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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 to the Bitcoin monthly show. I really enjoyed this. I always look forward to speaking to Bitcoin Q&A, and I always learn something. I hope you learn something as well. We have a lot to cover, so I'll dive straight in after the adverts.

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Yeah, really, really cool. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode. I hope you learn as much as I have. And if you have any feedback or any other questions, then do reach out to me or Bitcoin Q&A and we will help if we can.

Enjoy. - Hello, mate. Nice to speak to you again. - Even Max, how we doing, mate? - Very, very well. Looking forward to a bit of a catch-up here. I feel like I need this Bitcoin monthly pod more than I ever have because I feel very behind.

I've had a lot of other stuff going on and I've sort of taken my foot off the gas for a couple of weeks with the updates and I feel lost and blind and all sorts of things are going on that I don't understand.

So yeah, looking forward to dive in. - Life has a habit of getting in the way of Bitcoin sometimes, doesn't it? - It does. How about you? How have you been? - Yeah, super busy. Lots on the go at the moment, a bit like yourself, struggling to keep up.

So like you say, this podcast forces me to stay somewhat of the speed. So we can have a brief chat about what's going on. It's tough to say it today, isn't it? - It's almost impossible, but it's a lot of fun trying.

- Yeah, definitely. That's part of the challenge. - Yeah, so we've got some updates. I see at the top of the list for updates is Taproo. There's a lot that I'm seeing flying around on Twitter about this.

Can you tell me a little bit about what's going on with the developments here? - Yeah, in short, a hell of a lot. It's something I've found difficult to keep up to date with, really. So I've done a bit of homework before we recorded, so hopefully I can give everybody listening a bit of a sort of TLDR as to what's going on.

So Taproo obviously is a proposal improvement to improvement proposal for Bitcoin that has been a bit of controversy over how it's going to be implemented. Bitcoin call this month, well, last month, sorry, just at the end of March, released a new client, Bitcoin calls, should have had the number, that's terrible of me, isn't it?

0.21.1, which has in it what's known as speedy trial, which is the agreed upon trial period to hopefully get Taproo active on the network. The way it's going to work is from the most recent difficulty adjustment, which I believe happened probably three or four days ago, something like the first in May, I think.

From that date, miners can now, when they manage successful block, they can signal whether or not they are ready for Taproo. There's been quite a lot of people on Twitter that have been eagerly anticipating this one.

And unfortunately, in the first couple of days, we have failed the first signaling block already. So the signaling block basically runs in tandem with the each two-week mining difficulty epoch.

The way that it works with Taproo is that if 90% of the blocks mined within that two-week window signal for Taproo, it's automatically active. It's deemed that a very high percentage, 90% of miners are ready, and that is sort of, in my opinion, the best way to go for it.

Unfortunately, I think the time in between the difficulty adjustment and when the new Bitcoin Core client got released, most of the mining pools didn't really have chance to upgrade their Bitcoin Core client.

So we saw very, very low levels of signaling within the first difficulty epoch. We've already, even though we're only less than a weekend, we've already had too many blocks passed that didn't signal to be able to achieve it this time round.

So within the parameters of the speedy trial, we've got six, I think it's five or six difficulty epochs to get a successful launch of Taproo to get that 90% threshold that we need. So all is not lost, and those, I think there's like three or four, so two or three pools that have already signaled in the few blocks that have passed already

since the difficulty adjustment. I suppose the assumption is that if they've signaled once or like the odd is that they're not gonna stop signaling now, so it's just a case of hopefully the more, the rest of the mining pools get on board, update their Bitcoin clients so that they can actually signal that they're ready for Taproo

if they do minus successful block. Does that make sense before I move on to the other client that's out there at the moment? - Couple of questions. Firstly, are you saying that we have six attempts where it's within a difficulty adjustment, so whatever it is, 2016 blocks or something like that, and then they can come up six times,

so we've got whatever that is, it's about two weeks each one, isn't it? So we've got a few months, and we have to get 90% plus of minus signaling. - Within that two week period, yeah. - What percentage have we had so far of people signaling?

Do you know a percentage or? - I think it was quite low, it was like five or 10%. But I don't think it was a true sort of representation, let's say because of the timing, the client came out after the, or just after the signaling period, signaling sort of window opened, so I don't think the mining pools have had chance,

or many of the mining pools have had chance to pull their finger out and get their Bitcoin core client up to date to allow them to be able to signal. - Okay, and then the next question would be, what does it actually mean for a minor to signal, and how would they be doing this?

Like, is it something that is literally a click of a button on their software, and it broadcasts signals that, okay, we're happy to go ahead with this, or is it something a little bit more complicated where potentially miners or mining pools are just like, oh, I can't be fucked with this.

Like, do you know what I mean? Like, how difficult is it for them to do it? - Yeah, so the new client, the new Bitcoin core client basically, when they use that as their node reference client to mine, will now allow them, when they mine a successful block, to add in a little piece of information, I think it's called a bit number,

and then basically if they include that little piece of information, it's sort of etched into the blockchain when they mine that block successfully, and it's basically just says, you know, I am slush pool, I'm ready for taproot.

- Okay, I'm with you. So it's not complicated for them to do it. - I don't think so, no. Obviously, you know, I'm not a miner, not an expert, but my understanding is yeah, I don't think it's too difficult.

I suppose with any software update, there is some risks, and if you're running a significant, you know, significantly big mining pool, you're probably gonna be air on the side of caution a little bit, aren't you?

- And then, okay, and then final question would be, is it from the individual miner, or is it from the pool that they join? For example, someone like Tarantula Hoddle, or someone like that, if they've got their miners running and say they're linked to a pool like slush or someone like that, do they have choice on each individual miner

that they're running, or is it literally the pool that determines it for the people who join the pool? - Yeah, it's the pool, basically. It's whoever has final say, to sort of publish the block to the blockchain, and so using your example, yeah, if Tarantula's mining with slush pool, he's giving his hash towards their total effort,

if you like to mine a block, he's at the mercy of whatever they want to signal. But the good thing about that is that say, he is mining with slush pool and slush pool have indicated to everybody in their pool that they're not interested in taproot, then he can just pull his hash power and point it to F2 pool,

if he knows that they are going to signal for taproot if that aligns with what he wants to do. - Okay. - So it's a good bit of game theory, actually, because we saw, I think it was slush pool that actually mined the first block that did signal for taproot, and they saw a massive jump in hash power

from everybody that was potentially mining with a different pool that saw that slush pool was definitely game on for taproot, and they pointed all of their miners at slush pool because they, again, it aligned with their ideals.

- Very interesting. It's going to be fascinating to watch this over the next few weeks and months. - Yeah, so just to cap that off, basically, if we achieve that, which I believe we will, if I'm being honest, over the next five or six difficulty epochs, then what happens, basically, is taproot is locked in,

and it would be active in Bitcoin core for everybody else to use taproot, the benefits of taproot, which we can come on to in a minute. I think it's in November of this year. Hence, the name Speedy Trial, if we get the 90% signaling within the three month period, it goes active in November.

If we don't, it basically, it just times out and nothing happens. - Okay. - So that brings us on to the other client, known as, well, there's been, again, some controversy over the naming of it.

I'm just going to call it the Luke Jr. client because I know he's one of the people behind it, Luke Dash Jr., to start off with, these two clients are exactly the same. They're both active now.

They're both looking for 90% of hashrate to trigger. If they see 90% of hashrate within that divine two week block, a signal for taproot is locked in. The difference is that the Luke Jr. client runs, the signaling window runs until this time next year, basically runs until next summer.

I think it might actually be next November. So it gives the miners a lot longer to signal for taproot. The key difference is that if come next November, we still haven't got the 90% of miners signaling for taproot, which is highly unlikely, if I'm being honest, that client then will start to reject any blocks

that don't signal for taproot, basically. So this is like going back to our previous podcast where we talked about lot equals true and lot equals false. This is essentially a lot equals true client that says if after 18 months, miners you're not interested in supporting the taproot rules, we're just going to reject all the blocks.

So it's a little bit more, well, it's a user activated soft fork at the end of the day with a long timeout period. There's a signaling period of 18 months. So the difference between the two clients is speedy trial.

If it fails, nothing happens. We stay the same. The Luke Jr. one, if it fails after 18 months, then that's when we start rejecting the blocks and saying no, we want taproot. - What's your feelings on this?

'Cause to me, I don't like that. I think the forcing of something, even if it's something that I won, the forcing of something feels a bit anti-Bitcoin to me. It doesn't feel quite right, but also I'm not a miner and I'm certainly not Luke Jr.

So I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. It just doesn't feel right. - Yeah, I think given the fact that it's such a big, a big signaling window, I really don't think it's going to come to the fact that we're going to need to force anybody to do anything.

If I was a betting man, I'd probably put a few sats on the fact that the speedy trial is going to be successful. The miners all update their client and start signaling because it's other than some of the bike shedding in the background around some of the smaller parameters about how it's activated.

Taproot is fairly uncontroversial. Most people, well, I've not met anybody that doesn't want taproot. Most of the controversy seems to be around how we implement it. So I'm fairly confident some might say naive that speedy trial's going to work and that we'll probably have taproot in November.

- Okay, well, let's hope so. - Right, do we want to touch on quickly just some of the benefits that taproot brings if and when it gets implemented? - Yeah, I actually think that would be really useful.

It would be good to do it evenly. So the benefits, which it seems like there are quite a lot, but also if there are any negatives or could potentially be any negatives, it'd be interesting to hear those as well.

Just so we get a realistic picture of why some people might not signal a certain way or might have some reservations, although same as you, I've not heard anyone have an issue so far. - No, like I say, it's fairly, from a physical change perspective, it's fairly uncontroversial.

There isn't really any downside to it other than I suppose the risk of, we've just sort of talked about the two implementations and there is a very, very small potential of a change split because we've got these two clients.

Again, I don't think it's going to come to that, but I suppose that's a risk with any soft fork, but other than that, I've not really heard of any downside to taproot. The main benefits that you do sort of overall summary is that it enables a lot more complex scripting types to be implemented on top of Bitcoin.

So most of which haven't actually been thought out yet, but what it does is it enables things like tapscript and a couple of other upgrades, which are far beyond my sort of level of expertise, to be honest with you, but it enables probably going to get some shit for this, but some Ethereum type, smart contracts and functionality,

but to be built on top of Bitcoin, which is a good thing for me. - You basically just makes it more flexible. You can do more. - Exactly, yeah. The one of the main ones that gets banded around is that it's going to be good.

It also introduces snow signatures, which enables a couple of things. Number one, it's going to make multi-sig a lot more private on the blockchain. So currently if you've got a multi-sig wallet, if you spend from that multi-sig wallet, it's blatantly obvious that it is a multi-sig spend.

So we can also group into that any lightning channel open or closes because they're essentially a two of two multi-sig and they stand out on the blockchain, which can provide some ins for chain surveillance firms to be able to sort of do some fingerprinting and tracking, which as we have both wax lyrical about before now,

we don't like and not many people that use Bitcoin do. So if we get, oh, sorry, I'll be positive. When we get taproot merged in, we get the short snow signatures. What that'll mean is that when you spend from a multi-sig wallet or you do a lightning channel open or lightning channel close, that'll essentially just look like a,

it'll look exactly the same as any other taproot transaction. You won't be able to see that there is, say, two signatures and two of transaction because you've got a two or three multi-sig.

So it hides that and basically it looks exactly the same as any other taproot spend. So there's some quite big privacy benefits there. And the other one, it enables but not straight away.

It opens the door for cross input signature aggregation, which is probably one of the biggest selling points for me and a bit frustrating that it's not gonna be, I think we're probably two or three years away from it unfortunately.

But we need taproot for this. What cross input signature aggregation is essentially, rather than, let's use a coin join as an example. There's five different participants going into a Whirlpool transaction.

Each one of those provides their own signature and each one of those will have to pay a fee for providing that signature because it takes space on the blockchain. Well, once we get the cross input signature aggregation, those five inputs will combine, so the five signatures from each of the participants

will be combined into one signature. So rather than paying for five sets of signatures on the blockchain, we're only paying for one. And if you split that one fee across those five participants, you can see you get an exponential saving in transaction fees.

Which, like I said, good for coin joins because they are inherently big transactions with lots of people taking part, but also provide savings for, like we touched on earlier multi-sig users as well.

Okay, a few things I'm not quite sure on there. First would be when you say that Schnorr signatures are going to be used, we're not going to use ECDSA anymore for security. Are we going to go to Schnorr?

Or am I thinking of something else? Because a couple of years ago, there was a discussion about moving from ECDSA because something was no longer like patented basically. And it was cryptographically provable to be secure, whereas ECDSA is not.

Or am I thinking of something completely different? No, yeah, you're right, basically. ECDSA is an elliptic curve, digital signature algorithm. And it's the method that yeah, Bitcoin uses for you to be able to provide a signature to prove that you own a specific input, but it also allows me to verify

that you are the correct owner of like key without me being able to see that private key, if that makes sense. Yeah, you can see it one way, but not the other. Exactly, yeah, so Schnorr signatures are basically going to be a replacement for that.

So if you start to use Taproot, a wallet that supports Taproot, yes, you'll be using Schnorr signatures, which provides that in terms of bytes, they're smaller, which again comes back to some fee savings.

I think the actual signature size itself from ECDSA to Schnorr is fairly marginal, but I suppose when we're talking in terms of bytes, every little helps, I suppose, once you start mounting that up over multiple signatures or multiple transactions, the savings will add up, I suppose.

It's less pressure, it's less transaction size on the blockchain as well, so hopefully it should reduce even marginally some blockchain fees for everybody. And security-wide, although ECDSA as it seems like it's obviously been fine, what I had heard, this is years ago now, is that this is provable, whereas ECDSA is not,

and therefore technically it should be more secure, is that right? If I'm being honest, I don't know, I've not heard about that one. Okay, well, if anyone listening knows, maybe you can reach out and tell me, but I'm sure that's what I had heard.

And then the final question I had on all of that is with this cross-signature input-- Cross-input signature aggregation, yeah. So with that, if you're having five people or five inputs into a coin join, are you saying that effectively, it would not only help with the fees, but it would help with privacy,

because you'd have five different inputs that would all be signed as one transaction, and therefore you wouldn't know who owns those original signatures, or is it just that it's gonna save on fees but not actually increase the privacy?

Yeah, it's just the fee thing, because you can't hide outputs on the blockchain because it's essentially a UTXO that you're spending. So it doesn't hide the fact that there's five people going in and five people coming out.

What it does do is it incentivizes people to participate in coin joins, because if you're just spending to me and you've got two inputs, sorry, if you're spending one input to me, you're just doing a single UTXO spend, you're footing all of the bill for that one signature, aren't you, to spend to me?

Whereas if you're taking part in a coin join that spends to me as well, and you're sharing that one signature fee with two, three, four, or the people, it's actually cheaper for you to do that than it is for you to pay me directly.

So it incentivizes privacy? Yeah, definitely. Okay, so that's really it. And so if this gets, if this, say in the next, I don't know, eight weeks or 10 weeks or whatever, this happens, this goes through 90% of minus signal.

Does that mean that, right, this is now working? Or does that just mean that it opens the door for people to develop something so that this can work? Yeah, so it would be, I just wanna clarify as well that the cross input signature aggregation that we spoke about isn't part of this first taproot release.

I don't even think it's being actively developed at the moment, it was spoke about for a couple of years. And I believe that it's quite a big change to implement. So if at best, we're probably a couple of years away for it, unfortunately, you still get the key aggregation just not the cross input stuff.

So the multi-sig, the people using multi-sig or lightning will get a bit of benefit, but the main benefits from my perspective around the privacy stuff for coin joins is a way out. So if, yeah, it's an empty question, if speedy child is successful and it goes live, that just means then that anybody running the Bitcoin core client that,

well, if anybody's running either of those because the minus signaling is being watched for on both clients, it will just mean that those nodes will accept blocks that contain taproot outputs.

That, but for me, that's not gonna change straight away because that, what it means is that the wallet clients that we use would need to implement it as well and have it available to use in their UI, which I'm sure is probably gonna take your fair bit longer than November.

- Okay, so what I take from that is there doesn't seem to be a lot of downside. If it is implemented, it won't do a lot out the gate. We won't really notice many changes as a user out the gate, but it opens the door for developments that could be very helpful for fees and for privacy.

And so it would be a big win, but we'd sort of still be waiting a little bit of time. - Yeah, Nylon had their perfect, so am I? - Cool. - Cool, all right. Next one, where are we? Bitcoin Explorer.

Now, I said this on Twitter and I think this Bitcoin RPC Explorer is, well, that is what it says on the tin. It's an explorer that comes packaged with, I think literally every single node package on the market today.

And I feel like it's a bit of an unsung hero in the fact that what it enables people to do. So it's basically, it allows you to query your own node via basically a website that's produced by your nodes.

You can access it either if you're on your home network or if your node package allows it, you can access it via tour from anywhere in the world and it gives you the status of your node, mempool stats, you can look through historical blocks, you can see what the hash rate's like, you can see all sorts, you can run RPC commands

so you can use the infamous GetTX outset info which allows you to verify the supply. And it just wraps it all up into a nice shiny web interface. And I think a lot of people don't really give it the credit it deserves and it's had an update recently.

This month, that just introduced some new support for prune nodes, a new dark theme and just basically polished up the user interface. But I just wanted to throw it in there just to bring it to people's attention again.

But the chances are, if you're running a node, if you have a lock into the settings, there probably is a Bitcoin RPC Explorer floating around in there somewhere and it's quite a powerful tool really that you can use to get all sorts of very Bitcoin-related info without having to query somebody else's node.

I don't know whether you're a bit like me but actually you run far too many nodes. Is this one you've used before? - No, I think I've maybe seen it on my my node possibly as an option, but I haven't used it to be honest.

And like I said yesterday, being honest to everyone who is listening, I'm running a lot of nodes but all of them, other than my Raspberry Blitz at the moment, are fucked. I can't send transactions, I can't do anything.

I threw a bit of a wobbly yesterday through all my toys out of the pram. I'm like, "Ah, fuck it, I'm not even running these anymore. "I'm gonna give up my app." And today I've come back a stronger man and I'm gonna try and tackle them and wrap my head around it again because it needs to be done.

But no, I haven't, but I think I've seen it on the my node. - I've just sent you the link in the chat. It's come out really weird for some reason. You'll have to sort of fish out the... For everybody listening, you can see, no, it's on the Zancaster.

For everybody listening, if you go to, you can see an example of this. It's like a public one at bitcoinexplorer.org. And that looks identical to how it would on your node. Well, obviously it's querying somebody else's node, basically, but if you wanna go and have a little play around with it and see what sort of stuff it offers,

it's a really, really powerful tool. And if you're running a node, have a poke around, I can always guarantee it's gonna be there. - That has come out. - You've seen the weird, and yeah, I'm just trying to like sift through it.

That's the weirdest link I've ever seen. I'm on it now, okay. Yeah, I'm on it now. So this is the, it's already got the dark theme on there. What I've gone on it. - Cool. - Okay. - That's blocks.

Interesting. No, I've not used it before. It looks good, actually. - It's really good. If you think of it, like, I've been pulled out of space, but with 10 cents more info on it as well. - Mm-hmm.

- Cool. - So really good one. Check it out, bitcoinexplorer.org. Moving on to, okay. More, more, Twitter drama. You're laughing because you just see what's there. - I've just seen what's there, yeah.

- So, Bisk, a tool to buy, KYC, no KYC, Bitcoin,

or other currencies as well, has announced this week that they're going to add lightning as one of the options for a base layer, which caused a bit of a stir among someone on Twitter. I think it probably wasn't communicated all that well.

I personally saw the tweet and thought that they were ditching Bitcoin basically, and that Bisk was gonna be solely a liquid product. So you would go on, you would need liquid as your sort of base currency to then go and do whatever you needed to do, which I thought was a bit strange.

Anyway, it's been clarified now that they're going to have two clients, or at least an option within one client to switch between liquid as your base currency and Bitcoin. Now, I can sympathize with why they might wanna do this.

I mean, I'm not the biggest fan at all of liquid. Perhaps we can get into that later if you wanna. Like I said, I can sympathize with their push to look for an alternative in terms of managing fees for users.

The problem is, at the moment, a Bisk transaction actually consists of four on-chain transactions. Now, we've been pretty lucky. We're recording on the third of May. And in the last couple of days, I think the average fee rate has been something like seven or eight sets per byte.

And I think as low as four or five has been getting confirmed into blocks as well. So previous to that, sort of earlier in April, we did see some quite sky-high fee rates of 200 sets per byte, which if you're having to do that four times, that's gonna start mounting up.

And it's gonna start pricing out some of the smaller trades. If you wanted to go onto Bisk and buy $100 or $200 or pounds worth of Bitcoin, you're not gonna be left with as much as you would like at the end of that.

So just to sort of flesh that out for those that haven't used Bisk, the reason it's four transactions is the buyer needs to put in a deposit to their Bisk account. So they need to already have some Bitcoin and they need to send that to their Bisk wallet.

The seller also needs to do the same. So there's two transactions. Once the trade is initiated, the seller would then need to send their Bitcoin that they're selling into an S-Grow account where it's held so that they can't scam anybody.

And then the buyer would send over their fee via whatever method they've chosen. So if it's bank transfer, cash or whatever. And then so that's three transactions. And then the fourth transaction is the buyer transferring it out from the S-Grow to their Bisk wallet.

And I suppose then if they wanted to take that out of Bisk and put into whole storage, it's another transaction again. So you can see why sort of a hundred plus sets per byte, that's, you know, it's going to mount up but I suppose the total transaction is split between the two people, isn't it?

But even so, it's still a significant amount of fees. - It is a lot because on top of that, when we've discussed it before, I use Bisk a lot. The average amount that I see in terms of above market price is probably five, six percent on average in the UK.

And then you've got your fees to send the money into Bisk. Those four transactions, five if you take it off as well. Plus your, I can't remember, it is 0.25% or something you pay to Bisk.

It all adds up and let me say for a small transaction, which is generally what seems to be available more, more is like the smaller ones. Yeah, it is going to put people off. - Definitely, so like I said, to take it back, I can see why they're looking to other options.

I think the uproar was initially around the fact that people thought they were completely ditching Bitcoin. It transpires that they're not, it transpires that there's going to be two different markets.

Now, whether that sort of splits an already low liquidity pool into two further pools, you know, the Bisk, sorry, yeah, the original Bitcoin Bisk, if you like, and then the liquid Bisk, what that impact that's going to have to the liquidity for people wanting to buy and sell on there, I don't know, I suppose a time will tell

what she thought's on that one. - I like Bisk, I've used it for a long time. I've tried to get a lot of people to use it. I don't know enough about liquid to fully understand the trade-offs, but from the little I do understand, you are trusting more than you would with Bitcoin and trade-offs-wise, I personally prefer lightning to liquid

if I'm looking at something as like a second layer. I understand why they're doing it with the fees. I get that and, you know, all these fees and all these things add up and they make it more difficult for people to wrap their head around no KYC Bitcoin.

Many people are just not going to be willing to pay those fees. So I get why they're doing it. I don't, I also don't know enough about liquid, but I don't really like it from what I do understand.

So it doesn't excite me, it also doesn't really piss me off, but I am seeing a lot of back and forth on Twitter about it. I don't know, I'm sort of somewhere in the middle. It doesn't really massively upset me, but I'm certainly not happy to see liquid.

If they'd said something like, oh, we can do it with lightning, I'd probably be a bit happier. - Yeah, I think the difficulty with lightning is obviously how do you do that escrow so that, you know, the reason it's there is to protect both the buyer and the seller.

You haven't got that functionality and lightning to my knowledge at the moment. - That's a good point, I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, because of the escrow bit, so it'd have to come off lightning and then into Bitcoin.

- Is there not a way of doing some kind of escrow with lightning? - If there is, I'm not aware of it. And I would imagine if it is possible, somebody's already exploring it, but I've certainly not heard it mentioned at the moment.

Well, hey, you never know, taproot might open up the door for that to happen, you know? - Like you're saying, if it's more flexible and you could have some kind of smart contract that would allow for it, because the other thing, what I'm seeing all over Twitter at the moment is spilling over from the bisque stuff to the Monero stuff

and there's this massive arguments all going on all over the place and it's all I'm seeing. My thought is, well, it could have some kind of smart contract and they could have some kind of escrow service, then potentially that could be used on some of these darknet markets as well.

I can't see why you couldn't use something like Samurai, go through Whirlpool, then open a channel to lightning, then use lightning if it had an escrow service on the darknet markets, because some of the people purchasing small amounts of things on there, the same thing, they can have the same problem with fees.

Yeah, I think the top and bottom of it with darknet markets is nobody's using Bitcoin on there anymore. - Which is crazy. It's fucking good. It's a massive market, like. - I think it says a lot about Bitcoin's, the current state of Bitcoin's privacy, though, unfortunately.

I don't frequent darknet markets, but I talk to people who do regularly and it's all Monero. It's become the default. So I think it says a lot about what sort of people who really, really value and need privacy for reasons that are fairly obvious and are simply not using Bitcoin.

- Some people will sit and make the argument they go, "Oh, we shouldn't be using those markets." Well, for people like that, firstly, fuck off. It should be free, people are gonna do what they want.

And secondly, if those people can't be secure and comfortable using Bitcoin, it also means that people in terrible governments and people who seriously need this and all the chat that goes around of people saying, "Oh, we're gonna change the world.

"We're gonna allow people around the world "in third world countries to have freedom." They say it, "Well, if they actually meant it, "then they'd care about privacy." So to me, if they're not caring about privacy and they're banging on about all that stuff, they're just talking shit, they're just virtue signaling

because if they are not using it on darknet markets, then I'm pretty sure people who have governments who would either imprison or kill them for using it, that they certainly won't be using it either.

And then where are we? Like, what are we doing? What are we here for? - Yeah, quite right. You hit the nail on the head there. I think just to tie into that more Twitter drama, the samurai team announced a couple of days ago that they've given a grant to a recent fork of Bisk called, I'm not sure how you pronounce it,

either Havino or Havino. And basically, previously around 80% of Bisk volume was Monero, and I think a growing group of Monero guys got frustrated that there wasn't more of a focus on supporting Monero within Bisk.

So whoever they are behind it have fought Monero and the samurai team have given them a grant. Obviously, it's quite clear that the people who value the privacy have their ideals aligned somewhat with the developers at Samurai.

They've given them a grant to support the development of this Bisk clone that's using Monero as a base currency. And I think it's probably tied into the fact that the lead developers at Samurai are working on atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Monero, which caused the stir among some of the maximalists out there.

So, but what, again, early days at the moment, but from what I can gather, it's gonna be basically, Samurai will absolutely still be a Bitcoin wallet, but it'll have a functionality there that you can do an atomic swap into Monero.

Probably a good option will be with your toxic change from initiating a Willpool mix. What you do with it after that is completely up to you, but the very little that I do know about Monero is that kind of, once you're in, it's pretty difficult to follow you.

So, essentially a good use case there, but I said this on another podcast last week, I'm absolutely sort of ignorant to Monero and it's pros and cons at the moment, but it just seemed apt to throw it in there given that it's a fork of bisque and there's gonna be some functionality to do some atomic swaps between the two chains,

probably this year, I think. - The atomic stuff, atomic swap stuff, really I find quite interesting and yeah, it's gonna annoy a lot of people, but from my understanding as well, Monero's privacy is very good with its ring signatures and all that kind of stuff that it has going on and I have heard some people say,

"Oh, well actually you can unwind it, you can track it." I think it was Chris Belcher when I was speaking to him months ago, he was saying something along those lines that it actually, it can be tracked.

I don't fully understand it, but it seems it would be much harder. And so, if there was to be atomic swaps possible and you could do that like you're saying with toxic change or something like that, would it be possible then to change that into Monero and then from Monero makes a one transaction

to another Monero wallet and then peg back out so that you come back into Bitcoin, if that makes sense. So, and if that is the case, then is that the best tool that we have possible to break links?

- Yeah, I mean, that approach you just describe people or I know people that do that already, but they do it through custodial methods, so the swap at the moment isn't of an atomic nature, so there's trust involved.

But what I know people do is that the small bits of change that are too small to go into a pool, they'll send them into a Monero wallet that they've got over time, they'll accumulate it until it's up to say like a million sats and then they'll send it back through the same custodial, the trusted third party, whoever it is

that's offering the swap service back into Bitcoin to a new address. And from what I'm told, again, I'm somewhat ignorant to it, to be honest. From what I'm told, it's really good at breaking the transaction graph and you come out the other side with basically enough to go back into Whirlpool.

- If that's the case and if we can have atomic swaps, would it be better to just do that fee-wise rather than go through coin joins? 'Cause the fees, it's fairly expensive to do it and from my understanding, Monero transactions are very cheap in comparison to Bitcoin.

So would it not make sense for people just to do an atomic swap into Monero of whatever size they were going to coin join, do a hop or two and then jump back out into Bitcoin again? - Should you say what I'm asking?

- I get where you're coming from. I think there's a couple of things so that is number one, you've still got amount correlation so if you send a million sats out to Monero and then a week later a million sats comes back, potentially be tracked from an amount correlation, probably be fairly difficult to do.

The other risk as well as obviously Bitcoin's proven itself to be a much better store of value than Monero. So if you, I think, again, the little I know about Monero that the more privacy you get, the longer you're in it, but the trade-off of that is if you leave some of your Bitcoin, well, if you swap some of your sats

into Monero and then leave it there because it's the most private thing to do, then your exposure yourself there to the exchange risk between the two, if Bitcoin goes through the roof and Monero goes the opposite way, then you've lost a lot of sats.

So it's a trade-off again between what the value more, your privacy or the potential of your net worth going up again. - I completely get that. What I was more thinking is that you would just continuously, depending on the cost of this atomic swap, you would continuously take single UTXOs,

bang them into Monero and then immediately back out to a completely separate wallet or that UTXO, the fucking L-max, that UTXO goes into Monero from the atomic swap and then you send it in two separate payments of random amounts, slightly apart from each other to separate wallets, so that you would just do it as a continuous thing

and then you're not exposed to the volatility of Monero 'cause I agree with you, I don't wanna keep my money there, but I'm also not enough of a maximist to say, "Well, if something's useful for my privacy, "I'm not gonna use it."

So I kind of would see it like that, is that you could do it UTXO by UTXO on a continual basis and maybe could something like that be programmed to do automatically so that you would have its sat saying samurai wallet and as fees drop, it would automatically do it for you and you'd already put in your next wallet address

for where you want it in Monero, if that makes sense. - Yeah, I mean, it sounds logical to me, how that would be coded into the wallet, I've absolutely no idea. I'm sure it sounds pretty fucking complex to me.

- Oh, well, it ends tomorrow, mate. (laughing) - I've got an hour. - There you go. But it sounds in theory like it would work. I'm sure there's probably people like Ergo or Max Tannehill listening to this going, you absolutely fucking weirdos, there's a gaping hole in that thought process.

In theory, it sounds like it works, but I still don't think it negates the need for equal output coins or post-mix tools. I think it just works in harmony as an extra tool, like you say. - Cool, okay.

- Right, next on the list, hot off the press, this one only dropped yesterday, so it's not actually in the April index that we're mainly talking about, but I thought it was worth dropping in there because it's quite a big one for most users.

Blue wallets finally implemented Tor as baked into the wallet, so that doesn't sound like a big thing, but let me lay out the sort of process of what it gives you. So currently, if you're an iPhone user, you blew wallet with your own node, the only option until now you had was to connect

onto your local network so you could only use it at home or whatever your node is located, or you had to rig up some sort of VPN to that you could turn yourself back to your home network where your node is to be able to contact it and operate Bitcoin fairly privately.

If you used Android, you had to use a god awful app called Orbot, which was basically like a Tor proxy. It's like a Tor proxy, it's an app that basically runs Tor on your phone and you can add apps to it so that that app runs through Tor that enabled you then to connect remotely back through the Tor network to your node at home.

So that worked, if I'm being honest, it was just Orbot was somewhat glitchy if I'm being honest. So now they've implemented Tor as part of the app for both iOS and Android. So essentially, you would set your wallet off, go into the settings of the app, enter your Electrum server, onion address, hit save,

and now you can talk to your node without any extra apps, without any dicking about from anywhere in the world. So from a usability perspective, given that blue wallet is probably one of the fan favorites particularly around newer users, it's a big win.

- Yeah, that's really cool. - Where are we next? Okay, the guys at B2C Pay Server announced quite a big vulnerability disclosure this week with more than one vulnerability. Some of them, most of them have been being nice, massively over my pay grade.

The main one, and the first one that's listed on the sort of bug disclosure is basically, I'll read out the notes to do it justice. A malicious party could generate an email asking for a password reset to the victim.

If the victim clicked on the link in the email, the target account could be taken over. So effectively, if users were vulnerable to basically a dodgy email, which would allow them to take over the account, and if you've got a hot wallet, which most B2C Pay Servers do, especially if you wanted to use tools like page or no lightning,

then you're gonna have funds in there, and the private keys are gonna be on that device, be it hosted in the cloud or on a VPS or even at home. So could have been potentially, well, yeah, they've hit the nail head there, their cluster is critical.

And if you're running the latest version of B2C Pay Server and you're already up to date, which I believe came out about a month ago, then you're already safe. And the good thing is about bug disclosures is that most people hide most software updates.

They hide the bug fix, they don't mention it, and then they'll release the disclosure like a month later after they know that most people have already updated. So if you're running the latest software, you've got nothing to worry about.

If you're not, I'd urge you to update ASAP. - Okay. - Okay, C lightning. So this is a block streams implementation of lightning, probably one of the less used ones. I think it's more for the command line elites like Catan.

They've released the beta version of dual funded channels, dual funded channels, essentially, if you're I, well, currently, should I say, if I was, if that mean you wanted to open a channel max, it would either have to be me opening a channel to you, which would result in all of the liquidity of the channel being on my side,

or vice versa, you opening one to me and you would have all of the liquidity to spend on your side. Well, now they've released the beta where two users can come together and fund from both ends of the channel.

So that means that, well, number one, you can split the cost of the on-chain transaction to open it. And number two, it means that you've got an instantly balanced channel with no dicking around with, you know, swap services or having to spend them so you can receive.

- That's cool. - Very cool, yeah. So, and probably quite timely as well around, again, we're, overall, we're starting to see on-chain fees rising, so it's a good little trick, really, that's going to enable people to split that load and come out with a balanced channel at the end of it.

- Very nice. - Right, next one. Cold card, seed, XOR. Have you seen this one? Do you know much about it? - A little bit from our chat with Rodolfo the other day, but I don't feel confident enough to, I think I get the basics of it.

Give us the TLDR so I can have a drink from gas. - My understanding is that it would help be able to split seeds and be able to have some kind of plausible deniability rather than having one set of 24 words, you could have two and then an attacker wouldn't know that actually you've got, you basically got it split and you could put funds

on a portion or you could put a funds on both individually, but together they have the real amount, could hide your amounts a little bit better. That's sort of what I've got from it. - Yeah, basically that's the gist of it, the way I understand it is.

So the problem they were trying to fix currently is that if you've got a seed plate with your seed on it and it's fairly obvious to most people that that's probably a Bitcoin backup and that if, well, the most metal backups don't hide anything do they, it's your seed stamped into metal or punched into metal, it's obvious what it is

and if you enter that into a wallet software you can see how much Bitcoin is in there. Obviously you can mitigate that by, you should mitigate that by using a passphrase and storing that separately.

So this seed exal is a different approach which, like you rightfully said, basically allows you to split your seed into two or more new seed phrases. So I'll try and use a working example.

So let's say you've already got a call card set up, you've already got a seed plate there but it's a bit of a risk because you think, well, if anybody finds that, I'm up shit creek. So what you can do is, there's a set in the device now that you can go in and say, right, I wanna split my seed into three pieces.

It will then spit out three lots of seed words. So they're full bit 39 seed words. So you can, what you would then do is stamp those three seeds into more seed plates. So they look to the layman like it's just a seed, one plate equals one seed for one wallet.

And they essentially are, you can load Bitcoin onto each one of them. But to get to your real Bitcoin wallet, you would need to input all three of them into your call card or into a device that can read this seed exo, where that is unclear to me at the moment, to get to your real wallet.

So it, like you said, provides plausible deniability too. You would need all three of those seed plates together to get to your real wallet. If somebody was to find just number one of the seed plates, you might have put like a million taps on there.

They think they fit the jackpot 'cause they found your Bitcoin. But in reality, they haven't found your real stash, which might have a full Bitcoin on it. - Okay. And can you put a pass phrase on top of that as well?

- I believe you can. It sounds like we're getting into the realms of making shit too complex that you're gonna lock yourself out of your Bitcoin if I'm being honest. - So it's kind of like a multi-sig that's not a multi-sig.

For example, let's just do it with mine. So I've got a call card. Currently it's got a pass phrase and 24 words. If I was to use this new feature, then would it keep my original 24 words plus it would make me two more sets of 24 words or would the original 24 words now be useless?

And I'd have three sets of 24 words that are brand new that I'd now have to re-stamp and then disperse geographically so that if someone found one, they find whatever a few sats on there, but only when all three come together, then they can access.

- Yeah. So it doesn't change anything to do with your original seed. - That's still valid. The problem it's trying to overcome is that if anybody was to find that original seed plate that you've got stamped into metal and you didn't have a passphrase on it, they've got all your Bitcoin.

Whereas if you were to destroy your original single seed plate back up for your current call card wallet and split it into two using this XOR tool, then you would need either the cold card and you'd know the pin number to get into it to spend your Bitcoin.

Or if you lost your call card, you would need both of the seed plates that you just created combined into the XOR tool on the cold card to recreate your real wallet. - Okay. And it creates three always or you can choose.

- As many as you want. - I don't know. - It's got to be at least two for obvious reasons 'cause it's trying to fix, yeah. But I think, I don't think there's a limit as to how many you can do, but obviously the more you add, the more complex it's making.

- Could you make it so that you keep your original 20, say you've taken the time and it takes time to stamp this into a metal plate? Can you do it so that you keep that one and you just now have an additional 24 or however many additional 24s you have?

- Yeah, yeah, you could. Yeah, you could do it that way as well. - And it's really good. I actually really like that because it kind of solves a lot of issues that concern me. And I do something that everyone tells me not to.

Everyone is always like, "That's fucking stupid. "You should never do that." But I think it works and I'm probably wrong. - I know what you're gonna say. - Yeah, should I say it live or not?

- Go on. - Or should I? - Okay, I'll say it. So I take my 24 words and a disgustingly long, awkward fucking horrible passphrase that I don't even know myself without looking at it on the plate.

And then I split my 24 words. So I have 12 on one plate, 12 on another plate and then I have a disgusting passphrase and they're in different parts. So only when they come together, could I actually possibly sign because I don't fucking know my words or my passphrase to do it?

But everyone says that's really stupid. This would basically be that but not splitting my 24 words. It would just be adding additional 24 words. - Yeah, so the only difference between your approach and this actual tool is that if somebody was to find one of your 12 word plates, that wouldn't be a valid seed.

So if they put it into a wallet, they would know that it's not a valid wallet because you won't have to check some at the end. With this seed XOR, each one that it creates is a valid seed that you can load some Bitcoin onto to create some plausible deniability that if they find one, then they only find your,

you know, they don't find your real honeypot stash. - I really like that. I think that's a really fucking good idea. - It is, but if it's your only backup and you lose one, you lose everything.

- True. - But I suppose that's true of a single seed with just one seed plate, isn't it? If that's your only backup, you're fucked. So it is a benefit, yeah. - You'd have to have multiple in multiple locations just in case and have them stamped into steel and all that kind of stuff.

It adds complexity. I get that, but it also, it makes sense to me security-wise. And actually one question while we're on coldcard and all this kind of stuff. One thing that I was thinking with, if you can do that and have like 24 words in or three of those 24 words in separate locations and then a passphrase on top,

would it not make sense to wipe the coldcard that you've put all of those onto if you're not, you know, if it's proper cold storage? Would it not make sense to wipe that and then keep that somewhere else so that if someone was to ever find that, they don't just need your seed phrase, they would actually need the three dots of 24 words

and your seed phrase, even if they had the physical device. - I'll be honest, I think you kinda lost me at the end. Where did the three lots 24 words and your seed phrase come in? - So you use this seed XOR or XOR or whatever it's called.

You create three lots of seed words, 24 words in one, 24 words in the second, 24 words in the third and you have your passphrase. So they need four different things. - Okay, yeah, I'm with you.

- But if they were to find your coldcard, which is in another location, if they find that and it's already set up so that all you have to then put in is the passphrase, they only need-- - The pin you mean?

- Pin and the passphrase. - Pin the passphrase, yeah. - So they would only need the pin and the passphrase, not the pin, the passphrase and the other three 24 words. - Correct, yes. - So would it not make sense if it's proper cold storage and if people are telling the truth when they say,

"This is for generational wealth, I'm not touching this." Would it not make sense to then wipe the coldcard and restore it back to factory so it doesn't have access without those other bits?

- Yes, but you're putting all of your eggs in one basket then, aren't you? Where you just have that backup that you've created and if you lose one of those sea plates, you're fucked. - Yeah, you're fucked, yeah.

- Whereas if you lose one of those sea plates and you've still got your coldcard that just needs your pin that you know to get into it, you can spend the way, you can spend out on that wallet and make up and making-- - Not the passphrase.

- Yes, yes, yes. - Okay, yeah, fine, it's a bit simple hat, I get that. - It is, it is, but it's worth thinking about for sure and I think it adds to the fact that it makes sense to have multiple types of backups as well.

Don't forget, the coldcard does SD card backups as well. The problem is with that is obviously that each one of those backups has a 12 word passphrase to unlock it as well, so that you've got-- - I know.

- You've got to worry about looking after that as well. - Yeah, okay. - But in hindsight, if you were to back up onto an SD card, keep that at your parent's house and then literally just write down those 12 words, those 12 words only mean something to that SD card.

The likelihood of somebody finding those 12 words and then go into your parent's house and find an SD card and go in, hmm, I wonder if I try and decrypt that SD card with these 12 words, is it gonna do anything?

It's unlikely, isn't it? - It's true, I mean, the main takeaway is that there's lots of different options and that this just makes it more complex for an attack and it allows this sort of diversion to happen where someone will go, "Aha, I've got your Bitcoin," so they think they've got it and that gives you that to knowability,

so I think that's really cool. - Yeah, right, okay, a couple of quick ones just to touch on my node and Raspberry Blitz have both added lightning terminal. Lightning terminal is basically a browser-based interface that allows you to manage your lightning channels.

Probably a little bit more of a power user thing for people who are running routing nodes that do frequent channel rebalancing or swap loop-ins or loop-outs. It's basically a flashy user interface that allows you to do that away from the command line.

I've not had a chance to use it yet, it looks pretty cool, but I just don't use lightning often enough to, well, I've never had to rebalance a channel. That sort of tells you how infrequently I use lightning, really, but I thought it was a good one to throw in.

The Samurai guys have reduced the Ricochet, the fee for their Ricochet feature, and they've cut it in quite literally in half. It's down to 100,000 sat, so a quick TLDR on what Ricochet is basically is.

It uses multiple hops when you send a transaction. Each hop is a new address within your wallet. Obviously, you wouldn't know that from on the blockchain, but it creates a transaction string of, I think it's for transactions sequential one after the other, which, like I say, adds a bit of distance

from the activity that you've been doing in Samurai and your recipient. The likely use case for this is kind of when you're sending to an exchange, really. So say that you're sending to Cash App, and they're renowned for looking back three hops into a transaction history to see if there's anything fishy going on.

You might want to use Ricochet to add those hops so that you can sort of skirt around that sort of minimal level of chain surveillance. It's not a tool I've used because, well, number one, I don't sell Bitcoin, and number two, if I did, it wouldn't be through something like Cash App, but you had a chance to use Ricochet before that?

- Again, I've had no need. I try not to ever sell any Bitcoin if I can help it. And yeah, if I was, it would be probably to you or someone I knew, or it would be to Bisk or Huddle Huddle or something like that.

So I've not had any need, but I had a question on it, which is what about the timing with it? Is it literally four addresses, bang, bang, bang, bang? And then straight on to the final one, which we're sending it to, or is it sort of spread out timing-wise?

And is it spread out in terms of it cuts it in half to two and then they go together as one? Or like, how does it work? 'Cause it seems a bit obvious to me. It seems like it was the same amount just to four different addresses straight away and then on to an exchange.

If they actually cared, they'd be like, well, that's pretty obvious. Yeah, there's two types of Ricochet. There's the standard Ricochet, which I believe just sends it quite sequential in the way you've just described.

And then there's another one called Staggard Ricochet, which leaves a little bit of time between each send. I'm not sure on the specifics of how much time it is. If you're gonna use the Ricochet tool, probably a good idea to connect to the Samurai teams painting first, because what that will enable you to do then

is rather than then take their fee in one lump sum, which again, might give a little bit of a footprint on chain for somebody who's looking for that specific activity, they take their fee out at each hop.

So that would work by differing the amounts that are being sent each time as well. And it just adds multiple more outputs along each hop as well. So rather than just being like you say, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend it, spend and change, spend and change, where the change is their fee.

Okay, yeah, that makes more sense. So that's the better way to do it, if you're gonna use it. All right, Craig Sparrow wallet has added in support for child pays for parent transactions within the graphical interface.

Again, we seem to be talking about fees quite a lot lately. Child pays for parent is essentially a method for boosting transaction that you've got stuck in a memo. The sort of summary of how it works basically.

If say you're spending to me max and you do a low bar for you, you spend in a million sets to me and you've got say a hundred thousand sets in change back to your wallet. The transaction's stuck in the memo 'cause there's been a fees bike, it's been set there for two days.

I'm getting, or let's say it's, you know, you're spending to me and I'm giving, you're buying something off me. You're getting edgy now because you want whatever I'm selling you. So you wanna boost that transaction.

So what you can do then is take that change out of what you've got that's a hundred thousand sets that's still unconfirmed 'cause it's part of that transaction and you can spend that to a new address within your own wallet.

So that creates what's known as a child transaction. When you create that child transaction, you do so at quite a high fee. What that does then is when you broadcast it and to the high fee obviously in Tysys the miners to want to include that transaction in a block but to do that they have to include the parent transaction

which was you paying me, that million sets. So it just provides a bit of an incentive for the miners to say you're dangling the carot basically to say, look, you can have all these fees off this child transaction if you include my parent transaction as well and they can't do one without the other.

So it's a good option really to, if you've got a transaction stuck, obviously, you could only do that if you had the change output if you spent the entirety of a UTXO to me, you wouldn't be able to do it.

- Yeah, I weirdly was talking about this to my missus 'cause I'm really romantic like that and I was talking about a child paid parent the other day because I had sent a parcel to a friend abroad and it's been weeks to go there and I hadn't gone for the most expensive payment and I was like, oh, do you know what?

Like with Bitcoin you can just do this child pay some parents. So what I could do is as this is traveling effectively, I could boost the amount of stampage that I've put on it to make sure that it would get there quicker.

- And I think you've lost him. Just while he's coming back, I'll cover off the other way that you can do a child pay for parent transaction. So in the analogy where Max was paying me and it was stuck in the, his transaction was stuck in the memo and he didn't have a change output to be able to boost it.

And if I wanted to, I would be able to do the same. So I could take the unconfirmed output of his million cents paying me and I could spend that to myself to speed up the transaction again.

Obviously it would be me that's incurring those fees. So if I was a merchant selling something to Max, the chances are I'm not incentivized to do that. So it only really works that way if you're, if you're paying to a friend maybe and you can sort of twist their arm to create that parent transaction.

Max has just messaged me saying that his laptop's just died. So I'll probably pause there and wait for Max to edit this bit out. - Hey, mate, we're back. My laptop just completely died on me.

I have no idea why, but we're back. And I think we were basically through the updates. Did we have a couple more or were we basically there? - Yeah, well, I just stopped by saying magnet hand strikes again.

(laughing) But yeah, three things left to cover was number one, there's a new blockchain satellite been released. I'll just briefly cover over it. Basically what it enables is that you can buy a, let me just see now, $500 satellite.

It acts as a base station that you can chuck on your roof. It's got a ethernet cable that comes off it and you plug it into a Bitcoin node and you can basically listen for block data from the block stream satellite without an internet connection.

Great form of privacy perspective and because this block data is basically just being pumped out across the globe and anybody who listens on the right channel, basically with one of these satellite base stations, you can basically just passively listen, receive all the block data at no sort of ongoing cost and in a very private way.

The kicker here is that you can't actually broadcast transactions, it's sort of listen only if you like. So if you were to use this as your setup, you would need a method of broadcasting your transaction through somebody else's node, which does have potentially some private privacy risks, but there are options

where you can do this through Tor and stuff. So probably again, one for the more advanced user, but it's a good little tool to maybe if somebody's going mobile, it might be a good option, potentially.

Okay, yeah, that's cool. And what's the reason that people can't broadcast? It's just, like you said, it's just that you're picking up the data that's accessible to anyone who is listening in the right format.

Yeah, basically it's a satellite, it's a listen only device, so it's just listening for the data that's been broadcast across the defined band that the block streams are like users. Okay, cool.

Last two pieces, education pieces. First one, keep it simple, Bitcoin. You'll be familiar with his awesome video guides on pretty much everything. He's done a Bitcoin security guide. It's basically a start to finish guide on acquiring Bitcoin, setting up a hardware wallet, cold card, backing up your seed words onto steel,

creating an encrypted backup, linking that cold card to a software wallet, testing and verifying your backups. So for somebody who is not planning on transacting very often and he's just going to sort of buy and hold, it's a really good all-encompassing video to get you from zero to hero.

Nice. Last one, a bit of a self shield to be honest with you. I don't normally like to show my own stuff on this podcast, but I put a lot of effort into this one, it took me fucking ages.

New one on multi-sig, true to form. I've bought a new domain, multi-sig.guide and it is a guide aimed at intermediate or more advanced users. If you're a beginner, feel free to read it and try it on testnet.

Don't sort of dive in and throw your complete stash into this. It's a guide to set up a two or three sovereign multi-sig using your own node and a cold card, a cold wall and a new piece of kit on the market called a seed signer.

It's pretty much a grassroots movement at the moment. I think you actually had him on the podcast, didn't you, last week, was it, Max? - Yeah, yeah. - Pretty cool. - Just been a live yesterday.

- So, you know, rather than explain what seed signer is, I'll just say go and listen to that podcast and you'll have a much more eloquent description from the man himself. But yeah, it starts a finished guide on setting up your two or three multi-sig, using Spectre and then backing it up or testing your backups into Spyro as well,

which is also awesome, I love Spyro. I think that's all we've got, Max. We've got to the end of the list or be it with a brief break. - Technical issue, it wouldn't be the same show without that, I think.

Before we move on, I wanted to ask about this multi-sig a little bit because I know you've been really busy with it. I know it's been quite an undertaking to get it all done. What's your experience been like now that you've done it and you've written the guide?

How are you feeling about multi-sig and what's been the experience? - Yeah, good question. So the setup process was easier than I thought. I'm glad I did it. It was an itch that I wanted to scratch purely because a lot more people were sort of asking me about it and my default answer before, although it hasn't really changed,

was just use single-sig, back it up on a metal C-play and use a passphrase and store it separately. My advice to 95% of people that come to me for advice is still that single-sig is where it's at.

Keep it simple, stupid. It's an old saying, but it still rings true now. But for the advanced user that kind of knows what they're doing and they're comfortable with the notion of signing devices, using Spectre, what an expo is, the difference between an expo and a private key and how you would safely manage and back those up.

It's a good option, but the problem is, and I cover this in the guide, is that multi-sig cures some problems and creates others. So it fixes, it mitigates against the famous $5 wrench attack where somebody was to break into your house, threatening you with a big steel pipe and said, give me your call card

or give me your seat back up or I'm gonna cave your skull in. If you've just got a single-sig and you don't use a passphrase and you give them that, then you can wave bye-bye to all your sats.

Whereas if they were to do that and you've got a two or three multi-sig, that all of the back-ups and signing devices are distributed, well, anyway, you like really, even if it's just a couple of miles apart, the likelihood of an attacker coming into your house, grabbing hold of you, taking one device

and then marching you to the next device, the next location, wherever that may be, without you being able to raise some alarm to the fact that somebody's is attacking you, trying to steal from you, it is pretty slim.

So it really does mitigate against that threat. However, it also introduces massive amounts of complexity in terms of you've now got three devices and three backups to store somewhere safe.

If you transact often, it means that you're gonna have to drive to two different locations to be able to sign the transaction to spend from. So if you're spending quite often, it's probably not gonna be, well, it is gonna be a massive headache for you.

And you also have got like three, instead of having one secure location to come up with, you've now got three secure locations to come up with because if you keep them all in the same building, then it's kind of pointless in having a multi-sig, basically.

So the obvious thing-- - And people can see your spending from one. - Yes, yeah, until we get taproot, multi-sig on chain, it sticks out like a sore thumb. So again, you know, if you've got UTXOs that are tied to your personal identity and they see that you use multi-sig and you know,

that data was leaked, might make you a bit more of a target to think, well, I'm gone, if they've got multi-sig, they're probably gonna have a fair bit more than if they've just got a mobile wallet with a couple hundred thousand sats on it or something like that.

So, let me say, my advice to most people is still just stick with single-sig and use a passphrase. That's what I'm still doing and I've got no desire, even after going through the process of setting it up with these three signers and making the guide.

I've still not that enamored to make the big shift just yet. The other thing, the final thing to consider as well is inheritance. If you've got a two, three, multi-sig and that's geographically distributed, is your partner, if you've got hit by a bus tomorrow and didn't make it, is your partner gonna be able to

find all those signing devices or backups, know what to do with them, to put them together to be able to find the Bitcoin and then know what to do with them to sign the transaction, to be able to spend it?

Well, if I speak for my wife, the answer is a big fact, no. So, something else to consider as well is that, you know, is your Bitcoin gonna die with you? - Good point, yeah, it's interesting though.

I like, there's a lot about multi-sig that I really, really like, but for me at the moment, there's too much going on, but I'm sure these things are gonna get easier and a lot of these problems are gonna be sorted.

There's definitely some great parts of it, but it does seem like a lot and I would be worried about losing my funds. - Absolutely, yep. - But yeah, great guide, I scanned my eyes over it and it's very, very clear and nicely laid out with all the links in there, so definitely go and check it out.

- Thank you, sir, right, questions? Quite a few this week. - Yeah, we did, actually. - Although, I think we've covered a couple of them already, haven't we, with what we've been chatting about?

- Yeah, we have, so I think we've basically covered this, but Mr. Crown has asked to help roll out taproot faster, do we need to update our nodes or is this only the miners? - Yeah, so we covered it at length at the start, for the time being, it's just the miners, basically.

The, as things stand right now, the earliest that a user could have a direct impact to taproot is by running the Luke Jr. client, which doesn't, the user activated the side of that, doesn't activate for another 18 months, so.

Not really a lot the user can do at the moment. I mean, you can still run out of the client and sort of signal as a user, if you like, but in terms of the direct impact of the protocol, there's nothing at the moment.

- Next one is, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, Vindenius, is that correct? - I think it is. - Yeah, I always miss the call for questions for any podcast you are on. For your upcoming one with Max, could you speak on the nuances and potential trade-offs with using the Sentinel Watch only wallet with Samurai?

I'll give a scenario now. Let's say after 50 mixes or something, rather than send to cold storage, I just set up Sentinel. What are the pros and cons for the show? Don't answer now. - Yeah, it's a good scenario, and I know a lot of people in the Samurai community that do exactly that.

They're not big proponents of hardware wallets, and they're more than comfortable with the security that an offline phone gives them. So, yeah, using your scenario, what you essentially could do is just create your mixes in a Samurai wallet, and then you can take that Samurai wallet offline.

You could set up the what you could import all of the expuls into Samurai wallet. There's no private keys on the device, so you can kind of, well, it wouldn't be great for privacy, but you could leave that on your kitchen table if you wanted to, and the worst that would happen would be that somebody could open it

and see how much Bitcoin you have, but they won't be able to spend anything. So, yeah, pretty good option. Obviously, it's low cost. It's just a phone app. It doesn't cost you anything to do that.

The probably a bit more tin foil hat and you answered the pro, which would be the fact that because Samurai Whirlpool requires you to sign, it's a hot wallet, basically. So, if you were storing long term, there would be people out there that would say, well, yes, it's offline now, but it's not truly cold storage

because those private keys were once on a internet connected device, and who knows, you know, somewhere in the future, somebody might be able to somehow be able to find your private keys because it was connected to the internet.

If I'm being honest, it's never gonna happen, but a lot of people like to have their cold storage in on a device that's whose private keys have never ever touched the internet, like a cold guard or something like that, but I do know a lot of people take the exact approach that he's just taken, and they just take that offline,

they cancel, or they sort of remove all the private keys from Whirlpool, the graphical interface and the command line interface if they were using one, and they're just more than happy to keep it offline and sentinel, and then they just have their seed words.

Stamped into a seed plate so that if in the future they want to spend, they can just recover it into a new samurai wallet and they're awake and they're back online. - Fair enough, yep, that makes sense.

Another one which I think basically has been answered already, but it's from MTC. I heard Gladstein mention cross-sig, if I recall correctly, in his rip with Preston Pish, would love to know more if it's on your radar.

- Yeah, so he's referring to cross-input signature aggregation. I always struggle to say that one. Which, yeah, we covered it at length at the start, so hopefully we've already answered this question.

- Cool, what else we got? Mr. Crown, here we are. Richard, will you dive deep into signing devices, hardware wallets, seed signer, perhaps? I'm not sure, we sort of run a little bit over, we try and keep these under an hour and a half, I'm not sure quite where we are now, but I'm not sure quite what he means by deep dive into them.

I'm not sure whether he's asking which ones we recommend or what he's asking here. - Yeah, so a couple of things, Al, is he asked this on the first of May? I dropped my multi-guide on the second of May, so hopefully there's a lot of content in my multi-guide that will answer his question, although I know who this chap is

and he's the guy that has kindly sent me a number of 3D printed parts, one of which was the case of my seed signer, which is a project I'm absolutely loving and I would urge people to go and listen to the podcast that you had within last week.

- Yeah, I spoke to him the other day as well, on the seed signer community on Telegram, seems like a really cool guy. - Yeah, yeah, as is Richard, like I say, he sent me quite a few 3D printed parts and I've got some more on the way actually, so I just wanted to give him a big shout out and perhaps it's quite a big piece

diving into signing devices, so perhaps one for a later date maybe. - Okay, maybe we can cover it next time round, go a little bit deeper and maybe he can ask again, so that he's a bit clearer on exactly what he wants to know.

- Yep, work for me. - Cool, all right, anything else we haven't covered, anything you're working on at the moment, you can tease or are we basically ready to wrap up? - I think we're ready to wrap up on, no more guides for me for a while, that multi-sig one took it out of me, I need to break it, so yeah,

maybe there might be something next month maybe, but I've honestly got nothing on the radar at the moment. - Cool, all right mate, well good to speak to you and for everyone listening, I hope that was helpful and just reach out to us if you have any other questions for next month and we'll go through them.

Cheers, Max, pleasure as always. - Cool, alright mate, bye bye.