that crypto cloaks has confirmed that they're interested and they have I think almost all the pieces

in place I think they're they seem like they're crazy busy over there but they're I think the next step for them is really just getting the listing up on their website and and making it available but yeah and they'll ship worldwide I think that'll be a little more expensive so I'm kind of

actively seeking people you know maybe at least one party in South America and maybe somebody in Asia just because it helps so much with the postal service seems like it's gotten less reliable you know ever since this this pandemic started I've I've shipped a few things to

Europe cases that I've made for different people and stuff and like it seems like things are running it takes longer for things to get places so if we can spread out you know to a few different people making these in different parts of the world I think that'll help a lot. Yeah definitely

that time waiting for them people just want to once they've got the idea in their head they want to have it and they want to have it as quickly as possible and the shipping costs as well from America to Europe aren't always that reasonable so and I'm not a hundred percent familiar with how VAT works

but it seems like that can play for coming to play for some people too yeah massively it can really be a problem but no I'm glad I'm glad to hear that you're doing that and crypto cloaks are my new sponsors on this show and they you know I mean not just because they're my sponsors I really really love what they're doing and I think

it's just something that really helps having all these different options for node cases and being able to personalize things and make them your own is just really exciting and I think it makes people get more into this stuff the more like cool stuff that people can have in their office and the more different cases

and the more different options that people have the more fun it is and I really think like I know it doesn't make a difference to how the actual unit works but I really think that it helps draw people in because when people come into an office or they see one of these devices and it looks really cool like the Triton

node case or something like that they'll ask and they'll go what's that that looks really cool and then you can be like oh yeah there's this thing which let me tell you about it and it's a really easy end to start a conversation with people yeah the node construction has come a long way from being just kind of like a pile of hardware

in a dark corner of your house to something you could put in your living room like you said like people noticed and ask about for sure yeah absolutely mine is still like that I've got five Raspberry Pi's all wearing away all just like a big tangled mess with no cases on them they look like shit but I am waiting I'm waiting for my Triton

and my Lightning node case as well which I've had personal lives so I'm very excited to have those and show them off very cool yeah can you tell me a little bit about your Lightning node case like what software that runs and what like the I'm I feel like I don't know

as much about what's out there right now for Lightning as I should yeah so for Lightning I'm using a Raspberry Pi Blitz and it's got a screen on it so I've ordered a case from Crypto Cloak switch is personalized which I won't reveal what it's got on there because it's going to go on twitter

when it arrives but yeah it's a really nice case it's going to go on there and I can still interact with the screen on it and I find the Raspberry Blitz from everyone I speak to seems to be the most stable it seems to be a really good option I like it a lot but I also have Lightning on my my node if I wanted to use it

and I'm going to run an Umbral for my Mrs just to get her into just to get her into Lightning and so she can start using it but yeah I like having this probably not the best object to have the screen on the Raspberry Pi Blitz but I think it's kind of cool it looks nice so I kind of have that straight off at the moment what about you

are you running a Lightning node at the moment so I am not running a Lightning node I have a my node as well and I was at one point running a Lightning node but I had to rebuild the project because I had a hard drive in it that was starting to run out of space so I've upgraded to like the hard drive that

should last for the next decade or so at least but I think it's neat the nodes like they're finding ways for those to be useful to people and ways like I would have never thought of like it's I think as the Bitcoin ecosystem evolves like it's it's going to be even more and more important

for people to have a node at home there's like the privacy advantages of running your own explorer so you're not leaking leaking information about you know your holdings or transactions you're interested in but also like what I look forward to is being able to run kind of a self-managed Lightning node

at home that there's some sort of automatic channel management but that I can also via VPN or something linked to my phone so that when I'm out in the world you know I have access to the channels and liquidity that are on my node at home and that's something I'm looking forward to and then for the whole I'm not

sure if this is going to take off or not but in terms of making a tiny bit of yield by supporting coin mixing that's something else that I'm encouraged to see a lot of the the node software producers incorporating in to like join market and stuff like that I think there's there's a few really interesting things you can

do at home that obviously other people are realizing and that's why the node space is just growing so fast absolutely and other things like ln pool as well if you're looking at yield you can do things with that which is pretty interesting it's not something I've tried myself but it's it's something that I think has a lot of legs and

yeah the mixing side of it although it's not massive you're still earning SATs and gaining privacy so that's really really cool and then you know in terms of if you say you say you were to run a Raspberry Blitz you can use I use Thunder Hub now which is really good which is like a

gives you access on a on a web page makes things really really simple and you can rebalance channels with a click of a button it's is very very slick has dark mode which is nice and then you can link that to your I don't know if you've ever used Zeus Evan Kaludus made it it's like

Zeus lightning app that you can just link to that so we featured him a couple of months ago actually I would check it out so it's Zeus ln.app is their website and you can just you can attach that to your node and you can just use that as your phone wallet and everything goes through your node awesome yeah it's really really cool and

relatively easy to set up I mean I managed it so I'm sure you'll do it very easily I'm gonna have to try and get that up before I'm lucky enough to be able to be going to Bitcoin 2021 in June and it'd be very cool to have that set up beforehand nice yeah yeah are you looking forward to that I imagine

are you gonna be there for the whole time or yeah so I am I've I remember watching the San Jose Bitcoin 2013 conference on live stream and I've been kind of like wanting to I've been wanting to go to a Bitcoin conference or some sort of event probably for like eight years now and so this is finally going to be my first just with

with you know like family and I'm in a row in a part of America where there aren't a lot of Bitcoin conferences nearby so it's I'm super stoked I'm super stoked to kind of see some of these people that you follow on Twitter and you really have a lot of respect for it it's going to be a thrill to

get to meet some people in person yeah it looks like a lot of fun I sadly not going but it does look like a lot of fun a few friends are going from the UK and I'm rather jealous of that yeah I hopefully we can soon put all this like coronavirus stuff behind us and get back to like normal people are they the friends you have going

do they have to like when they come back to the UK are they going to have to quarantine for a while or how does all that work yeah I won't docs who they are but I think I believe they have to have forged papers to say that they're going for work and prove that it's for work so they're

allowed out of the country and I believe then they will need tests to go out test to come back and they'll have to quarantine it's really I mean we're full on we're full on in the UK going for the vaccine passport all that sort of stuff so my concern is I'll probably not be able to travel again

I snuck out fairly recently and had a friend sort of forge all the documents for me so I could get out but we were quite heavily questioned getting through borders all the way through it was pretty nerve-racking and there's a £10,000 fine and potential imprisonment for breaking the rules so it's pretty authoritarian here

so I saw it was a news story so you never know like how accurate they are but for me it was a tweet that there have been some like fairly large and significant protests in London and maybe other like major cities and it seems like the BBC is actively not covering that is there any truth to that

absolutely true yeah there was about a million people or 750,000 people at least protesting the BBC completely overlooked it and they reported numbers but like nowhere even close I mean like orders of magnitude below but that doesn't surprise me because the BBC is completely owned I mean completely and utterly owned and

if you were to which most people still do if you were to sit and watch the BBC you would believe that coronavirus is going to kill you and everyone you love unless you get the vaccine tomorrow that everyone who doesn't get it is evil that you should wear a mask by yourself in your car like a fucking idiot just I mean it's just

complete brainwashing complete nonsense there's no there's no concern about what the truth is it's just propaganda yeah there's I listen to a podcast with John Vallis and Michael Krieger who I wasn't familiar with Michael Krieger but it was funny he was talking about

so many people in society are basically walking around with their brains turned off right now just kind of believing like whatever you know they see on that square box in your living room kind of thing yeah yeah absolutely what's your view coming from a line of work where you're sort of very much in the

well it's sort of establishment and and working as a police officer and then finding Bitcoin and doing what you're doing how's your views changed if at all on the system and the way that it runs has has falling down the rabbit hole made you question things that you didn't previously

or were you always open-minded and always thought this way that's a that's a interesting question so I didn't mention it before but I'm actually retired from law enforcement my extremely weak hands in 2017 thankfully paved the way for me to retire from law enforcement and I'm now a stay-at-home dad which it's super blessing to be

with my kids like every day and see more of their lives and whatnot and anyhow back to your question I think what all of this has kind of made me come to realize is that there's just this huge kind of machinery of momentum in society where even things that don't make sense or things that aren't necessarily good ideas

just kind of keep perpetuating themselves because most people aren't paying attention and everything from you know all the coronavirus stuff we've been talking about to inflation and it's like a lot of things like once you've kind of like had your eyes opened and seen how kind of senseless some things about our societies

are it's tough to close your eyes. I generally have like a pretty positive view of human beings and I probably had a little bit of a polyannish streak in me when I got into law enforcement I still believe that you know the vast majority of people who get into law enforcement are well-meaning people who primarily

they're not there to be bullies they want to serve their community and generally do good in the world. Are there a few bad apples that do some really stupid things that you know hurt people and that those those situations need to be addressed absolutely but I try not to paint law enforcement just because it's a part of my

past with you know a broad stroke I think they're generally good people and it kind of comes down to so the majority of my work was in crimes against children because that was a hugely growing area of crime especially in the digital forensic space in terms of online crime and stuff this was when I started it was kind of on the tails of

Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing protocols which caused this sad but worldwide huge explosion in the amount of pornography child pornography that was produced that was available out there and you can get into different arguments about you know libertarians and there's some sort of like

I generally believe in people's right to be sovereign but there still has to be some sort of hands-on force for good in the world where you know if you're a battered wife and your husband's hitting you like whether or not it's you know the local police service or if if we're fast forwarding 30 years in the future and

it's some sort of neighborhood security co-op like there are times in the world where people need help like in real time in meat space and I think there's always going to be a place for law enforcement. I'm probably going off into the weeds on this but like short answer like I'm a big believer in people having the freedom

to do things as long as they're not harming anyone else but I also think there's a place in the world for social contracts I wish they were a little bit more locked in instead of like you just kind of do the birth lottery and wherever you land is the social contract that you're kind of forced into but

at some levels obviously it makes sense for human beings to collaborate and to make reasoned trade-offs in terms of benefits to organize in larger groups that's what we're doing here in Bitcoin is like you know we're all not going at this alone.

Yeah absolutely and I agree with you even though I probably take a fairly anarchist view of the world like that I've probably had maybe I've been unlucky but without doxing myself a fair amount of issues with law enforcement that have not been particularly right or fair. However

I do agree that even if it's privatized which is probably the way that I would prefer things there has to be some level of protection for people like you're saying the abused wife or you know child pornography or these sort of things because although I think if we were to in a dream world get rid of the state we would still have issues

and they would still need addressing and yes I think that family units would be stronger I think with the theft of people's time going down through inflation and the family units growing stronger you'd probably have more you'd have better relationships within those families and you'd obviously have better protection from those families

but some people will slip through the cracks and for those times having some sort of policing service or law enforcement within whether it's citadels or larger areas is probably always going to be needed because you're always going to have terrible people doing terrible things and the more we can stop that

the better. It certainly seems to me from living in England that our freedoms are being taken very very quickly and people are and I don't think that it is like you said I don't think it's the average police officer I think they're there for good I think most people in this world are there for good

but I think there's almost this invisible hand mixed with stupidity that just forces them to do things that I guess when you're in it you're not even necessarily thinking too much about it but a lot of the measures that are being taken here are taking away freedom to speak taking away freedom to move

and now sovereignty over one's body and what they cannot or cannot have in it and that is a very scary difficult thing to navigate like when I have conversations with people and I say look I don't want a vaccine to do what you want like I honestly if it makes you feel happy you do it but we're getting to the stage where to choose not to

you are not going to be allowed to work or travel or do anything and you're almost being painted as like a crazy loony conspiracy person who's going to kill other people's grandmas you know you see all of this propaganda on all around bus stops and every time you enter a shop and all over posters everywhere and it's like

it's saying these sort of things like are the people who aren't wearing masks people who aren't getting vaccinated you're killing someone's grandma and it feels like a sigh up to me it feels fairly dangerous and that is why this Bitcoin community and some of the more practical measures that people are coming up with for freedom are

a real light they're like a real exciting thing up in the morning and make me excited to crack on with the day because I do feel that there's hope I do feel that we win and there's going to be a balance found yeah I totally agree and I like as we all do we probably have personal friends that aren't Bitcoiners or who

you know are aware of it but not you know as far deep into the rabbit hole and I think about like my life where would I be right now if there was no Bitcoin had never been you know Satoshi never invented Bitcoin it wasn't a thing and I it's a little setting because like

I talk to friends who aren't into Bitcoin and they probably look at me a little weird when I say it but I'm totally earnest and that Bitcoin gives me hope like I can't imagine what my life would be without it like I it has spurred a great deal of personal growth in me and it honestly

like gives me hope for a better future because I think there are a lot of communicating changes that a lot of people wouldn't expect but when you start to have a more equitable economic system which is you know exchanging money and money for goods and services is like a fundamental medium of communication

for human beings and when you start to reform the fairness of that I think we potentially see all sorts of different cascading impacts in different societies where they get it right the the vaccine passport like you you were kind of talking about like that absolutely terrifies me and I think that's almost like a line in the sand

for some people because it and this is another thing I pulled from Michael Krieger like you start to game that idea out and then once there is some sort of you know enhanced privileges for people who have the vaccine maybe some of the airlines jump on board and so it's even harder to travel even within your own

country like here in the United States so if you can't travel because you haven't gotten the vaccine does that affect your employment status or what kind of job you can have and then we kind of start to develop into this multi-tier society where there are people who have decided to get the vaccine who who have certain rights

and privileges and freedom to move within the country and then there are people who have decided that they're leery about the vaccine and don't get it and maybe they don't have the it's it's that's the part that's terrifying to me and some of it I'm not a student of like Chinese history but what I've read about the cultural revolution

and what you were kind of describing about billboards and commercials and stuff like that there's a very cultural aspect to it and it it terrifies me that like not just you know where you're at but in other countries even including here in America like this whole epidemic of wokeism kind of like

feels like shadows of like a cultural revolution in other places I don't know yeah it definitely does but you know I agree and I think that the only way out is Bitcoin you know you can you can try and have I've tried to have conversation I've been saying I've been

almost play for play called what was gonna happen in the UK since March last year and I've laid it out and written it out for my family and they've laughed in my face and even as it's happened play for play they they still just have all gone and had the vaccine they all look at me like I'm an idiot they all

take the piss they all just willingly go into it and the same with most people around me and I've just come to the conclusion that some people will just do as they're told they've been programmed well enough through the education system and work and they're in their little box they sit and watch the news and they will never question

anything it's too hard they'll never think about buying Bitcoin they never do any of it and so I take that as my responsibility to the ones that I care about to stack as hard as I can to secure my funds and when it all comes tumbling down at least I can try and help some of them that's as much as I can do and I think that's as much

as any of us can do is fight for our freedoms and save our purchasing power and get on with it because what's happening around us is not going to stop from us telling people what we think because they don't care they just simply don't unfortunately there's a lot of truth yeah well look it's been really really good

catching up with you I love the project and I love this direction that you're taking things it's really exciting and like we said this is hope as down as we can get about corona and all the other bullshit we have Bitcoin we have all these incredible projects that are popping up all over the place and people are collaborating

and I'm excited to see what happens over the coming years so you know I really appreciate you coming on I really appreciate everything that you're doing and I hope you have an amazing time at the conference I'm very jealous about that and if we are ever allowed to travel it'd be great to catch a drink or

catch up at a conference in the future really enjoy chatting to yeah I would totally be up for that and hopefully that's a reality in the near future I really appreciate this opportunity just to be on your show and I think I'm getting slightly better at explaining the value proposition of seed signer I'm it's probably not totally

refined yet but yeah thanks for for letting me on and let me talk about it if I can just kind of point people to a couple resources if they're curious to yeah definitely the first is my twitter profile it's just @seedsigner on twitter the second is the github repo is

probably the best place if you're interested to learn more the technical details about the project if you just google or DuckDuckGo or whatever you use just search for github seed signer and seed signers all one word that should take you to the right place and I'm also on telegram @seedsigner so if anybody wants to shoot me a DM there I'm

absolutely reachable there as well we also have there's a seed signer telegram group there's a link to that in my twitter profile that there's about 150 people in there now who you know just people hanging out working on seed signer and some other hardware projects who are just kind of like riffing and have questions

for each other so it's a great place for people who want to learn more about the project or who are curious to jump off the cliff and build one themselves and may have questions about different hardware options or the process so it's just a great resource excellent and I'll put those in the show notes as well

and yeah I encourage anyone who's listened to this and thought that's a really cool idea for the sake of $50 and some fun putting this thing together it's well worth doing and yeah thanks again for coming on I've really enjoyed it absolutely thank you cheers mate take care bye bye